Causality Reading Group: JF Martel presenting Quentin Mesailloux's "Time Without Becoming"

Okay.

So, welcome to the

I'm glad everyone's just checked in with

their their perspective on time. And so,

I

for me that's a prompt I've used before

and similar to like asking people like

their religious background of their

upbringing. I think asking for people's

perspectives on time really like reveals

them in very interesting

ways. And so,

you know, it takes a bit of time, but

I'm I'm glad that we we went through

that. And I feel like I know you all a

little bit better.

So, today we're reading Quentin

Meillassoux

Time without Becoming which and J.F.

Martel is going to be

leading the discussion. So, he'll he'll

speak for you know, around half an hour

and then we'll move into conversation as

always.

Um

I'm really excited to have J.F. Martel

here.

So, I think I first came across J.F.

through his podcast Weird Studies which

is excellent. And so, if you haven't

seen it it's this you know, very

well-read thoughtful experimental artful

podcast. He's a co-host there and you

know, I've learned a ton about all kinds

of branches of

philosophies mainstream and esoteric.

And so, yeah, really appreciating having

him here. I also attended his

art in in the age of AI or art in the

age of artifice

series which as someone who spent a lot

of time in the AI and art space

there's a lot of the same dialogue kind

of spinning its wheels and this is

something that just like felt like it'd

come from another planet and was really

really engaging with these very topical

questions in a way that I found really

really refreshing. And so,

yeah, really appreciating having J.F.

here. J.F. has also got a feature in the

upcoming issue of Orbital Studies which

is also excellent.

of other things which I'm sure he can

tell you about. I think he's working on

a second book right now. He's a

filmmaker.

With that I'll I'll hand it over to J.F.

and the floor is yours.

Thank you Thank Thank you, Xavier. Um

Yeah, so

from the

pre-recording discussion I gathered that

most of us here probably aren't super

familiar

with the kind of philosophy that

Meillassoux is doing in this in this

paper.

Um

And so, I think that just to begin, I

think I would like to just

make it clear that that Meillassoux's

operating here in a tradition of

philosophizing that's very different

from the type of philosophy you'd expect

to see for example, in a philosophy of

science syllabus in North America.

So, um

he's operating in what's called

continental philosophy.

So, his major references are people like

Bergson who whom we talked about before

the recording or Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze

or Hegel or Heidegger. Kant, you know.

Um and so, he's operating within that

tradition where philosophy um

begins to blur the lines that separated

from

more literary enterprises, essay writing

in the Montaigne tradition or even

sometimes fiction

poetry.

Um which isn't to say that it's not uh

thinking that it's not rigorous. It has

its own rigor.

But I hope that the discussion we have

following my my presentation which I

hope won't be too long

will allow me if need be to maybe

clarify some of the ideas and try to

adapt them to a

a paradigm that's more aligned with

an analytic approach or scientific

approach cuz I do think that there's no

incompatibility here. There's just a

translation problem sometimes.

So, um

Okay. So, who is Quentin Meillassoux?

He is a French philosopher still alive

very much. Uh still writing although

he's been silent for many years now.

Um his breakout work has not yet been

published. It's called L'Inexistence

Divine or the Divine Inexistence and

that was his doctoral dissertation

which to read it you can find a pirated

PDF somewhere on the internet or you can

travel to Paris and go to the

Bibliothèque Nationale or whatever it is

and try to find a the copy there.

Um but it has a kind of almost legendary

status in certain

sectors. And

his second book or his his first

actually

published book called After Finitude,

Après la la finitude

is essentially

um

uh

a part of the Divine Inexistence which

has not been published. Um and the paper

that I shared with you

called Time without Becoming is

essentially a précis of the core

argument from that first published book

After Finitude.

