Consequently, it is a mistake to imagine that these allegories can
describe
our becominganything.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
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As human beings, our questions or motives in determining the meaning of a thing arise because o f the claim things have on us, a claim that describes the material world as somekindoflimit. Thisclaimisnothingnew. FrankensteinhaslittletodowithAIor science, except as an expression of anxiety about our interpretations of the instability of the distinction between inanimate and animate, between human and otherness. It is True that science explicitly questions this distinction, claiming that it is not given but is made, a product of a set of causes and effects that we now call evolution. But the book is not questioning these limits in relation to how they are constituted within nature (or out). Rather it examines the moral implications o f drawing the difference between human and others superficially, examining how we interpret our obligations to others. The problem o f alienation Frankenstein explores is possible because we can identify with the monster and the monster with us: and in this it is a novel asking about the relationship between
personhood and citizenship. It may suggest that our recognition as human (our inclusion in a community) must arise from a recognition of certain origins, but we are not made like the monster and yet he may describe our condition. The novel does not ask but leaves us with the question 'what does it mean to be made'? That question was partially answered and given a special claim on us by Darwin. But how would Darwin fit into a discussion about what counts as human? . His thinking explains, and is now used to explain, how things become living, how living creatures become intelligent, even become human. Do we imagine Darwin would pressure our texts away from the questions o f interpretation exemplified in the confusion between citizenship and personhood? I have to leave this question hanging, but the difficulty of fitting Darwinian thought (as opposed to rhetoric) is
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exactly the difficulty o f making the relation and difference between cause (what science describes) and interpretation (what literature demands) clear. This is the difficulty of constructing an intelligence in a machine.
For example how would our claims about the limits or status of subjectivity or our ideological judgments survive philosopher Daniel Dennett's description o f the necessity for selfishness within evolution? :
"As soon as something gets into the business of self-preservation, boundaries become important, for ifyou are setting out to preserve yourself you don't want to squander effort trying to preserve the whole world: you draw the line" {Consciousness Explained, 174)
The interpretations that function within, as and between the confusion between citizenship and personhood in Frankenstein mean we ask for the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, as it were, from inside the security o f acting as animate creatures.
AI turns this interpretive investigation o f the inanimate around. It investigates the difference between the inanimate and animate (or conscious and mechanical) as it were from the outside, not from the assumption that this distinction is meaningful but that it is caused: human beings or animals or plants are effects. Cognitive Science asks 'how can onegeneratequalitativeexperiencefromwhatcanonlybedescribedquantitatively? Itis, for example, much easier to teach a computer how to do calculus, than it is to teach it what a chair is. How can we get from our interpretations of ourselves to the causal mechanisms of our minds? This is, however, as much a question about and of poetry as about AI.
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Keats' ends the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with the equation: "'Beauty is truth, truthbeauty. '" Evenifonethinkthisisafailedline,theinterrogationofthemeaningofa thing, o f the urn in Keats' ode, suggests that any other answer would fail to give the thing meaning. Even this answer gives the proper form without the necessary force that would make it true (although it might seem beautiful or it might not). But that this question, 'what is the meaning o f a thing? ', should be important to us organizes one o f the currents in the following pages, and at the very least describes a problem romantic poetry found itselffacedwith. Theequationbeauty=truthdescribes,Ithink,arequirementfororan ideal (of whatever status) of poetry in general, although how to construe truth and beauty here is always at issue. Poetry always seems confined by an asymmetry: it can enact meaning or beauty but it's claims on truth are tenuous, becoming more tenuous within modem scientific culture. Things or objects can function as the grounds for truth, and one can argue that this is always the case, but it is certainly the case when what is real is primarily described as material. Within the Keats' ode, the status of the um is complex and shifting (within the poets interrogation), but it functions at least as the vanishing point ofthereal. Thus,theasymmetryofpoetryispartlycounteredbythefactthatitistheum that speaks the equation between beauty and truth: in a rough allegory the thing, the um, with its status as true (or real) asserts an equation between beauty and truth that can only function aesthetically, as an expression of beauty. The um as thing (the real) articulates the truth as an aesthetic. The attempt to enact the qualitative (meaning, beauty, intention, and so on, what AI calls qualia, what it feels like to be conscious or to be human) through an embodiment in language describes what Coleridge called a philosophic poem: to enact
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the beautiful (or meaningful or intentional) as real and true: poetry with ontological force, the force ofthe real which we describe as true. This is close to what is attempted in AI: to enact the equation between beauty (or the meaningful) and truth, and in this translate our interpretative relations with causal processes.
Traditional AI makes two founding assumptions about this project: what is called the symbolic system hypothesis and the algorithmic assumption. The first claims that the processes underlying intelligence are not just described symbolically but that they are symbolic: we ourselves as well as our thinking are constituted as nothing more than the self-reflexive (to varying degrees) processing of different kinds of symbols within a vast system of symbolic relations. The second claims that our mental states are algorithms, procedures that convert inputs into outputs according to a defined set of rules: a recipe or a function converting or computing inputs into outputs.
What kind of claim do these algorithms and the symbolic processes they enact have on us? AI assumes they are both true and are the only way anything can be made meaningful. In this picture, only symbolic processes, which are not interpretations, allegories or non-symbolic computations, can have sense, and thus our brains must enact these symbolic processes as our mind (There are ways even of construing all of reality as such symbolic processes within physics).
Heidegger wants to displace the claim of this picture of the world on us. Although I do not think Heidegger understood it in this way, the best sense I can make of his claim, in "Das Ding", that "the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened" ("The Thing", 166) is that the
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possibilities determined by thinking, knowledge, technology, and economics that produced a working bomb alters the kind of metaphysical possibilities in and through which we function. We can literally enact our death through our knowledge and its potential to destroy the world: I call this a metaphysical fact because our knowledge and knowing, when instituted within social power, has ontological force so great as to destroy us. The worldcanbecontainedbyourknowledgebecauseitcanbedestroyedbyit. Theatomic bomb as a metaphysical fact is a new conceptual limit determining the scope o f our commitments toward what we count as real. We can only believe in ghosts to our greater peril. Thisfact,describingthelimitoftheworldbyourknowledge,enactedthroughthe possibility of nuclear destruction, is that what counts as matter, and what matters and counts for us will have to include a commitment to a physics that can manipulate the substance o f the universe through a complex set o f mathematical models. This is called the possibility o f losing my life by losing the world. That this loss o f the world can be enacted
through human knowing, as if from a single source, gives knowing ontological force not unlike turning the world into a fantasy. What Joyce described as "lethelulled between explosion and reexplosion . . . from grosskopp to megapod, embalmed, o f grand age, rich indeathanticipated"(FW78. 04-06)hasgainedanewallegoricaltarget: wecanliterally enact our death through our knowledge o f the world as a whole and its potential to destroy the world. The problem ofthe machine is not only about our knowledge of how to be mistaken for a thing or how to be mistaken for being human. Our understanding of ourselves and the world must be a kind of reverse evolution, undoing our feelings and interpretations into quantities within some created conceptual language, a language not
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restricted by the limits o f cause or interpretation. The failure to find such a language has been the failure o f AI.
2. 3 Spiraling from interpretation to cause
The fundamental assumption for Cognitive Science is that the brain is a computer. All forms o f meaning and understanding must be derived from the computations o f neurons. 7 This Computational model grounds all mental functioning in rationality. But this rationality should not be mistaken for what we often oppose by the word
'irrationality' (these words are used primarily as interpretations). Cognitive Philosopher John Pollock defines rationality as the ordered, non-random transition between mental states: "try to imagine a creature possessing mental states but entirely unconstrained by considerationsofrationality"(HowtoBuildaPerson,70) Suchrandomtransitionswould resultinasystemscrashonanycognitivelevelonwhichtheyoccurred. Thisuseof rationality is really a way of arguing that all mental processes (metal states and their
transitions), including language instantiate an ordered system.
Pollock is attempting to construct this kind of system. He tells a story about how
to move from things and causes into interpretations and qualities; this describes an aesthetic,butnotanaestheticlikethatinanovel. ThisisthestoryofOscar. (Iwillgive only the schematics o f this story without concerning myself here with the justification o f the type/token mentalism for which he argues, although such a theory can also be understood to form an aesthetic)
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Oscar I is a system that consists o f sensory input, some information processing mechanism; which produces a picture ofthe world. This picture is generated from generalizations (computational processes) about this sensory input. These cognitive abilities are embedded in a conative (from Latin conatus, endeavor, attempt) function determining a set o f goals. Such a mental model, although Pollock ignores this, already figures symbolically a kind o f self but in this case one determined only by its pain sensors and its response. If pain then flight, if flight fails, then fight. This describes the mental functioning o f an amoebae, and therefore has its limits.
