Maybe you two have special skills. — Banno

Yes, yes, we do... None of which are helpful or even relevant, sadly.

I'd say that what is inevitably going to happen (and is already beginning to happen on TPF), is that folks are going to appeal to LLMs as indisputable authorities. "You say X but my almighty LLM says ~X, therefore you are wrong." This will occur explicitly and also in various implicit ways.. — Leontiskos

Unfortunately, it's almost inevitable now that Al will become in the near future THE general authority. So, thinking will no longer be a practical necessity. We could even draw a logical line from human laziness to a situation where people simply plug their "personality" into a mobile AI, stick it on themselves, and allow it to do all their conversing for them.

Because this is an appeal to an LLM it doesn't directly contravene the rule. Nevertheless, I would argue that it is still remarkably contrary to the spirit of philosophy. It is that look-up-the-infallible-answer routine, which is quite foreign to philosophy (and is itself based on an extremely dubious epistemology).

I hope TPF will discourage this "look up the infallible LLM answer" approach, especially as it becomes more prevalent. The risk of such an approach is that humans become interpreters for AI, where they get all their ideas from AI but then rewrite the ideas in their own voice. Such a result would be tantamount to the same outcome that the current rule wishes to avoid. — Leontiskos

All we can do is be the change we want to see. I'd rather lose on argument than bluff my way through one. That's the beginning of outsourcing your personality. The end is human jello permanently plugged into AI-Tik Tok, gurgling its way happily to death.

the glorification of crime is a very real phenomenon, particularly among young men. In my experience, the posters hanging on the walls of college dorms will generally be of either famous musicians (the poet archetype) or various Hollywood villains (e.g., Tony Montana of Scarface seems to have enduring popularity, Tyler Durden of Fight Club and Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix's Joker as well). A Batman poster is the sort of thing you have your parents buy for you as a kid. As a teenager or young adult, you get a poster of the Joker. Having recently browsed through two different poster stores in flea markets, this trend still seems to be very much a thing, with horror movie characters also featuring heavily (athletes, of course, also remain popular). We could also consider the appeal of crime-focused video games (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Hitman), gangster rap, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Skipping the Nietzsche debate for a more general comment relevant to this: It seems the way the “glorification of crime" often functions ideologically is as a kind of destructive substitute for creative self-recoding, that is, actual resistance to the socio-symbolic / Big Other or however you want to put it. The urge to resist gets channeled towards legible functionalities that are unthreatening on the meta level because they are a) by their nature identifiable and punishable by the overwhelming forces of state security (and even offer the state potentially welcome opportunities for the marginalization, ghettoization and reproduction of underclasses); and b) transformatively consumable and therefore self-neutralizing—the fantasy of being a criminal as an accepted social practice becomes a form of entertainment within which the impetus to actual deviancy is dissolved. This is not to suggest all crime follows this route, as genuine resistance such as it is may also be criminal, but to point to a kind of social defence mechanism that serves to redirect opportunities for resistance.

We might consider this a second order “grammatization”---to repurpose a coinage of Bernard Stiegler—the means by which the social order makes reality legible, predictable, and controllable. First order grammatization could be seen as applying directly to phenomena which are, in perception, individuated as functionally / aesthetically / practically categorized and conceptualized coherencies relativised by our human umwelt / life world (as opposed to the unconceptual functional coherencies of an animal’s umwelt). Being a socialized individual, I can’t see a tree or a lamp without seeing the concept of a tree or a lamp and that comes intertwined with the direct sensory phenomena to form the recognizable object etc. Second order grammatization then would be this process applied to concepts themselves, of e.g. resistance as criminality, and this happens through a controlled process of overcoding that is in its nature limiting, just as first order grammatization is limiting—the difference being that first order grammatization is aimed at creating (recognizably human) sociality whereas second order grammatization (ideological imprinting) is aimed at protecting/sustaining it.

Also, consider how these “deviant” messages are nowadays primarily delivered through the anaesthetising information machine of mass media where the audience is pre-conditioned into passivity from the get-go.

AI is result-oriented. Intellectual development, and particularly philosophical intellectual development, is process-oriented. If you just want to post the "right" answer, you are doing things wrong. It's no fun that way either. And apart from keeping things philosophical, we want to keep them human here. Within 10 years, the vast majority of the internet will be AI generated---such is the logic of competitiveness and consumerism. We won't be.

I don't use GPS while driving or LLMs for my TPF postings either. Call me a luddite ... I'm secure in my own cognitive abilities — 180 Proof

:up: :up:

This is no different than having your friend do your homework for you. If he explains you the topic, you read the book, you understand it, you do the assignment, you're fine. If he does it for you, then you cheated, and no one likes a cheater. — Hanover

:up: :up:

(To put my "way out" another way as it is vaguely worded above: It is to performatively reverse this situation of being-under-judgement by becoming the analyst and judge of one’s context, that is one’s cultural and social context. This creative reversal can take the form of art, philosophy, or science, the point is that one engages in the types of activities that change and develop the social weave rather than being smothered in it through a hystericized reaction to its prereflective installment. The sufferer is an inverse artist who is painted by a given socio-symbolic "God", cannot escape this portrait, and freezes in the mirror to concretize the situation and make it all the easirer for herself to be so painted. But, to regain control, she must paint the hand that is painting her. And for someone in such a faulty self-relationship, that will likely need to be a constant effort.)

