On HU
First I wanted to highlight this lovely comment by composer and artist Diamanda Galas, responding to James Romberger’s essay about David Wojnarowicz. The thread actually has a ton of thoughtful and heartfelt responses from Wojanrowicz’s associates and others. It, and the original article, are well worth reading if you missed them.
We started the week with a post by Domingos Isabelinho on Mat Brinkman.
Stephanie Folse continued her Elfquest reread with issue #2.
Sean Michael Robinson argued that the concept of talent is not helpful in teaching art.
I didn’t much like Hitchcock’s 39 Steps.
Ng Suat Tong discussed Tobias Tycho Schalken’s “Folkore.”
Alex Buchet provided a comics New Year gallery.
And Alex Buchet continued his series on language and comics, focusing on Batman, Smurfs, Mad magazine, and more.
Next week we should have posts on manga drama CDs; the pricing of original Jaime Hernandez art; Jason Overby, cocaine, and the internets; Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism, and more.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Splice Today I discuss a book by John Mullarkey about philosophy and film.
Mullarkey is insistent on the “aesthetical properties” of film. He notes that philosophers who discuss film often focus on narrative and theme and ignore mise-en-scene, editing, sound, music, etc., to say nothing of extra-aesthetic issues such as distribution, consumption and audience. Yet he’s so intent on listening to what this wonderful heterogeneity of film has to say to philosophy that he misses the most obvious point, which is that philosophy is aesthetic and heterogeneous as well. Just as film is not just it’s narrative and theme, so philosophy is not just its thought and theme.
Also at Splice I discuss a new comp of Bollywood psychedelia.
But such is the Columbus-like experience of world music crate diving, in which you compulsively pat yourself on the back for discovering that obscure fruit off which some significant proportion of the world’s population was already living.
At Madeloud I highlight some great Muppet music.
Other Links
Robert Stanley Martin on Lilli Carre’s The Carnival.
Been looking at a bunch of essays about The Wire. Interesting pieces by Marc Singer here and here/
Jonah Goldberg says the Wire is conservative here.
And a long profile of David Simon here.
I noticed another review of Mullarkey’s book over at Film-Philosophy.
Re: the Mullarkey book, you’re in trouble if (as the Hilst review suggests) your main criticism of Zizek is derived from Masson’s attack on Freud (and, transitively, on Lacan). Pace Masson, the problem with Freud isn’t that he couldn’t handle the truth about the prevalence of child sexual abuse in middle-class Vienna around the turn of the century. The problem with Freud is that most of what he said is false.
Re: Goldberg — jeez, Noah, you read with a broad brush. He explicitly says that his point “isn’t to say the The Wire is a conservative show”. It’s at the start of the fourth paragraph.
That said, if Goldberg seriously thinks The Wire isn’t a liberal/progressive show, then he either watched a different show than I did, or he was smoking crack while he watched it. The contortions to which politically passionate people will resort, just to justify liking a work of art! (I’m equally guilty as Goldberg, just in the other direction).
I really don’t think that most of what Freud said is false. I think the main thing he said that was false was that his work could be evaluated in a scientific paradigm where judging it as true or false makes any sense. He had a lot of interesting/poetic/philosophical insights about how human beings think and relate to each other and to their own brains which I think are provocative/productive/sublime. He had a great insight into how stories work, and how that relates to how people think. Some of what he said was silly or wrong, but I don’t think that needs to invalidate everything he said.
Sorry about the Goldberg thing; I wrote the blurb a bit after I’d read the piece, and probably just wasn’t remembering it right. Better to have said, “about conservatism and the Wire” or some such, no doubt.
You’re dead right that Freud himself thought his work should be interpreted as science. Indeed, that was his primary defence of psychoanalysis after the 1910s (? I can’t recall the exact dates now; it might have been a bit later), once it had become obvious that it had no therapeutic benefit. It might not alleviate your neuroses, Freud conceded, but at least it gives us insight into how the human mind works.
I actually agree with Freud about this (and disagree with some of his philosophical critics, like Popper) — what he was doing was absolutely science. It’s just science that turned about to be false, like phlogiston-theory, or Darwin’s theory of inheritance.
Take something like Freud’s theory in Totem and Taboo about the origins of religion. To simplify somewhat, the theory has two parts: (1) an historical/phylogenetic thesis that, in the distant past, humans lived in small groups consisting mainly of a female harem ruled over by a dominant male. “One day”, the sons of the dominant male, who had been exiled lest they reproductively compete with him, banded together and returned to kill their father. (Actually, Freud is quite clear that this “primal crime” occurred many times, in many locations, but it’s easier to speak as though it happened only once.) As a result, the sons felt an overwhelming guilt, which they tried to alleviate through various symbolic rituals, which eventually transformed into the set of doctrines of rituals we call “religion”.
2) Combined with this is an ontogenetic thesis about how modern people come to be religious. Viz, we moderns have inherited (via so-called “Lamarckian” inheritance of acquired characteristics) this overwhelming guilt, and to alleviate it, we likewise conform to various religious beliefs and behaviours available in our culture.
Now, clearly both (1) and (2) are the kinds of things which are either true or false. I happen to think they’re both false; moreover, I think there’s no evidence to support them. (Indeed, it’s because of the latter that I think the former). It’s false that our ancestors (human or homninid) lived in that kind of social structure, it’s false that there was a primal crime, it’s false that that’s how religion started, and it’s false that inherited guilt explains the existence of religion in modern times. And, what the hell, it’s false that acquired characteristics can be inherited in the way believed by Freud.
Given that all this is false, I can’t see how the theory gives us any insight into the origins of religion, or the modern appeal of religion, or anything about human psychology or the human condition.
Ditto for e.g. the main thesis of Interpretation of Dreams, viz. that dreams are the disguised fulfilment of childhood desires; or the four-stage theory of childhood sexual development. If it’s false that children pass through oral, anal, genital and phallic stages, and that some children get fixated at various points, and that that explains various paraphilias and personality traits in adults, then what insight does the theory provide?
There’s a moment in Totem and Taboo though (don’t have the reference on me, but remember it clearly because it was so funny) where he says, basically, “don’t take this literally.”
The origin of religion he provides is a brilliantly perverse story. It suggests that religion has something to do with law, guilt, and fathers, an interpretation which has sparked tons of fascinating discussions and ideas about how society and religion work.
Freud doesn’t tell us how the brain works. He tells us how the mind works. The mind isn’t a scientific phenomena; it has biological bits, but it’s also embedded in the family, in society — it’s a story, not a fact. That’s why Freud was wrong that he was doing science, and not wrong about most other things.
The mind is too a scientific phenomenon. There are plenty of empirical studies to demonstrate such a thing.
Freud was wrong that he was doing science because he simply made up a bunch of shit about the mind, not because he was studying the mind.
If we’re thinking of the same passage in Totem and Taboo (TT), it’s where he says that we shouldn’t interpret the story to mean that there was literally just one primal horde and one primal crime — rather, there were many, across a long period of time. But, IIRC, he doesn’t mean that the primal crime never literally happened — on the contrary, he means it happened heaps of times! And he means that it literally happened heaps of times — that is, there really was a father who ruled a harem, and he really was killed by his sons, and they really tried to expiate their guilt through various symbolic means.
Secondly, if he’s wrong about the actual phylogenetic history and contemporary ontogeny of religion, then who cares what he suggests religion has something to do with? If I tell you that religion was implanted in the human mind in the tenth century BCE by fifth-dimensional fairies, including Superman-pesterer Mr Mxyzptlk, that may be suggestive too. But if it’s false and not even close to the truth, the suggestions aren’t very helpful.
Third, it doesn’t take Einstein — or Freud! — to suggest that (Judeo-Christian) religion has something to do with law, guilt and fathers.
Fourth, it’s just false that religion has “something to do with law, guilt and fathers”. It’s true that SOME religions do — in particular, the offshoots of Judaism, and some of their antecedents like Zoroastrianism. It certainly doesn’t strike me that Buddhism cares much about fathers, or that John Frum cults care about guilt. Not even if we accept the Freudian thesis that the connections may be symbolically distorted.
(And before you object, it’s clear from TT and his other discussions of religion in places like Civilization and its Discontents that Freud takes himself to be saying something about all religions, not just the religions present in early 20C Vienna).
And, yeah, I’m with Charles. The mind is perfectly amenable (at least in part) to empirical investigation. What would you say about e.g. things like the following?: Chomskian theories of generative grammar; Marr’s computational theory of vision; research showing implicit racial bias even in political progressives; research showing that people are more politically conservative when in the presence of disgusting stimuli; etc. etc. etc.