Oscar H
TheprimaryfailureofOscarIisitsvictimizationbyitsenvironment. Survival
potential increases with the ability to make predictions about the world (or really about itself about its responses to its sensory inputs). Such predictions mean that Oscar II, in replacing Oscar I, must be able to make generalizations about the environment in relation to his goals (in this case only avoid pain). This is the beginning o f mental fiction.
These predictions are generated through self-reflection: an internal sensor senses whenandwhy:pointythingsmeanpain. Isay'meanpain'becauseitoperatesasa
judgment based on a correlation between a rudimentary self (that defined by pain sensors) and the representation of pointy things. This correlation is possible by virtue of the goal (avoid pain) and the possibility for Oscar o f modeling his own sensory outputs. What these sensors do is construct generalizations about certain aspects of the environment in relationtoOscarsownresponses(pain). Suchgeneralizations,reallypossibilities,are
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logical fictions. There is no question whether they are true or false: everything that looks pointycausespain. porOscarIItheworldisfullofpaincausingthingstowhichhe always reacts as if the possibilities, the generalizations about how the world effects Oscars pain sensors, are always true (but in fact Oscar has no notion o f truth because there exists nopossibility,forhim,ofthesepredictionsbeingfalse,eveniftheyarefalse). Possibility means always true fiction. This is the mental world o f a worm.
Oscar IU
The problem with being a worm is that the environment can be deceptive and one's own sensors can fail or produce false information. Not all pointy things are alike, a pointy leaf is not like a pointy stick, and a machine-eating tiger is not the same as the mirror image of such a tiger.
Oscar HI experiences a mirror stage. Initially Oscar I and H were like amoebae to worm; Oscar n and m , however, are like bird to cat (I guess the bird has eaten the worm). The cat is able to distinguish a mirror image from another animal (it's not clear whether the cat thinks it's its own image). The bird responds to a mirror image as if it is another bird (it attacks the image)
Oscar HI must be able to evaluate the ontological status of its perceptions, are they real or not, it must be able to recognize mirrors as mirrors, and mirror-images as mirror- images. Oscar n sees the world phenomenological, as if its eyes were video or film cameras. If you hold a camera and film while walking around the picture jumps, and bounces and shakes. The viewer gets a headache trying to stabilize the picture into sense.
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Why don't we see like that? We walk around and yet our picture of the world doesn't really jump around like this; why?
To answer this we must ask how can we make Oscar m generate a world separate from his senses, such that he can evaluate his sensory inputs in relation to this stable world? Pollock ask: how can Oscar distinguish between machine-eating tigers and mirror-image tigers? Asking this question means asking the difference between appearance and reality, and its answer requires an interpretation.
This level o f interpretation requires another layer o f internal sensors, this time evaluating the first level o f internal sensors. Pollock thinks that our picture o f the world is generated by two different kinds ofgeneralizations: "On the one hand Oscar HI has generalizations about the relations between his perceptual inputs and the states o f his environment, and on the other he had has generalizations about regularities within the environment that persist independently of perception of the environment"(4). This independent world is generated as a set of generalizations not about the world but about Oscars correlation o f himself (defined by avoidance o f pain) to representations (processed sensoryinput). Thiscorrelationisevaluatedinordertodeterminehigh-levelregularities that constitute a stable world, that in essence allows us to see without all the bouncing.
Now these kinds of evaluations take place at many different computational levels within the brain, and most o f these evaluations take place through hard-wired computational processes about which we have no awareness.
Pollock argues that there is a distinction between sensation and the feel of sensation. Thefeelofsensationistheoutputofsecondlevelinternalsensors,sensorsthat
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sense the first level internal sensors that process our perceptual information: being-aware means and is the sensing o f perceptual input (this is the link AI wants to make between 'mean'and'is'). Thequalitativefeelofourconsciousnessorsensingmeansandisthe processing or sensing of lower level internal sensors by higher level sensors. Consciousness and the qualitative feel o f our experience, what understanding feels like, or meaning, or love, or whatever are only what we call this second level sensory processing of our own internal processing.
I think this implies for example that all o f our emotions, love, hate, desire, fear, etc. are only interpretations of physical states. We try to make meaningful (sometimes by connecting it to some putative cause) physical states that we sense but do not understand. Even our emotions are interpretive fictions, convenient descriptions that may mask a mechanism whose primary purpose may be to simplify decision processes (emotions force us into decisions). *
What exactly does it mean to process the information from our first level internal sensor? Pollockshiftstheproblemofconsciousnessorqualitativefeelingintosome magical processing. How do these interpretations produce new effects? Or how do we invest ourselves in all o f the complicated ways we do in our correlation between internal sensors and our picture ofthe world? I don't think we should find Pollock's picture satisfactory.
Whatever the merits ofthis model ofthe mind (and there are many), it leaves us with a puzzle. So far I have described only two kinds of meta-languages, which seem to describe the limits o f the other, but whose relation remains unclear: a language o f cause
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described vaguely here by different versions of Oscar, call this Darwinian engineering, and a language o f interpretation, commonly used in literary analysis, asking about meaning, anddeterminingthedistinctionsbetweenanimateandinanimate,etc. Butthisinterpretive language undermines its own status by showing how its distinctions and categories are so unstable as to be senseless without ontological limits o f exactly the sort described by science. But these scientific limits are not foundations precisely because we cannot get outside o f our interpretations. Thus these languages o f science and literature speak in two directionsatthesamething. Ithinkthisisourinheritanceandtheforgingofanother language that includes both of these languages is the underlying although unrealized promise o f AI, and I think our problem.
1Translated and found in Kenny, "Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy", 14.
2 In Being and Time.
3 Is Thoreau's jump from anyone's embodied, particular eyes to God's eyes justified by the same trick that Heidegger uses to move from Dasein-as-mine to its identity as Being-with in Chapter IV of Being and Time! The kind of holistic, non-formalizable link between particular and universal that Heidegger constructs both elucidates a critical dependence between meaning and existence, while at the same time offeringthegreatestresistancetothepossibilityofembodyingaconstructedmind. Daseinbecomesa soul. Ibelieve,however,thatHeidegger's"soul''isfalse. (Howisitpossibletotalkaboutfalsesouls? ) But I am nevertheless left with investigating the intransigent existence and meaning of our use of, belief in,andneedforwhatHeideggerpointsto. Ifconceptsarenotthings,thenwhatarethey: howisit possible for us to function at a level o f abstraction beyond materiality?
4 Cora Diamond describes what it means to understand the answer to a Sphiax-like riddle:
[T]o know the solution to a riddle is not merely to know o f something that thought o f in some way or other it is the solution: you have to know how it is the solution, If you are simply told that man is the solution to the Sphinx's riddle, but do not understand why--ifi that is, you do not understnad why man is supposed to have four legs in the morning and so on--you are in the positoion of someone who 'knows' that every equation has a solution without any idea o fhow that may be arrived at (270)
5This is, of course, not the end of the opportunities for analysis.
6 P. M. S. Hacker. Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy o f Wittgenstein. 1Neuronscanbeintwostates:excitatoryorinhibatory;onoroff:thustheyaredigitalcircuits, by stimulation a neuron reaches an activation potential and fires. The energy of this firing is not variable-- so no information can be encoded in the strength of the output--only by the fact of the firing and in, what doeschange,therateoffiring. Greaterstimulationofaneuronincreasestherateoffiring. Thereissome confusionwhetherthebraindescribedinthiswayislikeadigitalorananologcomputer, digitalswitches (or in computer science these are called logic gates) are like digital clocks, they are in one state or
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another- analog switches are like a clock with two hands--the changes in rate describe an analog relation. Itdoesn'tmatterforus--buttheassumptionbymostAItheoristsandcognitivescientistsisthat it is digital. .
8 This might be a way o f explaining how replicants in the movie Blade Runner can generate emotions even though they are designed not to have any.
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3
Romantic Fragments and Modernist Machines
InalettertohissisterandbrotherKeatsimaginessoulsasmadenotgiven. This making proceeds through what is given: the world as circumstance and the mind as intelligenceandmemoryandemotion. Whywouldapictureofthemindexpressa theology or a moral stance? "The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature and not further" (326). 1The inanimate is the limit o f human happiness. Thislimitengenderstheworldasa"valeofSoul-making",rewritingthe Biblical "a vale o f tears. " In support for this inanimate limit, Keats animates a rose with sensation, in order to tell a tale of crucifixion:
For instance suppose a rose to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful
morning, it enjoys itself, but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun--it cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they are as native to the world as itself--no more can man be happy in spite, the worldly elements will prey upon his
nature. (326)
The unity between the divine and human, between fundamental ontological difference, is twisted toward biology, into a unity between rose and human. In order for Keats to tell the story of our inhabitation and involvement in the world as a limitation on our happiness he endows a rose with a conscious o f that which threatens not its consciousness specifically, butitslife. Sucharoseisnotnativetoanyrealworld,butevenitsfantasticsentience
Notes for this chapter are on page 102
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does not free it from its containment and belonging to a world described by power, not determined by the roses intentions.
