Month: October 2019

Rushdie’s Windmills – All Too Real?

A strange month – more like 6 weeks – with only a single post, thanks to some new exciting work I’ve been getting into, and in which I will continue to be buried for some months if not years to come. I’ll share what I can – confidences permitting.

[Aside – Last weekend, Sat and Sun I had hundreds of hits, 150 and 250 respectively,  on a single post from 2016 (with a 2018 update) – the title of which is a quote from Thomas Paine: Odd because so far as I can see it has nothing to do with the single post I did make last weekend – a continuation of my “deep dive” into idealism and pan-psychism.]

Thing is, despite being too busy to read and post much, if anything, other than the odd social media interaction, I have used the travel and hotel time to read. Mainly Salman Rushdie’s latest “Quichotte”.

Now I’m a solid fan of Rushdie’s imagination and style, the obvious Midnight’s Children and Satanic Verses, as well as the later Ground Beneath Her Feet, The Enchantress of Florence and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights not to mention the “fatwa” biographical Joseph Anton. [Post Note – add Victory City to that list.]

I mentioned already from the start and again over a third through – on twitter – that I was getting a strong sense of Neil Gaiman from the fantastic US road-trip narrative. But then it’s not the first time I’ve expressed this parallel, and it continues to the end. No bad thing.

Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods“ felt like Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker and Long Dark Teatime) meets Salman Rushdie (Satanic Verses and Two Years) on several levels

Salman Rushdie’s Two Years  put me much in mind of Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” and every bit as rich, and there is at least one direct reference.

Bulgakov’s “Master & Margarita” is seriously weird and compelling. Some cross between Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods but written in 1930’s Russia!

It helps of course to have your own experiences of the US, culture, cities and road-trips between them, but then US road-trips are probably engrained in our culture whether we’ve made them or just watched the movies. There are running “jokes” – every place mentioned with “Name”, “State Abbreviation” and “(Population)” from the smallest US boondocks drive-through to the greatest Asian cities, not least Mumbai of course, or Bombay as Rushdie and several of his author’s characters insist on still calling it – which is fine by me, they’re all phonetic anglicised spellings anyway.

Droll and knowingly witty throughout, the narrative actually builds quite slowly, and it took me several sessions to get engaged beyond my fascination with the continuing aura of American Gods.

But the confabulation of reality and fantasy builds to the very end, Life of Pi or maybe fake news anyone? And indeed, that is the point of reading what Rushdie has written. It’s a satire – or maybe an all too real parable – on the demise of any grip on reality in the world as we are coming to know it.

The story itself is a classic quest, more than one in fact with multiple levels of irony between author and characters in their own fictional narratives, but obsessive irrational questing in the manner of Melville and his semi-autobiographical Ishmael narrating his Ahab. And there is a good dose of Amor Vincit Omnia – both creative and destructive – to the very end.

There were cars on fire and broken Best Buy windows, revealing that the desire for meaningless destruction and free TV’s survived even the end of days.

The world no longer has any purpose, except that you should finish your book [who me?]. When you have done so, the stars will begin to go out.

Is that what you believe, that life is meaningless and we are turning into animals without morality?

[Yes] I think it is legitimate for a work of art made in the present time to say, we are being crippled by the culture we have made, by its most popular elements above all – and by stupidity and ignorance and bigotry.

There was news on the radio [in the] Chevvy Cruze, [that it] was being discontinued along with the Impala and the Volt as part of General Motors’ cost-cutting drive. [Me and mine again?]

What I hoped for is indeed beyond hope … all around me the whole human race was losing its reason, its capacity for ethics, its goodness, its soul. And it may be, I can’t say, that this deep failure brought down upon us the deeper failure of the cosmos.

Everything is so radical, so post-Einsteinian, we’re having to make up the physics as we go along.

Newton announced his theory of gravity before he’d done the math. He just knew he was right.

Harrowing stuff, disturbingly close to the apparent reality of our times. Rushdie has done it again. Essential reading.

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[Post Note: The US road-trip “quest” I didn’t mention in the comparison’s above was of course ZMM (Robert Pirsig’s 1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), already given as a background to my own thinking at this time, despite the Melville comparison, like ZMM itself.

Here, Rushdie in an interview about “Quichotte”, points out the explicit ZMM parallels questing for reality between father(s) and son(s). Hat Tip Dave Matos via Robert Pirsig Association. And again tacit, Windmills, Quichotte is explicitly Quixote without need to draw the comparison?

See also Rushdie remarking on the ZMM influence in his latest “Knife” in 2024.]

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Realism vs Idealism Saga Continues

Often cast in the physicalism vs pan-psychism sense, it’s an argument I’ve left long behind for my “information realism”.

