Book Discussion: Systems and Subjects
Thinking the Foundations of Philosophy and Science
This post is inspired by a Book Discussion on my latest solo book Systems and Subjects: Thinking the Foundations of Philosophy and Science featuring
, Thomas Hamelryck, Daniel Garner of , and . All four thinkers read and offered endorsements for the book before its publication earlier in the year.You can access a free preview or buy a copy of the book here: Systems and Subjects.
There is video of this written summary: Systems and Subjects Book Discussion.
Philosophy Portal is hosting a conference June 24/25: Logic for the Global Brain.
Origins
I open the Preface to my doctoral thesis with a reflection on just how difficult it is to select a point of origin when opening a certain narrative development:1
“There is no way to say with objective certainty when the journey of writing this book started. The origin is eternally present in our repetitive action. Without recourse to this assumption how do I select the origin of my journey? Did it start the day I officially decided to start my PhD programme? Did it start the day I first reached out to my current PhD supervisor? Did it start the day I first heard about the technological singularity? Did it start the day I became fascinated by science and evolution? Did it start the day I took my first step onto a big yellow school bus taking me to kindergarten?”
When selecting an origin it seems to come down to a subjective point of reference that appears relevant only retroactive to the unfolding of what is currently under discussion. In the context of discussing Systems and Subjects: Thinking the Foundations of Science and Philosophy (2023), I am choosing to open this story with the transition from my Masters education to my Doctorate education. It is precisely in the gap of this transition where I started to work on what would become Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon (2020).
When in this gap I was primarily thinking in terms of evolutionary theory, as it had been my major focus at both the undergraduate and graduate level in anthropology. I was interested in developing a theory of biocultural evolution to explore the gap between great apes and human beings, but also thought that this work was necessary because of the disconnection between evolutionary theory (focused on bio-history) and what seemed to me to be the speculative futures horizon opened by the actuality of modern science. Specifically, I was interested in the way a new theory of biocultural evolution could potentially forward the discourse in technological singularity theory, which suggested that in the near-term future, evolution would transition into a new phase driven by artificial intelligence.2
However, once starting my doctorate, my research led me from evolutionary theory towards the necessity of continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. This transition can be observed happening within the meta-structure of the doctoral thesis as a whole. What is basically happening in this transition is a movement of applying evolutionary thinking to our current situation to applying dialectical thinking to our current situation.3
Towards the end of my doctorate, a few colleagues and I were trying to find the next chance to extend our research projects. We started a project titled “The School of Thinking,” and ran a workshop at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinary (CRI)4 in Paris through a connection I had made with their president Francois Taddei. It was here where I first started teaching the art of dialectical thinking as the working through of A=B logic, or stated otherwise: the logic of positive contradiction.5 At this workshop I met the director of the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (BCSSS), Stefan Blachfellner. He thought that it would be interesting to combine or apply dialectical logic to systems theory, and overtime, we managed to develop a post-doc research position where I would try to think through systems theory dialectically.
The Book
After a long meditation on systems theory, mostly focused on the foundational work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy in General Systems Theory (1968),6 and contemporary technical works in systems theory, specifically Principles of Systems Science (2014),7 I saw an opening that I had not seen before. To be precise, I saw that systems theory was not only open to transgressing or transcending disciplinary boundaries with the concept of system as a generally applicable notion to all levels of reality, but also open to including subjectivity more deeply into the nature of the object-in-question.
However, I felt that this needed to be more explicitly brought to the surface of the theory. The best way into developing that angle, I thought, might be to apply dialectical logic to the meta-historical relation between systems theory and continental philosophy. Traditionally speaking, not only have disciplinary sciences and continental philosophy been in antagonism with each other, but general systems science itself has not made room for dialogue with continental philosophy. What would a dialogue look like? What would a work look like that constantly put one (A, general systems science) into relation with the other (B, continental philosophy)?
My basic methodology included the idea that the concept of system as a general category useful for all levels and disciplinary boundaries, could be put into a feedback loop with the subject as such. Thus, the Preface “On Scientific Reflection” emphasises that what is at stake in this work is essentially a double move which simultaneously hystericises the subject of science, while introducing the drive of the subject as an important variable potentially capable of building a new masterful or systemic discourse.
