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Amira .

You are not a self! Bodies, brains and the nature of consciousness by prof Thomas Metzi... - 3 views

www.abc.net.au/...2705963.htm

Consciousness mind & brain Neuroscience science philosophy psychology

shared by Amira . on 23 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Nobody has ever seen a will. How many grams does a will weigh? What colour does it have? We don't find a will in the brain, that's for sure. What we have is the conscious experience of having free will, of actually deliberating, wanting something, of weighing different goals against each other and so on, and that conscious experience of free will, that will be explained by science.
  • So, what makes you you?
  • you make the provocative argument that there is no such thing as a self, that there never has been, that there never will be.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Thomas Metzinger: Yes, it's actually not so provocative, it's not an original idea at all. Many philosophers, David Hume, in the Anglo Saxon universe have said that for a long time. Who am I? The physical body certainly exists, the organism exists, but organisms are not selves. I don't deny that there is a self-y feeling. I certainly feel like someone, but there is no such thing. There is neither a non-physical thing in a realm beyond the brain or the physical world that we could call a self, but there's also no thing in the brain that we must necessary call a self.
  • Of course Buddhist philosophy had that point 2,500 years ago. So the idea that, as philosophers say, the self is not a substance, that it is something that can stay and hold itself in existence, even if the body or the brain were to perish, that's not a very breathtaking and new idea. What I am interested in is to understand why we just cannot believe that this is so. We have the feeling there is an essence in us, a deepest, inner core. We have this feeling that there must be something that is just not right about neuro-scientific theories about self consciousness, there's something beyond it. And I want to understand what that deepest core is because that's the origin of the subjectivity of consciousness.
  • But the experience of looking, of being directed to one's own feelings or to one's sensory perceptions of the outside world, this is itself an image. There is nobody looking at the image, it's like the camera is part of the picture or the viewing is itself a part of the process of viewing. This is how a first-person perspective emerges in our own case, the question is, okay, if it's not a thing, if it's not something in the brain, what kind of a process is it? And I think it's a process, as philosophers say, of representing, that is of making an image, and that process is not there all the time. You know you have a conscious self in dreams, you have one in your waking life. During anaesthesia or during dreamless sleep there is no such thing as this process of self-ing, if I may call it like that.
  • The conscious self...that's what we call consciousness today. I think it's also something like a computational tool that helps us to navigate the world, like the mouse pointer that tells you 'You are here and now and you can control this and that'. And so we actually have something like a simulation of the world, and I think the amazing thing is Mother Nature has done this much better than any computer today. Millions of years ago we have this feeling of being present in the world as selves, and that's a great achievement of natural evolution and the evolution of nervous systems, but it's virtual.
  • Natasha Mitchell: So interesting. So, consciousness literally is the appearance of an inward world, but that world is a very partial representation of the material, the real world that we experience, is your suggestion.Thomas Metzinger: Right, it's just like your physics teacher perhaps told you in high school, in front of your eyes there is just a raging ocean of different wavelength mixtures, there are no coloured objects. Coloured objects are the models your brain creates of visual objects. The world model our brains create has many dimensions, it has the dimension of auditory perceptions, of sound and speech and music, of colours and smell. But it also has these gut feelings, all our body perceptions, moods, emotions, all these are parts of...it's like a thin film which creates the boundary to the world. I'm not saying there is no outside world and I'm also not saying we're not in contact with it and we don't act in the world, but just for conscious experience, how it appears to you, that is actually an inner space, that is something that is very local in your own brain. In the real world there is no self as one substantial thing. That's part of the simulation.
