“The Experience Machine” by Andy Clark

Along with Karl Friston, Clark has been on the forefront of the effort to understand the human mind via the concept of predictive processing. This is a pop-neuroscience book intended to detail this concept to the layman. He begins with levels of processing, “However complex or high-level the predictions, it is prediction errors that must then carry the news, signaling differences from the expected and thereby keeping us in touch with a changing and sometimes surprising world…. Human brains seem to benefit from intelligent prediction strategies of just that kind, and they do so in an especially powerful way, thanks to the use of multiple “levels of processing.” In these multilevel contexts, simple predictions are nested under less simple, more abstract ones…. In this kind of multilevel arrangement all that flows forward (from the sensory edges ever deeper into the brain) is news—deviations from what is expected. This is efficient. Valuable bandwidth is not used sending well-predicted stuff upward…. Systems like that are wonderfully frugal in their use of the incoming stream of information. Instead of trying to deal with everything from scratch they effectively sift and filter the incoming data by highlighting only what was unexpected. This is the nugget of truth in the notion that human brains hallucinate reality. It means that the world we experience is to some degree the world we predict. Perception itself, far from being a simple window onto the world, is permeated from the get-go by our own predictions and expectations. It is permeated not simply in the sense that our own ideas and biases impact how we later judge things to be, but in some deeper, more primal, sense…. What we might think of as simple or “raw” sensory evidence is itself never experienced. Instead, experience always and everywhere reflects those rich webs of prior knowledge and here-and-now expectation…. Since all human experience is constructed from mixtures of expectation, attention, and sensory stimulation, it will never be possible to experience either the world or your own body “as it really is.” Indeed, it rapidly becomes unclear what this could even mean.”

Action is just as important as perception in the framework of predictive processing. “Ordinary daily actions (according to predictive processing) are caused by predictions of bodily sensation. They are caused, more precisely, by predictions of the flow of bodily sensations that would occur if that very action were to be performed…. Successful action involves a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy…. By making prediction the common root of both perception and action, predictive processing (active inference) reveals a hidden unity in the workings of the mind. Action and perception form a single whole, jointly orchestrated by the drive to eliminate errors in prediction…. Actions come about because we mentally represent the completed effects of the action…. This is sometimes said to reverse a commonsense notion of causality, since instead of the action causing the effect, it is the representation of the effect (the completed action) that causes the action itself to unfold…. This became known as the “ideomotor theory of action,” since the idea (or mental image) of the completed motor action is what brings the actual movements about…. By launching a cascade of sensory predictions, and then rendering them true by means of action (thus eliminating the resulting prediction errors), the brain creates the desired movements…. The deep unity (under predictive processing) of perception and action should now be apparent. There are two different, but equally effective, ways to minimize prediction errors during our encounters with the world. The first is by using prediction errors to help us discover the best guess about how things are out there in the world. But the second is to act so as to make the world fit some of our predictions.”

Clark references Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on the role of perception and interpreting the signals of the interoceptive system in creating emotions. “The central idea is that a single kind of process combines inner and outer sources of information, generating a context-reflecting amalgam that is experienced as emotion…. The very same bodily information can thus feel very different according to how we represent the larger context in which the bodily signals arise…. According to interoceptive predictive processing, feelings and emotions are what result when we integrate basic information about bodily states and general arousal with higher-level predictions of their most probable causes…. Emotions and feelings reflect a process that combines interoceptive (inward-looking), proprioceptive (action-guiding), and exteroceptive (outward-looking) information with model-based predictions of all those signals as they are occurring…. The winning predictions will be the ones that best “make sense” of that large and varied body of information.”

Precision-weighting is integral to the system of predictive processing. “The most successful predictive model always sculpts the way the brain deals with the incoming signals. It alters the response of neurons at multiple cortical levels, amplifying and dampening them (courtesy of all that variable precision-weighting) in ways that reflect the brain’s best guess at the structure of the objects out there in the world…. Precision-weighted prediction (usually) serves our purposes by highlighting some things at the expense of others.”

Our personal histories shape our predictive models. Clark argues that perception is neither passive reception nor free fantasy, but a controlled hallucination continuously corrected by prediction error. “The most basic way that we actively construct our world is by selective sampling. We move our body and aim our gaze in ways that reflect what we expect to encounter…. Humans with different individual histories, will harvest different sets of stimulations from the very same world. But as we selectively harvest those simulations, our brains impose structure a second time, processing the sensory information in ways that amplify and dampen, extracting meaningful structure that itself reflects our own prior experience…. We cannot help but base our current waves of prediction on our own native tendencies and particular life histories. Where those predictions vary, so does human experience.”

Clark returns to the role of actions in shaping and creating our world models. Predictive processing thus becomes, for Clark, not merely a neuroscience theory but a general framework dissolving sharp distinctions between perception and action, mind and world, organism and environment. “Practical actions and epistemic actions are determined in exactly the same way, as the predictive brain makes counterfactual predictions about what kinds of futures will result if certain actions are launched. Actions are then chosen that deliver preferred outcomes directly (when possible) or else that probe and sample the environment to bring forth more information, reducing key uncertainties, and making the desired outcome more likely in the future…. Any predictive processing agent able to minimize error relative to future goals will discover both epistemic and practical actions, and how to mix them together. In all such scenarios, all the brain does is select the actions that best minimize future prediction error relative to goals.”

David Chalmers and Clark came up with the idea of the extended mind to describe the scaffolding outside the body that becomes enmeshed with the human mind, creating one seamless entity, “Extended minds arise because predictive brains are naturally expert at exploiting opportunities to use information-gathering action loops to help them achieve their goals…. Our constructed worlds can sometimes take over, transform, and augment functions once carried out by our brains…. I continue to believe that as the resulting weave between brain, body, and external resources tightens, it becomes less and less productive to think of mind as something locked neatly behind the barriers of skin and skull…. Brains are prediction machines that invoke external resources as easily (and for the same reasons) as they engage practical actions and activate different aspects of they dinner circuitry…. This creates a circular causal web in which mind is—at the very least—constantly porous to body and world.”