The rose slips from the perception ofsensation to an interpretation ofthe meaning ofthese sensations as 'annoyances'. Even to evaluate negative stimuli as annoyances implies a complex o f responses that involves the possibilities o f happiness and hope, a language ofintention in which the consciousness or the desires or beliefs or values ofthe rosestructureitsrelationtotheworld. Therosefunctionsasarosewithinasystemof opposedintentions. Intention,inthiscaseannoyanceorhappiness,isafunctionofthe systematic relation between the rose and the world, and is therefore in neither. The world is animated and the intentionality o f our involvement in the world is determined and guaranteedbythisanimation. Coleridgepicturesthisin"TheEolianHarp":
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
Thought is generated as a consequence of our involvement with dominant non-human forces;intentionfunctionswithinthesystemofworldandbeings. Ourintentioncanbe generated by reducing ourselves to things--and then displacing intention into the environmentthroughwhichthisintentionbecomesvisible. Weenterintothedominionof arbitrary forces to the degree that we can let the rose stand for ourselves, allegorize ourselvesasusedbytheworld. Inthissensewearealwaysinvisibleinthisallegory. We
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exist as nothing more than our own interpretations o f ourselves through our language or actions. Allegories describe and constitute a limit to our knowing ourselves.
Consequently, it is a mistake to imagine that these allegories can describe our becominganything. Theycanonlydescribehowourinterpretationschange. Whenthey describe change they describe it teleologically, as if the allegory were a machine. Even if wearemachineswefunctiononlypartiallythroughourinterpretations. 'Causation'hasa particular grammar that overlaps but is not continuous with 'interpretation'. Wittgenstein at one point investigates how the word 'reading' describes how we read words into speech, how words 'cause' our reading, not our understanding o f what we read.
But why do you say that we felt a causal connection? Causation is surely something established by experiments, by observing a regular concomitance of eventsforexample. SohowcouldIsaythatIfeltsomethingwhichisestablished by experiment? (it is indeed true that observation o f regular concomitances is not the only way we establish causation. ) One might rather say, I feel that the letters are the reason why I read such-and-such. For if someone asks me "Why do you read such-and-such? "--I justify my reading by the letters which are there. (PI? 169)
Whatever a causal connection is, it is not a 'feeling'. "We imagine that a feeling enables us to perceive as it were a connecting mechanism between the look of the word and the soundthatweutter"(PI? 170). Ourfeelingisaninterpretationafterthefactofour reading. Itisthecasethatwereadwords,andthusthatthereisacausallinkbetween
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these words and our reading. But we do not 'know' this through introspection, nor through feeling ourselves reading.
Is Keats confusing the language o f causation for that o f interpretation when he claims that "[t]hen you will find out the use ofthe world . . . [is] I say 'Soul-making"'? What kind of making is this "soul-making"? To what degree should we read poetic soul- making, a "Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense o f Identity," as theology, psychology, hyperbole, anachronistic, animistic, metaphoric? Keats configures the world as meaningful through our use o f it. Soul-making is how we use the world. Do we know or experience the world separate from this, or any use? The world acts against us as a limit, and in this uses us. This use does not imply the intention o f the world so much as an interpretationofaneffect. Keatsreinterpretsthislimitingforceasthecontextinand
through which we make a 'soul'. Thus the interaction between the domain of what is, nature, and the functioning o f our intentionality produces a surrogate in the 'soul' for both ourintentionality(oridentityorselfor. . . )andtheworldaslimit. Descartesseparates consciousness from living: ". . I, perceiving that the principle by which we are nourished is wholly distinct from that by means of which we think, have declared that the name soul when used for both is equivocal. . . I consider the mind not as part o f the soul, but as the whole o f that soul which thinks" {Philosophical Works, 2. 210). Keats in effect stitches
together this separation with the soul. Self-reflection and self-generation as descriptions of both consciousness and of animation constitutes a theology. But this does not answer the question about the ontological status ofthe soul or ofthis theology. What this does
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show is that we respond to this problem by translating ontological questions into semantic questions. Thisisagrammaticalpebble-game.
Keats' souls begin as intelligences, "sparks of divinity . . . atoms of perception-- they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. " A soul arises only when an intelligence becomes itself, that is, acquires an identity. Keats asks "How then are Souls to be made? "
This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series o f years. These three materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action ofMind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. (326-27)
Keats describes the soul and its making as if it were a theory or a recipe, which structurally looks as much like Hegel as like Freud. What can this theory do? What can the recipe create? The problem, for Keats, is that the world uses us, and we must somehowusetheworld. Technologywouldofferonewayofdiminishingthepowerof nature to annoy us; but other human beings are as native to the world as storms and neitherseemsultimatelycontrollable. Onekindofhappinesscanbeincreasedif fundamental needs are met and disease is eradicated. Intelligence, phenomenal
consciousness or awareness, what we see, and judgment, how we know, alters the Heart, the 'Mind's Bible", a hornbook, the Mind's experience'; in turn, the Heart, "the text from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity, alters the Mind. Intelligence must be transformed into a soul through a suffering and experience within the world:
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I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read -- I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that school anditshornbook. DoyounotseehownecessaryaWorldofPainsandtroubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? (327)
This is a picture through which to generate humanness beyond the ontological limits of the inanimate and o f circumstances. What kind o f theoretical weight can such a picture sustain? WeshouldnotlookfortheIntelligencenortheHeartinourmindorbody. This picture, while it describes interactions, only mimics a mechanism. The movement from mind to soul is internal, a process of moral instruction and selfconversion. If this is a reduction o f a theological commitment to the ontological status o f the soul, can we say that in reducing it to a moral ideal it works only as a metaphor? What is growing here? if not a real soul then the imagination, the mental, our being as what? The world or poetry becomes a moral laboratory, a realization or transformation of our potential selves into greater degrees o f actuality.
Mind through its confrontation and interaction with the inanimate limits o f the world and the limits of self, exposed in suffering, failing, desire, and self-reflection, determinesitselfasanethicalstance:asoul. Ifthisisnotaphilosophyofmindthenwhat is the function o f the symbolic language that invokes this philosophy? Its function, I believe, is to offer a particular kind of foundation for a morality that need not appeal to Godnortotherelativisticvaluesofaparticularcommunity. Thisfoundationis simultaneously aesthetic and ontological: a theory about how we inhabit language as if both language, our inhabitation, and 'we' or 'I' are real. The interpretative and the
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constitutiveareconfusedasanIdentity. Thelinkbetweentheoriesofmindandaesthetics follows from this function. This is why theories o f aesthetic justification attempt to justify art by attempting to establish the truth-status of figurative language or fantasy. This defenseoftenarguesforamoraleffectgeneratedbyfiction. HarryBergerJr. thinksthat "the great problem confronting classical thought was that it did not quite know how to keep the order it assumed as objective reality from looking like a projection" (10). This is why Aristotle's poetics, in which truth is recovered, reworks his theory o f perception in
De Anima as simultaneously a work of making and knowing. The problem for the Romantics, I think, is that they did not know how the unity o f experience determining the world as a world could be distinguished from their interpretations o f the world.
In Keats theory the Soul is an analogue for art: "so let me be thy choir" ('"Ode to Psyche"). The question 'what justifies this analogue? ' seems to demand answering the question 'what is the ontological status of this "theory" of mind? ' I take this question to beawayofaskinghowweinhabitlanguage. Keats'theoryofthebecomingofthe intelligence (through its interaction with the Heart and circumstance [the world]) into a Soul stabilized as a self-possessed identity is a theory ofjustification directed at the question 'how we can live? '.
Geoffrey Hill re-constructs this soul-making as a means o f redemption in his claim that Coleridge's "To William Wordsworth" functions as "the private utterance of highly organized art can for a while stabilize the self-dissipating brilliance o f the listener's mind, that is, Coleridge's mind, the mind that is concentrating upon that very diffusion" (12). How does 'mind' 'stabilize' in "the private utterance of highly organized art'? "Private
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utterance" does not mean 'private meaning', susceptible to the force o f Wittgenstein's private language 'argument', the absurdity o f a language functioning as a language without public criteria determining the meaning o f words from one moment to the next. The force o f 'private utterance' attaches to what it means for someone to be 'stabilized' in language. The specialness of aesthetic language lies not in its form, but in its utterance or its use as language standing for, or acting as the expression of, a 'mind' ('mind' here remainsablackbox). Anexpressionofmindisnotatheoryofmind. Rather,itisa temporary identity that allows a fiction or a figure to seduce us into a moral stance towards ourselves as if toward the world, or towards the worlds as if towards ourselves: "a poet can transfigure his own dissipation by a metaphor that perfectly comprehends it" (13). This moral stance is an interpretive stance ('this means x'), where we allow the interpretation to constitute ourselves or a text.
