Category: Books

On his marvelous new blog, on which he manages to write more in a day than I do here in a month, and with consistent brilliance, Graham Harman makes a concession (or, I should probably rather say, a restatement) that I had been hoping to hear from him for a long time:

It’s not a matter of forgetting Kant’s exclusion from the in-itself. It’s a matter of questioning why he gives humans a monopoly on such exclusion. In a sense, I’m trying to let rocks, stones, armies, and Exxon join in the fun of being excluded from the in-itself. A sort of Kantianism for inanimate objects.

This is pretty close to one of the major theses of my own forthcoming book on Whitehead:

Whitehead rejects correlationism and anthropocentrism precisely by extending Kant’s analysis of conditions of possibility, and of the generative role of time, to all entities in the universe, rather than confining them to the privileged realm of human beings, or of rational minds. (p. 79)

Throughout his books, Harman rightly praises Whitehead for rejecting what Harman calls “the philosophy of human access,” that is to say, the philosophy that gives a privileged position to human subjectivity or to human understanding, as if the world’s very existence depended upon our ability to know it.  Rejecting the philosophy of human access means, among other things, rejecting Kant’s privileging of epistemology. As Whitehead puts it, since the 18th century, and especially since Kant, “the question, What do we know?, has been transformed into the question, What can we know?” (PR 74). What’s so energizing about Harman’s “object-oriented philosophy,” or about “speculative realism” more generally, is that it refuses to subordinate its arguments about the nature of the world (or about anything, really) to (second-order) arguments about how we can know whether such (first-order) arguments are correct. Kant endeavored to use the subordination of what we know to how we can be sure about the validity of what we know as a firm grounding for “any future metaphysics”; but of course this kind of meta-questioning inevitably leads to an infinite regress, or to an infinite argumentation that prevents one from ever making any actual arguments (this, I take it, is the witting or unwitting lesson of Derrida and of deconstruction). When we privilege epistemology, or the question of what we can know, over metaphysics, or the question of what we do know, we fall into the abyssal rabbit-hole that Hegel called the “bad infinity”. [Though in truth, I have always preferred this “bad infinity” to the sort of infinity of which Hegel approved — because the latter seems to involve a kind of fatuous self-confirmation, that would make “what we can know” into the measure of all existence. Kant at least insists that there are things whose existence we must affirm, even though we cannot know anything positive about them — sort of like Rumsfeld’s now famous “unknown unknowns” — whereas Hegel entirely subordinates existence to knowability. But that is a subject for another essay].

Now, I understand that Kant is the godfather of what Harman calls “the philosophy of human access,” or what Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” Seriously, for all the speculative realists, Kant is the Number One bad guy. Nonetheless, as I have already suggested, it has long bothered me that Harman was (at least until now) unwilling to say about  Kant’s “things in themselves” what he says about Heidegger’s “tool-being”: that the concept is an important one, in underlining how things, or objects, cannot be reduced to our knowledge of them; that is to say, how things have a subterranean existence beyond whatever aspects of them we (or for that matter, any other entities that encounter them) are able to grasp. (Since Harman’s whole point is that there is no sense in privileging my encounter with a stone over, say, the snow’s encounter with that stone — the same problems of limited access arise in both situations). Harman argues that Heidegger makes a crucial step beyond human access with his concept of tool-being, even if he falls back into privileging human access in other aspects of his thought (like whenever he talks about Dasein). Couldn’t one make exactly the same argument vis-a-vis Kant?

Admittedly, I ask this question to a large extent for aesthetic and stylistic reasons. It is simply that (perversely, I admit) I enjoy Kant’s prose, while I do not get any pleasure at all from Heidegger’s. (As I have forgotten what little German I ever knew, I read them both only in translation, which makes the question of my likes and dislikes even more dubious and complicated). These preferences aside, however, the right question to ask is: what difference would it make to Harman’s argument if it were to be founded on Kant’s doctrine of things in themselves, and the impossibility of accessing the in-itself, instead of on Heidegger’s doctrine of tool-being (or the “subterranean reality” of things “which never comes openly to view” — Tool-Being, p. 24), and the irreducibility of things to their mere presence (or present-at-handedness)? How would Harman’s argument change, if it were to credit Kant instead of Heidegger with the discovery of a subterranean reality beyond, and irreducible to, representation and presence?

