Statement of the Problem
Arguments making a case for complexity and hybridity, usually formulated in response to previous over-simplifications, are by definition hard to refute--but they can also be hard to get excited about.
Yasushi Utsonomia
From the notes to Jon The Dog meets Mad Scientist Utsunomia :
I believe that place cannot be separated from performance and sound as a factor in music. Until quite recently, it was necessary to travel some distance to enjoy music, which would be performed at some specified place and time, and I believe there was a special value in this distance and place. There was a meaningful and close connection between the place and the music performed there, which somehow has become lost, resulting in a weakened music, qualitatively.Because Utsunomia is a forward-thinking person, though, his approach is that rather than trying to simulate natural places in recordings through ever more synthetic methods, we should try to establish a sense of place specific to recordings which could not exist in real space. And this recording does it: it's physically disorienting and destabilizing.Especially the possibility of recording has weakened the role of place, and for that reason, music has lost much of the power and function it once had. Further, in many genres of music, the recording process adds reverberation and other information which was formerly a function of the place of performance, making a mere technical frame of something that was once essentially meaningful and purposeful.
There are many tacit agreements in recording technology and sound production technology. For example, though there is no use of human senses without some slight motion, for the convenience of recording, positions of microphones are rigidly determined, or moved at the convenience of the recorder. But with the physical act of sound reception as a basis, this is not a matter of interest for the brain. The brain processes sounds from perpetually moving ears as a means of obtaining a greater amount of information, which is the brain's main interest. The amount of information spikes by this motion, but recognition that it is the motion creating the increase is not very common.
Jerry Fodor on Galen Strawson on Consciousness
Seven points me to Jerry Fodor's assessment of Strawson's plainly named Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?. Some very hasty thoughts on the following:
There are three philosophical principles to which Strawson’s allegiance is unshakeable. The first is that the existence of consciousness (specifically, of conscious experience) is undeniable; that we are conscious is precisely what we know best. (To be sure, we can’t prove that we are conscious; but that is hardly surprising since there is no more secure premise from which such a proof could proceed.) Strawson’s second principle is a kind of monism: everything that there is is the same sort of stuff as such familiar things as tables, chairs and the bodies of animals. This, however, leaves a lot of options open since Strawson thinks that nothing much is known about that kind of stuff ‘as it is in itself’; at best science tells us only about its relational properties. What is foreclosed by Strawson’s monism is primarily the sort of ‘substance dualism’ that is frequently (but, he thinks, wrongly) attributed to Descartes.The emergence problem, as well as most the suggested answers, is not a new one, and I've found any of its proposed solutions to be exceedingly thorny. The French materialists of the 1800s ran in circles around this issue: some went full-force into vitalism (i.e., the assignment of some mysterious "life principle" to all matter) and declared any and all matter to be capable of judgment, while others tried to negotiate compromises of assigning some sort of proto-consciousness to matter. Diderot's solution was one of the more sophisticated, but also someone question-begging: he called all matter to be "passively" conscious, made "active" through some kind of transformation. Is this emergence or not? The problem does not appear to admit half-measures; either the raw stuff of consciousness is there, or it's not.The third of Strawson’s leading theses is a good deal more tendentious than the first two; namely, that emergence isn’t possible. ‘For any feature Y of anything that is correctly considered to be emergent from X, there must be something about X and X alone in virtue of which Y emerges, and which is sufficient for Y.’ But Strawson holds that there isn’t anything about matter in virtue of which conscious experience could arise from it; or that if there is, we have literally no idea what it could be. In particular, we can’t imagine any way of arranging small bits of unconscious stuff that would result in the consciousness of the larger bits of stuff of which they are the constituents. It’s not like liquids (Strawson’s favourite example of bona fide emergence) where we can see, more or less, how constituent molecules that aren’t liquid might be assembled to make larger things that are. How on earth, Strawson wonders, could anything of that sort explain the emergence of consciousness from matter? If it does, that’s a miracle; and Strawson doesn’t hold with those.
This separates the problem of consciousness from the lame "half an eye" attack on evolution, which is easily answerable by saying that half-eyes existed and were evolutionarily adaptive. It's precisely the seeming holistic nature of consciousness that makes it maddeningly intractable. But I think this is the premise that needs to be attacked, because it makes the problem seem more unsolvable than it is.
Consider the problem another way. When I'm under anesthesia, it appears (to the best of my recollection) that "my" consciousness disappears. Maybe my body or parts of it are still "conscious" in a way, but whatever constitutes consciousness in this state is wildly different from what constitutes it when I am awake, in sheer virtue of it seeming not to be "mine." There's always the hypothetical possibility, of course, that my memory was turned off during that time and yet I still endured all that screaming pain consciously. (The very real experience of some people who are paralyzed but not rendered unconscious and insensate by anesthesia has always struck terror in my heart.) But it seems reasonable to say that I was truly not conscious during that time.