  • On the one hand I believe that we could have much better science and a much better science of consciousness if many of the involved researchers would do things like meditating or other practices in, say, altered states of consciousness, but as a philosopher I don't believe that in a strict sense that we can just look into our own minds and find facts there. I usually keep this completely separate, this is my private life, but I am also first a long-term meditator and just by chance in my early 20s I've had six or seven spontaneous out-of-body experiences. Nothing dramatic, just when falling asleep. They made me think a lot because I was just writing my PhD thesis on the mind/body problem and I just found out that everybody on the research frontier is a materialist...
  • Natasha Mitchell: So they locate the mind in the body and very much in the brain.Thomas Metzinger: Or to the point that they say that there has never been anything like a mind, that's the most ruthless form of eliminative materialism, as we call it.
  • for most people this only happens when they try to sit up or so, jump up, and then they suddenly really jump up and they float out and then they realise this physical body is behind them. That would be a very simple and natural out-of-body experience that hundreds of thousands of people have had on the planet. Then you suddenly have the experience that your self, your centre of thinking, of attending, is located out of your physical body for the first time and often you experience a second kind of bodily shape, an ethereal light body in which you can fly around. That is of course, or so I have claimed, the root of our belief in souls because human beings have had these experiences at all times and in all cultures, long before there was science or philosophy, and people have made theories about what could that be because it's pretty realistic, at least as realistic as your lucid dreams are. It's at least as realistic as waking life, and then you have a problem. I mean, are you going to tell people about this or are they going to send you to the psychiatrist...
  • atasha Mitchell: Exactly, you've spent many years trying to explain it, but scientifically. And in fact you describe yourself in your new book as an intrepid philosophical psychonaut. It sounds like you've tried all sorts of experiments on yourself, as well as in collaboration with scientists and their subjects. You got your surgeon to alter your anaesthetic regime when you went under surgery once.Thomas Metzinger: Yes, they were really cynical. They said, 'So young man, you've been writing your thesis about the mind/body problem. Observe yourself now!' And they knocked me out and it was very nasty, it was a very death-oriented waking up phase, there was nothing that resembled an out-of-body experience, it was in parts frightening. No special discovery there. But if you want to enhance your lucid dreaming, one thing you could do, a simple old classic, is stop drinking at noon, then stare at a glass of water just before you go to sleep in a really thirsty condition, then you place half a tablespoon of salt in your cheek and go to sleep and make a firm commitment as soon as you are there again and you realise you cannot lift it to drink, you will become aware that you're dreaming now. I can guarantee what's going to happen.
  • Full lucidity means that you become aware of your own agency, that you can control the dream world and your own body, you can go through walls or make experiments, and there are very interesting experiments. For instance, you could ask, as a philosopher, another dream figure if they actually think they have a conscious mind of their own or if they actually think they're a subsystem of your dreaming brain right now.
  • Thomas Metzinger: But more seriously what I'm of course interested in is the functional building blocks of what I call the human self model. So in the transition from the ordinary to the lucid dream, for instance, you gain all these memories you have lost, who you are in waking life, that you have had lucid dreams perhaps before, and most importantly perhaps you can control the focus of your attention, focus your own mind. I don't know if you've ever realised this but in ordinary dreams you cannot really control your attention. And then it's of course an amazing, a unique state of consciousness from a theoretical point of view because it's the only state of consciousness where you are not a naïve realist, where you actually experience everything as an internal simulation and you lose this feeling of moving in a real external world. Then you know you are moving in a simulation and you can try all kinds of things.
