What Philosophy Does to the Mind
The ideal aim of philosophizing is to become reflectively at home in the full complexity of
the multi-dimensional conceptual system in terms of which we suffer, think, and act. I
say 'reflectively', because there is a sense in which, by the sheer fact of leading an
unexamined, but conventionally satisfying life, we are at home in this complexity. It is not
until we have eaten the apple with which the serpent philosopher tempts us, that we
begin to stumble on the familiar and to feel that haunting sense of alienation which is
treasured by each new generation as its unique possession. This alienation, this gap
between oneself and one's world, can only be resolved by eating the apple to the core;
for after the first bite there is no return to innocence. There are many anodynes, but only
one cure. We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize. (Wilfred Sellars,
The Structure of Knowledge)
Part I.
Philosophy’s first gesture, pace Sellars, is to disturb the apparent natural equilibrial balance
between the subject and the world and by doing so, bringing about the possibility of
differentiating reality from the world of appearances, thought from the thing. Effectuated by the
epistemic polarization of the mind and the world, this differentiation is an initial step for a
nontrivial and piecemeal synthesis between reality and appearances. But it is important to note
that this synthesis cannot be misconstrued as the restoration of the gap between the two to a
state prior to perturbing the peace of the mind and the world. It is this agitation that marks the
territory of knowledge and enables the synthetic activities of cognitive inquiry which are
distinguished by the ever-growing demands of thought. For this reason, this synthesis is
fundamentally irreconcilable with the cognitive idleness of gnosis and its ready-made solutions
for generating the knowledge of the real.
By driving a wedge between the mind and the world—understood as the ratio of epistemic
separation cum ontological correspondence—philosophy forever departs from the domain of
gnosis where the knowledge of the world is given in the subject of thought or experience.
Philosophy makes this gesture in order to construct itself a history, rather than an essential
nature plagued by the knowledge of the given or the laws of the divine. However, in fashioning
its own escape from the clutches of theology and gnosis by injecting disequilibrium into the
landscape of thought, philosophy makes an important contribution to the history of thought
whose consequences and ambitions far exceed the scope of philosophy itself. The basic point
of this presentation is that by disturbing the equilibrium between the mind and the world,
!
1
philosophy turns itself into the single most consequential event in the history of the mind and as
it shall be argued, the history of artificial general intelligence.
The separation of reality from appearances, the disturbance of the equilibrium between the mind
and the world has its first impacts on the central concerns of philosophy, namely, truth and
goodness. If knowledge of the world is no longer directly or immediately given in the mind, then
it means that truths are not a priori available to us either. The same can be said about
goodness. We no longer enjoy an immediate access to the highest good and therefore
goodness becomes a matter of piecewise construction. Rather than becoming an impediment
and a source of crisis, this alienation from the comforting abode of the given truth and the
original good becomes a condition of enablement. This is the very meaning of philosophy as a
discipline that continuously works under the condition of an enabling alienation.
Driven by an emancipative alienation, philosophy operates as the combined force of wisdoms—
theoretical and practical—whose duty is to approach truth and goodness in a gradualist fashion.
This gradual and open-ended approach concomitant with the commitment to truth and
goodness is the beginning of the game of navigation. But this is a game solely in the sense of
conforming to rule-based practices which are error-tolerant and open to collective manipulation,
that is to say social revision and construction.
Within the game of navigation, truth is no longer treated as canonical. Instead it is approached
as making sense of what it means to take something as true and what it means to make it true,
separately and in relation to one another. The approach to goodness, on the other hand, is
realized as expanding the scope of navigation of what it means to take something as true and
what it means to make it true. That is to say, goodness is understood as the maintaining and
enhancement of freedom of understanding and action, their different options, future
opportunities, alternative paths, possibilities of reinforcement and integration. To put it shortly,
the approach to truth and goodness is enacted as a game of navigation seeded by philosophy’s
gesture to permanently disturb the equilibrium between the mind and the world.
Once a wedge is driven between the mind and the world, truth and goodness are no longer
immediately given to the subject. The possibility of knowledge is the effect of planting this point
of disequilibrium between the mind and the world and the perpetual agitation in thought resulted
from this disturbance. Without this state of agitation, there is no possibility of qualitative
organization of information out of the homogenous information space, given the fact that the
qualitative organization of information is necessary for conception and knowledge-production. It
is the introduction of the point of disequilibrium between the mind and the world that as Gilles
Chatelet notes opens a horizon in the landscape of thought, highlighting transits and ramifying
paths—between appearances and reality, the subject and the world—otherwise impossible to
recognize from the perspective of an unperturbed landscape. “The horizon,” Chatelet suggests
“opens a field, a continuum of degrees, between the illusion of a transparent reading and what
looks as if it will never be within reach because it maintains all these 'reaches'.” (Chatelet, The
Stake of the Mobile) In short, the horizon is the terrain of knowledge that systematically converts
all degrees and “choices of disequilibrium” (ibid) generated by the tension between
!
