Riffing off a nice post by John at Ktismatics on whether we have direct access to our own minds…

Whenever there’s a discussion about the neuronal vs. the mental, issues of causation and reduction often come up. Can conscious activity be reduced to an explanation of neuronal activity? Does the neuronal level of organization *cause* the level at which qualia are experienced? What form does that causation take?

My stance is that causality is really a much, much looser concept than physical science would make it seem. Over time, physical science has corralled causality into a smaller and smaller area — but that area is occupied by some pretty inscrutable things — things like “forces”, which end up being mostly tautological at a paradigmatic level (“it’s a force because it makes things move — it makes things move because it’s a force”), and metaphorically hinky at the level of theory (gauge bosons as “virtual particles”).

So when we think about the neuronal “causing” the mental, we usually have in mind some sort of physical-science-like efficient causality, because that’s what we see as operating at the molecular level of description that neural networks inhabit.

But the question is — why are there multiple levels of organization at all? Is reality really separated into strata of magnification, with causality operating horizontally within a layer and vertically between layers? If so, are the vertical and horizontal causalities the same *kind* of causality?

This is where reduction comes in. It seems that a lot of people think that if we can describe something at, say, a molecular level, we have reduced it, and we no longer need the description at the higher level, because we’ve explained everything that needs to be explained. Let’s say that we have a particular arrangement of a certain sort of molecules, and we know exactly why the regularity of that arrangement and the nature of the forces between the molecules allow photons to pass through without being absorbed. Have we “reduced” the emergent property of transparency? A scientist would probably say that we have — that the perceptual level of “seeing through” something doesn’t add anything to the explanation.

But that’s just one idea of reduction. Here’s another. Let’s say that we have a game that’s defined by the manipulation of yellow and blue marbles on a grid according to a set of rules. We’re given an initial row, from left to right, of, say, a thousand marbles on the grid, some yellow, some blue — and we’re given eight simple rules about how to place marbles on the next row of the grid. The rules tell us to look at each marble in the row, and place a marble below it with a color that’s based on the marbles directly to the right and left of the marble we’re looking at. For example, a rule might say, “if you’re on a yellow marble with a blue to the right and a yellow to the left, place a blue marble below it”, or “when a yellow marble’s neighbors are both blue, place a yellow marble below it”. It will take five hundred steps, but eventually we will run out of marbles, because the ones on the ends don’t have neighbors, and therefore don’t get marbles placed below them.

So what we have is an extremely simple system with only two entities, eight rules, and 1000 objects. Reductively, we would say that we have fully explained the system, right? We know all of the things that there are (red and blue marbles), all of the possible ways that they can be manipulated (exactly eight ways), and the exact configuration of the entire universe at its inception (a line of 1000 marbles). We know everything there is to know about the system.

Okay. So what if I now asked you to tell me, given a particular row of a thousand marbles and a particular set of eight rules, what the sequence of yellow and blue marbles will be after 250 steps of applying the rules. But wait, there’s a catch — the *only* thing you’re *not* allowed to do in figuring it out is *actually carry out the 250 steps*.

Why this prohibition? Well, the set of rules and the initial lineup of marbles are what constitute the *reduction* of the system. If you actually carry out the rules to find out the configuration after 250 steps, you haven’t *reduced* anything — you are actually *running* the real, unreduced system.

So — is it possible? Can you do it?

The answer is that in some cases, it’s impossible.

Now, many people would say that the example I just gave confuses reduction with predictability. But what if, instead of asking you to predict the sequence of marbles after 250 steps, I asked you to tell me, in a general way, if the rows of marbles produced by following the rules would make a pattern, and, if so, what sorts of features (in general) that pattern would exhibit. Could you do that? The answer, once again, is that in some cases, you couldn’t. Some configurations of marbles and rules produce weird repeating patterns that look like spaceships. The spaceships are not in the rules or the marbles — they emerge from them, but are not explained by them.

What I’m getting at is that although predictability and reduction are not the same thing, they are intimately related and not really separable. Predictability is the only real test we have to tell us if we have explained something fully. Reduction is a way of formulating a prediction about how something will behave.

