Humanities: problematic. Process philosophy & systems ecology: Awesome.

The following is an example of the sort of stuff I write for school. Thus it's marching to a bit of a different drum than the mad-science-poetics elsewhere on the blog - but there's a lot of thematic overlap, so I thought I'd share.

This is a formatted-for-blog excerpt from an essay in response to the question "can evolution explain religion?" I figured some of y'all fractal-loving types would dig it, and maybe throw some dirt at me... or something. Obviously the essay question is necessarily problematic... it wouldn't be academia if it weren't! lol. I began by stating the need to define "evolution" and "religion" for the purposes of answering the question. Religion is pretty much taken to mean religious behavior - and in particular group behavior. Next, it is clear to me that 'evolution' as a concept should not be treated as an irreducible unit with static semantic value. Evolution is an popular abstraction shaped in part by consensus in the evolutionary sciences, and also by bulldada (the media). Mmm.. mission-oriented science mixed with propaganda...delish!

Dictionary: [evolution is] the process by which different kinds of living organisms are thought to have developed and diversified from earlier forms during the history of the earth.

So. It's a process. That we know. Eeeeeexcellent!

It is the nature and nuances of this process which continues to be parsed and redefined by scientific research. We must keep in mind that science is not only a body of knowledge (and a relatively open-source one at that), but a method. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired Magazine, wrote "Science is the structuring of knowledge...most importantly, science is the method whereby knowledge is structured so that it can be structured further." In the evolutionary sciences, we seek to identify algorithms, reconcile patterns, find the units and currencies that code for form and function - essentially, to articulate a biological cybernetics. Since Darwin set the bar over a century ago, there has been an investigation into what units and forces are driving the evolutionary process. The way we conceptualize this process is often honed by how science articulates causation, and how much is attributed to certain causes. The "scientific story" of genes and heredity has taken the floor as a conceptual engine for evolution, and perhaps invited a degree of focus on the individual, isolated organism that has occluded attention to group and system-level selection. More recently, epigenetics has gained attention as a field exploring ontogenic phenotypic differentiation that is not necessarily coded by DNA as such. So evolution is a process, and our articulation of that process is dynamic and ongoing. Then, bearing in mind that we shouldn't consider 'evolution' to be a static, irreducible concept, what we must ask here is can evolutionary science explain religious behavior?

Implicit in this question there is the question of whether evolutionary science can currently explain religious behavior, and then there is the question of whether science can ever explain religious behavior. Ummm...let us turn to the former, because I'm a simple creature. Can evolution explain any behavior? Well, yes, it can certainly point us to the reasons for transmission of individual behaviors, like courtship rituals, for example, or the development of spoken language. And it can most certainly explain the emergence of physiological structures that enable certain behaviors. However, I think the explanatory scope of evolutionary science is limited partially because it can really only sufficiently explain process. Perhaps then evolutionary science can help refocus questions in many academic fields by illuminating certain edges of knowledge, perhaps at least reserving an autonomy (= temporary autonomous zone) for uncertainty in complex systems. Such a project need not be restrictive to the academic community. Indeed, development and quality of knowledge should be emphasized over quantitative accumulation. Concepts that we are learning from studying evolution and ecology like emergence, uncertainty, and complexity in nature could have transdisciplinary application, and also help to check a tendency toward reductionist analysis. Let us briefly survey some of these concepts as they are relevant to evolutionary ecology. Like the insights granted by refocusing the Darwinian lens from the individual to the group and discovering how group-level activity may occur, applying evolutionary concepts on the systems-levels promises to stretch the mind even further to conceptualize how systems made up of multiple plants and animals achieve "functionality". By functionality I mean generally providing conditions suitable for the perpetuation of more life. So uncertainty, for example, is a statistical concept used to illustrate that in a given process or situation, possible outcomes are known, but not the probabilities of those outcomes. Thus we may have an idea of potential futures, but we have no basis for calculating the likelihood of them happening. Uncertainty can also refer to situations where we don't know anything about the possible outcomes or the probabilities. This concept, whether it is formally acknowledged or not, abounds in ecosystem analysis (and de facto economic analysis) because of the simple fact that our scientific knowledge of how ecosystems work is limited. A large reason for this is that we do not have the data to account for webs of cause and effect operative in ecosystems, and moreover we haven't fully grasped the extent and shape of those webs. I can't resist giving the example of the recent research on mycelium, which are potentially vast underground networks of fungal filaments, of which mushrooms are the fruiting bodies. It has been found that mycelium plays a huge role in forest ecology - as far as scientists can tell it is able to function as a communication system between trees - a veritable "nervous system". It is thought to have a role in synchronizing budding in the springtime among a stand of trees as well as even being able to allocate nutrients to nutrient-deficient trees. I won't digress any further, but I'll simply say that this sort of awareness about the 'cybernetics' of ecosystems completely challenges our ability to sufficiently study anything living in isolation. (I had to sort of "rein it in" since this is being read by hoomanities professorz. Please forgive me, punks. I got mycelium some play, and for that I am thankful.) Back to our discussion about uncertainty. Risk is a related measure referring to a situation where we know possible outcomes and can calculate the probabilities of attaining those outcomes - a classic example would be the case of a dice roll, where we know all the ways a die could land and can also calculate probability because the geometrical shape of the die gives equal opportunity to each possible outcome. Often people colloquially use the word "risk" when they really mean uncertainty. Next, the concepts of complexity and emergence are related. Complexity here can describe the state of complex systems, where a large number of elements interact in fairly simply ways, and these localized relationships aggregate to form larger-scale patterns. These elements could be plants, animals, or even molecules - or some combination thereof. They could have a higher degree of agency, in the case of bees in a hive, or simply be plants performing physiological functions that affect surrounding organisms - like releasing chemicals from their roots or respirating. I think complexity, particularly complex adaptive systems, like forests or ant colonies, are interesting in a study of evolution because they represent levels of organization that are enabled by the physiological characteristics of the flora and fauna that comprise them - and in particular the sorts of relationship that these characteristics permit. Low-level behavior and interaction is able to be optimized because of an organism's physical and in some cases cognitive architecture, which has been honed by the process of natural selection. Emergence refers to the phenomenon wherein such systems develop irreducible properties that are dependent on network interaction, or relational order. This is where reductionist approaches really start to fall apart, because emergent properties are brought about through relationship and interconnectivity, and cannot be predicted or explained based on examining an element or 'node' in the network. For example, a classmate of mine was talking about research in neuroscience and said "they (scientists) have opened up the brain countless times and have yet to find the mind". In a theory of emergence, the mind (intelligence, awareness, etc.) emerges from connections between neurons, and not from the neurons themselves. Neurons do not contain "intelligence". Thus if one was able to put someone's brain in suspended animation, or make all neurons stop firing, would consciousness happen? I dare say it wouldn't, and neither life, for that matter! I think the paradigm-shifting potential of complexity and emergence (particularly with respect to biological life) lays in the fact that we need to bring scientific attention to process, not just components and mechanics. We are here because of dynamism and complexity. If intelligence is an emergent property, and social networks (or groups, which are vessels for meme transmission, thus consensus) can produce unpredictable patterns and activities, are they not an instance of emergence from emergence? Most importantly, by studying these systems we can hope to peer in on the evolution of relationship, and gain a better, if humbled, understanding of its power in nature. In Breaking the Galilean Spell, Stuart Kauffman waxes rather poetic about the pedagogical (and it seems, implicitly spiritual) virtues of emergence. He writes that "[e]mergence says...while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it..." and he emphasizes that "[s]cience cannot foretell the evolution of the biosphere, of human technologies, or of human culture of history."

