Hello and welcome to our first session of Dave and the Sea, The Fragmented Legacy of Freud as the Dawn of Psychoanalysis. First I would like to present the description of the seminar, which will be administered by Reza Negaristani. Reza is a philosopher, he has contributed extensively to journals and anthologies, and lecture that numerous international universities and institutes. Its current philosophical project is focused on rationalist, universalism, beginning with the evolution of modern systems of knowledge and advances toward contemporary philosophy of rationalism. The procedure and the demands for
special forms of human conduct is the author of Cyclonopedia by Repress 2008. 1920, Freire has published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and in the vein of Copernicus Newton diary before him, he has disturbed the peace of this world in yet another way. But his new perturbation seems to be even more troubling in that it has agitated the alleged perpetual peace of our given world at a deeper level, thus are considered as unshacomable and a-heaven. The last bastion of human comfort in the face of a crumbling world, world, the birth of a new one no less prone to further and stronger concerted demands. It is as if once the human lose this one last wrench, the flames of the war against this world forged in the
image of the human will spread and burn the city of men and God to ashes. The focus of this eight-session seminar is Freud and his legacy regarding tricky topics, the unconscious, the nature of trauma in Freud's work and his immediate legacy and drive and drive-like behaviors. Other than the work of Freud pertinent to this seminar, we will be reading comparable works painted by the members of the inner circle, Gendroferenci and Autorenk, among others. During the seminar, we will zoom in on such subject matters as the status of casual role or casual relevance, the neonatics of psychological theology, the dynamics of memory and tongue and theories of unconscious motivation in Freud's work and his collaborators.
Covering both psychoanalytic and speculative dimensions of Freud in the inner circus project, the overall goal of this analysis is twofold. One, rather than questioning the status of Freud's virtual psychoanalysis, sorry, rather than questioning the status of Freud's virtual psychoanalysis in relation to science or identifying it as a pseudoscience, we rather assume that Freud's psychoanalytical method is compatible with the scientific method. Therefore, we seek to find out not only whether the findings of Freudian theory of the unconscious and drive can be validated on scrutiny, but also whether such findings tell us something more than what
natural and special science already tell us. Two, in tandem move one, which parts of this project should be re-adopted, which parts which should be fleshed out and which should be discarded. Thank you all. Now we'd like to pass it back to Reza. Hello everyone. Thank you very much for taking this seminar. and thank you very much for the introduction. So essentially this session we are doing a kind of a light introduction and I assume that we won't be able to complete this light introduction today. Some of it will be left for next session so we are already behind
the schedule. So I will going to go over three trajectories leading to Freud, inner circle, vision of psychoanalysis. One would be you know the trajectory leading the Freud's mechanistic energetics vision of psychoanalysis coming through physics and unification of physics and biology through thermodynamics gives Freud and the inner
circle Breuer and Freud particularly a kind of energetics view of the psyche and psychological phenomena. The other one would be the philosophical trajectory, particularly with regard to the unconscious. And that would start with just regular trajectory of history of philosophy, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and so on and so forth. and and natural philosophy also which was the main source of influence for early Freud
but of course Freud sheds his inspirations from natural philosophy of Schelling at some point in in his life and moves toward the mechanistic energetics model, which is the proper Freudian model of psychological or psychic phenomena. And the third one is going to be the influence of Darwin. The third trajectory would be the influence of Darwin. And as you know, the abstract, the introduction on the seminar had it, essentially Freud needs
to be thought in a way within the lineage of Darwinian new sciences, right? So these three ones, I try to cover the first one, the energetic models, then going to the philosophical one, probably we can't finish the philosophical one and then a little bit of the philosophical trajectory and Darwinian trajectory probably will be left for next session and then after that we will continue with our syllabus. What was I going to say? So as always, we introduce ourselves.
Say a few words about, introduce yourself, say a few words about what your background is, what you are currently working on, and why you have taken this seminar and how it might actually enrich what you are trying to do right now or you are going to do in the future. And I think best we start with our generous moderator. And of course, oh, before that, dear moderator, would you please let those poor attendees into the class? Of course, of course. Bystanders.
There's a lot of them. Yes, there's a lot of them. Well, they're not supposed to talk unless everyone who has, who is truly part of the class has talked, and then they can talk and intervene, ask questions, so on and so forth. But nevertheless. I guess everyone was promoted. Do you want me to call out the...
Sorry? My order for the presentation? No, for the introduction. I think that we go through the gallery view, starting with you, and then is it Benito? Yes. And then we go from left to right and top to bottom. So my name is Icaro Gabriel. I'm a master's student at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. I'm actually a JP Caron. I forgot the word. He's my supervisor. I really forgot the word. Yes. I'm sorry. Currently, I'm working on compatibilism
between free will and determinism in Spinoza as well in the rational, cold rational phase of Mark Fisher. So it's a very early stages of the research, but I guess that. I see, I see, I see. I mean, if you are interested in cold rationalism phase of Fisher, that would be early array as well. Okay, yeah. In fact, before writing Nail Unbound. Okay. Thank you so much. So Benito? Yeah, can you hear me?
Yes. Okay. Hi everyone, I'm Benito. I have a bachelor in philosophy in La Sapienza University of Rome. My interests vary, I think, in the spot in which aesthetics, ethics and political philosophy meet. So political conquests of various social groups, I'd say that's my principal interest of the moment. I see, I see. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Next person, that will be Anna.
Hi, do you hear me? Yes. Great. My name is Anna. I'm an artist from Moscow. I have a background studying journalism, media, cultural analysis, and arts. Well, I was, for a while, I was conducting media restoration academia and i was interested in media effects and their political power uh was digging into um media fri framing media priming and then just setting and um the construction of the figure of the enemy and now in my current artistic practice i'm also trying to investigate the figure of the other and the state of it so um i think that led me to the seminar but also very much driven by Reza's work. Thank you. And I really hope and looking forward
to the seminar and I really want to learn more from all of you. I think that's it. Thank you. Reza, I muted you, I'm sorry. I'm unmuted. Okay, sorry I was muted. Thank you so much. This is actually quite intriguing, particularly that, you know, the figure of the enemy. I think there would be some sort of, you know, kind of like a digression into those territories in this seminar. I hope so. Lika? Hello everyone, I'm also from Moscow and I'll just say why I'm interested in this seminar.
I became interested in Freud when reading the works of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion and Bion is famous for developing epistemology for psychoanalysis. And what I found useful in this regard in Freud's work so far is the story of of five-year-old boy guns. It was very lovely. Also, three essays on sexuality and the so-called meta-psychological body of work
of Freud starting from the last two chapters of interpretation of dreams. That's what I read so far. Thank you so much. You are going to fill us in with regard to Bjorn. I have just literally downloaded some of the stuff to read. well you know of course precisely because we are trying to get the background I didn't actually include and I don't have any sort of knowledge I have just from what you suggested in past seminar I started to read some of the stuff they are quite actually impressive so yeah this is something that
we are going to and you are going to be responsible for this indoctrination to the work of well for it beyond. So Iona? Yes, hello. Hi, everybody. I'm I'm Ioana. I'm a media artist based in the Netherlands. So I work mostly with digital media. I come from Romania, and have a background in design mostly but I've made a move towards you know visual arts and perhaps more conceptual arts. Recently I've been trying to develop a kind of editorial practice where
I've been trying to conduct interviews and also trying to develop a new method for myself where through interviews I end up constructing conversations that never took place. So I mash up speakers or interviews that were conducted separately and bring them together into a kind of linear narrative where they respond to each other. I joined this seminar I think to kind of progress my knowledge of Freud's in general also in a potentially playful way. Because my angle, at least I've been reading about psychoanalysis from Deleuze and Guattarian
kind of perspective. Sure, okay. It's nice to go back to the stories and actually like, yeah, kind of fill in the gaps and lay a foundation. Sure, sure. That's magnificent. Thank you very much. John? I'm John. I am a director of research at a clinic that works with people who are formerly incarcerated and people in recovery from opioid use disorder. My training is as an intellectual historian and philosopher of science, but most of my work right now is around addiction. Some of it's very empirical social science, but I'm also working on implications for addiction for our understanding of consciousness,
rationality, and especially political philosophy. I took this course, the thing that I'm thinking about most relevant to this course is transference and the implications of transference for different theories of rationality. So thank you, I'm thrilled to be here. Absolutely, it's magnificent to have someone like you here. I feel really guilty to talking about smoking addiction in front of you. We all have our addictions and we shouldn't feel ashamed of them. Thank you very much. Maxim? Yeah, hi.
I'm also an artist. I'm based in Moscow. In my practice, I usually turn to topics of alternative knowledge and some personal rituals and intuitive approaches and some kind of material research, plasticity and effects and the aesthetics. So what made me to enroll this seminar? I think it's the interest for the unconsciousness and and to try to have an essential grasp of Unreal and explore the possibilities that are grounded in each other.
And to give a... I think that's it. Sorry. Thank you. No, no, all good. Thank you very much. Let me just take a note. And our next kind of familiar face. Aaron, we're talking about you. I'll try to be quick. Yeah, my background is also in intellectual history and German, German literature. So I love modernist Vienna. So this will be fun. And I guess just by chance, because it's happened to sort of overlap with my work, the sort of person supervising me has had me read a lot of Janet Malcolm lately in very kind and direct words to teach you how to shut up and listen.
