pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
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Wandering philosopher. Purveyor of Platonic heresy, Kantian computationalism, and Hegelian minimalism. (he/him/it which speaks)
Newcastle, England
Joined April 2011
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Here's a meta-thread organising the Laruelle thread ('Non-Laruelle') into chapters, which will be expanded as it continues to expand. Chapters will be subdivided into parts.
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So much of Leftist political persuasion is trying to convince people that our goals are worthy *despite* the fact that many of those who share them are an absolute nightmare to deal with, personally speaking. I feel like we’re generally not honest enough about this.
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I can’t believe I’ve not come across this Turing quote before: “If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent."
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Guys, Kant had this one sorted a couple centuries ago: concepts without intuitions are sci-fi, intuitions without concepts are fantasy.
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I'm going to do the unusual thing here and defend the strongest metaphysical reading of the death drive I think is feasible. This is the version of it articulated by Deleuze in Difference & Repetition, which then bleeds into his work with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.
I’m sorry, but “the death drive” is not a thing. It’s just bad metaphysics.
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You're on a first date with someone, and they tell you their favourite book. Its title is a random collection of letters. You slowly come to the realisation that this is but one scenario in a vast combinatorial space searched by some alien force beyond your ken. You cannot leave.
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Okay, I promised a quick introduction to the history of the terms 'metaphysics' and 'ontology', so I'll try to provide it in as concise a way as possible. However, this will involve going all the way back to the Presocratics, so you've been warned in advance.
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Quick update for anyone worried about my silence: I’ve been let go by Newcastle, as they’ve ended hourly paid teaching and didn’t shortlist me for the permanent job created to compensate. And I’m now on my 4th pain med combination, awaiting tolerable side effects. Not great, tbh.
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Authenticity.
What’s something people romanticize but it’s actually horrible?
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Someone on FB asked for a definition of Hyperstition, and this is what I came up with: a narrative schema that allows us to aesthetically capture the ways in which our collective anticipations of the future have causal force in the present.
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I don’t entirely know why, but I feel like myself for the first time in the better part of year. Possibly a fleeting moment, but worth noting nonetheless.
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So, I'm reading MacAskill's 'What We Owe The Future', and though I'll have some more things to say about it at a later date, I have to stop and address what I take to be a truly, characteristically bad argument he makes therein (p. 176-177 for anyone interested).
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The Wicker Man Fallacy: a straw man so elaborate and extensive that a group can more or less define their own position by ritually burning the opponents they've trapped inside it.
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I’m thinking of writing a piece positioning my neorationalist take on AI against two tendencies I’m calling ‘vulgar rationalism’ (roughly the LessWrong/EA Bayesian/utilitarian sphere) and ‘popular romanticism’ (a more diffuse nexus of left-academia/reactionary humanism).
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Honestly, I wish people would just realise that algorithmic bias and bureaucratic stupidity are *exactly the same thing* so we could start unpicking the rationalisations implicit in both, as they're synergetic: you have to get them both to tackle either successfully.
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@PhilosophyTube
We're not taught about any history that would make England (and its extension) seem like a contested political project rather than a natural formation: the separate pre-William kingdoms, the Peasants Revolt, the War of the Roses before the Tudor resolution, the Levellers...
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Here’s an important thing to understand about the way the world is changing: the barriers between espionage, intelligence, propaganda and marketing are dissolving, such that what it means to be an *asset* and who might be one, is exploding in all directions.
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Once I get my health in order, I need to find something else to do with my life, basically. Turned 36 recently and the feeling that I’ve wasted a decade clinging to academia is pretty strong. As such, I’m finding it hard to be philosophical about much of anything right now.
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Regular reminder that I was once *literally* hexed in a ritual performance at Goldsmiths by a salaried academic who presented me as an avatar of white male privilege in philosophy. I make ~£5K a year teaching. I’ll happily be a symbolic whipping boy if you pay me a living wage.
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I read (most of) Martin Hägglund's This Life a few months back, aiming to confront a contemporary representative of the view that mortality is what gives life meaning. This is a view I'm quite opposed to, so I suppose it's worth articulating some of my objections here.
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There are two lines of thought about 'concepts' in philosophy: one that sees them as shared ideals (either metaphysically (Plato/Frege) or socially (Hegel/Brandom)), and one that sees them as cognitive components (either psychologically (Kant/Fodor) or socially (Quine/Wilson)).