I wonder, what is the necessary data for us to have for something to be "explained"? I'd venture to say that explanation is a culturally contextual thing, which in the Western scientific worldview is achieved by largely reductionist methods. As mentioned before, such methods consist in describing complex phenomena solely in terms of constituent lower-level phenomena. As we discover new methods of information transmission in biological and cultural systems, we must acknowledge that when we identify units, agents and forces of transmission (like genes) we risk engaging in reductionism by granting them more causative power than they actually have. It seems like in the history of science there are such cycles of 'over-attribution' immediately following new discoveries.
Furthermore, it seems that scholars from different fields have different ideas of what constitutes explanation when it comes to religion. Those steeped in economic theory have devised rational-choice theory as an explanatory tool, whereas cognitive scientists feel that the stacking of cognitive modules like theory of mind, agent detection and minimally counterintuitive representations can 'explain' religion. Then we have the sociobiologists, who explain how group organization occasions and transmits religious behavior. When Anne Clark (a UVM professor and unequivocally my mentor!) came as a guest-speaker to our seminar she emphasized the extent to which a given scholar of religion's intention will dictate to what extent they will be able to use knowledge and methods from evolutionary science to answer their research questions. It is necessary to consider what, in the vast body of scientific knowledge, is helpful to scholars of religion. Considering evolutionary time, which encompasses the progression of biological life on this planet, may not be particularly useful for, say, an historian of medieval religion. It is also useful for me to consider if when we say evolution we can or should include cultural evolution. Indeed, there is debate about to what extent cultural evolution (the transmission of ideas and technologies) is predicated on patterns and orders of biological evolution. It is evident that the rate of cultural or "memetic" transmission is a bit higher than the rate of biological evolution, which is at least in a genetic dimension temporally staggered by the procession of generations. The history of human civilization as we know it presents us with a panorama of events that may not necessarily need the language of evolutionary biology to explain their cause and effect. To paraphrase Professor Sugarman, we must ascertain the correct distance from which to view something; if we stand with our eyeball an inch away from a large painting, we may not really succeed at seeing the painting, although we may be seeing something (and perhaps look rather special while doing it...). We can say with certainty that biological evolution, through the development of animal brains (since, as we've reviewed, humans aren't the only animals that have "culture"), has truly occasioned cultural evolution. William Irons wrote "[religion] is largely a cultural institution which rests on a psychological foundation." Two fields within evolutionary science that seem to be properly "sized" for use as hermeneutic tools for studying "religion" are cognitive science and sociobiology. For a scholar of religion to be optimally informed by the 'fruits' of Darwinian thinking, tools from cognitive science can be useful when parsing universal features of religious behavior. However, cognitive science seems to encourage us to consider individual brains, and to properly study religion we need to consider the aggregate effects of groups of brains in relational networks. As mentioned earlier, the universality of individual religiosity ("belief") is questionable - much more arguable is the universality of group religiosity. This points back to process; "religion" is something that arises from relationship! Although we may be able to argue how individual brains are optimized for religion (which is what cognitive science attempts to explain), I don't think we can locate religion in the individual any more than we can locate the mind in the brain. Perhaps we can locate aspects of religion, like we can study religious behaviors in an individual and examine how cognitive modules perhaps create feedback loops of reinforcement that motivate those behaviors... but these behaviors are naturally orientations toward things outside of oneself. I want to emphasize that these things to or from which religious behaviors are oriented - beside sometimes being supernatural agents - are other people - other members of the species homo sapiens! This is truly where sociobiologists can offer insight. As we've learned from our reading of David Sloan Wilson's work, group-level behavior historically presents cases where individual interests are checked and modulated by some sort of ethical system, often a religious one. One of Wilson's key arguments for the adaptive value of religion is that it has modulated group solidarity and provided mechanisms by which groups can enforce certain regulations that check individual behavior that may be exploitative to other group members or their shared habitat. Thus he has provided a strong case for natural selection operating at the group level, and religion often being a proximate factor in that selection historically. Humans have evolved to be social primates and indeed, and our history has literally been written by warfare, kingship and religion; essentially groups of humans interacting with other groups.

