Daniel Dennet's "Multiple Drafts model," the Cartesian Theater, and Musil's Narrative

I am reading Daniel C. Dennett's book Consciousness Explained (1991) and just came across a passage explaining what Dennet calls the "Multiple Drafts Model" as an alternative to the persistent (even if unconscious or supposedly overthrown) model of a Cartesian Theater, which presupposes a central consciousness within the brain to which all input is directed and within which all input is processed. Dennett's model is similar to my mapping of Musil's novel as an infinite proliferation of de-centered circle worlds without a center, and it seems fitting that he uses the metaphor of fiction often in his book, and, in this passage, the metaphor of drafting, editing, selecting, narrating, and streams of contents, if not of consciousness. Speaking of the non-linear, de-centralized editorial processes that occur when the brain receives input, he writes:

 "These editorial processes occur over large fractions of a second, during which time various additions, incorporations, emendations, and overwritings of content can occur, in various orders. ..What we actually experience is a product of many processes of interpretation--editorial processes, in effect.  They take in relatively raw and one-sided representations, and yield collated, revised, enhanced representations, and they take place in the streams of activity occurring in various parts of the brain.  This much is recognized by virtually all theories of perception, but now we are poised for the novel feature of the Multiple Drafts model: Feature detections or discriminations only have to be made once. That is, once a particular, 'observation' of some feature has been made, by a specialized, localized portion of the brain, the information content thus fixed does not have to be sent somewhere else to be rediscriminated by some 'master' discriminator. . . These spatially and temporally distributed content-fixations on the brain are precisely locatable in both space and time, but their onsets do not mark the onset of consciousness of their content. It is always an open question whether any particular content thus discriminated will eventually appear as an element in conscious experience [or, in Musil, as a part of the published text!], and it is a confusion, as we shall see, to ask when it becomes consciousness. These distributed content-discriminations yield, over the course of time, something rather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be thought of as subject to continual editing by many processes distributed around in the brain, and continuing indefinitely into the future. This stream of contents is only rather like a narrative because of its multiplicity[but awfully like a Musil narrative precisely because of this multiplicity!]; at any point in time there are multiple 'drafts' of narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain" (113).

Where, then, we might ask, if there is no central node in the pineal gland as proposed by Descartes, where then is the author? Does this mean he really is dead? I would propose that Dennett's model suggests that consciousness is not undermined or negated by its lack of central node, but that it is dispersed, simultaneous, much more complex than we once thought; but that this does not mean that we are unconscious. It would follow then that there is an author inside of each of us, but that this author looks and acts differently than we have imagined for centuries, and that Musil's novel has shown us most clearly how this author/consciousness operates. Dennet continues: "Most important, the Multiple Drafts model avoids the tempting mistake of supposing that there must be a single narrative (the 'final' or 'published' draft, you might say) that is canonical---that is the actual stream of consciousness of the subject, whether or not the experimenter (or even the subject) can gain access to it" (113).  And while the skepticism about whether or not the subject (author) or the experimenter (the reader) can gain access to the internal stream of consciousness (meaning or intent of the author?), it seems to me at least that Dennett's new model of consciousness is a modernist novelist.

