Lacan and Artificial Intelligence

Here I'd like to try to make a little more explicit some of the more provocative interrelations between Lacan's philosophical and psychoanalytic project and the goals of modern artificial intelligence. Let's start with the "hard problem" of consciousness, which can be phrased: "Why is there a subjective component to experience?" In his seminal article Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, Chalmers puts it thus:

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

This "undeniable" element of experience is the zone of subjectivity proper. It is not, properly speaking, a location, a concept, a word or an object. On the contrary, this zone seems to be the ultimate source of linguistic/gestural 'reality'; as such, it represents the capacity of a signifier to delay its own signification, the delay being the experience of the signification which depends on future utterances to acquire its meaning. Such a postponement is not technically a concept, a word or an object, but an experience or a temporal mode. There are close ties here to Derrida's notion of differance here: for Lacan, the self constructs its identity relationally, as signs do.
So, in short, the crisis can be boiled down to a recursion problem: How can we even begin to signify "how the self begins to signify"? This "explanatory impasse" of consciousness, our inability to translate it into schematic, algorithmic or in any sense technical (non-poetic or archetypal description) results, apparently, from the curious self-ownership of experience, from the fractured reflexivity of intentional awareness. Lacan closely analyzes this cut or rupture as the joint or juncture of subjectivity in his 1949 lecture on the mirror stage (which is also the subject of the first paper in Ecrits.)
Lacan's work on development was of course influenced by Freud, but also very much by Marxist psychoanalyst Henri Wallon, who lectured at the Sorbonne in the first decades of the last century. Wallon's theory differed from Piaget's model of development by asserting the possibility of regression (which cannot occur in Piaget's theory.) For Wallon, from the moment a child is born (and probably much earlier) there already exist impulsive and emotional factors, affective influences from the external environment which are mirrored by internal feelings and a burgeoning subjective awareness. These factors dominate the child's reality until, by positive and guided interaction, the child differentiates emotional modes and dispenses with "gestural disorder"; the child integrates the external stimuli, allows these to structure their reality (instead of the affective internal sensations which previously dominate.) This second stage (which Wallon called the sensorimotor and projective stage) supports the emergence of two distinct kinds of intelligence: practical intelligence which emerges from the manipulation of real world objects and the child's own body, and discursive intelligence which can emerge only through structure interaction (imitation, appropriation and correction.) The most important philosophical consequences of Wallon's views (on Lacan) is the crisis of development. Wallon emphasizes the messy causality, the properly dialectical (in the Hegelian sense) progress of development: the subject is structured by a lack; a positive theory of development is, in a sense, a critical impasse, an anti-synthesis, for an all-too-real crisis of disruption underlies all possible development and progress.
So for Lacan, the crisis at the mirror stage is not the erasure of a previous body composed of "bits and pieces" which are united by a glance in the mirror ("Ah! I am finally unified once and for all!") To Lacan, the salvation of a unity of consciousness is already a misrecognition and only highlights the ever-present risk of a depersonalization, the traumatic possibility of a real disruption, of regression--one step forward, two steps back. The child has a desire to see himself as an "I," as a complete entity exterior to the external world. Desire itself, for Lacan, is a desire for wholeness; yet the desire is the hole, desire is the missing piece. The object of desire--the completed self--structures our self-directed activity through maintaining a distance to the desired object. The subject is this division; the object (the symbolic hole within the imaginary whole) is the desire. Lacan, then, is saying that the "recognition" the child experiences when he looks at the mirror is actually a misrecognition, that is, it recognizes a lack: the sense of wholeness emerges from "bits and pieces." Being doubly outside ourselves: this is what it to be ourselves. So in looking at the mirror, by misrecognizing ourselves, we create a self which is alienated from us, which is structured by a lack which we try forever (impossibly) to close and endlessly fantasize about filling in. Let's hear from Lacan himself (from Sheridan's translation of Ecrits):

This act [looking into the mirror], far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates--the child's own body, and the persons and things, around him. This event can take place, as we have known since Baldwin, from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial (what, in France, we call a 'trotte bébé'), he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support, and fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. For me, this activity retains the meaning I have given it up to the age of eighteen months. This meaning discloses a libidinal dynamism, which has hitherto remained problematic, as well as an ontological structure of the human world that accords with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge. We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification , in the full sense that analysis gives to the term; namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image--whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago.