To reiterate, in effect "religion" consists of relational networks of behaviors that represent not just 'social circuitry', but 'ecological circuitry' as well. An organism is not a closed system, and neither is a group of organisms! The curious thing about religion is that it does dozens of other things beyond just the world-construction (mapping) function that we discussed earlier (this cited part was snipped for reasons of length, feel free to contact me). !Attention eco-design punks: Religion is an emergent characteristic of human culture that performs many functions and is supported by many elements. This is why, in the light of evolutionary science, it seems problematic to divide human culture up into categories like religion, art, science, music, language, etc. The universal acid of Darwin's idea - as Dennett characterizes it - seems to want to eat through the boundaries we've set up between these categories. When we try to extract religion from our social ecosystem to throw it under the microscope, we may find ourselves having to sever connective tissue that we didn't know existed. This occasions what I believe is a strikingly isomorphic comparison - that of human cultures to ecosystems. Let us envision "culture" as a social ecosystem that contains these various aforementioned aspects; music, art, technology, religion, etc. If we compared a human culture to a forest ecosystem, we could compare these "cultural functions" to various ecosystem functions like nutrient cycles, waste absorption, and climate maintenance, to name a few. Ecosystem functions are one of the more elusive things to define by the current scientific paradigms, but they can be best described as the aggregate effect of the complex interactions between ecosystem components. An example is the function a rainforest provides of maintaining climate patterns through the cumulative effect of so many trees alternatively absorbing and transpiring moisture. Moreover, many ecosystem functions grow out of each other or form feedback loops between each other. Ecosystem functions can't be deduced by their constituent low level interactions, and moreover their net effect is as far as we know non-linear; it isn't reached by a linear chain of cause and effect. Because of this we really have no idea to what extent we will disturb an ecosystem if we extract certain quantities of natural resources from it. Moreover, if we "extracted" one of these ecosystem functions, the entire system would be thrown into relative disequilibrium -- well, actually, it would completely fall apart. Similarly in human culture, there is interconnectivity and feedback between cultural functions that we seem to want to separate - for example between religious behavior and musical, artistic or gastronomic behavior.

[[insert open-source conclusion here]]

The Word Made Cybernetic: The Cyborg as Ascetic

In the first pages of his book The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, Geoffrey G. Harpham opens with a discussion about St. Athanasius of Alexandria's Life of Antony, one of the most influential texts in Western literature and more directly formative in the genre of Late Antique hagiography (saint's lives). Seen as the hagiography par exellence, this text gave shape to the holy man as cultural superhero in the Late Antique world, at a moment when the formerly sectarian Christian religion was spreading to the point where it was being endorsed an even defended by the Late Roman and Byzantine State. The text is also fundamental because of its authority in a specific discourse of asceticism, which is derived from a Greek word meaning "training" or "discipline", but is associated with its more visible 'effects' as encountered by a non-ascetic: the unkempt hair, long beard, single garment, emaciated figure, spartan abode, and tranquil presence of the ascetic master.

St. Antony was a founding figure of the Christian tradition of desert monasticism that took off in the 4th century C.E.—withdrawal from urban or populated areas to solitary wilderness abodes where a practitioner would effectively practice defeating any desire for 'the world'—often, as with Antony, this took the form of battling with demons. Ascetic practice often consisted of daily prayer, meditation, dietary austerity, fasting, and strict restrictions on sleep. It bears many similarities to Indian yogic tradition as well as the renunciation undertaken by the Buddha, but ostensibly the Christian ascetic was engaging in a form of imitation of Christ, and also imitation of the Christian martyrs who made up the first saints and 'holy people' in the tradition.

Within the tradition, Asceticism is not seen as hate for the body or "deprivation", even though those are popular 'outsider' associations. Instead, it is seen as a perfection of the body for its highest possible purpose, which especially in the Eastern Christian tradition was a form of theosis in the contemplation of God. As one Abba said, it is not the body that he wants to 'kill', but desires.

Also germane for our discussion, asceticism is associated with special abilities or "gifts." In The Lives of the Desert Fathers and other hagiographical literature from Late Antiquity, desert fathers (and mothers) often possess powers of clairvoyance (they know for example, the very moment an Abba dies in a faraway region), prophecy (seeing the future), teleportation (Abbas often crossed rivers this way), shamanistic abilities to communicate with animals, exorcism, and of course, healing the sick (even by distance). They also typically possess superhuman levels of endurance—especially with regard to nourishment. Some are said to have gone without eating for unbelievable amounts of time or subsist on very little food (a few lentils per day). In the 'ascetic zeitgeist' of the desert movement, it was often hard to separate these charismatic, extra-institutional figures from cult heroes that would distract people from devotion to Christ (or, politically worse—the Church, which was fragmented with factionalism at this time and fighting for imperial alliance). Thus, it was important for the ones fighting for authority through textual discourse to emphasize that these holy people did not acquire their power themselves, rather it was conferred by God. Thus emerges this image of the (Christian) ascetic as someone who is granted special abilities and charismatic gifts because they "meet God halfway." They do all the work, but when that work finally pays off in the form of ability and mastery, it is God who ratifies, and is ultimately the source, of their holy gifts. This says something interesting about human agency and the ability for humans to "signify" anything (to each other). I.e. Who is the source of meaning—us or what created us? (And you don't even need to be a theist to ponder this point, as the question is being hashed out in non-theistic fields of inquiry like process philosophy and biosemiotics). Harpham, engaging in what could be called an interdisciplinary 'literary analysis' of asceticism, writes:

[H]uman beings are incapable of true signification; the successful "performance" of signs can only be God's work. The best we can hope for ourselves is not that we learn to use signs, but that we become signs—and not spoken signs, but durable signs, "written in heaven" in a script which, defying the nature of script itself is intimate with the divine essence.

