Catnip: A Case for Affective Self-stimulation as a Fundamental Behavioral Drive

I am of the opinion that phenomena like catnip orgies are best modeled in terms of dynamic systems theory. According to this line of thought,

intentions are seen as grounded in neural patterns. The autonomous nervous system constrains the path of future firings as long as the pattern or [Resonant Cell Assembly] lasts. (Some intentions entail long strings of firing patterns, yielding coherent complex behavior, as in the intention to play a game of basketball.) Sensory input continually feeds into the system along the way, either reinforcing the settling into a pattern or shocking it out of a pattern into a chaotic zone in which other patterns strive to emerge. Decisions are precisely the brain’s falling into one pattern or another, a falling that is modeled as the settling into a basic of attraction that will constrain neural firing in a pattern. There is no linear causal chain of input, processing, and output. Instead there is a continuall looping as sensory information feeds into an ongoing dynamic system, altering or reinforcing pattern formation; in model terms, the trajectory of the system weaves its way in and out of a continually changing attractor landscape whose layout depends upon both the recent and the remote past of the nervous system. (Protevi, 2009, p. 18)

With this in mind, we can understand cat behavior in terms of the catnip chemicals perturbing the intrinsic homeostatic dynamics of the cat-system such that it triggers a cascade of self-stimulating behaviors. It has been hypothesized that the active chemical in catnip mimics a sex pheromone for cats. And because the neural substrate of sex behaviors is likely based in pleasure pathways, we can assume that the experience of smelling catnip is intensely pleasurable, perhaps orgasmic. We can then argue that pleasurable self-stimulation is a fundamental drive for mammals. The pleasure-pathways are so directly attuned to behavior that any perturbation of the pleasure-equilibrium is bound to set off a behavioral cascade that seeks to amplify pleasure by whatever means available until equilibrium is reestablished.

Moreover, we can generalize from these behaviors to a wide array of self-stimulation in human behavior e.g. sex, drug/food addiction, masturbation, etc. It is only the top-down control networks of adult cognition that allow for the inhibition of self-stimulation. That this might be so is evidenced in how autistic children are largely driven by self-stimulation (known as “stimming“). Without the possibility for reflective self-control, autistic children are more or less locked into repetitive behavioral loops that focus on affective self-stimulation. Accordingly, the theoretical insights of dynamic systems theory may help scientists better understand the mechanisms of self-stimulation, leading to new behavioral therapy techniques.

Heidegger and Zen

Heideggeroids are known for their word play and inability to generate concrete expressions. This is especially true of scholarship on division II of Being and Time and later Heidegger. I’m sometimes suspicious that the scholar I’m reading has no idea what he or she is talking about. Accordingly, Heideggeroids usually substitute bad neologisms and jargon for a clear understanding of the phenomenon.

A Heideggeroid might respond by saying they are only following the Master’s lead. But Heidegger can be excused for his cryptic writing style because he understood the phenomenon to be described. Because he had such an intuitive understanding of the subject matter, he also realized the difficulty of capturing the rich manifold of human experience in the web of language and concepts. And not just any web, but one deeply embedded with metaphysical presuppositions that had long since oozed into the vernacular understanding by means of leaky philosophical systems. All his life then, Heidegger struggled with the same problem that has faced Zen for centuries: how do you think about thoughtless experience?

Rigorous phenomenology reveals that reflective, thinking consciousness sits on the surface of our total cognitive system. The idea of a vast, subpersonal ocean of mental activity is well-accepted by theorists today. Moreover, meditaters have understood since its original development that the thinking mind is part of a greater whole.This idea was also “in the air” during Heidegger’s time (through psychology and psychoanalysis). Indeed, one could say that the “they-self” is Heidegger’s attempt at describing unconscious processes in nonpsychologistic terminology. However, if we admit that the nonconscious mind is a legitimate form of human mental experience, albeit not filtered through language and socially constructed concepts, how do we include it into our phenomenology?

Close study of the mind reveals that it is the unconscious libidinal energy that grounds the rational, self-reflexive ego. Without the emotional undercurrent of the unconscious, the thoughts that float on top would lose their connection to the ongoing stream of bodily experience. You can see then the dilemma that phenomenology faces when confronted with the fundamental reality of the they-self.

