The Ape & the Sea (Session 3)

So hello and welcome to the third session, The Ape and the Sea by Reza Nagarstani. Please Reza, take it away. Hello everyone, thank you. So, as I said, we are behind our schedule. I try to go through some of the, you know, So, the stuff from energetics that I was talking about, and kind of covering the law of constancy, and then moving to flies and, you know, the way that Freud particularly, you know, through

correspondences with flies, starts to incorporate this energetics as a foundation of this new speculative biophysics into his later works. Of course, as I said, it goes through a lot of revision as the time passes. And then the other one, if we have time, I'll also briefly go through Pierre-Jeannette, you know, some of his main ideas. Of course, you know that Pierre-Jeannette also is a contemporary of Freud. And, you know, while Freud considered Jeanette as, you know,

an extremely astute thinker for some sort of reason throughout his life, probably because of competition and precisely because Jeanette was somehow, in terms of timeline, had come up with some of these energetic speculative biophysical ideas in terms of hysteria, neurosis. First, Freud became extremely critical of Jeannette to the point that he was saying that my concepts have nothing to do with Jeannette and concepts. So I will cover some of Jeannette's view and how they kind of contrast or relate

with Freudian ones in this territory. So let's go with presentations. Okay Denise do you want to start do you have something prepared or should I? You can go. I mean I have something prepared but I think you can go. Sure, I guess I will screen share. So what I have is short and is just sort of running through what I think is a kind of interesting bit of the scientific history and the kind of larger, philosophical and sort of political connotations

that are informing it in this debate. So I'll screen share. Though I'll preface this by saying I was traveling all day for work yesterday. So this is kind of incomplete, but I'll post it later. Let's see, how do I enter screen share? So the way I got onto this thread and thinking about this, I think was during Reza's seminar

last year or like sometime over the winter um when i was looking for the origin of um freud's quote about the the sort of great humiliations uh of man of comparing darwin copernicus and then there's sort of the discovery of the unconscious as the kind of third nail in the coffin of special creation, right, as the sort of culmination of overthrowing this idea of a kind of, yeah, sort of unity of human character and consciousness. I won't read the whole quote, but we'll just take a look at it.

Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was with the name of Copernicus, who taught that we are only a tiny speck in the world system. Let's see. The second transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin. Man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from our present-day psychological research, which is endeavoring to prove that the ego of each one of us is not even the master in his own house. Now so looking into the origin of this, I found that it's, to call it plagiarism, is a bit unfair,

but it's sort of riffing off of a funeral oration given by the chair of physiology of the University of Berlin for Darwin in 1882, a man named Emile Dubois-Rémont. He was a French Huguenot, but raised in Germany, and one of the actually most prominent scientists and sort of popularizers of Darwin during his time. And so he makes the very same comparison in his speech. Darwin seems to me to be the Copernicus of the organic world. In the 16th century, Copernicus put an end to the the anthropocentric theory, doing away with the Ptolemaic spheres, and doing away with, let's say, the Empyrean, the abode of heavenly hosts. 100 years later, Darwin still held that man alone

had a soul and that beasts were mere automata, but after the, on the origin of species, all things were seen to be due to the quiet development of a few simple germs. And so I think, I think the, the sort of necessary context for thinking about Freud really comes from this sort of gap that opens at the beginning of the 19th century and sort of frames all of 19th century science about the question of what life is and this sort of intense debate on the one hand between a kind of vitalist tradition that really comes out of post-Kantian idealism but has a lot of proponents in the hard appliances and a kind of materialism or reductivism that's best identified most famously

with Helmholtz but also very much with this figure Emile de Bois-Gaimont and Ernst Bruckner, actually. I'll get to a little later while they were students at the University of Berlin. They were working under a man named Wilhelm Müller, no, Johannes Müller, who was the chair of the Anatomy and Physiology Library, laboratory, who was a big proponent of vitalism and the belief that physics and chemistry could not sort of present any kind of coherent theory of what life was. There was another book published in 1842 called Animal Chemistry by someone named Justus

Liebesch, which I think proposed that like the combustion of digesting food was the source of of life energy, but basically a sort of circle of rebel students under Mueller, Heldenholtz. Among them decided to sort of oppose their teachers' views and wrote what's called the Du Bois-Réments-Grucke Ope. Sort of apocryphally, they signed it in their own blood. I don't know of any real evidence of this, but it's worth reading because it really kind of gets at what the struggle was here. So we, the undersigned, pledge to put in power this truth, that no other forces than the common physical chemical ones are active within the organism.

In those cases which cannot at the time be explained by these forces, one has either to find a specific way or form of their action by means of physical mathematical method, or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion. So they wrote this as their kind of manifesto in 1842 and signed it, and this became the kind of breed of the Helmholtz School. And I sort of went in during our first session a bit about the discoveries of the energetics and Helmholtz's sort of transforming of, I forget what his name was at the moment.

of the theory of force into the theory of energetics. And a key aspect of this was Duvar-Raymond, who sort of applied the sort of galvanist principles of animal electricity to discovering action potential and nerves, sort of the amount of energy it takes to transmit a signal and that sort of physical tissues and nerves carry electrical signals. And this is the way they communicate. These are kind of some illustrations of the kind of machines. He developed the kind of special sort of galvanistic electricity reader

and was able to demonstrate the sort of transmission of signals and the amount of... as sort of negative feedback or sort of ground level energy, similar to as we were talking about with sleep in the last session. And so these four, the four people who undersigned this manifesto went on to found the Berliner Physikalische Gesellschaft in 1845, which Dubois-Vermont was the president of, and then Helmholtz. And this became kind of the first and largest association of physicists. And I guess like thinking of this in terms of a sort of a larger social conflict between

on the one hand, to the really kind of government and church sort of endorsement of vitalist theories with a kind of scientific materialism that was very strict, that life sort of continues linearly from physical forces gives us an interesting way to kind of read the intellectual history here. Of course, Ernst Brücke, one of the signatories then went to Vienna and became Sigmund Freud's teacher. We also talked about him a bit last week. And I guess the one other thing that I would do then is sort of try to tie this in a bit to the history of philosophy, right? The source I would do this with that I really like is Willem de Vries' Dialectic of Teleology,

which is about the kind of post-Kantian, Hegelian, like picking up of Aristotelian teleology. And so I think it's worth a minute to go back to the beginning and think of this kind of great humiliation trope. And remember that Kant was also, I think Kant was named, maybe Kant himself didn't name it the Copernican Revolution, but Kant's critical philosophy was named the Copernican Revolution. Kant was called the all-destroyer, the obliterator, crusher. and I think it's important to look at actually how Kant kind of opens up this gap with the

critique of pure reason between the realm of nature and what's scientifically explainable and what isn't and the question of where life falls in there which sets up this whole debate in the 19th century is actually opened up by Kant. De Vries has it this way. With the rise of Galilean Newtonian science, teleological explanations fell in general disrepute, explicitly rejected by Bacon, Descartes, and many others at the time. Teleological explanations, scientific explanation were seen to be mutually exclusive. This extremely harsh view of teleology was combated by Leibniz, but that sort of a sort of Kantian view was what dominated by the time of the early 19th century. So Kant's view is that anything observable

and objective experience is explainable by Newtonian mechanics. The experience world is a Newtonian world, a grand mechanism. We can't attribute objectively purposes as causes. This would be backwards causation. And while teleological concepts play a necessary heuristic role, right? We can think of the heart beats for the purpose of pumping blood in the system. That's not an objective fact about a human body. And so he creates these kind of regulative concepts or ideals that we need. So the upshot of this is that our application of the term organism is not objective, for it is not founded upon the constitutive employment of the categories,

