In chapter 8, Ruyer starts to shift from convincing us that we need to posit an ideal realm of finalist activity that supplements our usual materialist explanation to explaining a bit more about how this realm works. The first question he tackles is one as old as philosophy -- the mind body relation. How can the unity of an equipotential surface like the brain or the embryo coexist with the multiplicity of parts that come to instantiate it? In particular, how can the unity of our moment to moment subjective experience relate to the multiplicity of the objective content shown in that experience. Any dualism is inevitably plagued by the question of how the two qualitatively distinct sides can interact. While we have called these sides 'ideal' and 'material', the real distinction for Ruyer lies not in these names, but in the functioning of each realm. The ideal realm is defined by the immediate unity we see in any end-directed activity. It operates through final causes. By contrast, the material realm is multiple and operates exclusively through the step-by-step linear billiard ball model Aristotle called material causality. So 'mind' and 'body' are merely shorthands for 'all-at-once' and 'step-by-step'. The mind body problem is then a question of how final and material causes are related. Ruyer has spent 7 chapters focused on the insufficiency and contradiction of explanations of conscious activity based on material causes alone. But his insistence on the reality of final causes means that we now always have two mutually exclusive options competing as explanations of our experience.
The examination of the facts forces us to rethink the Cartesian break between a thinking soul and a mechanical body. The opposition, as it emerges from recent observations and experiments, is instead between (1) the organism as a set of tools or a set of organs insofar as they are tools and (2) consciousness (primary or secondary, organic or cerebral) that assembles multiple elements in such as way as to turn them into "amboceptors" in a causal chain and that thematically oversees the operation of organic machines, regulates them in case of lesion or failure, and thus gives to organic structures the property of equipotentiality. (NF, 76)
It's only at this point that Ruyer bites the bullet and announces himself as an idealist or 'finalist' monist. He argues that our belief in material causes and material stuff is an 'objective illusion' caused by the conditions of our knowledge, and not an objective feature of the universe in a metaphysical sense. This is obviously the type of massive metaphysical claim that I think goes beyond questions of proof. Ruyer has certainly motivated this perspective with examples and arguments. But at this point I think it's more productive to put aside any possible objections and simply try to sympathetically understand how a worldview that puts mind -- and not just human mind -- first would work.
This solution can be formulated in a few words: the problem posed by the duality of consciousness and the body, consciousness-organism and body-organism, is illusory for the excellent reason that there is no body. The "body" is the byproduct of the perception of a being by another being. The perceived being is perceived by definition as an object, in the etymological sense of the term. It appears as independent of the observer, and this leads him to substantialize it. This substantialized object is then called a "body." (NF, 77)
The idea is that the only real things are those we are calling 'mental' -- unities that have an immediate "self-enjoyment" or "self-survey". These things hold together on their own in the manner of our I-consciousness or the embryo, which means they are not things so much as end-directed activities. Because these are a kind of instantaneous ideal activity, they have no parts, properly speaking. In a way, they are conscious only of themselves (in relation to a goal as we'll see in the next chapter) and not of any external object. So not only is Ruyer reducing everything to an ideal realm of consciousness, but he's asserting that the real foundation of all consciousness is self consciousness. Reality is simply collection of all these immediately self-conscious, or auto-subjective forms that maintain themselves and strive to realize some end in themselves. So far Ruyer has only given the brain and the embryo as examples of these forms, but we'll soon see him start to include atoms and water molecules, and anything else that has a unitary self-maintaining form -- ie. all those things that we would characterize as "more than the sum of their parts". This is to say that the ideal units of Ruyer's scheme are not just things like humans and perhaps those animals we would normally reflexively self-conscious, or that would recognize themselves in a mirror, but anything that acts in a way that seems to imply that it knows that it is.