Finally, Clark returns to the importance of weighting in building world models, “Variable precision-weighting is the single most powerful tool in the predictive processing toolkit…. In the brain, precision-weighting alters patterns of post-synaptic influence (the strength of the signals passed on after the synapse “fires”). This means that specific signals can be selected for enhanced impact. The signals selected for this special treatment will be ones that are expected to be both reliable and important for the task at hand…. Precision variations of this kind underpin both conscious and automatic deployments of attention…. The brain learns how and when to vary its precision estimations as part and parcel of the process by which it acquires the generative models themselves. Those models and associated estimations of precision are learned by repeated exposure to flows of sensory information in the context of trying to act in the world.”

“After Virtue” by Alasdair MacIntyre

MacIntyre tries to give a historical account of the human virtues. He begins with the problems of modernity and its emphasis on rationality and the individual, “The bifurcation of the contemporary social world into a realm of the organizational in which ends are taken to be given and are not available for rational scrutiny and a realm of the personal in which judgment and debate about values are central factors, but in which no rational social resolution of issues is available finds its internalization, its inner representation in the relation of the individual self to the roles and characters of social life…. Thus the society in which we live is one in which bureaucracy and individualism are partners as well as antagonists. And it is in the cultural climate of this bureaucratic individualism that the emotivist self is naturally at home.”

For MacIntyre, the Enlightenment project got waylaid when it rejected the Aristotelian concept of human telos, “If my thesis is correct, Kant was right; morality did in the eighteenth century, as a matter of historical fact, presuppose something very like the teleological scheme of God, freedom and happiness as the final crown of virtue which Kant propounds. Detach morality from that framework and you will no longer have morality…. Moral arguments within the classical, Aristotelian tradition—whether in its Greek or its medieval versions—involve at least one central functional concept, the concept of man understood as having an essential nature and an essential purpose or function…. For according to that tradition to be a man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose: member of a family, citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God. It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that man ceases to be a functional concept…. Once the notion of essential human purposes or functions disappears from morality, it begins to appear implausible to treat moral judgments as factual statements.”

According to MacIntyre, modernity got further offtrack when it tried to separate the concepts of facts and truth from the concept of values, “The notion of ‘fact’ with respect to human beings is thus transformed in the transition from the Aristotelian to the mechanist view. On the former view human action, because it is to be explained teleologically, not only can, but must be, characterized with reference to the hierarchy of goods which provide the ends of human action. On the latter view human action not only can, but must be, characterized without any reference to such goods. On the former view the facts about human action include the facts about what is valuable to human beings (and not just the facts about what they think to be valuable); on the latter view there are no facts about what is valuable. ‘Fact’ becomes value-free…. If the deontological character of moral judgments is the ghost of conceptions of divine law which are quite alien to the metaphysics of modernity and if the teleological character is similarly the ghost of conceptions of human nature and activity which are equally not at home in the modern world, we should expect the problems of understanding and of assigning an intelligible status to moral judgments both continually to arise and as continually to prove inhospitable to philosophical solutions.”

Teleology provides the framework within which human actions, lives, and virtues can be evaluated as ordered or disordered with respect to human goods, “If a human life is understood as a progress through harms and dangers, moral and physical, which someone may encounter and overcome in better and worse ways and with a greater or lesser measure of success, the virtues will find their place as those qualities the possession and exercise of which generally tend to success in this enterprise and the vices likewise as qualities which likewise tend to failure.”

MacIntyre’s diagnosis is that modern moral discourse consists of fragments of older moral languages detached from the forms of life that made them intelligible. This explains the interminability of modern moral disagreement: rival parties appeal to concepts such as rights, utility, autonomy, equality, desert, or duty, but these concepts derive from different traditions and cannot be adjudicated by a neutral rational standard. Emotivism is therefore not merely a philosophical doctrine; it is embodied socially in the figures of the manager, therapist, and aesthete, and politically in the alliance between bureaucratic expertise and individual preference.

For MacIntyre, Aristotle’s virtue ethics provide the indispensable starting point for recovering the intelligibility of morality after the failures of the Enlightenment project, “Human beings, like the members of all other species, have a specific nature; and that nature is such that they have certain aims and goals, such that they move by nature towards a specific telos. The good is defined in terms of their specific characteristics. Hence Aristotle’s ethics, expounded as he expounds it, presupposes his metaphysical biology. Aristotle thus sets himself the task of giving an account of the good which is at once local and particular—located in and partially defined by the characteristics of the polis—and yet also cosmic and universal…. Aristotle has cogent arguments against identifying that good with money, with honor or with pleasure. He gives to it the name of eudaimonia…. It is the state of being well and doing well in being well, of a man’s being well-favored himself and in relation to the divine…. The virtues are precisely those qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve eudaimonia and the lack of which will frustrate his movement toward that telos…. For what constitutes the good for man is a complete human life lived at its best, and the exercise of the virtues is a necessary and central part of such a life…. Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues. Moral education is an ‘éducation sentimentale’…. The educated moral agent must of course know what he is doing when he judges or acts virtuously. Thus he does what is virtuous because it is virtuous.”

MacIntyre returns yet again to the telos of man, “The impersonal unchanging divinity of which Aristotle speaks, the metaphysical contemplation of which furnishes man with his specific and ultimate telos, can itself take no interest in the merely human, let alone in the dilemmatic; it is nothing other than thought timelessly thinking itself and conscious of nothing but itself…. Since such contemplation is the ultimate human telos, the essential final and completing ingredient in the life of the man who is eudaimôn, there is a certain tension between Aristotle’s view of man as essentially political and his view of man as essentially metaphysical…. Correspondingly a city founded on justice and friendship can only be the best kind of city if it enables its citizens to enjoy the life of metaphysical contemplation.”

