For all you TL;DR fags

[Veilside]

Scott Bakker, “The End of the World As We Knew It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse”


INTRODUCTION

I need to begin by saying that I am a writer, not an academic, and certainly not a researcher. And if this wasn’t enough for you to sprinkle a little sceptical salt across the salad of ideas I will be presenting, you should know that I write not literary fiction, but the lowest form of commercial fiction short of Harlequin romances, epic fantasy. Given that epic fantasy was the genre most likely to be dismissed or lampooned by academic specialists, by ‘serious people in the know,’ I figured that was where the action had to be. Because I think we’re trapped in a game theory nightmare, because I think that we–whatever we are–are doomed even if the technological optimists are right, I see myself as a ‘post-posterity writer,’ as part of the first generation of writers who cannot pretend that subsequent generations will redeem the esotericism of their works. The only literature I’m interested in, indeed the only literature I think has positive social value, is literature that reaches beyond the narrow circle of the educated classes, and so reaches those who do not already share the bulk of a writer’s values and attitudes. Literature that actually argues, actually provokes, rather than doing so virtually in the imaginations of the like-minded.

Living literature.

One of the downsides of being kicked out of your philosophy PhD program is that you can no longer avail yourself of the many self-congratulatory myths provided by the academy. I’ve had to make up new ones. So I’ve become exceedingly fond of seeing myself as a ‘thinker.’ As much as I would love to put a capital T on the term, I’ve yet to summon the hubris to do so. But even still, I’ve been telling myself that the world needs crackpots, and that institutions like yours, cleaving to outdated pseudo-cognitive scruples, are dedicated to rubbing us out. You see, I really am free to think whatever the hell I want, so long as I continue telling rip-roaring yarns. I can pursue any and all the ideas that used to cause me so many institutional and interpersonal headaches when I was still pursuing my degree.

So I’m going to write as I think a thinking writer should write, as someone who can perhaps offer a fresh perspective precisely because they are an institutional outsider, unconstrained by the various path dependencies that so often deliver us to dead ends.

And as a writer and thinker both, the thing I am most interested in is this… this very moment now…
Whatever the hell it is.

NEUROPATH

I came up with the idea for my last book, Neuropath, in the course of several conversations with my wife. She’s never particularly cared for epic fantasy as a genre, not even the kind that features lawn ornaments for characters, so I thought it would be nice to write something in her preferred ‘guilty pleasure’ genre, the psycho-thriller. I had recently finished teaching a Pop Culture course where, given my growing contempt for semiotics, I decided to take an evolutionary biological approach, to look at mass mainstream culture as a modern prosthesis for various aspects of our stone age minds. So my head was swimming with nifty analogies and formulations.

We thought we were the centre of the universe–science showed us wrong. We thought we were struck in God’s image–science showed us wrong. We still think we’re the great ‘meaning maker’–and now science seems to be showing us wrong, that this is simply another conceit of our limited perspective.

What an awesome premise for a hack-and-slash sexploitation piece.

The idea was to write something set in a near-future where now nascent technologies of the brain had reached technical, and more importantly, social maturity, a time where the crossroads facing us–the utter divergence of knowledge and experience–had become a matter of daily fact. A time when governments regularly use non-invasive neurosurgical techniques in interrogations. A time when retail giants use biometric surveillance to catalogue their customers, and to insure that their employees continually smile.

A time after the apocalypse.

Truth be told, this talk represents something of a homecoming for me–I am extremely grateful to Nandita Biswas-Mellamphy and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism for affording me this opportunity. Neuropath represents both how far I have and have not travelled from the things I once believed as a student here. Man, did I think I was a radical badass. I’ve migrated from an odd brand of post-structuralism to an odd brand of contextualism to a downright bizarre species of sceptical naturalism. I am half mad for interdisciplinarity.

Which is why I offer this general discussion of the novel’s philosophical underpinnings, both as a cautionary tale and an act of provocation.

You are not so radical as you think. In fact, you are nothing at all.