  • Thomas Metzinger: Because one of many elements of the conscious self I need to understand is the sense of ownership. Long before language and concepts you have the feeling 'this is me', and we also have this, for instance, in using tools. It may be very important when you use a rake or a stick for the period while you use it to actually incorporate it into your body image. What I was interested in was is there something like a global sense of ownership. Not just a feeling of owning your hand or maybe owning a thought, but owning the body as a whole, and can that be experimentally manipulated, that was the question.
  • My theory—big, unintelligible philosophical theory—says that we identify with this image of our body because we cannot recognise it as an image. And if my theory is correct, there should be just this one element of global identification and it should be easy to control it experimentally. That was the idea behind it. But I must also...one warning, the idea of global ownership for our body as whole is a dangerous idea because it introduces a second self, like a little man that does the owning.
  • what do you think was most adaptive about...most beneficial to us as a species about this unique sense of selfhood that it seems that we possess?Thomas Metzinger: Well, in general of course it's good for an animal to have a model of its own body. How fast can I run? Should I pick a fight with this guy? Or better not? How far can I jump to the next branch? How heavy am I? What are my collision properties? That was important. So I think bodily self models have been on this planet for a long time. The next invention was emotions, to know what is in your own interest and in the interest of your offspring, to have the experience of being...I guess, bonding, you say in English, to other conscious selves.
  • In your work you're also very concerned about our changing conception of consciousness with the help of neuroscience, and this is something you're very enthusiastic about, given your partnerships with scientists for many years, but you're calling for a new field of ethics, Thomas, a ethics of consciousness. What would be the focus of such an ethics and why do you see it as being so crucial?Thomas Metzinger: We do have this brand new discipline since 2002 of neuro-ethics where one investigates the ethical consequences of new technologies that come out of neuroscience, like new lie detectors, cognitive enhancers, brain implants and so on. Our image of ourselves, the image of man, of humankind, is changing faster and more dramatically then through any other scientific revolution in the past. In a way we are destroying a lot of what mankind has believed in during the last 4,000 years, but it's also clear that in this emerging vacuum neuroscience will not be able to put something new into this vacuum.
  • how will our culture actually react to a naturalistic turn in our image of man, if there's no supernatural root even in our minds anymore, and we actually have to come to terms with the fact that not only our bodies but also our minds are results of a process that had no goal, that was driven by chance events...I mean, how are we going to come to terms with this? Will we develop a culture of denial, or will we all become vulgar materialists? And I think something that could help us to take this step in integrating all this brand new knowledge and the new potentials for changing our brains and our minds technologically...
  • Thomas Metzinger: And pharmaceutically, that's what we're researching in my cognitive enhancers group...how are we going to make this historical transition in an optimal way? And I think, to put it very simply, we could do it by just thinking not only about what is a good action but what is a good state of consciousness. What states of consciousness do we want to show our children? How can neuroscience help us with optimising education? What states of consciousness are we allowed to impose, to force upon animals? Are all these experiments in, say, primate research, in consciousness research, in neuroscience ethically tenable? What states of consciousness should be illegal in our society? New drugs. What states of consciousness do we want to foster and cultivate?
  • It's also a question of preserving our dignity in the face of these sometimes very sobering discussions, and in developing a cultural response to it. Can modern science help me? It's not only about defending ourselves, it's also about what I call riding the tiger; can all this new knowledge help us to improve our autonomy, maybe also our rationality? How can I take responsibility and charge for the way I deal with my own brain? Can it help us to die better deaths? Who knows? But I think we should all, not only philosophers and scientists but all of us, start to think about what we want to do with all these new brain/mind technologies. Just looking the other way won't make it go away.
  • Amira . on 23 Jan 10
     
