Philosophy Forums
I have been writing philosophical content on online forums for over fifteen years, first at forums.philosophyforums.com and then, when that closed down, as a founding member and administrator on thephilsophyforum.com where I post as Baden. There are some samples on realism and the philosophy of art below. See also research.
As The Philosophy Forum has now moved to a new Discourse-based server, the current site run through Plush Forums has been archived here. The posts below along with the vast majority of my online philosophical writings are now available exclusively there (searchable under my username “Baden“). I still work at the Discourse-based site that is under the same ownership and is inheriting the domain name.
I cordially invite you to join the forum, which I believe will continue the tradition of being the best place to discuss philosophy on the internet in a popular context.
Philosophical Influences
I think it’s important to say a few words about my major philosophical influences and where they fit into my thinking, both to situate it and to introduce their related perspectives, which I think are all very relevant and even crucial to understand today in a super-charged technologically driven media environment that threatens to run out of our control, but also, perhaps, presents important opportunities for self and social development.
I have priovided links to key freely available texts where possible, and quotes / extracts and their sources as an alternative.
Adorno
Both for his association with the Frankfurt School and critical theory in general and specifically for his work in negative dialectics, I am indebted to Adorno. His way of looking at conceptual reality ties closely to my own ideas concerning language and discourse and the challenges it presents us with (as expressed both in my webcomic “Discourse Dog” and the concept of “Symbolic Debt“.)
Beckett
Samuel Beckett has been a massive influence on my philosophical writings, and as I’ve grown in my own philosophical knowledge, I appreciate him more and more not just as a playwright and novelist who can provide us, still today, with a unique literary experience, but someone struggling with the nature of discourse, its inherent contradictions, and how it relates to subjectivity.
Berardi (Franco “Bifo”)
Bifo Berardi is an original and, I think, growingly relevant thinker who tries to help us break out of our conceptual prisons by encouraging what he refer to as rhythm and poesis. Those concepts of his, along with that of the semiosphere have been highly nourishing food for thought and I’ve addressed them directly in my essay Biosemiotics and the Art of Poetic Resistance. available as an individual online text here or as part of the essay collection Technoethics.
“In the digital network, labor is the execution of a program. It is the recombination of signs. We no longer inhabit a world of physical things, but a world of information-flows that capture our attention and saturate our ‘brain-time.’ This leads to a state of permanent electro-stimulation, a pathologization of the soul where the ‘productive’ self is never truly ‘off,’ but constantly processed by the machinic assemblage of the market.”
Berardi 2009: The Soul at Work (From Alienation to Autonomy).
Chomsky
I am indebted to Chomsky not so much for his work on linguistics (though I recognize his brilliance there) as my own linguistic orientation is more Hallidayan (see Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics mentioned below), but to his eye-opening work on politics, which I have read since my early twenties and which has been massively influential in the devlopment of my own political views as well as being integral to my social and political education. It’s inevitabl then that a Chomskyan cynicism towards power pervades my work, and that, in my opinion, is no bad thing.
Key text: The Responsibility of Intellectuals
Deleuze and Guattari
Deleuze and Guattari bring to my analysis a sophisticated and fruitful alternative perspective of flows and intensities that helps to open up spaces for creative and disruptive thought. My enzymatic knowledge machine concept is a direct influence of their idea of machinic assemblages. Other conceptual directions highly influenced by their work include my exploration of the faciality machine in my essay Faciality and Pathology.
Key text: Postscript on the Societies of Control
Fisher (Mark)
In terms of the spirit in which I approach my work, Mark Fisher (R.I.P.) is one of my closest allies. His analysis of capitalism in “Capitalist Realism” is a major foundation in my understanding of how the capitalist part of technocapitalism has made itself untouchable, and is, along with Slavoj Zizek’s analysis, a much needed antidote to the market pollyannaism of Fukuyama and fellow apologists for the cultural homogenisation and apparent dead end that Fisher eloquently and engagingly describes in his work. His work on “hauntology” is another major influence on my online enzymatic knowledge machine.
“Capitalist realism… is the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. […] It is like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture, but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Interview on Capitalist Realism
Halliday (Michael)
As alluded to above, my approach to linguistic (and applied linguistics as part of an education degree was my Master’s major subject) is distinctly Hallidayan. His Systemic Functional Linguistics, I believe, dovetails with the divisions of subjectivity I later theorized under the influence of many of the other thinkers here. And this is an area that at some point I hope to further explore.
