Over at Perverse Egalitarianism, a discussion that has been extremely productive and, I think, valuable, has taken a turn for the worse. In response to Mikhail’s entirely fair question about whether or not the realist would banish religious debate from the public sphere, I made, what I believe, to be the entirely obvious observation that among the vast majority of religious folks (and I’m Southern so we’re all “folks” us) are realists where they’re beliefs are concerned. Just as I am a vulgar naturalistic materialist, the religious believer is not a correlationist in their belief, but is committed to the thesis that the claims they make about God, the soul, the afterlife, and spirits are claims about real things, not simply phenomena or appearances. In other words, in the public space we have many competing versions of realism duking it out amongst one another. Yet somehow this rather obvious (I thought) claim got transformed into the thesis that all of these realisms are true or, we might say, the thesis that we should let a thousand realisms bloom.
I think this Rubic’s cube appropriation of my claim reveals something fundamental about the difference between realist and correlationist approaches to thought. Put in the rhetorical frame of a Zizekian mode of speech, I’m led to wonder, who’s really dogmatic here. As a realist I’m committed to the thesis that if something is knowledge, then it is not simply a claim about phenomena as they appear to us but has rather revealed something deep and real about things independent of us that would belong to these things regardless of whether or not humans existed to know them. Where the correlationist is committed to the thesis that these properties can never be said to belong to objects themselves but only objects for us, the realist says no, these things are in the objects themselves. That is the ontological thesis. But from the standpoint of epistemology, I think the realist is extremely modest. The realist says we are trying to discover the nature of the real, we’re fairly sure we’ve discovered a few properties of the real, we conclude that there are certain properties belonging to the real based on the best available evidence, but we also recognize that subsequent discoveries might entirely overturn these conclusions. In addition to that, the realist, of whatever stripe, recognizes that they are obligated to duke it out in the public space, providing reasons and arguments for their position, and that their reasons might ultimately fail to persuade or be based on faulty evidence.
read on!
Thus, for example, when my very good friend Jerry said that we do not yet have an explanation of phantom limbs, I attempted to provide a hypothesis as to how our brain neurology might explain the existence of phantom limbs. I pointed out that while an amputated arm no longer has nerve cells to sense pain, we do not amputate networks of neurons in the brain that presided over the functioning of that limb and that whenever we use the remainder of, say, our arm, these networks of neurons are activated producing effects of pain in our mental map of where the remainder of what our arm was (from what I understand hands have been grafted on to patients that lost their hands and their phantom pains subsequently disappeared, indicating that damage to nerve endings, including the absence of nerve endings, produce pain responses in our neural maps of our body). This is a hypothetical explanation that can subsequently be overturned. Moreover, it is a hypothetical explanation that respects his criticism, the reality of his observation, and seeks to address it. If I, as a vulgar materialist naturalist, strive to explain a phenomenon like phantom limbs in neurological terms, then this is because I possess the conviction that the naturalistic explanation of mental states is the best hypothesis we have available to date by virtue of what it is so far able to explain. In the absence of compelling observations to the contrary, I thus see no reason to relinquish this hypothesis. As they say, the “Lion’s Share” of evidence stands in the naturalist’s court.
If I have a problem with the correlationist position, then this is because, in addition to other reasons, I see it as an essentially dogmatic position. As I have argued in the past, the correlationist desires to “know before they know”. By this I have meant that the correlationist attempts to draw an a priori limit to what we can know, deciding in advance what is dogmatic and what is critical. In practice, I believe this leads to truly dogmatic conclusions. Because the correlationist has rejected our ability to know the referent or the “thing-in-itself”, they are therefore able to say, in advance, that any findings of empirical science are “dogmatic” or “naively” realist. As a result, in practice, they are able to ignore these findings a priori, because, you see, the correlationist already knows and nothing could possibly contradict the findings of the immediate givens of their self-consciousness. They know before they know and as a result become know-nothings, because you see, for the correlationist, they have a “superior” knowledge of conditions, that enables the rejection of anything empirical.
For the realist, by contrast, the real is, to adopt, yet again, a Zizekian term, a sort of vanishing mediator. The real is something that we’re pursuing, that we’re trying to know, but that we recognize as being extremely slippery. As Lacan would say, we grasp the real by bits and pieces. All the realist asks is that we go with the best available evidence and the most likely hypothesis based on that evidence. Indeed, following Badiou, the realist absolutely loathes the Platonic idea of banishing the sophist or the skeptic, because he benefits so much from the critical reflection of the skeptic or sophist on his hypotheses. These claims are a constant spur to the realists inquiries into the world. Thus, just as the True Believer ™ seems to absolutely adore the atheist, the vulgar materialist-naturalist-realist adores the critiques of the skeptic believer. The correlationist, by contrast, finds no point in such debate as he’s already concluded the intrinsic limit to knowledge.
