Posts Tagged ‘philosophy of mind’
“A translator’s primary work isn’t knowing what it means (that’s a prerequisite, not the work itself). Translation is working out how to say it, how to write it. Translating is writing.”*
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: the estimable Damion Searls argues for a literary approach to translating rigorous philosophical texts…
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s [here] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a book with an aura. His name, let’s admit it, is already a vibe; the title sets an extremely highbrow tone; the paragraphs are all numbered, promising a very impressive logical rigor, even if questions linger. (Is 6.2322 really exactly one level more primary than 5.47321? What does “3.001” mean since there’s no 3.0 or 3.00?) And then the text itself has a kind of cryptic grandeur, awe-inspiring opacity, Olympian disregard for normal human understanding that gives us what we expect, what we want, from such an iconic philosopher. It’s an exciting challenge. A lot of the reason why the book has been so widely read in the century since its English publication in 1922, by philosophers and philosophy students and nonphilosophers alike, is how it makes its readers feel.
Several similarly forbidding-yet-thereby-thrilling books were published in English that same year—T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; James Joyce’s Ulysses—but unlike those, the Tractatus was a translation, and the question arises how much of its style was a byproduct of bringing it into English. The book’s title did not come from Wittgenstein: it was an esoteric pun on Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus from 1670, suggested by G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher who was the fourth most important figure in getting the book into English, after the credited translator C. K. Ogden, the actual translator Frank Ramsey [here], and Bertrand Russell [here]. Wittgenstein’s own German title was the far more humble and straightforward Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, something like Essay on Logic and Philosophy. Russell’s introduction, included in the first edition and every subsequent one until this one, firmly placed the book in the context of technical academic philosophy. And the book’s language in English was simply not at all like Wittgenstein’s forceful, earnest, fluid, subtle German.
Yet the book in English is what it is; should it just stay that way? This same debate came up around the retranslation of yet another iconic book from 1922: C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. He too completely changed the title (from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to the Shakespeare quote Remembrance of Things Past); he too created an English-language voice, lush and purple, that wasn’t the original’s. And yet his writing was what generations of English-language Proust readers knew and loved; his translation was modified slightly over the years but largely preserved; when Lydia Davis came along with a new translation faithful to other aspects of the original, such as Proust’s analytical rigor, many readers didn’t care whether or not her version was more like the real Proust—Scott Moncrieff’s Proust was the real thing as far as they were concerned.
The situation with the Tractatus is clearer and less debatable, for two reasons. First, the earlier translations are more deeply flawed than Scott Moncrieff’s Proust ever was. Second and perhaps more important, Wittgenstein’s book is explicitly about the relationships between language and thought, between language and the world, making it imperative to get these relationships right in translation. And so I have retranslated the book, paying special attention to where the assumptions of typical academic philosophy translation would lead us away from expressing Wittgenstein’s thought in English. Implicitly, I am making the case for a certain kind of approach that is generally called “literary”—attentive to emotional nuances, subtle connotations, and expressive power—even when translating rigorous philosophical texts…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Translating Philosophy: The Case of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in @wwborders.
* The equally estimable Emily Wilson, paraphrasing Searls
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As we emphasize essence, we might spare a thought for the creator of the inspiration of the title of Wittgenstein’s work, Baruch Spinoza; he died on this date in 1677. One of the foremost thinkers of the Age of Reason, he was a philosopher who contributed to nearly every area of philosophical discourse, including metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. His rationalism and determinism put him in opposition to Descartes and helped lay the foundation for The Enlightenment; his pantheistic views led to his excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.
As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude … that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honored save justice and charity.
– Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670
“Everything / is not itself”*…
Toward an ecology of mind: Nathan Gardels talks with Benjamin Bratton about his recent article, “Post-Anthropocene Humanism- Cultivating the ‘third space’ where nature, technology, and human autonomy meet“…
The reality we sense is not fixed or static, but, as Carlo Rovelli puts it, a “momentary get together on the sand.” For the quantum physicist, all reality is an ever-shifting interaction of manifold influences, each determining the other, which converge or dissolve under the conditions at a particular time and space that is always in flux…
The human, too, can be seen this way as a node of ever-changing interactions with the natural cosmos and the environment humans themselves have formed through technology and culture. What it means to be human, then, is not a constant, but continually constituted, altered and re-constituted through the recursive interface with an open and evolving world.
This is the view, at least, of Benjamin Bratton, a philosopher of technology who directs the Berggruen Institute’s Antikythera project to investigate the impact and potential of planetary-scale computation. To further explore the notion of “post-Anthropocene humanism” raised in a recent Noema essay, I asked him to weigh in on the nature of human being and becoming when anthropogenesis and technogenesis are one and the same process.
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“I can’t accept the essentially reactionary claim that modern science erases ‘the Human.’ Demystification is not erasure. It may destabilize some ideas that humans have about what humans are, yes. But I see it more as a disclosure of what ‘humans’ always have been but could not perceive as such. It’s not that some essence of the Human goes away, but that humans are now a bit less wrong about what humans are,” he argues.
Bratton goes on: “Instead of science and technology leading to some ‘post-human’ condition, perhaps it will lead to a slightly more human condition? The figure we associate with modern European Humanism may be a fragile, if also a productive, philosophical concept. But dismantling the concept does not make the reality go away. Rather, it redefines it in the broader context of new understanding. In fact, that reality is more perceivable because the concept is made to dissolve.”
How so? “The origins of human societies are revealed by archaeological pursuits. What is found is usually not the primal scene of some local cultural tradition but something much more alien and unsettling: human society as a physical process.