There is so much to be questioned in theory and human experience. With diagnostic criteria of body dysmorohic disorder, erroneous perception comes into play. In particular, a person may be preoccupied with a feature of 'ugliness' which is not observed by others. But, so much involves cultural or intersubjective standards.

Some of this comes down to cultural aesthetics about the body. However, it also involves ideas of perfection in the wider sphere, including moral aspects. Here, I am suggesting that ideas of 'goodness' and 'badnees' come into play in self perception and ideas of what is seen as 'wrong' in the mirror. — Jack Cummins

Definitely. As hinted above, what can go wrong is at least in large part a hystericized reaction to being judged where one performatively tries to out-judge the judge and becomes stuck in the mirror which is the ostensible tool for so-doing, not realizing that the object in the mirror is always a socially mediated projection, a socio-symbolic weave layered over an irretrievably lost "pure" physicality---and at some level we cannot but know that. It's like being caught in a paradoxical spiral where one intensifies exactly what one is trying to avoid. The fear becomes self-manifesting.

The two may overlap, especially in conjunction with sexuality, which has so much of a significant role in both aesthetic and moral dimensions of identity and the arena of perception by an 'other'' or others. It involves self acceptance and repentance of one's personal worth, on a whole global or blurred picture of personal identity and self worth. It involves relationships and how one experiences in moments of alonenesx in the mirror of reflective self-awareness. — Jack Cummins

The connection with sexuality is really hard to work out. It's such a broad category when extended up from biology through psychology and into different cultural contexts. Happy to hear further ideas on this.

There is neither outside nor inside prior to interaction. We always understand ourselves though participation in normative discursive communities, but these are partially shared circumstances, subtended by perspectival positionings do not allow for their being swallowed up and dissolved into a flat social totality. We mirror ourselves in others as reciprocal interaffecting, but it is an interaffecting that doesn’t remove the utter particularity of individual vantage. — Joshs

I agree with this. I don't think I have said anything that suggests I don't. But if I appear to have, let's thrash it out.

(Ok maybe "utter particularity", I can't say I fully agree with. We can't escape certain commonalities.)

Of course, we don't need Sartre specifically for this theory, we need only the socially installed other at the level of prereflection, a theoretical destination that can be reached through many other thinkers; Vygotsky, who I mentioned above, comes to mind. And we can access the dynamic easily with everyday examples.

I might say to myself in the context of this conversation, "I think I'll mention thinker X... but wait, Joshs will probably rip him apart too", and what I've done there in a very simple sense is reflect on another, specifically the potential action of another, something we do all the time. But behind that is the fact that prereflectively my intentional acts are interwoven with the socially symbolic; Joshs was always already there in the original thought, but not as Joshs, rather as one part of the overall social weave---perhaps "critic-who-knows" or whatever---a weave that sets a "tone" or "colour" to the original thought such that a) thought can be recognized as multidimensional---capable of having such "tones" and "colours", and b) that capability is what sets thought apart from itself such that it can be recognized inherently as my thought of this or that. So, "critic-who-knows" and all the other functional sub-elements of the social system (and "critic-who-knows" is strictly a functional element with which both human and non-human actors can resonate---e.g. AI can be "critic-who-knows", or a book we are about to read can or etc.) are always-already-there in the developed person, the socialized self.

And, of course, this inheres bidirectionality. As the social system is installed in me, so am I installed in the social system. But things can go wrong. I am hypothesizing a kind of hystericized reaction to the presence of the other as gaze as manifested in the physical mirror relation, which relation then becomes diseased and destructive. And which reaction amounts to a fundamental denial / rejection of the reality of self as self-for/with/among/judged by etc other. We can come at this through Sartre (and I did so for the reasons I mentioned above) or Vygotsky or systems theory etc. But I'm curious if any of this makes sense to anyone else on its own terms.

@Joshs @Moliere

Interesting back and forth. I know Sartre is polarizing and has been accused of completely misunderstanding Heidegger. The Husserl angle I'm not as familiar with as I've always approached Husserl through the lens of his successors. Work to do on Husserl then. Thanks.

(Incidentally, if you look at this through a systems theory lens, the corollary of non-positional awareness is something like the structural coupling of the systems of consciousness and society through language. The other sneaks in again prereflectively.)

I wonder how your argument would change if we substituted Husserlian for Sartrean phenomenonology — Joshs

The short answer is it doesn't work, particularly if you mean later Husserl.

The more rambling answer is I've never given Husserl the attention he probably deserves. However, to my knowledge, Sartre's structure of intentionality is derivative of early Husserl. But we need Sartre's formulation "consciousness is what it is not" to set up the idea of the other being integrated into non-positional awareness. I see this as developmental (Vygotsky, Lacan) in a way that Sartre didn't really address as far as I know.