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Right, I'm a man of my word, and I'm going to do a thread on Laurelle, transcendental philosophy, and non-philosophy. But, I'm going to put a bit of a narrative and philosophical spin on it. I'm going to talk a bit about ignorance, and what to do with it. TBC in 2021.
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If you want to know where Analytic metaphysics went wrong, look at the bit in On the Plurality of Worlds where David Lewis asks himself the question 'what's the cardinality of the set of possible worlds?' and then sketches a brief guess, rather than recoiling in formal horror.
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This is a hard test for a principled commitment not just to bodily autonomy but morphological freedom, and far too many people fail it.
anyone who is "transhumanist" but goes "eww transgender people" is a fraud and intellectually/culturally unserious. if you can't handle people not aligning with their biological sex, you are not prepared for the complete dissolution of the human body lol
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"You actually have to do politics yourself. You can’t read it off of what the bad guys are doing. You have to decide what you’re interested in and what’s going to serve the cause of justice. And that’s not just negating things that your adversaries say." -
@OlufemiOTaiwo
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With a bit of luck I’ll be less miserable and self-pitying in a few weeks. Solidarity guys.
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Semi-regular reminder that
@ContraPoints
and
@PhilosophyTube
, among others, are more influential public intellectuals than almost anyone working in an philosophy department. We should look at where public philosophy is actually happening, as opposed to where we think it should.
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We must hold strong against Aristotelian revanchism.
When I was in graduate school, hylomorphism and teleology were still considered more or less dead, if they were considered at all. Now there are growing literatures on each in mainstream academic philosophy and they’re back on the menu. Aristotle’s revenge continues apace.
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Just wait till they learn about ℵ and the hierarchy of transfinite cardinals. Expect future culture wars over transmasculinity fought by metabros axiomatically stipulating the existence of strongly inaccessible manliness.
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I suppose I should say something about LaMDA. As ever, my main issue is that people insist on running together consciousness (sentience), intelligence (sapience), and personhood (autonomy) when talking about whether machines are sufficiently human-like to warrant whatever.
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My main commitment when it comes to aesthetic criticism is that you should engage with what the work is, and what it is trying to do, not compare it to some notionally better thing you wish it were, or that you wish it were trying to do instead.
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The main problem I have with statements in the genre of ‘everything is political’ is that they get used to bury the need for non-obvious justificatory work under a supposedly obvious platitude. Everything may *potentially* be political, but the *actuality* is what’s at issue.
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So, here’s a thing I’ve been struggling to put into words for the past few months: at a certain point bipolar disorder starts feeling like slow-burn dementia.
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This is what happens when you train neural networks largely on tone and its stylistic relics. They pick up formal features of arguments (not so much fallacies as tics) that have almost nothing to do with semantic content (focus on connotation over implication).
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The Chinese Room Argument is the closest thing I've ever found to a 'rationalisation pump'. It doesn't generate any useful intuitions about computation or mindedness, it simply emboldens people to rely exclusively on the intuitions they already have.
I can't believe how stupid Searle's argument against AI is. How the fuck did I ever find this convincing
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A note for my new followers and a reminder the rest: if you're surprised by the range of philosophical topics and figures I can quite happily synthesise on a moment's notice, and are wondering why I'm not employed, I have never gotten through to interview in a philosophy dept.
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@PhilosophyTube
...the list goes on and on. The whole history of contestation, dissent, and compromise is turned into a natural evolution from the divine right of kings to liberal democracy, empire, and post-industrial malaise.
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Okay. So my paternal grandfather smoked 60 a day and died from a heart attack in his 50s. Similar story for my maternal grandmother. One grandparent out of 4 made it to her 90s. Guess which one didn't smoke? Nevertheless, I think that this is completely wrong. Bear with me.
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The possibility that there might be something as simple as a conditional obligation ('if you choose to have a child, it is better to conceive it so as to avoid having migraines') is simply not considered. The local richness of practical reasoning is dissolved into a global soup.
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It's worth remembering that the academic enemies of left-accelerationism did everything they could to portray us as millenarian monsters, while our real enemies saw exactly what monsters we really are:
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Just saw 'bodiless boys of the void' used as a pejorative to describe Negarestanians. I think that's another one for a T-shirt.
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Actual status update: been in a bad place mental health wise, at the blurry intersection of bipolar down phase and medication side effects. About to switch to yet another pain med, chasing the hope of a more manageable symptom profile.
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Honestly, from my perspective, this is an exceptionally good example of how decision theory can rot one's brain. Choice, and therefore obligations to choose, can only be conceived as selecting between ranked outcomes. All reasoning is flattened into an order relation on states.