Thus, God is the "true author" of the sign that is the ascetic body—the sinewy figure and glowing countenance of the yogic master is not (just) a product of his own individual agency, rather it is a signification, a sentence, a word, written—made decipherable—by the Creator (or Cultural Discourse if you like) as part of a higher-order "conversation" (in which living creatures, ever expanding in semiotic complexity, are like set-pieces on an infinite game-board). The will of this holy man may have played a great part—indeed, it did most of the heavy lifting—in engendering what is seen when we behold him. But none of this—none of his training, his discipline—is legible to others unless it is somehow inscribed on his body—or as his body. The integration of a "bottom-up" process with another "top-down" process provides the outcome, which is: The living body as a whole cannot be a sign unless recognized, and ratified, by an Other, or others. This is why in many ways we are signs not authored by ourselves (even though we are)... because we appear to others as coherent systems, whereas we experience ourselves as fragmented, incoherent, and open. Thus, along with thinking of asceticism as inscription upon the body, it is also useful to think of the body as itself an instrument of inscription. But who is the Scribe? Whoever or whatever it is (God, Evolution, Nature, Memes, Stardust, take your pick) it has always seemed clear that we cannot be it.

Or can we? Enter the cyborg. The cyborg is a "cybernetic organism" that has been, in modern literary imagination, divided roughly into two categories: The android, who is manufactured and not of human origin, that incorporates living tissue (to varying degrees), or the bionic (modified) human. Androids can, and do, vary in their ratios of organic/mechanical, but as technology within science fiction and cinematographic special effects become more advanced, androids have been envisioned as less like machines reducible to parts (i.e. the Terminator or Data) and as functional simulacra of humans, even biologically indistinct (like the later model Cylons). Cyborgs of human origin come from the imagination of a future in which human technology will enable a cybernetic merging of human-with-computer (in both mental and physiological capacities) to produce life extension and/or "superhuman" abilities (one example of this kind of cyborg is Major Motoko Kusanagi from the Ghost in the Shell franchise). Just as hagiographical literature constructs the holy ascetic is a "sign" authored by God, Cyborgs are "signs" authored by us—in code—in a machine language. But to what end? As part of what conversation? In essence, I think it's a conversation we've been having for a long time.

St. Antony, who was mentioned above, is one among many Christian saints who, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, have been the objects of local cult veneration for nearly as long as Christianity itself. I won't get into the theological technicalities of how the Vatican and the Patriarchates formally justify saint worship and separate it from idolatry—because that would entail nothing less than a book on the history of Christianity. But the point is that saints have historically been venerated as "intercessory" figures that can grant miracles (especially healing) and treated as spiritual 'celebrities' or personal guardians/patrons (even to the exclusion of God/Christ or the Virgin Mary), yet they are also historical people who were members of actual Christian communities and lived and died like 'the rest of us'. Yet they are also enhanced, super-human, "perfect", but yet not in an unreachable way (since they are not God). The lines of distinction between Christ and the Saints grows thin, since especially according to the metaphysics of relics they are envisioned as physically merging with Christ after death (and so their physical remains are, much like icons, 'overshadowed' and in some sense alive with the presence of the Holy Spirit). Tracking the history of Christian saints is a fascinating way to do anthropology because it reveals the way in which diverse local conditions across Europe and the Near East met with extant ideals that defined what a holy person was—the tension created by these dual realities has proven to be immensely prolific. They are like the ancient hero cults of the Greco-Roman world, but somehow a more open category, less located in a mythic past. They are also like the Bodhisattvas of Mayana Buddhism if only in their intercessory role in the spiritual economy.

Many people in American culture, influenced by Protestant, anti-clerical views, see saint veneration (and the veneration of the Virgin Mary) as silly or superstitious. To them it represents the remnants of a broken system. This is unfortunate, because what many fail to see beyond their "patriotism" and political biases toward the Catholic church is the immense and patently obvious devotional value of saints. As one of my professors succinctly put it, representations of saints reflect anxieties and desires related to what it means to be human—their representation in literature, iconography, or oral tradition, are means to track these concerns. What are the limits of human freedom? What are we capable of? How do we remain after we die? (Not to mention all the ethical shenanigans)... moreover, there is often, in my view, something mutant, deviant, abject, about the holy men and women that win sainthood. In many ways the entire discourse of human sanctity anticipates contemporary transhumanist thought. In fact, it makes better sense to say that transhumanist thought and cyberpunk literature is merely the latest iteration of existential anxiety surrounding questions of the nature of the consciousness, death, mind/body dualism, and essential continuity of anything that could be identified as the self.

There is a sort of secular devotionalism inherent in our attitudes toward cyborgs, because they share one particular discursive role with the figure of the saint—that is, they try to "answer" similar existential/spiritual/ethical concerns. We are not "done" with the question of being... far from it...we have only just begun! Comparing the cyborg to the ascetic is delightfully ironic, since the two seem philosophically opposite—the former associated with godlessness and hubris, and the latter associated with exemplary piety and servitude (and its reward)? But yet "opposites attract", and I have a feeling that the cyborg is, in the symbolic order, a sort of inverted saint, yet functionally they serve a similar "devotional" purpose, and this is what I'm interested in. Perhaps it is only what we are worshiping has changed—then it was God's power, and his mystery, now it is the power of science, which is the power of nature as ours to appropriate—and so just as it is a sort of worship, it is also recognition of something ominous, awesome, and fearful—because we have now divided God into a million parts and are "free" to do with them what we wish—but there is a nagging feeling in the back of our minds that we are still not "free"—there is still a fate for us. Thus the cyborg is a sort of eschatological figure, especially in its vengeful "evil" guise which is more apocalyptic.