For Lacan, all knowledge is paranoiac because it is built directly upon deception, and in this way he directly opposes himself to Cartesian theories of the subject which derive their power from the reflective axiomatism of the cogito. He can say this because he understands the mirror stage as an identification. In Freudian theory, identification is always identification with another, especially an ideal image of oneself. This assumption of an image is understood to be an ideal mental object from the child's earliest memories--that we have an imagined ego-ideal which we strive to identify with. In other words, the ego is a fiction:

This form would have to be called the Ideal-I [je-ideal], if we wished to incorporate it into our usual register, in the sense that it will also be the source of secondary identifications, under which term I would place the functions of libidinal normalization. But the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego [moi], before its social determination, in a fictional direction which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality.

The agency of the ego--a phrase which ought to be of some interest to artificial intelligence experts--is identified prior to its social determination as an irreducible fiction, one which cannot be integrated into being-in-the-world by any sort of dialectical synthesis. Yet we are driven towards precisely such a resolution, and this is the rupture in which the ego circulates as a pulse, the cut in which we attempt to resolve our own discordance with ourselves, that is, the break between ourselves and our own reality. Whether or not "Can we model/simulate such a rupture?" is a meaningful question, we shall have to leave for another time.

Socioeconomics and Ideology

At first glance, the two spheres of human existence seem hardly even to touch one another. The socioeconomic situation in a given society already seems so material, so concrete, that the lofty abstractions and vainglorious rationalizations of political ideology seem almost as excrement of the functioning of the political economy, culture as mass-produced fractured residue of the production process, as a consumptive afterthought, called in only to justify, explain, speculate about or apologize for the status quo.
It is Capital's great triumph to link the social and economic struggle of the oppressed against the priveleged to the self-serving political agendas of the warlords of the global economy, to the central ideology of capitalism itself. The guiding principle of capitalism is expansion, accumulation, increase in the production and extraction of surplus value-- it is surplus, unpaid labor which furnishes the basis of accumulation and essential direction of capitalist expansion. Capitalism can only expand through greater and greater social and economic exploitation of labor. Marx gives the general law of capitalist accumulation, which is NOT some kind of natural law, as a relationship between capital, accumulation and the rate of wages. In this selection, he demonstrates a fundamental barrier to wage increases--that for the system to work there must be a critical amount of unpaid labor which turns into profit--which allows the foundation and endless reproduction of the capitalist political economy. Marx only briefly notes the possibility of an alternative state of affairs as an "inverse situation, in which wealth is there to satisfy the worker's own need for development." Instead, like in religion where we are governed by ideas we make up, in capitalistm, we are governed by the law of commodity-fetishism. The mode of production turns labor into a commodity that workers are forced to sell at a loss:

The relation between capital, accumulation and the rate of wages is nothing other than the relation between the unpaid labor which has been transformed into capital and the additional paid labor necessary to set in motion this additional capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two magnitudes which are mutually independent, i.e., between the magnitude of the capital and the numbers of the working population; it is rather, at bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labor of the same working population. If the quantity of unpaid labor supplied by the working class and accumulated by the capitalist class increases so rapidly that its transformation into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labor, then wages rise and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labor diminishes in proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the point at which the surplus labor that nourishes capital is no longer supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue is capitalized, accumulation slows doewn, and the rising movement of wages comes up against an obstacle. The rise of wages is therefore confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalist system, but also secure its reproduction on an increasing scale. The law of capitalist accumulation, mystified by the economists into a supposed law of nature, in fact expresses the situation that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labor, and every rise in the price of labor, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever larger scale, of the capital-relation... Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

(See also: Cambridge Capital Controversy)

The Question of Peace

Bush’s new plan is worthless. Not because it is a bad strategy based on a false hope that this war could be won, or because he’s dismissed vital recommendations; Bush’s new plan for Iraq is worthless for the same reasons the Iraq war itself was senseless.

We must protest that the Iraq War would not have been made a “better” or “just” war even if this administration had not lied to us about why we were going there. Even if they had not dissimulated the truth about what could be expected and what the material and human costs would be, this war would not be justified. This war would be excessive and prejudiced even if there had been none of the major slip-ups, criminal oversights and grossly negligent miscalculations. No, even if they could have guaranteed their mission would unfold flawlessly, the mission would still be delirium: the war would still be sadistic and unjustified.

