“Unless you strip bodies of their corporeal nature and impart corporeal nature to incorporeal beings, nothing you expect will take place”*…
In 1965, Hubert Dreyfus wrote the first widely-considered critique of artificial intelligence, Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, a report for RAND. He updated and expanded the work for broad publication in 1972 as What Computers Can’t Do (which was further updated and revised for two subsequent reissues) and a “sequel,” Mind Over Machine (in 1986). For a precis of Dreyfus’ views on AI, see here.
His invocation of alchemy resonates still, for example in the estimable Henry Farrell‘s consideration of Adam Becker‘s (great) recent book More Everything Forever…
Adam Becker’s “More Everything Forever” begins by describing the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI guru who Sam Altman thinks deserves a Nobel Prize. Yudkowsky’s ambitions for humanity include “[p]erfect health, immortality,” and a future in which “[i]f you imagine something that’s worse than mansions with robotic servants for everyone, you are not being ambitious enough.” According to Yudkowsky and his peers, a “glorious transhumanist future” awaits us if we get AI right, although we face extinction if we get it wrong.
“AI” and “transhumanist” are new terms for rather older ambitions. As the seedy occultist Dr. Trelawney remarks in Anthony Powell’s 1962 novel, “The Kindly Ones,” “[t]o be forever rich, forever young, never to die … Such was in every age the dream of the alchemist.” Renaissance alchemists won the support of monarchs like Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor who squandered his realm’s money on a futile quest to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. Now, as Becker explains, AGI, or artificial general intelligence, has become the means through which philosophers might transubstantiate our mundane reality into a realm in which the apparently impossible becomes possible: living forever, raising the dead, and remaking the universe in the shape of humanity.
These ideas would be a curiosity, if they weren’t reshaping the world, and policymakers’ understanding of national security…
[Farrell explains, elaborating on the beliefs in play and explaining how they played in the Biden Administration (which, he argues, largely internalized them) and now in Trump’s…]
… The Biden administration’s policies rested on risky bets. AI may not be the universal solvent for vexing and complex technological problems promised by Altman, Amodei, and their peers. Some (including most members of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, as well as myself and colleagues) believe that current approaches will not lead to anything like self-improving AGI anytime soon. As DeepSeek’s success in building AI models suggests, semiconductors may not provide the chokehold on AI that American policymakers believed.
In any event, the Trump administration has seemingly opted for a different approach, replacing a grand plan for a global AI order with a loose approach based on the ever-shifting convergence between notions of American greatness and the particular interests of well-connected companies. This currently involves leveraging control of technology to maintain American domination, cutting deals with Gulf states, while trying to cut China out. When Trump toured the Gulf states with an entourage of tech CEOs, he offered access to top-end semiconductors in exchange for promises of massive investment, graciously accepting a jet plane, and a large-scale money transfer routed, with fees, through his family stablecoin.
This emerging blend of imperium, magical technology, and self-dealing too is reminiscent of the Renaissance. The English wizard John Dee, who claimed to have turned mercury into gold in the presence of Rudolf II, is also credited with coining the term “British Empire.” As a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I, he combined alchemical experiment and indirect conversation with angels with more mundane plans to extend British power across the Atlantic and enrich himself.
The alchemists’ quest for immortality and universal transformation is again entangled with the struggle among empires. The dreams of perfect health, the conquest of death, and mansions with robot servants that Becker describes inspire visions of a radically transformed far future and a near present in which America can use advanced technologies to bolster its power. Such visions stem from an ideology of salvation that has indeed fueled important technological advances but may be quite wrong about where those advances will bring us.
