Metaontology. Toward a prehuman thinking

Chapter 2 - Prehuman thinking

Marcello Vitali-Rosati

Who thinks?

τῆς ἀμερίστου καὶ ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἐχούσης οὐσίας καὶ τῆς αὖ περὶ τὰ σώματα γιγνομένης μεριστῆς τρίτον ἐξ ἀμφοῖν ἐν μέσῳ συνεκεράσατο οὐσίας εἶδος, τῆς τε ταὐτοῦ φύσεως αὖ πέρι καὶ τῆς τοῦ ἑτέρου, καὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ συνέστησεν ἐν μέσῳ τοῦ τε ἀμεροῦς αὐτῶν καὶ τοῦ κατὰ τὰ σώματα μεριστοῦ: καὶ τρία λαβὼν αὐτὰ ὄντα συνεκεράσατο εἰς μίαν πάντα ἰδέαν, τὴν θατέρου φύσιν δύσμεικτον οὖσαν εἰς ταὐτὸν συναρμόττων βίᾳ. (Burnet 1957, Τίμαιος, 35a, See annotation)1 There seems to be something like thinking. Even without having a precise definition of what thinking is. This text has proposed an initial, intuitive definition of thinking as the connection between the world and something else—whatever this “something” is. For the moment, this definition suffices to understand that there seems to be something like thinking. This chapter will begin by trying to answer the question “who thinks?” Only after deeply considering this question will this text address the question “what is thinking” and will try to give a more sound definition of this notion.

There seems to be something like thinking. And this serves as a first source of evidence of the following sentence: here - right here in this text - is something that could probably be interpreted as a form of thinking. What actually is this thing? An English text, a set of written sentences, an ensemble of ordered words or characters, or, better, a series of 0 and 1 inscribed on a data storage device - probably an electro-mechanical or an electronic one. This set of somehow organized inscriptions seems to communicate something about the world, it gives an interpretation of it, perhaps, it describes it, it expresses it or it represents it. There are objects like this everywhere. Thinking can be identified in many different sorts of inscriptions: written words, sounds, images, traces. It is possible to imagine that there is something like thinking inside human beings - in their heart, in their soul, in their mind, in their brain, or whatever one can call this “inside” and wherever one can place it. This idea of a human-specific thinking is closely related to another concept: the concept of “consciousness,” which this text will analyse below. τοῦτο γὰρ λαβεῖν μὲν ἀναγκαῖον, οὐ ῥᾴδιον δέ. φαίνεται δὲ τῶν μὲν πλείστων οὐθὲν ἄνευ τοῦ σώματος πάσχειν οὐδὲ ποιεῖν, οἷον ὀργίζεσθαι, θαρρεῖν, ἐπιθυμεῖν, ὅλως αἰσθάνεσθαι, μάλιστα δ’ ἔοικεν ἰδίῳ τὸ νοεῖν· εἰ δ’ ἐστὶ καὶ τοῦτο φαντασία τις ἢ μὴ ἄνευ φαντασίας, οὐκ ἐνδέχοιτ’ ἂν οὐδὲ τοῦτ’ ἄνευ σώματος εἶναι. (, I, 1, 403a4, See annotation)2 This human form of thinking would be a specific kind of bodily inscription which has been imagined in different ways throughout history: “like” a wax tablet, “like” a mechanical automate, “like” an electric or electronic device. The belief that there is thinking inside human beings can be supported by many arguments and, for the moment, this text will not challenge them. The point here is to know what or who produces that thinking. There is something like thinking, this thinking could be inscribed in a text, or possibly inside a human being, but who or what is the cause that determines thinking?

ἔγρετο δ᾽ ἐξ ὕπνου, θείη δέ μιν ἀμφέχυτ᾽ ὀμφή: (Homer 1920, 2, 41, See annotation)3 ἐγὼ δ᾽ οὐκ αἴτιός εἰμι, ἀλλὰ Ζεὺς καὶ Μοῖρα καὶ ἠεροφοῖτις Ἐρινύς, οἵ τέ μοι εἰν ἀγορῇ φρεσὶν ἔμβαλον ἄγριον ἄτην, ἤματι τῷ ὅτ᾽ Ἀχιλλῆος γέρας αὐτὸς ἀπηύρων. (Homer 1920, 19, 86, See annotation)4 Many hypotheses are possible: it could be pure chance, it could be the result of complex physical dynamics, it could be the production of a god or a first principle or an eternal intellect. One of the most common ideas is oddly that the cause of thinking should be identified with a subject. The reasoning behind this idea goes approximately like this: Mais qu’est-ce donc que je suis ? une chose qui pense. Qu’est-ce qu’une chose qui pense ? c’est une chose qui doute, qui entend, qui conçoit, qui affirme, qui nie, qui veut, qui ne veut pas, qui imagine aussi, et qui sent. (Descartes 1824, “Méditations métaphysiques,” tome 2, See annotation)

  1. there is something like thinking
  2. it seems as though there is thinking inside human beings
  3. human beings should be able to produce this thinking
  4. there is something which characterizes human beings, being the ability to produce thinking: this something is called “the subject.”

If the first two statements appear reasonable, the third statement is not a logical corollary: it is clearly a paralogism. The fact that there is - possibly - a form of thinking inside human beings does not imply that human beings are the producers of that thinking. The fact that there is something which thinks does not imply that an “I” thinks. On the contrary, the very idea of a subject - an “I” as the producer of thinking - is the result of the observation of the presence of thinking and the associated need to explain its origin.

Was den Aberglauben der Logiker betrifft: so will ich nicht müde werden, eine kleine kurze Thatsache immer wieder zu unterstreichen, welche von diesen Abergläubischen ungern zugestanden wird, — nämlich, dass ein Gedanke kommt, wenn „er“ will, und nicht wenn „ich“ will; so dass es eine Fälschung des Thatbestandes ist, zu sagen: das Subjekt „ich“ ist die Bedingung des Prädikats „denke“. Es denkt: aber dass dies „es“ gerade jenes alte berühmte „Ich“ sei, ist, milde geredet, nur eine Annahme, eine Behauptung, vor Allem keine „unmittelbare Gewissheit“. Zuletzt ist schon mit diesem „es denkt“ zu viel gethan: schon dies „es“ enthält eine Auslegung des Vorgangs und gehört nicht zum Vorgange selbst. Man schliesst hier nach der grammatischen Gewohnheit „Denken ist eine Thätigkeit, zu jeder Thätigkeit gehört Einer, der thätig ist, folglich —“. Ungefähr nach dem gleichen Schema suchte die ältere Atomistik zu der „Kraft“, die wirkt, noch jenes Klümpchen Materie, worin sie sitzt, aus der heraus sie wirkt, das Atom; strengere Köpfe lernten endlich ohne diesen „Erdenrest“ auskommen, und vielleicht gewöhnt man sich eines Tages noch daran, auch seitens der Logiker ohne jenes kleine „es“ (zu dem sich das ehrliche alte Ich verflüchtigt hat) auszukommen. (Nietzsche 1886, Chapter I, §17, See annotation)5 In other words, it is possible to imagine that there is thinking in many places - and possibly also”inside" human beings, whatever that could mean: brain, neurons, soul, mind, heart… But this does not imply that the place where thinking is is also the producer or the cause of thinking. The active producer of thinking remains a mystery: it is impossible to deduce from the fact that thinking is there who or what put it there - whether this “there” is inside a human being or elsewhere, like in a text. But then, why does the idea that human beings are the producers of thinking seem that “natural?”

There are many reasons behind this common idea. This text will identify two main reasons: on the one hand, thinking seems to be necessary in order to define human beings and differentiate them from other beings; on the other hand, there is a particular conception of consciousness that seems to imply the impossibility to “get out” of a particular human being which is called “I.”

Anthropocentrisms

Thinking seems to be what allows human beings to define themselves and to identify themselves as something at the center of the world.

