RSA 08- Resisting Scientific Authority

8/6/2019 RSA 08- Resisting Scientific Authority

1/23

Resisting Scientific Authority: Consciousness Science and the Recalcitrance of Self

Eli Brennan

Teaching Fellow University of Minnesota

PhD Candidate University of Pittsburgh

[email protected]

412-614-0419

1


2/23

The Argument. As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of

knowing must be the faculty which experiences. This faculty I treat of.

Principle I. That the Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form

of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are

derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call'd an Angel & Spirit & Demon.

- William Blake All religions are One

Common sense can be changed by science. Heliocentrism displaced Geocentrism,

even if the Sunseems to rise, we know that we revolve around it. As science takes on

questions of first person experience, though, things get dicey because what is being

studied is human experience, making the label expert somewhat more difficult to place.

One way to view this is to think about scientific perspective as a third person perspective

being pressed to service in the understanding of first person phenomena. Can an MRI

show what I mean when I say I love my son? As knowledge of the biology and

information systems behind consciousness advances, the self is coming under the

descriptions of scientists- and many of them are suggesting that there may be no there

there; arguing, as we will see, that the self is something of an illusion, a pattern projected

upon a chaotic neural machine. Where does this leave our knowledge of ourselves?

This fairly academic discussion has taken on a public character, as popular interest

in scientific advance leads to a discussion about the science of consciousness directed

explicitly toward the public. Public lectures by Dan Dennett, Stephen Pinker, and others

at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference1 imply a non-technical interest in

what emerging knowledge suggests about the nature of our experience. Theres a notable

topoi of frustration at the resistance of common sense to the rationality of science, as

Dennett says with frustration, its difficult for people to accept change their minds about

1Which you can view here: http://www.ted.com/themes/view/id/4.

2
http://www.ted.com/themes/view/id/4http://www.ted.com/themes/view/id/4


3/23

consciousness because everybodys an expert (Dennett Can We Know). Here, I will

argue that the rhetorical problem for science in explaining human experience is the

recalcitrance of the phenomena of experience; third person observation and measurement

doesnt exhaust what we mean when we refer to the first person qualia (a basic unit of

phenomenal experience, what it like to be in a particular bodily state) of human

experience. In this frame, the philosophical problem ofqualia is not an epistemological

problem- private states are unknowable by objective method- and so meaningless, as

Dennett would have it, but a rhetorical problem encountered as epistemic wisdom

confronts the aesthetic foundations of the self.

The play of aesthetic confidence pushing against epistemic fortitude constitutes a

tantalizing object of rhetorical inquiry. Here aesthetic and epistemic rhetoric negotiate the

boundary between philosophy, science, and common sense. When NPRs Science Friday

sat in on a conference on consciousness, they came upon a poet, a philosopher, and a

scientist to debate the problem of selfhood in the face of neuroscience. This radio

program strikes at a way to understand the structure and the stakes of popular reception

of the science of consciousness. These rhetors, taken as figures (the Poet, the

Philosopher, and the Scientist), dramatize the tensions of human subjects studying

themselves objectively. By placing this instance in the context of resistance, I hope to

highlight the radical potential of a (Peircean) pragmatic reading; the tension between

poetic, logical, and empirical reason will be understood as an indissoluble tension at the

foundation of selfhood. The resistance of common sense selfhood to

biological/mechanical reduction cannot be eliminated, but neither does it determine the

future of knowledge of consciousness. Instead, a purposeful tension between

3


4/23

imagination, recalcitrance, and understanding characterize the process and the product of

the science of consciousness.

What Ron Greene calls the constitutive model of influence, featuring a contested,

multiple, and fluid self as a site of ethical judgment has been figured as an alternative the

Cartesian center of the influence model of rhetoric; the intentional subject (29).