It is my opinion that Heidegger, inspired by contact with the Eastern world and his own experience with nature, was a deep meditater. Indeed, I think any phenomenologist will miss the boat entirely unless they are thoroughly trained in meditation. Meditation allows you to fall into the thoughtless they-self without forgetting about the experience. This is the difference between a trained phenomenologist and a layman. Both are equally prone to falling into the they-self, but the phenomenologist expects it and is ready for it. The layman does not “wake up” or “return” to consciousness and then ponder about the time lost. The layman will not exercise the metacognition necessary for noting his return from the they-self, he will simply think a thought and then return to his absorption in the world. The phenomenologist however will not just return from his fall, but realize that he has “found himself”. The layman is never aware of his lostness in the way the phenomenologist is.

I suspect Heideggeroids are in the same position of ignorance. They read Heidegger’s words and learn how to string his neologisms into semi-coherent sentences but they fail to grasp the original, wordless experience of absorption. Because they do not understand the full target of phenomenology, they wind up sounding strange and esoteric in their speech and writings. But it’s time to wake up from this lostness into jargon. Heidegger already did the heavy phenomenological lifting for us. If we are to continue the task of phenomenology then, I think Heideggerians would profit more from heavy meditation rather than reading the Master. After all, a return to the “things themselves” does not mean a return to dusty German texts; it means a return to the primordial phenomenological datum: lived experience in all its manifold richness.

Favorite links – 6/24/10

• The Philosophy Smoker tackles the question of whether philosophers should switch to Latex for writing papers. Mr. Zero concludes that it isn’t worth the effort, but see the comments for dissenting opinions.
• Graham Harman has a nice post commenting on the revised version of Stambaugh’s translation of Being and Time. “I never quite understood what the problem supposedly was with the original Macquarrie & Robinson translation.” I also really liked a post Harman did lamenting the lack of mythical dream narratives in today’s society.
• Steve Shaviro has a nice post on William James’ and the metaphysics of mind
• The Chronicle has an interesting opinion article on the “Avalanche of Low-Quality Research” in the sciences
• Nicholas Carr comments on some recent research that suggests computer-use does not correlate with higher test scores in children. What does? Reading books.
• Crooked Timber on corruption in academia.
• Mark Changizi has an excellent article on why color inversion thought experiments don’t work in the way their proponents think they do.
• Levi at Larval Subjects has a nice post discusses the implications of being “pretty much stuck with this planet” in the event of a catastrophe.
• You Are Not So Smart argues that in reality opposites don’t attract and when they do, relationships end up falling apart.

James on Philosophy

Philosophic study means the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind.

-William James, “The Teaching of Philosophy in Our Colleges”

The Hypothetical Evolution of Hallucinatory Self-regulation

I just reread Julian Jaynes’ chapter on the brain in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and it’s really fascinating. He raises some incredible questions. First, he notes that almost all important brain functions are represented bilaterally in the brain. This makes evolutionary sense because functional redundancy is a survival skill in the event of injury. But curiously, language is not bilaterally represented yet it is perhaps the most important function in human existence, separating us from the animals. We would not be human without it, as feral children sadly demonstrate. Moreover, the left hemisphere is often called the “dominant” hemisphere because most people are right-handed, and thus have a left-hemisphere dominance in voluntary control (and there is even a right eye field dominance).

There must be a good reason then why something as important as language wouldnt have been bilaterally represented during evolutionary development. We know from lesion studies that if we take out the Wernicke’s area in the left hemisphere during childhood, the whole mechanism of language will transfer to the right hemisphere. So it isn’t that the right hemisphere corresponding to left language areas is incapable of bilateral language redundancy, it’s that it must subserve some other function that is even more valuable for us than language. Jaynes asks, what is this function? His answer:

The selective pressures of evolution which could have brought about so mighty a result are those of the bicameral civilizations. The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of gods. (103-104)

This is Jaynes’ hypothesis of the “bicameral mind”. The bicameral mind is based on the metaphor of a divided house, like two selves housed in one brain (similar to split-brain patients). On the right side is the god-complex, grounded in the right temporal cortex. It’s function was to solve problems by synthesizing complex information and relaying linguistically-coded behavioral instructions to the other side, the mortal-complex, grounded in the left temporal cortex. The gods obeyed and the humans heard. And to hear was to obey. This function substituted for voluntary will in our preconscious ancestors.That this might be true is evidenced by the fact that the temporal lobes have their own private communication channel: the smaller anterior commissures. Moreover, articles like these:

• Auditory hallucinations and the bicameral mind
• Neuroimaging, auditory hallucinations, and the bicameral mind
• Auditory Hallucinations and the Temporal Cortical Response to Speech in Schizophrenia: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study
• Activation of bilateral auditory cortex during verbal hallucinations in a child with schizophrenia

show that the neural substrate for schizophrenic hallucination is the the right temporal cortex, as per Jaynes’ theory.