While Ruyer resists calling this a flavor or panpsychism (pg. 74) because that term suggests that these unities are all modeled off the human psyche, he is clearly suggesting that the universe is composed of many individual 'minds'. Somehow this thesis still seems shocking to me despite the fact that I find it pretty hard, intellectually speaking, to see why believing that reality is at base material should somehow be more natural or convincing than believing that it is 'spiritual'. Nevertheless if we reject the existence of any objective material particles and accept these innately subjective unities as the only building blocks of reality, we are still left with the problem of why it appears to us, as one of these unities that directly knows itself, that the world is filled with all kinds of lifeless material stuff. Fortunately, this 'hard problem in reverse' actually turns out to be quite a bit easier to solve. As Ruyer has argued, it's tough to see how meaningless causal interactions among purely material bodies could ever somehow magic up a new dimension of meaning, even if we claim that this dimension is illusory. But if we grant that there are many 'subjective atoms', each one a source of meaning and self-actuating activity and intelligence on its own, then it becomes relatively easy to explain where the illusion of materiality comes from. Each subjective unity is really only conscious of itself, of the inside which composes its entire world. So when it encounters another, distinct, subjective unity, it can only experience this subject as an outside, as a pure, dumb, object, as non-self. Materiality simply reflects the limits of each subjective unity.
For this reason Ruyer introduces a distinction between knowledge, which is ultimately always a species of intuitive or internal self-knowledge, and observation, which is a description of what's happening at the 'surface' of the subjective form, the place where it touches other subjective forms. In the case of conscious human subjectivity, this latter obviously corresponds to how our brain responds to shifting sense objects. The brain is an example of an equipotential, autosubjective surface that knows (or better yet, "is a knowing of") itself from within, but also observes objects of sensation outside itself. This is why what we call "sensation" has both an objective and a subjective component.
In everyday life, sensation is at once, indissociably, observation and knowledge, a physical event and an act of knowledge. It is a physical event insofar as the sensory organ is a system that can in principle be replaced by an artificial device; it is an act of knowledge insofar as the living tissue of the organ or of the corresponding cerebral area—or rather what appears as organic tissue to an external observer—forms part of the equipotential and autosubjective domain that is the very reality of the knowing being. Sensation is an act of knowledge and not of pure observation, insofar as it is the act of a being already in the world, capable of grasping significations and of having a sense of the "other"—a sense as primitive as the intuition of its own existence. Pure observation would never be knowledge, but only event, exchange of energy. Pure knowledge would remain virtual, because it would provide no details about the "other." It is the combination of observation and knowledge in sensation—in other words, of the living being's primary, autosubjective, organic consciousness and of physical events on the sensory organ—that allows a "detailed knowledge" of other beings. (NF, 81)
As a result, what we usually call our body is just an encounter with a domain outside of ourselves, whose principle of unity we don't grasp for the simple reason that our unity doesn't encompass everything (though by hypothesis, it corresponds to some unity as part of some other subject, in this case our organism subject rather than our cognitive subject). It's important to note that this distinction knowledge and observation, ideal and material, is not an epistemological one based only on the limits of our human autosubjectivity, but one Ruyer consider as real metaphysical distinction (though, oddly, one side of this real distinction only points to illusions). He approvingly quotes Betram Russel's comment that:
... the distinction between mental and physical (in the sense of "material") "belongs to theory of knowledge, not to metaphysics." (NF, 80)
But the theory of knowledge Ruyer has in mind here is a unique one. The knowledge in question isn't only human, but the knowledge that any subject has. An object that appears as material to one subjectivity might be entirely contained as an aspect or part of the finalist activity of another. It's tempting to say that, relative to any single subject, material existence is completely real, and yet if we were to occupy a divine perspective, we would see that there is no such thing as material existence, since all real things are part of some subjective unity. However, I'm not sure this is correct just yet, since it seems to hypothesize the reality, and hence subjectivity, of a space that contains all the other subjectivities. That is, this borders on being a theological question.