What do these things have in common? Rachel is working through an installation art project, which in its ‘primitive accumulation’ phase involved canning lots of tomatoes and drying their skins. The following are some incomplete thoughts she’s written pursuant to assembling an actual art work out of her materials. This is a work in progress; she is interested in feedback. Here’s Rachel:

Concepts and Daydreams:

I have 100 jars of tomatoes that I’ve canned. As I’ve been canning (a rather dull process overall) I’ve daydreamed different fictitious scenarios that could result in these 100 jars:

* It’s a science discovery. Archaeologists uncover this stash of primitive food rations and put it on display for the public. Or anthropologists (of the old imperialist regime) discover this tribe of people called “Farmers”. They hypothesize about the tools used, etc. They show video footage of the strange customs. (I watched a documentary about head shrinking Indians of the Amazon that probably prompted this train of thinking.)

* An old woman who obsessively cans to ward off death. (playing with the idea of ritual and superstition)

* A person getting ready for the apocalypse by building and stocking a cold war era type bunker. (This one, and a bit of the one before it are based on my real life experiences with a Holocaust survivor named Helen who I knew as a teen. Helen’s son hired me to “clean” her house, saying that if she couldn’t get her life under control he would put her in a home. I had unique access to Helen’s small, filthy trailer stocked to the ceiling with junk that she just knew would come in handy when the next disaster hit (candles she made out of crayons, stacks of newspaper, magazines, half a room full of sweaters). She also collected animals and strategically left bags of their food around so that if she died they’d have food for a while and not eat her body—something she was really afraid of. Canning 100 jars of tomatoes is something Helen would’ve done if she’d found a good deal on tomatoes. Helen was obsessed with being totally in charge of her world, so to accomplish this she made her world very small—literally the confines of her trailer, which she rarely left. I never did get that house clean.)

* An old woman who copes with her anxieties about death and change by canning everything in her life—including her husband, cat, furniture, clothes, etc. She cans all winter long and by spring has filled her house with jars of household items and sits with them and enjoys how still they are.

These are just the stories I made up while I worked. I’m not sure that any of them go anywhere.

That said, I’m kind of into the idea of treating the cans and the skins as science objects. One thing I have yet to do for the jars is label them. I’ve been putting this off because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. I could do this in a science format with the latin names and weights of things. I could put the skins in little sample jars and weigh them and label them.

I also think it would be interesting perhaps to make a Helen-type bunker filled with crap. Obsessive amounts of junk. What I’m interested in is nostalgia and how it is a form of controlling our worlds. Helen was extremely nostalgic about her things, no matter how junky they were. There was a reason to every single thing in there.

Overall:

I’m realizing that it’s not specifically farming that I’m interested in but control, attempts to control our worlds and those in it, and the anxiety that accompanies this desire and inevitable failure. Farming is a tool or language available to me to discuss these concepts because of my background and affection for farming culture.

End Rachel. Readers, any thoughts?

Collating two nice clear instances of emergence. The first is from xkcd, courtesy of hyper tiling. The alt-text is the kicker, but you may have to click through to get it:

The second is from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), courtesy of Ktismatics:

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.

“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”

Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

A little Orientalism here, but it’s Calvino so everything gets its exotic turn.

One of the criticisms that’s been leveled at the new philosophy is that it is incoherent. I am neither qualified nor motivated to investigate whether this is true in a rigorous conceptual sense — Frames/Sing has taken some good cracks at it. But without getting into that I wanted to trouble or at least expand what we might mean by coherence. I’m going to be reinventing some wheels here, bear with me.

As Kvond says in the linked post, ideas can be coherent in the very narrow way of making sense or matching up theoretical parts without having “applicable coherence.”

There is a thin line between “incoherent” and “the supposed coherence between concepts does not do the explanatory job”. “The hand of Zeus makes it rain” is both coherent (at least I understand what the sentence means), and also incoherent as an explanation. All the explanatory connectives are missing.