The notion of a war on terror is as incoherent as this administration’s delusional vision of the prospects of the Iraq war (“We will be greeted with open arms, as liberators!”) I say even if Bush had never told a lie and never made a mistake, the doctrine underlying the war is inherently flawed: the very concept of a war on terror (which is not a war of terror) is unstable, and has led Bush to an apocalyptic worldview where only brutality is significance. Of course, this is nothing more than a misguided nihilism. But the fact remains that this war is as unjust as it is hopelessly paradoxical.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying human rights, democracy, freedom and so on aren’t important values; I am saying that we are dreaming if we think these are universally coherent notions upon which we can forcibly establish a benevolent government in a tumultuous region torn by millennia of ethnic strife and religious conflict. This dreaming is precisely the point--we now must consider pivotal role fantasy has played in the presentation of this conflict. A simple question can illustrate this point: why, despite the humanistic and democratic image we vainly uphold, is so much of U.S. foreign policy concerned with the more or less brutal assertion of American hegemony?

The central fantasy around which all this orbits is the ethos of “militaristic humanism” or even “militaristic pacifism,” which is an otherwise ordinary military intervention, but supposedly conducted to advance the cause of peace or of humanity. We must protect human rights, as long as these have a consistent meaning. This also means we have a right (and a duty) to a consistent interpretation: we must be critical when the government tells us we have a duty to intervene militarily on the basis of a “morality” of human rights. Such a morality is already suspect, but when it asserts itself as higher than international law, and higher because of terrorism or the new world order, we must protest.

The most obvious feature of this morality of human rights and promoting democracy is that it actually separates and marginalizes human beings. This ideology does this in the same way religion separates rather than unites and in the same way capitalism exploits workers and marginalizes the poor. The Bush doctrine is a misguided ideology of entitlement, constructed to protect entrenched wealth and U.S. business interests. Such a “morality” disfigures lust for power, transforms it into “love” for humanity, but the ideology remains completely congruent with expanding the reach of global capitalism. The whole spectacle (Christianity, democracy, capitalism) is espoused as an apocalyptic, military-invigorated “humanism.” This supposedly “enlightened” philosophy ultimately means nothing more or less than the U.S. asserting its unilateral right to supersede state sovereignty in defiance of international law on behalf of national interest.

My problem with all this is not that the fact that the rapacious pattern of globalization is exploitative, or that its perpetrators are delusional, or even that our moral gestures in the international arena are little more than cynical performances presented in bad faith. My issue with the imperialistic policy of this government is the blatant lust for ascendancy, for unquestioned American dominion. We must bring an end to hiding this lust for power behind a veil of “spreading freedom” not because it’s wrong but because it’s disgusting and dishonest. Disguising an obsession with control behind humanism and “bringing new hope and opportunity” is an easily recognized fascist pattern. A much stronger injunction is concealed behind offering a seemingly free choice (e.g., to Iraqis, to consumers): to obey, to enjoy, to belong, to be the same.

The hypocrisy of militaristic pacifism is that it is a pure fantasy. The thing which causes the illness is supposed to cure it. Opposite ends of the political spectrum coincide. This confused war is at once pure idealism and real materialism. On the one hand, we are obviously fighting to increase security—that is, to protect American business interests, especially oil—and of course this is pure materialism, capitalistic expansionism of the kind we’re getting pretty used to by now. On the other hand, we are also fighting (ostensibly) to protect human rights and democracy, though this is a web of fantasy which shields us from the trauma the rest of the world experiences as the vicious declaration of American supremacy.

This is not morality as in a question of business “ethics,” of reigning in corporate or government corruption; this is now a question of empire and global peace, of theocracy and extremism, of eschatology and theology proper. The secret desire is not that different, only more carefully concealed, from the underlying motivation of countless other religious wars: to know whether or not our conceptions of God are identical, which is also to prove our God “true.” God is the unspoken word that structures the entire discourse in debate regarding this conflict. The stain, the irremovable split in humanity’s (un)shared understanding of God is the true significance of this war.

God pervades the logic and rationale of American military intervention as the basis of a morality which suspends the consensual democratic ethics of state sovereignty and international law. This is a clear-cut example of religious fundamentalism. The cure is the cause of the disease. We are combating extremism with extremism, force against force, violence against violence in a purely un-religious struggle for power (which is then disguised and represented as a religious struggle.) What we secretly desire is a clean war, a war without casualties, only converts. In other words, we desire the transformation of war into a pure operation, an obscene video game--a virtual war.

The goal and by-product of this perverse, neurotic desire is real death: the fantasy that guards us from the encounter with reality thereby structures our relationship to the world through aversion and fear. This fear becomes hatred and then annihilation in an ever-quickening circuit of greed, deception and violence. There is no single answer: we must each begin to think for ourselves. The more we look for some savior to illuminate the path to freedom, the more we are guilty. The more we demand some great leader show us the way to universal justice, the more we sink deeper into a permissive, sloth-like society of perverse enjoyment without freedom, into the commercialized herd mentality of addiction without truth.