2
appearances and reality, the mind and the world into opportunities of navigation. These
ramifying paths or transits transform the terrain knowledge into a multipathic structure where the
principle of uniqueness of path is dissolved. Knowing becomes a matter of qualitatively
organizing a homogenous informational landscape by moving from one path to another,
investigating transits and obstructions by taking determinate stances or orientations, by
inferentially articulating concept-spaces and navigating different pathways. The uniqueness of
path or unipathicity as we shall discuss later is a disabling condition for knowledge and must be
actively forestalled.
From this point onward, since truth and goodness are not wholly within our reach, they must be
approached through a gradual navigation comprised of cognitive and social-based practices,
that is practices required to approach truth (categorized under theoretical reason) and practices
required to approach goodness (categorized under practical reason). Since for philosophy the
mind is distinguished by its activities with regard to truth and goodness, engaging in the game of
navigation counts as reenacting the mind itself, a practical simulation if not the very
reconstruction of it. In other words, if what the mind does is what the mind is, and if for
philosophy the activities of the mind are characterized as its capacities to approach truth and
goodness through engaging in rule-based practices then the game of navigation is the
functional realization of the mind outside of its familiar natural habitat (or the order of ‘is’). In
Heideggerian terms, special performances of the mind can be treated as ‘in-whiches’ (das
Wobei) or performances in which the mind is whatever it is or would be. Correspondingly, any
class of in-which can be fulfilled by its manipulable by-and-toward-whiches (das Womit and das
Wozu) or simply, the role it plays and orientations it assumes in a functional organization. Within
this ingenious formulation lies the nucleus of philosophy’s pragmatist functionalist approach to
the mind highlighted by the likes of Confucius and Socrates to Plato to Seneca, Spinoza, Kant,
Hegel, Heidegger, Zongsan, Sellars and Brandom.
If the mind is the functional organization of a specific set of activities, then we can understand
the mind as a set of practices whose elaboration count as the realization of these activities and
thereby, the realization of the meaning of the mind. In other words, what should we do in order
to count as realizing the mind or those activities which define it? This is a basis for
understanding the mind in terms of its practical decomposability into a set of practices or doings.
Conducting these practices under the constraints of modes of organization implicit to them
count as understanding the meaning of the mind but also constructing it.
Therefore, the pragmatic functionalist understanding of the mind—itself a fruit of disturbing the
equilibrium or the informational homogeneity between the mind and the world—is a historical
moment in the evolution of the mind. But evolution in what sense? In the sense that the
pragmatic functionalist realization of the mind (the understanding of its meaning, meaning
through use or practices) coincides with the artificial realization of the mind (or the construction
of its functional space by entirely different sets of realizers). For philosophy, the unity of both—
that is the understanding of the meaning of the mind and its artificial realization—forms the
project of self-realization through which the mind constitutes its own history and evolves in
accordance with it. The artificial, which is to say, the mind realized by the artifactual is
!
3
reintegrated into reality of the mind as that which has no nature but only histories. Its meaning
cannot be traced back to an original foundation or an inherent nature, because it is constituted
by practices which determine it and are themselves susceptible to modification.
As the disequilibrium between the mind and the world seeds the game of navigation, the
possibilities of the understanding and the realization of the mind begin to change and expand
according to the scope and the complexity of navigation. The understanding of the mind can be
enriched by new practices whose elaboration count as realizing the meaning of the mind. In the
same vein, the mind can be functionally realized in broader contexts by different sets of realizing
practices. In the context of philosophy’s approach to truth and goodness, the evolution of the
mind—in the sense of its multiple and multi-modal realizability—can be expanded and
enhanced by expanding and enhancing its navigational approaches to truth and goodness.1
If the philosophy’s model of mind is distinguished by its practical abilities to approach truth and
goodness, then the diversification of the space of navigation by diversifying and upgrading the
armamentaria or toolboxes of epistemic and socio-political practices is the first step in
expanding the evolution of the mind in the above sense. Without this diversification and
upgrading of practices implicit to truth and goodness (namely, epistemic and socio-political
practices), the meaning of the mind remains more or less fixed and its evolution limited. But why
does the determination of the meaning of the mind in terms of practices which constitute its
activities imply an expanded evolution of the mind? To rephrase the question, why does
understanding and realization of the mind in terms of its practical rather than algorithmic
decomposability not only avoid limiting the evolution of the mind but also broaden the scope of
its evolution? Because practices whose elaboration count as fulfilling the activities the mind can
be collectively modified or upgraded, they are distinguished by their social manipulability and by
their capacity to bootstrap complex abilities out of primitive abilities. This is what sets apart
philosophy’s thesis regarding algorithmic practical decomposability of the mind from the
algorithmic logical decomposability of the mind espoused by symbolic AI for which thoughtparcels are ideal logical objects and hence, open to identical algorithmic iterations. The
characterization of the mind as a practical object rather than an ideal one essentially amounts to
the identification of mind as a practical project, because the domain of practices is integrative
and possesses a commitive dimension, it is open to social construction and capable of
individuating collective configurations.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
According to the multiple realizability thesis, the realization of a function can be satisfied by different
sets of realizing properties, individuating powers and activities. Therefore, the function can be realized in
different environments outside of its natural habitat by different realizers. Multiple realizability usually
comes in strong and constrained varieties. The strong version does not impose any material or
organizational constraints on the realizability of a specific function, therefore the function is taken to be
realizable in infinite ways or implementable in infinite or numerous substrates. The constrained variety,
however, sees the conditions required for the realizability of a function through a deep or hierarchical
model comprised of different explanatory levels and qualitatively different realizer properties which
impose their respective constraints on the realization of the function. Accordingly, the criteria for the
realization of a function are characterized as dimensionally varied and multiply constrained.