And this one is sort of directly about the sort of petty interpersonal conflicts of the translator of the Freud's lease letters and his lawsuit with the Freud archive and Anna Freud. So it's quite fun. And I'll recommend that. What is it? Would you be able to type the title? Is it in German? No, no. These are all in English. They were done by a New Yorker journalist in the 80s. And she wrote a couple of books about psychoanalysis. Would you be able to type the title? This one is just in the Freud archives. And it's very fun. And the other one I'll share is called the impossible profession. And also goes into like sort of. There are so many damn thing that stuff have been written on Freud.
Yeah. They're all fun. There is another one, this Canadian guy, Rhodes. It has some really good stuff. Actually makes you interested in Freud. you know someone badmouths freud or badmouths someone and they're feeble and then you actually get more interested in what is going on with this guy there is this book called uh freud in the crypt or psychoanalysis in the crypt something like that no i don't know that one but yeah um we should yeah you'll hear from me plenty Yes, is it Anshul, right? Or my apologies for mispronouncing.
That's all right. It's Anshul. You're almost there. Hi, I'm Anshul. I'm from Mumbai. I studied architecture and I've been practicing as an exhibition designer for the last three years, three to four years, exhibition designer and art production person. So yeah, I'm not really coming from a background of research, but I've always maintained a certain curiosity about Freud and psychoanalysis and and questions relating to consciousness and the unconscious.
And I think that's what drew me to this seminar. I see. Yes, I'm a little bit nervous because a lot of the readings that you suggested were just like right over my head. Well, yes, the readings are a little bit, this is not the first complaint that I'm getting about the reading materials. materials. I'm not complaining. It's all good. It's all good. Those of you who are getting my class, I mean, people who have been studying with me know that the vibe of the class is quite light. We are casual and we do conversations a lot. Sometimes things get a little bit intense.
But that's all about it. And we do a lot of gossiping and this sordid jokes. I look forward to it. Thank you. Absolutely. Nima. Hi, Reza. Hi, everyone. My name is Nima, and I have background in studio art. Right now, doing my PhD in Emergent Technology and Media Art Practices. And in my research, I'm interested in desert as the place for the repressed. and also i'm interested in this platform desert as a place for the future creative practice and the reason that i take this class is that first because of you because your works were always a source of inspiration for me and we had a lot of conversation about that and
also working on my dissertation and working on one chapter specifically with you and I forgot to send you an email. I'm so sorry about that. I'm so sorry. It wasn't a busy time. Yeah, no. And the second reason is that I'm constantly using unconscious in my discussion and in my writing. And we had a brief conversation about unconscious in previous seminar with you. And with this seminar, I really want to know that how I can use unconscious and what is unconscious. Yes, yes. That's essentially what we are. And probably at the end of the seminar, you wouldn't be in a better situation than the last seminar in terms of understanding
what unconscious is. That's great. All right, yeah. Is it Luya or Luja? Luya? Hi, it's Luya. Hi. I'm from Zagreb, Croatia. I have an MA in art history and comparative literature from the faculty of humanities and social sciences in Zagreb. I'm also working there as a teaching assistant, but in the past years, I've been working mostly as a independent curator. Right now, I've opened a show, which is still going on with the program, which is, it focuses on parasites,
which are inspired by Michel Serres' book, Parasite. So here specifically interested in this Parasite as noise interruption and I'm quite interested in the idea in this regard in storytelling and world building. My really, my only, from my studies, my only introduction to Freud was, funnily enough, with just his text Moses and monotheism and his writings about Leonardo da Vinci. So yeah. Thank you very much. No, I mean, the concept of parasite, maybe not in a completely Sarian sense, but something that we will actually go into cover, particularly when we are going to cover
Sando Frenzy's work and the concept of alien will and that sort of stuff. Sando Frenzy is essentially like what you might call to be the covering the parasites, the noise side of psychoanalysis in the inner circle. And I highly recommend him if, I mean, we are going to cover like one of his works, but there is actually a whole three volume of conversations between him and Freud that you can actually find it on Libgen. That's a really good one. Ravi?
Hey, my name is Reviv. I'm based in New York City. I have a BS in math and physics, but I've had an interest in philosophy and psychoanalysis since undergrad. I took some courses and like some light undergrad stuff in Freud. And I did an independent study on Deleuze as well. But more recently, I've been interested in German idealism. And there's a lot of threads, I think, between that and Freud and psychoanalysis in general. So I'm interested to get into that.
Like I've been reading Schelling right now, And there's a lot of like proto-unconscious stuff in that. Yes, yes, definitely. So, and unfortunately, I see a very dark future ahead of you. You're putting yourself in the quagmire of philosophy. Yeah. You know, having a bachelor in physics and math and then doing psychoanalysts and philosophy, be that's not kosher that is bound to lead you to the dark recesses of philosophy unfortunately all right well i'm excited i guess you have to unmute yourself you said me right sorry yeah i mean uh alexandre i'm from maracajou
Brazil. I'm actually still finishing my undergrad my graduation in international relations but I've been in and out of university in the last like eight years and like my first my first discipline was actually engineering mechanical engineering but but yeah but yeah since then i i already had this interesting philosophy mainly psychology actually psychology or psychoanalysis i mean kind of dark similar but i mean are you more interested in kind of like the psychoanalytic
interaction yeah sure sure yeah okay yeah like at that time i thought that psychology was actually Freud or something you know I see but yeah psychoanalysis mainly yeah but I tried so because I actually tried studying at university so I tried to look at all the like Carl Rogers and a lot of people different people but nowadays it's mainly psychoanalysis yeah That's my impression. I mean, yeah, engineering and having a kind of interest in psychoanalysis creates kind of like elegant monsters. Elegant monsters.
Yeah, like it started really to converge with what I've been thinking about these two last, these last two years, I think, with this, like I'm finishing the international relations. relations thing. So I'm actually really trying to engage deep with political economy and start studying Marx and stuff. And then like for you, for Karan, like this math Wittgenstein thing, I don't know. It's starting really the Hegel thing. So you are taking JP's... I guess so. It's in October, right? I guess so.
Yes. JP Jean-Pierre is a magnificent sort of philosopher. Highly technical. He knows his stuff far better than anyone that I know of. Yeah. Magnificent philosopher. You guys really changed my mind. Yeah, so I'm actually reading with him and Eduardo that's in this class too. Yes. And then we are reading the Social Decimals book by my team, right? Yes, of course. My team is a great friend of mine. Yes. Yeah. So just to finish, I think my project will be something regarding the noise, the knowledge of noise. Oh, that's great.
That's great. Then, I mean, I know that Jean-Pierre is going to write a review of Mateen's book. Then, it hasn't been published yet, but you know Inigo Wilkins? Yeah, I never read the book, the Reversible Noy's book. But you can ask him for the manuscript. It's very generous. He might actually send in some chapters. but that's also a very great book. And it's going to be published soon, hopefully. Hopefully. Thank you so much. Thank you. Sorry for that. No, absolutely. Ehsan, I think we, your thing was mute. You go on. Can you hear me?
Yes. Hello, guys. My name is Ehsan. And actually, everyone's background was much more interesting than my, I'm a dentist, but I started from doing the researches in neuroscience. It led me to like the talks about cognitive, conscious and other stuff, then lead to psychology, then other parts. And after that, I really got interested in like philosophy of science, more rationalism, skepticism, sorry for my accent. Now I'm here to approach the more Western side of looking into Freud and the things like conscious, cognitive things.
So it's really interesting for me. Super. Thank you so much, Hassan. Thank you. Omid? So many Iranians here. oh yeah i'm i'm sort of iranian my dad's iranian but i grew up in the uk yeah you actually don't look iranian to be honest with you except for the mustache yeah well that's a recent addition so yeah um so my name is omit um i'm a phd student at tufts university in boston um i work in the english department um and i'm working on like kind of literary work and documentaries which kind of do um i know history in a kind of weird way. And I'm taking this class because I've found that psychoanalysis has been a really useful
theory for talking about cultural texts, but I haven't really got a grounding in it, as opposed to just more like an amateur kind of reading. So I'm looking to get a further kind of introduction into the thought and the full system of Freud's thought. Superb, thank you so much for me. Thank you very much. Diego? Yes, hi, everyone. My name is Diego Moreno. My background, I studied sound engineer, and then I moved to philosophy. I studied philosophy and I'm an MA in philosophy. Right now I'm doing a PhD, and the topic is the philosophy of history of Friedrich Schlegel.
And I'm here basically because I've never read a write properly. So yes, I'm kind of curious. And I would like to see how it was as approach to the topic and to learn as much as I can. And basically what I'm trying to say is that I'm here because I would love to fill that gap. Superb. No, I mean, this is something that your line of research is something that I have just this tiny bit of knowledge about. So I think that you should intervene quite often in this class.
