Jon Cogburn's Blog

everything that remains great about New Orleans is manifest in this blog (hat tip Graham Harman)

The New Orleans Free School is doing a course on speculative realism and object oriented ontology. The blog for the course meetings is HERE. It's anarchic and fun and interesting in equal measure.

Point e in the overview of March 7th meeting is the following:

e) no e.

And there are some real philosophical gems in there. What should an object oriented ontologist say about death? This is actually a huge issue. Does the substance that you are change when your body is destroyed? Most OOO folks are committed to actually existing possibilia in just as strong a sense as Graham Priest's recent work. Is death merely a radical form of dormancy, not different in kind from what happens to you when you sleep? This would actually be a case of Graham Harman's metaphysics providing a service to Quentin Meillassoux's theology.

I'm not saying that OOO must answer these question (perhaps they are unknowable to creatures like us right now). But OOO raises these questions in a particular kind of way.

I love sleeping, and have always hated the bit in Zarathustra where Nietzsche mocks the cult who try to sleep as much as possible. Harman's last essay in Towards Speculative Realism is the only interesting philosophical account of sleep that I've read. Which is weird. We spend 1/3 of our time in that state, you'd think it would get more philosophical coverage. I guess J.L. Austin's brief remarks on the phenomenology of dreams are pretty important as are Dennett's meditations on a possible indeterminacy between memory and experience. . .

If death really were like sleep then that would be pretty cool in my book.

In any case there's all sorts of other Speculative Realism filtered through New Orleans fun on the blog. I've added a link to it on my roll at right. It will be a blast to follow this.

Harman and the issue of an infinite intellect

One of Graham Harman's commitments that is most difficult for many people to accept is the view that there are no perfect recipes.

It's one thing to say that the chair and a description of the chair are two different things. But Harman holds that any description of the chair will leave something out. So even God could not have a cookbook that would allow him to produce the chair such that she can predict all of the chair's possible interactions, and the properties that emerge as a result, with everything else.

There are two connected ways to take this, both of which I think Harman endorses: (1) as a claim about metaphysical emergence, where there is always the potential for genuinely novel, genuinely surprising (even to God) properties called forward when the chair interacts with other things, and (2) a claim about the limits of representation.

I'm very interested in the extent to which these two claims mutually re-inforce one another.

Mark Silcox and I have a paper in American Philosophical Quarterly that I think is relevant to further working out (1) (or at least working out a Harmanian, perhaps to be contrasted with Deleuzian, theory of emergence).

But (2) itself is a little bit delicate. Again, could an infinite representation (shades of Maimon and Hegel here) of the chair allow one to predict all of its possible interactions with other elements (by "interactions" I don't just mean movement through space, but all of the properties that emerge as a result too)? For Harman, such a representation would just be another identical universe! So it would not in fact be a representation.

Another way to put the objection, not involving a mirror universe, might be to say that the "infinite representation" would be nothing like actual human languages, with recursive syntaxes. I mean there would be no computer program to determine whether something was a sentence of the language. But then the "representation" would be so transcendent that it would at the very least be as weird as the paired universe.

I lean towards this view, and it in fact follows from my piece with Silcox, but it is one that scientistic philosophers would lean against. They would say that the representation might be in some sense infinite, but in the kind of way computers can generate infinities through recursion.

I don't know of a knock down argument against the scientistic philosopher here. On the other hand, I can't think of one plausible reason to believe it, and naturalism's bad track record with respect to mathematics, the advent of matter, normativity, and run of the mill emergent phenomena such as colors, makes me deeply skeptical here too. I mean, I do not think that the null hypothesis should be that Harman is wrong. Rather, I think one can (and I intend to, actually) argue that the burden of proof is on Harman's opponents here.

Some preliminary thoughts on Meillassoux's theology

I think I might be teaching the first graduate seminar on Graham Harman in the United States. At least two of my students are applying for this awesome summer institute at Bonn on the new ontology (teachers including Hagglund, Brassier, Harman, Grant, and Zizek!) and as part of a class on Derrida with my colleague Francois Raffoul they should get a chance to work through some of Hagglund's work.*

We've started the semester with a huge dollop of Meillassoux and Harman on Meillassoux (many notes thus far are HERE, this week I'm going to include more stuff on Harman on Meillassoux). Two Springs from now I'm scheduled to teach a class on Meillassoux and Graham Priest which will be awesome, awesome, awesome and which Insha'Allah might form the genesis of some collaborative work with Levi Bryant (at the very least it will form the genesis of some solo work on Bryant, which would also be awesome).

One of the things we've read this semester is Meillassoux's "Spectral Dilemma" essay and Harman's exegesis of parts of Meillassoux's second (currently unpublished) magnum opus L'Inexistence Divine. Strangely, I was able to lead a discussion of some of the material in the article in the current adult sunday school class I'm doing on the Meaning of Jesus.

So I think today, February 12, 2012 might be the first time Meillassoux has been taught in an adult sunday school class (notes on that class HERE; Meillassoux is mentioned multiple times in different contexts).

I do not think my teaching bits of Meillassoux today will be the last time that conscientious Christians will struggle with his ideas in churches though, for a couple of reasons.

Fantastic new website for O-zone

The web-site for the new journal O-Zone has undergone a bit of a facelift and it's really cool. It's configured so that there will be links to conference presentations and things like that.