After After Finitude, he wrote a book

called The Number and the Siren, Le

Nombre et la Sirène which is an

ingenious absolutely brilliant analysis

of a poem by Mallarmé, Stéphane Mallarmé

the French decadent poet or symbolist

poet depending on how you want to argue

it. Um and what he does there is he

engages in a kind of literary exercise

of deciphering the poem and he brings

the poem and Mallarmé's general kind of

poetic philosophy in line with his own

philosophy of absolute contingency which

we'll be exploring today. And then after

that there's just one tiny little book

called Science Fiction and Extra-Science

Fiction in English which is essentially

just a series one or two lectures he

gave. Uh really fascinating but nowhere

near the magnitude of the preceding

works and since then it's been quiet.

So, we're all waiting with baited breath

because as you'll see today or as you as

you saw if you finished reading the

paper he's only gotten started and he

hasn't really achieved his goal yet.

Um

Well, what is that goal? So, Meillassoux

just to to to kind of situate him.

Meillassoux's a rationalist. So, he's

coming straight out of the tradition

that begins with Descartes. Um he is not

an empiricist.

Um

the other thing I wanted to say was that

Meillassoux is a materialist but of a

very very strange kind. He calls his

philosophy speculative materialism.

Um and I would include it in the kind of

array of new paths in philosophy that is

sometimes referred to as weird

weird realism. Um

or speculative realism.

Um and so, causality for Meillassoux

exists. He is a champion of the natural

sciences. Um but causality cannot be

thought of in law-like law-like terms.

Causality for him must be thought of as

almost accidental as you'll see.

Um

and because behind the appearance of

causal closure for Meillassoux there is

a seething what he calls hyperchaos

that must be thought. It's not something

we can test for but it's something that

all your thoughts deep deep down

presuppose.

And that hyperchaos transcends or defies

all sense of causality. In fact, it

defies reason.

Um

Henri Bergson whom we talked about

earlier

uh once said that what what we need

today is a metaphysics

that suits and accommodates natural

science. We need a science needs its

metaphysics.

And Gilles Deleuze who was a a disciple

of Bergson not not a in

not an IRL disciple like he lived after

Bergson. Uh he started after Bergson had

passed away but really was tremendously

influenced by Bergson repeated this

claim that the goal was should be to

give science its metaphysics.

Science is calling for a metaphysics

that doesn't yet exist.

Meillassoux agrees with them but he says

that they both failed miserably.

Precisely because what they did was they

created more metaphysics when what

science calls for isn't is the end of

metaphysics. And the presentation of a

new ontology, a new way of thinking

about being itself that is not

metaphysical.

Now, Meillassoux is not the first

metaphysician to claim he's not a

metaphysician and that metaphysics is

dead. We'll just in parentheses this is

almost a kind of

uh necessary obligatory gesture. But in

his case there's some sense to it, I

think.

So, what he wants to give us is a

rational ontology

that ultimately that that that that that

that heaves to reason but ultimately

undoes even reason.

In order to then

bring reason back almost like a phoenix

out of the ashes. Okay? So, it's a very

interesting move he's making or series

of moves.

The big problem, the reason why Bergson

and Deleuze failed according to

Meillassoux is that

they they are both proponents of what

Meillassoux calls correlationism.

And this is the kind of foundational

gesture of modern philosophy. By modern

philosophy I mean philosophy starting

with Immanuel Kant and his so-called

critical turn, right? Immanuel Kant puts

an end to the old metaphysical

speculation. Suddenly we can no longer

talk about the world as it is in itself.

We can only talk about our subjective

access to the world. Okay? And so

Meillassoux calls this correlationism.

So, what I'm going to do is read you

something I've prepared for this

in order to be clear and then it might

get a little dense, but hopefully in the

discussion afterwards we can clear up

certain areas and I can reread certain

passages if you need me to.

I'm trying not to be dense. I try to be

very clear. I'm not I'm not into the

obscurantist sort of edge of philosophy.

I like to be very clear, but sometimes

you know, you got to get into the weeds.

Um

but before I read, I just want to

explain three key terms

from the philosophical tradition which

you may or may not be familiar with.