You know, whenever I say bullshit, say, Reza, you are talking bullshit. Alberto? Hi, everyone. Hi, Reza. Nice to meet you. Absolutely. My name is Alberto Ponce. I'm a Chilean writer and design critic. And my background is in ecocriticism. And now I'm studying, I come in an independent study of the, the process between care, design and animism. So it's the first time I read something like Freud and psychoanalysis. I never wrote that in my life.
So thank you very much. you know that there was a phase in Freud early life early work where basically it was a proponent of certain sort of not animism in today's but a certain sort of animism we are going to cover that up you know at some point but yeah thank you so much cool that was really nice thank you Absolutely. Georgina? Hello, my name is Georgiana. I am from Romania. My background is in literature, aesthetics,
and cultural analysis. And I'm doing the transdisciplinary path here at the New Centre with Jason Mohagesh. And beside that, I'm a poet and I work for an applied science university here in Amsterdam and I'm doing research on models and metaphors of the mind by extension of AI and I basically trade myself as the person who's going to try to use poetic devices or like poetic theory to two bridges between the way we envision technology and yeah and like my
Seminar participation was kind of encouraged by the fact that I look in my poetic work, I look at, let's say, the poetry of those poets that think consciousness as when it's stormed by trauma, be it geopolitical or personal, like spiraling minds. consciousness that are kind of thrown off orbit by some sorts and I come from a place of mild animosity and skepticism towards Freud and western traumatology and at the moment is very and it's very intuitive and I want to have more solid reasons to
keep being keep having that animosity but maybe i don't know maybe i mean i mean i hope that uh it's hones out your animosity this seminar yeah i i really want to let's say think through what the word like wider circles like uh what role your political trauma or even cause cosmic trauma if we can think about it in that way plays in these like states of consciousness or if we accept this term more or less i see i see no i mean uh i mean the old seminar is not it's not uh to vilify freud uh
because freud is absolutely a giant uh i mean um the more i have thought about this is that Freud is obviously a reductionist of a sort, right? But it's not your run-of-the-mill, Dandenette reductionist. Just like it would be insult to Freud to compare him to such a, you know, such reductionist philosophers like Dandenette and so on and so forth. But nevertheless, we are going to go through the whole thing, you know, looking at the structure, functions, contents of psychoanalysis. And yes, I would say that there are things that just don't add up, ultimately, in Freud's
theory about drive, the unconscious, and trauma. But I would say, as someone who has gone through different phases with regard to Freud, completely Freudian at the beginning, then completely critical Freud, then half and half, you know, critical, not critical. And now I see Freud actually as a very, very interesting sort of figure, precisely because it unfolds a lot of other problems that continue to persist, you know,
in philosophy, in materialism, and to surprise of so many of you in theoretical physics and biology. And that's why I think that is very important and that's why You know, you don't piss around with giants like Freud. You entertain them. Akshat, you want to? Yep, it's your turn.
I think I heard my name, so I'll just go ahead. Okay, so I'm a novelist. I'm a poet. I write experimental fiction. I'm trying to push the boundaries and trying to do that from a third world perspective. With respect to psychology and psychoanalysis, both fields have been in my life for almost a decade now. And I'm one of the monsters that Ray was talking about. I have an undergrad in mechanical engineering. And right now I'm studying machine learning and natural language processing. Because I plan on shifting careers pretty soon into artificial intelligence.
My interest in this seminar is like many fold. So one of the interesting things that happened when I joined the new center was that a lot of my philosophy projects which were gathering the dust, I decided to pick them up again. And one of them is studying artificial intelligence from both the perspective of science and philosophy. And Ray has done a lot of work in that, obviously, in intelligence and spirit. But, sorry, Reza has done a lot of work in that, in intelligence and spirit. and what I'm hoping for from this seminar is I think just like hoping to see Deluz and Gattari get taken down and maybe a return to Freud because funnily enough in like Ray Brasier's
last seminar one of the things that he did was a return to Marx so I just want to see if Deluz and Gatari can get completely taken down here. And that is one of my hopes. Don't believe in... I'm not going to do that. But I have actually good news for you that there is actually the fundamental thesis of Freud is essentially can be translated into artificial intelligence. And what is that exactly? We are going to talk about it ultimately in next few sessions. But think about this, that one of the greatest of Freud's contribution
is unification of physics and biology under psychological phenomena or psychic phenomena. And psychic phenomena for him are not merely negative, right? It's just not always unconscious. He is a kind of a rationalist, realist, materialist, if there is such a thing. So he creates essentially, Freud's should be understood within a continuum, within a continuum, that extend from physics proper to biology proper. So this already creates a certain sort
of what you might call to be dilemma for his own time. That psychic objects, psychic content, psychic functions, and psychic structures belong always and all the time to the continuum of the inanimate and the animate, right? physics and those of biology. By virtue of creating this continuum, working through this continuum, artificial intelligence can show up in any sort of grades from the inanimate
to the animate, from the inorganic, the organic, right? So one of the first things that usually, you know, this kind of vitalist AI, artificial intelligence denialists say that, well, you know, intelligence cannot find a home other than organic life. Freud actually, his idea of psychic structure, functions, objects, and contents, being always in this continuum between the inorganic and the organic,
completely goes over that sort of denialism. and shows that why it is wrong. Because you can have psychic structure, functions, objects, and contents, the fourfold of the psyche, within any sort of great spectrum, you know, grades of discontinue from the inanimate to the animate, from the inorganic to the organic. And so far, so long as they have the conditions of possibility of psychological generation,
that is actually really interesting. So he's not like Dan Danette who says, Dan Danette in Darwin, The Dangerous Idea, last chapter, which is about design space and the inevitability of artificial general intelligence. He says, well, you know, nature creates all these sorts of stuff, right? Like cognition, intelligence, through algorithmic processes, through merely trial and error in like baby foot, baby steps, baby steps, it corrects itself and it can create such a thing. Freud actually has a far better idea that yes, of course, because they are both working within
the framework that has been given to them by Darwin himself. And within the Darwinian panorama, the idea of intelligence between the inanimate and the animate, inorganic, and organic just doesn't make sense that much, right? However, Freud puts a restriction on this. He says that so long as there are conditions of possibilities, like Kant, so long as there are conditions of possibilities for generation of psychic phenomena at a specific grade of this spectrum, this continuum,
for extending from the inorganic to organic that are sufficient and being fulfilled we can have intelligence and there is nothing more to intelligence really and that we get to this uh i think one of the more uh one of the things that i'd be more interested in because i completely accept your argument with respect to intelligence but um one of the things that I'd be interested in is the palliative value of these systems. Because as of now, I think I've, I won't say I've pushed myself into this position, but I'm in an anti-psychoanalytical and anti- like, psychological
position. So I don't, I don't, I've stopped. We have so many enemies of psychoanalysis in this scenario. Unbelievable. No, so I'm not, I'm not an enemy. I'll, I recommend everyone to get a psychologist. It's just advice that don't take for myself so i'd be very interested in seeing i only i you see one of the greatest things about philosophers is that they usually don't actually talk to psychoanalysis or psychologists right they read psycho psychologists or psychoanalytical works as if they were works of philosophy and that's the greatest thing you see a philosopher is always you know know what is wrong with him her them
it's just that it's no one's business to get into my mind. It's my own business and I know the causes. This is why that, you know, clinical psychoanalysis for some people actually doesn't work because they already know their causes. They know what they are coming from, right? And it is actually very hard to convince a philosopher that, you know, your daddy had this sort of thing, and you are still thinking about your mommy and daddy at this point. Well, I'm just reducing this sort of stuff to a very
caricature eyes uh scenario but no philosophers we don't do that sort of stuff we don't actually talk to shrinks you know that's that's the whole point um so uh my apologies i cannot is it uh Mstislav? Mstislav. Mstislav. Yes, Mstislav. Hello, my name is Mstislav. I am from Kyiv, Ukraine, and currently I am residing at Madeira due to the circumstances. I am part-time, still part-time working as a lecturer in Kyiv Polytechnic University.
I'm the certificate of transdisciplinary studies. I have a PhD in philosophy, and I have defended a thesis on pseudoscience. So my attitude towards Freud was first a hostile attitude. Then I have read Brasilla's Nihil Unbound, and it has launched a sort of revision process. my revision of Freud's works, I have read Beyond Pleasure Principle, then I have met the work of Adrian Johnstone, Time Driven, on the nature of drive. So I want to revise the Freudian legacy, especially after engaging myself into the problem of metaphysics of temporality. And my
uh my current project is the i call it by two working titles the first one is a critique of diachronic reason and the second is the geology of night uh based on the theory fiction writing uh using the william hope hodgson's nightland and well and some of my philosophical investigations or something like that including your chapter intelligence and time from uh intelligence and spirit. So I'm rather intimidated by your background. I mean, this is this magnificent.
The thing is that the pseudoscientific charge has always been levied against Freud, right? why I introduced Adolf Grunbaum, a book about foundations of psychoanalysis, particularly Freud. So Popper was adamant about the pseudoscientific nature of psychoanalysis, right? Adolf Grunbaum, Howard thinks that Popper is completely wrong. There is no pseudoscientific element in general, in general, in Freudian psychoanalysis or Freudian psychology.