So we must criticize warlords when they argue their violence is justified by appealing to a humanity which they truly desire to subjugate. We must confront them with their bald contradictions, hold them accountable for their greed and its consequences, force theocratic and nationalistic ideologies from the halls of power and from our own minds. In other words, we must combat complacency and “militaristic pacifism” with direct action, with a militancy of our own. The struggle for peace is at once a struggle for freedom, and as such it can only be achieved through greater understanding, through communication, through collective action and solidarity.

We must reject the false unification of fantastic ideology, and reach for a higher collective based not upon an “ideal of humanity,” but upon nothing. That is, upon being free. Force and violence cannot create anything. Only thinking, speaking and actively working for freedom and justice can establish a lasting peace. In closing, I urge you to see the threat posed by our delusional aggression and to act on behalf of humanity and history. To act for all of us, for the question of peace is stark, inescapable and glaring— shall we universally renounce war, or shall we abandon humanity to extinction?

In the end?

Perhaps the most subtle instant of artistic insight: knowing when the work is complete. Knowing a thing is done is always a decision, a superego injunction to believe, to accept; art lives precisely in this deception, that it is possible to be told what to believe, or put another way, that we can ever know what other people actually want from us. What is the terminating stroke if not precisely the final "cutting" of the art-work out of its particular mode of being into the "universal," the work of art: a subtraction which makes whole. This point bears elaboration. From what is the sculpture subtracted? The raw materials of artistic production. From what is the work of art subtracted? From the artistic universal-- and we can think this in two ways, either as the "sublime" moment of deep sensitivity to the beauty of the universe, or as the universal artistic indeal, that unabashedly subjective universal; in fact, we can also conceive of this "from-what" of the work of art as the "universe" of the painting, that non-existent/empty reality in which the inversions and distortions of the artistic presentation are finally placed into a bizarre-enough context to make sense. So the art work betrays a lack, a cut which would otherwise go unnoticed, precisely by disguising it; yet there is no lack at all. Art persists in this lie as a stain, a horizon: an untameable pulse oscillating in the deep empty void of an (otherwise) still and silent universe.

The Universe is a Network

What do I know for certain?

Only this:

The universe is a network.

The only thing that exists is connection.

Energy flowing through fields of force, the teeming struggle of an infinite variety of arrangements of molecules. The struggle, the connection, the pull and the release—this only is reality, not the static isolated “moments”--but an enormous arrangement of complex and dynamic interconnections, a chaotically swirling, quantum-entangled flux, a living, breathing non-linear cosmic network.

So the points do not exist—only the in-visible (“imaginary”) lines connecting them. The points are always “becoming” based on, through, for and as a direct result of their co-relations. Attributtes and properties are all relations in this sense: strictly they are outside of the object in itself. But the thing-in-itself does not exist.

Nouns name only an open network, or ensemble--as in the set of all dimensions or free variables of the situation under examination—whereas verbs name relationships, actions within a context: are verbs not more truly real? Doesn’t the struggle have more reality than the combatants? Once framed by a linguistic superstructure, the elements become autonomous, playthings.

We learn through this sort of mental manipulation: construction of idealized micro-world “thought-experiments” and predicting what various results would be. This placing into a frame establishes a context only by what it leaves out, the distinctions it brackets off. No such construction can stand under its own power for long: the sociopolitical situation which informs and sets the boundaries of the frame sows the seeds of the limits destruction at the same time. No single human idea can obtain relevance throughout eternity.

Frames within frames within frames.

An endless series of moments: discourse is the temporal revelation of an imaginary/symbolic universe by an ever-growing light and awareness.

Or is our encounter with the real--light itself?

Mind Design

Open question: what do we need to build a mind?

Two general approaches to simulating cognition:

* On the one hand, you can take the mind as whole: identify major structures such as learning, memory, perception, etc., in order to simulate functionality. Thus we formally, directly or indirectly, construct a model of higher cognitive processes and write a program which simulates it. This is a centralized, top-down "hierarchical" model, relying on the formal structure, or rather--the alliance and convergence of the form and structure in mental phenomena. In order to elicit the elusive element of awareness, we model the abstract form as well as the formal structure of the mind.