In Defense of Modernism, Again

Dear Readers,

I have been silent for quite a while, thinking and writing about other things which (gasp!) are not enough related to Musil to discuss here; but I woke up this morning thinking rather angrily again about the accepted idea that modernism "failed," that so-called modernist artists were naive, utopian, simple, and self-centered people who did not have the benefit of a post-modernist deconstructionist education. Basically, the assumptions lead to the conclusion that to believe that art is meaningful or that personal expression is important is hopelessly solipsistic and naive. Unfortunately, when Benjamin proclaimed in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" that art would henceforth be replaced by...politics, his prophecy came true to a large extent. And while I think we can understand why Benjamin was tempted to make that devil's bargain in a moment of deep distress under Nazism, which led him to be suspicious of all sorts of  ideals and all sorts of illusions and all sorts of pedestals, we also see him struggling mightily with giving up on everything he held most dear. To give up art for justice and politics turned out to be a bad bargain all around--as I think Adorno conceded with a vengeance-- as we ended up with neither. Instead we got politics, totalitarianism, and anti-art. The human spirit has never recovered and it may very well have been this movement of anti-art and rampant skepticism that we have to blame for our current age of commodification and emptiness, more than some left-over remnants of traditional values. The theory seems to be that everything that still smacks of the old regime is at fault; perhaps it is the other way around; maybe the debunkers and cynics are at least as much responsible for our current crises as those who still cling to "outmoded" ideals and a sense of the sacred. But there are, luckily, still people who are "naive" enough to still believe in "aesthetic redemption,"  i.e., to believe that art, quite divorced from ideology or party platform or particular political message, is one of the fundamental practices that makes us human and--yes--also humane; that art, as the free exploration of ideas and forms and feelings and possibilities, is still a sacred (and, alas, increasingly threatened) thing, and, finally, that art-making is an important, meaningful existentially effective activity. What we say, make, put into the world changes it. My friend Renee asked me the other day why it upset me so much, and the answer is because it is a question of the value of art itself, it is a matter of the life and death of art, and spirit, and humanity.

I had been reminded of this pervasive anti-modernist canard by a mention of yet another book, Stephen Eric Bronner's Modernism at the Barricades, that continues to promulgate these unexamined generalization about this something people call modernism, without, or so it seems, presenting anything better as alternative. Bronner writes, with typical holier-than-thou attitude,  that:

"Modernists may have believed that they were contesting modernity, but their efforts and their hopes were shaped by it. Their activities legitimated what they intended to oppose. Their critique, in short, presupposed its object. Modernists believed that they were contesting tradition in the name of the new and the constraints of everyday life in the name of multiplied experience and individual freedom. These artists were essentially anarchists imbued with what Georg Lukács termed “romantic anti-capitalism.”
They opposed the “system” without understanding how it worked or what radical political transformation required and implied. Oddly, they never understood how deeply they were enmeshed in what they opposed. Modernists envisioned an apocalypse that had no place for institutions or agents generated within modernity. Theirs was less a concern with class consciousness than an opposition to the alienating and reifying constraints of modernity. Unfettered freedom of expression and a transformation in the experience of everyday life were the modernists’ goals. Even when seduced by totalitarian movements, whether of the left or the right, most of them despised what Czeslaw Milosz called the“captive mind.” Not all the problems that they uncovered—sexual repression and generational conflicts, among others—required utopian solutions. But their utopian inclinations were transparent from the beginning. Modernists believed that the new would not come from within modernity, but would appear as an external event or force for which, culturally, the vanguard would act as a catalyst."

Typical. The idea that, say, a modernist like Robert Musil, whose deep and thorough analyses of society, history, social structures, psychology, art, physics, mathematics, probability, sociology, was a poor deluded idealist who couldn't understand what was at stake in making art or in society; the idea that, say, someone like Stephen Eric Bronner is oh so much more aware, savvy, informed, and subtle, is rather laughable. Which is not to say that we are not all blinded to some extent by our proximity to our own times, or that Musil or others of his contemporaries could not see certain things that we might see better from afar. But these sorts of critiques  blindly and arrogantly presuppose that now, finally, today,we have the answers. That by revealing the way everything anyone ever believed in--up until now-- has been  a social construction (an idea which, by the way, long predates postmodernism), the current critics are suggesting that they are somehow exempt from such complicity in their own social construction. They propose that everything up until now that anyone thought or believed in was created by external social constructs and systems, but now, suddenly, the contemporary critics have managed to get themselves outside of Schrödinger's box and inside it at  the same time; now, suddenly, we have the vision that Kafka, and Musil, and Woolf and Sartre (those poor deluded fools!) didn't have.