I am not sure about this, but my preliminary suspicion is that a recourse to Kant instead of Heidegger might force Harman to abandon, or at least modify, one of the most important features of his argument: his brilliant revival of the philosophical doctrines, which have been despised for most of the last several centuries, of substantialism and occasionalism. For Harman, if objects have a “subterranean reality,” beyond whatever relations they enter into, and beyond whatever qualities other objects are able to grasp of them, this means that all things or objects in the world are independent substances, entirely separate from one another. And, given that objects or substances are radically disjointed from one another, the relations between substances — which, ordinarily, we just take for granted — themselves need to be explicitly explained. As Whitehead says (and this is his criticism of substantialism; or his criticism of Harman in advance, as it were):

Such an account… renders an interconnected world of real individuals unintelligible. The universe is shivered into a multitude of disconnected substantial things, each thing in its own way exemplifying its private bundle of abstract characters which have found a common home in its own substantial individuality. But substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing. (Adventues of Ideas, p. 133)

Harman answers this objection by recourse to occasionalism, or to what he also calls vicarious causation. An “occasion” must be posited to show how independent entities, each locked into its own subterranean existence, could encounter one another at all, even superficially. In the 17th century, occasionalism meant the intervention of God at every moment in every interaction between two or more entities. Harman argues, for the very first time, for a non-theistic occasionalism; he creatively explains how interactions between objects can occur, but can only occur, when both objects are located in the interior of some larger, or more all-encompassing object. The universe has layers of reality, and we never get either to the bottom or to the top.

Now, substantialism and occasionalism are the aspects of Harman’s thought that most perturb his readers (myself included). One would like to accept his “object-oriented,” anti-correlationist argument, his refusal to place “human access” at the center of things, or to give such access a uniquely privileged status, without thereby having to accept the radically anti-relational consequences that he draws from this argument. To think this way, however, is to do Harman an injustice: his substantialism/occasionalism is not a bug but a feature; it is precisely the creative core of his metaphysics. So what follows might well be just another attempt to evade the full audacity of Harman’s argument.

Nonetheless, I do think that reference to Kant’s “things in themselves” might really make a difference here. Heideggerian tool-being is inherently relational and “global,” as Harman explains. But by pushing Heidegger just a little bit, Harman is nonetheless able to argue that “tool-being recede[s] not just behind human awareness, but behind all relation whatsoever” (Tool-Being p. 288). For if human awareness loses its privileges, and is no different from any other sort of relation among objects, then what Heidegger says against the delusions of presence applies just as well to all other forms of relation. I want to suggest, however, that this logic might change if we see Heidegger’s argument about presence as a derivative of Kant’s argument about the relativity of phenomena. For Kant, noumena lurks inaccessibly behind phenomena, just as for Heidegger, the hidden tool-being of all entities lurks inaccessibly behind those entities’ presence-at-hand. But for Kant (unlike Heidegger?) the limitation which grasps of noumena only their reduced phenomenal profile is not only a loss or a reduction, but also a positive act, a construction, a bringing-into-relation. (This is why Whitehead, despite all his criticisms of Kant, nonetheless praises Kant as “the great philosopher who first, fully and explicitly, introduced into philosophy the conception of an act of experience as a constructive functioning” — Process and Reality, p. 156). Phenomena are generated out of the encounter between subject and object in Kant — but if one is willing to “to let rocks, stones, armies, and Exxon join in the fun of being excluded from the in-itself,” then we can say that phenomena are positively generated out of all encounters between objects: this move away from human access, and toward objects indiscriminately, is precisely what Whitehead accomplishes (so that, for Whitehead, “subjectivity” is precisely the result of such a constructive process, rather than what initiates it).