We are being ushered into a world where AI models offer new and useful means to summarize the information of the world and draw nonobvious connections across it, but can also weave new syncretic religious beliefs together from the myriad human sources that they summarize. In the early 20th century, Weber argued that rationalized Calvinism had led to the defeat of the old gods and the inexorable disenchantment of a world dominated by bureaucracy and organized capitalism. In the early 21st, just the opposite is happening as AI draws open the gate for the return of the fantastical. Yudkowsky’s eschatology is just one of the prophetic visions attendant on AI. The practical changes that AI will bring to bureaucracy and markets will go hand in hand with religious ecstasy and fervor, as some people come to believe that they can speak to God through the machine, while others use it to elaborate their own extended fantasies about politics. As Becker’s book shows, technology is not just an abstract force changing the world, but a mirror in which human beings see their dreams and ambitions made manifest. We’re starting to discover what that looks like at scale.
Eminently worth reading full: “What AI debates have to do with alchemy,” from @himself.bsky.social.
Then consider this, from Nicklas Lundblad, a senior exec at Deep Mind, Google, Stripe, and elsewhere, recently turned public policy Fellow. In a piece adapted from a lecture in a series of talks on the philosophy of artificial intelligence that he gave at Mid-Sweden University), he puts Dreyfus’s thought into context, tracing the history of arguments with/against it over the years, as both technology and thinking about technology advanced. He concludes…
… So, we may say, what is Dreyfus answer?… That he is obsessed with showing that machines are incapable of being human?
In fact, his conclusion, already in 1965 – and then repeated in the 1972 book – is much more interesting. Here is how Dreyfus concludes his critique:
If the alchemist had stopped poring over his retorts and pentagrams and had spent his time looking for the deeper structure of the problem, as primitive man took his eyes of the moon, came out of the trees, and discovered fire and the wheel, things would have been set moving in a more promising direction. After all, three hundred years after the alchemists we did get gold from lead (and we have landed on the moon), but only after we abandoned work on the alchemic level, and worked to understand the chemical level and the even deeper nuclear level instead.
Dreyfus’ answer is not to get stuck in the question of what computers can’t do – but to reject even that last piece of thick ontology and ask if we are making a fundamental conceptual mistake. He suggests that we find what is to intelligence as chemistry is to alchemy and look for another set of concepts, another language, to describe what we are doing.
We would, in Dreyfus view, be much better of trying to build alien intelligence or replicate animal intelligence or even jettisoning the idea of intelligence entirely in favour of a new concept – perhaps something like cognicity – that removes the Difference from the research program.
Dreyfus recommendations would imply that we should drop the benchmarks that distract us and instead focus on simpler, thinner ontologies around tasks and interactions. What we need, he would suggest, is a conceptual shift into that simpler ontology – at least if we want to make real progress.
The shift into modern machine learning seems to prove that when the thicker ontology was abandoned we did discovered things obscured by the idea of man as a symbolic animal.
What if we abandon both the idea of man and machine?…
Also worthy of a full review: “Reading Dreyfus,” from @nicklaslundblad.
* Zosimos of Panopolis, an alchemist (and Gnostic mystic)
###
As we think about transmutation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 (only 11 years before Dreyfus wrote Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence) that IBM introduced the “IBM 608,” the first calculating machine to use only solid-state transistors instead of vacuum tubes (thus needing only about 5% of the power to perform the same operations). The machine was housed in several large cabinets and could be purchased for $83,210 (or rented for $1,760 per month)… that’s just over $1,000,000 on an inflation-adjusted basis (or about $22,000 per month). It used more than 3,000 germanium transistors and could store 40 nine-digit numbers and perform 4,500 additions per second, among other operations.
“Listening is like running down a mountain on a switchback trail, the sound of surprise generating its own momentum. There’s a punk glee inside the bluegrass craft– and a punk vehemence inside the bluegrass smile.”*…
On the heels of Hardy Strictly Bluegrass [and here], Warren Hellman‘s gift to San Francisco, the most recent annual installment of which was last weekend, a lovely piece by David Alm on a more traditional event…
I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.
I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.
The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.
There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.
One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited…
…
… An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church.
The tradition dates to the mid-1700s, when Scots-Irish immigrants first settled in Appalachia. Even then, coastal property was for the elite, forcing poorer immigrants inland and south, through the Shenandoah Valley to southwest Virginia, where land was plentiful and cheap. Their music quickly took root. “The Scots brought fiddles and liquor,” Ted McAllister, one of my neighbors in Felts Park, told me. “The Germans brought church music and beer.”