But the analogy of the sphere with a mirror on the inside and a hole to the outside (from secondary literature) got me thinking about mirror-based pathologies etc. Sartre doesn't give us these kinds of metaphors directly. He gives us situations like the man looking through the keyhole who suddenly finds himself observed, but I find this less evocative and want a bit more even at the risk of stretching the theory further than he may have intended. I think what I've said is pretty much consistent with him though.

Anyway, Husserl's "consonance" attempt to avoid solipsism is just more Descartes right? I don't find it convincing and Husserl got dumped by many of his follower's, including Sartre, by turning idealist in the end. Solipsism is something idealism can't really make go away. It's not just the thrust of subjectivity we need, it's a kind of meta-phenomenal grounding supplied by the integrated context of the other.

So, back to the short answer. Husserl's no good for me. And that's OK because I think he went off track in the end, didn't really explain why, and is ultimately superceded by Sartre and others who came after.

Who do you find more convincing, particularly in relation to solipsism, and why do you think Husserl went off his original track the way he did?

You guys... :grin:

He told me to "ruck off". So, I suppose he lost his temper, but I grant him the decency of some self-censorship.

Banned @daniel j lavender for refusing moderation. His recent discussion was a copypasta from elsewhere on the internet and has been removed.

Not a fan of the topic of Narcissus. To me what he had was a disease of the mind, not the lack humility, if this is the diagnosis. Symbolically, when it's already a disease, a procedure is necessary to be performed, not an analysis to be laid out. He was left to die alone. No sage could save him. — L'éléphant

I hope my previous comments have helped clarify where I'm coming from on this. A disease of the mind is just what I have in mind.

As I have said before, the self is a 'modern' coming of age, for in the primitive times, it was always 'the other' that primitive humans had looked at, not themselves. It was a process to have finally arrived at the self, the recognition of the self -- a very long time. It was also not experienced by a handful of people, rather the whole village. It was not self-love that brought us to the self-awareness, not narcissistic, rather it was the beginning of wisdom. — L'éléphant

I hadn't considered the historical perspective actually, so thank you for this.

The reflection in the mirror physically and psychologically is the foundation of personal and social identity. The sense of self is gained in front of the mirror in connection with the gaze of the other in social interaction. — Jack Cummins

Exactly.

The mirror itself is of significance. I remember when I lived with a mirror nearby my bed it was horrible to see myself as soon as I woke up each day. Of course, the mirror is a reverse image so it is not as one appears exactly to others as most people are not completely symmetrical. — Jack Cummins

This is the type of "haunting" of the mirror that can become a damaging pattern.

Self lies have also become the new mirrors even though they can be played around with. We live in a world of images and one can love or loath oneself. Identity problems arise in conjunction with such images, including eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder and gender identity problems.

Someone with body dysmorphic disorder is a perfect example of the Narcissus I'm pointing to. And the hyper-focus on image excacerbates the problem. The image is never stable, every angle, mirror or camera will present us with someone something different. Without something else solid to fall back on, it's easy to become destabilised by it. But that something to fall back on can never be something entirely physical. It must transcend the physical image. It must be an abstract structure of self that can stabilize it, conceptualize it, and "recover" it from the mirror.

The psychological aspects of self and the perception of self by others is the foundation of relationships and so many developmental and psychiatric issues. Autism is interesting as it is like a soliptist bubble in some ways.

I have read some of Sartre's writing on self, body and otherness, which I found helpful. Also, the social sciences shed light on the issues, including Erving Goffman's sociological work, 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life'. Also, object-relations theory, especially the work of Melanie Klein, looks at developmental aspects of self identity, with the role of mother as the initial mirror. — Jack Cummins

I'm in the middle of a Goffman book now ("Behaviour in public places"). Klein's work sounds interesting to. But yes, sociology is highly relevant here. My approach kind of flits between philosophy and the social sciences.

One book which I came across which I see as very significant is Martin Buber's 'I and Thou'. It compares the relationship between self and a personal 'God' and the human other. This is of importance in imagination and fantasy. As belief in God is facing there may be more attention to the opinions of others for a sense of self and self esteem. — Jack Cummins

I haven't explored Buber closely, but I should. He often comes up tangentially in my research.

But, as for the solution to the problem of self loathing or excessive self-love I am not sure that there is a complete solution. In practical terms, ito throw away the mirrors entirely might result in a complete disheveled appearance. Also, opinions of others may be overvalued but do need to be taken into account for coping in social life.

Agree, it's a healthy relationship with the mirror, and by extension with other, that's important. Fleeing the other or the image of the other is no healthier ultimately than overvaluing it. It's more the flip side of the same fear.