Two points follow. The first is to say that Strawson's definition of consciousness must apply to me while I am under the knife and anesthetized (or, for that matter, when I am dead). This destigmatizes the word "consciousness" from what we associate as human experience. The second is to ask whether consciousness is necessarily experiential. Consciousness obviously is a prerequisite for experience, but without the brain and nervous system, we have to ask what's left of consciousness: either a destigmatized notion of "experience," or no experience at all. In this sense, Strawson's argument is a complement to David Chalmers's panpsychism, which famously maintained that thermostats can be conscious because they function analogously to connectionist networks. Strawson's argument is wholly different, but the crux of the dilemma is the same.
All I can say is that having removed the domesticated notions of "experience" and "consciousness," the anti-emergence claim should no longer seem horribly nonintuitive. Unfortunately, though, I think the converse applies as well: there no longer seems to be an intuitive argument for the anti-emergence claim. And thus the problem transforms itself into the functionalist vs. Searlian arguments of years ago--is consciousness everywhere, or just in some sorts of matter?--but in a form I happen to consider more compelling and universal, since it no longer argues from cognitive capacities and knowledge, but from raw experience.
[There remains the problem of "mineness," which I'll try to get to at some later date.]
Brendel on Furtwängler
Lean, bent slightly backwards, and with an elongated neck, Furtwängler in front of an orchestra gave the impression of overlooking vast spaces. His beat had very little in common with that of present-day conductors. In stretches of pianissimo it could be minute and extremely precise; elsewhere, outstretched arms undulated downwards in total physical relaxation, so that the orchestra had to guess where the beat should be. The sounds thus produced could be of an elemental intensity that I have not experienced since. The image of 'Jupiter tonans' was what came to me then: Furtwängler's thunder was always preceded by lightning-shaped movements, which made the orchestra play considerably after the beat (if there was a beat), and induced double-basses and cellos to prepare the ground for the sonorities by discreetly anticipating their entry. Arthur Nikisch, according to Furtwängler, was the only conductor who presented a thoroughly unforced appearance; Furtwängler regarded himself, in this respect, as Nikisch's pupil, and believed that any contraction of muscle on the part of the conductor would show up in the sound of the orchestra as if reproduced on a photographic plate.What I wonder, after reading this, is whether the controlled/uncontrolled dichotomy is the wrong one to apply to modern conductors vs. Weingartner, Mengelberg, Stokowski, early Celibidache, etc. I would say that Furtwängler was completely in control of what effect free bowing would have, for example, and could marshal that in a less nitpicky way to shape the larger structure of a piece. Such practices have just fallen out of style, unfortunately; the vocabulary has become more limited.Furtwängler's technique, though seemingly unfocused and impractical, was in fact well considered. Not only did it help to anticipate the quality of sonorities and the delay of an important beat: it also foreshadowed changes of atmosphere or the gradual modification of tempo. And this leads us to Furtwängler's particular strength: he was the great connector, the grand master of transition. What makes Furtwängler's transitions so memorable? They are moulded with the greatest care, yet one cannot isolate them. They are not patchwork, inserted to link two ideas of a different nature. They grow out of something and lead into something. They are areas of transformation. If we observe them minutely, we notice that, at first almost imperceptibly, they start to affect the tempo, usually a great deal earlier than is the case with other conductors, until their impact finally makes itself felt. Even where I disagree with the amplitude of Furtwängler's tempo modifications -- as in the first movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony -- I do not know what to admire more: the urgency of his feeling or the acuteness of his control.
Alfred Brendel, "Furtwängler"
ANTIFESTO
No art without art, no text without text.
- No mention of institutional affiliation.
- No discussion of the publishing industry.
- No discussion of academia or academic careers.
- No attacks on critical theory.
- No arguments with or over print media.
- No blog triumphalism.
- No "literary" vs. "non-literary" classifications.
- No arguments from authority.
- No false objectivity.
- No aping of academic prose styles.
- No aping of popular prose styles.
- No smugness.
- No discussion of this manifesto.
[Thanks to EW for the title and JBF for the runner-up.]
Thomas Hardy and the Emotion-Sensation Connection
Hardy suffered from synaesthesia, though being Hardy he saw the days of the week in rather less Technicolor hues than others with the same condition: "Monday was colourless, and Tuesday a little less colourless", while Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were slightly differing shades of blue.Now, was it that he saw those particular objective colors, or that his concepts of those colors were given to more muted names than ours? Or were the concepts right, but his judgments biased in a depressive manner? Seven, can you help?