This metaphoric comprehension entangles the poet in the very language in which hefailstoactorconfiguretheworldorhimselfasmeaningful. Wecanuselanguageto describe the world within systems of values (the logic of a language game); the application of the distinctions determining any language game, however, is continually subject to normativerestrictions,criteriaoflegitimacy,andontologicaljustification. Thecriteria determining legitimate use, while grounded in social and linguistic conventions, continuously require ontological support justifying the actuality of the distinctions and entities indicated or expressed within a language. In other words we can use language as a self-contained descriptive system of values or distinctions, but we can only enter language, that is, constitute ourselves and the world through the justifications o f both the
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application and the existence o f these distinctions and values. (This is not to say we do not make mistakes, but that there are limits. I can, for example imagine that rocks rolling downmountainsaregods. IfIaminthepathofsucharock,Icanstandthereand embracethisgodinamomentofexquisitehappiness. Mylifemightbemoremeaningful than someone who thinks rocks are rocks, and they are better avoided when they reach a certainvelocity. IfIclaimtherock-as-godpictureisequivalenttotherocks-are-hard
picture I have made a grammatical mistake. The rocks-are-hard school is superior if ones goal is to stay alive. The rock-god school might be superior if my goal is to die meaningfully in a mountain accident. Relativistic arguments often make confused comparisons. Inthiscasephysicsactsasalimitonhowsuccessfulabeliefsystemisasa survival system. The question remains: is it better to live a life o f fictional fantasy that may be meaningful, or a life o f scientific realism that may not be? . These may not be opposites in any real sense, but their application is fraught with confusions). Ontological
justification can describe the limits o f our involvement, and the meaning o f this involvement, in our language.
Poetry works through configuring ontological justification as a problem o f interpretation. This formulation can justify Ransom's vague description o f poetry as "ontological or metaphysical maneuver" (The World's Body, 347). In poetic use the demand for ontological justification appears as a demand for recognition, to use the creation ofmeaning as an expression ofself. The constitution or the making ofourselves marks our expressions o f value as expressions o f power; these expressions cannot supersede the systematic normative organization and functioning o f language, where the
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accuracy o f statements becomes an acting through, agreement with, and description o f language. Our failure or success within these normative rules cannot be mediated through our self-constructions, but only by the determining structures o f society, language, biology. These normative rules urge or measure us; our ontological creation ofourselves and our world within language measures orjudges language. We can forgive our ontological failures but never our failures in clarity. Hill, quoting Chesterton's study of
Dickens says, "'a saint after repentance will forgive himselffor a sin; a man about town willneverforgivehimselfforafauxpas"'(7). Artisaconstructionwithinthe'density'
o f language, the normative resistance o f words and the incommensurability between different concepts, ideas, meanings, and language games. This poetic making delivers both the poet and our poetic responses "up to judgment"(14). Hill divides this judgment up between a (1) judgment o f our "empirical guilt" accompanying our possible failures and faux pas within the normative criteria of our language and social life and a (2) judgment of the "Sin" that Karl Barth understands as the 'specific gravity of human nature as such' (15). 6 This 'empirical guilt', or the normative force of language, has its own weight. "[I]t is at the heart o f this 'heaviness' that poetry must do its atoning work, this heaviness which is simultaneously the 'density' o f language and the 'specific gravity o f human nature'" (15).
The failure of clarity, the difficulty requiring interpretation in Finnegans Wake (and in a different way in Philosophical Investigations) forces the reader to mediate the normative rules through ontological justification (the radical need to determine the ontological status of its language as the exercise of its art), and to mediate the constitutive
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force of ontological justification by the normative rules of our language (its humor, what Wittgenstein calls grammatical jokes). The normative rules o f language can function like the laws o f nature (the descriptions o f form as quantity) and our ontological justifications are judgments about how we function within these laws. Together these rules and
judgments constitute us within language and describes our intentionality, seemingly our qualitative mental relations. Finnegans Wake, therefore, can describe our constitution as humanbeingsasafunctionofacommentaryaboutitsownlanguage. Ournormative language while constituting the possibilities of meaning available to us can not function ontologically, that is, we can exist within and through these possibilities, but we can only exist at all, through the ontological or creative pressure attending the kinds o f ontological
judgments we make about the normative status of our language games, for example, 'Do I love you? ' 'Can I love? ' 'Is love possible? ' This explains why ordinary criteria can fail; why we are continually tempted by skepticism. 2 If I rewrite Hill's formulation of our deliverance up to judgment, I can suggest a vague canopy to include this play between ontology and epistemology as a moral crisis: "in the constraint of shame the [Wakean\ poet and [grammatical philosopher] [are] free to discover both the 'menace' and the atoning power o f his own art" (17).
Our survival in language requires an act of will. We must, however, take responsibility for the governance of our will, and not cede or abrogate our moral involvement within language to the confusion ofuse which distorts and hides this moral dimension within the confusions and entanglements between language games o f power
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(ideology)disguisedasmoraljudgments. Somethinglikethissensemotivates Wittgenstein to remark his distrust oflanguage:
Human beings are profoundly enmeshed in philosophical--i. e. grammatical-- confusions. They cannot be freed without first being extricated from the extraordinary variety o f associations which hold them prisoner. Y ou have as it were to reconstitute their entire language. --But this language grew up as it did becausehumanbeingshad--andhave--thetendencytothinkinthisway. So you can only succeed in extricating people who live in an instinctive rebellion against language; you cannot help those whose entire instinct is to live in the herd
which has created this language as its own proper mode o f expression. (MS 213,
? 423; quoted in Kenny, "Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy", 16).
Poetry and philosophy both constitute kinds of rebellion against language. This distrust of language constitutes a religious stance, a configuration of oneself as anything or anyone in relation to a negative limit which can determine our meaning and our world. What is it like to be trapped within a system of meaning within which you cannot escape but which you distrust? Finnegans Wake is a comic version o f Kafka's The Castle.
Coleridge, commenting on the mental schema articulated in Wordsworth's Prelude, redescribes the reciprocal relation between the senses and the world that constructs the mind. Following what he believes was "partly suggested by me . . . He
[Wordsworth] was to treat man as man--a subject o f eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out ofthe senses"(188). This could seem a conquest ofa world, or the construction
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o f a Khananite pleasure palace after such a conquest. Eliot, in 'Gerontion,' finds such a
world "a decayed house", where "In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,/ To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk/ Among the whispers"; where these whispers, these "vacant shuttles weave the wind" into a riddle about the consequences of
knowledge ["After such knowledge, what forgiveness? "]. Our ordinary needs eat, divide and drink the world into metaphors (cliches: whispers, weave the wind) that signal the loss, consumption and disappearance ofthe world. The organic world symbolizes its own loss. Eliotdescribesamoralterror,akindofknowledgethatcanappearasaskepticism generated from failing senses, but I think it is more likely a realization that a soul can fragment through a kind of self-reflection in which the indifference ofthe world and our own indifference generates a specific terror. Poetry can enact this terror as what we are. Thisstance-indifferentterror--isneitherexistentialnorstrictlyspeakingmoral. Eliot's poetry describes this terror as a realization that the soul (and our demand for redemption) and subjectivity (at least our speaking T ) describes the subjunctive: we live counterfactually. Eliot does not discover this. The possibilities of either idealism or modem skepticism, when understood as moral responses to scientific knowing, outlines
the soul, subject, self as subjunctive. (This does not mean the soul, subject, self are constructed; they may be given as perpetual possibility; making a soul or a mind follows as apossibilityofthispossibility). Eliot'sdiscoveryisoftheterrorgraspingandattending modemself-reflection. Heexposespartlywhatthis'subjunctive'means,teachingusthe consequence ofthis knowledge (ifit is 'knowledge'). Words describe ideal forms that our descriptions belie into algorithms of loss:
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To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my site, smell, hearing, taste, and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact?
Age and terror and revulsion and the failure of our knowing and knowledge, the realization that not only can the mind and the world be confused for each other but that a failure o f courage, sense, or meaning can tempt us to deny our mind. Instinct, the algorithm describing the non-human, and our dying, the algorithm o f loss, sketch the limits ofour knowledge ofboth ofthese as despair: "What will the spider do,/ Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs.
