The Virtues of Neuroscience; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 2

The Virtuous Brain (always working for the benefit of itself?)

In the beginning of Enlightenment and Extinction, Brassier weighs neuroscience against the manifest image. Brassier finds the manifest image as a subtle theoretical construct that we can understand as our original pre-scientific understanding of the world always and already. We can understand the manifest image more specifically in the Heideggerian concept of Being, and Derrida's insistence of asking what the question of the question is. Both of these gestures are theoretical constructs that put the ontological question in the hands of a sphere that can't be accounted for. We rely on our original "seeing of the world" when trying to understand this pre-scientific sphere. In phenomenology, we rely on our first-person perspective to understand the world independent of the scientific understanding of the world that this manifest image would like to discredit for not understanding an ostensible wholly other that always and already happens to being. Brassier follows the argument of Paul Churchland that attempts to annex the manifest image to the scientific image. Instead of seeing the pre-scientific world as something that precedes science's understanding of the world, the pre-scientific world can be accounted for in the 3rd person by the observational disposition of scientific work. Both Brassier and Churchland are critical of the mysterious realm that post-Kantian philosophy would like to ascribe to this experience. Instead they find a less mystical, and more specific understanding of being before being in the neurocomputational alternative where we observe the kinematics of cognition through brain activation patterns and the synaptic structure that permits neurons to pass on electrical signals to other cells or neurons. In the last post we discussed Brassier relying on and privileging this "hard science" over the mystical proclivities of philosophers. While Brassier commends Churchland's work of eliminative materialism for showing that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena is wrong and naive (folk psychology), he finds problems with the metaphysical descriptions (virtues) he gives to brain patterns that were to annex the manifest image of consciousness. Brassier commends the reductionist gestures of eliminative materialism for showing that folk psychology is incapable of understanding "meaning" and "pre-scientific intuitions," but wonders if these ideas of "meaning" and "meaningfulness" are concepts that need to be called into question in the first place. Where Churchland will find cognitive science as being able to answer these questions, Brassier wonders if these are questions to even ask in the first places because they're at an absolute distance from knowledge. With Churchland's enthusiasm for the vector activation understanding (PVA) of consciousness comes an idealism. Churchland ascribes virtues to the brain and how it functions ostensibly independent of our linguistic formulations about ourselves as beings of consciousness without realizing that he's borrowing the terminology of folk psychology to make these claims. Brassier will take him to task for this in order to humble the hypostatic gesture of neuroscience that doesn't realize its borrowing gestures. Brassier wants to take Churchland's eliminative materialism further than Churchland took it to de-representationalize the neurocomputational model away from this hypostasis, or metaphysics of consciousness if you will. The virtues of the brain that Churchland thinks represent brain processes aren't virtues, but something below the linguistic and representative realm. To "understand" this, we first need to understand what the brain is not doing; being a virtuous substance.

