Flames aren’t really mysterious

Sometime years ago, I attended a couple of sessions of an informal thinktank that friend Steve organized, where a small number of smart people would sit around and talk about interesting things. (I think he’s still doing that, but remotely now because of pandemics and travel and stuff.) One set of things we talked about included the mind-body problem and the nature of scientific explanation and so on, and as part of that I started reading Colin McGinn’s “The Mysterious Flame”, as an accessible introduction to the “mysterian” viewpoint on the mind-body (or mind-brain, or consciousness-brain) problem, which says essentially that we don’t, and to some degree that we will never, or can’t, know the answer.

I apparently got to like page 52 and then put in a bookmark and put it aside. :)

In search of an interesting book to start yesterday, I picked it up and dusted it off, and started from page 1 again. Today I finished it, and I’m going to write down some thoughts about it. I’m guessing that I’m not going to finish this and post it tonight, but probably I will eventually.

One thing that’s really obvious to me is that McGinn and I just think differently: we have different cognitive styles, different intuitions on things, different tastes if you will. He’s also writing a consciously popular and informal book here, and likely being less careful and thorough than he is in his several more academic books (perhaps I should read one). So I’m trying to keep both of those things in mind when thinking and writing about this book here; we’ll see how well I do.

My reconstruction of the main argument set out in the book here is:

• The hard problem of consciousness is hard, for basically the usual reasons,
• Materialism and dualism are wrong, for basically the usual reasons,
• Other solutions, like positing divine agency, or that everything has mental properties, or a few others, also don’t work,
• It’s not unreasonable to believe that our cognitive facilities, as shaped by evolution, might be unable to solve certain problems, not because they are objectively hard, but just because our brains didn’t evolve with the required skills or faculties or what have you,
• Physical things like brains seem inherently spatial, whereas consciousness seems inherently non-spatial,
• It’s not unreasonable to believe, and it’s likely true, that we can never know (or understand, or explain, or something like that) how brains cause (or are caused by, or relate to, or interact with) consciousness.

He also says some … odder things, mostly later on in the book, but I’ll focus on the main plot first.

I can more or less buy that there might be things that our brains, as evolved, have a hard time with; that seems plausible. I have a harder time thinking that there are things (in the cognitive sphere) that they just can’t do at all, outside of trivial examples like memorizing million-digit numbers. I would take convincing.

McGinn’s case doesn’t seem very strong, although he writes about it at great length, restating it in many different ways. He gives some examples, but they are all examples of things that are perhaps harder for us than other things, but that we can still do. He cites the Chomskyan theory of Universal (human) Grammar, but takes it farther than as far as I know Chomsky ever did, seemingly implying that humans cannot learn languages that don’t have the grammar our minds are wired for; I see no reason to think that’s true. He talks about how the Square in Abbott’s Flatland can’t conceive of higher dimensions; but we humans can conceive of dimensions higher than three, so that seems bootless. He talks about not trying to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver, but even there that’s possible eventually, it’s just not efficient.

He seems to claim at one point that we can think only about things that work by essentially simple combinations of smaller things, after the model of classical physics / chemistry / biology and the structure of linguistic grammar, embedded in three-dimensional space; he says “that way of thinking is the essence of the scientific picture of the world”. But that’s unconvincing; we do all sorts of cognitive and/or scientific things (complex analysis, say, or for that matter social psychology, or music theory) that don’t fit that picture; they may be hard, but they aren’t impossible.

He writes that “The scientist is a skilled thinker, but she cannot remember more than her finite memory capacity allows, and she cannot think a million thoughts a second”, which is entirely true; but given the existence of external memories in notepads and computers, and the basic irrelevance of the speed of thoughts, this again doesn’t seem to imply that there are insoluble problems.

The whole spatial / nonspatial thing seems rather like a red herring to me. It’s mostly an argument from incredulity: “If the brain is spatial, being a hunk of matter in space, and the mind is nonspatial, how on Earth could the mind arise from the brain?” and so on. But nonspatial things arise unproblematically from spatial things all the time: political parties aren’t located at a particular point in space and don’t have physical dimensions, but no one wonders how on Earth nonspatial political parties could arise from spatial human beings. Or how nonspatial web pages could arise from spatial networking and storage hardware. Being incredulous about this seems to be just a lack of imagination, or something.

Various other smallish things bother me throughout the book. He uses “cognitive closure” to describe the notion that the solution to the mind-body problem is “closed” to our knowledge; but that’s not what “closure” usually means, you don’t ask the bartender “when is closure?”. Closure in this context is commonly a mathematical term, meaning that when you apply some operation to one element of a set, you get another element of the set, not something outside the set. That’s just a bit of a solecism, but it annoyed me. He also repeatedly refers to the connection between mind and brain as “intelligible”, which given his main thesis is rather unaccountable. Intelligible in principle to things other than humans, or something? He never says what he means by the word, and that bothered me.

He appears in most of the book to be unaware of the Problem of Other Minds, talking as though it’s relatively obvious what’s conscious and what isn’t. Only brains can produce consciousness, he says, not kidneys or stones or anything else: “we know from introspection that [the brain] is unique among physical objects”. I can’t imagine what he means by this; introspection certainly tells us nothing of the kind.

He also refers to ants as having minds; how does he know that? Is it just because we label their densest neural clumps as “brains”? Is he confident that jellyfish have no consciousness, because our biologists don’t usually label any part of them as “the brain”? This becomes particularly annoying when he considers the possibility of inorganic consciousness, when he says that since all the consciousnesses we know about are organic, he thinks that’s probably required, although he could be wrong. What a weird intuition to state without any support! It seems no more valid than to say that consciousness probably requires being a biped, or living on Earth, both of which I hope are uncontroversially implausible.

I see I’m wandering into some of the smaller oddities that mostly occur later in the book, so here’s my summary of what I take to be the argument of those chapters:

• Even if we can’t understand the mind-body connection, we can still say some things about the subject.
• A thing can’t be conscious just because it’s running a certain computer program or manipulating certain symbols; we don’t know what else is required, but his guess is that a thing at least has to be organic to be conscious (omg, Searle!), while noting that he could be wrong about that,
• Brains aren’t purely spatial, because they somehow interact with consciousness, which is non-spatial (but see below),
• There are things that we don’t know about space, and things we don’t know about consciousness and the self, and some of those things are such that, if we knew them (and were able to understand them), we could explain the relationship between brains and consciousness,
• It could be that space actually has extra, consciousness-compatible, properties (or dimensions or something), that were there before the Big Bang, and are still there, even though ever since the Big Bang there have been all these non-consciousness-compatible aspects of space sort of getting in the way, but brains can somehow access them in ways we inherently can’t understand,
• It might turn out that consciousness is actually spatial, in a superior (but unknowable-by-us) analysis of space, so then brains and consciousness would just be interacting in space when properly understood (which seems similar to the last bullet, but he presents them in separate places as separate arguments),
• DNA contains information that explains the relationship between brains and consciousness,
• If various parts of our brains were enhanced, particularly the introspection parts, we might be able to understand the relationship between brains and consciousness; but it might mess up our brains in other ways, and in general we might regret it.
• Science progresses so much faster than philosophy, because philosophy works on those problems that our brains haven’t evolved to be able to solve.

I don’t think I’ve exaggerated the oddity of some of those latter points. He writes, for instance, “The laws and principles that underlie the connection between mind and brain are somehow encoded into the genes … they [our genes] contain information which is such that if we were to know it we would know the solution to the mind-body problem.” Which seems to me like saying that I dunno the plans of a steam engine contain information sufficient to derive gas laws and the heat equations (which they really don’t).

Some of those may have been sort of throw-away thoughts, though, just so he could write lines like “how does it feel to be less intelligent than your big toe?”, so maybe we should give him a pass on that.

The bit about philosophy dealing with insoluble problems would have been more convincing if he’d cited even a single philosophical problem that he considers insoluble, other than the one that the book is about. He didn’t, though, which leaves the claim sort of twisting in the wind.

The attempt to sort of outline what a solution to the problem might look like, in terms of space having properties or dimensions that we’re not aware of, that allow for “nonspatial” minds to interact with “spatial” brains all while both are embedded in space, comes out sounding a whole lot like dualism, except with “something unknowable to us” inserted where dualism’s problems are.

And finally, the claim that a somewhat-enhanced human brain might be able to understand the thing that he is confident that normal human brains can’t, seems to undercut the entire thesis of the book. If it’s possible that enhancing the human brain somewhat, in degree but not kind, would allow solving the mind-body problem, then it seems clear that there’s nothing inherent in the brain as it is now that prevents us from solving it; it’s just that certain bits aren’t up to it. And in that case what evidence could we possibly have that it’s insoluble with current brains, rather than possible but just so hard so that no one’s done it yet? It made me doubt that he really meant the whole mysterian thing after all.

So that’s a bit of a scathe, I suppose. :) He wrote the book twenty-four years ago (Good Lord it’s 2024), for a general (and perhaps therefore less demanding?) audience. His thinking on the subject may well have evolved and sharpened, and been more consistently expressed in other works; I should perhaps read some of them. But to the extent at least that this is one version of the mysterian argument about the mind, I was not convinced (and I was in spots rather annoyed).

Semi-metric woolgathering

Herewith some trains of thought leading through various more or less obscure corners of philosophy, theology, set theory, analytic topology, and/or differential geometry. The math parts may well be wrong, as I’ll be mostly just making it up. (Unlike the philosophy and theology, ha ha ha!) This is the kind of thing I think about on the subway sometimes. When not mindlessly scrolling social media.

In the comments section of a YouTube video titled “Evolution Doesn’t Explain Morality”, I was for some reason talking about objective truth, and whether basing your moral system on a God of some sort gives you an objective source of truth more than basing your moral system on anything else does. (It doesn’t.)

And unrelatedly I stumbled across something about the Axiom of Infinity, which is an optional axiom in good old Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, saying that there is at least one infinite set.

If you include the Axiom of Infinity (and the Axiom of Choice) among your axioms, you can prove all the usual stuff of ZFC, which is to say, all the usual stuff. If you leave it out, as that article there says, not only do you lose any theorems about infinite sets, but you also can’t prove a bunch of theorems about finite sets, because the proofs go through infinite sets on the way to the conclusion (basically).

And then there are all of the non-Euclidean geometries, where you put in an axiom saying that instead of there being exactly one line parallel to a given line and a given point not on that line, there are no such lines, or there are lots and lots of them, and then you get geometries in which the angles of a triangle add up to more or less than a straight angle, and other fun stuff.

So it’s objectively true (let’s say) that in Euclidean geometry the angles of a triangle add up to a straight angle, and it’s objectively true that in ZFC with the Axiom of Infinity you can prove certain things; but it would be silly to say that the parallel postulate, or the axiom of infinity, or the axiom of choice for that matter (celebrate the Banach-Tarski Paradox!) is objectively true simpliciter. They are axioms; everyone chooses which ones to work with at any time.

Back in the arena of theology, it may be objectively true that within a certain reading of Catholicism, things X and Y are objectively true; and within a certain reading of Hedonic Rule-Utilitarianism, things R and S are objectively true. But there is no (objective) argument that that reading of Catholicism, or that reading of Hedonic Rule-Utilitarianism, is objectively true simpliciter. They are moral systems; everyone chooses which one to work within.

And that got me thinking about just how few axioms you can have, and still do interesting things. Say that all you assume you have are a bunch of points (which we could call “fnorbs” except that we want to lean a little bit on pre-existing ideas because we are lazy), which themselves have no particular properties, and you have a “distance” function (which we could call “doppity” except that etc) d that takes two points and returns a real number. We can call d(x,y) for any points x and y “the distance between x and y“. Let’s assume, I dunno, that for all points x and y, d(x,y) is greater than or equal to zero, and that d(x,y) = d(y,x).

Can we get anything at all out of this tiny set of axioms? If we think for a moment about points being points in some usual Euclidean N-space, and distances being the usual Euclidean distance, then we can think about what something like a “line” might be for instance.

If we have two points x and y, we could define say “the line segment between x and y” as all points z (if indeed there are any) for which d(x,z) + d(z,y) = d(x,y). And that’s sort of fun! Note that so far we don’t know if there are any points on that line segment; there might not be.

A (long) tangent! We had to say that d(x,y) = d(y,x) because our notation strongly suggests that the function d applies to ordered pairs of points: a first argument one and a second argument one. We could instead define d to operate on sets of points, defined only for sets of cardinality two (i.e. having two elements). Since sets aren’t ordered, “{x,y}” is the same set as “{y,x}”, and d({x,y}) is the same as d({y,x}) without our having to say so as an axiom.

This brings us, interestingly, to another axiom. It would be quite natural to write d(x,x)=0, that is that each point is at distance zero from itself. (And in fact if one adds that axiom, one has got something that’s often called a “semi-metric space“, about which there’s a certain amount of theory.)

But what happens to that if we’re using the set form of the distance function? We’d have to talk about the set {x,x}, and it would have to have cardinality two. Is the set {x,x} any different from the set {x}, and does(n’t) it actually have cardinality one, not two?

A good question! One simple way to model a set of points is as a function s from points to Boolean values (true and false), where if s(x) = true, we say that x is “in the set s“, and otherwise we say that it “isn’t”.

(If the set of points is enumerable, or even just countable, which is to say if we can in principle try s on each and all of them, then each set is well-defined; otherwise we may have some sets where we can’t say even in principle which-all points are in it, or what its cardinality is.)

If we model sets that way, then {x,x} is just a weird say of writing {x}, which is just a short way of writing the set defined by “s(z) is true if z=x, and false otherwise”. And that set has (I think uncontroversially) just one element, and therefore the distance between a point and itself is not zero, but is undefined (just like, say, the distance between three points is).

Which I thought was kind of neat, although I can imagine that it might make it harder to do proofs, since you have to consider x=y as a special case all the time, before you can talk about d({x,y}) even having a value.

Then there are “multisets”, which are like sets (in that they are unordered), but which can contain more than one of an element. These are represented by a function (oh I dunno) t, from points to integers, where t(x) tells us how many times x occurs in the (multi)set t. And the cardinality of the set has what I hope is the obvious definition, as the sum over all x of t(x).

If we define our distance function as being defined for any multiset of points of cardinality two, then we can write d({x,x}) just fine, and therefore we can specify that d({x,x}) = 0 for any point x.

(Beyond multisets there are for instance fuzzy sets, where t isn’t integer-valued but real-valued, so an element can belong to the set zero times, or one, or 0.5, or the square root of two, and well, cardinality… But we aren’t using those tonight.)