My friend Mikhail, says to me, that the realist is unable to account for things like justice and utopian ideals for peace. This leaves me scratching my head as to what Mikhail understands by naturalism or materialism. Certainly Mikhail recognizes that if the naturalist is right, it is nonetheless biological vehicles such as ourselves that conceived things such as justice, the good, and universal peace. It was our brains that, according to the naturalist, created these values. All that the naturalist requires is that we give explanations of these normative criteria consistent with the naturalistic hypothesis. The naturalist certainly doesn’t deny that we have thought these normative criteria and that they have a profound influence on how we act in the world. And as my Slavic friend Mikhail once said to me, wishing does not make it so. Perhaps we wish that we could separate these things entirely from our embodiment in these, as I put it once to my dear Slav Melanie, “sacks of flesh”, but if it’s the case that we are sacks of flesh then we require an account consistent with that fact. The realist is more than happy to concede that this might not be a fact, but merely asks for good, well grounded observations to demonstrate this point, not rational hypotheses based on what they believe is required by a disembodied reason for this to be the case. The naturalistic standpoint might require us to give up the thesis that the “ought” cannot be derived from the “is”. Yet if the correlationist is to make the argument that the “ought” cannot be derived from the “is”, they will require something more than the dualistic argument that the concept of normativity requires it. My concept of a just society requires that everyone is taken care of and that we have equality, yet that doesn’t make it so. At any rate, at least the realist recognizes that these are matters of debate and observation, rather than issues foreclosed a priori.
April 14, 2009 at 4:52 am
Again, I think you are overreacting, I don’t think I said anything out of the ordinary, I really don’t understand what made you so upset.
April 14, 2009 at 5:01 am
And as I have responded many times in the past, you have to know what knowledge is to know – that’s as old as Plato – everyone who knows, knows before they know because if they didn’t, how would they know that they know when they know something?
April 14, 2009 at 10:48 am
“Thus, for example, when my very good friend Jerry said that we do not yet have an explanation of phantom limbs, I attempted to provide a hypothesis as to how our brain neurology might explain the existence of phantom limbs …[] … This is a hypothetical explanation that can subsequently be overturned.”
I understand it has been overturned, or at least modified, by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran’s first demonstration of neuroplasticity? His experiments on Victor Quintero’s phantom left arm, which he had recently lost in a car accident, traced how the neural map (in the somatosensory cortex) that processed input from the ghost limb was quickly ‘re-wired’: Ramachandran asked Victor to sit quite still and with his eyes closed as he lightly brushed Victor’s left cheek with a cotton swab.
Victor felt the swab on his left cheek and on the back of his absent hand. Ramachandran then touched another spot on Victor’s cheek. That was his absent thumb. Then touching the skin between Victor’s nose and mouth: missing index finger. Then just below Victor’s left nostril: a tingling on Victor’s left pinkie. And the relation was reciprocal: when Victor felt an itch in his former hand, he relieved the itch by scratching his face. Ramachandran hypothesis was that the neural map reconfigures itself: the strip of neurosensory cortex that presides over the functioning of the face, being adjacent, connects, over-rides, or takes over the area that originally received information from the now phantom hand, intermingling and conflating the two.
Similarly for other limbs eg the feet and the genitals (when Dejan scratches his feet, more genitals appear on his blog; when Mikhail shouts, Levi barks, etc).
“And as my Slavic friend Mikhail once said to me, wishing does not make it so.”
Yes, but the difficulty is that repeated wishing, like a repeated thought, does indeed alter brain chemistry/neural mapping in the frontal cortex, the seat of reasoning, logic and higher thought as well as of endless rumination, so ‘strengthing’ the (imaginary) realism of your neighbourly religious fundamentalists.
This may seem trivial, but it has significant implications in for instance the treatment of ‘mental’ problems: the still dominant (but false) ‘hypothesis’ is that if a patient responds well to some specific treatment (drugs, psycho-therapy, CBT, the Lacanian clinic, etc), his/her neural map will have reconfigured in the same way irrespective of which treatment was chosen.
It transpires that drugs ( for example, Paroxetine for depression) have an opposite effect on brain chemistry that cognitive therapy: CBT, for instance, deflates overactivity in the frontal cortex, whereas Paroxetine, by contrast, raises activity there. On the other hand, CBT increases activity in the hippocampus of the limbic system, the brain’s emotion center, while Paroxetine lowers activity there.
But neither are convincing ‘cures’ when the underlying causes (and ‘symbolic blockages’) still reside, still continue in social reality, in political economy.
April 14, 2009 at 11:06 am
Correction: Harry=Beckett. I confused my cortex with my hippocampus …
April 14, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Interesting observations, Harry. I think you’re right on the mark with respect to the plasticity of the brain. I have a feeling that a lack of awareness with this plasticity is what makes some humanities folks so hostile to neurology. Years of hearing the brain compared to a computer has created the mistaken belief that the brain is hardwired, rather than something that is perpetually rewiring itself. I have mixed feelings about what you say here:
While I certainly agree with what you claim in the first paragraph (that we’re strengthening and reinforcing synaptic connections when we continuously ruminate on something), I think you’re making a bit of a leap in the second and third paragraph. The thing is that a positive response to a particular treatment also indicates that certain synaptic relations are being broken down and rewired in new ways. There is not one thing, symbolic networks, and another thing, affects and behaviors. Rather, the two are tightly bound together and inseparable from one another. This is why functionalist theories of mind such as we find in Jerry Fodor, are so inadequate in these discussions because they ignore the role of neurotransmitters and synaptic connection formation in these processes. For this reason, I think that your observation about Paroxetine versus CBT therapy is inconclusive. The fact that we see a lot more activity in the frontal cortex when we do an fMRI scan of someone on Paroxetine, is inconclusive as to what is going on synaptically in this region of the brain. In other words, it is only on the premise that the synaptic connections remain the same that this argument is compelling.