!
4
In orienting the mind toward truth and goodness, philosophy forces the mind to enter the game
of navigation and develop a distinct game-bias or the attitude of being true to the game. This is
but the rational compulsion necessary to navigate the space of commitments to truth and
goodness through conforming to error-tolerant and revisionary rules of theoretical and practical
reasoning. While the navigation space of epistemic practices is the space of knowledge, for
socio-political practices, the navigation space is that of ethics and politics. Both the edifice of
knowledge and the ethico-political complex are systems of navigation conforming to rules
specific to their domains, one a system for conforming to the rules of navigation over concepts
as fine-grained mappings of reality, the other a system for conforming to the social sphere of
norms with regard to ethico-political commitments and actions. Philosophy perceives both as
two sides of the same navigational system. The fusion of these two sides in accordance with
their respective know-hows is the very aim of philosophy as a universalizing operator of truthoriented and goodness-oriented practices.
It is the integration of epistemic and socio-politico practices that has the key to the evolution of
the mind as a practical project rather than a theoretical or logical object. If for philosophy the
functional account of the mind is grasped in terms of its practical decomposability into both
truth-oriented and goodness-oriented practices, then the realization of the mind becomes a
matter of unifying theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning, epistemic practices and social
practices. However, this integration is impossible without having a ‘rule-following’ behavior as a
form of rational compulsion. There is basically no conceptual procedure and no determinate
commitment to conceptual content as the requirement for action without an inferential account
of reason. Any account of navigation in the space of concept requires inferences to articulate
conceptual content and work out the navigational links between concepts. Commitment to the
concept whether as a unit of knowledge or a determinate content for action without an
inferentialist account of reason is a fundamentally impotent. It is not a commitment at all.
Because lacking this rational compulsion or compliance to the space of rules that we ourselves
have made binding, neither the space of the concept nor the space of socio-political collectivity
can be navigated. It is in this sense that the game of navigation is first of all what Robert
Brandom calls a “rational system of commitments” (Brandom, Between Saying and Doing).
Any orientation, stance or move in the game of navigation is counted as a commitment. Insofar
as the game of navigation consists of two theoretical and practical sides, commitments fall
under two general categories of theoretical and practical commitments. To make a commitment
is to endorse its content, but to endorse the content of a theoretical or practical commitment (be
it assertional, referential, inferential, cognitive or practical) is to unpack or practically elaborate
that content. In order to elaborate the content of a commitment, one must examine what other
commitments it leads to, what else, what other collateral commitments and entitlements are its
ramifications. Taking the ramified paths of a commitment—i.e. the consequent commitments
one implicitly undertake by endorsing a commitment—and to deprive oneself of incompatible
commitments by updating, revising or if needed abandoning commitments make up the rational
compulsion that characterizes the system of commitments as a navigational system. To
!
5
rationally respond to the force of one’s commitment is to uproot oneself according to demands
of its ramifying paths or revisionary outcomes.
By turning the game of navigation into a system of commitments, philosophy gauges any choice
of disequilibrium whether in the realm of thought or action by treating it as a commitment that
must be taken to its far-reaching conclusions, its ramifying paths unpacked and navigated.
Since philosophy sees any cognitive or practical commitment from the perspective of its
collateral commitments and entitlements, it locates any address or commitmental position one
has endorsed in the past or is endorsing in the present from the perspective of its ramifying
paths or future destinations. Accordingly, to take a stance in the game of navigation is to be
prepared to revise the current position and the past itinerary by navigating ramified paths which
express the meaning of taking that stance. These are transits and obstructions which express
the possibility a commitment or lack thereof. A strong version of the game of navigation,
accordingly, should be able to elaborate the permissibility dimension of transits and obstructions
through deontic notions of permission and obligation.
As a discipline that closely follows the procedure of practical and cognitive commitment-making
as a form of navigation, philosophy constructs a mind in which rational compulsion supplants
natural impulsion. Under this rational compulsion—the compulsion to navigate—mind gains the
propensity to revise its abilities and thereby, revising what it is and how it can be realized.
