What is the ancestral phenomena? Okay, so the ancestral phenomena, or rather not phenomena, precisely not phenomena, ancestral statements about beings that were there when there was nothing, no possibility of manifesting them as phenomena, are couched in terms of primary qualities. informatics for Meosu describes the primary qualities of objects, and it describes the primary qualities of objects that can exist without us being there to manifest them. That's the only way to understand what science is telling us. But that is completely incompatible with philosophy since Kant. So there's a suspicion here that against the very strange and bizarre
things that science is telling us. Perhaps philosophy has come down a little too much on the side of comforting our default attitudes towards the world, towards limiting ourselves within our own lives and our own experience. Perhaps science is telling us something about an outside and philosophy has not been able to make sense of it at all. philosophers can claim to be too modest to talk about supernovas or say that we're not doing that we're doing something else this is precisely what Meosu is trying to trying to show us is impossible because it's not just that the two things are slightly incompatible
they're actually polemically opposed the vision of reality that philosophy gives us is totally incompatible with what science is telling us. More cunningly, a philosopher can allow a scientist to be valid in their own terms. And you hear philosophers saying this. Well, what scientists do is valid in their own terms, in their own practice. But then the philosopher will claim that standing above science, the philosopher needs to add a corrective, to add a caveat, to add a correlationist coefficient to every scientific statement. Okay, so let's try to do that. This supernova began to explode 4 million years ago for us. This doesn't make any sense.
These rocks formed from lava flowing over the surface of the Earth millions of years before the birth of mankind. We're flowing over the rocks millions of years before the birth of mankind. But this statement is only valid for the community of scientists or for our linguistic consensus. These statements are clearly not about our world, completely incompatible. So Meir's using this lever of the ancestral, or what he calls the archifossil, to force a decision and to show that correlationism is a serious, serious problem. if the philosopher claims to be talking about a deeper level than the mere level of science that means very exactly that the philosopher is telling the scientist that he doesn't know
what he's talking about the philosopher is telling the scientist that he's afflicted with a naivety that doesn't allow him to realize that his statements all rely on a prior correlation essentially a very condescending attitude. So as we've seen, this is not really a compromise that can be accepted. The scientist can tell the philosopher, you're simply wrong, these objects did exist. And if you want to create a philosophy unable to account for hundreds of years of scientific knowledge and render our understanding of the world invalid, then go ahead. And in a sense, this is something like what's happened, that philosophy has retreated to the humanities and has ceased to be engaged with science in this way.
Not all of philosophy, but certainly what became known as continental philosophy in the last few decades of the 20th century. So, yeah. I think the scientists, they also themselves, they say, ah, we're playing this again and so-and-so million years ago until a new theory comes up and says, ah, no. Yeah, sure. So they also, they're kind of in the limit. Yes, but that's a different thing. The correctability of the theory is not the same thing as reducing it to a correlation. Because even if you make a theory that you believe
could be corrected at some future time, the statement that you make, if it's to make sense, it still has to refer to something. You can't actually, even if you believe that the statement might be corrected, the sense of the statement is still there. The sense of the statement is still, given all the data, this is what we can say about what happened four billion years ago. Because we want to stay there. Yeah. Yeah, it's a different, but it's a different point. Yeah. I think Quentin talks about this in the book, in fact. Yeah. So why does the philosopher want to hold on to correlation?
I think it's to do with a very central aspect of speculative realism. And that's to do with meaning and being. With this lever that Mea Su uses, he basically prizes apart meaning and being. Things can be without meaning anything. Obviously, when the supernova happened, it meant nothing, because there was no one there for it to mean anything to. But it's also, in a profound sense, meaningless to us. It's something that we can't make sense of within our life world. And this is related to time, new ways of thinking time. Because the basic problem of ancestrality is that it posits a time that precedes meaning.
Time was there before meaning. It's a time that precedes any givenness to consciousness. And science is somehow able to think this time that has no relation to human time. and as we saw for Kant space and time are the forms of intuition and time is what he calls the inner sense it's the most fundamental sense upon which our experience is built and then we saw how Heidegger's notion of time was even more humanized it was the time of the project and the horizon within which we live I have a problem with this because there is all the time someone is thinking about this About a time being...
Yes. There's someone thinking about it. But the statement which that person is formulating is about something which was not manifested to anyone. So the question is not... the question is the question of the sense of the statement it's about the meaning of the statement the reference of the statement not about the fact that there's someone thinking it it's not really a problem that someone's thinking it
Nor using language because I guess Well what kind of language are they using? They're using a mathematical language Yes and the mathematical language is just as approximative as verbal language in a way but it's used to describe something beyond language Me too I get the same kind of problem when you speak about the examples that you did earlier this is like lava flow here and there this is a lot of time then of course you make reference to the construction of time the construction of understanding of stone but it's a construction of
it's a different construction of time to the construction of time that belongs inherently to the human being it's a notion of time like geological time is a notion of time that's hugely kind of traumatic to the cultural psyche when it appears. So it's not the same, it's not a natural sense of time for the human. And the problem is not that, okay, physics, geology, cosmology are done by human beings. The problem is to do with, if we are to philosophically ratify what those scientists are doing,
then it demands that we accept the reality of objects without manifestation. we have to think these objects that were there before they were able to be manifested and that's not possible within the correlationist framework so the claim is that somehow scientists are thinking are able to access something outside the correlation would you say that it's the same that speculative realism to philosophy went through the same thing as, let's say, the A&T, like the Latour and the John Law,
and these people were in relationship to sociology. Is the same kind of problem that the science studies people of the A&T could say? I don't know. Why would you make that parallel? Because they were also coming out of a frustration that sociology was unable to say anything about science science beyond social construction. So they were saying that sociology looking at the group of scientists could only talk about what are the social constructions of the lab or so on. But they were unable to deal with the construction of the lab itself. Yeah, I think in that sense, yes. And also giving a kind of agency to the objects themselves. Yeah. yeah yeah
how is it related to platonic way of thinking is it going with or completely against well every philosopher has their own interpretation of what platonic thought is but certainly in Meosu I think there's a platonism in the sense of the mathematical platonism that mathematics is the way in which we unlock the being of things. I was thinking about, in my head, the thought that reality is over there. The kind of distance between the individual and reality not being able to reach it, actually.
That would be more of a correlationist perspective, I'm not sure what to say about that. Sorry. But also mathematics has a non-totalizable all. Yeah. So in respect of set theory, which I guess Melasu gets from Badiou, a lot of students these students that use this mathematics because already Kant calls mathematical syllogisms an a priori. Because they are true whether we regard them in respect of our determined way of perceiving the world as secondary qualities.
So they are already in his thought a priori, as opposed to our knowledge that is always a posteriori, after it has been processed through phenomena. So mathematics already in Kant is part of the numeral beam, I guess you could say. you could say, but the kind of mathematics Meazoo is talking about is not the eternal form of mathematical truth as such I don't know, maybe you have to elaborate a bit on this but the way I understand it is that the mathematics he is talking about is the language of mathematics as a non-totalizable because you can't count
all possible ways of counting Well, he uses that as a device, but I don't think that's necessarily what's at issue here in terms of the question of the primary qualities. I mean, he uses the cantor and the transfinite as a kind of device, but it's arguable whether that's really central to what he's doing. But I think here he's just... The hunch that he works on here is that it's something about mathematical language that enables us to make these statements, these ancestral statements. And there's actually a problem there because not all ancestral statements are mathematical statements.
What we know about the geology of the earth and dinosaurs and so on, that's really not mathematical knowledge in the end. although I think he would argue that it's based on these dating techniques which are based on physics and physics is mathematical but I think that's rather problematic because his question here then is if we grant that science is able to think these things to think this alien real and this alien time these primary qualities, it's through mathematics. How can mathematics describe a world without us?
So the archifossil is something that's given to us and certainly we think these things within human culture, within the correlation, if you like, but it's intrusion into the correlated world creates this gap and makes this whole. It reveals this kind of chilling outside. And Meirsook concludes this with a stark and striking return to rationalism, saying an absolute is thinkable. And it's necessary to say that this statement, in the context of a kind of modest philosophies,
the finitude-obsessed philosophies, the language-obsessed philosophies, it's self-startling for a philosopher to say an absolute is thinkable. But he can't, of course, rely on God to provide him the guarantee with thinking this absolute. So it's important that Meosu actually concedes the point. He actually does accept that we do seem to be caught within this correlationist circle that prohibits the thinking of an absolute. So he's looking for a chink in the armor, a point at which this circle is punctured, which lets us into the outside of this unmanifested realm. And he sees this in these scientific statements. And so he asks, well, how are they possible? So in a sense, he knows that we have already made it outside.
He knows that it's through mathematics. But he also knows that philosophy hasn't understood how. philosophy hasn't understood either that we can do this or how we can do it and I'd like to just read a bit of an interview that I did with Mayer Sue recently he says in fact mathematics for me are the strange possibility to speak about a world a very special world a world without thinking or life mathematics are the possibility of coming back from the infernal from death's realm. You go to death's realm and return. It's a special realm. And really for me, it's the big mystery. Because for me, experiencing qualities and so on, my world is always a world of sensation, of vitality, of thinking. This is a familiar world. But the real mystery is what the
world would be like without thinking, without humanity, without life. What would it be like? There would be no colours, no relations. This is really strange. What would it be, death's world? And the mystery is that science actually tells us just that. And this is kind of going into this dark, horrific affect that Martin was talking about, that we're talking about death's realm. And there's also an interesting point here to do with imagination, I think, because what he's saying is science exposes us to this realm precisely in so far as what science tells us is unimaginable. So there's no way we can actually, as soon as we imagine ourselves into these worlds,
into these objects, then we correlate them and we're no longer looking at what science tells us. So, of course, culturally, there's this problem with squaring how we naturally think as human beings with what science tells us. And in a way, Meir Su is kind of deflationary in this respect because he's telling us, yes, there is no way for the imagination to capture this. This is why science is a special type of knowledge, because it deals with primary qualities. Now, so mathematics, so it seems, is able to do this, but we don't know how. and correlationist philosophy has obscured the question
or has no interest in the question and on the other hand scientists perhaps are spontaneous realists they don't ask the question, they don't pose the question or if they do, they don't do it within the realm of their professional life and I've certainly interviewed scientists for collapse and they all think about these things but it's kind of sequestered off from what they do every day because every day they sit at the computer, they process the data, they're busy with what they're doing and they don't ask these questions. So philosophers have been unable or uninterested in comprehending this passage from the correlationist circle. And so Meir Su asks,
Meir Su asks, how can thought then carve out this path towards the outside? How can we follow the thread through the ancestral phenomena into the outside? So next he notes that what's interesting about correlationism, what's interesting about this notion of a conditioning that conditions all of our knowledge, is what he calls its factuality, or its facticity. It's factuality. It means it's a fact. the fact that our knowledge is conditioned in this particular way and that's a fact. It has the character of a fact rather than a necessity. As Kant himself said,
there may be other beings who experience the world in different ways who have different forms of intuition. All we know is this is the one we've got and we're stuck with it. So for the correlationists, therefore, we know that our knowledge is conditioned in this way. we don't know why, we just know that it is we can certainly say that it has to be like this we can't say that it has to be like this but we can say that this is how it is and this is thought of as an incapacity as a weakness or a finitude of thought that is we admit that everything that's given to us is given to us for us not as it is or as it might be in itself we carve out this finite circle within a greater reality so the correlationist again is like a kind of agnostic
but according to Mayasu this agnosticism must be turned from an apparent weakness in thought into a knowledge that is a positive knowledge of the capacity to be other but then this capacity to be other this pure fact of the givenness of the correlation that fact itself can't be conceived as a correlate of our thinking, precisely because it harbors the possibility of our non-being, of the non-being of the correlation. I can't think my capacity not to be as something that is for me. I can't think the non-existence
of the type of conditioning that conditions my knowledge as something that's for me, because if it wasn't so, then I wouldn't be there. So it's here that Meir-su discovers a fault line that runs right at the heart of correlationism. He, in fact, kind of intensifies correlationism. Correlationism wanted to de-absolutize everything. It wanted to strip the possibility of speaking of an absolute by attaching to every thought this correlationist caveat. It's only for us, for us, for us. But we can see that this de-absolutization can only exist by absolutizing the fact of the correlation itself. So either you de-absolutize everything,
including your own capacity to be otherwise, including the notion that the correlation could be otherwise, in which case you're merely in subjective idealism, you're unable to say anything about anything, or you absolutize your own capacity to be otherwise make this capacity into an in itself rather than a for us that is to say the fact of the correlation the fact that our forms of intuition could be different only makes sense as an absolute statement we don't want to say that the forms of intuition are as they are and they mustn't necessarily be as they are because Kant won't allow us to do that.
But in that case, we have to make an absolute statement of their factuality. And this is how Meir Su produces this puncture in the circle of correlationism. He shows that there is, in fact, an absolute which is thinkable. Correlationism has two principles, the de-absolutization of experience and the factuality of the correlation or the conditioning. And these two are incompatible. And this absolute, this absolute possibility to be other is what Meir-Sue calls radical contingency or absolute contingency or hyper-chaos. It replaces metaphysics, which would be the universal laws of being, with a new principle.
and this new principle is not a metaphysical absolute it's not an absolute entity or a god it's not an absolute thing that must necessarily exist that must be it's what he says is an absolute that is not an absolute entity an hypothetical principle that is a principle that doesn't depend on anything else but it can be proved by argument It's a kind of escape hole that pre-exists in the finite circle of correlationist thought. It's not constructed within that circle, but it's available. It's absolutely available. And so in this case, it's an intellectual intuition of the kind that Kant argued was impossible because of our finitude.
Does he think about this only in relation to kind of Western tradition? or did he try to place it outside, like for example in relation to Zen Buddhism or anything like that? No, that could be interesting. I'm not aware of him ever talking about that. Is there a similar concept? There's the concept of nothingness, so like another way of thinking about the individual that is larger than the self. Yeah. But that wouldn't quite be the same thing. No, I don't think that. That was my question. and try to compare it? Yeah. No, no one I know has tried to do that. I mean, he's working his way out from the situation of Western philosophy.
I mean, so he's beginning within that tradition, obviously. There's something about it that in no respect but helpful. Helpful? Yeah, in the sense of, it doesn't give us advice to how to live or whatever. Well, this is an interesting thing because I mean the whole idea of being useful is completely alien really to speculative realism because it begins on the presumption surely that we We can't subordinate truth to instrumentality. This is the basis precisely of the banal realism of Western civilization.
Is that, well, whatever's useful is real. That's why we still... It's the basis of human life and of human culture. is that what's useful to us we regard as real. Like, my beliefs about your motives. Are there such things as motives or, you know, emotions or, you know, whatever, all the things that we think of as real, all the things we like to watch on reality TV are the things which are real, which are, they're real because they're useful to someone. They're useful to the system. It's useful to society for those things to be real entities. So to identify the real with the useful is precisely what we're trying not to do.
So whether we expect that to produce a useful thought or not, I think part of what speculative realism wants to get away from is a practicism in thought, that is a subordination of philosophical thinking to the immediate aim of having to have some political or ethical consequence. But having said that, in fact, if you look in, I think, Collapse 4, there's this interesting preview of Meir Su's magnum opus, which seems to never arrive. he's been writing it I think for 11 years now, in which he talks about a virtual God.
And he does in fact draw out a kind of ethical position. But to me, in a sense, it's disappointing that, you know, is that really what this was for? But nevertheless, this is the kind of, this is where the philosophy is going towards I mean this is what the after finitude is only a small introduction to pose the problem the real book is this book on the virtual god not the god that exists nor the god that doesn't exist but the god that might come sometime in the future because of hyper chaos because anything could happen at any time it's a very interesting
argument I mean it's bizarre yeah I can also see that this is useful this thinking is useful exactly to make use of the only say who cares about it if we are not if it's useful for doing things I mean it was more connected with that. Why is it useful for doing that? I mean, there is still the point where thinking, speculative realism at all, seems still connected to enabling XYZ,
like expanding possibilities. Hmm, expanding. I mean, obviously, as a realism as anything else that can be spoken about, has use value, has some kind of, as soon as something becomes, gains simplification, it can be introduced into use. But it could be a kind of... Use it now to get out of correlation. Yeah, sure. But what I meant rather was in the sense of, and so he's not trying to make the world comprehensible or make connection to other kinds of existence, it's exactly not to critique, or he doesn't want, and he's not interested in producing agency for something, but rather,
but rather the subjectivity that we perform the world is only one possibility. He doesn't call anything what it else could be except that he has no validity whatsoever. It just happens that it is this one. So in a way the darkness that the Mea Su opens for is also only dark from here. Oh, of course. It doesn't allow our subjectivity to be maintained and taken for granted. But it also opens for all other kinds of light, so to say. But you somehow said that if you want something radically different,
it has to be to the worst in respect of from where we come. because it won't be like this and it won't be an enhancement nor it won't be an enhancement of this it will be something utterly different so what Mayasu somehow does from a sort of a dilettante perspective is is is also a promise of another kind of world that is actually is not which has no compatibility with what our world is but that also means that if this world goes under which apparently some people think it does
then that's no problem because there will be another one or something else will be and Yeah, but of course a part of the principle of, I mean what is this thing that Mea Su claims to have discovered through this kind of hole in the correlationism? It's this absolute capacity, an absolute capacity to be other, right? It's not a metaphysical theory that that explains how one thing becomes another. It's an absolute capacity to be other. It's a new notion of time, this notion of radical contingency.
Absolutely, radical contingency. So like empirical contingency would just mean that Things could be other than they are, but that kind of contingency always takes place within the framework of a limited possibility or potentiality. It always takes place under a law, so things could be different, like this glass could be there instead, or there, or there. But that's within a regimented framework of possibility, and the framework of law is always tied up with the framework of metaphysical law. is always tied up with the notion of time, because things change within time, things become other within time, according to certain principles.
And that's what metaphysics try to get to. But absolute contingency is the notion of a time in which not only things aren't stable, like this can move from here to there to there, not only things are contingent, but laws themselves are contingent and can change at any time. And this, according to Meirsu, is what lies outside the correlationist circle. It's what he calls a chronics rather than a physics, which is not the same as a becoming. So Meosu seeds the point of correlationism. He uses a rational argument on the very basis of correlationism to deduce this unhypothetical principle, the principle of absolute contingency. and therefore he posits this absolutely new type of a new type of absolute
and we'll just read what he says here because this is actually getting back to an answer to to martha as well if we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute what we see there is rather a rather menacing power something insensible and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realising every dream but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian
God and capable of anything, even the inconceivable, but an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas. See, something akin to time, but a time that's inconceivable for physics, since it's capable of destroying, without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it's inconceivable for metaphysics, since it's capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even god. It's a time capable of destroying, even becoming itself, by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis and death. So, it introduces a completely, what's important
is it doesn't introduce a new metaphysical way of thinking, it introduces a new way of thinking by thinking through this point of hyper-chaos. And in answer to your question, Martin, I think it can't be used as a way to write off the problems of the world by saying it's okay, another world will be along soon, precisely because hyperchaos is compatible with the laws of nature remaining as they are for any amount of eons. Right, so it's not a kind of warrant to think that everything is going to change all the time, because obviously
we know that's not the case. And this is what's really important about hyperchaos, that it's It's the absolute capacity for things to completely change, it's absolute contingency, but that's not incompatible with things staying the same. So it can't really be used as a kind of transformative theory in that sense. It's not the theory of becoming. It's not a theory of becoming. And this is the... Doesn't it say like we cannot say anything about anything because anything can change it anymore? That's absolute. That's the absolute. It kind of gives up. You could use it in that way.
You could use it in that way. But that's not the way that Meosui is using it. It's finding it helpful that we cannot say anything about anything. anything can change anymore yeah well exactly because it seems like ok so at the moment this looks like the black hole it's something that obeys no law no pattern there can be no metaphysics there can be no way of catching suspect zero and yet we do have access to it we do catch this thing and so Meir Su is saying when we look at the ancestral being the archifossil when we stare through the electron microscope
this is what we're looking into this is what we're looking into the face of indeed it's something beyond the empirical findings of science and Meir Su is very much so a philosopher he's not he's a philosopher But he sees at the basis of what science is able to do, this puncture to the outside, this terrifying form of time. But at the same time, he claims to philosophically rediscover the speculative import of science, something that was really lost since the time when we used to have such a thing as a natural philosopher, who was both a scientist and a philosopher.
So this is one version of the important bond between science and philosophy in speculative realism. So, to answer your question, he's saying, he then asks, how could this disaster provide the foundation for scientific discourse? Because this is the only clue he's got to go on, right? That science is able to do this. That it's somehow possible through mathematics. and then he's found this way to the outside. He's found this one way to the outside from within correlationism. So he needs to connect the two things together. And he begins to show in After Finitude that from the principle of factuality,
from this absolute principle, you can begin to deduce other propositions. So in fact it becomes, for him, a foundation of a new system of reasoning. and the first one is the collapse of the principle of sufficient reason which is that the principle Leibniz's metaphysical principle that everything that is has a reason to be as it is well this collapses and the various other corollaries that he draws out of this principle but disappointingly for all of you he hasn't published his new book yet So we're unable to see how he develops this into its full fruition. But he claims to be able to draw out from the principle of absolute contingency
the foundations for the possibility of mathematical thinking. Therefore, what he will set out to do, he'll try to achieve by escaping correlationism and refounding the philosophical possibility of science as statements about the ancestral on the basis of his absolute principle. And in the context of speculative realism, Quentin Mayer-Sue is the rationalist. The real independent of the human that he discovers isn't an entity that stands outside everything. It's not a metaphysical principle that governs all things. It's a rational principle that we discover to be necessary. And it reveals that the reason why mathematical science is unthinkable for
a philosophy that always correlates object with subject is that its local empirical findings about the ancestral are rendered possible on the basis of this speculative point, this single thought that connects us to an outside of all correlation. I think, should we stop there for a short break. Since we've got not so much time left now, I think what I'm going to do is to leave Ray Brassier until the morning, so we have a good invigorating blast of nihilism
tomorrow. And it occurred to me that it would be interesting to talk about, rather than talking about just the philosophy today and talking about these different extensions and the activity that Urbanomics done with artists tomorrow, we can now talk about this particular project. And also, because someone was asking me the question, as an artist, what could I do with this is difficult to see with these kind of very abstract concepts and with the idea that the kind of reality we're talking about is not accessible to the imagination. How can we deal with these concepts? And this is a question that I've always really been
very interested in is if you're dealing with ideas that inherently act against representation, that challenge the conditioned reality that we know, then how can you use them? How can you present the kind of experience that this thought gives you in another form? And so I think it would be interesting to talk about a project that Urbanomic has done with the
electronic composer Florian Hecker, who's based in Vienna and who's been working for many years on a variety of conceptual projects that use various different kinds of sound synthesis. And back in, I think at the end of 2009, in fact before that, in 2008, I had spoken to Florian and he was interested in doing something for Collapse and we wrote this piece in Collapse number 3, which was about the project that he and Russell Haswell were doing with this piece of technology that the composers and Arcus created called the
U-Pick, which is obviously like from the 70s, it's this huge great thing which is by today's standards a not very powerful computer. But the idea with that was that you could create, you could interact on all levels of sound from the microsonic to the level of a complete piece just by using a pen. And his idea was that it was a kind of pedagogical tool. He called it polyagogical tool, so that children could investigate sound and use sound outside the kind of limitations of particular instruments. They could actually investigate the kind of
grain of sound. And following on from that, I had many conversations with Florian, and at one point he got hold of Quentin's book and he became really enthusiastic about this idea of hyperchaos, obviously something that kind of struck him about it. And in 2009, Urbanomic commissioned him to create a piece based on the concept of hyperchaos. And so this, in a very acute way, brings home this question of how do you deal with ideas that can't be fully represented in a piece, and instead use the materials of the artist
to make ideas compelling or accessible. And in a way it's a completely paradoxical enterprise to try and make, you're trying to make this idea of something which is completely abstract and removed from experience, livable. You're trying to dramatize it into some form in which you can experience it. And I'm interested in whether this manifestation of philosophical ideas in experience entails a kind of inevitable betrayal or an inevitable failure of aesthetic experience before the idea. And I'll just describe a little bit the process of developing this piece with Florian. so after I'd been working with Florian for some time
I began to understand his engagement with psychoacoustics as being related to an attempt to analyze and finally to somehow break down the conditions of objectivity for sound that is the conditions under which we recognize something as a sound what is it that makes us recognize oh that's one thing making a noise that's two things and psychoacoustics is the field of scientific research which answers these types of questions which explains how from the molecular the series of molecular disturbances that constitute sound the brain constructs or reconstructs sound objects which in turn are then attributed to sound sources
so hopefully it should be clear that there's a kind of parallel to the Kantian problem here a parallel to this idea of the conditioning of what comes from outside in order to create objects so theories of psychoacoustics deal with this question what is a sound and what are the principles according to which we differentiate from the raw data that reaches our ears one, two or many sound objects locate them, identify them react to them. And there are various, during the course of experimentation, scientists have discovered various psychoacoustic effects. These are kind of reproducible experiments that demonstrate the point at which these principles of construction
would kick in and start to take effect. In other words, since the advent of electronic sound and machines which can vary all of the parameters of sound, you're able to create experiments in which you can actually hear your own brain assembling or putting together sound into sound objects, because you can find the point at which two sounds become one, and you can get to the exact point, the limit of that, and then you can actually hear the thing happening. So it enables you to kind of pinpoint these conditions of auditory experience. and Alfred Bregman's work is particularly important here so he's identified various effects and various illusions
so for instance the continuity illusion which specifies certain conditions under which you hear one sound continue even when it's masked by another so technically speaking the first sound becomes inaudible but you'll hear it continuing and that's dependent on the length of time between the pulses and so on. So your brain will create a kind of phantom sound object because your brain is expecting a certain thing and it's our brain's default tendency to look for a certain type of object that obeys consistent rules. So in other words, linking it back to Meosu, in a sense you could say our brain is spontaneously metaphysical. It has these metaphysical rules about how things should behave
and these illusions or effects are kind of demonstrations of that. Another one that Florian's used in his work is what's called a localization blur which is Jens Blauetz, based on Jens Blauetz's work. This specifies conditions under which you can create a sound object that can't be localized to one place in space. So you can have a sound object which you're sure of the direction of and then by varying the parameters slightly, it becomes displaced, so it comes from two places, and then it becomes really unidentifiable. And so a lot of Florian's work uses these effects, and he manipulates them in a very masterful way, really.
He creates these environments where attention and awareness then becomes focused on the very act of constructing sound objects, the construction itself. and on the different ways in which we can understand it, we can theorize it and experiment with it. So I began to see that his work was related to a kind of spontaneous metaphysics in the brain. And where does this come from? Well, of course, it's a matter of evolutionary cognitive biology. The brain has endowed us with a complex set of rules that express a kind of biological theory of objects, a biologically instantiated theory of objects, or a metaphysics. And this is very interesting from the point of view of speculative realism
because speculative realism is of course interested in troubling or in disrupting the spontaneous notion of realism that we've been bequeathed by evolution. It's interested in questioning questioning whether the spontaneous image of reality in which we live our everyday lives in fact can be disrupted by this other register of reality. So in this, from this perspective, you could say that psychoacoustics in fact describes a kind of systematic hallucination.
sound objects are really hallucinations they're functional modes of hallucination that have favoured our species survival enabling us to employ sound in a useful way but they can also be made to misfire and to break down and this is an important point about the human being's spontaneous image of reality is that it doesn't necessarily correspond to how things are it's produced not on the basis of a correlation with reality it's produced on the basis of what worked for survival and obviously what worked for survival we don't need to know that we live on a planet that's not flat
it's more useful for us to think that it's flat we don't need to know about supernova that's not useful to us so there's a very limited range range of rules, mostly relating to medium-sized objects that we can grasp with our hands, which provide the basis of our image of reality. So this is where I was with Hecker's work, when both he and I began to see some points of connection with Meosu. And primarily, in the second half of Meosu's book, he rethinks what's called Hume's problem. This is a classic problem in philosophy put forward by the empiricist Hume, who we've already mentioned. Hume had
asked simply, how do we know that the laws of nature will remain the same tomorrow as they are today? And as we'll know, Mayasu's speculative solution to this question is going to be, we don't know, we can never know, but he's going to turn that into a positive piece knowledge, a positive point on which to base a new kind of philosophy. So Hume had said famously, how do we know the sun will rise tomorrow? Or he has this other example of the billiard balls, which is a kind of famous vignette in the history of philosophy. How do we know that if we hit a billiard ball at a certain angle and it travels for a certain distance in a certain direction, how do we know that if we hit it at the same angle tomorrow, then exactly the same impact won't result in it transforming into six hermit crabs
that are suspended in mid-air and then explode. How do we know that the laws of nature are going to be the same tomorrow as they are today? Since there's a disjunction between what we've experienced so far and our imagination that it's not hard to imagine that these things could change. We can imagine any number of bizarre things that might happen when one billiard bull hits another. So how do we know that things will continue as expected? and Hume says we can't be sure on the basis of experience because we've just got the experience that we've had so far and that's not really a basis for anything but equally reason doesn't help us because try as we might there doesn't seem to be any watertight rational argument why the laws of nature must stay the same so Hume's conclusion as we've said was we have to shift the locus of philosophical inquiry
from an attempt to use rationality to account for the laws of nature into an inquiry into how human experience generates the notion of laws. So it becomes a psychological problem. And Hume's response to this is that it's to do with habit and repetition. We believe in laws because we see things repeated. And we gain the notion of laws. Repeated, consistent experiences generate expectations. And that's the source of the laws of nature. they're artifacts of the constitution of the human understanding not something that can be identified rationally and you can see how this feeds into what Kant will do later yeah is there a difference between that it has to be this every time in the future
or that you can say that this was why or does it have to be the same question ultimately I think it's the same question well ultimately it's the same question isn't it because you're asking which effects will follow from which causes in each case so you want to know given this cause can I know that this effect will always follow from it yeah that's all you can know that it has done so far But they can still, because as I understood it, you couldn't say even that it has this reason. No, no, he can't say that.
This is precisely Hume's point, is that you can't draw from experience. Maybe it's like that now, but it doesn't have to be that. Why is it? Because there's no reason. Reason gives us no warrant to think that we can predict. We do predict. That's what we do as humans. Psychologically, we're built to predict. But when we think about it, there's no reason. So basically Hume was saying the philosophical attempt to build a watertight rational theory which will tell us why we can know that one cause will always lead to the same effect,
must always fail, because all we have to go on is our experience. That's what empiricism is. It's the notion that our theories come from experience and not from reason. Yeah, you don't understand, but I didn't understand why. If you can, is it possible to say that this happened because of this? Is that ever possible to say that it has happened? For Hume, no. For Hume, all there is, as he says, not cause but constant conjunction. We've constantly seen the two things conjoined, but that doesn't make enough to call it cause.