And he tries to show why that is the case, but then he tries to show that, look, okay, if uh Freudian psychoanalysis is not a piece of pseudoscience then to what extent can it actually survive the test of sciences right that's actually a far more interesting idea right instead of getting rid of it by calling it pseudoscience uh writ large right saying that okay, this is actually following a scientific method, but now see at what junctures
psychoanalysis fails in its own promises of being scientific in a modern sense of modern sciences. Thank you so much. Oh, I mean, we are going a little bit, as I predicted, introductions are always taking a lot of time. So those people who are attendees, they should pass the microphone to the other person who is actually taking the class. And Ikara, would you be able to let the five other poor attendees in? i already did that i think they they need to log out and look in again
okay okay because i'm already promoting okay michael well i am i know that you are attending but you want me to be here to defend your thesis uh yeah well i promise this this is not an excuse this is real at sometime in the next half hour i'm gonna have to leave to pick up my uh fiance from uh surgery so uh i might miss the abuse i hope you will not drag me too much, but it's fine if you do. I'll watch the recording later. But yeah, and this is going to lose me all possible credence, especially with this paper, but my journey... Absolutely, that paper, I mean, how many of you are on Discord? Please, if you are not on Discord, ask either Rafael at NewsCenter by emailing organizers at
thenewcenter.org or our dear moderator, and they will hook you up with the Discord. Because we are actually discussing real time on Discord about the class, the seminar, the topics. and so I suggest that one of the reading texts for this seminar would be Michael's text. It's called Kant's, what's the title? Kant avant Freud. Kant avant Freud, which is a joke on Lacan or a pun on Lacan's Kant avec Saad. Now you are bringing Lacan into my class.
Yeah, so that's the kind of one thing that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned so far. I started looking into psychoanalysis with Lacan via the kind of Zizeki and Milo. And as far as being a monster, I studied computer science and I still work as a software engineer. But my monstrosity has just grown, especially in the last couple of months when I've been on leave due to a medical condition. and yesterday I bought my first tarot deck. So you can see how far off the rails I had gone. And that actually was inspired partly by Ana Longo's recent seminar on rule-governed games, which I'm trying to remember now who brought up some tarot stuff in those conversations.
So anyway, you can see that I'm kind of interested in, I would say I'm most interested in contingency and contradiction and that kind of stuff because of that kind of reawakening by the Hegelian kind of people. But before that and alongside that, I've always had a long abiding kind of cybernetic, pragmatic, what I kind of considered rationalist bent where I wanted to see how we could, Like my main objective intellectually when I joined the news center was how can we join cybernetic theory and systems theory and maybe a bit of like a small amount of Whiteheadian process influence with Paolo Freire's critical pedagogy, some form of psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity and or asubjectivity.
and bring that to bear on political and economic problems, practically speaking. So issues of distrust, not just of others, but of oneself, and the way that contingency actually can be the only path to understanding necessity have been kind of my main things I've wanted to understand. So with this paper, I was kind of shocked to find what I perceived as a reluctant draw towards the unconscious visible in Kant as he tries to develop his later thought in the Opus Postinum. and he goes through all these different drafts and just seems to be confronted over and over again with the problem of, okay, but how do I understand, how do I think about what I'm thinking really, which you would think is kind of has been his whole thing all along, but to me it just seemed
like even as he tried to start the Opus Postum with this project of how do we go from metaphysics to physics, he just kept coming back to, in my interpretation, what is the unconscious? Yes, yes. Well, I mean, this is the thing that, you know, as you know me, I am an idealist, right? I absolutely cherish the thesis of idealism, but I think that this is, idealism is actually not that far removed from what you might call to be a kind of transcendental realist, like in the vein of Kant and other people.
But the thing is that you should always think about this, that for a canonical rationalist or an idealist, you have to squeeze a lot of stuff in order to entertain the idea of unconscious in purity, right? And unfortunately that comes with a certain sort of bent on materialism, which I wouldn't say Kant totally agree with that, right? So you should always understand the The idea of the unconscious in Kant remains like you have the hound of the Baskerville
on a short leash, right? It looks like a puppy on the paper, right? a hound of Baskervan on a short leash, which is the idea of the unconscious, looks like a puppy. And I think that you need to extend a little bit that leash in philosophy. Control, you know, you always have to have a leash on the unconscious, but you can't have such a short leash such as Kant on the idea of the unconscious. Great way to put it.
And maybe a tarot deck to make life decisions is not enough of a leash. But I do think that there's something to the, and I think for me, it's all about finding different perspectives. And that's why the kind of materialist side, I think, is really important. But I haven't figured out the best way to reconcile it. So if you look at something like Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy, the whole point is the only genuine perception is that which comes about from an encounter which he calls dialogue between co-equal active agents in the world that are acting upon the world and mediated by the world and so without that active engagement in the world then you can't trust but even then at that point i mean when we are going to talk about this and uh uh you i mean
I have already said it, I mean, all the attendees can come to the class and talk. We are going to talk about this. It's actually the idea of co-consciousness. And Janet talked about this for the first time. And Foon Hartman also talked about this. So it is not really clear that the idea of dialogue, once you entertain the idea of the unconscious, how it can be mitigated through the dialogue, through interaction. Because it seems to me that when we are saying that, well, you know, so in the canonical sense of early philosophy, so individual subjects have their own unconscious,
right unconscious ideations and unconscious and the psychic percepts and so on so forth it just doesn't uh very clear to me that how if you extend it to your neighbor and a dialogue with your neighbor can actually mitigate that idea It actually extended. So here, the idea of co-consciousness comes through. And co-consciousness is very different from Husserlian transcendental co-constitution, namely intersubjectivity. intersubjectivity does not actually mitigate the problem of co-consciousness, namely extension of unconscious outside of you, outside of the ego or self as a subject.
Well, I'm excited for the rest of the class. I do have to go pick up my fiance now. Thanks for letting me get the word in and I'll try to drop by later. Absolutely. Denise? Can you hear me? Yes. I'm Denise. I am originally from Mexico, but I've been living in the Netherlands for like seven years. And like long time ago, I studied architecture, but like slowly moved into kind of cultural studies and a bit of art. and for like three years I worked in a fulfillment center in the Port of Rotterdam like as a warehouse worker and I think that experience really kind of kind of affected my
research so for the past couple of years I've been doing research specifically on like labor and the condition of like brown workers like specifically in the context of the Netherlands and so with that like linked to kind of colonialism or like a like a critical race theory and I guess I'm interested in this intersection between like critical race theory and sexuality but linked to notions of like class and labor and this fulfillment center was of like an online supermarket so I think I'm also interested in that specific kind of more contemporary post for this labor and at the moment I have like a scholarship here I'm actually I'm in a hostel in Sweden because I am preparing like a you can see a boat there um yeah I'm outside my hostel because yeah I'm doing
this like art project and I'm trying to build something maybe later I can shoot pictures um yeah and it's about the same like about labor and I think my medium true to um kind of convey this research on labor and sexuality it's been through like uh like videos and performances and uh specifically like science fiction or theory fiction so i'm trying to do this this weekend and i hope i succeed and i guess my interest is psychoanalysis and pro is in this line of like deepening for the like theory fiction or uh to perhaps i don't know for the characters or it stuck the way we'll get it we'll get into some very speculative scenarios at the end of the
seminar where you can actually use some of that steal them by all means possible yeah yeah i'm excited i have no idea what to expect about like uh yeah what could be the input of Freud and psychoanalysis but I think it's gonna be fun and yes thank you. Dear Gregory Can you hear me? My name is Gregory Van Wagenen. I have a I also have a math degree. I don't know what that says about me. I did a master's in philosophy. That says a lot already. Okay. Don't hate me. I did a master's in philosophy at the University of Texas,
and mainly it was analytic. It was on Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia. So I'm excited to be here to learn Freud. I don't know as much as many of you, but I will be your student. No, absolutely. No, I mean, that wasn't actually a sarcastic comment. If you don't math, probably you can actually don't ever understand what Freud was trying to do, right? Math and physics literally are, you know, the centerpieces of Freud's project for some reason.
Okay. So, Enda, I see that you have grown your hair. We are not, we are going to get rid of you because you have been bystander, Nima, and Rachel. Hi, I'm Rachel. I'm coming from the post planetary program. I'm currently studying architecture. Recently, my work has been incorporating a level of computation algorithmic computation because I'm interested in understanding behaviors that emerge around an aggregation of agents. So I'm here in this seminar because I'm quite interested in different aspects of memory, actually and the way things are remembered um the language of its expression the language of
expression of trauma and i guess generally i'm interested in philosophy and incorporating different ways of thinking into my work process so i'm excited to be here absolutely thank you so much and yes we are going to talk about why is that the unconscious show its full force when it comes to recollection, you know, when it tries to assemble pieces of memories, fragments, shards of memories through time and put them together. And, of course, there is always an individual story to be told with regard to individual people
and their own memories. And of course, if we take memory in deep time, that's actually a different sort of scenario. Imagine we try to recollect deep time memories. Have any of you watched the movie Memoria? Vitilda Swinton. Very good. My God. Did you like it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is slow and yeah, it's a mess, but a slow and mesmerizing. That is, that is really, if you want to write theory fiction and Freud and memory, this is it.
