Interdisciplinary Perspectivist Approaches
Discussion
Eric Schaetzle:
"While Rovelli focuses on "relationalism" and takes Werner Heisenberg as his muse, in Posthumanist Performativity Karen Barad focuses on "agential realism" and Niels Bohr. They both come from a place of broad consilience. As Barad writes: "The “knower” does not stand in a relation of absolute externality to the natural world being investigated — there is no such exterior observational point." This much is clear, but there are important differences between where they place emphasis. For Barad, Bohr illuminates the agency of matter. Barad writes: "For Bohr, apparatuses are particular physical arrangements that give meaning to certain concepts to the exclusion of others; they are the local physical conditions that enable and constrain knowledge practices such as conceptualizing and measuring; they are productive of (and part of) the phenomena produced; they enact a local cut that produces “objects” of particular knowledge practices within the particular phenomena produced. On the basis of his profound insight that “concepts” (which are actual physical arrangements) and “things” do not have determinate boundaries, properties, or meanings apart from their mutual intra-actions, Bohr offers a new epistemological framework that calls into question the dualisms of object/subject, knower/known, nature/culture, and word/world... On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations — relations without preexisting relata. It makes no sense to talk about independently existing things as somehow behind or as the causes of phenomena. In essence, there are no noumena, only phenomena... On an agential realist account, discursive practices are not human-based activities but rather specific material (re)configurings of the world through which local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted."
Barad also provides the interesting background history Rovelli largely skips over: "The postulation of individually determinate entities with inherent properties is the hallmark of atomistic metaphysics. Atomism hails from Democritus. According to Democritus the properties of all things derive from the properties of the smallest unit—atoms (the “uncuttable” or “inseparable”). Liberal social theories and scientific theories alike owe much to the idea that the world is composed of individuals with separately attributable properties. An entangled web of scientific, social, ethical, and political practices, and our understanding of them, hinges on the various/differential instantiations of this presupposition. Much hangs in the balance in contesting its seeming inevitability." Our world of hyper-individualism may owe in part to the legacy of Democritus (as well as Parmenides, Zeno, and Plato, per McGilchrist). Barad is in good company with Latour, Haraway, and Bennett here, and the notions of agentic realism are well trod posthumanist ground. Related is Standpoint Theory (or Standpoint epistemology), about which Mila Ghorayeb writes “Theorizing that centers experiential knowledge is not a new feature of contemporary identity politics or of “postmodernism.” Early modern philosophers also spoke of socially situated knowledge. In Discourse on Method, René Descartes argued that diversity of opinion arises from different experiences. As such, those with different experiences will bring us different perspectives about how they experience the world and how we relate to each other.” This has been taken in many directions. Olufemi Taiwo cautions “[The] very strength of standpoint epistemology – its recognition of the importance of perspective – becomes its weakness when combined with deferential practical norms. A constructive approach would focus on the pursuit of specific goals or end results." Rovelli edges still further toward the relativism that Barad and others might shy away from. He is in apparent agreement with descriptions of agentic realism and the implications that follow, however there is a rot at the core of any materialisms, no matter whether these are posthumanist or not. And his reconfiguration of knowledge cuts still deeper.
Studies of perspectivism have also been introduced into contemporary anthropology, initially through the influence of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and his research into indigenous cultures of South America. Jon Goodbun wrote, "When goals are set by an instrumental conscious purpose based upon a necessarily partial viewpoint, and unmediated by a wider eco-systemic awareness, all kinds of pathologies play out [cf. McGilchrist]. Bateson developed research methods of “double-description” and “metalogues”, arguing that perceiving the patterns which connect living systems – essential for not breaking those relations – requires working with multiple views of the world. This method has been extended in recent years by radical anthropologists such as Eduardo de Viveiros de Castro and Eduardo Kuhn, through various multi-perspectivist approaches." Viveiros de Castro called to make anthropology a practice for “la décolonisation permanente de la pensée”. His name should be familiar to anyone who has read Eduardo Kohn's highly acclaimed book "How Forests Think". Kohn's work builds upon authors such as Latour, Haraway and Viveiros de Castro, and seeks to take the social sciences beyond the limits of strictly human relations. So here we have come full circle once again, making interdisciplinary links between physics and anthropology, between the relationalism of Rovelli and the perspectivism of Viveiros de Castro (we can even link this to politics, as Rovelli does with Bogdanov). In Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism Viveiros de Castro writes: "All beings see the world in the same way. But because affects, dispositions, and capacities render the body of every species unique, what changes is the world that they see." This echoes both Nagarjuna's perspectivism, "The wisdom of awakening bursts forth by itself", and Rovelli's statement that "facts are relative", they are perspectival. If we want to truly understand the perspective of someone who comes from a different culture and speaks a foreign language, translation alone may not be enough. Translation is a “mapping”. Maps can be very good, but they can also be deceptive if they contain convincing errors. We must agree with Alfred Korzybski that “a map is not the territory”, and recognize that as the complexity of what is translated increases, the fidelity of the map tends to decrease. Eventually one must learn the territory itself, the language and culture, and dispose of all maps, pass through all the filters, until reaching the final barrier which even those who share the same culture and language cannot penetrate, the irreducible features of perspective that language itself was invented to bridge.