The theories may be false, and the findings may not be robust, but at least they seem to me to be (a) scientific (as in, either produced or tested by methods that we typically characterize as “scientific”) and (b) about the mind. They’re about how we understand and produce language, how vision works, how implicit attitudes can conflict with stated beliefs, how apparently irrelevant factors can influence our moral and political views, etc. What’s not mental about those things?
I knew I’d flush Charles out…
I think you’re right that Freud is much more right about western religion about other sorts.
I’m pretty sure that’s not the bit I’m remembering from Totem and Taboo. I may have to reread the thing now though….
I think it’s easy to reject Freud’s insights as obvious since they’ve become so thoroughly accepted; the subconscious has become the way just about everyone reflexively thinks about the mind, for example. Just because it’s obvious now (or accepted now) doesn’t mean that it was always obvious though.
For instance…one of the more important insights of Freud for me is the idea that the self is not unitary; “I think therefore I am” is false because there isn’t an “I”. That’s been really important for a lot of philosophers. And I don’t think rejecting it as non-scientific makes it worthless or unfactual anymore than Descartes is worthless or non-factual, even though he certainly thought he was doing science (or more exactly, math) as well.
When you say those factors are not robust, I would agree. I think they’re attempting to talk about mind through social science, or something that looks like science. I don’t think that’s the only way to talk about mind, and I don’t find most of those approaches especially convincing as a way to talk about mind. It seems to me that literature or philosophy or religion tend to be more revealing and more thoughtful.
Speaking of the history of the mind and philosophy and science….
Noah, have you read De Rerum Natura? It’s one of my favorite works. It’s the explanation of Epicurean philosophy, how the mind works, and it’s the beginning for a lot of physics (the idea of the atom). It’s, er, also in the form of an epic poem, in Latin. *tempts* It’s utterly bizarre.
Haven’t read it — certainly not in Latin!
I just read Discourse on Method a couple of weeks ago, which was actually really entertaining.
For ultimate mental whiplash, I recommend reading it with a Stoic philosopher at the same time, like Seneca’s letters. Great contrast. De Rerum is kind of a hoot, because there’s some really charming whackiness in it about floating around, and ghosts of memory, and oh, I don’t know what all. I should really reread it.
I haven’t read Discourse on Method. We should have a roundtable on dead philosophers some day.
Freud didn’t come up with the notion of the subconscious, though. He had many predecessors, notably William James.
Sure. But it’s Freud’s version (linked to sex and dreams and slips of the tongue and childhood) that most people think of, surely.
“I think they’re attempting to talk about mind through social science, or something that looks like science. I don’t think that’s the only way to talk about mind, and I don’t find most of those approaches especially convincing as a way to talk about mind. It seems to me that literature or philosophy or religion tend to be more revealing and more thoughtful.”
You don’t know what you’re talking about, Noah. What has literature or religion corrected cognitive science about the order of conceptual development? Or how memory works, such as the well-established U-shaped curve found in memory tasks? Or Miller’s magic number 7 in attention? Or all the evidence that suggests reading uses a phonological filter? What do these other disciplines have to say about mental rotation? And on and on. As for “social science,” well, cross-cultural studies are important, so I don’t see psychology as opposed to anthropology and sociology. We know more about how mental categorization works due to cognitive anthropologists and psychologists working off of each other’s studies. What have literary and religious studies contributed to or contradicted about that? That’s it reducible to culture or belief? If so, they’d be wrong. And philosophers have had a good deal to say about much of this, but it’s been the ones who know something about the research. Nor have such findings come from neuroscience, even though it should be part of the discussion. I’m not dismissing other disciplines using their own methodologies to study their subject matter, only your myopia.
I was going to say this in response to Jones earlier, but psychoanalysis today would probably be pretty unrecognizable to Freud: it’s much closer to sociology, viewing social interactions from the lens of individual subjectivity — not consciousness, Charles, so the study of “mind” is pretty irrelevant to the way literature approaches these problems. They would not offer “corrections” or even contributions to those questions because the subject matter is defined so differently. It’s rigorous, but it’s not in the least bit “scientific.”
I’m curious to know what you think about this article, Charles?
I guess I tend to be suspicious of the social sciences not because I don’t believe their data but because I think science in general often makes overreaching claims to authority, and I think authoritative claims about social phenomena can be very destructive. They influence social change in ways that can shut down and shut off avenues of human expression and existence, and they do it from a position of privilege. That concerns me. If we were a culture of people who embraced pluralistic explanations for phenomena and didn’t seek certainty, this wouldn’t be a problem, but we’re not. We do seek certainty (or we eschew it altogether in some anti-intellectual false pluralism that’s just no understanding at all…)
Scientific authority intervenes in that cultural fabric in ways that make great sense for systems where there’s simple causality: virus causes disease, exercise improves heart function. But it makes less sense for systems where the causality is very complex and recursive, and I think not only is science not capable of acknowledging the limitations of the method in culturally meaningful ways, but also people aren’t really capable of hearing that message even if science was able to send it.
Ah, well, everyone has their own myopia, surely.
You manage to make religion and philosophy and literature have nothing to say about the mind by insisting that the mind only means what particular researchers say it means. I’m not familiar with that particular research, sure. Does that mean that mind is only what you say it is because it’s what you say it is? I’m not especially convinced.
Why exactly is mind only about cognitive development? Or memory tasks? Do any of your theories really contradict the idea that consciousness is constituted by desire? Or by the relation to the law? Or the image of consciousness presented by James Joyce or Virginia Woolf? Or, say, Zen ideas that the only mind is no mind? Those aren’t falsifiable ideas; they’re poetic insights. About the mind.
You’re accusing me of myopia, but you want to put the term “mind” in a box and keep it for your friends and your friends only. Everyone else lacks the professional expertise to discuss the matter, yes? And yet I’m supposed to be the one looking at my navel. But that’s science, I guess — count the pieces of belly button lint and insist you’ve discovered something about the center of the world….
Oh; the one topic in mind research I have read a bit about is AI research. The idea that that stuff is more rigorous than Freud seems…well, the evidence is shaky, let’s say.
Noah: the specific Freudian “insight” I claimed as obvious was the one you were actually talking about. Viz. the insight that “religion has something to do with law, guilt and fathers”. I repeat: it’s patently obvious that that’s true of Judaeo-Christian religion, and it’s patently false that it’s true of religion in general, even granting the possibility of symbolic distortion.
As to the other two “insights” you mention. Well, Freud didn’t originate the idea that much of cognition is unconscious. That has a strong tradition in German thought, notably in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. (Freud vehemently denied that he was influenced by either of those two, to an extent that makes me think he doth protest too much). Even Kant — the all-time arch-rationalist — thought that motivation was unconscious; there’s a passage in the Grounding where he says (something like) the hidden wellsprings of action are unknowable. (You might think that was due to his general transcendentalism, but I think that’s a mistake, for reasons that would bore everyone if I detailed them).
So, okay, maybe Freud didn’t originate the idea, but maybe he took it out of the realm of philosophy and into scientific and therapeutic psychology. Only, he didn’t do that either. Charcot and Janet got there before him, as Henri Ellenberger demonstrates at great, great, great and tedious length in The Discovery of the Unconscious.
So, okay, maybe he didn’t originate the idea, and maybe he didn’t introduce it into psychology, but maybe he at least popularised it. Well, that may be right. But that hardly makes him a great thinker. Richard Dawkins popularised GC Williams’ gene-selectionism; Herbert Spencer popularised Darwin’s theory of selection; Robert Chambers popularised the theory of common descent; James Gleick popularised chaos theory. None of those guys is what you’d call a great thinker.
Moreover, Freud only popularised the unconscious by thoroughly mischaracterizing it in such a way that it appealed to people’s natural intuitions about psychology. Freud’s innovative move wasn’t to give us a revolutionary way of thinking about the unconscious, but to say that unconscious thought was fundamentally the same as conscious thought. (Yeah, I know that’s 180-degrees different from the standard interpretation of Freud; I’ll provide grounds for it if you really want me to).
So much for the unconscious — whew. As for the idea that the self isn’t unitary, well, there again, Freud didn’t originate that idea, either. Hume argues precisely that, pace Descartes, ‘“I think therefore I am” is false because there isn’t an “I”’ (I’m quoting you here). That’s in the Treatise, I think, or else the Enquiry, or maybe both; I can’t recall. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nietzsche argued much the same, although I can’t remember enough of his work to say for sure. And what’s more, I’d argue again that Freud popularised the non-unitary self only by mischaracterizing it in such a way that it appeals to people’s intuitive ideas about psychology.
So there.