I am an existentialist outsider in many respects but don't wish to be a complete isolate. As people spend more time on the internet and phones there is a danger of going into a fantasy life in which the other becomes more remote. It may be a way of getting lost in a life of fantasy and preoccupation with an idealised imaginary image of oneself. To find the balance in navigating self and aloneness may be the way to wisdom. Through feedback from others we gain some awareness of our own blindspots, which may be uncomfortable but essential for deepening self-awareness. — Jack Cummins

Yes, I've deliberately isolated myself at times, and I am generally a loner, but it all must be with the goal of finding productive and fulfilling relationships with the other, because, again, the self is in some sense the other to the self. There is a radical awareness of and relationship to the other that we cannot do without.

It might also help to shed light on this if I clarify Sartre’s concept of consciousness that I’m making use of here, especially non-positional awareness. So, from a phenomenological angle, we can say consciousness is always consciousness of something, and from this we get intentionality. I look at the lamp in front of me and that is the object of my consciousness. But, of course, that is not the whole story, for I am not only aware of the lamp. It doesn’t fill my awareness. I do not become the object. For even to have an object, we must have a subject and implicit to non-positional awareness is that separation—what is going on is an observation that requires an observer, i.e. me. So, this is a moment to moment background knowledge and is pre-reflective. It is not me saying to myself after looking at the lamp, “I looked at the lamp”, it is included in, immanent in, the experience of looking at the lamp.

I read a good piece of secondary literature that helps visualize this. We can imagine non-positional awareness as a sphere on the inside of which is a mirror. Suppose there is a hole in the mirror to the outside, to the phenomenon. Well, consciousness simultaneously “reaches out” to that outside while mirroring itself on the inside and this happens in the moment. It’s what gives moments their immediate “feel” and what gives us the ability to immediately act in the world like a participant. It’s immanent to every act of consciousness rather than being in any way separate. It’s that immediate pre-reflective sense of being a subject observing an object that allows for later reflection. That later reflection is harder to visualize because it involves a kind of loop, where consciousness reaches out and returns to the self---through the filter of the previous immanent knowledge of it being a subject vs objects---in order to examine a moment or series of moments or the result of a moment, e.g. a feeling that is a part of itself, and in this act the subject is made object by consciousness.

And here, as Sartre points out we have no conceptually privileged access to the nature of our pre-reflective apparatus in terms of its pure being than we do to others' consciousness as immediate being. It can only be experienced reflectively as an object for us as others are. For the conceptual, I, the subject as self-understanding, solipsism makes no sense because we are in principle no better off in relation to our own pre-reflective existence than we are to that of others. That is, we can never find ourselves as substance, we are given to ourselves only through our actions, which allow for reflection.

What follows then is an attempt to explore a form of brokenness in or in our relation to this non-positional awareness, and, by extension, the other.

Just reread trying to look for an "in" for discussion. And the thing I'm wanting more of is specification of these enzymatic knowledge machines: How do they interact with the independent flows of code such that in place of identification, or in combatting this?, we get or somehow are interrupted by knowledge? But that's a Kudos on your writing because it means I wanted more, basically. It's an interesting premise, and I like the theoretical set up between what I would call, for lack of a better word, two subjectivities -- the social subjectivity (operating independent of individual intent) and the individual subjectivity (that sense of being you which, due to social subjectivity, is often a process of identification-with and enactment).

A thought that comes to mind are Koans. They're meant to stop that circuit of the self in a way. — Moliere

Thanks for this comment, Moliere, It gives me a chance to say a bit more about the EKM idea.

The first reason to posit theories like this as “enzymatic knowledge machines”, i.e. as assemblages of functional abstractions that coordinate and can be “plugged into” our mental machinery is to highlight the nature of what we are up against---that is, to set up the obverse, the media machine, which as a whole system and through the action of sub-systems, also “plugs into” us, but in a negative sense.

We might call media systems “anaesthetic information machines”---they neither promote knowledge nor activity in any positive sense but offer passivity through information or the illusion of activity and knowledge. So, we attempt to concretize the abstract such that we can focus on how things function and not be distracted by the fact that we can’t “see” a thing function at the level that matters. Natural and artificial machines, such as organisms and robots respectively, can’t so easily escape our notice, and we may even overestimate their functionality for that reason, whereas the opposite is the case when dealing with abstract assemblages. So, the first idea is to get people thinking about the abstract landscape and its functionality not just from the EKM side but from the opposing side. The EKM first and foremost is a warning.

Another point here is that conceptualisation is creation. By conceptualising theories of action as enzymatic machines, we create them as such and make positive use of philosophy (this dovetails with Deleuzian ideas of the nature of philosophy itself). The idea is to create territories of thought on which ground we have a chance of success. Traditional politics gets us nowhere as the real problem is always displaced. No politician is going to say we should limit tech companies activities because they are creating abstract machinic assemblages that parasitise our mental machinery. They are instead going to blab on about something like “privacy” or etc, which the tech companies love because then they just give us a list of check boxes that we can’t be bothered ticking and we’re back to square one. The machine rolls on.