Ruyer then spends the rest of the chapter explaining both why we believe that there are other subjective unities outside our self and also why we shouldn't attribute subjective unity to just anything outside our self. The crucial distinction is between forms that our self-maintaining and self-repairing, organic forms that 'know themselves' generally speaking, and what Ruyer calls aggregates, machines, or crowd phenomena. Objects that fall outside of our direct experience (essentially all objects other than ourselves) may or may not be subjective unities. Though we can never tell for sure, some of these objects might be subjects, with a self-reinforcing unity of their own. Others though, for example crowds of people that behave like a fluid (NF, 84), or clouds or waves, might appear to be bound together as objects of our perception, but on further inspection, these bonds are only superficial and don't constitute a real subjective reality. Objects bound together from the outside in this way are empty phenomena -- they are not real in-themselves because they are not real for-themselves. Instead, the ontological starting point must always be a subjective unity that is simultaneously in-itself and for-itself. Even the simplest real thing is already a subject.
Every being, every center of activity, is its own subject and possesses itself. Every being that is not an aggregate, every "organic" being in the broad sense in which Whitehead uses this term—which also includes the individualities of physics and chemistry—is a form, that is, directly self-possession, "for-itself" as well as "in-itself." Brute, blind, and deaf existence has to be understood starting from this presence of forms that possess themselves, in the same way that the laws of classical physics can be rediscovered from the data of microphysics. They derive from these data by virtue of the multiplicity of beings which, having become foreign to one another, only touch by their edges, superficially, and only act on one another step by step; they can thus form clusters, processions, or crowds incapable of autoconduction. (NF, 86)
In the next chapters, Ruyer will begin the difficult task of explaining how we end up with such a multiplicity of beings when we begin with only simple unities. We might expect him to assert that all these unities were all present from the beginning, but the way Ruyer has used the embryo as his guiding metaphor suggests instead that they derive from a single unity via differentiation. Which is to say that a single unity somehow "others" itself through its development.
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Two tangents related to the distinction of knowledge and observation.While this distinction at first seems to imply some objectionably vague 'intuitive' type of knowledge whose only object is a sense of self, the more I reflect on it, the more I like it.
For one, it separates and clarifies the two sides of the feedback loop involved in predictive processing or enaction. The top down aspect of predictive processing is all about modeling or guessing what the world might well be like, predictions which are always based on what we want to get out of it. Priors are all about the values, significations, ends, of the organism -- they say more about us than the world. But we test whether these priors fit the circumstance through observation. Often, proponents of the Bayesian brain hypothesis describe priors as 'models' of the world, and assume that their goal is to accurately represent it. People rarely seem to discuss who these models are for, and what exactly would make one physical system count as a model of another. But the whole reason we have certain priors, the whole point of knowing how likely it is that the world is in state A, is that this state is significant for the organism -- it makes a difference. Generating prior probabilities must be a process of learning about the world and must be a calculation incarnated in some neural mechanism. Nevertheless, what we want to know the prior probability of must come from some sense of its importance of relevance. That is, the selection of the states that we want to construct priors for seems to act like a form of intuitive self knowledge. Of course, we can push this selection back by claiming that these cerebral states are 'really just' what our organism wants, and those desires in turn are 'really just' what the species wants, itself 'really just' a product of the magic of self-replicating DNA, etc ... But the end of this chain is always pure chance, which as we've seen is incapable of explaining value and is contradicted in the very attempt to grasp it.
Second, this distinction also helps to make sense of the puzzling relationship we have to the body during meditation. If the mind changes, so does the disposition of the body, and even what counts as the body. Our normal sense of self-identity is intimately tied to the way our cerebral consciousness is geared towards moving us around the world and manipulating external objects. The brain is the center that controls and integrates these objects -- the technical individual in Simondon's terms -- and immediately knows itself as this significant unity. These are my limbs and my tools controlled for my purposes. What happens then when we systematically turn the brain away from its customary contents and customary surveying activity? What happens when we do nothing, and let the sense of that center drop away? We sense a strange shift in our consciousness, one that people frequently characterize as a broadening or widening. And frequently we sense a corresponding shift in the sense of the body. It may expand, or distend, or at the limit even simply dissolve along with any sense of our conceptual self consciousness. I'm not sure what's going on there -- perhaps we are able to put our cerebral consciousness into touch with the organic consciousness from which it differentiated, or perhaps we are further differentiating the cerebral consciousness -- but the fact that our self identification covaries with our body identification suggests that these are two sides of the same coin. Ruyer's scheme accommodates this naturally. If one subjective unity has greater scope than another, if it encompasses more within itself, it will naturally find less outside itself, thus altering what it encounters as a body. In fact, Ruyer even provides a thought experiment which inadvertently makes this point by mimicking the traditional immobility of meditation.
