No More Learning

These modes ofself-reflection, the theological, the mechanical, and the social, determine the limits of mind enacted in my three 'texts'. I describe the
grammar o f these modes in order to demonstrate how we construct ourselves through the dynamic interaction o f our everyday and every night uses o f language, and in their generation of our sense of time, of the possibility of a future as an aesthetic.
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Such an aesthetic cannot entail the abandonment o f the claim truth exerts on our self-descriptionsandsubjectiveexpressions. Wecannottakecareofourselveswithout "truth".
The man who seeks truth becomes a scholar; the man who wishes to act out his subjectivity can become a writer; but what must be done by the man who seeks that which lies between the two? (Robert Musil)
I'm tempted to think Musil is being funny, or at least ironic, when he asserts that a scholar seeks truth. But if we take him seriously, and maybe replace "scholar" with "scientist," the anxiety in which he finds himselfbecomes clear. Roughly, the truth Musil thinks the scholar (or scientist, in my case) seeks is that which can be verified, that which can be found and tested as an objective fact or principle, or if we want to extend Popper's emendationtothispositivistnotionoftruth,thatwhichcanbefalsified. Thistruth
remains independent, at least in its ontological claims, o f meaning, the acting upon or ordering o f the world within a subjective frame, construct, system, etc. Certainly scientific "truth" serves and is used within a whole series of language and ideological games, but its claims about the world, which are never meant to be absolutely true, cannot speak to the significance o f these claims in relation to our desire to justify our lives: in other words,
you can use science to give meaning to life but you cannot be scientific when you do this. The modem individual, the man without qualities, is hamstrung between that which is true but meaningless and that which is meaningful but false. The perception o f this seeming separation is the foundational virus sparking literary modernism. Modernism could not domesticate this anxiety. It remains unresolved, simply because literature and maybe all
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the arts do not have the means to resolve it. One can easily reformulate this anxiety back into any originary moment o f the modem (defined by different disciplines or conceptualizations o f culture) that one thinks important. One o f these, Descartes' Cogito ergo sum betrays the need, opened up by science and materialism, to collapse the world intoourownconsciousnesssuchthatthetruecanremainmeaningful. Thecostofthis attempt is the seductiveness ofmodem skepticism, the generation of a self an identity, a consciousness grounded in our knowing.
A solution to the fear that what is meaningful is not true is to somehow re- conceive ourselves as objects within the purview of science or scholarship, of "truth," and thus to make our attempts at subjective ordering indirectly "true. " Even in this solution, however, meaning apparently has no ontological significance, only survival value. To give meaning or art, as a subset of how we assert our subjective meanings, ontological force, one must construct something that is subjectively meaningful and simultaneously true.
One must build a mind, which is to say that building a mind is a theological exercise. One can indeed conceive of art, as Thomas Mann says in Dr. Faustus, "as mind," both in its attempt to embody truth but also as a result of its own necessary functioning within the possibility o f meaning defined by human subjectivity. Musil, therefore, wants to be a kind of cognitive scientist, or he wants, unbeknownst to himself to think within the domain of inquiry one might call neuro-aesthetics, as much to indicate what it is not as what it exists
between.
Musil finds himselfbetween Dilthey's Geisteswissenschaften and
Naturwissenschaften, resisting the drive to reduce the one to the other. Musil's desire to
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think within a Naturgeisteswissenschaften, secure in its ontological claims without appealing to substance (things) or socio-historical reality, has a history in English. One could make a list and call it a genre, bearing some affinity to G. Steiner's Pythagorean Genre and to Menippean Satire or Frye's Anatomy, and to various attempts to construct a language game, or collection of such games, somewhere between mind and world. These texts, however, articulate the interstices between language games, including their own, and thus unwind themselves into the limit of what counts as human; Thus they examine our formoflifebygeneratingnewforms: TheAnatomyofMelancholy,Browne's
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, Cavendish's Blazing World, Wilkins' Mercury: Swift Messenger, Godwin's Man in the Moone, Vico's New Science, Swift's A Tale o fa Tub,
Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Blake's The Four Zoas, Coleridge's Biographia Litteraria, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Pater's Marius the Epicurean, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Poe's tales, Thoreau's Walden, Melville's "Bartleby," the essays ofEmerson and H. James, Finnegans Wake, Meta-fiction, some modem Science Fiction, and Artificial Intelligence programs. The members o f this literary genealogy translate, transform, and negotiate with a comparable (but more central) set o f philosophical texts in order to enter language throughtheseductionof(orresistanceto)metaphysics: BrowneparleyswithDescartes; Cavendish trumps Descartes and Newton; Wilkins translates Leibniz; Vico, Janus-faced, sits beside Spinoza, Sterne sexualizes Locke; Coleridge and Carlyle lie through Kant, Schelling, ei al. , Carroll points at and teases Frege and Freud, and so on. These two strands enter into, and offer themselves as displacements o f the attempt to mediate between the claims of substance (things), of meaning (understanding, justification,
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knowing, significance, going on, oflife, etc. ), ofthe psyche (the inner/mental, instinct, subjectivity), and o f temporality (objective, scientific, existential, social, developmental, historical). I intervene in these claims through the temptation toward nonsense, or maybe a certain kind o f mind-sickness, resisted, exploited, lanced, and encouraged by Wittgenstein and Joyce (and, for me here, Eliot, Heidegger, Thoreau, Dennett, Cavell, and