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה אָדָ֛ם בְּצַלְמֵ֖נוּ כִּדְמוּתֵ֑נוּ (, Genèse 1.26)6 This means that thinking is not a product of human beings. On the contrary, thinking is the cause of human beings. This is particularly true for a specific definition of humanity which has emerged within humanism, starting from the XIVth century. In medieval Christianity, humanity was defined as the fact of being in the image and likeness of God. This definition positions human beings at the center of the organization and structure of the universe. It must be underlined that this definition is based on texts: the sacred texts, the divinae litterae. These texts are the grounds on which human beings can build their own definition and grant themselves a stable essence.

quaeso a vobis ut in hac causa mihi detis hanc veniam accommodatam huic reo, vobis, quem ad modum spero, non molestam, ut me pro summo poeta atque eruditissimo homine dicentem hoc concursu hominum litteratissimorum, hac vestra humanitate, hoc denique praetore exercente iudicium, patiamini de studiis humanitatis ac litterarum paulo loqui liberius, et in eius modi persona quae propter otium ac studium minime in iudiciis periculisque tractata est uti prope novo quodam et inusitato genere dicendi. (Cicero and Watts 2007, 9, See annotation)7 Because they are sacred, divinae, these texts are not historical. They belong to the eternity from which they come and they are not inscribed in human temporality. Texts simply express an eternal ahistorical truth, and this truth defines human beings. From the XIVth century, another idea of texts begins to emerge. It is not a completely new idea - nothing is ever entirely new - because it is basically a reinterpretation of some Latin texts, but it is new compared to the most common way of understanding texts at that time. According to this new idea, texts are historical, they have a particular life and in order to understand them one has to know this history. The interest in the humanae litterae surpasses the interest in the divinae litterae: texts are something produced by human beings or, more accurately, writing texts is what actually defines human beings, their very essence. Human beings are not defined by sacred texts, they are defined by the texts they write; they are, first of all, text producers. Being human means producing texts. But what are texts? They seem to be the most evident material manifestation of thinking. Human beings as producers of texts are producers of thinking. And, finally, they can be defined as something that thinks.

Dicemus igitur quod aliquis ex nobis putare debet quasi subito creatus esset et perfectus, sed velato visu suo ne exteriora videret, et creatus esset sic quasi moveretur in aere aut in inani, ita ut eum non tangeret spissitudo aeris quam ipse sentire posset, et quasi essent disiuncta membra eius ita ut non concurrerent Bibi nec contingerent sexe. Deinde videat si affirmat esse suae essentiae : non enim dubitabit affirmare se esse, nec tamen affirmabit exteriora suorum membrorum, nec occulta suorum interiorum nec animum nec cerebrum, nec aliquid aliud extrinsecus, sed affirmabit se esse, cuius non affirmabit longitudinem nec latitudinem nec spissitudinem . Si autem, in illa hora, possibile esset ei imaginari manum aut aliud membrum, non tamen imaginaretur illud esse partem sui nec necessarium suae essentiae. (Avicenna 1972, De Anima I, 1 R16)8 [T]here are three feature common to all conscious states: they are inner, qualitative, and subjective in special senses of these words. (Searle 1999, 41)

καὶ ἔστιν ὁ μὲν τοιοῦτος νοῦς τῷ πάντα γίνεσθαι, ὁ δὲ τῷ πάντα ποιεῖν, ὡς ἕξις τις, οἷον τὸ φῶς· τρόπον γάρ τινα καὶ τὸ φῶς ποιεῖ τὰ δυνάμει ὄντα χρώματα ἐνεργείᾳ χρώματα. καὶ οὗτος ὁ νοῦς χωριστὸς καὶ ἀπαθὴς καὶ ἀμιγής, τῇ οὐσίᾳ ὢν ἐνέργειαa·[…] χωρισθεὶς δ’ ἐστὶ μόνον τοῦθ’ ὅπερ ἐστί, καὶ τοῦτο μόνον ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀΐδιον (οὐ μνημονεύομεν δέ, ὅτι τοῦτο μὲν ἀπαθές, ὁ δὲ παθητικὸς νοῦς φθαρτός)· καὶ ἄνευ τούτου οὐθὲν νοεῖ. ( III, 5, 4310a10, See annotation)9 The false syllogism shown above is now explained: it simply inverts the dynamic. Human beings are not the producers of thinking. Rather, they are the result of it, in the same way as they are not the producers of texts, they are the result of them because, in fact, the essence of humanity is defined starting from a particular conception of texts. There is a circularity to this interpretation of human beings as producers of thinking or text: human beings think because they write texts, they write texts because they think. On the contrary, the truth is that human beings are the result of these texts and this thinking. Thinking therefore precedes human beings.

To challenge in this way the idea that thinking is a production of human beings - which might seem almost natural after modernity - is the necessary starting point for developing a new understanding of what thinking can be and its connection with the world and Being. But even if it is possible to admit that human beings can be the result and not the producers of thinking - and of texts or other forms of inscription - it is much more difficult to assume all the consequences of such an idea and to develop a global philosophical grasp of them.

Many people find it repugnant that we, with our language, our consciousness, and our creative powers, should be subject to and answerable to a dumb, stupid, inert material world. Why should we be answerable to the world? Why shouldn’t we think of the“real world” as something we create, and therefore something that is answerable to us? If all reality is a “social construction,” then it is we who are in power, not the world. The deep motivation for the denial of realism is not this or that argument, but a will to power, a desire for control, and a deep and abiding resentment. (Searle 1999, 33) This text inscribes itself in a long tradition of human decentralisation. This tradition is not chronologically linear. Dicere porro hominum causa voluisse parare praeclaram mundi naturam proptereaque adlaudabile opus divom laudare decere aeternumque putare atque inmortale futurum, nec fas esse, deum quod sit ratione vetusta gentibus humanis fundatum perpetuo aevo, sollicitare suis ulla vi ex sedibus umquam nec verbis vexare et ab imo evertere summa, cetera de genere hoc adfingere et addere, Memmi, desiperest. (Lucretius Carus 1975, 2, 41, See annotation)10 The idea of human decentralisation is always present but more or less so according to the epoch and place. It can thus not be described as a progression - from a more anthropocentric point of view to an increasingly less anthropocentric one. In any time and place, there are some strongly anti-anthropocentric theories. To provide some examples: Greek atomism and epicureanism, heliocentric theories as opposed to geocentric theories, evolution theory, theories of the unconscious. All of these approaches remove human beings from the center. All of these ideas have existed in many different forms, and in many different epochs, but there are historical moments in which they converge and have a more visible impact. Heliocentrism states that the planet where human beings live is neither the center of the universe, nor the center of the solar system: Earth is not the most important point in the universe, and other planets could exist, possibly millions of them. Therefore, Earth’s inhabitants are not more important than other animals that potentially inhabit other planets. This is why heliocentrism seemed to be incompatible with the Christian idea of human beings as made in the image and likeness of God Convinci la cognizion dell’universo infinito. Straccia le superficie concave e convesse, che terminano entro e fuori tanti elementi e cieli. Fanne ridicoli gli orbi deferenti e stelle fisse. Rompi e gitta per terra col bombo e turbine de vivaci raggioni queste stimate dal cieco volgo le adamantine muraglia di primo mobile ed ultimo convesso. Struggasi l’esser unico e propriamente centro a questa terra. Togli via di quella quinta essenza l’ignobil fede.Donane la scienza di pare composizione di questo astro nostro e mondo con quella di quanti altri astri e mondi possiamo vedere. Pasca e ripasca parimente con le sue successioni ed ordini ciascuno de gl’infiniti grandi e spaciosi mondi altri infiniti minori. Cassa gli estrinseci motori insieme con le margini di questi cieli. Aprine la porta per la qual veggiamo l’indifferenza di questo astro da gli altri. Mostra la consistenza de gli altri mondi nell’etere, tal quale è di questo. (Giordano Bruno 2000, 454, See annotation)11. Evolution theory states that there is no substantial difference between species: there is a continuity which links a species with another and, more importantly, humans are not essentially different from other species. They come from other species, they were not created as they are and therefore they are animals like all the others. There is not an eternal idea of “human being,” an immutable form; human beings are just the result of a progressive adaptation to the environment, exactly like other species. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines. (Dawkins 2006, 20, See annotation) . If this is true, how is it possible to find a specificity of human beings that can distinguish them from other things and give to them some importance? How is it possible to continue to defend the assumption that human beings are “superior” than other “things?” This question is the point that makes thinking so crucial: it seems that the fact of being producers of thinking could be the only way to defend human centrality. And from here stem all theories stating that even this is not true. Theories of the unconscious affirm that most of what human beings think is their own production - their thoughts -, but is not actually controlled by them – it comes from outside and it shapes consciousness.