Now, when Heidegger (followed by Derrida) attacks metaphysical and scientific thought for its reduction of the reality of things to mere presence, what he misses is the Kantian sense in which any such reduction is also a positive construction: it is a new event, a creation, a transformation or a “translation.” (I am thinking here of what Levi Bryant calls “Latour’s Principle”: “there is no transportation without translation.” Harman’s own book on Latour is coming soon). Heidegger’s critique of presence might be summarized as the idea that translation is always a betrayal of that which is ostensibly being translated. But Kant’s conception of constructive functioning maintains that translation is the creation of something new: a successful translation (which for Heidegger is impossible) is not a perfectly faithful reproduction of the original, but precisely (to cite the terms of Latour’s Principle in inverse order) an act of transportation, a carrying-across which, in the process, thereby makes something new. From this point of view, both Whitehead and Latour give us a Kantianism without privileging human access, a Kantianism for all entities. And seeing the constructive work of relays and transportations/translations in this manner releases us from the desperate recourse (though, of course, Harman does not see it this way) to positing a universe of occult substances that can only communicate vicariously.

To put this in another way, just briefly (since this is something I am still working on, and trying to work out): Harman’s criticism of Whitehead is that Whitehead’s vision of relationality reduces the world to an endless infinite regress, something that is “too reminiscent of a house of mirrors.” According to Harman’s summary, for Whitehead any entity “turns out to be nothing more than its perceptions of other entities. These entities, in turn, are made up of still further perceptions. The hot potato is passed on down the line, and we never reach any reality that would be able to anchor the various perceptions of it” (Guerrilla Metaphysics, p. 82). This criticism, however, is based on the assumption (precisely rejected by Whitehead) that “perceptions” are nothing positive in themselves, but just passive registrations of that which is perceived. Harman’s objection no longer holds, once we recognize that “perception” (or what Whitehead rather calls “prehension,” precisely to differentiate from the Humean, or classical empiricist, notion of perception) is itself a constructive functioning, a positive, creative and self-creative, process. And it is in all these acts of perception themselves that the “reality” already exists and “anchors” everything around it.

Harman also says that “no relational theory such as Whitehead’s is able to give a sufficient explanation of change,” because if a given entity ” holds nothing in reserve beyond its current relations to all entities in the universe, if it has no currently unexpressed properties, there is no reason to see how anything new can ever emerge” (ibid.). But Whitehead doesn’t quite say this; he says, rather, that what he calls the “subjective aim,” which is the way in which an entity skews or modifies its relations to all other entities, in a process of “decision”, is precisely that which the entity holds “in reserve” in relation to the other entities that it perceives. Once again, because Harman follows Heidegger (instead of Kant), he is unable to give credit to the way that perception as constructive functioning, precisely because it is always incomplete or selective, thereby produces new properties, new twists of relation, and thereby gives us novelty without the need to have recourse to occult substances.

I will be the first to admit that my argument here is incomplete; I need to say something as well about Whitehead’s notorious “eternal objects,” which play an important role in the processes over which I am disagreeing with Harman. I probably also need to say something about Whitehead’s notion of God, and how it relates to Harman’s counter-intuitive attempt to assert an occasionalism without God. And I certainly need to spell out more fully how I see Whitehead as championing a Kantianism without privileging human access. But for now, I have run out of energy and this post is already too long.

