On Reason and Spectral Machines: Robert Brandom and Bounded Posthumanism

I distinguish two theses regarding technological successors to current humans (posthumans): an anthropologically bounded posthumanism (ABP) and an anthropologically unbounded posthumanism (AUP). ABP proposes transcendental conditions on agency that can be held to constrain the scope for “weirdness” in the space of possible posthumans a priori. AUP, by contrast, leaves the nature of posthuman agency to be settled empirically (or technologically). Given AUP there are no “future proof” constraints on the strangeness of posthuman agents. -/- In Posthuman Life I defended AUP via a critique of Donald Davidson’s work on intentionality and a “naturalistic deconstruction” of transcendental phenomenology (See also Roden 2013). In this paper I extend this critique to Robert Brandom’s account of the relationship between normativity and intentionality in Making It Explicit (MIE) and in other writings. -/- Brandom’s account understands intentionality in terms of the capacity to undertake and ascribe inferential normative commitments. It makes “first class agency” dependent on the ability to participate in discursive social practices. It implies that posthumans – insofar as they qualify as agents at all – would need to be social and discursive beings. -/- The problem with this approach, I will argue, is that it replicates a problem that Brandom discerns in Dennett’s intentional stance approach. It tells us nothing about the conditions under which a being qualifies as a potential interpreter and thus little about the conditions for meaning, understanding or agency. -/- I support this diagnosis by showing that Brandom cannot explain how a non-sapient community could bootstrap itself into sapience by setting up a basic deontic scorekeeping system without appealing (along with Davidson and Dennett) to the ways in which an idealized observer would interpret their activity. -/- This strongly suggests that interpretationist and pragmatist accounts cannot explain the semantic or the intentional without regressing to assumptions about ideal interpreters or background practices whose scope they are incapable of delimiting. It follows that Anthropologically Unbounded Posthumanism is not seriously challenged by the claim that agency and meaning are “constituted” by social practices. -/- AUP implies that we can infer no claims about the denizens of “Posthuman Possibility Space” a priori, by reflecting on the pragmatic transcendental conditions for semantic content. We thus have no reason to suppose that posthuman agents would have to be subjects of discourse or, indeed, members of communities. The scope for posthuman weirdness can be determined by recourse to engineering alone

Deconstruction and excision in philosophical posthumanism

I distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in human terms. I claim that this transcendence can be viewed as analogous to that of the thing-in-itself in Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy. This schema implies an impasse for transhumanism because, while the radically non-human or posthuman would elude evaluation according to transhumanist principles such as personal autonomy or liberal freedom, it is morally unacceptable for transhumanists to discount the possible outcomes of their favoured policies. I then consider whether the insights of critical posthumanists, who employ a cyborg perspective on human-technology couplings, can dissolve this impasse by “deconstructing” the opposition between the human and its prospective posthuman successors. By exhibiting its logical basis in the postructuralist philosophies of Derrida and Deleuze, I show that the cyborg perspective is consistent with both cyborg humanism and a modified speculative posthumanism. This modified account treats the alterity of the posthuman as a historically emergent feature of human and posthuman multiplicities that must be understood through their technical or imaginative synthesis, not in relation to a transcendental conception of the human

Nature’s Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalized Phenomenology

Phenomenology is based on a doctrine of evidence that accords a crucial role to the human capacity to conceptualise or ‘intuit’ features of their experience. However, there are grounds for holding that some experiential entities to which phenomenologists are committed must be intuition-transcendent or ‘dark’. Examples of dark phenomenology include the very fine-grained perceptual discriminations which Thomas Metzinger calls ‘Raffman Qualia’ and, crucially, the structure of temporal awareness. It can be argued, on this basis, that phenomenology is in much the same epistemological relationship to its own subject matter as descriptive (i.e. ‘phenomenological’) physics or biology are to physical and biological reality: phenomenology cannot tell us what phenomenology is really ‘about’. This does not mean we should abjure phenomenology. It implies, rather, that the domain of phenomenology is not the province of a self-standing, autonomous discipline but must be investigated with any empirically fruitful techniques that are open to us (e.g. computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, etc.). Finally, it entails that while a naturalized phenomenology should be retained as a descriptive, empirical method, it should not be accorded transcendental authority

Promethean and Posthuman Freedom: Brassier on Improvisation and Time

Ray Brassier's "Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom" (written for the 2013 collaboration with Basque noise artist Mattin at Glasgow's Tramway) is a terse but insightful discussion of the notion of freedom in improvisation. He argues that we should view freedom not as the determination of an act from outside the causal order, but as the reflective self-determination by action within the causal order. This requires a system that acts in conformity to rules but can represent and modify these rules with implications for its future behaviour.Brassier does not provide a detailed account of how self-determination works in improvisation. His text implies that the act of improvisation involves an encounter between rule-governed rationality and idiomatic patterns or causes but does not specify how such rules operate in music, what their nature is or how the encounter between rules and more rudimentary “pattern-governed” behaviour occurs.I will argue that, in any case, there are no such rules to be had. Instead, claims about what is permissible or implied in musical processes index highly-context sensitive perceptual and affective responses to musical events. I develop this picture in the light of recent accounts of predictive processing and active inference in cognitive science.This account provides an alternate way of expressing Brassier’s remarks on the relationship between music and history in “Unfree Improvisation” one that eschews normative discourse in favour of an ontology of social and biological assemblages, their affects, and the processes they entrain.This adjustment is of more than aesthetic interest. Brassier’s text suggests that the temporality of the improvising act models an insurgent relation to time: specifically, the remorseless temporality explored in his writings on Prometheanism and Radical Enlightenment. I will conclude by using use this analogy to elaborate the idea of a posthuman agency adapted to a hypermodern milieu of self-augmenting technological change