Accordingly, we might be able to tell the following “Just So” story. First, emphasize that the first complex societies were authoritarian through and through, or at structured by a rigid social hierarchy. Moreover, we could assume that the development of narrative skills would have been to (1) allow the dominant fathers and chieftons to more easily give complex commands in terms of dense linguistic codes (2) allow people to better remember and recount what their fathers, and their father’s father, had instructed them to do in times of need. This generational chain of command was more important and sacred than anything else. The fathers and chieftons would remember the instructions of their father and chiefton on how and when to plant the crops, how to be brave and fight when the time comes, how to live in the Dorian mode and die a honorable death (so that your fame will live on), etc. At this early point in our social evolution, we can assume that language was represented bilaterally in the brain given its importance for keeping the cultural traditions alive and the social control mechanisms operating smoothly.

Granting all this, we can then hypothesize that a scaffolding effect arose as a result of the linguistic control mechanisms. The scaffold was this: everyday, day after day, our ancestors’ brains would have been directly sculpted by the following habit schema: leader commands, I obey. After so many years, this voice would have sculpted the motor pathways in the brain such that hearing it would always result in obedience, much like modern day hypnosis. Such was life; authoritative to the core. Next, we can suppose that these ingrained obedience patterns might have started “looping” in the brain, like a melody or thought that gets stuck in your head all day. As Jaynes says

Let us consider a man commanded by himself or his chief to set up a fish weir upstream from a campsite. If he is not conscious, and cannot therefore narrative the situation and so hold his analog “I” in a spatialized time with its consequences fully imagined, how does he do it? It is only language, I think, that can keep him at this time-consuming all-afternoon work. A Middle Pleistocene man would forget what he was doing. But lingual man would have language to remind him, either repeated by himself, which would require a type of volition which I do not think he was capable of, or, as seems more likely,by a repeated ‘internal’ verbal hallucination telling him what to do. (p. 134)

It was the unique behavioral opportunies of enduring-attention that provided the selection pressures for the right hemisphere language centers to be readapted for hallucinatory self-regulation. This would explain why schizophrenia has such a strong genetic component and why it remains with us today despite being so dysfunctional in a modern society (answer: because it was once kept people alive to listen to their voices). New evidence is even indicating that auditory hallucinations are more common in “normals” than previously supposed, especially in children (e.g. imaginary companions).

Now, in our imagined society, linguistically-coded verbal commands from fathers to sons dominated the social control mechanisms of behavior regulation. A son grows up everyday listening to his father command him like a puppet. The father himself grew up obeying his father, in addition to the tribal chief (and so on for centuries). The chiefton dies suddenly. We don’t have a concept of death. His body is lying there motionless but he isn’t giving orders anymore. How can we get the chiefton to command us once more? We take his body and clean it, dress it, and prop it up as if he were doing his normal day to day business. We give him food and drink and all his favorite material possessions, trying to appease his spirit so that he will command us again. Wait! A voice belows. The body speaks again! He commands once more! But now it is different. Now he is directly talking to us, more powerful and more authoritative than ever. We cannot refuse his voice; we cannot stop it from compelling us. The voice is heard even when the chieftons body is not around. We cannot close our ears to the thunderous voice. The gods and demigods are born. True ancestor worship begins. Sophisticated burial rituals to induce commands from dead bodies show up in the archeological record. Such work has routinely discovered disembodied heads and scenes of daily life in burial tombs. Why would they mess with the dead bodies of their leaders? To induce auditory hallucinations. Such began religion and the priestclass. Such began schizophrenia and the bilteralization of language on the left, body-controlling side, and the all-knowing language of the gods on the right side, stepping in to command us during times of stress and crutch decision making. The trigger for hallucination is stress but for most moderns, the threshhold is high. For some, however, it is low, far too low (hence schizophrenia).