    German philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinger is one of the world's top researchers on consciousness, instrumental in its renaissance as a respectable problem for scientific enquiry. From out-of-body experiences to lucid dreaming, anarchic hand syndrome to phantom limbs, his investigations have taken him to places few dare to go. Be spooked, bewildered and amazed.
Amira .

Collective Intelligence: The Need for Synthesis by Kingsley Dennis | Between Both Worlds - 1 views

betweenbothworlds.blogspot.com/...ive-intelligence-need-for.html

Collective intelligence collaboration Intelligence Wisdom society technology internet

shared by Amira . on 23 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Amira . on 23 Jan 10
     
    To upgrade our thinking patterns is a beginning step to an upgrade in human consciousness, and is necessary if we are to succeed in adapting to our rapidly and inevitably changing world. In other words, if we don't enact a change, or learn to adapt to the incoming energies of change and transformation, our presence is likely to be no longer required, or needed. It is a sobering thought.
Amira .

What is Rationality? | Less Wrong - 0 views

lesswrong.com/...what_is_rationality

Rationalism philosophy

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Rationality is the ability to do well on hard decision problems. Another central theme of rationality is truth-seeking. Truth-seeking is often used as an aid to decision-making: if you're trying to decide whether to get a cryonics policy, you might want to find out whether the technology has any good evidence suggesting that it might work. We can make good decisions by getting an accurate estimate of the relevant facts and parameters, and then choosing the best option according to our understanding of things; if our understanding is more accurate, this will tend to work better.
  • Rationality is also the art of how to systematically come to know what is true. Often, the processes of truth-seeking and decision-making, both on the individual level and the group level are subject to biases: systematic failures to get to the truth or to make good decisions. Biases in individual humans are an extremely serious problem - most people make important life-decisions without even realizing the extent and severity of the cognitive biases they were born with. Therefore rational thought requires a good deal of critical thinking - analyzing and reflecting on your own thought processes in order to iron out the many flaws they contain. Group dynamics can introduce mechanisms of irrationality above and beyond the individual biases and failings of members of the group, and often good decision-making in groups is most severely hampered by flawed social epistemology.
  • Rationality techniques and topics include:
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  • Following through with simple logical inferences and numerical calculations - A surprising number of bad decisions and conclusions can be avoided by doing relatively simple pieces of logical reasoning without error or flinching in the face of the conclusion. Common general examples include non sequiturs such as affirming the consequent, argument from fallacy, and taking absence of evidence as certitude of absence ("I haven't found any evidence for it therefore it can never happen" type reasoning). Many bad decisions also result from not doing simple arithmetic, or not taking into account quantitative reasoning. See this website on environmentalism gone wrong due to a failure to reason quantitatively.
Amira .

Science historian cracks the 'Plato code' | PhysOrg June 28, 2010 - 0 views

www.physorg.com/news196943667.html

philosophy science

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - Cached
  • A science historian at The University of Manchester has cracked "The Plato Code" - the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher's writings.
  • Plato was the Einstein of Greece's Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy's findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought. Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music, a 'harmony of the spheres'. Plato imitated this hidden music in his books. The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea - the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today's culture wars between science and religion.
  • "It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.
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  • This will transform the early history of Western thought, and especially the histories of ancient science, mathematics, music, and philosophy. Dr Kennedy spent five years studying Plato's writing and found that in his best-known work the Republic he placed clusters of words related to music after each twelfth of the text - at one-twelfth, two-twelfths, etc. This regular pattern represented the twelve notes of a Greek musical scale. Some notes were harmonic, others dissonant. At the locations of the harmonic notes he described sounds associated with love or laughter, while the locations of dissonant notes were marked with screeching sounds or war or death. This musical code was key to cracking Plato's entire symbolic system.
  • Dr Kennedy, a researcher in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, says: "As we read his books, our emotions follow the ups and downs of a musical scale. Plato plays his readers like musical instruments." However Plato did not design his secret patterns purely for pleasure - it was for his own safety. Plato's ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato's own teacher had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death. Encoding his ideas in secret patterns was the only way to be safe. Plato led a dramatic and fascinating life. Born four centuries before Christ, when Sparta defeated plague-ravaged Athens, he wrote 30 books and founded the world's first university, called the Academy. He was a feminist, allowing women to study at the Academy, the first great defender of romantic love (as opposed to marriages arranged for political or financial reasons) and defended homosexuality in his books. In addition, he was captured by pirates and sold into slavery before being ransomed by friends.
  • Dr Kennedy explains: "Plato's importance cannot be overstated. He shifted humanity from a warrior society to a wisdom society. Today our heroes are Einstein and Shakespeare - and not knights in shining armour - because of him."
  • "The result was amazing - it was like opening a tomb and finding new set of gospels written by Jesus Christ himself. "Plato is smiling. He sent us a time capsule." Dr Kennedy's findings are not only surprising and important; they overthrow conventional wisdom on Plato. Modern historians have always denied that there were codes; now Dr Kennedy has proved otherwise. He adds: "This is the beginning of something big. It will take a generation to work out the implications. All 2,000 pages contain undetected symbols."
  • Amira . on 15 Jan 11
     
    A science historian at The University of Manchester has cracked "The Plato Code" - the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher's writings.
Amira .