* Alternatively, people have looked at the self-similarity of structure at many different scales in the brain (and really all of nature) and noted that the human brain is made up of tiny, near-identical parts whose interactions and arrangement derive from/result in mental events and which bear within their structure a startling self-symmetry, a similarity to the organ(ism) as a whole. In other words, this view interprets the higher-level processes as the consequence of the collective interaction and organization of smaller self-similar processes and attempts to elicit the desired higher-level behavior to "emerge" by modelling the lower-level processes. We'll call such a set of lower-level agents a "swarm." In this view, consciousness is THE example of a spontaneous emergence of complex and orderly behavior from nothing, from random noise, awakening slowly as a direct consequence of neurochemical inter-actions and the self-organizing cellular arrangement of the brain. So, there is in this view a need to model the arrangements and patterns of interaction of the lower substructures of the brain: this is the bottom-up "swarm intelligence" model and it relies implicitly on a gradual emergence of self-organizing complexity to produce intelligence behavior-- behavior which precisely because it is emergent cannot be directly programmed in. The resultant breed of complexity is held to be at least analogous to consciousness.

Both seem to use mathematical operations to approximate an abstraction of consciousness. This double reversal must be re-emphasized: the epic scope of both of the above models leads them to attempt to construct a model of a mind after an abstraction of mental behavior, and then to approximate the abstraction mathematically.

I think some extension of Godel's theorem could and should be brought in at this point to demonstrate that both directions in AI are though promising quite fatally flawed: we sacrifice the rawness of the mental event in its abstraction, and we doubly sacrifice the integrity of the conceptualization when we reduce it to mathematics: you can't have your cake and eat it too.

The structure of consciousness is neither mathematical nor abstract. After Lacan, it is structured like a language.

We only learn language by communicating with others. The swarm intelligence model must be understood as operating on multiple levels at once to get around Godel's theorem, perhaps precisely in the spirit with which that theorem was produced: as representing the possibility of intuition--just like language always escapes the bounds of what has already been said, the possibility of originality. How can we understood--and model--swarm intelligence operating at multiple levels? Self-similarity is not enough. We can't have just 'one' agent composed of many smaller agents: we still won't reproduce linguistic competence. At minimum, we always need 'two,' so that there is an 'other' to begin communicating with. The key to emergence is such a 'positive feedback loop,' where the behavior of agent A is dependent in part on the behavior of agent B, and vice verse--after several rounds of interaction, their behavior becomes 'synchronized' and on a global level a new more complex pattern of behavior emerges. At all levels of the structure, we must have a swarm, even at the level of the individual agent. But how can we converse with a swarm? Well, OK: I guess we need enough layers until what they're communicating with at the top level is English. What do the layers represent? Not linguistic contexts. After all, that's a pretty high-level conceptual structure. Context is constructed through the interaction itself. The A.I. should, in other words, have a single over-riding goal--trying to figure out: "What do you want?" At each level of the structure, we'll have swarms of agents operating over the objects appropriate to that level, whether they're words or mathemes or images or memories or ideas or any combination thereof, and each agent is performing self-generated 'operations' over the objects in the domain. How are certain operations priveleged over one another? Let's say the operation represents an original interpretation: subject to flaws, perhaps, possibly just a vague image that only later, if ever, is refined. The data set which the agent has available to it is modified in some way based on each agent attempting to perform the operation which is an answer the question "what do you want." We'll use evolutionary algorithms to train the agents to produce operations which are closer to "what we want"--which will, being linguistic, have to be interpreted. The intuition this model is based on is that consciousness is not simply memory, perception, etc., or simply the emergent result of a single swarm. The insight, if indeed it is one at all, is this: consciousness is fundamentally non-mathematical--which is NOT to say that mathematics cannot be learned, used, enjoyed and understood by conscious beings, simply that the nature of consciousness is not mathematics, it's ultimate structure is that of a gap, precisely between mathematics, logic, reason and the real. The joke seems even crueler when we realize our methods for modelling consciousness are precisely digital, discrete, mathematical in foundation. The structure of consciousness is, once again, that of language, insofar as it is in fact pulsates within an endless void, oscillates around an infinite abyss or rupture, the null point of non-convergence which bridges "reason"/time, cultural logic with the real (never perfectly distinguishable from the imaginary.) The construction of an English-speaking robot for whom a fairly legitimate argument for having a mind could be made is possible. Linguistic competence is a recursive swarm function.

The fundamental problem is how to "bound" the seemingly infinite space conjured into reality by language, not merely "interior" reality (so to speak,) but how to model time itself? Is simulation the same as duplication? What would it mean if--say--a linguistically competent agent manages to pass a Turing test even though it lacks any "true" understanding (so to speak) of what the past and future mean? Just what is this thing called time?

Despite this rather messy philosophical hurdle regard time--and there are not a few of these mines floating around these watesr--Even though the base substructure of the brain is not linguistic, we use language. Human-created machines can be made capable of linguistic competence. Point blank. The only question is how to model it effectively. And surely early models will be crude. The point is we need a system which is flexible. Can be improved, enhanced over time and is able to learn. The problem with language is that it is tied up with just about everything else, indeed, by shaping our understanding of reality, it shapes our reality itself. In a powerful sense--and this is why the cogito cannot merely be thought but must be enunciated--we are conscious because we say we are. The same formula applies to a disturbing number of other abstractions.