I don’t think those ideas were as intuitive as you think they were before Freud made them intuitive. They’re intuitive because of Freud.
Freud’s a great thinker and a great writer. He had tons of bizarre ideas and put them together in odd and original ways. The Oedipus complex is pretty weird and brilliant; it gets at something about the relations between fathers and sons and mothers which is counterintuitive but really a productive way to think about culture and emotions and sexuality.
How can you mischaracterize the subconscious exactly? It either doesn’t exist or it’s a metaphor. It’s like saying he mischaracterizes the soul.
I don’t think it’s obvious that Christianity is about fathers in the way Freud said. It’s obvious now, certainly. I don’t think it’s obvious that children are sexual, and that that matters. I don’t think it’s obvious that dreams are a link to the subconscious, or that desire structures the unconscious. All that stuff is obvious now, of course, because we’re so steeped in Freud.
I disagree with Freud about lots of things. Like lots of folks, though, I’ve found his writing productive and interesting. Hardly anyone invents anything, and obviously he got lots of things from other philosophers — but even your note about that (protesting too much) rather points to Freudian anxiety of influence, doesn’t it?
Maybe I should add…the last book of Freud’s I read was the case study of Dora, which I thought was pretty evil and depressing. It was evil and depressing in interesting ways, though.
People have hated Freud pretty much from the moment he put pen to paper. I guess it’s kind of comforting to know that that’s still the case….
Finally, re: the brouhaha over understanding the mind scientifically…Wittgenstein somewhere says something like, eventually all philosophical disputes end up with one or both sides reduced to grunting and thumping their fist on the table. “But, damn it, there is such a thing as free will!” “Damn it, no there isn’t!” I fear that we’ve already reached that point in the debate between me and Charles, on one side, and Noah and Caro on the other. I’m a methodological naturalist (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#MetNat), and Charles seems to be one too. Noah and Caro aren’t. This probably isn’t because we carefully weighed the considerations on each side and respectively came to a reasoned conclusion; it’s more likely a matter of temperament or intellectual training or (almost certainly) both.
That said, I’ll thump my fist on the table a few more times, what the hell. It seems to me that plenty of folks “on your side” (as it were) make all sorts of empirical claims about how the mind actually works, and that those claims, once we’ve tested them empirically, appear to be false. I mentioned a couple of false empirical claims by Freud; I could keep doing that, literally, all day long.
Even Lacan, for instance, seems to have made empirical claims about minds. Everything I know about Lacan, I learned from the back of a cereal box, but he makes claims about the age at which children recognize themselves in mirrors, right? Wikipedia says he puts that developmental stage at 6-18 months (and if wikipedia says, then it must be true). Empirical claim about actual childhood development; eminently testable by “science”. And once tested, it seems to be false; that developmental stage seems to occur later, around 24 months. (Admittedly, I don’t know either Lacan or the relevant empirical developmental psychology well enough to make definitive judgements here).
Durkheim makes claims about the function of religion, viz. that it’s to increase social cohesion. (You folks like Durkheim, I hope?) Again, empirical claim, can be tested empirically, albeit with some difficulty. The jury’s still out on whether it’s true or false.
I’ll say just one thing more. I don’t think that flagrantly false claims about empirical matters give us much, if any, insight into the things they’re claims about. By “flagrantly false”, I mean things which are not just false, but also have low verisimilitude (i.e. aren’t even close to the truth). Aristotelian physics is flagrantly false. There’s no distinction between sub- and super-lunary matter; sub-lunary objects don’t have a “telos” of falling downwards; things don’t fall faster depending on their mass; etc. Intelligent design, aka creationism, is also flagrantly false. The features of organisms; their biogeographical distribution; their taxonomic diversity; etc. etc. — none of these things are the product of intelligent design.
No one thinks Aristotelian physics gives us important insights, poetic or otherwise, into how matter works. No one thinks creationism gives us important insights into how living things are. So why should we think that flagrantly false theories about how minds work give us important insights into how minds work? I’ll say again: my fifth-dimensional theory about the origin of religion doesn’t tell us anything about how religion actually started. Likewise, Freud’s theories don’t tell us anything about how minds work, or how culture works, or how civilization began, or anything else (except for the few things he did get right).
“No one thinks creationism gives us important insights into how living things are.”
Not sure what you mean by “no one.” There wouldn’t be any evolutionary theory without intelligent design. Really, there woudn’t; Darwin was heavily indebted to Paley in the way he structured his argument and the way he thought.
The problem is that insisting over and over that these extremely abstruse and not especially testable theories are absolutely right and everything else is wrong pretty much boils down to assertion. More, the scientific epistemology is hopelessly naive even as science. Rejected theories are often the basis for accepted theories; pathways not taken come back all the time and teach us something new. Claiming that imagining new ways of thinking or engaging with scientifically wrong but perhaps poetically interesting ideas tells us nothing — who are you to say? Are you sure you wouldn’t be the guy standing on the tower of piza shouting at Galileo that Copernicus was disproved and could teach us nothing? Don’t you think it’s maybe just a wee bit intellectually arrogant to dismiss entire traditions of thought on the grounds that they don’t happen to fit very well with your preferred paradigm.
Mind and civilization and culture aren’t equations. Sometimes even equations aren’t equations. There’s lots to dislike about Freud; Lacan was often wrong (when you could even figure out what he was saying); I don’t give a crap about Durkheim (and his theory sounds silly to me, for what that’s worth.) But so what? I’m not their mother; I don’t need to defend or even like everything they said. I often find their thought productive and interesting; it clicks with me as to the way the world works, and this culture works, and my own brain works, and movies and literature work, not always, but sometimes. I find them a lot more interesting, and a lot more subtle, than a worldview which demands to delineate once and for all the boundaries of mind, of culture, of life, and of the soul. But, as you say, different strokes for different folks.
To keep going on Freud…
1) I don’t hate Freud. I just think that most of his theories were false; and not just false, but flagrantly false. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t doing science; it doesn’t mean he was doing bad science; it doesn’t mean he was a bad guy. It means that his theories were false. I agree that he was a great writer, one of the all-time great writers of science. It’s just a shame that he mostly wrote things that were false. To quote Joe Brown, nobody’s perfect.
2) You can mischaracterize the unconscious by saying that it has features XYZ when, in fact, it doesn’t have features XYZ. I would be mischaracterizing the unconscious if I said that it was made out of jelly, or only worked between 11.57 and 11.58 AM on alternate Wednesdays, or that only people with blue eyes had one, or…likewise, Freud mischaracterized the unconscious by claiming that it operated entirely via a belief-desire structure.
3) “I don’t think it’s obvious that Christianity is about fathers in the way Freud said”. I believe in the historicity of ideas as much as the next history of science grad. But I also think that a religion which worships the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and which repeatedly calls God a “father” is pretty obviously “about” fathers. And the other, non-obvious things he said about religion (e.g. that it’s a symbolic expiation of unconscious guilt which we inherited from our ancestors) appear to be false.
4) No, it’s not intuitive that children are “sexual”, whatever, exactly, that means. I never said it was. Nor is it intuitive that children pass through four developmental stages of sexuality, or that fixations at those stages affect later personality traits and paraphilias, or that there’s a latency period between the ages of six and twelve, or that the mature form of female sexuality is a genital one and that clitoral orgasms are sexually immature, or that girls and women suffer from penis envy. None of that is intuitive or obvious. Then again, none of it is true, either.
5) That dreams are a link to the unconscious may not be intuitive. That dreams have “meaning” to be “interpreted” is very intuitive. Freud’s theory of dreams was explicitly a reaction against then-current psychological theories of dreaming which didn’t attribute “meaning” to them, but instead explained them in quasi-mechanical terms. (The sort of explanation that you might make today if you said dreams were the product of neurons misfiring, say). But the main thesis of Interpretation of Dreams isn’t that dreams are a link to the unconscious. The main thesis is, specifically, that dreams are disguised fulfilments of childhood wishes. That seems to me to be false, too.
6) I don’t even know what it means to say that “desire structures the unconscious”, so I have no idea whether it’s intuitive or not. But if it means something like “the unconscious produces behaviour which fulfils desires”, then I think that’s appealing to something very, very intuitive in our theories about behaviour and minds (what psychologists call “folkpsychology”). To wit, the idea that all behaviour is an attempt to fulfil desires.
No, it’s not intuitive that “parapraxes”, mental disorders, cultural systems, etc. are attempts to satisfy desire. But it’s very intuitive that human behaviour is such an attempt, so it’s very intuitively appealing that even apparently non-motivated behaviour is likewise such an attempt.