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As human beings, our questions or motives in determining the meaning of a thing arise because o f the claim things have on us, a claim that describes the material world as somekindoflimit. Thisclaimisnothingnew. FrankensteinhaslittletodowithAIor science, except as an expression of anxiety about our interpretations of the instability of the distinction between inanimate and animate, between human and otherness. It is True that science explicitly questions this distinction, claiming that it is not given but is made, a product of a set of causes and effects that we now call evolution. But the book is not questioning these limits in relation to how they are constituted within nature (or out). Rather it examines the moral implications o f drawing the difference between human and others superficially, examining how we interpret our obligations to others. The problem o f alienation Frankenstein explores is possible because we can identify with the monster and the monster with us: and in this it is a novel asking about the relationship between
personhood and citizenship. It may suggest that our recognition as human (our inclusion in a community) must arise from a recognition of certain origins, but we are not made like the monster and yet he may describe our condition. The novel does not ask but leaves us with the question 'what does it mean to be made'? That question was partially answered and given a special claim on us by Darwin. But how would Darwin fit into a discussion about what counts as human? . His thinking explains, and is now used to explain, how things become living, how living creatures become intelligent, even become human. Do we imagine Darwin would pressure our texts away from the questions o f interpretation exemplified in the confusion between citizenship and personhood? I have to leave this question hanging, but the difficulty of fitting Darwinian thought (as opposed to rhetoric) is
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exactly the difficulty o f making the relation and difference between cause (what science describes) and interpretation (what literature demands) clear. This is the difficulty of constructing an intelligence in a machine.
For example how would our claims about the limits or status of subjectivity or our ideological judgments survive philosopher Daniel Dennett's description o f the necessity for selfishness within evolution? :
"As soon as something gets into the business of self-preservation, boundaries become important, for ifyou are setting out to preserve yourself you don't want to squander effort trying to preserve the whole world: you draw the line" {Consciousness Explained, 174)
The interpretations that function within, as and between the confusion between citizenship and personhood in Frankenstein mean we ask for the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, as it were, from inside the security o f acting as animate creatures.
AI turns this interpretive investigation o f the inanimate around. It investigates the difference between the inanimate and animate (or conscious and mechanical) as it were from the outside, not from the assumption that this distinction is meaningful but that it is caused: human beings or animals or plants are effects. Cognitive Science asks 'how can onegeneratequalitativeexperiencefromwhatcanonlybedescribedquantitatively? Itis, for example, much easier to teach a computer how to do calculus, than it is to teach it what a chair is. How can we get from our interpretations of ourselves to the causal mechanisms of our minds? This is, however, as much a question about and of poetry as about AI.
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Keats' ends the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with the equation: "'Beauty is truth, truthbeauty. '" Evenifonethinkthisisafailedline,theinterrogationofthemeaningofa thing, o f the urn in Keats' ode, suggests that any other answer would fail to give the thing meaning. Even this answer gives the proper form without the necessary force that would make it true (although it might seem beautiful or it might not). But that this question, 'what is the meaning o f a thing? ', should be important to us organizes one o f the currents in the following pages, and at the very least describes a problem romantic poetry found itselffacedwith. Theequationbeauty=truthdescribes,Ithink,arequirementfororan ideal (of whatever status) of poetry in general, although how to construe truth and beauty here is always at issue. Poetry always seems confined by an asymmetry: it can enact meaning or beauty but it's claims on truth are tenuous, becoming more tenuous within modem scientific culture. Things or objects can function as the grounds for truth, and one can argue that this is always the case, but it is certainly the case when what is real is primarily described as material. Within the Keats' ode, the status of the um is complex and shifting (within the poets interrogation), but it functions at least as the vanishing point ofthereal. Thus,theasymmetryofpoetryispartlycounteredbythefactthatitistheum that speaks the equation between beauty and truth: in a rough allegory the thing, the um, with its status as true (or real) asserts an equation between beauty and truth that can only function aesthetically, as an expression of beauty. The um as thing (the real) articulates the truth as an aesthetic. The attempt to enact the qualitative (meaning, beauty, intention, and so on, what AI calls qualia, what it feels like to be conscious or to be human) through an embodiment in language describes what Coleridge called a philosophic poem: to enact
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the beautiful (or meaningful or intentional) as real and true: poetry with ontological force, the force ofthe real which we describe as true. This is close to what is attempted in AI: to enact the equation between beauty (or the meaningful) and truth, and in this translate our interpretative relations with causal processes.
Traditional AI makes two founding assumptions about this project: what is called the symbolic system hypothesis and the algorithmic assumption. The first claims that the processes underlying intelligence are not just described symbolically but that they are symbolic: we ourselves as well as our thinking are constituted as nothing more than the self-reflexive (to varying degrees) processing of different kinds of symbols within a vast system of symbolic relations. The second claims that our mental states are algorithms, procedures that convert inputs into outputs according to a defined set of rules: a recipe or a function converting or computing inputs into outputs.
What kind of claim do these algorithms and the symbolic processes they enact have on us? AI assumes they are both true and are the only way anything can be made meaningful. In this picture, only symbolic processes, which are not interpretations, allegories or non-symbolic computations, can have sense, and thus our brains must enact these symbolic processes as our mind (There are ways even of construing all of reality as such symbolic processes within physics).
Heidegger wants to displace the claim of this picture of the world on us. Although I do not think Heidegger understood it in this way, the best sense I can make of his claim, in "Das Ding", that "the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened" ("The Thing", 166) is that the
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possibilities determined by thinking, knowledge, technology, and economics that produced a working bomb alters the kind of metaphysical possibilities in and through which we function. We can literally enact our death through our knowledge and its potential to destroy the world: I call this a metaphysical fact because our knowledge and knowing, when instituted within social power, has ontological force so great as to destroy us. The worldcanbecontainedbyourknowledgebecauseitcanbedestroyedbyit. Theatomic bomb as a metaphysical fact is a new conceptual limit determining the scope o f our commitments toward what we count as real. We can only believe in ghosts to our greater peril. Thisfact,describingthelimitoftheworldbyourknowledge,enactedthroughthe possibility of nuclear destruction, is that what counts as matter, and what matters and counts for us will have to include a commitment to a physics that can manipulate the substance o f the universe through a complex set o f mathematical models. This is called the possibility o f losing my life by losing the world. That this loss o f the world can be enacted
through human knowing, as if from a single source, gives knowing ontological force not unlike turning the world into a fantasy. What Joyce described as "lethelulled between explosion and reexplosion . . . from grosskopp to megapod, embalmed, o f grand age, rich indeathanticipated"(FW78. 04-06)hasgainedanewallegoricaltarget: wecanliterally enact our death through our knowledge o f the world as a whole and its potential to destroy the world. The problem ofthe machine is not only about our knowledge of how to be mistaken for a thing or how to be mistaken for being human. Our understanding of ourselves and the world must be a kind of reverse evolution, undoing our feelings and interpretations into quantities within some created conceptual language, a language not
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restricted by the limits o f cause or interpretation. The failure to find such a language has been the failure o f AI.
2. 3 Spiraling from interpretation to cause
The fundamental assumption for Cognitive Science is that the brain is a computer. All forms o f meaning and understanding must be derived from the computations o f neurons. 7 This Computational model grounds all mental functioning in rationality. But this rationality should not be mistaken for what we often oppose by the word
'irrationality' (these words are used primarily as interpretations). Cognitive Philosopher John Pollock defines rationality as the ordered, non-random transition between mental states: "try to imagine a creature possessing mental states but entirely unconstrained by considerationsofrationality"(HowtoBuildaPerson,70) Suchrandomtransitionswould resultinasystemscrashonanycognitivelevelonwhichtheyoccurred. Thisuseof rationality is really a way of arguing that all mental processes (metal states and their
transitions), including language instantiate an ordered system.
Pollock is attempting to construct this kind of system. He tells a story about how
to move from things and causes into interpretations and qualities; this describes an aesthetic,butnotanaestheticlikethatinanovel. ThisisthestoryofOscar. (Iwillgive only the schematics o f this story without concerning myself here with the justification o f the type/token mentalism for which he argues, although such a theory can also be understood to form an aesthetic)
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Oscar I is a system that consists o f sensory input, some information processing mechanism; which produces a picture ofthe world. This picture is generated from generalizations (computational processes) about this sensory input. These cognitive abilities are embedded in a conative (from Latin conatus, endeavor, attempt) function determining a set o f goals. Such a mental model, although Pollock ignores this, already figures symbolically a kind o f self but in this case one determined only by its pain sensors and its response. If pain then flight, if flight fails, then fight. This describes the mental functioning o f an amoebae, and therefore has its limits.