Barbara Biesecker, Bradford Vivian, Kendall Phillips, Ron Greene and others understand

the self as an autonomous entity to be a fiction, and in its place assert something like a

rhetorical model of achieved subjectivity. What is curious about the debate over

consciousness is the extent to which there are no Cartesians, leaving the ethical moment

to be not a resistance to the imposition of an essential self, but rather a reclamation of the

reality and ethical import of interiority. The Science Friday discussion, and the debate

about consciousness studies more broadly (especially the debate about qualia), suggest

that the ethical and political stasis concerns not the imposition of subjectivity, but rather

its evacuation. This debate, we will suggest, points to an older debate than the one noted

by Greene, realism against the aesthetic turn in rhetoric. Instead, it invokes the debate

between realism and nominalism; the question of whether non-particular things, like

states of consciousness, are real in a way not exhausted by their material substrate. This

essay will look briefly at a constitutive model of rhetorical subjectivity as a way of

approaching a public debate about the epistemic and ethical status of consciousness. This

background will set up a reading of the figures of agency embodied in the Science Friday

debate. Finally, I will reflect on the tensions between this reading and the poststructuralist

approaches to subjectivity that are common in rhetorical inquiry and suggest some further

theoretical work.

4


5/23

Part One: Rhetorical Subjectivity and Resistance

If a stable unitary core to a persuasion model of rhetoric, the intentional subject, is

an illusion- an ideological effect- how can we study rhetoric? One attractive answer,

proposed by Greene, is to focus on judgment. Here the embodied tradition of rhetorical

thinking is kept alive, but includes in its purview the constitution of the agents of

discourse. Under this view, we look to argumentation and rhetoric more broadly to

identify the constitution of judgment, its terms, participants, and criteria for evaluation.

Importantly, we should look for the constitution of controversies themselves as in need of

judgment:

The rhetorical perspective on argumentation, from the standpoint of a constitutive

model of effectivity, understands judgment as an aesthetic-ethical process made

possible by how arguments speak for and speak about persons, places and events.Judgment emerges as the stake for a rhetorical perspective on argumentation and

the constitutive model allows argumentation critics to study "the politics of

judgment" (Greene & Hicks, in press). The politics of judgment investigates how

argumentation makes possible particular judgments, displaces other forms ofjudgments, decides who gets to judge, what criteria, are, used for judgment, and

perhaps most importantly, what events, behaviors, texts, and/or populations appear

as objects that require a form of public judgment. (Greene 29)

So it should alert us that something like consciousness and subjectivity comes to be

publicly contested at all. What happens in this model is not (merely) that three people try

to persuade a static audience that consciousness has a certain character. Instead, the

problem of consciousness is being constituted rhetorically, as are the subjects of

consciousness. The characters posed, then, and the style of their rhetorical becoming,

constitute part of the social ontology of consciousness.

This constitutive model is promising for a debate like the debate over consciousness

5


6/23

because the scene of judgment needs clarifying. A pure influence model would leave

more questions than it would answer: what would being convincedthat consciousness is

an illusion, and that we are merely appearances produced by biological process, even

mean in a practical sense? This rhetorical situation, sidestepping the debate between

Bitzer and Vatz, is constitutive of the identities for whom the status of consciousness

takes on the aesthetic and ethical immediacy that we call judgment (Greene 23). It is

neither purely a moment of influence nor a constitution of rhetorical affect, but a site in

which we can begin to unpack how the intellectual traditions generating the constitutive

model-phenomenology, critical hermeneutics, social constructionism, structural semiotics

and post-structuralism-- disperse similar and competing ethical visions tot rhetorical

studies (Greene 27). What we are studying, then, is both the substantive epistemic

argument of both sides, but also the aesthetic, ethical, and political judgment made

possible by contest. Both the objects of our inquiry, as we as subjects of rhetorical

inquiry, are called into the process of agency.

Poststructuralist trends in rhetorical scholarship suggest an approach to the subject

formation involved in these rhetorical contests that leans heavily on the destabilization of

identity and subjectivity as a way of loosening up the ground for resistance to imposed

identities. The work of Bradford Vivian, Kendall Phillips, and Barbara Biesecker are

stark examples of the habit in contemporary rhetorical scholarship to use rhetorical

agency as a way of explaining resistance to imposed identity. Vivians hope is that the

content of subjectivity that we have inherited as static semantic content can be dislodged

through rhetorics emphasis on form:

6


7/23

What role might rhetoric play in this re-imagining of subjectivity? ModernWestern thought has defined the subject according to contentthat is, by the

nature of the essence or being the subject is said to possess. Drawn around thiscontent, the subject comes to appear enclosed, perhaps autonomous, and identical

to itself. In this essay, however, I argue that the self may be conceived as a form

a rhetorical formthat exists only in its continual aesthetic creation, in its

indefinite becoming. The self is, by this account, isomorphic with the threshold

out of which it is composed. Such a formulation makes the self open to difference,to continual movement and transformation, instead of identical to itself. (Vivian