(more later)

(Love)

You know, there's an old saying: "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."

There's some truth to this. Not because everyone is scheming, nor just because friendship is never symmetrical, i.e., since a friendship is dynamic, 'give and take,' that is, a power struggle;

The real truth is in this: you can't really hate someone until you know them well. That's also to say you can't really hurt someone until you let them get close to you. Likewise, you can't get your heart broken if you never let yourself fall in love. That seems strange to say--"let yourself fall in love"! After all, we tend to think "love" in a very passive, gentle way. Love is enchantment, the world is transformed: the ocean becomes an orchestra and the stars become angels, the woman into goddess, love indeed is a transubstantiation: but could it be an involuntary reaction?

Isn't what we are thinking of here as "involuntary" things we do without thinking like our heartbeat or breathing? Aren't these things done really by the whole organism, as it were, all at once and for the benefit and survival of the creature? Now, wouldn't love be the MOST voluntary action as an embrace with your "whole" body? We hate our enemies in the same logic as we love anyone: not because there is a goal outside of love or hate for which we strive, but because these experiences, these modes are goals-in-themselves. We play merely because there is a game to be played, we push only because we know there is resistance, we move only if we know there is going to be a counter-movement. On several levels, love is oscillation between polarities-- as such, love articulates an ancient, infinite rhythm; love is the glorious betrayal of the power of One.

Modern romantic love: tragic transcendence. Billy Corgan singing: “Love is suicide.” The narcissistic and self-destructive hope that--one day--meaning and truth can be restored their rightful, empty place.

As firmly as "love" and "death" are inscribed into the mysterious circle of our existence, there is a proper LACK of experience of the direct thing-cause of either love or death. We only experience death from the point of view of the living other, even in the case of "our" own death, since technically speaking, death occurs to something which is not "us," since that which is "us" is already dead and gone; in a similar vein, we experience in love the death of someone, the “old” you that wasn't in love. Not that we become someone else, but we watch the death of another who is ourselves: "Love is watching someone die," as Ben Gibbard put it.) Death as experienced in love is also an inner rebirth. “Falling in love” follows the monotonic rhythm of annihilation/creation/annihilation. In love is there not a transfiguration of our everyday world which amounts to a revelation of the before-unseen but beautiful qualities of our surroundings? Yet despite such 'spiritual' changes we draw not one inch closer to the true object-cause of our desire, since our desire, insofar as it is 'pure,' is technically meta-physical: not because it is a non-substantial desire, but because love is a desire for that which is not merely substance, that is, a desire for something which is absolutely other than ourselves: love denotes the relation between two absolute entities which yet does not bind them into being defined only by one another: a sort-of “touching with pressure,” a respect for mutual freedom to exist in their own way. Yet love certainly is transformative, perhaps is transformation itself. Movement without love is empty, mechanical. Passion is what gives color, vibrance, energy to human existence.

Love as a desire embraces (but does not consume) the transcendent, the coherence of alterity. Lust as a drive is an oscillation (like, of course, sex): a merging of boundaries, a sort of immersion into the cosmic flux. In love we experience indirectly our own death: but only as another who is oneself. Love is, then, distinguished from the bravado of lust: "I am greater than myself;” love is rather the movement of transformation, the powerful injection of change and life into reality. Love follows a rhythm of death and resurrection, a living-through-death which results in a more “meaningful” life: after Ranciere: "I am another."

Love represents not a unity, for the people in the relationship remain “absolute”, are still completely and wholly "themselves,” irrelevant of whether they “want” to be. Even if you’re whipped, you’re still yourself—you’re just acting submissive, : love is but arrangement, the anticipation of the other within the same: the lover is the woman among women. Fear of death is the intoxicating anticipation of the object of love: the vertigo of the infinite abyss, the endless crazy energy of the libidinal drives. Love and death share their deepest meaning in representing an ultimate dis-connection. Is romantic love in a sense not the reversal of Christian 'fraternal' love between all members of humankind? "Love thy neighbor" is antithetical to particular love. Only the experience of death (or anticipication of, really a kind of 'inner' death)--before we can even comprehend such a universal love.