B. Johnson).
These literary and philosophical texts can form a complicated 'genre' if they are
understood to ask the question 'Can one construct a philosophy of mind from literary aesthetics? ' This question can seem obvious, a kind oftraditional truism that seems to neednoexplanationasitseemsnottoforAbramswhenhewritesin TheMirrorandthe Lamp that "In any period, the theory of mind and the theory of art tend to be integrally relatedandtoturnuponsimilaranalogues,explicitorsubmerged"(69). Orthisquestion can seem surprising, as if the demands of a theory of mind to attach logic to biology overwhelm the problems of fiction or even the possibilities of meaning. Both the surprise and the ordinariness ofthis question should surprise us. Finnegans Wake and
PhilosophicalInvestigationsenactthissurprise. Theyeachfunctionascomplementary limit cases o f each other in the investigation and enactment o f the limits o f aesthetics as the limits ofmind, and ofthe limits ofmind as the limits ofaesthetics. The relation between mind and art, configured as Abrams shows in similar analogies and metaphors (wax tablet, mirror, lamp, etc. ), exposes how we inhabit our biology and our language. Exploring this inhabitation means describing the limit between sense and nonsense as a formofourbeing(notasonlyananalogyormetaphor). Theanalogiesbetweenmindand
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art, therefore, should be seen as symptoms and riddles about the problem o f meaning as it constitutes our ontological commitments. The following chapters attempt to listen to and respond to these symptoms and riddles, with the recognition that the ontological status of bothaesthetics(literature)andphilosophiesofmindmustbejustifiedinanewway. The descriptive power o f science and the translations o f these descriptions into technology
challenges the status of the analogies between mind and aesthetics in a way that displaces the implied symmetry o f Abrams' description. The ontological status o f interpretative analogies is not equivalent to the causal relations described in cognitive science.
Geometry infects the mind as well as metaphor. The ciphers organizing the mind run not to circles, but for the moment can stand as two overlapping (? ), congruent(? ), tangent(? ) ellipses, in some metaphoric non-Euclidean geometry, one wrapped around a region whose primary focus is Sense and the other whose primary focus is Nonsense. The region o f nonsense is bounded by Finnegans Wake and the region o f sense by Philosophical Investigations. In each case the ellipse includes at its farthest extreme the locus o f the other ellipse. Sense and nonsense, themselves, should only serve as deictic markers of structures, interpretations, possibilities, actions, and functionings whose form and meaning prove intractable.
The Wake and Investigations operate and articulate a self-reflexive language that resists collapsing the mental into analogies of substance, and yet they both retain an ontological claim on our attention. This is only possible to the degree that these works offer themselves as limits within which the transformation o f nonsense into sense (or the reverse) describes the temporal pressure which pushes understanding a sentence into
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understanding a life (our own). The limits of language explored in the Wake and Investigations, therefore, mediate the relation between how to go on in life, the justification we ordinarily call the meaning o f life, but maybe the sense o f life that prevents us from pressuring our answers too seriously, and how to go on with words, how to go on reading, talking, listening, understanding. The description o f how words mean within particular language games determines the kinds of claims we can make when we use these words. Weleamhowtoapplythesewordstoourcommitments.
Finnegans Wake dissolves sense into the temporality of being. Sense, as a (or the) form o f consciousness, remains, but under the ontological dominance o f temporal change and our, as Joyce calls it, "infrarational senses. " Wittgenstein, in Investigations, dissolves temporality into sense. The aesthetics and logics ofthe repressed or disguised terms, sense in the Wake and temporality in Investigations, build different forms of unconsciousness within these texts, complementary but polarized forms o f mind and worlds. Wittgenstein pulls his investigation toward the pole of sense, articulating the logic o f language games as a way o f restricting nonsense, but not as a way o f denying nonsense anddoubt,butratherasawayofmoderatingtheseundertheaspectofsense. Conversely,
Finnegans Wake delimits sense by stretching its language into nonsense. The Wake approaches what Barbara Johnson calls poetry, "the repository o f knowledge about the resistance o f language to intentional dissolution. And 'absolute randomness' is the outer limit of that resistance" (7). Wittgenstein assumes that philosophy investigates the grammar o f 'is' and Joyce assumes that literature investigates the grammar o f 'mean[ing]\ The limit of resistance that Johnson describes, however, not only configures that
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randomness as meaningful (as resistance), but undoes meaning or identity or the world as mine or yours or ours. The loss ofintentionality, the aboutness of our language, our involvement in a world as our world, means the dissolution o f the interpretative functions of consciousness. The randomness of "intentional dissolution" is not necessarily the randomness o f a chaotic world, the failure o f cause and effect. It may mean this or it may not. We may simply be asleep or have suffered brain damage or have returned to some earlier stage o f primate evolution or have died. Interpretation might make causal explanations visible and possible, but it does not constitute the world into a proximate causal order.
