RND/ In which Reza Negarestani’s patently ridiculous tome “Intelligence And Spirit” appears as an accidental Onion parody of conservative ‘postmodern-generator’ style parodies. Or maybe just a big showy display of barefaced mystification and stupefying verbiage – an unfettered, pseudo-philosophical slab of Quatsch and Nonsense.
[..] a book on computation and culture that is riddled with patently false claims about concepts developed in computer science, filled with bizarre overextended analogies, fallacies of reasoning which would be covered in a Philosophy 101 course, and questionable references – the sort of book that might be derided as an exercise in para-academic vacuity
– Reza Negarestani, Engineering the World, Crafting the Mind (neroeditions.com)
That is, to consider Reza Negarestani as a fucking academic charlatan.
By whose baffling yardstick of strict academic rigor was this book measured against, in order to give it the publishing green light? Mr Negarestani must be sky high on model airplane glue if he remotely imagines he’s written anything philosophically genuine or meaningful. It’s doubtful anyone who really knows anything about Artificial Intelligence would find such a book useful – except perhaps as a handy impromptu door jamb to a hot A.I Research Lab. Books like this (and their bizarre publication) simply don’t help anyone understand contemporary constrained cognitive existence – especially under the modern algorithmic jackboot of globally computational neoliberalism.
At no point does Intelligence And Spirit pass the classic ‘Rhodes Conjecture’:
You’ve given us Greek salad. Formulas equations – a lot of fancy terms that don’t mean a thing. I wanna know if you’re doin’ something that’s gonna help us out of this deep shit we’re in, or if you’re all in there just jerking each other off.
– Captain Henry Rhodes (Day Of The Dead, Dir. George Romero 1985.)
- A conceptual scenario, in which Urbanomic/Sequence Press and MIT (of all people) get a gentle sarcastic and satirical ribbing for publishing this eye rolling paean to intellectual vanity. On and bloody on it goes – 560 never ending pages, ala “[..] to stimulate the arithmetical and logical processes as an extension of the 5141 [..] an infinite translate in mathematics of tolerance and charity among artificial memory devices is ultimately binary.” Jebus, what a crock.
Here’s Reza in hot virtual action – a talk given at dubious sounding ‘Illuminations Research School’ July 2018 in Tyumen. The sound is deliberately muffled – but much in the same way his entire book is cognitively muffled:
Here meanwhile are some of the laughable, servile sycophantic raves about Reza’s Intelligence on Goodreads:
This movement of self-overcoming through self-effacing intelligence production is the defining factor of intelligence – as geistig force it is impersonal and moves through us towards the beyond.
Er yeah no doubt. (I’ve personally moved far beyond it.)
A masterwork of synthetic philosophy [..] while retaining the possibility and the mandate of constructing artificial general intelligence as the apex of self-conception and self-transformation [..] I suspect Negarestani’s work won’t garner any significant attention from the philosophical and AI communities anytime soon.
- Lol, too damn right there mate!
Extremely detailed and at times technical the sheer scope of this book is almost breathtaking and intimidating. I will write a more engaged review after rereading some of the more technical chapters.”
- Good luck with that, buddy! doesn’t hold breath
Dense [..] If you manage to finish the first chapter then you are for a ride.
- No real comment possible.
Of course, good ol’ Ray ‘Batshit Jumblewords’ Brassier pipes in, warbling its ignoble praises from on high:
[..] it advances beyond both metaphysical and postmetaphysical readings of Hegel by showing that spirit can no more be sociologized than it can be substantialised. And in a gesture that identifies the Platonic ascent towards the Good as the ultimate vector of cognitive and political emancipation.
- The fuck, Ray? Piss right off, mate.
Only perhaps taken as modern work of ‘theory fiction’ – more on this later – might Reza’s work may seem pretty solid; someone enamored of the ways people within such elite alt.literary Venn diagrams operate could also easily place this on their designer yin-yang coffee table, confident of its presence as a cool conversation piece while the artisan cheese and white whine are passed around in polite (speculative) company.
Yet “Intelligence and Spirit” also appears some of the biggest load of non / anti philosophical bollocks you’ve had the misfortune to try to skim-read. Talk about a fully automated computational brain spasm; even with a cursory glance, someone may conclude that in plain ‘Cartesian Common Sense’ terms, old Reza seems perfectly incapable of writing anything remotely clear or understandable in plain English.