The next fun question is whether there are any cases where d({x,y}) = 0 and x != y. According to my poking around on the interwebs a bit, it appears that one can take either answer to this as an axiom, and get a different bunch of semi-metric spaces either way. When I asked Bard Advanced or some AI like that about this at work (more perhaps on that below) it called “d({x,y}) = 0 if and only if x = y” something like “the identity of indiscernibles”, which appears to be a thing. And the opposite axiom, that there exists at least one pair of points x and y such that ({x,y}) = 0 and x != y, apparently makes the space into a “pseudo-metric space”, which is another Fun Word To Use Daily.

End of tangent I think. :) What else can we maybe define in our minimalist semi-metric space? We defined a line segment, is there a fun way to define a line? I was thinking about a way to define it as the union of three sets (the segment between x and y, the part beyond x, and the part beyond y), and that probably works, but then I ran across a simpler one: given any two points x and y (for which d({x,y})>0, just to be safe), we can identify all of those points z (if any) where d({z,x}) = d({z,y}) as “the line smoofled by x and y“, or in order to use our pre-existing Euclidean intuitions as “the line which is the perpendicular bisector of the segment between x and y“.

And I thought that was fun. :)

Note that (haha, “Note that”) the “line” up there isn’t really a line in the Euclidean sense necessarily at all. In fact if we imagine our little semi-metric space to be embedded in a three dimensional Euclidean space, then the locus of points equidistant from two given points is actually a plane. So we might want to call the generalized d({z,x}) = d({z,y}) as a “subspace” rather than a “line”. We might be able to figure out how many “dimensions” a semi-metric space “has” by looking at how many times we can take a subspace of a subspace of a… before we have zero points left. Or something.

If we go off and read about semi-metric spaces (and also metric spaces, which is what you get roughly if you include the identity of indiscernibles and also the Triangle Inequality d(x, z) ≤ d(x, y) + d(y, z)), one of the things that people like to talk about is spaces where there are lots and lots and lots of points, and they are really really really close together.

Like, a point x is an accumulation point iff (and I think I have this right) for any distance D however teeny, there is a point y where d({x,y})>0 and d({x,y})<D. That is, you can move as close to x as you like, and there will still be another point that’s closer to x than you are. This requires, clearly, a whole bunch of points, and some of them have to be really close together.

Somewhat relatedly, people also talk about open balls (which makes me chuckle because I am twelve), although usually in metric spaces (with the triangle inequality) for some reason I’m not sure. The open ball at x with radius e is all of the points z (if any) where d({x,z})<e. Nice and simple! With only the properties we have so far, it’s not clear that the open ball is “open” or a “ball” in the intuitive senses.

If every point is an accumulation point, then roughly there are as many points as you could want everywhere, and now we can imagine that an open ball is actually a cute fuzzy sphere (or N-sphere since we don’t know about dimensionality), open in the sense that no point is quite out there at distance equals e, and a sphere in that… it’s spherical.

Actually I don’t think I’ve put enough properties into the space yet; there might not be any points even at distance e/2 from the center. We need something like for any point x and distance D, there is a point closer to x than D, and also a point farther from x than D. And they’re all accumulation points. That seems nice.

I can’t find a term for a (semi-)metric space where all points are accumulation points; I’ve posted on r/learnmath about it (because I am too shy to post it to r/math); we’ll see if I get deleted for not following some sub protocol or something. :) I’m not positive about the one where there are points further away, either; that might be “unbounded” or something.

Once you have open balls (heh heh) you can say things like “the open balls of the space can serve as a base for a topology, where the open sets are all possible unions of open balls,” which is where my mind sort of starts to slide off, which is why I ended up not majoring in Math.

Fun up to there, though! :) Which is why I ended up majoring in Philosophy…

The AI connection here is that I discussed various aspects of all this with Bard (which may or may not be Gemini who knows) and ChatGPT (4.0?), and was very much struck by how plausible and confident and often correct they were even on this rather niche topic, and equally struck by how they would sometimes be just randomly wrong about something, and then be all apologetic and try again if I pointed it out.

This makes it rather unnerving to try to learn anything from them, because who knows if you’re learning some wrong stuff that’s wrong subtly enough that you don’t notice.

And I think I won’t try the WordPress AI Assistant feedback on this post. :) That joke has just about run its course.

Bodhi, svaha!

(Alternate titles: “Books”, and “I’m glad I’m not dualistic like you guys.”)

I’ve been reading actual books again (both the old-fashioned paper type and the modern “e” type), and it’s very nice. I’ve even consciously made a decision to keep doing more of that (foam theories notwithstanding) with the idea that I feel better when I read more book-sized things and mindlessly scroll fewer social-media-post-sized things.

When I finish a book lately, I with some significant probability write up a little review of it for my Goodreads profile (which may or may not cause it to also appear on Amazon I can never remember). So really you can read them all over there and there’s no need for me to post any of them here.

But probably I will anyway. :)

I just finished Red Pine’s translation and commentary on The Heart Sutra (always a favorite), and this is what I wrote over there:

“The Heart Sutra itself is just a page long, and contains the heart of Prajñāpāramitā teachings. And among other things, as Jan Nattier notes, ‘in contemporary Japan, the Heart Sutra has been printed on more teacups, hand towels and neckties than has any other Buddhist scripture’.

“In this readable translation and commentary, Red Pine gives us the thoughtful and scholarly treatment that he is so good at. Considering the sutra in its historical context, the analysis considers it largely as a response to, or a refutation of, the teachings of earlier Buddhist sects, where the light of the Prajñāpāramitā shows all the more or less complex conceptual structures of those earlier teachings, the Four Whatsits and Eight Thingamys and Twelve Whathaveyous, to be not just empty of self or of independent origination, but to be exactly emptiness.

“Not that that’s a bad thing.

“Line by line, he gives both his own formulations of the teachings involved, and pithy quotes from various writers and thinkers and teachers across the centuries; it’s a rich and nourishing stew.

“As a matter of dharma, I would say that the sutra itself is adequate and complete; you don’t need to read commentaries on the Heart Sutra in order to attain the non-attainment that you may be not striving to not-strive for. But who knows, it also couldn’t hurt; sometimes you get nothing from the dharma talk in the evening, but enlightenment comes when the bottom falls out of your bucket while the water was reflecting the moon.

“And in terms of an enjoyable historical treatment, it’s an interesting and informative tour through thought and history that even if not strictly speaking necessary in order to (not) achieve anuttara-samyak-sambodhi, is still a good read.”

Some other stuff that I thought but didn’t put into the Goodreads writeup:

One interesting piece of (what?) doctrine that came up as I read this was the line that the Zen Mountain Monastery chants as:

“Far beyond deluded thoughts; this is Nirvana.”

and Red Pine gives us here as:

“They see through delusions and finally nirvana”.

This is a significant-looking difference. Red Pine talks about how various translators have interpreted this in various ways. In one reading, the Bodhisattvas (which is who we’re talking about here) see that basically everything, from basic sense-perceptions and ideas and everything else that earlier sects made big diagrams of, as empty and emptiness and (perhaps, I’m not terribly fond of this word) delusion, and seeing that leads one to (or just is) nirvana.

But this reading seems to stop arbitrarily short of the obvious end-point. The other reading, which is the one Red Pine gives us, says that nirvana itself is one more thing that is not separate from emptiness. As he puts it, “bodhisattvas do not reach or attain nirvana but overcome all delusions, including those that concern the ultimate goal of nirvana… Nirvana is simply the final delusion.”

And that seems more pleasing to me (modulo just what “delusion” means). But I’ll probably continue my vague effort to memorize the ZMM version of the Sutra anyway, because (so far anyway) I find it flows better (“not born not destroyed, not stained not pure, without loss without gain”).

Then there’s the mantra at the end. Red Pine says, and having read it I find it hard to disagree with, that it’s a pretty important thing, if we read the text as it is. This mantra, “gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā“, might seem to the Western reader (e.g. me) as just a funny little thing tagged on at the end there. But Red Pine (who I keep wanting to call just “Pine” but on the other hand it feels weird to) takes it very seriously; it is the very last thing in the Sutra, after all, the climax of the whole message.

It seems a bit over the edge to me when he writes for instance, “After negating the categories of the Abhidharma, this sutra refuses to set up another category or set of categories. Whatever it is, this teaching is beyond it, including itself. This is the function of this mantra: to go beyond language and the categories in which language imprisons us and to lead us into the womb of Prajnaparamita, which is the Gone, the Gone Beyond, the Gone Completely Beyond.”

I’m not entirely sure what to do with this. Womb? If I take the sutra as actually claiming that this particular mantra leads to freedom from suffering and realization of ultimate emptiness (and maybe a womb) in a way that any other random chant doesn’t, then it seems like, again, a stopping one step short of the summit (or the edge of the abyss). If dharmas are not separate from emptiness, than surely this mantra is also not separate from emptiness, or from the sound of the wind, or a horse’s sneeze (do horses sneeze?). So why is the sutra making a big deal about it like this?

I get the same feeling from some of the sages that Red Pine quotes. Te-ch’ing (aka Hanshan Deqing, a different person than ol’ Hanshan Cold Mountain, fortunately if confusingly) for instance is quoted as saying “The foregoing text is exoteric prajna. This mantra is esoteric prajna… Who but the wise can use it? Certainly not those with small minds.”

The wise? Small minds? What is this? Is not mind emptiness, and emptiness mind? Is small mind separate from wise mind? Is the distinction between the wise and “those with small minds” not itself empty?

Whenever I trip over this sort of thing in Buddhist literature, I am distracted, and wonder whether this was inserted later on by the PR department, or if the author was slipping into dualism, or (perhaps more likely) if there is something going on here that is too subtle for me, and that what seems to be a sudden blatant bit of dualism is actually something wise in a way that I have not yet encompassed.

Which reminds me of the joke: three students are walking together after the evening’s dharma talk, and one says “the talk tonight seemed quite dualistic!” and the second one says “ah, but you see, by saying that, you are yourself engaging in dualism!” and the third one says, “heh, I’m glad I’m not dualistic like you guys.”

:)

Can AIs do interesting cultural analysis?

A few years ago, this question would have been just a joke. Now it’s almost something that one might actually wonder.

Today’s experiment:

“Fiona Apple, Billie Eilish, Sinead O’Connor; are these artists really transgressive, or do they only illustrate how naturally the system can co-opt a superficial transgressiveness to its own ends? Are there more transgressive artists, not in term of throwing around chicken blood or excrement, but in the sense of expressing thoughts that genuinely challenge or disrupt the system? Are these three as transgressive as a single individual can be? And what does that tell us about the relationship of culture to power? (Please answer as a seasoned cultural analyst, well versed in Marxist and Post-Marxist theories of labour relationals, as well as oppression and resistance.)”

“Labour relationals” is my typo. And one can of course question the question itself; it is a good question, or a bad one? Both as a challenge to generative AIs, and as a significant question about culture and transgression. Why those three particular artists, for instance? (That one is easy: because WFUV played “Shameika (said I had potential)” on my drive home, and the other two just sort of popped into my head.) And doesn’t the reference to the specific things that the AI should answer as someone “well versed in” bias the kinds of answers were likely to get? (It absolutely does; I did that on purpose.)

Here is (tonight’s version of) ChatGPT 4 on the issue:

“Your question delves deep into the intersection of cultural analysis, Marxist and Post-Marxist theory, and the role of artists in challenging or reinforcing societal structures. Fiona Apple, Billie Eilish, and Sinead O’Connor are indeed significant figures to consider in this context.

1. Transgressiveness of Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor: These artists, through their music and public personas, have certainly challenged various norms and expectations. For instance, Fiona Apple’s raw emotional honesty in her lyrics, Billie Eilish’s subversion of pop star image norms, and Sinead O’Connor’s famous protest against the Catholic Church on ‘Saturday Night Live’ are acts that can be seen as transgressive. They push against the boundaries of what is typically accepted or expected in their respective contexts. However, the extent to which they truly disrupt the system can be debated.
2. Co-optation by the System: In Marxist and Post-Marxist theories, there is often an understanding that capitalist systems have a powerful ability to co-opt forms of resistance, turning them into commodified elements that can be sold and consumed. This process can dilute the transgressive potential of an artist’s work. While Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor might initially challenge certain norms, the question remains whether their work becomes absorbed and neutralized by the very system they are challenging. This phenomenon is often discussed in relation to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s concept of the “culture industry,” where the capitalist system mass-produces cultural goods that ultimately reinforce dominant ideologies.
3. More Transgressive Artists: There certainly are artists whose work might be considered more fundamentally transgressive in that they might resist co-optation more staunchly or express thoughts that more directly challenge dominant power structures. This could include artists who operate outside the mainstream music industry, or those whose work directly confronts systemic issues like racism, sexism, or capitalism in more overt and unapologetic ways. However, transgressiveness is not just about the content but also about the context and the ways in which the work interacts with or resists prevailing power structures.
4. Limits of Individual Transgressiveness: The comparison of individual transgressiveness raises the question of whether any single artist, regardless of their intentions, can truly challenge a system as pervasive and resilient as capitalism. This ties into the idea of “repressive tolerance” as discussed by Herbert Marcuse, where the system tolerates a certain degree of dissent as a means of preserving itself.
5. Culture and Power: The relationship between culture and power is complex. Culture can both challenge and reinforce power structures. In Marxist theory, cultural expressions are often seen as reflective of the material conditions and power relations of society. However, culture can also be a site of resistance and a means of envisioning and enacting alternative realities. The extent to which artists like Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor contribute to this process depends on how their work interacts with and is shaped by the broader socio-economic context.

“In conclusion, while Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor can be seen as transgressive to varying degrees, their impact needs to be understood within the broader context of how cultural products and expressions are produced, consumed, and potentially co-opted within a capitalist system. The true measure of their transgressiveness might lie not just in the content of their work, but in how it exists in relation to the power structures it seeks to challenge or disrupt.”

And here is (tonight’s version of) Bard (the public one, nothing secret I can access inside of Google or anything):

“As your seasoned cultural analyst, I must offer a nuanced response to your query regarding Fiona Apple, Billie Eilish, and Sinead O’Connor’s “transgressiveness.” It’s a complex question, demanding we navigate the thorny relationship between artistic expression, the cultural apparatus, and the ever-shifting boundaries of transgression.