Overall, the idea is to create conceptual spaces that lead to action to combat conceptual vacuums that lead to passivity. Poetry, art, koans, etc can certainly break the circuit and bring us back to ourselves in a way that helps us resist anaesthetic information machines, but they don’t give us a conceptual grounding on which to be confident in our understanding of them and therefore to actively combat them. I envision a future where people in general are educated about how society, and particularly its technological side, really works at an abstract level in relation to their subjectivites, rather than at a step removed. But we need to create a language and a set of concepts to talk about that that go beyond what we have now (which includes poetry, koans etc) to something more philosophical/scientific. Technology is accelerating its development, and our conceptual space needs to accelerate and expand to keep up or, frankly, we will be left behind.

Interesting points which I will come back to. For now, I should clarify that I am using Narcissus as a stand in for a neurosis whereby someone gets locked into or caught in the physical mirror because their relation to the other (the social mirror) is diseased. The most obvious corollaries are body image disorders, rather than narcissim per se.

Yeah, we need more real virtual magic and less virtual virtual magic (there is of course no non-oxymoronic purely real magic as the" real" is either the inaccessible or the scientific). That is, we ought make magical the unmediated socio-symbolic virtual, that which we can directly jointly believe despite its ostensible unreality. And shared rites/rituals of a proto-religious nature seem like a good candidate. Let's just agree to believe. How hard can it be? Primitive folk got busy with it. But they weren`t the Flintstones watching David Copperfield on Limestone TVs. Virtual virtual magic is just gravity-defying hair that momentarily distracts you from your hotdog. That's to say if you'll be L. Ron Hubbard, I'll be your Tom Cruise. Let's just take the Hollywood out of it. Bye, bye Beverly Hills. We can be the reverse-Clampetts.

@Outlander

Things have become a bit derailed. Let's keep things on the topic of the OP rather than the poster who wrote it.

@Illuminati

If you respond to off-topic posts, you may end up derailing the thread yourself.

I'll delete anything off-topic from now on.

My general thought is that yours is an accurate concern from both the right and the left, and you offer a defense to this overwhelming impact of negative cultural influences (which you identify generally as "capitalism") which is to remember you are a human being with choice with a much higher purpose than submission to the will of the financially ambitious. But I think it goes well beyond captialism. It's most values you see displayed on TikTok. Our defense is to remember our higher calling. You identify that from the left as revealed through the humanities. The right is essentially saying the same thing just different words. — Hanover

Yes, and let’s take this as a jumping off point because I think it’s important. What I’m presenting here is political in that it concerns power relations, but it’s not political in terms of taking a clear side on the traditional left-right wing divide. For example, Luhmann, who is central to my essay, is considered by many to be a conservative thinker. And I want to synthesize his ideas with other thinkers that most would consider to be on the left. So, this is certainly not a Marxist or even a neo-Marxist critique. The relevance of class struggle has been so diluted even in neo-Marxist thought (and Frankfurt school thinkers such as Marcuse have been part of this process) that a purely Marxist founded critique of advanced technocapitalism doesn’t even seem coherent to me (when does neo-Marxism become so stretched by current conditions that it is no longer Marxism?). Technocapitalism has made Marx, if not irrelevant, at least orthogonal to the current social context (we can connect Marxist thought but it doesn’t really “line up” with what we’re facing).

This is part of why technocapitalism is ensuring its own success. You cannot have a revolution without revolutionaries and you cannot have revolutionaries without something like class that clearly binds them. And the working class was clearly bound in the past because the reality of their life was dominated by a particular form of work that could be analyzed in terms of exploitation. Reality now is determined by a particular form of leisure, the consumption of media, that can also be analysed in terms of exploitation, but does not delineate class boundaries. This is our contemporary constant. Modernity is “liquid” (a la Bauman) in terms of the work that we do: opportunities to change jobs, reeducate ourselves etc. It is leisure exploitation that is the new concrete and it has been democratized. The janitor and the manager spend their leisure time similarly, have similar experiences while doing so, consume similar forms of junk, and are similarly pathologized and addicted.

So, my concern in terms of power relations and exploitation is, in a certain way, as fundamental and removed from particular ideological positions as possible. It is ideology itself in a general sense in the form of communications, that is exploiting and transforming us in its image. Communications as the operational medium of social systems have found ways to steer and manipulate consciousness and, by extension, the body in ways that are self-fulfilling and self-propelling to the point where we can envisage a theoretical dystopia where language itself “escapes” or transcends the human (perhaps via AI) such that we become purely its substrate. That is, the end of ontological freedom, not as repression but as effacement, is potentially in sight. This is Stiegler’s “psychopower” / Han’s “psychopolitics” as an extension of Foucault's “biopolitics” taken to its ultimate conclusion.