Watch everything, if you can, my advice to everyone. Yes, yes, absolutely. I highly recommend it. The movie Memorial. with Tilda Swinton yes yes I've seen the movie yeah it's about the so there is this woman who visits her sister right and she she has this perception of a loud boom in her ear and she cannot go to sleep anymore she doesn't know
where it's coming from because other people don't see it don't hear it this boom doesn't exist for other people probably it does beneath the threshold of consciousness uh conscious persons and she goes and uh goes to amazonia and starts to talk to other people to anatomists to forensic people that what is this boom and they try to create forensically they try to create this sound that is going into her ears and she compares it with the wearing that comes from the bowels of
the earth itself right and i'm not going to spoil you but there is a very strange scene when she actually meets this kind of person who has probably not a shaman but a person who who has become one with the universe with the world with the planet earth who can remember all the memories leading from the inorganic to the organic person he is now, right? And she talks to this person. And then after that,
she finally remembers where the boom came from. It's a, okay, the spoiler, because it's not a movie that cannot, I mean, look, it's not a thriller. It's a very slow movie. So the boom comes from a tropical forest, an alien spaceship, at the beginning of time, creating a warp drive, you know, poof, goes to another dimension. and she's hearing that boom. It's magnificent. It's absolutely a magnificent movie. Richard?
Sorry. Yeah, Richard, yes. Can you hear me? Yeah, great. Hi. Sorry I'm late. I guess I was... I used to work on fascism as a political theorist. and write about that. Of course, Freud is very relevant to lots of theories of the experience of Aschism, but I didn't really attend to them when I was writing about stuff. I tried to develop a kind of a psychoanalytic vocabulary that was different from that. And I guess now I'm interested in going back to Freud and seeing what I got wrong and seeing if I can kind of prepare some of my ideas by reading film who's smaller than I am. that's why it's very interesting super thank you so much um so um
is it uh oh carl you are bystander i'm not going to talk to you uh sarah hi i'm a psychology and psychoanalysis student and i'm a little scared that you all hate psychologists for a reason and um right now i work in a psychiatric clinic with schizophrenic students students no patients and we do our therapy and other kinds of therapy. Superb, superb. I mean, would you be able to a little bit,
you know, once in a while, make a commentary about the clinical practice? Yes, of course. Superb, magnificent, magnificent. Thank you very much. Kirsten? Hi, I'm Kirsten. I have a really bad memory. I'm sorry. Not COVID though. I'm an artist And most of my work is driven by my own experience. I grew up, I was born and I grew up in the former East Germany, the GDR.
And now I'm living in the United States and Philadelphia. So I'm very interested in this, like in the self, what's constituting the self, the individual and the breaking points of it and the dissolving and the nothingness. and all I heard was already tapping into these points. So I'm very curious to hear from other people, their standpoints. May I ask you, and please, you do not need to answer this question if you feel uncomfortable. What was your experience of East Germany?
What was my experience? Like in a Freudian sense, in a psychoanalytic sense, the wall, the mirror. Well, I think it was also the political was very personal and very great. because of uh of course because of the was that uh um what was the intelligence services yes um so it was very traumatic so it was like chaotic to say the least in in family life um and and um very traumatic and a lot of drama there was a lot of drama and now of course one looks
back and it's like this is baffling why it was so traumatic and so much drama. And it's only when you actually come to the United States of America that you see the dramas of the world. Yes, exactly. I mean, Americans have their own drama. Yes, very much. Yes, but our dramas are very different, unfortunately. Yes. Yes. So, and yeah, I just, I'm very interested also in this form of migration and losing the cell that one identifies with or what one thought to be, and when that breaks away, what happens then to the cell and how to, out of this fragments, how to rebuild or come
out of it. Superb, superb. Okay, thank you. I'm really glad to have someone like you in the class. And please, please do contribute as much as you can. You know, we can learn much about your experiences. So, my dear friend, let's have five minutes of of refreshments, go to bathroom, eat water, and then we are going to talk about some heavy weight matter in physics and biology.
Just wait one more minute and then rule aside. Thank you so much, everyone, for introducing. I think it's actually necessary. Sorry that it took a long time because we have a lot of panelists.
But I think it's actually necessary to kind of gauge in who is working on what and what are their interests and so on and so forth. So the class doesn't get bipolarized at the end of the day. Thank you.
Iqbal I'm waiting whenever you want me to start let me know. Yes, seven minutes. Should I start? Yes, yes. Okay. So, dear friends, as I mentioned, the introduction is about three main trajectories that leads
the rise of psychoanalysis, early psychoanalysis, by way of Freud, Breuer, and the inner circle. The first trajectory we want to cover today is the influence, or rather the epistemological foundations of energetics. The reason I'm suggesting this is precisely because, so the idea of the unconscious, the idea of the unconscious as something that works against the conscious,
both in a healthy manner and through hysteria in an unhealthy manner against the conscious is something that could not be done in Freud's work if Freud wouldn't have a certain sort of scientific unification between physics, neurology, and biology. Right? Because, ultimately,
you should think about Freud as a person just like Kant, who works under great principles, principles or laws right insofar as Kant's ideas and ratiocination reasoning about things in the world and ourselves and our place in the world are beholden principles of cognition, cogitation, cogitatum. Freud also have those sorts of principles.
It's just that those principles are no longer purely rationalist. They are rationalists, but they are tinged with physical concerns, with sciences. And this is, you see, the problem with Freud, he wants to create a science. Science in a modern sense, not in a kind of 20th century French idea of science, namely, systematicity between axioms of a particular system, because that would be also a science.
But Freud strives to elevate the position of psychoanalysis from the very beginning to the position of respectable sciences. And what is respectable sciences back then? Well, it's physics. You know, there are whole lots of progress, advances are being made in physics in the later half of the 19th century.
And Freud has no option to call this new sort of development of his, which is psychoanalysis, to call it a science without synchronizing it with the physics of his own time. But the physics of his own time is not really homogeneous. I mean, physics in the late half of the 19th century is actually not homogeneous.
It becomes homogeneous by way of certain sort of principles, certain sort of discoveries, that put physics behind the back of every other sort of exact sciences, such as biology, neurology, so on and so forth. So what is the name of this science that Freud wants to emulate in order to call psychoanalysis a science and not anything otherwise.
Well, it's physics. But how can you actually do that? Because physics in the first half of 19th century is in shambles. Physics have certain sort of ideas of laws of nature by way of Newton, ideas of causality, but are quite vague. You see, physics in the first half of the 19th century,
it's more like a recipe for heterogeneity rather than homogenization. It's a recipe for diversification, diverging rather than unification. So, what actually happens in 19th century, second half of the 19th century that allows for unification, unification of physics with biology, neurology, psychology, and so on and so forth.
The thing, the trigger, is very simple, and we are going to cover this as we move forward in the next few sessions. It is the discovery of the first law of thermodynamics. So someone tell me what the first law of thermodynamics is. And by that moment, when Julius Meyer discovers the first law,
it is actually not really even close to our understanding of the first law of thermodynamics today. It's a very different sort of beast. There are certain sort of what you might call to be distortions of concepts. and all of these are being inherited to freud's canon freud's work distortions some healthy some unhealthy from perspective of science so what is the first law of thermodynamics
someone should say something anyone the law of conservation so essentially uh the law of conservation of energy uh energy can like neither be created nor destroyed this transfer from uh lower entropy to higher entropy i guess lower entropy to higher entropy is is not actually part of this first law but yes the first part absolutely was correct any other per any other uh you know attendees want to say something about the first law of thermodynamics one thing i wanted was going to maybe mention is
the importance of boundaries and you're talking about the first law in the sense that you can't really state it without the idea of a closed system or a boundary between like... An isolated system. Yeah. An isolated system. And you can't really state it. Usually these two concepts, closed system and isolated system are being a little bit fudged. In canonical terms, we usually think a closed system is an isolated system, but the closed system is not actually an isolated system in physics. Isolated system, this only happened for isolated system, ideal isolated systems. Right, yeah, or I always,
or kind of just the fact that you need an idea of a boundary between two different thermodynamic states. And would you be able to fill us with this idea that why the idea of boundary should be important? with regard to this first law? I think it's because the easiest way to think of the first law is conservation of energy. But the only way to think about measuring that is if you can denote a change in energy. And the way that that works physically is you usually have to conceive of two different like thermodynamic systems that are interfacing.
Superb. That's really a good answer. Any other person, even the bystanders, you know? Anyone want to say anything about the first law of thermodynamics? Okay. So the idea is simple as this. The first law concerns with one simple principle. So energy, it used to be called force back in the times when Julius Meyer came up with
the first law of thermodynamics. It was called force. And you see that the idea of force actually goes through Freud. conservation of force, not conservation of energy, because force was a certain sort of mobility, a mobility in which, you know, the exchange between heat and work can be calculated, right? So people were talking about conservation of force back then.
not conservation of energy today the first law of thermodynamics is simple conservation of energy what does that actually mean that energy cannot be created ex nihilo nor can nor can it be non-constant so So essentially, I want to give you a picture of what thermodynamic actually is.