That’s not to say it’s obvious, or that people thought so before Freud. It is to say that Freud is appealing to our intuitive ways of explaining behaviour. Freud didn’t revolutionise the way we think about thought; he expanded the way we think about thought into areas where we previously didn’t apply it. That’s why Freud’s ideas caught on, both with the general public and with intellectual culture. That’s why Freudian theory persists today outside of academic psychology, and other false theories like phlogiston theory or behaviourism generally don’t.
Nah. It persists because phlogiston is about physics, which works really differently than philosophy, which is what Freud was writing about.
Your last paragraph seems like complete gibberish to me, honestly. On what basis is Freud intuitive exactly? Because people still believe him. Why do they believe him? Because he’s intuitive. All you’ve got really is appeals to common sense on the basis of which you say stuff is common sense. It’s like the ontological proof of God; there to convince you if you’re already convinced.
Or, you know, as another possibility, maybe Freud revolutionized the way we think about thought by taking ideas that were around and applying them in new and unique ways, which is how most revolutions work — ideas don’t just generate spontaneously, y’know? And maybe his ideas are still useful because he combined intuition and insights in ways that are still exciting and interesting many years later. Even though they’re not science.
“I would be mischaracterizing the unconscious if I said that it was made out of jelly, or only worked between 11.57 and 11.58 AM ”
Not if the unconscious doesn’t exist you wouldn’t. The unconscious isn’t a cell-phone (except maybe metaphorically.) You can’t mischaracterize something that’s a metaphor. I don’t think it’s all that useful or interesting to claim the unconscious only works at certain times of day (other than being kind of funny.) Saying the unconscious is a jelly is more fun, but not nearly as interesting as what Freud did with it.
Incidentally, the idea that all behavior was based around an attempt to fulfill desires (and especially sexual desires) was so not intuitive that it freaked people the fuck out when Freud first introduced it, or so is my understanding. It’s a measure of his success that you now dismiss him on the basis of the fact that his primary assertion is so well-established that you can’t even imagine what it was like before people believed it as part of common sense. Such are paradigm shifts, I guess.
Well, as I said, I doubt there’s much headway to be made between the “Yay science!” and “Boo science!” camps. For the record, I think that science is massively irrational, ideologically inflected, limited at any given time by its historical situatedness, socially constructed, heavily influenced by sociological and psychological factors etc., and furthermore that there’s no unitary scientific method, that it’s difficult or impossible to demarcate science from other disciplines, etc. But, to paraphrase Churchill on democracy, I still think science is the worst way of finding out truths except for all the other ways. *Thumps the table*
As for Galileo and Copernicus, the reason that Copernicus’ theories are valuable is that, as a matter of fact, the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around. If Ptolemaic geocentrism were true, Copernican heliocentrism would be much less valuable, perhaps to the point of having no (epistemic) value.
Mendelian genetics is false. But it was closer to the truth than Darwin’s theory of inheritance, and is thus more (epistemically) valuable. Newtonian physics is false. But it’s better than Aristotle. Einsteinian relativity will probably turn out to be false. But it’s better than Newton. Contemporary high church cognitive science will turn out to be false in many ways (and I say this a fully-fledged member of the congregation). But it’s better than behaviourism, or the humoural theory. Quantum physics circa 1925 was better the Rutherford model of the atom. Quantum physics circa 2010 is (I presume) better yet. And so on. False theories can be plenty epistemically valuable, primarily by being closer to the truth than currently available alternative theories.
As for the importance of creationism, well, I think it’s historically false that there wouldn’t be evolutionary theory without it. Both Hume and, IIRC, Lucretius (him again?) offer kinds of evolutionary theories (albeit very bad ones). Both were writing before Paley’s “watchmaker” argument. Lamarck published his first statements of evolutionary theory around the same time as Paley published the watchmaker argument, but was probably not influenced by him. Okay, there were statements of the argument from design before Paley, but still.
Now, Paley’s influence on Darwin is more interesting, but I still think it’s false that neither he nor Wallace (who basically independently invented the same theory as Darwin, around roughly the same time) would have invented evolutionary theory without Paley. (They may not have invented it without Malthus, but that’s a different matter). Darwin’s theory has two main parts: (i) the hypothesis that all organisms are derived from common ancestors; and (ii) the hypothesis that the distribution of traits and organisms, as well as other biological phenomena, is best explained by natural selection, in combination with some other (perhaps weaker) evolutionary forces. Neither of those hypotheses depend on the thought that organisms were designed by an intelligent creator; indeed they contradict that thought.
What Paley did do, and creationism more generally does, was to emphasise the appearance of design in organisms. The argument from design essentially says “Organisms are really well suited to their environments; how could that happen unless it were intentionally designed?” This leads, particularly in Britain, to an emphasis on explaining the appearance of design. Paley, and similar creationists, provide an explanandum for evolutionary theories to explain. “Oh yeah, mister smarty-pants evolutionist? Well, how do you explain this?” But there are also other things for evolutionary theory to explain, and Darwin or Wallace still might well have invented evolutionary theory to explain those other things (instead of inventing it to explain those other things and the appearance of design).
Meanwhile, on the Continent, biologists were much less concerned with explaining the appearance of design, and much more interested in explaining development and heredity. If Darwin had been French or German, he probably wouldn’t have spent so much time explaining the appearance of design. So certainly Paley influences the things Darwin thinks he has to explain, but not, I think, to the point that Darwin wouldn’t have invented the theory without him.
Okay, let’s work through this. Re: the unconscious as a metaphor…the dichotomy you presented upthread is false.
(Hey — a false dichotomy! Surely I get some dialectical points for accusing you of that…sorry)
You say that the unconscious “either doesn’t exist or it’s a metaphor”. That seems wrong to me. Either the unconscious doesn’t exist, or it does. That is, either there really is thought which is unconscious, or there really isn’t. Either you really have unconscious thoughts of the kind “I want to kill daddy and fuck mummy” or you don’t.
Now, if there isn’t really (or, better yet, literally) an unconscious, there is a further question: is there metaphorically an unconscious, or isn’t there?
I’m neither a philosopher of language, a linguist or a semiotician. So I have, to a near approximation, no</strong) theory about how metaphor works, much less a theory of its truth-conditions. So I don't really know how to assess the question "is there metaphorically an unconscious?" or (perhaps you'd prefer this formulation) how to assess the claim that the unconscious is a useful metaphor for thinking about the mind.
But I hope we can agree that the status of the unconscious as a metaphor isn't an alternative to its literal existence, but is actually predicated on its non-existence. If the unconscious literally exists, then it isn’t a metaphor for how the mind really works; it is how the mind works.
So the options are really threefold: (1)The unconscious exists; (2.1) the unconscious doesn’t exist and isn’t a good metaphor; and (2.2)the unconscious doesn’t exist but is a good metaphor.
Now, I still think you can…well, maybe not mischaracterize a metaphor, but at least deploy an inapt metaphor. Like, if I say that Noah is a basketball — round, orange and bouncy — that doesn’t strike me as an apt metaphor. (Maybe you know things about yourself that I don’t, and think that it’s a good metaphor!) On the other hand, some metaphors are apt; I suppose they’re apt because the things they’re comparing are genuinely alike in salient ways. (But, as I said, I’m not at all qualified to say how metaphor works, so I’ll leave open the possibility that its something else entirely that makes metaphors apt).
So then the question becomes twofold: (1) Does the unconscious actually exist? and (2) If it doesn’t exist, is it an apt metaphor to use in thinking about the mind? I happen to think that that the answer to (1) is “yes”, although I disagree strongly with Freud about the exact nature of the unconscious. In fact, I think you’d have to either (a) be crazy or (b) have an inappropriately restrictive definition of “thought”, to deny that there’s unconscious thought, and lots of it. But I think that that seems obvious to me, not because of Freud, but because of the cognitivism that arose in psychology from the late 1950s onward as a response to behaviourism. My reasons for believing in unconscious thought are that, basically, there doesn’t seem to be any other way to explain phenomena like language comprehension and production, vision, social psychology, etc. Not because I think there’s lots of unconscious desires of the kind posited by Freud. (I do think there are lots of unconscious desires, and that some of them are of the kind posited by Freud, but not all of them, or even most of them, are).
So I have a hard time answering the second question, “If the unconscious doesn’t exist, is it an apt metaphor to use in thinking about the mind?” because I think the antecedent is false. If there isn’t an unconscious, which I think there certainly is, I can’t see how it could be useful metaphor for thinking about the mind works. But perhaps I could be enlightened on this.
Stupid html tags…
This whole dichotomy “either the unconscious exists or it doesn’t” stuff seems weird to me. Especially here on a blog about a largely fictional artistic medium.