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So, here’s a way of reframing this question: which societies enabled coexistence and collaboration between people with divergent social styles, rather than imposing a dominant social style? Such social pluralism is very important indeed.
Which human societies, past or present, come closest to your ideal of how we should live together?
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I seriously believe that philosophy needs something like ArXiv: a place to store and distribute work not simply in progress, or prior to validation, but independently of it. Philpapers is too close to the current model of validation ('publication') and its disciplinary norms.
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Remember when the controversy was over whether Israel would ever attack a hospital?
700 bodies now discovered at Nasser hospital alone (1,500 uncovered at Al Shifa), patients, some with catheters still attached, children, with hands still bound, doctors and nurses, still wearing their scrubs, many shot in the back of the head at point blank range execution-style
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Okay, it’s overly serious answer time. Yes, diagnosis culture can be cringe. But I’d argue that a certain amount of cringe is an inevitable consequence of what is a broadly positive development. One that should be mitigated, yes, but not simply dismissed.
the inevitable end of diagnosis culture is completely removing agency from people — complete infantilization so that none of us have free will. what an attractive concept for people who wish to remove themselves from the complicated truth of what it means to live a life!
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This morning I was reminded of my favourite painting, Umberto Boccioni's The City Rises, and felt a vague anxious fuzz about discussing it in public, owing to the political legacy of Italian Futurism and the way it's been used to critique l/acc in the past. Fuck it, I love this.
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I'm starting to get the feeling that the big intellectual conflict of the next decade is going to be Bayesians vs. Cyberneticists, which is to say verificationism vs. falsificationism with better mathematical tools.
As
@maradydd
would say: Norbert Wiener did nothing wrong.
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One final bit of diagram posting, to tempt potential readers.
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I have just been exposed to something so unbelievably cursed it is hard to stare straight into. Here is a my first TERF book for children, which condenses the entire rotten theology of embodiment into its title. Someone save us from these hierophants of meat.
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I think much of who I am today was shaped by people either asserting or strongly implying that I've made some sort of social faux pas and then refusing to explain what this is, let alone what I could do to make up for it. That's the perfect cusp of social anxiety for me.
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I think one way of looking at the economic pathologies of our society, without using words like 'capitalism' and 'rentiership', is to talk about inequities in the distribution of risk. Some have more taste for risk than others, sure, but risk is not distributed on this basis.
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It's hard to believe it's been four years since Mark left. What a day to talk about the meaninglessness of death. If there's one thing Meillassoux is right about, it's that nothing less than the complete and total resurrection of the restless dead could make death meaningful.
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Regular reminder: it's important to think about the embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended ways in which cognition is concretely realised, but equally important to account for abstractions through which these are rendered disembodied, disembedded, inactive, and incorporated.
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The idea of running global response to pandemics on the back of private patents for vaccines looks less and less defensible by the day. This isn't ideology, it's sabotage.
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This thread is a good example of the sheer ideological paucity of e/acc. A demand for more of the same distinguished only by its sheer intensity, wrapped in a sci-fi aesthetic.
What did you think accelerationism and transhumanism was? Vibes? Everything staying the same, but with you and your friends having a robot butler?
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The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine...
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After much productive procrastination, the whole of my Philosophy and Religion course on Abrahamic theology, its philosophical roots, and its philosophical legacy, is finally up and available for your viewing pleasure:
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Always hard to narrow it down to four, but here's a few that had quite an impact, roughly in order.
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Since I seem to have gained a few more followers in professional philosophy, here’s a provocative statement of my position: Kant’s transcendental psychology just *is* the program of artificial intelligence, and can be elaborated through contemporary logic and computer science.
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Controversial idea: journals are irrelevant and we shouldn’t really care if there’s a new one.
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This is a point that the free software/creative commons movements have been making about Gates's 'philanthropy' for years. The good he has done is entirely outweighed by the effort he's put into shoring up the global system of intellectual property.
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If you can't handle me at my most cringe, you don't deserve me at my most based.
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If there’s a minimal wish upon which an egalitarian politics might be founded, without too much controversy, it’s that, in some sense, everyone else should have the opportunity to make the mistakes you have somehow survived and learned from. We only deserve them if others do.
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This is perhaps the most tempting/tragic contradiction embedded in the human condition: "you are not a person until you can appreciate the intrinsic value of children, who are by this definition not persons." This absolute scission of value from respect infects everything.
Theory: sometime when people have children they forget that prior to having children they too were humans capable of feelings & empathy.
