The Man Who Knew Nothing (Session 5)

So hello all and welcome to the fifth session of the man who knew nothing from neurodiversity to practical schizophrenia I'm going to pass the mic over to Reza, but I'll just note that we have two presentations today one is by Evrim and one is by Andrew. I thought that you are going to talk about Who's that? Alex you. Oh, no, I wasn't going to present Okay, okay. Sorry for the confusion. Hello everyone. Happy belated new year. Sorry, I had to switch, you know, the syllabus a little bit because I thought that it's best to

talk about this subject so then we can actually look more into the psychoanalytic and what you I call to be neuroscientific ethics of the self. This is a kind of, you know, after two weeks of not having class, I thought that it would be an exciting way to open it. In any case, I don't want to say anything. I think that first we should hear the presentations. But before that, how many of you in all honesty read the piece, The Jet Propyled Couch?

Okay, okay. It is quite a very, very interesting piece. Okay, so let's hear from our presenters. So it was Andrew first, I believe, since he was presenting on the jet propelled couch. Sure, thanks. I feel like I should preface this by saying this is the layman's presentation on this, as I don't really have any philosophical background, but yeah, I'll just get into it. So yeah, so my presentations on the jet propelled couch as taken from Robert Linder's book, The 50 Minute Hour.

First I'll present the bio of the protagonist Kirk and I'll ask what causes the alienation of self. I'll then discuss Kirk's ability to move between worlds and ask how we can share our worlds with others. Finally, I'll address the danger of new worlds as totalizing structures. To do this, I'll refer to Reza's text, Unidentified Gliding Objects from Hypersonic Hypersicians, as well as a short story from Borges. So in the jet propelled couch, Linda tells the story of a patient referred to as Kirk Allen, a CIA operative who believes he is in fact two selves, which causes his boss a lot of grief. One of Kirk's selves, which he understands as a fake self, is a brilliant physicist working

for the CIA in the States, and the other, his true self, is an intergalactic ruler in a distant universe. As Linda tells it, Kirk's upbringing had much to do with the development of his second self. He was the only white child on a small Hawaiian island, his parents had little time for him, and the one local woman who properly reared him was taken away from him suddenly. All of this resulted in a sense of distance growing between Kirk and the rest of the world. He then found in reading his only way of apprehending the world. So his upbringing set the appropriate conditions, but the untethering of the self truly begins for Kirk when he reads a book in which the protagonist shares his own name. He finds the contents of this book to perfectly match the events of his own,

until then forgotten life. And suddenly he knows with great certainty that what he's reading is his own biography. Later on, Kirk gets completely overwhelmed by the advances of a colleague. And this is when he first gains direct experience of his intergalactic self. Linda thus describes this othering of the self as a defensive psychic maneuver. And this is something I'm a little unclear on. I'm not sure whether to read this alienation of the self as something that we all necessarily experience or as something to aspire to? Is it the inevitable result of the unshakable global perspective of old through the repair mobile or mobile frame of reference? And here I'm quoting from Reza's text on page 1642.

Or is this untethering of self something that can only be achieved under certain circumstances? Either way, in Kirk's story, we find some guidelines for how to best recognize ourselves as alien, and in doing so, construct new worlds and new ways of knowing. This alienation should not be seen as a response to any particular trauma, but as a positive means for becoming a world builder. So Kirk has built his own multiverse, but what's even more peculiar is that he has the ability to switch in and out of this multiverse. He can, to some degree, control when or how he oscillates between one world and another. And not only is this a core factor in Linda accepting Kirk as a patient, but it seems to me the core of a healthy madness.

Switching between worlds is not enough, however. The ultimate goal of this moving back and forth should be to reconfigure the world beyond us. One delves into their personal multiverse in order to come back out equipped with new means to impact reality. In your text, Reza, you discuss language, specifically toy predicates in similar terms. You talk about using language to create world versions, new iterations of reality that are not radically disconnected from the old world. And retaining this link between old and new struck me as essential. To reformulate the world usefully, one must remain somewhat connected to that world. In Kirk's case, we see what happens when our multiple worlds are radically disconnected.

The very creation of his new world is posited on its extreme distance from the old. He uses this multiverse to shy away from reality as a reaction to old world traumas. So while Kirk may be able to switch between worlds, he is unable to bridge the gap between them. oscillating between worlds is one thing but the true challenge is returning to the old world and bringing your fresh new multiverse with you how does one share their worlds then for Kirk the multiverse crumbles when it's shared with Linda in Linda's own world words a delusion such as Kirk's has room in it for only one person at a time when another person invades the delusion the original occupant finds himself literally forced to give way one thing

Kirk does manage to do is bring forth his maps of the multiverse, these artifacts that hint at another world. But even these are not enough to make his multiverse something collective. And this brings us back to language, one core quality of which is its shareability. Language allows us to reconfigure reality, but surely we need shareable languages to build shareable realities. It's not enough to adapt one's personal lexicon and learn, you need others to share that lexicon with you. In Northern Australia, a number of Aboriginal languages exist that are without words to describe egocentric directions. No left or right or up. These languages rely exclusively on cardinal directions instead. So to tell someone to make space in the car using these languages,

you might tell them to move a bit to the east. Speaking in this way therefore requires knowing where the cardinal directions are at every moment. And this gives the people to speak these languages, an almost superhuman sense of orientation. So this example is just a, I mean, we see in this how profoundly language can shape understandings of self and of reality. But the issue is when you start compelling others to use your own, your language and to share your worldview, you quickly arrive at totalitarianism. And this brings us to Borges, whose short story, Tlón Úrbá Orbis Tertius is a warning against the dangers of totalizing other worlds. For those who don't know it, the story is about the planet Tlón, which the narrator is made aware of through

a mistype in his encyclopedia. The world of Tlón is both fictional and utterly totalizing. Its histories and languages steadily come to replace all others. And here we're given another hint at what makes a healthy madness. In any newly built reality, there must always remain the possibility of things being otherwise. Annihilation at the hands of any totalizing structure can be avoided so long as one can say, and yet. And herein lies the beauty of the toy predicate, a playful form of language in which possibilities multiply endlessly. The example you give Reza, for those unfamiliar, is a new word for the color of emeralds, as in Instead of calling them green, we might call them green up until a certain point and then blue thereafter.

So grew. With this approach, we get the multiverse. We get worlds in the plural. It means each newly created world contains within it the kernel of one world more. So to be mad and yet retain your individual identity, another world is never enough. What you need is a multiverse. That's it. Thanks. Excellent. Excellent. A couple of comments and possible questions for you, Andrew. So yes, I think what you said at the beginning was extremely important. It seems that, so it is a classical case of what you might call to be a schizophrenia

from a clinical perspective. And the thing is that his schizophrenia is precisely because he sees his self at the outer rims of earth, at the outer rims of Earth, almost sucked up into galactic abysses. But he's not capable, as you said, capable of connecting back those worlds with his own world, which is a paper-pushing person, scientist. And this actually opens a very fundamental

question. We all have escapist fantasies, right? So if there is an escapist fantasy, obviously means that there is something wrong with the world in which we live, either personally or globally. But the thing is that, is the solution to just posit alien worlds where we can inhabit or is it rather in a way of world making to always connect back not only

these dissociated worlds but also connect them back to the world we live in. That would be the true escape. It is no longer an escapist, a schizophrenic fantasy, it is escape par excellence. Now the question for you and this is my curiosity, I actually want you to tell me that if you have conducted such experiments with your psyche as a person, because we usually do,

We just don't tell anyone. Well, I particularly remember having done that as a child, specifically. More recently, I'm sure there would be examples, but not that I can immediately think of. Well, I mean, there's always the imagining of apprehension before any event where you imagine how things could go one way or the other. But I don't think that's quite the same as... I mean, that seems different to positing a different world completely.