If this outer limit is the inhuman, the transcendent point toward which skepticism drives, then our machines seem to offer transport beyond the phenomenal limits of our knowing. De Man, Cavell, and Lacan all say as much. Technology would serve as a symptom through which we discover that the brain is the seat of intelligence and not the heart. Machines, and the formalisms animating them, reform our analogies within an increasingly more grounded ontological faith: our analogies gain power not through our
belief, but through their greater intimacy with the substance (means) through which we act. Artificial Intelligence programs, in this sense, and more in their potential than actuality, read us, and not we them, as the limit o f the inhuman, a limit through which we re-interpret ourselves, constructing fundamental othemess as particular philosophical- aesthetics. This is the way to proceed toward a link between meaning and mind through doubting and belief: "His hearing is indoubting just as my seeing is onbelieving" (FW 468. 15-16). Therationalityof'intelligentprograms'andthenonsenseoftheWake
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function as, what Wittgenstein called "objectfs] ofcomparison": 'Tor we can avoid ineptness or emptiness in our assertions only by presenting the model as what it is, as an object o f comparison --as, so to speak, a measuring rod; not a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond" (PI? 131). Not all measuring rods, however, are measuring rods.
Hearing, and not seeing, that is, doubting, means, with a Heraclitian like aplomb, recognizing time; And thus we are again in the Wake:
hearing in this new reading o f the part whereby, because o f Dyas in his
machina, the new garrickson's grimacing grimaldism hypostasised by substintuation the axiomatic orerotundity. . . could simply imagine themselves in their bosom's inmost core, aspro tem locums, timesported acorss the yawning (abyss) (FW55. 34-56. 05).
Thus we find Artificial Intelligence close to (if not in) Finnegans Wake, even in the difficulty we might have in going on as we read. Joyce writes not only as the kind of cognitive scientist Musil wants to be, he puts together a text which unwinds us into the "between" truth and meaning. In a letter to Ms. Weaver, his publisher, he writes
"I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things. All the engines I know are wrong. Simplicity. I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes o f course, The wheel is a perfect square. "
This engineering means "[w]e seek the Blessed One, the Harbourer-cum-Enheritance" (FW264. 08-09; an entrance into and inheritance of [L ens] being our own human inheritance, the condition for our own blessedness. This condition he calls "Ever a-going,
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ever a-coming. Between a stare and sough" (FW264. 10-11; sough: moaning sigh,
swamp). "There's a split in the infinitive from to have to have been to will be" (FW271. 21-2). Thisplace,this'there,'between'to',agrammaticalmarkerofintentional force, expressing the form o f desire or will or action, and the verbal complex o f possession ('have') and being ('been,' 'be') and possibility ('will': as if possibility opposes possession) is the "Harbourer-cum-Enheritance": the human being as a non-substantial
nexus formed in place, becoming, beside, preserving itself as its own history.
Modem literature, I think, should be understood as a continuing response to a
developing mechanical materialism and its implications. Finnegans Wake is a point, as Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus, where "solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism" (5. 64). Literary history also demonstrates, as does the move from empiricism to skepticism and idealism, the inverse. The temptation toward stylistic solipsism (where form is content, and thus a kind of linguistic collapse into subjectivity) betrayed by modernist literature arises not simply as a development o f symbolism and as a reaction against science (toward pleasure, as in Poe, or meaning, as in Eliot), but through strictly carrying out literary realism, as seen in Joyce's move from Dubliners to and within Ulysses and into the Wake. Finnegans Wake collapses reality into an "extensionless point", or "non-psychological I", or, as Joyce calls it, "world, mind. " This point of embodiment represents the end o f literature. It is in this sense that Finnegans Wake also points toward the more fully embodied aesthetic o f what Artificial Intelligence promises.
We should at least ask what kind ofliterature can withstand the leverage exerted by a materialism so thoroughgoing as to dissolve the soul, or what might be left of our belief in
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immaterial essence, and then remain aesthetic, protecting what we understand as the "immateriality" of meaning, of our minds, and ofour attachments?
We might not recognize Finnegans Wake as art; we might not know what it is or does. In many ways it is not a work o f art, but rather a text which requires one to create orgenerateanaestheticthroughwhichandinwhichitwillberecognizedandfunction. It re-enacts not our everyday experience, nor the ordinariness o f our being awake, but the everynight experience and the ordinariness of our being asleep. It is literally a mind in a vat in which the controls organizing the coherency of its input have failed and exposed the mind's mediated relation to the world, to that which controls this input (a demon, a god, ourselves? ).