“Language is a range of possibilities, an open-ended set of options in behavior that are available to the individual in his existence as social man. […] The internal organization of language is not arbitrary but embodies a positive reflection of the functions that language has evolved to serve. To mean is to act semiotically; language is the primary means by which we act and interact.”
Lacan
Jacques Lacan, whose work I came to be familiarized with through Slavoj Zizek, provided me with the extremely valuable framework of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, which served as a major impetus to my developing thought concerning discourse, particularly as I have expressed it in the webcomic “Discourse Dog” , and the essay “What Can Go Wrong in the Mirror”.
Key text: Inisistence on the Letter in the Unconscious
Luhmann (Nikhlas)
Discovering Nikhlas Luhmann’s work was a revelation. His sytems theory dovetailed very productively with my knowledge of Lacan, Zizek, Stiegler and other theorists and led to an exploration of the work of Maturana and Varela and others that was foundational for my essay “Freedom, Precarity, and Enzymatic Knowledge Machines”, which I consider to be one of the most important in the book Technoethics. That essay is available individually here or as a discussion OP on the tpfarchive.
“Social systems use communication as their particular mode of autopoietic reproduction. Their elements are communications which are recursively produced and reproduced by a network of communications and which cannot exist outside of such a network. […] A social system is not composed of humans, but of communications. Only communication communicates.”
Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems.
Pinter
Harold Pinter along with Beckett is my favourite playwright, and many of my plays and clearly influenced by him or derivative of the style of his theatre of menace. The Third Party is one such example. What Pinter does with dialogue reflects what discourse does to us. He infiltrates the type of language we use everyday to allow us to see what’s behind it in a mirror of the way discourse inflitrates and peers into us. Apart from The Third Party, many of the short plays in the collection Syncopation are very Pinteresque.
“A character in a play who says something is not the author saying it. It is the character saying it in a particular moment… Truth in dramatic art is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. […] But as a citizen, I must ask: What is true? What is false? The politician is interested in the maintenance of power and in the control of language. We are surrounded by a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”
Pinter, H. (2005). Art, Truth and Politics (Nobel Lecture).
Pirsig (Robert)
Roert Pirsig is perhaps the most formative nd earliest of my major philosophical influences. I read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” as a teenager and was fascinated by it. It’s a work of literary and philosophical quality that enacts its own thesis on quality. And it’s also a very moving story based on Pirsig’s own life. I read Pirsig’s follow-up “Lila” years later along with other works related to his metaphysics of quality (MOQ), which is expressly referenced in my essay Biosemiotics and the Art of Poetic Resistance.
“Quality is not objective. It doesn’t reside in the material world. Quality is not subjective. It doesn’t reside merely in the mind. It is a third entity independent of the two. […] A Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, and not vice versa. The Sun of Quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them.”
Pirsig, R. M. (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Sartre
Sartre and his existentialism have been long-term influences on me. I read “Nausea” as a university student, and “No Exit” and his philosophical works, including “Existentialism is a humanism” and parts of “Being and Nothingness” later. My play “The Third Party” has a clear debt to “No Exit”, and I explicitly explore Sartrean philosophy most explicitly in my essay “What can Go Wrong in the Mirror” though his existentialist viewpoint is implicit in much of my other fiction and non-fiction.
Key text Existentialism is a Humanism:
Schiller (Friedrich)
Freidrich Schiller’s wonderful and foundational philosophical text “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” is the direct progenitor of my novella “Cecil and the Little Lord” which as well as being a whimsical story of a talking rabbit and a spoilt aristocrat is a direct allegory of that work adn is written in a style directly influenced by the classic translation I read. Schiller’s ideas of the sensuous and formal impulses and the desirability of their balance through the play drive doevtail directly with my ideas concerning a trialectic of being (symbolic, sentient, and physical), and the need for these to be holistically integrated through the action of an ontologically free subjectivity. This need helps make Schiller’s ideas, I believe, today more relevant than ever.