304)

This move is seen as a crucial political lever in the fight against the tyranny of a static

subjectivity imposed by history (Phillips 311, Vivian 304). This part of rhetorical

scholarship posits a subjectivity that is fluid, multiple, and always unfolding. It is, as a

brief preview, a remarkably similar idea of subjectivity as that offered by the Poet in our

discussion, Jorie Graham. This thoroughly destabilized self is, however, only part of the

story. As we will see, the textualization of the self, its de-essentialization, is remarkably

compatible with the project of eliminativism (the argument that consciousness is

epiphenomenal- not realin an empirical sense) pushed by some philosophers of mind and

cognitive scientists. In this controversy, it is not the ghost of the Cartesian cogito that the

self finds itself resisting, but an epistemic argument denying the ontology of selfhood.

As a way of making our analysis of constitutive rhetoric concrete, we will take

seriously the style and substance of the Figures of subjectivity performed in the Science

Friday debate; the Poet, the Philosopher, and the Scientist. These 3 figures push against

one another for about 40 minutes in this artifact, embodying the ethos of their position,

and advancing their perspective on the controversy. First, the Poet, Jorie Graham, shares

her Imagination and Experience. Then, the Logician, Thomas Metzinger, offers his

7


8/23

Doubt. Finally, Antonio Damasio, the Scientist synthesizes the discussion through his

Rhetoric. These figures embody the style and substance of aspects of human agency, and

their controversy is a play of the forces that constitute agency. While this paper is limited

to the reading of the event as an embodiment of the rhetorical tensions of identity

construction, I should note that these figures, the Poet, the Logician, and the Scientist

play a vital role in the humanistic critique of Descartes by figures like Giambatista Vico

and Charles Peirce. One relevant note from this related research is that these figures were

often thought of as proportional, and mutually implicated, and especially for Peirce,parts

of a process of becoming; the imaginative confronting the recalcitrance of the world,

giving way to a synthesis of habit. This is not the same thing as declaring each figure to

have their own domain, poetry over matters of the heart, logic over matters of the mind,

science over matters of nature. Rather, the process of inquiry, the constitution of the self

as a sign, has aesthetic roots, epistemic constraints, and pragmatic effects- where no part

of the process can be reduced to another. Seen this way, the performance of a debate

about consciousness by these figures constitutes a dramatization of conscious thought

itself.

8


9/23

Part Two: Doubting Our Selves- Science Friday Debates Consciousness

Cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence theory have all become

somewhat more available culturally, as the Third Culture continues to crank out widely

sold (if not read) books on the science of consciousness. The marketing is pat: the

mystery of consciousness is being explained in our generation! Dont you want to know

the answer? The fascinating thing from here is that once you buy the book, you much

more likely to find an elimination of the mystery of consciousness than a solution to it. A

large swath of the cognitive science and philosophy of mind literature declares the hard

problem of consciousness a non-problem: language is just playing us for fools. Jaegwon

Kim has said that the hard problem of consciousness is: How is it possible for the mind

to exercise its causal powers in a world that is fundamentally physical? (30). Many

argue that the solution is to explain away the problem: if everything above the material is

epiphenomenal- theres nothing to explain. A fascinating debate has continued between

these doubters of the self and those mysterians, as Dan Dennett is fond of labeling his

intellectual foes,who believe there is something more to it than the substrate: as it is

often said, there issomething that it is like to be us. This debate has proceeded with a

great deal of self-reflexive analysis of method, purpose, and presumption. This

controversy highlights a central concern in our study, how should we as rhetoricians

understand the epistemic sophisticate who denies the central theoretical categories of

rhetoric (orator, audience, pathos, ethos, doxa, endoxa, etc.) any robust existence, and

claims a largely logical epistemological argument as their proof?

An Artifact of this Controversy: Science Friday on NPR

When Ira Flatow and the Science Friday team put together this public discussion

they made an interesting point just by identifying relevant perspectives to represent. The

Poet articulates the very early judgments of conscious life- she is humane and evocative.