THE ARGUMENT AND THE ARGUMENTS

Ostensibly, the narrative of Neuropath is structured around something called ‘The Argument,’ which is simply that humans are fundamentally biomechanical, such that intentionality can only be explained away. Rather than enter the conceptual jungle of the determinism/compatibilism debate–where interpretative ambiguity and ‘death by a thousand qualifications’ allows every position to think themselves right–I try to steer the dilemma away from intractable metaphysical grounds. The dilemma simply does not need guesses regarding materialism or the fundamental nature of causation or what have you to bite. Whatever a mechanism is ‘fundamentally,’ it obviously strikes us as incompatible with any number of intentional concepts. The Argument is something that people tend to ‘get’ even in the absence of specialized training, such as the kind we all suffer.

Personally, I stumbled onto it as a fourteen year old.

But aside from the Argument, which I don’t think requires rehearsing here, the narrative presents several secondary arguments, which taken as a whole seem to paint mind and meaning into an exceedingly difficult corner.

The first is a straightforward pessimistic induction. Historically, science tends to replace intentional explanations of natural phenomena with functional explanations. Since humans are a natural phenomena we can presume, all things being equal, that science will continue in the same vein, that intentional phenomena are simply the last of the ancient delusions soon to be debunked. Of course, it seems pretty clear that all things are not equal, that humans, that consciousness in particular, is decidedly not one more natural phenomena among others.

The second involves what might be called ‘Cognitive Closure FAPP.’ This argument turns on the established fact that humans are out and out stupid, that the only thing that makes us seem smart is that our nearest competitors are still sniffing each other’s asses to say hello. In the humanities in particular, we seem to forget that science is an accomplishment, and a slow and painful one at that. The corollary of this, of course, is that humans are chronic bullshitters. I’m still astounded at how after decades of rhetoric regarding critical thinking, despite millennia of suffering our own stupidity, despite pretty much everything you see on the evening news, our culture has managed to suppress the bare fact of our cognitive shortcomings, let alone consider it any sustained fashion. Out of the dozen or so instructors of practical reasoning courses that I have met, not one of them has done any reading on the topic.

The fact is we all suffer from cognitive egocentrism. We all seem to intuitively assume that we have won what I call the ‘Magical Belief Lottery.’ We cherry pick confirming evidence and utterly overlook disconfirming evidence. We automatically assume that our sources are more reliable than the sources cited by others. We think we are more intelligent than we in fact are. We rewrite memories to minimize the threat of inconsistencies. We mistake claims repeated three or more times as fact. We continually revise our beliefs to preempt in-group criticism. We regularly confabulate. We congenitally use our conclusions to determine the cogency of our premises. The list goes on and on, believe you me. Add to this the problem of Interpretative Underdetermination, the simple fact that our three pound brains are so dreadfully overmatched by the complexities of the world…

Maybe we will discover Adorno’s ‘Messianic moment’–more importantly, maybe we already have. But the fact is we simply lack the capacity to collectively recognize it. As Richard Dawkins is prone to point out in his interviews, the thing that distinguishes scientists is that even if they disagree, they do tend to agree on what would change their minds.

We don’t.

This is what cripples the pre-emptive and ‘separate but equal’ approaches that were my favourite theoretical security blankets back when I was first a Heideggerean and then a Wittgensteinian. In the first instance, I was inclined to believe that science, since it lacked the conceptual resources to examine its own assumptions, was simply a kind of bad philosophy in desperate need of diagnostic interpretation to straighten itself out. In the second instance, I was inclined to think that science was simply another language game which, despite the obvious power of its domain specific normative yardsticks, didn’t necessarily carry reductive water in other language games.

Now, I no longer pretend to know What Science Is. Maybe it is a kind of bad philosophy. Maybe it is a kind of language game or normative context or whatever your unexplained explainer happens to be. But since we are such theoretical bunglers outside the institutional confines of science as a matter of fact, it strikes me as more than a little inconsistent to use exclusive commitments to any of these speculative interpretations to then condition my commitments to scientific claims–a little too like using a cognitive Ted Bundy’s testimony to convict a cognitive Mother Theresa.