And what does this vision amount to? That art should avoid at all costs any association with "romantic anti-capitalism", i.e, that it should avoid the romantic part, but keep the anti-capitalism part?! That all art should avoid any belief in its ability to move people, to change reality, to be meaningful to life?! That all art that does not explicitly engage in the class struggle is somehow absurd, utopian, bourgeois?! Are we really still trying to please a moralistic bogey like Georg Lukacs?! Seriously?!  Do we really agree that to be mature, sophisticated, and socially-responsible, we must replace art with politics? If that is what maturity is, I do not want to grow up. And I doubt, when you really consider what is at stake, most of you would want to either.

Of course the dualism set up by this debate between politics and autonomous art is itself a construction, as is the idea that one must choose between solipsistic belly-gazing and creative existential participation in world-making. Of course Musil believed that art was a matter of ethical world-making, and that this vitally important world-making could only continue if the artist was left to create outside of ideologies and instrumental goals. As he learned from Nietzsche (who is somehow considered wise enough to use as a foundation for much contemporary theory, but who is then put condescendingly back into a box because he believed in such "silly" things as art, genius, will, ideals), the destruction of social constructions, the realization that many of the foundations upon which society is built are just that--constructions-- does not mean that one should stop constructing,  but that one must continue to construct, more and more beautiful and fantastic structures, more images and forms, always with the energetic willful excitement of creation, always aware that all of the forms can and will and must be broken down and again and built up.

The idea that only the people in power are able to construct ideals and realities is a crippling and actually very elitist construct. Anyone, any artist, any person (all people are, thought Nietzsche, "creative subjects" whether they will be or no), any creative subject can, to borrow from Thoreau, "effect the quality of the day" and overturn perceptions, conceptions, and social forms.  And then some. Art remains powerful. Art still changes reality. Art is still revolutionary.  But it has to believe in itself and not capitulate to Marxist ideology and moralistic posturing or fatalistic cynical theory. Why do we care about this cynical attack on modernism? I repeat, it is a matter of the life or death of art, of a belief in the possibility of shared meaning, of the belief in the possibility of language, form, sound, space, arranged in a certain way by a particular person with a vision, an idea, a hunger, a love, a fear, a desire, to touch, change, move, revolutionize the life of another person and even a whole world. As Rilke learned from looking at the archaic torso of Apollo, You must change your life. Some will say that this is solipsistic or self-centered. But to change one life is to change the world. And art is still one of the most potent means to change lives, perspectives, worlds, realities, despite all cynical theories to the contrary.

Ethics and Political Engagement; Thoreau, Musil, and the Great Unwashed

Henry David Thoreau

This morning I am thinking about ethics, and how ethics is different from an immediately self-interested castigation of injustice. "Not in My Back Yard" is an ethos often criticized by those who want to belittle the concerns of protesters; and in a way this criticism is justified--but mostly insofar as it might be used against those whose backyard is, for the moment, spared, and who, thus, do not have the imagination to see that someday it will not be, that someday their lawns, their jobs, their rights, the air they breathe, will be taken from them too. My yard is your yard, or your yard is my yard may be another way of spelling the categorical imperative.

Ethics, then, implies a way of thinking not inspired by NIMBY, and thus those operating from immediate outrage about their own discomfort may be inspired to protest for reasons that are not motivated by strictly ethical considerations. Ethics implies a consciousness of justice beyond self interest, and motivated by a sense of what is right, a sense of what one cannot, as a human being, countenance in one's own name as citizen, person, neighbor.

Having spent the last few days involved in an uncharacteristic flurry of political engagement in little Burlington, Vermont, I am struck by a number of unfortunate realities and questions about what factors do and do not induce people to become politically engaged in our society.  I read "Civil Disobedience" on the steps of City Hall yesterday with a number of brave and beautiful people in honor of and defense of a number of our fellow citizens who were shot at with rubber pellet-bullets on July 29th by Burlington police. These concerned citizens were engaging in a peaceful blockade during the Governor's Conference. They were protesting devastating plans to destroy land  and  eco-systems reaching from Canadian Inuit populations into Vermont, plans in the interest of profit for the few.

