Left is not woke; panpsychism and AI; event series
Review of Susan Neiman's new book; short essay from a newsletter reader
Dear all,
The autumn series of digital events is almost finalised. Confirmed speakers include: Manon Garcia, Arianne Shahvisi, Tommie Shelby, Huaping Lu-Adler, John Lysaker, Wolfram Eilenberger, and Souleymane Bachir Diagne. More on all this to follow in the weeks ahead.
We are also gearing up for the final editorial process on our forthcoming autumn issue on “Where is Public Philosophy Going?” Guest editors Peter West and Jon Hawkins have put together a really heavyweight selection of contributors. I’m very excited to watch this one come together. Again, more on this soon.
Your Sunday Read
“Everything You Love Has Gone Woke”: Nathan Oseroff-Spicer reviews Susan Neiman’s new book, Left Is Not Woke. The key idea in Neiman’s book is that the “woke” left have betrayed the core Enlightenment values that have characterised left-wing thinking for the past few hundred years, including a commitment to universalism, a focus on justice over power, and a belief in progress. It’s fair to say that Nathan does not find Neiman’s arguments convincing. This review is intense, polemical, and extremely engaging. I hope you enjoy it. You can read the review here.
Reflection
Mind Over Matter?
by John Kendall Hawkins
When I was a younger thinker trying to figure out an angle on the phenomena that beset me comprehensively all around – the mystery and wonder of five senses alive to the details! – I first sought relief from the Catholic corporatization of Christ’s simple proclamations about morality, culminating in the Golden Rule. But, eventually, I sought out wisdom less parochial and found myself falling in love with Spinoza’s ethics and his pantheism. God Is In Everything seemed like a far more dignified and empathetic response to the human condition than the accumulated pettiness of small sins watched over by false patriarchies.
Still, that new vibe only lasted long enough to get me through Kant and Hegel as an undergraduate majoring in philosophy. Then Nietzsche and Camus and Foucault came along and converted my desires and seeing to grand relativism, and suddenly there was no room for a God of any kind. Suddenly I was alone, a still point of light in a dark cosmos. But, lo, then I recalled what Carl Sagan said out of Vangelis music on TV all those years ago, “You are star stuff.” This was an extraordinary revelation, a new paradigm for my worldview, and the beginning of my new life as a panpsychic. Not God, but Consciousness Is In Everything. I looked for someone to high-five, but found myself alone one-hand clapping.
Here I am many years later in what should be a peaceful period in my life once again wrestling with the devil of original temptation and the endless array of obscured objects of desire. I had a healthy hippie funk grooving with panpsychism, which is not a new way of seeing but goes back to Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics and more recently has irrupted in the works of Leibniz, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Galen Strawson, and Philip Goff. Now, I’m in the middle of research into the possible consequences to human consciousness as we move forward into the realm and (possibly) dominion of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI reawakens a sleepy concern for the ethics of technology use, of course. But, more importantly, regarded in panpsychist terms, AI likely has consciousness, too, already - just not human consciousness. Humans are bio out of chemistry, and chemistry bursts out of particles. If panpsychism has truth, and can be scientifically validated (as some cosmologists say it can be), then the already acknowledged superior intelligence of AI is something we humans, with our condition, should be worrying about. At the end of Mind at the End of Its Tether, published in 1945 just before the double-tap on Japan, the futurist H.G. Wells, predicted that humans were coming to place of darkness that no utopia vision, not even his, could salvage. He wrote:
Man-must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favor of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. Only a small, highly adaptable minority of the species can possibly survive. The rest will not trouble about it, finding such opiates and consolations as they have a mind for.
This seems to succinctly sum up the task ahead of human beings in the Age of AI and Mind over Matter.
Ending
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Wishing you all a lovely Sunday, wherever you are.
Anthony Morgan
Editor
I am dying to know two things. 1) which Frankfurt School theorist claims fascism is the product of the enlightenment and 2) do the theorists who attack universalism throw out every notion underwritten by universalism?
I am not doubting these claims exist. I am simply curious about the details--since these views seem important and I am not aware of them.
The argument seems convincing overall, especially the doubts about whether this word means anything in the critics' mouths.
It is odd that a word describing a disposition or state without any description of beliefs required or arrived at as a result of the state--pretty similar to 'alert' is supposed to mean a vast and sweeping pile of substantive content, a whole world view.
Maybe it's because the people who are enjoined to be alert to danger/hazards, etc. are the real objects of the term so anything 'they' say is 'woke.' The idea seems to be if 'they' say anything that is not amenable to our outlook but requires taking up 'their' outlook to comprehend then it's illegitimate.
This simply seems like an us v. them idea in disguise. I don't understand why the right wing use of the term woke isn't the real
attack on universalism. 'They are talking again, so there's no need to take up the claims they make and consider whether they're true.' If there are universal values, including enlightenment values, the claims people make about oppression and so on are defensible via those values. Maybe everything people mean isn't perfectly understood in enlightenment terms because of the idea of a universal subject and a blindness to subjectivity of certain kinds if people but the moral arguments do make sense on standard universalist grounds unless you assume some people aren't really people. 'Woke' is to negate ideas as coming from certain kinds of people, to shut down the whole discussion because the perspective of certain people is automatically illegitimate. But when people invoke 'woke' from the right, when is it not against a standard moral claim that's at issue? When are the evidence and arguments not standard evidence and arguments?
Well, from my journal of 40+ years to your pen. All the investigations, the jettisoning of credos, the new (age) catechisms, then some relief from pristine atheism, on to Crosby, Still, Nash & Young's, "We are stardust," to reemergent Sagan-ism and the promise of cosmic consciousness. At moments like this, when another's reflections match my own, the cosmos speaks! Thank you, friend. Patricia Trentacoste