But why, given all of these considerations, does the idea of human beings as producers of thinking persist? As stated previously, the history of theory is not linear; it is not a progression. It is not correct to imagine that theory during history is moving further and further away from anthropocentrism. On the contrary, the stronger anti-anthropocentric theories become, the stronger anthropocentric theories become. The fact of considering human beings as producers of thinking can be interpreted as a reaction to the contrary tendency of considering them as a peripheral result of external dynamics.

The problem of consciousness

Another reason to believe that human beings are the producers of thinking relates to what may be called “the problem of consciousness.” This is most likely a more fashionable way of asking the same questions raised above today. The problem of consciousness renews last century’s debates between science and philosophy: consciousness seems to be one of the last irreducible “objects.” At the same time, it seems as though science has become more aware of the problem of consciousness - notably thanks to some interpretations of quantum mechanics - and thus seeks to consider consciousness from a scientific point of view. The timeliness of this issue is further reinforced by the metaphor used to describe consciousness and more generally thinking: since the second half of the XXth century, the model used as a metaphor to explain human thinking has become informatics. The modern automat has been replaced by contemporary computers: thinking is something “like” an algorithm implemented in an electronic device. For simplicity, in what follows physical systems will be considered to be constituted of elements in a state, for example neurons or logic gates. All that is required is that such elements have two (or more) internal states, inputs that can influence these states in a certain way, and outputs that in turn are influenced by these states (Tononi 2015, See annotation)

It is difficult to give a definition of consciousness without using the subjective kind of language that this text avoids. To talk about consciousness, this text would use personal pronouns such as “I” or “we.” This text will try to show that this prejudice is the very problem. The use of pronouns prevents an escape from consciousness, or, to be more precise, the use of pronouns creates a barrier between “inside” and “outside” consciousness. By “consciousness” I mean those states of sentience or awareness that typically begin when we wake up in the morning from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until we fall asleep again. (Searle 1999, 40–41)

A possible starting definition would be the following: consciousness is the conviction for a certain living creature - for example a human being - that there is something going on inside them and that they are aware of this something. This “something” would include feelings, thoughts, sensations, emotions. All of these things are experienced as if they were taking place “inside” and as if they could not be described completely from the outside.

This idea of consciousness seems to demonstrate three important things that, if they were true, would entirely invalidate the point of view that this text is trying to defend:

  1. The world must be defined in terms of a tension between two poles: a subject and an object. The question is how the subject comes into relation with the object. In this sense, the only possible access to the world is through an “inner” experience. This means that access to the world is always subjective
  2. Thinking is inside and only inside
  3. This experience is irreducible to an objective description
    1. this means, more specifically, that syntax and semantics are irreducible.

It is important to precisely explain these three points in order to avoid any terminological ambiguity. The very definition of consciousness is based on the idea that there are two separated poles: an inside and an outside. The concepts used to describe consciousness actually imply this separation: “feelings,” “sensations,” “experiences” are structures that represent this original separation. In other words, this first, tentative definition of consciousness implies a theoretical problem determining the impossibility of “getting out” of consciousness. It is as though the definition and the problem form a sort of tautological syllogism: consciousness is the fact of having two domains (the inside and the outside) and this implies that these two domains are completely separate.

Philosophers have only described the correlationist circle, in various ways; the point, however, is to step outside it. (Shaviro 2014, 68, See annotation) Beginning here, the problem seems to be: how can one step outside the circle of consciousness? But this text wants to show that the point is not to get out of the circle, but more precisely to realize that there is no such a circle at all. The only way to “step outside” and to solve the problem of consciousness is thus to get rid of the initial definition.

That neither our Thoughts, nor Passions, nor Ideas formed by the Imagination, exist without the Mind, is what every Body will allow. And it seems no less evident that the various Sensations or Ideas imprinted on the Sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever Objects they compose) cannot exist otherwise than in a Mind perceiving them. I think an intuitive Knowledge may be obtained of this, by any one that shall attend to what is meant by the Term Exist when applied to sensible Things. The Table I write on, I say, exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my Study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my Study I might perceive it, or that some other Spirit actually does perceive it. There was an Odor, that is, it was smelled; There was a Sound, that is to say, it was heard; a Colour or Figure, and it was perceived by Sight or Touch. This is all that I can understand by these and the like Expressions. For as to what is said of the absolute Existence of unthinking Things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their Esse is Percipi, nor is it possible they should have any Existence, out of the Minds or thinking Things which perceive them. (Berkeley 2009, 25, See annotation) The fact that thinking is inside actually means that it can only be subjective. It depends on a particular closed structure. This structure can be a human being or another living creature, or even another kind of object - a machine, for example. But the fact that thinking stays inside implies that there is no possible relationship with the outside if it is not mediated by this inside. This means that the risk of solipsism remains, because it is impossible to experience something which is not inside the thing that makes the experience. The point here is that this inside can never be reduced to an outside: it is impossible to give an exhaustive description of what happens “inside” to make it graspable from the outside. Thus it is actually impossible to account for the subjective experience to decide if and how it can be considered objective.

The irreducibility which is at stake here is not the fact that consciousness could be a state which is not the result of some other states, but the fact that consciousness is not objectively describable. Therefore, it is impossible to consider consciousness as something that can be universally analyzed and understood. The subjectivity of consciousness is destined to stay subjective, by definition.

What are the reasons for accepting these three points?

In order to answer this question, consider a simple example: two sentences that give different descriptions of the same situation:

  1. “I see the sun”
  2. “There is a vision of the sun”

The first sentence accepts the three points mentioned above. There is a self-standing, autonomous structure, “I,” which has something going on inside itself: this structure generates an event, which can be called vision, or perception. The starting point is this self-standing structure, and by definition it is thus impossible to move beyond this structure. “I” is the only substance here, the only certainty, the only indubitable fact. Everything which follows the “I” - from an ontological point of view - depends on it. “I see the sun” means that “I” is enclosed in its very structure and it can access only what is inside the clear borders of this structure. “I” is the producer of the vision, it produces the experience and the only thing that “I” can have is what it has produced itself. This closed situation may be called “awareness”: “I” is aware of the fact that it sees the sun. The awareness is the process folding in on itself which derives from the fact that “I” cannot escape itself, and it is wholly contained by its borders. The only certainty is its contents.

The second sentence does not presuppose an existing structure. It limits itself to declaring that an event is taking place. The event is described as such. Something is happening. The vision is not predefined as a necessary subjective phenomenon because the very notion of subjectivity is yet to appear.

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red,’ ‘blue,’ and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue.’ (It can hardly be denied that it is in principle possible to obtain all this physical information from black and white television, otherwise the Open University would of necessity need to use colour television.) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous know- ledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false. (Jackson 1982, 130) According to the normal formulation of the problem of consciousness, consciousness is precisely the fact that the first sentence cannot be “reduced” to the second one. This impossibility is based only on another presupposition: the fact that there is an irreducible difference between the meaning of the experience and its objective structure. In other words: even if all the objective dynamics implied in the vision of the sun were taken into account, described and known, there would again be something missing: what seeing the sun is for “I” and therefore what it actually means.

The presupposition behind this idea is that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax. For example, this text is made by a structured series of characters which respects a complex set of rules. Understanding this syntax objectively does not allow an understanding of the meaning of this text. The problem is very interesting because it is another manifestation of a desire to define human beings as different - and finally superior - to other objects. To simplify this question: a machine can perfectly process this text’s syntax, but it cannot understand its meaning. The meaning of this text is only understandable for a human being who is, thanks to their inner structure of consciousness, able to actually produce meaning from syntax.

The opposition between syntax and semantics is another polarity strengthening the separation between inside and outside, subjects and objects. But this is nothing more than another prejudice inscribed into the very words used to describe an event.