In the universe of science fiction, the cyborg/android is the "perfected body"—the modern spin on the ancient ascetic. But the cyborg is perfected by a radically different technology than the dialogic and rhetorical "technologies" that produced ascetic bodies in the Late Antique Mediterranean. They are "perfect" in an a-priori way—born or made that way—they didn't have to "work" for it. And this privilege (cyborg priviledge?) is connected, in our literary imagination, with an insidious darkness. The "perfected body" is the goal of ascetic praxis, but enfolded within the perfection of the body is the perfection of the mind. However, the cyborg is "made" perfect (though a different definition of perfect than in ascetic discourse), but the "mind" is deranged—characterized by void, lack, privation. But this is yet another epistemic trap that we've set for ourselves, because there is no "mind" apart from the body. Thus the persistence of Cartesian mind-body dualism in modern culture embarrassingly shows through the earlier cyberpunk conceptions of "the evil cyborg". Students of gender studies will have a field day with the depiction of cyborgs in film, since one interpretation of their 'perfection' is iterated through notions of ideal masculinity or femininity—not to mention sexual prowess and allure. But yet this is merely one more "empty sign"—a trick, since their sexuality is vestigial, "for show"... this epitomizes their ability to "be signs" and also "not be signs". They are skeumorphs of humans. Somehow this is an intense object of desire/fear...

The "evil cyborg" epitomizes the poststructuralist apprehension of the "runaway text" lost in a maze of discourse, completely escaped from its original "authorial intent." The sentient machine, though, is text (literally code) that has become sentient—self aware—but since its sense of self is alien to our own, what it has really become is "other-aware": aware of us. And this is the moment when the cyborg-android is its most threatening—perfect, superhuman, aware of us, yet not necessarily "aware of itself" in any human way at all. But it is interesting that we would incarnate a sort of concsiousness that "sees us"... because that is what God was (is) supposed to do. But the cyborg is decidedly NOT God. And therein lies its chilling power, its 'creepiness'... it has most of the attributes of God, except for care. Love. Probably "God's" most defining factor. And when you leave out that ingredient, what do you have? The Devil? Cyborgs are certainly demonized, especially in their cyberpunk forms. But that argument is too simplistic—they can't be the "devil" by the same exact token by which they aren't God. They are somewhere between human and God. Which is to say, because we're talking in hermeneutical language here, they are somewhere between what we "mean" when we talk about being God and what we "mean" when we talk about being human. The saint, too, is such an intermediary figure, suspended between theosis and "mere" humanity.

They are the subject of our envy not only because of their physical ability, but because they often don't have human desires or fears. They have a different relationship to "death"—if they have one at all. One common trope for android-cyborgs in science fiction is that they learn to become more human, either by their own volition or because of encouragement from their human peers. In other words, they are 'forced' to desire it. The result is the becoming-human of the Other (as God became human in Christ?) and the climax is the (our) emotional relation to this Other, achieving the seemingly impossible and paradoxical. This sort of emotional catharsis is so well epitomized in the relationship between John Connor and the Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Here, the human boy and the cyborg programmed to protect him forge a friendship, but it ends in emotional tragedy (for John) because ultimately the cyborg has to self-destruct to fulfill his mission.

 In this way we sublimate our desire for relationship with the unknowable into the figure of the cyborg. We want to be them and they want to be us. How quaint! They are envisioned as malicious by default—abject-ified—but also envisioned as heroes, saviors, oracles—thus like saints and "holy men" their power, their signification, ultimately comes from a strange but efficacious mix of deviance (or hybridity or mutation) with sanctity—and what is sanctity if not at least the enshrinement of what is "ideal"? Since the "miracles" our cyborg-heroes perform are a product of techno-science, reducible to code that we wrote, they somehow outperform their ascetic predecessors because they are programmable—there is no mystery or question of whether they will succeed in their heroic endeavors. They do actually embody a certain kind mystery but it is elsewhere—instead of the sublime mystery of faith they embody a sort of "dark mystery", the darkness felt by the fragmented and incoherent self.


We need our fix... Even in an age—in a genre—that has forgotten about God, and with him, the Devil... we still have to get our darkness (ourselves) somewhere. 

Computers: Confounding philosophy since the atomic age

Or, why your mind is more like a steam engine than a pocket calculator...

Today, mainstream philosophy of mind and cognitive science has a little limp in the methodology department. The root of it, perhaps, is computationalism: the notion of mind as computer. It is more specifically a notion of cognition as computation - cognition being the processes of thinking, knowing, and assimilating sense perception into something coherent. For many, "mind" and "cognition" mean roughly the same thing - I like "cognition" because it denotes process and dynamic nature more than the word "mind" does.

One of the reasons computational methodologies are so hard to grow out of is that the idea of the theoretical Turing machine in the 1940s - and its actualization shortly thereafter in computers - was readily adopted as the ultimate heuristic for understanding minds. Briefly (if I can!) a Turing machine is an abstract 'conceptual' machine, although it can be - and is - realized in actual machines i.e. computers. At the time of its conception by mathematician Alan Turing in the 1930's, the technology available for him to draw from aesthetically was basically state of the art printing technology. Thus early descriptions of Turing Machines are reminiscent of typewriter-like contraptions, except instead of like 50 typebars, there is only one, and this is a magical typebar because it can not only print a symbol on the paper, it can also read the symbols on the paper. The Turing Machine has basically two elements - a 'tape' or strip of paper or something divided into boxes or cells where symbols are read, written and overwritten (1 symbol per cell) and a read-write head (our magic typebar!) It can do a few discrete things including be in a finite number of states, carry out instructions, move to the left or to the right, and read symbols and write symbols. The instructions typically go something like this “if the machine is in state X and the current cell contains a zero then move into state Y and change the 0 to a 1”. This is called a transition rule and is the basic building block of what we would now call a computer program for the Turing Machine to carry out! The machine stops when it cannot carry out the specified transition rule that it is currently on (i.e. when the program's purpose has been served). If you've heard of binary you know that ones and zeroes form the most fundamental level of code for all computers. The computer you're using is a really, really fancy Turing Machine - or rather, a snazzy conglomeration of them. One of the reasons 'the original' Turing Machines are kind of a bitch to understand (at least for a social science critter like me) is that we really take computers for granted nowadays. They are such a part of our cultural fabric and daily lives - and for most of us it is only their highest-level functions - like a graphical user interface - that we deal with. So to most of us "computer" evokes memories of like, fiddling around on your desktop, browsing the interwebs, and maybe just how cool your laptop looks with its new skin on. Don't worry. I understand.