MacIntyre believes the concept of practice is central to recovering an intelligible account of goods and excellences, “A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. It is to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice…. Thus the standards are not themselves immune from criticism, but nonetheless we cannot be initiated into a practice without accepting the authority of the best standards realized so far…. A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods…. Every practice requires a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationships to those other people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practices.”

MacIntyre distinguishes internal goods from external goods. Internal goods are excellences achievable only through participation in a practice; external goods are money, status, power, and prestige. Practices need institutions to survive, but institutions characteristically pursue external goods and therefore threaten to corrupt the practices they sustain. The virtues are necessary to preserve practices against this corruption.

Besides a practice, MacIntyre considers the unity of a narrative life and the the embedding of goods and virtues within a tradition to be necessary for the proper return to virtue ethics. The culminating concept is tradition. A tradition is not inert inheritance but an historically extended argument about the goods internal to practices and the good of a whole human life. MacIntyre’s alternative to Enlightenment universalism is not irrationalism but tradition-constituted rational inquiry. This is why the final opposition is Nietzsche or Aristotle: either morality after the Enlightenment is exposed as disguised will, or the Aristotelian tradition can be recovered as a rationally defensible alternative.

MacIntyre treats Aristotle as the indispensable starting point for recovering the intelligibility of the virtues, not as a complete solution. Aristotle’s account must be revised by the later tradition, especially by the ideas of narrative quest, practices, dependence, historical tradition, and a less biologically fixed conception of human telos, “The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest…. The only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest…. Without some at least partly determinate conception of the final telos there could not be any beginning to a quest. Some conception of the good for man is required…. It is in looking for a conception of the good which will enable us to order other goods, for a conception of the good which will enable us to extend our understanding of the purpose and content of the virtues, for a conception of the good which will enable us to understand the place of integrity and constancy in life, that we initially define the kind of life which is a quest for the good…. A quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge…. The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good. The catalogue of the virtues will therefore include the virtues required to sustain the kind of households and the kind of political communities in which men and women can seek for the good together…. The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.” MacIntyre argues that modern moral discourse is a fragmentary survival of older teleological and theological schemes; that emotivism is its characteristic social form; and that morality can become intelligible again only through practices, internal goods, narrative unity, and historically extended traditions of rational inquiry, with Aristotle as the necessary but incomplete starting point.

“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. IV” by Solvej Balle (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

This fourth volume by Balle continues with Tara Selter being stuck in the eighteenth of November. But now she is very much not alone. At their villa in Bremen, those who met there eventually settled into a routine of formal meetings where various topics would be submitted and then debated, “This morning there were twenty-nine of us around the table. We had got hold of more chairs, and the rest of us perched on the sills of the bay windows overlooking the garden, in the gray light from the sky. There was no end to the possible topics of discussion, no end to the suggestions for our decision-making procedures and agendas, no end to the digressions and additions and ideas that branched out in all directions…. It turned into a meeting about the names of things, about the words for the peculiarities of the eighteenth of November, about the chances of ever finding terms that truly fit, about precision and the spaciousness of language.”

Tara continued with her explanation,“Someone proposed we name the world we came from—the life we had lived before the eighteenth, TOL, for example, The Other Life. Gita suggested DAL, Das andere Leben, but Henry didn't like that…. One of the Val Benoît residents suggested that we call time before the eighteenth La Vie Avant and the time after La Vie Maintenant; that way we could talk about LaViA and LaViM. This led us back to the difference between acronyms and syllabic abbreviations, until Gita's group pointed out that we also needed to address time after the eighteenth, La Vie Après, but that too would be LaViA, introducing unnecessary confusion—unless, of course, we could expect these two to be the same: that the world we return to after our life in the eighteenth would be exactly as before. Then they could share a name…. There are those who refer to us as loopers and the others as noopers, and some speak of repeaters or returners, but that raises the question: Who are the repeaters really? Isn't the difference simply that we know we are repeating the eighteenth while the others believe everything is normal? But we see them going about their business, again and again. So who is the repetition?"

Finally, the group decided it would put on a special conference with the aim of making a more systematic exploration of their situation, “Many pointed out that our explorations lacked a theoretical foundation, that attempting to build hypotheses or explanations would be futile without a thorough understanding of past theories of time—from the pre-Socratic period to the twenty-first century. Should our foundation not be in place before we start indulging in fantasies? Others, however, believed it was precisely the temporal theories of the past that had fallen short, that the prevailing conception of time itself was fundamentally flawed.”

“The Matter With Things Volume 2: What Then is True?” By Iain McGilchrist

The second volume of McGilchrist’s magnum opus focuses on philosophy more than neurobiology. He is still concerned with the left and right hemisphere split of the brain, but he goes into much greater detail discussing objective truth, morality, consciousness, the nature of the self, human values, and what makes life worth living. He begins by discussing reality, subjectivity, language and concepts, and the map and the territory, “The left hemisphere thinks reality is what it itself puts together, because that is all it knows – the theoretical construct in which it lives. For it, theory trumps life. If it therefore decrees that a state of affairs shall be a certain way, then reality will, it believes, bend to the decree. Since the left hemisphere uses language to label, this often involves a belief that changing the label will change the reality…. That there is no one fixed reality, and truth is not single or fully certain, does not mean that reality has been mysteriously abolished. That there is no one view that encompasses all truth about the world, does not mean that truth is made up, and can be whatever we want it to be.” He continues by discussing how the brain processes new experiences, “There is a reliable difference between the hemispheres in terms of their handling of fresh experience. They have shown that new experience of any kind – whether it be of real-life objects, sounds, skills or imaginary constructs – engages the right hemisphere. As soon as it starts to become familiar or routine, the right hemisphere is less engaged and eventually the ‘information’ becomes the concern of the left hemisphere only…. New experience tends to come from the periphery of the field of attention, and that is the province of the right hemisphere – which is, after all, on the lookout for whatever unexpected is happening, at the moment that it happens; whereas the left hemisphere is concentrating on what is already identified as of interest, known and familiar, and at the centre of the attentional field.” He also discusses uniqueness, “Uniqueness presents particular problems for the left hemisphere’s tool, language. Uniqueness brings everyday language to a standstill. Anything truly unique cannot be expressed in such language, which is why whatever is profound, personal, or sacred, if it is to be expressed in words, can be so expressed only in poetry…. Reductionist thinking, more typical of the left hemisphere, to which uniqueness is opaque, holds that all can be accounted for by breaking things down to further, and yet further, entities. Uniqueness, however, halts analysis: it is a standing rebuke to our ever-ready categories.”