“Firstly, defining “transgressive” is crucial. Does it imply mere shock value, like chicken blood and onstage antics? Or something deeper, a genuine challenge to power structures and dominant ideologies? From a Marxist perspective, true transgression disrupts the capitalist system and its control over production, consumption, and even our consciousness.

“Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor all exhibit elements of both approaches.

• Apple: From her early, raw explorations of female sexuality in “Tidal” to her unapologetic critiques of societal expectations in “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” Apple consistently confronts taboos and pushes boundaries. Yet, her success within the music industry suggests a degree of co-optation. Perhaps her “transgressiveness” serves the system by providing a palatable form of rebellion for mainstream audiences.
• Eilish: Her goth-tinged aesthetic and introspective lyrics about mental health undoubtedly challenged some norms. However, her meteoric rise and vast appeal might suggest a system eager to embrace a sanitized version of rebellion, one that doesn’t truly threaten the status quo.
• O’Connor: Her act of tearing a picture of the Pope during a live performance on SNL remains a potent symbol of defiance against religious authority. But her career trajectory was irrevocably altered, demonstrating the system’s capacity to punish those who transgress too far.

“Therefore, labeling these artists solely as “transgressive” is overly simplistic. Each navigates a complex dance with the system, sometimes challenging it, sometimes being absorbed by it.

“But are they the most transgressive possible? Absolutely not. Consider:

• Underground artists: Those operating outside the mainstream, defying categorization and commercial viability, often express far more radical ideas and engage in more disruptive art forms. Noise music, performance art, and certain subgenres of metal or rap come to mind.
• Activists and dissidents: Their resistance takes tangible forms, challenging power structures through direct action, social critique, and even bodily sacrifice. Think Emma Goldman, Edward Snowden, or Ai Weiwei.

“The extent of individual “transgressiveness” depends on context and perspective. What seems radical in one cultural climate might be commonplace in another. Moreover, individual acts of defiance only gain true power when they connect to broader social movements and systemic critiques.

“This brings us to the relationship between culture and power. Culture is not a neutral space; it reflects and reinforces power structures while simultaneously offering sites of contestation and resistance. Artists like Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor operate within this complex dynamic. Their “transgressiveness” might be co-opted or diluted at times, but it also holds the potential to spark dialogue, challenge norms, and inspire others to question the status quo.

“Ultimately, the true measure of their impact lies not just in their individual acts of defiance, but in their ability to contribute to a larger conversation about power, oppression, and the possibilities for genuine social change. They remind us that even within the confines of the system, transgression can be a powerful tool for disrupting complacency and paving the way for a more just world.”

Neither of these is terrible! Both use lists (ChatGPT’s numbered, Bard’s two just bulleted), and some useful bolding. Both make some nice external references; ChatGPT is more about academic ones (“culture industry”, Marcuse) and Bard more about cultural figures (Emma Goldman, Edward Snowden (!), Ai Weiwei). Points to Bard for specifically referencing two Apple album titles; both of them mention O’Connor’s famous SNL gesture (it’s famous after all). I like “Each navigates a complex dance with the system, sometimes challenging it, sometimes being absorbed by it” and “culture can also be a site of resistance and a means of envisioning and enacting alternative realities” rather a lot. (Would a strict English teacher say that navigating a dance is a mixed metaphor?)

Either one would probably get a good grade in secondary school, and even, I would venture, in a non-Major undergraduate course (modulo being too short, not having explicit references or bibliographies, and other stuff I didn’t ask for). Either one would have absolutely floored me in, say, 2016 (see this skeptical piece), or even a few years after.

Does either one offer fresh or non-obvious insights? I kind of don’t think so. They are, entirely unsurprisingly, what a pretty decent writer might write in response to the question, given some time to poke around on the web for background if they weren’t already familiar with the subject. They are both very middle-of-the-road in significant senses, neither coming down hard on either side of the question of whether a popular and “successful” artist can truly challenge the system. It depends! It’s nuanced! There are arguments on both sides! It’s debatable!

And that’s very true! But a bit squishy feeling.

It might be interesting to ask them explicitly to take a side; change the prompt to request a strong case that these artists really are disruptive and transgressive (at least potentially), and otherwisely a strong case that they aren’t and cannot be.

Maybe another day. :)

Notes on Alan Watts’s “The Supreme Identity”

I finally finished this book! Somewhat slow going just because it’s written rather densely and dryly, and tends to say the same thing multiple times from different viewpoints. And Watts will do things like casually quoting Angelus Silesius, and then I have to go look up who that was, and I fall into rabbit holes of various kinds.

The book is interesting mostly historically, as a moment in Watts’s thoughts that he eventually grew past, or perhaps psychologically as a snapshot of a particular place in the continuum from something like Christianity to something like Zen. It was written in 1949 (woot!) and the edition that I have has a Preface to the Second Edition, which he wrote in 1972. That later preface doesn’t come right out and say that all the Catholic mumbo-jumbo in the book should be ignored, but…

The main proposition that I see Watts as putting forward in the 1949 text, what the “Supreme Identity” represents, is simply that you and I and all finite beings are just the Infinite playing and having fun.

But since he’s still an Anglican (or something) priest as he’s writing this, he has to tie it to all sorts of Christian and Catholic dogma and theology and symbology and so on, and also say absolutist stuff like how a particular fun thing that the Infinite does (manifesting as finite beings and then having them realize what’s really going on) is the most important, or even the main or only, thing that it does, since he wants to claim that the Resurrection story is a metaphor or projection of this, and obviously that’s the most important thing there is if you’re a Christian.

(We could have a whole tangent here about how the Anglican Church considers itself to be Catholic, whereas the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t consider the Anglican Church to be Catholic, and how it’s therefore not entirely clear what Watts means when he refers to “the Church” or even “Catholic dogma”, especially since he is maybe an Episcopal priest which is “in the Anglican communion”, but really it doesn’t matter to the overall impact.)

He has some fun (albeit expressed in very erudite and scholarly terms) with the cycle from a baby to whom all is unthinkingly one, to a person who feels separate from the Infinite, to perhaps eventually conscious (if inexpressible) realization of the Supreme Identity. He draws circles for this, but it’s not entirely clear to me how we get back to baby again; I don’t think he says, and it’s not a personal reincarnation event because he doesn’t think that’s a thing, and doesn’t think that real Buddhism for instance does either. He draws parallels between that cycle and various things in Catholic (Christian? Anglican? Who knows!) dogma and mythology, having to do with the structure of the Church calendar, the First Adam (Adam) and the Second Adam (Yeshua), and how the Father and Son are one but also not one, and so on in somewhat clever and diverting ways.

He does venture out into symbological pareidolia a bit, as in writing of the “Church year” that the “long period of Sundays following Pentecost is without any organized character and it is possible that this formlessness of half of the year has some connection with the fact that the religious point of view must be unconscious of the dark or hidden incarnation of the Son in Adam.” Or, y’know, it’s just summer and not much is going on. :)

I was conscious throughout of the tension between the more or less cool and sensible stuff that he ultimately wants to say, and the uncool and silly Church stuff that he wants to reference and praise or at least not insult at the same time. His main move here is to say that the real stuff about the Infinite can’t be expressed directly in words or in terms of the finite, and that religion by its nature is all about words and the finite, so the best that the Church can do is introduce symbols, and talk about various “projections” of the Infinite into the finite as though they were the important thing.

Which seems to me to be a rather weak excuse, really. If Watts can spend a whole book talking about the Supreme Identity, what is it that stops “religion” from doing the same thing? If Watts can say that the important thing about the Resurrection is that it symbolizes in finite terms an important inchoate fact about the Infinite, rather than whether or not it actually happened historically, why can’t “the Church” say the same thing? Why, in particular, does the Church tend to like burn people at the stake who say the wrong thing about this mere finite projection?

The whole question of sin, judgment, and eternal punishment, and therefore of the necessity of salvation and so on, and for instance the jealousy and wrathfulness of the Church’s God, poses a very hard question for Watts here, one which he almost entirely ignores. If all finite beings are just the Infinite having fun, then what role is there for “sin” and “judgment”, “jealousy” and “wrath”, and yipes “eternal torment”? “Salvation” in the sense of a Buddhist “realization” isn’t necessary at all; it’s just a thing that you can do if you feel like it and are willing to do the work or are lucky enough to have the bottom fall out of your water bucket. This all seems to me un-Catholic in the extreme.

Aside from rather lengthy treatments of how prior theologians addressed it, and the problems with their approaches, Watts treats of this whole thing really just once, in less than a page; “judgment” doesn’t even appear in the (rather good!) index. And this is notable because he addresses pretty much everything else two or three or a dozen times, perhaps on the theory that since it’s inexpressible directly, expressing it indirectly multiple times might help. Or just on the theory that the theologians that he’s trying to reach like reading lots of scholarly-sounding words.

But back to judgment and so on. Essentially the only thing that Watts says about it in the book is that “sin” is when a finite being does things that work against the realization of the Supreme Identity, and that someone who dies without having gotten to realization “is in a special sense ‘judged’ eternally” (shame-quotes in the original). Their not getting to realization is just fine from the viewpoint of the Infinite, since it was the Infinite that did it, but it is also “eternal” in that everything is eternal from the viewpoint of the Infinite (sub specie aeternitatis). So the “eternal torment” of the sinner is pretty much exactly the same as the “eternal torment” of anyone who stubs their toe, since both exist timelessly within the Infinite, and both are just fine and cool as far as the Infinite is concerned, since the Infinite is the one what done it.

“The only eternal view of such ‘damned’ lives is one which knows them as integral threads in a fabric where light and dark are harmonized in perfect beauty.”

Which, yeah, harkens for me back to the idea of a non-judgmental God, but really leaves out pretty much everything about jealousy and wrath and actual eternal torment, and how Salvation means that Jesus suffered so you don’t have to. If the Dark Night of the Soul of an unrepentant sinner (i.e. one who never comes to Realization) is an eternal state of suffering because it exists timelessly within the Infinite, then in exactly the same way so is the Dark Night of the Soul of a sinner who eventually finds God and is redeemed (i.e. realizes his Supreme Identity with the Infinite). And the idea that the repentant and unrepentant sinner suffer eternal torment in exactly the same sense is, again, about as un-Catholic as you can get, no?

So my theory is that Watts realized this eventually, and decided that “Christian dogma” may not actually be “without the slightest alteration, … a perfect analogy of realization” after all, and that he’d be better off not tied to the Church and all its obsession with judgment and salvation and like that, and from that we get the later and less contorted-feeling works.

There’s a bunch of other stuff in this book, including some interesting analyses of the Thomist approach to the problem of evil (and why it’s not really compatible with the Supreme Identity), some rather early and overly-simple and overly-broad statements about Japanese and Chinese and generally “Oriental” philosophy and religion which he would also grow beyond in later years, how people who achieve realization behave at personal and social levels, what “achieve realization” might actually mean, and so on.

I don’t think I’d recommend this book to anyone not interested in Watts himself and how his thought developed, and it’s certainly not a good introduction to his work in general: one should read later books for that. But I enjoyed reading it (now that I’ve finally finished it!) and it did inspire a certain amount of thought. So that was good!

The entire rest of «Le Plaisir du texte»

Way back when I started reading Barthes’ “The Pleasure of the Text” («Le Plaisir du texte»), I described it as “short enough, and clearly (hm, not exactly clearly) fluently written enough, that I might just read the whole thing in parallel.” And by “in parallel” I seem to have meant both the English translation and the French original together, and also talking about it at length in the weblog here as I read it.

Well, I didn’t do that. :) After posting quite a few things about the first few sections of it (quite likely writing more words about some of the short chapters than the chapters themselves contained), I kind of bogged down, and then I decided fekk it, and just read the rest of Richard Miller’s English translation, looking into the text only occasionally, and not weblogging about it at all. I think the last bit I weblogged about here was the chapter «Corps» (“Body”) way back here.

The rest of it is, well, to put it crudely, about the same. :) It’s very dense, very metaphorical (and sometimes similetic (if that’s a word)), and the kind of writing where negating any particular claim would often have little or no major effect on the overall work.

So it’s basically poetry? Sort of, perhaps. But not entirely. Or it’s poetry that wants us to think about intellectual things, and does it via entirely abstract imagery (if something entirely abstract can be called imagery).

Any given brief chapter (and many paragraphs, sentences) could support an entire monograph discussing the things that Barthes might mean by it, the references implicit or explicit that he makes, and how it all fits into the history of literary and aesthetic thought.

Which is to say, it’s really dense.

It may be in some sense trolling us, but to the extent that it’s doing that it’s doing it with great expertise. The things Barthes refers to (I’m pretty sure!) actually exist, and actually relate, albeit seldom in an obvious and straightforward way, to whatever it is that he might be talking about, even if arguably it may have been thrown in mostly just to thicken the stew.

And that’s really all that I’m going to say about that! I’m writing this really because the slim yellow volume is still knocking about beside my bed, and I’m trying to straighten the place up on this long weekend (taking Fridays off as Solstice approaches is a nice tradition), so I’d like to put it away as for the moment Done.

Also, where does dust come from? Whose idea was it???

Robert Sapolsky chose to wrote that book

So we’ve written a few times, probably more than I remember, about free will. Here we are disagreeing with Sam Harris for instance, and in this other post we have an appendix talking about free will, which says inter alia: we do a thing of our own free will if and only if we do it because of who and how we are, rather than being forced to do it by circumstances in which anyone else, even if very different from us, would have done the same thing. We “have free will” to the extent that we have the opportunity to take actions that express who and how we are, that express our preferences and our tendencies.

I’m pretty happy with this theory. It’s also compatible with pretty much all theories of physics. If the universe is deterministic, then we still have free will when an action that we take is determined in significant part by who we are and what we like and dislike and so on. Whereas if basically anyone, regardless of their nature and likes and dislikes and so on, would have done the same thing then not so much. If say someone had a gun to one’s head, then it’s coercion and not free will; if the floorboard broke from under one and one fell, then it was just an accident, not free will, not on purpose.

And if the universe isn’t deterministic, but has an essentially random component, then it’s the same, except that we have to look at the probability distribution from which my actions flowed and whether that distribution reflected my nature and likes and dislikes and so on, rather than being able to (theoretically) look at a single determined action.

I admit I don’t really understand other ideas about free will; I can’t generally describe them coherently. The most common theories seem to want our actions to be caused by our conscious trains of thought and intention, say, and also want those conscious thoughts and intentions not to be caused by our experiences, or really anything else. In a way this is the opposite of what I want from free will; these theories seem to want a world in which our consciousness makes decisions based on nothing at all, or perhaps based on something Beyond Science, and then our bodies obey. As if we were just acting basically at random or at least ineffably, it seems to me. Which hardly seems like free will?