Suppose that I’m locked in aroom and given a large batch of Chinese writing. Suppose furthermore(as is indeed the case) that I know no Chinese, either written orspoken, and that I’m not even confident that I could recognize Chinesewriting as Chinese writing distinct from, say, Japanese writing ormeaningless squiggles. To me, Chinese writing is just so manymeaningless squiggles. Now suppose further that after this first batch of Chinese writing I amgiven a second batch of Chinese script together with a set of rules forcorrelating the second batch with the first batch. The rules are inEnglish, and I understand these rules as well as any other nativespeaker of English. They enable me to correlate one set of formalsymbols with another set of formal symbols, and all that ‘formal’ meanshere is that I can identify the symbols entirely by their shapes. Nowsuppose also that I am given a third batch of Chinese symbols togetherwith some instructions, again in English, that enable me to correlateelements of this third batch with the first two batches, and theserules instruct me how to give back certain Chinese symbols with certainsorts of shapes in response to certain sorts of shapes given me in thethird batch. Unknown to me, the people who are giving me all of thesesymbols call the first batch “a script,” they call the second batch a “story” and they call the third batch “questions.” Furthermore, theycall the symbols I give them back in response to the third batch“answers to the questions.” and the set of rules in English that theygave me, they call “the program.” (Searle 1980, 417, See annotation) Consider the following example, which could be used to defend this polarity. There are two symbols made from a set of characters:

a?

and

b

There is then a table which specifies that a? must be followed by b.

This is an easy instruction that can be applied. A machine is able to do it: when the input is a? it gives the output b.

This is only syntax. There is no meaning in it.

The following is an almost identical example. There are two symbols made of a set of characters: What is the sun? and A star.

There is then a table which specifies that What is the sun? must be followed by A star.

What is the difference between these two examples? From a syntactical point of view, there is no difference at all. But there is a difference if there is no longer a correspondence table: a machine will not be able to combine the first symbol with the second. But someone - or something - who is able to go beyond syntax and understand the meaning, without the need for a table, will be able to combine the two. This is because they will “understand” what “sun” and “star” mean. To strengthen this example, it is possible to call on a pronoun and, assuming that it refers to a self-standing autonomous and well-defined structure, say: “you feel something different when you read a? and then b and when you read What is the sun? And then A star.”

This argument is very well expressed in Professor Jefferson’s Lister Oration for 1949, from which I quote. “Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain—that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.” This argument appears to be a denial of the validity of our test. According to the most extreme form of this view the only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe ‘A thinks but B does not’ whilst B believes ‘B thinks but A does not.’ Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks. (Turing 1950, See annotation) The problem is that this example is designed to clearly define the set of elements that are available in the first case and to leave ambiguous the elements that are available in the second case. In the first case, there are only the two symbols and the table. In the second one, there is something else. But what is this something else? The answer that the example tries to provoke is: “meaning,” assuming that meaning is what is left after considering all the elements declared. But the problem is that these elements have not been declared. What if there were many tables, each defining instructions to establish relationships between different symbols? A table establishing a relationship between the symbol Sun and the symbol star, another setting a relationship between Sun and a picture, another setting a relationship between Star and bright, another one between bright and warm and between star and astronomical object consisting of a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its own gravity, and so on. Imagine millions, billions, trillions of these relationships. Would the example still make its point?

Now consider again the two sentences: “I see the sun” and “There is a vision of the Sun.” The first one implies that the meaning of the sun is something which can only be understood by this “I” and that, ultimately, it is “I” which creates the meaning. The second sentence cannot access this meaning, which remains inside “I.” But what if both the sentences were linked to trillions of relationships? What if the meaning came from the quantity of relationships involved? In this case, it would be acceptable that the difference is not between syntax and semantics, but rather between degrees of complexity within syntax.

There is something more: the example was, on one hand, a suggestion that there is something that is irreducible to syntax and, on the other hand, an implication that this something is “inside” a human being. “I” can understand the meaning of the sun being a star. This comprehension is set inside “I.” The tables that specify the correspondence between a? and b are clearly “outside” – they are “out there,” on a piece of paper. They could be transferred on many other inscriptions and they are still there, somewhere. If meaning comes from many related correspondence tables, this implies that meaning is always “outside.” It can only be outside. Or, to be more precise, there is no inside and there is no outside, there are only inscribed relationships and the more relationships that there are, the more they are complex and interrelated, and the more there will be something that can be called meaning. The awareness, the possibility of folding meaning and of making sense of it also depends on other relationships. Meaning is there (neither inside, nor outside), awareness is there and, lastly, consciousness is there.

These relationship tables can produce links between symbols, pictures, other symbols, texts, characters, and all kinds of materials. They can be the origin of “feelings,” which could be described as complex relationships between very long strings of texts and other materials. The sentence “I think that the sun is beautiful” is the result of relationships defined between these characters s, u, and n and dictionary entries associating them with a definition (like “the sun is a star”) and other definitions, and poems about the sun, and scientific sentences about it and texts defining what beauty is and a set of human behaviors in response to beauty (facial expressions, linguistic behaviors and so on). According to this description, it is very hard - albeit impossible - to distinguish between what happens inside, say, a human being’s brain and what happens outside of it. Neuronal behaviors depend on training, a training defined by a relationship table integrated in the neuronal system thanks to some kind of “learning.” This “learning” is nothing but a material transcription of these materially inscribed relationships.

Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men, and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. Or take a word of a dozen letters, and let each man think of his letter as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole word (Tononi 2012, loc 217.0, See annotation) The key here is the fact that these relationships must, all of them, be accessible from the same standing point. Meaning and consciousness are the result of this particular accessibility to a definite and finite, albeit high, number of relationships.

Therefore, the problem does not relate to the irreducibility of semantics to syntax, but instead to the very high number of syntactical rules which is, as such, almost impossible to exhaustively describe.

This text defends the idea that consciousness can be reduced to something simpler, but that consciousness is something which can be described as all the other objects: in other words, experience and meaning are actually objective concepts, and they can be described as such. There is no fracture between an inside and an outside; everything, from this point of view, is on the same level. What seems to happen inside is just as “outside” as all other things, or, to be more precise, there is no inside because there is no outside, from an absolute point of view.

This notion of an irreducible inside demonstrates that thinking can be considered as something that takes place somewhere, but mostly that thinking is produced by the very structure in which it takes place. And these two notions are not the same.

It is possible to have an irreducible consciousness that is the result of complex dynamics between different objects bearing relationships with one another. These relationships are out there.

Human, posthuman, prehuman

The anthropocentrism of our “default metaphysics,” which Harman rightly finds objectionable, rests almost entirely on the dubious presupposition that human beings are uniquely rational, uniquely possessed of subjectivity and interiority, and uniquely capable of thought and/or language. (Shaviro 2014, 72, See annotation)

The main aim of the above reasoning is to show that the assertion of a thinking that is exclusively human is a prejudice. Yet this prejudice is, itself, so deeply rooted in the logic and structures of language that it would be naïve to believe that it is possible to abandon it in a few pages. This text offers the concept of prehuman thinking. To do this, it is necessary not only to make an analytical critique of all the structures that determine a structural anthropocentrism of thinking, but also to imagine a complete revolution of language, modes of writing, and conceptions of the world.

The very roots of philosophy - and more broadly of language - are anthropocentric, and in order to get rid of this anthropocentrism it is necessary to redefine some basic concepts and notions. The first aspect to consider is the definition of “human” and the notions of “posthuman” and “prehuman.” This text follows on from a long reflection on the status of the human being. The critique of anthropocentrism can be traced back to very ancient times. The idea that the human beings are the only possible starting point for thinking and reflection has been at the foundation of countless discourses. Today, this critical reflection is often identified by the label “posthumanism” or “posthuman studies.” The starting point for these approaches - which remain very varied and heterogeneous - is to question whether there is something like a “human being” and whether this something has an essential, substantial dimension. In other words, it is necessary to take a step backwards from the essential unity that would be a human being and to accept the possibility that this “thing” may not in fact be a “thing.”

The human is a historical construct that became a social convention about ‘human nature.’ (Braidotti 2013, 26, See annotation) In this sense, humanism could be defined - ignoring for the moment the historical meaning of the term which will be contested below - as an approach which accepts that the adjective “human” refers to a specific number of qualities and characteristics which define the essence of the human being. Le culte de l’humanité aboutit à l’humanisme fermé sur soi de Comte, et, il faut le dire, au fascisme. C’est un humanisme dont nous ne voulons pas. (Sartre 2009, 75, See annotation) Being human would therefore mean corresponding to an essence, marked out by a series of fundamental attributes. It doesn’t matter what these attributes are - having speech, hands, soul, reason, and so forth -: what does matter is that there is something graspable that establishes the boundaries between an object that can be considered a “human being” and another object that cannot.

My posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of human and nonhuman, examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized. (Barad 2007, 66) The common starting point of many “posthumanisms” is to say that there is nothing given as a “human being.” “Human beings” are actually the result of a process which produces them as human beings. In this sense, even historical humanism can be considered as posthumanism for the very reason described above: for the XVth century humanist, texts were the producers of human beings and not the other way around. The “essence” of human beings is a production, the act precedes the essence.

But why, then, make reference to “post” humanism? The “post” suggests that posthumanism comes “after” humanism, but this is false both from an historical and an ontological perspective. Hence the reason why this text instead proposes the term prehumanism.

At the start of it all there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man,’ formulated fi rst by Protagoras as ‘the measure of all things,’ later renewed in the Italian Renaissance as a universal model and represented in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (see figure 1.1). An ideal of bodily perfection which, in keeping with the classical dictum mens sana in corpore sano, doubles up as a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values. Together hey uphold a specifi c view of what is ‘human’ about humanity. Moreover, they assert with unshakable certainty the almost boundless capacity of humans to pursue their individual and collective perfectibility. That iconic image is the emblem of Humanism as a doctrine that combines the biological, discursive and moral expansion of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress. (Braidotti 2013, 13, See annotation)

The term posthumanism is historically false for at least two reasons: on the one hand, the idea that human beings are not the only possible starting point predates historical humanism; on the other hand, humanism as an historical period does not propose a strongly essentialist idea of human beings and does not position this idea at the center of the universe, thus implying a strong anthropocentrism. As stated above, the main shift that occurred from the XIVth century onwards was a change in perspective on texts. The almost unique interest in the divinae litterae that characterized the Middle Ages is replaced by a profound attention to the humanae litterae. The divine texts have a metaphysical value that goes beyond their actual inscription: they are the word of God. Human texts have meaning only in an immanent dimension. Humanity, humanitas, is redefined on the basis of this idea. Instead of being made in the image and likeness of God, humans become the ones who read and write. Already in the Middle Ages, the human being was a result: the result of the sacred text that defined its essence in the image and likeness of God. But the value of these texts went beyond the text itself and took on a metaphysical meaning: therefore, the essence of the human being took on an absolute and indisputable value. The human being is at the center of the world because God placed him there. When the human being is the reader and writer of texts, these texts are material, determined, immanent texts. The human being is the result, the derivative of these texts. Classical texts are the material that produces the human being, he or she who is no longer a starting point, but rather a point of arrival. Humanitas is not given, it is acquired: by reading and loving the humanae litterae.

This is particularly true in the case of one of the icons that is often taken as a paradigm of the humanist idea of humanity: Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. A close look at this image reveals that da Vinci is absolutely not attempting to define an idealized human essence, but to comment on a text: da Vinda engages with the Vitruvian text positioned in the contours of his drawing. The definition of human being is not a pre-existing and given idea, it is the result of a text, of its circulation and commentary.

Humanity is no longer the fact of being in the image of God, and thus, through this relationship, being at the center of the Universe. Rather, humanity consists in taking an interest in the things produced by human beings. What human beings produce are, first and foremost, texts. Human texts thus become the center of interest: the humanae litterae become more important than the divinae litterae. This change of perspective implies a series of revolutions in thinking which can be summarized as follows:

Mentre, a sua volta, la verità è così staccata dalla personalità storica di un filosofo, che importa pochissimo il veicolo terreno attraverso il quale si è manifestata. Non importa l’uomo, quell’uomo: importa un pensiero, a cui il mutar nome è meramente accidentale. Di qui le strane attribuzioni, e gli anonimi, scomparendo il singolo nell’opera sua o nel frutto di una collettività. (Garin 1994, 23, See annotation) 1. In the first place, a new interest in history emerges. Not the history of the universe - the metaphysical history of the Bible -, but human history. According to medieval sensibility, what was happening on a human scale was of no real philosophical interest: human beings as such are only vanitas and deserve attention only in relation to a wider, metaphysical picture, precisely as sons of God. But humanism implies a change of scale: human history has an interest in itself. But then, what seemed to the scholastic philosophers to be part of their contemporaneity, begins to be put into a historical perspective according to which decades, centuries and millennia count. Compared to metaphysical history, a thousand years is a blink of an eye: Aristotle can therefore be considered by Thomas Aquinas as a contemporary. However, a decade is already an important interval of time in human history; antiquity is therefore, according to humanists, radically different. 2. Linked to this sensitivity for human history is an interest in the materiality of documents, which are the vehicles of human thinking. A text is no longer the timeless expression of an eternal truth, but a document which has a particular history and whose author, conditions of production and context of circulation can be traced. Classical texts have always been read, but what changes with humanism is the way in which they are read: it is the critical detachment that allows philology to emerge. 3. The renewed interest - for it cannot be said to be completely new, of course - in the human dimension ultimately implies a certain humility with regard to the human condition. Humanism does not consist primarily in a kind of arrogance that places man at the center of the universe. On the contrary, humanism derives from a progressive awareness of the fact that human beings are not at the center of the universe: if they could be as sons of God, they can no longer be so as mere human beings. It is not a case that heliocentrism finally became a dominant worldview from the XVth century onwards. This loss of centrality was accompanied by a change in theoretical interests: the gesture of humanism consists in limiting thinking to subjects within the reach of human beings. Humanism returns the human being to the center not because of overconfidence or anthropocentric excess, but through an acceptance of human contingency. Instead of man at the center of the universe as made in the image of God, man as the only possible measure because, as humans, they have access to nothing else.
Perché ciò di cui si lamenta da tante parti la perdita è proprio quello che gli umanisti vollero distrutto, e cioè la costruzione delle grandi «cattedrali di idee», delle grandi sistemazioni logico-teologiche: della Filosofia che sussume ogni problema, ogni ricerca al problema teologico, che organizza e chiude ogni possibilità nella trama di un ordine logico prestabilito. A quella Filosofia, che viene ignorata nell’età dell’umanesimo come vana ed inutile, si sostituisco no indagini concrete, definite, precise, nelle due direzioni delle scienze morali (etica, politica, economica, estetica, logica, retorica) e delle scienze della natura. (Garin 1994, See annotation) Noi dobbiamo, se vogliamo essere uomini, comunicare con gli uomini. (Garin 1994, 30, See annotation)

The idea of the arrogant centrality of the human is undoubtedly present in history, and perhaps it also appears in humanism - for example, in its modern reemergence, in the praise of a normative and normalized human rationality. This text does not intend to deny that this dimension of anthropocentric arrogance exists in the various humanisms, but rather to show that there is no linearity between an anthropocentric, humanist approach and an anti-anthropocentric, posthumanist one. Both ideas coexist in the course of history. Once again, then, why speak of “post” humanism?

Ontology thus becomes fundamental: but in fact the very starting idea of posthumanism is that the essence of human beings - and thus humanism - comes after the dynamic that produces this essence. posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all — in the sense of being “after” our embodiment has been transcended — but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself. (Wolfe 2010, XV) The posthumanist approach of interest here differs sharply and radically from other approaches - often defined as “trans-humanist” - according to which the goal of humanity today should be to increase and “perfect” the human. The characteristic of trans-humanism is that it is based on a strong idea of human essence: it is precisely from this essence that human can be increased. The human being is a substance and it is possible to make this substance perfect by following an almost Aristotelian notion of essence as becoming oneself. Posthumanism is in this sense completely opposed to trans-humanism: posthumanism denies a stable and predetermined essence of the human being.

Even from an ontological point of view, therefore, posthumanism comes before humanism. This is another reason to refer to prehumanism instead of posthumanism.

My sense of posthumanism is thus analogous to Jean-François Lyotard’s paradoxical rendering of the postmodern: it comes both be fore and after humanism: before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms (such as language and culture) of which Bernard Stiegler probably remains our most compelling and ambitious theorist—­and all of which comes before that historically specific thing called “the human” that Foucault’s archaeology excavates. But it comes after in the sense that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical (Wolfe 2010, 11–12) But there is a final, more fundamental reason for favoring the prefix “pre” over the prefix “post”: this text not only describes an approach that comes before and goes beyond humanism, it firstly describes something that precedes the human ontologically as well as chronologically.

This text proposes a thinking that is independent of the concept of the human being, but also of the human as a species that historically appeared at a certain moment on Earth. This text proposes a thinking that is prehuman in that it already exists before the appearance of humans.

The human is thus always second and derivative: from an ontological point of view and from a chronological point of view. More importantly, there is something chronologically anterior to human beings that must be considered as thinking.