 Few of the people who read "Civil Disobedience" yesterday were at the original protest and some of us who joined the protesters later for a march to the police station and back to City Hall were disturbed and put off by the tone and the inarticulate message of the protesters whose fundamental right to protest we had been defending. "The Burlington Police Department is Fucked Up" was not exactly a sign we felt proud to stand behind, nor were we practitioners of the nuances and power of language comfortable chanting slogans whose ill-considered meanings we could not get behind. So we left them to their own devices,  and went off to drink a glass of wine before the City Council meeting that same night, where we hoped to hear more articulate voices of dissent and concern. Indeed, there were more articulate voices, a great many, which was encouraging, but also a good deal more ranting and incoherence; and I am left wondering about why people who might have something meaningful and considered to say so often stay home from such things, while the extremely disenfranchised and wretched of the earth come out in larger more visible numbers.

This morning I am thinking about ethics, and about the role and responsibility of the intellectual, or "Geist" in Musil's sense, in society. Is it possible, as Musil asked during the Paris Conference of  Writers in Defense of Culture, to engage in complex discourse about such questions, or must we devolve to chanting simplistic slogans and a polarized celebration of one brand of right-thinking over another? Must we choose between non-participation and participation in things we can't whole-heartedly stand behind? And finally, why is it that the disenfranchised and the wretched of the earth are the first ones to speak out against injustice while the relatively comfortable (like myself) so often sit by and criticize their tactics? Is it really because we are as-yet inured to the pains that they already feel everyday, and because our ethical imagination is so weak that we do not yet see or believe in the imminent dangers of which they warn us? Or is it because we don't want to associate with the great unwashed, the half-mad, the angry and resentful mob? They certainly have good reason to be angry, to feel disenfranchised, to feel that they have no voice, to feel betrayed and unheard. We only wish they had something better to say once they are given a platform upon which to say it. But perhaps it is our fault for not lending our voices to the discussion more often.

Thoreau and Musil present powerful models of independent ethical voices, who neither compromised nor watered down their complicated intellectual analyses and who were able to remain true to themselves while still making significant statements about what they deemed unjust and insupportable. Clearly, Musil suffered for his adamant resistance to the lure of the Soviet Republic (he was booed off the stage at the Paris conference and called a Fascist sympathizer because he predicted that the Soviet brand of thought-control was not so very different from that of  his German and Austrian oppressors), although he tried, in his way, to bear witness and to speak against the horrors of Nazism; and Thoreau was never a member of any club (though he was surrounded in his own home by active abolitionists and himself helped in the escape plans of several fugitive slaves). Thoreau maintained the individual's imperative to be true to himself, as an acorn grows into an oak, while seeing to it that he does not sit on the shoulders of others or steal a plank from a drowning man. They both had the imagination to consider the suffering of others and to understand that in all the great world, we share one back yard.

The Great Cathedral of Cologne, Moby Dick, and Montrous Novels

I just read in Moby Dick this sentiment, kindred to Musil's own infinite mood:

"I now leave my cetological system standing unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught--nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!"

More on Monsieur Teste

My friend Kenneth Harrison sent me a lovely explication of M. Teste which reminded me of why I am of two minds (and bodies!) about the question of disembodied heads. For there is something attractive indeed in the conception of a mind floating and free from the stings and arrows that flesh is heir to, that may transcend the limitations of physical walls, that may, with the help of imagination, travel to distant lands and happier days, and, of course, this is part of what literature and art provide for us---a separate realm untouched by the indignities and prosaic dullness of the everyday. A world of dreaming.

"The great French poet and thinker Paul Valéry invented the character Monsieur Teste. ‘A mystic without God’, Teste was committed to uninterrupted, undistracted thought. His whole life’s work was “to kill the puppet,” the automaton, inside himself. In the famous An Evening With M. Teste (1896), Valéry leaves his hero drifting off to sleep, observing the stages of his own gradual extinction, and murmuring “Let’s think very closely… You can fall asleep on any subject… Sleep can continue any idea…” as his self-awareness fades into suspension points. Valéry himself kept a diary for over fifty years (collected as the Cahiers [Notebooks]). One of his central concerns was to observe the successive phases of his awakening, as in the early hours of the morning he annotated his mind-rise. Naturally, dreams preoccupied him as much as the daily resurrection of the self. He suggested that dreams might be an attempt to make sense of the body’s passage from sleep to wakefulness. Like me, he was unimpressed by Freud’s evidence-impoverished claims about dreams being the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ – that multi-storied jerry-built word-castle which so many otherwise intelligent people have taken for a scientific idea. Nor did Valéry buy the notion that dreams could be prophetic, the mind slipping along loops in time to enable us to see the future of the world or the will of God."