Why is it important for the unification of physics and biology and neurology? such that Freud can create psychic phenomena, talk about psychic phenomena on the rappel of physical phenomena, right? Well, thermodynamics is quite simple, at least on the surface. Thermodynamic consists of two laws and one bylaw, a bylaw, a bylaw.
This bylaw is actually quite very important. Usually this bylaw is being integrated already into one of these two laws. The first law, energy cannot be created ex nihilo. Two, energy is always constant. Preserved within an isolated system. What is an isolated system? An isolated system is a system that has a boundary within which mass and energy cannot be exchanged. exchange of mass and energy
will throw off the first law of thermodynamics so we are talking about an ideal isolated system Physics usually, at least 19th century physics, entertain itself with ideal systems, isolated closed systems, so to speak, such that we can actually understand the behavior of the system, right? you know for example you have a black box the black box is a system how are you going to actually understand the behavior of this black box
your system well a French mathematician had the best idea well you know you have to fuck around with the black box. You have to finger it. You have to disturb it. You have to perturb it. Such that the black box creates certain sort of trajectories. And trajectories in dynamic systems are jargons for abstract mathematical models. of behaviors of a system in time.
Trajectories can be completely diverging from one another, right? You know, think about one of those examples in sci-fi that you have an artifact that you have recovered from alien civilization. You do not know what it is. But you start to kind of poke this poor bastard black box, this alien artifacts. And every time that you poke it, it creates a trajectory of behaviors. It kind of expands, it contracts, it explodes, so on and so forth.
And then the idea here in physics is quite similar to this sort of sci-fi scenario we are talking about. That the system, a system, a system can be anything, including mind and the unconscious. It's just, system is a, what you might call to be an arbitrary designation of certain things for which we don't have complete parameters. Complete parameters. So, encounters with a system, there is a black box.
you have to poke around with the system, you have to play with it, and then the system creates certain sort of behaviors. These are called trajectories or tendencies in dynamic system, modern words, for these sort of behaviors. And there are mathematical models, maps so to speak that allow us to integrate trajectories or the behaviors of an unknown system a black box integrate these trajectories and create a model of the behavior of the system so first of all
a system is nothing but its own behaviors. Lesson one from dynamic system and physics. A system is nothing but its own behaviors. I'm not talking about behavioralist sort of stuff. i am talking about that if you intervene or perturb a black box in thus and so manners it creates a certain sort so this is an input this is a black box and there are certain sort of trajectories coming from it what we want to do
is to integrate the trajectories that come from it, the behaviors, and we are going to integrate them by mathematical models, by way of mathematical physics, to create the idea of what the system is, because the system doesn't really exist. Literally, there is no such thing as a system. a system is only a system in so far as it exhibits or displays certain sort of behaviors in time and space where they can be mathematically modeled right and i poke into this black box and certain sort of vibrations come
from the right side as I am pushing it. And these vibrations, we are going to integrate them, and we are going to study them. We are going to integrate all of them. And that would be the behavior of the system. The behavior of the system in the sense of integration of trajectories of behaviors in time would be this system would be this black box otherwise there is not such a thing as a black box and there are certain sort of mathematical models which are highly complex sex made to discover the guts of a black box right like this is your unconscious
a black box and we have to perturb it and then we actually see what happens when we perturb this black box. And then we create a mathematical model out of this. And that would be what I would call, you know, the model of the black box. So we unveil the black box by way of the trajectories and the behaviors that it has taken in time. Now, this is the main idea that these people at this time in 19th century are talking about.
The problem, however, becomes quite evident to them very, very early on, that imagine that this black box, cigarette box, is an organism. It's not a proper physical system. You know, it's not a thermostat, it's not an engine, it's not a mechanical device. It's an organism. It's a black box of the organism.
So how can we actually say that an organism will follow the same or can be modeled on the same model that we basically model physical systems on? on. Are physical systems the same as organic models or organic structures? Obviously not. So there is a kind of a gap here that ought to be filled in. So this requires a change in a principle, in the principles of physics with regard to
biology. In the sense that we ought to come up with certain principle of physics, which by principle can be extended to that of biology. From the inanimate to the animate, from the inorganic to the organic. Well, that principle that allows us to do, to fill the gaps between physics proper and biology proper is the first law of thermodynamics
first law of thermodynamics simply states that energy cannot be created ex nihilo nor can it be lost We can isolate the system. Now, you might ask yourself, is it really that interesting, this discovery of the first law of thermodynamics? Well, yes, it's very interesting.
Precisely because it becomes a general principle, a general principle that extend from the physics proper and physical phenomena to those of the biological phenomena, writ large. And Freud falls for this because at his heart, he wants unification. He doesn't want just psychic phenomena in the sky and physical phenomena down in the slums of the earth.
Right? He doesn't want that. He wants to create a bridge between these two. And the bridge is this first law of thermodynamics. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to claim that psychology or psychoanalysis is a scientific discipline. In the modern sense of sciences. thoughts, questions, so on so forth before I move forward. Can I ask really quick about the notion of applying this black box principle to
biological systems? Like one thing that you see used often as examples when you do like dynamical systems is like population models, things like that, like predator- Yes. Would you consider that an example of something that would be biological as opposed to a physical application as you're alluding to? The thing is that none of them actually can be considered physical or biological. so long as we do not have principles to locate where the phenomenon or the unfolding of the trajectory of the black box happens in the space and time.
Right? So, for example, think about this. I mean, completely speculative Schellingian physics, so on and so forth. Think about this, that there is a stone that turns into an insect. and that insect goes through phases of transition to become a butterfly right for them at that point it is really hard to say
when physics starts and it ends and where biology starts and it ends, they don't have that. Precisely because there is no unification with biology and physics. There is no continuum. Only in a continuum, you can say a number, for example, number one in a continuum, a natural number, a star, and it ends, becomes number two, or a decimal, or so on and so forth, a real number, rational number, irrational number, so on and so forth. So, you see, all they want to do at this point is to create a continuum, a unification principle
within physics and biology, and then locate certain sort of psychic phenomena within this continuum, such that, just like numbers, where basically they are inserted in the continuum, say where this continuum where this number starts and where it ends yeah you can say this about the consciousness as well in the continuum of the inorganic and organic by way of physics the discoveries of physics so where where does consciousness
a start and where does it end? Can I make a comment? Absolutely, absolutely so. It seems like there's this really interesting question around historicity that enters here. Because the difference between the black box and the biological individual, after Darwin is always that the biological individual the biological species has his has historicity it has a process of chance and contingency incorporated into it so what you say about freud's move um makes perfect sense but it introduces
another rupture because you can't precisely model the individual phenomena with historicity like a black box it can only be modeled individually in particularity that is as something like a case study this is actually something that i i invited absolutely uh ikara would you be able to send discord link to everyone of course of course so this is something that i have been talking on on the Discord. Look, the problem is that, sure, that is actually the case.
But think about this, that, for example, We do certain sort of things. They have certain sort of consequence or ramifications. Can they always be traced forensically by way of historicity? Of course not. The whole point here is that as Adolf Bastian has said it in the psychic unity of mankind,
that probably we can never actually get into the bottom of this. all we have is a kind of a two-view, a two-tier sort of perspective into the inner workings of what we are actually doing, what you might call to be the outside view and the inside view. So the proponents of the inside view are like cultural relativists, are kind of like people who see tribesmen in Amazon, you know, like, who's that great philosopher,
ethnographer we have in Brazil? Rivero to Castor. Yeah. So he's talking about the animism and all this sort of stuff from the perspective of the Amazonian native people, right? This is actually not interesting to me. It has all really been kind of talked about by way of Herder. So Herder was a cultural relativist. So with regard to an inside view of how things going on for a native Amazonian tribe,
you might say that well yeah things are very different from us but that creates a certain sort of cheesy utterness a cheesy colonialism and that's why I don't like this sort of theories at all and we vary the castro I'm actually more interested in what Adolf Bastien's model is. That, look, when we are actually dealing with such sort of micro-local phenomena, like tribal behaviors in Amazonia,
in the steppes, in tropics, so on and so forth, you might actually feel that you should abide by the internal view of the tribe to defend the tribe, right? To defend their rights. But that is not really, I think, is actually an interesting topic, philosophically or otherwise. Adolf Baxians adopts a two-view of looking at local tribes
and indigenous people. The two viewpoint is like this, that, look, the fact that you have perceptions of certain sort of things happening around you, regardless of the content of the narrative, that you say that, well, this tree is actually alive, or this tree is like, you know, full of soul, and so on and so forth. That sort of statements only come from a certain sort of category of a priori categorization,
which means that there is already a kind of what you might call to be the view from the above. and this view from the above is what you might call transcendental philosophy, so to speak, that, you know, the fact that we see thus and so things around us is because we are having necessary and sufficient means to say thus and so things, make claims about what we actually do see, right, regardless of the veracity of such claims.