Key text: Aesthetical and Philosphical Essays
Simondon (Gilbert) / Stiegler (Bernard)
It’s apt to mention these two together I think, both because I came to Simondon through Stiegler adn because Stiegler directly devlops many of Simondon’s concepts and applies them to cotemporary technologically saturated life. Absolutely indispensable and central to my thinking are, among others, the ideas of technics, individuation / disindividuation, proletarianization, and the Pharmakon. Thinking of language as a form of technics and technology as pharmacological , I have found as an extremely fruitful basis for much of my philosophical work and Stiegler has been absolutely crucial to my writing of Technoethics where he is mentioned immediately in the introduction. This is justified not only by his direct relevance to the material, but by the fact that my exploration of his ideas led to so many more connections, it’s hard to imagine the book being written without him. I will add that though written before I read him, much of the technological dystopias of Lobe are consonant with his ideas.
“Culture has become a system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics. This is the result of the assumption that technical objects contain no human reality. […] The machine is a stranger to us; it is a stranger in which what is human is locked in, unrecognized, materialized and enslaved, but human nonetheless. […] The presence of man in regard to machines is a perpetual invention. Human reality resides in machines as human actions fixed and crystallized in functioning structures.”
Simondon, G. (1958). On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
Vygotsky (Lev)
I owe much of my basic sociological views to the work of Vygotsky who offers a sophisticated individual developmental basis for social reality that was way ahead of its time. I studied Vygotsky as a Master’s student and his general view I find compatible with much of my later thought. The idea of the internalisation of social discourse as integral to identity formation is exactly the kind of viewpoint needed to bring individual and social identity into a coherent whole and here, Vygotsky, was a visionary (who unfortunately died young and denied us further examples of his genius).
Key text: Genesis of Higher Level Functions
Zizek
I have probably read and listened to more of Slavoj Zizek than to any other philosopher and it would not be unfair to conclude from this that I have learned more philosophically from him than anyone else, though that’s not to say that I always agree with him. It is through Zizek I have learned most of my Lacan and Hegel and cultural critique in general and his influence at some level runs through almost all of my work. I find his blend of popular culture and deep theorizing extremely engaging and effective. Sadly, I lack the encyclopedic knwledge of literature and cinema necessary to replicate it.
“The lesson of cyberspace is that the ‘Self’ is a screen-persona, a series of masks, and that behind it there is nothing but the void of the Subject. The ‘I’ is not the substantial person behind the masks, but the very gap that separates them. When we are ‘wired,’ our physical body is not simply left behind; it is rather ‘short-circuited,’ its functions are taken over by the digital machine. The more the subject is reduced to the ‘pure’ observer of the digital screen, the more his very existence is outsourced to the machinic process, leading to a state of ‘interpassivity’ where the machine acts and believes in our place.”
Žižek, S. (1999). The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.
Samples
These are just a very few examples of the 15,000 or so posts I have written on The Philosophy Forum, almost all of which are now stored here as the site has moved to a new platform. The archive itself is an extremely valuable repository of philosophical thought and I recommed exploring it.
Direct vs indirect realism
Perception is best understood as a process acting on reality, a state. The claim that direct realism implies that perception equals reality takes us down the wrong path. A more accurate phrasing would be to say that a direct realist claims that what is perceived (a state) is reality (a state) not a representation thereof.
I think the way to best understand direct realism in face of the obvious objections is to think of the notion of perception as containing within it the concept of representation. So perception = the process of representing directed towards the self. It’s reflexive. Whatever you want to say about the form of representation can be said within the context of the act of perception. So, to say we perceive a representation is superfluous. Perceiving is representing, only it’s done reflexively.
When you say that you receive sensory data from an external object and form a perception of that object on the basis of this data, you’re making unnecessary additions to what is essentially a unified process. The processing of external objects using the senses just is your perception. And your perceivable reality is the sum of the extant objects that can be processed at a given time. From the outside, the processing looks like a bunch of neurons firing; from the inside, it is the perceptual experience.
The indirect realist conjures up an unnecessary middle man where none is necessary. He/she wants to say we perceive sense data, not reality. So, we’re left with the perceiver perceiving a representation of reality, or, with substitution, the perceiver representing to self a representation of reality. Instead of simply, the perceiver representing reality to self.