Plato's stave: academic cracks philosopher's musical code by Julian Baggini | The Guard... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...lato-mathematical-musical-code

philosophy Ancient science astronomy universe

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Kennedy used a computer to restore the most accurate contemporary versions of Plato's manuscripts to their original form, which would consist of lines of 35 characters, with no spaces or punctuation. What he found was that within a margin of error of just one or two percent, many of Plato's dialogues had line lengths based on round multiples of twelve hundred.The Apology has 1,200 lines; the Protagoras, Cratylus, Philebus and Symposium each have 2,400 lines; the Gorgias 3,600; the Republic 12,200; and the Laws 14,400.Kennedy argues that this is no accident. "We know that scribes were paid by the number of lines, library catalogues had the total number of lines, so everyone was counting lines," he said. He believes that Plato was organising his texts according to a 12-note musical scale, attributed to Pythagoras, which he certainly knew about."My claim," says Kennedy, "is that Plato used that technology of line counting to keep track of where he was in his text and to embed symbolic passages at regular intervals." Knowing how he did so "unlocks the gate to the labyrinth of symbolic messages in Plato".
  • Believing that this pattern corresponds to the 12-note musical scale widely used by Pythagoreans, Kennedy divided the texts into equal 12ths and found that "significant concepts and narrative turns" within the dialogues are generally located at their junctures. Positive concepts are lodged at the harmonious third, fourth, sixth, eight and ninth "notes", which were considered to be most harmonious with the 12th; while negative concepts are found at the more dissonant fifth, seventh, 10th and 11th.Kennedy has also found that the enigmatic "divided line" simile in the Republic, in which Plato describes a line divided by an unstated ratio, falls 61.7% of the way through the dialogue. It has been thought that the line refers to the golden mean, which expressed as a percentage is 61.8%.
  • It also explains why it is that Aristotle, Plato's pupil, emphatically claimed that Plato was a follower of Pythagoras, to the bafflement of most contemporary scholars.
  • Amira . on 15 Jan 11
     
    Historian claims Plato's manuscripts are mathematically ordered according to 12-note scale
Amira .

Neuroscience, free will and determinism: 'I'm just a machine' By Tom Chivers | Telegrap... - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...rminism-Im-just-a-machine.html