9


10/23

The Logician is curmudgeonly in a playful (and exceptionally German) way. He is

precise and detached. The Scientist in this discussion serves as a mediator of sorts,

embracing the fundamental truth of our experience as emoting selves, but conscious of

method- impeccably empirical in orientation. In this negotiation of exuberance, doubt,

and mediation we can find an embodiment of the rhetoric of sensibility that illustrates our

struggle for personhood. This non-reductive view takes in the richness of our

imaginative, critical, and adjudicatory roles in life as well as the way they impinge on

each other.

While there are lots of ways to read this text, my method will be to commit

largely to the recorded performance. Audio of the event is available at npr.org, and I will

only use the text to pin down quotes. The way the performance obtains in reflection is as

a series of positionalities. We will follow the contributions of the performers and try to

add some relevant context for some of theirtopoi. What we must not lose sight of is that

our participants dont lock all their meaning in their arguments, but also signify by

exemplifying their relative positions in the process of thought: first we are poetic, then

we are critical, and finally we are rhetorical. We invest in our imagination knowing it will

be pruned by the world and it is in the mediation of this process that we produce our

selves. This is also why we know them to be quite real. What will be suggested here is a

unique approach to the aesthetic underbelly of epistemic judgment, all informed by our,

largely, neglected humanists. We will let our players take their turns; first the Poets

experience, second the Logicians Doubts, and finally, the Scientists Rhetoric.

The Poets Imagination

There's just a sense of--the solid self is no one's operative illusion, and Ithink that we're not combating that here. What we're trying to do is figure

out, you know, what goes into the construction, whether it's a poem, a

work of art, a work of philosophy or, you know, a neurological

undertaking that exhibits the characteristics that momentarily coalesce into

10


11/23

a self, and then whether that momentary coalescence can last long enough

to love or do good or to do harm. (Graham)

The Poets voice in this exchange of views on consciousness comes from 1996

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and current

professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, Jorie Graham. Life for Jorie Graham is

very rich, and she works hard to keep it that way. Her sustained awe of experience is

infectious. She just seems more alive than most people. Theres a somewhat nave feel

about kind of person, as if the world intends to go very fast, but they insist on going at

exactly their own speed with a kind of serious joy that makes it hard to scowl at them. In

the work of Antonio Domasio she has found a neuroscientist who takes seriously the

importance of our emotional states in the function of the human organism. It is interesting

to note that a third person perspective on consciousness- performed often through brain

imaging technology- doesnt surprise or irk Professor Graham in the least. In explaining

the work that a poem does (the poem A Prayer which she read for the audience), she is

happy to slip into what someone might want to see as a reductionist perspective on

thinking:

And then at a certain point there's a turn in the poem and a series of

pressures that the bodily experience of the witnessing of the minnows

compels the speaker to suddenly undergo, and they become feelings and

then emotions and then they lead to a kind of thinking, and then eventually

to a sense of a moral or ethical predicament, which I think is something

that Dr. Damasio maps quite brilliantly in his work. Obviously we just do

it instinctively. (Graham)

Theres no apparent tension to come from the fact that neurophysiology makes what we

feelpossible. But also from this perspective, it would be nonsense to deny the fact of our

conscious selfhood. Its presence is its proof. We are its proof.

Graham sees her work as being a kind of medium of sensation; building poems

11


12/23

(which she sometimes calls machines) that affect a moment of selfhood. In a

fascinating moment in the dialog, she makes an analogy between the process of poetry

and the reductionist language du jourfor this same process as described in cognitive

science and neuroscience: monitoring. Our Scientist, Damasio, explains that the biology

of the self can basically be explained by the fact that some information processes are in

continuous monitoring of other processes, and that ultimately consciousness is the net

result of a cascade of reflexive self-monitoring. After somewhat awkwardly joking about

this clumsy metaphor of monitoring she pivots, and instead breaths life into this dry

idea borrowed from the study of information systems:

Well, there is a way in which the imagination is an instrument for trawling

through an experience in the world with a sort of charged emotional,

intellectual openness, attention that Keats called negative capability. And

he did add 'without irritable reaching after fact and reason,' meaning by

that, that you don't necessarily know what you're looking for but you know

that you are looking. And it's a certain quality of attentionthat the term

'monitoring' seems to capture very well.

