Sci-Fi

I guess I have more to say about the preface than I realized, because there's another bit I find interesting here:

Following Samuel Butler, we discover Erewhon, signifying at once the originary 'nowhere' and the displaced, disguised, modified and always re-created 'here-and-now'. Neither empirical particularities nor abstract universals: a Cogito for a dissolved self. We believe in a world in which individuations are impersonal, and singularities are pre-individual: the splendour of the pronoun 'one' -whence the science-fiction aspect, which necessarily derives from this Erewhon.

 

Science fiction in yet another sense, one in which the weaknesses become manifest. How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other.

Deleuze mentions in an essay on Hume that he admires the science fiction aspect of his philosophy:

Hume's position is therefore quite peculiar. His empiricism is a sort of science-fiction universe avant la lettre. As in science fiction, one has the impression of a fictive, foreign world, seen by other creatures, but also the presentiment that this world is already ours, and those creatures, ourselves. 

 

...

Hume raises unexpected questions that seem nevertheless familiar: To establish possession of an abandoned city, does a javelin thrown against the door suffice, or must the door be touched by a finger? To what extent can we be owners of the seas? Why is the ground more important than the surface in a juridical system, whereas in painting, the paint is more important than the canvas? 

I really like the idea of thinking of philosophy as a sort of science fiction, a plausible story of possible worlds that of course are just so many distortions and inversions of whatever principles animate our real world.  Ever since reading Nietzsche I've been dismissive of the idea that philosophy ought to be a quest for truth or the queen of the sciences founding all the others on some metaphysical bedrock.  It's really about inventing the story of a world that could be our own.  You imagine what would happen in this world and flesh it out as you go.

I think this idea dovetails particularly nicely with my own interest in the brain and AI.  And I don't mean this just because AI happens to be a perennial theme of regular sci-fi.  One of the "invariant features", so to speak, of all the worlds in which philosophy is being written, is the possibility of writing philosophy.  A metaphysical system that purports to explain the nature of reality but that fails to account for the way in which the system got written down doesn't seem to me to be philosophical at all.  In other words, philosophy as such has to apply to itself, and cannot  leave to the side the question of what thinking is the way science does.  To me it seems natural that one of your first questions as a thinking philosopher is going to be, "how does my thinking work and what other kinds of thinking are there besides mine?"  Hence the AI angle.  Philosophy is required to eat itself.

P.S.  Eventually I wanted to connect the AI line of thinking back to the bolded part of the first quote (the bit about pre-individual singularities).  The point of contact was going to be another quote I had in mind where Deleuze (and Guattari?) talk about "micro-brains".  This takes the idea of AI in the other direction.  Instead of trying to understand and duplicate one big brain, the question "what exactly is thinking" could potentially lead you to see other smaller brains scattered all over the place.  I actually find this a more fruitful direction than contemplating our robot overlords.  Alas, I cannot find that quote.  In the process, I also realized that the connection between pre-individual singularities and micro-brains is promising, but needs some serious work.  Chalk it up to the thrill of live-blogging!