Over time, Scottish fiddle tunes evolved, as oral traditions do, and began to mix with the musical traditions of enslaved Africans, who had brought with them gourd instruments that would evolve into the American banjo, along with rhythms the Scots had never heard before. Old-time music, in other words, is the music of diasporas, fed into a blender and then worked into a froth. A lot of traditional folk songs came out of this period, too. One that I learned at Galax, “Going to the West,” tells the story of a young man who leaves the mountains of his birth, “where labor is in vain,” to seek the fertile plains out west. It’s the story of my own Scottish forebears, who settled in South Dakota before moving to what is now suburban Chicago, and later, Florida.
Bluegrass, by contrast, was born in the 1940s, when Bill Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys took those mountain sounds, combined them with Southern church music and blues, and tightened it all into something you might call an uncle of rock ’n’ roll. There’s a reason that Billy Strings plays to sold-out arenas and pickers from around the world can play classics like “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” at the drop of a one-chord.
Where bluegrass is punchy and clean, designed for the stage, old-time is ecstatic, designed for participation. Bluegrass jams attract spectators who marvel at the players’ pyrotechnics; old-time jams get people on their feet. At Galax, some folks drag big pieces of plywood around the fairgrounds looking for old-time jams, where they’ll lay the board down at the edge of the circle and dance. Flatfooters they’re called: the percussion section…
Eminently worth reading in full.
In a southwest Virginia fairground, thousands of musicians gather every August to keep a centuries-old tradition from flickering out: “A Place Among the Fiddlers,” from @longreads.com.
###
As we pick, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939 that George D. “Judge” Hay, the creator and producer of The Grand Ole Opry, invited Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys to audition for a spot on the prestigious radio broadcast. The audition was a success, and Monroe chose “Muleskinner Blues” for their debut. According to observers, when the curtain went up, the audience and Opry regulars alike (including stars such as Roy Acuff, Uncle Dave Macon, and Pee Wee King) were awed by the furious tempo of the Blue Grass Boys. Band member Cleo Davis later observed that the audience “couldn’t think as fast as we played.”
Monroe quickly scored a recording contract, and switched personnel to establish the line-up that became famous, surrounding himself (on mandolin) with Lester Flatt (guitar), Earl Scruggs (banjo), Chubby Wise (fiddle), and Cedric Rainwater (bass). Together, they polished the traditional mountain music celebrated at Galax into a genre that took its name from their group. and Monroe is remembered as “the Father of Bluegrass.”
“But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes?”*…
As Ravi Somaiya suggests, Ted Kaczynski— the Unabomber– and his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, were uncomfortably prescient about modern politics…
I was going through some old papers last week, when I came across two handwritten letters I received from Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, in 2017 and 2018.
My address was filled out in Kaczynski’s own stark, strangely spaced block capitals, precise and somehow odd. The return address was Florence Supermax prison in Colorado, a highly controlled and secured facility which houses a 9/11 conspirator, the cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, and the leaders of the Latin Kings and the Aryan Brotherhood, among other notorious, or notoriously dangerous, criminals.
Kaczynski was a gifted mathematician — he went to Harvard at 16 — and a loner, who abandoned his career to live in isolation and pursue a bombing campaign against the rise of technology, and the fall of the natural world, from 1978 until 1995. He was caught in 1996, and was serving several life sentences when he died in custody in 2023.
I wrote to him because I was fascinated by his combination of breathtaking prescience — his 35,000-word manifesto, published in 1995, is absolutely correct and reads like a description of modern life — and a cruelty and contempt for his fellow man that led him to squander that gift and kill three people and wound dozens of others in the service of fomenting a moronic fantasy revolution.
It’s a combination that defines modern politics — a solid basic intuition, matched with an idiot desire to hurt anyone who disagrees. And it gets at something in modern culture, which often asks whether we can enjoy the work of someone whose other actions we find morally lacking. I guess I thought if I understood Kaczynski better, I’d understand all that better too.