Wittgenstein's Confession
In 1936, Wittgenstein took it upon himself to prepare a confession to which he would subject his closest acquaintances. I say "subject" because...well, read on.
For both Rowland Hutt and Fania Pascal, listening to the confession was an uncomfortable experience. In Hutt's case, the discomfort was simply embarrassment at having to sit in a Lyons cafe while opposite him sat Wittgenstein reciting his sins in a loud and clear voice. Fania Pascal, on the other hand, was exasperated by the whole thing. Wittgenstein had phoned at an inconvenient moment to ask whether he could come and see her. When she asked if it was urgent she was told firmly that it was, and could not wait. 'If ever a thing could wait,' she thought, facing him across the table, 'it is a confession of this kind and made in this manner.' The stiff and remote way in which he delivered his confession made it impossible for her to react with sympathy. At one point she cried out: 'What is it? You want to be perfect?' 'Of course I want to be perfect,' he thundered.In the same year in which he made his confessions, Wittgenstein astounded the villagers of Otterthal by appearing at their doorsteps to apologize personally to the children whom he had physically hurt. He visited at least four of these children (and possibly more), begging their pardon for his ill-conduct towards them. Some of them responded generously...but at the home of Mr Piribauer, who had instigated the action against Wittgenstein, he received a less generous response. There he made his apologies to Piribauer's daughter Hermine, who bore a deep-seated grudge against him for the times he had pulled her by the ears and by the hair in such a violent fashion that, on occasion, her ears had bled and her hair had come out. To Wittgenstein's plea for pardon, the girl responded only with a disdainful, 'Ja, ja.'
In reflecting upon the effects of his confession he wrote:
Last year with God's help I pulled myself together and made a confession. This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relation with people, and to a greater seriousness. But now it is as though I had spent all that, and I am not far from where I was before. I am cowardly beyond measure. If I do not correct this, I shall again drift entirely into those waters through which I was moving then.(Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 370-372)
Gadamer on Hegel and Language
What [Hegel] calls dialectic and what Plato calls dialectic depends, in fact, on subordinating language to the "statement." The concept of the statement, dialectically accentuated to the point of contradiction, however, is antithetical to the nature of hermeneutical experience and the verbal nature of human experience of the world. In fact, Hegel's dialectic also follows the speculative spirit of language, but according to Hegel's self-understanding he is trying to take a hint from the way language playfully determines thought and to raise it by the mediation of the dialectic in the totality of known knowledge, to the self-consciousness of the concept. In this respect his dialectic remains within the dimension of statements and does not attain the dimension of the linguistic experience of the world....Though he may not have intended it as such, I think Gadamer here pins down the gap between Hegel's instrumental use of language and Wittgenstein's privileging of it. Gadamer is talking about Hegel's notoriously obscure Preface to the Phenomenology and the focus on "speculative propositions." Hegel distinguishes speculative propositions from the Kantian model of subject-predicate (i.e., object-property) in that the predicate does not limit the subject, but instead explicates the concept inherent to the subject. I won't say more about speculative propositions as such. Instead, focus on the role of language in the process, which is purely instrumental in generating conceptual and dialectical content. The concept, though it may be disguised, logically precedes the subject, which logically precedes any descriptions given to it. Language does not perform any role over and above the underlying concept, nor does it elaborate on it. It only shows the way back to a revealing of the concept.Language itself, however, has something speculative about it in a quite different sense--not only in the sense Hegel intends, as an instinctive prefiguring of logical reflection--but, rather, as the realization of meaning, as the event of speech, of mediation, of coming to an understanding. Such a realization is speculative in that the finite possibilities of the word are oriented toward the sense intended as toward the infinite. A person who has something to say seeks and finds the words to make himself intelligible to the other person. This does not mean that he makes "statements."
Truth and Method, III.5.3B
What Gadamer says, in effect, is that this underestimates language and overestimates concepts. He mentions "intelligibility" as a task that language can serve from which concepts (and the "statements" in which they are expressed) are excluded. Ignore Gadamer's double-use of the word "speculative," and think of language's role as one of negotiation quite independent of conceptual baggage: an autonomous meaning generator.
This is not an uncommon move in deconstruction, but it's rarer in hermeneutics because one must still "close the circle," as it were, and constitute some gestalt of meaning. Gadamer does this at great length, and I believe Wittgenstein does too, though far more obliquely, in his idea of rule-following. Hegel, however, never takes that first step. His intersubjectivity remains one of concepts and not one of language.