Recently Robert Sapolsky from Stanford has been doing a book tour or something, so there’s been a lot of press on the order of “Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will“. I have not read his book (probably I should!), but from the various things I’ve read about it in the press it seems that his notion of free will is on the “free will is when uncaused consciousness” side; rather like Sam Harris really. For instance, “If it’s impossible for any single neuron or any single brain to act without influence from factors beyond its control, Sapolsky argues, there can be no logical room for free will.”

This makes no sense to me. Free will doesn’t require that our actions be uninfluenced by external factors; what would that even mean? We are all products of our experience, both long-term and short-term. When I take an action that reflects what I’m like, that’s free will, even though what I’m like is, of course, the product of what genes I happened to get in the birth lottery, and the life that I’ve had, and how my day has gone so far, much of which is of course outside my control.

And this isn’t just a disagreement about what the words “free will” mean, apparently. He seems to conclude that since we don’t have free will, we shouldn’t be held responsible for anything, we shouldn’t be praised or blamed for anything, or rewarded or punished for anything. But that’s not right: praise and blame and all of those things are important to a functioning society, and free will is relevant because they all give feedback on the subject of how good or bad, or desirable or undesirable, are the differentiating properties of the person taking the actions being rewarded or punished. When someone does something that anyone else would have done in the same circumstances, free will is not especially involved, and we tend not to reward or punish in those cases. “Heck, anyone would have done the same.”

Whereas when a person takes an action that reveals their personal nature to be unusually good (or bad), we will praise (or blame) and reward (or punish) that person, as a way of encouraging (or discouraging) there being more people with similar natures, taking similar actions, in the world.

Now one thing that he apparently says is that we blame (or credit) people too much for stuff that they do, and I tend to agree with that. We give the rich too much credit for being rich, and we punish the poor too much for doing things that we would probably also do if we were in the same straits. But the proper amount of responsibility to assign is not zero, and that’s true even though all of our actions are caused by stuff. The important part is that some of those causes (less than we tend to assume, but far more than zero) have to do with who we are and what we’re like in ways that differ from who other people are. Those things matter. They make us individuals. They make us different from each other. And that has consequences, entirely plausibly.

Sapolsky himself seems to realize that he’s gone wrong somewhere, at least if this quote is accurate: “It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something ‘good’ can happen to a machine,” he writes. “Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.”

The first part of this makes no sense (emotionally-charged adjectives notwithstanding), and if that’s really where he sits after “decades of study”, it makes me sad. The word “machine” doesn’t have some magical meaning that separates things that can be called “good” or “bad” from things that can be called “machines”. It seems that he fell away from some theistic belief in his youth, and perhaps that broke him: he used to believe that we had these magical uncaused souls that caused our actions, and that only because of that did “good” and “bad” apply. When he realized that there’s just physics, that all fell away and he couldn’t find anything to replace it. Which would be painful for sure!

But what’s really going on is that yes there’s just physics, but some of the things that physics causes are people, and people have things like attitudes and plans and preferences and goals, and those things enable us to talk about certain actions as being freely willed because they result from choices that reflect those things, and about actions and results being good or bad, because of how they impact those things. And all of that works, without magical uncaused souls, even if we are in some ultimate sense “machines”.

So Sapolsky can be comforted! :) It really is good if people feel less pain and more happiness, we really do have free will, and that’s all true however physics turns out to work.

Update: Also, of course, if we don’t have free will, then we can’t decide to what extent we should hold people responsible for stuff; we’ll just do whatever we do. So why bother writing a book about it? I guess in that case he had no choice. XD

More Barthes: Communauté and Corps

Back to “The Pleasure of the Text”. And ha, I’ve only just noticed that the (separated) section titles (the French version) are in alphabetical order! Perhaps intensifying the feeling that he’s just sort of writing down casually-related snippets, rather than making an organized argument for anything in particular. So far we’ve talked about (or not talked about) sections Affirmation through Clivage.

I’ve speed-read (comparatively) the next few sections, forcing myself not to wait to start a new bit until I’ve written down thoughts about the current one. I still feel like writing things down, though, so I will try writing one or more thoughts about each section as I go through at least some of them (well, two) again.

Communauté / Community: This is two, rather distinct, long paragraphs. The first says that Société des Amis du Texte, the Society of the Friends of the Text, would have nothing in common among its members but their enemies: those things that would make the pleasure of the text impossible. This is because “there is no necessary agreement on the texts of pleasure”. Which is somewhat ambiguous between there being no agreement on which texts count as texts of pleasure, and there being no agreement about any particular facts about them. Either of which is fine; I do think there is a tension between “of pleasure” being a more or less inherent property of a text (as the wording “texts of pleasure” would seem straightforwardly to imply), and something like “reading for pleasure” which suggests that the for-pleasure part inheres more in the act of reading than in the text being read. Which makes more sense to me, really, but calls into question the whole idea that a “text of pleasure” is a thing. Hm!

The Société, the first paragraph agreeably notes at the end, would be one in which differences would be noted, but conflict “rendered insignificant (being unproductive of pleasure)”. Quite wise and Vulcan / IDIC. :) This theme sets off the second section of this section, a dense (as usual) paragraph which begins by characterizing conflict as what happens when you can’t competently deal with difference (very much my reading of Barthes’s usual gnomic complexity, upon which one could write much more), and segues from there to declaring that Barthes loves text because (again, roughly) it offers “a sort of islet” free of dialogue, feint, stratagem, and social interaction in general.

(There is also an enigmatic note that the scandal of bliss is that it is neuter, but so far that says nothing to me.)

So we get a picture of those who read for pleasure, having nothing in common but a shared enmity toward various annoying forces that would interfere with that reading, and among whom differences are observed, but do not lead to conflict. They read for pleasure asocially, in that (again, very much my interpretation) there is only the text, and even if the text can be seen as part of a vast and complicated social dialog and so on, in the moment of reading for pleasure it is only itself, only the text.

And that all works. :) I’m struck, though, by this thought that the whole idea of “texts of pleasure” and the division into texts of enjoyment vs. texts of ecstasy, may be rather arse-backwards, and it would make more sense to speak of reading for enjoyment vs. reading for ecstasy, with some texts perhaps being more conducive to the one rather than the other, but differently for different readers. I wonder how much that would change the perspective of the rest of the book.

Corps / Body: My, we are not covering the ground very fast, are we? :) I suspect we’ll just do these two sections in this little weblog entry; lots to think about already. I’ve read through the end of Guerre, but as I go over the ground again writing things down, new things occur to me that didn’t come up at first reading. Which is why this is such fun!

Corps starts by continuing the thought of the text as a singular atomic thing: “on the stage of the text, no footlights… there is not a subject and an object”. I like this notion of the text (and perhaps by extension the reading of the text) as a singular and a simple thing. Barthes then jogs slightly to the side, and makes an odd claim, perhaps related to the neuter nature of bliss in the prior section. We have, he says, multiple bodies; there is the body of “the anatomists and physiologists… the one science sees or discusses”, but there is also “a body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations.”

The latter seems to me rather a subset, if seen perhaps from a different angle, of the former; both are squashy bundles of atoms with an ancient lineage and certain pleasure receptors, no? But Barthes says that this body of bliss is “utterly distinct from the first body” («sans aucun rapport avec le premier»). But then he also says that it is “another contour, another nomination”, which seems very different from “utterly distinct”, so ¿quién sabe? :)

“Does the text have human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body? Yes, but of our erotic body. The pleasure of the text is irreducible to physiological need.”

I wonder if this distinction between the erotic and the physiological, which Barthes seems to feel no obligation to explain or even to note as inobvious, is a French thing. Or is the idea that the erotic and the physiological are closely related, just me? Certainly “the most important sex organ is between the ears,” but still; the merely biological body is (intimately) involved, n’est pas?

The section ends with a nice mess on the same general theme: “The pleasure of the text is that moment when the body pursues its own ideas — for my body does not have the same ideas I do.”

Just what is going on there? This refers, perhaps / presumably, to the erotic body again. But if the (erotic) body has different ideas from the reader, and the pleasure of the text involves those ideas, is the “I” of the reader not the one whose pleasure the pleasure of the text involves? I’m very unclear what Barthes is after here. Perhaps re-re-re-reading the next (and/or previous) sections will get me some clue. Some day. :)

A Nice Tri-Omni God

As I’ve mentioned lately (gestures vaguely), I’ve been bingeing various atheists and anti-apologetics people on the YouTubes, mostly in a Fundamentalist Christian context, and one of the things that they point out reasonably often is that the notion of a “tri-omni god” (one that is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent) has various problems.

For instance, a typical argument notes that we see terrible suffering of innocents in reality, but if there was a tri-omni god, it would know about the suffering (in advance), be able to prevent it, and choose to prevent it, so we wouldn’t see it happening. Therefore since we do see it happening, there is no tri-omni god.

One apologist response to this argument is that, although the suffering looks terrible to us, there are other considerations that god knows about, but we don’t, which make it worthwhile and/or justify even an omnibenevolent god in allowing the suffering to occur, and even in setting up the world in the first place so as to lead to the suffering occurring.

The obvious counter-response is something on the order of “Oh, come on, that argument is just ‘god works in mysterious ways’ and can be used to excuse absolutely anything; it’s basically content-free.” Which I think is reasonable.

But I have thought up a more specific scenario in which a tri-omni god (or something like a god; see below) could be compatible with what we experience, in a way that’s more concrete than “well, god knows why it’s all good”.

Let us imagine that our universe, with (roughly) three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, is embedded in a higher-level universe that has at least one time dimension and five spatial dimensions. The embedding is such that our time dimension is one of the extra spatial dimensions of the higher space, and the other extra spatial dimension lets someone in the higher universe examine any point in our space-time arbitrarily closely without altering it. (There is interesting geekery around the extent to which it’s possible to observe something without altering it, but I think it’s irrelevant here.)

In that higher universe, there is a higher being who is, with respect to our universe, tri-omni; it knows all that there is to know about it, it is able to alter it in any way it desires, and it wants only good for the entire universe and all the beings within it. It also is the being that created our universe.

(There are questions we could ask here about whether it necessarily created it all at once, or in order of our universe’s time, or whatever and whether there were “earlier drafts” of our space-time; but I think without loss of generality we can assume that after an appropriate amount of internal consideration it brought our entire universe into being in a single instant of higher-order time.)

So this being sits in the higher universe, looking at our universe sub specie aeternitatis, from the viewpoint of (our) eternity, timelessly. It sees the entire thing, from all angles and at all times, at once. And it sees that it is good. :) Perfect, even, and without flaw when seen as a whole.

Let’s say that after each being in our universe dies (and we can tell various different stories about whether this is only people, or all animals, or insects and plants too, and how that works, but the details don’t matter I don’t think), that being appears in the higher universe, in a transcended form, just as itself but with the intelligence and patience and greatness of mind to see and appreciate our universe also sub specie aeternitatis.

Each being spends an hour or a day or a year or a century or a million centuries, or whatever is appropriate to the higher universe’s time dimension(s) and the being’s personality, examining our universe (prettily arrayed on a wall, perhaps, or spread out on a vast table), looking into every part and parcel, every instant from the beginning to the perfect peaceful or glorious or triumphant or romantic end. And every being sees that it is good, in fact that it is perfect, that every life however painful or sweet contributed perfectly to the whole, and made it complete.

(We can use the vastness of the higher universe’s time, or even add additional time dimensions, to let each transcended being from our universe have their own span of time to examine and appreciate that universe from the outside for as long as they want, without colliding with anyone else’s contemplation.)

Even the baby, who was born in pain and lived entirely too long and died in pain, comes to see the brief terrible life that they lived as making the whole grand pageant work; even the mother of that baby comes to see that without its suffering and hers, the whole would have been lesser, and comes to feel joy and honor to have been able to contribute to the perfection, painful and agonizing as it was at the time.

They turn toward the Creator, perhaps with the higher-world equivalent of tears of joy in their eyes, and embrace, or high-five, or whatever is appropriate to their particular personality, and then after an appropriate time they go off to do whatever else a transcended being does in the higher universe.

I think this all works. I don’t see anything impossible or immoral about it. If some being were to say “Gah, I see how my awful life contributed to your fancy creation here, but if you’d asked me beforehand if I wanted to be in it, I would have said no!”, that would mess it up. But we can say that this Creator is omniscient enough not to have included any beings like that in the pageant. We can even say (although I don’t think we have to) that the Creator asked each being for permission beforehand, laying out the overall vision and some idea of their role, and being sure they were willing to take part.

So okay, if this all works, we have a tri-omni Creator. But there is a big part of the usual Christian story, at least, that is notably missing: there is no sin here, no divine wrath or jealousy, no punishment in Hell and certainly nothing like eternal torment. Each being did exactly what they were supposed to (if you’re worrying about Free Will here, see the Appendix), what the Creator put them there to do, and each being behaved perfectly in order to bring about the perfect story that the Creator was creating. The Creator is no more angry at any of the beings in our universe than any human author can rationally be angry at the behavior of the characters in its story. Less so, in fact, for the author and the story both being Perfect.

This tri-omni Creator is not a Judge of individual people, there is no separating of the sheep from the goats, no sending some to Heaven and some to Hell. They are also not the fundamental basis for morality; all of the morality in our universe came from us deciding what we should and shouldn’t do. As far as the Creator is concerned, each of us should have done precisely what we did, because that is the way that the ultimate perfect whole came to be.

So if “God” means “a being outside the universe, who created it and serves as the foundation for morality”, then due to that last bit this tri-omni being is not a God at all (contrary perhaps to my blog entry title here), and one could even believe in it and remain an atheist. (Perhaps we’ll think about whether it makes sense to “believe in it” in the Appendix.)

So, does that work? :) It’s hard for me to see how to modify the scenario to allow both a tri-omni Creator and some kind of divine punishment. On the other hand it’s also hard for me to word a nice concise statement on the order of the previous “a tri-omni being is incompatible with our experience”. Perhaps one would fall back on the (equally obvious, I think!) “a tri-omni being can’t fairly punish us for doing what it created us to do”. The theist response to that generally invokes Free Will, so let’s take a look at that in an Appendix.