…
All this would suggest, in Bratton’s view, “that cooperative social intelligence was not only the path to Anthropocene-scale agency for humans, but a reminder that the evolution of social intelligence literally shaped our bodies and biology, from the microbial ecologies inside of us to our tool-compatible phenotype. The Renaissance idea of Vitruvian Man, that we possess bodies and then engage the world through tools and intention, is somewhat backward. Instead, we possess bodies because of biotic and abiotic ‘technologization’ of us by the world, which we in turn accelerate through social cooperation.”
In short, one might say, it is not “I think therefore I am,” but, because the world is embedded in me, “thereby I am.”
…
Bratton’s view has significant implications for how we see and approach the accelerating advances in science and technology.
A negative biopolitics, so to speak, would seek to limit the transformations underway in the name of a valued concept of the human born in a specific time and place on the continuum of human evolution. A positive bio-politics would embrace the artificiality of those transformations as part of the responsibility of human agency.
Bratton states: “Abstract intelligence is not some outside imposition from above. It emerged and evolved along with humans and other things that think. Therefore, I am equally suspicious of the sort of posthumanism that collapses sentience and sapience into an anti-rationalist, flat epistemology that seeks not to calibrate the relation between reason and world, but is instead a will to vegetablization: a dissolving of agency into flux and flow. Governance then, in the sense of steerage, is sacrificed.”
To mediate this creative tension, what is called for is a theory of governance that recognizes the promise while affirming the autonomy of humans, albeit reconfigured through a new awareness, by striving to shape what we now understand as anthropo-technogenesis.
In the political theory of checks and balances, government is the positive and constitutional rule is the negative. The one is the capacity to act, the other to amend or arrest action that could lead to harmful consequences — the “katechon” concept from Greek antiquity of “withholding from becoming,” which I have written about before.
An ecology of mind, in the term of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, would encompass both by re-casting human agency not as the master, but as a responsible co-creator with other intelligences in the reality we are making together…
“The Evolution of What It Means To Be Human,” from Nathan Gardels and @bratton in @NoemaMag. Both the conversation and the article on which it is based are eminently worth reading on full.
Pair with: “Artificial Intelligence and the Noosphere” (from Robert Wright; for which, a ToTH to friend MK): a very optimistic take on a possible future that could emerge from the dynamic that Bratton outlines. Worth reading and considering; his visions of the socioeconomic and spiritual bounties-to-come are certainly enticing.
That said, I’ll just suggest that, even if AI is ultimately as capable as many assume it can/will be– by no means a sure thing– unless we address the kinds of issues raised in last week’s (R)D on this same general subject (“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way”) we’ll never get to Bratton’s (and Wright’s) happy place… The same kinds of things that Bratton implicitly and Wright explicitly are mooting for AI (as a knitter of minds in a noosphere) could have been said— were said— for computer networking, then for the web, then for social media… in the event, they knit— but not so much so much in the interest of blissful, enabling sharing and growth; rather as the tools of rapacious commercial interests (c.f.: Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification”) and/or authoritarians (c.f., China or Russia or…). Seems to me that in the long run, if we can rein in capitalism and authoritarians: maybe. In the foreseeable future: if only…
* Rainer Maria Rilke
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As we contemplate collaboration, we might send mysterious birthday greetings to Alexius Meinong; he was born this date in 1853. A philosopher, he is known for his unique ontology and for contributions to the philosophy of mind and axiology– the theory of value.
Meinong’s ontology is notable for its belief in nonexistent objects. He distinguished several levels of reality among objects and facts about them: existent objects participate in actual (true) facts about the world; subsistent (real but non-existent) objects appear in possible (but false) facts; and objects that neither exist nor subsist can only belong to impossible facts. See his Gegenstandstheorie, or the Theory of Abstract Objects.
“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”*…
Representation of consciousness from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician (source)
… but that doesn’t mean that we won’t attempt to answer “the hard problem of consciousness.” Indeed, as Elizabeth Fernandez notes, some scientists are using Schrödinger’s own work to try…
Supercomputers can beat us at chess and perform more calculations per second than the human brain. But there are other tasks our brains perform routinely that computers simply cannot match — interpreting events and situations and using imagination, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Our brains are amazingly powerful computers, using not just neurons but the connections between the neurons to process and interpret information.
And then there is consciousness, neuroscience’s giant question mark. What causes it? How does it arise from a jumbled mass of neurons and synapses? After all, these may be enormously complex, but we are still talking about a wet bag of molecules and electrical impulses.
Some scientists suspect that quantum processes, including entanglement, might help us explain the brain’s enormous power, and its ability to generate consciousness. Recently, scientists at Trinity College Dublin, using a technique to test for quantum gravity, suggested that entanglement may be at work within our brains. If their results are confirmed, they could be a big step toward understanding how our brain, including consciousness, works…
More on why maybe the brain isn’t “classical” after all: “Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement,” from @SparkDialog in @bigthink.
For an orthogonal view: “Why we need to figure out a theory of consciousness.”
* Erwin Schrödinger
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As we think about thinking, we might spare a thought for Alexius Meinong; he died on this date in 1920. A philosopher, he is known for his unique ontology and for contributions to the philosophy of mind and axiology– the theory of value.
Meinong’s ontology is notable for its belief in nonexistent objects. He distinguished several levels of reality among objects and facts about them: existent objects participate in actual (true) facts about the world; subsistent (real but non-existent) objects appear in possible (but false) facts; and objects that neither exist nor subsist can only belong to impossible facts. See his Gegenstandstheorie, or the Theory of Abstract Objects.
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