Capsule credo for the journal:

Located within a post-Kantian philosophical outlook, where everything in the world, from the smallest quarks to lynxes to humans to wheat fields to machines and beyond exist on an equal ontological footing, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies invites new work that explores the weird realism, thingliness, and life-worlds of objects. Possible methodological approaches and critical modes might include: actor-networks, unit operations, alien phenomenology, agentic drift, onticology, guerrilla metaphysics, carnal phenomenology, ontography, agential realism, cosmopolitics, panpsychism, insect media, posthumanism, flat ontology, dark vitalism, prosthetics, territorial assemblage, vibrant materialism, dorsality, distributed intelligence, dark ecology, hyperobjects, realist magic, post-continuity, and other paradigms for object-oriented thought still coming into being and yet to be articulated.

Sign me up! Actually I already am signed up. Anyhow, Joe Bob says check it out.

syllabus to class on Graham Harman

My syllabus to PHIL 4952 Topics in Metaphysics for this Spring Semester at LSU is on-line HERE.

This is going to be an absolute blast, and also help substantially with the Speculative Realism book that I'm writing now.

some background on Harman and Speculative Realism (and cool new book series) [click link for full post]

Graham Harman has the announcement of an Edinburgh University book series on Speculative Realism HERE. His book on Quentin Meillassoux will be the first in the series.

via www.newappsblog.com

Really interesting intereview with Don Ihde (hat tip Graham Harman)

I'm still too ragged out from air-travel with family to say anything interesting about this, but the interview is HERE.

This red meat quote really doesn't do justice to the interesting things Ihde has done, so it might be goofy for me to include it. But of course I have a weakness for red meat, so here goes:

Too much of so-called continental philosophy acts as if the last words were said by the godfathers, but surely there can be development in new directions? Some would ‘naturalize’ phenomenology, others do ‘heterophenomenology,’ so I do postphenomenology. I certainly acknowledge my debts to Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty—and also the hermeneutic traditions which add Gadamer and Ricoeur to the tradition.  But I am also critical of the ‘subjectivism’ associated with Husserl, the ‘romanticism’ associated with Heidegger, and the ‘lingusticism’ associated with the hermeneuts. Moreover, philosophy of technology—better technoscience studies in my term—must be sensitive to materiality.  Husserl had very little to say about technologies; Heidegger had lots to say but retained a nostalgic romanticism over simple technologies; and Merleau-Ponty, often insightful, usually was indirect about technologies.

Anyhow, from the whole interview it's pretty clear that he's the next guy after Bogost I'm immerse myself into when I get back to thinking about games.

provocative post by Morton on Goedel

Morton's post is HERE [Update: fascinating response to Morton by Levi Bryant HERE. And response by Morton HERE. One thing that's become clear from Morton and Levi is that Hofstadter's notion of a "strange loop" is ripe for Harmanization (the process whereby a philosophical property taken to hold either in subjects or between subjects and objects is shown to actually hold first and foremost either of objects or between objects and objects).]

Mark Silcox and I actually have a couple of dogs in that fight (did I just stretch the metaphor to breaking?) and I'll try to respond later. Morton's appropriation of Hoffstadter's Goedel is really interesting.

In four publications (see enumerated list below) Mark and I try to build an account of emergence out of limitation results in computability theory (the most important one for speculative realism issues is the one forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly).  I tend to think of the Object Oriented Ontology thesis of withdrawal in terms of this. Substance is the dispositional realm that allows non-modal properties to be presented (almost wrote "present-ed," Augh!) by objects to other objects (this may be more Levi Bryant than Graham Harman). Mark and I have argued that what is distinctive of emergent properties is that they are not algorithmically specifiable from a set of subvenient properties. When put together with some of the central OOO theses, this means that the way the non-dispositional "objectively present" properties emerge out of a deeper dispositional realm on two or more objects interacting is in some manner distinctively non-algorithmic.

Anyhow, Mark and I use Goedel type arguments in defending and clarifying this (and in me and Jason Megill's article we try to show that such arguments have wider scope than anti-Lucas/Penrose types have admitted). When you put Mark, me, and Megill's appropriation of Goedel together with Graham and Levi's central insights you might get argumentative support for something like what Morton is proposing. This is a really important issue for me.

I am NOT saying, "oh me and my friends have already thought of this." We haven't. What Morton is proposing is new and involves the Hofstadter focus on the way Godelization gets you a kind of self-reference. This is really important. I'm just excited about it because it might provide one of the key links between stuff I've been doing and stuff I'm just starting to do (the other link is quite obviously Ian Bogost, which Mark and I are going to do an on-line reading group on in the next year, and I might teach a class on after I do the Harman class in Spring, and Galen Strawson class in Fall).

I'm going to think about this for a couple of days and then post something else.

Anyhow, here are references for the papers I mentioned with links to abstracts. Again, if anyone is interested in any of these e-mail me at joncogburn at yahoo dot com. I'm a week behind in e-mail, but I will write you back!

1. Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, "The Emergence of Emergence: Computability and Ontology." American Philosophical Quarterly, (forthcoming). [ABSTRACT]
2. Jon Cogburn and Jason Megill, "Are Turing Machines Platonists? Intuitionism and the Computational Theory of Mind," Minds and Machines, (forthcoming) [ABSTRACT]
3. Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Philosophy Through Video Games, Routledge (2009) [ABSTRACT]
4. Mark Silcox and Jon Cogburn, "Computability Theory and Literary Competence," The British Journal of Aesthetics, 46.5, (2006), pp. 369-386. [ABSTRACT]
5. Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, "Computing Machinery and Emergence," Minds and Machines, 15.1 (2005), pp. 73-89. [ABSTRACT]