but upon the regulative employment of an idea of reason. This means that although we may have to believe that we live in a world which is populated by organisms among which we count ourselves, we can never really know this to be the case for the concept of an organism is not a scientific or objective concept. That's a citation from De Vries. And so I think this is a really important fact informing both the development of post-Kantian idealism, and the kind of accusations of Kant as this sort of all destroyer, this inventor or creator of nihilism, right? And it's not simply framed in the religious terms that we usually think of, of Jacobi objecting to a world

in which we can't have the existence of God or Hegel being disturbed by denying the absoluteness of freedom, but that actually biology as a science can't work under this Kantian division. And this is how De Vries frames Hegel's sort of rejection of this Kantian account of teleology in order to try to incorporate biology as a science. This is also, I think, how we can think of, though I have a lot less to say about Schelling. Schelling's natural philosophy also sort of attempts to incorporate biology as the scientific paradigm of what philosophy ought to be

instead of Newtonian physics, right? I won't go into all of that, but I think that sort of opens the kind of chasm in which sort of mechanistic, materialistic explanations on the one hand and vitalist ones on the other are kind of trying to figure out different ways integrating life concepts and biology as the sort of young developing science into the kind of philosophical understanding of sciences um the interesting way this works out is the kind of return to Kant uh at the end of this period the neo-Kantians and the re-establishment of physics as the basis of science but um the other interesting bit is to think about the kind of uh

gap between and contrast of the terms Geist and Seele, right? And the way that Hegel is trying to defend Geistliche, spiritual phenomena, which for him includes not just meaning, intention, psychological phenomena, but also life itself, from the kind of Seele or psychological in which Freud, under the influence of the Helmholtz circle and Ernst Brücke, try to create a way of creating a realm of psychological phenomenon that can fit and flow from the simple physical, chemical, biological, psychological,

in a mechanistic, materialistic way. I think it's Ludwig Klages who creates a kind of culture thing between Geist and Ziele later, and I've heard that Reza has some things to say about him, but I think that's a good place to close in this kind of 20th century contrast of the psychological and the spiritual or intellectual as opposed cultural forces and scientific understandings. I can stop the share. Yeah, I mean, thoughts on that.

I wish I could go more into- Aaron, would you be able to share this with us, I will, yeah. I saw some interesting stuff at the end, which basically was scrolled up. I just don't want to take too much time. I will definitely share it. Yeah, so I was going through, there's a lot more to say about Duval Raymond. He was very famous as a lecturer in his late years. I have heard his name coming with different sources of stuff, but I've never really looked into it. William James visited him as well. the people who taught Pavlov studied under him in Berlin. And he has a bunch of theses about the limits of what we can know with science and not, I sort of started to list out, that are all very

interesting and good for kind of, because there's sort of similar problems to the way we think about these problems today, actually, in terms of like the hard problem of consciousness is something that he formulated in the 1880s. And in the same way that Dennett's intentional stance is not any different, like Dennett's intentional stance still describes Hegel's, like what Hegel critiques as Kant's faulty conception of teleology as merely a subjective, as a descriptive state of a system rather than a functional relation. Yes, yes. But it would take way too long to explain the Hague. No, no, no, that's really great. I mean, with regard to your last point,

how much are you, are you any of you familiar with Eduardo from Hartman? Oh, you talked about him a bit, but. Right. So from Hartman, you know, that is basically the first one that is after, you know, kind of like tries to tie together no kind of natural philosophy, Fichteian, Hegelian, Kantian, Leibnizian's idea of unconscious teleology and Darwin, of course, together as a systematic philosophy of the unconscious as a kind of successive move to Schopenhauer. And he's, in fact, a pessimist, a systematic pessimist, right?

But he's a systematic pessimist in a sense that he basically thinks that Schopenhauerian pessimism has an insolent, a slothful attitude toward the idea of pessimism and the whole idea of the unconscious that is floating around in the Schopenhauerian philosophy. And then he tries to go, Lucha did more scientifically to reclaim the idea of the unconscious behind the will and represent it, like Schopenhauer. And he also, I remember there is this chapter in design, I was supposed to do in the introduction, but there was no time, about design and Darwin and purpose.

It's chakra and teleology. He also goes on to say that, you know, that, you know, the notion of purposed end is ultimately derived in the first instance from the experience, you know, of our own conscious mental activities. And there is nothing more to it. So it's essentially in the first instance, the purposed end is, it's not as if, you know, like kind of like a Danetian thing, but rather he accepts it in, you know, but in so far as it is modeled, our own conscious activities.

And he goes on, he has this thing, he says that when I see that I am not able to realize my will directly and recognize the means as efficient cause of the end, the willing of the end becomes to me a motive, i.e. efficient cause for the willing of the means. This in turn becomes efficient cause for the realization of the means through my act and And the realized means becomes efficient cause for the realization of the end. So then we ultimately, this sort of approach to means and ends being modeled on conscious

activities is a system of triple causality with four terms. requires four terms in order for it to be systematically addressed. Willing of the end, willing of the means, realizing of the means, and realizing of the end. And then this is with regard to the idea that, you know, any sort of causality that we are talking about with regard to the idea of efficient causes, and he doesn't talk yet about final causes, efficient causes, is between mental

and mental events, causality between mental and mental events, willing of the end and willing of the means, and between material and material events. efficient causes can be so the way that we model efficient causes based on conscious activity of willing can be projected on two different uh rounds one between mental and mental events material and men material event and then between material and mental events So it shows, so he says that basically that what he tries to do here is to show that behind

like Schopenhauer, behind the will, there is the unconscious. But the will is a, you you know, conscious mental activity. That's the whole idea of means and ends. We model it on such does and so mental activities and project it. The range of such mental activity, how it can be projected stuff that are happening in the mental domain, in the material domain and between material and mental domain can be modeled vastly on this sort of mental conscious activity whose source is the unconscious, right? The unconscious for him is the final end,

the final cause, the final cause. So anything that we are projecting into the teleological system has for him has is modeled on efficient causes, which in turn are modeled on conscious mental volitions and willings, which in turn are springing forth from the unconscious as the final cause. And this is all from philosophy of the unconscious from 1870? The philosophy of the unconscious, yes.

No, that sounds great. And it also sounds very familiar to how De Vries explains Hegel's sort of functional model of teleology. Yes, yes. Using sort of representational states and reaction to... Yes, yes. I will, so another thing, I mean, this is, he essentially tries to reject the idea, he wants to reclaim and recover the idea of, you know, of the end in a teleological sense, But not in any sort of Darwinian, I mean, sorry, Aristilian sort of way.

But rather that the idea of the end eternally remains an unconscious idea as a driving force of all willings. So questions for Aaron, if anyone wants to ask anything? Anyone, anything?

Let's see, Maria typed something about the flow of experience, which I guess is in relation to Husserl and sort of phenomenology, but I'm not sure I have a good answer to that. Here is another quote by von Hartmann. He says, there is an unconscious idea of purpose and end, which united with will dictates the

conscious willing of the means to attain it. Yeah, I guess I have two questions for you, Reza. I'm not that familiar with Schopenhauer. I was seeing somewhere though I'm having trouble finding it right now that Helmholtz and DuPont Raymond hated Schopenhauer and sort of associated him with some of this kind of vitalist... Yes, yes. Freud actually, this vitalism for Freud was more in fact to the natural philosophy than Schopenhauer, but he could see it. In fact, I think that there is, I can find it for you,

There is one of his early works where he, yes, through the influence of Helmholtz, he basically castigates Schopenhauer as having the residues of this sort of vitalism. But then later in his life, there is this lecture where he says that there is among all these philosophers, Schopenhauer is the most clear and the most insightful one. And he says that so people are saying that he's a pessimist. To me, that doesn't that war doesn't mean anything. He says that the only thing that I think that he was on the right path, and I'm not going

to say anything bad about it, he says that the only thing about Schopenhauer that I think needs to be rectified is that he sees both life and death as instincts. And you know, as I mentioned, death, death drive, or drive is not an instinct for Freud. That's precisely because of his energetic side, Helmholtzian side, or Feshnereian side.