These terms are necessity, contingency,

and possibility because these play

there's a whole kind of calculus of

these concepts in what I'm going to read

in in the paper that hopefully you've

read.

Um

so necessity

in in philosophy in metaphysics when I

say that something is necessary, I'm

saying that this thing this entity this

event must be.

What I'm saying is that to deny it would

involve a contradiction.

So for example, if I say the triangle

has three sides,

this is necessary, right? Because

triangle means shape with three sides.

Um and so

you might say existence is necessary

because existence must exist. I cannot

deny the existence of existence without

contradiction. So just a kind of a banal

example.

Contingency means

that something if something is

contingent, it happens to be. It could

exist or not exist without

contradiction. So for example, you or

me, we are a contingent. We know that

we might never have been born

that the world doesn't require us to

exist in order to exist in itself.

Um and or the color of a car, a blue car

could have been red, etc. you know?

That's contingency.

And then possibility is

defines what could be. So that is to say

what I can think of as as potentially

being without contradiction. So for

example, a unicorn is possible. A horse

with a horn is perfectly possible.

Didn't evolve here on Earth as far as we

know, but it could. You could imagine

that on some far-flung planet there's a

horse-like creature with a horn that

would match to every in every detail our

definition of a unicorn including maybe

even the healing powers of its horn. Who

knows, you know? The point is there's no

contradiction in the idea.

Um

however, if I think of an unmarried

bachelor to take the typical the old

example in philosophy, that is

impossible because a bachelor means

someone who's married. Therefore, an

unmarried bachelor is a contradiction.

Therefore, that is impossible. Or is it?

But anyways.

Um so without further ado, let me read

what I've prepared and hopefully

this will be I'll be able here to kind

of deliver to you the essence of

Meillassoux's paper.

So correlationism

insists

that we can't know the in-itself.

Right?

That we can't know ultimate truths about

reality because anything we say about

reality necessarily includes the act of

saying it.

In other words, we can't speak of the

world without us, that is without

consciousness.

Because all of our claims already

presuppose the consciousness from which

we speak.

There's no view from nowhere to put it

in a banal way. Every view assumes a

viewer, a mind, a thought.

Thought and world are inextricably

correlated to one another. Hence the

term correlation. There is no escape

from correlation.

Here's a quote from the paper on page

one.

Quote, the argument for this thesis is

as simple to formulate as it is

difficult to refute.

It can be called the argument from the

circle

and consists in remarking that every

objection against correlationism

is an objection produced by your

thinking and so dependent upon it.

When you speak against correlation, you

forget that you speak against

correlation and hence from the viewpoint

of your own mind or culture or epoch,

etc.

The circle means that there is a vicious

circle in any naive realism.

A performative contradiction through

which you refute what you say or think

by your very act of saying or thinking

it.

End quote.

It was by overlooking this that the old

pre-Kantian metaphysics was able to make

claims about necessary beings like God

or laws

and thereby to postulate the absolute.

Kant put an end to that old metaphysics

and ushered in what Meillassoux calls

correlationism.

Correlationism is first and foremost an

anti-absolutism.

What it denies at bottom is the

possibility of making absolute claims,

claims that were commonplace and indeed

expected of philosophers before the

critical turn occasioned by Kant.

Unfortunately, this anti-absolutist

stance creates serious problems for a

correlationist reception of the

discoveries and theories of natural

science

which necessarily and and by its very

nature assumes the literal truth or the

possible literal truth of its

statements.

Something that philosophically speaking

amounts to naive realism

understood as the correspondence or

adequation of thinking and being of the

mind and the world. Science assumes that

the mind is able to grok the world as it

is. It does this as a matter of course.

Meillassoux demonstrates the aporia or

the paradox of the very notion of a

correlationist science through the

problem of what he calls the

arch-fossil.

He gives two examples of arch-fossils in

his in his paper, radioactive isotopes

and starlight.

Both of these can serve to index events

that occurred out there without us long

before the appearance of life on Earth.