Thus love as well as death disconnects us from the universal, from the real; in love we escape from the true reality into a rosy realm glowing with a holy, otherworldly light, the entire universe orbiting majestically around the object-cause of our desire: my lover. Death is the irreducibility singularity, the base common ground of all "life" and therefore endlessly chained to, or rather: us to it, as the lover to the object of love, unable to carry his weight properly but also unable to let go and so jealously guarding it, pushing it along until: without warning--the weight is lifted.

Truth

(1) A particular truth must be relative to context. (why?) Ambiguity of language.

(2) Context exists only in relation to a consciousness.

(3) So truth is not absolute.

(4) The ultimate being is simultaneously prior to and beyond abstractions.

(5) So Truth is neither absolute nor relative, just simply beyond the this-and-that of linguistic representation.

(6) Intentional schemata are unable to adequately encapsulate being-as-it-is.

(7) Once again, the truth of an ontology is relative to the consciousness which utilizes it.

(8) In ethics, truth is both relative and absolute, since we balance the interests/value systems of the individual against and with the collective.

(9) Ethics--or, viewed from an alternate perspective, Action--is a resolution of the linguistic disjunction, since it is both thought and action and since we are concerned with both the absolute and the particular.

(10) To lead a just or a good life--- to seek truth--- to be happy--- what lasting, eternal value can these obtain given that those who dream these existences are themselves mortal? Such goals mean nothing in-themselves, but for the person who actively believes them, they can have whatever meaning he or she chooses.

(11) Truth is therefore a choice. (Is being a choice?)

(12) Truth never lasts-- that is, the universe constantly changes. So the only thing that stays the same absolutely is impermanence.

(13) Being is a unified infinity-- not the resolution of all paradoxes, but the process by which this resolution is endlessly unfolding. Existence is not a fleeting, static, external conglomeration of appearances-- but the process of being by which everything at last becomes itself.


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Truth is a metaphor, an argument from vapor. We seek it at all times and in all places; yet, we do not always act as the truth within us directs us. This voluntary separation is free will, and by this separation we are conscious. Consciousness cannot be dissected apart from this separation-from-being which accompanies the notion of truth. Yet as consciousness, as a reflection of a separation, we seek the truth of ourselves apart from everything else. When we introspect, we reflect ourselves upon ourselves--an infinite series of mirrors repeating the same image eternally. What is the scene these mirrors reflect? A singular, vast emptiness, a hole in space--the profound isolation and alienation of the individual. Then by an unlikely infinite extension of this nothing, we arrive at the doubt at the core of everything--and this, what we have reached after so much doubt, so much tribulation, this must be what we are searching for, tha holy grail of the philosophers--truth! Yet by claiming what we have found at the center of the universe is truth already escapes the restrictions of our methodology, explodes the boundaries of rational exploration. The full scope of our realizations breaches the grid within which we hoped to place our truth, analyze it, dissect it--direct it's unfaltering light into the deepest recesses of mystery and thereby place everything at last into its absolute position. This universality, this immediate presence belies the truth of Truth--that being is not a static, inanimate object to be studied, but the entirety of our experience, of our reality. Separation from this reality enables truth, so truth is ultimately only a reflection of this separation. Truth is the conceptual refraction of Being. By reflecting that which is (and so occupying a peculiar position where what it is, is what it is not,) by existing only in this abstract, indirect fashion, we see truth finally as a paradox. If truth were merely absolute being, if truth represented only the facticity of the universe, it would cease its transcendence, it's imperviousness to doubt. Truth is what is--yet consciousness is what it's not, and is not what it is. Consciousness represents a rupture in the absolution of truth-- faith, the movement of infinity, recaptures only an assurance that the particular contains the universal in some unspecified way. The absolute freedom which characterizes our condition must be contrasted with our entanglement, our interdependence, upon everything else that exists. This duality is the essential dualism of humanity-- the source of our fear and our hope, of our wickedness and our purity, of love and hate--and simultaneously is the eruption of dichotomies entirely, the resolution of the paradox, the end of mystery. Let us recall again the essential paradox, the crux of the human condition: how to act? Caught in the tethers of our multifarious existence, with all the angst and richness of human drama, what do we do next?

Nothing

There's no truth in anything.

It seems grim, doesn't it? You look down deep into your own existence, you escalate your doubt to heaven and drive your questioning deep down to the very roots of being-- and there is only emptiness. A raw, random loosely joined bundle of connections to other objects.

This is because truth is relative to context.

"Context" just means the conditions and situation of a given phenonema (object, person, process, event, etc.)-- the truth of phenomena is relative to the context of that phenomena because the phenomena in-itself has no substance. Any existent considered separate from being is an empty abstraction, a hollow conceptualization, the abyss. Individual, solitary existence--the kind of existence created by consciousness--is defined by this nothingness at its very heart, a profound emptiness.

What is a Philosopher?

A philosopher simply wants to know what it means. Philosophy is an endless search for meaning because its aim is so straightforward. “What does it mean?” can be posed in a million variations eternally.

The answers themselves are subject to further inspection, contemplation and finally, a request for clarification: What does it mean, anyway?

Where does the circle end?

Philosophers walk a slippery slope, but above what are they perched?

If we are honest, it is clear the end of philosophy is and must be action.

A philosophy is empty if in the end all it brings are doubts, hesitation and despair. Truth necessitates ethics which necessitate action. How we act is the method by which others determine what we mean. The full expression of meaning must involve an action. Purely linguistic meaning—speaking without acting and not meaning what you say--is as much a hypocrisy as a philosophy of inaction and isolation.

So the ultimate solution is simply to act as an example for others, at all times, of the greatest hopes one has for the human race. Certainly a rather extreme request, but the only judge qualified to determine your progress along this endless quest is yourself.

Deconstructing meaning itself leads philosophy to its most dangerous and radical extremes—the intersection between the metaphysical and the everyday, that line which is so blurry and evasive, which constitutes conscience and ethics.

Faith is only the first step; without it, we would be without philosophy (and superstition, for that matter) entirely. The paradoxical belief that the circle will lead us to a destination that is anywhere we haven’t already been is the leap of faith. Seemingly opposed to reason, these leaps make reason possible. How are we to distinguish between philosophy and organized superstition?

From an absolute perspective, all our beliefs are superstition—we must have the faith that makes it possible to believe that at least some of our beliefs are accurate most of the time. This is confirmed by interaction with reality; things and people exhibit predictability to our relatively simple models.

The absolute truth out there probably doesn’t correspond precisely to our models, which are really just hacked together well enough to get tangible results, but their practical benefits are what make them relatively good enough anyway.

Actually being able to build a working rocket by studying mathematics and engineering suggests that at least some of what is being taught rests on accurate models of an underlying, objective reality, even if all parameters which may have effects on the results are not always ‘completely’ understood. This lack of understanding of all the complex interrelations between objects is what is responsible for the apparent randomness and contingency of events.

The difference we are discussing is similar to the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning. Only because of the vast amount of evidence we can rally can we assert that there probably exists an external reality which behaves in mostly predictable ways. External reality cannot be deduced from perception or using language in any absolute, objective way. Being-in-itself reveals itself by appearing, through appearances.

Being exists to our mind both directly through experience (which is untranslateable) and indirectly through representation--linguistically or conceptually (which is translatable but already is bound by subjective distortion of meaning.) Thus, any introspective search cannot lead to firm knowledge which is certain, nor can manipulating concepts nor arguments in any language lead to absolute certainty. We once again must turn to faith to provide the confidence to at least temporarily abide this unalterable, unresolvable condition.

We must assume the circle resolutely, lovingly, for even though we are in search of it, it is only because the circle exists that we may question at all. Knowledge itself has been under assault since Descartes, but we must resist the nihilistic tendency to assume that external being does not exist, that reality is a meaningless illusion.

It is difficult to take our faith so far as to assert that IF one were to be able to perceive the whole of reality at once, then some sort of ultimate meaning to the entire thing would be obvious and the randomness vanish completely. However, just because certain events or phenomena exhibited unpredictability, from an ultimate standpoint, the results weren’t random in any sense, since they depended causally on the entire history of the universe prior to the event.

This absoluteness of external being-in-itself is what causes despair in the philosophers of existence, for what could be more naked and raw than the object-in-itself, devoid of consciousness and thus of context and meaning? Explode everyday reality, abandon it in a vacuum, and the result is an absurdly random collection of nothing particularly important or interesting, anyway.

All this deconstruction is a conscious effort; taking the deconstruction a step further, we realize that our consciousness is both the beginning and the end of meaning. The meaning of an infinity is a contradiction which is allowed only by faith. We are able to mean that which we do not fully understand, can grasp only in a limited way.

We can express that beyond which we concretely experience, which allows for the expression of an infinite number of possible truths. Though the objective validity of any given alleged piece of truth is always in question, a subjective validation is simply authenticating the expression with your lived experience, which while ultimately untranslatable is a constrained window upon the absolute.

Faith inverts subjectivity and allows the possibility that some of our thoughts and beliefs reflect truth to a significant degree. Relativity is important to remember here; it is less important from ones own perspective that ones beliefs reflect absolute reality than that they reflect the reality with which one is actually confronted with. Knowledge, while infinite, is not beyond our grasp, even though it may be inexpressible.