"Churchland is perfectly explicit in explaining why he considers the PVA paradigm of cognition to be 'better' than its folk-psychological rivals, and he proposes a precise formula for gauging theoretical excellence. Global excellence of theory is measured by straightforwardly pragmatic virtues: maximal explanatory cohesiveness vis-a-vis maximal empirical heterogeneity purchased via minimal conceptual expenditure." For Churchland, there is a "better" way for understanding consciousness than others, specifically the PVA neurocomputational model instead of the manifest image which we talked about in regards to Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Churchland asks us to move in the direction of pragmatism instead of trying to look for some universal truth in cognitive activity. In other words, he wants us to use a pragmatic theoretical model when explaining the brain. The put it more simply, the brain for Churchland is to be explained via the basic principle of Occam's razor; pragmatism's venerable grandchild. Now, what are these pragmatic virtues that are found in Occam's razor that define the ambitions of neuroscience (broadly speaking of course)? "In what sense precisely are theoretical virtues such as simplicity, unity, and coherence necessarily concomitant at the neurological level with an organism's reproductively advantageous behavior? Churchland simply stipulates that the aforementioned virtues are already a constitutive feature of the brain's functional architecture without offering anything in the way of argument regarding how and why it is that neural network's learned configuration in synaptic weight space is necessarily constrained by the imperative of unity, cohesion, and simplicity." The pragmatic virtues we are referring to then are "simplicity, unity, and coherence." To be as straightforward as possible, the brain is simple, coherent and unified because its behavior is in the service of advantageous reproduction. We will see later on that the idea of consciousness as reproductively advantageous is problematic. This will crumble the idea of the structure of consciousness being pragmatic because we will see it having no end, making our imputations of virtues upon its phenomena null. Churchland simply asks us to follow a pragmatic model with the idea in mind that this is more "beneficial" towards understanding consciousness. Essentially it's more beneficial to see consciousness as beneficial. But where do these beneficial pro-reproductive concepts come from? If they don't come from folk-psychology alone, they belong to a history of metaphysics that would like to see things simply and in a unified manner. But is this not a predilection of the ontology of literature? This is what Brassier takes Churchland to task on. "In order to make a case for the neurocomputational necessity of superempirical virtues, Churchland would need to demonstrate that the latter are indeed strictly information theoretic constraints intrinsic to the vector coding process, as opposed to extrinsic regulatory considerations contingently imposed on the network in the course of its ongoing interaction with the environment." How's it possible to say that the superempirical virtues of pragmatism operate in the brain without having a lexicon of pragmatic concepts to be able to execute this description? This lexicon of pragmatic concepts are the luxury of a historical world already developed. If Churchland were to play Hegel and find these specific pragmatic virtues as the development of the world into the recognition of itself (as a pragmatic one), then he would somehow have to contend with the fact that folk-psychological concepts for instance are more prevalent than pragmatic ones which he finds inferior to the nuerocomputational explanation. The problem is not in the neurocomputational explanation of consciousness itself. The problem is in attaching virtues to this model. The problem is really in saying "this model is better than this model," not because the neurocomputational model may be a superior model for understanding consciousness, but because many different descriptions and methods are available to an explanation of consciousness regardless of which model's enthusiasts think their model is "true." Brassier will want to lead science into not saying that it's a better model than a folk-psychological model of consciousness for example. It doesn't matter for the science of consciousness that there are other approaches towards the understanding of consciousness. Once it feels that it's in competition with something it ought to already knows it's not in competition with, then it will apply virtues to its method in order the strengthen its legitimacy. This justification of course ought not to be in the mind of the pure observational scientist. The question of this ever being possible needs to be asked (Derrida would be an obvious reference as someone who would say this is absolutely not possible). The more we move on in this text, the more we will gain a sense in which Brassier can or cannot operate as a pure observer. For now, "The trouble then is that in arguing that simplicity, unity, and coherence are constitutive functional features of the brain's neuroanatomy, Churchland is but one slippery step away from claiming that brains represent the world correctly as a matter of evolutionary necessity, i.e. that they necessarily have 'true' representations. Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of claim that Churchland had swore to abjure: 'Natural selection does not care whether a brain has or tends towards true beliefs, so long as the organism reliably exhibits reproductively advantageous behavior.'" The problem again is in finding the brain as a "reproductively advantageous" organ. This is a true belief. What Churchland is erroneously saying is that natural selection does not care if a brain has true beliefs, as long as it has one true belief in being reproductively advantageous. So then, natural selection does care towards the belief in reproduction. There will be ample time in the next post to show how this is not the case (the belief in "Nature" being "reproductively advantageous"). The problem now is imputing belief to an organism that doesn't operate in beliefs a contrario to the human being who has developed beliefs in the manifest image in order to describe phenomena on its own terms. As we stated in the past post though, Brassier will need to explain how consciousness is able to come up with something like the manifest image instead of consciousness operating under the auspices of the neurocomputational model. In other words, how does the figurative explanation of phenomena (via lingustic formation through western philosophy through German idealism) happen by way of observation of the neurocomputational model? Is this a question that can be answered by the neurocomputational model? Is this a question to be answered at all? To be clear though, Brassier isn't saying that it's not possible to give a linguistic formulation pertaining to neuro-phenomenal experience. "That successful networks do indeed tend to exhibit these superempirical characteristics as a matter of empirical fact is uncontroversial, but it is a fact about cognitive ethology..." For us, we understand the microbiological structure of the brain in terms of superempirical characteristics which is to say it "makes sense only within the macrophysical purview of evolutionary biology." In other words, what happens in the brain is at an absolute independence from what we casually observe to be happening in the brain based on our macro-beliefs in evolution. "...it seems that the the superempirical virtues Churchland invokes in order to discriminate between theories must remain extra-neurological characteristics, characteristics which reveal themselves only in the course of an ethological analysis of the organism's cognitive behavior within the world, rather than via a neurological analysis of the brain's microstructure." In other words, our analysis through language of other organisms using our own lexicon of beliefs are beyond what happens on a neurological level. How the neurological level is to be understood at all remains to be seen, but applying pragmatic and evolutionary adjectives to its function is reasoning on the side of extrinsic considerations, those extrinsic considerations plainly being what's good for us (being).