The Authority of the Bicameral Mind

Recounted by Julian Jaynes,

One sunny afternoon not long ago, a man was lying back in a deck chair on the beach at Coney Island. Suddenly, he heard a voice so loud and clear that he looked about at his companions, certain that they too must have heard the voice. When they acted as if nothing had happened, he began to feel strange and moved his chair away from them. And then

…suddenly, clearer, deeper, and even louder than before, the deep voice came at me again, right in my ear this time, and getting me tight and shivery inside “Larry Jayson, I told you before you weren’t any good. Why are you sitting here making believe you are as good as anyone else when you’re not? Whom are you fooling?”

The deep voice was so loud and so clear, everyone must have heard it. He got up and walked slowly away, down the stairs of the boardwalk to the stretch of sand below. He waited to see if the voice came back. It did, its words pounding in this time, not the way you hear any words, but deeper,

….as though all parts of me had become ears, with my fingers hearing the words, and my legs, and my head too. “You’re no good,” the voice said slowly, in the same deep tones. “You’ve never been any good or use on earth. There is the ocean. You might as well drown yourself. Just walk in, and keep walking.” As soon as the voice was through, I knew by its cold command, I had to obey it.

The patient walking the pounded sands of Coney Island heard his pounding voice as clearly as Achilles heard Thetis along the misted shores of the Aegean. And even as Agamemmon “had to obey” the “cold command” of Zeus, or Paul the command of Jesus before Damascus, so Mr. Jayson waded into the Atlantic Ocean to drown. Against the will of his voices, he was saved by lifeguards and brought to Bellevue Hospital, where he recovered to write of this bicameral experience.

Who in the history of literature does Mr. Jayson’s hallucinated voice remind you of? The booming, fatherly voice, the absolute moral judgement, the “You should fear and obey me” attitude? Atheists and skeptics often ridicule religious people for being weak-minded in light of rational evidence that gods and demigods do not “really” exist. But clearly, Mr. Jayson did not have a choice in obeying his god. It was not a matter of choosing to believe; it was simply about giving in to the command of the dominant authority. Giving in to authority and letting the patriarchal male dominate through admonitory verbal judgement is fundamental to human behavior. It’s how social relations were governed for hundreds of thousands of years (and to this day remains a powerful tool for mass social control as indicated by hypnotism, meteoric dictators, and religious sermons).

Is it any surprise then that the phenomenon of religion is pervasive enough to warrant speculation about “god genes”? It was the internalization of admonitory judgement through schizoid hallucinatory control mechanisms that catalyzed the unique human phenomenon of ancestor worship. As the ancestors became surrounded in myth and lore, they were internally constructed and experienced as the first gods and demigods. The god complex, grounded by the right hemisphere’s synthetic problem solving skills, dictated commands in time of stress and crutch decision making. It was our alliance with the gods that made our amazingly rapid cultural evolution possible. But as society grew more complex, the social control mechanism of bicamerality grew weak in comparison with the control mechanisms of written language (Hammurabi’s code, the Torah, etc.), bureaucracy, and the priest class. As the gods’ power and influence faded, humans resorted to sortilege, divination, prayer, and oracles to get in contact with what was once so direct: the will of the gods.

And as great civilizations crumbled under their own weight and scattered in response to cataclysmic events, a new self-control mechanism was selected for on the basis of a fundamentally plastic neocortex: consciousness. Linguistic constructs such as the “I/Me/Mine” complex allowed for the generation of a psychological distance between our physical behavior and the autobiographical self or “narrative center” that holds our folk psychological stories in place. The psychological space catalyzed the development of what’s now called “working memory”, “executive function”, “thought-control”, “introspection”, “short term memory”, etc. It was this ability for metacognitive control that gave rise to self-regulating concept-schemas like individual responsibility, agency, freewill, and having a “soul” or “mind”.

Right now Micah Allen and I are co-writing a article on google wave for Frontier‘s special topic issue on consciousness and neuroplasticity. Here is our extended abstract:

Recent research has demonstrated that throughout development the brain exhibits a natural ability to change in response to experience at both structural and functional levels. This plasticity is expressed through both the formation of new neurons (e.g. Maguire et al 2001) and the redeployment of functional connectivity (e.g. Torrerio, 2010). Although plasticity is also found in lower animals, research suggests that it is prefrontal connectivity between regions that differentiates humans from apes (Schoenemann, 2005). Furthermore, the prefrontal cortex, particularly the default mode network (DMN), retains this plasticity well into early adulthood (Gogtay et al, 2004; Raichle, 2001). Social-cognitive functions then, are not stable in preadolescence, and we argue that it is this unstable connectivity that enables the development and utilization of narrative consciousness.