It does seem crucial in a poem that--and the best poems exhibit this. One

only has to think of someone like John Keats--that what is being

monitored is not only a phenomenon in the outside world, but what one's

own heart is feeling, what one's own muscles are doing, the entire list that

Tony just underwent for us. And the poem is, in fact, an undergoing of an

experience. It's not the report of an experience.

The speaker in a poem is the protagonist of the poem, not the narrator of

an event. So it is very much an--as Stevens would say, a poem is an act of

the mind in the process of finding what will suffice. He also says that a

poem is the cry of its occasion, and he doesn't say that it's the report of its

occasion or the interpretation of its occasion. He says it's a reaction to and

12


13/23

an undergoing of, which is what the dramatic term 'cry' would lead one to

believe and feel. (Graham)

The moment that sensation splashes upon what we take to be our mind is Professor

Grahams concern. Qualia are her objects of study, and she follows their life further

down the stream of consciousness, as the subject forms themselves around the

contingencies that confront us. The experience of sensationgrounds our ethical relations

with the world.

How is this so? In a bold argumentative posture, this view of the self agrees with

the reductionist that Descartes was wrong- certainly there is no theater of the mind,

nobody there in any case to be watching the show. The self is rather a struggle to achieve

continuity of consciousness over time: to manifest who we are by dragging who we were

into the territory of who we will become. The primordial moments of this process are

consequential in this view because they are the very foundation of the self- the seat of

agency is ultimately grounded in the complexity communicated by raw sensation.

We're talking about a state that's itself a momentary state. It's a matter of a

kind of delay in the act of cognition that allows for other kinds of

information and a more complex understanding of the reality that one is in

to filter in. It's not that eventually you don't reach for fact and reason; the

poem is a machine or an act that moves from the body up through the

emotions, into thought and then into action. But it's about lingering for a

much longer duration in the state of receptive sensation. It allows for the

world to thicken and become more real and, as I said before, more

complex. As Whitman would say, 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then,

I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.

And one of the reasons that it's so important that we keep ourselves as

complex as we possibly can, not oversimplified in either a notion of the

self or oversimplified in the notion of an abandonment of self, is that we

13


14/23

are, as I said before, creatures that have agency and are going to have to

act. And to have an ethical universe that we can operate in, we have to

perhaps make our reality as real--and we're living in a world in which it's

becoming more virtual every minute. So I think everyone at this table is

involved with an attempt to keep reality as thick and as materially real as

possible in order that it not become, you know, something as thin as a

screen. (Graham)

Here we find a view similar to the constitutive model of rhetoric mapped by Greene, and

filled in by many others, a view that follows sensuality outward toward ethics, insisting

on their continuity through time. This is an artful self, treated to a rich interface with the

world- taking our sensual competence seriously in our effort to be at home in the world.

The stakes involved in a denial of the self that enlivens our appreciation of the

world could not be any higher. It is this self that we construct which can be accountable.

The act of judgment is born of, and ultimately attached to, our selves- as we experience

them. Prof. Graham elaborates on the seriousness of learning to appreciate the complexity

of life:

I don't think that the constructed voice of any poet or, for that matter, any

painter or even composer is naive in the sense that it doesn't know that it's

a construction. But it is concerned with creating a system which will allow

a person to feel empathy and to undergo accountability. And, you know,

we might not be here really, but we really are killing people. And we

might not, you know, have actual--you could probably prove to me that

I'm a creature, a total creature of circumstance, but unfortunately, I'm also

a creature that has to cast a vote. I'm a person who has to be a mother. I'm

a person who's responsible for taking care of somebody wounded in an

emergency.

And at that point, whether I have a moral life and a complex moral life--

14


15/23

well, whether I'm able to process the information that this culture--I think

that news report that preceded you--I actually wanted to ask you if it was

real news or if it was just, like, funny news you made up for us before the

program started. But at any rate, if we are to take just the news to heart,

the levels of complex personhood that we have to develop in order to

retain not only our sanity but our humanity at present--and something that

will allow us to remain, you know, fully capable of handling

contradiction--fear, rage, compassion--capable of being outraged at

terrorist acts and perhaps unwilling to undertake terrorist acts ourselves in

order to retaliate--maybe we have to have selves and be too simple and

naive, because if we give up on that, there's something horrifying about

the degree to which we might slip out from under the mantle of

accountability.