Oscar H
TheprimaryfailureofOscarIisitsvictimizationbyitsenvironment. Survival
potential increases with the ability to make predictions about the world (or really about itself about its responses to its sensory inputs). Such predictions mean that Oscar II, in replacing Oscar I, must be able to make generalizations about the environment in relation to his goals (in this case only avoid pain). This is the beginning o f mental fiction.
These predictions are generated through self-reflection: an internal sensor senses whenandwhy:pointythingsmeanpain. Isay'meanpain'becauseitoperatesasa
judgment based on a correlation between a rudimentary self (that defined by pain sensors) and the representation of pointy things. This correlation is possible by virtue of the goal (avoid pain) and the possibility for Oscar o f modeling his own sensory outputs. What these sensors do is construct generalizations about certain aspects of the environment in relationtoOscarsownresponses(pain). Suchgeneralizations,reallypossibilities,are
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logical fictions. There is no question whether they are true or false: everything that looks pointycausespain. porOscarIItheworldisfullofpaincausingthingstowhichhe always reacts as if the possibilities, the generalizations about how the world effects Oscars pain sensors, are always true (but in fact Oscar has no notion o f truth because there exists nopossibility,forhim,ofthesepredictionsbeingfalse,eveniftheyarefalse). Possibility means always true fiction. This is the mental world o f a worm.
Oscar IU
The problem with being a worm is that the environment can be deceptive and one's own sensors can fail or produce false information. Not all pointy things are alike, a pointy leaf is not like a pointy stick, and a machine-eating tiger is not the same as the mirror image of such a tiger.
Oscar HI experiences a mirror stage. Initially Oscar I and H were like amoebae to worm; Oscar n and m , however, are like bird to cat (I guess the bird has eaten the worm). The cat is able to distinguish a mirror image from another animal (it's not clear whether the cat thinks it's its own image). The bird responds to a mirror image as if it is another bird (it attacks the image)
Oscar HI must be able to evaluate the ontological status of its perceptions, are they real or not, it must be able to recognize mirrors as mirrors, and mirror-images as mirror- images. Oscar n sees the world phenomenological, as if its eyes were video or film cameras. If you hold a camera and film while walking around the picture jumps, and bounces and shakes. The viewer gets a headache trying to stabilize the picture into sense.
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Why don't we see like that? We walk around and yet our picture of the world doesn't really jump around like this; why?
To answer this we must ask how can we make Oscar m generate a world separate from his senses, such that he can evaluate his sensory inputs in relation to this stable world? Pollock ask: how can Oscar distinguish between machine-eating tigers and mirror-image tigers? Asking this question means asking the difference between appearance and reality, and its answer requires an interpretation.
This level o f interpretation requires another layer o f internal sensors, this time evaluating the first level o f internal sensors. Pollock thinks that our picture o f the world is generated by two different kinds ofgeneralizations: "On the one hand Oscar HI has generalizations about the relations between his perceptual inputs and the states o f his environment, and on the other he had has generalizations about regularities within the environment that persist independently of perception of the environment"(4). This independent world is generated as a set of generalizations not about the world but about Oscars correlation o f himself (defined by avoidance o f pain) to representations (processed sensoryinput). Thiscorrelationisevaluatedinordertodeterminehigh-levelregularities that constitute a stable world, that in essence allows us to see without all the bouncing.
Now these kinds of evaluations take place at many different computational levels within the brain, and most o f these evaluations take place through hard-wired computational processes about which we have no awareness.
Pollock argues that there is a distinction between sensation and the feel of sensation. Thefeelofsensationistheoutputofsecondlevelinternalsensors,sensorsthat
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sense the first level internal sensors that process our perceptual information: being-aware means and is the sensing o f perceptual input (this is the link AI wants to make between 'mean'and'is'). Thequalitativefeelofourconsciousnessorsensingmeansandisthe processing or sensing of lower level internal sensors by higher level sensors. Consciousness and the qualitative feel o f our experience, what understanding feels like, or meaning, or love, or whatever are only what we call this second level sensory processing of our own internal processing.
I think this implies for example that all o f our emotions, love, hate, desire, fear, etc. are only interpretations of physical states. We try to make meaningful (sometimes by connecting it to some putative cause) physical states that we sense but do not understand. Even our emotions are interpretive fictions, convenient descriptions that may mask a mechanism whose primary purpose may be to simplify decision processes (emotions force us into decisions). *
What exactly does it mean to process the information from our first level internal sensor? Pollockshiftstheproblemofconsciousnessorqualitativefeelingintosome magical processing. How do these interpretations produce new effects? Or how do we invest ourselves in all o f the complicated ways we do in our correlation between internal sensors and our picture ofthe world? I don't think we should find Pollock's picture satisfactory.
Whatever the merits ofthis model ofthe mind (and there are many), it leaves us with a puzzle. So far I have described only two kinds of meta-languages, which seem to describe the limits o f the other, but whose relation remains unclear: a language o f cause
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described vaguely here by different versions of Oscar, call this Darwinian engineering, and a language o f interpretation, commonly used in literary analysis, asking about meaning, anddeterminingthedistinctionsbetweenanimateandinanimate,etc. Butthisinterpretive language undermines its own status by showing how its distinctions and categories are so unstable as to be senseless without ontological limits o f exactly the sort described by science. But these scientific limits are not foundations precisely because we cannot get outside o f our interpretations. Thus these languages o f science and literature speak in two directionsatthesamething. Ithinkthisisourinheritanceandtheforgingofanother language that includes both of these languages is the underlying although unrealized promise o f AI, and I think our problem.
1Translated and found in Kenny, "Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy", 14.
2 In Being and Time.
3 Is Thoreau's jump from anyone's embodied, particular eyes to God's eyes justified by the same trick that Heidegger uses to move from Dasein-as-mine to its identity as Being-with in Chapter IV of Being and Time! The kind of holistic, non-formalizable link between particular and universal that Heidegger constructs both elucidates a critical dependence between meaning and existence, while at the same time offeringthegreatestresistancetothepossibilityofembodyingaconstructedmind. Daseinbecomesa soul. Ibelieve,however,thatHeidegger's"soul''isfalse. (Howisitpossibletotalkaboutfalsesouls? ) But I am nevertheless left with investigating the intransigent existence and meaning of our use of, belief in,andneedforwhatHeideggerpointsto. Ifconceptsarenotthings,thenwhatarethey: howisit possible for us to function at a level o f abstraction beyond materiality?
4 Cora Diamond describes what it means to understand the answer to a Sphiax-like riddle:
[T]o know the solution to a riddle is not merely to know o f something that thought o f in some way or other it is the solution: you have to know how it is the solution, If you are simply told that man is the solution to the Sphinx's riddle, but do not understand why--ifi that is, you do not understnad why man is supposed to have four legs in the morning and so on--you are in the positoion of someone who 'knows' that every equation has a solution without any idea o fhow that may be arrived at (270)
5This is, of course, not the end of the opportunities for analysis.
6 P. M. S. Hacker. Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy o f Wittgenstein. 1Neuronscanbeintwostates:excitatoryorinhibatory;onoroff:thustheyaredigitalcircuits, by stimulation a neuron reaches an activation potential and fires. The energy of this firing is not variable-- so no information can be encoded in the strength of the output--only by the fact of the firing and in, what doeschange,therateoffiring. Greaterstimulationofaneuronincreasestherateoffiring. Thereissome confusionwhetherthebraindescribedinthiswayislikeadigitalorananologcomputer, digitalswitches (or in computer science these are called logic gates) are like digital clocks, they are in one state or
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another- analog switches are like a clock with two hands--the changes in rate describe an analog relation. Itdoesn'tmatterforus--buttheassumptionbymostAItheoristsandcognitivescientistsisthat it is digital. .
8 This might be a way o f explaining how replicants in the movie Blade Runner can generate emotions even though they are designed not to have any.
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3
Romantic Fragments and Modernist Machines
InalettertohissisterandbrotherKeatsimaginessoulsasmadenotgiven. This making proceeds through what is given: the world as circumstance and the mind as intelligenceandmemoryandemotion. Whywouldapictureofthemindexpressa theology or a moral stance? "The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature and not further" (326). 1The inanimate is the limit o f human happiness. Thislimitengenderstheworldasa"valeofSoul-making",rewritingthe Biblical "a vale o f tears. " In support for this inanimate limit, Keats animates a rose with sensation, in order to tell a tale of crucifixion:
For instance suppose a rose to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful
morning, it enjoys itself, but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun--it cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they are as native to the world as itself--no more can man be happy in spite, the worldly elements will prey upon his
nature. (326)
The unity between the divine and human, between fundamental ontological difference, is twisted toward biology, into a unity between rose and human. In order for Keats to tell the story of our inhabitation and involvement in the world as a limitation on our happiness he endows a rose with a conscious o f that which threatens not its consciousness specifically, butitslife. Sucharoseisnotnativetoanyrealworld,butevenitsfantasticsentience
Notes for this chapter are on page 102
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does not free it from its containment and belonging to a world described by power, not determined by the roses intentions.