I mean, Oz doesn’t really exist. Nor does Avalon, or Metropolis. But they’re metaphors for things that really exists (even multiple somethings). But they’re also things that “exist” as fictions. Their existence is materially “false” but it wouldn’t make sense to say they don’t exist. They exists as metaphors and as ideas.
Just because Freud initially advanced the unconscious as a material thing doesn’t make it stop existing once its material reality is no longer taken seriously…
I think post-Freudianism is great for talking about things that exist without any material existence. Those things don’t follow science, which is about material things. Trying to make science apply to non-material things is going to work in some ways and not work in other ways…
Hey Jones. The argument about false theories and their use is central to Feyerabend. Your common sense argument (he’d say) is basically naive. All theories are more flawed than you’re claiming, and theories don’t actually replace each other by being better than one another, but through paradigm shifts that do some things better and some things worse. I’d recommend reading Against Method, if you’re interesting. You might find it fun to raise your blood pressure.
It’s hard to say whether Paley was essential to Darwin, fair enough. He was certainly essential to the questions Darwin asked and the way he asked them. That’s a lot of how evolution came to be…so, in terms of your first point, I think the argumetn holds — that is, intelligent design is not worthless, but is in fact central to the development of evolution as we know it. Claiming that Copernicus was only valuable because he was right rather begs the question. Perhaps another discredited theory will turn out to be right because it’s right. If you automatically dump all those theories as worthless from the get go, science never has the chance to use them to advance, yes?
The problem is that you’re thinking of metaphors as wrong or right. A better move would be productive or not productive, I think. And Freud’s metaphors have been hugely productive for art, for philosophy, for religion — and even in science as well, if only to open up questions to be shot down.
Metaphors are aesthetic; they’re judged not on whether they’re apt but on the things that aesthetics are judged on, which are pretty hard to pin down.
It’s hard to know exactly what it means that there’s an unconscious because consciousness is pretty thoroughly ill defined. What is consciousness? Philosophers have been trying to figure that out for as long as we’ve had philosophers. They still can’t even figure out whether a Turing test makes any sense, as far as I can figure. Since consciousness is extremely ill-defined, it seems to me quite, quite difficult to say that some thought is unconscious and some is conscious in any way that makes sense. You can use metaphors or something like it to describe what you think is going on, but it’s all fairly arbitrary, as near as I can tell. Saying Freud “mischaracterizes” the unconscious suggests that you have a really good idea of what the unconscious is. And if you do, you’re quite far ahead of the rest of us, who I’m pretty sure don’t.
The way I’d say it’s a useful metaphor is that is splits consciousness in two; upper layer and lower layer (another metaphor) and argues that we lack access to one (in some ways) but (in other ways) there is commerce between them. Same with id, ego, superego; you split consciousness up into different parts in order to talk about motivations and ideas. I’d argue it’s all basically metaphor because, again, what we actually know about this stuff is pretty limited — much less than we know about gravity, for example, and we don’t really know how that works either.
Re: desire structuring the unconscious. The point here is that desire structures the self. The individual is created by desire, not the other way around. Freud could actually be read as saying something like, “It wants, therefore I am.” People don’t desire; desire peoples. The idea that what you want makes you who are rather than the other way around is very counter-intuitive; deeply anti-humanist, and a pretty great way to think about (for example) why people behave like they do, why art is structured the way it is, why societies are set up as they are — just tons of stuff. Does it explain everything always? Of course not. But it’s a really creative and powerful way to think about lots of things.
A lot of points here; I’ll have to cherry-pick or else my response will be even longer than my previous diatribes.
Caro first. I find “existence” talk a little hazy, even though I suppose I introduced it into the discussion. I prefer to talk in terms of truth, I guess. So let’s go.
It’s either true that there’s unconscious thought or it’s false. And it’s either true that unconscious thought is as described by Freud, or it’s false. Likewise it’s either true that there’s an Oz with a wizard, or it’s false. And it’s either true that there’s a Sherlock Holmes, or that there are unicorns, or that there are fifth-dimensional fairies, and so on, or it’s false. Or you can say that either these things are real, or they ain’t.
Separate from the question of the truth-simpliciter of these propositions is the question of their truth-according-to-various-fictions. E.g. it’s true-according-to-the-fictions-of-Arthur-Conan-Doyle that Sherlock Holmes. And it’s true-according-to-the-fictions-of-Frank-Baum that Oz exists. It’s *not* true-according-to-the-fictions-of-Arthur-Conan-Doyle that Oz exists, since Conan Doyle is (a) describing a fictional world where there seems to be no magic and (b) writing before the idea of Oz was invented.
Separate from *that* question is the question whether it’s true that there are ideas/concepts/thoughts about various things. (NB: I don’t think that ideas/concepts/thoughts are the same thing, or that that list exhausts the relevant mental entities) It’s true that there are ideas about Sherlock Holmes, and ideas about Oz; although that wasn’t true a thousand years ago. (I’m assuming that ideas/etc. are mental entities, and not e.g. Platonic forms; that there aren’t other planets with aliens thinking about Holmes and Oz; etc.)
None of what I’ve said so far should be controversial.
Now, how does the unconscious fare on each of these three questions? First, I think it’s true that there’s an unconscious, but I think it’s false that there’s a Freudian unconscious (FU).
Now, is it true-according-to-various-fictions that there’s a FU? Yes, it certainly is. There are many fictions produced post-Freud which have described people with a psychology with a Freudian unconscious. Since I believe there isn’t really a FU, I interpret these fictions as science-fiction or fantasy.
Now the third question: are there ideas about the FU? Obviously there are. This entire discussion would be meaningless – as in, it would literally make no sense whatsoever — if we didn’t each have ideas (possibly not the same one) about the FU. I would have to be either insane, deeply ignorant or deeply confused to deny that there are ideas about the FU. I don’t think I’m either of the first two, and I hope that I’m not the third; ergo, I don’t deny it.
Now to Noah.
My undergraduate degree was in philosophy, and in the history and philosophy of science. So I’ve read Feyerabend. And I’ve read various post-Feyerabendian people in “science and technology studies” and the “sociology of scientific knowledge” whose views would make Feyerabend’s hair curl. I’m just not convinced by many of their views.
I should back off from the claim that scientific theories only have epistemic value to the extent that they have verisimilitude. I never actually said that, just that lower verisimilitude leads to lower epistemic value, which I stand by. But if I gave the impression of making the stronger claim, I retract it.
There may well be aspects of epistemic value, other than verisimilitude. One is whether something leads to truer/more productive/more progressive (in Lakatos’ sense)/whatever research. Even there, greater verisimilitude will (ceteris paribus) generally lead to more good research. But there are lots of other things which can also lead to good research, and it’s often a matter of historical accident. As far as I can tell, Malthus was wrong that, as a matter of mathematical necessity, populations expand geometrically and the capacity for food production expands arithmetically. Nonetheless, his work was crucial in the development of Darwin’s and Wallace’s theories. So his work has some epistemic value — it led to (partially) true theories! — despite having low verisimilitude.
Another thing that I don’t believe, and haven’t said anything to commit myself to: that successive scientific “paradigms” replace earlier ones by being true. As I said, I think many of our current scientific theories are going to turn out to be false. You should think that, if you know anything about the history of science, where most scientific theories ever have turned out to be false. (This is known in philosophy of science as the “pessimistic meta-induction”).
There are plenty of instances in the history of science where truer theories have been replaced by falser ones. In the 1910s and 1920s, most developmentalists thought that Mendelian genetics and the discovery of chromosomes disproved Darwinian natural selection. Behaviourism replaced pre-behavioural, pseudo-cognitivist psychology .
As to present-day science, I don’t know much about it outside of psychology. But even there I could list plenty of current scientific views that have replaced earlier ones and that I think are false. e.g. I think it’s false that there’s a Fodorian language of thought. I think it may be false that representations are non-distributed. I think it’s false, in some cases, that you need a load of “innate” knowledge to develop various capacities such as causal cognition. I think that the evidence for the influence of parental behvaiour on childhood development is flawed. I think it was a mistake to suppose that thought processes in Western psychology (aka homo psychologicus) are cross-culturally universal. Etc. etc.
I don’t even think scientific “paradigms” replace one another by dint of having more verisimilitude (i.e. by being “closer to the truth”). It’s just as much a matter of luck, sociological pressures, etc.
But I also think that, luckily for us, there have been cases where later “paradigms” have more verisimilitude. In some cases that has been because the evidence in their favour is greater. This was eventually the case for heliocentrism, although it may not have been true at the time of Copernicus, or even of Galileo. I think it was also the case for the theory of Darwinian evolution in the 19C, and for some aspects of the neo-Darwinism that emerged in the 1930s in response to resurgent anti-Darwinian theories.