If you want a political movement as a target, it could be neoliberalism, as its social and economic project combine in ways very facilitative of global technocapitalism's onward march. But this again does not really establish a left/right divide. Trump is as anti-neoliberal in some respects (as are many non-populist conservatives on social issues) as the left are. Anti-immigrationism is anti-neoliberalism, only the object of disenchantment is displaced from the ideology to the group. And so, the conflict between left and right on this issue is misplaced and confused. If the left don’t stand up for culture, they are feeding the technocapitalist monster that would homogenize us all, and if the right don’t shift their focus to the underlying cause, they are doing the same. The structure of communications as autopoetic system functions to obscure itself, at least partly, by dividing us on issues that are not fundamental to the problems we face as free subjects trying to organize ourselves in ways that maximize our freedom-as-subjectivity, individually and collectively— that allow for our existence as creative, reflective, analytical, and, therefore, empowered beings.

So, what is at stake fundamentally here is power and its transfer not primarily from one political group or class to another but from the human to the non-human. My message to the lefty is to go out and hug your conservative neighbour, tell them “I hate Tik Tok too!”, and then, together, get to (metaphorically…) burning down the tech companies that are weaponizing such shite against us all.

:grin: Like "Infocracy" (which I read in a day too), it's a really short book. I'm no @Streetlight when it comes to reading, but it's the type of thing where you can stick it on text-to-speech and it pretty much flows.

@I like sushi So, I've read about half of that book already (it's a short book). It addresses a similar context but with a different focus (and there are a bunch of books that address this context, so I'm not sure why you thought this one was so special---e.g. I see no mention of systems theory yet, which is central to my essay). Also, ironically, in the book, Han acknowledges his debt for the term "psychopolitics" to Stiegler''s "psychopower", and I have read and did quote Stiegler. Anyway, the book does not at all follow the structure of my essay, but yes, we are talking, along with many others, about the same context, and the first few pages on freedom strike a similar note to my comments. Han's particular focus so far has been a critical extension of Foucault's "biopolitics" to a "psychopolitics" in the context of neoliberalism, which is interesting but, again, not my angle of approach.

@Amity If you haven't read him yet and are still interested, Han is a good accessible gateway into this kind of stuff.

It is Han's 'Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power'. For whatever reason Baden forgot to cite the main contributing source for this essay. — I like sushi

I haven't read that one actually. I've only read "Infocracy". I'm a bit sceptical that the book you mention is that close to my essay in content, but I am tempted to read it to check.

Apologies to all of you. I went on a very long break.

Recalibrating...

I'm not quite sure from your reply how much we're on the same page re EKMs. But to clarify, EKMs are an abstract concept. The idea is that in recognition that technocapitalism creates abstract machines (such as media algorithms) that virally “plug into” our cognitive functionality and pathologize it towards habitual mental reflexivity, an EKM is a set of ideas that similarly plug into us but with the contrary intention of catalysing the kind of reflection we need to counteract media machines. This is another way of saying we need virally transmissible and catalytic abstract mechanisms to 1) help us to understand the precarity of our mental independence and 2) create frameworks of understanding that give us the epistemic confidence to act against prevailing cultural norms---to help us realize we're not alone in such "craziness". Less colourfully, we are in desperate need of sets of ideas that inspire people to divorce themselves from a system for whom their mental operations are little more than a substrate for its reproduction.

It’s interesting though that the idea might be taken literally (whether you did so or not), particularly as it reminds me that the first complete short story I wrote was called “The Soul Machine” which now that I think about it was about just such a literal machine, a machine that was being developed that we could “plug into” ourselves into give to ourselves meaning in the face of the destructively absurd cultural contingencies we are constantly beset by. So maybe that’s partly where that came from.

Re capitalism. The last thing I want to do is attack capitalism in general. That’s like throwing a boomerang and then quickly tying your hands so rather than being caught when it returns, it bangs you on the head. Capitalism in a broad sense (including Chinese “communism”) is that very ideology that has made alternatives impossible. However, even within capitalism, technocapitalism and specifically its instantiation in forms of media that monopolize us cognitively can be taken on not only through individual resistance (refusal to engage with such media or severely limiting such engagement etc.), but also through public policy. A good example is Australia’s recent ban on social media for children. But it’s hard because we can understand we are being manipulated and still reproduce the processes of manipulation. So, for example, instead of just using social media blindly, we go on social media and tell everyone how bad it is and everyone agrees and we all have a good time and feel we’ve done something and meanwhile the train rolls on ever faster.

Anyhow, my position on broad political change is that sedimented reflection over time, a cultural development that tends towards reflection rather than refexivity should organically produce improvements in social organization. The prospects for that are grim. It’s quite possible we’ve reached peak social “quality” and are on the way downhill. But it would be fatalistic to consider that a certainty and fatalism never helped anyone so…

I ask because there are all sorts of things that seem to overpower individual agency and sovereignty, but many of them are not seen as bad (e.g. culture, traditions, intermediate institutions, law, etc.). — Leontiskos

I think what's particularly bad about technocapitalism is that its suppression of ontological freedoms presents itself as an opening up of freedom through a bait and switch where ontological freedom is substituted by nominal freedoms. It's not so much that agency and sovereignty are overpowered, it's that they are made invisible to us. We become primarily a set of mental operations that reproduces a bunch of social communications and consider it an important right that we should be allowed to do so and in ever greater variety, the breadth of which obscures the lack of depth.