Kvond does a lot of heavy lifting here by distinguishing what we might call ‘internal’ coherence from ‘external’ coherence. Internal coherence self-referentially satisfies the requirement of a wittgensteinian language game, that is, it makes sense once one knows the rules. In this way “the hand of Zeus makes it rain” would have been fully coherent to an ancient Greek as both a sentence and an explanation. External coherence looks outward to see if the game makes sense in relation to anything but its own internal logic — by predicting the coming of rains, for example, rather than accounting for them post hoc. In the same way we might ask whether there’s anything (or perhaps enough) to learn about how business and finance actually work from playing Monopoly or reading The Wealth of Nations.

The externalization of coherence has barely begun here, however. Once the standard is not just logical consistency of concepts to themselves but their correspondence to some outside benchmark (which of course has to be pulled inside somehow to serve this function, but that’s another discussion), the barn door is open and all kinds of relations become available as possible moments of coherence.

Applied or applicable coherences, those relations that are actually established between concept things and other things (alliances and assemblages, for Latour), include the ways that ideas cohere with environments, resources, modes of production and so on. We may say here that ideas are coherent with or ‘fit’ their times, and become effectual insofar as this is so. Saying that Graham Harman’s philosophy is homologous to speculative capitalism is this sort of claim.

Ideas may also be affectually coherent by assembling with feelings, providing conceptual referents for them or enabling relationships based on them. In some feminist and anti-colonialist work this is asserted as a higher quality of coherence than aridly rationalist rigor. And ideas may be aesthetically or hedonically coherent by assembling with habits, dispositions, tastes and preferences, which if we follow Bourdieu may be fields within larger political-economic assemblages. These modes of external coherence are not mutually exclusive.

So from these perspectives the orienting premise is that any idea that achieves publicity is likely to be coherent according to both some internal coherence (its language game, perhaps incipient) and to a network of external coherences. The questions then are, coherent how, with what/whom, and for what purpose(s)?

In the good old days we called this sort of questioning ‘ideology critique’, naively confident that we could find one master coherence from which to judge all the others.

From Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, p. 50:

One time, I had a job with the department store Abraham & Straus, in their ’systems’ department. There were four or five of us under one director, way up in the attic of the building. There was some dispute with a salesman about which system for making change for the customers was the faster: the Lamson Conveyor or the cash register. So, I was stationed on the main floor with a stop watch, counting the time it took customers to pay and get their change with either method. I was bareheaded and was often interrupted by people asking for their way out or for the nighties department. To stop this, I took to wearing a bowler. This mystified everybody, including the house detective. I guess I left before concluding on the Lamson Conveyor or the cash register, but after a discussion with the boss–a rather heated one. He had become crabby after being flooded with inquiries:

“Who is this man with a bowler, a gray herringbone suit, a mustache, and a stop watch?”

Exact timing can be hard to ascertain in Calder’s engaging anecdotes, but this would have been in the early 1920s, during a knockabout period after his graduation from college and in the context, evident here, of widespread fascination with scientific management or ‘taylorism’.

As we now know from supermarkets, the answer was 'both'.

Calder’s laconic delivery is a nice counterpoint to his engineer’s eye and artist’s sensibilities. This is the guy who defined the field of kinetic art and who elsewhere in the book describes a Shriners parade as a ‘human mobile’. What I like here is his fine sense of irony about the moving parts in this human situation that defy reduction to a linear control system. The bowler is not normally found in the inventory of rebels and saboteurs, but it’s interesting to see here on a micro-level how little pressure is needed to disrupt semiotic systems and deflect, for a moment at least, the clumsier projects of power.

We were talking this morning and decided that the ability to turn little things into big things would make an awesome superpower. In the graphic novel its origin would be a secret behaviorist experiment gone terribly wrong, releasing drama radiation that transforms our hero/ine from a mild-mannered mensch with a good sense of perspective into a molehill-busting mountain-maker.

Who knew a Geiger counter could detect drama radiation?