Scott Bakker’s Neuropath is a science-fiction thriller about a rogue neurosurgeon who kidnaps people and grotesquely manipulates their brains, sometimes killing them in the process, and other times releasing them once their minds have been subtly but horribly deformed. It’s pretty disturbing on a visceral level. Now, the psycho-thriller with a sadistic genius as a villain is a pretty familiar genre at this point (cf., for instance, Hannibal Lector). But Bakker’s novel offers a science fictional twist on this genre by extrapolating neuroscience slightly into a plausible near future, so that theoretical prospects hinted at in recent neurobiological and cognitive studies have been confirmed as actual, and current cutting-edge technologies like Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging have been pushed to a level beyond their actual present capabilities. In spite of these changes, the world of the novel remains in most ways recognizably our own. So one might call Neuropath a hard-SF, near-future psycho-thriller. But even that description is inadequate. What really distinguishes Neuropath is that the book has a concerted thesis, referred to by the characters within the novel as “The Argument” (in capitals); this makes it into a philosophical novel: a contemporary version of what Voltaire called the conte philosophique, and a strong example of SF as “cognitive estrangement” (Darko Suvin’s definition of SF as a genre).

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

The Argument in Neuropath goes something like this. Consciousness is severely limited. It is a very recent evolutionary adaptation, superimposed upon a wide array of older neural processes of which it is unaware, and which it cannot possibly grasp. We are only conscious of a very thin sliver of the external world; and even less of our internal, mental world. Most of our “experience” of the inner and outer world is a neurally-based simulation that has been evolutionarily selected for its survival value, but the actual representational accuracy of which is highly dubious. We are not conscious, and we cannot be conscious, of the actual neural processes that drive us. And indeed, nearly all our explanations and understandings of other people, of the world in which we live, and above all of ourselves are delusional, self-aggrandizing fictions. It’s not just that we misunderstand our own motivations; but that such things as “motivations” and “reasons” for how we feel and what we do actually don’t exist at all. Everything that we say, think, feel, perceive, and do is really just a consequence of deterministic physical (electro-chemical) processes in our neurons. “Every thought, every experience, every element of your consciousness is a product of various neural processes” (pp. 52-53). In particular, “free will” is an illusion. We never actually decide on any of our actions; rather, our sense of choice and decision, and the reasons and motivations that we cite for what we do, are all post-hoc rationalizations of processes that happen mechanistically, through chains of electrochemical cause-and-effect. All our rationales, and all our values, are nothing more than consolatory fictions.

The Argument is close to the “eliminativist” positions of philosophers like Paul and Patricia Churchland, and Thomas Metzinger (and also perhaps Ray Brassier, who draws out the phenomenological consequences of this position in his book Nihil Unbound). Bakker says in his Author’s Note that he is not — or at least does not want to be — a elimitavist and a nihilist, but he cannot think of any valid arguments against such a position. The Argument draws on research in cognitive psychology (with its claims about non-conscious computational processes in the brain, and its studies of the delusional nature of human self-understanding), neurobiology (with its understanding of the actual physical processes that underly various forms of thought), and (alas, also) evolutionary psychology (with its dubious claims that human values, feelings, understandings, and tendencies to act are “hardwired” adaptations from the Pleistocene). The findings of these research programs are taken as proof that nearly all speculation (philosphical, psychological, fictional, or whatever) on the nature of the mind and of humanity dating from before 1970 or so is utterly worthless, a form of self-congratulatory self-delusion and unwarranted belief. Science is distinguished from all other forms of understanding on the basis that it alone forces us to accept unwanted and dislikable conclusions, because it “doesn’t give a damn about what we want to be true” (Author’s Note, p. 306).

Of course, the fact that Neuropath is a novel, rather than a treatise by a brain scientist, or a philosophical tract by Metzinger, means that it is far more compelling than such works can ever be — and entirely for non-rational, non-cognitive, and non-scientific reasons. Indeed, the book’s most powerful effect is an entirely rhetorical (rather than rational) one. It compellingly discredits in advance any attempt to argue against its reductionist and nihilist theses: for the mere fact of claiming that subjective experience has any validity, or that meanings and values have any significance whatsoever, already convicts you of being somebody who wants desperately to evade the truth by clinging to alibis that flatter our human self-esteem. If you don’t accept the Argument, by that very fact you have discredited yourself and demonstrated the truth of its assertion that all our reasons and beliefs are self-delusions, and that we cannot intuitively grasp –much less face and accept — the gloomy truth about ourselves. Any attempt to say that things aren’t quite as horribly meaningless as The Argument makes out puts you in the category of those people who think they are living in Disney World instead of the real, actual world