Oh, it was the paper you're referring to, the Project for Scientific Psychology from 1895. I think that was the reference. I think that's the one, yes. Where Freud is attacking Schopenhauer. Yes. Yeah, pre-sectionalytic. And then, yeah, I guess my other question for you, Reza, a place where I'm interested in looking more, as I heard you are very much not a fan of Ludwig Klages. But of the sort of pulling of this, like... No, I like your reading, Amy. It's kind of weird. bizarre. I just kind of came across it, but of the way that these kind of motifs get pulled into the sort of 20th century post Nietzschean debate, right, sort of, and the sort of

opposition of geistliche and zeeliche, right, between the psychological and the intellectual, the spiritual, and whether that has any bearing on Freud and the kind of preference for psychology among materialists, right? Or even the way that later someone like Deleuze tries to pull together a pure vitalist like Vanquist with Freudian psychology. Yeah, I mean, you see, that's actually quite a very twisty. I don't have that much stuff to say about it, but the twist here is that strangely,

So the idea of a drive in Freud, as we have seen it briefly and you talked about it, has its roots in a school of thought, which, you know, kind of propped up against the vitalist movement. And it seems that Freud has a very twisted interpretation of energetics as a vitalist one. You see, that's actually quite interesting. But I don't know how much really about, you know, the influence of this later between life and psychology and systematicity and intellect over the development of, you know, later post-Nichean philosophies.

But I mean, I'm sure there is. But I mean, Freud, I mean, Deleuze, yeah, Deleuze is actually quite an interesting one. Because, yeah, sure, he is also using Lacanian things, but I mean, particularly in Anti-Oedipus, he is very much in tandem with Freud's energetic view. but later on it seems that this Deleuze take on Freud's energetics takes kind of almost a Spinozian Bergsonian sort of bent or slant which I don't know I mean I haven't seen really anything good on Deleuze takes on Freud's energetics and how much is, you know, kind of

distorting it or reappropriating it. Okay, great. Yeah, thank you. I had one kind of broad question about modeling like if we think of freud's critical kantian move i guess would you should we see it as like throwing a bridge between this sort of materialism reductivism and the vitalist side of things or is that the wrong model to think of it as is it more um expanding upon the more materialist side and discarding with vitalism i'm just curious how how people think because it seems like with the first law of thermodynamics, Freud's kind of making his, one of his key critical moves

founded on energetics. And is that one to be understood as throwing a bridge between these two different schools of, you know, life sciences thought? Or is that the wrong way of thinking about it? I don't know. I'm so yeah, I guess what I'm trying to work out, it's clear that Freud is very influenced by the sort of strict materialists, right? And it's so I feel like the way that I understand it right now is at least he sees what he's doing as founding a new kind of materialistic science that like chemistry is just sort of approaching its own subject matter according to the the material rules of it right but it does kind of rely on a sense of like psychic energy or

psychic substance right that's like qualitatively different in some way than like that that that follows its own rules in the way that chemical substances show a different level of complexity than simply physical ones and and so on right i guess that's how i'm understanding it that like in trying to translate like perception, like the amount of pressure on skin or an eyeball as opposed to light. And like that it has something to do with the active principle of the kinds of neurons that are there and how they translate it. It's not just force being applied

to an eye, that the transformation that the eye does in turning a stimulus like light or physical pressure into a sensation follows its own set of rules, and that what Freud is trying to measure is in some ways the pleasure, pain, sensation energy as a kind of energetic substance that he thinks he can mathematize. at least in this early work, that's the sense that I get, right? Reza, would you? Yes, I would say that, I mean, it is clear that Freud begins with this project of bridging, right, early on, early on, while he's still under the influence of natural philosophy,

but when he begins to, you know, the project of, what's that, scientific psychology, and then goes toward his psychoanalysis. It seems that he notices this project is completely untenable, and it's in fact redundant, particularly because the vitalist leg of it is just limp, just doesn't work. So why to keep it? And so the key here is that at the core of, Aaron suggested the core of the sort of speculative biophysics, which becomes the engine of this

new scientific psychological project and eventually psychoanalysis, is that yes, everything should be reduced to that sort of physical chemical thing. That's all there is, right? You know, the laws of conservation and the other laws as well. The energetics, generally speaking. And biology here is simply a change in the quality of the sorts of energy that act under their own roots, right? And this is actually being schematized by Freud early on as the

architectonics of what is it called? Phi Psi Omega, Phi Psi Omega schematism. So Phi Psi Omega eschemism has a tripatriate regime of neurons or systems. One is, Phi stands for, I think, preferral exogenous systems of secondary neurons, which are basically only traffic in quantities of energy, right? And the second one is the psi one, psychological

endogenous system of neurons, of sympathetic neurons, which are work in basically they They translate quantity to quality. For example, true intensification, summation of certain sort of quantities turned into qualities, so on and so forth. And then the last one is the omega, which are basically perceptual psychological systems that account for conscious, primary conscious activities.

So the sort of energetics, the sort of these pathways, which is kind of becoming what you might call to be the pillar on which Freud wants to now describe the psychic events, psychic events exclusive to biological organisms on pure energetics without any sort of reference to vitalism in the sense that all everything that goes into this omega system or architectonics basically deals with energies, either pathways that increase energies

in terms of quantity, pathways that translate quantity to quality, or change qualities from one another to another, and pathways like the, you know, relation of the omega with uh phi and psi uh omega being the psychologically conscious uh perceptual uh systems which uh have a more complex relation that they excite without adding to the quantity or changing the quality they excite what is already taken place in those two other systems phi and psi so and And again, based on their own rules, based on completely on their own energetic rules.

In fact, this is the case that many critics still think that Freud's idea of, insofar as Freud's idea of psychic events, based on the idea of his, you know, perceptual eschematism in this Phi Psi Omega architectonics. And furthermore, because for Freud, perceptual perception is merely, not a Kantian, but merely energetic compartmentalization of energy in terms of quantity, quality,

the translation between the two and their registration, that doesn't leave for any sort of, extra, what you might call it to be, a story about vitalism or that sort of stuff that in Natur philosophy that Freud was early on interested in. Like literally everything that he wants to talk about psychophysics, biology, and psychic events is already available within the energetic model and how he has formulated it. So in that sense, he's very materialist.

It's just that he is not physicalist anymore. Reduction is physicalist, precisely because, as I said, he doesn't go to seek the explanation of certain sorts of psychic events in description of some specific neurons or some specific parts of the nervous system. Rather, he has created this sort of energetic system or architectonics within which all of these are in Kahoot, all of these systems are in Kahoot coordinated and they create this sort of of basically ideas of psychic events,

neurotic, hysterical, paranoic, hallucinatory, obsessive compulsive, and so on and so forth. And it's really interesting that the idea of the whole Phi psi-omega system is, in fact, one of the first instances of cybernetic paradigm. Yeah, I thought right there about Simondon, actually, when you were talking about that. There's a similar tripartite division, like in Simondon's sort of individuating that. Yes. Yeah, I will actually talk a little bit more about the whole idea of phi-size system, omega system.

Let's go for next presentation because we are running a little bit short. And then we have questions, then we have a break, then I will start. And then we let all the questions at the end to be dealt with. Okay. So. Lica, did you already present your video? Do you want me to go or do you want to present your video? No, no, please, I won't present a video, it's just as if I'm in the second group. Oh, sorry, okay, I will show my screen, I guess. So, can you see my screen? I think. So I chose this text by Janet to kind of just expand a bit more. And yeah, just like as a,

I've never read the Janet before, and I don't have much experience with psychoanalytical, like, author, so just bear with me a bit. So I found super interesting and relevant that this text discusses the disease of catalepsy and that for me it seemed that Janet tried to kind of indig a bit more in the ideas about consciousness and unconsciousness through analyzing this nervous disease and for me the most interesting ideas about the text were that Janet poses a question whether there is consciousness during these cataleptic attacks or states.