There are texts, like this one, which can be considered prehuman from an ontological point of view, because their “authors” or their “editors” or their “readers” do not exist before the text, but are rather the production of the text. However, from a chronological point of view, this very text appears - as such - in a time when there is a species called the human being. But there are other texts, other forms of thinking which appeared in a time - and/or in a space - without human beings. This idea will be the focus of the following chapter.

This text will thus take a prehumanist point of view. Concretely, this has three main implications: an ontological one, a linguistic one and an ethical one.

Il n’y aurait donc pas d’un côté l’esprit (ou la culture ou le langage), et de l’autre l’être (ou la réalité ou le monde), mais plusieurs manières d’être. L’ontologie devient le discours de l’anthropologie, parce que la notion d’être apparaît comme le comparant le plus puissant. Cela ne signifie pas qu’il est le plus indéterminé, mais au contraire qu’il est le plus intense, celui qui nous oblige au déplacement et au dépaysement le plus grand (Maniglier 2012, See annotation)12 Form an ontological point of view, this text will defend the idea that Being is always mediated: it is the point made in chapter 1 about the inseparability of Being and thinking. As opposed to other approaches of this kind, the mediation will not be a human mediation and thus will not imply a fusion between ontology and anthropology. Metaontology is a prehuman ontology. This means not only that it is possible to have an ontology before having human beings from an ontological point of view, because the essence of human beings comes after, but also that there is an ontology before human beings chronologically which means that access to the world is not initially human.

From a linguistic point of view, a prehumanist approach implies a removal of all the expressions suggesting that access to world, meaning and thinking are all products of a human being or their minds. This task is far from simple. Even the most basic argumentation uses linguistic structures, suggesting that the producer and the interpreter of meaning can only be a human being. To conceive a prehuman thinking requires a review of the totality of language. It is necessary to invent new forms of argumentation, new expressions. It is necessary that the entity that claims the production of thinking is not a human being. It is also necessary that the addressee of the text is other than a human being. It is therefore necessary that the texts - or rather particular inscribed texts - can speak to one another. It is necessary that the emergence of meaning becomes evident before any interpretative intervention that requires a human being. This linguistic work will therefore have technical implications, insofar as only embodied entities can be the place from which meaning emerges. All forms of linguistic abstraction must be banished. The repercussions of this linguistic work will be more evident in chapter 3, which will discuss inscriptions - and here the text speaks to itself, speaks in its inner self.

L’homme se fait ; il n’est pas tout fait d’abord, il se fait en choisissant sa morale, et la pression de circonstances est telle qu’il ne peut pas ne pas en choisir une. (Sartre 2009, 66, See annotation) Finally, it is obvious that this work of reconceptualization will have strong ethical implications. The human being is the starting point as well as the finality of almost all ethical approaches. Ethics seems, by definition, to be anthropocentric. How is it possible to imagine a prehuman ethics? Who will the ethics care about? Who will produce it? In fact, the ethical question is one of the reasons for the emergence of posthumanist approaches. “Humanist” ethics, or better, an ethics based on a strong and essential idea of human, can only be violent. Essence is the fulcrum of violence because it is a measure that is meant to be absolute and objective and therefore destroys, at the outset, every possible form of difference. The ethics of the human is an ethics of the non-human, because defining an essence of human implies drawing boundaries and thus removing all that is not considered human. Anything that does not fall within the definition of human can - and must - be subject to those who are human. This exclusion can concern any type of group: whether it be defined ethnically, sexually, socially, etc.

The idea of thinking as an exclusive and typically human attribute is often used as a starting point for the delimitation of ethical boundaries: those who think are on a higher ethical level than others. This is based on two a priori: first, that there is a subject who thinks and, second, that this subject induces that those who are like them can also think, while others cannot. It is obvious that this “proof” of belonging is biased, just like the clear break between syntax and semantics analyzed above. It is prejudice that justifies the exclusion of difference. Everything that is not understood is excluded. The meaning is what the subject can understand. Everything else is nonsense. The machine that combines symbols does not think, it does not handle semantics because it works differently to what the subject knows. The foreigner, the one who speaks a “barbaric” language is also devoid of reason - and therefore of thinking.

These questions will be at the center of the last chapter, despite the fact that they are already at stake in the present chapter: they express themselves in the language of this text and they orient all its theoretical choices.

What is thinking

This chapter opened with a starting, exploratory definition of thinking as the connection between the world and something else—whatever this “something” is. The notion of connection and of relationship seems to be at the center of thinking: it is its very nature. It is now necessary to return to this definition in order to refine it. Here, thinking is considered as a general, formal structure. The first part of this chapter questioned all the a priori about what thinking is and especially the fact that it is the production of a subject or of a mind and that it is, in many ways, “internal” to a human being or, more generally, internal to something.

Considered in its strictly formal dimension, thinking is a form of connection. But what is this connection? How is it structured? What are its specific characteristics? What does this connection connect? This text has associated the nature of this connection with some other important concepts: the notion of relationships and the notion of mediation. Thinking was described in chapter 1 as a formal word to express any kind of relationship between “a thing” and something else.

It seems that the first question to ask is about the “things” that this connection connects. It is firstly necessary to specify that connection is an original structure and not a derivative one. And, secondly, it is necessary to keep in mind that, according to the results of chapter 1, it will be impossible to define thinking as something separate to Being: defining thinking means defining Being.

Whitehead opposes correlationism by proposing a much broader—­indeed universally promiscuous—­sense of relations among entities. But Harman opposes correlationism by deprivileging relations in general. Instead, Harman remarkably revives the old and seemingly discredited metaphysical doctrine of substances (Shaviro 2014, 30, See annotation) This implies that it is mandatory to avoid two possible interpretations of the ontological status of “things” and “connections.” The first one consists in the idea that initially there are two given entities - for example, the world and something else - which are afterward linked by a connection. In this case, there would be something like “things” and then a connection between them: “things” would be ontologically prior to their connections. The second interpretation consists in the idea that connections come first and the poles of these connections come only after the connection as such. In this case, relationships and connections precede essences and “things.”

The first interpretation is an ontological, essentialist interpretation of the world: there are things, which are something; Being is on the side of things. Afterward, these things can be connected with each other, but these connections will always be secondary to things and ultimately contingent and unnecessary. This interpretation implies taking one of the first two positions described in Chapter 1: being is separate from thinking - whether human beings can know it or not.

Bref, le préfixe « inter » vise à mettre en évidence un rapport inaperçu ou occulté, ou, plus encore, à soutenir l’idée que la relation est par principe première : là où la pensée classique voit généralement des objets isolés qu’elle met ensuite en relation, la pensée contemporaine insiste sur le fait que les objets sont avant tout des nœuds de relations, des mouvements de relation assez ralentis pour paraître immobiles (Méchoulan 2003, 11) The second interpretation is anti-essentialist and denies the substantiality of things. There are no things; there are only relationships. The problem is that in this way it becomes very difficult to develop an ontological discourse, because things escape, they are only aftereffects of relationships.

But there is a third possibility, which this text defends: connections and things constitute an inseparable atomic unity. Ontologically, this means taking the third or the fourth position described in chapter 1: Being is always already mediated, and thinking and Being are the very same thing. In this sense, connection is the inner structure of Being, because Being and thinking are unified. But then what is the connection, exactly? What is the relationship? What is the mediation?

Connection can be expressed as an as: Being is only as something. This as is the internal structure of Being. But at the same time, this as is thinking. Thinking is thus the general formal structure of Being: this structure is mediation and this mediation is a formal connection, an as. The formal structure of Being is “something as something”: a shape as a leaf, another shape as a tree, a set of texts linked together as a concept… or even a text as a text, a volcano as a volcano or as a force. Something as something.

And Harman takes the atomicity of Whitehead’s entities as a guarantee of their concrete actuality: “Consider the case of ten thousand different entities, each with a different perspective on the same volcano. Whitehead is not one of those arch-­nominalists who assert that there is no underlying volcano but only external family resemblances among the ten thousand different perceptions. No, for Whitehead there is definitely an actual entity volcano, a real force to be reckoned with and not just a number of similar sensations linked by an arbitrary name” (2005, 82). (Shaviro 2014, 34, See annotation) The fact that Being and thinking are one and the same implies the necessity of multiplicity: Being is multiple because Being is always as something and as such it can be as something else. Therefore, only the fourth position described in Chapter 1 is possible: Being and thinking are inseparable and thinking is a unity not so much because it is not universal but, rather, because it is the very structure which determines the multiplicity of Being. At the same time, this multiplicity is not undifferentiated: Being is always as something and it can be as something else, but it cannot be as anything. This is the realistic position of metaontology that tries to conciliate the merging of Being and thinking in a realistic way. It is thus necessary to define how mediation as an internal structure of Being works, and to question what its boundaries and its limits are. The coherent definition of thinking as an internal structure of Being is the only possible way to avoid the undifferentiated thinking, identified as an important risk in chapter 1.