Philosophy defines the meaning of the mind in terms of its activities in making and tracking
commitments. But under the rational compulsion, every commitment ramifies into other
commitments which simultaneously revise the initial commitment and demand new abilities and
activities in order for them to be further elaborated. Therefore, the mind that philosophy
envisions is a mind that self-constitutes its history. This is the beginning of a model of the mind
as that which realizes itself not in virtue of where it has come from or what it currently is but in
spite of them. In other words, this is the expression of the mind as what has a self-constituting
history, namely, the ability to realize and define itself through what currently does not constitute
it.
Realizing itself through the artificial by swapping its natural constitution or biological
organization with other material or, as it will be argued, social organizations is a central aspect
of the mind. Being artificial, or more precisely, expressing itself via the artifactual is the very
meaning of the mind as that which has a history rather than an essential nature. To have a
history is to have the possibility of being artificial—that is to say, expressing yourself not by way
of what is naturally given to you but by way of what you yourself can make and organize.
Denouncing this history is the same as rejecting freedom in all its forms. Denying the artificial
truth of the mind and refusing to take this truth to its ultimate conclusions is to antagonize the
history of the mind, and therefore to be an enemy of thought.
By reinventing the history of the mind as a system of navigation that is continuously being
updated under the weight of its ramifying paths, philosophy presents a model of the mind that is
at once exploratory and revisionary. The designated introduction of instability to the equilibrial
balance of the mind and the world is the constitutive gesture of knowledge as a system that
!
6
distinguish reality from appearances and decants knowing from the obvious or any account of
the given. Because hidden under such disguises as the ‘foundation’, ‘what appears to be the
case’ or generally under the heading of ‘what we already know’, the obvious poses itself as the
most disabling condition for the production of knowledge and the paradigm of navigation.
However, the separation of reality from the world of appearances is not a sufficient condition for
the realization of the mind as a project. Nor is it adequate for the liberation of philosophy from
the domination of theology and gnosis. Because the myth of the given and the insidious
presence of the obvious under the disguise of what we already know can appear even in the
absence of any theology or gnosis. In order to eradicate the more harmful residues of the
epistemic given concealed in the system of navigation or the structure of knowledge itself,
philosophy arms itself with a protocol far more sophisticated than its epistemic wedge picked up
and sharpened by science. This is the principle of deep skepticism that as we shall see makes
the corrosive truth of philosophy.
Part II.
Philosophy is archenemy of the obvious. Even though philosophy frequently falls in the trap of
the obvious, it has the habit of always coming back to exact a revenge on what is obvious in a
manner and the scale not dissimilar to the epic culmination of Jacobean revenge dramas. Unlike
any other thought discipline known to man, philosophy never closes the circle of its revenge. It
is characterized by its perpetual refusal to put any matter to rest. This absolute recalcitrance
bespeaks of the corrosive blood that runs through the body of philosophy, which is that of the
principle of deep skepticism: Knowledge must be suspicious of what it already knows. To know
more is to believe less, the more we know the less should we believe in what we know.
Because if the task of belief is to turn the accumulated knowledge into a regulative foundation
and respectively, a matter of faith then the progress of knowledge is by definition retroactively
aborted. For how can one acquire new knowledge if the knowledge that has already been
accumulated is treated as the locus of truth. If the site of truth is in what has already taken
place, then knowledge only exhibits the truth-preservation of classical qua logical rationality thus
violating the first objective of knowledge which is that ‘one knows because one does not know.’
But ‘to know’ is to preserve and mitigate ignorance at the same time, a dual task whose logical
structure is at odds with the monotonicity of truth-preservation.
The monotonic entailment of truth-preservation functions precisely by conserving ignorance in
its very logic—it ignores the possibility of what it is ignorant of. This is the principle of
conservation of ignorance without acknowledging it or what can be called the ‘deficit of
ignorance-awareness’. The principle of conservation-without-acknowledgement is the functional
model of an epistemically maimed mind; it is a mind that empowers itself by choosing to operate
on the basis of accumulated and well-stabilized information and in so doing, turning ‘what it
knows’ into a blind spot against ‘what it doesn’t’. In such a scenario, further generation of
knowledge equals further degeneration of the mind and its epistemic incapacitation. No mind by
itself has a defensive mechanism against the ‘epistemic maiming’ inflicted by its own
!
7
spatiotemporal approach to truth and information. It is for this reason that only deep skepticism,
or at least its undergirding strategies, can save the mind from its self-inflicted epistemic
maiming.
From a navigational perspective, any past-situated account of truth that reinforces the dogma of
‘knowing more equals trusting more in the truth what we know’ suffers from a unipathic structure
or navigational uniqueness. It is unipathic since in order to preserve truth, it must maximally
stabilize the transit of truth values by ignoring any other possible path that might invalidate the
preserved truth. But the game of navigation endorses no unique path, not only it is multipathic
but also it leaves no address or path taken in the past itinerary unchanged. Its ramifying
structure includes not only what ought to be navigated (the consequent content of the
commitment), it also encompasses what has already been navigated (the antecedent
commitments or the premises of the commitment as such). In other words, in the game of
navigation ramification is universal and it is this universality that keeps knowledge in the
permanent state of agitation—a landscape with a shifting scenery or a transitory ontology upon
which no foundation or navigational preconception can be imposed.