One’s own conception of the nature of the self is an area where the hemispheric split plays a role, “The self as conceived by the left hemisphere, should be – and is – an entity that is relatively static, separate, fixed, yet fragmentary, a succession of moments, goal-oriented, with its needs at any moment perceived as essentially competitive (since others may similarly target the same resources), determinate, consciously wilful, circumscribed in the breadth and depth of what it sees, at ease with the familiar, certain and explicit, but less so with all that is fluid, ambiguous, and implicit, and unaware of the limitations of its own knowledge. The self as conceived by the right hemisphere should be – and is – more akin to a process than a thing, essentially fluid and less determinate, nonetheless forming a unique whole over time, aware that it is fundamentally inseparable from all else that exists, open to others and to experience, more concerned with co-operation than competition, less consciously wilful, more engaged in what one might call ‘active passivity’ (an open attendant disposition, in which one is ready to respond to what emerges), seeing the greater picture in space and time, and aware of the extent of its ignorance…. In other words, the self as intrinsically inseparable from the world in which it stands in relation to others, the social and empathic self, and the continuous sense of self, with ‘depth’ of existence over time, is more dependent on the right hemisphere; whereas the objectified self, the external self, and the self as an expression of will, is generally more dependent on the left hemisphere.”

McGilchrist discusses how the nature of time is essential to the human conception of reality, “Conceptualising time immediately puts one on the outside of the experience, rather than being within it, the standpoint alone from which it can be understood…. Time is no thing…. Time is adverbial, if it is anything that grammar recognises; an aspect of being (itself a verbal noun, or gerund) or of Dasein (also a gerund). Time is not separate from events or experience…. It is itself an aspect of experience…. Reality is what we experience – ever moving, changing, and continuous. Things, however, are secondary, static, products of perception which supervene on ‘from above’, not support ‘from beneath’, that field of flow.” The nature of reality is embodied and the human body is a creature always in motion, “Motion is at the core of every aspect of our experience, and of our ability to make sense of it, in a way of which we are normally unaware, because our analytic intellect cannot deal with it…. Mind and body are inseparably connected.” Conversely, “Analytic thought and language tend to immobilise the world…. The idea that perception is altered by, and may even be secondary to, activity is familiar from the Gestalt theory of perception, according to which we are co-operatively constructing the aspects of the world that we see…. Perception is an active, not a passive process – or better, it is a profoundly interactive process…. Movement is as foundational as space and time. Each requires the other. Space is the potential for something to move within it; time is the potential for something to change within it. Both become actualised in flow…. Analysis, the forte of the left hemisphere, ultimately yields stasis…. Analysis wants measurement, and measurement begins the process of immobilisation and fragmentation. Yet it is never quite equal to what it measures…. Motion can, of course, never be reached by aggregation of static elements.”

Relatedly, McGilchrist takes on the concepts of space, matter, form, and time and how each relate to lived reality. “Space and time are not containers in which we live, but aspects of being…. Time speaks profoundly to the human condition in a way that space, however fundamental it might be, simply does not. Time is relentless, like another being’s will, where space is pliable and may be fashioned, though not without limits, to our own. Time is emotive; space is bland…. Despite this, space has the means to be generative: it is the potential for motion, and gives rise to form, which is what we see, precipitated out of potential, in space…. While time shows us that aspect of reality which is always incomplete, space shows us that aspect of reality which has been achieved…. Forms are usually evidenced in matter, and matter in forms: no-one has seen matter without form…. I can see imaginary or abstract forms, with the mind’s eye, or in certain states of mind with the bodily eye. But matter is inconceivable without form…. The forms that are found in Nature are the result of motion, and embodied movement, not stasis; similarly, movements found in Nature enact forms, not structures.” He continues, “40 years of efforts to simulate the Standard Model on a computer have so far failed. To perform such a simulation, one must first take equations expressed in terms of continuous quantities and find a discrete formulation that is compatible with the bits of information in which computers trade…. If reality is such that our knowledge is intrinsically, not accidentally, incomplete; if it is intrinsically, not accidentally, uncertain; if it is intrinsically inexpressible in everyday language, requiring exceptional, non-denotative, highly metaphoric, ‘poetic’ use of language to get beyond the limits of language; if we must deal not with facts but with connexions; if entities are never wholly separable from other entities; if the process of a knower coming to know is interactive or reverberative, each changing the other – not distanced, inert and owing nothing to the presence, and possibly the nature, of the one who comes to know; and if any attempt to model it reduces what is continuous and moving, to what is static and discrete – if all of this is true, it is clear which hemisphere will be better suited to discerning it.”