And I would say that Bastien is quite right to say that absolutely under no condition we should adopt when it comes to indigenous people the internal view. We should also adopt the external view. from nowhere and no time. The categories, Kantian whole stuff, you know, the condition of possibility of seeing something doesn't so. Because otherwise, unfortunately, the whole thing starts to erode
into pure cultural relativism. And in cultural relativism, unfortunately, we cannot defend indigenous people as a matter of fact. Yeah, Aaron? I think Akshad raised the question. Thank you, Arun. My internet connection is a little here and there, so I got yittered from the whole call. So I did catch some of what Reza was saying about the indigenous
people. My question is, I guess, and it's not intended to be a controversial thing to say I think but uh as much of uh like both thermodynamics and philosophy that I've read the usual approach that people take with respect to analyzing or like integrating thermodynamics into philosophy is taking the second law of thermodynamics with respect totally fine bullshit absolutely second law is absolutely confused in philosophy I'm going to talk about this Right, right. So this is why I want to raise a question. So essentially, because also just
as a little background, the second law came from this fantastic little book that people can read if they want to. It's called Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat by Sadie Karnot. And it's one of the things that also like disproves perpetual motion. Absolutely, yes. Right. So, Reza, my question is, with respect to your critical approach that you're taking here, with respect to isolated systems and black boxes, isn't it the case that human beings are essentially irreducible to isolated systems? Because we are, like, I don't want to get into the territory of process philosophy here but without like going there uh aren't we open systems
uh going through like multiple states something something that i have already heard uh that uh you see when we are talking about physics right isolated systems and uh closed system I saw the system is a proper term here, rather than closed system. No, actually we are not open systems. We are open systems in a very restrictive dynamics under certain sort of provisions and principles of physics. uh the same can be said about the idea of isolated system when we are talking about
isolation in physics we are not talking about a truly isolated system right we are talking about like literally you and I. You see, this creates a certain sort of cognitive resonance usually among people that they think that, oh, well, we are open systems. Yeah, well, of course we are open systems. And would you be able to tell me what is actually an isolated system? there is no such a thing as a proper isolated system right so you're modeling this you're
hypothetically modeling with such things but that is a part of the question that i'm asking is uh your model assumes that there is something inside the black box in some senses if we take no no No, we can never actually assume such a thing. No, absolutely no. And that's the whole point about the unconscious, as I will talk about it. No, we cannot assume that there is anything inside the black box. Because why is that? And the black box is just another name for system. system can be extended to infinity right at infinitum it can be you it can be me it can be
Aaron having a laugh it's all black boxes it's just system this is a physical property under certain sort of parameters that we can associate with certain sort of phenomenal entities right and we then we have to create so we can't actually talk about phenomenal entities without understanding so what is the boundary condition for them you know obviously if a certain sort of physical entity a phenomenon so to speak not even physical entity a phenomenon
doesn't have a boundary then it wouldn't be a goddamn phenomenal entity right because that would be that would be uh you know contradiction in terms so uh we are going to talk about this that just imagine imagine we are we are we are actually exercising a certain sort of as if thought experiments uh in lieu of physics proper right imagine that something didn't have a boundary that wouldn't be actually an entity there wouldn't be actually a part and more so
a physical scientific study would it be no it wouldn't so we are kind of trying to kind of benevolently understand the sort of constrained and const principles to say that what actually means for something to be called a system such as psyche such as you just me so on so forth and then what would be outside of the system i think just one the one concern that i did have was uh something like like if we're taking like
extending the thermodynamic analogy to the full let's say there's a maxwell steaman inside the box but obviously there is no such thing so uh i i was just thinking this approach or this method even though the division of things and uh enclosing things into like discrete units in order to be able to talk about them whether in terms of we are not actually doing discretizing you remember Remember, the first law of thermodynamics opens up the very idea of physical continuum and mathematical by extension, that essentially anything that we are going to refer to from
now on is within the continuum, meaning that think about this Peirce continuum, Charles sanders purse, when you drop, you know, a drop of ink on a white sheets, so the ink starts to kind of dissipate. You can't actually say, because, because of the dissipation of the ink on a piece of paper, what Perse calls the blank sheet of assertion, you can't actually say where the ink, the whites, the stars, and where the black ends.
You can't do that precisely because there are boundary conditions, and these boundary conditions are fundamentally part of physics and this boundary condition means that you're already in the realm of not discreteness but that of continuum i am uh i think i'm going to like withdraw this like point and i'll maybe bring it up later because like my whole thing is every continuum can also be looked at as a discrete system so any while we might be happily making claims about it as a continuum that's someone else in early 20th century mathematics every continuum can be uh decomposed to discrete uh entities
but one of the greatest uh uh things that uh charles sander first contributed to canon of mathematics was that no actually it is wrong how can it be that the continuum can be decomposed to discrete entities and you can think about this with regard to individuals and the collective and the collective unconscious right individual consciousness and the collective unconscious. You know, where does it begin? That is actually, where does it begin and where does it end
with regard to individual consciousness? That is actually a very superb, I would say, question. Something that probably will come back. But yes, thank you so much for these critical comments. Okay, I'll try to go quick because there's a lot. So first, did anyone have a chance to read the, it was a pretty short paper, the Klaus Peter Köpping paper on Bastien. On Bastien, yeah. Uh-huh. Oh yeah, I was just trying to summarize it because I thought it was useful in trying
to sort of think of Faustian as a kind of synthesis of the sort of enlightenment and romantic views. The view from outside and the view from the inside. Inside, exactly. And just as a summary, sort of the way, what he calls the psychic unity of humanity is, yeah, is a kind of continuum from the physical to the psychic, right? and he gets this by taking Herder's concept of like ethnic cultural representation or a thought, the Volksgedanker, and he develops instead like two concepts out of this, one that is the social representation,
sort of concepts, and the other, which he calls an elementary idea or an elementary concept, a logoi spermatikor. I guess, sort of seed thought. And these that he thinks like must have some kind of fundamental basic kind of practical unity among all people. And this is what anthropology is supposed to get at, right? Yeah, I liked this quite a bit. It's a short sort of summary of it, but it's really quite interesting. Aaron, you know his main dictum, Adolf Bastian's main dictum? No, I was not familiar with him before.
That which we think is that which thinks in us. That's lovely because my thought on reading this, and as it is to most things, I'm a big Hegel fan is that sort of the whole 19th century is a working through and response to Hegel. Right. And that it's really important to kind of take a step back to trace our steps here. Yes. I mean, he's kind of Hegelian, but not Orthodox Hegelian. in the sense that uh as i said so we can think about consciousness in terms of
for certain co-constitution trans and liberal co-constitution right inter subjectivity that look if i actually have a dialogue with you you are the one who are making me in the process I am the one who are making you in the process. The thing about co-consciousness, which is Bastian's thesis, is actually not co-constitution. Co-consciousness is different from co-constitution in the Hossalian sense. The reason is quite clear. Think about this. So how many have you read one of those desert island children, Robinson Corozoa and so on and so forth?
right you know so islands and the children of islands always live in a very localized sort of topos place so on so forth but you should always think about this that the reason that we are in such a localized topos of thinking and feeling in a deserted island like Robinson Crusoe, and we are all Robinson Crusoe. It's because we are sunken into the bottomless ocean. And we have communication with other islands, whether we like it or not.
You know, the greatest, and this is Ebna Nafis, Theological Autodidactus, written in the 14th century, right? It is considered to be the first great work of science fiction and theory fiction, philosophical fiction par excellence. So, Epna Nafis, Theological Autodidactives, start with this scenario that you're in an island. We call this island of consciousness, immediate consciousness, right?
You know, all you have is your goddamn fucking island and your own self. You know, there is nothing. There is no Friday here. There's no Robinson Causeway, colonialist stuff here. So it's just you and yourself in an island. So, the problem runs us forward. In so far as you are an inhabitant of a desert island, completely alone, by yourself, having some and such percepts,
of trees, coconuts, and so on and so forth, on this motherfucker island, then you're already implicitly implicated in the plot of the ocean, of the abyss. The abyss is the unconscious. and those islands that are close to you that you might reach them at some point probably not now because you haven't turned your unconscious philosophy
of unconscious the conscious philosophy of unconscious you cannot go and seek those people but the time will come and you will see those people for what they are and who they are and at that time you become part of what I call resonance atoll you know, a bunch of islands, things that are very separate from themselves, but are in an atom, right? Sunken into the depth of the ocean.
And then they notice that, we can actually communicate with other parts of the world, but that communication comes through a lot of uh what you may call to be uh hegelian uh labor right um where you see yourself that yes i see those people in fact i wouldn't be this person as I am today without implicitly factoring in those people
outside of me. This is the idea of co-consciousness. The idea of co-consciousness, great example for this is a picture of Dorian Gray. What is a mirror? Someone tells me what a mirror is. what is the mirror why that it's always being used in horror movies to the extremes such that where emmanuel can sees himself in the mirror he sees a demon on the other side
right like dorian gray and oscar wild what is a mirror tell me is a transference the correct answer mirror is actually a metaphorical uh what you might call to be uh equivalent of the idea of equation of you know the the equal sign you know when algebra invented it created a massive sort of philosophical disturbance
in the Middle Ages. I mean, arithmetic was a big deal. But when algebra was invented, it truly completely went over the old world. It created a new one. What is algebra of al-muqabala? Right? So algebra simply means in Arabic, to put the bones together. It means articulate. Articulate what you are trying to do. You see, you have fragments of bones,
and this is actually coming from medical science. You know, so imagine that your foot or your bone has been fragmented, and then you put all of these fragments together, and then you articulate the bone. This is the meaning of articulation. Al-jab. This is the meaning of al-jab in Arabic. Al-jab also means destiny. By way of force. By way of determination. Al-Mukabla, Al-Jabra, Al-Mukabla, Al-Jabra and Al-Mukabla. Mukabla simply means face off.