That some replacement theories are “truer” than their replaced theories is a contingent fact about how things have actually turned out. It’s certainly not a necessary result of doing science. It may or may not be made more likely by doing the “scientific method” (whatever the hell that is) than by doing other things — I’m agnostic about that, I guess. Here endeth the lecture about history and philosophy of science.
If many theories are false, though, and you don’t know which ones are false, how can you tell which disgarded theories have greater or lesser epistemic value? It’s all largely a crapshoot at that point, isn’t it?
Otherwise that all seems reasonable enough. (My MA thesis was on Paley and his links to Darwin, for what that’s worth.)
I think, as Caro sort of implies, you go a lot farther with Freud thinking of his work as stories or metaphors than thinking of it as science. He insisted it was science himself, of course, because he wanted that prestige and was (like many a philosopher) enamored by the (promise of) rigor. But most of what he was talking about was aspects of human consciousness which aren’t particularly amenable to rigorous science. As a result, most of your efforts to approach this in a rigorous way (he must be right or wrong; it has to be a metaphor or it doesn’t; it can’t tell us anything about the unconscious unless it’s right; etc.) seem to be elaborately missing the point, at least from my perspective.
I really can’t imagine what it would be like to know more things with unassailable certainty than the rest of mankind ever in history. It’s like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix waking up and saying ‘I know kung fu.” It seems like an intolerable burden.
Is everyone familiar with the distinction between “ontic” and “ontological?” Per Heidegger, there are things that are actual, reality we deal with and can measure or sniff or lick or whatever, and there are things we understand to be the case. Cognitive science has the mystical appeal of fusing the ontic with ontology, but that’s sort of the thrust of Western rationalism generally. It’s an extremely powerful structure (power is what it deploys more than truth, I’d argue; as a non-pragmatist, I don’t equate the two).
Speaking of mystical appeal. did someone say something at some point about cognitive science research unearthing proof that 7 is a magic number? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure someone with tenure could prove it.
And yes, I do appreciate penicillin and believe in evolution. I would just argue that I could hardly even think to do otherwise.
Jones, I’m not sure the shift from existence to truth really is that much of a shift: you’re just replacing the noun existence with the linking verb “is” which is a verb denoting, well, existence…and then wrapping it with the true/false either/or.
I mean, saying:
“It’s either true that there’s unconscious thought or it’s false”
is the same thing as saying
“it’s either true that there exists unconscious thought or it is false.”
My point (I think) is that “truth” is a wonky concept when we’re talking about a thing whose existence, whose being, is fictional. Truth in the real world is beholden to different standards than truth in a fictional one — especially a fantasy one. I’m not sure it matters all that much whether the story is science fiction or fantasy or just plain fiction.
I think the boundaries between novels are artificial – my imagination, my creativity, can combine them or inflect them infinitely without any damage to their “existence,” because it was fictional to begin with. So if I recombine them in odd ways, non-characteristic ways, what truth has been violated? Especially if that recombination is inspirational rather than the outcome…that’s imaginative synthesis. That’s influence. I think we could in a matter of minutes come up with myriad examples of works of art that boil down to a combination of “x truth according to the fictions of author y” and “z truth according to the fictions of author a” — and the result would possibly just be another great fiction (or at least, a perfectly acceptable fanfic crossover, ouch.) But I’m thinking more along the lines of, say, the combination of sources in Hamlet.
I mean, there is internal rigor and consistency that’s violated, but that’s artificial anyway. And I don’t mean to stop you from thinking about all this from a scientific vantage point if it interests you. For me, though, when I reach for Lacan or Zizek, I’m just not looking for that kind of externally oriented scientific explanation…I’m looking for heuristics that help me see where something in one fiction illuminates something in another.
Just to note: I’m almost certain Charles would agree with the last point. He’s better with Zizek than I am.
I think he just thinks I’m going too far in saying Freud has something to say about mind in addition to fiction — or maybe I’m wrong in thinking that science doesn’t have a lot to say about mind? We may just be at semantics here; I was sort of pushing brain to biology and using mind to mean all the aspects of conciousness that aren’t reducible to biology…. I don’t know if that will assuage Charles’ wrath or not, though….
OH! I forgot to mention… I’m reading a thing by unrepentant Lacanian Julia Kristeva, who mentions (possibly ignorantly, but let that be my eternal caveat) that the Islamic conception of God has significant parallels with the Prime Mover of Aristotle’s Physics. That should cause some sputtering.
I tend to hear Charles as saying that all aspects of consciousness are ultimately reducible to biology…which, especially when you extend it to the products of consciousness and to communication, is somewhere between nonsense and reductio ad absurdum to me. I know the schtick of cog sci is that notion that all the stuff they study really is material and appropriate for scientific study, but I just have problems with the absolute disavowal of the idea that thoughts are non-material. Ideas are more than emergent properties of axons — especially once they’re written down and shared.
I saw this ridiculous article today about some scientists trying to prove whether or not intercessory prayer actually helped heal people, and I just think that kind of thing is abjectly stupid, a complete waste of money and effort, and an utter and total mockery of the point of science. You’re either — if you don’t believe in God — trying to prove a placebo effect, which is problematic for all sorts of reasons, or — if you do believe in God, setting yourself up for Him to smack you down for your little faith.
Cog Sci does a similar orientation-of-subject-matter shell game with the definition of mind as linguistic philosophy (i.e., “mind” in cog sci is as specialized a term as “subject”), it just moves in the direction of material realism instead of abstract idealism (and leaves the ordinary signifier instead of flagging it as jargon).
So I guess I would say it this way, Noah: science has something to say about the mind as science defines it. But I agree with you that there’s also something that’s excessive about the mind, over and above the scientific definition of it. That excess is most visible in things that are in some sense the residue of our minds, once our biological minds are removed from the equation — the art we create, the culture we inhabit. Thoughts, once externalized, are no longer properties of minds — they’re certainly not independent of minds, but trying to explain them in biological terms doesn’t get at the parts that aren’t biological, like the intersection between the individual mind — or subjectivity — and culture/history.
That’s a very literary terrain, and I think it’s not all that controversial to assert that science has very little to say about literature. Except that science has a lot to say about why the things that make literature work and work well are bad — that’s Bert’s well-said bit: “power is what it deploys more than truth.”
Bert: HA! My favorite Kristeva sputter-inducing comment is the one about Madame Mao being the most successful feminist fashion designer in history, having dressed a billion people — and put an end to foot binding.
That’s so great! It reminds me of Jello Biafra saying of metalheads (of whom I would number myself, in the dork subgenre) that no gym teacher ever got so many kids to dress alike.
Bert and Jello FTW!
I suspected that, if this thread ran long enough, someone would eventually bring up materialism/non-materialism — a table-thumping issue if ever there was one.
There are lots of things I’d object to in Caro’s characterization of cog sci…for one thing, there are plenty of cognitive scientists who work on culture — Joe Henrich, Dan Sperber and Shaun Nichols, Paul Rozin, Jon Haidt…to name just the first few that come to mind. For another, it’s not obvious that cog sci is necessarily “materialist” or “material realist” (I’m not even sure what the latter means). Dennett isn’t exactly a materialist and not a realist (at least not straightforwardly so), but he’s a kind of cognitive scientist. Kant was a sort of proto-cognitive scientist in some ways, but certainly not a realist. You can believe that thinking is computation without thinking that computation is material (although it may be materially instantiated). Chomsky is the archetypal cognitive scientist, but doesn’t think humans can ever explain consciousness. And so on.
The prayer study seems silly to me too, but not for the reasons Caro cites. It seems silly because there was an extremely high probability of a null result. But that’s not to say that it wasn’t worth doing. There are plenty of people who believe in an interventionist God, and that prayer is a reliable means of influencing him to intervene in your favour. There are many of those people in your own country (which I presume is the US). You may think their theology is idiotic, but it’s nonetheless the theology they hold. Many such people tout, as a matter of empirically observable evidence, the success of interventionist prayer: “My aunt Martha prayed every night…and her cancer was cured!” Such successes are routinely offered as evidence for God’s existence, benevolence and power.
It’s not stupid, abject, a mockery etc. to demonstrate that such anecdotes don’t add up to a robust empirical phenomenon. Again, you may think it’s stupid to expect God to demonstrate his existence that way, or to believe in an interventionist God, or to use miracles as evidence about God, or whatever. But it’s not stupid to debunk a widely held (even if stupid) belief.