McGilchrist next takes a deep dive into the nature of consciousness, “When I use the word ‘consciousness’, I refer very broadly to all that we might call ‘the experiential’. This covers all the activities that go on, for each of us, as we say, unconsciously and preconsciously, as well as consciously; but could not go on without what is conventionally referred to as subjectivity, or inwardness…. I discriminate, reason, make judgments, find things beautiful, solve problems, imagine possibilities, weigh possible outcomes, take decisions, exercise acquired skills, fall in love, and struggle to balance competing desires and moral values all the time without being reflexively aware of it. Note that these are not just calculations, but rely on my whole embodied being, my experience, my history, my memory, my feelings, my thoughts, my personality, even – dare I say it? – my soul: ‘psyche’ in the broadest sense…. Even Descartes derived the ego from experience, not experience from an ego. What can more conservatively be claimed is that something about me – in the ‘field of me’ – permits these particular activities: and that something is what, in the broad definition, I am calling my consciousness…. I would say that matter appears to be an element within consciousness that provides the necessary resistance for creation; and with that, inevitably, for individuality to arise. All individual beings, including ourselves, bring forms into being and cause them to persist: each of us is not, ultimately, any one conformation in matter, but, Ship of Theseus-like, the conformation itself, the morphogenetic field, which requires matter in order to be brought into being, but, once existent, persists while matter comes and goes within it…. The conclusion we should draw is – not that all that we can encounter are representations of something we cannot know – but the precise opposite: that we do actually deal with reality and know it, just with an aspect of it that we partly call forth ourselves by our approach. The fact that we play a part in its being what it is does not make it unreal…. Things, it seems, emerge from our descriptions of experience: they do not constitute it. Whether a thing enters our world or not depends on the scale at which it is seen, or sought…. It may be objected that, whether we see something or not, it still exists. But what that tells us is that a ‘thing’ is a category within our thought…. If Nietzsche was right in saying that ‘A thing = its qualities’, and qualities change unrecognisably with scale, so do things come and go from experience depending on how they are observed. As the perspective shifts so do the Gestalten.” McGilchrist concludes, “If matter is a product of primal consciousness, and is the creative element of resistance within it which causes ‘things’ – becomings and processes – to be precipitated out as differentiated entities in space and time, this requires no further purpose than itself. It is the never-ending coming into being of the cosmos, in which the primal consciousness comes to understand itself…. I believe that what exists is a locally differentiated, but ultimately single, field of potentiality, which is constantly actualising itself. Thus all is one, and all is many. Each differentiation is, however, also a Gestalt that is complete in itself – a new whole, not a fragment…. There is no reason to dub our full experience of the world an illusion, while ascribing to the very partial mathematical description of the world the reality. I also believe internalism is a mistake, and that consciousness is located not inside us, but in a non-spatial ‘betweenness’ created by our attention and the object of our attention. It is, therefore, always a partial revelation – and partly, also, a creation of the act of experiencing – but our part in it does not negate its reality: that is reality…. I do not claim to know what experience is any more than anyone else, except that it is the condition on which I know anything at all. And yet we all understand it directly. It is what we know (kennen) better than anything at all, and yet know (wissen) least of all about. It is therefore difficult to discuss, since neither language nor reason are well adapted to it. Language is already at a remove from direct experience.”

McGilchrist stumps for moral realism, “The main claim is that value, whether it is truth, goodness or beauty, is not, as our culture has come to regard it, an ‘add-on’, a human invention, some sort of extra that is not intrinsic to the nature of the cosmos, but is, rather, itself constitutive of the cosmos and is discovered by, and disclosed in, the encounter of life…. I think truth matters more than utility, because I see truth as an ultimate value, irreducible to anything else: that is part of my view of the cosmos as pregnant with meaning, soliciting our allegiance, rather than a place where it is good enough to get by with comfortable lies. For me, values are part of its very fabric, not optional adornments…. Truth is a moral value, like beauty, and goodness…. Values are not just validated by the outcomes they achieve: they are inseparable from our deepest emotional experience.” He next tackles human purpose, “Whatever creative energy underwrites the unfolding of the phenomenal universe is continually active and involved in that universe; that the future is tended towards, but not closely determined; rather it is open, evolving, self-fulfilling. This means that it seems ‘purposeless’ to some; richly ‘purposeful’ to others. To me, a universe with tendencies towards beauty, complexity, and the rich unfolding of uniqueness is already teleological…. Though purpose may be more or less apparent at different levels, the process of life cannot, in reality, be broken down in this way…. Living beings equally shape and are shaped by a world that is coming into being alongside them in a reciprocal, and reciprocally paced, process, not negotiating a path across its already pre-formed surface…. Interdependence means not just interaction, but mutual constitution.” Finally, he takes a stab at the nature of the sacred, “God, truth, and infinity are all processes, not things; comings into being, not entities that are already fixed. All three seem to me, however, like rivers, to combine stability with flux. ‘All things flow’; but ‘by changing, a thing remains the same’. Ultimately, Being and Becoming are aspects of the same thing…. Becoming is even more fundamental than Being.”

Finally, McGilchrist describes what is ailing modernity, “We are now in the grip of an obsession with human power and the subjugation of nature, at bottom of which lies our infatuation with technology: the power to manipulate. We have subordinated ends to means. We emphasise self at the expense of others, our rights rather than our duties, what we have rather than who we are, the material rather than the spiritual, and vaunt the reach of the unaided human intellect. In such a world God is a nuisance…. When our society generally held with religion, we might indeed have committed many of the same wrongs; but power-seeking, selfishness, self-promotion, narcissism and entitlement, neglect of duty, dishonesty, ruthlessness, greed, and lust were never condoned or actively and openly encouraged – even admired – in the way they sometimes are now. In other words, we have lost all shame.” He concludes, “The deep truths about reality are likely to appear initially paradoxical. What look like things – with inevitable suggestions of stasis, certainty and fixity – are processes; and all such thing-like processes are interdependent with others, bringing one another into being. Everything is changed by context…. There is absolutely no reason to believe matter to be ontologically prior to consciousness.”