It was the wrong question, and thus an endeavor doomed to failure. But when I opened one of the letters I found that it had led me to ask him what he thought about Donald Trump. His answer was brilliant and also made me uncomfortable in a way that I still can’t quite describe.
He started by apologizing for the delay in replying. (Even if you find killing people acceptable, you still get a twinge if you keep someone waiting for a message.)
“There’s a lot to be said in regard to DT and the social and political phenomenon that he represents, but I don’t have the time to say it all here,” he wrote. “So I’ll just call your attention to the paragraph that appears on pages 52-53 of my book.”
This, in my limited experience, was very Kaczynski. He loved to be awkward, and elliptical. He also pointed out that the paragraph was written long before the notion of Trump as a political figure became a realistic one.
I got a copy of his book, and have to admit to a frisson as I opened it. I confirmed that he’d written the section in 2010. Then I found the pages he’d cited. It was one short paragraph. To understand it, you have to understand the underlying theory he has, which is detailed on pages 28 and 29:
“Biological organisms, evolving through natural selection, eventually invade every niche in which biological survival is possible at all, and, whatever measures may be taken to suppress them, some organisms will find ways of surviving nonetheless. Within any complex, large-scale society, a similar process will produce self-propagating systems that will invade every corner and circumvent all attempts to suppress them. These systems will compete for power without regard to the objectives of any government (or other entity) that may try to steer the society. Our argument—admittedly impossible at present to prove conclusively—is that these self-propagating systems will constitute uncontrollable forces that will render futile in the long run all efforts to steer the society rationally.”
The precise paragraph he cited goes on:
“Two competing, entirely legal self-prop systems that have arisen in the U.S. during the last few decades are the politically correct left and the dogmatic right (not to be confused with the liberals and conservatives of earlier times in America). This book is not the place to speculate about the outcome of the struggle between these two forces; suffice it to say that in the long run their bitter conflict may do more to prevent the establishment of a lastingly peaceful world order than all the bombs of Al Qaeda and all the murders of the Mexican drug gangs.”
He’s … right. Or, rather, I agree with him. I covered the rise of the Tea Party on the right, and Occupy on the left, at around the time he wrote it. And they have since risen from niche movements to define the entirety of our politics.
Each needs the other to secure its support and push it to greater extremes of ideology and violence. And the love-hate conflict between them is so destructive and widespread that it leaves little room for anything else.
And now I’m making the political argument of a conspiracist murderer. I spent a few days troubled over this, and then remembered that theory rarely survives contact with reality, no matter how brilliant the theorist.
Kaczynski was making the same mistake as the political groups he describes — he failed to understand that people fundamentally want to be happy, and get along with other people, and that they will find unexpected and unpredictable ways to get to that spot. He also failed to understand that nothing is permanent, and that nature works in cycles.
Intellectual humility was not his strong suit. In that, he was a man of our era, more than of his own…
“The Unabomber on Donald Trump,” from Bungalow Magazine.
Further to Somiya’s conclusion– and in fairness to Kaczynski– elsewhere in Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski channels Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander:
A new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance, then set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to do. People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control…
Full text of Kaczynski’s manifesto is here.
(Images above: left source; right source)
* Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future
###
As we fumble into the future, we might that it was on this date in 1582 that Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Poland introduced the Gregorian calendar. While this was “October 5” in the rest of the world, those four countries, adopting Pope Gregory XIII’s innovation, skipped ten days– so that there, the date shifted from October 4 the day before to October 15. With the shift, the calendar was aligned with the equinoxes, and the lunar cycles used to establish the celebration of Easter. Britain and its colonies resisted this Popish change, and used the Julian calendar for another century and a half, until September 2, 1752.