Anyway, it seems to me that at this point we’re just table-thumping about either methodological naturalism or materialism, and that I’d just be repeating myself if I kept going. So I’m going to bow out of the discussion, which was quite enjoyable.
…you think someone who believes in an interventionist God is going to find that scientific study even the teensiest bit compelling as a debunking? That’s why it’s silly — it would only ever be convincing to people inclined to believe it anyway. I don’t happen to think they’re idiotic at all — I think the only idiocy is the idea that their faith will be affected even an infinitessimal amount by a scientific study that claims to prove their God isn’t directly involved in their well being. And for people who don’t have that faith…the study is probably self evident. Who is the audience for that ridiculous thing? People who think you need a scientific study for everything. Set some priorities, people.
Here’s Chomsky: “Cognitive science ought to be concerned — should be just a part of biology. It’s concerned with the nature, the growth, the development, maybe ultimately the evolution, of a particular subsystem of the organism, namely the cognitive system, which should be treated like the immune system or the digestive system, the visual system, and so on.”
That sounds pretty materialist to me!
Glad you enjoyed the discussion. Me too!
Can’t…resist…responding…
No, I don’t think such a study will convince interventionists that prayer doesn’t work. Any more than work showing that there’s no “innate” difference in intelligence between blacks and whites, or that blacks are no more likely to commit crime once you control for poverty and education etc., or that inter-racial genetic variation is swamped by intra-racial variation — any more than any of that work would convince a committed white bigot that blacks aren’t inferior.
What such work can do is remove evidential support for one side of the argument, which can defuse its dialectical strength. Like, a white bigot might say that blacks are inferior because they’re naturally stupider. If you can show that, actually, they’re not, you’ve potentially done something useful — you’ve shown to someone whose mind wasn’t already made up that the evidence for black inferiority isn’t as strong as the bigot claimed. That’s true even if you’re not going to change the bigot’s mind; even if he’ll (sic) probably just switch to some other “evidence” and keep on believing what he already believed.
Likewise with the religion study. Like it or not, people do use the efficacy of prayer as an argument for god’s existence, benevolence and power. If you can show that prayer isn’t reliably efficacious, you can reduce the strength of that argument (even if you’re not going to convert the committed theist into an atheist).
As for why the hell you would run that study as opposed to any of the other things you could be doing with your shell games and ordinary signifiers and whatnot…well, there have been various studies into intercessory prayer in recent years, so I don’t know which one you read about. But the most recent one that I know about, known as STEP, was funded by the Templeton Foundation.
Templeton is controversial in some quarters; many atheistically-minded folks think that they’re basically apologists for theism. That’s not quite their explicit mission statement, but I think it’s true about a lot (though not all) of the research they fund. (The wikipedia article on the foundation seems fairly balanced to me, based on what little I already know about it). So that particular study was funded by folks who wanted to show that prayer works. I have no idea whatsoever about the religious views of the actual researchers, or what their motivations were…beyond getting some of that sweet, sweet Templeton funding.
While people with varying belief systems may diverge on the issue of whether studies on prayer efficacy are A) meaningful and B) embarrassing to everyone involved, we can all certainly agree, if we have half a brain, that we know it’s not going to prove the efficacy of prayer scientifically. Speaking as a Christian and a self-described non-imbecile.
“You can believe that thinking is computation without thinking that computation is material”
Is “thinking as computation” ground zero for cognitive science? Am I wrong in thinking that the scientific evidence for that theory is extremely tendentious (again, I’ve read debates about AI, and the evidence there that thinking is computation seems pretty shaky…more a matter of faith one way or the other than evidence….)
Only 1 day and look at all the responses!
Caro: Regarding that article about diminishing significant findings in science, I’d say that if that causes skepticism in science (yes, it should), it’s hardly a defense of the truth claims of any literary or religious approach (which are even less concerned with replicability). My stats professor used to regularly go on about not publishing null results, and then just throw up his hands. I’m a pretty skeptical individual, but when it comes to the effects of drugs on the body, I’ll still place my bets on science. When I read Kafka as an atheist, it’s not so troubling if others don’t replicate my findings. (This, too, is a statistical problem in the dangers associated with false positives vs. false negatives.)
When you say, “the study of ‘mind’ is pretty irrelevant to the way literature approaches these problems,” you do realize you’re making a critical point about Noah’s summation (“I don’t find most of those approaches especially convincing as a way to talk about mind. It seems to me that literature or philosophy or religion tend to be more revealing and more thoughtful.”) and not my view that these various disciplines are talking about different things, don’t you? He’s the one dismissing cogntivism’s approach to the ‘mind’ based on literature and religion. My point was that these approaches don’t address any of the cogsci 101 subjects I mentioned. If cognitivism’s issues aren’t interesting to Noah, fine, but that’s different from saying that he didn’t find them convincing (which demands a literal comparison between the various approaches to the same subject).
Noah’s right, I agree with you here: “For me, though, when I reach for Lacan or Zizek, I’m just not looking for that kind of externally oriented scientific explanation…I’m looking for heuristics that help me see where something in one fiction illuminates something in another.”
Noah: “Does that mean that mind is only what you say it is because it’s what you say it is?”
No, not at all. I was merely pointing out (using the rationale that you’re now using) that you can’t dismiss cognitivism’s approach to the mind based on what religion and literature have said. As a literal truth claim, religion the world over is a lot of bunk, but as a set of ordering metaphorical systems, I don’t have any general problems with it, and often find truth in it. If a Catholic told me man is inherently a sinner, we’d probably agree. And, similarly, I wouldn’t criticize or dismiss Hegel because he didn’t properly address attentional capacity.
As a side note, you seem to be interchangeably using ‘subconscious’ and ‘unconscious’, which aren’t the same thing. The former is something that’s cognitively penetrable, that can be consciously changed, like our mental lexicon. The latter, at least in cognitive science, is impenetrable, like the perceptual system. That Freud made cognitively penetrable structures unconscious is a huge problem with his thinking, for a fairly obvious logical reason: if you can consciously change something, it isn’t unconscious. When people apply the unconscious as some structurally determining system, his illogic becomes more than metaphorically problematic.
Noah: “I was sort of pushing brain to biology and using mind to mean all the aspects of consciousness that aren’t reducible to biology”
Caro: “I tend to hear Charles as saying that all aspects of consciousness are ultimately reducible to biology”
Hmm, do I think consciousness is centered in the body and developed through the body’s interaction with the world? Yes. I’m not a dualist, at least, not in the traditional sense. I think a lot of people get the computer metaphor of cognitive science mixed up with robots and determinism, when, in fact (as Jones pointed out), there are a lot of cognitivists (including AI researchers) who are anti-reductionists and aren’t materialists in any traditional sense (I like methodological naturalism). I tend to not dismiss emergent properties, that the interaction between more basic elements creates something new to the world. But, I guess it’s possible that from a god’s eye view all emergent properties could be explained from the casual properties of the monads. Until we reach that level of explanation, I’m of the belief that consciousness is a immaterial causal property that has only arisen from particular biological systems. I also believe in free will in the libertarian sense. If I could give a conclusive argument for any of this, I’d be the greatest thinker in the history of mankind.
Out of time, but I’ll be back.
Charles, could you give an example of a difference between the subconscious and unconscious, and the way in which Freud got them mixed up?
I think you’re hearing me as being more opposed to cognitive science than I actually am. In my original quote, I was trying to say it was my subjective take or preference (“I don’t find” these approaches all that helpful or interesting.) I’m basing that, as I said, mostly on AI stuff, which when it tries to describe consciousness often seems boosterishly mechanistic in ways that seem really dumb to me. But I’m willing to back down/clarify and agree that science can point to interesting ideas about the mind (thinking about it more, that would have to be the case if I admit that it can tell us something about the brain.)
I do think that, as Caro and Bert said, there’s an impulse in science to make it seem like we know more about mind than we do…or at least to argue that we will eventually know a lot more than we do now, though I think even that is disputable. But I’m pretty sure Jones wouldn’t disagree with that, at least….
I don’t think Freud mixed them, but I don’t agree that it makes much sense to separate what he called the unconscious from the sub- or preconscious. Most people agree that we have the latter. But if you can consciously manipulate the unconscious (say, through therapy), it’s the subconscious (in the same way that through reading we add words to our mental lexicon).