“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. III” by Solvej Balle (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

This third volume of Balle’s novel departs from the first two installments in that Tara discovers that she is not alone. “In the eighteenth of November, people follow patterns, and as long as you don’t draw them out of their established routines, they will stay in their allotted places. They don’t walk down the steps one day and up the steps the next…. As the man in the green shirt was going up the steps, now wearing blue, it began to dawn on me that I might not be the only one at odds with the eighteenth of November.” She meets Henry Dale and they trade stories and commiserate. “I have met someone who remembers. This sentence has been buzzing around in my head since this morning, and now I am typing it here…. Now there are two of us. Two of a kind: remembering, trapped in the eighteenth of November and no longer alone.”

Eventually, Henry moves in with Tara and they discuss how they have been spending their eighteenth of Novembers, “He says he understands my interest in the Romans. That it’s no surprise the Romans brought us together—with a bit of help from coincidence, of course. We had both landed on the banks of the Rhine, at the border of the Roman Empire. We had both lost the futures which once stretched out before us: the nineteenth

and the twentieth and all the weeks and months we had imagined lay in store, but little by little had been erased. It’s hardly surprising that one turns to the past…. Henry believed that anyone paying attention to the world around them would inevitably become interested in the Romans—or at least in the fall of the Roman Empire…. When you inhabit the same day for so long, you start to see all the cracks. There’s nowhere to hide anymore. We have come to a standstill in a time that is starting to crumble. Europe in freefall. The final days of the West. It’s no wonder one feels compelled to

follow in the Romans’ footsteps. One wants to know what led them to their downfall…. We were bidding farewell to the Western world. Goodbye, aufWiedersehen, ciao, adieu. Buona sera, Evening Lands…. I had never been interested in the mechanics of history, in patterns and progress and necessity, periods and waves, glory and decline. I had been interested in

what brought the Romans to a halt…. It had always been about the things, I said. The objects. The material. I was interested in what existed. What had been carried through the centuries.”

At the end of this volume, Tara and Henry discover that it is not just the two of them who are stuck in the eighteenth of November. At first, they meet Olga Periti and Ralf Kern. “We’ve held a meeting about our future and where we should live. We are sticking to the agreement that we meet every hundred days. That we belong together. We have had a meeting about belonging together, and we do. We belong together when we agree and when we no longer agree…. Now we are searching for a place to live. We’ve looked at apartments in the city and houses on the outskirts. It isn’t easy, as we are four people who need to reach an agreement. Four people in the eighteenth of November. Who knows if there are others? Maybe we are five, or eight, or sixteen. Maybe even more. People who wake up every morning to the eighteenth of November. It’s not difficult to imagine. Not anymore…. Ralf has calculated the probability of there being others, and the odds are greater than you’d think. If there are only four of us, it’s a miracle that we managed to find each other…. And then suddenly there they were. Yesterday. As in, five people at the gate. They had parked their car, climbed out and buzzed the intercom…. This was an insistent noise, and the eighteenth of November doesn’t have any insistent noise from the buzzer at our gate. And yet it did.”

“The Life You Want” by Adam Phillips

In this short collection of essays, Phillips contrasts the methods that psychoanalysis and pragmatism use to help a person get the life that they “truly” want. “What ‘getting a life’ now involves has become an essential perplexity, partly dependent on the stories about lives that are available to us, but always beginning in the families or social groups we grow up in…. Beginning with our mothers, we are the targets and the recipients and interpreters of often confounding messages about what is wanted of us, what we are wanted for, and what we are encouraged and discouraged from wanting…. Without always knowing what they are doing, the people who look after children – mostly the parents, but not always – recognize and sustain the parts, the versions, the aspects of the child they prefer…. We then spend our lives seeking recognition for, and avoiding recognition of, the aspects of ourselves that our parents – and the societies they are part of – couldn’t face…. We are haunted by the versions of ourselves we have been unable to be.”

Phillips spends a lot of time deconstructing both Freud and Rorty’s thoughts: on the nature of the human mind, on the Self, and on the ways humans cope with living their lives in general. “Both Freud’s psychoanalysis and Rorty’s pragmatism tell us, in their different ways, why wanting matters…. Pragmatism wants us to ask: what is the life we want—or think we want (and then, sometimes as an afterthought, why we want it)? Whereas psychoanalysis wants us to ask: why do we not want to know what we want?” Phillips suggests both men were preeminently concerned with Freud’s conception of the unconscious. Funnily, they did not agree on what Freud meant. Or rather, Rorty had chosen to reinterpret Freud’s meaning to suit his own purposes, in pragmatic fashion. “The unconscious described by Freud was a ‘reservoir’—his word—of representations of instinctual life, and a form of thinking he would call primary process and that finds its most vivid exemplar and illustration in dreams…. Freud’s unconscious refers to our fundamental and founding unknownness to ourselves; to the bodily desire that ineluctably drives our development; so in Freud’s story we are not suffering from original sin, but from original frustration. His biologically based unconscious is, as it were, an enigmatic and insistent presence and pressure in ourselves, and in our lives…. The unconscious is in this story our hidden truth, our hidden drama going on behind the scenes; a truth and a drama we are often unable and unwilling to bear, and are by definition surprised if not shocked by…. For Freud, what keeps us and gets us going are our desires for our objects of desire; for Rorty, it is our purposes. These are two very different things; our purposes are made up by us, our desires not quite, or not only, made up by us…. Freud, as Rorty knows, redescribed our ideas about autonomy and the self in ways that virtually discredited them as in any way useful fictions, Rorty took them for granted…. Rorty is determined to reject the idea of the Freudian unconscious as some bewildering ‘primitive’ force driving us through our lives. A predatory voraciousness is replaced by what might be a visionary company; exploitation is made a virtue; an enemy is superseded by a potential friend…. Freud’s question is: what, if anything, can we do with our instincts? And then: what are our instincts doing to, and with, us? Rorty’s rather different question is: what do we want to make of ourselves?”