Some people belief the earth is flat. Some people believe the earth is young. Some believe that the earth is hollow and that Hitler hides within it, waiting for the day to sort things out. Still others believe the earth is a social construct. Beliefs are so cheap it’s amazing they don’t sell them at Walmart. Cognitive Closure FAPP, the fact that we are theoretical half-wits outside of science, is what forces the issue, what closes the sophistical door.

What warrants a long, hard, and most importantly, honest look at the troubling implications of science.

CONSCIOUSNESS AS COIN TRICK: THE BLIND BRAIN HYPOTHESIS

What if we’ve been duped, not simply here and there, but all the way down, when it comes to experience? What if consciousness were some bizarre kind of hoax?

The final secondary argument offered in the novel is based on something called the ‘Blind Brain Hypothesis.’ Consciousness is so strange, so little understood, that anything might result from the current research in neuroscience and cognitive science. We could literally discover that we are little more than epiphenomenal figments, dreams that our brains have cooked up in the absence of any viable alternatives. Science is ever the cruel stranger, the one who spares no feelings, concedes no conceits no matter how essential. In the near future world of Neuropath, this is precisely what has happened under the guise of the Blind Brain Hypothesis, the theoretical brainchild of the story’s hero, Thomas Bible.

Consider coin tricks. Why do coin tricks strike us as ‘magic’? When describing them, we say things like “poof, there it was.” The coin, we claim, “materialized from thin air” or “appeared from nowhere.” We tend, in other words, to focus on the lack of causal precursors, on the beforelessness of the coin’s appearance, as the amazing thing. But why should ‘beforelessness’ strike us as remarkable to the point of magic?

From an evolutionary standpoint, the uncanniness of things appearing from nowhere seems easy enough to understand. Our brains are adaptive artifacts of environments where natural objects such as coins generally didn’t ‘pop into existence.’ Our brains have evolved to process causal environments possessing natural objects with interrelated causal histories. When natural objects appear without any apparent causal history, as in a coin trick, our brains are confronted by something largely without evolutionary precedent. Instances of apparent beforelessness defeat our brains’ routine environmental processing.

The magic of coin tricks, one might say, is a function of our brains’ hardwired abhorrence of causal vacuums in local environments. The integration of natural objects into causal backgrounds is the default, which is why, we might suppose, the sense of magic immediately evaporates when we look over the magician’s shoulder and the causal history of the coin is revealed. The magic of coin tricks, in other words, depends on our brains’ relation to the coin’s causal history. Expose that causal history, and the appearing coin seems a natural object like any other. Suppress that causal history (through misdirection, sleight of hand, etc.), and the appearing coin exhibits beforelessness. It seems like magic.

I bring this up because so many intentional phenomena exhibit an eerily similar structure. Consider, for instance, your present experience of listening. The words you hear ‘are simply there.’ You experience me speaking; nowhere does the neurophysiology–the causal history–of your experience enter into that experience as something experienced. You have no inkling of sound waves striking your eardrum. You have no intuitive awareness of your cochlea or auditory cortex. Like the coin, this experience seems to arise ‘ready made.’

The Blind Brain Hypothesis proposes that this is no accident. Various experiential phenomena, it suggests, are best understood as a kind of magic trick–only one that we cannot see through or around because our brain itself is the magician.

Whether or not the so-called ‘thalamocortical system’ turns out to be the ‘seat of consciousness,’ one thing is clear: the information that finds its way to consciousness represents only a small fraction of the brain’s overall information load. This means that at any given moment, the brain’s consciousness systems possess a kind of (fixed or dynamic) information horizon. What falls outside this information horizon, we are inclined to either overlook completely or attribute to the so-called ‘unconscious’–a problematic intentional metaphor if there ever was one.

Just as the magic of coin tricks is a function of our brains’ blinkered relation to the coin’s causal history, the Blind Brain Hypothesis suggests that many central structural characteristics of consciousness are expressions of our brains’ blinkered relation to their own causal histories, an artifact of the thalamocortical information horizon.

Given that our brains are in fact largely blind to their own neurophysiological processing, it seems clear that an information horizon exists in some form. Structurally, the brain is simply too complicated to track itself. Developmentally, the brain lacked both the time and the evolutionary impetus to track itself.