Algorithms for the unitary eigenvalue problem

Eigenvalues of unitary matrices arise in a variety of contexts in applied mathematics. This dissertation present four new algorithms for computing the eigenvalues of unitary matrices. In chapter 1, we give an overview these algorithms, and then survey the major applications where eigenvalues of unitary matrices arise. In chapter 2, we present the unitary QR algorithm, an algorithm that can used to compute all of the eigenvalues of a unitary matrix. In chapter 3, we present two Krylov space algorithms that approximate some of the eigenvalues of a large unitary matrix. Finally, in chapter 4, we present an algorithm that compute the eigenvalues of a unitary matrix U when U is expressed as a product U = U1 Un of unitary matrices of the same order. As a special case, we consider the generalized eigenvalue problem for unitary matrices

Disconnection at the limit : posthumanism, deconstruction and non-philosophy

Speculative posthumanism (SP) conceives posthumans as agents made inhuman by a technological disconnection or ‘withdrawal’ from human social systems (The disconnection thesis – DT). DT understands becoming nonhuman in terms of agential independence. An artefact like a robot is a ‘wide human’ so long as it depends on its human-related functions to exist. But what is an agent? SP forecloses a purely conceptual response to this question because it rejects transcendental accounts of subjectivity founded in human experience or social practice (Unbounded Posthumanism – UP). UP renders this question illegitimate because it denies there is any theory of agency that could apply to all agents. Not only does DT not tell us what posthumans are like, it has no criteria for determining when disconnection occurs. It follows that understanding the posthuman (if possible) must proceed without criteria. The content of unbounded posthumanism is produced by disconnection rather than by the schematic theoretical content of DT. I will argue that this implies an intimate relationship between the understanding and practice in posthumanism that allows us to draw fertile analogies between UP and two other ‘philosophies of the limit’ Derrida’s Deconstruction and Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy.peer-reviewe

Reduction, Elimination and Radical Uninterpretability

In this paper I argue that the anti-reductionist thesis supports a case for the uselessness of intentional idioms in the interpretation of highly flexible, self-modifying agents that I refer to as “hyperplastic” agents. An agent is hyperplastic if it can make arbitrarily fine changes to any part of its functional or physical structure without compromising its agency or its capacity for hyperplasticity. Using Davidson’s anomalous monism (AM) as an exemplar of anti-reductionism, I argue that AM implies that no hyperplastic could use intentional psychology to predict its future intentional states or the psychological consequences of self-alterations. This is because AM implies there would be no laws allowing the hyperplastic to infer the psychological consequences of its self-alterations. This implies that no generalisations linking current to future psychological states would hold either - these could always be defeated by a self-intervention carried out by the hyperplastic. By the same token, neither hyperplastics nor human interpreters could use intentional psychology to understand the behaviour of other hyperplastics. Radical interpretation of hyperplastic agents - if such there were - would be impossible. It follows that were humans to become hyperplastic posthumans, intentional psychology would have to be instrumentally eliminated because neither the capacity nor the linguistic idiom for attributing propositional attitudes would retain predictive or hermeneutic utility

AN EVALUATION OF BETTER PRICING UNDER COMPETITIVE CONTRACTING PROCEDURES FOR NAVWAR AND NIWC PACIFIC ADVISORY AND ASSISTANCE SERVICES

A goal of the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command and the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is to acquire advisory and assistance services (A&AS) on time and at fair and reasonable prices. Although these organizations employ a range of competitive and non-competitive contracting procedures, the efficacy is unclear toward this end. This research project uses quantitative data analysis of FY20 and FY21 Federal Procurement Data System outputs totaling $3.4B, emphasizing Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity Multiple Award Contracts (IDIQ/MACs). The results indicate that both organizations achieve better pricing under competitive procedures instead of an exception to fair opportunity or when the organizations do not have a reasonable expectation of receiving multiple offers. Recommendations include maximizing competition under MACs, provided multiple offers can be expected and exceptions to fair opportunity are not applicable. In these situations, the government may want to consider single award IDIQ contract vehicles to satisfy procurement requirements. These vehicles may result in better pricing compared to using an exception to fair opportunity under a MAC.CivilianCivilian, Department of the NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Promethean and Posthuman Freedom: Brassier on Improvisation and Time

Ray Brassier's "Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom" (written for the 2013 collaboration with Basque noise artist Mattin at Glasgow's Tramway) is a terse but insightful discussion of the notion of freedom in improvisation. He argues that we should view freedom not as the determination of an act from outside the causal order, but as the reflective self-determination by action within the causal order. This requires a system that acts in conformity to rules but can represent and modify these rules with implications for its future behaviour. Brassier does not provide a detailed account of how self-determination works in improvisation. His text implies that the act of improvisation involves an encounter between rule-governed rationality and idiomatic patterns or causes but does not specify how such rules operate in music, what their nature is or how the encounter between rules and more rudimentary “pattern-governed” behaviour occurs. I will argue that, in any case, there are no such rules to be had. Instead, claims about what is permissible or implied in musical processes index highly-context sensitive perceptual and affective responses to musical events. I develop this picture in the light of recent accounts of predictive processing and active inference in cognitive science. This account provides an alternate way of expressing Brassier’s remarks on the relationship between music and history in “Unfree Improvisation” one that eschews normative discourse in favour of an ontology of social and biological assemblages, their affects, and the processes they entrain. This adjustment is of more than aesthetic interest. Brassier’s text suggests that the temporality of the improvising act models an insurgent relation to time: specifically, the remorseless temporality explored in his writings on Prometheanism and Radical Enlightenment. I will conclude by using use this analogy to elaborate the idea of a posthuman agency adapted to a hypermodern milieu of self-augmenting technological change