A philosopher who believes in living things
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
within the last couple years i've been occassionally trying to cultivate that sense again, but with only blips of success.
For example, after my first few months of practice I increasingly got awe struck by everyday things. Even though the bricks of the church are identical in that they were made from the same mold, they are all unique after centuries of erosion and sun exposure. This might be intellectually obvious, but is a whole other thing to realize through subjective experience (as if looking at a masterpiece painting up close).
With that said, I've also experienced the dark side of meditation. It's not all roses.
To summarize, I almost failed the mirror test, lol.
There were smaller issues, but that's all they were: smaller issues. This "almost not recognizing myself in the mirror" thing that felt scary as hell and I concluded that I couldn't wield the Buddhist philosophy properly and I was developing myself towards an unknown place with unknown consequences.
Everything was singular in its overwhelming confusion of intricate detail.
Perhaps a microscope could give you a few more blips of success?
As in, “well, even that beer can has a little bit of a soul “.
As a motivator for care and stewardship of our world, you could do worse!
“When we claim that there is, on one side, a natural world and, on the other, a human world, we are simply proposing to say, after the fact, that an arbitrary portion of the actors will be stripped of all action and that another portion, equally arbitrary, will be endowed with souls,”
The interesting observation in the discussion is just how quickly people turn apprehensive when any notion of individual human supremacy is challenged, even when it rests on entirely arbitrary distinctions. Rather than just focussing on the natural world it seems even more obvious when it comes to institutions. Nation states, corporations, churches, all of them vastly outlive their individual members the same way a human outlives its individual cells. And just like we attribute agency to human beings rather than solely their cells, it makes perfect sense to think of non-human entities in the same way.
A paragraph that stuck with me was Yuval Noah Harari's description of agriculture:
"“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. . . . The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
In ordinary language we are perfectly happy to use agency-adjacent words when talking about non-animal entities "I'm hiding from the rain", "That marble on the floor isn't going to get away from me" etc. Obviously in many cases we would also deny them agency, but I think it's hard to be too dogmatic about this unless you're playing some specific language game.
According to Bennett, hoarders are highly attuned to these truths, which many of us ignore.
And here is where she completely loses the plot. Up until that point it's kind of a bass-ackward way of acknowledging that human beings are not special and not fundamentally different from the world around us. Her "everything is magic" conclusion is 180 degrees off correct, which is that nothing is magic, including human agency.
"Everything is magic" vs "nothing is magic". Why do you care more to side with "nothing". Just curious, personally my vote is on "everything".
Is it just a preference, or is there more?
Tip: don’t use science dogmatically.
What she is talking about is more about questions of philosophical priority than metaphysical/spiritual assertions.
If you are interested at all, the book they reference is quite good, and almost certainly not what you'd expect. Ill just say it's more Deleuze than Plato :)
Where is this generation's Carnap?
From reading the article, neither the author nor Bennett is arguing that these objects are actually the mechanism or cause to which these events occur.
To rephrase their underlying worldview, Bennett seems to find intellectual and epistemic merit - or at least interest - in exploring the notion that some objects have properties which make them more or less likely to initiate or augment human, natural or other actions, on or around those objects.
From my reading of the article, this isn't someone trying to explain causal relationships but rather someone highlighting the benefits of different modalities of thought, as they relate to the intellectual and cognitive experience of the reader.
Also HN: This program is my new search engine and chat buddy. Shouldn’t we face the possibility that it might have a sort of sentience?
Such thinking is largely in bad odor among the sorts of people who tend to congregate here. Who cares? Who should? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.
Ascribing agency to inanimate things is a return to the pre-scientific past and an abandonment of science.
I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction more than sacrifices to the gods.
please I highly recommend Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour, mentioned in the article. he's not by any stretch anti-science. it's about recognizing that's things as such have agency, even if they are "inanimate" and when we treat them that way we are actually better prepared to deal with the impact they impose.
in fact, his probably most famous work, We Have Never Been Modern specifically addresses the concern you raise, with regard to exactly what science is supposed to be. but you have to read trying to understand that science ignores philosophy at its own peril.