from: http://philosophynow.org/
issues/91/Notes_Towards_a_Philosophy_of_Sleep


The idea of a "mind-rise," observed as a passage from dream to wakefulness, is suggestive, and I am also reminded of William Beckford's imperious resentment of the encroachments by vulgar reality upon his rapturous dreaming and imagining. And yet, and yet, the physical world, even in its most humble exempla, may be a conduit to the most heavenly blisses.

Embodied Mind, Aesthetics, Transcendence

I am reading a fascinating book by Mark Johnson called The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics and Human Understanding that argues against mind-body dualism and affirms the essential connection of aesthetics as a general activity of human awareness and intentionality that is not limited to Art, though Art, according to Johnson, is a vital  model of the sort of acute attention toward meaning-making we might follow to make our lives more meaningful. The connections to Musil's explorations of feeling and reason, and his struggles to map out the keys to how to live through aesthetic experience,  his search for a "day-bright mysticism" which did not devolve into wishy-washy anti-intellectualism, and his quest for a meaningful grounding for ethical behavior should be obvious.
In contrast to Monsieur Teste's disembodied mind (discussed below) and the whole tradition of separation of thought and experience, reason and emotion, Johnson spells out what it would mean to embrace what he calls an embodied mind theory, whereby "the apparatus of meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning" are "intrinsically shaped by the body" and its sensory relationship to the environment, to others, and to nature.  Johnson exposes the treacherous consequences of centuries of maligning the body and the feelings with which its "impure" reason is associated. There is, according to Johnson, no such thing as "pure reason, " and the desire to "free oneself from the body" is called a "dangerous idea". The consequences of adopting an embodied mind view include the acceptance that there is no such thing as a disembodied soul, "no transcendent soul or ego," that meaning is grounded in physical, bodily, environmental experience, which is always shifting, that reason is a series of embodied "processes by which our experience is explored, criticized, and transformed in inquiry...[Reason] is tied to structures of our perceptual and motor capacities and ... it is inextricably linked to feeling," that "imagination is tied to our bodily processes and can also be creative and transformative of experience". "Our ability to make new meaning, to enlarge our concepts, and to arrive at new ways of making sense of things must be explained without reference to miracles, irrational leaps of thought, or blind impulse. We have to explain how our experience can grow and how the new can emerge from the old without merely replicating what has gone before". "New meaning," he concludes suggestively, "arises from and remains connected to preexisting patterns, qualities, and feelings".  Another particularly thorny consequence of embracing  the embodied mind theory would be to acknowledge that there is no such thing as "radical freedom,"i.e., "no transcendental self, no disembodied ego, to serve as the agent of free choice...". This embrace, Johnson notes, calls us to discover a "view of choice that is consistent with cognitive neuroscience and its insistence on the embodied mind and yet which doesn't make a shambles of our notions of moral responsibility".  This begins to be partly answered by Johnson's seventh consequence, a consequence which challenges many of our most cherished views of imagination, creativity, and transcendental freedom,even though we no longer rely on otherworldly visions of the divine, heavens, or disembodied souls: "Human spirituality is embodied" and not "vertically" transcendent. The dream of vertical transcendence, of escape above and outside of the body,  attempted to "solve the basic human problems that stem from the fact of human finiteness" out of a feeling that "the body must somehow be transcended if there are to be any satisfactory answers to the human condition of limitation, helplessness, and finiteness". The embodied mind theory, in contrast, suggests a glorious embodiment, a spirituality "grounded in our relation to the human and more-than-human world that we inhabit" ...a horizontal transcendence, "namely our ability both to transform experience and to be transformed ourselves by something that transcends us: the whole ongoing, ever-developing natural process of which we are a part".  Amen to that.