Well, have you had fantasies of living in different worlds, having different selves, like in a concrete manner, like you actually start constructing them? I, I, the closest I can think of is, uh, having invented alias, like an alias, but not a world around that alias. If you understand me. I see, I see, I see. Yeah. I see. Well, this is one of the things that I want to talk about that essentially, uh, yes,

alias is just like basically what you might call to be a plurality of self. And the thing is that based on what we have read in the Stoics, in the Cynics, in early 20th century philosophy, particularly Wittgenstein, we notice something quite important. The one cannot simply create a self without creating the world that supports it. if you have new people

then you should actually give them a new land right if you have inhabitants of a new planet you should give them a new planet thank you so much Really excellent, excellent presentation. So next one, our next victim. That would be Avrim. My name is Deleuze and Stoics. We will show some connections between the discussion that has been carried out on Stoics

in the past four sessions and the last account of Stoicism. One of the strategic questions Reza repeatedly brought forward in relation to Stoicism but also to cynicism consisted of a distinction between practice and theory. One way of putting the course was what does it take to create an idea. It was formulated as what practices are needed to offer a human theory. What is meant here is that not all actions or practices end up with ideas or In order to create a novelty in thought, one should actually practice the necessary conditions for that novelty. These conditions are not given, but themselves must be created.

Philosophy will thus emerge from the very lives that are the very conditions that we create for it. This also goes parallel with what John Sellers calls in the Art of the Teaching, which is the technical definition of philosophy, which argues that philosophical ideas or doctrines are primarily expressed in one's behavior. This means that our lives are the two locals where philosophy effectuates, and what is known as abstract theory is an outcome of it. I think we lost him. Did we? Yeah, I'm not seeing him any longer.

I'll message him one moment. Okay, we'll see if he responds, but if anybody else wants to speak right now, this would be an appropriate time. No, I think that he is the connection. We can hear you. Okay. The Leuces reading is centered around the precise way the ontological distinction between corporeals and incorporeals is theorized. According to this theory, bodily or corporeal things constitutes the realm of causes while

incorporeal or sensible entities constitute the realm of causes. we have between bodies is rather actions and passions and not causes and effects. The relationship bodies are relationships between causes and only after these internal relations between causes are grown into a certain maturity that incorporate effects can be produced. Here we can see one of the examples concerning the platonic duality between bodily copies and transcendent ideas or between physical and metaphysical entities, where copies are subordinated to ideas as their products. In the Platonic model, corporeals are and incorporeals are causes, while the overturned

stoic version becomes the causes of incorporealism. The second important dimension of the the overturning of the Platonism is that the locus of the incorporeal ideas undergo a radical change and is relocated as the metaphysical surface of corporeal things. The metaphysical objects not anymore in a transcendent realm but cover the surface of physical objects like an unity in the membrane. In this translocation, Deleuze says, the idea is deprived of its hearts and also the surface as an incorporeal effect. In fact, I really like this metaphor. I think

it is very strong. It is as though the the Platonic ideas high above suddenly follow us and envelop our bodies like an imperceivable skin but also effects produced by our bodies. It is as though they are released from our pores or to use a metaphor by Deleuze again, they climb the surface by emerging from the depths of the body. This very short summary of the overturning of Platonism has profound practical and ethical consequences. Deleuze finds this ethical dimension of stoic philosophy in the primacy of events that is identical with the incorporeal surrogate. His well-known formula is to be worthy of what happens

to us. An act is ethical if it is performed as a consequence of the loyalty to the events happening to the corporeal entities. It is a measure of acting in accordance with the abrupt falling of the idea upon us such that quote the action is itself produced by the offspring of the events and quote. However, it is also that all events are produced by way of actions or certain relationships between corporeal entities. So there is a reciprocal genesis between corporeals and incorporeals. What is more relevant to my argument is the message between corporeal to incorporeal. Doloz elaborates this passage through a process that he calls dynamic genesis, which defines

the psychoanalytic development of the life of a baby from the three-corporeal world to the production of incorporeal metaphysical surface. Here we can see the Platonic movement from the cave to the sun or from matter to the idea, but without doubt in its overturned or reoriented stoic version. So what happens is that the baby gradually moves from the meaningless and puristical noise surrounding it to the voice and then to speech and finally to the metaphysical surface. The true metaphysical journey is from the infantile depths of the body to the surface and not from copies to the models. What I would like to say at this point is that the passage from corporeal to incorporeal,

which also designates the role of ideas, doesn't have to be restricted to a psychoanalytic or individualistic story of . We can also think of a social and political mode of development, which moves from physical to metaphysical objects. A socio-political dynamic genesis, not only a psychoanalytic one as Deleuze is . It is important to note that a coreality is never one and simple. It is already a mixture of various other corporeal entities. However, in its given states, it is never enough to form an incorporeal effect. This means that there is no direct transition from a corporeal entity to an incorporeal one. As Deleuze says, one should first of all learn how to experience.

To mix means both to take into account all combinations at once and experience the unknown depths of the physical objects. This is exactly what it takes to create an idea. One of the most important lessons to learn from this is that there is no present criterion to judge a certain and mixture is good only because the bodies are sufficient. All combinations are affirmed at once and thereby able to create a surface or a metaphysical idea. The question is what kind of corporeal mixtures we must create in order to witness the emergence of the thing. What the Lewis calls the schizofenia

is precisely these that consisting of mixtures of actions and passions between bodies or causes. In fact, what pre-Socritics discovered as nature was in but the same corporeal beds from which schizophrenic experience emerges. What Stoics added was that nature is not an imminent measure for good actions, as pre-Socritics believed, just as there is no transcendent measure, but a field of experimentation from which new mixtures can be created. My point is that a schizophrenic experience of the society that is initiated by the investigation of new mixtures and unknown physical depths of social structures

but also by the beginning of all combinations of actions and passions might become the condition for the construction of society In this context, acts such as masturbation in public or incest should be understood as acts of creating mixtures. They are totally misunderstood as long as their aim is reduced to discomforting the majority whose individuals are endowed with moral judgments against life. What is aimed here is to penetrate into the depths of things, rather than merely confronting the public with shocking things in order to derange established norms. It has a much better perspective than the provocation of the other. It is rather to mix one with the other to the degree that the corporeal mixture of society reaches the point of having for itself a metaphysical surface.

The provocative aspect is that a byproducts are not an end. Created here is a mixture of public space and the However, this mixture is insufficient and the encounter is only partial. It is up to deepen and mix further the mixture. So I think there's been some minutes. Excellent, excellent. Do you have actually, would you be able to send us, if it is possible, the text that you have written? Yeah, of course. because I think that it packs a lot of problems and I cannot actually reply to

all of the problems but I think that you brought up some really challenging the self one question so so okay we can say that you know bodies are in the realm of causes axiom one in a spin as this extends right axiom to life is a field of possibility. Essentially understanding how a body can basically impinge a causal factor on another body. So if that is the case, then by

what means can we actually open up this field of possibilities which is called life to understand that there may be different kind of causal interactions or extensions can we simply do it by way of a kind of passion or do you really think that we need something more so the relationship between beliefs are not cause and effect but actions and passions so they are kind of half causes they're not a body can never be the cause of another body or a body cannot

be the effect of another one but there are never less interactions interactions as possibilities, right? How I understand it is that bodies can come together and create mixtures or chains of causes and if this chain can become major enough so I don't think it is a it is completely determinable I think there's

always an uncertainty one this this mixture or a chain of causes is enough to create a an effect but how I understand it is that one action or just one body is not enough to yes it's a conglomeration it's a conglomeration of bodies yes yes but nevertheless the standing question is that how can these bodies first of all conglomerate you know by virtue of what factors and two how can the the community of bodies

in an ethical sense can give us an ethical injunction about our passions desires and thoughts and beliefs so I think the understand is that the the criterion for is if if this mixture of bodies is able to create a creative surface or a metaphysical idea then sufficient this is the criterion for judging it as a good action I see I see