I don’t intend this observation on Neuropath‘s self-confirming rhetorical strategy as a criticism; things are rather more complicated than that. Let me explain by putting it another way. The fact that Neuropath is a novel and not a scientific study or philosophical treatise means that it seeks, not to prove its theses either logically or empirically, but rather to demonstrate these theses, by putting them forth as strikingly as possible. And as a demonstration, is brilliant; all the more so in that the novel’s narrative itself recounts the making of such a demonstration. Even as Bakker demonstrates to us the inescapable truth of The Argument, his main characters Thomas Bible (the protagonist, a Columbia psychology professor) and Neil Cassidy (sic; the antagonist, Bible’s lifelong best friend and the mad neurosurgeon whose crimes dominate the plot) demonstrate the truth of The Argument to the world they live in, and to compel its acceptance, without any hope of escape. The novel narratively enacts the very process that it recounts: ironically compelling us to accept the overwhelming evidence for a thesis that we are constitutionally unable to accept, for not only is it violently counter to “common sense,” it undermines the authority of the very process by which we accept and reject ideas.

The Argument was first developed, as Thomas remembers, when he and Neil were undergraduates; they invoked it as a kind of party trick, in order to out-argue, and thereby disconcert and humiliate, English and other humanities majors. After all, if we are just puppets of neurochemical processes, then literary works have no intrinsic value apart from their ability to trigger certain neural responses and thereby pull our strings; and all the claims of literature, philosophy, and art either to insight or morality are bogus. (Bakker, in writing the novel, remains fully aware of this implication, to which his own work must be subjected as much as any other. The novel is in this sense self-consciously ironic, as so many genre narratives tend to be). But in the present time of the narrative, the demonstration reaches rather wider dimensions. Essentially, Neil sets sets out to set forth the Argument in the very flesh — that is to say, in the brains — of his victims. A billionaire businessman’s brain is rewired so that he is no longer capable of recognizing faces. Even in the mirror, and all the more when he looks at people around him, all he can see is the horrifying, characterizable visage of a stranger or an alien. (Prosopagnosia, or facial agnosia, is often discussed in scientific and pop-scientific writing). A porn star’s neural system is tweaked so that sensations of pain activate her brain’s pleasure and reward centers; she is led to compulsively drive herself to orgasm again and again, by slashing and mutilating herself until she dies. A fundamentalist preacher is subjected to neural firings that alternately lead him to feel the damnation of Hell and the joy of salvation. A politician prone to speechify about human dignity and moral responsibility is transformed into a cannibal who avidly devours a still-alive young girl, all the while pathetically protesting that he does not want to want to do this, that he cannot help wanting to do this. Finally, Neil straps Thomas into a machine he calls Marionette (an extrapolation from actually-existing Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation technology), that makes it possible to forcibly cycle him through a whole series of mental states, ranging from utter despair to a sense of unvanquishable well-being, from gentle benevolence to misanthropic rage, and from self-disgust to exaltation and feelings of omnipotence.

Through such demonstrations, Neil is trying to get Thomas to recognize the truth of The Argument — just as Bakker is trying to get the reader to recognize this truth. That is to say, Thomas advocates The Argument intellectually: he is in fact, more than Neil, its orginiator. And he has articulated the main points of The Argument in books he has written, and in the classes he teaches. But Thomas doesn’t feel the truth of The Argument viscerally — which is to say that he doesn’t actually live by it. (By his own account, this truth is so uncomfortable that it is impossible to actually live by — not only because we cannot really deal with its bleak truths, but also because we are so constituted that we cannot get rid of our illusions, even if and when we recognize them as illusions). Much to Neil’s disgust, Thomas lives his personal life as if values and meanings really existed, as if free will (or making decisions) were actually possible, and as if his love for his two children actually had sense and were not just the forcible result of evolutionary “hardwiring” and neurochemical programming. Neil justifies his gruesome experiments on the grounds that it is of no consequence whether the neurochemical impulsions that determine his victims to a particular course of action are the result of his own manipulations or just of “the environment” in general — in either case, the human being is a puppet of forces that he/she can neither control nor comprehend. Of course, this also means that Neil’s attempt to demonstrate the deep truth of The Argument is itself without sense, since all human beliefs are ungrounded and without sense. By weaving this level of meta-argument into his narrative, Bakker forestalls us from invoking it as a counter-argument against the book’s demonstration. Everything is beautifully air-tight, as the novel draws into itself, and neutralizes in advance, any attempts to argue against it.