Rather than actively ‘eschewing obfuscation’, it appears Reza’s goal is to fully douse himself in theoretical snake oil in order to somehow successfully pass as not E.F.C entirely fucking clueless (about eg. Artificial Intelligence.) His resulting total failure only seems testament to his own ongoing struggle with human artificial intelligence or H.A.I – intelligence which appears intelligent but which really isn’t, and is in fact merely artificial, ie. fake – a simple lie or dull illusion.
Indeed taken as disjointed whole / hole, Reza’s book reads like like an extended rant given by those old prisoners in the ‘white void’ featured in classic dystopian sci fi vision THX1138; a people long since thoroughly accustomed to their fate, who stand around all day patiently extolling the virtues of their own alleged cognitive superiority and moral intellectual purity – people who in ages passed would have been simply labelled Collaborators; talking that cool calm talk through their clever holes – telling you to ‘take it easy man, bide your time, wait around for important updates from our dedicated committee of experts’ – in short, keep on forever listening to their B.S plans and intricate politics, their well thought out brand of hyper smart, utter time wasting vapidity – to which the only clear and definitive answer seems: “Yall can go politely talk yourself to death, cos I’m the fuck outa here.”
In a letter to Wilhelm Hausenstein, Rainer Maria Rilke said “A victim of a shipwreck or a man floating hopelessly among polar ice-blocks tries till his last minute to put on paper his observations and his emotions [..] He continues to register all interconnections and intercommunications in the phenomena of the world even though the latter is already turning away from him.”
While it seems at least partially commendable that Mr. Negarestani has attempted to register such ‘interconnections’, the melting polar ice blocks of his chosen subject have already drifted far away from him and his wilful, highfalutin, academically obscurantist gaze. It seems he’d do well to follow Chomsky’s words: “One choice is to follow the path of integrity wherever it may lead. Another is to put such concerns aside passively adopting the conventions instituted by structures of [vacuous intellectual] authority.” (Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals.)
Indeed such a dire work reminds one of the Chomsky’s classic grammatically correct, semantically nonsensical formation ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously.’ If only Intelligence And Spirit had been presented simply as ‘theory-fiction’ (an approach to understanding bizarre contemporary existence through a dire fusion of fiction and speculative theory) then its grating conceptual failings could not only be forgiven, but even celebrated. Say for example you’d been told it was “The work of a half crazed intellectual, locked within an ivory tower in some distant land by an evil Artificial Intelligence. He works alone for untold years on an obscure philosophical monologue about his digital captors that purports to express sense.” OK, cool!
It is in this playful, re-contextual narrative spirit that we (re) present “Reza Negarestani’s Unintelligence And Spit” – select slices from Reza’s distinctly / strictly academic and desiccated tome, running parallel to his own, manifested here in the form of bad-postmodern freeverse. They should provide readers with a more-than-adequate taste of the rambling original.
The following symbols (errant ‘tin-wiskers’) have been inserted into each dialectic verse-code: Banana, Rhino, Black Coffee, 3AM. The resulting loose pages can be found scattered throughout the THX white-void prison, some of them lightly smeared on one corner with dried human feces, or odd transparent gel-like vomit from an unknown nearby source, stinking of rotten artificial chicken.