but is it is it do you think I'm sorry to pester you because I actually really I I thought that the whole paper, the whole presentation was full of punches. So I apologize if I actually pester you with more questions. The thing is that I actually want to know is, okay, so is this action, how does this action or effect, this basically the end, the end consequence, how can it actually be re-assimilated into ethics in the sense of how

can we actually identify it for one, for first? Then how can actually we think about it as if it was a component, an indelible component of ethics? I need to think about this a little bit. I'm not trying to put you in a frame view. I actually really like the challenges that you made and I wish I had read this paper so I can make more detailed questions. It was actually

quite very, very bold, very espionistic, yeah, sure. But I don't think that it was just espionistic. It actually brings us back to the question between, you know, the interaction between what you might call to be autonomous self or self-conscious self, which is conceptual, and the natural self and the natural self is just all about the body yeah and the natural self is something is defined with depth so that is always

calling us to discover more and creating creation of may is the very experience of discovering new depth in the inside the body do you think that the idea of mixture how do you think of idea of mixture because for example for for Plato the idea of mictum which is mixture always requires a low boy namely reasons how can how can this is actually really the fundamental question of ethics so how can we discover new mixtures ie concrete possibilities yeah that was actually

that was the my main main so from a psychoanalytic point of view from what by what he calls the dynamic genesis but he goes to childhoods and the Psychoanalytic theory. Well, that was my question actually. Can we think of this outside psychoanalysis in a... Can we think of this in the social and political realm? Uh-huh. So my example was the combination of the public space and the masturbating body.

so this is we can try to think this not as a mere provocation but as a as only a first step in the you know in a longer process of real than ethics sorry you decide to build an ethics namely the science of possibilities or mixtures yeah no I really agree I completely agree you really nailed it down fantastically and really excellent excellent excellent that that thesis is just like really good okay up to hecklers now who is going to heckle

I mean, I'm not going to heckle, but in terms of applications, Evren, and perhaps you're familiar with this group of philosophers. I mean, the most recent person who sort of has contributed to what I term differential Deleuzeans and they're philosophers who do not read Deleuze as a philosopher of the event, but a philosopher of virtuality. This was sort of inaugurated in Alessandro Sarti and Giovanni

Siti's analyses of differential heterogenesis and the emergence of the semiotic function. But and I never get his name right, but there's a new... His name, the book's name title is Against Continuity, and it's by Edinburgh University Press. Arjen Klein-Harenbrink, maybe, do you know him? Okay, well, yeah, I mean, he's the newest contributor to that speculative realism series, but he's not a speculative realist. I mean, he just poses to those as a philosopher of continuity

rather than a philosopher of multiplicity that is fragmented. You know, reading him as a kind of quantum philosopher. But these people are always also searching for some type of of a mathematic, starting often from Maimon's dialectic, opposing it to Hegel's dialectic and working thereafter. And some of the science quantum work that they related to. And I mean, this was also the case with Manuad De Landa to some degree. I mean, I would say that he was one of the primary people also read Deleuze like this, but I was just going to suggest that you may find some of

these more recent approaches to Deleuze relative to this question you just asked in the very end. Yeah, thanks for the suggestion. You're welcome. Adam, should we have a bathroom break? Sure, yeah, we can take five minutes there. Yes, bathroom breaks through and take more than that. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

So, maybe we should actually open this up to an open conversation before I actually say something. I know that some of you might have very strong opinions about this piece. My idea is that there is a friend of ours who has been silent today. Alexandra? I think Alexandra is out.

Maybe Carl can say something, because I know that you are quite certain about some of this stuff. Yeah, it's very much parts of what I'm working on myself. I think with the question of schizophrenia, and especially in Deleuze at the point of the logic of sense. It's a huge problem for him. And I think much of this sort of what happens later in Anti-Oedipus is sort of a way to sort of get away and try to sort of resolve these problems. Because of how sort of the right of the schizophrenic is very much,

there and he can't really get away from it. And what's so interesting about his description at that point, I think it's in the 13th series. I'm just tagging on to Abraham's presentation now but I'm going to sort of try to, I won't speak for too long, but I'm going to try to wrap around to the text we were reading for today. Anyway, what's interesting is sort of that very much the body of the schizophrenic is penetrable or it's penetrated. It's an, it opens up, it lacks a, it lacks a surface in the sense that the surface sort of is, is penetrable. And I think it's very, very important to think about sort of this, this

question because it has very much to do throughout sort of the Les' work. And we also see it in Freud and Roger Caillois, the idea of having a sort of schizophrenia being some sort of dispropiation by space and a sort of return to space and sort of a return to a... A kind of dissolution. Yes, exactly. A dissolution of the self. And so I think very much hinges on this sort of the possibility of sort of establishing a some form of corporeal interiority as a prerequisite for having perhaps thought itself.

And I think much hinges on in Deleuze specifically sort of how you I mean or in Spinoza how the different attributes can relate. What do you think that the interiority would be? what do you think that priority would be what I think it would be yes I mean I think I'm waiting I think it's a difficult question but I think what one should sort of establish is in sort of where it would be perhaps I think the psychoanalysts of course would always sort of discuss a social interiority or a sort of a relationship between the self and the social surroundings.

Whereas one could also think in sort of, and I think this is what makes the sort of thread that we are pursuing here interesting, that one could also speak of a sort of natural interiority and we're talking about the natural body as Alexander has written in the comments here. I think it's very interesting to sort of think about the relationship as in sort of spatial terms and physical terms too. Yes, you see the thing is that for example social exteriority is actually already an individual interiority. Essentially you don't get an individual without

the Oedipus of the social. The thing is that however you get, as you said, a natural exteriority which is also interiorized, it's just that you don't have an access to it. And that's a monogram of ethics really. we can we can also but not natural ones natural ones are actually really messy precisely because essentially what we are trying to do is to say that okay i'm a conscious person I can, it's just as early as Kant, this problem in transcendental philosophy emerges and becomes

extremely explicit in neuroscience that, okay, now, you know, I can actually look at the conditions of possibility of myself. But can you really? if those problems were natural there are basically uh uh what you might call to be uh away from the faculty of retrospection Yeah. And moreover, I think, was sort of the great challenge that is posed to sort of thought

by this sort of, what I call it, philosophical schizophrenia is the insistence of it that you cannot think me, and in the sense that any sort of philosophizing about me is illegitimate, And it's very difficult to sort of overcome that sort of very strong insistence. Yes. But you can also, yes, I think that, yes, that's one. But there is also a soft philosophical or what you might call the ethical approach. Yeah. In the sense that there is a realization that comes historically and not simply a priori.

is actually a posteriori, historically speaking, that we are natural animals. We are sentients who have turned by virtue of some other things into sapiens. So what should we do? Well, the thing is that what should we do is not really a good question at this point, precisely because You haven't yet determined what kind of sentience you are and what kind of sapience you are. The question of ethics should always be about degrees of what you might call to be collaboration

or complicity between sapience and sentience, between animality and humanity. You're making a, this is a parallel distinction because I would argue that the animality I see humanity distinction. I mean, as a vegetarian and so on, I'm already privy to consider as a false distinction. But without even- You just said you are a vegetarian. In my- Reza, you've known this about me for years now.