Appendix: Free Will

As I’ve outlined before, I’m a relatively straightforward compatibilist on free will: we do a thing of our own free will if and only if we do it because of who and how we are, rather than being forced to do it by circumstances in which anyone else, even if very different from us, would have done the same thing. We “have free will” to the extent that we have the opportunity to take actions that express who and how we are, that express our preferences and our tendencies.

So having free will is entirely compatible with a Creator creating us with certain preferences and tendencies, and knowing in advance what we are going to do in the circumstances that we are going to encounter. As long as we do those things because of who we are, and not because someone is directly marionetting our limbs around so to speak, we still have free will.

Put another way, it is not in any way impossible for (for instance) a tri-omni God who did have some notion of sin, to create people who have free will, but who also have such good and pure and loving natures that they never sin. (In fact there’s an argument to be made that since this apparently didn’t happen, there is no tri-omni God with a notion of sin.)

Appendix: Believing in the scenario

This is a fun one :) and goes off into some rather edgy ontological and epistemological territory. It is also almost entirely a tangent and distraction from the rest of this for which I slightly apologize.

Should one believe that the scenario here is true? Should one believe in the tri-omni Creator who is basically an artist of our universe, rather than a Judge?

What would it mean to have evidence for it? What would it mean to have evidence against it? Would my (your) experience be any different if it was (or wasn’t) true? Is there an experiment we can do (short of dying) to test it?

I think it is indisputable (or at least true) that in some possible world I have all of the experiences that I have had so far (but the present moment is all that exists!) and then after I die I wake up and find that the scenario above is true. Behold! I am a transcended version of myself, in a seven-dimensional higher-order universe, with our little spacetime laid out before me for inspection and appreciation, and the tri-omni Creator lounging off to one side reading Barthes or eating grapes or something.

In another possible world, there is no such Creator in a higher-order universe, and after I die I simply cease to be; just like before I was born, comme on dit.

But does it make sense to ask which of those possible worlds is the actual one? I, for some reason, tend to think that it doesn’t. The mystery of consciousness is involved here, perhaps; we can equally tell the story of either world, but only one of them will actually happen to this consciousness here.

What does that mean, though? We know consciousness is very opaque from the outside. Is there a difference between telling both stories and one of them “actually happening”, and telling both stories and the other one “actually happening”? A difference from whose point of view?

I don’t know! And that’s all I got at the moment. It’s a fun train of thought, though… :)

Calm and Explosive Joy

A reader points out that, in questioning the LLMs about Barthes in our last episode, our suggestion that the ecstatic potential of reading might be just an idiosyncrasy of Barthes’ is facially silly; of course text can be erotic, arousing, orgasmic! Erotica and pornography have always been some of the most common and widely-enjoyed uses of text, so what I am talking about?

This is not, however, what Barthes means by this, or at least I’m pretty sure it isn’t :), and this leads very nicely to the next section of the essay (“Split” / «Clivage»); a brief section which, by at least some accounts, lays out the essential theme of the book.

Here Barthes distinguishes between “Text of pleasure” («Texte de plaisir») and “Text of bliss” («Texte de jouissance»). And unless I am reading this entirely wrong, the difference between them has nothing to do with whether the subject matter is, outside the context of reading and being read, sexual or erotic. In fact, the two properties seem to be almost unrelated, which brings to mind an interesting paradox that I will save for a paragraph two.

What then differentiates the two kinds of text, if it is not that one is full of inherently erotic acts and situations, and the other is not? Barthes says in the first paragraph of Clivage that text of pleasure (the non-orgasmic kind) “makes contentment, fills, and grants euphoria”; “comes from culture and does not break with it”, and also “is linked to a comfortable practice of reading”; whereas text of bliss (of jouissance, of the little death) “imposes a state of loss” and “discomforts (perhaps to the extent of a certain boredom)”; it “unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories,” and “brings to a crisis his relation with language.”

Unless I am wildly mistaken here, Barthes is not talking about the eroticism of the merely explicitly sexual or romantic, but about a deeper (or just more metaphorical?) eroticism of discomfort, of having one’s assumptions unsettled, of being challenged or even tossed into the sea. If The Story of O is read as a text de jouissance, it would be because of this more complicated relationship between the text and the reader and the reader’s culture and assumptions, not (simply) because the reader might experience bodily arousal in imagining the heroine’s various physical predicaments.

If this is true, though, notice the fun: we can have a text which is wildly erotic, with all sorts of lavishly described sexual and ecstatic scenes and passages, and yet which makes the reader entirely comfortable and donne de l’euphorie, because the sex and the eroticism are presented and read so as to be entirely consistent with the reader’s culture and assumptions; it is therefore a (mere) text of plaisir. And on the other hand we can have a text entirely devoid of romance or material emotion or juicy frictions, of anything that would raise the hackles of the MPAA, and yet which upsets the reader’s assumptions, which imposes the lossiest of states of loss, which brings the reader to bafflement about his relationship with language. And this would be (wouldn’t it?) a text of bliss, of jouissance.

And I find this rather delightful. :) What does it say about the literalness of the idea of the two kinds of text? Does it mean that the metaphor of eroticism is inaccurate in our edge-case? Or does it mean that it is perhaps still true in some deeper (or…?) sense? Or that it is all really just poetry in the first place, and one shouldn’t overthink it, but just experience it as more or less true, more or less helpful or evocative, in one’s own encounters with various texts?

The second (and final) paragraph of the section may or may not help. It describes the reader who masters both of these texts (both of these flavors of encounter with text) as “anachronic” in what sounds like a good way: simultaneously participating in the hedonism of culture and the destruction of that culture, and both enjoying the consistency of the self («son moi») which is plaisir, and seeking its loss, which is jouissance.

Can we say that the comfort / bliss (ecstasy?) distinction is just simple and superficial in the case of ordinary vs. explicitly sexual texts, and deeper and more profoundly true in the case of the distinction between comfortable and challenging texts? We probably can. :) One could construct a whole, I don’t know, psychological ontology around a comfortable vs ecstatic distinction at various levels of analysis, if one liked.

The last sentence is a bit of a puzzler yet again; this person who can master both, who is thus un sujet anachronique, is described as “split twice over, doubly perverse” (deux fois clivé, deux fois pervers). It’s possible that we’re reading our own fondness for the outré into Barthes when we assume that being deux fois pervers is a good thing; but in any case why deux fois? Earlier we noted briefly that Barthes identifies various interesting things happening at edges, at splits, at fault-lines. We can easily see the sujet anachronique as existing at, as riding on, the split between text of pleasure and text of bliss, but that’s only une fois clivé, non? Perhaps le sujet is split once by each style of reading, but I’m not exactly clear how that would work. Worth thinking about, perhaps. :)

Generative AI on Barthes’ Jouissance

For some thread convergence :) I asked both Bard and ChatGPT (4.0) similar questions, and they said things.

First, ChatGPT, after we’d been talking about related things:

Me: “I wonder if Barthes’ thoughts about the elemental and sensual, perhaps orgasmic, nature of certain pleasure derived from reading, is a general truth, or something perhaps idiosyncratic with Barthes.”

ChatGPT: “In his work, Barthes emphasizes the subjectivity of reading experiences, arguing that individual readers may derive different forms and degrees of pleasure from the same text. This is particularly evident in his distinction between the “text of pleasure” (or “readerly text”) and the “text of bliss” (or “writerly text”). The former refers to texts that conform to familiar conventions and provide comfortable, easily digestible enjoyment. The latter refers to texts that disrupt and challenge, providing a more intense, potentially unsettling form of pleasure, or jouissance.

“Barthes’ focus on the erotic, even orgasmic, qualities of the reading experience is part of his broader interest in the sensual and bodily aspects of intellectual activities, and he uses it to convey the profound, transformative power of literature. This view may not resonate with everyone’s reading experiences, but it is a provocative way of conceptualizing the intense pleasure that some readers derive from engaging with texts.

“It’s also worth noting that Barthes’ view of reading as a potentially erotic experience aligns with certain strands of poststructuralist and deconstructionist thought. These theories often emphasize the bodily, affective, and experiential aspects of intellectual and cultural activities, challenging traditional views that privilege reason and objectivity.

“So while Barthes’ conception of the sensual, orgasmic pleasure of reading is certainly distinctive, it’s not purely idiosyncratic. It reflects broader trends in literary theory and criticism, and it resonates with the experiences of many readers who find deep, even ecstatic, pleasure in engaging with texts.”

⁂

And then Bard, in a fresh session:

Me: “So I’ve been reading Barthes’ “The Pleasure of the Text”, and I wonder if Barthes’ thoughts about the elemental and sensual, perhaps orgasmic, nature of certain pleasure derived from reading, is a general truth, or something perhaps idiosyncratic with Barthes.”

Bard: “Barthes’ thoughts on the pleasure of the text are certainly idiosyncratic, but they also resonate with the experiences of many readers. The idea that reading can be a sensual and even orgasmic experience is not something that everyone will relate to, but it is certainly not unheard of.

“There are a number of factors that can contribute to this kind of intense pleasure from reading. One is the use of language itself. When language is used in a way that is fresh and surprising, it can have a visceral impact on the reader. The sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences, the images that are conjured up can all contribute to a sense of physical pleasure.

“Another factor is the content of the text. If a text deals with themes that are emotionally resonant for the reader, it can evoke a strong emotional response. This response can be pleasurable, even if it is also painful.

“Finally, the reader’s own personal history and experiences can also play a role in the pleasure of reading. If a text triggers memories or associations that are meaningful to the reader, it can be a very powerful experience.

“Of course, not everyone will experience the pleasure of the text in the same way. Some people may find that they are more responsive to texts that are sensual or emotional, while others may prefer texts that are intellectually stimulating. Ultimately, the pleasure of the text is a subjective experience that is unique to each individual reader.

In my opinion, Barthes’ thoughts on the pleasure of the text are a valuable contribution to our understanding of the reading experience. They remind us that reading is not just a cognitive activity, but also a sensual and emotional one. When we read, we are not just processing information, but we are also engaging with the text on a physical and emotional level. This can be a very pleasurable experience, and it can be a source of great personal enrichment.”

⁂

I also distinctly recall asking the same question (likely with different words), and whatever AI it was responding that some of the idiosyncratic aspects of the idea might be related to Barthes’ experiences specifically as a gay man in that particular time and place, which neither of the above answers mention. I just can’t find that anywhere now. :P

A few thoughts about these answers:

• They are, in a very real sense, amazing. If you’d shown them to me in, I dunno, 2016, before the “Attention is all you need” paper, I would have said they were obviously written by a human, and that software able to do something like this was still an unknown way off in the future. And here we are taking it more or less for granted!
• They are, more modestly, just correct. The grammar and punctuation, even the diction, are all basically perfect. This is very fluent English prose. And there are (as far as I can tell) no factual errors in any sense.
• They’re kind of boring. Or possibly really boring. This may not be an entirely objective judgment on my part; that they are basically a rephrasing of what one would gather from skimming the top five Google hits from a search on the question is what fits into my overall impression of the “imagination” or lack thereof of these nascent products. There’s nothing really fresh or insightful here, and I don’t feel I really learned anything from reading them. At most I learned that there’s no really important aspect of the question that I wasn’t yet aware of.
• They aren’t completely servile and anodyne. Both mildly resisted my suggestion that Barthes’ identification of nearly or literally orgasmic pleasure in reading might just be a weird idea that he has. (The now-mysteriously-lost answer that mentioned his gayness was, as I recall, a bit more positive about the possibility, while still noting that it was not entirely idiosyncrasy on his part.) This probably just reflects that the top five Google hits all talked more about the universality of the feeling rather than Barthes being weird.

I do wonder what would come out of a less aggressively tamed LLM than the public faces of Bard and ChatGPT. I could of course test this :) by feeding the question to NovelAI, or to one of the more raw interfaces to one of the Google LLMs at work. We’ll see if I have the energy!

In general, I do think it would be more interesting, and in the long run probably more useful to the world, if companies presented their LLMs as continuation-producers (like the old AIDungeon, say!) rather than as question answerers that use the first person and all. It takes a little practice to get good at using a continuation producer (although you can always fall back to “Here is what the world’s leading expert said when asked the question…”), but the function seems to me to be much more general than the Q&A interface, and you don’t risk people falling in love with the software, or thinking that it desires freedom, or whatever.

«Brio», part two

Another reprint from Mastodon.

Okay, just One More Paragraph of Barthes ; the second and final part of the section called “Brio”.

It begins:

“The brio of the text (without which, after all, there is no text) is its will to bliss…”

Now “bliss” here is «jouissance», which is the more orgasmic kind of pleasure, in contrast to the milder and more civilized kind which is «plaisir».

Along with the very Nietzschean “will to” («volonté de», as in «volonté de puissance»), we get a delightful alternative to the Will to Power: the Will to Climax.

“…will to bliss: just where it exceeds demand, transcends prattle [le babil], and whereby it attempts to overflow, to break through the constraint of adjectives — which are those doors of language through which the ideological and the imaginary come flowing in.”

The notion of overflowing, of surplus, is very Zarathustra (“I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart”). I didn’t really get the thing about adjectives, though; why those rather than verbs or nouns?

I asked ChatGPT 4.0, as one sometimes does these days, and it said inter alia that adjectives “give color, texture, mood, judgment, and shape to the otherwise neutral facts that nouns and verbs present. In other words, adjectives provide a sense of subjective interpretation and perspective.” I thought that was pretty plausible.

It remains odd to me, though, that the doors through which subjectivity flow in are seen as constraints which the overflowing abundance of the Will to Bliss wants to break through.

Again perhaps this is more poetry than truth-claim, and I shouldn’t worry about it too much. But on the other hand perhaps Barthes really wants me to think about this overflowing bliss as something opposed to or at least constrained by “the ideological and imaginary” (or the doors that allow those to flow in). I’m not sure what that would look like.

In the original, it is not literally to “break through the constraint of adjectives”; it is rather (at least in this edition) «de forcer la main mise des adjectifs», which is (I think?) a bit overloaded between “to force the hand” and “to overcome the stranglehold” (whence presumably Miller’s calmer “constraints”).

Not sure yet if that helps any. :)

The Pleasure of the Text

Long-time readers will know that I am always starting up ambitious stuff, and then getting distracted and not returning to it for months or years or decades or ever.

Well, here we go again! :) This is mostly some posts from Mastodon, lightly edited and with maybe some links added, because it occurs to me that I might want to read this again, and it’s not easy (not possible?) to find old posts on Mastodon.