The book as such is structured into four parts, and while systems theory is the explicit focus of all four parts, a different continental philosopher floats in the background of every section, opening a different aim for the application of systems theory to the subject:
Dasein’s Interior: Heidegger
Heidegger can be used to open a clearing in order to use the concept of Dasein to ground the different disciplinary sciences on their shared horizon of being
Historical Meta-Psychology: Freud
Freud often tried to get psychoanalysis accepted as a science, but I take a different route: bringing science to the level of Freudian metapsychology
Political Overman: Nietzsche
Nietzsche leaves a power vacuum (Death of God/Paradigm), so I try to think the consequences by analysing the battle of political metahorizons
Conceptual Absolute: Hegel
Hegel casts a shadow on modern thought, the split between philosophy and science is proof, here we can think science on the level of the concept
Reflecting with others
When I finally had a chance to publish the book, I was also lucky enough to have four collaborators read and offer an endorsement for the book,
, Thomas Hamelryck, Daniel Garner of , and .In celebration of publication, I invited the four of them for a Book Discussion. The idea was to invite them to reflect on their impression, perspective and effect of the book after having sat with its content for an extended period of time.
Here I offer a summary of some of these impressions, perspectives and effects:
Layman Pascal: opens his reflections with a friendly reminder that psychonaut Terence McKenna “cut his teeth” on Ludwig von Bertalanffy. But Layman interprets the key dialectic to think through, not necessarily “systems” and “subjects,” but rather “systems” and “religion.” In a very Hegelian turn,8 Pascal critiques the idea (from the summary on the back of the book jacket) that we should not “play on the frontier of our knowledge horizon in the total absence of final answers,” but rather that we should bring together presence and absence, and affirm an on-going becoming of “total-ish” final answers. From this “total-ish” perspective, Pascal’s spirit “dances” with a timeless temporal structure, which is inherently pluralistic and dynamic, making use of anticipation in an “adjacent sweet spot” where the present and future (eternally?) touch each other. What orients us in this pluralistic and dynamic structure is the relation between more or less organised states of coordinated subsystems, which give us a sign as to the workability of the real.
Here Pascal suggests that the heart of Systems and Subjects is found along the line that not all symbolic orders are the same. Some symbolic orders favour regress (vis-a-vis organisation), befriending the death drive in destructive feedback loops (he gives examples like Nazi politics or purity code churches). On the other hand, symbolic orders that can deepen our drive into a pluralistic and dynamic “timelessly temporal” structure would be those symbolic orders that optimise the death drive and destruction, building an open-ended incompleteness into their identity. This requires establishing a field of psychotechnologies qua skills that you need to relate wisely to attitudinal growth capable of resolving contradictions at higher levels, rather than consciously or unconsciously desiring to eradicate contradictions for a “successful” or “finalised” self-other organisation.
In this way, the essence of Pascal’s commentary involves an avoidance of totalised reified symbolic orders. This is a problem because systems often reward behaviour that tends in the direction of finality or closure, and ignores efforts to resolve confusion and impotence in an open-ended way. Here Pascal highlights the fact that the spirit of symbolic castration runs throughout Systems and Subjects, and what it calls forth is the need for curiosity: to lean into contradiction and paradox as a pain within the pain itself. When we do not lean into contradiction and paradox, when we fail to work with tension and rather affirm non-contradiction, we inevitably encounter an unworkable failure which erupts in the form of a marginalised other. In this way, Pascal (perhaps paradoxically) asserts that working tension and contradiction is working the subject itself. We must stabilise by incorporating it.