I am tempted to say, therefore, that Neuropath is a cleverly designed hall of mirrors from which there is no exit. But that would still be, I think, to sell the book short. There is more to be said about the fact that, although the novel is grounded in cognitive theory, and practices a particularly intense form of cognitive estrangement, its primary accomplishment is affective, rather than cognitive. This is really just another way of saying that the book is indeed a work of imaginative fiction, rather than a scientific or philosophical treatise. When Neil is torturing Thomas, pulling him through one emotional state after another, he remarks that Marionette has finally accomplished what art has sought to do throughout all of human history: it gives the one who undergoes it (I am not sure what noun to insert here: the viewer? the audience? the consumer? the experiencer?) a powerful, vivid, and utterly compelling and convincing vicarious experience, of total participation in feelings that are not one’s own. (Of course, the larger point is that all human experience is vicarious, or aesthetic, rather than “real” and “actual”. I experience as mine what is really happening to someone else — or better, to no one. As Metzinger puts it, there is nothing that the experience of “being a self” is like, because in fact no such things as selves exist in the world).

And this, I think, is the paradoxical key to the novel. What makes Neuropath so powerful, so memorable, and so compulsively readable, is not The Argument itself, so much as the visceral intensity and horror of the way it is demonstrated. Neil’s manipulations (and those of other neuroscientists in the novel, such as the one who implants nanomachines in the brain of Thomas’ four-year-old son that repeatedly stimulate his amygdala, or so-called “fear center,” so that the child is forcibly in a constant, unremitting state of utter terror) — these manipulations so disturbing because they are violations of the mind as well as the body. They assault our most intimate sense of self-identity. We like to feel (wrongly) that no matter what happens to our body, our mind (or spirit, or soul) somehow can remain free and unaffected; in disproving this, Neil’s experiments wound human dignity (or human narcissism) more profoundly than either merely “physical” tortures, or doctrines like those of Freud or Metzinger, ever could. The absolute horror comes from intervening in the selfhood of the victim at such an intimate and interior level; the result is an unparalleled sense of absolute devastation. And the book’s reliance on science and technology — the fact that it only slightly extrapolates from what we already know, and what we already can do — makes it menacing in a way that the fantastic (as opposed to the more straightforwardly science-fictional) cannot attain.

This is important because Neuropath is ultimately (perhaps in spite of its author’s intentions) less about what human beings really are, than it is about what human beings can suffer, and what we can accomplish technologically. To put it otherwise, the novel is not so much about the (alleged) essence of the human mind and brain, than it is about power. What I have left out of my account of the novel so far is that Neil has long worked for the National Security Agency, and that the technologies he makes use of have all been developed, and employed, for torturing alleged “terrorists” and other prisoners. The demonstration that Neil seeks to make to Thomas, and perhaps to other people as well, is actually a national security secret. The FBI enlists Thomas to capture Neil, not on account of his actual crimes (which they do not care about, and do their best to cover up), but in order to recover the information that, in the process of going rogue, he has hidden, encrypted, or stolen.

