ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: AI, Anti-Ai vs OOO, Enaction

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

AI, Anti-Ai vs OOO, Enaction

A perceptive commenter writes:

Curious as to what you think about pan-psychism vs eliminativist position? Ah -- googling i see you've got a dozen posts on pan-psychos...

I respond: Eliminativism versus pan-psychism—these are apples and oranges. In other words, you could be an eliminativist who thinks that consciousness inheres in nerve firings. I'm neither an eliminativist nor a pan-psychist--I'm an object oriented ontologist.

In other words, I think that there is something that my mind does that isn't that different from what a pencil does when it rests on a table. It's the other way around: it's not that pencils have minds, it's that minds are pencil like. The onus is on AI and anti-AI to prove that consciousness is a special bonus prize for being highly organized or highly evolved, a suspiciously anti-Darwinian notion.

I was talking with a neurobiologist in New Zealand who also thinks that consciousness is much "lower down" than AI or anti-AI deem to be the case. The smart money is on consciousness as an interobjective configuration space that includes 1+n objects (such as enaction theory).

1 comment:

Michael- said...: "The smart money is on consciousness as an interobjective configuration space that includes 1+n objects (such as enaction theory)."

That damn near made be break my face via a big ass smile. Enaction is the only why to fly...; May 31, 2011 at 5:17 PM

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

AI, Anti-Ai vs OOO, Enaction

1 comment:

Counter

ShareThis