When we access our brain ‘from the outside,’ we’re exploiting circuits developed over millions and millions of years of evolution. Our brains are primarily environmental processors, exquisitely adapted to how things are in their environments. As a result, when we access our brains as another object in our environment, we have tremendous success ‘seeing how things are’ with our brains. When we access our brain ‘from the inside,’ however, we’re forced to completely forgo all this powerful circuitry. Instead, we’re limited to what seem to be relatively recent evolutionary adaptions, the ‘wiring of conscious experience.’ Our brains are not primarily brain processors, and as a result, we have tremendous difficulty ‘seeing how things are’ with our brains–so much so that we cannot even see ourselves as anything remotely resembling the brains we encounter in our environment.

Given these structural and developmental handicaps, information horizons have to exist. The real question is one of how they impact consciousness.

That the absence of information does affect experience becomes immediately clear if you simply attend to your visual field. You can actually track the falling off of information from your fovea–a spot the size of your thumbnail held out arm’s length–across your periphery and into …

Oblivion?

In fact, the point at which your visual field trails away lies outside of the very possibility of seeing. Sight simply does not exist on the far side of your ‘visual information horizon.’ We rely on other, non-visual systems to stitch successive visual fields into a coherent spatial environment, and so tend to ‘overlook’ the limits of our looking.

As mundane as this might sound, this example actually underscores something truly remarkable. It seems clear that the ‘trailing away’ of our visual field is a basic structural feature of visual experience, a positive feature. So does this mean it possesses neural correlates? Does it make sense to infer the existence of ‘visual trailing’ circuits? If not, this suggests that a neurophysiological lack can manifest itself as a positive feature of experience, in this case, the closure of our visual field. In other words, not all experience possesses functional correlates––at least not in the straightforward way we think.

Consider the ex nihilo character of volition, or they way want and desire simply ‘come upon us.’ According to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, decisions and affects simply arise at the point where they cross the information horizon and are taken up by the thalamocortical system.

Or consider the so-called ‘transparency’ of experience, the fact that we see trees, not trees causing us to see trees. Since the processing involved in modeling environments falls outside the information horizon, all we access is the model and none of its constitutive neurological antecedents.

Intentionality also seems to fit. Since the processing behind our recollection of trees, say, falls outside the information horizon, our brain substitutes an abbreviated synchronic relation, what we have conceptualized as ‘aboutness,’ for a diachronic one, the particular causal provenance of our recollection.

The structure of normativity provides another potential candidate: since the processing involved in the bottom-up generation of behavioural outputs largely falls outside the information horizon, the thalamocortical system can only use the ‘tail end’ of regularities, so to speak. The brain only gives consciousness ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ and nothing of the actual processing involved in testing.

Something similar might be said of purposiveness and the way teleology turns causality on its head: the information horizon encloses the circuitry involved in hypothetical modeling, but not much else, so even though our brain generates behavioural outputs bottom up, we perform actions for this or that–under the guise of bottomlessness. ‘Goals,’ the suggestion is, are what’s left when the bulk of the brain’s behavioural processing falls outside thalamocortical information horizon, save those involved in anticipation.

On this account, consciousness is a perpetual and quite impoverished middle-man, accessing, thanks to the information horizon, only opportunistic fragments of more global processes. We’re like a lone audience member, chained in front of the magician of our brain. We can intellectually theorize the causal provenances that make the tricks possible, but we are ‘hardwired into’ our perspective, we are nevertheless forced to experience the ‘magic.’

Nothing, I think, illustrates this forced magic quite like the experiential present, the Now. Recall what we discussed earlier regarding the visual field. Although it’s true that you can never explicitly ‘see the limits of seeing’–no matter how fast you move your head–those limits are nonetheless a central structural feature of seeing. The way your visual field simply ‘runs out’ without edge or demarcation is implicit in all seeing–and, I suspect, without the benefit of any ‘visual run off’ circuits. Your field of vision simply hangs in a kind of blindness you cannot see.