The rose slips from the perception ofsensation to an interpretation ofthe meaning ofthese sensations as 'annoyances'. Even to evaluate negative stimuli as annoyances implies a complex o f responses that involves the possibilities o f happiness and hope, a language ofintention in which the consciousness or the desires or beliefs or values ofthe rosestructureitsrelationtotheworld. Therosefunctionsasarosewithinasystemof opposedintentions. Intention,inthiscaseannoyanceorhappiness,isafunctionofthe systematic relation between the rose and the world, and is therefore in neither. The world is animated and the intentionality o f our involvement in the world is determined and guaranteedbythisanimation. Coleridgepicturesthisin"TheEolianHarp":
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
Thought is generated as a consequence of our involvement with dominant non-human forces;intentionfunctionswithinthesystemofworldandbeings. Ourintentioncanbe generated by reducing ourselves to things--and then displacing intention into the environmentthroughwhichthisintentionbecomesvisible. Weenterintothedominionof arbitrary forces to the degree that we can let the rose stand for ourselves, allegorize ourselvesasusedbytheworld. Inthissensewearealwaysinvisibleinthisallegory. We
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exist as nothing more than our own interpretations o f ourselves through our language or actions. Allegories describe and constitute a limit to our knowing ourselves.
Consequently, it is a mistake to imagine that these allegories can describe our becominganything. Theycanonlydescribehowourinterpretationschange. Whenthey describe change they describe it teleologically, as if the allegory were a machine. Even if wearemachineswefunctiononlypartiallythroughourinterpretations. 'Causation'hasa particular grammar that overlaps but is not continuous with 'interpretation'. Wittgenstein at one point investigates how the word 'reading' describes how we read words into speech, how words 'cause' our reading, not our understanding o f what we read.
But why do you say that we felt a causal connection? Causation is surely something established by experiments, by observing a regular concomitance of eventsforexample. SohowcouldIsaythatIfeltsomethingwhichisestablished by experiment? (it is indeed true that observation o f regular concomitances is not the only way we establish causation. ) One might rather say, I feel that the letters are the reason why I read such-and-such. For if someone asks me "Why do you read such-and-such? "--I justify my reading by the letters which are there. (PI? 169)
Whatever a causal connection is, it is not a 'feeling'. "We imagine that a feeling enables us to perceive as it were a connecting mechanism between the look of the word and the soundthatweutter"(PI? 170). Ourfeelingisaninterpretationafterthefactofour reading. Itisthecasethatwereadwords,andthusthatthereisacausallinkbetween
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these words and our reading. But we do not 'know' this through introspection, nor through feeling ourselves reading.
Is Keats confusing the language o f causation for that o f interpretation when he claims that "[t]hen you will find out the use ofthe world . . . [is] I say 'Soul-making"'? What kind of making is this "soul-making"? To what degree should we read poetic soul- making, a "Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense o f Identity," as theology, psychology, hyperbole, anachronistic, animistic, metaphoric? Keats configures the world as meaningful through our use o f it. Soul-making is how we use the world. Do we know or experience the world separate from this, or any use? The world acts against us as a limit, and in this uses us. This use does not imply the intention o f the world so much as an interpretationofaneffect. Keatsreinterpretsthislimitingforceasthecontextinand
through which we make a 'soul'. Thus the interaction between the domain of what is, nature, and the functioning o f our intentionality produces a surrogate in the 'soul' for both ourintentionality(oridentityorselfor. . . )andtheworldaslimit. Descartesseparates consciousness from living: ". . I, perceiving that the principle by which we are nourished is wholly distinct from that by means of which we think, have declared that the name soul when used for both is equivocal. . . I consider the mind not as part o f the soul, but as the whole o f that soul which thinks" {Philosophical Works, 2. 210). Keats in effect stitches
together this separation with the soul. Self-reflection and self-generation as descriptions of both consciousness and of animation constitutes a theology. But this does not answer the question about the ontological status ofthe soul or ofthis theology. What this does
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show is that we respond to this problem by translating ontological questions into semantic questions. Thisisagrammaticalpebble-game.
Keats' souls begin as intelligences, "sparks of divinity . . . atoms of perception-- they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. " A soul arises only when an intelligence becomes itself, that is, acquires an identity. Keats asks "How then are Souls to be made? "
This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series o f years. These three materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action ofMind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. (326-27)
Keats describes the soul and its making as if it were a theory or a recipe, which structurally looks as much like Hegel as like Freud. What can this theory do? What can the recipe create? The problem, for Keats, is that the world uses us, and we must somehowusetheworld. Technologywouldofferonewayofdiminishingthepowerof nature to annoy us; but other human beings are as native to the world as storms and neitherseemsultimatelycontrollable. Onekindofhappinesscanbeincreasedif fundamental needs are met and disease is eradicated. Intelligence, phenomenal
consciousness or awareness, what we see, and judgment, how we know, alters the Heart, the 'Mind's Bible", a hornbook, the Mind's experience'; in turn, the Heart, "the text from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity, alters the Mind. Intelligence must be transformed into a soul through a suffering and experience within the world:
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I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read -- I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that school anditshornbook. DoyounotseehownecessaryaWorldofPainsandtroubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? (327)
This is a picture through which to generate humanness beyond the ontological limits of the inanimate and o f circumstances. What kind o f theoretical weight can such a picture sustain? WeshouldnotlookfortheIntelligencenortheHeartinourmindorbody. This picture, while it describes interactions, only mimics a mechanism. The movement from mind to soul is internal, a process of moral instruction and selfconversion. If this is a reduction o f a theological commitment to the ontological status o f the soul, can we say that in reducing it to a moral ideal it works only as a metaphor? What is growing here? if not a real soul then the imagination, the mental, our being as what? The world or poetry becomes a moral laboratory, a realization or transformation of our potential selves into greater degrees o f actuality.
Mind through its confrontation and interaction with the inanimate limits o f the world and the limits of self, exposed in suffering, failing, desire, and self-reflection, determinesitselfasanethicalstance:asoul. Ifthisisnotaphilosophyofmindthenwhat is the function o f the symbolic language that invokes this philosophy? Its function, I believe, is to offer a particular kind of foundation for a morality that need not appeal to Godnortotherelativisticvaluesofaparticularcommunity. Thisfoundationis simultaneously aesthetic and ontological: a theory about how we inhabit language as if both language, our inhabitation, and 'we' or 'I' are real. The interpretative and the
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constitutiveareconfusedasanIdentity. Thelinkbetweentheoriesofmindandaesthetics follows from this function. This is why theories o f aesthetic justification attempt to justify art by attempting to establish the truth-status of figurative language or fantasy. This defenseoftenarguesforamoraleffectgeneratedbyfiction. HarryBergerJr. thinksthat "the great problem confronting classical thought was that it did not quite know how to keep the order it assumed as objective reality from looking like a projection" (10). This is why Aristotle's poetics, in which truth is recovered, reworks his theory o f perception in
De Anima as simultaneously a work of making and knowing. The problem for the Romantics, I think, is that they did not know how the unity o f experience determining the world as a world could be distinguished from their interpretations o f the world.
In Keats theory the Soul is an analogue for art: "so let me be thy choir" ('"Ode to Psyche"). The question 'what justifies this analogue? ' seems to demand answering the question 'what is the ontological status of this "theory" of mind? ' I take this question to beawayofaskinghowweinhabitlanguage. Keats'theoryofthebecomingofthe intelligence (through its interaction with the Heart and circumstance [the world]) into a Soul stabilized as a self-possessed identity is a theory ofjustification directed at the question 'how we can live? '.
Geoffrey Hill re-constructs this soul-making as a means o f redemption in his claim that Coleridge's "To William Wordsworth" functions as "the private utterance of highly organized art can for a while stabilize the self-dissipating brilliance o f the listener's mind, that is, Coleridge's mind, the mind that is concentrating upon that very diffusion" (12). How does 'mind' 'stabilize' in "the private utterance of highly organized art'? "Private
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utterance" does not mean 'private meaning', susceptible to the force o f Wittgenstein's private language 'argument', the absurdity o f a language functioning as a language without public criteria determining the meaning o f words from one moment to the next. The force o f 'private utterance' attaches to what it means for someone to be 'stabilized' in language. The specialness of aesthetic language lies not in its form, but in its utterance or its use as language standing for, or acting as the expression of, a 'mind' ('mind' here remainsablackbox). Anexpressionofmindisnotatheoryofmind. Rather,itisa temporary identity that allows a fiction or a figure to seduce us into a moral stance towards ourselves as if toward the world, or towards the worlds as if towards ourselves: "a poet can transfigure his own dissipation by a metaphor that perfectly comprehends it" (13). This moral stance is an interpretive stance ('this means x'), where we allow the interpretation to constitute ourselves or a text.