Accordingly, we argue that the high-level cognitive operations typical of human behavior crucially depend upon our ability to evaluate and synthesize experience through narrative scaffolds. Such narrative practice depends upon the plasticity of social cognitive brain mechanisms and can be seen as a recently evolved capacity dependent on tool use (Tylen et al, 2009) and language (Jaynes, 1976). We suggest that it is precisely these culture-centric functional connectivity mechanisms that underlie conscious human narratizing within an “interiorized” workspace or “global theater” (Baars, 1997). Moreover, it has become apparent that exposure to narrative practice in childhood has a special impact on cognitive development (Hutto, 2008). We will argue that these findings provide support for the narrative or social-constructivist approach to consciousness (Jaynes, 1976; Dennett, 1986, 1991). It is our view that a proper consideration of the brain’s phylogenetic and ontogenetic plasticity alleviates any skeptical worries (Block, 1995) about the conceptual coherence or empirical plausibility of consciousness as a social construct.

To further support our argument we review recent evidence that demonstrates highly plastic brains learn to narratize in childhood from exposure to discourse with others. This protoemphathetic interactivity (Gallagher, 2005; Protevi, 2009) can be seen as the nonconscious cognitive scaffolding upon which the special attitude of self-reflection is constructed, giving rise to consciously sensible (i.e. introspectable) qualities. Furthermore, we will argue that recent research on cognitive scaffolding (Clark, 2003, 2008), internal speech (Morin, 2005), narrative practice (Menary, 2008), and childhood development (Reddy, 2009; Blakemore, 2009) provides ample support for the claim that consciousness proper is a social-linguistic construction learnt in childhood. Last, we review the role of plasticity in default brain networks for narrative and minimal consciousness.

Possible Congruence of Harman's Withdrawal Thesis with Ecological Science?

For the longest time I’ve had trouble understanding Graham Harman‘s radical thesis of withdrawal. What does it mean for two entities to “withdraw” from each other as they interact? How can we reconcile this idea with complete causal closure? Doesn’t gravity, for example, affect an apple through-and-through? It wasn’t until I read the following passage from Varela and Maturana’s interesting little book, The Tree of Knowledge (1987), that I made sense of it as a general ontological requirement.

Ontogeny is the history of structural changes in a particular living being. In this history each living being begins with an initial structure. This structure conditions the course of its interactions and restricts the structural changes that the interactions may trigger in it. At the same time, it is born in a particular place, in a medium that constitutes the ambience in which it emerges and in which it interacts. This ambience appears to have a structural dynamics of its own, operationally distinct from the living being. This is a crucial point. As observers, we have distinguished the living system as a unity from its background and have characterized it as a definite organization. We have thus distinguished two structures that are going to be considered operationally independent of each other: living being and environment. Between them there is a necessary structural congruence (or the unity disappears). In the interactions between the living being and the environment within this structural congruence, the perturbations of the environment do not determine what happens to the living being; rather, it is the structure  of the living being that determines what change occurs in it. This interaction is not instructive, for it does not determine what its effects are going to be. Therefore, we have used the expression “to trigger” an effect. In this way we refer to the fact that the changes that result from the interaction are brought about by the disturbing agent but determined by the structure of the disturbed sysem. The same holds true for the environment: the living being is a source of perturbations and not of instructions.

Now, at this point the reader may be thinking that all this sounds too complicated and that it is unique to living beings. To be exact, as in the case of reproduction, this is not a phenomenon unique to living beings. It takes place in all interactions. And if we do not see it in all its generality, it becomes a source of confusion. (p. 96)

Basically, Varela and Maturana are saying that we can only think about objects in terms of unities that are structurally determined in their organization. All changes in a system are changes of structure, which can be the result of intrinsic structural dynamics or triggered by interactions with everything else. Moreover, Varela and Maturana claim that this feature of structural unification undergoing change applies to  the scientific description of all interactions because otherwise we couldn’t make sense of how and why object unities breakdown (a car is the most obvious example).