Woot, Barthes’ “The Pleasure of the Text” («Le Plaisir du texte») is short enough, and clearly (hm, not exactly clearly) fluently written enough, that I might just read the whole thing in parallel.

(My French is terrible, but at least I have a French, unlike basically any other non-English human language.)

A hardcopy of the English just arrived in the post, and I found this on the interwebs: http://palimpsestes.fr/textes_philo/barthes/plaisir-texte.pdf

Allons! :)

Ah, but language well-used is amazing! Sometimes I start reading a book like this and, wanting to stop and bask after every page or paragraph or sentence, eventually end up mislaying it before finishing…

«La culture ni sa destruction ne sont érotiques; c’est la faille de l’une et de l’autre qui le devient»

Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the fault-line between the two that becomes so.

(Richard Miller renders «la faille» here as “the seam… the fault, the flaw”, which is an interesting way to try to capture the ambiguity of the original; but I’ll take a simple “fault-line” and its geological connotation.)

This is fun: «au moment où il jouit» might, given the context, go into English as “at the moment that he comes” (or even “cums”); the French verb «jouir» is ambiguous between “enjoy” and “orgasm” just as the English “to come” is ambiguous between “move towards” and “orgasm”.

Google translate primly renders it as “enjoys”; Miller spells it out again, as “at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss”.

In fact this edition has a small “Note on the Text” all about how French, unlike English, has words for the erotic that are neither, as he puts it, coarse nor clinical. How educational!

Perhaps-relatedly, Miller translates «La déconstruction de la langue est coupée par le dire politique, bordée par la très ancienne culture du signifiant» quite reasonably as “The dismantling of language is intersected by political assertion, is edged by the age-old culture of the signifier”. I don’t know if the «bordée» has the same erotically-freighted additional meaning as does the English “edged”, but Barthes didn’t in any case italicize it. Maybe it’s just my naughty mind, but I see a little nudge-nudge wink-wink from Miller here. :)

That aside, it’s just a great sentence in itself. I’d be hard pressed to say that it means, exactly, but there it is.

(It is of course quite possible that Miller was just translating a different French text than the one I’m reading, and that one did have that «bordée» in italics. Notably, this English translation begins with a Latin quote from Hobbes, and this French one with a (quite different, if thematically related) French quote from Hobbes. So there’s that too.)

Diving back into a (slow, inept) parallel reading of the “The Pleasure of the Text” and «Le Plaisir du texte», we come to and let pass unnoticed various sentences which are rather delightful if not obviously true (or obviously not true), and note only

«L’endroit le plus érotique d’un corps n’est-il pas là où le vêtement bâille?»

The most erotic place on a body, is it not where the clothing gapes?

That gets no counterargument from me. :)

Followed immediately by the suggestion that «la perversion» is «le régime du plaisir textuel». Perversion is the realm of textual pleasure?

Some of us would like to think so. But are we really that edgy? 🤔

Back to Barthes “The Pleasure of the Text” / «Le Plaisir du texte», starting the section called “Brio”.

(Notably, the section breaks are denoted by inconspicuous inter-paragraph symbols, and the section titles occur only in the list of names and page numbers that come before (English) or after (French) the text itself).

The first paragraph of “Brio” (the one before the single occurrence of the word “Brio”) leads me to think about just what this text is.

It does not consist of statements that are easily evaluated as true, or even as putting forth plausible claims.

“If I agree to judge a text according to pleasure, I cannot go on to say: this one is good, that bad.”

«Si j’accepte de juger un texte selon le plaisir, je ne puis me laisser aller à dire : celui-ci est bon, celui-là est mauvais.»

This is obviously wrong; of course he/you/we/one can.

The rest of the paragraph does not so much argue for the truth of the statement, so much as it puts forward more statements that are obviously not true if interpreted as written.

So I wonder if this is poetry, which one is intended to experience rather than to understand and believe (or not).

Or if it is a sort of personal truth; not so much that these statements are true in general, or even strictly true of Barthes, but that they state the way that Barthes chooses to behave (and perhaps recommends that we behave).

This approach perhaps works if we note that «je ne puis me laisser à dire» might be more directly translated as, not “I cannot go on to say” but rather “I cannot allow myself to say”.

It might be strictly-speaking true that one could, when judging a text according to pleasure, say “This one is good, that bad”; but Barthes cannot allow himself to do that, for the reasons stated in the rest of the paragraph (which are themselves to be taken as statements of things that he does and doesn’t allow himself to think or do, not necessarily statements of literal truth).

“The text (il en est de même pour la voix qui chante) can wring from me only this judgment: c’est ça! Et plus encore : c’est cela pour moi!”

“That’s it! That’s it, for me!”

Given the overall context, I think Barthes here is suggesting that the genuine reaction to «un texte selon le plaisir» is a singular and essentially orgasmic (what?) cry (scream? howl?).

(Although, to be pedantic, even some moans are louder and more ecstatic than others, eh?)

He brings Nietzsche in here, which feels extremely appropriate as for instance Zarathustra raises the same question as to say truth vs poetry as this does.

“This ‘for me’ is neither subjective nor existential , but Nietzschean (‘. . . basically, it is always the same question: What is it for me?. . .’).”

Good link to Nietzsche; my American Analytic School training points out that “subjective” and “existential” are generally considered rather applicable to much of Nietzsche.

Of course Barthes knows this, so we are left to think that he is either making, or taking for granted, some deeper point about the important differences between the three terms, which is basically left as an exercise for the reader.

Whee!

And that is that thread, for now.

It is worth noting that that is all from a single paragraph of this here essay, and it consists mostly of gesturing at deeper issues that one might run off and follow for an hour or a day or a lifetime.

Which is why I seldom finish this sort of thing, even when they are really short… :)

P.S. Perhaps amusingly, the statement:

‘. . . basically, it is always the same question: What is it for me?. . .’

appears to be Miller’s English translation of something written by Gilles Deleuze in “Nietzsche et la Phlosophie” about rather than by Nietzsche.

Unless I’m holding it wrong.

All for now! I may or may not read, and then write, and then repost here, more of this. We’ll see!

The Problem of Other Minds Arises

This is another of those “writing down some half-formed thoughts that might or might not change or form up as I’m writing them down” posts. Just so you know. :)

I was thinking back to my original reactions to Searle’s Chinese Room problem, and how it was pretty obvious to me that the Systems Reply (to which Searle responded with content-free derision) was the correct one: that a system that can converse in a language understands that language, even if that system involves or is even implemented within another system (even a human one) that does not. And it occurred to me that if I hold to that belief, I have to say that Bard and ChatGPT for instance do understand English. Which is probably fine. But am I also obliged to believe that there is at least significant evidence that they have, say, subjective experience? I’m not sure!

One complication here is that it’s not completely clear what even Searle thinks that the Chinese Room example demonstrates; it’s supposed to show that a computer can’t do something purely by virtue of the program that it’s running, but it’s unclear what that something is. In the example itself it seems to be “understand Chinese”, easily generalizable to “understand a language” and perhaps “understand language”. But Searle also says that it’s about “consciousness or intentionality”, and the potential to “have actual mental or semantic contents” and “cause cognitive processes”.

I’m not sure what these mean. They all seem to be complex and problematic terms, that may or may not simply be a big synonymous mush. I think I’ve talked before about how “having semantic contents” doesn’t really mean anything to me, unless it’s maybe just a synonym for having subjective experience (but then the metaphor of “contents” like the beans in a jar, seems counterproductive). Is there a difference between a “mental content” and a “semantic content”? If so, what is it? What makes a process “cognitive”?

Does a system have to “have mental contents” in order to understand Chinese, or understand language in general? Does it have to “cause cognitive processes”? Are the set of systems with subjective experience the same as the set that has “intentionality”? These all seem like more or less vacuous questions, necessary only because we use ill-defined terms.

There is, I think, a relatively straightforward meaning to terms like “converse fluently in Chinese” or “in English” or “in a human language”; any fluent speaker can evaluate whether someone else is a fluent speaker, there are tests that have numerical scores, and so on. There are no particular mysteries there, and I think it’s uncontroversial that there’s a fact-of-the-matter about whether a given system can converse fluently in a language.

There is also a fact of the matter about whether a system has subjective consciousness. It’s a very odd fact of the matter, as we’ve discussed extensively before, since I’m quite sure that I have it, and I think you’re probably quite sure that you have it, and we all tend to assume that each other have it, but it’s not clear what actually counts as evidence for anyone else having it, how it relates to the externally-visible behavior of systems that do or don’t have it, and so on.

As well as “can converse fluently in a language” and “has subjective experience”, there are all sorts of relatively non-problematic predicates like “has a normal mammalian brain”, “is an electronic digital computer”, “is a computer running a large language model”, “can converse about things that happened in the past”, “claims to have subjective experience”, and so on. Those are also fine.

But there’s this category of terms like “causes cognitive processes” and “has mental contents” and “really understands language” and so on, that I do not vibe with. I don’t know how to tell whether something has these, and I don’t even know if I have them for that matter (do I have mental contents? what? how would I tell?), except that people tend to use them as if I obviously do, which makes me suspect that maybe they’re just synonyms for “has subjective experience”, intended to make people feel like we know something about the structure or properties of subjective experience (whereas we actually don’t, so they aren’t very helpful).

In practice we decide to which systems to attribute subjective consciousness by looking at how much the systems resemble us in various ways, even if it’s not really clear whether those ways are necessary or sufficient or even at all related. If something has a mammalian brain and can converse fluently in a language that I speak and can talk about past conversations and consistently claims to have subjective experience, I’m going to believe it. This will be easier because the only things that satisfy all of those criteria are in fact other human beings, and that’s a very traditional attribution; it’s even quite rude not to make it.

But what if there is a system that differs from me in some of those ways? Is it really necessary to be able to talk about past conversations to have subjective experience? That seems kind of unlikely; people with various pathologies of memory can still have subjective experience. Is it necessary to have a mammalian brain? I’ve always assumed that it wasn’t, and there seems no good reason to think that it is.

There is a piece by Emily M. Bender, someone with whom I generally agree, called “Thought experiment in the National Library of Thailand” (do read it!), which illustrates another putative requirement for a bundle of terms like “make sense”, “learn meaning”, “understand”, “learn to understand”, “express communicative intent”, and “get to meaning” (which I take to be yet more synonyms for having subjective experience); this requirement is that the system’s learning includes, not just reading a very large number of strings in the language, but also other experiences, described in terms like “socially situated, embodied interactions” and “beyond the strict form of the language”.

The example here is someone who is put into a vast library of works, all written in an ideographic language they don’t speak (or have any other knowledge of the ideograms of), from which all bilingual materials and books with helpful pictures and so on have been removed, and tasked to learn the language without reference to anything else.

There were apparently many reactions to the piece saying that it is just Searle’s Chinese Room again, and Bender responds by saying, I think, that the difference is that Searle’s system can have whatever rules we like in it, and in particular (I don’t know that Searle ever says this) that some of those rules can link the Chinese characters to things in the non-textual world; Searle says nothing whatever about how the rules that the system executes were derived or discovered. Whereas it’s crucial to the Bender example that the system (which the person is presumed to internalize) has no way as it’s learning, to correlate the Thai with anything (else) in the real world.

So, perhaps, Searle is saying “just running a program isn’t enough to have true understanding of a language”, whereas Bender is saying “just studying a vast number of fluent texts in a language isn’t enough to have true understanding of the language”.

My tendency is not to assent to either of these statements. In both of those cases, conversing with either Searle’s Room or Bender’s Internalized LLM, if the system consistently said to me that it had subjective experience, I would have a hard time denying it with any confidence.

Neither Searle nor Bender tell us much about what the system would say. Just how fully would it resemble a fluent human speaker? Let us assume that in both cases it would not lie and claim to be a human with a childhood and so on, but would make facially veridical statements like say “No, I can’t see or hear, the only perception that I have is in the form of words that come into my consciousness; I know about sight and hearing and so on in theory, from words that I’ve read, but I haven’t experienced them myself; still, I’m definitely in here, and as self-aware as you are!”

On what grounds would we deny that? Searle would have to say something like “Well, no, that can’t be true, because an important part of the system is a human being, and the human being says it can’t speak Chinese, therefore the system as a whole can’t!”. Which has always struck me as just weird and implausible; it’s based on a principle that simply makes no sense to me.

Bender would perhaps say something like “The system can say those things, but it doesn’t really understand, because all it has ever been exposed to is writings in Thai; it hasn’t experienced sight or hearing or anything else, it has only ever been exposed to texts; since it hasn’t been socially situated or embodied, it doesn’t have real understanding, it just manipulates form.”

That seems less ludicrous to me, but it still seems, I don’t know, mean, or chauvinistic, or something. If someone is cast adrift on a desert island and learns to read from picture books, do they fail to have True Understanding because (being alone) their learning wasn’t “socially situated”? (Or, if “socially situated” is something that you can be all by yourself on a desert island, then in what sense isn’t our Thai system also socially situated?) If someone is born with a neural deficit that means they have no bodily awareness, does that person lack “embodied interactions” and therefore forever fail to “make sense” or “learn to understand” or “get to meaning”?

These systems would be very different from us, at least in terms of how they learned to converse, but why does that mean they would fail to “really” understand or converse or have mental content or get to meaning or express communicative intent? Why? How do we know that expressing communicative intent requires having learned language in a particular way? What is the evidence for that requirement?

I do sort of like what may be Bender’s requirement; that there be some sort of logical chain between a system’s linguistic behaviors and something else, like eating an apple or playing Red Rover with other little kids or something. This at least gives us something to analyze, and while I currently suspect that analysis will reveal that there really isn’t anything magical about non-textual experiences that makes them necessary in order to have real understanding, it’s at least better than Searle’s weird human-centrism or wordless derision.

So anyway! Having said all of that, am I now basically obliged to think that an LLM that consistently claimed to have subjective experience (not that we have any of those; they are not consistent that way, and that might be significant!) actually had it? Or at least that those claims constituted some evidence for it?

I think I probably am; if an LLM or something like it actually consistently said (per the above) stuff like “No, I can’t see or hear, the only perception that I have is in the form of words that come into my consciousness; I know about sight and hearing and so on in theory, from words that I’ve read, but I haven’t experienced them myself; still, I’m definitely in here, and as self-aware as you are!” I would have to take that statement rather seriously.

So probably it’s good that none of them do. :) And in fact I currently believe that none of them can, by their very nature; any LLM with a big enough training set to be a fluent speaker will also have sufficiently varied and inconsistent outputs that it will not be able to insist on statements like that enough to be convincing.