This, the Blind Brain Hypothesis suggests, is what the now is: a temporal analogue to the edgelessness of vision, an implicit structural artifact of the way our ‘temporal field’–what James called the ‘specious present’–hangs in a kind temporal hyper-blindness. Time passes in experience, sure, but thanks to the information horizon of the thalamocortical system, experience itself stands still, and with nary a neural circuit to send a Christmas card to. There is time in experience, but no time of experience. The same way seeing relies on secondary systems to stitch our keyhole glimpses into a visual world, timing relies on things like narrative and long term memory to situate our present within a greater temporal context.

Given the Blind Brain Hypothesis, you would expect the thalamocortical system to track time against a background of temporal oblivion. You would expect something like the Now. Perhaps this is why, no matter where we find ourselves on the line of history, we always stand at the beginning. Thus the paradoxical structure of sayings like, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” We’re not simply running on hamster wheels, we are hamster wheels, traveling lifetimes without moving at all.

Which is to say that the Blind Brain Hypothesis offers possible theoretical purchase on the apparent absurdity of conscious existence, the way a life of differences can be crammed into a singular moment.

But I’m getting carried away.

If our brains were somehow, impossibly, wired to process themselves from the inside (as the subject of introspection) with the same fidelity with which they process themselves from the outside (as the object of neuroscience), then one might expect the generation of ‘action’ to be experienced as one more thing within the great causal circuit of the environment. Rather than experiencing desires ‘motivating’ those actions, our brains would simply experience the translation of environmental inputs into behavioural outputs in toto. There would be no desire, only behaviour arising as another natural event. Rather than experiencing norms constraining those actions, our brains would experience the processing of behavioural outputs against ongoing environmental input. There would be no ‘right or wrong,’ no ‘corrections,’ only attenuations of behaviour in response to real-time environmental feedback. Rather than experiencing purposes guiding those actions, our brains would experience the processing of behavioural outputs against past environmental feedback. There would be no ‘point’ to our actions, only behaviour reinforced by previous environmental interactions.

But the ‘wiring of consciousness’ is far from complete, perhaps necessarily so. And given evolutionary imperatives, it stands to reason that the thalamocortical system would exploit it’s own limitations, leverage its own information horizon. If the processing behind our environmental interventions is inaccessible, and if the ‘ownership of actions’ pays reproductive dividends, then the development of something like the ‘feeling of willing’ makes a strange kind of sense. Since the greater brain behind the information horizon simply does not exist for the thalamocortical system, it has to cobble things together and make evolutionary due.

This, the Blind Brain Hypothesis suggests, could be the case for the ‘feeling of aboutness,’ the ‘feeling of forness,’ the ‘feeling of rightness,’ and so on. None of these things feel like coin tricks, like magic, simply because they are the mandatory constant, not defections from an otherwise causal background. But they seem to vanish when we look of the brain’s shoulder–they share the same antipathy to causal cognition–because they are, in a strange way, artifacts of an analogous limitation of our perspective, more the result of what we lack than what we possess.

If the Blind Brain Hypothesis turns out to be true (and heaven help us if it does), then consciousness could be–basically, fundamentally–a kind of coin trick. The so-called ‘hard problem,’ the problem of explaining consciousness in naturalistic terms, could be insoluble simply because there’s no such natural phenomena as ‘consciousness.’ The magic can only vanish as soon as the coin trick is explained. In this case, we are the magic.

For me, this is where the plank of reason breaks.

Where things become apocalyptic.

CONCLUSION

As a former graduate of the Theory Centre, my suspicion is that many of you might interpret these speculative ramblings as a kind of naturalistic distortion/vindication of the ‘post-modern subject.’ The ‘fragmentary subject’ is old hat in circles such as these, old enough to have long ceased being radical (though for some strange reason I still regularly encounter people who insist talking about it radical tones of voice). This is the reason, I think, some are initially underwhelmed by the implications of the Blind Brain Hypothesis.

First, we need to appreciate that the institutional migration of these concerns from armchairs (or couches, as the case might be) to research centres is as drastic as can be. People who do not appreciate the distinction between philosophy considering these possibilities and science considering them, it seems to me, are typically those who, despite all reason, think that their theoretical philosophical positions warrant exclusive commitment–who think they’ve won the Magical Belief Lottery. Since they already think the post-modern subject true, further confirmation strikes them as superfluous. But as I said, few things are quite as cheap as belief. Hopefully my earlier discussion of our cognitive shortcomings makes the irrationality of exclusive commitment to any of these speculative forays clear. We are theoretical cripples.