The problem with phenomenology was always its own premise; philosophy as a descriptive science. The problem with this is a sense that there was a lack of rigor in understanding phenomena in our own terms. There was always the fact of having to borrow concepts from a developed language to try to describe something that happened independent of this historically developed language. If phenomenology exhausted one thing, it was the idea of how much linguistic description could be made of phenomena. Husserl's work is an archive of figurative descriptions of phenomena. Regardless of how extensive Husserl's work was though, there was the sense that linguistic expression couldn't "show" the micophysiology of consciousness. As we stated in the last post though, Husserl was without the luxury of modern cognitive technology, and so relied on pure reason as the method for science. As cognitive science develops though, it would help to have a reading of these basic readings to see how extensive the descriptive sphere could be exhausted when pertaining to consciousness. This would help in the fact that thinkers would be much less apt to apply "superempirical" terminology to something that was happening independent of it. While phenomenology acted as a descriptive science, it made sure not to act as a teleological science and Husserl took great pains to introduce much of his work with a Cartesian reduction so the reader could operate without the reader wanting to apply presuppositions to the work at hand, regardless of how innocuous these presuppositions may have been (pragmatic presuppositions). This much neuroscience could learn from phenomenology. It's this much that Brassier understands and how he is able to work within the extensive space of Heidegger and Churchland. He's able to see the benefits of a "pure science" when observing phenomena but also able to criticize a scientific method if it isn't aware of itself as relying on metaphor or applying a naive teleological presupposition to its work. His work on Paul Churchland thus far has proven Brassier as a faithful thinker in this regard. The question will be how he will be able to understand consciousness scientifically independent of metaphor, i.e language, or whether this is even possible. If not, the understanding of something called "consciousness" will have to be obviated when "seeing" anything in general pertaining to an "understanding of consciousness." It's here where a nuanced, subtle, but clear nihilistic disposition will pave the way for some very interesting thoughts. How to reconcile this nihilistic disposition with any "understanding" in general will be very interesting. As a preliminary question, what is the relation between nihilism and science?

Invented Feelings; Ideas 1 Part 2

"I don't have to explain reality. I just feel it" (This post is at the expense of Ken Wilber)

Standard practice in a Husserlian text is to first criticize every method ever known to man in terms of reality being the object of the method. Most of his criticism goes to empiricism which he spends much time on in the Crises and almost as much time on in Ideas 1. At first though, Husserl does admire the original impulse of empiricism as springing from "praise worthy motives", and from it's abstention from "powers of tradition and superstition". Nonetheless, he gets to the point where he finds empiricism countersensical when it finds it's grounds in criticizing metaphysics and scholasticism as elaborating on the spectres of "ideas" and "essences". This post will not be about Husserl's perennial admiration and criticism of empiricism though. To be brief though, his criticism is based on the fact that an eidetic insight is needed to first establish anything called "experience". For an empirical statement to be made, I must have an original presentive intuition which makes immediately valid judgments, these judgments that first establish what any experience is in the first place. It's here where a thinker would firmly place in the the field of "idealism", and to some extent there are many analogies between him and German idealism (especially if we consider Kant an "idealist"). But just as there are analogies between Husserl and the earlier German tradition, there are as much analogies to his deferring to a real-time experience that envelops a theory of empiricism. That being said, Husserl exists in-between both modes of thinking. This we will see in later posts. In this post though, I want to emphasize the importance of Husserl's criticism of Idealism so he can't simply be lumped in with that mode of thought, as something that is absolutely opposite of logical positivism for example (and anyone who has read Husserl will know how much concern he placed in logic, albeit a logic to experience). As Husserl spent much of his time elaborating on the problems with empiricism's method, he wasn't so outspoken (in his published work) in his criticism of Idealism. Husserl knew that empiricism had a strong hold on not just the philosophical world, but the world in general as a theory of experience, which I would think made him spend as much time as he did showing the lack of grounding in the empirical author. In Ideas I though, he makes a striking criticism of idealism; I think enough so to fully keep him out of ever being considered an idealist. It's not just the logical substance in his criticism but the tone in which he approaches idealism that conveys to me how strongly he felt about dispensing with idealist proclivities, even more so than his thoughts towards empiricism (because Husserl saw the a rigorous admirable motivation at Empiricism's inception). This post then will elaborate on his criticism of idealism, so that Husserl can be distinguished from everything that he criticizes in that mode of thinking.