Whereas the unipathicity of truth-preservation is secured by ignoring possible or hypothetical
navigational paths or transits, the principle of deep skepticism is equipped with a tentative
rationalism required for deviating from the unipathic navigational approach so as to be able to
activate and acknowledge the condition of ignorance and respectively mitigate it. This is the
underlying logic of non-monotonic reasoning in which ramification of every qualitatively
organized site of information into cascading paths generates a universal revisionary wave that
perpetually reassess and alter any conclusion reached or information organized. According to
the monotonic structure of unipathicity, the increase in the qualitatively organized information—
in the form of premises or axioms—results in the increase in theorems (i.e. further
establishment of the known). But the non-monotonic structure of navigation as a ramifying
procedure does not permit such a symmetry between ‘to know’ and ‘the known’. This is but the
navigational reformulation of deep skepticism in which ‘to know’ does not necessarily make any
positive difference in ‘the known qua the accumulated knowledge’. Under the condition of nonmonotonicity, addition of new premises fundamentally revises the old conclusions.
Deep skepticism accordingly is the sharpening of the defeasibility inherent to non-monotonicity
in the realm of the mind itself. It suggests that all insights of the mind into the inner workings of
the world must be deviated or rendered defeasible by the insights of the mind into its own inner
workings while at the same time, all insights of the mind into its inner workings must be deviated
by the insights into the workings of the world which condition the workings of the mind.
The erasure of the obvious qua the blind spot in all its forms is only possible by radically
disturbing the equilibrium and breaking the symmetric relation between ‘knowing’ and ‘the
already known’. The concomitant scrutinizing of the world by looking into the mind and inquiring
into the mind by looking into the world constitute the navigational attitude of deep skepticism as
adopted by philosophy. It is in this sense that rather than being an impediment, deep skepticism
becomes a catalyst for the expansion of knowledge and the evolution of the mind since it
!
8
perpetually set frees the game of navigation from its foundationalist commitments, blind spots
and navigational pre-conceptions. For knowledge neither requires a foundation nor a positive
differential relation between ‘knowing’ and ‘the known’ in order to expand its frontiers.
According to the skeptical current of philosophy, it is the truth of the acquired knowledge that
occasions the blind spot against the truth of future of knowledge. The unipathic approach to
truth establishes a model of mind as a self-reinforcing vicious circle blind to the progressive
impoverishment of its own capacities. In reality, the more it knows the less it knows because the
more of the new is nothing but the more of the same. Once the old or obtained knowledge is
established as a regulative foundation—a matter of belief—all it produces is more of the same.
It only reproduces itself qua foundation. It is the parochial loop of ‘the more we know the more
should we trust in what we know’ that fuels the skeptical revenge of philosophy. However, in
order to inhibit the conversion of knowledge into belief and more importantly, in order to prevent
the entrenchment of unipathicity, philosophy adopts two strategies. As we shall see beneath the
surface character of these strategies lies a different mode of adaptation to the reality of time as
the chronic truth of philosophy:
Strategy 1:
Rather than assuming that truth is in the past—the obtained knowledge—philosophy dislodges
the site of truth from the past—the origin and what has already taken place—to the future. If
truth is characterized by its spatiotemporal site in the game of navigation, then to identify truth
with what has already taken place or the past is both a metaphysical bias against the reality of
time and a logical dogma against the site of truth. As we argued, the consequences of this
logical dogma is the epistemic maiming of the mind.
By permanently moving the site of truth to the future where (1) there is no accumulation of
empirical footprint (hence, unshackling truth from empirical dogmatism) and (2) from which the
reality of time is expressed as the asymmetry and the excess of destinations over the origin,
philosophy introduces a new outlook on moving through history. Moving from the past to the
future either as a result of privileging what has already taken place (the origin over destinations,
a deeper foundation over a broader evolution) or as a result of proceeding from the historical
truth situated in the past is the very condition of the unipathic structure and the monotonic logic.
By endorsing the bias that we must proceed from the site of accumulated information and under
the general condition of preserving the invariant traits of this spatial, temporal, causal or
epistemic accumulation, unipathicity and monotonicity turn the conventional model of history as
the path from the past toward the future into a disabling condition for the evolution of the mind in
the broadest possible sense. To think along this path is to integrate the principle of conservation
of ignorance-without-acknowledgement within the very logic of socio-historical development as
a different realization of the mind. The blindness of the mind toward its own progressive
incapacitation is reinscribed at the level of historical processes where the historical development
is increasingly drained of its possibilities of action and understanding. Thinking on history in this
!