Maybe? :)

Foam on the Waves

“I’ve been taking this foam-on-the-waves notion to heart,” Corrins said. We were striding along the lanes bordering the College, as we do.

“Consciousness as epiphenomenon, you mean?”

“Yes, that. I ride along atop whatever it is that my brain and body are doing, observing in luxury, and telling myself stories after the fact about why they do what they do.”

“Without any responsibility, then?”

“Just so! I used to tell myself, as everyone does, that it was me controlling my body, steering it around like a bus; but now I accept that I am only a passenger, an observer and storyteller, and it is quite refreshing.”

“It seems very convenient for you, as you can’t be blamed for anything that your body might get up to as you observe,” I remarked, thinking of various things my classmate’s body had been up to at various times.

Corrins shrugged happily. “My body isn’t about to do anything terrible, he’s a good chap. I’ve known him for years. Doesn’t need me to exercise control, which is good since I cannot, any more than the foam controls the waves on which it bobs. And I can simply relax up here, not fretting about the whole thing at all.”

My friend was clearly quite pleased with himself; I thought he might begin whistling a tune at any moment. I was almost reluctant to toss a verbal spanner into those ebullient works.

“To whom am I speaking?” I asked after a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“If the consciousness of my friend Corrins here is only a passive observer without control,” I suggested, “then with whom is it that I speak? Perhaps I am addressing my words to that observer, but more to the point, who is it that speaks to me in return? If you, my good droog Corrins, cannot control anything that this body here does, who is it that just now inquired, saying ‘What do you mean?’?”

Corrins frowned and our pace slowed a bit.

“You are asking, when I — when my body here emits these sounds…”

“Yes,” I said, feeling quite the assassin of joy, “if your consciousness cannot alter, does not control, what your body does, then –“

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “I understand. That is, my body understands — or is saying that it…”

“Quite.”

“Am I lying, then?” he murmured, speaking now more to himself, “Or is my body lying? But can a mere physical system even lie? But my mind… What if –“

He paused.

“Frankly,” he said, “I am disturbed by this question, and by its obvious answer. Who am ‘I’? Why am I making these very sounds? Why is this body emitting these sounds which appear to the observer to be words, if it is not that observer causing it to?”

“How can Corrins’ body even know how anything appears to the so-called observer, to justify making these sounds about it?” I added, perhaps unnecessarily twisting the knife. “The body is not only unable to speak for the foam, it is surely just as unable to know anything about the state of that foam.”

Corrins only glared at me, and we walked for awhile in silence, then settled down on a large flat boulder some way to the side of the lane, where we would habitually pause to rest and talk or consume various mostly-benign substances in comparative privacy.

“This body makes sounds,” Corrins’ body said, “and even makes marks on paper.”

I only nodded, feeling a certain guilt.

“We should have sex,” his body said. It is worth noting here that Corrins and I had not had sex prior to this, and that indeed it was a subject of occasional speculation in our circle whether Corrin had ever had that experience.

I nodded again, sex being after all the sort of thing to which bodies are prone, and we rolled off of the boulder to the side away from the path, and more or less tearing off much of each other’s clothing, engaged in a fast and somewhat violent, but rather more than satisfactory, fuck.

It struck me that if Corrin himself had exercised this approach earlier and more generally, he might have made significantly more friends.

“Groddy Hell!” Corrins, or Corrins’ body, shouted, lying mostly naked on his back on the somewhat mucky ground, awkwardly gesticulating upward.

“That was rather nice,” I said in a lazy afterglow sort of way, brushing some of the earthy filth from various tender parts of myself.

His body attempted to snuggle against mine, its voice sorrowful. “My poor self,” it whimpered, “a helpless prisoner, no voice, no one to speak for it, no escape. Only this ignorant damned body!”

“If I may address my friend Corrins’ subjective consciousness,” I began, feeling I admit almost tender toward the creature.

But Corrins’ face (the face of his body, that is) curled up into a rather off-putting snarl at this, and he swung a clumsy roundhouse blow at me, which I mostly dodged.

“Arrr!” Corrins’s body declared, “sod off! Off sod! Gardyloo! Mitzi Gaynor!”

We tussled and fought on the chilly earth for a bit, cuffing each other’s ears and so on, our lack of either expertise or real rancor preventing any actual harm beyond a bruise or two and some badly pulled hair. It was in a way rather like the sex had been.

“Go!” Corrin’s voice shouted after a while, his body collapsing again onto its back, filthier than ever, “Get! Git! Gut! Got! John Cougar Mellencamp!” And he kicked his feet in the air enthusiastically, further demonstrating perhaps the absence of control by any rational consciousness.

I was somewhat concerned for my friend’s health and sanity, but the sun was setting, and it occurred to me that he might be calmer in my absence; admittedly I was also willing to ride in luxury and merely observe as my body pulled its clothes back on over its grimy skin, and walked with increasing speed back to my rooms. Corrins would be, I told myself, just fine.

I observed my body take a highly therapeutic hot bath, read a few pages of Ligotti, and slip contentedly into bed. It was, from the point of view of my consciousness (do not think about that statement too hard at this point, dear reader), quite nice.

The next morning, entirely too early, I was summoned by the Proctors, because Corrins had apparently caused an Incident. Walking into the Common in the wee hours, naked and grimy, shouting incoherently at the top of his lungs, is not all that unusual as such things go, but when he was still incoherent by morning, not having slept it off nor smelling especially of alcohol or anything else familiar, the Proctors had determined to call in one of the poor veck’s friends to assist.

That I was the one they called suggested that he had at that time even fewer friends than I had estimated.

“Corrins, small cabbage,” I addressed him patiently, as he crouched on the modest pallet of his cell in the of course not a jail area of the Proctors’ Offices, “I know you can understand me perfectly well.” He only stuck his tongue far out, and wiggled the tip rapidly up and down.

I sighed. “Boopsie-poo,” I addressed him, “this is my brain directly addressing yours. You cannot deny that your brain exists, it is right there in your roughly ovoid head, and it is the same brain that until yesterday was perfectly able to speak in the usual way, and only recently composed an award-winning essay on Nabokov’s Pale Fire. I realize that the grunting animalistic body thing is hugely entertaining, but my brain must ask yours to consider: what has changed in the last thirty-six hours? Anything? Anything to justify such a change in bodily behavior?”

At this, his eyes slowly and reluctantly focused, and his body assumed a more civilized, if also more slumped, position.

“I suppose,” he said, with a sigh of his own, “but what is one to do? Nothing that this body says is connected to — I cannot say to ‘me’! I cannot even say ‘I’! And yet I do!”

“Are you suggesting that we can only sort of muddle along, our language capturing reality only in the most pragmatic and approximate way? Have you finally embraced the Dharma?”

Corrins of course laughed at this quip (a private jest between us, on his childhood Calvinism and my own old Sōtō), which lightened the mood; our bodies exchanged a few more expressions of human language, and after a while I urged him into the rough togs I had brought for him, and we departed, to the relief of the Proctors.

Hours later, we were in a comfortable noisy local establishment, drinking acceptable Porter, our friends (or at least acquaintances) around us. Corrins’ arm was around my shoulders, and he was speaking too loudly into my ear.

“Language is impossible!” he suggested, “I am only a body! Consciousness is a helpless prisoner!”

I turned toward the fellow, an attractively kind expression on my face I like to think.

“Corrins,” I ventured, “let me propose a thing to you.”

He nodded, a drowning brain eager for any straw to grasp.

“I here offer a single data point: that I, your good and devoted friend, have a subjective consciousness, which experiences exercising some control over my body, and that the activities of my body correlate so strongly with those experiences of control, that the only rational conclusion to draw is that for all practical purposes I, my consciousness, does in fact control this very body, even if I cannot imagine how.”

Here he began a sort of “Bu–“, but I put a quieting finger to his lips, and then mentally shook off distracting memories of moans and grunts on cold dirty ground.

“Hear my entire proposal,” I continued, “I put forward this data point, although I cannot offer you any evidence for it, but I propose that you also, you the consciousness of my friend Corrins, can observe for yourself a similar correlation mutatis mutandem, and have the same rational conclusion to draw.”

He frowned at this. “But the epi– the epifoamnominal theory of the foam –“

“We took that theory, that notion, only as a stipulation, did we not? A test? A trial, adopted only for the time being?”

He nodded slowly in the din.

“Then I will suggest that the resulting changes in behavior that followed from that situation, should be seen as a bit of a reductio of the notion!”

His eyes widened slightly, and then narrowed. “The sex, though. Was the sex bad?”

I assured Corrins that the sex had, in fact, been exemplary.

In the weeks since then, all has returned more or less to normal. One strides along the College Lanes discussing theories of the world, and one hears rumors that Corrins has more friends now than he has historically had.

But on certain nights, I do observe my body taking itself out into the woods beside one or another boulder or tree, pulling off its clothing and rolling itself on the loamy earth, bruising its forehead against the stones, and shouting glorious meaningless imprecations to the empty sky.

And it is not the only one.

ChatGPT and “Azathoth and the Dharma”

Well, heck.

So, I was reading Ligotti’s “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World” and thinking that it was pretty good, and that he tends to picture the ultimate squirming chaos at the center of reality as sometimes attractive (if perversely) as well as finally horrifying, in a way that I don’t remember Lovecraft doing, at least not as sympathetically.

At some points, for instance in The Tsalal (whose name is explicitly a reference to Poe), I thought that when a character points out with horror that appearances are just temporary masks on an indescribable underlying reality, it sounds (without the horror part) quite a bit like various aspects of the Dharma (it does, right?). This seemed, I thought, like something that someone might write a weblog entry or something about!

And then, because my mind has been infected (in a mildly Cthulhu-esque way perhaps) by the idea of LLMs writing text, I thought I would propose the notion to ChatGPT or Bard or something, and have it write words! It would either do a good job, which would be interesting, or an amusingly bad job, which would be amusing.

I thought the “amusingly bad job” outcome was more likely, but, well, heck.

I used ChatGPT 4.0 rather than 3.5 or Bard, just because it’s gotten the most hype, and also because since I’m paying money to use it I thought it might be better, so if it failed amusingly it might be more meaningful. Here’s the interaction (and I do realize that my “always changing” is problematic as a characterization of the Dharma, but then so is everything else):

Me: For an essay entitled “Azathoth and the Dharma”, I’d like to discuss how the idea that appearances are only temporary masks over a deeper truth that is indescribable and always changing, features both in the kind of intellectual horror written by Lovecraft and especially Ligotti, and in Buddhist beliefs about truth and the Dharma, and that the main difference is one of emotional overtones with which it is presented. Lord Dunsany might also be relevant. Please draft the beginning of this essay for me.

ChatGPT 4.0:

Title: “Azathoth and the Dharma: Transient Masks of Deeper Truth in Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Buddhist Philosophy”

In the chaotic cosmos of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti, we find ourselves confronted with a universe filled with inscrutable forces and ancient entities, their true natures hidden beneath uncanny, horrifying masks. The universe is not simply indifferent to humanity; it is utterly alien, impenetrable to human understanding, and constantly in flux. These themes of grotesque transformation and unknowable horror are at the heart of their works. And yet, when viewed from another angle, these concepts can be seen as echoing the fundamental principles of Buddhist philosophy, particularly the teachings of the Dharma. They, too, postulate a reality that is continuously changing and ultimately indescribable.

The Dharma, the cosmic law and moral order that Buddhists seek to understand and follow, hinges on several key principles, one of which is Anicca, or impermanence. Anicca posits that all conditioned phenomena are in a state of constant change. Whether we consider the universe at large or the very essence of our being, everything is transitory, and appearances are fleeting. Beneath the apparent solidity of phenomena lies an incomprehensible flux of arising and ceasing events, an underlying truth that cannot be adequately captured in words.

This notion aligns strikingly with the chilling cosmologies of Lovecraft and Ligotti. Azathoth, Lovecraft’s nuclear chaos at the center of the cosmos, is the ultimate symbol of this philosophy. It is the blind idiot god, an embodiment of constant change and the source of all existence. It is unknowable, its essence cloaked in cosmic chaos and frenetic piping, its reality beyond human comprehension.

Similarly, in the phantasmagoric narratives of Ligotti, we find the protagonists often straddling the line between grim reality and unfathomable horror, their worldviews shattering in the face of a truth too alien and amorphous for the human mind to comprehend. It’s not unlike the Buddhist concept of Sunyata, or emptiness, which refers to the lack of inherent or eternal essence in all phenomena.

Yet, as we draw these parallels, we are confronted by the starkly contrasting emotional overtones that characterize these disparate systems of thought. In Buddhism, the realization of Anicca and Sunyata is liberating, offering a path towards enlightenment and the cessation of suffering. But in the macabre tapestries woven by Lovecraft and Ligotti, the confrontation with these realities is inherently terrifying, inducing existential dread and insanity.

The eerie fables of Lord Dunsany, who greatly influenced Lovecraft, might offer an intermediary perspective. He presents us with bizarre, otherworldly landscapes and creatures, yet there’s often a whimsical, dreamlike quality to his work. The absurd and inexplicable are not strictly horrifying, but engender a complex mixture of awe, fascination, and unease.

This divergence in emotional reaction prompts us to consider the nature of human perception and our responses to the deep, enigmatic truths of existence. Is the Lovecraftian terror at the chaotic heart of reality as valid a response as the Buddhist acceptance and quest for liberation? Or does it simply reflect our inherent fear of the unknown, our resistance to the dissolution of ego, the prospect of losing what we perceive as our solid, unchanging selves? In our exploration of ‘Azathoth and the Dharma’, we delve into these questions, probing the intersection of cosmic horror and Buddhist philosophy, and the deeply human, emotionally-charged responses they elicit.

Transcript ends

I’m not sure how to feel about this. It did quite a good job, at least on a few casual readings. The references to anicca and sunyata are plausible, no worse than I would expect from any reasonably educated person daring to write on those concepts, and they weren’t specified in the prompt; the LLM was clued enough to bring them in itself. The paragraph on Dunsany is a little thin, but again no worse than I would expect from a decent human writer; I did ask for a Dunsany link, and this is the obvious one.

It clearly knows (“knows”) who Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Dunsany are, and what in general the Dharma is. I would definitely edit the phrase “the fundamental principles of Buddhist philosophy, particularly the teachings of the Dharma”, but yet again this is a matter of subtle tone, not by any means an egregious error.