And he proposes the idea of rudimentary consciousness, which I also found interesting. So just like a kind of like a brief overview, this is the catalepsy disease, which is what I understand is the kind of this, well, maybe I can read it. It's an affection of the brain, intermittent, a paratic, characterized by the suspension of the understanding and the sensitivity by which the aptitude of the muscles to receive and keep all the degrees of contraction that they are giving. So it's this sort of like suspension, that's kind of my understanding, the suspension of movement of the body, no? And it's perhaps unlike the epileptic attack, which is characterized by

like a constant shaking of the body. This is, it seems perhaps the opposite. So just like a very few general sort of like descriptions of what catalepsy is about, as I was saying, like it relates to the absolute immobility of the subject. I also of course, while I was reading the text, I thought back in last week when we mentioned Dostoyevsky and his description of epilepsy. Because I think for someone like me that is not very familiar with psychoanalysis texts, I found the descriptions that Janet uses to describe these episodes or attacks in the body much more kind of poetic than I thought.

It seemed more poetic than clinical. I don't want to... So maybe I can just read a bit. Leonie, on the contrary, in the state we are describing, invariably retains the attitude in which catalepsy surprised her, without the smallest tremor coming to rebuild consciousness and thought. Their eyes themselves wide open, without any blinking, maintain the same direction with fixedness. In a word, the movements of organic life, full beats and breathing remain alone, and all movements which depend on the relationship life and which expresses consciousness are suppressed. Then I also found interesting the interaction between the body that is in this cataleptic attack, who in this case I would say like a subject that is witnessing this event,

and how the mediation of movement and the interaction with these other bodies. I also found interesting this idea of like the continuation of the, like from the description in the reading, it seemed like if this other body imposes a movement or moves one like arm or one part of the body, the body will indeed do this movement. again another quote about the expression of the phenomena of how it is an attack that affects the whole body janet writes everything smiles and then this i found it a bit weird and i think it's more like a maybe like a question to everybody if it's true or not like it says that associations of

states with each other if a gay music is heard before the subject he loves then begins to dance sad music makes him cry. So I didn't understood very well if this is true or not. And as I said, it seemed like the question that haunts more the text or like the main, that leads to the main thesis of Janet is whether there is consciousness in catalepsy. Meaning if this body that, he in the beginning of the text refers to this analogy of a statue that can imagine or can information be posted. If these statues without resistance of any kind, if they can still think, and if they have some conscience that bring them closer to us. And his thesis is that yes,

that there is conscience because there is memory in catalepsie. And he refers and he makes a lot of connection between the catalepsic events to events of sleepwalking. And because the catalepsic body does not remember anything after a catalepsic attack, but the same subject sleeps walks, it does remember something about the sleepwalking. Hence, Janet concludes that there is indeed memory in a catalepsic body. And here's when he introduces the idea of what does it mean that this memory presents itself in another? But if we think of sleepwalking as a state that

is categorized as an unconscious state, what does it mean that there is memory in this state? And I found this quote quite interesting, and that it relates to previous seminars in which we were discussing about memory and unconscious. It says, does the memory, if it reappears in a normal state, would be a good proof of consciousness. But since reappears in another state, it's only proof of physical automatism. Those did not prove that memory is neither a proof of consciousness nor of unconsciousness, but that perhaps that is necessary to look outside of memory in order to describe these catalytic events. And of course, one of the main characteristics of this event

is the lack of language, that these bodies do not talk during a cataleptic event. And that hence, he introduces the idea of like a rudimentary consciousness, a different kind of consciousness that happens through these events. And that is a consciousness that is capable of sensations, but not of ideas. And that it's not an intelligent obedience. And so it's a memory about sensations. and he also talks about the question of perception that we were just saying and yeah, just like a different consciousness that happens to it. So I also find it interesting to relate to, I don't know, maybe it's like it's a question for later to what's the relationship between the psychic events

that Freud's talk about and this idea of the rudimentary consciousness. and of course it all comes to affection as well and that it seemed like we talk about this affective nature of when we talk about memory and unconsciousness and the kind of perhaps perceptions or knowledge that can happen through these other kinds of consciousness as Janet proposes rudimentary consciousness. And I think you finish more or less the text with this quote that I also find it interesting, which is I guess expanding a bit more in what the rudimentary consciousness is about. That is the association of ideas is therefore not necessarily linked with

the formation of the personality and one can develop without the other. And just to close the presentation I'm putting here the quote that I mentioned last time from Dostoyevsky and I think it's interesting to kind of reread this quote now with these ideas about the rudimentary consciousness and the kind of that this kind of description before and in this case an epileptic event and this description of the higher degrees of sensitivity and perception that happens in the body is not merely like it seems like an end in itself and it's not

merely only the step before the attack. So yeah I think this was my presentation which is more yeah open and I don't know if I'm proposing an idea it's more I guess connecting different stuff that we've been saying. Superb thank you so much uh it was excellent it actually gives me an opportunity to just maybe actually I can wrap up a good chunk of uh Jeanette's theory so we can actually get into the other sort of stuff um it's very good uh thank you so much uh for, again, the presentation. The reason that I actually asked for all of you

to read this part, precisely because how he wants to use this example of catalepsia and somnobulism in order to uh explicate the idea of consciousness for him idea of consciousness is not something that is always in a uh you know pure state you know this whole idea you know people are talking about consciousness they think that consciousness some sort of you know things he actually wants to show that when we are actually doing consciousness stuff if taken individually these conscious acts or conscious activities

once analyzed they show traces of highly unconscious activities right beneath the surface so then why to go and say that well for example this uh cataleptic or somnabilist is under pure or absolute unconscious state. So again, instead of trying to entertain one idea, one form of pure consciousness and everything else would be the unconscious, he wants to explicate it, to decompose the idea of consciousness into intermediate forms of

consciousness, each of which being synthesized with one another, and each of which by itself singularly can be as unconscious as the other one. That the idea of consciousness is in the synthesis of this micro transient, a small consciousnesses, right? So, for example, the cataleptic and the sumnabilist,

you know, estate, he prefers to identify it as a conscious estate, as an intermediary conscious estate. Now, so what is this intermediary conscious estate that he wants to talk about? And this is just one of the, among so many other intermediary conscious estates. this is what he calls uh the state of uh mere absorption of sensations mere absorption of sensations like a sponge a sponge consciousness you know that merely absorbs

things from the outside sensation and stimuli from the outside it's intermediary precisely because it resides between a fully organized synthetic consciousness or forms of consciousness and pure mechanisms pure automatic mechanisms to that extent this intermediary consciousness for cataleptic would be would be an impersonal psychological automatism that's what he calls it in in that

chapter and then later on he you know compares them to a to the basically consciousness in a nascent state right after you wake up from a sudden fit of faint, right? In that moment, you see the, when you wake up, then you see that there is no organization here. You essentially, there is a certain sort of dissociation between

in various threads of consciousness or forms of consciousness. And this is kind of what he calls it, a very acute form of regressed psychology. What he wants to try to build on this is that he wants to show two things. Now, that's at the bottom of neurotic and hysteric behaviors, there lies this sort of a regressed psychology comprised of these disorganized, highly dissociated threads or

forms of consciousness, fleeting, transitory, all of them. And if for some reason, so there is, he actually has, I have highlighted it, I can read it, he actually creates a very highly sophisticated causal, nomological causal law for this sort of emergence of this source of etiologies, pathologies, hysterionics, you know, neurosis, obsession, so on and so forth. And he says that this is a necessary, first of all, this being in this sort of regressed psychology in this intermediate form of, or living in this intermediate forms of consciousness,