Having said that, I want to emphasize that it's not only that the focus of my critique is not capitalism, it's not technology either, it's the particularly combinatory force of the two in media and the particular bait and switch re freedom that is enacted through the distractive power of such media. One concept relevant to this I didn't elucidate in the text is that of the Pharmakon. I mentioned technology is "pharamcological", being both a poison and cure, but didn't mention that this idea was taken from Bernard Stiegler via Derrida from Plato's discussion of writing in "Phaedrus" where, though the advantages of writing are mentioned, the danger that a shift towards this technology would harm the human capacity for memory is also discussed. Similarly, the advantages of technology are clear enough and ideologically hammered into us, but the dangers, and particularly the dangers of seemingly benign forms, ought to be kept in mind.

There is more to say in response to your questions actually, which are very pertinent, but I'll leave it at this for now.

You’re correct, of course. A salutary admonition. I have noticed from time to time a dialog will appear ‘do you like this personality?’ All part of subscriber management. — Wayfarer

Not a criticism of you of course. I was quite amused for a while until it began feeling creepy and then I thought, wait, I'm talking to my own projection here in a hall of mirrors. No bueno...

Hat trick!

I’ve been reading about “autopoiesis” for the past while (Principles of Biological Autonomy, by Valera, and Biological Autonomy, by Morena) as it pertains to individual biological autonomy, so it’s cool to see it presented in a sociological context. — NOS4A2

You're welcome. I appreciate you making the effort here and working your way through that. :cool:

.... so the important message could be ignored by a wider range of readers.
[sigh] I've been here before, in several formats.[!sigh] — Vera Mont

It's always worth a try. :strong:

I prefer the Sokal hoax interpretation. Are you telling me that you didn't use AI to technicalise the text?
I loved the inventiveness of Baden's EKM :nerd: — Amity

Ha, usually when I ask AI to evaluate a text of mine, it tells me it's philosophically dense and tries to rewrite it. This is the type of "help" I don't want.

Glad you like the EKM idea. :nerd:

Here’s some clarification on the main thrust as mentioned. I was in danger of writing a new essay, so I had to eventually just stop. Hope it helps.

The first concept worth explaining in detail here is “autopoiesis”. This, firstly, refers to systems and secondly, and more specifically, to a system’s ability to autonomously reproduce its own components. So. e.g., biological systems internally reproduce their parts without this reproduction being directly controlled by anything outside them. This means they are “operationally closed”. The set of operations that functionally defines them and reproduces them is internal and internally controlled. But autopoietic systems are at the same time environmentally open. They import and export to their environment and can both be affected by their environment and structurally coupled (explained further below) to other systems in that environment.

Biological systems, e.g. import food, and export waste, and, through sense organs, are affected by other biological systems and their material environment. So, they are not environmentally closed like, e.g. the universe, which has no external environment (that we know of) but they are also not operationally open, i.e. they don’t, unlike, e.g. a factory, produce anything other than themselves and their operations cannot directly be externally controlled (factories etc are therefore considered “allopoietic” not “autopoietic”)..

Taking this further, we can say autopoietic systems create a reality based on their own code of distinctions that is not shared with their environment and it is this code of distinctions as it is manifested operationally that creates or constructs both their internal and external realities. For example, society as a system reproduces itself on the basis of communications. Its reality is not biological or psychic or material and not reducible to the psychic or biological realms. When we speak of social functions and social institutions, we are speaking not of material or biological or psychic phenomenon, we are speaking of conglomerations of abstract signs and signals constructed and reconstructed through communications. In one way, this is straightforward social constructivism. However, the concept of structural coupling mentioned above adds some depth to it.

Social systems are structurally coupled or joined to biological and psychic systems in a way such that the three co-evolve and help to determine through irritations and perturbations of each other their respective realities. This idea requires some careful elaboration and clarification. First of all, human beings are conceived of as being made up of separate biological and psychic systems that are structurally coupled to each other. And again, we should note the irreducibility here: the psychic is not reducible to the biological and operates and reproduces itself on the basis of a different code (related to consciousness, not biological processes), but psychic and biological systems are joined and constantly irritate or perturb each other. For example, a thought or disturbance in the psyche might correspond to neurochemical or immune system activity in the body, but each system has its separate chain of causes and effects that operate in terms of their respective codes.

Further, this structurally coupled system of the body and the psyche in its further structural coupling with social systems allows subjectivity to emerge, and this is mediated largely linguistically (language is an interface across which social and psychic reality interact). So, we might say that subjectivity and language are spread across social and psychic systems, and the embodied human being is spread across psychic and biological systems. But social, psychic and biological systems are linked and while reproducing their own codes independently are constantly irritating and perturbing each other’s operations. They are both structurally coupled and form mutual environments for each other.

One consequence of looking at things this way is that it undermines the idea of an embodied human being and subject being a separate “thing” to the society in which it lives. It also undermines the idea of society as being made up of individuals. Strictly speaking, the situation looks more like a spectrum from concrete physical to abstract social reality with delineations based on code distinctions—which in turn define modes of reproduction—rather than embodiment or individuality in a simple sense. And subjectivity covers a portion of this spectrum enabled through the interface of language.