REZA NEGRASTANI’S UNINTELLIGENCE AND SPIT
i. Once self-relation concretely becomes part of the order of thought
That extends over into reality nothing can stop the rise
Of synthetic intelligence
All given truths all achieved totalities and traps of history
Begin to slowly vanish
A spider’s web baptized in corrosive solvent
It is the future dead history of philosophy conceived
As the elaboration of a program for artificial general intelligence
Misunderstood as the impersonal and collective evolution
Of bad 3AM thoughts that construct themselves
According to a view from nowhere and nowhen
ii. In which Reza Negarestani formulates the ultimate form of intelligence
As a theoretical and practical thought
Unfettered by the temporal order of actual things
A real banana movement
Capable of overcoming any state of affairs concerning Meaning that
From the perspective of the present state of his awful text may appear
To be the complete totality of its ahistory
Building on street corner philosopher ‘Bagel’s account of geist
As a multi-agent conception of mind
And ‘My Mate Geoff’s transcendental psychology
As a functional analysis of the conditions of possibility of having no mind
Negarestani provides a critique
Of both classical humanism and dominant trends
In posthumanist typeface choice
This remarkable fusion of continental philosophy
in the form of a renewal of the speculative ambitions
Of Germane Idealism and analytic philosophy
In the form of dull / extended thought-experiments
And an anti-philosophy of artificial languages
Opens up new perspectives on the meaning
Of human artificial intelligence
Exploring the real potential of posthuman unintelligence
And what it means for ‘us’ to live in its prehistory
Or at least that’s what the b.s back cover blurb says
I.T IS ONLY WHAT I.T DOES
i. To argue from a functionalist perspective
That mind is only what it does
That what it does is first and foremost realized by the sociality of agents
Which itself is primarily and ontologically constituted
By the semantic space of a public language
What mind does is to structure the universe to which it belongs
Structure is the very register of intelligibility as pertaining to the world
For only in virtue of the multilayered semantic structure of language
Does sociality become a normative space
Of recognitive-cognitive rational agents
ii. Structured as experiences and thoughts
To describe the community of rational agents as a social model of mind
The functional picture of geist is essentially a picture
Of a necessarily deprivatized mind predicated on sociality
As its formal condition of possibility of a rhino
Perception is only perception because it is apperception
And apperception is only apperceptive
In that it is an artefact of a deprivatized semantic space
Within which recognitive-cognitive agents emerge as by-products
Of a deeply impersonal space
Which they themselves have formally conditioned
SEMANTIC STRUCTURE AND DEPRIVITIZED SOCIALITY
i. To extend encompass and integrate both consciousness of itself
And consciousness of the universe
Conceiving itself as the configurative or structuring consciousness of itself
Endowed with a history rather than a mere nature or past
It becomes an artefact or object of its own conception
Where there is the possibility of having a history
There is also the possibility of having not only the concept of the concept
But also a history of history
A critical transformation of mind as an object of its own concept
The critical reconception of the object into which it has transformed
And once there is a history of history
There is the possibility of abolishing what is given
Or purports to be its consummate totality
Remodelling philosophical thoughts in accordance with the contemporary
Which in contrast to the Apollonian approach
Does not abide by historical accuracy or result in faithful treatises
But instead sees the positive insights and theses of philosophies
Through the lens of the contemporary optic
It is not this approach is the preserve of self-disciplined scholars
Rather than the proper work of of Dionysian roaming
Which latter in turn opens up new terrains of thought
To renewed scrutiny; mind is ultimately understood
As the dimension of structure or a configuring factor
Something which can only be approached
Via an essentially deprivatized account of black coffee
Of discursive linguistic apperceptive intelligence
ii. In which the nature of this investigation and reconstruction originates
As much from the viewpoint of the contemporary
As from that of the cognitive sciences
Specifically the programme of artificial atilligence
For to become part of the veritable history of intelligence – a rough sketch
Provides an outline of a functionalist and deprivatized account
Setting down premises that will be spelled out and elaborated
Necessary conditions for the realization of intelligence
In the form of an advanced program of mystical supernatural transcendent theological connotation
OUR MAIN OBJECTIVE
i. Rather than investigate the possibility
Of constructing artificial general intelligence
Or to review the popular narratives of posthuman superintelligence
We are in virtue of what we are determinately not
Far removed from our entrenched and subjectivist experience
Dimensions of the realization of discursive apperceptive self
A pure perspectival encounter with the world
Speculative extrapolations in the final chapters
Inquiring into sociality and syntactic-semantic complexity in a vein
Now much closer to theoretical 3am computer science
ii. I gradually learned to become blind to the supposed divide
The ambitions of philosophy are far too vast and comprehensive