The arch-fossil allows science to make

what he calls ancestral claims, that is

claims of the type for example

that the Big Bang happened 14 billion

years ago or that the Earth was formed

4.5 billion years ago.

For science, such claims are not

intended to describe events within

subjective consciousness.

They're meant to describe events that

took place long before anything like a

conscious subject existed.

If correlationism is to remain

consistent, it can't take the ancestral

claims of science on their face. At

best, it can say that science describes

the past as it appears for us. Indeed,

the past itself is the past only for us.

It tells us nothing about the world

without us, the world in itself.

We're always already in the picture.

That is the correlationist circle. And

this troubles Meillassoux because he's

seeking a way to recognize the

exceptional strength of correlationism

while nevertheless affirming the

validity of scientific materialism as a

description of the real world, the world

as it exists with or without us.

Correlationism is thus uneasily opposed

to the natural sciences.

But it's much more confidently opposed

to idealism.

Okay? So for Meillassoux, idealism or

more broadly subjectivism because he

wants to speak here of all those

philosophies that make the subject

essential.

For Meillassoux, idealism tries to

supersede the more skeptical form of

correlationism by turning the

correlation itself into a new absolute.

So subjectivism

claims that

the reason we can't conceive a reality

that's radically exterior to any subject

is that no such reality is possible.

The subject is the absolute and

necessary condition of all existence,

all being. Idealism, of course, as you

probably know, is the philosophical

philosophical position that claims that

mind is all that exists and that

everything supervenes on mind. In other

words, subjectivity, however construed,

is fundamental and the material world

emerges as the simply permutations of

that fundamental mind.

For idealism, without the subject there

is no world.

In this way, the correlationist circle

is absolutized.

And natural science becomes merely a

kind of commentary within the closed

world of human subjectivity.

So you can see here that correlationism

uh it it can

turn into idealism the minute it makes

the correlation which means the

necessary connection of all statements

about the world to the stating of that

statement itself, it can make that the

absolute. And therefore it goes back to

the old metaphysics, but makes

itself

the kind of fundamental ground of being.

So if correlationism is is defined

precisely by its rejection of absolutes,

it has to find a way to refute its own

absolutization in subjectivism.

Meillassoux argues that the only way to

do so is by making correlationism's

programmatic negation of absolutes.

It's necessary rejection of all

necessary beings more than an opinion.

The negation of absolutes has to become

necessity in itself.

In other words, what correlation needs

to to defeat idealism is an absolute

refutation of all absolutes.

And this leads me a suit to the decisive

question.

This is where he makes the argument. Can

thought think itself as contingent

rather than necessary?

Can we conceive the extinction of

thought and the continuation of a world

without thought?

Never mind whether we can imagine it

phenomenologically.

The question is whether we can conceive

it logically as a real and dense

possibility, to quote Meillassoux.

If we could not, then it'd be impossible

to conceive our own death, something we

are of course all perfectly able to do.

To think my death, I must think a real

possibility that doesn't depend on my

thinking it because the dead don't

think.

If death depended on my thinking it, it

could not I could never actually die.

Therefore, the very intelligibility of

death requires a possibility that's

independent of correlation,

outside the circle.

Ultimately, what Meillassoux's talking

about here is the apodictic contingency

of thought itself, which means that

thought is by definition and uh

contingent. It could or could not be.

We to think

thought as necessary would involve for

Meillassoux a contradiction.

Even as the inexorable correlate of all

statements of contingent facts, thought

reveals itself as contingent in nature

when we assess it rationally.

Thought can or even must think its own

contingency.

Mind can or must think its own

facticity, which means the same thing.

Subjectivism therefore errs when it

claims that the subject or subjectivity

is necessary. The subject is only

conceivable as contingent.

Okay? So, correlationism is thereby

radicalized by Meillassoux. But in being

radicalized, it's defeated.

And a way opens up back to a kind of

realism that he's seeking.

Correlation thus radicalized affirms the

contingency of all things. And in fact,

it affirms contingency as the only

necessity.