There's such a thing in my- Every time I tell you, you have the same reaction. It's the same reaction to it. But that's not the point. You know, Katerina Kolosova's book is all about treating animality as a philosophical subject without ever referencing actual animals. That animality via the Holocaust, not the historical instantiation of the Holocaust, but Holocaustos, the burning of flesh is essentially the reduction to animality. It's a reduction to something physical and this allows for the capacity of a further burning, you know, burning being like a capitalist surplus,

making surplus. And animality is used this way, you know, by a host of philosophers. Derrida's complicit in it, Christoph has complicit in it, Deleuze does the same thing when they reference animality. Oftentimes it's a placeholder for some type of reduction into a physical substratum. Not always though, not always. I mean, when is animality some type of, I mean, short, let me hear your... In the sense that animality doesn't coincide with base materialism, that's what I have thought about. You see, animality actually,

If you actually go to that end, then it means that you really don't believe in humanity because humans are animals. It's just very particular kinds of animals. And if you reduce them to base matter, then literally you cannot rescue the idea of humanity in any sort of sense, nor ethics. I mean, absolutely. I absolutely agree with you. What I'm saying is the destruction of brute materiality and the bodily or biological domain of exteriority, you know, in Marxian relative surplus value, but also in this fixture of Holocaustos or the burning of the dead animal, which etymologically, that's what Holocaustos means.

means. It comes from enigma stata or this ritual Greek offering to the dead, which was at first always supplementary. There was always the benefaction of milk, honey, wine, and perfumes. Then the Holocaustos was historically instantiated as a response, as a different ritual, and it served as sort of the foundation of logos, of law and order in the polis, through the destruction of physical body. And this thus, and this is documented, ensured the immortal light of reason. And there's a parallel, according to Kolosova, and I find this quite intriguing, between this and the capital cycle that invigorates the complete Holocaust of all animality and material vestiges,

so as to ensure that absolute rule of pure reason or of absolute spirit finds itself perfected. To be honest with you, I am completely in disagreement with Catherine. I have a huge amount of respect for her. But literally, capitalism has nothing to do with reason. Capital has nothing to do with reason? No, absolutely not. I mean, she doesn't argue that it does, but I also could imagine an argument. Slight of hand to say that, okay, I hate rationalism. Then I associate capitalism with rationality. Then I actually say that capitalism basically is killing animals. So hence...

Well, it's killing physical objects, no? I mean, isn't this like necessary for the commodity to assume some type of value, some type of surplus value so that we are able to economize it. We have to sort of abstract and that abstraction is, you know, It has to do with rationality. That, you see, economy actually emerges from a fundamentally different dimension, which actually is essentially the idea that Nick Javo actually talked about this quite fantastically. It is about the idea of collectibles and how we can actually manage

these collections because these collectibles actually do, at the end of the day, satisfy certain kinds of desires of human beings, aesthetically, in terms of scarcity, in terms of economy, so on and so forth. But that doesn't mean that these are purely rational or they have anything to do with rationality. I think that Katrina actually mistakes or confuses rationality with something which is quite prevalent today, and that's rational choice theory. Yeah, I think you're right, Reza, about the point on rationality, absolutely.

I mean, I, for one, am more, in comparison to Katrina, while we're both Laurelians, I'm much more privy to the neorationalist position. In fact, I identify pretty closely with some of the fundamental arguments of neorationalism. But I do think that there is something interesting, just in the way that animality is so often used historically by philosophers, particularly within the continental tradition to uh where animals are reduced not into labors but commodities that serve the use value of combustion combustion not the literal sense a combustion of their materiality yes and i mean this is becomes an ethical question because

they're used as like the the fulcrum form a pure ethics by people like derrida um but you know i I mean, this is a reinstantiation, perhaps, of the capitalist move. It's a capitalist ethics. It's an inherently capitalist ethics. That's, I think, the main interesting. Yes, my answer to that would be that humans, human reason is nothing but the hermeneutics of the animal. of that. Essentially, it means that we are still trying to figure out how much we are of the nature, or causal factors, and how much we are of rules that we have instituted.

I think that, yeah, sure, Foucault had talked about this in terms of analytic of the finitude of man, but I don't think that he's actually quite clear about this. He's quite very vague. No, I think this is actually a task of self-consciousness for humanity, to decide how much of this you are. And of course, this has massive amounts of ethical consequences. Because if everything is natural, then literally Schopenhauer knocks at your door

and says that okay if human is just an animal then how about this that we can actually murder each other without any sort of what you might call to be reprieve or basically feeling bad about ourselves. No. So you see, the whole idea of ethics comes from this moment that there is humanity. This humanity, however, is not metaphysical and

not a metaphysical index. It is actually a historical idea. It is truly through and through an artifact. And if we cannot take the idea of artificiality, of the idea of humans seriously, then we are utterly doomed. Ethics absolutely started from this unstated axiom that humans are good, not because they are good in themselves, but precisely because ethics begin from this axiom that the idea of humanity is an artifact, and hence it is

constructible. It can be constructed in different, numerous ways. And what is this, if not the very idea of world building that we are looking at this text now, that someone who suspends his self merely to create this outer realm around his world so he can look at his own mundane life from different perspectives. That's what sapience is, a self which is always in suspension.

Would anyone mind if I jumped into the debate here? Please jump. So one thing that I thought would be interesting to bring up with respect to Jet Propelled couch is I've heard before the contention that Kirk Allen is used as kind of a means of describing a real-life person who was Paul Leinberger, right? Yes. So Paul Leinberger had two kind of careers in terms of his writing. One was he was one of the foundational figures in psychological warfare and propaganda.

And he served, well, in addition to doing OSS activity in China and elsewhere, he also apparently helped Nasser to set up his own particular propaganda regime in Egypt in the 50s when NASA was still attending to come to power. But also, Leinberger was a science fiction author. These are these kind of two different pursuits that were undertaken by Leinberger. And I have tried to think about this with respect to Jet Propelled Couch and what might drive this kind of character to do this kind of thing.

And one thing that does come to mind in terms of trying to conceive of post-war globalization, particularly as it involved the interventions of different clandestine agencies, is that it does appear as though that kind of an initiative with respect to planetary world building or political economic engineering was one that was done. with the basic conviction that this could not be done with full transparency, or even that we could not build a planet as a fully accessible historical artifact.

have. And the result of this has been that, and I think that we can see this even today, and I think that this has kind of helped to contribute towards the kind of fragmenting of popular opinion and people's vulnerability to conspiracy theory, is that we don't have even now, really ever, even in political science, a notion of planetary, a planetary causal structure in which all the information is available. There's always this notion that something could happen and the information that we have to explain it isn't sufficient. And that there was some other, you know, operation or meeting or some other causal force that was part

of some sort of deliberative effort to which we don't have access. And so I do think that this is kind of an interesting piece in terms of considering planetary design, which is something that I'm kind of involved in. But even for anyone, world-making and the construction of a large-scale kind of political economic structure for humankind, that I think that the fact that our historical artifact is kind of spongy form right now, they're all kind of lacuna and all kind of spots that are ambiguous. I think that this has had a negative impact. And I think that it has spurred a kind of escapism or at least a longing for an understanding

of one situation in which all causes are accounted for. Yes, yes. But there is also a different take on this in the sense that, okay, so Kirk Allen creates these worlds, right? Essentially, is a very escapist schizophrenic escapist impulse as uh the psychoanalyst talks about it but the thing is that uh he does actually attain a state of eudaimonia

Astute happiness. And the thing is that we can think about this in terms of what we have been talking already in terms of a stoicism, cynics and so on and so forth, in the sense that self is not a given. It is merely an artifact, an artifact that should be multiplied and constructed, otherwise you will never feel the eudaimonia. Well, the construction is, you know, self-propelled couch.

It's not necessarily a question of pharmacology always, but there's different points where there are mention of drugs. And particularly in the beginning, I believe there's a short passage that touches upon psychometric drugs. And this of course makes sense when we consider the psychoanalyst's role diametrically opposed to the psychiatrist's prescriptory role. And I'm curious about particularly in our epoch of drug dependencies, many of them pharmaceutical, this question of attempting to reach this

moment that you describe of artifactually molded self, you know, I mean. That's a good question. The only reason that I don't have any answer to this is because I don't take drugs. I'm just afraid of them. But maybe some... I mean like prescription drugs really because those are, I mean not just prescription drugs. Twitter now, look at Twitter. The amount of millennials who basically gulped down. uh you know antidepressants and stuff so uh so often it's just like utterly unbelievable

utterly unbelievable i mean when you look at the reports uh and you you just scroll down and you see that oh the age is really significant There is something that should be explained here. Obviously, they are also into the business of world making, but is it really world making? In the sense that you take drugs, medicine, and you feel good. Yeah, sure. You feel good. And you go on Twitter, on social media, and create an alien,

an avatar. And then you start to post stuff as if you were someone else. Well, that's what you might call to be the druggy Kirk Allen. The thing is that I really, I'm not really sure about these kinds of stuff. I'm fundamentally skeptical about drugs. You can't take drugs, medicine, when you are truly helpless. But it seems to me that people are just trying to replace the arduous task of mental construction of different worlds with drugs.