“The art of the parenthesis is one of the great secrets of eloquence in society”*…
Florence Hazrat, with an adapted excerpt from her recent On the Mark- From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World…
On October 16, 1586, a young man writes a desperate letter to his friend: “My dear Weyer: Come. Come. My life is in danger and I long to see you.” Weak from the festering wound in his thigh, he scribbles those few lines in a shaky, hardly legible hand. Will the famous doctor be able to save him? When Weyer arrives the next day, the letter writer is already dead. Sir Philip Sidney [here], courtier, poet, and fervent Protestant soldier under Queen Elizabeth I, had been fighting Catholic Spain in the Netherlands when a bullet struck him, burying itself deep in the flesh of his thigh. The life of the superstar of Tudor high society was cut short, at the age of thirty-one, in a way mirrored by his own writing: Just before leaving for his holy war, Sidney interrupted the epic story about errant knights [The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia or simply Arcadia], which he had been working on for years, in the middle of an exciting battle. He left the action hanging on a parenthesis.
Anaxius lept away. Whereat ashamed (as having never done so much before in his life)
Readers, like the sentence and the plot, are on tenterhooks about what comes next. The work, of course, remains unfinished. Even so, Sidney was merely following a common composition practice of pausing mid-sentence or mid-matter, and using the parenthesis as a memory springboard when it was time to pick up the pen again. Yet considering how his own life was cut short at the height of his social and literary success, it’s hard not to entertain interpretations of the interrupted sentence as an eerie omen…
… When Coluccio Salutati invented the parenthesis, nearly 200 years before Sidney perfected it, he rendered visible an age-old rhetorical practice of inserting a particle of a sentence into a greater whole. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian called it interpositio, drawing attention to putting something in the middle of something else. But one suspects that there is a limit for how long the mini-digression can become without hijacking the main sentence (or story). There was no rule on the length of a parenthesis; it was up to the discretion of the writer to adjudicate appropriate delay. It makes sense, then, that Sidney’s near-contemporary, the schoolmaster John Hoskins, writes in his Directions for Speech and Style (1600) that “all parentheses are in extremities, either graces or disgraces to a speech”…
… Parentheses, turning the inside of a sentence out and the outside in, ask readers to shuttle back and forth, exercising mental agility that nurtures a flexible set of thoughts and feelings. Sidney’s brackets include qualifications of the thrust of the main sentence, comparisons, doubts, metaphors, and examples, all of which dilate the narrative into a complex, three-dimensional woven tapestry, accommodating innumerable opinions and interpretations. The parenthesis in word and deed is an ethical way of life: We pause for thought.
There’s something mysterious about the “little moons”, as Erasmus called them. The moon has represented, in various traditions, creation and destruction, rebirth, eternity, the feminine, time, marking time, mystery, the night, and secrets. And so has the parenthesis. The convex-concave curves of the open and closed parentheses cup something said by the way, whisperings, secrets mouthed into the reader’s ear, mumbled under the author’s breath. For Renaissance writers, punctuation belonged to the visual-grammatical and the spoken-rhetorical. Headmaster and pedagogical author Richard Mulcaster categorizes parentheses as “creatures to the pen and distinctions to pronounce by”. They’re amphibian in striking out a precarious existence as belonging to both the water of the spoken and the land of the seen. The (two) visual walls make meaning discrete, even as they remain permeable enough for the eye to slip in and out. You can’t overlook a bracket. Yet you can also read right through it. How does one read a bracket? How does one read it out? Mulcaster suggested that “the words enclosed by them are to be pronounced with a lower and quicker voice than the words either before or after them.” Both visually and aurally, then, what’s inside nestles safely between parenthetical palms, protecting tender expressions of intimacy.
Brackets establish a special magic between reader and writer. Perhaps that’s why Sidney used them to dedicate his work to his sister Mary, a gifted translator and accomplished poet in her own right:
Here now have you (most deare, and most worthy to be most dear Lady) this idle work of mine: which I fear (like the spider’s web) will be thought fitter to be swept away, than worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks, were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulnes this child, which I am loath to father.