The unit o f coherence in the Wake should be defined not as a sentence as such, but as a statement which simultaneously functions as a locally relevant sentence and an illustrative(? )orinterpretative(? )recapitulationoftheWakeitself. Inotherwords,the nonsense ofthe words gains meaning not as language about anything other than
themselves as a continual form of self-justification. The Wake rewrites knowledge claims as value claims in order to construct being or a selfor a text as an axiological matrix that can function with ontological force.
An artificial intelligence program is, even if it fails, a form o f art in the way that FinnegansWakeisaformofart. Ifeachattemptstorepresentandembody(tobecome)a formofmind,thentheyeachalsofunctionasakindofmetaphysicsortheology. Artificial Intelligence, as embodied theology, attempts to construct whatever used to be called spirit within the mechanical logic of scientific materialism and mathematics. This is at least one
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way o f explicating Vico's definition o f art as that which "does its utmost to give a body to spirit" (Scienza nuovapr. bk. iii, chp 26). AI, therefore, attempts to transform a language into an ontological aesthetic, to give a language ontological force. I f we accept Wittgenstein's caution not to organize our descriptions ofthe mind as ifit were an immaterial body, then the Cartesian mind/body problem is replaced by the problematic relation between soul and being, soul and God, that is more like the theological puzzles concerning the soul that Aquinas considered.
Finnegans Wake attempts to construct a grammar determined by ontological commitmentsthatarenotafunctionofrepresentingthingsandsubstances. TheWake's non-substantive ontological commitments are (an) aesthetic. Thus, articulating the logic, or the demands ofthis aesthetic, constitutes a grammar, or a set of shifting grammars, of an inner mental life-world, invoking our everyday life not only through our night-time experience but as an experiment on and within the sleep-generated fall into skepticism and intermittent idealism.
I do not mean to suggest that we should think in opposition to science in the way that Heidegger attempts in his later work; the demand, instead, is to think through and as a function of the materialism that defines the limit of any ontological claim. We can make differing,butnotopposing,ontologicalclaims. Ifartoffers,asBeckettassertsinMolloy, the "laws ofthe mind", what can we discover about the logic oftheir formation, the significance of their form, their etiology, meaning, continuity, hopefulness, effect if we acceptorconsiderthisoffer? TheselawsarenotmonumentsofamentalHammurabi.
Our brain works without a homunculus operating the levers. The unity of mind that
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allows for a directed and effective response to stimuli, even in animals with rudimentary brains,isafiction,avirtualunity,abiologicalaesthetic. This,ofcourse,pointstoboth some idea o f a priori categories and to the physiological pre-conditions for vision, language, taste, etc. But it also allows one to ask in what way does how we use words depend on how our brain uses words, on how our brains use us using words? From within our biology and our form of life, the functional unity of mind and language, as an aesthetic, exists as a response to the pressures our thinking, consciousness, planning, doubting, making exerts on instinct, desire, physiological needs and so on. We cannot enter into our biology through the portal o f this unity o f mind; but we can respond to it.
Werespondbytyingourselvestoandseparatingourselvesfromthisbiology. Our making ofthe world, ofour perception, out ofwhatever given or set ofcategories one imagines, seems unable to capture our own making (I mean also our own biological making) even if others like ourselves inhabit our made worlds. Self-reflection, however, builds all sorts o f meanings derived and dependent on not only who we are but what we are. One might sideline this "what we are", or one might answer it, if one could self- reflect outside of knowing. Wittgenstein sets up aesthetic barriers to protect his separation of grammar from phenomena, moibus-strip twisting us back into our practices and our being (how should one understand the interaction and difference between being
and identity in the Investigations? ). In order to pressure grammatical analysis into the aesthetics of our temporality, I will constructs the limits and interaction between sense and nonsense along one of the axes Wittgenstein uses to map our form of life, whose ends are marked by the sentences "Understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a theme
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in music than one may think" and "The human body is the best picture o f the human soul". Why does Wittgenstein invoke the musical and visual, appeal to metaphors o f the metaphoric at these limits, as expressions reflecting back toward language? Our misuse of words pushes us not only into confusion, but into art. How are these aesthetic appeals like his assertion in the Blue Book that "[a]s part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life" (5)? What justifies Wittgenstein's attempt to limit our inquiry into the logic determining a form of life by these two curious appeals to art, justifying these limits aesthetically?