And in so far as this necessity can't

itself be grounded in thought,

this absolute contingency

locates itself outside of thought. It

becomes the new in itself,

not as a thing or entity or God, but as

the necessary nonexistence of any

necessary thing or entity.

Correlationism refutes idealism only by

refuting itself. Because in refuting

idealism, it has found something that is

not correlated to thought, absolute

contingency.

Meillassoux calls this strange in itself

hyperchaos, distinguishing it from

ordinary intramundane chaos, the kind of

chaos you might talk about in physics,

by characterizing characterizing it as a

form of time,

a time that is no more aligned with

disorder than with order,

a purely creative and destructive time,

distinct from the time of physics,

capable of making or breaking any law,

entity, or being at any moment without

reason.

The principle governing this hyperchaos

is what Meillassoux calls the principle

of unreason.

In other words, reason followed

rigorously to its end destroys the

principle of sufficient reason

and with it causality and reveals an

a-rational power at the heart of all

things.

And I'll end my little talk here by

reading a quote from After Finitude,

which is the book that this paper is

kind of drawing on.

Can you repeat again Kant's principle of

sufficient reason? I forget what it is.

Well, the principle of sufficient reason

is is not Kant, it's actually Leibniz.

And it's the idea that anything that

happens has a reason to it to happen.

Anything that exists has a reason to

exist. And Meillassoux is saying that

this this principle is radically false.

We can get into the why after.

But here's that little quote that I'm

giving to you for for more poetic

reasons, but I think it really kind of

conveys something of the energy of

Meillassoux's philosophy.

So, he's talking here about hyperchaos,

this

this nonentity behind all things.

Quote, if we look through the aperture

which we have opened onto the absolute,

what we see is a rather menacing power,

something insensible and capable of

destroying both both things and worlds,

of bringing forth monstrous absurdities,

yet also of never doing anything, of

realizing every dream, but also every

nightmare, of engendering random and

frenetic transformations, or conversely,

of producing a universe that remains

motionless down to its ultimate

recesses, like a cloud bearing the

fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright

spells, if only for an interval of

disquieting calm.

We see an omnipotence equal to that of

the Cartesian God and capable of

anything, even the even the

inconceivable.

But an an omnipotence that has become

autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid

of the other divine perfections, a power

with neither goodness nor wisdom,

ill-disposed to reassure thought about

the veracity of its distinct ideas.

We see something akin to time, but a but

a time that is inconceivable for physics

since it is capable of destroying

without cause or reason every physical

law, just as it is inconceivable for

metaphysics since it is capable of

destroying every determinate entity,

even a God, even God.

This is not a Heraclitean time since it

is not the eternal law of becoming, but

rather the eternal and lawless possible

becoming of every law. It is a time

capable of destroying even becoming

itself by bringing forth, perhaps

forever, fixity, stasis, and death. End

quote.

Now, as to how this grounds natural

science for Meillassoux, well, this is

where he ends. He's like,

yeah.

I've painted myself into a corner. But

Meillassoux has this really great way of

painting himself into corners and then

taking this sudden leap onto another

level. And so, the first move he makes

in that direction is to say that this

hyperchaotic quasi-non-God

hyperchaos thing,

it has it can't just do anything.

If there's there's at least one thing it

can't do, and that's to produce a

contradictory entity.

Whatever it generates has to be

consistent with itself. It can't produce

an A that's also a not A. And that

begins to ground the rational

dimension of this otherwise completely

nonrational infinite possibility that

he's characterizing as hyperchaos.

I have my own theories as to how you

could bring this back and kind of affirm

natural science through it.

Whether or not we'll get into that, I

don't know, we'll see. But

that was my little presentation.

Now, if some of it was too dense, I

apologize,

but let's try to clear things up if need

be. So, hopefully give you a taste of

it.

All right. Thank you, Jeff. That was

incredible.

Yeah, so

that's a lot to take in. We're moving

into the discussion.