Like the moment that you take drugs, you're in a different world altogether. How about that? It looks fine. It feels good. But is it really good? But it also fundamentally changes the baseline, you know, psychographically and neurologically. I mean, materially, groves on the brain begin to take a different curvature after a certain amount of taking antidepressants and SSRIs, arise I believe you know so that baseline that ability to world make is almost you know a rug that's taken under one's feet after this moment so it fundamentally changes in world making as a

proscriptive possibility. Yeah but unfortunately it doesn't come from ethical world making in the sense that it is not rationally demanded by an ego which is not pure but nevertheless is quite conscious of its own problems. I would say that drugs get rid of the problems and give you an ego which should look like as if it was a protagonist of the movie all along. Yeah, I mean this is a this is another concern that I have and I think that it

can extend to maybe like you said social media and as humans become increasingly cyborg, I think that this will play an increasing role, which Reza, if I understand you correctly, part of world making is there's a set of constructive steps that one makes. Maybe one advances along, one revises, there is learning at play. And eventually if you come up with something satisfying, there's eudaimonia and there's some sort of a feeling that is satisfying because it relates the steps that you've taken to the end result. and you feel as though you have been able to come up with something better. On the other hand, if you just give yourself some sort of a supplement,

you have this feedback process where you have some sort of a feeling that is good, but it hasn't resulted, like you said, from any kind of constructive learning process. And I think that this has the potential to get increasingly worse as we find ways to give ourselves supplemental, psycho, pharmacological, other forms of satisfaction that have to do with basically just hacking the brain or hacking our physiology. Yes, yes, absolutely. And this comes to this point that I wanted to mention earlier on. Essentially, ethics to us is now naturalized fully.

So essentially we try to seek ethical questions by means of naturalized and empirical questions. Just for example administering a drug, it basically makes you a very good person, happy, cute, so on and so forth. But the thing I I would say that no. The question of ethics is actually about the clash between naturalization, a greedy naturalization, and a robust rationalization. And the thing is that ethical injunctions come

not in virtue of what nature is, but in virtue of the ambitions that are ordered, the vocations, so to speak, of what we ought to do. They have nothing to do with nature. Humanity is an unnatural artifact, through and through. Saying that humanity is unnatural doesn't make it supernatural. It just means that it obeys different kinds of laws or rules. Well, but I think that this maybe introduces the debate you were having with Ekin once again,

which is, so you can say humankind is unnatural, but it's not supernatural. but I mean the same could be said about other forms of nature as well I mean nature is constantly breaking the precedent set before it whether it's a formation of new species or how can how can you actually identify these breakages or ramifications if not by the sheer virtue of human reason Kant was right. I see. So it's that breakage that you'd identify as being unnatural.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. More questions. Maybe Alexandra, Alexandra. I know Alexandra is always full of questions. Or maybe Lenka. I don't know. Any person. Sean? Someone, please. I would like to get into the, go back toward the drug situation and probably bring into question the stoic elements of volition probably as a way of artificially artificialization of the

human that in order to go outside of oneself or to let's say become more artificial it does require a conscious effort and what the drugs do let's say is give your responsibility to an other entity. You actually are not in control. Yes, to a substrate. Yes, absolutely. And I think that I would relate this situation back to the Lesung-Ghattari and the jet-propelled couch in the sense that the schizophrenic part in the Lesung-Ghattari has been named in the past as this sort of drug-infused text. I don't think that's the case though. That is not the case. I think that there are actually constructively self-conscious Hegelians. Like they literally want to create a schizophrenia.

but uh i know i was thinking let's say like do they make you learn to be a practical schizophrenic do they make you work your mirror neurons like in the metzgerian sense like how in the sense you can see this this way in lindler lindner know that he actually learns from the schizophrenic. He actually learns to be a schizophrenic. Yes, but I would say that this is precisely because the Luz and Gattari of French philosophers, you know. If you are French philosophers, you have a distaste for neuroscience and physiology, But ethics should take physiology and neuroscience very seriously, not as if they are trumping

on ethical injunctions, but in terms of limiting and enabling constraints. That's the most important thing. ethics that doesn't have any relation with materiality is not an ethics really it's just a free floating stuff Questions, questions, questions. And also some of you who have some commentaries on this text that we read.

I was wondering if maybe we could relate the kind of change in Kirk Allen's psychosis where he goes from like his practice of remembering his future biography to living out his biography as a sort of break from this substrate he starts with into like actual world building because he has that sort of like complicated middle period where he does some sort of like if he remembers it certain way then it's true and if he remembers it another way it's not true but in terms of like relating back to this kind of talk of drugs at the substrate um it almost seems like this book is an easy sort of thing for him to ride on for a long time and kind

of teaches him a certain way. But then he breaks. Yeah, he breaks. I would say that the answer is a strategy for time bending. So basically memory, as we know it in a transcendental sense, is the very core of our conception of time. So essentially he tries to recreate new memories, to assemble memory slices from different sources.

essentially he's in the business of time bending. And of course time is the very, I would say, ultimate element of the ego. So if we are actually paying attention to this story, he tries to eject his ego into the abyss beyond. Like literally. You know, pushing the button like a pilot. And instead of falling down, you fall up. This is what he's trying to do.

a certain kind of new conception of time, but he can't come up, he's not interested in coming with a new conception of time. All he can do is to manipulate his memory by adding new feedbacks into it. Manipulating memory is, I think, one of the greatest ethical ideas in the sense that so we take ourselves as persons right as this very specific person precisely because we have certain kinds of memory about ourselves so on so forth

I think that the war of ethics should not be launched against ego but actually time, namely the assembly of the memory. Ethics begins when time starts to dissolve for a person. And here we actually see a great example of it, to the point that by virtue of suspending his memories, thinking that his memories are merely snapshots of different sci-fi books,

he actually ends up building new worlds, namely new selves. There's something a bit cautious. If we consider that at one point in our lives, we will all perhaps as we age, as we age and

our, you know, neuronal capacities have begun weathered and begin to wither, will we not all become Kirk Allens in some way? slowly at first trying to combat it, maybe lapsing even those of us who are weary of pharmacological solutions, trying to preserve whatever hold on the world we have. But you know eventually lapsing into this kind of, and it will manifest in different ways for different people with different genetic predispositions. But it's almost inevitable.

And that's one way that, you know, reading this text before, I've hermeneutically engaged with it. Can you talk a little bit more about your last sentence? what that this is how i i engage with it that this is how i feel the yes i mean like you know there's these uh conversations between charles at times uh where he grounds his uh there's this what should they have sent for you to a hospital i guess what for well maybe in a hospital i could find out why I did it and why I would get fixed so I wouldn't do it again. I mean, regardless of

whether this is contextualized within criminal behavior, whether this is contextualized within losing the ability to match family members' faces to memories and thus know as an amnesiac or as one with early onset Alzheimer's, who the people around you, who your family members are, because there's not a biographical nature to this book, right? I mean, Jamie spoke of this. I spoke of the contrast of this, the certain escapism maybe that this tale carves. But a lot of, I think there's a way

to read this as a sort of, and this was why I also brought up the pharmacological element, because I mean, while I think it's easy for us to resist, to really grapple with world making and prioritize become entrepreneurs of the self through, you know, quote, organic unquote means, there will come a time where those prescription drugs serve a remarkably different purpose, many of them related to the preservation of neuronal C-fibers and so on. You know, the very tethering that we have to mentality and cognitive processes as we've

known them for the majority of our lives, engaged with people on memory-based processes, for you know that entire scaffold begins to crumble much like it does for the protagonist here but imagine that you are not actually taking drugs you're quite happy maybe but at the same time you know i mean it's a it's a question of self-awareness but you know the the lapse into The question is that why any person should actually get compelled to create new worlds? Well, you have Alzheimer's, let's say, right? Or you get an early diagnosis of Alzheimer's.