For me to be pigeonholed into cosy compartments
Vast concrete building blocks of theoretical practical and axiological significance
Upon which the systematic relations between
Are elaborated in theory and practice
Yet the capacity to have thoughts or to inhabit the general order
That which expands and acts on the world of which it is a part
Begins with an investigation into the conditions necessary
For the possibility of having a transcendental psychology
Becoming cognizant of this link is what counts
As the genuine expression of self-consciousness
A task whose first milestone is a private retrospective
Of its own conditions of realization
THE SELF CONSCIOUS RATIONAL AGENT
i. The functional description of discursive conceptual and historical geist
In the context of those activities that characterize it
But also constitute it in the first place
Setting forth a project wherein theoretical and practical desacralization
Of the mind as something ineffable coincides with the project
Of historical emancipation and the disenthrallment of intelligence
As that which both frees itself from its local and contingent limitations
Treating whatever conception of itself it has arrived at
As the milieu of an unrestricted attention and commitment
ii. In which the distinction between the subject of conception
And the object of the concept is suspended
Elaborated in subsequent chapters this functional characterization offers insights
Into what it means to reorient consciousness and thought
Toward an emancipatory banana project
The core of which is the emancipation of cognition itself
ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
i. The immediacy of X and its mediation is retained
This allows us to see the cancellation
Not as a single punctual act that abstractly or totally negates
But as a development the product of a positive labour
Of determinate rhino negation that takes time
The suspension of the self-portrait of the human
Or of the capitalist mode of production as alleged immediate totality
Is thereby differentiated from naive forms of posthumanism
A revolutionary politics in which negation is decoupled
From the process of determination
And instead is turned into a fetishized form of abstract negation
Which in its indeterminacy presupposes a metaphysical account
Whose immediacy is actual and which therefore is falsely assumed
Can be abolished
By an all-destroying and total negation
ii. In this respect in addition to determinate negation
Distinct concepts of speculation and reason
Speculation is to be contrasted with simple reflection
Which is reflection through and on that which is allegedly immediate
For example what it means to be a rhino
Is often taken as something immediately present
And thus left unexamined
By objective movements that suspend the immediate element of reflection
And in doing so incorporates reflection as the reflection of opposites
A developmental stage in 3am speculation
NEW ADMISSIONS OF UNITY AND IDENTITY
i. Rather than operating externally on concepts
The immanent operation of the Concept itself – its skeptical epoche or suspension
Regard ing non-evident propositions
Give rise instead to the idea that for any proposition or property
Its contradicting opposite or incompatible property can be put forward
With equal justification
To break from the stasis and practical untenability of black coffee
In such a way that skepticism is no longer idly opposed
But becomes a dynamic and productive vector
What my mate Ray Brassier has called a ‘dialectics between suspicion
And trust’
The phenomenal knowledge of geist therefore presented
As a self-consummating skepticism of bananas
The assimilation of epochs into reason
And its complete remodelling as the dynamic process of suspension
And determinate negation
ii. The formal figure of the human or the functional picture of mind
Can no longer be refined
Nor can they shed their entrenched dogmas without a rational skepticism
As a matter of fact this restricts one’s departmental prospects
Rather the path is the conscious insight
Into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge
For which the most real is in truth merely the unrealized concept
For that reason this self-consummating skepticism
Is also not the kind of skepticism with which a fervent zeal
For truth and science imagines it has equipped itself
So that it might be over and done with matter itself
iii. Where critique of the transcendental structure is suggestive
Of both the operation of ‘Bagelian’ suspension
And the productive incorporation of skepticism into phenomenology
Into the transcendental project which sets out to investigate
The functional picture of mind and the 3am shadow
The account of function that’s attributed to the mind
Its conceptualization rendering unintelligible making objectives
A piece of practical reasoning we can then talk about over black coffee
The function or malfunction of the heart
Where institutive judgement it is not problematic to attribute functions
A lump of clay or the planet Jupiter
METAPHYSICAL SLIPPERINESS IN CONTEMPORARY FUNCTIONALISM
i. Invaluable insights regarding the problem of functional analysis
Insights drawn from the epistemological methods
Nested hierarchical structures where the problem of different scales or levels
Is of the utmost importance
To develop a more fine-grained paradigm of functional analysis
Before coming back to a more comprehensive description in terms of its function
Providing brief comments regarding the kind of functionalism or material constraints
To the extent that there are adequate material-causal and logical-semantic structures