The following is excerpted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Functionalism. Please check it out and scroll down to find "Machine state functionalism" for more.

"In a seminal paper (Turing 1950), A.M. Turing proposed that the question, “Can machines think?” can be replaced by the question, “Is it theoretically possible for a finite state digital computer, provided with a large but finite table of instructions, or program, to provide responses to questions that would fool an unknowing interrogator into thinking it is a human being?” Now, in deference to its author, this question is most often expressed as “Is it theoretically possible for a finite state digital computer (appropriately programmed) to pass the Turing Test?” (See Turing Test entry)
In arguing that this question is a legitimate replacement for the original (and speculating that its answer is “yes”), Turing identifies thoughts with states of a system defined solely by their roles in producing further internal states and verbal outputs, a view that has much in common with contemporary functionalist theories. Indeed, Turing's work was explicitly invoked by many theorists during the beginning stages of 20th century functionalism, and was the avowed inspiration for a class of theories, the “machine state” theories most firmly associated with Hilary Putnam (1960, 1967) that had an important role in the early development of the doctrine."¹

To many, a computer was (or, is) more than just a metaphor for mind. Rather, the cybernetics of the computer came to constitute the new optimal solution for explaining how minds work. Cybernetics is the study of the structure of information flow within a system - in this case, a digital computer. To be clear, we are not hampered by a focus on cybernetics per se - in fact, cybernetic theory as applied to living systems (yielding focus on complex/dynamic/adaptive systems) has lots of promise in terms of revolutionizing the surprisingly tidy, curiously inorganic allegations made by computational theories of mind. When quantum computing is the state of the art, philosophers of mind will probably say that the brain is a quantum computer. Whether or not that would be "a step in the right direction" is irrelevant (indeed, some existing theories in that vein are quite fascinating and deserve much attention) - the point is simply that technophilia by itself is a poor basis for philosophy.

It's no coincidence that the "cognitive revolution" began to bloom in the immediate wake of the commercial computer's entrance on the cultural scene of the 1950s. In this world, data (represented information) was king. More specifically, syntax was king - the linear way in which data are organized. Variables and algorithms, the fundamental building blocks of computer programs, are purely syntactic and linear in nature. They follow if/then protocols and adhere to numerical precision. And they are fixedly sequential; only one action can be executed after a necessary preceding action. A theory of mind founded on computational characteristics pictures the mind as a network of cognitive modules that deal in some sort of symbolic language akin to machine code; our internal states, dispositions, feelings, are thus precise results of some sort of strict procedural (not to mention linear) sequence. Thus many theories that could be called computationalist are lazily founded on the idea of static mental representations. I have been wondering, though, given the sheer number of neurons in the brain (100 billion), and thus the staggering number of possible neural connections - are any two brain states ever exactly the same? I think not... it's not a river we can step in twice. I realize that neural states and "mental representations" aren't really the same thing to theorists. But then what the hell are mental representations? Are they cognitive phenomena that we perceive? In that case, they belong to a phenomenology of perception, not to cognitive science (and in the former realm they would be welcome!) I simply wonder if we need theories of representation at all here. But I digress - back to our sketch of the computational trajectory in cog sci. For such theorists, the target question becomes: what are these fundamental data by which intra-cranial commerce is achieved? This is in fact, an irrelevant question, because the brain does not deal in symbolic representations! There is no "data" as such in the brain. To see this clearly, we must attempt to shed the influence of our cultural obsession with data (which could be said to be the most ethereal incarnation of oil...) Instead of being like a collection of Turing machines, imagine that a cognitive system is more like a network of self-regulating mechanical gizmos - whose design and functioning is sourced from the laws of nature like gravity and thermodynamics. Instead of being made up of daisy chains of transistors and switches, like a computer, cognitive and perceptual systems are made up of a bricolage of "natural machines" - devices like gyroscopes and centrifuges, that are linked in webs of cause and effect with each other and with the encompassing environment.

This latter proposition, which could fall under the umbrella of dynamicism, has been well illustrated by Australian philosopher Tim Van Gelder, who maintains that a better characterization of cognitive systems are dynamical systems that self-regulate.

Before I go any further I have to couch this into a broader theoretical context. Connectionism is an umbrella term for a range of theoretical positions in any philosophy or science of the mind that see cognition as an emergent phenomenon arising out of the procession of a complex adaptive system. The complex system is, namely, the totality of the neural networks contained in at least the entire nervous system (not just the brain). In this system, and in many other complex adaptive systems (bee or ant colonies, for example) the constituent units that make up the system at large often have a very narrow scope of agency. In other words, they have a simple repetoire of relational actions - actions or events that can effect other units or nodes in the system. (Indeed, in the jargon of the field such units are called agents.) For example, we know of several factors that modulate the degree of agency one neuron can have on another. Theories embracing complexity, however, do not focus on the units of the system in a reductionist way [in isolation] but rather they focus principally on relationships and patterns in the system. It is there - in the temporal dimension of those process-based phenomena - where the closest thing to 'information' - and perhaps meaning - can be divined. The structural foundations of complex systems are, contrary to what one might think, often very simple from a design standpoint. It is not how they work at a systemic level that is mind-boggling, but rather it is what such systemic operation enables them to do and to be on a large scale. A key feature of complex adaptive systems like the brain's neural network is that processing tasks are distributed over a huge (ginormous, really) number of agents. This makes them very resilient, among other things.