Alzheimer's people cannot do that, really. They don't. What, they can't take drugs, you're saying? No, they can't create new worlds. Well, for your whole life, you have created worlds, right? now you are at a certain age where you've gotten this diagnosis and it's not just Alzheimer's you know a host of what do you mean by your entire life you have created new prior to this neuro degeneration the onset of neuro degeneration one has philosophized this is the philosophers crippling that I'm describing, an anxiety-ridden situation that... In any sort of, basically, what you might call to be mental pathology, yes, you're already

in a new world, right? But did you actually choose it? No, you didn't. No, of course not. This is a person who actually chooses to make new worlds. It is part of his schizophrenic infrastructure. And that's what makes it really exciting. But I don't think it needs to just be schizophrenic is what I'm saying. I mean, I feel like the same argument... No, no, no, no. Schizophrenic, not in a clinical sense, in a very mundane sense. And that's what makes it a universal condition. This is why maybe I say there's a, you know, a prescience to this arc because we will all in some way, particularly those of us who are

genetically predisposed to some type of neurodegenerative disorder, become, you know, because of our Alzheimer's, because of our whatever, schizophrenia, etc. This will, you know, we will create worlds in some sense. And we will believe those worlds we create. And there will also perhaps be a temptation at one moment. My idea is completely different. is that I would say that in spite of what we are suffering, what kind of mental or neurophysiological pathology that we suffer, we can still be mentally autonomous people, persons.

And that is the whole point of ethics. This is what we have talked about since day one. Essentially, let me give you an example from my own self. I have one of the worst anxiety boats. Like literally, suddenly I get obsessively compulsive about bad news and I have panic attacks. these panic attacks have become more, more frequent. But I have learned that I can actually do something. You know, how about this?

You know the idea about the memory palace? Yes. Where you basically create a palace where you put your treasured memories in different compartments. Hannibal speaks of this beautifully. Yes. Mine, however, is not a memory palace. It's what you might call to be a very thick-walled, anti-anxiety palace. So I have created this island for myself. Every night that I go to sleep, I actually go to this island and I have different basically houses which can inhabit me according

to my mood. And literally after that I really didn't have any sort of anxiety. You see, these are programmings which can only come from how you understand yourself, how you understand the rules of ethics, and how you understand the constraints of the world. Reza? Yes. And I still don't really understand how the world making and the ethics is, I don't know, coming together.

I mean, You see, Sophie, there is one thing, there is this cryptic line in late Wittgenstein where he talks about life form, Levens form, or Levens Forman. And he says that every life form is a world. Right? The question of ethics is actually to take care of different life forms. But of course, Of course, humans by virtue of their limitations cannot think like a dolphin or a shark.

Nevertheless, we can do something better. they can actually turn this idea that life is a field of possibilities and hence we can actually make these possibilities concrete for ourselves. That's what basically at stake here. A life form which understands that every life form is a new world. Okay. I have a question.

So this anti-anxiety world that you create as far as I understand this is only a product of your imagination? No, absolutely not. No, unfortunately, if it was a product of my imagination, I would have, as a rational person, I would have got rid of all of them. Unfortunately, these are concrete threats, like real threats. I mean, what I meant was the anti-anxiety role that you created for yourself. Yes, yes, to counter the real threats. Yes. Yeah, so that's a product of your imagination, right?

Absolutely, rational imagination as Kant could have talked about it, productive imagination. Yeah, and it has positive effects on your psychology. Utterly, completely, yes. What I don't understand is, I can't really see the philosophical significance of such imagination. So we always, I mean, it is, we always imagine such a... My answer is very simple. You see, imagination always is larger than a personal ego.

So personal ego, precisely because of its natural ingredients, you can't do that much. to basically rectify it. You actually have to exercise a rational imagination. Think about counterfactual scenarios. You see, that's the whole problem. if i could actually look at the person get rid of all these anxieties i would have done that but i know for the fact of experience not scientifically from the fact of experience

which is actually quite bad. I know that I cannot deal with these things on my own. So I have to use a different faculty to counter them. so what's uh what makes it different from uh making fictions for ourselves in order to uh in order not to confront the reality i mean this is all the time right i mean we Yes, yes. No, no, let's remember what I said about escapism, escapist fantasies,

that they are actually quite real, you know, because they address real problems in the world. It's in the sense, what I'm trying to say is that yes, if fictions can address or account for problems, then they are good. If they can't, then unfortunately, you know, they're just fictions, pieces of literature. And ethics, for the most part, is that kind of fiction that addresses your problems, as we have learned through Stoics and Cynics, and here in basically,

the jet propelled couch. I would like to go back a little bit and sort of try to put things together again, as it were. Because I think we are dealing with two figures here from the two presentations, that's my take on it. The one is this, what we might call the sort of the escapist schizophrenic, and the other is the one who simply collapses and is unable to, as we talked about, sort

of undergoes a dissolution into space. And what I wonder is, is this the, perhaps the the ultimate risk that one has to safeguard oneself against, either voluntarily by rationally fantasizing or perhaps as it were, sort of involuntarily as a sort of defense mechanism? I would say that it is actually ethics at the end of the day is the very risk that you should take. But this risk should be understood rationally.

Precisely because inside reason and judgments, the power of judgment as Kant would have called it, there is always an element of risk. So you just cannot get rid of this risk. If you get rid of this risk, there is no rationality. There is no practical reason. There is no ethics. I would say that, yes, the whole point is to take this with a risk, but understanding that risk is a component of rationality and not otherwise. Yes, but what I am saying is that we are perhaps dealing with two risks.

One is the risk of being unable to cope with the reality and simply collapsing, and the other risk is of perhaps anyone's escapism or necessary escapism escaping too far and losing oneself in that way. Are these not the two separate risks that one can sort of... Yes, yes. ...things that can happen? There absolutely are. There absolutely are. I would say that you see the whole definition of risk always is tethered to what I was talking about in the last sessions, namely modal vocabulary, the vocabulary of possibility and necessity.

So, I would say that, yes, without understanding this fact that all risks are modal and counterfactual, counter to the fact, you might actually end up confusing the difference between the two or bloating each of these forms of risk. The whole point is to actually, the actual risk assessment, a rational risk assessment, is to understand how can I actually live with

the understanding that both these risks are real. That is a practical injunction. It is not something that comes from the law of risks or contingency. No, it is absolutely rational. It is a certain kind of assessment that makes ethics, ethics. The logic of risk. Oh, please go on. That was a magnificent question, by the way.

Well, I'm going to have to think a little bit more, I think. I'm not necessarily sure if I'm… Perhaps I am only talking about danger and not a full-blown conception of risk here. Certainly in facing these dangers, there is this sort of, perhaps not a necessity, but a... I don't think that we should think about risk only in terms of danger. I think we should think about risk in terms of time. I think you're absolutely right about that. and yeah. It looks like Federico had a question. I don't know if he wants to speak on that.

Well, I was thinking about, well, these loose thoughts that came into mind about the practical schizophrenic as being aware of the elasticity of time, since, well, Metzinger talks about that we always wind up or take up time as naive realists, because there's always a delay in our inner perception of time. And once we are actually aware as practical schizophrenics of the elasticity of time, do we want it to become a formless goo, this means in a non-autonomous way, or do we want to stretch it out as far as it can go? The action of stretching out time requires this form of autonomy and effort that you're talking about. And for example, when Kirk Allen makes this inhuman effort

to compile his biography as an intergalactic entity, or when Metzinger talks about the out-of-body experience, this means that once you go outside your own body, do you panic and this experience ends? Or do you take control and take it as far as it can go? Like, do you want to experiment? That was one fucked up difficult question Federico. I will actually deliver the full artillery your way next time we talk because of asking me this question. Okay, I think that...