Participatory Universe In attempting to characterize the unifying qualities of systems with phenomenal experience, Christof Koch said "if it feels like something to be such a system; it has an interior perspective. The complexity and dimensionality might differ vastly, but each one has its own crystal shape." Koch is famous for, among other things, working on the neural correlates of consciousness with Francis Crick and later with Giulio Tononi on "integrated information" theory. In the place of dominant interpretations of quantum mechanics with their reductive approach, Wolfgang Smith proposed the use of Thomistic and Aristotelian concepts, like "potency and act". He believes these better explain how a "corporeal object" and its associated "physical object" constitute a whole of which either aspect may be dealt with depending upon our perspective, but cannot be reduced one to the other. By comparison, Carlo Rovelli, also a critic of many of these same interpretations, suggested that in fact there are no objects per se at all, and that the apparent paradoxes of QM are better understood using a relational ontology as the starting point. Sterling Brown, the actor who played Randall Pearson in the drama series "This is Us", said “Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.” Koch and Brown are two people who generally are not mentioned together, but the metaphor of a translucent crystal, prism, or lens recalls the etymology of the word perspective, which Walter Benesch, in his 1997 book "An Introduction to Comparative Philosophy", said combines the roots 'specere' (to look) with 'per' (through). Thus perspective is 'seeing through'. It has taken me over 20 years, but I feel that I now understand the most difficult chapters of that book. The moment of enlightenment could perhaps be traced back to Rovelli's presentation on 6/2/21 for the annual Mike Jackson Lecture on Systems Thinking, when he noted that relational quantum mechanics (RQM) describes how systems manifest themselves in interactions. He was clear that this is "relational or relative (perspectivism), not subjective. It does not depend on the knowledge of a subject, it is rather about the structure of relational phenomena." (Similarly, Deleuze wrote: "Such is the foundation of perspectivism. It does not express a dependency on a predefined subject; on the contrary, whatever accedes to the point of view will be subject.") Rovelli's fundamental description of relationality opened my mind to seeing things I formerly thought I understood, but in an entirely new light. Conceptual links that seemed tenuous and obscure made more sense.
This applies to the outline and content of Benesch's magnum opus. He wrote "Consciousness, the elements of our experience, and symbols can be objectified if viewed as independent objects. But this is always accomplished by an observing, thinking subject from a point of view, in an actual situation, whose interpretation is dependent upon a sequence of remembered, possible situations, in which all distinctions made and names applied are a synthesis of the aspects of human experience and the perspectives that observers and their cultures have upon these (200)... Understanding, then, is a combination of aspect and perspective, while failure to understand or to know would entail trying to separate aspect from perspective (31)... Perhaps our very survival depends upon this. Certainly the quality of the mental and spiritual lives we live in philosophical space presupposes it. (201)" Benesch frequently turned to Feng Youlan, who wrote "Things are ever subject to change and have many aspects. Therefore many views can be held about one and the same thing. Once we say this, we assume that a higher standpoint exists. If we accept this assumption, there is no need to make a decision ourselves about what is right and what is wrong. The argument explains itself." (212) In his 2014 article, "The Paradox of Thinking and The Unthinkable", Walter Benesch wrote: "Nature is a continuum. Human beings are that aspect of the nature continuum that is aware and capable of having a perspective upon itself as a changing dynamic process... The 19th and 20th Centuries marked a shift in the physical and social sciences from the axiomatic and materialistic objectivism of the Greek philosophers of the Axial Age toward a dynamic process view of both nature and knowledge. This is a view which is much closer to the views of many traditional Chinese philosophers of the Axial Age. This shift has been accompanied by a realization of the implicit necessity of accommodating the ‘mind of the observer’ as an aspect of the ‘nature of the observed’ in the process of observation within what Wheeler calls a participant/ spectator universe. This not only challenges the absolutist, mechanistic presuppositions of naïve empiricism and classical physical science; it also requires replacing them with a flexible epistemological methodology for accommodating the rapidly changing theories of nature in physical and social science."
