[penland]

Alan Jacobs has a pithy overview of Morton, and the following is taken from a recent post on Morton by him:

This strategy of employing familiar language in unfamiliar contexts gives the appearance of being radical but may not be quite that. It strikes me as being largely a reversal of Skinnerian behaviorism: the behaviorists said that human beings are nothing special because they're just like animals and plants, responding to stimuli in law-governed ways; now the object-oriented ontologists say that human beings are nothing special because animals and plants (and hammers and black holes) all possess the traits of consciousness and desire that we have traditionally believed to be distinctive to us. The goal of the philosophical redescription seems to be the same: to dethrone humanity, to get us to stop thinking of ourselves as sitting at the pinnacle of the Great Chain of Being.

It's hard for me to take Morton too seriously because our ( by which I mean his and mine ) Metaphysics are so diametrically opposed. Hyperobjects are so ontologically complex as to give the feeling they have been invented solely to justify the philosopher's pre-existing beliefs ( though in fairness, you can write that about a lot of things ).

[patcon]

I'm going to write a thing that I'm not sure I totally believe, but I'm going to try it on for size. Pls feel free to push back on any part, or give feedback on whether anything resonates with you:

I don't think you give enough credit to the potential importance of eloquent memes and the building of new religions of sorts, in pursuit of making the more complex truths about our world and humanity (which hopefully can inform desired common futures) more palletable to a sizeable majority. (My underlying assumption is that we are emotional machines that sometimes engage in rational thought, and not vice versa.)

Pure rationalism won't get us to the future we deserve. We need to treat our packages of beliefs almost as we do the most widely-used open source projects -- shiny surfaces, perhaps built collaboratively, that package up a more meticulously considered core, rooted in something that tends toward a more just world -- a surface thing that is perhaps a little more superficial and concealing of it's unique working, but can be interrogated and dissected by those who care to dive in. The rest can just consume it and have a shallow affinity for the beautiful packaging, and that's ok. The point is that we together build the core carefully, we can all interrogate it to understand why it does what it does, and why it points us in certain directions without asking us to go all the way down the rabbit hole, and that those who care to question its tenets can dig deeper into them.

So in this analogy, might Morton just we working on the pretty UI, that's trying to package up the underlying architecture in a way (if not with 100% fidelity) that can at least be more socially transformative ? It's this line of thinking that makes me feel your criticism to be, while not untrue, then at least somewhat counterproductive to the sorts of action/memes that I believe will be most effective in the world.

[dimaggiosghost]

It depends on values.

Someone who values the best version of the currently knowable truth would have one perspective.

Someone who values human life over freedom has another.

Others value believing in something palatable for a majority of others (clothes, social status, etc.)

Most of what we look at is our projection. Parents believe in things like the future. Others are content for their moment, without wishing for that.

It's impossible to escape our initial and very personal biases to describe these things.

IMO the best we can do is to reveal consistencies we can act upon. For me that is enough.

[mercer]

I think you might be right, but I hope brain-machine interfaces might be able to solve some of the problems.

[tpeo]

That word - "hyperobjects" - has deeply hurt my soul.

Why do people come up with things like this?

[obstinate]

On the one hand, I viscerally agree with you because I have some distaste for some aspects of philosophy. On the other hand, we have terms of art in CS that seem equally obscure to outsiders. Have you ever looked at the complexity theory wiki?

[tpeo]

>complexity theory wiki

Wait, there's a wiki on complexity theory? Computational complexity or the complex systems kind?

I don't find the term as obscure as a I find it offensive: it just sounds wrong. But yeah, there are plenty of terms like that in any field, whether they be obscure or just irksome.

[obstinate]

https://complexityzoo.uwaterloo.ca/Complexity_Zoo

[devoply]

Well what you have is a metaphysics of the logos, of rationality. That metaphysics is 400 years old and is already responsible for geoengineering the planet, and not geoengineering in some good way but geoengineering in the most reckless way you could think possible. It's also responsible for countless other global scale experiments which have been shown to wreak havoc on the planet. Surely it's evident that your metaphysics is deeply problematic now, wait until it's even more problematic as the amount of power we possess grows. The other metaphysics, that of animals and nature, that has a history of millions of years and usually works for millions of years until some catastrophe. The only really good thing about the logos is the potential power to prevent that sort of catastrophe, but also the power to cause exponentially more extinction events on shorter time scales. Possibly even our own. I would say that your metaphysics is totally untested and experimental, where as in the metaphysics of rest of life and dealing with nature of on its terms is time tested and therefore more true.

[yellowapple]

"the behaviorists said that human beings are nothing special because they're just like animals and plants, responding to stimuli in law-governed ways; now the object-oriented ontologists say that human beings are nothing special because animals and plants (and hammers and black holes) all possess the traits of consciousness and desire that we have traditionally believed to be distinctive to us. The goal of the philosophical redescription seems to be the same: to dethrone humanity, to get us to stop thinking of ourselves as sitting at the pinnacle of the Great Chain of Being."

Reminds me of a bit from the Jargon File's chapter on "Anthropomorphization" (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/anthropomorphization.html):

"Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people are biological machines — consciousness is an interesting and valuable epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery which is not fundamentally different in information-processing capacity from computers.

"Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the difference between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a substrate of silicon and metal is a relatively unimportant one; what matters, what makes a thing ‘alive’, is information and richness of pattern. This is animism from the flip side; it implies that humans and computers and dolphins and rocks are all machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of ‘consciousness’ according to their information-processing capacity.

"Because hackers accept that a human machine can have intentions, it is therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to other complex patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness is mechanical, it is neither more or less absurd to say that 'The program wants to go into an infinite loop' than it is to say that 'I want to go eat some chocolate' — and even defensible to say that 'The stone, once dropped, wants to move towards the center of the earth'."