I apologize for being very naive, but I think that the whole point of humanity is what you might call to be taking risk into an opportunity. perhaps I'm very much invested in the heroic Stoics like Seneca or Promethean people as we know it today I think

the very idea that risk actually matters is a fundamentally ontological and metaphysical question, which is not relevant to us. It really is not relevant to us. Precisely because, okay, if that is the case, then how about, as Quentin Masu says, how about the laws of nature actually change their course next second? Does it mean that it actually overrides an ethics?

No, it doesn't. Precisely because ethics makes its own time. But I will think about the rest of your questions. And they were, my God, Federico, Jesus. I'm sorry. Do you need to bring the nukes on me in front of the public? We need to put a little bit of contingency there.

But I don't know, maybe what Mila Sux talked about, well, I haven't read them in depth, but this thing about the natural contingency that comes into, say, I don't think it removes ethics, as you say. and probably ethics is in its own time its own space but uh i think we can actually work to make a bridge uh to put our ethics into test rather than to get rid of them like yeah this happens when but the thing is that i think that the origin of ethics is not coming from reality by reality I mean stuff out there I actually feel

fundamentally kind of I don't know how can I say it on basically whatever about the term reality. The term reality is quite vague. Why do we need the term reality? So when you are talking about the term reality, it is as if you say that there are some stuff out there, right? That's all good and fine.

But then Then that is not where you actually stop when you are defining reality, precisely because you want to say that, oh, reality has certain kind of aspects that impinge upon our actions and logic. But then wouldn't that be the very equivalent of the myth of the given? I think ethics has started from a fundamentally different way. It has started with the idea that, as Plato had already knew about it, of course, you

know, he just basically experimenting with this stuff, that there is no such a thing as a reality out there. If you say that there is a reality out there, you're most probably are already thinking about some sort of a structured reality. And yes, if you are just talking about the stuff, then the stuff are neutral. They don't actually impinge on anything you think or you do. Ethics began from this realization that reality is a very precarious idea. That was, I would say, the starting point of intellectual schizophrenia.

Questions, questions, heckling, swearing, cursing, whatever. Alexandra has been so very quiet. Maybe we should get into Alexandra. Max is laughing because we were both part of the same class. Well, there's been a lot of sidebars from Alexandra. Yeah, well, actually I don't look at those because they give me panic attacks.

This is part of your mantle castle. There's no... the sidebar is in the moats. It's just like, you know, just imagine that if you're a commander in chief and you have launch attack on your enemies, do you really want to read every goddamn news on media? No, you absolutely don't. almost you're donald trump i think i think he engages with his critics maybe max can say something i don't know if this is really so relevant but in the before we started there you mentioned the

response the pamphlet response talking about they have the clocks but we have the time but that seems like a very different conception because you were talking about sort of a tight historical time of a community as opposed to an explosion of time so I don't know yes but I think You see that even the communitarian, the historical time, is quite actually wide. Sure, it is not like deep time of Darwin. But you should understand that everything that we do, every civilization that has always emerged,

is actually working in accordance to the clock of social time. or socio-economic time. Of course I can go and basically talk about Darwinian deep time and these kinds of stuff but no I just wanted to say that even if we are basically these kinds of people. Still some people just don't get it. They are still thinking that this time is coming for free. No. Historical time is actually very costly. It doesn't come for

free. It is not for everyone. You should have already paid the prices to get the subscription into the historical time. Hecklers, swearers, people who are hostile, Someone, please.

Okay, so perhaps I can ask a question here. So I was wondering what the sense of world is when we're talking about world making. And I'm not familiar with the relevant Goodman text. I think you're drawing from ways of world making. but so the way that i'm thinking about this is that there can be world making at the level of theoretical descriptions or world making at the level of empirical content and those things are quite distinct and one of the ways that we could think about this is let's say you know kirk allen he thinks that he's on this other planet so when he says you know i'm living on sram ulna one say perhaps when he's referring to that that is equivalent at the level of empirical content

of saying i am on a military base in the american southwest when he says i am on sram ulma one that is translatable as i'm on military base x in the american southwest this is the same thing as putnam's brain in a vat objection to or objection to the sort of deception that could be enabled in the brain in the vat cases where there's always a translation that you can make between a statement which would apply to some supposed external world. It will apply likewise in the case where I'm saying if I point to this is my window here and in fact I'm a brain in a vat, in fact what I'm saying is my, uh, the brain is moving from chemical state one to chemical state

two. And that's a translation that you can make. So I think that there's like an empirical content level in which the world is not refabricated, but there's different sorts of predictions that we can make based on whether I'm on this other planet or whether I'm on a military base. There will be, of course, different theoretical ramifications, but I'm not sure that we can say that he's making a new world at the level of the empirical content. I would say that I'm merely talking in terms of Goodman's I would say that Goodman would say to you that the very fact that you actually think that there is such a thing as a world is already quite questionable.

In the sense that empirical facts don't come free. They are essentially the products of world making, ways of knowing as he makes it. In the sense that how can you actually say that you are in an Archicillian world or a a mind world. And you can actually discover the equations of motions which support the Copernican system, namely a different world.

So I'm giving a different theoretical description of a particular empirical content, but the empirical content referred to in both systems is identical, despite the theoretical difference? Are identical? Are identical to a certain point in the sense that, you see, the whole point with regard to Goodman is that he's a realist, as I mentioned. Reality doesn't matter to him. So if reality doesn't matter to him, then how are you actually going to extract empirical facts, right? Well, empirical facts are a species of worlds.

Like, if you have different worlds, then you have also different empirical facts. essentially Goodman would tell you that for example these kinds of basically motions that we have seen in the Ptolemaic system in the geocentric system are derived from the kind of world that we have made around them And the thing is that we can make a new world, such as the Coperican system. And of course, he will complement this claim with saying that every new world that you

can make has already elements borrowed from the old world. And that is completely true. Copernican system, unfortunately, I was actually sharing this on Twitter, Ray's discussion with this guy about the Copernican system and its opposition to the Ptolemaic system. No, actually the Copernican system really was not the kind of novel world that you can think about. This world was composed from the world, old world elements.

Essentially, it was composed from Ptolemaic equations put together according to different kinds of principles, and that's the whole idea of world-making. You just don't get to have new worlds. Every new world is actually the consequence of the operations, certain kinds of operations, abstraction, techniques that you implement on an old world such as the Ptolemaic system. So would you say that the word earth in the Ptolemaic system has the same reference as

the word Earth in the Copernican system? Well that's actually quite interesting. You see, reference with regard to what? Reference with regard to their respective systems or corresponding systems or reference with regard to one another? Well, so I'm a sort of externalist about reference so I tend to think that the way that reference is fixed is through a process of like social normative consideration where I say that there's this sort of this is this sort of thing and you say that it's that sort of thing and it's it's fixed by the fact that we are are talking

about something which we both will see is identify the facts but is it really fixed by the facts because facts scientific facts are also are derived from the whole business of world making so you see there is there's a certain kind of contextuality here uh that uh basically so you know old philosophers of science thought that okay you know copernican system is better than Ptolemaic's system precisely because they can actually implement Okan's Eraser, the principle of simplicity of parsimony, upon them.

But that is not really true. That absolutely is not true. The whole point is that it's a matter of soundness in a computational sense. you will. Essentially the kind of claims that we make in the Copernican system are more computationally sound with regard to the very constraint that we have observed. So the question of soundness is I think is the most important question, not the question of truth, not the question of consistency,

It's a question of soundness. Question of soundness is quite a physical computational idea. You have to triangulate it with what is actually happening in the world. For example, off of my mind, this is just an utterly fucked up metaphor. You see, yes we can talk about simplicity. Simplicity is a good thing in Okam's sense, but the thing is that we can also talk about

simplicity not in terms of about how many hypotheses do you have. We can actually talk it in terms of energy and computation. And that's basically what is being done today. We can say that the Copernican system takes less energy and less time in order to answer its hypothesis than the Ptolemaic system. Of course, to a layman, this is not really a great proposition.