where forms of consciousness are transitory and fleeting from one another and not synthetic, is a necessary cause of what you might call to be these sorts of hysteric or neurotic behaviors. But necessary doesn't mean that it's sufficient. It has become sufficient under certain sort of traumatic events that allow them to take the form of you know kind of like what you might call to be illusory synthesis of consciousness even though they are not really you know kind of in a

organized state of consciousness certain sorts of traumatic events give the illusion of that all these transitory haphazard fleeting consciousness have a semblance of integrity or integration. They have coalesced with one another and they have made a person. And he thinks that this is exactly at the root of multiple personality disorders where you have these fleeting consciousness is that they haven't really synthesized a person but by way of certain sort of factors these desperate

you know loose threads of consciousness have been combined into an assemblage of a semblance of a person, of a semblance of a person, or basically different, you know, from this sort of semblance of a person, there emerge various multiple personalities, right? The thing, however, the way that he basically sees this and how he differs from Freud, he thinks that, you know,

the root of psychic pathologies is the weakness of synthetic consciousness, the weakness in synthesizing these threads of consciousness together into transitory holes, right? That can be synthesized even further to a wholesome person. Whereas Freud doesn't actually think like that. Freud thinks that behind majority of these, you know, kind of pathologies, psychological pathologies, There is no, they cannot be traced back to the weakness of synthetic person, synthesized

threads of consciousnesses, but rather it should be traced back to the idea of defense and tension spaces, which we are going to talk about. So for Freud, his defense, defense, the root of the source of psychological pathologies should be traced back to defense mechanisms of ego, of an ego that is failing, right? Because defense mechanism by itself is not cause of pathological psychological events. It is when it is combined with other factors,

or if it is hereditary, those factors, or if they are introduced as you are growing up, Then they create defense mechanisms which gradually know the structure of ego. So defense mechanisms in these sorts of pathologies, Freud thinks that these defense mechanisms try to actually save ego, to protect it against either illusory or real outside incidents, malicious or otherwise. But as they are protecting ego, they are also degrading ego

to the point that ego essentially becomes a very highly entrenched pathological defense mechanism. Basically on the path to murdering itself. Let me read this part from Janet. You should also recognize that Janet, there's a certain sort of gossip here.

There is another reason that Freud's distance himself from Janet, because Janet actually influenced heavily Brewer, Joseph Brewer's studies on hysteria, which was co-authored with Freud. Freud didn't like Brewer, really. And as he was going to descend himself from Brewer's idea of hysterionics, moving towards his own energetics and interpretive ideas of psychoanalysis, he had to also descense himself from Jeannette, who was an inspiration for Brewer's account of hysteria. So this

is what Jeannette talks about, you know, what it means to become conscious. What actually consciousness means, as I said, you know, consciousness is not really one thing. Consciousness is a process, right? A process of synthesis of various forms at different scales of consciousness. So that a small elementary synthesis, endlessly repeated, become the elements of other superior syntheses. Being more complex, these new syntheses are much more varied than their predecessors. Although they are still units, they are units with qualities which differ from each other.

Just as single-celled creatures are alike and creatures composed of many cells begin to take on distinct forms, the vague conscious awareness of pleasure and pain little by little becomes determine sensations of different kinds. Each sensation is thus a whole, a composite, in which elements of consciousness, which themselves corresponds to very simple movements, have been combined. We must not say that a child learns to feel such a sensation and that he subsequently learns to make the corresponding complex movement. He has learned the two things at the same time, and the coordination of his movement is done at the same time

as the organization of the elements of the sensation. So in this sense, the whole idea of conscious perception is a certain sort of creative synthetic activity that is always in the making. it's not only creative activity but it's also a conserving activity precisely because um for the sort of you know multi-level idea of consciousness where elementary uh consciousnesses move to our other sort of consciousness and then create you know larger scales larger holes uh organized

forms of consciousnesses, that there should be also a conserving activity so that the new whole does not actually destroy what has already taken place, but preserve them what has already taken place and transfer and elevate them to basically to a newer scale, to a new level of organized conscious activities or synthesis of consciousness. And that conserving activity is essentially the function of memory, where basically it reproduces. It reproduces what has already been synthesized

within the newer synthetic edifice or the new whole. So in a sense, Jeanette, in a very classical sense, believes that consciousness, you can't talk about consciousness without not being able to talk about individuation. of consciousness. And this individuation is actually the individuation of the identity of consciousness. It provides a sense of continuity in discontinuity and unity in plurality of different forms

of consciousness being thus and so synthesized. So, and But it seems again, Janet is not really like, you know, kind of like a extreme form of pro-individuation, like, you know, kind of later sort of philosophers, precisely because like Freud, and he essentially thinks that the ultimate,

kind of organized consciousness always takes the form of I. I ego. So in that sense, it's very much in tandem with Freud. So ultimately all the synthetic conserving activities do is that they coagulate consciousness around one thing, I, ego.

I don't know how many of you have read His Majesty, The Ego, Freud's essay. And it talks a little bit about this sort of stuff. It's a very good one. Where he says that, you know, Freud actually later on starts to question this. He said, why did all sorts of consciousnesses should really coagulate around this I-ego? the majesty, right? What can be a different source of paradigm where the synthetic actually is more open-ended rather than coagulating around the, you know, I-ego. Because to him, that this whole soul, he realizes that this sort of I-ego is kind of like, you know,

the resembles this hero that's in every daydream, in every story, is basically the hero of the narrative himself. He's both damsel in distress and the white knight that comes to the rescue of it. So But also, this sort of faltering, I mean, as I said, even though Freud becomes very

critical of Janet, it's actually some of the criticisms are quite constructive criticisms, or complementary criticisms that take some of Janet's formulations to a different source of, you know, kind of ends. So even though the synthetic or creative and conserving activities that's of consciousness or forms of consciousness ultimately should coagulate or coalesce around around ego or I, identity. And to Freud, this seems to be a little bit of a shaky move.

He nevertheless accepts that this is usually what happens. And the danger is precisely that this is usually what happens in the construction of an identity, of an ego. And because of the fragile, you know, a structuration of ego, then there is also the possibility of falling into the abyss of dissociation. So that falling into the abyss of dissociation, which is at the root of hysterical neurotic behaviors,

should be ultimately, you know, traced back to the frailest structure of ego itself, right, rather than to, you know, traumatic events to exogenous events, so on and so forth. Because for him, those are conditions under which a cause, a necessary cause becomes sufficient, right? The necessary cause here for Freud is that the structure of ego

in its essence is fragile. because of this terminal tendency to coalesce consciousnesses around one solid pole, ego-eye, identity the name which I attribute to myself and under which I attribute my consciousness is to this identity and no one's else so let's have a

break and then we come back Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm ready whenever you are.

Let me know when you want me to start. okay okay i will start then um so yes from this perspective that the necessary cause for these adverse psychological behaviors,

before it's become interested in incidentally should be found not in exogenous causes, but endogenous, one endogenous cause. And that's ego itself, identity, ego identity. And that, it leads to a certain sort of frightening thesis that is constitutive of later Freud's

where it almost turns into a, who's that author that I loathed? Ligotian story, you know? Ligotian story in the sense that what if that this ego identity is merely a bundle of illusions? Right? This sort of dizzying prospect of entertaining such an idea. then what if the greatest curse of consciousness was not really consciousness as for example legateses being conscious of the world but rather these consciousness conscious activities tend to synthesize it one another,

conserve one another, to ultimately coalice around a singular identity. An identity that's on the facade, like a building, and the facade seems everything is fine, but if you go to the basement of it, you see that the foundations, the armatures, are non-existent, right, or eroding. And literally, Freud entertains this idea, in fact. So then you might ask, so then what would be the job of psychoanalysis then?

you know, if this is the truth of ego, of personhood, then what is actually the difference between a wholesome personal consciousness, organized consciousnesses for a person, and a kind of free-falling ego or identity that is in the process of deterioration into all sorts of degenerative psychological pathologies? Will or how can they actually be? but Freud probably is not really that interested in this sort of question, but

he's really more interested in the sense that how can we actually tell the difference between these two? Freud says that, well, that's, it all comes to the defense mechanism. that a wholesome conscious person has thus such and such defense mechanisms which can basically work with you know outside affects affects, and antithetic ideas without succumbing to either dissociation

or certain sort of highly, what you might call to be, precarious forms of catexis. Otherwise, there wouldn't be that much difference between a healthy ego, in theory, a healthy ego and an unhealthy ego. It's really in the defense mechanism. And the defense mechanism of the so-called unhealthy ego is a certain sort of defense mechanism that shows really the cracks and fissures within the structure of ego itself.