So how are you going to actually put bones together? How do you actually, when you are seeing yourself on the other side of the mirror in a horror movie how do you actually say to yourself that that thing on the other side of the mirror looking back to me and it's not me it's kind of me right is al-muqabla meaning face off by way of mirror mirror means equation here um excuse me uh i had a question just a minute uh lika has written
no no no please sure i'll go after that oh sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry uh i had a question um um if you are talking about black box and like uh poking it trying to figure it out isn't just reducing it to different algorithms like uh different algorithms that says what it is and effect of different algorithms on each other and isn't uh using like uh first um newton just trying
to put biological phenomenas in algorithms, trying to classify them? Would you be able to tell me what algorithms are? We can identify the outcomes and maybe the process of it, but isn't it the thing that we're trying to do, like trying to put algorithms in on biological sense, like the behavioral patterns or the outcomes? Is it that you're categorizing it? As on algorithms, I mean, biophysicists absolutely fucking hate
the idea of algorithms. I mean, this is why a lot of French vitalist philosophers hate the idea of AI Why? Because they think that idea of AI, artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, meaning human level AI, realization of intelligence, a sapience like us, would be absolutely absorbed precisely because they think that algorithms are procedural works, right? of works, and I'm going to talk about this later on, the idea of work in terms of thermodynamics,
because I think that, you know, no intelligence can actually be composed to these sort of step-by-step procedural works, you know, that there is something to life, that there is something to life that does not allow artificial intelligence to arise, precisely because it should always come through the nature, to the you know inorganic physics chemistry to biology right so that's why they actually
hate this idea they completely hate this idea of artificial intelligence by way of algorithmic procedures I think it's fine bullshit I would say why I think it's a bullshit. I don't mean it in a... First, I actually need to shed another sort of bullshit, a sort of, you know, kind of idea of rise of artificial intelligence by way of the principles of nature, right? So this is in Dan Dennett's Darwin's Most Dangerous Idea, where he actually makes
a example, a metaphorical example of a blacksmith, a blacksmith, right? And he essentially tries to make this example to show that any person who thinks that artificial intelligence is not going to reach the level of human cognition just doesn't understand the meaning of nature, right? This is so Dan Dennett's 101. So Dan Dennett in Darwin Dangerous Idea creates this metaphor of a blacksmith, of a blacksmith.
So the blacksmith, so he's being given, you know, a shoddy beam of metal like you know uh sorry i'm talking parsi someone uh back in the days Iranian mafia here remember that we were given like some chunk of metal it's not even a beam it's just a chunk of metal so how can you actually make this chunk of metal
into a hammer, like the hammer of Thor or Prometheus. No, hammer is mythologically very interesting. So Dan Danet talks about this. Okay, this is the idea of making intelligence. So you are being given with chunk of something, right? how can you actually make intelligence sapience intelligence by that i mean sapience rational agency at this point how can you make rational agency out of a fucking uh chunk of stuff
so dan denet says something like that that think about the metaphor of the blackest him. So this is exactly what a blacksmith gets in his thing, you know, a chunk of stuff, a metal. So what he does, he put it in the furnace, heat it up, it starts to hammer it. It starts to hammer it. Remember the first scene of Conan the Barbarian? They really love this seal.
It's magnificent, absolutely magnificent. That's that's that's the meaning of intelligence. So he starts to hammer it. And the metal actually starts a molten metal. And not a molten, but kind of on a metal stable equilibrium, starts to change its shape. So this cube, formless chunk of metal you have been given, and you are going to make a blade out of it. I mean, that's just impossible. And that's also an allegory for how can we make intelligence?
well you put it in the furnace you heat it up you bring it up and you start to hammer the shit out of it and then it starts to flatten out then you put it in the cold water then you take it again in the furnace heat it up you start to hammer cooling down hammer cooling down heating cooling so you see we are actually following an algorithmic procedure here number of hammerings number of heatings and number of coolings or a piece of metal for it
to become the greatest blade of the Conan barbarian. Right? So, I'm sorry. We ran out of time. We have to listen to Lika and then we have to close it up. Lika, please. Okay. I had a comment about Bastion's theory. about elemental thoughts. I read about his theory of elemental thoughts and what's been... and I like it. I like this idea of abstract universal elements of psyche that
that are present in every... It's usually called full universalism. But what was suspicious to me, what I didn't like in his theory is that for some reason, because of ethnology, ethnography of the time, He, as I understood, thought that in order to get those elemental thoughts in their purest form, we need to find the most isolated people as can be.
We need to find those Robin Zones. and yeah and there is actually a certain point of truth to this you see when we are actually studying a system, a generalized system and we do study system generalized in a generalized manner in fact when we are making a model for a system it should be as generalized as possible right model of psyche model of individual behavior so on so forth black box but there is a certain sort of what you may call to be twist to this sort of story
that yes you should actually get as many exceptions weirdos as possible because they are the top constraints on the behavior of the system. Yes, but how do you know if a person is really isolated? Because in this Robinson book by Defoe, the book suggests that the person is completely alone in an island, But it actually is not so because what he's doing all the time is reading the Bible, the collection of theological articles.
And this makes him... Fucking Bible. How are you finding it? This makes him not alone. This activates the transference in him instantly. And maybe that's, yeah, when I read Robinson Crusoe, I thought that if a person reads, can actually read a book and has a book, It says that if a person has language, then he is not isolated at all. But maybe in terms of psychoanalysis, there is another level.
Yes. There is another level of... When, for example, a person is not talking, but talking the Western language. But when a person sees a tree and addresses the tree and thinks that a tree has a soul. So if I think that a tree has a soul, then I'm again activating transference. So maybe transference is... Transference is actually the mirror function. Let me... Is it more universal than language? Yeah, I know we are going over the time, but let me actually show you this thing.
My apologies. Share a screen. Can you see this? Ooh, Marlena. Yes. Mirror, mirror on the wall, or the theory of resonance, co-constitution, and co-consciousness. Right? And another one, Dorian Gray Dilemma. So this is Kant 101. I see myself outside of the phenomenon
and phenomenal behaviors as a thing, as a thing that looks back at me on the other side of the mirror it's like you know the the canonical uh horror movie uh thing so this can't looking at himself and the other side of the mirror you might actually be tempted to say that the other side of
of the mirror is the unconscious. Now, actually, as we were going to talk about in next sessions, now the other side of the mirror is not the unconscious. The mirror is the unconscious. That's the greatest discovery of Freud. the mirror is the unconscious so mirror so freud talks about this to his students at some point he creates an allegory of a gatekeeper
he asks his students if i remember correctly so we have two chambers two rooms so to speak one of the rooms is completely dark no light comes in and no light comes out it's an isolated system in terms of thermodynamics right there is no exchange of mass and energy from the system there is no disturbance this is uh the first chamber and then it says that there is a second chamber where
slivers of light come to this room this chamber and at the end of this room which is always dark but you can actually diagnose and see that there is someone at the end of this room or this chamber so we have two rooms two chambers and then there is a gatekeeper between these two rooms between these two chambers and then freud asks his students dear students and i'm going to ask dear students
in this allegory what do you think the unconscious is in this allegory where do we stand we stand in front of two so we have on the left we have a completely darkened pure black chamber nothing there is no light there is no exchange of mass and energy into this system, a complete black box, right? And then on the right side, we have a box, a system, a chamber, where there is slivers and beams of light, where even though it's dark,
we can actually recognize that, yeah, there is a certain sort of entity at the end of the room. and then there is a guard between these two chambers uh basically you know guarding uh the the transition of information between these two chambers so in that allegory what is the unconscious Can I venture an answer? Those slits that allow any amount of light. Can you elaborate on this? So okay so I'm going to use like some very
general terms and not get very technical about it. The guard is are imperative to maintain our own sanity. The room into which the light comes is our understanding of, well, it's the entirety of our understanding of everything. The black uh mesh the undefined mesh is um i think it can be perceived like it can be seen in two ways it's not only the undifferentiated mess of data that we get about ourselves through our perception
of ourselves not just from the outside but from the inside as well and our perception of the entire universe around us so that undifferentiated data is the black room the unconscious are those slits through which uh that undifferentiated data comes and turns into understandable light inside our conscious mind like this is my understanding super super uh any i can say i mean any any person who wants to say something about this uh the picture of durian gray
For me it seems that the black, the total black box is consciousness. But what is unconsciousness I don't know. Okay, okay. Because it is something, black boxes, maybe, I don't know the structural part of psychoanalysis, but maybe that is I. I thought about the guard being the unconscious, but I don't know if that makes sense. We're saying this? Yeah, Alexandre. You said that the guard is the unconscious. Okay, okay.