mind & brain Neuroscience cognitive science technology Free will philosophy

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Prof Haggard is demonstrating "transcranial magnetic stimulation", a technique that uses magnetic coils to affect one's brain, and then to control the body.
  • The machinery can't force Prof Haggard to do anything really complicated – "You can't make me sign my name," he says, almost ruefully – but at one point, Christina is able to waggle his index finger slightly, like a schoolmaster. It's very fine control, a part of the brain specifically in command of a part of the body. "There's quite a detailed map of the brain's wiring to the body that you can build,"
  • I watch as Christina controls Prof Haggard's fingers like a marionette.
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  • The idea that our bodies can be controlled by an outside force is a pretty astonishing one. "This is absolutely out of my control," insists Prof Haggard, as his muscles continue to move. "I'm not doing it, Christina is. I'm just a machine, and she is operating me."
  • What does this mean in terms of free will? "We don't have free will, in the spiritual sense. What you're seeing is the last output stage of a machine. There are lots of things that happen before this stage – plans, goals, learning – and those are the reasons we do more interesting things than just waggle fingers. But there's no ghost in the machine."
  • The conclusions are shocking: if we are part of the universe, and obey its laws, it's hard to see where free will comes into it. What we think of as freedom, he says, is a product of complexity. "An amoeba has one input, one output. If you touch it with one chemical, it engulfs it; with another, it recoils. "If you see a light go green, it may mean press the accelerator; but there are lots of situations where it doesn't mean that: if the car in front hasn't moved, for example. The same stimulus sometimes makes me press the accelerator, but sometimes the horn. We are not one output-one input beings; we have to cope with a messy world of inputs, an enormous range of outputs. I think the term 'free will' refers to the complexity of that arrangement."
  • philosophically, morally, and – most worryingly – legally. "We understand what brain areas are responsible for impulsive behaviour, and which bits are responsible for inhibiting that behaviour. There's a whole brain network associated with holding back from things you shouldn't do. "What happens if someone commits a crime, and it turns out that there's a lesion in that brain area? Is that person responsible? Is the damage to the machine sufficient for us to exempt them from that very basic human idea that we are responsible for our actions? I don't know." He refers to a major project in America, where "lawyers, neuroscientists, philosophers and psychiatrists are all trying to work out what impact brain science has on our socio-legal sense of responsibility". This runs shockingly contrary to the sense of freedom that we feel in terms of controlling our actions, on which we base our whole sense of self and system of morality. "As far as I know," says Prof Haggard, "all societies hold individuals responsible for their actions. Even in animal societies, individuals have reputations. Non-human primates adjust their behaviour according to how other animals will respond. Junior males will not steal from older males, because they know they'll get beaten up. That's the beginning of social responsibility; the awareness that your behaviour has effects on the behaviour of others, and can have good or bad consequences.
  • "It's a rule that we need to have as social animals. You couldn't have society unless, if you do something wrong, you pay for it. The question is, what do we do when people don't have the brain machinery to play by the rules – or decide not to play by them? That's not a scientific question. That's a moral one." Maybe, I suggest, we've over-defined free will. Perhaps it doesn't exist in the mystical breaking-the-laws-of-the-universe way, but there is a sense in which this "me", this brain and body, responds to the world, reacts to information, tries to shape its environment; takes decisions. Can we not pull free will back to something more defensible? He taps his fingers.
  • "Yes, interacting intelligently with your environment might be enough. The philosophical definition of free will uses the phrase 'could have done otherwise'. I picked up the blue cup; could I have picked up the white one? Given the initial conditions, the world as it was, could I have acted differently? "As a neuroscientist, you've got to be a determinist. There are physical laws, which the electrical and chemical events in the brain obey. Under identical circumstances, you couldn't have done otherwise; there's no 'I' which can say 'I want to do otherwise'. It's richness of the action that you do make, acting smart rather than acting dumb, which is free will."
  • Some philosophers – Robert Kane, and, famously, Karl Popper and John Eccles – have held out hope that quantum indeterminacy, the randomness at the level of the universe's finest grains, could rescue true freedom. Prof Haggard is dismissive. "No one wants to be told they're just a machine. But there is simply nothing approaching convincing evidence for the quantum view. Popper and Eccles proposed that free will was due to quantum indeterminacy in the chemical messages that communicate between neurons. "But none of that happens at the quantum level. From a physics point of view, it's macro-level." Besides, quantum activity is purely random, and randomness gives you no more freedom than determinism does. Does this bother you, I ask? Being a machine? "I keep my personal and professional lives pretty separate," he says, smiling. "I still seem to decide what films I go to see, I don't feel it's predestined, though it must be determined somewhere in my brain.
Amira .

Transindividuation by Bernard Stiegler & Irit Rogoff | Journal e-flux 2010 - 0 views