For Harman, this is what sets Whitehead apart from the post-­Kantian correlationists, for whom we cannot speak of the actuality of the volcano itself, but only of the problem of access to the volcano or of the way in which it is “constructed” by and through our apprehension and identification of it. But at the same time, Harman also sets Whitehead’s atomism against the way in which, for the speculative realist philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant, objects as such do not exist absolutely or primordially but only “emerge as ‘retardations’ of a more primally unified force” (Harman 2009a). For Grant, as presumably for Schelling, Deleuze, and Simondon before him, there would be no actual volcano, but only its violent, upsurging action or its “force to be reckoned with.” (Shaviro 2014, 39, See annotation) In order to better explain this complex situation, this text will make a distinction between two different concepts, explaining the very structure of the unity Being-Thinking: the notion of mediating conjunctures and the notion of the reflection plan.

Mediating conjunctures and reflection plans

First, this section of text will provide some definitions, before taking into account some examples in order to clarify the definitions.

Mediating conjunctures are the metaontological situation of the multiplicity of Being. They are the set of all the possible mediations in an act. These mediations are the formal structure of the as described above. Mediations are so numerous that they may seem infinite, but they are not. They are finite, but of an order of magnitude that is very difficult to grasp. The order of magnitude is given in a combinatorial way: it is equivalent to the set of permutations with repetition of all the elements that make up the mediating conjunctures. Mediating conjunctures are always plural and the expression “mediating conjuncture” in the singular would be devoid of meaning, because it would refer to a particular condition of being that would crystallize as a single unit.

A reflection plan is one particular combination of the mediations constituting mediating conjunctures. It is characterized by the fact that it has a diatopic dimension which is caused by a particular mediation which is contradictory compared to all the other possible reflection plans of the mediating conjunctures. Therefore, mediating conjunctures produce a very high - but finite - number of different, incompatible reflection plans. This multiplicity of reflection plans is the multiplicity of Being. Being-multiple are the set of multiple unities of thinking-Being which are the reflection plans derived from the plurality of mediating conjunctures.

These definitions may seem very obscure, but they are actually quite simple and easy to formalize. A few examples will help in clarifying.

Here is a school of fish. Here is a sphere of fish. But is it a sphere of fish? It can also be a particular fish - Nemo - who is swimming in a particular direction at a particular speed. Is it Nemo who is to thank for his particular behavior, is he the individual creating the sphere of fish or is it the sphere that determines Nemo’s behavior? But actually, is there any sphere or any fish? Or perhaps there is just a specific volume of water at a specific temperature with water molecules having particular speeds, directions, etc. In addition: there is a shark somewhere, this shark is hungry because, yesterday, a particular meteorological condition made it difficult for the predator to find food. The meteorological situation was due to an anticyclone on the Atlantic latitude of…

What is the situation that these sentences describe? They are mediating conjunctures. These mediating conjunctures are the set of all the possible mediations in an act. Mediations are the formal structure of the as: something as a school of fish, the school of fish as a sphere, the sphere as a set of fish, Nemo as a fish, the environment as water, water as a set of H²O molecules, a particular pattern as motion, motion as speed and direction, molecules as a particular physical concept defining a neutral group with two or more atoms, atoms as another physical concept, a particular motion of a fish as a behavior, a specific behavior as predatory, a set of parameters as meteorological conditions.

Clearly, this list could go on for a very long time. It is not infinite, but the combinations are so numerous that it would be impossible to enumerate them here. It is not indefinite: each as must have a material inscription, as chapter 3 will show. For example, the fish as H²O molecules is not part of the list because the fish is not a set of H²O molecules; there are no material inscriptions of a fish as a set of H²O molecules. The particular situation as a book is not a part of the list, because an underwater school phenomenon is not a book. Nevertheless, the list could become very long and if it is possible to exclude more statements than those which are included, the included are impossible to grasp as a whole. However, it is important to underline that each element is always mediated as something else and that this mediation can sometimes be recursive: A as B, B as C, C as A. The possible as are always finite.

Furthermore, the whole set of mediations may not necessarily be coherent. It is possible to have something like: Nemo’s behavior as the cause of the sphere, and the sphere as the cause of Nemo’s behavior. In this case, an asymmetrical relationship exists in the set of mediations in both one sense and its opposite sense, which produces a logical contradiction. To formalize this situation, it is possible to use the symbol >, which represents an asymmetrical relationship to formalize “cause of,” N for Nemo’s behavior and B for the sphere. Thus the two sentences “Nemo’s behavior is the cause of the sphere” and “the sphere is the cause of Nemo’s behavior” will give:

N > B ∧ B > N

Now >, by definition, implies ¬ <: this is the logical definition of an asymmetrical relationship. So:


N > B -> N ¬ < B

This represents the sentence: the fact that Nemo’s behavior is the cause of the sphere implies that Nemo’s behavior is not caused by the sphere.

But

B > N = N < B

This means that: the fact that the sphere is the cause of Nemo’s behavior is identical to the fact that Nemo’s behavior is caused by the sphere.

So there is a logical contradiction:

(N ¬ < B) ∧ (N < B)

Nemo’s behavior is not caused by the sphere and Nemo’s behavior is caused by the sphere.

La diatopia è l’impossibilità per il piano di riflessione di muoversi in alcune dimensioni. In altre parole esisterà per ogni piano di riflessione w almeno una dimensione m nella quale w manterrà coordinate costanti. La m di w sarà sempre c. In questo senso w non si può muovere in m. Chiamiamo questa proprietà del piano di riflessione “diatopia” calcandola dal termine “diacronia” proprio in quanto tale parola sta ad indicare una rottura spaziale in una dimensione. È come se tra c e, ad esempio, c+1, ci fosse una rottura irreparabile, analoga alla rottura che il fra-tempo segna, diacronicamente, tra istante e istante. Ma, mentre la diacronia è possibilità di movimento per il piano di riflessione, la diatopia impedisce ogni movimento. La diatopia è la struttura che caratterizza logicamente la trascendenza. L’alterità è trascendente in quanto diatopica. In questo senso possiamo dire che gli altri piani di riflessione sono assolutamente altri rispetto ad un piano w dato. La dimensione in cui il piano di riflessione non può muoversi non è necessariamente la stessa per ogni piano di riflessione. In questo senso (anche se non solo in questo senso) la diatopia è asimmetrica. La spezzatura dello spazio che impedisce al piano w di muoversi fino a coincidere con il piano q non è necessariamente una spezzatura per questo secondo piano q. D’altra parte esisterà almeno una dimensione d in cui il piano q non può muoversi. Se la dimensione diatopica è la stessa per due piani di riflessione una coincidenza tra di essi è logicamente impossibile. D’altra parte anche se la dimensione diatopica è diversa è necessario un movimento di entrambi i piani di riflessione affinché una coincidenza sia possibile.1 L’alterità è trascendenza irriducibile ad immanenza. (vitalirosati?, See annotation) This violates the principle of non-contradiction which states that ¬(p ∧ ¬p). These analysis will be the focus of chapter 4. For the moment, it is enough to understand that mediating conjunctures do not respect the principle of non-contradiction because it is possible to define reflection plans. They are one particular combination of the mediations constituting mediating conjunctures, which respects the principle of non-contradiction: each of these combinations - and thus each reflection plan - is a set of coherent mediations. Therefore, as in the schooling example, there will be a reflection plan where N > B and another where B > N. Each of these mediations ((N > B) and (B > N)) will be the diatopic dimension of the reflection plan, one whereby reflection plan α – containing the mediation “Nemo’s behavior as the cause of the sphere” – is diatopic. This may be compared to all the reflection plans containing the mediation “the sphere as the cause of Nemo’s behavior.”