Our selves, as we experience them, are real in the sense that they are our gateway to

everything else. Our selves are our commitment to the world. They are our Word. To

break them is to let loose the worst caprice of which we are capable. The ethical

relationship of our aesthetic posture can hardly be more clear.

It will be the contention here that this sense of selfhood characterizes what Peirce

called Firstness, the general quality or potentiality upon which all being and reference

depends. This way of being is open in its generality, and energetic in its contribution. But

it is also imprecise. When Firsts confront the world- they are resisted by brute actuality

(whether material or logical) and their generality is trimmed by concrete embodiment. It

is the way we work through the difficulties of mediating particularity and generality in

ethical ways when we are called to judgment. Furthermore, we have a sense of the

subject here that acknowledges the processual relationship between aesthetic, epistemic,

and rhetorical judgment that transgresses the supposed domains of knowledge. This view

of the self is not without its doubters.

15


16/23

The Logicians Doubt

And, of course, this introspective, first-person access to consciousexperience is very sudden neuroses in the target phenomenon. And so I

think first-person access through poetry and literature is an important part

of the picture. Philosophers, of course, are interested in conceptual clarity

and in epistemological issues and so forth. For us it is interesting that areal epistemic progress is made right now, because we've been at the topic

for many centuries and we've seen it go up and go down. And we also see

the limitations that all the other disciplines have. For instance, something--just to give you one example I notice when listening to Tony and Jorie is

that they are both naive realists about the self. (Metzinger)

To believe our senses is in a sense quite foolish. We move more than the Sun- it

just doesnt look that way. The stick doesnt bend in the water- it just seems that way.

The first person perspective, untamed by method, can be quite embarrassing in this way.

Sober people of philosophical training take very seriously the banishment of folk wisdom

when it is contradicted by empirical observation, analytical astuteness, and often both.

We have a role for those who cut common sense down to size. The world after all often

says No if you know how to ask it about your abduction. There are much more reliable

measures for the world than those we find immediately present as human subjects. It is

perfectly natural to put the posit of a subject a self to the test. It could be that the idea

is nonsense, a useful fiction, a noble lie. For the Logician, we should apply the most

rigorous epistemological posture available to identify exactly the availability of

phenomenological selfhood to measure. The voice of doubt will come in our exchange

from Thomas Metzinger, head of the department of philosophy and the director of the

Theoretical Philosophy Group at Johannes Gutenberg University.As you can imagine, having access to methodological insights like these makes

one eager to confront those who are more nave.

[Metzinger]They really think there is such a thing in reality, and I would

rather claim that none of your listeners, nor you, Ira, have something or

16


17/23

are something like a self. There are just no such things as components of

reality. What exists are self models, representations created in brains,

which are not any more recognized as representations by brains. But if we

look closely, there is no thing, a self thing, that corresponds to these

neurorepresentations in the brain, and that is the actual thing, the actual

idea, we now have to depart from in this phase of our history. FLATOW:

Would that be like saying, 'My brain thinks, therefore I am'?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Prof. METZINGER: Well, it's not your brain, you know.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Prof. METZINGER: My brain implies that there is a relationship of

ownership between you and your brain, and I think the truth may be even

more frightening than that.

To simply believe in the self on the basis of active phenomenology is to beg the

question: If the third person perspective on the self is the only legitimate epistemic

position, individual reports arent any kind of evidence at all. The crux of the

epistemological problem here is an issue of perspectivism. If the first person experience

is just inaccessible by responsible method, we neednt recover the phenomenon in our

explanations. Method here determines meaningful questions, and the implication by

people like Metzinger Dennett, the Churchlands, and others is that what is invisible by

this method is fantasy. Its an epistemologically financed ontological argument: if we can

see it from here, its just not real.

Looking forward somewhat, we should not be surprised that common sense has its

own recalcitrance. If this more epistemically robust approach to the self is so radically

different, we are urged to ask just what this means for us- since we as subjects are the

object in question. As we saw with the Poet, the Logician too has a context. Note this

exchange:

17


18/23

LEE (Audience Member): Hi. Lee from University of Utah. Two-part

question: If there's no self thing and self is a mental process, first, for Dr.

Damasio, is there some sort of disease or brain injury where there have

actually been people who are conscious but don't have a self? And can you

describe what that kind of person would be like? And second, what does it

mean to Joe Public on the street that there's no self thing?