So, proponents of connectionism favor the description of information storage and manipulation as being the arrangements and rearrangements of neural pathways in the brain, as opposed to explaining mental models and their syntax, a hallmark of computationalist theories. Jerry Fodor's theory on the language of thought is an exemplary computational approach to cognition. As you may discern, a lot of computational talk is simply a totally different manner of talking about cognition than is the connectionist dialogue. I would say it's a more narrative theoretical language, very grounded in linguisitcs, and thus a little bit more compatible with our native folk psychology (how the average person typically perceives their own thought processes). It is mythic, in a sense - but I don't think in the good sense. If you're familiar with this blog you know that I'm quite a fan of mythic language and thought when it's self-aware and utilized as a spiritual and emotional tool. My beef with computationalism is simple really: my brain ain't a Turing Machine, yo! Y'all think it's so good at making decisions - ze brain? Discrete decisions don't really even exist on a neurological level. Perceptually, they do - but inside there it's just warring groups of neurons, vying for your attention.

Searching for an alternative model to the ever-popular Turing Machine, Van Gelder describes the centrifugal governor, a mechanical device invented in the 1780s to enable factory steam engines to maintain a constant speed.

I'll try to briefly summarize the workings of this device for the purposes of our discussion. Essentially, the genius of this governor lies in its inclusion of a centrifugal mechanism; an object with a component that revolves around a fixed central axis, and of course requires earth's gravity to function. This centrifuge is connected in such a way to and from various part of the steam engine so as to enable the engine to continually adjust its incoming flow of steam - effectively producing a static speed. In this case, the "centrifuge" is the component to the far right with the two fly balls. The belt wheel below the fly-balls is connected to an 'output shaft' attached to the engine whose rotation reflects the engine's speed. If this shaft spins too fast or too slow, the horizontally-spinning fly-balls will either rise or lower (thanks gravity!), which through a series of connected spindles, adjusts a throttle valve on the pipe carrying steam into the engine. Viola! You have a mechanical feedback control system.

The centrifugal governor is thus temporally synchronized with the steam engine; it is a mechanical extension of the engine itself. It is like a limb extended into the environment, designed to gather dynamic "information" using a sense modality - in this case to sense an effect of gravitation - that then modifies the functioning of the engine. The steam engine has something like a sense organ, perhaps!

I put "information" in quotes above because there is something curious about self-regulating contraptions such as James Watt's governor compared to the technology we take for granted today - these contraptions are nonrepresentational. That is, they don't rely on any static set of programmed commands to function. A computerized device could be designed to do the exact same thing as the governor - but wouldn't that be a waste of energy, what with gravity already here to help? To make a computerized governor we would have to create an abstract program - a set of rules for the computer to follow - that would have to continuously engage in a sequence of tests in order to help the engine achieve a constant speed. But with the centrifugal governor, to quote Van Gelder, "there are no distinct processing steps, [so] there can be no sequence in which those steps occur." The centrifugal governor constitutes a cyclic program, not a sequential one with a defined beginning and an end.

The brain is a kluge of such self-regulating contraptions - jerry-rigged and feedback-looped together by great spans of geological time. They run on pathways carved by gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and surely quantum mechanics! A cognitive system contains intercomplementary parts; quantities that are "coupled" to feed back each others' energy. Such couplings are analogous, in the governor, to ¹the position of the fly-balls on the centrifuge and ²the amount of fuel (steam) running through the engine. This sort of coupling creates consistency - not precise consistency, of course - for that does not really exist on the level of complex organ(ism)s. Rather, it creates a sufficient consistency - a seamlessness in operation that suffices for whatever particular goal the system has. In the case of the governor, the goal may be to keep a steam engine in a textile factory from slowing down and causing an industrial loom to malfunction. In a cognitive system perhaps consistency is a range of neural state-space necessary for, say, seamless visual perception to occur (or, as the case is, the cognitive apparition of seamless visual perception, since our eyes have large blind spots, etc). What is maintained in the case of the governor, and perhaps similarly in cognitive systems, is a dynamic equilibrium; a system that maintains a steady state by regulating its outputs in proportion to its inputs.

This leads me to a compelling thought: such systems of dynamic equilibrium (or stable disequilibrium) have a functional metabolism, of sorts. Which leads me to this next idea:

A cognitive system is much more like an ecosystem than a computer.

Using ecosystem as metaphor could at least lead us down a more intellectually fruitful path than explaining a mind in terms of a tool of its own creation. The computer is a tool of the mind. But not so with an ecosystem - indeed, it is the other way around: the mind is a tool created by the ecosystem. Let us then defer to systems ecology, situated in the safe embrace of physics and biology, as an arena within which we can continue our inquiries into the nature of mind and cognition.

