Template changes

I've updated the template so that if you want to post something long but only want the first paragraph or so to show, you can use the handy "expandable post summaries" feature, as Jeremy wanted.

Using it requires a little extra work after you write your post: basically, you have to go to the "Edit Html" tab in the editor and use the following html tags to separate the beginning from the main body of your post:

Here is the beginning of my post. <span class="fullpost">And here is the rest of it.</span>

Of course, for "Here is the beginning..." substitute the actual beginning of your post and so on.

[Update, Jan 26 2006: This procedure is no longer necessary. I changed the code, so that now all you need to do is use the nifty little post template and everything will be done for you automatically. Besides, now the "Read more" link does not appear automatically. Thanks to the code from ChuBlogga!]

The New Cognitive Sciences and Political Theory

I just recently finished reading Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained (1991). If you click on the link to the book on Amazon, you may find that some of the reviews are quite hostile (and some, in my opinion, miss the point entirely, but that's another story); but I found the book enjoyable and nicely written for a general audience (with the occasional very bad joke thrown in; there are some disturbing similarities between Dennett's style and Thomas Friedman's).


Dennett's purpose, as the title says quite explicitly, is to explain consciousness (or "explain it away," as some of his critics would argue), or rather, to provide a philosophical framework for such an explanation; and he is conscious (pun intended) that in the process he will likely arouse much hotility, both from regular readers (as some of the Amazon reviews show) and philosophers alike. I came to it with a midly hostile attitude myself ("mildly" because I enjoyed very much Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, so I thought this earlier work could be worth reading even as I was skeptical of its premises), since I had been persuaded by the types of arguments presented by people like John Searle (of "Chinese Room" fame) and Colin McGinn, (and from a different perspective, Hans Jonas) who argue or would argue that Dennett's project is on its face preposterous since consciousness could not be explained by the kind of "third person" perspective that Dennett takes. But I came away from it, if not convinced, at least far more open to the kind of argument that purports to explain consciousness as a specific effect of the self-organization of human brains attained via evolution, and less convinced of the cogency of Searle's and McGinn's arguments. (It is an interesting fact in itself that this debate over the "explanability" of consciousness has become so polarized - perhaps a sign of a hidden antinomy of reason, in Kantian terms? But that's another story. So many stories, so little time.)

Dennett draws on a wide variety of research in neuroscience, computer science, and other disciplines to make his argument, though this is perhaps not the book to read if you are interested in the "state of the art" in those sciences (it was published in 1991; for the state of the art in neuroscience, you probably have to read something like Christopher Koch's The Quest for Consciousness, which I'd love to read but have not been able to). But the book's strength is as a philosophical argument - ultimately drawing on Darwin, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, as Dennett makes explicit here and there - to shift the metaphors by which we think about "consciousness," or more generally, "the soul," a program which Dennett continues in his later work, Freedom Evolves (which I am currently reading).

Dennett is not always at his best on the political implications of thinking of consciousness from this new perspective - informed by what I would call, broadly speaking, the "new cognitive sciences" - though that there are such implications seems to me clear. I am less interested in the ultimate correctness of Dennett's theory - there are many competing models of consciousness that draw on these new sciences - than in what they mean for thinking about politics and political theory. I am less clear as to what these implications could be. (So here we come to the point, you say, and then you find out that there is no point).

Dennett, in some ways, is like a more cheerful, more empirically grounded Nietzsche: the new sciences are relentless in the destruction of god, the soul, and all such metaphysical fancies (there are holdouts, to be sure). He does not delight in destroying (unlike Nietzsche), and he does not shy away from erecting new "sacreds" - the tree of life at the end of Darwin's Dangerous Ideas, for example; his good humor can be infectious, and there is a real delight in discovery in his work (I sure learned a lot of weird stuff about human consciousness that really jolted some pre-conceived ideas I had). But after you read him, it's hard to think (speaking as the unreconstructed Platonist I play at being in my work) of the "soul" in the same way as before. What point is there, for example, to the tripartite psychology of book IV of the Republic? One might say that there are political points, but what if that sort of phenomenology used by Socrates there is all wrong - deceives you, in fact? What can it mean to speak of "self-control" or "reason mastering the appetites" if our brains are the way these new sciences say they are, a kind of loosely structured "pandaemonium" shaped by natural selection? There are some answers to these questions - indeed, I could come up with some myself - but I wonder: should we, as political theorists interested in mostly historical approaches, pay any mind to the astounding revolution occurring around us? Do the new cognitive sciences have something to tell us about politics?

Anyway, just thinking out loud and wondering whether others share my perplexities. (A loooong thinking out loud, you might complain. But bloggy things are perhaps useful for this sort of stuff).

Unideal Observers

A blog by graduate students in philosophy at Bowling Green University: Unideal Observers. They seem much more official than this blog.

Foucault on Plato's STATESMAN

Rummaging for information on Foucault (connected to the idea of the state as a form of technology, something that Foucauldians are associated with) I came accross a lecture by Foucault - Omnes et Singulatim (1979) - where he discusses Plato's STATESMAN.

His reading and use of the dialogue are pretty interesting. He clearly sees that the idea of the statesman as the "shepherd of man" is rejected by the Stranger - though also partially incorporated in the idea of the statesman as a kind of weaver. According to him, however, the specific difference between the shepherd and the statesman is that the former cares for human beings one by one - each individual person - whereas the latter is only concerned with the city as a whole. This seems to me not quite right: the shepherd is explicitly said to care for human beings as a herd, i.e., in groups (261d-e), but the ultimate point Foucault is making is similar to one I would actually make, namely, that the shepherd's knowledge gathers all the knowledge of the care of human beings into one person, whereas the statesman's knowledge does not. The shepherd thus cares for every aspect of the human person, while the statesman does not.

Foucault uses this argument to make a distinction between the "pastoral" and the "political" forms of power (the distinction is also grounded historically in other uses of the shepherd metaphor, but Foucault spends comparatively more time on Plato). The pastoral form of power is individualising - its oriented to the whole individual; the political is oriented to the unity of a community. He then traces the development of "pastoral" forms of power through Christianity all the way to the modern era. Interestingly, however, his argument is that the modern state represents a kind of convergence of these two modalities of power - the pastoral and the political. Though I take it that this distorts a bit the meaning of the Platonic claim that statesmanship cannot be a kind of shepherding - it does seem to suggest something important about the modern state and its reach into the whole lives of individuals - through the incorporation of the various forms of human knowledge into the state, perhaps. I can't quite put my finger on it. Perhaps if I read more Foucault. I don't suppose there are a lot of readers of Foucault in this group?

Wednesday morning procrastination

Via Crooked Timber, a funny little essay on how procrastination can help you be more productive by philosopher John Perry and some thoughts in Nature about how blogging might or might not help science. I tend to think it will.