They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs.
That's fine, but beliefs aren't knowledge, and they aren't science, and they have nothing at all going for them anymore except that they make people feel warm fuzzies. Those aren't science either.
Philosophers have a relevance problem, but as long as you can slap "quantum" on any jumble of nonsense and have a million people agree with it, they'll at least have an audience.
systems theory is the crux here. and Latour's Actor Network Model is basically just systems theory. if you refrain from reducing the scope of your systems to a single chemical reaction but looks at the complex interplay withing systems, you start to see what I'm actually talking about.
They’re not, but some scientific terms might help demystify the actual point being made—
1. Emergence means that higher levels of matter can have behaviors that are not determinable from its constituents (e.g. chemistry).
2. In cybernetics, Downward Causation means that the constituents’ behaviors can actually be influenced by behaviors at higher levels.
I’m not a physicist so I’m not sure how much of the “quantum” weirdness can be isolated to its domain, but complex systems appear to be mysterious across the entire hierarchy.
> They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs... beliefs aren’t knowledge and they aren’t science
Science is an instrument for verifying beliefs about very specific things though. My favorite definition of science is that it is a system for drawing out the patterns (regularities) of nature that are the same across space and time. It can only focus on “common denominators” of reality (not the whole of it) in order to reduce it to the parts which can be predicted (material prophecy). But it’s not an instrument that you can use to verify beliefs about segments of reality that it’s designed to ignore. Like it can’t deal with its own foundational question (i.e. “can we truly deduce the unseen by only what is seen?”), and surely Truth is larger than we can know by any single tool for ascertaining it.
From the article:
"A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye toward it, turning your body in a different direction—which might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your head on the concrete, in a series of events that’s the very last thing you planned or intended. Who has “acted” in such a scenario? You have, of course. Human beings have agency. But, in her telling, the piece of plastic acted, too. It made something happen to you."
No, your reaction to seeing the shiny plastic on the ground is what happened to you. Your brain recognized it as something potentially interesting and/or valuable. The shiny piece of plastic did not somehow will you to pick it up, it cannot and does not have agency. (I can't believe we're having this conversation on HN. WTF is going on in the culture that makes animism suddenly attractive?)
EDIT: Thought experiement: If you were blind or it was night time and you were walking by the shiny plastic you would not even notice it to pick it up.
Your thought experiment doesn't hold; if someone were trying to dress attractively and a blind person doesn't see them, does that mean they're not trying?
Ok, but the intent does not reside in the plastic, the intent was in the person who designed the piece of plastic to catch the eye.
> Your thought experiment doesn't hold; if someone were trying to dress attractively and a blind person doesn't see them, does that mean they're not trying?
The article seems to imply that these inanimate objects exert some kind of influence on us (and possibly on other inanimate objects?). If they possess this kind of woo-woo influence why does it matter if we can see them? The philosopher in the article seems to be saying that they can draw her form a distance without her even seeing them.
What if the creator is dead? The only place the intent can reside, then, is in the things they left. And the only thing I'm trying to say here is that 'intent' is a word with undefined semantics. Its only job is to be useful, not to actually point to a thing in the physical world.
> If they possess this kind of woo-woo influence why does it matter if we can see them?
I'm not sure where in the article 'influence' was described in this way - as an aether, basically. It doesn't follow that if inanimate things have influence, we don't need to interact with them in order to feel it, or that if I were 300 light years away, I would still be able to feel the influence of a shiny plastic thing. What the writer is talking about isn't well defined, but it's not acausal either.
Then the intent died with the creator. The can opener doesn't have as it's intent the opening of cans. The designer of the can opener designed it with that intent in mind. The can opener has no mind. We can see the designers intent in the can opener, sure, but the can opener has no intention in itself to open cans and cannot do so without some human picking up the can opener and using it to open the can.