This line of thinking brings us to a tricky question however. So far, Ruyer seems to have identified his autosubjective unities with our typical everyday I-consciousness. That is, we, I mean I, the royal we, the editorial, your friend and humble narrator of FPiPE, are a subjective unity. But this consciousness at least appears to be varying all the time. My experience changes from moment to moment, though each instant of it is presented as a unity in itself. Is my subjective unity then instantaneous? If so, are the instants connected, and how? Or are they like moments in the development of an embryo that have shifting contents but an overall unity of trajectory? Does this imply that only my whole life is the subjective unity? But then where does it start and stop? And what do we make of the possibility of a spiritual development that suggests we can transform to the point of transcending what once at least appeared to be an existing unity? These questions are of course closely related to words like "scope" and "more" and "encompass" that I used above without defining them. How can one subjective unity be 'bigger' than another? And for that matter, how do things that appear so navel-gazingly closed on themselves even interact with one another? Ruyer has yet to approach any of these questions.
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Second, this distinction also helps to make sense of the puzzling relationship we have to the body during meditation. If the mind changes, so does the disposition of the body, and even what counts as the body. Our normal sense of self-identity is intimately tied to the way our cerebral consciousness is geared towards moving us around the world and manipulating external objects. The brain is the center that controls and integrates these objects -- the technical individual in Simondon's terms -- and immediately knows itself as this significant unity. These are my limbs and my tools controlled for my purposes. What happens then when we systematically turn the brain away from its customary contents and customary surveying activity? What happens when we do nothing, and let the sense of that center drop away? We sense a strange shift in our consciousness, one that people frequently characterize as a broadening or widening. And frequently we sense a corresponding shift in the sense of the body. It may expand, or distend, or at the limit even simply dissolve along with any sense of our conceptual self consciousness. I'm not sure what's going on there -- perhaps we are able to put our cerebral consciousness into touch with the organic consciousness from which it differentiated, or perhaps we are further differentiating the cerebral consciousness -- but the fact that our self identification covaries with our body identification suggests that these are two sides of the same coin. Ruyer's scheme accommodates this naturally. If one subjective unity has greater scope than another, if it encompasses more within itself, it will naturally find less outside itself, thus altering what it encounters as a body. In fact, Ruyer even provides a thought experiment which inadvertently makes this point by mimicking the traditional immobility of meditation.
... man is constituted in such a way that he can be in a relation of observation or even in a "social relation" with himself. He sees his arms and hands extended before him, and he can speak to them like Lady Macbeth; he sees most of his body when he is seated or when he examines himself in a mirror. But the fact remains that if it were possible to conceive a human being living alone, without a mirror, with an immobilized head, incapable of looking at or touching himself, we do not see how such a being could have the curious idea of considering himself as double and as composed of consciousness and of a material body. (NF, 77)
This line of thinking brings us to a tricky question however. So far, Ruyer seems to have identified his autosubjective unities with our typical everyday I-consciousness. That is, we, I mean I, the royal we, the editorial, your friend and humble narrator of FPiPE, are a subjective unity. But this consciousness at least appears to be varying all the time. My experience changes from moment to moment, though each instant of it is presented as a unity in itself. Is my subjective unity then instantaneous? If so, are the instants connected, and how? Or are they like moments in the development of an embryo that have shifting contents but an overall unity of trajectory? Does this imply that only my whole life is the subjective unity? But then where does it start and stop? And what do we make of the possibility of a spiritual development that suggests we can transform to the point of transcending what once at least appeared to be an existing unity? These questions are of course closely related to words like "scope" and "more" and "encompass" that I used above without defining them. How can one subjective unity be 'bigger' than another? And for that matter, how do things that appear so navel-gazingly closed on themselves even interact with one another? Ruyer has yet to approach any of these questions.
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