Kevin's Watch

welp, i finished it a couple of days after my last post.

i'm not really sure what i think about the argument or the book to be honest.

i went to the innerwebs to see if i could find someone talking about it.

what i found was an interesting discussion between the author and a blog reviewer named jonathan.

www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2008/06/ ... -2008.html

to read jonathan's review click the blue link that says "my review of neuropath has gone live over THE ZONE"

scott bakker wrote:What I do want to take issue with is your reading of the philosophy, which I think is, well, hamfisted at best. The position espoused in the book is NOT eliminative materialism. In fact, it takes no metaphysical position at all.

I knew from the outset that this would be the primary philosophical misreading of the book, which is part of the reason why I so emphatically (and yes, repetitively) identify the problem in EPISTEMOLOGICAL terms. Everywhere you turn you find cognitive psychology in this book - something which your review completely, and quite conveniently, overlooks. Because you failed to pick up on this, you seem to have slotted the Argument into a form that you seem to think can be easily diagnosed and dismissed.

The position espoused in the book is skeptical naturalism, the contention that humans are so bad at theoretical cognition (a fact well-established in cognitive psychology), that outside the sciences there is very little we can confidently hang our cognitive hats on, (though we are continually forced to for pragmatic reasons).

The fact is, the sciences are revealing a picture of ourselves that is very troubling. Experience is just not what we think it is, which is to say we are not what we think we are. And this threatens everything we think we know. As I mention in the Afterword, the conflict is between experience and knowledge. Neuropath does not resolve this conflict in any way.

umhm. nod nod. thats all well and good but i still did not give a shit about the protagonist or really any of the characters (with the exception of the kids.)
maybe i'm just to stupid to enjoy it. what. ever.

personally, i'd rather go to one of bakker's lectures than read another book by him.

so this is the question that this book brought up for me.

is everything pointless or not? are our lives pointless? without meaning?

so, mr. bakker posits that experience is not what we think it is and we are not what we think we are.

so then...what are we? what is experience?

and is it all pointless?


honestly, who really cares. or maybe why should we care?

i am alive in the world. i negociate it to the best of my abilities (however limited they might be.) do i need to know "why" to do that?
i don't think so. i never have know why at any rate.
likely i never will know why or whatfor.

i am here, i'm collecting experience in my understanding of what experience is. whatever happens when my body dies doesn't really matter. what matters to me is that i ENJOY being here as best i can.
what matters to me is that i try not to hurt myself or others.

so what if i don't have any cognitive certainty of what i am or what experience is. i mean really, so what?

I would say that the Argument posits nothing more than the supposition that we are merely biological computers and that volition, desire, and will are merely illusory ad hoc justifications. He then goes on to show how science can violate us on much more fundamental and horrifying levels than we might have imagined simply by messing with the circuitry of our brains. Torture is one thing when done to the body. The body is temporal and is merely the machine that is being driven by the mind. But what if one could not just break the mind but show you, unequivocably and without doubt, that there is no fundamental you? That is the horror.

Brinn wrote: volition, desire, and will are merely illusory ad hoc justifications.

damn near buddhist iddenit?

Brinn wrote: He then goes on to show how science can violate us on much more fundamental and horrifying levels than we might have imagined simply by messing with the circuitry of our brains. Torture is one thing when done to the body. The body is temporal and is merely the machine that is being driven by the mind. But what if one could not just break the mind but show you, unequivocably and without doubt, that there is no fundamental you? That is the horror.

umhm. /nod nod. i just wasn't really horrified i guess.
there's prolly something fundamentally wrong with the not-me.

Bear in mind that Bakker's target audience for this novel was the average thriller reader. He's directing the argument toward people who might not have considered these kinds of issue of identity, and for whom it would be a more challenging concept.

average thriller reader? i'm not sure who that is.
i mean, i read lots of detective fiction, mysteries, crime fiction, stuff like that. am i not the average reader?

true i do read a lot of serial killer stuff. and stephen king.
and lots of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction.
maybe i'm immune to "the horror"!

Brinn wrote:I would say that the Argument posits nothing more than the supposition that we are merely biological computers and that volition, desire, and will are merely illusory ad hoc justifications. He then goes on to show how science can violate us on much more fundamental and horrifying levels than we might have imagined simply by messing with the circuitry of our brains. Torture is one thing when done to the body. The body is temporal and is merely the machine that is being driven by the mind. But what if one could not just break the mind but show you, unequivocably and without doubt, that there is no fundamental you? That is the horror.

I do not think that Bakker's argument is all that scary for humans as we are. I think it is fairly easy to accept that if we are shaped at all by our experiences, our senses must take in these experiences in numerous ways and reprogram our brains with them (building new connections between ideas, storing info in various ways, etc). So, I don't find it that scary that I am biologically programmed.

What is scary is that as we understand the chemical mechanisms which are created in response to a particular experience, we can skip the external stimuli and go right to altering a person's brain. It is also somewhat troubling to contemplate whether making people do things that once would have been reprehensible to them is alright, as long as they are programmed to accept/enjoy it (worker class(es) in Brave New World come to mind).

Hehe. One thing that always comes to mind when I think about brain chemistry is a matrix-like science fiction story in which a man leads a revolution against a gov't that has put people to sleep with VR machines that keep them content. Shortly after he succeeds in freeing a compound, we find out that he's been leading a revolution to free people from VR machines in a VR induced dream. Whenever one considers that the brain CAN be altered very directly, without any input from the body's sensors, one begins to worry that .

In this sense, unhappiness is reassuring that one is "free" of the most nightmarish trains of solipsist thought until one realizes that unhappiness is reassuring that one is "free" of the most nightmarish trains of solipsist thought.

This reminds me of althusser's discussion of ideology, which tends to imply that humans are ideological creatures who in breaking out of one ideology inevitably adept new and different ideologies. However, I am not entirely sure I agree with this. At the same time, it is true that the motivation to define ourselves as individuals is extremely strong, and that there is an ideological tendency in most people to hate ideology.

After letting the book gather dust on my shelf for the last few months, I finally decided to read it yesterday (have to love the end of the semester, especially when all the papers are out of the way). Finished it tonight. I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The one dig at English scholars aside, Bible reminded me, uncannily, of myself, and the Argument is a longstanding one between me and a good friend (chalk me down on the 'no free will' side).

Many thanks to Brinn for loaning it to me.