Many reacting recently to Kastrup’s Idealism / Pan-psychism as the kind of stuff “only stoned hippies could contemplate as real”. Myself, I get why he’s contemplating (promoting) it, but it’s really just word-play in the end using “consciousness” where I would use “information.” ie although he’s using the word he’s not really saying the real / physical world is conscious, merely made of experience-stuff, more like experiencable stuff (ie real information).

That is the physical and the psychological are equally real, since they are both manifestations of the fact that fundamental reality is information, and both equally explicable – along with erstwhile conundrums (“hard-problems”) like free-will, subjectivity and mental agency – in terms of their evolution from there.

Several times before when writing on this (see links) A J Owens comments with quotes from Whitehead, to which I often respond “no doubt, nothing new under the sun”. I did spend some effort getting up to speed with Russell’s metaphysical take, so I guess I should do the same with Whitehead at some point.

Prompted today, by these two tweets, the first with a quote from Wallace:

And this response from Matthew Seagall (FootnotesToPlato):

With a link to this (draft) piece: “Physicalism and Its Discontents: A Study in Whitehead’s Panexperientialist Alternative”

[Although not referred to in this piece, Seagall has written on Kastrup, and Pigliucci’s response, in a Whitehead context before. See links at the bottom. He does however refer to IIT(Tononi) and Dennett(B2BnB) and more, often mentioned here on Psybertron.]

Whiethead’s “radical empiricism” is kinda where I started, though for me it was Wm James “radical empiricism” as used by Pirsig – stuff experienced / experiencable immediately / diectly as an interaction in the world at a fundamentally real level prior to / independent of any mental abstraction or interpretation.

“a conception of experience as basic to Nature”
Whitehead quoted by Seagall

Also concluding:

“the panpsychist alternative is superior to physicalism’s eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, and emergentism”

No doubt, as I say, but it’s not necessary to go that far. We still have emergence and a kind of causal supervenience but both physics and psyche emerge from the experiencable stuff – information realism.

It’s the experience that’s basic to nature, not the consciousness of it or of itself.

[Leibnitz – see Smolin’s “nads”.]

Pan-experientialism better than Pan-psychism – I’ll say.
[Russell > Whitehead > Quine > Dennett … pedigree apparent]

[Wittgenstein – referring to Tractatus only, misses Witt’s joke at the expense of the logical positivists – misreading of “Whereof one cannot speak …”]

But I have no doubt this is true:

“Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism is a protest against the lifeless Nature imagined by Descartes, Galileo, and Newton, and a rejection of the narrow linguistic analysis and sterile logical positivism of his philosophical contemporaries. His is an attempt to make natural science philosophical again by asking whether physical causes and motions need be so violently segregated from the conscious reasons and emotions by which we apprehend them.”

No indeed, they surely don’t. And it’s as unfair on Descartes, Galileo and Newton, as it is on Wittgenstein – they each had their own projects of their day. With the first three it was about making space for God alongside their physics, since consciousness appeared God-given and God had to be given a place.

“He is perhaps best situated within the American pragmatist tradition stemming from Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey …”

“… in particular his genetic account of mutually sensitive prehensions is an attempt to make good on James’ psychological insight by building it out into a coherent cosmological scheme.”

Now that I can believe (see James ref above.)
Him, Pirsig, me & all. I like “prehensions” before “app” and “comp” – pre-conceptual experience, radical empiricism.

“He was influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson whom he credits along with William James and John Dewey in the preface to Process and Reality.” [Wikipedia]

[Interestingly Tononi in the list of refs, but not in the text.]

[Need to see a statement of “Whitehead’s process-ontology”- as I’ve said before, the fundamental nature of experiencable real world information, is a process view because it’s the interaction, the event, that is the experience of the real world. I’ve called it “relationalism” previously, before I settled on the atomic nads being “bits” of information.]

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Post Note: Clearly just rough notes, not really a review of Seagall’s paper, simply sparked by it, but also previously:

Clearly that real entity vs conceptual object is in Whitehead too via the process of radical experience. Simply easier in French because they have distinct words for the different knowings – which may go a long way back – but clearly a lot of this goes back to James (US) & Bergson (Fr)  in the western canon. Whitehead is the Brit that most picked-up on it and influenced the rest of us, despite the dominant prevalence of the objective (and all the logical positivism that ensues) in present day scientific orthodoxy

“Bergson travelled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the Harvard philosopher who was Bergson’s senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. The two became great friends. James’s impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of 4 October 1908:

‘So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy.'”

[Wikipedia]

A long, slow turning “point” it has turned-out to be (see scientistic orthodoxy) but just maybe we’re getting there. (James seems to be the nexus of the whole story?)