Thomas Metzinger developed the concept of “minimal phenomenal experience” (MPE) from that of “minimal phenomenal selfhood” (MPS), which included a “weak, geometrical first-person perspective”. He asked “is perspectivalness a necessary condition for phenomenality?” He said no, because the definition of perspective he used requires that a self-conscious “epistemic agent model” is alert, oriented, and has executive control in terms of attentional agency. Still, it may be worth asking if it is really possible to ignore the fundamentally perspectival (or relational) nature of experiential content. Metzinger's definitional choice was likely made to meet the qualifications he assumes are necessary for nonduality, which he associates with a “God’s-eye point of view”, however this seems conceptually flawed, given the assertions of numerous philosophers and physicists that this would be a "view from nowhere". Given his chosen criteria, the decision to exclude the observer from phenomenal experience makes sense, but is incompatible with relational physics. This is too high a price to maintain the internal consistency of his arguments, which are then reduced to an inapplicable thought experiment. Metzinger should rather consider the possibility of a nondual and nonabsolute relativist (or multi-perspectivism) approach, beginning with Zhuangzi. Rovelli’s definition of perspective is compatible with this, and in contrast to the definition used by Metzinger, is understood to be simply how “systems manifest themselves in interactions”. This could make it a fundamentally constitutive feature for MPE. Perhaps a reformulation of MPE as “minimal perspectival experience” using Rovelli’s definition of perspective would also be useful for understanding Zhuangzi’s notion of “fasting of the mind” (zuowang, 坐忘) and Dogen’s notion of perspectival delimitation (as described by Bret Davis). These concepts can then expand our understanding of how an empathic relationship with all life (and ourselves) is possible, and further develop Benesch’s aspect/perspective dimension of philosophical space, as it draws upon support from Zhuangzi. Defining the minimal qualities of perspective and contextual depth would allow one to more easily engage in the transformative potential of perspective, whether expanded, contracted, or shifted, that both Zhuangzi encouraged and has since been recommended by many others (see Bach, Barrett, and Vance below). Regardless of whether conceived of as minimal/maximal, shallow/deep, narrow/broad, or focused/diffuse, the 'fasting of the mind' concept is intended to enable appropriate transformations of perspective, perhaps through downgrading weights on our epistemic priors, loosening the grip of habitual patterns of thought when they become maladaptive so that we can more efficiently respond to environmental change and stressors. A. C. Graham notes that such a person is in accordance with "the transforming processes of heaven and earth, and will say the right thing as naturally as a bird sings.” What Metzinger or Friston might refer to as the agent's "generative self model" is intended to harmonize the agent and environment in a single, synchronous relationship through continuous model updating, but this is prone to malfunction. Mind-fasting could therefore be understood as a corrective measure for improving this relational dynamic.
It has been suggested (though it is a simplification) that the only thing that is absolute is relative, or equivalently, only the relative is absolute. This is the Heraclitean dictum: panta rhei, everything changes, and it appears paradoxical to the absolutist Western worldview. Returning to Rovelli's arguments for relational quantum mechanics (RQM), or James Ladyman's description of ontic structural realism (OSR) should be helpful to explain it. Ladyman points out that fundamental physics points toward the conclusion that “at bottom” there are no “things,” only structure. This will sound surprising to many people. The most interesting debates are not about whether there are things or not, but rather how exactly we can best characterize this "thingless" structure. For example, Yuval Noah Harari suggests it might be pure information, the "dataism" he mentioned in his book Homo Deus. Rovelli's interpretation is that reality is relational, not relational in the sense of requiring conscious subjective observers, but rather in the sense of how one electron relates to another electron (or other particle), or more generally, how “systems manifest themselves in interactions”. There's a lot to unpack there, but at essence it involves a paradigm shift from objects to relationships as the defining feature of reality, and that goes for whether you or I are a part of that reality or not - it's thoroughly mind-independent. The hardest part though is just making the paradigm shift. As David Mermin describes it, "correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not", or otherwise stated "relations without relata". But what is particularly interesting is the implications of these theories. Our culture is bound up in our physical worldview. If we are going to understand minds, we will need to understand them by means of a properly formulated physics, and this will in turn influence our cultural worldview, just as evolution has remained a lightning rod of controversy to this day with real consequences. Depending on whether I believe humans were created fully formed out of clay, or whether I believe intraspecific conflict shapes social dynamics, or whether I hold that synergistic dynamics determine evolutionary phase transitions, any and all of these could influence my choices and behavior considerably. A misunderstanding (or denial) of either evolution or physics tends to produce maladaptive forms of politics and economics, with their corresponding social impacts. Some conception of perspectivism is likely to emerge from a more accurate relational understanding of reality. It won't look like the forms we may be most familiar with or correspond to the way we have traditionally defined these terms, there are certainly many poorly articulated versions in circulation today, but it's notable that there are also many which are compatible with our early intuitions regarding mind-independent descriptions of reality. If we are going to transform our diseased culture, we will need to engage in productive discussion with some of these."
(https://pedon.blogspot.com/2021/06/relationalism.html)