Poetry, in all its complexity, even in its modernist distortion, is not opposed to or leftoutofordinarylanguage. Literaryartarticulatesthedifferentconstituentlevels,the barely conscious aspects present in varying degrees and kinds in our ordinary language. Wittgenstein points to this, although in an unfortunate two-level image, as surface grammar and depth grammar. It is between surface and depth that we create our different kinds o f sense and nonsense. One should speak not o f depth grammar, but o f a complex set o f depth grammars. It is the logic and the aesthetics generated out o f these depth grammars, as they invoke and distort our surface grammar and as they turn about each other, that describes the limits ofwhat counts as a mind. These limits of mind function as symptoms o f an aesthetic prejudice. The shifting between language games, the waxing and waning of our form of life in describing a limit of mind enacts through these changes a
multiplicity o f times. This enactment is the form o f our being within the world. What is the relation of this Wittgensteinian aesthetic (the limits of the human) with the aesthetic animating Finnegans Wake, with the interaction between time and language brought out in
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the failure o f Artificial Intelligence, in general, and the weakness o f Heidegger's construction o f being toward the future and toward a thing?
My dissertation is structured as a kind of dialogue between Finnegans Wake and PhilosophicalInvestigations. In any such exchange the question ofwhat counts as such a dialogue is continually reformulated. I find myselftrying to write in an idiom that allows Finnegans Wake and Investigations to make a kind of mutual sense, with the attending dangeroflosingsensealtogether.
Thisdialogueisdirectedatthelogicalformalisms underlying Artificial Intelligence and more specifically at the causal mechanisms I describe inmytheoreticalmachine. Oneofmyconclusionsisthatsuchadialogue,sodirected, describes a theology, that is, the articulation of the semantic limits of our language and mind as ontologically significant. That is to say that in all three o f these texts aesthetics functions with theological import. I read Modernism, and its investigation of our language, as an attempt to construct a self-consuming calculus or machine that will write the world as poetry.
An engagement with these texts cannot take the form o f an argument. Interpretations have no ground: "every interpretation together with what is being interpreted, hangs in the air: the former cannot give the latter any support" (PI ? 198). Interpretations,consequently,requirecontinualjustification. Wecanevaluateboththese
justifications and the ontological efficacy o f the interpretations themselves (experiment in science is one way o f doing this). One must work not only to avoid confusing allegories (and other interpretive apparatus) for causal descriptions, but also to avoid confusing interpretations for meanings. If literature and its study and philosophy are involved in the
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problem o f meaning they should, at least, operate in the confusion between meaning and interpretation.
I imagine the ideal commentary on Finnegans Wake would be to interpret a set of texts as interpretations ofthe Wake, without mentioning or including the Wake. This would be a way o f writing toward Finnegans Wake as a limit, itself. I am not writing such a commentary, but I am attempting to think and write towards and at the limits of language described by Finnegans Wake, Philosophical Investigations, Heidegger's "Das Ding", Eliot's The Waste Land and a number of secondary texts. All of these texts generate ontologies o f fragments, condensations o f time, localized and shifting temporal- series: jug-time in Hiedegger, um-time in Keats, subjunctive-time in Eliot, language-game and philosophical time in Wittgenstein, between-time in Joyce. These fragments o f time describe in various ways models of animation as expressions of the limits between sense and nonsense, mind and world, the animate and the inanimate, and so on.
I will use myselfand a plethora oftexts to speak for other texts, for other people, for myself, and for machines. I am neither speaking in my voice nor letting these texts speakintheirs,norevenventriloquizingwiththesetexts. Icontinuallyaskwhetherany language is mine or whether any text means anything that is more than fantasy. It might seem that I am trying to speak and write as an 'our', as some ill-defined expression o f the humanspecies. Anyofusmightspeakthisway,appealtoourhumanityinthewayan ordinary language philosopher might appeal to his or her language. But such a use of 'our' is as problematic as an 'I' or 'you' or 'he', 'she', and 'it'. I can speak from neither a subjective (except temporally) nor an objective position, but towards and in relation to
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both,adjudicatingtheirclaimsonmeorusoranyone. IfIwritebetweenmyselfandthese texts, then I am trying to figure this 'between' as an inhabitation fit for an 'our' figured in relation to the limits o f sense and being that emerge under the pressure o f thinking.
This thinking has set up a complex pattern o f ocean currents and winds. Theological currents course through interlaving Aristotelian and Pre-Socratic currents. Music and opera move both above and below throughout troubling especially the waters of my discussions of Wittgenstein and The Waste Land. Cognitive science currents swirl around everything as do literary winds and the tides o f analytic philosophy and so on. Reading becomes a way o f sailing.
While operating in this confusion literature and philosophy must acknowledge that while we must write toward (and in relation to) the metaphysics o f science, the ontological limits it describes, they are not sciences. We cannot pretend that their are any binding rulesonthekindofinterpretation(s)artdemands. Interpretationrequirescontinualself- reflection because, in large degree, its claims are unbounded and thus meaningless. We must understand how this nonsense works both in relation to meaning, let's say the use of words within language games and our form(s) of life, and determines what kind of claim it can legitimately make on us.