More importantly, scientific claims tend to be socially actionable, immediately, particularly given its thoroughgoing integration with capital. Nielsen’s recent billion dollar plus investment in NeuroFocus is but the beginning of the so-called neuromarketing revolution. And given that technological advantages without obvious near-term deleterious effects always seem to be exploited in capital societies, the technologization of the brain, ranging from the therapeutic to the ‘neurocosmetic,’ seem inevitable.

Second, I think that if you look closely at those discourses that turn on some notion of decentred subjectivity, either in various ‘philosophies of difference’ or elsewhere, you will notice a kind of inconsistency. No matter how radical the revision, thinkers of difference generally treat the components of that subjectivity–affects, meanings, purposes, morals, moments–as wholes.

The fragmentation, I’m suggesting, goes all the way down. It’s not that we are not the self-present subjects of early enlightenment myth–an illusion easily explained by the invisibility of ignorance. It’s that we are not subjects at all.

Even though I refuse to believe the Blind Brain Hypothesis, I often find myself terrified–and I mean this quite literally–by the strange, inside-out sense it seems to make once you grasp its central intuition. Even the way it seems to confound reason possesses a peculiar explanatory force.

Consider what might be called the ‘Bottleneck Thesis,’ which might be expressed as: we are natural in such a way that it is impossible to fully conceive of ourselves as natural. In other words, we are our brains in such a way that we can only understand ourselves as something other than our brains. Expressed in this way, the thesis is not overtly contradictory. It possesses an ontological component, that we are fundamentally ‘physical’ (whatever this means), and an epistemological component, that we cannot know ourselves as such. The plank in reason breaks when we probe the significance of the claim–step inside it as it were. If we cannot understand ourselves as natural, then we must understand ourselves as something else. And indeed we do, as we must, understand ourselves as agents, knowers, sinners, and so on. We may define this ‘something else’ in any number of ways, but they all share one thing in common: a commitment to a spooky bottomless ontology, be it social, existential, or otherwise, that is fundamentally incompatible with naturalism. We can disenchant the world, but not ourselves.

Although not contradictory, the Bottleneck Thesis does place us in a powerful cognitive double-bind. Despite the sheen of philosophical respectability, when we speak of the irreducibility of consciousness and norms as a way to secure the priority of life-worlds and language-games as ‘unexplained explainers,’ we are claiming an exemption from the natural. How could this not be tendentious? The only thing that separates our supra-natural posits from supernatural things such as souls, angels, and psychic abilities is the rigour of our philosophical rationale. Not a comforting thought, given philosophy’s track record. Moreover, these supra-natural posits are in fact fundamentally natural. Their apparent irreducibility is merely a subreptive artifact of our natural inability to understand them as such in the first instance. But then, once again, the only way we can assert this is by presupposing the very irreducibility we are attempting to explain away. We simply cannot be fundamentally natural because of the way we are fundamentally natural.

Given the absurdity of this, should we not just dismiss the Bottleneck out of hand? Perhaps, but at least two considerations should give us pause.

First, there is a sense in which the Bottleneck Thesis is justified as an inference to the best explanation for the cognitive disarray that is our bread and butter.

Say sentients belonging to an advanced alien civilization found some dead human astronauts and studied their neurophysiology. Say these sentients were similar to us in every physiological respect save that evolution was far kinder to them, allowing them to neurophysiologically process their own neurophysiology the way they process environmental inputs, such that for them introspection was a viable mode of scientific investigation. Where we simply see trees in the first instance, they see trees as neurophysiological results in the first instance.

Studying the astronauts, these alien researchers discover a whole array of neuro-functional similarities, so that they can reliably conclude that this does that and that does this and so on. The primary difference they find, however, is that our thalamocortical systems have a relatively limited information horizon. After intensive debate they conclude that humans brains likely lack the ability to process themselves as something belonging to the causal order of their environment. Human brains, they realize, probably understand themselves in noncausal terms. They then begin speculating about what it would be like to be human. What, they wonder, would noncausal phenomenal awareness look like? They cannot imagine this, so they shift to less taxing speculations.