This is just a sketch – I could use some help with character development. Incidentally, one of my stupidly proudest possessions is the first dozen or so issues of the Incredible Hulk comic book, including this origin scene, which I avidly collected as they were translated and released in Italy in the early ’70s.

At the conference I met Jeffrey B. Perry, whose work is on the history and consequences of white supremacism. Jeffrey is currently doing a lecture circuit with his talk and slide presentation on “Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918.” He is at UMass-Boston this afternoon and will be at Temple University in Philadelphia on Thursday. See his website for details.

Although I’ve got some self-taught familiarity with the more famous players in the history of critical race theory, I had not heard of Hubert Harrison until running into Jeffrey between conference sessions. The Columbia UP page for Jeffrey’s book on Harrison offers this compelling capsule:

Hubert Harrison was an immensely skilled writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist who, more than any other political leader of his era, combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a coherent political radicalism. Harrison’s ideas profoundly influenced “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his synthesis of class and race issues is a key unifying link between the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement: the labor- and civil-rights-based work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist platform associated with Malcolm X.

The foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician of the Socialist Party of New York, Harrison was also the founder of the “New Negro” movement, the editor of Negro World, and the principal radical influence on the Garvey movement. He was a highly praised journalist and critic (reportedly the first regular Black book reviewer), a freethinker and early proponent of birth control, a supporter of Black writers and artists, a leading public intellectual, and a bibliophile who helped transform the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research in Black culture.

Jeffrey has also edited and introduced a collection of Harrison’s writings among numerous other scholarly contributions. His is clearly an extraordinary labor of love and honor.

We met up when my early Sunday morning panel was letting out and his mid Sunday morning talk was about to begin. I was struck by his passion and immediate self-identification as an independent, working-class scholar. I was also struck by his assumption that he had been placed disadvantageously on the program because he was an outsider bringing unwelcome knowledge. He saw a pattern of marginalization there. In contrast, I thought my paper had gotten dumped into the Sunday whatsits (Sunday is when most conference participants leave, so those panels are often loosely organized and sparsely attended) because I had submitted it solo and it hadn’t matched up at a glance with the main themes of the conference.

I suggested to Jeffrey that putting together a coherent panel and targeting it to the conference rubric might be a way to achieve a more favorable placement and reception for his important work. His dismissal of this unsolicited advice was firm and monosyllabic.

I’m glad to know about Hubert Harrison and grateful for Jeffrey’s work.

This morning at the Rethinking Marxism conference we went to a panel on “agrifood alternatives” (F6 on your programs). The talks were interesting, and the Greek guy actually talked to the audience about what he knows rather than reading a paper, which was nice. I had to step out for the one on family farm feudalism, but Rachel, who grew up on a family farm in family farm country, said she got it wrong by reading the organization of farm labor through a formalistic egalitarian ethic rather than understanding the trade-offs, reciprocities, constraints and affordances of the cultural form ethnographically.

One of the issues for the panelists was the sustainability of independent organic farming. There seemed to be some agreement between the two practical panelists that smallholder farming was only sustainable with substantial exchange networks enabling distribution of knowledge, goods and labor. This has historically been true, of course; either holdings are large enough to integrate essential resources and functions, or smaller units have to find ways to pool. Over lunch we talked about things like churches, Granges, barn raisings, guilds, Rotary Clubs and so on as this kind of partial or comprehensive networking institution for local communities. Tocqueville’s ’secondary powers’ and Durkheim’s ‘professional ethics and civic morals’ are examples in different contexts of the idea that there have to be ways of organizing community effort and resource between the household and the state.

There’s both some mythology and some truth to the idea that these kind of networking processes were self-organizing in traditional agrarian societies. When we say “capitalism” we are often using a shorthand to designate the kinds of networks that are created by markets. Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ points to a dynamic that is at least in principle self-organizing, albeit manipulable by savvy operators. The challenge for marxists and other critics of either system is to figure out how to make network formation more intentional and egalitarian, without losing the affordances (stability, prosperity) of the old self-organizing networks.

Off to another panel, on the economics of art.