Here, the resistance of subjectivity is clear. What if theres no substantive effect of

reductionist epistemology? As an explanation, knowledge must explain something- if

third-person observation cannot capture what it is like to be who we are, it may not so

much be wrong as inconsequential to the judgment of selfhood. Here Dennett also

confronts the tension between the philosophical ethos of necessity and the vulgar

insistence on expertise concerning consciousness. Some may want to find in this clash of

perspectives a kind if incommensurability, but as we will see- the stasis between the first

and third person perspective on the inquiry of consciousness is temporary.

The Scientists Rhetoric

I like to say that the brain is the captive audience of our body because itreally has--it's entirely at the mercy of this constant barrage of signals that

represent the body. And it is that very fact, this ability to represent

continuously, even when we are doing all sorts of things and having all

sorts of ideas that are not about our body, that probably forms this basicconnection, this anchor that allows us to generate a self and that allows us,

in fact, to maintain a continuity of self over a lifetime, as we all know we

do. (Damasio)

Antonio Damasios rhetoric is really quite something; his embrace of common

sense is literally constitutive of his scientific enterprise, and his scientific enterprise is

thus explicitly built as a mediation of the forces of imaginative impression and logical

restraint, between experiential and empirical belief, and fundamentally between aesthetic

and epistemic judgment. He is a recognized leader in the study of the neuroscience of

18


19/23

human emotions, and winner of Kappers Neuroscience Medal, the Beaumont Medal from

the American Medical Association, and the Reenpaa Prize in Neuroscience. I will argue

that what results is a rhetoric, and a science, that affirms the humanity of our judgments

and the realism of our worlds. We should begin with the irritation beneath the abduction

of ourselves; what is the nature of the question we are confronted with as we posit

ourselves. This is not a matter that can be epistemologically slighted because it is the

irritation around which these pearls form. Damasios answer seems like throwback to a

bolder science like Vicos- one that affirms our humanity as an object of study insofar as

we are its subjects.

So you have a very good example of this connection between poetry on

the one hand and science, which is not terribly surprising because good art

in general and science are really aiming at the same thing. We really want

to know about human nature in one way or another. The immediate

purpose tends to be slightly different, but in the end, that's what

distinguishes great science and great art. (Damasio)

These irritations of consciousness are deep and wide. They haunt us when we walk into a

room and cant remember why, when we slip between recognition and a failure of

recognition in trompe loeil, when we experience tip-of-the-tongue states, when we cant

account for a prior judgment (this one is fascinating because its literally a failure to

empathize with a past self), and so on. We know ourselves to be slippery performances,

but we also sense the continuity that makes such reflexive appreciation possible in the

first place. Damasio channels this deep curiosity not to snatch our selves from beneath

our social or cultural ideology (as Dennett, Metzinger, and others would like) but rather

to infuse it with yet another perspective from which to view our Selves. This rhetoric, at

least in this instance, is in extreme tension with a Revolutionary approach that would

overthrow our common sense, put our folk psychology in its place, or alter the premise

behind our theologies. Nonetheless, it is beautifully harmonious with our senses, and

19


20/23

undeniably generative of interesting research.

The Scientist, however, is a different figure than the poet and the epistemologist

because the role here mediates imaginative possibility with worldly, and logical,

recalcitrance. As such, the scientist is in a position to accept both positions to produce a

third. The biological systems of which we are made, which is notto say which we are,

are certainly very specifically responsible for the effect of consciousness:

What really happens, from our perspective now, is that if we did not have

the possibility in our brains to represent in great detail and in myriad

fashion what is going on in our bodies, we probably would not be

conscious individuals. We can actually say that we are conscious and have

a self as a byproduct of this enormous ability of our brains to monitor the

very different functions of our bodies. And the magnificent thing is that

the brain is doing this literally for every department of our organism.