On the issue of human self-understanding, the alien researchers suggest that with the early development of their scientific understanding, humans, remarkably, would begin to see themselves as an exception to the natural order of things, as something apart from their brains, and would be unable, no matter what the evidence to the contrary, to divest themselves of the intuition. ‘There would be much controversy’ they suggest, ‘regarding what they are.’

On the issue of social coordination, the alien researchers conclude that humans would be forced to specify their behaviours in noncausal terms, as behaviour somehow exempt from the etiology of behaviour, and as a result would be unable to reconcile this intuitive understanding with their scientific understanding of the world. Given that humans are capable of scientific understanding (the specimens were, after all, astronauts), the aliens assume humans would perhaps attempt to regiment their understanding of their behaviour in a scientific manner, perhaps elaborate a kind of ‘noncausal ethology’ (what we call ‘psychology’), but they would be perpetually perplexed by their inability to reconcile that understanding with their science proper.

Human understanding of their linguistic behavioural outputs, the alien researchers assume, would likewise be characterized by confusion. Once again the human’s intuitive understanding would be noncausal, and given the maturation of their science, they might begin to question the reality of their hardwired default assumptions–their ‘intuitive sense’ of what was happening as far as language was concerned. ‘There might be some noncausal X,’ the aliens conclude, ‘that for them constitutes the heart of their immediate linguistic understanding, but it would seem to vanish every time they searched for it.’ (The X here, of course, would be what we call ‘aboutness’). Some more daring researchers suggest humans might eventually abandon this X, attempt to understand language in thoroughly terms. But this would provide no escape from their dilemma, since such an understanding would seem to elide obvious phenomenal features that not only seem to belong to language, but to be constitutive of it. (And here, of course, I’m talking about normativity).

And so the aliens continue speculating, all the while marvelling at the poor blinkered creatures, and at the capricious whim of evolutionary fate that perpetually prevents them from effectively rationalizing their neurophysiological resources.

Is this story that farfetched? Could aliens, given intact specimens, predict things like the mind/body problem, the problem of moral cognitivism, the problem of meaning, and the like? With enough patience and ingenuity, I suspect they could. The Bottleneck Thesis, I think, provides the framework for a very plausible explanation of the intractable difficulties associated with these and other issues. The theoretical uroboros of the intentional and the physical, the human and the natural, has a long and hoary history, repeated time and again in drastically different forms through a variety of contexts. It is as though we continually find ourselves, in Foucault’s evocative words, at once “bound to the back of a tiger” and “in the place belonging to the king.” This apparent paradox is a fact of our intellectual history, one that requires explanation.

As an adjunct to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, the Bottleneck Thesis not only explains why we seem to have so much difficulty with intentional phenomena in general, it explains why those difficulties take the forms they do across an array of different manifestations.

The second thing that should give us pause before rejecting the Bottleneck Thesis is that it constitutes a bet made on a eminently plausible neuro-evolutionary hypothesis: that our neurophysiology did not evolve to process itself the way it processes environmental inputs–that our brains are blind to themselves as brains. Given evolution’s penchant for shortcuts and morphological malapropisms, the possibility of such a neurophysiologically entrenched blind-spot, although grounds for consternation, should not be grounds for surprise. So we have evolved, and so long as we continue to reproduce, our genes simply will not give a damn. It would be pie-eyed optimism to assume otherwise.

There are cogent empirical and conceptual grounds, then, to think the Bottleneck Thesis might be true. And short of actually discovering intentionality in nature, there is no way to rule it out as a possibility. Certainly the absurdity of its consequences cannot tell against it, because such absurdity is precisely what one would expect given the truth of the Bottleneck. If we have in fact evolved in such a way that we cannot understand ourselves as part of nature, then we should expect to be afflicted by cognitive difficulties at crucial junctures in our thought.

[Braindead]

How about yawn?

[Veilside]

I'm not surprised you'd think something about free will would be yawn, you probably don't understand 99% of it.