A computer is a simplified electro-mechanical system. Quasi-similarly, a garden is a simplified ecosystem. Unlike a garden or an organism, a computer is a CLOSED system. Computers do not draw from the edge of chaos for their continued functioning. They turn off and on and experience "new" things only when we give them formal input. But dynamical systems, like the earth's biosphere or a cell, do balance on a thin edge between chaos and order, where novelty is at a maximum. Computers don't have mechanisms that enable metabolic processes - and this is one of the reasons that we haven't realized strong AI. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote; to think, we must eat. Metabolism is what allows a system to maintain a relatively steady state through controlled process of decomposition and growth. Specialized structural (physiological) features allow an organism to engage in both entropic (involving the dispersion of energy) and complex syntropic (involving the organization of energy) processes. These coupled processes occur at many levels and on many scales - from cellular respiration to breathing. The intercomplementary relationship between entropy and syntropy is, to put it one way, the scale-invariant rule of the Jungle. All organisms - and, in fact, some systems that we think of as nonliving like ecosystems and planets - need to devise mechanisms for combating the second law of thermodynamics if they want to stick around for more than a little while. But to be clear, organisms care more about sticking around in the same form than do ecosystems or stars, which are a little more adventurous and all like "blaaaaargh!"

Can you guess what would happen if your brain reached a state of thermodynamic equilibrium? Yep, you would die. There needs to be a constant influx of energy into living systems, thus there need to be mechanisms for gathering that energy and then there need to be ways to sufficiently utilize energy once it is in the system. Lastly, the system needs to figure out a way of..er... gracefully liberating expended energy. :P

This is not just true for living systems! As Star Larvae points out, paraphrasing James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis:

"Lovelock...describes Gaia as being in a state of stable disequilibrium. Gaia operates far from equilibrium, not in a haphazard way with wild fluctuations, but with remarkable stability. For what now has been at least three billion years, the conditions of Earth have remained within the narrow chemical and thermal range that has enabled life to proliferate and evolve to its present state of complexity. Lovelock lists ranges of specific physical conditions within which Gaia must remain to survive as a living entity. A slight decrease in the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere, for example, would suffocate all but the most anaerobic forms of life. A slight increase, and the planet’s surface would incinerate.... [e]arth's chemistry is finely tuned to keep life alive."¹

We can use this discussion of metabolic process to shed light onto another confounded area of philosophy: artificial intelligence. "Strong AI" refers to synthetic intelligence that is equal to or greater than the intelligence of an adult human. What this means, formally, is for a machine of some sort to be able to carry out the same intellectual tasks as a human can. I'm not alleging that proponents of strong AI claim that intelligence is analogous with sentient understanding (although it sort of has to be if you really want to duplicate the "human intellect"). But many functionalists, who don't care to distinguish between ability and understanding have made that claim [if quacks/walks like a duck, then = duck]. American philosopher John Searle, making a refreshing case against a functionalist interpretation of strong AI, famously argues that digital computers - regardless future technological advancement - simply cannot possess sentient intelligence because their operation solely relies on their formal syntactic structure - and such structure does not in any way enable or cause the sort of semantic content that exists in a living, situated mind. Even as well as we may be able to simulate neural networks nowadays, it cannot be said that these networks are intelligent, just as it cannot be said that a weather simulation program is creating a hurricane when it is displaying an animation of one the computer screen. You can't separate the syntactic structure from a brain, translate it into some sort of material network of inorganic stuff and claim that intelligence or understanding can emerge from this network's functioning. What arises is merely the simulation of part of the brain's formal structure - nothing more. As Searle says, "no simulation by itself ever constitutes duplication". He finishes his article Can Computers Think? with this delightfully flippant paragraph:

"The upshot of this discussion I believe is to remind us of something that we have known all along: namely, mental states are biological phenomena. Consciousness, intentionality, subjectivity, and mental causation are all a part of our biological life history, along with growth, reproduction, the secretion of bile, and digestion."

(Emphasis mine)

To paraphrase something Bill Hicks once said, it's really no more miraculous than eating a burger and a turd coming out of your ass.

Cognitive systems have not just syntax, but unique semantic content. Semantics connects syntax to the world. But wait; this semantics is not unique because it is sui generis, strictly irreducible OR contains some immaterial quality - as many chomping at the bit to yell "dualist" would like to be the case! Cognitive systems have semantics because of the existence and interplay of four basic characteristics and their iterations - which differentiate us from the theoretically "intelligent" digital computer. These are 1) metabolism, 2) non-linear memory, 3) self awareness and 4) ability to autonomously and spontaneously experience one's environment (i.e. being perambulatory). I think that these four things are essential to this elusive "semantic" dimension of mind that even the most syntactically complex system could not touch. Our physical movement through the world, which is an environment of continuously emerging novelty, forms feedback loops with these four functions, which are in turn provide feedback for one another. Our agency is coupled with them.

The unique thing about the realization of consciousness is that it is (was) ultimately caused by millions of years of biological evolution and adaptation. Proximately (like, right now) it's caused by a bedlam of emergent biochemical phenomena in your nervous system. And ontologically consciousness seems like no biggie so it's no wonder we think that we can duplicate that shit with technology.

Machines will start to think when they have to eat and attract mates to survive (seriously!)

As we read earlier, James Lovelock made clear that the earth's biosphere is in a very graceful state of stable disequilibrium. We can undoubtedly say the same thing about consciousness. Indeed, it is a state very, very far from equilibrium - it is a complex metabolic state, that is to say, a system continually straddling entropy and complexity - in a very special way. A brainy way.

A brief addendum: I don't refute the possibility of strong artifial intelligence. But like Searle I just don't think a computer as we know it is capable of strong AI. I don't think the intelligent machine will be "built" in the mechanistic sense. It will be grown, more likely. We've got a lot to learn, that's for sure - consider me along for the ride!

***
Thanks to the folk at Star Larvae whose work taught me to take the concept of metabolism to whole new levels. Please read their excellent essay on "Metabolic Metaphysics".

Also see Tim Van Gelder's article, parts of which I summarized above, here (downloadable pdf).

Some more concise resources

What are Complex Adaptive Systems?
The Core Concepts of Neuroscience
YouTube vid of a Turing Machine made out of LEGOS
Machine State Functionalism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy