Hyperstition & The New Weird II (Session 1)

Okay, thank you all for joining us. This is the first session of Hyperstition, and it's an extension of Ben and I's seminar from a few months ago, which we did Hyperstition and a New Weird. This will be trying to extend upon the concept of hyperstition and to explore more science fiction and also explore concepts of fictional worlds, possible futures, politics, ethics, and time. So with me is, well with me without an image is Ben. We will both be sort of leading the seminar and we have our guest today is Paul Ennis who's here. So it's nice for, yeah

I know we have a lot of people who are here from Ireland right now, and I know it's very late, so thank you for being here at this time. And general structure, we've had two people here in the last session with us. So it's very laid back. We have, we kind of, Ben and I just picked a few texts in which we're finding some of these questions to be interesting, and I think we just, we want to explore them along with you. I don't think either of us consider Well, I mean, I'm not speaking for him But as there is himself an expert In anything we're doing We're just kind of going to experiment with these things And these ideas And mostly it will be built on discussion Today we're going to Discuss Melisou's book

Which is science fiction Extra science fiction And we're going to And we also Will discuss the Isaac Asimov short story if anybody wants to along with we have another short story by Willis what's the first name? Connie. Yeah, Connie Willis so yeah so I think Ben recently just gave a talk on something that's very similar or like a very similar concept to this. So I'm gonna pass it on to Ben. He's gonna kind of outline what we mean by fictional worlds,

possible futures, and kind of give a general context for the class, so yeah. Okay, hi everyone. So one of the things we wanna explore in the course is this relationship between possible and fictional, and how that relationship changes or doesn't change as it moves from fictional narratives, scientific narratives, ethical, political narratives, how that works. So one thing to talk about is kind of relationship between fictional and possible. As Tony mentioned, I did a talk in Melbourne.

tried to make a schema for how these two things relate. So basically possible worlds, when people say possible world, it's generally taken that it's built off our world. It's our world where something else could happen. There's some possibility that is generally not too extravagant in the way it's talked about, that possible is, you know, the materials of our world, something could happen in which a different future would emerge. That's the kind of, like, generic discussion of it. Whereas in the philosophical tradition, especially with someone like David Lewis, for him, possible worlds, you know,

all things that could, everything that could happen would imply a different world, and he thinks this is an important way of illustrating the categories of modality, of necessity, you know, necessity, contingency, possibility, these kinds of concepts that are in our language, he thinks, implies worlds are as real as our world. Which people have given him a lot of crap for that. But that's a bit too extravagant. so a possible world is just this kind of consistent world based on often discussed as this world

that unfolds from the known possibilities in some way but fictional worlds are similar and can function in a similar way in that fictional worlds are generally more or less parasitic on the real world. If you think of different genres, something like a crime show or a drama seems to take place in our world. There's nothing necessarily that sets it apart immediately from what we would call our world. Whereas certain genres like horror, for instance,

may be our world plus zombies, or our world with a particular serial killer in it, or something like this. And that relationship, that parasitism, between our world and the fictional world becomes more extreme with fantasy and sci-fi, because it often implies constructing fictional whole solar systems, galaxies, kinds of life, whatever it is. that may be more or less building upon what we know about our world or what could happen. So in those regards, those ones that are less parasitic in our world have to explore more extravagant possibilities.

But of course, so fictional and possible overlap quite a bit, but not fully. and so whereas fictional worlds often tends to suggest this kind of free and open kind of creation possible world often implies a more grounded a more grounded kind of imaginary but I think one thing we want to talk about is how how that might not necessarily play out in certain kinds of politics or in certain kinds of thinking when it comes to the relationship between science fiction and science or between knowledge and being or whatever it is. Yeah, there.

If that makes sense. Okay, yeah. I mean, at this, I would just break a simple break point. If anybody has any questions for Ben on this or comments, if they have questions perhaps about how it ties into the first seminar I mean I guess one thing before we jump into the book is you can type in the chat too if you don't want to actually say anything it's fine I can pay attention there as well as if we've all read this or not because I don't know if everybody has gotten a hold of the book. Yeah.

Derek, you've read it? Uh-huh. Okay. Okay, not yet. So, I know. Chris is here. He's read it. Always read it. The NASA? Yes. Yes. Definitely. I knew you got it. I've read it sometime. Okay, perfect. All right. So then I guess there's a few that haven't read it, so we can kind of walk through it a little bit. But first, before we get into it, we invited Paul to come and give us a little context of medicine and kind of give us a little framework to jump into this book.

I think it will be helpful for the people who haven't read it especially. So, Paul? Yeah, so it's a pretty fascinating text. I mean, it's been, I'm not sure how well everybody can hear me, yeah? Yeah, I can hear you. Very good. So, you know, it's been published in the Spectative Solutions CD years ago. It's in the realism, materialism art book as well, and now it has the univocal text. And it was also in a magazine a few years ago. So it's always been around as a kind of interesting text.

It seems to have a life of its own. And I was very interested that it was chosen for this course in particular. For me of course Mayesu mostly is after finitude and divine in existence, that kind of thing. But when I re-read it, so I re-read it yesterday, it's a long time since I properly looked at it, what struck me is that Mayesu is known as the anti-correlationist speculative realist guy. So that's the kind of team, you know, the way he's being presented to the English speaking world. And yet unless if you go to like his web page or just communicate with

him, he always says the main thing that interests him is Jung's problem. So he lists this as his kind of main area of research or interest. So Jung's problem of induction is May Sue's most interested in the kind of area, despite the fact that he's presented as this whatever the guy that gets us out of anti-realism and so on. And he calls it of course imaginative rationalism. One thing that's kind of missing from the text because it's so short is that we don't really get much of the sense of the kind of hyper-chaos, you know? And so this idea that, you know, we have the, in Art's Affinitude,

we have the primary absolute, which is the in itself, and which is taken from Descartes, and the derivative absolute, which is, you know, reaching, you know, primary qualities and all that kind of stuff. That's kind of absent from this text, which is sort of interesting. but what's notable is that after Finitude ends by saying, I can't prove this yet. So then he says, well, I'll prove it in the Berlin lecture, you know, eventually, which he kind of does. But what I like about this text in particular is that the real kind of meat of his work, what makes him, at least to me, interesting, is that it focuses on the in-totalization or the non-whole, non-all, all that kind of stuff.

That seems to be the trajectory that he's kind of hinting at. So there are articles like this, like the Contingency of the Laws of Nature, which is kind of a longer version of the Jung's problem chapter after Finitude. So, what's interesting is that he goes through something he does in Afterfinitude, but he leaves it in the footnotes, he says like, check out Afterfinitude, that's where you'll find the answer, which is essentially the idea that Leibniz, Kant and Jung all fail to solve the problem of induction, and all for different reasons. So Jung fails because he translates it into a psychological issue, habituation and so on,

so it's a non-philosophical answer. Kant, he says, you know, does okay, but at least treats it kind of in the correct manner. But essentially Kant's answer is that there is only necessity because otherwise we wouldn't be able to represent the world, the world would just look chaotic, so he has that nice mix of how would he be able to tell between dreaming and reality unless we have some sort of representation causality, singles out causality as one of the categories. So one of the things that I think is kind of missing in the text, which maybe might

help in terms of understanding the book, which is very short of course, is that he, in After Finitude, in this famous sort of passage, page 52 of After Finitude, he turns facticity, so the idea we can't find any ground or reason for why things are the way they are, he essentially says we need to trust rationality and he trusts reason over, so instead of like Jung's sort of solution of saying it's just a situation, he says we should trust reality and reality tells us that things could change for no reason at all, so the capacity to be other is to

be celebrated as he puts it. So he turns facticity, something we've taken for a long time, into an absolute ontological principle as he calls it. So one other area is rhetoric. So especially in the context of fiction, it's quite clear that May Sue is a rhetorical writer and he uses his, he kind of sets his enemies up in some way, you know, in half the finitude, in order to debunk them in some way. So this idea, you know, that famous part where he has the four kind of people arguing,

but of course, you know, these people don't really exist, the strong correlation is to recorrelation is and so on, but nonetheless allows him to escape correlationism. So I think rhetoric is quite important to him and that this book is probably the closest thing he's gotten to a nice and clear and straightforward, concise attempt to sort of underline his enemies, so to speak. So, of course, really, as I see it, the book is really against the principle of sufficient reason. It's against the idea of necessity, and it's against the idea that, so the classic issue,

the early reception of May Sue was that he was somehow defending science, that he was finding a way for us to get back to kind of primary qualities and mathematics and so on. But it's quite clear that hyperchaos, the principle that he reaches, the primary absolute, undermines all kind of forms of necessity and we see this mostly in extra science fiction 2 and 3 where you know you get this strange idea that so in the second one you kind of have to you know things might happen like a causally randomly but it's more but there

would still be some sort of stability you know but in extra science fiction 3 you would get like a full kind of hyper chaotic kind of thing. So in extra science fiction world too you just have to be vigilant. So the laws will mostly hold but there will be small things that might change. So you're still in the realm of some sort of science fiction world. There's still some grip on reality. In extra science fiction world kind of tree, well then you're in Mayasu's pure kind of territory of you know anything could change for no reason whatsoever, which I find kind of interesting because it's a way for him to try to imagine

what hyperchaos would actually be like. What would it be like to live in a hyperchaotic world, one in which say electricity just stops working as he says. So I mean mostly I see it as a kind of way for him to imagine fictionally what hyperchaos might actually be like to experience. So instead of the Kantian kind of thing where we just wouldn't be able to represent, it seems Maceu believes we would actually be able to kind of live in that world that there should be fiction about this, you know, there should be sort of a, sort of,

I guess, hyper-sufficient kind of based books based around this possibility of non-necessity. We live in that kind of world as he sees it. Yeah, so, yeah, and just one other thing I want to kind of stress is that that doesn't really get brought up in the book is that in his idea of hyper chaos we have this idea of there are events within the world that can be defined by a certain amount of possibilities. So a gambler who is showing a dice knows a certain amount of things are going to happen

and if the dice keeps landing as he says it's very properly loaded. So, but nonetheless nobody is in the position, and I guess the core may see a point that's kind of missing in the text, is that nobody has the ability to see the set of all natural laws, so nobody is in a position to say what is possible and what is not, in terms of the world with small w, as he calls it. And set theoretically, you know, that's also confirmed as you see it in J.R. Cantor's kind of way. So I guess, yeah, I mean, I don't want to kind of dwell too much in the background of this kind of thing, but as I see it, yeah, it's kind of like his first adventure into

trying to imagine what a kind of hyper-chaotic world vision might look like and whether, people will kind of take up the mantle of trying to write these kind of texts. What is it like to think without necessity in a very strong sort of way? So I think I'll leave it at that because I don't want to take up too much of your time. Well, thanks. That was really good, I think, actually. You actually were, in a very short time, were able to give a pretty good summary of a lot of the topics we're going to discuss. So if you would, if you, for one, I would ask if anybody has any questions for you.

And then afterwards, if you want to stay, we can, like, we'll go through it, like, I guess more step by step, and then maybe pull out some of these things if you'd like. Sure. First, does anybody have any questions for the call? Any questions that might help? Opening up the floor now for a little bit. Not too long because it's alienating and awkward. Yeah, it was really nice and clear. So Chris also agrees. So I'm going to take that as a radio silence.

I guess, Ben, before we start getting into this, do you want to say anything more about the humium problem? or of this, that he's speaking specifically about Karl Popper and Kant and human in this book. So he's renegotiating this problem. Well, yeah, thanks Paul. That was really concise and really helpful. One thing that was just interesting maybe to mention is that this it's quite interesting that I mean that Mayasu sees Hume

as you know unjustifiably seen contingency as a psychological problem as us being subject to the passions as he puts it, to desires and what's interesting is that there's these two fighting readings of Hume in the analytic world which are almost kind of a less extreme version of this, and I wonder if you have anything to say about it or if anyone else does, that it's often taken sort of two levels down from what Neisser would say where there's these camps that argue that

when Hume is saying that we can't make any causal connection between things. There's camps with people that say he's only talking about language, he's only talking about our ability to represent those changes and talk about them. So it's about things and experiences of things. And there's the other camp, which is represented by someone like Galen Strassen, for instance, who says that actually it's a deeper epistemological problem. It's not restricted to experience, certain non-experimental things and our experience of them. So I think it's interesting that Mantis is even stronger. It's kind of like the next step. Even though it's often presented as a ridiculous reading of Hume,

it's actually not that weird when it's put on that spectrum. Okay. Yeah, I think one of Meir's kind of curiosities as a philosopher, like one of his, I guess what makes him the philosopher's philosopher in some sense, is that he refuses, like even when he's talking about Popper and of course he takes Hume's problem from Popper, as in actual title, is that there is this sort of idea that the problem is epistemological in

some sense, you know. It's just about knowledge and it's just about over time we will essentially, you know, there's a kind of faith in Popper that even if, you know, things kind of, we rediscover new theories or new laws or whatever, that essentially with time, say, Newtonian physics will always stand and quantum mechanics may come along, they may change things, but nonetheless everything will still sort of function in some sense, like they'll still be theoretically correct. And I think, yeah, what Maceu is kind of saying and that with this past, present and future kind of thing is that nobody's ever actually really resolved

this. It's a, and maybe it's an impossible question, I think that maybe, you know, they say every philosopher picks one question that they're obsessed with. And I think for May Sue it's that this question has never been answered sort of ontologically, so I tend to sort of agree with them in that kind of sense, you know, like it's, but I do sort of feel that it is an impossible sort of question because we can't, you know, obviously go into the future and find out. But, yeah, so I mean, which is what I kind of like about MESU,

when he says, or one of the good things about his idea of advent and things happening for no reason and so on, is that it kind of confirms that actually it is the case that we cannot find cause and necessity. That is the ontological truth of this case. That's generally how I like you know that's generally how I see it but you know it's extremely kind of difficult to write in I don't know why he picked it if any philosopher would pick a question Jung's problem is probably the one to avoid so for

any other comments or no Alright, so for, I guess, for the people who have not read this, Petra, I don't know if you've read the book we're going to discuss, The Extra Science Fiction? Sadly, I have not. Okay, cool. No problem. But I'm enjoying it anyways. It's actually quite a short text. We've talked about a lot of the, I mean, the premise of it is he's discussing science fiction, fictional worlds, because he wants to approach, of course, Hume's problem of induction. Paul's set the tone for us. Do we all just have hard copies of that?

There are hard copies. I can let me just send you really quickly sorry to but I'll send you there's an article that's that gives you a lot of the information it's online okay thanks sorry to hold things up simple One sec. And we're gonna, this is actually pretty good. It's a pretty good article. It's pretty much this, as Paul said, there's like many different versions of this. There's some four or five different versions, right?

So there's three versions published, and then two English translations, two in French or something. So he sets up a basic dichotomy between science fiction and extra science fiction, which means... So he has to define here what his distinction is. is, and I'm not sure how much we want to go into, I mean, although we probably won't discuss it again, I want to kind of bear with me if you've read the book, I apologize. But, I mean, right in the introduction, he's going to give the difference between the two, and he says, right in page four, in science fiction, the relation of fiction to science

seems to be the following. It is a matter of imagining a fictional feature of science that modifies and often expands its possibilities of knowledge and mastery of the real. So for Petra, who missed Ben's introduction, this is a lot of which, Ben isolated the difference between fictional worlds and possible worlds. and a lot of this, I think, plays into this icon here. So the difference between the fictional and the possible is that, do you know the distinction or do you want to do with you? I mean, I wouldn't mind hearing it,

but if this is something we've already gone over, I can go back and... Yeah, I'm just quickly catching you up, so then everybody will be on the same page. Okay, thank you. problem. So basically he says possible worlds are worlds envisioned from known possibilities. They're grounded more in imaginary, and fictional worlds are more parasitic on the real world. They're free and open to creation. So science fiction plays a lot in this idea of fictional They're very similar definitions. So, I'll continue with Melo's series. He says, quote, Man's relation to the world undergoes a change by virtue of a modification to scientific knowledge,

which opens up unheard of possibilities for him. Whatever upheavals the possible futures introduce, they necessarily stand at the heart of science fiction with the orbit of science. So, there's obviously, he's giving us the problem of, that I think also Ben was trying to introduce to us, which was, we're asking a question in this seminar about politics and whether or not a fictional, science fiction has to be a politics of science. And here he sort of met us who is obviously grounding science fiction in this science.

But anyways, it's a pretty standard definition, but his definition of fictions of worlds outside science or extra fiction worlds, we are not referring to worlds that are simply devoid of science, he gives the example that there are experimental sciences that in fact do not exist. He gives another example, worlds in which human beings have not or have not yet developed a scientific relation to the real. So by extra science fiction worlds, we mean worlds where in principle experimental science is impossible and not unknown in fact. science fiction thus defines a particular regime of the imaginary in which structured

or rather destructured worlds are conceived in such a way that experimental science cannot deploy its theories or constitute its objects within them. So I just want to say one last thing in his introduction is that he's going to propose this guiding question and he says the guiding question of extra science fiction worlds is what should a world be, what should a world resemble, so that it is in principle inaccessible to scientific knowledge, so that it cannot be established in the object of a natural science. So these are the two basic concepts. I think for, and Ben maybe you want to comment

on this, but I think for the start of our session, I think actually this grounding question is very much like the one we would like to ask for the next four sessions. And kind of around this or playing with it or critiquing it. So I mean, yeah, that's very basic, very simple. So if nobody has any comments on that, we can kind of move on. I don't know if we need to discuss the problem of induction, or Popper's view, or Kant's view in detail,

because maybe that's, we've kind of briefed over it. but I don't know how you guys go. I mean, it's like the core, it's the explication of these three problems are the core of this book. So if we don't, we can basically... I'm sorry? Yeah, I wouldn't mind hearing about, I mean, at least the Kant, I find really interesting, that connection. So if anyone has something to say about that, I appreciate it. Okay. I appreciate the feedback, thank you. It's helpful. Ben, do you want to say something,

or do you want me to keep going? I mean, in terms of, like in terms of the Kant discussion in the text? Yeah, we can talk about his citations critique of your reasons, pretty much where this is coming from. So I think we can just sort of, yeah, maybe talk about Higgs' position and talk about Popper's position, because he's trying to give us leads into extra science worlds. Yeah, I mean, as far as Meizu argues, he says that both Popper and Kant misread, misread human's problem, or what Mansu sees as human's problem.

And so, you know, he says that Popper, you know, that Popper sees it as an epistemological problem. You know, it's just this problem of knowledge, which is, like I mentioned before, you can say it's a problem of knowledge interior to the practice of science. that's about, you know, our experiences and how we talk about them. It could be a little bit deeper. It could be what our knowledge is and what is outside of our knowledge, right? It can be this kind of more extreme view. So it could be like a epistemological problem within our knowing or within, or our knowing and our not knowing. And so Khan's solution,

or Khan's version is that, you know, he relies upon, you know, the transcendental deduction. He, you know, essentially that in order for, you know, Kant tries to stop himself from finding the same skepticism and worry as Hume does about, you know, maybe causal connections or just, you know, our habit or our perception of them, you know, he wants to say, Kant wants to say, no, you know, reason has a coherency and a strength to it. that is guaranteed by the fact that we can know things conceptually is how we combine our intuition, sense and intuition,

and we build concepts out of things to know the world, which is already, in a way, affected by the world because it's a synthesis of our experience and what we sense. so in this way by sort of giving reason this power to synthesize out of you know what we experience and what we and what seems must be the case about the structure of the world these kind of a priori assumptions the transcendental deduction allows Kant to try to sneak around the fact that maybe what we know and what the world is is disjunct in a way that would give us serious problems. And Mayas sees that as a kind of a cheat.

He says, and he's not, a lot of people have written about this, that the problem for Kant is that because reason decides that reason functions and that reason is self-certain in a way, it's actually a bit hard for Kant to justify what the limits of knowing and not knowing are. because our knowledge, sort of, you know, because the world is already conceptual, as we start to think about it for Kant, that then, at what point do you say, this is what we don't know yet and what we can't know? Deciding that line becomes very, very tricky. And so N.M.E.S.U. thinks that this kind of transcendental move,

which he also calls weak correlationism, in After Finitude, he thinks that that can't be justified. Basically, he thinks there's no reasonable, there's no kind of basic reasonableness on which Kant can make that deduction. If that makes sense. Hopefully. That was not just rambling. It was fairly clear to me. But you're, uh... Maybe. Still is adjusting. Yeah, so I guess I'll put the quotes for the... for what he's basically trying to summarize what I'm saying.

So for those who have read it, like, Derek, if you wouldn't mind, maybe, like, did you find it interesting, or did you find... Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sorry. I'm trying to remember what Popper had to say about possible worlds. Was it a kind of lexical thing about the language of science? Is that where he is with possible worlds?

I believe so. I'm trying to find that citation actually. It's not in the book, but... No, no, no, no, no. I don't know. I'm not a proper expert. But I'm... Yeah, I mean, neither am I. I'm just trying to get a sense of... of things. But the... I mean, the thing that I'm kind of most interested in is maybe jumping, like, too far too far in, but the Type 3 world that

Maya Sue describes, this kind of fiction that he uses to exemplify the Type 3 it's like a I don't know, like a romantic catastrophe or something kind of electricity stops working that's hyperchaos it doesn't seem particularly like I mean, I guess it's a fairly chaotic thing to happen, but is that the type 3 or is that the type 2? I can't remember that either. I would think that the electricity stopped working is actually our type 2, right? Because it's not completely outside of our...

That's what I was trying to remember. 3? It's a three is the example. This is the hyperchaotic kind of situation. But we can still, you know, we're not totally estranged by it. So this kind of definition of science fiction that he uses as well. I mean, there are others which, you know, the literature of cognitive estrangement or something. So it's like it's not as chaotic, it's not as hyper-chaotic as I might have assumed. Is that what I mean? No, I mean, actually, I would think it's more of a two, but I guess it's so...

I guess in the type two, it seems that things kind of fracture and fragment. And then you get pockets. So you might get a kind of, you know, a localized electrical failure, but not a kind of complete collapse of electricity. The possibility of electricity doesn't cease in type 2. It starts to kind of fade or something. I don't know. I was just trying. I'm kind of quite curious about how these things get demarcated in this or one, two and one, two and three and how close maybe the type one is to, I guess, how it might, I'm not even sure I can say the word, but correlate with where we

are now. These are the sort of questions that I have after, I only read the book this morning so those questions are the ones that came to me. Sorry if that's kind of . Well, I think the next step would be, I mean, the next step would be, I mean, if we don't, I don't know if we're gonna spend too much time discussing the proper Hume thing because we can go back and read it, and I pretty much do want to jump right into the three worlds So I can, I mean, we can just kind of go over the two and then maybe once we kind of rush back over it in this, we can then approach that question again and think,

and maybe think about it. So for the people who don't, who have not read this book or haven't read any of the other versions, the type one worlds, the type one worlds are worlds which are outside of science but they don't destroy science or endanger science, he says. Because he says, I quote, that science is structurally indifferent to events that can give place only to a testimony, not to a protocol of observation. so so the first type of world is I mean I think the first type of world

is very close to a sci-fi he doesn't give does he give you an example of like an actual story no no but he does say for science every phenomenon that is functionally causeless would either be non-existent or not have a demonstrable cause. Thus, it would have no consequence for science's existence. One would live in a universe where, alongside an unimpaired sphere of events, quote, for scientists, unquote, which can be reproduced at will in the laboratory. story. This is, so he's talking, there he's saying proper, but I probably shouldn't have

quoted that. But I'm trying to sort of think of something that we can classify what the first actual fiction world is and looking to Dennis or Paul or anybody that has an example I want to say it's close to Annihilation but I think Annihilation is closer to two than one. I didn't know at which point to mention Annihilation. to mention Annihilation. Oh, yeah. Paul, have you read Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer?

Me? Sorry? Yeah, I mean, or anybody. I know a few of us have because it was the first session. I guess when it comes to the three types of worlds, this also reminds me of his divine existence, which has this kind of qualitative leaps, things that just kind of happen for no reason, that kind of stuff. So I think like science fiction or extra science fiction world or type of world one, I think he's essentially saying, yeah, that's a science fiction. It's nothing too drastic. And he skips by it quite fast, I think.

In the second one, I think in the... Go ahead. Sorry. I think in the... Well, at least in the... Just going by... Just from a... Kind of the background of his work, it's a classic kind of Maesu thing, like the tripartite kind of structure, you know, you know, where he's leading you to the eventual drastic one. Like, you know, so a type two world is where you're getting very close to a world that, you know, science can still function, but nonetheless, you know, strange things will still happen, you know.

Whereas three is the very much the kind of like hyper chaos. And one of the only kind of things I don't like about the book is how short Type 3 worlds get treated. He actually gives a very, very short kind of shift really and gives only one example. But yeah, I think extra science fiction world 2 and 3 are sort of, you know, his kind of hyper chaotic sort of worlds. One in which it's kind of like mild hyper chaos. And three where it's pure kind of hyper chaos. But I wouldn't know enough about sort of like fiction in general to kind of have

like, you know, kind of good examples to be honest, you know. Yeah, I think in the, I think the basic thing is Type 1 could even be our world in a sense, right? Because he kind of claims that things happen that if they were through that, that inside. But he says, you know, that might be unreliable witnesses or there might be something that may be upset science but it happens here or there. And where he says, like, type 2, he says the irregularities are so frequent that they would are so, you know, drastic that they would

destroy science and the third type destroys consciousness. And like that's one question I have and I I've talked about this with Tony already like and actually Tristan Garcia mentioned this as well, that one problem he has is how do you separate this the notion of sense or how does man relate sense and consciousness and sense in terms of narration in that if you had a story that represented type 3 worlds

I mean, is the assumption that to represent a type 3 world, you couldn't do it within a type 3 world or if you had a representation of a type 3 world in a type 3 world would it just be what would that be and I wonder if that's partially the reason he doesn't talk about it so much because even his example is not that extreme because it begs the question a bit if consciousness is destroyed what is a book basically I think is something to ask there. Sure, and I think that's the reason why he chooses

a type, an extra fiction to describe the most. Because if you look at one of the quotes that I pointed to the right when he's defining the second world is that that they're necessary to abolish science, right? But consciousness stays, you said this. And then, but they're genuine because, but he says that it's a world in which we can only chronicle things. And this is the idea of narration. It's sufficient to abolish science, but the only science that sort of stays around or is kept, we've talked about, is history.

in a sense. So this one holds up to fiction or fiction that we could read or create or write, but the third is, yeah, quite, it seems impossible, right? Yeah, there's also the discussion between him and Florian Hecker, which, so this text appeared first in the That's Bec-Live Solution CD and they asked him what is sort of like what is his aesthetic vision and it would be to go to the world of the subjectivated matter you know and come back to hell's realm or death realm and all this kind of stuff

And so, I mean, there is that kind of sense of whether the idea is that the, his ultimate sort of aesthetic vision would be sort of the ability of consciousness to somehow travel to that kind of, you know, desubjectivated sort of world and escape consciousness briefly and then sort of come back, you know. But he doesn't... Still in this book he's kind of left off without really explaining the conditions of

the third... of XSF3, right? So, if this is like right at 43, saying that for... So on 44, first of all, let's try to understand more precisely what an extra science fiction tale should be. should be, it has to obey two requirements. A, within it, events take place that no real or imaginary logic can explain, and B, the questions of science is present in the tale, albeit in a negative mode. So we have to be dealing with the world in which science suddenly

becomes or is the course of becoming impossible, either entirely or partially. So I guess we can, to briefly run back through, I guess, the modes of fiction that he's talking about, right, you have science fiction, which is grounded around questions of science. You have extra science fiction world one, which is basically science fiction indifferent to science. You have extra science fiction world two, which is incoherent logic or something that threatens to abolish science or does abolish science. However, occurrences or history remains, events remain that can be told. And then you have the third world, in which it's

devoid of all necessary laws, and therefore it's no longer a world. He says this. It would be a universe in which disorderly modifications are so frequent that following the example of chaos described by Kant in the objective deduction, the conditions of science as well as those of consciousness would be abolished. So the second world, yes. The second world, the other point that we discussed is that the second world abolishes science but not consciousness, and the third world abolishes both. So this brings us back to the question of can you think anything outside of thought, right? I mean, can you think the outside of thought? Would you be thinking the extra science fiction world 3?

I don't have an answer to it, but it's interesting speculation. and I wish some sort of prototype could come or we could think of well then yeah so that you end up in an endless loop if you can retain order of events then you're retaining consciousness therefore it's extra science fiction too anytime you have an event so this is the problem so because you can narrate the fact so the question to go back to Derek's question is the fact that you can even narrate the sense that electricity stops working. It therefore has to be, I mean, if you can recount the events,

is that therefore not really the third world? Or is there something more in Metal Studio that I'm missing, like where this example of electricity is used again? Or is it only brought up here? Or is it brought up in hyper chaos? Only there. Only there? Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is one of his main problems with his books is that they always end on a kind of whether it's after Finitude, this book, or whether it's The Number and the Siren,

you're always left with more questions than answers. That's kind of his thing, you know? Sure. But there's very, very, very clear writing, which is like, I'm not used to it with the French writers. I mean, translations, at least. I mean, clear and concise, but very open to tons of questions. We had a bunch of notes. I mean, we've pretty much, in a weird piecemeal roundabout, going back and forth way, we've discussed the basics of this book. and I recommend

for those who haven't read The Billiard Ball which is a very short story I have a post on the classroom I actually have a collection of his essays but it's inside of that collection where you can read the sci-fi the short story which is a good example of this fiction or the second example so in this example and the potential murder occurs, right, where the billiard ball ends up going right through the character's body and ends up killing him in the end. So in the story they're trying to create an anti-gravity.

There's one character who's theorized, who has theories of anti-gravity, and there's another character who is a very pragmatic sort of doer who challenges him to... This theory is planned that it cannot actually occur, and so he's challenged to create this anti-gravity machine. And so in the story, the logic, the scientific logic obviously is sort of suspended here. However, you actually have this journalist narrator who's trying to recount the events and retell the events and put some sort of logic to it. Therefore, it falls into the extra science fiction 2 world, right?

And I don't know if anybody has any that has read The Billiard Ball? has anything that they like questioned about it or maybe it's categorization in his extra science taxonomy or anything or Ben if you have anything else because I'm kind of rambling I know I mean the hardest thing is I guess sort of sitting here to classify these systems. We can give a bunch of examples. I think you have Billiard Ball, but if Annihilation is a

different example, I think Annihilation is a good example of or some, I think some parts of Annihilation is a good example of extra science fiction 2 world because you have all of these characters all of which use scientific method or the experimental method And they're all inside of this, what is California, which is now called Area X. And they're experiencing all these different events that are occurring that they can't logically apply science to. So they have a lighthouse in which they can't logically measure with their scientific tools the lighthouse. The lighthouse also is inverted and grows down into the earth.

We have a sort of break with science, however, sort of ethical, ecological consciousness that's sort of like the driving force of annihilation. Let me look. So we could, I mean the things we did skip over Ben, well, was a little bit in the introduction we skipped a little bit over the sort of difference between philosophy and literature I guess that we might be able to, we can push towards the end or something or you talked a little bit

about the epistemological distinction. Let me just... The question I think that we really wanted to explore was this idea of narration that comes in at the end of this book. But if nobody's read it or wants to contribute, we can move on. Can someone say something about the idea of chronicling as maybe the relation between chronicling and narrating? Is this part of his technical terminology, the idea of the chronicle?

I would ask all that actually. Is that my answer? Not really. I mean, he does have one other book, The Number and the Siren, which kind of attempts to decipher a Malame poem and all this kind of stuff. But from just talking to people in general, they tend to think that he has kind of rhetorical aspect to him, you know, there is some sort of like chronology going on, especially in his history of philosophy, it's very short and concise and so on.

Whether it plays a major role in this kind of context I would be hesitant to say directly, which makes it, that's why it's kind of an unusual major suites, you know, because he he actually is talking about us humans in this very kind of earlier texts after Finitude are sort of nihilistic, kind of dark, the binary existence there's a lot of talk of human dignity and so on and hope in the future. But I wouldn't say narration is one of his kind of a, it's more something that seems

to be implicit in his work rather than he is explicitly, you know, kind of like focused on that as an area. But it does seem to be a team running through his work is probably the best answer I can give to that. I would say, like, I mean, doesn't this, I mean, doesn't his thing with contingency even play a huge role in this, if we're thinking of narration as history? I mean, I think this is, like, these things, like, consistently come up. I don't know if we can I mean when he's talking about extra science fiction 2 he's saying that we can

chronicle these things but they no longer have universal properties they no longer have scientific natural causes I think It would just be in the fact that we can record contingency, right? We can experience it recorded. There's a huge aspect in his work, which is about the fact that although we seem to have a desire for necessity and narration, say, some sort of linearity, we wish the world had some sort of direction or whatever. you know and he kind of seems interested in the fact that so for him yeah kind of

necessity is kind of like a standing for narration or chronicle it's it's something we clearly desire but that he doesn't believe in but nonetheless he recognizes that it's a temptation of the human Right, the metaphor uses the accident of things. So, yeah. Chris had a question. I think that actually it was very close. Or no, quote. So if narrative has an illimitable role in such as a circuitry,

is it is in part because the libidinal engagement of a storyline has an essential motivating role. What's the story is always a question that's always there. And temptation is me. Great phrase, yeah. So where, Chris, if you're around, where is this quote? Sorry. This is from the invitation blog. Yeah. I was just taking some notes, so I'm sorry. I'm kind of digesting. No problem. This is from the CCRU collection? No, this is from the Hyperstition blog itself. At one point, PDFs, or I copied and pasted everything I could find that was once there

into a PDF, if you guys want that. It's black on white instead of orange on whatever, black. But anyway, I think it's a really interesting question, and one I've been wrestling with because it's so important, I think, to have a narrative that is captivating enough to where you can, you know, maybe insert more didactic or explanatory inferences about worlds or what a world may or may not be. So it's a very interesting intersection for me personally, I don't know, I just think, actually just writing on hyperstition which I've been doing

a little bit of over the last year or two, I always keep what's the story on a yellow note on my laptop I get posted because it's really important I think to have a good narrative like we all love time travel films I'm sure but like and plot holes can be productive but you know they can also not be from the future so and that is one of the questions I think that we're trying to generally frame is really that you're touching on is how does hyper-precision complicate the relation between fictional and possible that we're setting up here. And it's exactly this sort of, well, I don't know if it's exactly,

but to put it in your sense, we need this sort of narrative, and the hyper-precision is sort of like, it sort of creates its own premises in regards to a sort of political politics, is what Ben and I were talking, or discussing when we were thinking about this. So, yeah, the questions of cyber positivity and possible worlds, quite interesting, I think. And Ben, if you want to chime in, maybe. Well, I mean, it's kind of a, I mean, it's a turn back to, back to, it's a way of kind of taking these original leading and

pushing it forward in an interesting way, right? Instead of saying it's not just, it's not that our passions or desires have us treat, you know, the relationship between causes and experiences in a way that's comfortable for us. But it's actually embracing embracing, like, unavoidability of you know, of desires themselves having a causal factor beyond just making sense of the world that's actually even more deeply structured into we think anything even the kind of way of reading there we have a desire to make sense

of things but our desire itself to make sense of things and it's not sensible So it would be kind of like a... Yeah, it would be a weird way of seeing land as Hume's passionate revenge on Mayasu or something. Maybe that's a bit too weird. I don't know. I think Chris is sharing the background.

I think we have about an hour, a little bit over an hour left, so if we could, at this Let's take a quick 10 minute break and we can come back at a half pass and we'll kind of try to work out some general questions and then finish out this session with some of the general themes and stuff we want to discuss and maybe learn a little bit about

the people in the seminar and what their actual interests are so we can direct discussion easier for the next sessions. So let's meet back here at half past. We'll take a 10-minute break. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

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Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

All right, I guess if we can all let me know if you're back. If it starts, if it starts again. We just have like, yeah, roughly an hour. Derek's here. Yep, I'm here. Ben's here. Okay. The rest have been kind of like that since the beginning, so.

Ben, I don't know if you got my message, but you want... I'm sorry, Petra? Paul left? Yeah, Paul had to go because it's late. Oh, okay. So if we have any other further questions with Paul, we can post it on the classroom. We can shoot it to him. I can invite him in. He can finish up the discussions, I think. But, yeah, it was getting late there, so he needed to go. Yeah, he stayed a lot longer than he expected, so that was quite nice. He had a good time. So, we did, I mean, like, so we did, I think keeping these ideas in mind, we did talk about, we did put another story, which is short, it's like 13 pages, we put it on, yeah, we

put it on the classroom as well. and I think this, I don't know if anybody has read it, so we can kind of push the story, like talking about the story itself to the classroom and maybe have a discussion there. But it did bring up some points, I think, that Ben and I were discussing just before the session And I think maybe laying them out just to kind of give some last-minute thoughts on Melisu. Try to have a quick discussion if people are available and want to talk or post it in the

chat as well if you don't want to speak. So what we found with the story was this Connie Willis story, the Schwarzschild radius is the story. So when we were talking earlier, both Ben and I, Ben was brought to the table the first And formally, sort of the way that she's presenting the story, there's these slowly contracting metaphors in which you have sort of reality and scientific experience. Well, they're held apart at one point, right? And then these two sorts of things, reality and scientific experience, empirical experience,

to close in the story until there's literally sort of no gap or there's a indistinction between what is reality what size what is was scientific experience I think this quite this is kind of interesting right because a lot of perhaps we well I don't want to say all science fiction about maybe modernist science fiction which we were talking usually holds these two separately in in order to sort of, I mean, they hold them separately at a distance in order to sort of compel distinctions between them and correct them, like to make political statements about these two things. And so her story is sort of, so her story sits, I think, in this sense, sits a little

bit outside of at least Melissu's definition here, a little bit. I don't know, like Ben, I don't know if I, like, because this counterpoint that I was going to explain, if I'm going over our outline, is your point, so if you want to talk about it, I don't want to. Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, I think it's quite, it's interesting how she does this, because it's often with sort of, you know, phrases that she, and it become closer, closer together where it's like these repetitions of frozen, right, frozen in terms of a frozen image and then frozen is then being frozen on the front and then it's like

can't get messages out this idea of redshift or things being red like this medicine makes this vision red and then redshifting stars and then the idea of like scientific theories and personal theories about what happened right, so things kind of slowly and safe distance, right this idea of safe distance and being an observer so it kind of funnels together towards the end and so what's interesting is that on the one hand I think she's kind of saying you can't separate reality and creation of science by the idea that scientific

that there's something about these kind of scientific concepts which are not created in a purely scientific realm. They're very much bound to sense and experience. Which is kind of an obvious statement on the one hand. But it's kind of interesting that she's challenging this what I think Mayasu would want to separate. That you can't have sense or narration without science and science without or even science without particular kinds of narration and she wants to collapse these so on the one hand it could be seen as a challenge to Maya Sue in a kind of, in a way she uses a metaphor, but on the other

hand it could be seen that science is just narration that sense and experience are all what science is and that that can easily fall apart so I think it depends on how how you read how you read this story and especially the last you know the last kind of statement right where the character who's been who has you know talked about all these horrible things that happened on the front in World War I and this you know kind of naive person interviewing him saying how surprised he was that Schwartzweil could create these mathematical theories for how event horizons

form on black holes while suffering from this disease and being under siege. Which on the one hand is like how could anyone think scientifically in those conditions, but also how could um um and of course there's a kind of tongue-in-cheek comment she's making that the idea of a black hole and the experience of war can be tied together in some kind of effective sense but also at the same time that scientific creations can change the way we view experience and such so I think it's a very interesting what the story does conceptually is very complicated

and yeah further complicates this relationship between science and narrative I was just going to say I actually haven't read that but in relation to what or just from the context you gave in relation to what Tony raised regarding cyber positivity and fictioneering I think it's really interesting to think about what fictions are worth transmuting into the domains of non-fiction or what we think we know and like it is most interesting or it's often most compelling when it comes from very fathomable

insane situations like the one you just described so I don't know just putting that out there But yeah, regarding cyberpositivity, sorry, I didn't really follow that through. Regarding autocatalytic, you know, like self-organizing systems, there's a certain way that you can't talk about, or there's a certain way that you can't explain them away, or even, like they use you more than you use them kind of thing. I don't know. I don't know. It's difficult. No, I think because when we were trying to contextualize this before the session, we

can see Ray Bressier's critique of Len coming up, but then we can think of cyber-positivity and sort of like we were saying, Amy Ireland's sort of position on these sort of runaway processes. And I think you fall, obviously, you fall, I think, close to sort of Amy's position as well. Definitely. I will make sure that that is recorded forever, definitely. So sorry. Sorry, so yeah, so it gets interesting to me.

I mean, we can talk about acceleration or capital, I think, as one of these narratives pretty easily. But it doesn't mean, it's like really, so where do you hedge your bets then? I'm still working this out. But yeah, it's pretty interesting. I think also inside of this realm you have Mark Fisher's Capital Realism there is possibility one way to read it in what we're talking about is that if you have capitalist narrative or narration

or story then if we're thinking possible worlds are being exhausted in sort of like in Fisher's sort of children of men example. Yeah, I still haven't heard that book actually. I should. Yeah. It's cool. Yeah, I mean it's talking about in a different sense that BFO is talking about in After the Future they're talking about very much similar. are very much similar stories with regards to capital, like modernism, I don't know what you want to call it, modernity, or capital as the ultimate grand narrative,

exhausting all of our ability to even imagine a future, which is sort of the exhaustion of possibility, maybe. Ben might want to... Sorry, I was talking about capital in Thomas Piketty's sense, strictly. So like, no, I was joking. Sorry. I didn't like that. When we talked about, so Paul also brought up, he sort of talked a little bit about facticity, which is a very important concept in Melisu.

And so one thing, I think one thing is actually quite interesting that Ben and I were speaking about earlier, was, and you sort of touched on it, you were talking about these things sort of being frozen on the horizon. So even if the object is sort of there, where you sort of have this informational point of view on ontology that we're closely, we're just like slowly treading it in, bringing it in. And one interesting relation to this sort of informational ontology, or whatever you might want to call it, is that it has an interesting correlation with the way

that Melisue is sort of reading Hume. And I don't know if anybody has anything, like, so I think like this, obviously the informational view on ontology is very much related to, I think, this cyber positivity. In what way? So if we're sort of like, we're left to treat the world as sort of like information, and

It sort of doesn't matter ontologically sort of how this world manifests itself. This is what we were discussing, right, Ben? But the ways in which we can sort of read them. Yeah, so please help me out, Ben. Sorry. No, I think, yeah, one of the things in May I see you is if, and probably how do you read the relationship between epistemology and ontology, and so on the one hand, if you say, you know, there's this kind of hyper-chaos is possible,

or there's these, you know, things could happen, you know, things could change without any reason, then it becomes very difficult to draw the line between unknowable based on what we have for science now and what's absolutely unknowable. And so Meosu wants to claim that rationality in particular mathematics gives us some privileged access to the absolute, to some privileged access to the real. so if you take him on his word for that you say okay we have certain logical actors we have some way of reading what occurs

even if what occurs is almost totally crazy and this goes back to the question of narration does narration remain in even the most chaotic world then in a sense it doesn't really matter if you treat ontology and epistemology differently because whatever traces you can pick up from the kind of chaotic world is what there is because even if there is some gap between being and knowing it doesn't really matter because if it changes you don't really know which one changed right so in a way and what we were talking about earlier is sort of how this relates to

in the Connie Willis story when she talked about the Shores Wild radius this idea that if an object fell into a black hole it would appear as just this kind of smear of information on the edge but then you could still read and know everything about the object even though it had been destroyed even though it would appear frozen to us even though it was completely gone and so there's this sort of interesting relationship between or there's this consequent idea that the world becomes informational and I mean

you can read this in various other ways of looking at physics not just in terms of philosophy but also in terms of whether you want to read things like how you want to read the arrow of time or how you want to read something like thermodynamics in terms of actual physical processes or just in terms of information if you can always get information off of something even after it's destroyed then are certain processes is reversible. So, and in a way it seems like there's kind of informationalization of being in Meisoo, if that makes sense. Okay. I guess it's sort of helpful in the way he...

I'm kind of breaking off from this, but the idea of chronicling something seems to me, I mean, what Paul was saying about the kind of rhetorical nature of the texts, not necessarily this extra science fiction, but perhaps after finitude, but the idea of chronicling is a strict recording of a timeline rather than a kind of narrating. I think it seems to be kind of... One is maybe more informational than the other.

One is kind of stricter. as a kind of stream fixed points known marks rather than a kind of narration It's very interesting to think about that and as you said earlier to paraphrase you don't want to correlate but it's interesting to take Mayasu's three worlds or four and and flip them back on science, I think. Like, to think of scientific interests and explanations as the disaster burlesque nonsense. And what was the third? I'm sorry. I can't remember, but I think it's interesting to think about

how you would categorize potential engendering, self-engendering worlds back on how we, what we know is absolute due to the arch fossil. But I don't know. I don't know much about science. It is an interesting question. I just also don't have any expertise to answer that. It's a good question. I think it's a fertile thing, though. I think we could very easily do readings of published, expensive, JSTOR access only scientific papers via these categories.

It would probably be really revealing and interesting. People are all about disaster scenarios, so like Yellowstone, whatever the Seattle earthquake thing is. And I don't know if you'd call that science, because it hasn't happened yet. But I don't know. It's definitely in the domain of, or the realm of that. I think so. And I also think to sort of, you were talking about the disasters. I think also it brings us to another important question for the seminar, or important maybe relation for the seminar that we could think about, which is its relation to sort of how we could think of these things in terms of ecological thought, I think, as well.

And we think about, like, we have a distinction between, well, it's a rough one, but it's a global anthropolitics and an earth politics that maybe Ben can explain to us in a second. But I think you have like Eugene Thacker's newest book. You have Book World Without Us. And Book World Without Us is actually sort of fictional science, right, I think. so somewhat I guess is getting closer to what you're asking yeah that book

was cool I had it in college I haven't looked at it recently yeah I was just thinking yeah I don't think like science is dominated by like apocalyptic pursuits but yeah it is interesting how it triggers maybe the desire to re-sharpen or like to set aside a compulsion towards resolving, I don't know, ecological threats, but also, I don't know. I don't even know. I don't know. You broke up for that last part.

I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, Internet's not good. You mentioned an example before that one, Tony. Before World Without Us? Yeah. UG Dashers. Oh, right, right. The Boston's Planet. Can you say more about what appears in that text to demonstrate what...

So, I'm gonna start, I think like the basics and then I sort of want to Ben to chime in because I think I'll have a good answer or somewhat. that these are speculative questions about how we construct fictional worlds, or we think of possible worlds, and the question that Eugene Thacker's doing is asking, does it even make sense to, sort of like the pessimistic, it's all about pessimism, right? So it's a pessimistic

viewpoint of does it even make sense to devise a world without us? If you're thinking the ecological mindset, does it make sense to devise a world because it would be better off without us, humans would destroy the world? I think these sorts of speculations are maybe maybe not exactly related to these categories of extra science fiction that we're talking about, but they're related to questions of fictional worlds and possible futures that we hope to sort of explore throughout the whole session. Okay, I see.

Or the four sessions, sorry. Ben might have an addendum. Well, no, I was just going to say, like, he, you know, like, part of that text, you have this idea that the human concept of world may be incompatible with the longevity or functionality of the planet, right? So this idea you know, you have world as a concept that has human use, that even that concept may do damage to the planet whereas the planet may be totally indifferent to us in our world. So... And I think maybe the way that text

ends is he says something to the effect of like, maybe all that's left is to think in the dust of this planet, or something like that. Like, exit the world and, I don't know, enter the dust. Yeah, because I think he... Go ahead. Yeah, he talks about, I think he ends with William Hulparchon's story, the one about what's left of humanity is living in a giant steel pyramid. Right. Mm-hmm. And it's sort of like the last refuge, and it's just about kind of, yeah, the futility of that,

of the fact that eventually the planet or the sun some conditions will change and that will be inhospitable for us yeah there's something thought requires a concept of a world that the planet doesn't really care and so what does that mean for philosophy it's the sort of yeah it's kind of a jury conclusion because it's probably not good for us. Let's see here. And a great point just got brought up on the sidebar, I think, also, or a great question, which is that this sort of thinking Eugene's work,

whether it relates directly to... So bringing it back to mostly text, if we can think of it as a type 3 world, So if, I mean, I think for sure a world without us is a world without consciousness, just without human consciousness, probably one defining it in a malicious sense, consciousness. And maybe it is a way of sort of getting us closer to type three, maybe. well the relationship between you have a man who's saying right that the world

in type 3 worlds consciousness would be impossible or it could be impossible for consciousness to form right as opposed to having the destruction of human consciousness maybe even willfully or unavoidable over time for Eugene okay And the relationship between those, I think, is interesting. I suppose in terms of fictional versus possible, right, in terms of what can be represented and what could be acted upon, and whether there are political reasons for destroying consciousness or something.

It's like an ecological choice, destroying consciousness, as opposed to you know impossible it's so interesting because it'll happen eventually I love Brassier's point in Nihil Unbound that extinction is literally unthinkable because there won't be someone there to think it it's like literally so absurd a gesture because it's literally unimaginable because it's not in the realm of language there's literally no one you would want to talk about that with if you happen to witness it you know yeah it's interesting I think in a sense that's that's funny so it's yeah it's not exactly

in this category but it is sort of like an off it's an off variant of a way of thinking a world or thinking what might be of a world in which it's a type 3 world. Does Mayasu say, I think maybe I heard somebody mention this earlier, but does Mayasu kind of articulate the difference between what we can speak about and what we can think about when it comes to a world without us? Like extinction, there would be nothing to speak about, as Chris mentioned, but there is something to think about. Maybe I don't know.

So for me, like language being the limit versus the realm of possibility of thinking being the limit? Does that question make any sense? So, uh, MetalScope doesn't discuss the world without us technically. He discusses human finitude. And he does discuss this problem from what I know is that you can't, so it's, in Maila Su, it's that you cannot think your way out of, for me it's

very weird, but it's you cannot think your way out of thinking. And this is that circular point I think that we're always coming around I think when we're just when we're trying to one for instance the whole four sessions we just did we were trying to pin down I think hyperstitions now we're trying to pin down what this type 3 world might be or what the conditions might be and I think this is sort of this is the in a way you can say this is like a strong correlation is on that you know that may also just like

embraces rather than, but I could be wrong. I don't know if anybody else is. Tell me I'm wrong, it's fine. By strong correlationism, what I think that means is what can't be spoken of, can't be thought or something? Or in what sense is it stronger than the typical Kantian correlationism? Because we correlationism is, there's generally a Kant's idea that we only have access to

our concepts of things but there are things in themselves but we can't know them. Whereas the strong version, which is, you know, which for me is pretty much everyone after German idealism onward, is just that there's not even things in themselves. So it's not that there's stuff out there that we can't know, that we only know directly, it's that all what we know is what there is. So it's like, yeah, there's not even, we shouldn't even talk about things in themselves or things outside of knowing. I can't remember, does math break the correlationism cycle? or is it strong? Do you remember? Like mathematical facts. In his, in Afterfinitude.

I mean, from what I remember, it's just that, I mean, math is a kind of example of how we can kind of, because he doesn't say we can escape strong correlationism. He basically says we should embrace it and kind of turn it against itself. Right. Which as far as I remember, math is kind of an example of this, right? And I think one place, Petra, in terms of language, and I don't know the text well enough to talk about it, but in the Malarmé text that Paul mentioned, The Number and the Siren, from what I know about it, Mea Su does attempt to try to say how discussion of number

in this kind of mode of deciphering Mallarmé's poem is in talking about number and in talking about the way numbers function Mayes who kind of argues it's a performative it's a performative act more than a representational one so that like the idea of doing maths or pursuing a logic is like the demonstration is like a demonstration of a sort of strong correlation, but that means more than it's not about representing, you know, it's not about us and the world. It's about this act of, that's absolute, this act that has truth in it. So that he kind of talks about it in this performative sense. So that, I mean, that might be something to look into,

but I don't know that text well at all, so I can't. Yeah. That's interesting. Sorry. Go ahead. I'll let us move on. I was just wanting to... The text that you distributed, one of the kind of background texts where you talk about the ineffable, creation and the ineffable. I think that would be... Oh, yeah. Yeah. I just thought it was quite a helpful background text. I don't know whether maybe this idea of creation... We've talked a lot about kind of ends in a way with Type 3 worlds,

but is there a way of thinking about Type 3 worlds as creative? Yeah. I mean, again, it's... I mean, again, it's what we discussed already in terms of the idea of talking about type 3 worlds from within our world or type 3 worlds within themselves. Because it's kind of... It seems impossible to talk about type 3 worlds within type 3 worlds because it might just... because we couldn't even say what would be sense or nonsense. But in terms of...

I think if there would be a creative act for talking about Type 3 worlds in our worlds in the term of narrating a Type 3 world from a Type 1 world or whatever, or maybe we could say our world. Maybe Masu wouldn't even want to talk about the real world as Type 1. I mean it seems like there could be a creative function in that I mean a type 3 world if you could have a type 3 world so structurally different you could have this representation of a world without consciousness that in some way would infect our consciousness that would be creative

in an actually novel way This is kind of what Paul was saying, that Mayas' aesthetic dream is that if we could visit hyper chaos for a weekend and come back, and that our neural architecture would be indelibly changed in a productive way. maybe that's one way of thinking about it because otherwise within the world, within a type of world itself it's hard to say what creation would be if there's no consciousness since, you know, it's hard for me to say how you measure creation without consciousness or without even without any kind of structure whatsoever

Thanks. So we have about 30 minutes, and I guess we can open up to any last-minute discussions on the book, the concepts, anything on the Mela Sue at all that might relate or have any interest to our discussions. And if there is a discussion after that, we'll just briefly describe some of the questions

that we might want to start framing for the next three sessions as we read these texts. And then we'll kind of do it in a backwards sense. Like I want to ask a few that I don't know, I mean, to sort of introduce themselves and sort of maybe tell us a little bit why this seminar is of interest to you. Like, are you working on a project or are you of some interest? And so that way it will better allow us to frame the next sessions. And then we'll be done for the day. So just my European people, just 20 more minutes. You know, it's past 1 o'clock for Ben right now.

So yeah, I mean, just to, does anybody have any last thoughts or questions? questions again if you want to go back and post these on the classroom we can as well we can move into the general framework for summer okay so so are when when Ben and I were coming together to kind of do this to do this seminar as we said like the the way he introduced it was basically contextualizing his talk that he gave in Melbourne. It was kind of a lot that influenced the seminar along with

the previous one we did on New Weird Fiction and Hyperstition. And this one we wanted to focus a lot more on reading the fictional works. Today we did a lot we did a lot more theory than I think we expected. So we can now prepare these sort of, these texts, they're all pretty short. We've paired them with some philosophical texts or theoretical texts. The next session will be on possible worlds, just the first chapter of Lewis's book. And try to get through as much as you can of Miavel's City in the City. and we'll kind of try to pull apart possible worlds

throughout this book. So the third session will be Michael Sisco's member, which we were supposed to read in the last session. We never got to, so we really wanted to bring it up. We'll read that along the text that we paired Sisco with. It's Marcus Gabriel's. Oh, yes. The world does not exist. Yeah. So that's a new book. It just came out recently. So hopefully you guys can get it. If you can't, I should be getting my... I have a copy coming very soon. But there is a pretty good...

There's a TED Talk, actually, that he did that I posted that kind of gives you the promise of, like, the questions that we will be asking. And I'll try to post excerpts from it when I have the book for us to read and share. The final session will be Kodawa Eshin's work, kind of discuss Mark Derry's. Well, we put the interview with Mark Derry in there as well to kind of talk about maybe Afrofuturism and maybe this sort of relation. And I think in there there's also the OKDIC stories coming.

I think they're in the third and the fourth session. So with that said, though, that's the text that we have chosen. And if anybody has text that they think is quite interesting to the topics or any previous topics, please post them on Classroom or at least a citation, and we can discuss them in here. We're not limited to discussing just what Ben and I picked, but hopefully people can contribute what they find interesting and what they're working on. I would like this... I would honestly really like this seminar to be like a... By Virgin. Nice for you to be here. Thank you. I would like for this seminar to really be useful for everybody to really push what they're working on, and we can sort of workshop ideas

and really not to be afraid to sort of say something that you're not 100% sure of and you just want to... Oh, awesome. Thank you for that. There's a text now by Gabriel. I'll post that in the classroom as well. And so I really want people to come in and feel free to workshop ideas if you want to sort of present your ideas, you can schedule that ahead of time with us. But basically, so if we were to talk about the general themes and the general questions that we're sort of approaching, we're looking at the philosophical and literary concepts

throughout the seminar of world and world creation. We talked a lot about this today. And we're examining the distinction between fictional and possible worlds, of course. Fictional worlds and possible futures, whatever you might want to say it. Specifically if we can bring in the sort of text that we learned or even the concept of just hyperstition and how it sort of plays into this role. And even we can discuss the concept of the weird. Both of these things are still available to the seminar. And a lot of things we're trying to see is how the creation of worlds can lend themselves to discuss the interconnections between temporal registers, politics, ethics, and these sorts

of things. So, the general question of the seminar is what are some of the ethical, political, and temporal issues at stake in the creation of fictional worlds? That's our general question. And that's why we'll explore many different versions in the seminar. The second kind of question that we're thinking of is, how is the concept of world necessary for politics as such? And a lot of this we're playing between the local politics, or we can think of it as the politics of the present, and localist, identitarian sort of politics, versus we can think of as possible or politics as a future, or future politics. So how does the concept of the world play into this?

And when we think about this, we can think about how self-reflexive do you have to be to be about consequences, the consequence of what you're doing, and thinking about them at sort of different scales, larger scales. So we have between local and the local politics and this sort of politics of the future, we have just sort of different viewpoints where one sees local action as a necessary contribution to sort of future conditions, whereas the other is the other sort of possible politics to the future that we sort of want to sort of group or think about are thinking about being a part

of the active construction of a new world. So this is how maybe this concept plays out in these two different registers. But even thinking further, if we're to think of, like for instance, Melisu's Type 3 world, is the concept of world even necessary if, well, it is necessary, even in it because it's negating it, right? And in type 3, it abolishes the world. There is no world. World does not exist. So that's just some questions about the concept of world. And we brought up another question already with Chris, and that was how does hyperstition complicate the relation of fictional and possible?

And we're thinking of this in terms of creating its own premise in regards... or creating its own premises in regards to politics. We can also think about ecological thought, which we talked about. So these are sort of things we're looking at. So we're looking at literature based in maybe we can always look at how these would correspond to these categories of extra science fiction worlds, but we're going to try to pair it with different ideas. And most of it we're looking at literature predicated about sci-fi, so it's predicated both on realist and speculative modes of storytelling.

We're going to kind of go between, I think, especially when we get to Afrofuturism. And so I'm going to put... These are just the general questions. I'm going to put them in the sidebar. And so if anybody has sort of any need for clarification of these or anything, but they would be good for us to think about throughout these sessions. And also, if anybody has any further questions that they would like to present for this session, that would be another... It would be also very helpful for us, I think all of us. Oh, the final question, obviously, that I'm missing, I'm sorry, is that thinking specifically

about sci-fi as a genre since we're going through a lot of sci-fi fiction, or science fiction, is that in thinking in political terms, is it political for just being futural, or does it have to be a politics of science, which I think we've discussed a little bit, And we've kind of maybe brushed over a lot of it in sort of quickly going through Mail of Skeets' short book. I'd be interested in... If nobody has any... These are the general sets of questions on the right. I would be interested, though, if anybody has any other questions they would like to propose in this session or if they're, like, coming to this seminar

with certain questions that we can add to the list so we can all collectively work towards these things. No? We're good with these sets of questions? Okay, well. So, sorry, I'll add one. I'm still really caught up with what Ben was, or Ben brought up regarding number as performativity and like the numbering number and, What's it called? Treatise on nomadology. So math, I guess, I think is a cool thing. Okay. I guess you address, but yeah. Alright, good.

Then, if there's no further questions here, then if I could briefly, because we spent so much time, Ben and I, and I've spent a lot of time talking for two and a half hours, I'm sure it's very getting annoying and we'll get some other voices maybe involved. If you can just briefly tell me just a little bit about maybe your background or why you're interested in these concepts or maybe you're interested in only a specific book that we're reading that was on the syllabus. It would be nice to get a little bit of an introduction. So if I can call on people if it's okay if Derek you in mind yeah sure I guess I'm interested in whether in

this seminar with with the relation between hyperstition particularly the the kind of multiplication of coincidences maybe with a paranoid method of fiction, say, the paranoid production of possible worlds. So that's, I mean, I guess that's maybe a project I'm working on. I'm a PhD student at the Royal College of Art currently, I guess, you know, independent researcher now. Okay. Okay, so that, thank you. Chris, do you want to? I mean, Chris, you're also interested in her position, but do you have a specific, like, any other interest?

I don't know. Yeah, I guess I'm not sure. I'm still determining that. I'm just studying philosophy, starting a grad program in New York City, but studied literature last time I tried grad school. So, yeah, I don't know. Interested in the intersection. Happy to meet all of you. Nice to meet you. I know you very well. Okay, Samir posted on the right. If anybody doesn't want to introduce themselves, that's okay. But if you want to sort of at least post to the classroom, it will really benefit, I think, all of us.

So we have a very diverse group. diverse group. These classes are always kind of run in very diverse settings, so they sort of have a very interesting sort of trajectory to them. They go off on long tangents, but I think they end up, as a whole, they end up being very productive, and I think a lot of people can get a lot of things out of these. But I really encourage everybody to sort of contribute as much to the direction of the seminar as Ben and I would. You are more than welcome to derail us, take us on a totally different path during that session. I'm just quite interested in working with everybody

and sort of trying to break the wall of silence that's happening. It's probably the most difficult thing about doing seminars in this setting is sort of, yeah, the ability to communicate on multiple different paths we can communicate for video, but we also have the sideline of chat. So I think within the next couple sessions, we kind of get used to each other, and it kind of builds and becomes very productive towards the end, so thank you all for joining us and being a part of this. And I guess we'll continue with any further discussion that we might have

or any further quotes that we might want to put on it. If the people who haven't read the book and don't have the book need some of it, I can try to help you get versions of it. But I recommend looking at the talk that's online if you can't get the book right now. It's quite useful. And then please contribute afterwards. and yeah, we'll see you next Monday and we'll discuss we'll discuss more we'll discuss a very classic text of possible worlds, I think and me of a book which I think is quite interesting. Has anybody read City in the City before?

Three times this year Alright, cool I would urge anyone who would overlook the city in the city, I would urge you to please read it because it's wonderful. Good. So I hope you'll be there with us next week. Yeah. I plan on it for sure. But, yeah. Okay, so, yeah, that text is also online. It's EPUB format. If you need a different version, if you can't read e-books or something, if you need a PDF, let me know. I can give you that. in general. Thank you very much for being here. I think this will be really fun. Thanks.