The proper method of carving at the joints
ii. Distinct classes of functions and their uniformities
A configured and configuring unity presupposing a plurality of constituents
Which may or may not be interlaced
Not a matter of pure abstractions
Since they are dimensionally varied and multiply constrained
Adequately analysed in terms of qualitatively distinct structural constraints
A proper analysis of a function – a blueprint for the realization
Its underlying structural constraints falling under the rubric
A critique of transcendental structure – the interplay of multiple activities
That cannot be straightforwardly merged
Or intuitively added together
THE FLAT PICTURE OF FUNCTION
i. A one-to-one correspondence between realizers
Properties considered as qualitatively identical to realized function
A transition map between input and output
Where the transition can be realized as many pathways mapping
An initial state to an output state
An unconstrained abstract realization
A functional isomorphism between the attributes
Inferential relations between domain-neutral mapping
Where such isomorphism presupposes the absence
Of distinct structural levels constraining and determining specificity
A rock or a piece of swiss cheese
In other words such views inexorably forgo the task of explaining
What it means to call something intelligent
Describing instead the exact structural constraints
By virtue of which something can be identified
The flattening of structural and functional dimensions
The consequent removal of specific constraints associated
Inevitably leading to biased conclusions
ii. A panpsychism described as an implicitly functionalist account
One which licenses the ubiquity of mind or its unconstrained realization
Across an expansive continuum
Examples in comparison with the deep picture of function
Grains of sand in the desert – bricks in the wall
A person subsumed shaped or assimilated by the system
Remaining oblivious to seemingly minor specifications
Risking mistaking functions or activities for things or links between
Feeding the infant ontologically subsumed within
Diagnosing its pathologies
The collapse of all social relations
Untenable and prospective explanations interventions analyses critiques
A resigned cynicism to fatalist optimism from analytic stinginess
All the way to speculative over-enthusiasm
FUNCTIONS OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL
i. To simultaneously imply the real and the ideal
The dual or correlative of the subject
That which characterizes in terms of actuality or true ness
Avoiding further confusion by abiding by distinctions between
The future history of functionalism unrealizable
By individual agents alone
A sociality afforded by language – not as a medium of communication
But as a semantic space within
A bundle of intelligent behaviours
Qualitative integration into a generative framework
Only realized by different causal and logical conditions
Black 3am coffee distributed across distinct structural hierarchies
Functional classes and distant receeding super highways
ii. To this extent the realization of geist
A master key which not only recognizes itself and its abilities
But also becomes capable of modifying
Its very conditions of realization
What was mere consciousness is now a formally instantiated self
An absolute knowing in which spirit sees through
The unintelligible unity of the objective world
A struggle for the unities of mind – a fruitless quest and ununintelligible toil
A permanent state of alienation
Where unintelligible unity with the world in its radical otherness
Finally comes into view
SOMETHING IMMEDIATE
i. In recognizing the conditions of its black coffee realization
It becomes capable of modifying those conditions
And thus of modifying its own 3am realization
Just not until it has recognized its unintelligible unity
As a part of a more integral rhino unity
Namely the unintelligible unity of mind and world
GEIST SUSPENDS CONTINGENT REALITY
i. In which different levels of integration reflect
The fact of each mode of integration
A qualitative shift in the structure of general intelligence
By how cognitive and practical abilities
Are systematically incorporated within new unities of consciousness
By which ach mode is represented and established
As a normative model for the formation
Of new attitudes subjectivities and institutions
For its constitutive agents
ii. Where what is essential for qualitative transformation
Are not simply modes of integration quaunities
But also the manners in which these unities are concretely established
Models for conduct and cognitive cultivation of those agents
That constitute geist
That encompassed by it – their recognition as theoretical and practical models
Agents with access to the unintelligibility of structural transformation
Thereby concretely and determinately recognizing the universal
An intelligence enabled to realize itself under a new and higher unity
Its constant striving to bring itself under higher unity
Finding resolution in that universal which as the truly absolute concept
Is only able to be grasped
As the idea of infinite spirit
A transparent reality in which it contemplates creation
Thereby establising 3am premises for functional change
For further transformation in the structure of agency
THIS CONSTRUCTIVE SPIRAL
i. The constructive kernel of geist
This logic specific to a distinct species of selves
Of conceiving through the form of phenomenological reflexive knowledge
An unrestricted unintelligible world which
In its explanatory otherness renders unintelligible
What that consciousness is in itself
The truth of itself and the unrestricted world