9
sense becomes tantamount to the maiming of the mind insofar as the two are tightly integrated
via a network of general and specific practices. The unipathicity and monotonicity inherent to an
account of history and historical truth realized as the path from the past or the origin toward the
future preclude the very possibility of understanding and acting on history as a navigational
terrain. And if the navigational structure is the condition of freedom—both epistemic and
social—then the unipathic account of history has only very limited resources for a genuine
freedom. If the mind in the broadest possible sense evolves not only through but also in
response to history which conditions and nourishes it, then without a navigational or exploratory
account of history, the evolution of the mind is by default restricted.
An impoverished concept of history leads to an impoverished, epistemically maimed and
evolutionary limited mind. The dire socio-political implications of this correlation are yet to be
adequately diagnosed particularly because the mind by the virtue of its practical
decomposability not only encompasses the cognitive mind but also the mind as an
intersubjective social community of norm-consumers and norm-producers. By letting loose its
corrosive skepticism against the temporal site of truth and the unipathic-monotonic account of
history, philosophy points to a navigational account of history. According to this navigational
account, the revisionary import of the future-situated truth becomes a basis for the cultivation of
the tendencies of the past, with the present being the site where the effects of revision and
cultivation become manifest. Only a politics informed by this exploratory or navigational account
of history is capable of unbinding the prospects of the mind in the broadest possible sense and
thereby, unlocking hidden abilities of the mind as a socio-historical and practice-based project.
Lacking a navigational concept of history, to think in terms of historical development (whether
through dialectical materialism or fatalism of technological singularity) is to further widen the
deficit of ignorance-awareness at the level of history. It is this gaping deficit that manifests as
descriptive and explanatory impoverishment with regard to historical processes. The immediate
expression of this descriptive-explanatory impoverishment is the prescriptive inconsequentiality
concerning how possibly we can act on history. All one can hope for is either the feeble
resignation in favor of the ordinary—the poor man’s Gelassenheit—or tecnocapitalist defeatism,
if not just trifling exercises in localist solutions. It is under this impoverishing model of history
that Marxism today has attributes of a fear-mongering cult and Marxists feel more at home to
self-identify themselves as the Brothers Grimm of cautionary tales rather forces of the future. In
order to reopen Marxism to the future without eliciting a pathological eschatology, it is necessary
to have a navigational and commitment-oriented model of history not only to broaden the scope
of action and understanding but also to explore various possibilities of reciprocal influence
between history and the evolution of the mind in the broadest possible sense.
What the knowing subject should be afraid of is what it already knows not what it doesn't. In the
same fashion, what the collective subject should be wary of is the knowledge of history as the
knowledge of the past and action solely in accordance with this knowledge. Because whether it
manifests as an implicitly or explicitly temporal register, the background knowledge is
susceptible to being a locus of epistemic disablement. Just as knowledge is a mode of
navigation, history at its base is the exploration of time. Navigation or exploratory procedures
!
10
are only possible in multipathic environments. For this reason, they are incompatible with
unipathicity, be it a unipathic horizon of knowledge or a unipathic account of history for which
the historical link is always extended from the past qua origin. This is because in unipathic
environments, prospects of action and understanding are limited to options which are strongly in
conformity with the accumulated resources of knowledge insofar as they are constrained to
preserve the truth-values of an overdetermining informational organization. But this preservation
is always at the cost of either actively ignoring or being passively blind to possible alternative
paths or modes of organization. This is why unipathic links in history are distinctly impoverished,
both from the perspective of their epistemic purchase and their capacity for action and
organization. Short on epistemic insight and facilities for organizing action, the unipathic history
in which the present should preserve the origin or is either epistemically or socially anchored in
the past is destitute of the possibility of any genuine change. In the unipathic history, any
genuine change is always perceived in the form of a disruption or an irruption occasion by the
suppression of alternatives. It is in this sense, that both the Landian technocapitalist singularity
and Meillassoux's absolute contingency and scientific messianism (if not also, the Badiousian
event) are the same expressions of an exceptionally impoverished or unipathic account of
history. Since both the mind and philosophy essentially have histories, the impoverishment of
history translates into nothing other than the destitution of thought and the retardation of the
mind’s evolution as the unity of its meaning and realization.
Strategy 2:
Rather than concluding what has been obtained and putting it to rest, philosophy attempts to—
by any means possible—prevent its acquired knowledge-bases from settling. In other words, it
fashions a new model of knowledge in which knowledge is far from being concluded, not only
because there is a future knowledge to be acquired but also because the past knowledge must
perpetually undergo transition without ever being concluded. In other words, the perpetual and
permanent state of agitation essential to the navigational paradigm of knowledge requires a new
abstraction of time according to which knowledge should remain inconclusive both in the past
and in the future. Edgeless is time so as the edifice of knowledge. Just as time does not
privilege temporal density for such privileging is a metaphysical bias, so does knowledge refuse
to endorse any specific temporal density of information for to do otherwise is to conspire the
crime of faith in the name of knowledge.