This is just so wrong. That these things are inanimate is not a scientific view it is an interpretation, period. People are allowed to interpret the world in other ways and most of the greatest scientific minds did not have this atheistic view. If you look you’ll find this is a relatively modern condescension.
>I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction more than sacrifices to the gods.
This is hyperbole at best. Irrelevant to the discussion.
This is very poetic, but it's incorrect. The divide between religion and science is largely historical, not inherent. Latour was mentioned and is a great read, and I'd also recommend Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which characterizes knowledge and how we refine it. It doesn't really talk about gods all that much.
If we ever find evidence for the existence of god(s), science will happily accept it like any other provable theory. Science couldn't care less about religion one way or another.
No, the Mississippi is a river: A collection of water acted upon by gravity and weather. It does not have agency - the Mississippi cannot decide to flood a town or breach a levy.
Heck, do you even have to know what the sun is to see that it glows in a way the average rock does not?
And yes, I know of blackbody radiation, it's why I used this example. Because blackbody radiation is something you can find in maybe some minimal sense all over the place and yet there's quite a difference between the sun and and the minimal EM emitted by an average rock, just as there is a difference between life with lots of agency and life with very little agency at all (e.g. viruses).
Sometimes the difference is more a difference of degree than kind. What propels us is persistent and internal to the parts of us we control and our own systems are self-stabilizing. What propels most of the universe is largely external and not controlled by anything with any significant agency or ability to deliberate.
But, how do you know every other human is the same and you're not the only one with free will? And following that, how do you know a river doesn't feel the same way?
As for the rest, communication. I can share information with other people and debate this. That's not possible with a river.
Animals are in between, they can clearly understand some things but not everything. Moreover we can point to an ability to process things that predicts this difference in our ability to communicate.
These automaton identifying people however with the ever-elusive force that they cannot identify don't seem any better positioned rhetorically than the free will people, but for some reason they get to claim that free will does not exist just because it cannot be identified with sufficient rigor to match their arguments despite not being able to provide a sufficiently rigorous definition of what happens at the limits where free will breaks down.
If Occam's razor where a thing it seems more sensible just to proceed as if free will actually existed.
If something acts only due to external forces - a rock rolling down a hill, or a river flowing around some rocks, we say it doesn't have agency.
If something partially acts based on processing/decision making processes running inside its own boundary - like us, or a roomba, we say it has agency.
So it comes down to processing and actions as a result of processing. Doesn't matter whether its deterministic or not.
* = (probably; ultimately it doesnt matter much whether its deterministic or partially random, either way theres no way of finding out the future other than waiting for it to arrive, due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions)
but you can build a computer in game of life that has memory and can base its actions on prcoessing and past input
I mean I'm not saying it conscious or anything. I'm just saying it has agency, which is to say "it is a thing that does things"
It's an attractive idea that some thing has agency (or consciousness, or whatever property you want to define) to the extent it does some sort of computation. But then you have to go figure out what it means for something to do that computation. That turns out to be extremely difficult; most things can be interpreted as computing most other things.
Chalmers paper is behind a paywall but I dont see how your point makes any sense. A rock is not processing anything, an insect or a person or a calculator is. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
The states that Putnam argues are happening inside the rock dont mean anything unless some action results from them. You'll notice I mentioned 'actions as a result of processing' above.
Surely the /concept/ doesn't depend on us having the tech to make such actuators...
Unless you're into panpsychism - which I can't discount because although its a ridiculous explanation of consciousness, all the other possible explanations are equally ridiculous
I suppose for what I'm calling processing there needs to be some order. Things that do processing (our cells, processors, etc) use energy to keep some order in the system (keep lower entropy than their surroundings by using energy from those surroundings). Whereas the river is just at maximum disorder relative to its surroundings the whole time.
You could make a water computer where water flows through pipes and collects in cups and then the weight of the cups implements AND gates and OR gates and so on. But in that case the order is provided by the pipework and the energy input is whatever gets the water to the top of the system (and maintains the pipework from being worn away over time)
Are you even looking?