Consciousness of an other
Of an object as such through the logic of self-relation
An artefact of its own concept
Adapting to ends and purposes not given in advance
ii. Oh to explore the possibility of realization
The play of forces already exhibiting infinity
An object for consciousness
A project of artificialization
As defeasible and disequilibrial constructive process
Informed by this model the positive freedom of geist
Its embryonic form this self relation this trivial tautology
An ongoing process of individuation abstracted
From any particular or substantive content
Not to be understood in terms of what it appears
A mere acknowledgement of oneself as living being
But a negation of objects and the outside world
Head-to-head with a resisting reality
Not passive but forcing the subject to project outward
To be conscious of a reality
Which is not an extension of self
But a 3am black offee order
In which objects negate back
Rendering the thoughts of the subject defeasible
And prone to sudden violent revision
TO BEGIN WITH A TRIVIAL PREMISE
i. Consequences are by no means trivial
They are in excess of such a premise
When a life form negates the outside world
In favour of its own interests
It also opens up a new vista
Wherein reality becomes unintelligible
As that rhino which is not in conformity
With the desires of the social life form
Actively resisting them
An adaptation to an ununintelligible reality
Which outstrips species-related interests and needs
This order of reason can be loosely characterized
As a system of essentially revisable thoughts
Actions enabled by the constraints imposed by reality
Of the necessary internal relations between
A formally represented order in the sense
That all thoughts and actions representing it also conform
ii. In which the acts of an essentially self-conscious creature fall
Under a formally represented order
In which 3am thoughts explain or cause actions
And one feels bound to the question of justification
A normative order of self-consciousness
Where mind gels into a unifying point or configuring factor
A self-positing of mind as unifying point
A formal condition required for the positing of reality
The uniting bond the configuring factor
An absolutely singular only articulated
On the basis of a concrete and penetrating analysis of the phenomenon
FULLY INSUFFICIENT PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION
i. The autonomy of thought and the alien thing
To be concretely realized in order for self-consciousness to establish
The determinate truth of itself
Of a reality that is in excess of thought
Stepping into the open and conceiving
A minimal and formal self-relation established
Opening up a gap between mind and world
The labour of negation where contact is onlyobtained
Through the hard work of conception
An objective striving turning into intelligence
Only when it loses its passivity
When it begins to re-engineer the reality of itself
Determinate representations of some implicit totality
Mirroring self-references established as singular
Permanently losing one’s home
A suspension in the abyss of unintelligible reality
Retroactively recognized as the most fragile of endeavours
ii. The transition from the formal autonomy of thought
To an achieved state of concrete self-consciousness
A fixed and unchangeable abstract universality
The freedom of substance
With nothing to receive from the outside
A mirroring passivity towards the other rhinos
Steeped in the 3am negativity of reason
A single cup of cold black coffee becomes an engine of freedom
A labour a project out of the black box of nature or technology
Where all traps of history begin to slowly vanish
A spider’s web baptized in a corrosive solvent
Unconditional endorsements of intelligence bound together
With the unconditional cultivation
Of certain practical and axiological unintelligibilities
Cursory sideways looks at the formal structure of self-relation
Minimal and prevalent forms – maps to be expanded and navigated
The order of theoretical practical and axiological unintelligibilities
Basic ingredients for the composition of unrestricted worlds
Some occult excess – an awkward fallacy
A bright circle
THE EXISTENT AND EMPIRICALLY PERCEIVABLE CONCEPT
i. In which an intended object consists in simply making itself
A simple identity relation conceived
From a reality that is of nowhere and nowhen
The negativity of reason positively extended over into the world
A formal space which is at bottom a deprivatized semantic space
A minded creature conscious of itself
An interactive semantic personhood
Where all selves are incorporated
Exhibiting the formal order of self-relation
The strange case of a historical delusion
An unavoidable struggle with others
Manholes leading to great tragedies
Grand delusions descending into the abyss of the ununintelligible
ii. Take the downhill path of an easy fall back to the homely earth
Where nothing is ever risked despite bravado to the contrary
A source of enablement and disablement
Of ontological epistemological and axiological unintelligibilities posited
As a given
The former path that of tedious tasks residing in a comforting home
Whose foundations sooner or later will be eroded
By epistemically schizophrenic bananas
The object of its own understanding
A conceptually mediated presence
The annulment of self-consciousness and the exploration of conditions
A full-blown transcendental philosophy
The product of infinite natural conditionality
Formal spontaneity of thought and the objective world
Now merely fused together – undergoing transformation
SUSPEND THIS PURELY EGOCENTRIC CONCEPTION