Finally, bring it like, you know, when we were talking about the mirror metaphor, right, in the Kantian sort of sense and also psychoanalysis. It's just imagine that it's that with the unhealthy ego and it's self-harming defensive mechanisms. It's like within that sort of mirror panorama, mirror example, you finally see the other side as the unmasking of your supposed healthy ego. finally see what ego is right in its pure sort of destructive deteriorating uh

sort of you know machinery And this is something that we come back later on, particularly with frenzy. So coming back to Jeannette, so in a sense, Jeannette is very key at least for early phase when he's working with Brewers on hysteria, is a key for Freud,

precisely because it seems that Janet's That idea of synthesis and conservation of consciousness, unity and plurality of consciousness can be easily incorporated within the new energetic model. One example of this is that Janet literally sees the confrontation of ego with the outside

environment as a certain sort of anticipatory system, in a very modern sense of anticipatory systems like life sciences right anticipatory systems what is that anticipatory system an anticipatory system is a system that that begins to um so it basically it generates a model of action on the of action on the environment this is a predictive model right So if you, for example, do X, it makes those and so outcomes in the environment.

And then repetition of such actions on the environments kind of prime the model, gives it enough data to give a certain sort of pattern of regularities or predictive patterns about what happens. So the system then anticipates the consequences of its actions on the environment regularly. However, and this is what Janet calls expectation. And expectation for Janet is one of the primary activities of ego. Expectation and anticipation, sense of precise,

anticipatory systems in terms of life sciences. And only biological systems have this sort of mechanism. to integrate the anticipation of the system within itself, such as they can correct their exchanges with the environment. It's about correction and navigation of the environment, anticipation of our action in the environment, such that we can internally anticipate them and correct anticipate them and correct and be capable of in real time, correct certain sort of errors.

So expectation is precisely that for an ego. And Janet thinks that ego is, so there is ego and there are antithetic ideas, right? And the confrontation between these two can be captured by the affective state of expectation, which is about, as I said, anticipation or contemplation of the possibility of something

to happen or an aim to be achieved. Now, the more antithetical ideas grow, you know, kind of adverse situations in the environment, so to speak, the higher the sense of egos or subjective uncertainty increases. So ego then as it's you know starts to exchange and face the environment, here in the psychological terms, antithetic ideas,

a sense of subjective uncertainty increases, it goes up. Now, Now, a healthy ego is the one that can navigate through this certain sort of uncertainty and keep its expectation with this uncertainty and a certain sort of healthy balance. whereas the unhealthy ego begins to create what you might call to be defective defense mechanism against these uncertainties

by either suppressing them inhibiting them or or simulating otherwise, basically pretending as if they are something else, and then incorporating that simulation or mal-simulation of these antithetic ideas into its own self. And that's what in psychoanalysis called delusion. So there are various ways that a defective defense mechanism can approach the growth of antithetic ideas and the increase in sense of subjective uncertainty.

Suppression, inhibition and mal-simulation, you know, pretending as if it is something else or recreating it in a different sorts of way. It has no connection whatsoever with reality. and you know anxious catastrophic expectations therefore can be understood as deficiency of the ego if you follow janet and to this end freud adds that if the primary ego is weak then what happens is that the distressing antithetic ideas which are growing start to

fibrillate. Therefore they become apparent in his own words at a moment of special excitement causing disorientation and alienation. They enjoy an unsuspected existence in a sort of shadow kingdom till they emerge like bad spirits and take control of the whole body which is as a rule under the orders of the predominant ego consciousness.

So So in a sense, is sort of, you know, kind of like intrusion of antithetic ideas and their proliferation

inside the edifice of ego is the result of ego's own defective defense mechanisms. This is what Janet calls counter will. It is not as if it is outside of the will, right? You know, as I said, they don't want to say that, you know, that it's just like merely the result of a kind of, you know, just like a brute face-off between the system, psychic system, and its

environment. No, they want to say that... So the will of the ego also comes with the counter will. And the counter will were basically antithetic ideas start in Freud's own words, start to proliferate and diversify within ego, will and counter will are two sides of the same coin they both

are rooted in the structure of ego and its defense mechanisms essentially counter will is something like what you might call to be a malfunctional anticipatory model of the environment. The anticipatory model is not part of the environment. It's part of the system itself. What drives the system to be alive, to navigate, to basically have a life, a living?

So the counter will, again, as I said, doesn't come from the environment. It actually comes from the model of expectations that the ego has itself constructed. Anticipatory systems are a species of dynamic systems, right? They are not statics, they do change. As we have seen it in Freud in the whole history of psychoanalysis, people

who show neurosis or hysteria, it's not as if they are constantly showing the same sorts of symptoms, the same sorts of fits, so to speak. It's just that they change. They also have the same sort of dynamic systems, the dynamic transition of, you know, what you might call to be symptoms and behaviors. It's just that, you know, they are not preserving the integrity of ego anymore.

Another one that I want to talk about with regard to why Jeanette for Freud is early on very important is the idea that What is it actually to be for something to be conscious?

Freud has said something in one of his essays, let me find it, this is something quite interesting Before I, you might want to answer that question, for instance, something here. It says, again, in his letter to Flies, says that, and this is again on hysterical paralysis, and he's talking about Janet's works on catalepsy. It says that, Freud says that, I can only associate myself fully

with the views advanced by Mr. Janet. This is about automatism and the power of dissociation. He then continues, the conception of the arm cannot enter into association with the other ideas constituting the ego of which the subject's body forms an important part. The lesion, considered as functional or dynamic, would therefore be the abolition of the associative accessibility of the conception of the arm." So it seems that, as I said, this whole idea that consciousness is never in isolation,

but consciousness is always in synthesis and conservation, means that association, there is no consciousness without association. If you take association out of consciousness, there is no accessibility to that consciousness. It cannot be integrated. If it cannot be integrated within other consciousnesses or connect with other consciousnesses, it remains fundamentally a regressive psychological event or activity. That is actually important. That consciousness by itself in isolation remains a regressive psychological activity.

Working against ego. Which then, now I ask it again, then what is it to be or what does it take for something to be conscious if that is the case if that mere consciousness or mere conscious activities or consciousnesses forms of consciousnesses if taken in isolation dissociated from one another However, they are not really consciousnesses in any sort of personal sort of way that we

talk about consciousness in regular sense. They are regressive psychological activities that works against ego. So to that end, any answer to that question that I asked, what is it, what it takes for something to be conscious, conscious of this or that, or in terms of, now think about this in terms of association and dissociation.