I do, of course, agree with your thesis about the blockages in social and political reality. I think that one of the central problems with almost all of these therapeutic approaches is that they place all of these maladies in the individual alone, failing to recognize the manner in which they’re also bound up with contemporary social structure. It’s not without reason that depressive and anxiety disorders have skyrocketed in our century. That said, to be fair, it’s not entirely realistic to tell a suffering person that they have to change the social order in order to overcome their particular malady.
April 14, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Yes, I largely agree with your arguments here. Just a few supplementary points:
1. Though the different effects of drugs versus therapies may be inclusive, a considerable and growing number of recent studies conclude that the effectiveness of drugs (and ‘alternative medicine’) versus placebos is insignificent (though Big-Pharma are predictably spending millions in order to discredit these findings). Here are the summary findings of just one such study: “The researchers obtained data on all the clinical trials submitted to the FDA for the licensing of fluoxetine, venlafaxine, nefazodone, and paroxetine. They then used meta-analytic techniques to investigate whether the initial severity of depression affected the HRSD improvement scores for the drug and placebo groups in these trials. They confirmed first that the overall effect of these new generation of antidepressants was below the recommended criteria for clinical significance. Then they showed that there was virtually no difference in the improvement scores for drug and placebo in patients with moderate depression and only a small and clinically insignificant difference among patients with very severe depression.”. It is the placebo effect that needs to be studied, not simply taken for granted, but this is more related to the context of power relations within which the biogenetic industries function (which not only attempt to individualize (as you highlight above) and medicalize maladies, but also to create them in the first place [‘disease marketing and branding’ etc]).
2. The second difference is that therapies require substantial effort on the part of the patient in comparison to a regime of drugs/placebos, with the result that both approaches may be subjectivized in very different ways that still remain undecidable. The sufferer may resolve any symbolic blockage or s/he may not, as there is often a symbolic price to be paid for ‘unearned’ treatments, especially if the social mechanisms that triggered the affects and behaviours in the first place remain.
3. I certainly agree that those afflicted by a severe or debilitating ‘disorder’ should’d be lectured about their social responsibilities for purposes of confronting the wider social order in order to address their malady (though the same could equally be said for ‘normal’ people), an awareness of how their networks of social, economic, technological, etc relations and material supplements directly impact on ‘mind’ and ‘identity'(rather than simply reducing mind to neuronal actiivity).
April 15, 2009 at 4:52 pm
While it seems undeniable, to me, that social forces/patterns/expectations/assumptions etc. shape who we are as individuals (to the extent we’re individual at all) couldn’t we also say that each individual is the center of a unique “society” all their own?
Family and friends form a web of social relations not only different in an obvious sense for each person but also differently related to over time and differently perceived in any given moment/situation.
Just as the observation of neural plasticity breaks down the distinction between, for want of a better metaphor, the hardware/software distinction, doesn’t , surely, the society/individual distinction break down in pretty much the same way and for pretty much the same reason ie. events perceivable only on the scale of the individual and events perceivable only on the societal scale are interdependent and co-arising to an extent that confounds straightforward “cause/effect” claims.
Trivial point perhaps . . . but it’s surely why the effectiveness of Prozac et.al. seems to be so different “in the field” than it turns out to be in double blind crossover studies, where all the symbolic and “society mediated” signifiers are stripped from the process.
And also why drug companies spend big bucks to have english and psychology majors come up with the names for their latest pill.
The words zoloft, celexa, welbutrin etc. are finely crafted to have power in themselves, and for reasons that have little to do with chemistry and everything to do with the invisible web of signs within which individual brains are only nodal points.
April 15, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Great comment, Exeter. I think you’re right on the mark with your analysis of the semiotics of pharmaceuticals. I do, however, think that care needs to be taken not to treat things such as pharmaceuticals as purely semiotic entities. I think this is to err too far on the side of a sort of Foucaultian discourse theory of such things. Rather, what I think is required is an ontology rich enough to recognize the power and efficacy of signs and cultural relations, while also recognizing that we are material beings and that there are real chemical forms of causation. In short, what needs to be thought is how domains like culture, social relations, economics, signs, neurology, material substances, etc., are woven together in a fabric constituting these phenomena. The absence of vitamin B1 and thiamine that plays a role in the onset of alchoholic’s dementia is not simply a web of signs. The analysis of webs of signs, I think, is of crucial importance because just as material substances play a role in neurology, signs play a role in synaptic formation as well. What is to be avoided, is a reductivist form of thought that allows only one or the other.