While Husserl considers Empiricism to be lacking in a thorough elaboration of experience, he sees idealism as simply "obscure". "To be sure, they speak of evidence; but instead of bringing it, as an act of seeing, into essential relations with ordinary seeing, they speak of a 'feeling of evidence' which, as a mystic index veri , bestows an emotional coloring of judgments". When addressing this "pure" idealist then, the idealist relies on an immediate "feeling of evidence". For Husserl, obviously this is a huge problem, not just philosophically, but personally. The lack of rigor in the "thinker" who relies on immediate feelings brings obscurity to the field of general science that requires rigorous methods and analysis. These "feelings of evidence" are mystic truth indexes according to Husserl (index veri). In other words, the starting off for any theory of reality in the idealist is from a Mystic starting point. It allows it's "feelings of evidence" to come from a Mystic starting point which it has no hopes for trying to understand, not wanting to understand. How easy it is to stop trying to understand when one doesn't really want to understand. This last statement is made in order to turn poorly-motivated-spirituality on it's head. This mystical starting point (index) bestows an emotional coloring of judgments for the idealist. Judgments then are not the affair-complexes in need of being elaborated on, but simply being understood with a "color" that is predicated to them by the idealist. "I feel it this way", "I feel that this the case". In a strong sense, the idealist wouldn't even know they are proposing anything in general. Would they even know they are idealists when attributing their colored-feeling-statements about reality? They would simply rely on a priori thinking without knowing anything besides the fact that it came before. This coming before would even be pushing it. It may just be the case for this "thinker" that there is some prior originariness without taking the time to possibly criticism this idea (metaphysics of presence). All that's required is that a judgment (any statement in general) has a certain color to it that gives an emotional sway to the thinker. We are going to have to give this idealist some credit though because they do think about what an evidence would look like. They reflectively see evidence as the product of an emotional coloring, whatever that may be (which we will soon go into). For Husserl, in the statement above, we see a more appropriate phenomenology of evidence. Firstly for Husserl, there is an "act of seeing". This "act of seeing" is brought into essential relations with ordinary seeing. Ordinary seeing is the one in which we speak of as naive empiricists; the kind of seeing that allows us the predication of "I see that chair". This ordinary seeing just doesn't happen on it's own though. It has a relation, an essential relation (it absolutely has to be the case), to an act of seeing. So there isn't just the indubitable de facto situation of "I see that chair", but a process in which this de facto and predicated situation has a relation to an "act of seeing". Broadly speaking, there is an act before predication that has a relationship to ordinary seeing. Of course we can think of this act as something as something that had to happen before it being spoken about. We went into this "empty" possibility in the first post when trying to understand the idea of eidetic intuition. The act can only be seen as an empty variable (an eidetic intuition), because it's an act that is not yet brought to elaboration. Not only does this variable exist though, but there is a process, a relationship between this act and what we normally call "ordinary seeing", the ordinary seeing that established empiricism's claim of objectivity that would try to "Occam's razor" scholastic thinking (see? Scholasticism was not simply an abstract discipline on "origins") and Aristotelian metaphysics. In other words, for Husserl, there is an elaborating that needs to be done between the act and ordinariness. This elaboration of relationships would be the project of phenomenology and will be explored in later posts in regards to Ideas 1. To simply posit experience as something like a "colored feeling" and privileging this colored feeling to a mystic transcendence is deeply problematic for understanding in general. "Such conceptions are possible only as long as one has not learned to analyze kinds of consciousness in pure observations and eidetically instead of theorizing about them from on high". This statement speaks for itself. Without understanding any method of understanding consciousness, in a pure observation where the subject, the ego was abstained from, then they would continue "theorizing about them from on high". I don't know how much "theorizing" would be going on if this idealist in this manner was deferring it's understanding from what comes from on the high; in other words, that mystic index that gave one magical and colored feelings that would be constitute experience for them. In other words, simply being able to say "I feel that this is the way" in a tone where it seems like the subject is speaking from some disingenuous "transcendental" sphere. In a formal sense, as was stated before, one would have to wonder whether this idealist really cared anyways (and this was the reason why Husserl spent time exploring the problems of empiricism, because it was a theory that took itself intellectually seriously, at the very least). "These alleged feelings of evidence, of intellectual necessity or whatever else they may be called, are no more than theoretically invented feelings". When someone says with any certainty that their certainty about experience comes from "the way they feel", because it has such and such a coloring to it, then it subsumed into an