Meaning embodies ontological claims, at least through the semantics o f 'to be'. J. L. Austin argued in "A Plea for Excuses" that "[wjhen we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or 'meanings' whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use words to talk about: we are using sharpened awareness ofwords to sharpen our perception of, though
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not as final arbiter of, phenomena"(130). Interpretation requires both justification for its claims(thelogicofitsallegory)anditsapplication(itsscope). Thusonecanproducea literary philosophy by investigating the semantics o f 'to be' within the procedures and structures o f self-reflection or self-forgetting that enact the justification o f the limits o f meaning and interpretation.
My initial question, 'Can I construct a mind out o f aesthetics? ,' should be modified, therefore, into something like three questions: How are literary aesthetics implicated as a form ofmind through a description ofthe grammar ofhow temporality (our negotiation between sense and nonsense) is embodied as the logic animating self- reflexive language games? ; how are our ontological commitments enacted, described, and undermined in this grammar? ; and what is the role ofjustification in enacting and determining the limits, interrelation, and confusions between meaning and interpretation?
The construction of a mind within the specific language games leading to Artificial Intelligence programs is an attempt to give art enough ontological force to justify itself withinthelogicofscientificmaterialism. Anontologicaljustificationofartisamind,a principle of animation determining what can function as a form of life. How do we function between meaning and interpretation? Confronting this question requires putting the legitimacy of literature, philosophy, and cognitive science at risk: "Working in philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects - is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's own way of seeing things. (And what one
expects ofthem)" (CV16e). 1
1Augustine, in De Trinitate, pursues a language of thought directed, through the Bible, towards God: Search is a striving for discovery, which is the same things as finding; and things found are as it were "brought forth" -w e remember the connection between the Latin words partus and
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repartus--andsocomparablewithanoffspring. Thebringingforthcanonlybeintheknowledge itself,wheretheyare(aswemaysay)shapedandformed. . . Accordinglywemaysaythatthe mind's "bringing forth" is preceded by a kind of striving, by which, in the seeking and finding of what we desire to know, knowledge is bom as an offspring. (IX)
If such a search could not be directed toward God but only toward facts, others, language, and interpretations, what kind o f knowledge would be produced? :
Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. rebelled against. them, and so on?
The common behavior o f mankind is the system o f reference by means o f which we interpret an unknown language. (PI? 206)
Anyone can find anyplace, any person, or any text foreign, and on another day, in another mood find this sameplace,person,ortextsoordinaryastodissolveintoobviousness. PhilosophicalInvestigations, Finnegans Wake, and Artificial Intelligence programs all describe ways o f negotiating, mediating, facilitating, and resisting this oscillation between confusion and clarity, between the visibility and transparency o f what Joyce calls the "world, mind".
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I
FRAGMENTS: FROM SOUL-MAKING TO PERSON-MAKING
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From Soul-making to Person-Making
'Is it possible for a machine to think? ' (whether the action o f this machine can be described and predicted by the laws of physics or possibly, only by laws of a different kind applying to the behavior o f organisms). And the trouble which is expressed in this question is not really that we don't know a machine which
could do the job. The question is not analogous to that which someone might have asked a hundred years ago: 'Can a machine liquefy gas? ' the trouble is rather that the sentence, 'A machine thinks (perceives, wishes)' seems somehow nonsensical. It is as though we had asked 'Has the number 3 a color? '. (BB47)
Wittgenstein pictures being human under the aspect of what he calls a form of life, or rather the complex o f language games, activities, history, biology, culture, and so on that constitutes humans as humans: "Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part o f our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing" (PI? 25). In this he imagines our humanness as a semantic function (what it is to be human is what it means to be human) under the ontological aspect ofthe self-limiting totality ofthis humanness as determiningallpossibleactions. Thisisnotaconfusionorhypostatizationofsemantic categories into ontological concepts ofthe kind that Wittgenstein demythologizes (understanding, time, meaning, and so on). It is a theological claim like "We cannot imaginethe'reality'ofGod. " 'Thinking','perceiving',and'wishing'functiononlywithin
Notes for this chapter begin on page 60.
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our form o f life through our participation in, inhabitation within and use o f language (games).
Our problem is not how to identify an intelligent machine. Such an epistemological question might be answered by the behavioristic Turing test, where the ability o f a machine to fool a human into thinking it also is a human would determine the successorfailureoftheprogram. Aconsciousmachine,however,wouldbeamachine which would mistake us as a form of itselfj within its own, and not our, form of life. The question we can ask that can lead us to artificial intelligence, therefore, is "Could a machine o f'kind X' mistake us for a machine o f'kind X'? ", where what it means to be recognized or 'mistaken for' can be established by observation (of machine Xs) as an
interpretation o f their behavior. Calling this machine species 'kind X', labeling it a member of a species is already to picture these machines within our systems of understanding and representation. Attempting to describe such 'kind X' machines generates a kind o f nonsense equivalent to that generated by let's say Aquinas' attempts to prove (and hence describe) God's existence. This kind o f nonsense might seem to be a- something-else-besides-sense:nonsenseastranscendence. Such'descriptions',however, are rational meditations on the relation between our thinking and being and the limit of this thinking and being understood as dependent on that limit.