As I’ve said recently I quite agree with Duncan that “if intellectuals want to be politically useful in some way, as intellectuals, some of the more useful things they can do are 1) provide an adequate analysis of current social, economic and political conditions; 2) start generating concrete proposals for social, political and economic alternatives.” If we take these to be worthy goals, the blog medium is promising for both.

It should be noted that marxists have historically been reluctant to do 2), going back to the young Marx’s scathing and perhaps counterproductive dismissals of the ‘utopian socialists’ with their neat little plans for ideal worlds. In this sense although the communist telos remains definitive in marxism and creates some distinctive categorical limitations, marxism and ANT have been consonant in a theory of practice for which networks and structures must be actively assembled rather than posited as givens.

It is possible to extract just this sort of theory of practice from Gramsci’s journalism and prison notes; he does some of that work himself, although presumably his plan to turn the Notebooks into a finished text for the ages included more such. But the thing to remember is that Gramsci’s practice was praxis (it was theorized), so extracting the theory from it and setting it aside as a thing in itself is not (yet) gramscian praxis. Gramsci’s theory of practice emerges from and depends upon its actual deployments, in the same sense that Bourdieu resisted extractions of his theory from his concrete studies. There’s a certain amount of making it up as we go inherent in ANT/Gramscian praxis; as the Notebooks show, everything is in play, from popular literature to philosophy and from party politics to the organization of work.

Ultimately the point I want to get at with all this ANT/Gramsci stuff, and it may not be all that new or interesting, is that neither ANT nor Gramsci authorize a practice oriented toward killing the werewolf with the silver bullet. There’s no single, focused problem, nor is there a single, focused solution. Of course this does not mean that ‘it’s all good’ as we go about the business of making the world a more pleasant place, but it does suggest that a flexible, recursive distribution of analysis and action is more likely to move us along, because it’s the only thing that ever does.

Because of the way the blog medium arose out of the interactive affordances of the internet, each blog, post and comment creates a node in a possible network of relations and alliances. Or they can just sit there doing nothing but taking up space.

Whether networks actually come of blogs depends to some degree on their content, and to a large degree on the work of authors and readers to create, maintain, intensify and extend links to other nodes. One of the first things I figured out is if I didn’t want to be just another odd online hermit muttering alone in my own cave, I’d have to go out and drum up business by finding other blogs with dimensions of affinity and making comments suggesting connections. (This can be a pleasure in its own right, of course.) Sometimes folks follow the trail of breadcrumbs and sometimes they don’t, sometimes they like what they find at the end and sometimes not. Over time, though, there tends to be an accumulation of readership and participation.

To shift metaphor, a blog is a bit like a gravitic mass. If it just sits in one place its pull is limited to the stuff that happens to wander by from the depths of outer space. But if it gets on a trajectory and visits other star systems it has a better chance of encountering capturable bodies, ranging from close orbiters to eccentric comet flybys; or even to get caught itself in a multi-gravitic system, like a group blog or a stable multiblog network. So anyway, dynamic motion and a certain weight of presence are important; connections don’t just happen because we’re nice people and our moms like us.

(For some reason Moby seems to think being made of stars helps ya get hot babes.) Btw, from the standpoint of this analysis the current series of posts has been a fail, attracting very little traffic or commentary [thanks to you who did!] and no links. So far Dead Voles has had its biggest days with posts that can be interpreted as gossip. This too is community-building, albeit negatively. Rather than moaning about this the next step might be to reflect on what it is about that communicative mode that attracts attention and participation so well, then find a way to inflect the dynamic for good purposes.

As I’ve already mentioned, the blog medium is not well-suited to enforcing orthodoxy, but it can work well to assemble alliances of affinity. It’s a good way to find and hook up with people who share interests and agendas. This is both a strength and a weakness. Communities’ tendency to create and maintain narrow, exclusionary biases can just be amplified and propagated. But if the community affinities remain open to negotiation and revision there’s an opportunity for the whole to become emergently more than the sum of the parts. I’m afraid I’m not saying much more than the creation myth of Web 2.0 here….