This is essential, for Pascal, when it comes to building religious systems, which operate within an irreducible interpersonal domain. When we are in the domain of the religious we are in the domain of an on-going dialectic of feedback between system and subject. Thus, the constructors of religion must be those meta-shamanic types that are capable of affirmative contradiction and navigating a world that has invited the alien and the psychedelic into the mainstream. What this comes down to, practically, is a type of navigation of autonomy and communion/freedom and love/commitment and openness, that is neither closed nor open, all the while avoiding dissolution into homogeneity.9 This is what Pascal calls the “condition of adjacency,” which works with the unity of presence-absence in a totalisation that is always-already a becoming and thus, in a Hegelian way, is always-already “total-ish.”10
Thomas Hamelryck: opens his reflections feeling “out of his depths” as a scientist specialised in bioinformatics and computational methods to study molecular biology. He noted that, after a presentation I delivered at his university on Systems and Subjects to a group of specialists, the dominant response was something like: is this worth while? What can we do with it? In short, Hamelryck asks: what is this book doing? His idea is that the book is primarily about, and concerned with, idolatry.11 He thinks that Systems and Subjects creates a “big symphony” combining thinkers in a way that leads one to a self-evident conclusion: simple explanations or final answers will always be disappointing.
Hamelryck further more asserts that Systems and Subjects, as such a tool against idolatry, is important for thinking these days. He frames our situation as an apocalyptic collision between the “300,000 year old human” and “hyper-connected digital networks.” This brings us towards a very dangers anthropological structure, where we need to learn how desire works (like, for example, the desire for idols), and how humans deal with desire (like for example, looking for simple explanations or final answers). When we confront the real of desire, for Hamelryck following Girard, we are confronting the real of violence as a result of the fact that humans do not know what they really want, but rather copy/mimic each other, and then get into rivalries escalating conflict when there are not in the proper boundaries or containers to structure the energy of desire.12
What to do about this situation?13
To start to work through some potential answers, Hamelryck reflects on the four major philosophers used throughout Systems and Subjects to justify their utility in helping us think this problem:
Heideggerian Dasein: helps us think the difference between external models (like artificial intelligence) and internal experience (like the phenomenal reality of human beings). This difference is increasingly important because machines can increasingly act like humans. But does this external behaviour reflect a real inner experience or just pure mimicry based on data processing? For Hamelryck the answer to the question is much closer to the latter: artificial intelligence in-itself is just dumb statistical models, and that they do not have any inner capacity for phenomenal experience.
Freudian Metapsychology: reminds us that humans are much less rational than scientists would like to think, and that the “Dawkins-style Atheists” desire to abolish religion with rationality does not work. Rather, people will spontaneously make their own religions, which can become potentially much more destructive and chaotic than the traditional religious structures. At the same time, humans have this tendency to get stuck in certain systems, whether explicitly religious or not, by thinking that a certain structure of prohibition is going to solve everything.
Nietzschean Overman: brings us to the importance of the distinction between a religion which gives us rules, and also their other side, i.e. the danger of their ossification. We need to think the balance between the need for real rules or prohibitions, and the need to relax the rules or prohibitions, in order to develop new ideas and to do things that would not be possible under default prohibition. The best example of this would be the way religions regulate sexuality. Here Hamelryck sees Nietzsche as a thinker of transgressive ritual, of the need to break the rules, of the need for some space to explore and go beyond the known into new areas.
Hegelian Concept: while Hamelryck admits to, not only not having read Hegel, but also not having any ambitions to ever read Hegel,14 he is nevertheless convinced that Hegel is an important thinker, and not a useless charlatan. Hamelryck thinks that questions provoked by Hegel’s systemic relation between phenomena-noumena is now becoming important in the work of contemporary sciences that deal with how subjects work in relation to the outside world.15 As a result, philosophy in general is becoming much more relevant, as the abstract questions traditionally addressed by philosophers are now much more concrete.
Hamelryck ended his reflection with an idea explored in Systems and Subjects of “Chesterton’s Fences”: he thinks that, in reading these books (i.e. the foundation of systems theory, or the great modernist philosophers), in terms like these (i.e. the collision between “the 300,000 year old human” x “hyperconnected digital networks”) we engage these fences rather than letting them break down. Maybe we do need to rip some fences down, but first, let us see what they are, and whether or not they can help us think through contemporary problems in the eternal collision between the old and the new.
Daniel Garner: opens his reflection by emphasising that the only way to think without contradiction and paradox is to think in a way that is self-limiting and too small, i.e. that you have “shrunk your system” to avoid contradiction and paradox, as opposed to embracing it and leaning into it. He also emphasises that subjective thought is intimately connected to the systemic truth of ontology, and that, by keeping our thought engaged with contradiction and paradox, we can expand to deeper and deeper creative self-relation to the truth.