This metaphoric comprehension entangles the poet in the very language in which hefailstoactorconfiguretheworldorhimselfasmeaningful. Wecanuselanguageto describe the world within systems of values (the logic of a language game); the application of the distinctions determining any language game, however, is continually subject to normativerestrictions,criteriaoflegitimacy,andontologicaljustification. Thecriteria determining legitimate use, while grounded in social and linguistic conventions, continuously require ontological support justifying the actuality of the distinctions and entities indicated or expressed within a language. In other words we can use language as a self-contained descriptive system of values or distinctions, but we can only enter language, that is, constitute ourselves and the world through the justifications o f both the
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application and the existence o f these distinctions and values. (This is not to say we do not make mistakes, but that there are limits. I can, for example imagine that rocks rolling downmountainsaregods. IfIaminthepathofsucharock,Icanstandthereand embracethisgodinamomentofexquisitehappiness. Mylifemightbemoremeaningful than someone who thinks rocks are rocks, and they are better avoided when they reach a certainvelocity. IfIclaimtherock-as-godpictureisequivalenttotherocks-are-hard
picture I have made a grammatical mistake. The rocks-are-hard school is superior if ones goal is to stay alive. The rock-god school might be superior if my goal is to die meaningfully in a mountain accident. Relativistic arguments often make confused comparisons. Inthiscasephysicsactsasalimitonhowsuccessfulabeliefsystemisasa survival system. The question remains: is it better to live a life o f fictional fantasy that may be meaningful, or a life o f scientific realism that may not be? . These may not be opposites in any real sense, but their application is fraught with confusions). Ontological
justification can describe the limits o f our involvement, and the meaning o f this involvement, in our language.
Poetry works through configuring ontological justification as a problem o f interpretation. This formulation can justify Ransom's vague description o f poetry as "ontological or metaphysical maneuver" (The World's Body, 347). In poetic use the demand for ontological justification appears as a demand for recognition, to use the creation ofmeaning as an expression ofself. The constitution or the making ofourselves marks our expressions o f value as expressions o f power; these expressions cannot supersede the systematic normative organization and functioning o f language, where the
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accuracy o f statements becomes an acting through, agreement with, and description o f language. Our failure or success within these normative rules cannot be mediated through our self-constructions, but only by the determining structures o f society, language, biology. These normative rules urge or measure us; our ontological creation ofourselves and our world within language measures orjudges language. We can forgive our ontological failures but never our failures in clarity. Hill, quoting Chesterton's study of
Dickens says, "'a saint after repentance will forgive himselffor a sin; a man about town willneverforgivehimselfforafauxpas"'(7). Artisaconstructionwithinthe'density'
o f language, the normative resistance o f words and the incommensurability between different concepts, ideas, meanings, and language games. This poetic making delivers both the poet and our poetic responses "up to judgment"(14). Hill divides this judgment up between a (1) judgment o f our "empirical guilt" accompanying our possible failures and faux pas within the normative criteria of our language and social life and a (2) judgment of the "Sin" that Karl Barth understands as the 'specific gravity of human nature as such' (15). 6 This 'empirical guilt', or the normative force of language, has its own weight. "[I]t is at the heart o f this 'heaviness' that poetry must do its atoning work, this heaviness which is simultaneously the 'density' o f language and the 'specific gravity o f human nature'" (15).
The failure of clarity, the difficulty requiring interpretation in Finnegans Wake (and in a different way in Philosophical Investigations) forces the reader to mediate the normative rules through ontological justification (the radical need to determine the ontological status of its language as the exercise of its art), and to mediate the constitutive
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force of ontological justification by the normative rules of our language (its humor, what Wittgenstein calls grammatical jokes). The normative rules o f language can function like the laws o f nature (the descriptions o f form as quantity) and our ontological justifications are judgments about how we function within these laws. Together these rules and
judgments constitute us within language and describes our intentionality, seemingly our qualitative mental relations. Finnegans Wake, therefore, can describe our constitution as humanbeingsasafunctionofacommentaryaboutitsownlanguage. Ournormative language while constituting the possibilities of meaning available to us can not function ontologically, that is, we can exist within and through these possibilities, but we can only exist at all, through the ontological or creative pressure attending the kinds o f ontological
judgments we make about the normative status of our language games, for example, 'Do I love you? ' 'Can I love? ' 'Is love possible? ' This explains why ordinary criteria can fail; why we are continually tempted by skepticism. 2 If I rewrite Hill's formulation of our deliverance up to judgment, I can suggest a vague canopy to include this play between ontology and epistemology as a moral crisis: "in the constraint of shame the [Wakean\ poet and [grammatical philosopher] [are] free to discover both the 'menace' and the atoning power o f his own art" (17).
Our survival in language requires an act of will. We must, however, take responsibility for the governance of our will, and not cede or abrogate our moral involvement within language to the confusion ofuse which distorts and hides this moral dimension within the confusions and entanglements between language games o f power
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(ideology)disguisedasmoraljudgments. Somethinglikethissensemotivates Wittgenstein to remark his distrust oflanguage:
Human beings are profoundly enmeshed in philosophical--i. e. grammatical-- confusions. They cannot be freed without first being extricated from the extraordinary variety o f associations which hold them prisoner. Y ou have as it were to reconstitute their entire language. --But this language grew up as it did becausehumanbeingshad--andhave--thetendencytothinkinthisway. So you can only succeed in extricating people who live in an instinctive rebellion against language; you cannot help those whose entire instinct is to live in the herd
which has created this language as its own proper mode o f expression. (MS 213,
? 423; quoted in Kenny, "Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy", 16).
Poetry and philosophy both constitute kinds of rebellion against language. This distrust of language constitutes a religious stance, a configuration of oneself as anything or anyone in relation to a negative limit which can determine our meaning and our world. What is it like to be trapped within a system of meaning within which you cannot escape but which you distrust? Finnegans Wake is a comic version o f Kafka's The Castle.
Coleridge, commenting on the mental schema articulated in Wordsworth's Prelude, redescribes the reciprocal relation between the senses and the world that constructs the mind. Following what he believes was "partly suggested by me . . . He
[Wordsworth] was to treat man as man--a subject o f eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out ofthe senses"(188). This could seem a conquest ofa world, or the construction
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o f a Khananite pleasure palace after such a conquest. Eliot, in 'Gerontion,' finds such a
world "a decayed house", where "In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,/ To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk/ Among the whispers"; where these whispers, these "vacant shuttles weave the wind" into a riddle about the consequences of
knowledge ["After such knowledge, what forgiveness? "]. Our ordinary needs eat, divide and drink the world into metaphors (cliches: whispers, weave the wind) that signal the loss, consumption and disappearance ofthe world. The organic world symbolizes its own loss. Eliotdescribesamoralterror,akindofknowledgethatcanappearasaskepticism generated from failing senses, but I think it is more likely a realization that a soul can fragment through a kind of self-reflection in which the indifference ofthe world and our own indifference generates a specific terror. Poetry can enact this terror as what we are. Thisstance-indifferentterror--isneitherexistentialnorstrictlyspeakingmoral. Eliot's poetry describes this terror as a realization that the soul (and our demand for redemption) and subjectivity (at least our speaking T ) describes the subjunctive: we live counterfactually. Eliot does not discover this. The possibilities of either idealism or modem skepticism, when understood as moral responses to scientific knowing, outlines
the soul, subject, self as subjunctive. (This does not mean the soul, subject, self are constructed; they may be given as perpetual possibility; making a soul or a mind follows as apossibilityofthispossibility). Eliot'sdiscoveryisoftheterrorgraspingandattending modemself-reflection. Heexposespartlywhatthis'subjunctive'means,teachingusthe consequence ofthis knowledge (ifit is 'knowledge'). Words describe ideal forms that our descriptions belie into algorithms of loss:
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To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my site, smell, hearing, taste, and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact?
Age and terror and revulsion and the failure of our knowing and knowledge, the realization that not only can the mind and the world be confused for each other but that a failure o f courage, sense, or meaning can tempt us to deny our mind. Instinct, the algorithm describing the non-human, and our dying, the algorithm o f loss, sketch the limits ofour knowledge ofboth ofthese as despair: "What will the spider do,/ Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs.