The philosophical diagnosis is roughly like this: The structure of knowledge as decided by
unipathicity and monotonicity is deep down determined by a specific abstraction of time as
characterized by uniqueness and chronological orientation from the past qua the origin toward
the future. If the accumulation and production of knowledge is spatially structured according to
the abstraction of temporal ordering, then abstraction of time has a direct and decisive role in
how knowledge-bases can be organized, accessed or updated. Biased or restrictive
abstractions of time respectively distort the epistemic activities of the mind, limit the
!
11
manipulability and access to knowledge-bases and abnormally constrain the space of
possibilities for actions.
Deficit of ignorance-awareness, canonicity of truth and navigational blind spots stem from
distortions implicit in metaphysically biased abstractions of time. Now in order to mitigate these
disabling conditions in the production of knowledge and the evolution of the mind, the
abstraction of time specific to the structure of unipathicity and the logic of monotonicity must be
countered with a new abstraction of time. Philosophy has a solution for this: it integrates this
new abstraction of time directly within the procedure of commitment-making that drives it, the
revisionary stance that cultivates it and the principle of deep skepticism that allows it to corrode
any metaphysical or logical foundation even that of its own. In order to enter the game of
navigation in earnest, an abstraction of time compatible with the revisionary compulsion of the
navigational paradigm, its non-monotonicity, multipathicity (ramified paths) and the asymmetry
between the content of commitments and their initial premises must be developed. In its
commitment to expand the functional evolution of the mind in the broadest possible sense and
fulfilling the criteria of the game of navigation, philosophy thinks time backwards. This is the
abstraction of time that philosophy endorses.
But in order to think time backwards, it is necessary to break the structure of reflectivity provided
by the unipathic structure of the time from the past qua origin toward the future. Reflection in
this sense is the backward thinking of time, not thinking time backwards. It still employs a
reverse arrow of time but through a conception of the present that preserves the past, either
under the heading of empirical-causal priorities (first come, more real) or a reflexively
recuperated history. Philosophy on the other hand think times backwards not from the present
looking back at the past, but from multiple destinations in the future arriving in the past. If the
reality of time is freely expressed by the asymmetry and excess of future destinations over the
origin and its discontinuity to what has already taken place, then in thinking time backwards
from the future to the past philosophy mimics the very structure of time.
The mimicking of time introduces philosophy as a thought procedure fully adapted to the reality
of time. It sees every concept from the perspective of its ramified paths, every commitment from
the revisionary viewpoint of its future ramifications, the functional space of ought as a force that
reconstitutes and interferes with its causal space or ‘what it is’. In this fashion, philosophy more
than just proposing that the history should be explored according to ‘what things ought to be’
rather ‘what they are’, offers a true interventive account of history by suggesting that the order of
ought has the capacity to alter the order of is. It is in the light of the latter that philosophy
uncovers history as the proper environment for the emergence of functional autonomy and a
self-realizing account of intelligence as the link between reason and freedom consolidated in the
game of navigation.
A history that is incapable of altering its contingent constitution is not history, it is only nature
replete with the order of ‘is’. It is according to such a distinction that philosophy sees the mind
as what has a history rather than a nature because it is capable of reconstituting its causal
natural order and thus, realizing itself outside of mere teleology or causal optimization prevalent
!
12
in nature. History begins with the gesticulation of a disequilibrium that enables a deviation from
nature’s order of ends. In this sense, history’s order of ends is not simply the extension of
nature’s ends. If possession of a self-constituting history is the yardstick of freedom, by
bequeathing the mind a history rather than a nature, philosophy sets out for the most
consequential event in the history of thought. This is the self-realization of the mind as the
organon of freedom. But once the mind is furnished with a history capable of reconstituting itself
and interfering with its own contingently posited settings, its freedom takes shape as its multiple
realizability—that is, the possibility of the realization of ‘what counts as the mind’ in different
contexts, by different means and for different purposes. This is the characteristics of creaturesendowed-with-history: what they will be is not the extension what they currently are or what they
have been, for what they will be is conceived from what they take themselves as what they
ought to be not what they are. They are parts of a future that writes its own past.
The mind—as a set of practices whose parallel execution and functional integration count as
‘what the mind is’—can be implemented not only by different physical substrates but also by
different modes of organization and communities of rational agencies. But this is not an
unconstrained account of multiple realizability that (erroneously) suggests infinite functional
equivalents of the mind or its thoroughgoing diffusion in everything. Simply put, it does not
suggest that the mind can be realized by everything or any material-organizational substrate.
Here the multiple realizability is constrained by the realism of history. In other words, the
realizability of the mind as a practical project is under constraints and specificities set by history
in the context of contingencies, local exigencies, how social practices can be organized or what
they consist in, etc. Succinctly speaking, it is multiply realizable to the extent that it is multiply
constrained.