This move ultimately collapses the distinction between subject and system, and leaves us with an entangled relation between the two. Systems and subjects ultimately blur into each other. Thus, what is at stake in Systems and Subjects, for Garner, is a double move: (1) once you realise that you are more controlled by systemic mechanisms than you realised (i.e. your subjectivity is a result of “puppet strings” of the system), (2) you can now subjectively engage systemic structures in a new way because the absolute is not just system, but also subject.
However, this double move (or negation of the negation, of the system), presents one with a confrontation with immanent anxiety. Why not do something? Why do something? This irreducible self-reference which opens up our creative relation to systems that can then change subjectivity is a thought of the Absolute Idea,16 where you can no longer go back to a world where you do not know that (i.e. the world where you were comfortably controlled by the system). The price to pay when you are controlled by the system is that you are just a puppet, but the price to pay when you are trying to dissolve “the system” for the “subject-system” is a coming to terms with your own desires and wills (which for Garner involves a confrontation with the absolute terror of your own desires and wills).
The key in all of this, for Garner, is a way to combat the evidence of entropy, negativity and heat death. When we think only in terms of systems (on systems on systems), we are led to the idea that everything is doomed to dissolution and decay. However, when we think the strange unity of “subject-system” we must learn to face negativity as a precondition for negentropy (possibility of new emergent order). Here Garner references a term introduced in the book: the river-hole of light as the becoming-lack.17 Lack is not just an empty void, but rather a historical opening to a new becoming. You can never completely fulfil your hole (void of desire), but getting a meta-perspective on the hole as such as an opening for becoming is a condition to become a self-turning wheel.18
Where Garner leaves us is with a meditation on the idea that this self-turning wheel is a ground for sociological gifts. Here we encounter the notion that, if we rise to the occasion (arguably Hamelryck’s collision between the 300,000 year old human x hyper-connected digital networks), we can give birth to a new type of subject, a subject that is a genuine gift for the other. Now that would be a seriously special historical accomplishment.
Tim Adalin: opens his reflections on the book with the idea that he feels overwhelmed by it all, the feeling that one cannot “take it all in,” that one is “an old man” being “blown by the wind” of the enormity or monstrosity of our present “subject-system.” In order not to be blown away in the real of living-and-dying as subject-systems, Adalin looks for orientation with some of the final questions that the book ends with: what will become possible for a higher order community of subjects? What freedoms will structure their existence? What love will be embodied right here and now? He suggests that, considered in their fullness, in their necessity, these are outrageous questions as much as they are profound.
I quite agree.
Adalin also points to some other meta-dimensions of Systems and Subjects. He notes that there are many repetitions in the book, but “good kinds” of repetition, where we are repeating from many different angles, repeating to open different ways of relating, repeating to open new styles of representation and thinking. In this sense, there is a feeling that Adalin would like to repeat this event, to take a break, “eat, sleep, rest,” and then come back and share again. With each sharing we may deepen the integrity of the address, which may communicate more or less the same thing again and again, that is: the embodiment of real commitments and decisions to confront the monstrosity of the present.
At the same time, Adalin also presences a type of critique of Systems and Subjects, a critique that re-presences a tension at the core of the work: the notion of metalanguage. While Systems and Subjects is critical of metalanguage, Adalin sees the necessity of repeating, of naming, of finding common discourse qua shared linguistic ground, in order to navigate existential-epistemic hazards. While acknowledging the danger of over-fixation, of an unchanging schema of interpretation as a response to the ever-changing “winds” and a response to the pain of lack, there is still a crafted repetition which brings us to the question of common ground that we can “grip” to “hold steady.” He suggests he is looking for something approximating a metalanguage, so it is not just chaos and relativity.19
Final reflections
After a series of responses to Pascal, Hamelryck, Garner and Adalin, each in turn offered some final thoughts on their experience with the book. Here I will simply leave you with these condensed summaries:
Layman Pascal: emphasises love for the project of combining systems theory and continental philosophy. Systems seem powerful but there is always the temptation to close on a metalanguage. So how do we hold the system so as to be genuinely open as a subject to all of our various overlapping networks? In engaging such a project, perhaps we open up a new optimism, but maybe it is more like a trans-pessimism? A trans-pessimism would be open to the negativity of heat-death/entropy so as to potentially be surprised by a new order or negentropy.