Monsieur Teste

Paul

Valéry

I have been rereading Valéry's Monsieur Teste (Mr. Head, from old French; Mr. Witness, from Latin testis), and considering the question of mind and matter. Monsieur Teste is, of course, a thought experiment in what it would mean to be all mind, cut off from the world and others, suspicious of sensations, abstract and isolated.  He is excruciatingly, heartlessly, exact, and contemptuous of the relatively vague experiences and expressions of the Other(s). While the whole question of mind's interaction with matter, or self's with the world and its others, is relevant in general for Musil's attempts, most of Monsieur Teste's considerations would probably have been too one-sided to appeal to Musil's more comprehensive vision. At times Teste's "tête" seems fatally pre-formed and tragically limited by its solipsism; elsewhere this mind is more open, expanding into infinite realms of possibility. In these moments he reminds me most of Musil and here we catch the sound of a kindred soul, or of what Teste calls in one lonely doubtful passage "another Self-Same," i.e., a person who might provide "an exact response" to his own mind. In Teste's "log book," for example, we read, under the heading of "The Rich in Spirit" this description:

             "This man had such possessions, such perspectives in himself; he was made of so many years of reading, refutations, meditations, inner combinations, observations; of such ramifications, that his responses were hard to predict; that he did not himself know where he would come out, what aspect would finally strike him, what feeling would prevail in him, what detours and what unexpected simplifications would occur, what desire would be born, what retort, what sudden lights! . . . "

And here especially we glimpse a kindred "other person" for our man of possibilities :

       "And perhaps he had reached that strange state of being unable to regard his own decision or inner response as anything but an expedient, knowing quite well that the development of his attention would be infinite and that the idea of finishing no longer has any meaning in a mind that knows itself well enough. He had come to that point of inner civilization where consciousness no longer allows an opinion to go unaccompanied by its procession of modalities, and finds repose (if this is repose) only in awareness of its own wonders, its own practices, substitutions, and innumerable precisions".

And finally:

         ". . . In his head or behind his closed eyes, curious rotations occurred -- changes, so various, so free, and yet so limited -- lights, like the windows of a house seen at night when someone is walking through it with a lamp, like distant revelries, or a night fair; but which, if you could approach, might change into railway stations and dancing savages -- or frightful misfortunes -- or truths and revelations . . .
              . . . As it were the sanctuary and brothel of possibilities.

             The habit of meditation made this mind live in the midst, and by means, of rare states; in a perpetual supposition of purely ideal experiences; in the continual use of extreme conditions and critical phases of thought . . .

             As if extreme rarefactions, unknown vacuums, hypothetical temperatures, monstrous pressures and charges, had been his natural resources -- as if nothing could be thought in him unless he submitted it, in the act, to the most energetic treatment, searching over the whole domain of existence."

Despite himself, perhaps, Valéry has gotten carried away with a sort of revery that belies Teste's supposed distance from the world. In fact, the windows of the house, mediated through those misleading and imprecise senses, see out as well as in, and language, as modest and daring interpreter, communicates and creates a basis for shared experience. Valéry  writes, answering his question of why Teste is impossible: 
"he is no other than the very demon of possibility... in this strange head, where philosophy has little credit, where language is always on trial, there is scarcely a thought that is not accompanied by the feeling that it is tentative...the short intense life of this brain is spent in supervising the mechanism by which the relations of the known and the unknown are established and organized".

And yet this experiment, worthy and instructive as it is, too must come to an end or alter its controls; it uses itself up; it reaches outside itself for response, for impetus, for antithesis, else it ends in sterility and silence, to which  the very writing of the book attests, a book that dares  to softly speak its wish for a "Self-Same"or an "exact response" in the form of a reader, while simultaneously asking for what might be more fruitful still: a resistance, a strong gust of wind or an irrefutable physical reality.