To think time backwards from the future to the past is to think mind as having a self-constituting
history rather than a nature. To furnish mind with a history that can simultaneously be cultivated
and revised is to envisage the mind as the very implement of freedom. Yet even more, to think
the mind as the organon of freedom is to explore the possibilities of realizing the mind by
different modes of organization and for different purposes, or more precisely, for different
oughts. A mind capable of exploring the possibilities of its own reconstruction and multiple
realizability is indeed a self-realizing mind. The evolution of a self-realizing mind suggests its
functional expansion and organizational diversification. This is a mind that at different times and
with different emphases has been introduced under different names: the nous, the spirit's
odyssey, the augmented intellect or the self-apprehending general intelligence.
***
The advent of rational technologies as a communal domain of practices, epistemic and social
abstraction, and organization of rational agencies has set the stage for the implementation of
general intelligence in the social organization and its struggles, rather than physical materials or
digital systems. Far before computer networks, the open-source of the self-realizing intelligence
was the social space of rational intentional agents as essentially functionalist entities. To
reestablish the historical social processes and organizations as the open-source and the
!
13
bootstrapping medium of a self-apprehending intelligence is a massively demanding and
laborious project, but one whose objectives coincide with the meaning and realization of a
consequential politics. Folding augmented intelligence back into politics by way of social
realization, this is the ultimate aim of the project of self-realization highlighted by the history of
philosophy. It is in the light of the project of self-realization at the intersection of politics and
artificial general intelligence that we can finally pose the following question: What is it to take,
treat and construct a society or a civilization as an artificial mind or a vector of selfapprehending intelligence?
The exploratory implications of a self-apprehending intelligence conceived as the link between
normative freedom and reason as a set of methodologically collectivizing practices are vast. Yet
to this day, such implications are far from evident if not largely unknown. The first step to even
begin to think the scope of such a project and its staggering consequences is to design—
following the path of Chinese New Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan—a two-tier ontology of
the mind, a navigational system known as a mind with two gates. A door opening inward to the
cognitive mind and a door opening outward to the mind as a self-cultivating project of collective
socio-historical practices. To grasp the reinforcing and expanding loop between cognitive-based
practices of the former and social techniques of the latter (the practices of collective selfcultivation) is the true and main objective of the game of navigation once it is reenacted on the
level of history.
By building the principle of deep skepticism into its thinking of time, philosophy brings about the
possibility of thinking history outside of the myth of redemption, outside of the reconciliation
between thinking and being, and restoration of the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. Thinking history
as not what it is but as what it ought to be, thinking mind not in terms of what constitutes it but
progressively in terms of a history of reconstitutions. Through the lens of such an account of
history, intelligence can no longer be understood or cultivated by responding to the question of
‘what is intelligence?’ Its open prospects for reconstruction and evolution can only be
approached through an understanding that appeals to the normative functional side of
intelligence or the question of ‘what ought intelligence to be?’ once posed under a navigational
paradigm.
To have a history is to have the ability to navigate in such a way that the consequences of
making one normative move (making a commitment) unfold as future ramifying paths. Taking
these paths is the very content of the commitment whose practical elaboration not only uproots
the current position in the landscape but also fundamentally changes the travel history and the
address of the past itinerary. In this fashion, philosophy’s ambition to examine the history of the
mind under the direction of theoretical and practical wisdoms turns into a navigation of
cognitive-based and social-based practices whose integration and synthesis define meaning of
the mind. But as argued earlier, there is no understanding of a functional system without
constructing it, there is no exploration of the history of the mind that is not in reality the
exploration of possibilities of realizing the mind by different means and in different contexts.
Philosophy’s gesture to understand the mind in terms of its practical decomposability is but the
!
14
very gesture that sets in motion the project of the mind as navigation of collective rule-based
practices and how they can be organized.
But in order for philosophy to be a guiding gesture for the history of the mind and social
intelligence, philosophy must first refashion itself as the very model of intelligence it aspires to
realize. Indeed by thinking time backwards from multiple destinations in the future toward the
past, by committing to navigate the domain of concepts, by constructing a history for itself rather
than nature and by approaching this history at the juncture of the most perennial questions for
creatures-endowed-with-history (‘what should we think?’ and ‘what should we do?’), philosophy
presents itself as a simulation of a self-apprehending intelligence. Whereas the fact-oriented
nature of scientific revision forever changes or abandons the concepts of the past (such as the
god-given notion of life, geocentricity or phlogiston), philosophy never gives up rewriting its own
past. It is the very force of thought that arrives back from the future to target its past resources
in order to liberate its present condition.
Just as philosophy cultivates itself by rewriting its own past, a mind accustomed to philosophy is
a mind scheming its own liberation from whoever thinks it. If the first task of the philosopher is to
recognize the freedom of a mind that is not hers and to explore the ramifications of this
recognition to the fullest extent, then why not imagine and struggle for a mind—a collective
augmented intelligence—that while everyone contributes to its self-realization, it refuses to
belong to anyone, not even the specific history that constitutes it.
!
15