invention. Lets push this further. Husserl here isn't saying that "Feelings don't exist". He's not trying to admonish people from "feeling" (although in some sense he's trying to admonish the scientific thinker from allowing feelings in general from influencing their thought) but admonishing the idea that evidence of experience and reality can be based on a vague feeling. Vague, because it's merely described in a coloring without any need of the further phenomenological elaboration of the act of seeing and it's essential relation to ordinary seeing. He elaborates on this somewhat poetically (ironic in its poeticism) in the Crises when trying to reestablish the basis of Science, not on technology, but the nobility of thinking (Hegel's conception of Philosophy as Science). While Husserl doesn't want strong feelings influencing his phenomenology, one can't help but see how strong his feelings are towards a rigourous philosophy. What Husserl is establishing here is very simple. If one wants to try to understanding consciousness, they will need a theory. This theory will need to be elaborate and will not be constituted by a simple feeling. I can't say for example that the state of affairs that "This chair is here" is the case because I have a distinct feeling that this is the case. At this point, I'm just making up a theoretical feeling (without knowing that I'm establishing any theory in general, because no theory is really being established) that is so simplistic that it really is "too good to be true". It's not an intellectual necessity that I have these "feelings" first before I have the evidence of the world, because I simply made them up on the spot in order to establish why something is the way it is for one reason or another (maybe someone asked me about it). The intellectual necessity is involved in logical relationships between acts and intentions on their way towards ordinary seeing (objectivity), phenomenologically. Husserl footnotes these theoretical invented feelings and refers to Elsenhans Textbook of Psychology where he states that these descriptions (invented feelings) are "psychological fictions without the least foundation in the phenomena". In other words, the mental processes that Husserl elaborates on so acutely here in Ideas 1 are simply given fictional feeling ideas in the Textbook of Psychology. What Husserl says next is I think the of the greatest importance to his criticism of idealism. "an upper stratum, that of an identical stating, as a mere significational expressing, on the one occasion conforms step by step to a 'clearly seeing' intuition of an affair complex, whereas on the other occasion a wholly different phenomenon, a non-intuitive, perhaps a wholly confused and unarticulated consciousness of an affair-complex functions as the lower stratum. With the same justice in the sphere of experience one could conceive the difference between the clear and faithful judgment of perception and any vague judgment of the same affair-complex as consisting merely of the former being endowed with a 'feeling of clarity,' while the latter is not". The expression of a "feeling" about experience that would like to be experience's "explanation" is just that, an explanation, for Husserl, a mere mode of sense (Experience and Judgment). The colored judgment that operates with the liberty of being a "clearly seeing intuition" is different from phenomenological phenomena which essentially is not colored, not immediate, and as we will see in posts after this, actually not "intuition", if we understand "intuition" in the classical sense of something being presented to someone immediately in which they are able to express what they are experiencing within a sentence as what experience "is". This other non-immediate intuition of experience is perhaps confused, and if it's not immediate, if it's not the naive disposition circumscribed in the empiricist and the idealist (here is where empiricism and idealism find something in common) , then it doesn't have the ease of being easily clarified, and for a certain time is unarticulated. Even if the articulation is going on in the unarticulated, it will be confusing at first, and Husserl will eventually warn the reader of how different Phenomenology is and how one is always a beginner, not just for the sake of wanting the reader to operate always at a null-zero point, but for the sake of keeping the reader away from the dogmatism's of empiricism and idealism that could easily be the case based on the way thought has happened to man, the way in which man thinks (which can be otherwise). The "clear and faithful" ("faithful" here is being criticized as dogmatic) judgment of perception, the relying on "feelings" to explain experience, is endowed with a feeling of clarity. Everything is just crystal clear for the idealist. Whatever they feel, is what experience is (which leads to nauseating 20th century platitudes like "do what you feel") . This is brought into distinction from experience not being clear, not being endowed (luxury) with with a "feeling of clarity", but at first and maybe always confused and unarticulable. Phenomenology will enter into this non-intuitive, at-first-confused unarticulated consciousness that grounds experience in it's absolute emptiness, it's eidetic necessities, and ultimately it's lack of clarity, or at the very least, it's lack of "intuition" understood in the classical dogmatic sense. In this sense, by not relying on what's dogmatic "clear", we are undoubtedly beginners in phenomenology. We are beginners at understanding experience and consciousness. We are beginners until we throw away the shackles of "clear feelings" defining what experience is. We may always be beginners in an infinite description, but we won't be shackled to the fictions of idealism.

Yeah, this post was a right hook to New Age "thinking".