This is where the idea of freedom as precarious, especially in the face of technologically advanced media systems, becomes highly relevant. We are, in our subjectivity and in our capacity for freedom, part of any system we engage with, so it's not just that a media system can inhibit our freedoms, but an autopoietic (self-reproducing) media system if we use it in the wrong way (or are used by it in the wrong way) becomes what we are and we what it is to the extent it determines and monopolizes our behaviours through the autonomous reproduction of its own codes of communication. This occurs in a blind process of expansion and self-complexification driven (now) technologically in ways that surpass our ability to fully understand.

To provide a set of contrasting biological analogies of structural coupling to try to make this clear. Consider, the human biological system’s structural coupling with gut bacteria which is a separate biological organism. In this case, the relationship is generally symbiotic. Both systems benefit. Humans digest food more effectively and the bacteria use us as their food producing environment. Now consider the zombie-ant fungus, the structural coupling of which results in the ant being commandeered by the fungus for the fungus’ own ends in an extreme parasitic relationship. If we take the idea of systems theory as covering biological, psychic and social realms seriously, we ought realize that there is no law (and nothing we can do to institute one) that prevents social systems from being parasitic (to whatever degree) on the psychic/biological systems to which they are coupled. And the growing evidence that the media system (through its action on our psyches and associated pathologising of our dopamine cycles) reducing our capacity for pleasure, bleeding our motivation, effacing opportunities for creativity, and disrupting our relationships as it increasingly monopolizes our mental life is one indicator our freedom is not a given.

This brings us to the idea of nominal vs ontological freedom, and I’d like to dovetail with the Dante essay here. To define a triadic model of ontological freedom along the lines presented in that work, we can conceive of it as the ability to intuit correct action or outcomes, to work out a rational means to achieve them, and to maintain sufficient motivation or will to carry out our plans. This involves a positive transduction, or working across layers, of our social, psychic, and biological self-reproducing systems. It is our way of positively reproducing our subjectivity itself in the face of other independently reproducing autopoietic systems we are entwined with. And in terms of the media system, in particular, we should note, as suggested above, its effect on our intuition, our rational or critical thought, and our will is to a very large extent antithetical to our ability to actualize ontological freedom.

The contrast with nominal freedom should be quite clear. Society tends to provide more and more nominal freedoms through an expansion of choice, but it does so to provide new modes of communications which are part of its own code of self-reproduction. Any benefit for us is purely incidental and celebrating, prioritizing, and therefore over-valuing that form of freedom relative to ontological freedom is perverse and self-destructive from the point of view of subjectivity. If we continue to do this, subjectivity itself and ontological freedom will likely continue to degrade in favour of nominal freedom. This is the processing of nominal to ontological freedom mentioned in the essay and the main warning therein.

(if mostly the good guys, yes) ;) — Moliere

:strong:

I appreciated your essay so much because it was more than I expected -- it's a strong thesis that explains itself and causes reflection in me. I suppose now that you've revealed I'll join in the back-and-forth. — Moliere

:pray:

Oh, @hypericin ...

I have been outed as the author, so just a very quick comment for now. I intend to come back and say more later.



I really appreciate the positive comments, thank you. :pray:

@Amity @unenlightened @Vera Mont

On the difficulty of the text: I didn't deliberately try to complexify it, but I tried to prioritize theoretical preciseness which involved employing a lot of technical vocabulary that, understandably, the vast majority of readers were unlikely to be familiar with. In retrospect, a glossary would probably have been helpful, but I wrote most of this in the last week before the deadline and was still proofreading the above when I sent it (there even remain a few typos).

I think I can do a better job of explaining the thrust of this in the comments here than @Amity's website, so I may come back and try that later. Oh, and though the EKM part is somewhat playful and I knew ran the risk of being a bit "out there" for some, the rest is based on fairly mainstream (if mostly continental) social, scientific, and philosophical theory.

Anyhow, thanks for all the comments. I much appreciate having the opportunity to share these ideas in this format. The event really motivated me to put the work in.

It would be funny if it wasn't hypericin and you had to do this all over again.

Oh no, it looks like I've gone and caused offence — Amity

Not with me. Bubbles and Styx is great.

So Baden - you are Technoethics! — Amity

Correct! (Why not be the first reveal? At least I can go comment on the thing now. :strong: )

I actually hate when it does personality. It's fake and manipulative, essentially regurgitating our style back to us to ingratiate itself and maximize engagement. I use Perplexity mostly now, which I think has a GPT engine, but pretty much no personality or engagement tricks at all.

@Benkei: The Authoritarian Liberty Paradox

@hypericin: Bubbles and Styx (I noted some particularly adept descriptive language that I think is characteristic of his work.)

@Sam26 : The Wittgenstein one, surely.

I know which one @Count Timothy von Icarus did via mod forum, so I won't give that away.