Discognition by Steven Shaviro

Author:Steven Shaviro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Discognition
ISBN: 9781910924075
Publisher: Watkins Media Ltd
Published: 2015-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Thinking Like a Killer

Michael Swanwick’s short story “Wild Minds” (1998) reads like a riposte to Scott Bakker’s Neuropath – even though it was written a decade earlier. The story strives to find continuing value in the adventure of human consciousness, even if all the darkest suspicions raised by reductionist neuroscience and eliminativist philosophy of mind turn out to be true. Swanwick insists upon the worst. He posits a world in which “the dark dimensions of the human mind” have been purged and exterminated, and he strives to affirm them nonetheless.

The story is set at a near-future point in which “the workings of the human brain” have been “finally and completely understood” by science. The story presents this as a fait accompli. Everything psychological, people now understand, is simply a matter of maintaining the right “chemical balances”. Everyone learns “the structural basis of emotions, and how to master them before they flush the body with adrenaline”. Everyone also knows that “self is an illusion. The single unified ego you mistake for your ‘self’ is just a fairy tale that your assemblers, sorters, and functional transients tell one another”.

In such a world, there is no longer any need for the old common-sense views of the mind that the eliminativist philosophers condescendingly dismiss as folk psychology. According to these philosophers, there are no such things as beliefs, desires, and feelings. These are just misapprehensions, or after-the-fact fabulations. When people claim that they are in pain, for instance, the real fact of the matter is that their C-fibers are being stimulated, and that they find this stimulation unpleasant. More generally, as Paul Churchland puts it:

Our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.

For Churchland, as for Bakker, our introspective reports on our own mental states are entirely delusional, and radically false. An accurate scientific picture of the mind will not subsume our habitual picture of ourselves, in the way that modern physics subsumes Newtonian physics as a special case. Rather, it will force us to entirely reject “folk psychology”, and construct our understanding of the brain on a totally new basis.

In the world of the story, this new basis has been definitively established, and is accepted by everyone. The people in the story describe their moods, for instance, as processes in which “some emotional sea-change” is “organizing itself deep on the unseen levels – the planners building new concept-language, the shunts and blocks being rearranged”. They apologize for giving expression to “emotional transients” that are not being kept sufficiently “under control”. Instead of providing fabulated reasons for their own – and other people’s actions, they now cite the actual physical causes that produce those actions. People say things like “my assemblers and sorters got into a hierarchic conflict”. They don’t fall in love so much as they discover that their “emotional components” are threatening to “collapse into a new paradigmatic state”.

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