"Cognition: as immanent to extended /distributed / differential bio-environmental systems in which “real experience” is the non representational direction of action via the integration / resolution of differential fields."
"They thus are naturalists in fighting the myths of the subject"
John Portevi
Thinking is precisely this adventure which connects its desires not to an identical reality or a primary nullity, but precisely to the an-identical, the differentiality of existence. Not a kind of compromise between two poles of the idea but a war with the arbitrary division of the idea into isolated components, the body of Life into organs without bodies. “We have to learn to think differently — in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” Nietzsche (Daybreak, II.103) "
By the time I have immersed my self into object oriented programming I always try to draw transverse connections with an object oriented approach to ontology and general to philosophy. The object oriented philosophy is the intellectual child of Graham Harman. I have to deal with his concept in greater detail and depth but for the moment my personal understanding about this object oriented approach is more inclined to DeLanda’s assemblage theory where an object is a dynamically constructed assemblage.
"De Landa: The call to be "more experimental" stems not from a utopian desire, and it certainly has absolutely nothing to do with "changing language in the hopes of changing perception". This type of talk belongs to the linguistic relativism that I attack above and which I think is a major block to any progress in this regard. Rather, the "call to action" stems from the realization that we never understood the world properly. We have extremely naive views about the economy, for example. We feel happy to simply speak about the "capitalist system" or "commodification", when the reality of economic history (as uncovered by Fernand Braudel, for example) is much more complex and full of opportunities. There are alternatives to the corporate model, such as a region of contemporary Italy called Emilia-Romagna, dominated by small businesses competing against each other not in terms of costs and reaping economies of scale, but in terms of product design and a concentration of creative people in a region (a model known as "economies of agglomeration"). Now, this region of Italy was put together over the last thirty or so years on the basis of experimentation: it was not planned from above (though local governments did play catalytic roles) and it was not guided by theory. Yet, our obsolete economic ideas prevent us from seeing how innovative this region is, and bias us to see in Emilia-Romagna just another form of "capitalism", or to dismiss it as a short-lived utopia. But a deeper understanding of economics has the opposite effect: it shows that past history is full of "Emilia-Romagnas", that our economic choices were never between "capitalism" and "socialism", but were more open than that.
A similar change has ocurred in our conception of matter, which is now viewed as capable of much richer behavior than before, and this needs to change the very form that a materialist philosophy takes. And being more experimental here is simply a way of responding to the extra capabilities we have discovered in matter itself. How this may impinge on the practice of art is related to what I said above in relation to theories of the genesis of form. To develop a new, non-essentialist, relation to materials (including linguistic materials) seems to me more important today than challenging social assumptions about what art is or how it should be displayed. (We have been "challenging conventions", or "deconstructing them" for over thirty years now, it's time to move on.)"
extract from an Interview by Art210
"As an intelligent species we spent millennia successfully coping with the environmental changes using accumulated knowledge about cause and effects relations. Hume himself argues that the ability to match means to ends (i.e. the capacity for causal reasoning), is not an exclusively human ability but may be observed in other animals which use it 'for their own preservation and the propagation of species'... The subject or person emerging from the assembly of sub-personal components (impressions, ideas, propositional attitudes, habits, skills) has the right capacities to act pragmatically (i.e. it match means and ends) as well socially, to select ends for a variety of habitual or customary reasons that need not involve any conscious decision."
DeLanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum,
To understand Hume means to accept that thought and physicality are not antithetical, this very much resonates with the 4EA (embodied ,embedded, enactive, extended and affective) cognition extensively described by John Protevi. Thus once this confusion has been resolved then someone can sense that the subject emerges from a field of physical sensations and other physical intensities.
Delanda nicely makes the analogy between software (thought) and hardware ( neurons) there is no way something significant to emerge when someone tries to map the word processed text that you are reading at this moment with the firing of and-gates or–gates deep within the transistors in the hardware. There are only different layers or better several softwares that bring the transistors and text into communication. The problem with the human mind is that no one has ever identified any of those layers that happened to be between neurons and thoughts.
The only thing neuroscience is capable of saying is not how we think but only “what our brain must be for it to be possible to think and feel in other ways” (Rajchman, p137). Delanda then provides through Deleuze an approach to the issue, “this problem should be approached evolutionary” to start from the simplest organism with simple sensations and minimum consciousness and then to add layers of complexity. for this argument Deleuze in different context brings forth Uexkull’s Umwelt to describe Tick’s cognitive process through three affects.
This kind of understanding concludes to the non antithetical nature of thought and physicality.
The above text is in form of scattered notes from the following sources
* Manuel DeLanda in
DeLanda, M., Ellingsen, E.(2007) Possibility of Spaces. In Models-306090, eds (Abruzzo et all), 306090 Inc.
Rajchman, J.(2001) Deleuze Connections.