Thomas Hamelryck: suggests that although we are in this intense collision between the archaic human and the global digital network, our contemporary universities are not capable of hosting and sustaining the really important and serious dialogues. This is because the really important and serious dialogues requires a heightened sensitivity to danger. Consequently, he claims that “books like this” and “conversations like this” are going to be increasingly important in the age of global artificial intelligence.
Daniel Garner: reminds us that we cannot off-load the responsibility of entropy, and in this there is nothing more terrifying than taking responsibility for the self as opposed to blaming the other or the system. We have to own our own dreams as nightmares (contradiction/paradox), and consider the possibility that self-reference is the new given. In that situation the self-reference can be the gift, the gift of ones self to the other via making our lives the very material to give to one another. In the age of AI we must stay human, we must stay true to our particular singularities.
Tim Adalin: concludes with the idea that we have a responsibility to communities of subjects that are in need of education for this time, and that requires that we become subjects that are capable of not only holding space but sharing space. The challenges of sharing space needs to be thought in its grandest sense. There is not enough emphasis in our spaces for an openness to conversations about actually building a life, and what that might involve. To really be subject-systems we need to relate locally and focus on precisely that question of what it means to build a life.
REMINDER: You can access a free preview or buy a copy of the book here: Systems and Subjects.
REMINDER: video of this written summary: Systems and Subjects Book Discussion.
REMINDER: Philosophy Portal is hosting a conference June 24/25: Logic for the Global Brain.
Last, C. 2020. Preface. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. ix.
Now technological singularity theory is basically common place, and the reality of artificial intelligence in the context of universal digital networks, is dominating our existence.
This transition required paying a real subjective price (even career sacrifice), specifically the price of intelligibility within a certain hermeneutical horizon of thought, that of the general scientific community, which has little patience for the real of dialectical logic. Nevertheless, one of the most important lessons one can learn in studying dialectics, is the lesson of the patience of the concept. With patience, in the careful building of a new world, an other hermeneutical horizon is possible.
The institute is now called “Learning Planet Institute.”
This seems to be the central message of Hegel’s Science of Logic (full course).
Bertalanffy, L. 1968. General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Application. New York: George Braziller.
Mobus, G. & Kalton, M. 2014. Principles of Systems Science. New York: Springer.
Fuck Hegel.
For a deeper meditation on Pascal’s idea of the future of absolute communities, see: Pascal, L. 2023. Nietzsche = Tragedy + Time, or: Of What Is Zarathustra a Prophet? In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 141-166.
Fuck Hegel x2.
This may be combined with Pascal’s idea that the heart of this book is about symbolic orders which can remain open-ended in an incomplete ontology.
This may also be combined with Pascal’s idea that we need to think of symbolic orders with a built-in incompleteness, navigated by subjects capable of mediating contradiction and tension.
This tension is something Hamelryck works through in his article in Abyssal Arrows, see: Hamelryck, T. 2023. Nietzsche’s Tantra and Girard’s Sutra. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 171-205.
Fuck Hegel x3.
Here he references Karl Friston’s unified theory of the brain, see: Friston, K. 2010. The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2): 127-138.
Following Hegel.
This metaphor is inspired by combining Nietzsche and Lacan.
Garner expands on this idea in his article in Abyssal Arrows, which is concerned with the problem of motivation and the potentiality of becoming Zarathustra’s children, see: Garner, D. 2023. The Overman and the Allegory of the Cave: The Problem of Intrinsic Motivation and Living as the Children of Zarathustra. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 49-140.
Here we should keep in mind the feedback loop between the intellectual and the personal in constituting the true drive of the subject vis-a-vis systemic conditionality. In keeping an active loop between the intellectual and the personal, one does not end up with one worldview, but one ends up with a systemic continuity. However, one can only ever make this drive a continuity retroactively, which means one is, in the real, required to stay open to the discontinuities and ruptures of the real (or leaning into contradiction and paradox). Of course, the discontinuity and rupture that will end the continuity of the drive as such, is death (which blows us around like an old man in the wind).
Love this—very thought provoking! Thanks for sharing.