Whatever is being perceived is being reflexively represented in the context both of the limitations of the particular perceiver’s perceptual abilities and the complexities of whatever other environmental circumstances are in effect. That’s how reality works. And there are all sorts of combinations of conditions accidental or purposeful that can be posited within that framework that don’t do violence to the coherency of direct realism.
To sum it up, the direct realist sees perceptual variations of the kind indirect realists believe to demonstrate intermediacy as actually being explicable within the context of the perceptual process itself.
Philosophy of Art
I think if we go down the route of aesthetics and beauty when judging art, we will find ourselves lost very quickly. When judging art I think it makes less sense to talk about what it is in terms of its form and much more sense to focus on its function. And if you’re really looking for a word that stands for what art aims for in how it functions, that word is probably “wonder”, “mystery”, “awe” or some combination of those emotions. And that hasn’t changed with the progression from classical to modern to postmodern art. It’s simply that what provokes wonder and mystery, what moves or elevates or inspires us has changed. When art was about imitation, the ability of artists to recreate reality on a canvas or elsewhere was wonderful; and when in a deeply religious age art was about religious imagery that was awe-inspiring. But we progress and pure imitation becomes passé, religion loses it force, and further fields need to be opened in which wonder can play. This is not to say the classics don’t still move us—they certainly do—but they move us in the context of their history and the variety of forms of art that exist today that contrast with them. They have not suddenly become bad art but they are not pushing the boundaries of wonder as they originally did.
What is bad art then in this context? Well, if we consider the function of art is to disturb us in a wonderful way then art which does not function or cannot reasonably function in that way is bad art no matter how aesthetically pleasing it might be, and art which does function effectively in that way is good art no matter how banal or unaesthetic its form is. Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” is often given by people as an example of bad art. And usually the reason given is “It’s just a latrine” or “It’s ugly” or something along those lines. Here the issue of form and function and the context in which these interplay is absolutely crucial. A latrine in itself is clearly not art, but when a latrine is placed in a context where it is presented as art and in that very presentation serves to disturb, provoke and perplex its audience it can then function as art. Of course, once it’s been done it no longer functions in the same way again. The bare latrine as great art is Duchamp’s just as the Campbell’s soup can as art is Warhol’s.
So in a sense art is “what you can get away with” but what’s interesting is to focus on why we can get away with it. We can get away with it when what we do functions in a particular way that disturbs or moves us or evokes wonder and mystery. When those emotions are absent, we cease to be able to get away with it, regardless of aesthetic qualities, and what is claimed as art is not accepted as such or at best is labelled “bad art”.
Artificial Intelligence and Sentience
There is an issue of frameworks here. What’s the justificatory framework for connecting the production of language with feelings and awareness, i.e. sentience? Mine is one of evolutionary biology. We expect beings who have been built like us over millions of years of evolution to be like us. So for those who posit a connection between the production of a fascimile of human language and the presence of feelings, you also need a framewok. If you don’t have that, you are not even at step one of justifying how the former can be indicative of the latter.
Again, sentience is the state of having feelings/awareness. It is not the outputting of linguistically coherent responses to some input. It’s more about the competitive navigation of the constraints of physical environments resulting in systems that need to adapt to such navigation developing reflexive mental processes beneficial to the propagation of their reproductive potentialities as instantiated in RNA/DNA.
If your framwework for sentience is the outputting of a fascimile of human language, it’s a very impoverished and perverse one. Apply Occam’s Razor and it’s gone. Sentience necessitates feelings not words. I mean, let’s realize how low a bar it is to consider appropriate outputs in mostly gramatically correct forms of language to some linguistic inputs (except challenging ones) to be evidence of feelings. And let’s note that the Turing Test is a hangover from a behaviourist era when linguistics and evolutionary biology were nascent disciplines and it was fashionable to consider people being like machines/computer.
My understanding of the term ‘sentience’ in itself logically imposes a belief I am sentient and reasoning by analogy justifies considering those like me in fundamental biological ways that are scientifically verifiable through anatomical, evolutionary, and neuroscientific testing to also be sentient. I do not believe I am sentient because I produce words and I do not have any justification for believing other beings or things are sentient simply because they produce words. Again, sentience is defined by feelings and awareness, which in human beings over evolutionary time happened to lead to the production of language. You can’t run that causal chain backwards. The ability to produce (a fascimile of) language is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of sentience nor, without some justificatory framework, is it even any evidence thereof.