Just as always,

you know, this is a transdisciplinary

group, and so it's expected that, you

know, each piece that we've read has

been from such a different tradition

that they're they're challenging, the

language is can be very different.

We'll understand this in very different

ways given our own backgrounds as well.

So, just I just want to like restate

that context. So, you know, approach the

conversation with like a generosity of

spirit.

Um

Uh and otherwise, you know,

it's a small enough group, we've all

been speaking together for some time, so

I won't facilitate too heavy-handedly.

Feel free to hop in when you want to

speak.

You don't need to directly respond to

what the last person said or what's been

placed in. You can think that you're

placing your thoughts into the middle,

and they may or may not be picked up,

and that's okay.

Yeah, please take it away.

Well, if if I may start, um

I I

I'm a obviously a a fan of of

Meillassoux. I enjoy reading his work.

Doesn't mean I agree with everything.

But

what I love about Meillassoux is that

he's affirming

an infinite possibility. And to me,

that's that's sort of

I got to that thought by reading

actually it was G.K. Chesterton in

Orthodoxy.

So, G.K. Chesterton's a wonderful

English writer of fiction and essays,

journalists, but also

an apologetic an apologist, a Christian

apologist. And he wrote this book

Orthodoxy, and he has a chapter in there

called The Ethics of Elfland,

where he kind of makes this bold

assertion for

infinite possibility as being an

immediately accessible truth of the

human mind via the imagination.

And what I love about about Meillassoux

is how he pushes rationalism into the

zone

of infinite possibility.

Um and I think that uh ultimately I

would say that I would defend

Meillassoux

uh in so far as I do think that

ultimately all science, all inquiry into

the nature of reality necessarily

presupposes

um ultimate possibility. I mean infinite

possibility.

Um this is baked into the scientific

method. When you're at the hypothetical

stage of conducting a scientific

experiment,

um you are in a zone of dreaming.

You are come coming up with possible

explanation. You are doing what uh the

philosopher uh Peirce called abduction.

You're looking at some a phenomenon that

presents itself with you to you in a

purely factical way. That's the

philosophical term. It's like you see

lightning, for example. Let's say nobody

really knows what lightning is. We see

lightning.

Um could it be Could this lightning be

like the sparks from Thor's hammer? Uh

could this lightning be the result of

you know, pressure changes in the

atmosphere? Could it be uh a sign from

an omnipotent god? We don't know when we

haven't looked into it.

There is that moment where we dream. And

then we look at the world. And the

scientific method presupposes that the

world is accessible to us, that the

world will reward our empirical inquiry.

That in itself is very mysterious why

that is at all. Um but

what Meillassoux's philosophy does for

me is it brings me back to that zone of

dreaming, which I think that a a

complete uh

appraisal of the real as we can know it

would have to include.

That there's this infinite possibility

that undergirds the real. And that we

err when we try to limit it or deny it.

You know, that I mean Karl Popper's uh

principle of falsifiability or

falsification, whatever it is,

is exactly that. It's just It's It's in

an epistemic register. He's just saying

like

scientific theories aren't scientific if

they're not falsifiable. Well, that

means that everything I can say about

the world might ultimately be wrong.

There might be more that I don't know

yet that would

uh give the lie to what I thought was

the case and bring up this new

possibility, this new set of

possibilities.

Yeah, I'll I'll I'll hop in. Um

Yeah, one thing that was coming up for

me reading this was trying to reflect

and maybe it's, you know, also the frame

of this is also a sort of contemplative

studies group. Um

You know, there's one part of me that's

like trying to really grok the maybe the

you could say the logical structure of

the ideas, but you know, I think Jeff

was pointing out the sort of the poetry

of this tradition as well and how it's

like hitting on a few different

registers. Um And so I think I I did

find myself

you know, wondering um and I haven't,

you know, had enough time to sit with

the piece after having read it to see

how it's working on me, but I am curious

not just to like kind of understand it

conceptually, but to understand what

does it mean to have taken in this

philosophy? In what way does it sort of

like transform my thinking in ways that

like I might see quite a bit later? And

that's been some of my experience with

the Continentals in general is that I

often actually quite annoyed when I read

them for some reason. I think it's

because of my own different tradition

and I'm trying to like figure out like

the logic statements and whether or not

they're they're accurate from like that

other world. And so some part of me

comes up like defensively or is is like

get often get angry and like that's not

right or that's not true or like this

isn't, you know, this this

how this is really going to like

um work on me.