www.e-flux.com/...121

philosophy cultural Individualism Human being

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • This is a segment of conversation between the philosopher Bernard Stiegler and cultural theorist Irit Rogoff that took place on the occasion of Stiegler’s lecture series, “Pharmaconomics” at Goldsmiths in February, March 2010, as part of his current professorial fellowship. In this segment, we touch on a couple of Stiegler’s key terms in the development of his thought, such as “transindividuation,” “transmission,” and “long circuits.” In his three-volume work Technics and Time, Stiegler has argued that “technics” (a constellation of models and discourses converging on information systems, codes, prostheses, machines, etc.) constitute what “is most properly to be thought as the key philosophical question of our time.” As Andrés Vaccari states about Technics and Time: In the human sciences, culture and language have also been progressively engulfed by the universe of technics: the artificial realm of institutions, rituals, knowledges, symbol systems and practices that makes humans functional, speaking, meaning-making creatures; that is, what makes humans human. The essence of the human, it seems, is the technical; which is paradoxically the other of the human: the non-human, the manufactured, unnatural, artificial; the inhuman even.1
  • Attention is the reality of individuation in Gilbert Simondon’s sense of the terms: insofar as it is always both psychical and collective. Attention, which is the mental faculty of concentrating on an object, that is, of giving oneself an object, is also the social faculty of taking care of this object – as of another, or as the representative of another, as the object of the other: attention is also the name of civility as it is founded on philia, that is, on socialised libidinal energy. This is why the destruction of attention is both the destruction of the psychical apparatus and the destruction of the social apparatus (formed by collective individuation) to the extent that the later constitutes of system of care, given that to pay attention is also to take care.
  • The first is education in the larger sense of transmission—inter-generational transmission—because, to my mind, this is the essence of education. What is education in this sense? Education is the relation between diverse generations, and contact is its mode of transmission. For example, an artist is capable of affecting, in and of themselves, a line of transmission from Paleolithic art through to contemporary art, and this transmission is a relationship to time, to human—I don’t like the word “human,” so perhaps we could say “mortal”—experience. These lines are within the artist, not made manifest by him or her, nor are they structures of representation, and they are put into effect through their practice, through the contact with them. Initially, the most common, everyday experience of education is the relationship between parents and children, or we could say that the space of the family is the first space of education. And here we can already begin to identify problems, which are very close, very connected to problems that you can see at other levels and modalities of education, in schools and in museums and in other similar institutions. And so I would like to speak about those three levels; this “family” education; academic education, lets say; and “cultural” education, that of cultural institutions. And in these three different levels, you can encounter the same problems—problems of circuits, long and short. Today, the problem of education at the level of the family is the short-circuiting of the relationship between generations through the operations of the media. What is created between generations are in fact long circuits. What Freud or Groddeck call the “id” is an unconscious space of long circuits. These unconscious spaces link generations along very, very long spans of time. What is produced within these long circuits are the material of the dream, for example, which is at stake in Freud’s interpretation of dreams, as well as clearly being the matter from which artists operate and produce. Joseph Beuys is extremely important for me because he was working on this question of long circuits aligning him in individuated ways with the past.
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  • I discovered that in fact in the 1880s, the Paris Opera had an extremely interesting policy regarding the “public.” When you were a member, you had a subscription to the opera, and you received the entire score of a new production before the performance. And you also received the transcription of the piece, an arrangement for piano and violin and voice as well as a commentary on the complexity of the score. And you had to prepare yourself before going to the concert hall. Why? In fact, at this time throughout the bourgeois families you had people with skills at playing the piano, the violin, or singing, and everyone was reading and writing music. Being capable of playing music was a condition for listening to music, because if you could not play, it was not possible to listen to this music. Because there were no hi-fi apparatuses, there was no radio or phonographs. So at the beginning of the twentieth century new apparatuses appeared that suddenly created a short-circuit in the skills—the musical skills of the public.
  • My own grandfather who died in 1935 was a worker who drove locomotives, but he was capable of reading music. But in my generation, our generation, reading music is exceptional, it’s not common knowledge, so in fact I think that in the twentieth century you had an extremely important, instrumental shift, a transformation in education in which suddenly the skills of the “savoir faire”—of playing instruments and reading scores—were short-circuited, and suddenly the relationship between artworks and their publics was completely changed.
  • My thought was much influenced by the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, who was an important thinker of individuation. Simondon says that if you want to understand the individual, you need to inscribe the individual in a process of which he is only a phase. As such, the individual has no interests. The individual is only an aspect, or phase of a process, but the process is what is important. So what is this process? It is the process of individuation, that is of transformation, and for Simondon, everything is a caught up in and brought into a process of individuation. For example, the passages of life are a process of individuation, but “technics” are also processes of individuations.