The same kind of diatopic dimension can be observed with a high number of mediations. For example: “the number of fish included in the school as 200” or “the number of fish included in the school as 201,” if the reflection plan is based on the description of the school which includes the shark. Once again: this number will not be indefinite or undifferentiated. It is not possible to make it up. It depends on the other mediations and must be coherent with them: the schooling as a pattern of fish determined by the presence of predators will be 201. The schooling as a pattern of fish of the same species will be 200.

This example shows how thinking-Being can be multiple and irreducible to unity without being undifferentiated.

Another example that may be helpful is this text itself. What is this text? A series of letters as words, a series of words as text, a series of bits as letters, a series of electrical impulses as numbers, a discourse as theory, a textual structure as argumentative unit, a textual structure as incoherent argumentative multiplicity, thinking as an author’s production, thinking as a non-human production, a text editor as a writing tool, a language as a means of expression, a set of ideas as understood by a reader, a set of ideas as understood by a machine… The list could, of course, be extended. It shows the mediating conjunctures surrounding this text as text – the text is one element or, better, a node within a series of multiple dynamics and interactions. This works in the same way as the previous example, because the school of fish as a school of fish is a node of the mediating conjunctures.

A node, lastly, can only appear as a node in a particular combination of affirmations that make up the list. Indeed, several mediations in this first list imply contradictions. For example: “the text is a production of the author” and “the text is not the author’s production.” The two assertions are obviously contradictory - it is not even worth formalizing this. It is also clear that the choice of one of these two assertions also implies the choice of other assertions in the list: the role of the tools, the fact that the tools can be considered as tools, the fact that the text is either a coherent unit or not, the relationship between words, letters and character encoding… Each coherent combination of assertions will provide a plan of reflection. Each plan will be diatopic in relation to all the others for at least one dimension - a contradictory assertion.

This definition of mediating conjunctures and reflection plans can be illustrated with another example: the relationship between probabilistic states and stable states in quantum mechanics. This is the node at the heart of the quantum measurement problem: the tension between the multiplicity of probabilistic statuses and the unicity of the observed reality. Quantum mechanic equations can determine many possible statuses. For example, an electron will have some possibilities to be found in a position and some other possibilities to be found in another position. This can be expressed as a series of statements composing a set of mediating conjunctures: “the electron A as in the position x”; the electron A as in the position y". These sentences are contradictory if it is accepted that an object can be in only one position at a time. When the position of the electron is measured, the electron will be in one – and only one – position. The measurement is the reflection of the reflection plan, reflecting in a particular way the mediating conjunctures in which many different statements on the position of the electron are possible.

A deeper analysis of this structure and of the dynamics of mediating conjunctures and reflection plans will be given in chapter 3.

Conclusion

It is time to conclude with a quick overview of the results of this chapter.

  1. Human beings are not the producers of thinking
  2. Thinking must be understood as a prehuman structure
  3. Thinking is the internal formal structure of Being: Being is always Being as something
  4. Being-thinking is multiple and thus it does not respect the principle of non-contradiction. The relationship between multiplicity and unity can be understood via the dynamics characterizing the relationship between mediating conjunctures and reflection plans
  5. Being-thinking is multiple, but it is not undifferentiated. Being is Being as something and thus it can be Being as something else, but it cannot be Being as anything. The limit of the connections depends on their materiality.

It is thus necessary to better analyse the nature of this materiality and to specify how it characterizes mediating conjunctures and reflection plans: this will be the goal of chapter 3.

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  1. Midway between the Being which is indivisible and remains always the same and the Being which is transient and divisible in bodies, He blended a third form of Being compounded out of the twain, that is to say, out of the Same and the Other; and in like manner He compounded it midway between that one of them which is indivisible and that one which is divisible in bodies. And He took the three of them, and blent them all together into one form, by forcing the Other into union with the Same, in spite of its being naturally difficult to mix. (Fowler et al. 1926, See annotation)↩︎

  2. To determine this is indispensable but difficult. If we consider the majority of them, there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without involving the body; e.g. anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally. Thinking seems the most probable exception; but if this too proves to be a form of imagination or to be impossible without imagination, it too requires a body as a condition of its existence. (https://web.archive.org/web/20110215175441/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id?=AriSoul.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div2, See annotation)↩︎

  3. Then he awoke from sleep, and the divine voice was ringing in his ears. (Homer 1924, 2, 41, See annotation)↩︎

  4. Howbeit it is not I that am at fault, but Zeus and Fate and Erinys, that walketh in darkness, seeing that in the midst of the place of gathering they cast upon my soul fierce blindness on that day, when of mine own arrogance I took from Achilles his prize. (Homer 1924, 19, 86, See annotation)↩︎

  5. With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds–namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." one thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"–even the "one" contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. (Nietzsche 2003, Chapter I, §17, See annotation)↩︎

  6. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness […]. (https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1?/, See annotation)↩︎

  7. I would ask you to allow me, speaking as I am on behalf of a distinguished poet and a consumate scholar, before a cultivated audience, an enlightened jury, and the praetor whom we see occupying the tribunal, to enlarge somewhat upon enlightened and cultivated pursuits, and to employ what is perhaps a novel and unconventional line of defence to suit the character of one whose studious seclusion has made him a stranger to the anxious perils of the courts. (Cicero and Watts 2007, 9, See annotation)↩︎

  8. One of us must suppose that he was just created at a stroke, fully developed and perfectly formed but with his vision shrouded from perceiving all external objects - created floating in the air or in space, not buffeted by any perceptible current of the air that supports him, his limbs separated and kept out of contact with one another, so that they do not feel each other. Then let the subject consider whether he would affirm the existence of his self There is no doubt that he would affirm his own existence, although not affirming the reality of any of his limbs or inner organs, his bowels, or heart or brain, or any external thing. Indeed he would affirm the existence of this self of his while not affirming that it had any length, breadth or depth. And if it were possible for him in such a state to imagine a hand or any other organ, he would not imagine it to be a part of himself or a condition of his existence. (None?, See annotation)↩︎

  9. And in fact mind as we have described it is what it is what it is by virtue of becoming all things, while there is another which is what it is by virtue of making all things: this is a sort of positive state like light; for in a sense light makes potential colours into actual colours. […] When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and eternal (we do not, however, remember its former activity because, while mind in this sense is impassible, mind as passive is destructible), and without it nothing thinks. (https://web.archive.org/web/20110215175509/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id?=AriSoul.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=3&division=div2, See annotation)↩︎

  10. “Further, to say that for the sake of men They willed to prepare this world’s magnificence, And that ’tis therefore duty and behoof To praise the work of gods as worthy praise, And that ’tis sacrilege for men to shake Ever by any force from out their seats What hath been stablished by the Forethought old To everlasting for races of mankind, And that ’tis sacrilege to assault by words And overtopple all from base to beam,– Memmius, such notions to concoct and pile, Is verily–to dote.” (Lucretius Carus 1975, V,156, See annotation)↩︎

  11. Convince our minds of the infinite universe. Rend in pieces the concave and convex surfaces which would limit and separate so many elements and heavens. Pour ridicule on deferent orbs and on fixed stars. Break and hurl to earth with the resounding whirlwind of lively reasoning those fantasies of the blind and vulgar herd, the adamantine walls of the primum mobile and the ultimate sphere. Dissolve the notion that our earth is unique and central to the whole. Remove the ignoble belief in that fifth essence. Give to us the knowledge that the composition of our own star and world is even as that of as many other stars and worlds as we can see. Each of the infinity of great and vast worlds, each of the infinity of lesser worlds, is equally sustained and nourished afresh through the succession of his ordered phases. Rid us of those external motive forces together with the limiting bounds of heaven. Open wide to us the gate through which we may perceive the likeness [52] of our own and of all other stars. Demonstrate to us that the substance of the other worlds throughout the ether is even as that of our own world. (G. Bruno and Gosnell 2014, See [annotation](https://hyp.is/ifvU7ls3EeuvVRcJUh5AkQ/www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Parallel%20Universes/Texts/Giordano%20Bruno%20On%20the%20Infinite%20Universe%20and%20Worlds%20(Fifth%20D.htm))↩︎

  12. So there would not be, on the one hand, mind (or culture, or language), and, on the other hand, being (or reality, or the world), but several ways of being. Ontology becomes the discourse of anthropology, because the notion of being appears as the most powerful comparison. (None?, See annotation)↩︎