New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Brief Comment on Cameron's Statement to the House of Commons

Some months ago everybody in Europe was praising the revolutionary and democratizing role social networks were playing in the Arab Nations. Facebook and Twitter were just marvelous. But this is different now. This is England. So according to Cameron, the ensuing measures are to be expected:

1. Police will be given discretion to remove face masks from people on the street.

2. The government would work with the police to stop people communicating via social websites.

3. The army could be used for guarding duties.

4. Last but not least: Curfew!

And no, this isn't China, it's England!

What's going on then? For Cameron, "young people smashing windows and stealing televisions is not about inequality", so he was eager to dismiss "phoney human rights concerns". At least he's being sincere on this regard. The official explanation: some opportunistic criminals are taking advantage of a peaceful protest. But I find this hard to believe. Perhaps Ken Livingstone, Labour's mayoral candidate, is right when he affirms that "the economic stagnation and cuts being imposed by the Tory government inevitably create social division." Perhaps, like Jenny Jones (the Green party's candidate for London mayor and a member of the Metropolitan police authority) just said, "the government must take some of the blame for what went wrong last night. Cuts in local services, especially youth services, played a role in fomenting tensions." 

So there might be a link between the riots and social inequality, but the government tries to separate any relation whatsoever that could render a global account of what's going on in England. I don't know who is willing to buy such a simplistic explanation that does not account for the destruction of social security in England for the last thirty years but I find it unsatisfactory and hypocritical. 

Has Dennett gotten it right?

I just finished the first draft of a paper on Daniel Dennett’s so-called heterophenomenology; actually against it. It bears the title “Phenomenological Skillful-Coping: Another Counter-Argument to Dennett’s Heterophenomenology” and I go on to explain the gist of Dennett’s heterophenomenology in order to criticize it from the point of view of European phenomenology. As everybody knows, with heterophenomenology Dennett attempts to provide a neutral method accounting for people’s utmost subjective experiences, what Dennett persistently calls their ‘own phenomenologies’. He has described heterophenomenology as “the neutral path leading from objetive physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjetive experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science” (Consciousness Explained).

I really don’t want to get into technicalities. Suffice it to say that there’s nothing easier than weeding out Dennett’s interpretation of phenomenology as introspection because —as Dan Zahavi has consistently pointed out—  “all the major figures in the phenomenological tradition have openly and unequivocally denied that they are engaged in some kind of introspective psychology and that the method they employ is a method of introspection” (for example, Husserl, Heidegger, Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty in several passages). Moreover, introspection is actually antiphenomenological from the outset for the very point of departure of phenomenology in Husserl’s breakthrough work, Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901), was precisely a call to abandon the dichotomy (Scheidung) between inner and outer perceptions, which Husserl associated with a naïve commonsensical metaphysics left behind with the concept of intentionality. And of course, introspection is parasitic of this Scheidung which endorses the idea that consciousness is somewhat inside the head and the world outside.

So when for example Thomas Metzinger, following Dennett, affirms (cf. Being No One, 2003) phenomenology is so absurd for it must clumsily settle conflicting statements such as the following: “This is the purest blue anyone can perceive!” versus “No, it isn’t, it has a faint but perceptible trace of green in it!” or, “This conscious experience of jealousy shows me how much I love my husband!” versus “No, this emotional state is not love at all, it is a neurotic, bourgeois fear of loss!”… well, then we laugh with scorn. By ‘we’ I mean, of course, the ones acquainted with the phenomenological tradition.

Letter to Foreigners, in View of the Lack of Trustworthy Information

Spanish Philosophy Professors and 15M movement insiders Luis Sáez (Universidad de Granada), José Luis Moreno Pestaña (Universidad de Cádiz) and Germán Cano (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares) have written a Letter to Foreigners, in View of the Lack of Trustworthy Information denouncing mainstream media not reporting accurately on the events taking place in Spain.

In the letter, they render an account of the 15M movement's aims and scope against the backdrop of much parlance tending to distort the movement itself.

Accordingly, they address the lack of information, the movement's concept of democracy (¡Por una democracia real ya!), and the rallies that were followed by camp sites in Spain.

All Things Shining. The Controversy

There's a recent controversy caused by Garry Wills' reading of All Things Shining. Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly (saluted as good news by Susan Neiman in the NYT). I cannot take a personal stand on the issue because I haven't yet read the book which is causing the stir. I just want to give you the links which I came across during these last couple of days.