  • Now we ourselves, as humans, are a type of individuation that is very specific, as our individuation is not only a vital individuation, that is, an individuation of the living organism, of life, but an individuation of the psyche as well, so it is operating as both conscious and unconscious processes. And Simondon says that the individuation of the psyche is always already an individuation of a group of psyches, because a psyche is never alone. It always operates in relation to another psyche. At the limit itself, himself, or herself, a psyche in this situation is a very specific doubling of oneself in narcissism and a type of dialectical relationship to oneself. But this situation of dialogism in the psyche is an interiorization of a primordial situation in which, if you follow the arguments of Freud or Winnicott, you are in a dialectic relationship with other psyches, such as that of your mother or your father. This individuation, for example, is omnipresent and continuous. When you are reading a book, you individuate yourself by reading this book because reading a book is to be transformed by the book. If you are not transformed by the book, you are not reading the book—you believe that you are reading. You may believe that you are, but you are not.
  • IR: So reading a book is a short-circuit. BS: It can be a short-circuit if you believe you are reading a book and you don’t in fact read it. It is a long circuit if you individuate yourself by reading the book, if you are in the process of individuating yourself. Now the theory of Wolfgang Iser—the theorist of the school of Konstanz—is that a book is a process of individuation, a book doesn’t exist as such. What exists as a book is the community of the reader. And this is extremely interesting. Because it says in fact that a book is a power of individuation, but not individuation as such. It is the circuit created, the long circuit created by the readers, which is the individuation of the book. And it is not only the case for the book. It is the case for every artwork or other forms of creative work in the humanities. Now, when you are individuating yourself with somebody—for example, we are now in discussion and in speaking, I am individuating myself. But in listening to me, you are individuating yourself through my discourse. You can individuate through my discourse by adherence with my discourse, but it’s also equally possible to individuate oneself by its contradiction, its negation.
  • A co-individuation is not the same as individuation, it is a process of individuation—for example in the dialogues of Plato, in which you have the presence of Socrates and Gorgias who are not in a position of individuating themselves. In the dialogues of Plato, the goal of the dialogues is nevertheless to reach a kind of agreement, even an agreement on disagreement if you can say, “we disagree on that,” “we agree on things,” “we disagree on that,” it is a kind of disagreement. It is a disagreement with an agreement about the disagreement. Part of the belief in socialization was to stipulate that a “gentleman” is capable of arriving at an agreement about a disagreement while a “barbarian” is not capable, and that is important for our argument here. This process of co-individuation, when it produces a kind of convergence and agreement, transforms the process of trans-individuation. Why? Because if you have a discussion and a topic, in the discussion you have several positions expressed during the discussion, but you have a moment in which you have what Simondon calls a “meta-stabilization”—a kind of agreement that can become a rule. For example, if you are a geometer or a moviemaker, you will meta-stabilize something that will become the style of Euclid, or the style of Fellini, or the style of Godard, or the style of Expressionism in German cinema in the twenties, and so on and so forth. And this becomes a kind of cultural inheritance, which created in philosophy, for example, a new dialectic, or perhaps an “apodictic” (the branch of philosophy that analyzes influence) that will then be transmitted in the operations of a conventional “objective” education.
  • There is a specific reason, an argument I am putting forward, which is that, in my point of view, the twentieth century began in the nineteenth century. There was a change, a very deep change, in the organology of transindividuation. Such was the text of Adorno and Horkheimer “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in which suddenly—through what is currently called mass media: television, cinema, radio, now digital technology and networks as well—the development of a new organology was forged, which in turn creates a new organization of the circulation of the symbolic. Within this new mode of organization, suddenly the production of the symbolic becomes industrial, subject to industrial processes. Here you encounter the production of symbols on the one hand, and the consuming of such symbols on the other—an aporia because it is impossible to consume a symbol. The symbol is not an object of consumption; it is an object of exchange, of circulation, or of the creation of circuits of trans-individuation. So this situation suddenly produced what I call short-circuiting—of trans-individuation. And it is a very long story, it is not framed by a short historical period, but extends over a long time.
  • There is an extremely interesting sentence by the anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan who says you need to participate at the level of feeling, of emotion, in order to exit something—not reject something, but engage with it emotionally. Why did he say something like that? He was a reader of Bergson, just like Simondon, and you know the problem for Bergson is what is called the “loop stimulus”—it is not a stimulus response, but is like Marcel Mauss, with the exchange of gifts. You can receive if you can give. If you can engage, you are also able to exit. If you are able to engage critically, then a process takes place that would otherwise remain static.
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