While I might be mistaken, this sounds remarkable like Harman’s thesis of objects withdrawing from each other as they interact. Harman seems to claim that every object-object interaction is characterized by each object retaining some “inner core” or “subterranean essence” while nevertheless interacting or “translating” on a “sensuous” level. I’m a visual thinker, so I always had trouble conceptualizing how this process of withdrawal works. But now I think my problem was with the specific term withdrawal, which is actually a misnomer if I am understanding Harman, Varela, and Maturana right. From what I gather, a better description of object-object interaction might go as follows: when an object interacts with another object, both objects need to retain their internal structural unity during the interaction in order for it to be considered an object-object perturbation or “translation”. If there was not a retention of unified structure, we wouldn’t be able to talk about the interaction in terms of two, separately organized unities. Without a separation of unitary structure (i.e without being “operationally distinct”), the structural changes become merely changes of the state of one system rather than changes as a result of the perturbation or translation between different objects. Varela and Maturana also point out that another possibility of object-object interaction is destruction, whereby one object destroys the organization of the unity of another.

One could say that my eyes have now been opened to the relevance of object-oriented philosophy to developments in ecologically oriented cognitive science. I still have trouble with how Harman argues for his thesis, but now that I have at least “translated” it into a familiar conceptual domain, I think I can finally accept some kind of generality of withdrawal for all possible object-object interactions. There’s gotta be a better metaphor than withdrawal though. It’s far too “spooky” for my likening. I’m also not convinced that this was Heidegger’s greatest lesson. But like I said, my eyes are now open to new possibilities of relevance.

UPDATE:

In response to my comment about Heidegger’s greatest lesson, Harman asks

Well what on earth are the other candidates?

My reply:

One of Heidegger’s greatest lessons was his distinction between the phenomenon and the semblance. In my mind, this was a realist “upgrade” to Husserl’s transcendental reduction. In his surrounding lectures and in BT, Heidegger critiques Husserl’s transcendental reduction for missing the original phenomenon to be described: our experience as embodied entities living on a physical earth, but “worlded” in terms of the categorial (i.e. socially constructed) intuition. Husserl accepted the metaphysics of the “natural attitude” but bracketed realist questions from the ultimate reduction for sake of Cartesian “certainty” and wanting to achieve “apodicticity” . Heidegger recognized the irony (and ultimate futility) of using Cartesian standards of certainty for the investigation of something as concrete as lived experience. This is why he ultimately endorsed a hermeneutic phenomenology that started from within the messy circle of lived experience, rather than from eidetically purified descriptions of transcendental correlation. By introducing the concept of “semblance” into phenomenology, Heidegger provided a means to capture by formal indication the natural attitude’s acceptance of empirical realism without suffering from internal inconsistency (since he can show that his opponents’ positions stand upon the strength of unquestioned assumptions). Husserl would have never said things like:

With circumspective interpretation, the way in which the entity we are interpreting is to be conceived can be drawn from the entity itself, or the interpretation can force the entity into concepts to which it is opposed in its manner of being (SZ 150).

Heidegger is talking about situations like when we see a stick in the grass as a snake or make perceptual mistakes wherein we radically misinterpret the given phenomenon. Fool’s gold is good example. Such language was phenomenological heresy for Husserl, which is why he thought Heidegger was trying to naturalize consciousness like some sort of objective anthropologist.  But by allowing realist concepts like the semblance into his methodology, Heidegger was able to account for the full spectrum of human experience, such as  when “The present-at-hand, as Dasein encounters it, can, as it were, assault Dasein’s Being; natural events, for instance, can break in upon us and destroy us” (SZ 152). Our experience with earthquakes, volcanoes, animals, etc. shows us that there is indeed an objective reality “out there”, ready to stand in our way or assist us (as with the sun, the wind, and the sea). If some hapless fool interpreted an earthquake as a simulation or dream, Heidegger would say that he was experiencing a semblance of the earthquake, not the genuine phenomenon of the earthquake as it is “in itself”. Indeed,”the fact that Reality is ontologically grounded in the Being of Dasein, does not signify that only when Dasein exists and as long as Dasein exists, can the Real be as that which in itself it is” (SZ 212). Surely this is a vast improvement over Husserl’s phenomenological method and deserves attention as a philosophical methodology.