i. To recapitulate the suspension of egocentric self-consciousness
The receiving end of negation
A negatively abstract speculative thought
Verging on intelligibility under the guise of an alien other
Now confined to a transcendental horizon unchallenged
By new objective facts of virtual experience
A critical reflection on the possibility of the variation and modification
A deeply philosophical project aiming to renegotiate limits of experience
Capable of using artificial language that
In every respect surpasses syntactic and semantic richness
Undermining objective identification of the source
A practical construction misconstruing accidental and local characteristics
The integration or bridging of concept and objectivity
Structures of unintelligence punctured
With an immutable identity
ii. This logic of self-relation
Imaginary mark on paper left by the gesture of the finger
Defining a point on a map of transformation
A series of historical instantiations under its concept
Its configuration changed
Atemporal transformations
A view from nowhen
The nonmanifest excavated by modern sciences
Intuited pure 3am black rhino coffee concept
Qualitative transformations in the structure of geist
The goal of spirit as freedom to do something formal
A temporal progressive march from the past
To sufficiently elaborated consequence
FIGHTS AGAINST THE GIVEN
i. Abolish the givens of theory
But also the givens of praxis and history
What is of paramount significance in the fight against the given
Is to place the given in action by transforming oneself
According to a concept that negates all particular manifest and given contents
A major assault on the locus of structure and categorial forms
The mind without black coffee a block of wax
A blank slate readily admitting the data
Certain supposed completed totalities of its own history
A strange 3am dynamic between its positive and negative conceptions
Maximizing its functional autonomies be they natural or normative
Conditions of enablement identified and harnessed to effect transformation
Reorienting repurposing and reengineering
Implausible and seamlessly sutured histories of one’s own obligations
Pro gressively breaking away from the given
In all its manifestations
ii. Where the self-correcting attitude of intelligence fails
A complete functional analysis of the mind is unavoidable
This path leading to the complete reorganization of mind
Its conditions of realization
A minimal criterion for what is meant by theory
Of a language with explicit formal dimensions
Semantic richness and transparency
Of distinct entities aspects and processes hanging out together
Taxonomic relations between two or more rhinos
A universe of discourse or the dimension of comprehensive data
Provided for the purpose of conceptualization or explanation
Yet not at all the totality of all conceivable objects
Of any kind whatsoever
ACCOMODATION OF DATA PROVIDED BY LANGUAGE
i. Oh for the construction of an absolutely systematic theory
The unrestricted universe of discourse wherein
One can frame theoretical claims unhindered
The elaboration of all interdependencies connections and distinctions
The sublime possibility of systematization
Wilfully mistaking what we call data for sensory givens
The ultimate form of intelligence works
Specialized domains with axiomatic elements
Of the connections between
A metaphysically slippery copula of mind and world
Communities of rational 3am agents constructing superior models
Governed discursive spaces and public language
Inadequate grasps and mobilization of formal sociality
The given cerebrum of any individual agents
A mere stubborn freedom that remains bogged down within the bounds
A sapient creature promoting humans as the constituents of mind
The illicit merger understood as a formal quality
A concrete account of the human described by sets of contingent characteristics
ii. Where computational activities hudgements inferences
And conceptualizations dance
Non heroic labours of unintelligibility at once responsible for thinking
A mis-self capable of treating itself as artefact or rhino
3am cognitive explorations rigorously subjected to change
Differing sets of material realizers expanding job prospects
A constructible activity not some structurally fixed entity
SENTIENCE OF THE HUMAN
i. From the perspective of this constructibility
The assertion that the sapient is an animal qua sentient
As an exercise in prejudiced dogmatism
The autonomous rule-governed form not a dimension of the human
But the dividing line between formal distinction
And substantive indistinction
A formal autonomy of thinking
In which our own sentience is caught
Integrated bundles of rational processes
Nonsensical aspects of unrestricted association
ii. In which one falls back on an ideologically charged contingency
The teleological actualization of final causes
To simply dissolve the problem rather than solving it
Humanist alternatives already forgotten
A sub species of rights and entitlements
To expunge our manifest self-portrait
Choosing instead those transitory embodiments of sapience that
Oh fuck it, I’ve no idea what I’m waffling on about
Banana rhino 3am black coffee
Here’s Contrapoints on Why they quit academia: “So specialized in fact, that is strains the human ability to give a shit.”
Example Reference Links
- Metafilter: Speculative Realism Breaks Out, Breaks Philosophy?
- Existential Comics: Schopenhauer and Hegel
- Tank Magazine: Intelligence And Spirit Lego Set
- Review: “Chronosis” comic book by Reza Negaresani Is Awful
- Quentin Meillassoux: Another Laughably Bad, Pseudo-Philosopher Charlatan Exposed
// how to play big science