“Everything Just Executes”: Jackson, Holism, Individualism

Interobjectivity

That's a nice phrase Robert Jackson has in his new post arguing for withdrawn execution as a feature of objects—so that they can't be described as individualist or holistic. Jackson:

The overall behaviour of a unitary procedural system is not agency as such, not does it just ‘appear’ from somewhere else, like outside the algorithm or an explicit source of randomness. Whilst there is the case that systems operate in this way concerning televisions, rock molecules and API’s, I am more interested in contingent operational systems. Political systems like the law, security for example. But also, ideas and thoughts are algorithmic and executant. fictional characters, cups, YouTube and catbeds. Companies have a determined rules, artworks do too. Everything just executes, forced to encapsulate each other for ever more.

I share his suspicion of “agency,” a strange transparent gel that you can spread on toast if you're unlucky, but which I've been unable to find anywhere I look. I know cultural studies types are addicted to sniffing it out, maybe I'm missing something.

I guess my very first response would be: objects are unique, but not indiviudalIST. They are "more than individual(ist)" but they don't go around behaving in an individualistic way.

Someone wrote to me today with some questions about emergentism and AI theory, which are directly related to this. I'm waiting back for his OK to put some of the points up here. But I shall say this for now: withdrawn execution guarantees that entities we directly encounter are only sensual: and this means that they are also “intersubjective,” nonlocal, happening between objects. Intelligence, mind or whatever, for instance: AI theory wanting to see it as a bonus prize for being highly organized, complexly evolved or whatever (a kind of emergentism). They will never find it this way. Why?

Because of what Turing himself said. Intelligence is in the eye of the beholder. It's a performance, it's performative. Turing is quite right, but in a way neither pro nor anti AI folks should like very much. The anti crew get a nasty slap hearing that intelligence is only a matter of looking and quacking like it. And the pro crew get a brickbat because they will never find intelligence no matter how hard they study neurons, because intelligence is (let's use a term I'm going to wheel out in Realist Magic) interobjective.