Defending Heidegger (Again)

Graham Harman, in response to some recent communication and thinking about Heidegger’s relationship to Berkeley, has this to say:

There is obviously something psychologically special about humans in comparison with rocks and perhaps even flowers. No argument from me there. All sorts of fascinating human complexity is not to be found anywhere else. But it does not follow that human psychological peculiarity needs to be built into ontology as a full half of the cosmos.

…

Here’s a very nice passage from Dominic, which gets to the heart of the dispute I’ve had with a number of Heideggerians in this space over the past year, including both Minds and Brains and Chris Ruth. Only a few days ago did I realize the nature of the mutual misunderstanding, but Dominic gets it right:

“In other words, the question is not so much ‘does the hammer exist when I’m not using it’ (Heidegger would readily affirm that it does) as ‘does the hammer have a relationship to the nail, apart from my intention to use the one to strike the other’?”

Yes, that’s it. In recent days I realized (but perhaps I realized it before, and then forgot) that a number of my Heideggerian critics interpreted me as saying that Heidegger is Berkeley. In other words, when I say that there is nothing in Heidegger about the interaction between two entities when Dasein is not watching, they think I’m claiming that Heidegger is a sort of solipsistic idealist.

Well, he may actually be a bit closer to that than Heideggerians think. But that’s not the heart of my claim, and Dominic does get the heart of my claim: it’s about whether the Dasein/world relation is privileged over the world/world relation. In reviewing Lee Braver’s book in Philosophy Today, it’s what I called the “A7″ thesis (added on to Braver’s other 6 excellently useful anti-realist theses). A7 = “The human-world relation is the center of philosophy, having privileged status over all other relations.” And that’s really the essence of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. It doesn’t matter how much a Kantian insists that things-in-themselves really exist (and not all Kantians are that adamant). What matters is whether philosophy is allowed to treat sun/Mars and raindrop/ocean in the same way as human/tree.

I think Harman and Dominic have nicely clarified a pressing question: does Heidegger’s philosophy allow him to admit that humans interact with the Earth in the same ontological manner as a hammer falling to the ground during an earthquake does? Clearly not, based on standard readings of Heidegger’s ontology. But on my reading, this is indeed allowed but rarely mentioned; why not? Because it’s just common sense, encapsulated by the “natural attitude”, our basic way of understanding the world we live in. Normal people don’t doubt that raindrops over the ocean are having real interactions with each other; they just never bother to question it because it is so firmly rooted in how we understand reality. Indeed, the independence of object-object relations is something we learn in infancy and never forget.

Moreover, Heidegger says in the History of the Concept of Time that Dasein is corporeal. This is common sense. Everyone knows that they have a body and this body is made of “material stuff”. Clearly, the natural attitude understands that corporeal stuff interacts with the ground in the same way that raindrops interact with the ground. On a crude level of analysis then, most people understand that human bodies and the world are on the same ontological plain when it comes to what Harman and friends call “translation”, otherwise known as “bumping into” or “interacting with”. Heidegger doesn’t deny any of this. Indeed, Husserl insisted that the phenomenological reduction doesn’t deny the natural attitude but only temporarily suspends it for investigative purposes. Heidegger rarely comes right out and confirms the natural attitude, but he always implies its truth and never denies it. Why the hangup though? Because Heidegger wasn’t interested in the natural attitude or object-oriented science. In the same way that linguists aren’t interested in anything but language, Heidegger was only interested in the unique properties of the animal-world relationship, more specifically, the human animal-world relationship.

Heidegger was fascinated by animal-world relationship because of several unique properties, including affectivity (finding-oneself) and intentionality (directedness towards). Indeed, he says in the History of the Concept of Time that

A stone never finds itself but is simply present-at-hand. A very primitive unicellular form of life, on the contrary, will already find itself, where this affectivity can be the greatest and darkest dullness, but for all that it is in its structure of being essentially distinct from merely being present-at-hand like a thing.

What Heidegger is talking about here is the self-organizational property of living bodies, that peculiar way of bootstrapping oneself across time into a highly effective dynamic core of homeostatic directedness. As Maturana and Varela put it in The Tree of Knowledge,

What is distinctive about [organisms]…is that their organization is such that their only product is themselves, with no separation between producer and product. The being and doing of an autopoieic unity are inseparable, and this is their specific mode of organization.