Sidney is hedging his words in ever more delaying parentheses. He adds comparisons (“like the spider’s web” and “as the cruel fathers”), classical allusions to Greek myth, and appeals to the reader (“most dear Lady”). Parentheses encase words, keeping vulnerable admissions safe and visually private. An open bracket is always twinned with a closed bracket — the words inside are never left out in the cold…
The uncontested early modern king of brackets and the place of the parenthesis: “Philip Sidney and the Extreme (Dis)graces of the Parenthesis,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
###
As we interrogate interpositions, we might note that today is Ship in a Bottle Day.
Ship in a Bottle Day was first celebrated in 2013. October 4 was chosen in honor of Jack Hinkley, founder of the Ship in a Bottle Association of America, who helped promote and preserve this unusual maritime craft.
The tradition of building ships in bottles became especially popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Sailors often made small models during long voyages, using their knowledge of ships, rigging, wood, thread, and simple tools.
The secret is not that the bottle is cut open. In traditional ship-in-a-bottle construction, the model is built so the masts and sails can fold down. The ship is carefully inserted through the neck of the bottle, and then the rigging is pulled to raise the masts into place. The process requires patience, steady hands, and careful planning. – source
“Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people”*…
As we float awash in the debate over who/what is conscious (only humans? animals? plants? AI? everything?), we might take a moment to ponder the role of consciousness. For example, in science.
Harald A. Wiltsche argues that physicists, and scientists in general, attempt to paint an objective picture of reality. Consciousness, experience, and subjectivity are forcibly pushed out of the picture. Indeed, even where science is empirical, this empiricism rarely involves a consideration of human consciousness, but rather the readings of some mechanical measuring device, or some hypothetical abstracted sum of all perspectives – a God’s eye view or view from nowhere.
A phenomenologist of science, Wiltsche paints a different picture. Physics, even in the form of quantum mechanics, has its origins in the phenomenology of human consciousness. No matter how hard scientists try, it can never escape those origins, and to truly move forward, it must understand and embrace them…
Physics and phenomenology are usually taken to inhabit different worlds. Physics aims at a description of objective reality in mathematical terms. Phenomenology—the philosophical movement inaugurated by Edmund Husserl—is an a priori investigation into consciousness and into the ways things appear in experience. Physics deals with equations, invariants, and symmetries, aiming to represent reality minus observers; phenomenology seems to concern precisely what physics leaves out: subjectivity, consciousness, meaning. If the two meet at all, it is only in polite, but ultimately inconsequential, interdisciplinary dialogue.
My claim is that this picture is mistaken. Physics does not stand outside phenomenology. It presupposes the very structures phenomenology seeks to analyse—above all, the structured correlation between subject and object through which objectivity first becomes intelligible. The task, therefore, is not to unite two distant domains, but to recognize a relation that has been there from the beginning…
[Wiltsche makes his point first with reference to spacetime physics, then to quantum mechanics. He concludes…]
… The question, then, is no longer whether physics and phenomenology should be united. As physics confronts its own conceptual foundations, the challenge is to bring into view the structures phenomenology has analyzed since its inception—and to explore how they can illuminate the meaning of objectivity in modern theory.
Eminently worth reading in full.
Physics cannot escape its roots in phenomenology: “Consciousness is the hidden architecture behind fundamental and quantum physics” (or archived version here) from @haraldwiltsche.bsky.social in @iai.tv.
Bonus question: if Wiltsche is right that consciousness is essential to advancing our understanding of reality, and consciousness is something that other things, living and “inanimate,” (do or can) possess, what does that mean for our quest to understand realit(ies)?… Or does a question like this simply (albeit implicitly) affirm anthropocentrism? How will we know?
See also: “A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself“
* Edmund Husserl
###
As we contemplate consciousness, we might note that it was on this date in 1977, at the High Wyncombe Town Hall in England, that the Bunch of Stiffs tour kicked off. It featured Nick Lowe’s Last Chicken in the Shop, Elvis Costello and The Attractions, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Wreckless Eric and The New Rockets, and Larry Wallis’ Psychedelic Rowdies– acts managed by Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera before they formed the Stiff Records label, which released a live album of the festivities in February of 1978.
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