Also, it turns out that Neil’s neurotechnology is double-edged. It is used to destroy the personal integrity of prisoners, to turn them into abject and grotesque reversals of what they previously were, in order to control them and extract information from them. But it is also used on NSA agents themselves, in order to transform them into killers and enforcers without remorse or conscience. Neil has in fact used the Marionette technology on himself, in order to dissolve any sense of obligation, gratitude, empathy, or guilt with regard to others; but also to annihilate any sense of being or having a self. At least, Neil claims that his “personal experience” or consciousness has been freed of any sense of agency or will: he just performs actions, he says, without having the feeling that he himself is an entity who wills these things, or actively does them. By cutting out portions of his neural circuitry, Neil has transformed himself into the sort of subject described by David Hume, who famously wrote that, when he looks within himself, he sees various “ideas” (desires, feelings, sense data, etc.), but never observes a “self” that would somehow “have” these ideas, or exist in addition to them. Neil is sort of a demonic version of the body/mind described by, for instance, the psychologist Susan Blackmore, who (combining cognitive psychology with Buddhism) precisely argues for a form of existence in which one has abandoned the fiction of being a self.

This leads me to several final comments about Neuropath. If The Argument has a “fallacy” that is not preempted by the book itself, this fallacy would lie, not in its positive expression of what science has discovered and what technology can do, but in its claims about what it is disqualifying or arguing against. The Argument tells me that I do not really have a “self”; and it proves its claim precisely by annihilating my very sense of “self.” This is dubious on two grounds. In the first place, in order to deny that the “self” exists, The Argument needs to substantialize, or essentialize, the very “thing” whose existence it goes on to negate. You have to first transform the fluid process of consciousness into a substantial entity, in order then to triumphantly demonstrate that such a substantial entity does not exist, and indeed cannot exist. But this has no weight against conceptions of the mind that do not reify it in the first place. The Argument works against Descartes, but not necessarily against William James. In the second place, a demonstration of power is not the same as a demonstration of essence. Modern neurotechnology is capable — or in Bakker’s SF extrapolation, may well soon be capable — of radically “rewiring” and rearranging the brain, with concomitantly radical effects upon the “mind.” This is indeed a demonstration of power — of the power of a technical and political-social apparatus — but it is not a demonstration of essence. The fact that we are capable of doing certain things to the brain does not in itself prove anything about the nature of the brain in all circumstances. As Bruno Latour or Isabelle Stengers might put it, the combination of the brain and the Marionette technology is itself an apparatus that must be constructed, and whose effects do not pre-exist its construction. What Bakker’s novel is really warning us of, is a drastic expansion of what intrusive brain technologies can accomplish, and therefore of what human beings can be made to suffer. (I’m reminded of Zizek’s warning, or suggestion, that virtual technologies could allow for a degree of torture that no one was previously able to inflict; and of the realization of just such a scenario in Richard K Morgan’s “Takeshi Kovacs” SF trilogy). The self that is destroyed by The Argument is in fact perpetuated by it, in order precisely that it may be made to suffer more horribly and concertedly.

Neuropath, like The Argument invoked within it, involves (among other things) a drastic overvaluation of consciousness itself — something of which cognitive psychology is in general guilty. The fact that, as Benjamin Libet’s experiments seem to suggest, my brain has already primed me to act in a certain way, before I become conscious of making the decision to act in that way, does not mean that my sense of “decision” is illusory, but only that the “decision” in question is not made by my consciousness. It is still entirely coherent to argue that my brain/mind/organism actually does “choose,” or make decisions, with my consciousness only being a secondary feature of the process (consciousness is apparently able to nullify the decision instead of ratify it, even without consciousness being that which makes the decision in the first place). The idea that everything the brain does is strictly causally determined can also be thrown into doubt, without invoking the “ghostly” actions of consciousness that hardcore empirical materialists have so long decried.(Walter J. Freeman does so, for instance, by invoking chaotic processes, in his book How Brains Make Up Their Minds). All this is not a matter of refuting The Argument of Neuropath, but of tracing its pragmatic consequences. Neuropath is all the more remarkable a work of SF, because of how it forces us to rethink its own premises, as much as the presuppositions that it gleefully destroys.

[ADDENDUM: see a lecture by Scott Bakker, recapitulating The Argument of the novel, together with some responses, here.]