Desilet: Enter the Trace

I brought in some material from Gregory Desilet into our ongoing discussion of essence and identity.

See Desilet's "Physics and Language," which discusses physics including QM (starting on p. 348). For example:

"As both the one and the many, the continuum does not require, and in fact precludes, a thorough merging of opposites. Where there is a tendency to see unity as fundamental the continuum asserts that difference is equiprimordial with unity. Oddly enough...[this is] consistent with descriptions Derrida gives for the term differance" (349).

More on identity and essence with Rosch

Here are some more of my posts from the IPS thread referenced in the last post:

How we interpret a 'postformal' cognitive level goes to the crux of the essence issue, as I explored at length in the real and false reason thread, i.e., it depends on which perspective(s) one chooses to describe it. There is no 'level in itself' like Kennilingam might suppose, with its own objective kosmic address. As you've noted in this thread it matters who is doing the addressing. So for me it comes down to the issue of postmetaphysics, which generally has a different interpretation of levels than does a metaphysician. I pointed to how Commons et al (the gold standard) are quite metaphysical in formulating postformal levels, whereas others see it as, if anything, not a 'higher level' but one that integrates what came before and is more a move of depth than of height. And minus the metaphysical underpinnings, more intersobjective perhaps. More a-perspectival, we might even say.

From The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1999) by Varela et al., p. 176:

Essence and Identity

I'd like to feature today a post by infimitas at the IPS forum with the above title. For me it succinctly states the postmetaphysical approach so I'll let him speak in his words, following:


An essence refers to what something “is”.  This works by having a set of essential properties or qualities, which act as necessary and sufficient conditions for it to “be” that thing.   For example, I can say of a poodle that it “is” a dog.  This implies that the essential features of “dogness” (an abstract entity, so to speak) are instantiated in that particular (concrete) poodle.  I hope I’m not over-simplifying things here.  There’s a lot more that I could say that doesn’t seem all that relevant, so I’m leaving it out.

Feudal capitalism

I've often speculated on the relation of capitalism to feudalism, that the former is in many ways an outgrowth of the latter, more of a lateral development than a vertical one. This article offers some interesting history on their relationship. An excerpt:

"It was the increase in the standard of living of the lower strata moving in the direction of relative equalization of incomes... that for the upper strata represented the real crisis.... There was no way out of it without drastic social change. This way... was the creation of a capitalist world-system, a new form of surplus appropriation. The replacement of the feudal mode by the capitalist mode was what constituted the seigniorial reaction; it was a great sociopolitical effort by the ruling strata to retain their collective privileges, even if they had to accept a fundamental reorganization of the economy....most importantly, the principle of stratification was not merely preserved; it was to be reinforced as well."

Lakoff on Obama's Jobs Speech

I figured Lakoff would like it, as my impression was that Obama framed the situation perfectly. Lakoff knows that politics is a game of influence, and that influence is effected through rhetoric that reaches deep into our core values which reside in our bodily emotions. Too often liberals, and even Obama (no liberal), frame their values in policy-speak, technical terms that appeal onto to the more intellectual among us. But let's face it, most of the voting public is not that smart and they are the vast majority at the ballot box. So speaking in their language, in plain English with emotionally charged and motivational rhetoric, is the way to get those votes. And Obama came through in flying colors with this speech.

The two truths, still?

It seems this old, old argument is still around, just taking new forms. Here’s more from the OOO thread that starts to touch upon Buddhist themes. This led to some past references to Buddhist material as well as embodied realist material:

Recall Morton said this:

"Bohr argued that quantum phenomena don't simply concatenate themselves with their measuring devices. They're identical to it: the equipment and the phenomena form an indivisible whole (QT 139–40, 177). This 'quantum coherence' applies close to absolute zero, where particles become the 'same' thing."

I think here he is in agreement with the conflation of observer and observed, reality and consciousness, that I mentioned in the PA thread. He is also Buddhist and sees this same conflation in his interpretation of it, one that is not uncommon and which we've explored and debated many times before. (Most recently here, with other references therein.)

And yes, the monism school (of the One Same (non)Thing) accuses the "relativist" school of the performative contradiction, as we've seen recently in a quantum guise. Here's how Varela answered it (my comments in following post), and Nagarjuna before him. (You might have to download the latter from Google docs.)

Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

This story from truthout is most illuminating, as told by Mike Lofgren who retired on June 17 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees.

Excerpts:

Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot.... But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots.... But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today....The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy....I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

OOO my word!

Some more thoughts on the previous post:

Some of Morton's language reminds me of Kennilingam's interpretation of Habermas in his critique of the philosophy of the subject. For example from Integral Spirituality, Chapter 8:

“So consciousness itself is deficient—whether personal or transpersonal, whether pure or not pure, essential or relative, high or low, big mind or small mind, vipassana, bare attention, centering prayer, contemplative awareness—none of them can see these other truths, and that is why Habermas and the postmodernists extensively criticize 'the philosophy of consciousness.'”

This is part of Morton's point about the withdrawn nature of ontological objects, in that they are inaccessible to a subjective consciousness “with privileged access to phenomena.”

Object-oriented ontology

In my research today I came upon this interesting article, “Here comes everything: the promise of object-oriented ontology” by Timothy Morton. It is of interest not only to speculative realism but also to some recent discussions on Caputo's ontology, modes of apprehension of such, and quantum theory. The article is 27 pages of text so I've culled some excerpts, lengthy in themselves.

Excerpts:

Speculative realism...asserts the deep mystery of a Non-Nature....object-oriented ontology (OOO)...goes further than this, rejecting essentialist Matter.... OOO is a form of realism that asserts that real things exist--these things are objects, not just amorphous “Matter”.... OOO extends Husserl's and Heidegger's arguments that things have an irreducible dark side: no matter how many times we turn over a coin, we never see the other side as the other side--it will have to flip onto “this” side for us to see it, immediately producing another underside. Harman simply extends this irreducible darkness from subject–object relationships to object–object relationships.... Causation is thus vicarious in some sense, never direct. An object is profoundly “withdrawn”--we can never see the whole of it, and nothing else can either.... We've become so used to hearing “object” in relation to “subject” that it takes some time to acclimatize to a view in which there are only objects, one of which is ourselves.

Quantum access

Continuing our IPS discussion on privileged access here are some excerpts:

Balder:

This reference might also be relevant: First-Person Methodologies, particularly the first section, "Inside-Outside: The Misleading Divide."

theurj:

I appreciate this paragraph from Varela and Shear:

"First, exploring first-person accounts is not the same as claiming that first-person accounts have some kind of privileged access to experience. No presumption of anything incorrigible, final, easy or apodictic about subjective phenomena needs to be made here, and to assume otherwise is to confuse the immediate character of the givenness of subjective phenomena with their mode of constitution and evaluation. Much wasted ink could have been saved by distinguishing the irreducibility of firstperson descriptions from their epistemic status."

Just a few more excerpts from Varela, touching on ground already covered here, but supportive anyway. And which still leaves for me the question of the leap from diving into the “subpersonal” to some degree and the connection with “the same unity” for every particular conscious awareness given the degree to which we cannot dive.