Focus on the part that Graham excerpts in his rebuttal:
“[Tim Morton's] lava lamps are achievements, as are Graham Harman‘s Lego blocks. They don’t fall from the sky; they are made into objects that withstand a fairly high degree of turbulence in their environments.”
Couldn't agree more. Ivakhiv's post is a perfect description of process relational materialism. On this view, entities, objects, whatever unfold in time. That's why Ivakhiv uses the term “achievement”—it's a verb (well, a gerundive really—a noun based on a verb), and as we all know, verbs are better than nouns, because they tell us more explicitly about the underlying process-stuff of which things are made. Bad, bad nouns! So a mat is matting, and a cat is catting, and entities are achievements.
Now let's get lavalamping.
With the help of my 6-year-old daughter I've plotted the evolution of an achievement:
The T axis is time. The A axis is achievement.
Who knows how this achievement happens: other entities, one entity melting into different shapes, evolution, God, novelty, vitalism, vibrant matter, who knows? It makes no difference. Let's just assume it happens. A blob begins to sorta kinda resemble an apple. At the bottom of the lava lamp (time T1) the blob is just a blob. By the time it's reached the top, the blob has morphed into an apple-like achievement (time T2). At some future date it will melt into something else, perhaps. There may be other blobs that interfere with its apple-esque beauty. Whatever.
Let's leave aside any worries about the A axis. Ignore the fact that the apple-blob is more blob than apple (some more fundamental goo underwrites its apple-ity). Ignore the possibility that the apple-blob only resembles an apple-blob in the eyes of apple-blob users (you, me, some worms, whatever). On this score its intrinsic appliness is simply a function of how it is “perceived.” Let's leave that aside, however, damning as it is for a materialist account of things.
Simply focus on the fact that at T1 the proto-apple is a mere blob, while at T2 it's an apple-oid.
Fantastic. This explains everything we need to know about how apples come to be: EXCEPT FOR THE TEMPORAL FRAME IN WHICH THE BECOMING OCCURS. We need T and A (pardon the pun) to account for the entities that manifest in the lava lamp. A major fact of our reality—time—can't be explained ontologically, it can only be assumed. OOO drivers will be able to put a time-fish eating a process-fish on the backs of their cars.
Relativity will not help you here, if you feel like defending lava lamp materialism. Relativity simply means that the frame is also blobby (Gaussian) rather than rigid (Galilean). It's still a frame, still ONTOLOGICALLY OUTSIDE the entity, achievement, thing. Imagine wrapping the graph around an orange. Congratulations. You now have the exact same problem, wrapped around an orange. A non-Euclidean failure to account for time ontologically.
Nor will quantum theory. Make time's arrow reversible so that the apple-oid can speak to the blob faster than light and cause itself to achieve itself. Heck, invent a totally new dimension and let the blob jump out of the frame (into a different or larger frame) like in string theory. Same problem.
In fact, NO SCIENTISTIC FACT-CANDY WHATSOEVER will make lava lamp materialism hold up against this refutation. Which by the way is roughly how Aristotle did it. What are we doing, regressing back to a pre-Aristotelian age? Sure you can think Aristotle has problems. But let's not fix them by regressing.
7 comments:
Great stuff to think upon Tim!
TIM: Ivakhiv's post is a perfect description of process relational materialism. On this view, entities, objects, whatever unfold in time.
ME: I’m not sure what is his post implied a particular container model of time, but I’ll let Adrian address that himself. I would suggest, however, that a “process relational materialism” need not entail such a view of time. “Time” could just be our interpretation of the relative unfolding and duration of material-energetic flows. The cosmos endures and reality expands (and cools) according to primordial properties and the various “achievements” or complex dissipative structurations (and singularities) that actually happen. Perhaps, then, the unfolding of dynamic material-energetic contingencies don’t happen are “time”.
TIM: Who knows how this achievement happens: other entities melting into different shapes, evolution, God, novelty, vitalism, vibrant matter, who knows? It makes no difference. Let's just assume it happens.
ME: But already we do know how things and flows happen (to a certain extent). We know exactly how an apple comes into being. We know how supernovas are formed. And we know how human bodies decompose. There is no mystery there. We don’t need to assume we know the rough and tumble of the cosmos via the eventful actuality of each specific assemblage of properties that comes into being. The explanation is in the details. In the raw materiality of onto-specific realities. Actual entities can be traced viz. their manifest (ancestral) properties and relations.
So why the strawman who posits “blobs”? How was anyone arguing for “blob” metaphysics?
And no amount of name-calling or analogy-making can explain away scientific statements/results. The predictive force of basic scientific understanding doesn’t just disappear because we simply desire a more META-physic explanation.
Then I again, I could just be a moron… It’s possible.
Tim - We seem to be generating more heat than light. (Both, incidentally, are nouns, though "generating" is a verb. "Achievement," last time I checked, was a noun too. Not that it matters much to me.)
Nothing you've written here convinces me that process materialism (as you call it) can't account for time. If you could convince me that OOO *can* account for it, that will be an achievement. You're much more likely to be able to do that than to convince me that my approach *can't* account for time (since to me it does that well enough already).
But I like the diagram. Good collaborative effort.
Michael--you said it, "relative unfolding and duration of material-energetic flows." This means that they happen IN TIME.
Adrian--if you can't take the heat...
Michael, "But already we do know how things and flows happen (to a certain extent)." Yes. But that wasn't my point. My point was that the HOW is IRRELEVANT.
Michael, "The predictive force of basic scientific understanding."
Yeah. But the force of lava lamp materialism, not so much.
"In fact, NO SCIENTISTIC FACT-CANDY WHATSOEVER will make lava lamp materialism hold up against this refutation"
What about thermodynamics? Entropy is what brings time into physics - not Relativity or Quantum Mechanics...
TIM: [Y]ou said it, "relative unfolding and duration of material-energetic flows." This means that they happen IN TIME.
MICHAEL: I don’t follow. ‘Unfolding’ happens in space, and ‘duration’ is the actual persistence of immanent material-energetic flows. Where do I imply that ‘time’ is anything like a container?
TIM: Michael, "But already we do know how things and flows happen (to a certain extent)." Yes. But that wasn't my point. My point was that the HOW is IRRELEVANT.
MICHAEL: Questions about ‘how’ and questions about ‘what’ cannot be distinguished. The ‘what’ is actually existing properties (with all the differential intensities and extensive particularities found in the vast cosmos ecology), and the ‘how’ is the specific processes and capacities inherent to those properties. Without talking about the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ together we fail to appreciate the fullness and specificity of actually existing entities, assemblages, relations and their hybrids.
TIM: Michael, "The predictive force of basic scientific understanding." Yeah. But the force of lava lamp materialism, not so much.
MICHAEL: I’m not quite sure I even understand what you mean when your characterize (or type-cast) a perspective as “lava-lamp materialism”. I think to cast that net to wide dies a disservice to the much more nuanced views of your interlocutors. I talk about the properties (plural) of things as they come into being and perish in relation to their contexts. And in all cases, the true explanatory power comes with an appreciation for the details (specifics) – which only methodology (science broadly speaking) can provide.
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