In Phillips’ view, it would seem that pragmatism and psychoanalysis are diametrically opposed, “What Rorty calls trying to get the life you want, to be what you wish to be, Freud could only be radically sceptical about; ‘the life you want’, for Freud, would be something you are by definition unconscious of – you have worked very hard not to know what the life is you want…. And in describing the life you want, you may be merely the ventriloquist’s dummy of your culture. Describing the life we want can sometimes be the most compliant – i.e., defensive – thing we ever do…. And not only are we unconscious of what we want and plagued by wishfulness, but there is a powerful force inside us, which Freud would eventually call the death instinct, that both wants us not to want, and wants us to harm ourselves and others; that wants the life we don’t want.” Phillips continues, “The pragmatist wants to assume that people want to get on, in both senses; the psychoanalyst assumes that people resist getting on…. In psychoanalysis, there is the unconscious and there are our ego-ideals; and psychoanalytic treatment is about how we fit them together, how we fit together who we seem to be with who we want to be…. Pragmatism tells us that we can only know, or surmise, who we want to be (not who we really are), and then make experiments in living to find out whether we are right…. So if pragmatism’s insistent preoccupation is about how we can, voluntarily, get the lives we want, then psychoanalysis’s preoccupation is about how we can survive and sufficiently enjoy our largely unconscious desires and determinisms…. Our nature as described by psychoanalysis – makes us radically unsuited to the lives we are capable of living (the very things that sustain us – our appetite, our desire – are the very things that torment us). And there is also, perhaps fortunately, a life instinct that contends with this death instinct in the unending war that, according to Freud, our lives really are.”

Finally, Phillips suggests that in fighting to get the life that we actually want we often use our interactions with others to offer up a kind of resistance as cope, “Ordinary everyday behaviour may be an unconscious probe to find out what the other person will do with what I do or don’t do, with what I say or don’t say, whether they can imagine and articulate the need in it; whether they can see something in it that I can’t. Whether they can see what is being resisted and what is being invited. As though ordinary life is a performance art in front of, initially, the parents and then anyone else who could be interested in one’s wants and needs, in one’s preoccupations…. So we don’t always know – are unconscious of – what we may be resisting, and that we are resisting; and we are dependent on the recognition of others who by their words and their actions show us our resistances…. We resist articulating our needs to ourselves and to others; and we resist the experiment in living that expressing one’s needs often entails…. We are most likely to resist what is most important to us. That is how we know it is important to us; we resist acknowledging it.”

“Transcription” by Ben Lerner

This short novel is Lerner auto-fiction at its best. So many crisp sentences; so much mystery about what is fact and what is fiction. The play of memory and how the past works on the narrative present. How much of this novel is about that Rosemarie Waldrop 2024 Paris Review interview on poetry? How much of the character of “Thomas” is actually Lerner’s other mentor and collaborator, Alexander Kluge? What details in the novel are true? Does it even matter?

The conceit of the novel is the narrator drops his iPhone into his hotel sink on the way to interview his mentor, in the age of post-covid, at his home just off Brown’s campus in Providence. Much of the novel revolves obliquely around humanity’s present relationship with technology. “I was almost due at Thomas’s…. To tell him the truth seemed impossible. How was it that even though I’d been concerned about bungling the technology I hadn’t borrowed a backup recording device from my anthropologist wife? In my head a poet friend who was retraining as an analyst suggested I’d been unconsciously driven to sabotage my interview.”

As the narrator, Lerner, walks across Brown’s campus to Thomas’ home, his relationships with time and technology synch, “I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.”

Thomas is a formidable presence in everyone’s life whom he touches. “I’d always encountered Thomas in medias res: when you visited, you were swept into some task or conversation, skipping over the conventional greetings. This was a relief because Thomas was one of those people I didn’t know how to touch; a handshake would seem too businesslike; a hug was impossible—the word in my head was French.” Thomas is not one for small talk, “We extend the dream when we share it. You call it fiction, but it is more…. But politics is when we sit around the fire and make the dream social, no? And that is a test of the fire, of the culture. This is better than psychoanalysis, which makes it property of the individual. So we should continue our dreaming now.”

The third and last section of the novel switches the narrator to Thomas’ son, with whom Thomas had a complicated relationship. The setup is that it is a chat between the son and Lerner, but it reads like a long monologue, with only the briefest of interjections interspersed. The son, Max, visits Thomas at Brown after he has been released from a Providence hospital after almost dying from covid. Max had said his last goodbyes over an iPhone call arranged by Thomas’ nurse, which has turned out to not have actually been the end. “All he recalled of the ordeal was being ‘awoken’ by the EMTs, as if he’d just been dozing in his chair, and then he recalled ‘the cacophony’ of the hospital, but mostly it was ‘empty space, just a long and dreamless sleep’ until he was off the ventilator, feeling sore and woozy. He wasn’t much changed, and yet he was utterly changed…. I remember thinking as I sat there drinking my coffee, scanning the walls, the piles of books, that the change might well have been in me—that I’d been altered by what I’d said, even if he’d never heard it or couldn’t remember it (are those the same thing?). I’d never had the chance to say goodbye to my mom and now I’d said goodbye to my dad but he’d come back from the dead and here I was to check on him.”

Finally, Max makes his own sort of mirrored confession to the Lerner character, “You’re not understanding. I’d already plugged my phone charger into the outlet near the table, one of those wireless chargers where you just lay your phone against the plate. I pressed record on my voice memo app and set it down on the charger. It was obscured from his view by the lamp—not that he would have paid much attention to it anyway…. No, I didn’t tell him that I was recording, I have no real reason to think he suspected anything, and I just lobbed some questions at him about his past—‘I can’t remember who cooked in your house growing up, was it only your mother?’—and then let him hold forth…. I was only half listening—I’d let my device do the listening as I sipped my wine and nodded—so I felt freed up to really look at him.”