Um and maybe the beginnings of a thought

is it really felt connected with

um narratives of like the Buddhist

conception of emptiness as this, in a

sense, kind of fundamental ground, but

you try to not treat it as a ground in

quite the same way and given that we did

the

you know, the codependent origination

reading earlier, I think there's a

connection there.

Um and emptiness is always emphasized as

a not a conceptual thing, but as

something that you will gain through

practice. And so, you know, I wonder,

you know, Meillassoux's I guess saying

that logic He's arguing that that

rational logic will point you towards

the truth of emptiness, but maybe

there's a second move that happens,

which is the like

the you know, in your in your heart, you

know, the full the full embodied sense

of emptiness. Um and so I'm I'm thinking

about the difference of those two

things.

>> That's interesting cuz

there is something to be said about

philosophy as a kind of contemplative

practice.

Um

where at least that's the only reason

why I'm interested in it is that you'll

take something in that seems very

foreign and strange and sometimes

absurd,

but you sit with it and suddenly it

opens up new avenues. And um

I I I do think that uh I mean even in

the Eastern tradition, there are many

examples. Uh Nagarjuna, you know,

philosophers who try to

bring us logically or rationally to uh

something like emptiness, um

sunyata and all that. So, yeah, I think

there's something to be said there. And

I do like the

uh analogy, the kind of like comparison

of hyperchaos and codependent

origination, which I I do think that

that there's something there. Like that

kind of now out of which the world

springs in every moment. Um and all

these are just conceptual ways of trying

to capture something that is experienced

in meditation. Uh I think I think that

you could frame hyperchaos as a take on

that. Albeit, you know, uh pitched to a

rather kind of weird uh cuz Meillassoux

is a huge fan, you can tell, of like

Lovecraft, you know, and um writers of

weird fiction. And so, he's always

trying to make you feel something of

like dread in his philosophy. But as he

says himself, it could just as easily

produce the most wonderful My Little

Pony universe you could imagine, you

know.

Um

I think I'd like to take a crack at just

kind of re- interpreting my

understanding of this and then how that

applies to causality.

Sure. All right. So, I guess my very

condensed take on it is that

first considering absolutism, where

everything you observe you think is

absolute fact, really countered by the

correlationists

saying um actually your experience of

this universe is intrinsically tied to

you as an observer.

Taking that a step further, actually

only what exists, this metaphysical

observable universe, is defined by your

observation.

And we can illustrate this with this

hyperchaos by imagining post-death

of all consciousness.

But one of the characteristics of this

hyperchaos is actually

the uncausality of it. It simply exists

in ways that

the only requirement is to not be

self-inconsistent.

But in that context,

it really relates back to some of our

previous conversations around

causality, whereas the observer is

implicit and assumed in a correlational

way in all of the causal statements and

claims that we make.

Which goes back to what is this

observer's scale? What is this

observer's

ascription of intent

of the

causal structures that we're observing

in itself.

That's that's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah, I

mean I wasn't there for the earlier

sessions, but I I I

totally That really resonates with me.

That ultimately what he's saying is that

causality is only thinkable in

correlationist terms. Which I think I

think that some physicists at least

would kind of like agree with that in

principle. That um I mean, it's hard to

imagine like one of the big problems in,

for example, block universe thinking is

how you explain the flow of time. How

can we be at any particular moment in

this block universe? Are we just kind of

uh traveling down a predetermined line

of cause and effect? And if so, what is

the nature of that thing that's

traveling down the line? Well, it's us.