It's monitoring what is going on in the chemistries of, for example, our

endocrine systems and our metabolic regulation, but it is also monitoring

what is going on in our viscera--for example our heart and lungs and gut

and the very skin that forms the membrane and limit of our bodies. And it

is monitoring also what is going on in the muscular activity. So, for

example, when you move about or when you have a facial expression of a

given emotion, all of this is being represented in the brain whether you

want it to or not. (Damasio)

Monitoring is not a metaphor; its a real process that is highly fallible as any number of

tricks of the eye ably demonstrates. But this is a non-reductive strategy: substrate-plus. It

is not surprising in the least looking at it this way that Damasio would seem more aligned

with the Poet than the Logician; they are talking about the same thing in different ways,

and see each others approach as complementary. An aesthetic life is meaningful but not

predictable. The critical enterprise can be deadening. Precision is meaningless in a

20


21/23

context where it cannot answer the question you are asking. In the negotiation between

these extremes, what Horst Rugthrof calls the dialectical tension of Pandora and Occam,

the energy of proliferation and multiplicity, and the constricting focus of precision.

When rhetoricians talk about approaches, poses, stances, frameworks, paradigms,

and the like being constitutive, it can mean various things. Lets try to be clear: Damasio

understands the truth of the Poet to be a fundamental part of the inventive process, and

thus literally a part of inquiry:

Well, just to say that intuition, with all of its unconscious component, is

very much at work in scientific as well as artistic work. We come to some

of our best hypotheses and especially interpretations with, very often,

something that we really don't know the source of, and that source is the

unconscious. And actually, wonderful thinkers have recognized this. I'll

just give two examples: one is Einstein, the other is the French

mathematician Henri Poincare. Both of them had a very keen sense of how

non-conscious the processing that led to, let's say, scientific or artistic

inspiration had to be. But I think Jorie should talk about this issue.

(Damasio)

The theoretical upshot of our analysis here seems to be that the moment ofaporia,

primordial acts of predication, the early fixation of aesthetic currents, and the process of

criticism and creative revision should figure prominently in our criticism when we are

actually concerned with the act of judgment rather than simply a revelation of meaning.

21


22/23

Part Three: Reflections

To say that the self is a rhetorical achievement and thus a powerful node of

resistance against the hegemonic tendencies of culture is only part of the story.

Sometimes the impositions are not static identities that can be destabilized. In the case of

inquiry into consciousness, a very live debate is occurring in which the role of rhetorical

resistance is in the name of a real self. As cognitive scientists adopt explanations of

consciousness as a series of drafts or as the result of competing processes or relative

fame, both metaphors Dennett tries out in Kinds of Minds, the poststructuralist

perspective seems like capitulation. We should find the stasis point shifted a bit in a

debate with no Cartesians. Graham insists that we can be a draft of a future self always

deferred, but still affirm the ontological and ethical force of aesthetic experience.

Damasio insists that without studying the self as we experience it we would not be able to

explain it. Neither voice fully mutes the insistence that our knowledge be driven by

epistemic principles that we can count on. It is in the play of these views that the

rhetorical self can be seen as a locus of resistance to a presumed hegemony of scientific

explanation. Since it is we that we are attempting to explain, we have a role in the

production of the very object of scientific inquiry, the conscious self. This contest never

expires, and every performance is a rhetorical event that helps establish the parameters of

understandable selfhood.

22


23/23

Works Cited

BIESECKER, BARBARA A. "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the

Thematic of Diffrance." Philosophy & Rhetoric. (1989): p110 - 130.

BLAKE, WILLIAM, AND WILLIAM BLAKE. William Blake: the complete

illuminated books. New York [London]: Thames & Hudson William Blake Trust, 2000.

DENNETT, DANIEL. ""Can We Know our own Minds?" (2003). Technology,

Entertainment, Design Conference. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/102. Accessed

Feb. 2007.

--. Kinds of minds: toward an understanding of consciousness. New York, NY: Basic

Books, 1996.

Flatow, I. G., Jorie; Metinger, Thomas; Damasio, Antonio (2003). Emotion, Cognition

and Consciousness. http://www.ted.com/themes/view/id/4. National Public

Radio (NPR).

GREENE, RONALD WALTER. "The Aesthetic Turn and the Rhetorical Perspective on

Argumentation."Argumentation & Advocacy. (1998): p19 -28.

PHILLIPS, KENDALL R. "Rhetorical Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Power, and Resistance."

Philosophy & Rhetoric. (2006): p310 - 332.

VIVIAN, BRADFORD. "The Threshold of the Self." Philosophy & Rhetoric. (2000):

p303 - 318.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/102http://www.ted.com/themes/view/id/4http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/102http://www.ted.com/themes/view/id/4

RSA 08- Resisting Scientific Authority

Documents

Transcript of RSA 08- Resisting Scientific Authority