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There've been many attempts to characterise the current phase of capitalism as tending towards neofeudalism, but the key point is this: from the domestic core to the industrial fringe, the pecuniary interests of landlords/rentiers are ascendant. Same old power, new distribution.
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So, to follow up tonight’s thoughts in another direction, the real tragedy of Land and Moldbug is that they are generally way more interesting than the people they attract. One’s disagreements with them can be *deep* in both senses of the term. But their fan base? Deeply sad.
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I once got to spend a pleasant afternoon walking around Beirut and talking about philosophy and other things with Daniel Dennett, and it's one of my most treasured memories. RIP.
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Self: I want to achieve something!
Brain: Fool, you want dopamine!
Cells: Fool, you want calories!
Mitochondria: Fool, you want ATP!
Molecules: Fool, you want to follow the path of least action!
Someone is getting fooled here, but it's not necessarily the guy at the top.
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Here's
@AaronBastani
quickly breaking down the central lie of the decade of austerity in less than 10 minutes. Spread it far and wide:
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Been waiting for this one.
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Here’s a brief note on some ideas that are still in progress. I’ve said before that the older I get the more Platonist I become, though, unsurprisingly, those aspects of Plato I emphasise are somewhat idiosyncratic. I want to sketch out some of these idiosyncracies for you.
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What I find most frustrating about Anglophone Continental philosophy is that so much of it is little more than an elaborate valorisation of the virtue of humility, which somehow systematically fails to practice it; it so easily devolves into an exercise in humbling everyone else.
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I've always disliked the way that Derrida and Deleuze get grouped together as 'poststructuralists' in the Anglophone world, precisely because Deleuze's metaphysics is better seen as hyper-structuralist, in opposition to Derrida's deflationary structuralism. What does this mean?
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If you want to see an outline of this theory stripped of its stranger references and reconnected to more classical problems in the metaphysical tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant...) and restricted to DST, check out my 'Ariadne's Thread' talk:
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Andreas Malm critiques Object Oriented Ontology and New Materialism in this new interview on eco-socialism, Palestine, and more!
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"Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living." - Ray Brassier
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The left-wing politicisation pipeline still seems to be doing its thing (
#contrapoints
). Each new crop of radicals think they've had the eternal truth of <the current year> revealed to them, and then confuse politics with interpersonal struggles of affirmation and denunciation.
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I have yet to encounter a more unproductive speech act than 'you need to read Derrida before you can talk about X'. I actually would like to read some more Derrida at some point, even just to elaborate my critique, but this pushes me 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
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On reflection, I think what most personally frustrates me about the current compact between research and teaching in the academy is that my own writing is more clearly pedagogical than hermeneutic, but this has not earned me any points towards becoming a pedagogue.
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There are times I wish we could have something like a 'symbolic amnesty' where we just wipe a particular terminological slate clean of connotations so that we can have certain conversations without constantly blundering into excuses to derail them.
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It's always been Hegel. It keeps getting more intense as I drift closer to him, clutching a knife. Refusing to simply capitulate and accept him is the only way to really engage him. If you aren't trying to betray Hegel, do you even sublate (bro)?
Who is your philosophical Enemy*?
*someone who cannot be ignored and must be traversed, whether good or bad
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@Helenreflects
@logicians
A sociological phenomenon that emerged from the Anglo-Viennese diaspora, initially based on the application of new logical tools to philosophical problems, long since become a form of scholasticism whose avowed ideals are increasingly in conflict with its disappointing reality.
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I’ve said it before, but these kinds of disagreements often stem from an inability to distinguish obligation and supererogation. Saying ‘It’s good to do X’ gets interpreted as ‘It’s mandatory to do X’ and then exceptions to the obligation get blown into a whole counter-narrative.
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This morning's mood: peer review is a cargo cult built on survivorship bias.
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I have a lot of disagreements with
@slatestarcodex
, but this is genuinely one of the best essays I’ve ever read about death and personal autonomy:
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I would rather explain the key ideas of a thinker, or rehearse the dialectical development of a key concept, in ways that both optimally compress them and make them maximally accessible to non-specialist scholars. I think this is a virtue, but it really isn't rewarded in any way.
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My decade? Largely trying to and failing to make it as a professional philosopher. Still a philosopher, questionably professional, but trying to think about how everything, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hangs together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.
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New post is done. Only about 3 months later than I intended. It's about ~18K, and uses some personal reflections to talk about embodiment, selfhood, and personal identity. I give you 'Normal Service Will Resume Shortly':
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