But nevertheless, it is something that can actually lead to further scientific discoveries. if we think about the scenario of the conflict between Copernican and Tuleman system in exactly such terms. Aren't you supposing here that theories are identical with some computational model of them? Because that doesn't seem to be a constraint. Yes, but unfortunately, you see, there is no theory that can claim to be outside

of the bounds of computation. So essentially, what we are trying to do is that to model all of these theoretical alternatives and rivalries by way of computation. And this is the Gudmanian thesis, really. I mean, at least according to the new riddle of induction. You know, we can be in a grew world, bleen world, but to valid inductive inferences that we decide in accordance with past regularities that we've picked up using constraints.

Replace constraints in language, which is what Goodman would say with constraints in computation because these are arguably equivalent. And then you can decide upon other inductive inferences as invalid. The question, I think, an interesting question, you know, I mean, like this, what I said is pretty established, but recently there's been two schools of thought that I've seen emerging in so far as deep learnings, processes of computation are concerned. And one retains this black boxed mysticism. This is a school of people like Frank Pascal and those who generally approach back propagation

and certain elements of heuristic learning as being non conceptual for human mentality to be able to project, make a mental image of, and thus understand. And then another is an attempt to demystify backpropagation through Hebbian learning and set theory and so on, sort of mediation between a historical approach and a highly analytical one.

But is there like, the question becomes returning to Goodman, instead of making these pre, these conceptions, these decisions, these worlds deciding upon them in advance, whether they be computational or linguistic, these, again, are equipollant, is there a kind of thinking that we do not possess that's able to proffer quantum thought to suspend the decision? I think this question is quite vague, precisely because what is actually quantum decision? well quantum thought is not making the decision it would be the kind of deep learning my apologies

my apologies quantum thoughts what is actually quantum thought to uh i mean it's it's before you know in the double slit experiment for instance we assume that there is a quantum world or we actually have reason to believe that there is a quantum world pre prior to observation prior to the decision, which is the passage of the slit. How do you know? That's what quantum physics tells us, right? That there is a world of multivalent possibility that as soon as is observed, becomes decided upon. But by virtue of what reason do you actually apply

a scientific you know conclusion to the field of ethics do you really think that they are the same I think that there I don't think there's a same but I think there's a passage from one to the other which at the very least what is that passage for me that passage it was something that very early on actually led me to pursue philosophy which was a kind of hardcore determinism where I no longer extended moral culpability to criminal behavior, in quotes, to certain types of behavior that perhaps were one operating under the

kind of complicity of free will, they would. And this derived from a kind of scientificism, the ability to assume a hypothetical super science complete physics model where there's a cause-and-effect schema that determines all world processes. And if this is the case, then there is no choice to proffer moral culpability. But isn't it- So there's a passage, I mean, from science to ethics, that's what that is. Sure. But the thing is that the passage from science to ethics comes at a great price. is essentially the question of the scales of the cut Yes, absolutely. you're talking about.

I mean, that's the decision, though. The decision is like the spatial temporal position which one occupies, and that's, you know, I mean, like, Batterman and Mark Wilson, this is them, not me. I mean, they've said this, and all I can do is agree. But then there is a different question that why ethics should actually, this in tandem with what I was talking about earlier, why should ethics actually basically conform to micro processes? Because that's not ethics, that's just nature.

Why should ethics conform to microprocesses? What do you mean by conform? Do you mean, should we, because when I, I mean, to me that means legislate. Okay, let me just give you one good example, new materialism, right? So we have a political ecological ecology, right, and ethics of climate change. So where does it come from? It actually doesn't come from macro human decisions. It actually come from the reduction of all human exceptionality in every sense to certain networks of materialities.

Can you elaborate a little bit on new materialism's ethics? I mean, surely there is one. I don't know if it's, I mean, I guess like Timothy Morton perhaps. No, I mean, I'm talking simply about Jane Bennett's vibrant matter. So in the last chapters, she talks about this idea that, okay, Perhaps the best way to end up the calamities of ecology is to adopt deep ontologies such that human exceptionality will basically completely in any sense will be annulled.

and then we will have just networks of material actants. Yeah, I mean, I mean, yes, this is of interest. I think there's perhaps, I mean, how would you respond to this? Well, the thing is that my response to these kinds of claims is just simple. It's not that detailed. I would say that any philosophy that thinks that by positing deep ontologies, they can

get rid of the problems of climate change. that are completely mistaken. The only way that we can move forward is by resurrecting a certain kind of concept of humanity which is neither metaphysical nor what you might call to be of species beings, beings, namely natural. And that is how we can actually move forward. It would be just a first stepping stone. Everything, every sort of ontology that simply dissolves

the notion of humanity wholesale is doomed to basically repeat the same mistakes that no liberalist capitalist has already done against the against the planet. Because what are these deep ontologies if not neoliberal ideologies? I would like to add to this. I think it was Raymond Rier and also someone else who I always forget to made a point that sort of we tend to model a lot of

philosophical innovations on technology. I mean, with reference to sort of the terms of networks, and now to, and also previously sort of quantum mechanics, it's... Let's just say that this has been proposed, that's sort of... You know, you see these networks, oh, things, we're starting everything as a network, and then we sort of enter everything as a network, right? And I think there is cause to be a little bit suspicious perhaps about sort of borrowing a, what one might call sort of a scientific image and importing it into philosophy with a... Absolutely. Essentially, when everyone thinks that argument, I think it's a cause for suspicion.

If everything is this or that, you should know that they are in the business of deep like everything is cheese everything is network everything is this everything is that no no no that's just like a bad formula Please go on. My apologies to interrupt you. Oh, no, that was basically my entire point. This argument has been made, and I think it's something to think about,

certainly, when we start modeling our understanding of epontology on something that's, yeah, we should probably think about where those images come from and sort of whether they are important for philosophy as such. Absolutely, absolutely. So we're getting towards the end here, so we might want to pick some presenters for the next session. Are there readings that you'd like us to go through Reza? It would be Sander Frenzy. clinical diaries and I will actually send the pages there are various specific pages and they are actually look like a horror movie so anyone who is into horror movies maybe

they should actually say something about that what kind of horror there's so many kinds what you might call to be transcendental horror the worst kind of horror the worst kind of horror yes because what is not the worst kind of horror if the kind of horror where demons actually connect back in a smooth continuum with the mundane life on earth like border Ali Abbas's

film border kind of kind of but still not not there yet not there yet yes So, victims. Who? I'll take it. Is that Alex? Yeah, that's Alex. Okay, great. Was there a second reading as well, or just that one? That's it. That's it. That's it. Do we need another victim? Typically, there's two people. we could have two people presenting on Frenzy or I don't know if there's some other thing that they could focus on.

Maybe if there's more than one passage in the book, one person could do one passage in some of the other. Yeah, there are actually more than one passage. But who's going to volunteer? Don't let me to be a dictator and come after you. Those of you who are smiling. Perhaps Joseph? Perhaps who? Joseph? Is Joseph there?

Sure, yeah, I can do it. Yeah, I can also present on other material if you're open to it. But if you want me to do another passage from Frenzy, I can do that. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. Thank you so much, both of you. Thank you. Thank you very much. OK, thanks so much, everyone. I'm going to stop the recording, but we can stay in the chat for a couple of minutes more. Yes. Anything to wrap up there? Thank you for being in this class. My pleasure and goodbye.

Reza, very briefly, I have a unclass related question. Yes, yes, I'm going to send it today. Okay, I just sent you the email so you don't have to go all the way through your inbox. Also you're back on Twitter now? Yeah.