“The Glance of Medusa: The Physiognomy of Mysticism” by Laszlo Foldenyi (translated by Jozefina Komporaly)

This book is a collection of Foldenyi’s essays on the common themes of transcendence, godliness, metaphysics, and myth. He introduces his own writings by quoting Heinrich von Kleist, “We would have to eat once more of the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence…. That is the final chapter in the history of the world.” Then Heidegger, “Ever since being got interpreted as Idea, thinking about the being of beings has been metaphysical, and metaphysics has been theological.” Foldenyi, himself, continues, “Traditional metaphysics is underpinned by a belief in a supposedly final and positive meaning, which meaning, by virtue of its very nature, also differentiates itself from everything that it invests with meaning. This traditional understanding of meaning, the abyss between Being and Be-ing, entices us with the prospect of a new world that, although available to all, can only be accessed if one renounces everything there is, and abandons what appears to be without meaning…. In lieu of an earthly, and hence fractured, Self-image, metaphysical thinking is fascinated by a solid and definitive, hence divine, Self-image…. Individuality is the endless reflection of mirrors reflecting one another, while, above all, actually reflecting the divine…. Human beings are doomed to metaphysics owing to their awareness of their own mortality.”

Foldenyi’s first essay is titled “Divine Experience and Divine Faith (Where the Bars of the Cross Intersect).” It begins with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “You go your own way of greatness; here no one shall sneak along after you! Your foot itself erased the path behind you, and above it stands written: impossibility.” Foldenyi begins by explaining mysticism, “The ‘personal encounter with God,’ known as the key characteristic of mysticism, is the seemingly moderate expression to convey the experience of mystics who have simultaneously lived a given moment (the moment of ‘conversion’) as deprivation and excessive fulfillment.” Heidegger asks, “Why are there beings at all, and why not nothing?” Foldenyi continues, “In the course of divine experience, what cannot be experienced becomes the subject of experience—excess appears within the parameters of moderation—while divine faith separates knowledge and experience, and differentiates moderation from excess…. Divine experience is intense, heated, momentary, and it makes no allowance for past or future, since it makes no allowance for time either…. Divine experience is incompatible with moderation…. In moments such as divine experience, when the individual breaks away from community and is all alone facing the incomprehensible, on the one hand, there are countless things to say, and, on the other, the mouth can barely utter anything.”

Many of Foldenyi’s other essays discuss juxtaposition and paradox. He is interested in the moment and the supremely personal. Foldenyi propounds, “Every live face conceals a mask—the mask of the impossible—into which existence as a whole is compressed, so that one can confront something that does not exist and yet is capable of subverting everything.” In another essay, he, again, discusses the concept of moderation, “The human being, by virtue of its sheer existence, is at the mercy of moderation, the limit and the world of order…. In moments of disruption, it becomes apparent that moderation is a prison, and, as its tenant, one is the prisoner of those who surpass existence altogether: Dike and Ananke; in other words, limitlessness and excess. Thus, one has to become limitless and immoderate in order to assess the totality of one’s own existence.” He quotes Heraclitus, “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul, though you travelled the whole way; so deep is its Law (Logos).”

In another essay, titled “The Impossible,” Foldenyi begins by quoting Plato’s uncle, Critias, “Nothing is certain, except that having been born we die, and that in life one cannot avoid disaster.” Foldenyi expands, “One experiences oneself as a banished God and, as a result, finds oneself bedazzled and tends to perceive life as a giant wound…. In unsettling moments, when one is touched by chaos and, having transcended everything, perceives oneself as the divine centre, it rightly feels that one has also become a victim of discord.” This is related to the concepts of Otherness and alienation. “In sacred moments, one gets to one’s inner self via the roundabout way of Otherness, initially moving away from oneself. Hence the expression ‘losing oneself’, since in such situations one is alienated from everything, including oneself…. Every historical period has encountered this alienation of the world from itself…. Relevant in this respect are the Gnostics, who interpreted alienation as a synonym for the so-called trans- or hypercosmic, and experienced an unsurmountable abyss between earthly existence and the alien and unknowable God in charge of this existence.” Getting back to Otherness, “The ‘Other’ is the expression of the impossibility that everything there is, mankind included, owes its origin to something that is not identical with itself. Every existence is charged with its own absence; in everything that there is, something Other is also inherently nestled…. Through existence, one is the depository of a ‘Being’ that guarantees all existence; at the same time, as an individual condemned to decay, one also has to endure the impossibility of this ‘Being’. The impossible, therefore, is not a noun, and is no equivalent to God, as proposed by theologians, or to Being, as perceived by ontologists…. The very usage of the word is misleading, since we are dealing with something that should not in fact be called impossible; a hyphen (-), free-standing brackets ( ) or three dots (…) would better illustrate this concept than words.” Foldenyi concludes by relating this explicitly back to the impossible, “One of the main aims of the European tradition starting with Plato and culminating with Christianity was to equip the individual to handle the temptation of the impossible…. Ideology teaches about the idea, or, to put it differently, about the sensorially visible…. By seeking an explanation for everything, ideologists find themselves attempting to leave aside the impossible, this defining characteristic of existence.” Friedrich Schleiermacher posits, “The more you fade from yourself, the clearer will the universe stand forth before you, the more splendidly will you be recompensed for the horror of self-annihilation through the feeling of the infinite in you.”

Foldenyi concludes, in his essay “The Power of Now,” by riffing, once again, on the essence of life and its momentariness. “What could human life entail if not a unique moment in which the impossible ruptures and something becomes possible? This moment between birth and death is like lightning; a luminous source that suddenly shoots off into the body of darkness. It surpasses everything while it lasts, appears indestructible and timeless, and is destroyer and creator of time. And then it disappears, just as suddenly as it came about, annihilated by the same immeasurability that led to its birth…. While endowed with the gift of life, the individual also feels short-changed, a feeling for which mortality is the most eloquent proof.” We are all out there in this world, but all on our own for this ever-brief moment of time. “In extraordinary moments, it becomes obvious that there is no society to alleviate the burden of the fleetingness of human existence, and that one cannot rely on other in the end.”