Gary Wills, Superficial & Sublime?, which appeared on The New York Review of Books, is a rather harsh piece, to say the least! The fact that the book at stake is "written by well-regarded professors (one of them chairman of the Harvard Philosophy Department)", made Wills rub his eyes "with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and shallow is it." Among other superficial musings, Wills accuses the authors of holding the idea that “there is no reason to prefer any answer to any other.” A vain superficial subjectivism, fully in accord ⎯one might say⎯ with the spirit of the cultural logic of late Capitalism. Wills' diatribe finds superficiality plaguing the book everywhere.

Dreyfus and Kelly have retorted that Wills misses the point altogether of the book: "Wills’s description of our project therefore, as holding that 'each person must forge his or her own view of the universe,' is an unfortunate characterization. That is the position our book is against." Kelly seems to have at least thought of writing a full take on the Wills review, but has summed up some impressions before he does that piece of rebuttal: "it seems obvious that these discussions are completely irrelevant to the central purpose of our book. I have to assume, therefore, that they are not what is really motivating his critique. What is motivating it, however, I cannot tell."

Again, I haven't read the book but two things suggest I must be on guard against Wills. First, his tone and arrogance and second, his quick and mocking dismissal of David Foster Wallace: my favorite newly discovered American writer. 

David Harvey: Crises of Capitalism

 

See also: 

Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey

A close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital Volume I in 13 video lectures by David Harvey. Harvey (cf. his CV) is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics and author of various books, articles and lectures. Harvey has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for nearly 40 years.

A Neuroscientific Prediction Refuted

I just read a recent piece on The Guardian bearing the title “20 predictions for the next 25 years”. Amongst the usual predictions as to whether the US will hand over its super power seat to another nation or whether medicine will finally find a cure for cancer or AIDS, what struck me the most was David Eagleman’s overestimation of neuroscience: “We’ll be able to plug information streams directly into the cortex”. Of course, predictions are based on conjectures and speculations of all sorts but the vertiginous advance of science in the 20th century must have certainly surprised even the most skeptical minds. After all, no prediction can be refuted in advance, or not really, for the future can prove one very wrong, and this specially in terms of scientific discovery. No doubt, this beautiful piece of technological machinery which I’m using to write this piece, my beloved Macbook Pro, was simply unimaginable just a few decades ago, when the only real computer available was the massive and clumsy ENIAC.    

Nonetheless I too, like Antonio Tabucchi, confess lacking any particular talent for prediction, because—in the words of the Pessoa expert—“when you have three or four elements in hand, you don’t have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions.” But the question is whether we actually have those three or four elements in hand, so that we can spread ourselves out and make such a bold prediction, like Eagleman, himself a neuroscientist, dared to make.  

Although Eagleman’s statements are lightly softened by ‘maybes’ and ‘probablys’, extravagant prophecies, unfortunately, are not at all unknown in the fields dealing with the sciences of the mind.

In a 1958 famous paper, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell gave a futuristic assessment of that which, at their time, was called heuristics—thought to be comparable to human intelligence simulated in a digital machine:

1. That within ten years a digital computer will be the world’s chess champion, unless the rules bar it from competition.

2. That within ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem.

3. That within ten years a digital computer will write music that will be accepted by critics as possessing considerable aesthetic value.

4. That within ten years most theories in psychology will take the form of computer programs, or of qualitative statements about the characteristics of computer programs.

Nobody has to remind us today of the fact that until now computers do not think—unless one entertained a petty and quite reductive understanding of human thinking. But still today the orthodoxy in cognitive science has it that general assumptions about the mind and intelligent thought and behavior are to be held, such as the following: the mind is an information processing system, a representational device and in some sense a computer (cf. the preface to the Blackwell Companion to Cognitive Science, edited by Bechtel and Graham). This is why it is not surprising to hear one high profile researcher and founder of these ideas and bizarre sci-fi dreams, Marvin Minsky, declaring that AI’s brain-dead while at the same time hoping for intelligent robotic waitresses to serve him martinis.  

The problem is that maybe some of those assumptions are plain wrong and that basic human coping is not to be measured on the basis of philosophical suppositions pretty much surpassed. Some positive signs are to be found recently. Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noë is a good example that you can be both scientifically well-informed and be critically aware of the philosophical limitations of AI and cognitive science. 

So I’m ready to make a few predictions myself. Cognitive science will be fundamentally reformed by situated cognition, embedded and embodied approaches and phenomenology, or else it’ll keep stumbling upon failure after failure. This will contribute to the definitive collapse of the distinction between analytical and continental philosophy and that anodyne gap will be saluted as a theoretical provincialism of the past. And believe me, some distinguished researchers around the world and some young PhD students like myself are already working on it.

But, you know, one has to be cautious with predictions and that’s why, on the matter, I tend to agree with Niels Bohr: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future”.