And, again, I think you’re confusing all the talk about computers and the like with mechanistic philosophy. Let’s say consciousness arises from a network of nodes and connections. One view has it that there’s nothing particularly special about the material involved, but it has to do with the configuration and processing power. So, even if you don’t know how consciousness arises from such a configuration (that it’s an emergent property), you could get consciousness out of any material if you could configure it in a similar manner to our wetware. Not that I buy that — it’s an interesting idea and there are some AI researchers and theorists who do — but it’s certainly not accurately called a materialistic or reductionistic view of consciousness. I suppose it’s mechanistic in a way, but not like Descartes’ comparing the results of vivisection to those garden robots. I suspect you’d deem any attempt to understand causal origins of consciousness boosterishly mechanistic (unlike, what, Freud!?!). I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit and one that religion isn’t any better equipped at pursuing than it was with cosmology. What do you prefer, calling it magic, the soul, and moving on?
Training as a Lacanian, I was taught that, in terms of proper jargon, the word “subconscious” was not a properly psychoanalytic term and that unconscious meant something different.
Specifically what different I’m not sure, because I don’t understand what subconscious means. My sense is that the difference is that whereas the subconscious can be accessed — subconscious suggestion, etc. — the unconscious can’t actually be accessed at all: at least, that’s Lacan. It can be “traversed” through the various mechanisms of transference, but it’s not a “positive” part of your mind. It just denotes the internalization of the negative, the gap between the imaginary and the real, differance…insert your choice of signifier for the Hegelian negative here. So you can’t consciously manipulate the unconscious.
That’s basically what got Lacan thrown out of the psychoanalytic establishment: his “linguistic unconscious” rejected the very possibility of the psychoanalytic cure. He still took patients though — for 5 minute sessions. Oy.
Charles, I still don’t know how you’re distinguishing subconscious and unconscious. I even looked at Wikipedia, which told me the subconscious has no precise definition, which didn’t help, but made me feel maybe a little better. So…help? What’s the distinction you’re drawing between them?
Or even, what are you saying is the difference between the conscious and the subconscious. I sort of know what Freud means when he separates conscious and unconscious; the unconscious is all the stuff that motivates you that you deny (by not remembering, by disavowing, whatever.) It’s the layers of you that aren’t you but make you; the absence that is the is you aren’t. Which is why it seems weird to think of it as mechanistic; it’s so poetic and shrouded in myth and weirdness — Oedipus moves you, sure, but I don’t see how that makes him a machine?
Also it’s weird to think of Freud as boosterish. I guess if you want a boosterish Freudian you have to go through Jung and get Joseph Campbell — but Campbell really isn’t Freud. Freud didn’t see human beings as triumphant in any way, least in their search for knowledge. The only way he’d figure you could build a human brain would be to give it a sex organ and then cut it off, and while castrated robots are a singular image, they don’t exactly seem like the singularity.
As for causal origins of consciousness — saying religion or philosophy isn’t well-equipped to deal with that in the way cognitive science is seems tautological, since religion and philosophy doesn’t have much interest in dealing with it the way cognitive science does. Though, by the by, religion has done fine with cosmology as far as I can tell. I presume you’re eliding the difference between cosmology and astronomy, which is exactly the sort of heavy-handed squishing of meaning and mechanism which makes me a little skeptical of cognitive science’s ability to elucidate or replicate the meaning-making bit.
Though if they want to try, that’s cool. I don’t have any problem with it in principle as long as they’re not vivisecting rats (which they probably are, unfortunately. Thank goodness we’ve gotten rid of blood sacrifice, huh? But I digress….)
In terms of materialism — I’m sure I’m missing something, but saying that you could get consciousness by replicating wetware seems pretty thoroughly materialist. In what way is it not materialist? You’re saying consciousness is inherent in the material, even if you can’t understand how that material works precisely. Being a materialist doesn’t mean you understand everything, does it? It just means you assume that the things you don’t understand have material causes.
When did Descartes talk about vivisection and robots? Is that in Discourse on Method? Did I miss that? That sounds insane.
Caro, I think it would be best to have as short a session with Lacan as possible.
I remember Descartes talking about moving statues in a garden controlled by hydraulics, but I’m not sure where I got that. But here’s a relevant section from Meditations on robots (to which he compares the cries of animals being cut):
“In this case I do not fail to say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax; and yet what do I see from the window beyond hats and cloaks that might cover artificial machines, whose motions might be determined by springs? But I judge that there are human beings from these appearances, and thus I comprehend, by the faculty of judgment alone which is in the mind, what I believed I saw with my eyes.” — quoted from here
Regarding materialism: consciousness arises from the network of connections, not the material substance in which the connections are instantiated. This is a grounding assumption of transferring one’s mind into virtual reality on a machine, such as in Neuromancer. If consciousness were inherent in the material, a full transference wouldn’t be possible. I guess a fullblown religious dualist might still call that materialist, but I think materialism requires a belief in reductionism to be meaningful. If you think consciousness is a soul that’s just been arbitrarily attached to some material, then any attempts at a causal explanation involving the world are going to be materialist — but I don’t give any credence to religious explanations like that. There are thinkers who believe intentionality is a property of all material reality (Hans Jonas, David Chalmers). Is that materialist?
Regarding the subconscious: here’s a map I found. It’s the stuff that’s available to consciousness, but which is currently in the shade. Many of the ways the brain structures the way we perceive or think is truly unconscious. If we alter that (say, though ablation), we restructure and change, say, the way we talk or remember things. A talking therapy ain’t going to affect that, but a car crash might.
Regarding mechanism: energies popping up, being diverted to something else or repressed doesn’t sound mechanistic to you? Or what about a universal, ordered developmental sequence of the psyche which places people into categories depending on what forces shaped them early on?
It’s easier to call Freud mechanistic than boosterish. As far as my reading of him though…his categories are pretty permanently and often offered with some hesitation — and frequently revised. And, again, the main way he thinks about how people work is by referencing myths and stories. Libidinal energy is diverted and flows from place to place, so yeah, it’s something of a machine analogy — but the way it’s directed is irrational and unpredictable and often contradictory. If it’s a machine, it’s a machine which behaves like a neurotic — at which point it’s not clear why that would really be mechanistic. The bottom line is that Freud just isn’t a rationalist. That’s why his claims to be a scientist always seemed to me fairly easily separable from what he actually did. Psychoanalysis just never looked anything like a science, no matter how Freud tried to sell it.
Thanks for explaining subconscious. Subconscious is like brain reflexes, then; things we really don’t control. Do you just basically reject Freud’s idea of the unconscious; that people act on motivations that they’re not aware of, or have desires or relationships that shape their behavior in ways they aren’t privy too or that they don’t understand? Or are you saying that there’s conscious motivations and then there’s biological/neural hardwiring which we don’t control which is the subconscious, and that’s it? (I don’t know what the deal is,but I clicked on that map and it didn’t take me anywhere….)
I don’t see why materialism has to be especially reductionist…and it seems to me that if you’re talking about material connections you’re talking about materialism. Attributing intentionality to material reality would be dicey — I’d have to see exactly what they said. But you could argue that that’s what Marx does, and he pretty much defines materialism, soooo….
I’m probably a materialist, I think. I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in the world spirit, or whatever.
Thanks for the Descartes quote. I can’t believe I didn’t key into that. He’s such a nutcase, Descartes. I really enjoyed reading the Meditations — but it’s definitely a queasy kind of enjoyment when you realize, yep, this is modernity — our culture’s brain is this guy. And he’s kind of evil and insane.
Isn’t the subconscious just a different translation of unconscious… Or a worse one/
Like I said, Wikipedia doesn’t seem to think there’s a standard difference between them. Charles seems to be using them to distinguish between a cognitive science concept and a Freudian concept. I don’t think that’s general usage, but it may be current in cognitive science circles….?
Using them to distinguish between a biological and linguistic-psychoanalytic concept is in general usage in lit crit…but the linguistic-psychoanalytic concept is really not that Freudian.
Just in case anyone remembers this thread: I’m reading John Horgan’s “The Undiscovered Mind” now, which addresses a lot of the issues that came up here. He is by no means a Freudian…but he does argue that Freud has in fact not been debunked, and that the reason he hasn’t been debunked is that alternative models — cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, psychopharmocology, neuroscience, etc. etc. — aren’t any more effective. Horgan argues that scientists can’t explain the mind, and that they don’t really seem to be making any particular progress in explaining the mind, such that it seems reasonable to suggest that science may in fact never explain the mind. He quotes approvingly Noam Chomsky saying, basically, that literature has been and probably always will be better at explaining psychology than science is. (Horgan isn’t a Feyerabend sort — he thinks that physics, for example, has established definitive truths. His argument is that mind science hasn’t achieved that kind of effectiveness, and that it may never do so.)
Anyway, it’s a very entertaining book; I’d be curious to know what Jones or Charles think of it if they’ve read it….