A meditation on God, on the possibility that interpretation, the demands of intentionality, teleology, and allegory, constitutes the world, can look identical to a meditation on the inanimate, on the possibility that there exists no possibility or that causes (evenifonlyexplanations)constitutethemindasaneffect. Thesetwopossibilities,
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interpretation after the fact in relation to putative final causes and the description o f proximate causes, together describe a machine, the inanimate defined through function (teleology) and functioning (causes: mechanisms), and together describe art, the inanimate definedthroughfunctionandfunctioning. Thispictureofmachinesandartarepicturesof us: our form(s) of mind, our identity, our mind, our being Darwinian machines and human beings, beholden to measures and qualities.
The failure to justify the limits o f interpretation (God) and o f causation (mechanics) can be survived by making and interpreting ourselves toward those limits. But nothing may count as such a making and interpreting. Cognitive philosophy under one aspect, Theology under another, Literature under a third promise this making and interpreting, but such promises must be justified. We have no intelligible language with which to speak about art which does not risk constructing itself as a form o f mind, and, therefore, as a pseudo-mechanism, as nonsense.
If I ask seriously 'Can a machine mistake us . . . ? ' how would I begin to answer that question? If I transmute 'Can I a machine mistake us . . . ? ' into 'How can we make a machine o f "kind X' mistake us for a machine o f "kind X '? ', I would already be pursuing a methodology: we can know what we can make, therefore, we must make what we want to know. Kurt Godel, in explaining his philosophical work, described philosophy as the analysis o f concepts, and science as the use o f these same concepts. Engineering philosophy into a machine, a philosophy machine, while at least a terrifying proposal (and useful as such), allows us to reconceive and merge Godel's distinction between philosophy
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and science within a model o f thinking where the analysis o f concepts, categories, and logics follows from their construction and use in an evolving machine (see chapter 14).
In his essay on "The Influence ofDarwin on Philosophy," Dewey pictures the possibilities o f thought circumscribed by the limits o f being described by evolution:
Once admit that the sole verifiable or fruitful object o f knowledge is the particular set of changes that generate an object of study together with the consequences that then flow from it, and no intelligible question can be asked about what, but assumption, lies outside. (311)
Joyce also describes this Darwinian limit:
The thing is he must be put strait on the spot, no mere waterstichystuff in a selfinade world that you can't believe a word he's written in, not for pie, but one's only owned by natural rejection. Charley, your my darwing! So sing they sequent theassentofman. Tilltheygoroundiftheygoroundagainbeforebreakpartsand all dismissed. (FW252. 24-28)
Thisisapictureofscientificconstraint("putstraitonthespot"). Evolutiondescribesthe relation between the inanimate and the animate through the rules o f scientific epistemology and constructs as part o f this epistemology the rules and possibilities for how any living being is made. These rules of transformation are directed at the facts describing the
world. Ahistoryabouthowanyonecametobe(atwhateverlevelofcomplexity),despite whatever ideological or axiological assumptions and patterns underlying it, exhibits forms of being whose status must be determined. Thus, it is easier to write a history of a person (whose ontological status is relatively stable), than it is a history o f literature when this is
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not understood as the history o f book, but the history o f meaning figured as both a particular text and functioning and created within or by the general forms of a number of totalities: language, society, ideology, biology and so on. How does one determine the relation between any particular and any whole when the ontological status o f the particular is always at stake? The self-reflection on the ontological status o f the units within any history or grammar is not a species of historiography or science, but a semantics of remaking what counts into what matters, in Joycean terms an 'evoluation', a story of
becomingthatisfundamentallyastoryofevaluation. Butanystory,asastory,willbe meaningless outside of our application of it to an aspect of our world (as a story of recognition). How do we find ourselves in a story? Such an application, however, requires a theory justifying the correlation of a theory (or allegory) with our experience. Darwin's power is partly a function of our necessary involvement within the picture of becoming (both o f what is real and what something is). The controversy surrounding it is alsoafunctionofthisnecessaryinvolvement. Thereisadifferenceinfindingoneselfina story and finding oneselfas a story. How do we find ourselves as a story?