So while the cellular organism is made of out the same physical “stuff” as inanimate objects, and thus “translates” in the same way on a fundamental level, the structural/functional properties of self-organization guarantee a unique “biological” phenomenology that is worlds apart from “stone phenomenology”. Furthermore, the addition of language, culture, and technology gives humans a “cultural” or “hermeneutic” phenomenology above and beyond the biological phenomenology that we share with our animal cousins. This is why Heidegger insists that language is the house of being, which constructs our unique “understanding of being” and gives rise to our capacity for ontological inquiry. Indeed, he says

Genuinely and initially, it is the essence of language to first elevate beings into the open as beings. Where there is no language — as with stones, plants, and animals — there is also no openness of beings and thus also no openness of non-beings, un-beings, or emptiness. By first naming objects, language brings beings to word and to appearance.

So it seems like Heidegger comes away unscathed from pejorative accusations of “correlationism”. He was fully capable of talking about the nail interacting with the hammer in the same way as our bodies interact with the hammer, but that just didn’t interest him. He was a phenomenologist after all, and remained one throughout his entire career.

Favorite links – 6/13/10

• Pharyngula writes on why Dear Abbey gives terrible advice to people concerned about ghosts
• Cool article on how people can only maintain the same size social network online as they do offline, what’s called Dunbar’s number (roughly 150 people)
• NeuroLogica writes on why superstitious rituals might have psychological benefits such as confidence
• Very interesting article by Neuroskeptic on why cats rub against your leg, domestication, and the evolution of behavior
• YeahOkaybutStill writes a great post on Wilfrid Sellars and how he straddled the analytic/continental divide with his conception of the scientific and manifest image
• What’s going on in the brain when we are lost in habit
• NY Times article on how for-profit colleges and trade schools are creating the new poor
• In depth posts by YouAreNotSoSmart on the meaning and importance of smiling and makeup
• Sam Harris on why there is probably no God (and you know it).
• Great post by Networkologies on Object Oriented Ontology and some of the challenges it faces as a philosophical movement
• NDPR on Ladyman and Ross’ interesting new book Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, which offers some skeptical challenges to contemporary analytic metaphysics
• Interesting article by Scientific American on why the “Reproduction Revolution” is  slowly but surely defusing the population bomb
• Nicholas Carr critically responds to Steven Pinker’s article in the NY Times about his work

Speculative Realism: A False "Revolution"?

Graham Harman recently linked to a “conversion post” by Crispin Sartwell that gushes over the “new realist” or “speculative realist” movement, a supposedly “revolutionary development”. Sartwell is apparently excited by speculative realism because “all of these people in some form or another seem actually to believe that there is a world of objects etc out there outside of human consciousness, and that we didn’t make this all up in a narrative, or construct it socially, or impose on it space and times as forms of perception etc: they are finally turning away from the kantian nightmare.”

This narrative of “finally” moving beyond the “Kantian nightmare” is tired and overplayed. Just once I wish people who  are bowled over by the “revolutionary character” of SR would point to a major 20th century philosopher who actually denies that the Earth, moon, and stars exists independently of human perception. They certainly can’t point to Heidegger as a culprit of “strong correlationism“. As I have been at pains to argue, early and late Heidegger would both agree that the “earth is real and exists independently of human access with a determinate spatiotemporal existence”. Accordingly, we see a sharp break with Kantian thought as early as the 1920s with Being and Time. Earlier still, William James and American pragmatism had long since broken with the “Kantian nightmare”. So had Husserl. So had Merleau-Ponty, James Gibson, and the whole tradition of ecological philosophy that started in the 70s and transformed into the current anti-Kantian and anti-representationalist tradition of 4EA philosophy.

Indeed, the whole attempt to make Heidegger a scapegoat for “strong correlationism” in order to tell an intellectual narrative about the “revolutionary” character of speculative realism is based on one-sided readings of Heideggerian phenomenology and simple ignorance concerning ecological philosophy as an intellectual movement stemming from phenomenology and pragmatism. Saying that the “world is real” is nothing new. In fact, it’s just common sense. That SRists attempt to launch a “philosophical revolution” in terms of “anti-correlationism” without ever decisively showing who these “strong correlationists” are bespeaks of hastiness and immaturity as a philosophical movement. Revolutions aren’t started by attacking strawmen. Point me to some “strong correlationist” passages in Heidegger and I will accept the “revolution” of speculative realism. Until then, I will be content to watch SR develop a false sense of accomplishment as it proclaims itself as the “new realism”.