Thoughts? I was thinking just how could we maybe relate this. Sorry, who's talking? Oh, yes, yes, yes. hi sorry uh so like sorry i was uh yeah please go on so do you think we can relate like janet's

ego with the idea of superego of froid because i don't really know what froid means by superego for example so super ego is a kind of a uh yes a kind of you know uh what you might call to be a rational super rational ego you know that that has certain sort of volitional expectations right and tries to uh guide the structure of ego to certain sorts of ends or expectations and basically realize those expectations realize those ends not by virtue of what you might call to be

this source of mere conscious activities, but by way of inferences. But of course that is how that, the way that ego here is being structured, shows that super ego is probably a very very tiny uh you know kind of a region of this sort of architecture of uh of the psyche that's on can you we can't hear you

can you hear me now yes does being aware and recognizing like a thought as a subconscious part of it does it take it to the actual conscious side if you are recognize a thought as like a projection of your unconscious does it like turn into a part of your conscious or does it remain as part of your unconscious well no i mean the unconscious here we are not talking about you know unconscious in the sense that i mean we are not talking about unconsciousness but we have again the same way that we

talked about unconsciousness as you know having different sorts of scales and levels we can say the same thing about the unconscious, right? Here, for example, early on, Freud and Brewer and, I don't know, even Janet or other people talk about the unconscious, they mean, you know, kind of real unconscious, automatic activities, right? basically they cannot be in their pure form they cannot be by definition they cannot be brought into basically consciousness they have to come through intermediary forms of the unconscious

incorporated within the consciousness and then yes they become you become conscious of them and That's the whole point. But I spoiled the answer, the giant answer to this. Like in cases like depressions, if it was like as easy to get it from unconscious to the conscious, like through a certain way? No, not everything that requires. No, you see, not every, you see, so there is this whole category of what you might call to be kind of pathological, psychological behaviors, right? And the etiology, the causes or sets of

causes for each of these are very different. Not every one of them has a very direct sort of thing, connection with the unconscious. As I said, majority of them, according to Freud, are basically are about the accumulation of antithetical ideas. accumulation of antithetical ideas uh in fact let me uh let me just for everyone let me just switch to share my screen and let's go this letter uh to flies and look at the table how he tries to categorize some of these um so depression is a different source than for example

hysteria or neurosis. That would be a different sort of etiological causes and requires a different source of approach to address the issues. Yes, I mean, you can know the causes of your anxiety, but that simply doesn't go away sometimes. But then again, Freud would say that precisely because then other than anxiety, anxious fits, there are other sorts of etiological factors present that kind of create a blind spot for you how to deal with these causes. Even though you are

knowing what causes my depression, I am still not feeling relieved. You know, that is precisely that he wants to introduce that when we are talking about these sorts of stuff, we are also probably talking about a multiplicity of etiological factors. One second, let me just go. Okay, let me... One sec. How do we do that? Share screen, share...

Oh, one second. Okay, can you see this? Yes, so what I'm saying, let me, yeah, hysteria, the incompatible idea is not admitted, incompatible antithetical idea. The incompatible idea is not admitted to association with the ego. The content is retained in a segregated compartment. It is absent from consciousness. Its affect is dealt with by conversion into somatic sphere.

Two, obsessional idea. Once more, the incompatible idea is not admitted to association. The effect is retained, the content is replaced with a substitute. Three, hallucinatory confusion. The whole incompatible idea, affect and content, is kept away from the ego. And this is possible only at the price of a partial detachment from the external world. One resorts to hallucinations, which are friendly to the ego and supports the defense. Four, paranoia. The content and the effect of the incompatible idea are retained in direct contrast to three,

but they are projected into the external world. Hallucinations, which arise in some forms of the illness, are hostile to the ego, but support the defense. and then he says that in hysterical psychosis in contrast it is precisely the ideas warded off that gain mastery the type of these is the attack and how do you pronounce that uh Aaron it's French so I'm not the expert but etat secondaire? Yes. If there are French speakers on this. Hallucinations are hostile to the ego. The delusional idea is either a copy of the idea

worded off or its opposite, megalomania. And this is the table of various kind of pathologies in terms of affect and content of antithetic ideas and their relation to ego and how they either boost defense or lead to its total defense, total failure of defense mechanisms. As I said, you know,

Freud has this idea that the defense mechanism, which essentially the centerpiece of the tension of ego in its own structure and with the outside is not by itself what you might call to be a kind of a yardstick for measuring the health of the ego. Comes to, you know, whether defense mechanism can actually works against ego.

or it cannot actually work against ego, but it works against its own itself. Or in fact, it doesn't do any of this. It is benevolent toward the ego, it boosts ego, it boosts its own self, but essentially, precisely because ego is this coalitions of different consciousnesses, it creates a certain sort of other sorts of problems. And we are going to talk about some of these categories in terms of affects and content and their relation to defense mechanisms and ego

later on. But yeah, so this is, you know, different categories. But coming back to the idea that, you know, what it takes for something to be conscious or how can how can something actually be known what does it take for something to be known So, Matislav, I saw that you had your hands.

I just have one clarifying question concerning Jeanette's work. May I share the screen? Sure, sure. Okay, I have noticed this definition of scientific intelligence by Jané, here it is, and I just wondered if we can correlate it or say about the equivalence of this definition with cons uh synthesis of concepts sort of concert synthesis which you write also in the chapter three of intelligence and spirit this notion of scientific intelligence as a synthesis of concepts is there is some correlation or something like that between that let me uh read it i'm uh i'm

I may read? Yes, yes, yes. The Toginous proper results in bringing together a large number of facts of consciousness in synthesis or general ideas. It does this by discovering their relationships between particular facts, which being able to remain the same between different terms, give unity to seemingly very distinct things. So I have thought this has reminded me about object as a concept, as the German word for object. Not Gegenstand, but object. Object, yes. Like translation or something like that. Yes, yes, yes, yes, of course.

And it seems that, you know, that sort of non-vulgar consciousness is, you know, something that, you know, in a kind of, again, in a vulgar sense, usually associated with superego. Right. As essentially a conceptual facility. Consciousness as a conceptual facility. Yes, I have thought about this analogy as well. So yes, yes, absolutely. So yes, and but then again, you see that there is actually quite an interesting sort of thing that he says something that you know, but so they're saying that this is like, but it's just very rare these things substantiate.

And this reminds me, when I was reading this, it reminded me of that essay that, not his books, that essay, I have forgotten the name of it, that Thomas Metzinger wrote. about this idea that, you know, yes, so it was an answer to his critics that, look, you know, you are trying to say that, well, you know, the whole idea of consciousness is a certain sort of, you know, kind of simulations, and it doesn't really exist. The processes basically create larger simulations and these simulations and interact and they create a model and these

models create more models until to toward the self model of personhood. And when we are thinking, when we are, you know, imaging stuff, daydreaming, even thinking, know regularly um we are doing um a lot of uh these sorts of vulgar consciousnesses simulations you know kind of computational simulations that have their basically their uh uh their roots in uh neurophysiological uh processes uh but so people were saying that so so then you are actually a

purely a reduction, so you don't have a room for, you know, that sort of conceptual consciousness, you know, consciousness as a unity of concepts. He said that, no, I actually did not mean that. I actually say that there is such a thing, but that only occupies a very tiny, you know, portion of our so-called conscious activities. I see. Thank you. Maria, you want to say something?