A river's movements and evolution of its path can be ascertained, analysed, reduced to variables, entered into a model that describes a causal mechanism, and out comes (progressively better) output that matches actual behavior. Thus a river is a natural phenomena subject to natural laws and analytical description.
A human being is an agent that continuously makes choices in a high dimensional choice-space of possible actions that can only be predicted and regulated by extreme measures such as physical confinement, psychological pressure, and denial of natural rythms of the body. A free human being of a given measure of 'wit' or 'curiosity' ("hey, temprature!") in a expansive context of choice would be nearly impossible to 'simulate'.
So simply by looking we "see" that indeed a human being, while certainly a natural phenomena subject to natural laws, exhibits unmatched complexity of behavior, and appears to act on internal reflection which is casually disconnected from immediate physical environment ..
...how could there not be? The idea that we're separate from the environment is an abstraction that allows us to operate in the world but it isn't reality. We're made up of the same elements as everything around us. We are created and built from them, and our brain is an elaborate machine operating on electro-chemical interactions.
If our environment could not influence our behavior, then psychology and psychiatry wouldn't exist.
The only substantial difference is the scale of the system. That you cannot draw a straight line from cause to outcome does not mean the system is not deterministic[0], it just means that it is too complex for you to comprehend.
[0] One might be inclined to bring up quantum mechanics, but that's a property of the entire universe including the river. And quantum behavior is very predictable, even if it is not exactly deterministic.
Yes it is, it just isn't very direct because the system we're trying to influence is very complicated. It's like the weather. We can influence the weather with things like cloud seeding, but it is a complex system so it is difficult to make precise predictions about. Introducing selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors in the brain is similar.
If you are arguing it is not, then you are again arguing a matter of degree. We understand how rivers flow well enough to be able to change that, but all that's missing from doing the same to weather, or the brain, is sufficient understanding of the system.
> Are you familiar with the idea of 'self control'?
Yes, probably much more so than you are since I've struggled with a food addiction my entire life and have managed to lose half my body weight at one point.
Of course you think you are in control, the same way a nematode might believe it is in control, but since we can simulate the entire brain of a nematode on a computer we know that the control is an illusion and the nematode brain is a system reacting to its environment in a complex way.
Our brains are the same, they're just much much larger and more complex. Not being able to simulate them on a computer yet does not in any way suggest that this is impossible.
That's one valid interpretation, yes. We don't choose our genetic makeup, which determines (along with environmental factors) the structure of our brain, and therefore also our mind.
Another valid interpretation is the one we're discussing: that humans are not a special case and that all complex systems can be said to have agency, even if we are not able to recognize it as such.
I understand the objection - clearly the Mississippi is not sentient, does not consciously choose what to do. It's a collection of matter that obeys the statistical laws of physics. Clearly the intuitive sense of the word 'agency' does not fit, at least to me. I think of agency as having the capacity for decision. But when I look at my dictionary, I see this definition first: "Faculty or state of acting or of exerting power; action, instrumentality".
We certainly cannot stop the Mississippi from flowing; is that not an exertion of power?
The Master does his job
and then stops.
He understands that the universe
is forever out of control,
and that trying to dominate events
goes against the current of the Tao.Discounting the utility of describing an unspeakably great swarth of jostling particles with one word is foolish though.
It's effective to discuss large segments of reality without having to know the position and momentum etc of every particle, assuming those segments have somewhat well-defined and known behaviour.
and p.s. before you get the urge to bang on that arrow consider this: under this philosophy we could easily support annual virgin sacrifices as a necessity to appease some unseen 'agency' in the natural world.
I noticed that anthropology seemed more and more cited as a source of diverse perspectives. See Descola specifically.
As an example, I heard a recent quote from an environmental activist that I found striking: "We are jot defending the Nature. We are the Nature defending itself".
I'm not advocating for or against the quote, but it deserves a thorough analysis, in 202x, and cannot be dismissed easily.
That will have to remain an open question for now, for I won't elaborate right now on that non-obvious question.