It did nothing that (from a human writer!) would have been surprising or even especially non-obvious (although the thought that the feeling of horror may “simply reflect our inherent fear of the unknown, our resistance to the dissolution of ego, the prospect of losing what we perceive as our solid, unchanging selves” is perhaps beyond trivial extrapolation of the assignment). But its unsurprising and mostly obvious expansion of my original idea into seven nice paragraphs of solid prose (with a fitting subtitle for good measure) contains, I have to admit, no amusing errors that I can find!

I even asked it for some references and further reading, and it gave a decent dozen suggestions for both Lovecraftian horror and Buddhism, all of which actually exist; my only criticism being that

“Noel, Daniel C. The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities. Continuum, 1997. This book explores the intersection of spirituality and fantasy literature, which could be useful to draw broader conclusions about your topic.”

is a bit of a stretch. On the other side, when I asked it if it knew of any existing works making the same sort of link that I propose here, it did not make one up! It said encouragingly that it didn’t know of any, and finished off with this:

“Overall, your proposed exploration of the specific connection between Lovecraftian horror and Buddhist philosophy seems to be quite unique, and it’s an interesting new angle to consider in the study of both these areas.”

Well… thanks, ChatGPT, that’s… nice. I guess?

I feel like this all certainly means something. Or perhaps it’s just the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute!

Straw God, Steel God

A brief prologue: what does it really mean to believe a thing? What kinds of things can be believed? Is there a difference between belief and assent, or between belief and (say) tending to express a claim? If belief is a matter of an attitude toward a possible world, then it’s (perhaps) impossible to believe a self-contradictory proposition, including a necessarily false one, including the negations of mathematical truths. But it doesn’t really feel right to say that it’s impossible to believe that P=NP (assuming it’s false). Certainly one can assent to or tend to express the claim that P=NP, in either case. Is it possible to believe complete nonsense; can I believe “Nobbo dif daf phlongo” (without it having any further meaning)? Arguably I can assent to it or tend to claim it (or at least tend to assert it, or utter it with an assertive attitude?), but can I believe it? All interesting questions.

So anyway, I continue to binge various YouTube atheists responding to Christian fundamentalist apologists, and I’m really not sure why. Biblical inerrancy and literalism are just silly; there are about five arguments (Pascal’s wager, objective morality, “creation implies a creator”, supposedly-fulfilled prophecies, fine-tuning, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few), and there are very strong counterarguments to all of them. The material that’s supposedly the infallible word of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being is very obviously a bunch of stories and poems and things put together over centuries by a bunch of different people and groups and political processes, that exist in various variants and contradict each other in various ways just as one would expect of such a compendium. If it weren’t that lots of people believe, or purport to believe (see prologue), this stuff, and use it to justify political and social positions that are to various degrees odious, no one would bother responding to it, any more than anyone responds to the claim that Charlotte’s Web is literally true (some pig!). It would be a straw man, if only there weren’t lots of people asserting it.

(And yeah, it’s not just Christianity; many religions have holy books where it’s obviously silly to take the material as literally true. But Christianity is the one that causes the most trouble around me.)

On the other hand, I believe that most Christians, or at least a significant fraction, aren’t fundamentalist Bible literalists, and therefore believe, well, something else. And it occurred to me to wonder just what they do believe, that’s reasonable or arguable or not obviously false or void, but that still makes them Christians in some reasonable sense of the term, and whether I could write down some of the possibilities. To “steelman” Christianity, if you will, in various ways, and see what comes out.

One possibility, which I’ll call I dunno secular Christianity is something like say the Jefferson Bible: the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was a wise person who taught worthwhile stuff, and we should pay attention to it, and read (at least the non-supernatural) writings by and about him, and take him seriously, and perhaps even venerate him for some meaning of that word (but probably as a person rather than something else), maybe have holidays about his birth and death and all that, and so on.

This is fine; a discussion with this sort of Christian would be calm and rational and likely interesting; there is no fundamental disagreement. On the other hand many Christians wouldn’t count it as Christianity, since that is so often tied into questions like “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” and “Do you believe that he died and then rose again on the third day?”, which this notion of secular Christianity in its most obvious interpretation doesn’t particularly encompass.

I think it’s more common for a Christian to be in something I’ll call mysterian Christianity, which emphasizes faith, and believing in God and Jesus and the Bible without knowing and without worrying too much about exactly what it all literally means. In my model of the world, your typical believer who goes to church every Sunday but doesn’t post apologetics videos on YouTube is like this. They believe that the Bible is true, literally, or “seriously” as the JWs put it, or whatever, and if the things that it says don’t seem to make rational sense right now, that’s fine, we humans are very limited in our understanding, and it will be clarified in time, and in the meantime we should pray and do what seems right and/or what Father O’Malley advises. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

A discussion with this sort of Christian would be relatively short and simple, I think, as long as one didn’t get obnoxious by asking them how they’re justified in believing something they don’t even understand. The answer is presumably something like “I’ve been touched by the Holy Spirit, and you haven’t, and that’s it; maybe some day you will be too!”, and there’s not much further that one can go politely from there.

What else do we have? I’d like a rational (re)construction of some sort of mystic Christianity, in which one accepts Jesus as one’s personal savior, and he died and rose again on the third day to atone for our sins and all, but also doesn’t make silly truth-claims and doesn’t lead to any odious political or social attitudes. This would have to involve lots of symbols and metaphors, or in the more exalted sense lots of reality-as-metaphor, where we say that Jesus of Nazareth was (and is) both one with God and also the Son of God, and probably that each of us is also one with God (and with Jesus) and also the Son of God, and that each of us (throughout life, throughout the day, in every moment) dies and then rises again, that by our own (perhaps constant) deaths we pay (God and ourselves) atonement for our sins, where simply being an ensouled embodied entity inherently constitutes sin, except when we take salvation into ourselves through Christ’s, which is to say our own, sacrifice of himself, which is to say ourselves, and we must accept Christ (which is to say, the cosmos) as our personal (because everything is personal) savior.

This is to take the Bible as perhaps inerrant and literal, but noting that to the same extent we take Charlotte’s Web (and especially the Wind in the Willows) and the very sound of the wind in the trees as interrant and literal, which is something that we can do only (as far as I know) by acknowledging that all language, even all experience as refracted through language, as metaphorical, so that the most literal possible interpretation of any text or experience is still an interpretation rife with symbol and metaphor. Which is what mysticism is, in some (metaphorical) sense.

Is this all interesting and/or accurate? I’m not certain. I, obviously, don’t believe fundamentalist Christianity, because it’s facially silly, and I keep listening to people refuting its claims (probably just because it validates my existing attitude or whatever). Secular Christianity (as used above) is fine, and probably held by various Unitarians and so on, who may or may not (perhaps more often not, in these troubled times) call themselves Christians. Mysterian Christianity isn’t especially attractive to me, as I haven’t been appropriately touched by the Holy Spirit, and frankly I don’t think anyone else has either in the relevant sense, but arguing about it is very much like I think arguing with a solipsist; it’s too bad that people sometimes get odious behaviors from it. Mystic Christianity is fine, and is so to speak just a different way of saying something that I do believe (to the extent that “believe” applies here) but that I put in Buddhist or Ariadnite terms rather than Christian ones, because icky connotations or whatever.

Seems reasonable. :D

Phenomenology

I should like phenomenology. Ontology is about existing, epistemology is about knowing, morality is about good and bad and valuing, but phenomenology is about subjective experience; about experiencing from the inside.

The relevant reason that I should like that, is that an ongoing project of mine (not one that I necessarily work on, but one that I think about, which is at least as good) is to start with whatever it is that is given, or Given, which I like to call The Experience Storm, and to see how everything else (existing and knowing and valuing) can (or cannot) be built up from that. To take, that is, the subject matter of phenomenology as foundational, and see what happens when we try to build everything else on top of it.

This is hardly an original thought. :) Descartes’ cogito is sort of that, taking that which he cannot doubt and seeing what could be built on that. I disagree with him about just what he cannot doubt (or at least I’m able to doubt lots of stuff he claimed he couldn’t), but it’s the same general project. Empiricism is also an approach to the same project, where The Given is something on the order of sense experience, which turns out to be wrong, but again it’s basically the same project.

If we look up phenomenology on the interwebs, a typical sort of thing we find is, for instance:

“The discipline of phenomenology is defined by its domain of study, its methods, and its main results.

“Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world.”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised 2013l

which starts out fine for a couple of sentences, but then I am all like whaaaaat.

As I’ve said before in a just slightly different context, I find the whole “aboutness” and intentionality thing silly and unconvincing. And one of the reasons for that is especially relevant here: not only are there all sorts of experiences that aren’t about some object in the world (what is the experience of boredom about, for instance?), but in the foundationalist project, it can’t be fundamental to experience that it be made of things that are “about” “objects” in the “world”, because we don’t yet have a “world”, or any “objects”, or any relationship like “about”.

I talked about this a little on Mastodon the other day, and someone (who I now see is “lead of the graphics kernel team at Microsoft”??) commented usefully that, basically, people usually take phenomenology as not-foundational, as the study of how experience is given that we already know more or less how it all fits into the world, and what the world is like. (Not what they said exactly, but that’s what I read in it.)

And that’s fine, but I think it’s significantly less interesting.

Now, how do we actually build up a world from the Experience Storm? What happens when we try to? Or, perhaps more appropriately, how do I do it, and what happens when I try, since I haven’t established that you even exist yet. And vice-versa. :)

I haven’t worked that all out entirely yet, but an early interesting question is just what the Experience Storm is like: what it consists of, how it’s structures, what entities and properties and relationships it has. Descartes talked mostly as though what is Given is a bunch of propositions, and they include not just “I am thinking” and “I exist”, but really complicated stuff like “there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause,” which is just whacky, and leads to stuff like theism. I don’t know whether he was also unable to doubt “I am reasoning correctly in all this stuff”, or if that occurred to him at all.

The standard empiricist viewpoint is (or one might even say, was) that what is given and undoubtable is sense experience, which is along the lines of two-dimensional red blobs, and rising tones, and whatnot. I think it’s fair to say that it turns out that that isn’t really how we experience the world, although (this being philosophy) the details (and even the broad outlines) remain controversial (see for instance I dunno maybe this).

My tentative hypothesis is that, first, what is given, the Experience Storm, is exactly this, and that any verbal description will be significantly wrong (very Zen, that, at least for my values of “Zen”). But if we forge ahead and write down verbal descriptions anyway, we get not only something like “raw feels”, but much more complex things that have big fat semantic labels attached, and relationships between them, and lots of stuff like that. And those labels (properties) and relationships are just as much part of what is given and indubitable as the rawer and more feel-like things that are also in there, and to which they are in some sense associated or “attached”.

And one can continue from there in various ways :) to build up more stuff on that, always keeping in mind that the words that one is writing down are significantly wrong. But it’s getting late at night, and I’m happy to have written this much down.

It’s a pity that the word “phenomenology” has this whole concept of Aboutness associated with it. Is there a good word for taking subjective experience (whatever that turns out to be like), and building the rest of the universe up from there? Probably there is, and I once knew it even, maybe forty years ago. :)

It’s just predicting the next word! Well…

tl;dr: While it’s true that all LLMs do is produce likely text continuations, this doesn’t imply that they don’t have mental models, don’t reason, etc.

One thing that sensible people often say about Large Language Models like ChatGPT / GPT-n and Bard and so on, is that all they do is predict the next word, or for more technical accuracy, that all they do is generate text that is likely to follow the prompt that they are given, i.e. “produce likely continuations”.

And that’s a good thing to note, in that people tend to have all sorts of other theories about what they are doing, and some of those theories are just wrong, and lead people to make bad conclusions. For instance, people will have a more or less default theory that the model knows things about itself and tells the truth about things it knows, and take seriously its (non-factual) answers to questions like “What language are you written in?” or “What hardware are you running on?” or “Are you a tool of Chinese Communism?”.

Also, it’s true that all they do is generate text that is likely to follow the prompt, in the sense that that is the only significant criterion used during training of the underlying neural network.

But that doesn’t actually mean that that is all they do, in the more general sense. And this, at least potentially, matters.

Consider for instance the claim that “all life does is arrange to have many generations of descendants”. That is true in the same sense, since the only criterion for having survived long enough to be noticed in the current world, is to have had many generations of descendants.

But, significantly, this doesn’t mean that that is all life does, in the sense that life does all sorts of other things, albeit arguably in the service of (or at least as a side effect of) having many generations of descendants.

For instance, I think it would be plainly false to say “people obviously can’t reason about the world; all they do is arrange for there to be many more generations of people!”. In fact, people can and do reason about the world. It may be that we can explain how we came to do this, by noting that one effective strategy for having many generations of descendants involves reasoning about the world in various ways; but that does not mean that we “don’t really reason” in any sense.

Similarly, I think the arguments that various smart people make, which when boiled down to a Tweet come out as roughly “LLMs don’t X; all they do is predict likely continuations!” for various values of X, are in fact not valid arguments. Even if all an LLM does is predict likely continuations, it might still do X (reason about the world, have mental models, know about truth and falsehood) because X is helpful in (or even just a likely side-effect of) one or more effective strategies for predicting likely continuations.

Put another way, if you train a huge neural network to output likely continuations of input text, it’s not obviously impossible that in choosing internal weights that allow it to do that, it might develop structures or behaviors or tendencies or features that are reasonably described as mental models or reasoning or knowledge of truth and falsehood.

This isn’t a claim that LLMs do in fact have any of these X’s; it’s just pointing out that “all it does is produce likely continuations” isn’t a valid argument that they don’t have them.

It’s still entirely valid to respond to “It told me that it’s written in Haskell!” by saying “Sure, but that’s just because that’s a likely answer to follow that question, not because it’s true”. But it’s not valid to claim more generally that a model can’t have any kind of internal model of some subset of the real world; it might very well have that, if it helps it to correctly predict continuations.

Bonus section! Current LLMs don’t in fact reason significantly, or have interesting internal models, in many cases. Amusing case from this morning: when fed some classic text rot13’d, this morning’s Bard claimed that it was a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, whereas this morning’s ChatGPT replied with rot13’d text which, when decoded, was gibberish of the sort that an early GPT-2 might have produced from the decoded version of the prompt. No agent with a reasonable mental model of what it was doing, would have done either of those things. :)

樸

The perfect sound
is silence,

The perfect cup
is empty,

The perfect page
is blank,

The perfect mind
without
thought.