Yeah. I wanted to say that as far as I understood Jene, he didn't think that the act of memorizing itself with sufficient a sufficient cause not a cause uh well maybe cause of for consciousness but he didn't say the same about the act of retrieving memories and then admitting them to speech and communicating them as narrative to a different person those two acts might well the returns of memories i don't think this is consciousness yet but the admission to speech and making them communicable to a different person it is already a symptom of consciousness. Yes, no, as I said, you see, so memory, even memory for him, essentially consciousness is really in,

okay, to answer the question, for something to be known, for us to be conscious of, for that thing ought to be integrated. That there is no such a thing as consciousness without integration, without the act of synthesis, right? The productive act of synthesis, which is that of the integration. Like the idea of the arm that Freud was talking about. Look, if by way of some sort of lesion, which is a functional, dynamic entity, we lose the unity, the integration with that arm,

even though it is attached to us, we are no longer conscious of it. It is no longer an idea. It abolishes that idea. that idea. So that's the whole idea that, as I said, that the consciousnesses are not integrated are not consciousnesses anymore. There are consciousnesses, but consciousnesses are in sort of regressive psychological state. What he wants to say that for consciousness to be achieved, it should go through a process of integration for something to be known it means for that thing ought to be integrated within the whole within within the within the act of synthesis

and what memory does here that's a necessary cause that's a necessary cause the act of synthesis integration for the act of knowing in sense of consciousness in a Freudian, Genetian sense, memory makes it sufficient precisely because it retains the traces of what has already been synthesized, transfer it to another scale or another unity of synthesis of consciousnesses. Because without this memory, then what you get is what you might call to be impediments to transition from one unity of consciousness, from one act of synthesis,

to another act of synthesis between consciousnesses, forms of consciousnesses. He wants to say that, so this act is actually very, quite actually very, yeah, in a sense, kind of Kantian and process of individuation. It happens in a space and time. And hence, for it to be accounted for, you need to have a spatial and temporal factors involved. Memory is part of that. To retain the structure. See, that is part of the life, right? It's kind of Robert Rosen 101.

How many of you are familiar with What is Life? By Robert Rosen. His famous masterpiece. So Robert Rosen idea, and this is why I'm saying that this is the first, Janet builds the first part of the biological leg of psychoanalysis, because the role of time is fully being accounted The idea that life does not actually take place or is actually impossible without a way for

a structure to remember its past estate, its past configuration, so that it can build on top of that. because if the structure that has been previously built, synthesized is being forgotten, then we are in the realm of the inorganic. But this sort of dynamic correction of the structure within time, sort of generative entrenchments of what has been previously built. And the correction of future state of this structure

or consciousness, according to what has already taken place requires a kind of a memory system, of a sophisticated memory system to remember previous configurations, previous mechanisms, responsible for the previous estate of the system. Without that, the structure simply dissipates. So yes, so Janet,

Janet's view of the consciousness as an act of production, an act plus an act of conservation, directly identifies consciousness as a biological fact, only exclusive to life. and life systems, biological systems.

So Dennis? I wonder whether in this thesis, memory is a constant, it's a variable that is fixed. I think if you are saying that for something to be conscious needs to be integrated and that memory is what makes it sufficient, but at the same time, we've been talking about that there are different kinds of consciousness or like the compartmentalization of consciousness, like memory remains the same in all these different- No, memory is dynamic precisely because, you know, when we are talking about memory, we shouldn't talk thinking about like a hard drive

that you basically plop something on the hard drive and it stores it, right? Memory, when we are talking about it, it's a memory in time, meaning it has a dynamic tendency to retrieve new correct data You know, so it not only retrieve new data, but also modifies, has a capacity to modify. That's exactly what memory does in biological organism, that it not only remembers previous the states of the system, but it is capable of modifying them as it basically moves forward

in time. So it's not merely kind of like an archival sort of structure or model. No, It's dynamic. It unfolds in time with regard to the states of the system. And the states of the system here are new unities of synthesis for consciousness, associations, so to speak. And once these associations are being endangered, then that's a problem. that you see that then that becomes usually these sorts of disturbances become etiological

factors for the rise of pathologic psychological behaviors. Okay, clear. Thanks. Arman? Where did Arman go? I'm just here. I was muted. Hello to everyone. I had a question about the parts about integration and being conscious. If we say being conscious of something and then integrating this multiplicity, the unity of the whole, that becomes a problem of normative, also a normative aspect of the problem.

Because you can say that some persons are wrongly conscious and they have the false consciousness, let's say. And that false consciousness needs to be measured against some meter. And as much as I understand in beyond the pleasure principle, he tries to say that this meter is the pleasure principle. And what escapes pleasure principle and goes to repetition is the part that is wrongly integrated into the modern consciousness. My question is then about narration, because when we say that we have... Remember the affect, remember that the antithetic ideas were, instead of, it was interesting that in that table, instead of form and content, we have affect and content.

Yes. So the affect is the energetic part, right? The affect is the energetic part, and the content is the interpretive part. Yes. And psychoanalysts should be able to interpret the content. That would be red flag. That something has been wrongly incorporated. Under this wrong incorporation, my question may be something like, under this wrong incorporation, the right incorporation seems to be something still vitalist. That's my problem with the idea, because the pleasure principle even dominates ego later on

in later stages of Freud's talk, if I'm not mistaken. Pleasure principle completely dominates even death, can dominate even death instinct. But the problem of trauma is that, as you said, in a defense mechanism. Later on, it becomes in the mechanism of integration on their consciousness. That's maybe not vitalism, but that's It's not vitalism, I would say. You see, as I mentioned, and that was the errands and the question that was asked. You see, on the paper, it looks like vitalism, right? Well, it is not vitalism precisely because we are talking about a biological system. So this idea of accumulation of complexity, right?

Can be actually talked about quite very accurately in terms of complexification in biological systems, right? And also the complexification of nervous system, and also that's Freudian sense, or genetic and sense of consciousness. This can easily be talked about in terms of biophysics, right? Just simply coming back to the laws of thermodynamics. Change of the quality of energy and accumulation and then again, tropic sort of principles. But with the presumption, underlying presumption always that the ideal state that we say that we strive for

is the state of death, right? Is the state of the... We don't strive for it. We don't strive for it. You see, when we say we strive for it, meaning that as if ego strive for death. No, it is the structure of the ego rather than the identity of the ego that strives for it. The structure of the ego is a biophysical one within which the psychology of the identity of ego is fully rooted. Yes, but it behaves like a particle, right? It doesn't want to be in the state of excitation. That's the presumption I'm talking about. The state of excitation is the state that we want to go out of,

like a particle that is excited and then emanates energy. discharge of psychic energy seems to be under this presumption that the idea citation is what the body wants to discharge or wants to go away from, right? Yes, but that is purely thermodynamic. We don't need to kind of like attribute to it as a kind of like a final cause in a certain sort of Aristotelian sense, right? We can simply talk about it in a very, the law of constancy, which I, again, I did not talk about it,

because that is the whole idea that within pleasure principle, which follows the laws of constancy, naturally comes tendency towards equilibrium, nirvana principle. Barbara Lowe's basically principle. So that's really actually quite an interesting thing that you see one of the, as I mentioned last session, that within the first law of thermodynamics, there already lies the second other two laws. So if you have the first law of thermodynamics as a pillar, as what addresses the pleasure principle, there comes naturally the drive, which is the death drive.

Exactly. which is basically the second law and the second law which is increase in entropy and the other one which is basically tendency towards complete equilibrium. Degradation in quality of energy. Degradation in quality of energy and what we are talking about is this degradation quality of energy precisely because you see consciousness happens according to speculative biophysics because of the possibility of qualitative change of energy from physical to chemical to biological to psychological right but then within this

within this sort of if the pleasure principle has all of that so it already also has a seed of its own qualitative degeneration by virtue of the very factor or by virtue of the very principles that it tries to preserve its own pleasure and maximize it Okay, thank you. Absolutely. Okay, is it time? Yes. That's 10 minutes, but yeah, the further discussions can be moved to Discord. Yes.

And next session, I will absolutely love Constancy, a little bit of flies, and then we go to what was that the next session? What is it? The next session we are doing? Does anyone know? I don't know. this is not mommy and daddy issues is it the session because i'm under prepared for that um you have session four or how many hours have you wasted funneling yourself thinking about mommy

and yeah or surely you have a rat for a brain is what comes first yes that's the one that's the the brain one and that one we are going to talk a little bit more about you know the uh phi psi omega system um so we're sticking with the freud police letters yes yes i think so yes yes yes and if i actually find something better uh that we can read in conjunction with that i will uh put it on discord so you can all read and also email all of you okay thank you absolutely love you all take care have a great weekend thank you bye bye