Wittgenstein, by and large, rejected the relevance o f scientific discovery (specifically Darwin's) to the conceptual work of philosophy, the analysis of how we use language and configure ourselves within this usage (the grammar). Wittgenstein's understanding o f philosophical grammar was primarily normative, and thus contingent on particular normative standards, but without a clear picture of how grammars change. Similarly while he recognized, and he himselfwas engaged in, the construction of new language games and new grammars, he did not analyze or describe this process of
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creation. This was partly because the philosophical problems arose when one either operated outside of a coherent grammar (or language game) or when the application of a grammar (a usage or interpretation) was not seen to be nonsense. Wittgenstein's relatively static picture of grammar made it difficult for him to appreciate the philosophical significanceofDarwin. AlthoughIwillnotexaminethissignificanceinanydetailinthis dissertation, the interaction between ontological and identity claims in Darwin opens up the problem of self-reflection in its theological dimension (a dimension which also collapses ontology and identity into grammar).
In Finnegans Wake evolution underlies the process ofbecoming and dissolution, in both its moral and epistemological dimension, that organizes our pictures ofthe night, in the same way that Vico's New Science, the Egyptian Book o f the Dead, Freud's Interpretation o fDreams do. HCE, one of the central 'figures' in Finnegans Wake, is himself"a theory none to rectiline ofthe evoluation ofhuman society and a testament of therocksfromalldeaduntosometheliving"(FW73. 31-33). Evolutionincludesan evaluation, at least an ontological commentary on the dead from which anybody and everybody came: matter has been educated through what we call evolution. Such a commentary is 'ontological' because such a process produces whatever is-real, and the success o f such a production acts as an ontological comment, even judgment. This ontological language, o f course, can only 'say' existence and 'betray' absence or extinction. It is not a 'language' that anyone must understand, but is an education that we all enact and embody.
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Science expresses a negative metaphysical fact: a description o f ontological limits without foundations. Hilary Putnam describes the loss o f foundations attending science:
Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whetherwewanttobethereornot,sciencehasputusinaposition o f having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position--and no end to it is in sight -- is that o f having to philosophize without 'foundations'. (24)
If science destroys metaphysical answers and cannot provide substitutes, in what sense is the atomic bomb a 'metaphysical fact'? Science, or rather the enactment of scientific knowing in technology, enacts ontological limits, not within its descriptions of the world, but in the way these descriptions correlate the world in relation to itself. Putnam unconsciously recognizes this metaphysical force when he writes 'whether you want to be there or not," an acknowledgment of ontological limits determining our possibilities, even if not in an absolute sense (an allegory of self-annihilation).
We replace foundations with limits in relation to which we correlate ourselves. We function and exist within systems from which we cannot exit, and these systems determine what counts as animate, conscious and human. The threat that these systems will determine our animation, consciousness and humanity as inanimate, as deterministic fictions, and as inhumane is the great theme ofFinnegans Wake and, after it, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:
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The war does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even o f the sort the Germans have engineered, ein V olk ein Fuhrer--it wants a machine o f many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity. . . . Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is i t . . . so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness--not a life at all, really. (Gravity's Rainbow, 152)
Technology enacts proximate causes through the process of its function and functioning. Such functioning describes a localized teleology, what Joyce called an "odium teleologicum" (L. odium theologicum) a hatred o f theological teleology (FW264. 04-05). The War might also only look like God. "[0]ur silent passing into the machineries of indifference" (482) means our translation into a fragment within a system defined by its functionandfunctioning. Gravity'sRainbowunderstandsthisseductiontobeadiscovery about how we enter and exit the world: "Whether you believe or not, Empty or Green, cunt-crazy or politically celibate, power-playing or neutral, you had a feeling --a suspicion, a latent wish, some hidden tithe out ofyour soul, something--for the Rocket" (784). Resistance is hardly the point, although it can seem like all that is left to being human, but even this might be describing a technique (and thus the effort Heidegger puts in re-defining techne). Resisting the "beckoning" of the rocket, Pokier "hunted, as a servo
with a noisy input will, across Zero, between the two desires, personal identity and impersonalsalvation"(473). Thisisnotaproofofanything,butamodemproverb.
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2. 1 Personal identity and impersonal salvation
In an essay saving Hume from the claim that he had separated 'is' from 'ought', Alasdair MacIntyre links "what is good and right" with "what we need and desire", countering the Kantian translation of morality into formalism:
We could give a long list ofthe concepts which can form such bridge notions between "is" and "ought": wanting, needing, desiring, pleasure, happiness, health-- and these are only a few. I think there is a strong case for saying that moral notions are unintelligible apart from concepts such as these (Against the Self-Images o f the Age, 120)
Part ofthe special status ofthe words 'wanting', 'needing', 'desiring', 'pleasure', 'happiness', 'health' is the way they mean, as interpretations of our stances toward the world, others, and ourselves. These interpretations are, then, posited as internal states or somehow constitutive o f who we are.
In "God and the Theologians", MacIntyre describes "a whole group of theologies which have retained a theistic vocabulary but acquired an atheistic substance" (,Against, 23) He argues that "we have no language to express common needs, hopes, and fears that go beyond the immediacies o f technique and social structure.