It's It's us. It's reality. And

Meillassoux's saying something like

yeah,

any type of rational

schema you might generate to explain a

state of affairs

includes you as the explainer.

But behind that, in the very act of

explaining it, of trying to explain it,

you are presupposing and affirming uh an

infinite possibility, a kind of

non-causal ground, for lack of a better

term, out of which worlds emerge.

Something like that. I'm not sure if I'm

totally in line with what you were

saying there, but I I really appreciated

that comment. It's really great.

Hakon, I see your hand is up.

Yeah. Hey Hey, I uh I Yeah, that was

like a

I got I admit I I didn't I I I don't

think I gave it enough time, so I was

like kind of like uh rusty, but your uh

your summary was so clarifying and gave

me so many thoughts. I don't know if I

have enough confidence to do what Lauren

has done with like a a

re

reflect, but um uh but yeah, the thing

that came up for the thing that got me

thinking was I think I'm always

Yeah, I'm I'm really always looking for

kind of the like

the not I think I'm really curious in

like what I would call like the knots in

things where things kind of invert or

they they need to break there's a

discontinuity in something to make the

whole thing hold together. And it's like

this interesting

the way you're framing correlationism it

was like, oh, it's interesting that

there's this whole branch that's

defining the whole like self-consistent

plane of possibility that like exists by

like at the point by through it's like

the point where it kind of knots or

there's like a an asymptote and it's

like it's like, oh, but there's this

whole other self-consistent realm and

maybe infinity's self-consistent realms.

Uh and you're just defining it by the

place where it perhaps necessarily

breaks. Um but and

Yeah, sorry. I I don't

I I don't You you were saying?

I said, yes. Yes. I I hear what you're

saying. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's like it's really um what

else although I I just I mean this is

totally out there and a little bit woo,

but I also find it very interesting I I

heard that like poles and knots like you

can get LLMs kind of really waxing

poetic and doing strange things and

going crazy considering them which is

like it's like a little bit validating

that like I think I've been interested

Yeah, in those structures for a while.

Um

uh anyway, sorry. I'll I'll pass that. I

think I maybe had something else, but I

lost it. Uh but yeah, thanks. I I like

my brain is just going. Appreciate it.

>> Fantastic. This reminds me in in the I

wrote a book called Reclaiming Art in

the Age of Artifice um and in that book

it I wrote it before AI before LLMs came

around. So, um but it anticipated to my

great uh

uh

surprise and and and and delight because

the book has just been republished. Um

it anticipated some of the the problems

that artists are facing today with

AI-generated art. But anyways, there's a

chapter in there that's called Rift in

Prophecy where I I make the argument

that what makes uh certain works of art

so potent for

interpretation and imagination kind of

so galvanizing is that they contain what

I call rifts or which are basically

breakage points, points at which the

work breaks. Um irregularities,

asymmetries, discontinuities.

Um

If you think about a Shakespeare play,

they're just full of these things that

just launch your imagination off in

divergent directions and open up new

possibilities of meaning. And so, I

share uh Pat Con, I share your um

your love of these points of failure

where something fails, where systems

break. These what Deleuze calls lines of

flight. Um and I think Meillassoux

really with hyperchaos has given us a

beautiful example of that. Um

It it makes me think about like

conceptually maybe we how much we learn

about the world by essentially like

pushing the knot around or like around

the different areas of the plane and

like it is super abstract, but yeah,

yeah, just like is that like a way to

learn about what reality is and uh

uh yeah. Okay. Thank thank you. Thank

you. Thank you.

Um perhaps I could uh come at it from a

slightly different angle.

Uh with is kind of a question really, I

think.

Um so, I was thinking about this

hyperchaos. I was trying to kind of

give it some space of where it exists

not as as a as a thing, but as as a

as a function, I guess.

So, I was thinking I was thinking about

um

correlation and I think there's a lot of

things in there about correlation

which saying which sounds to me more or

less sounds right.

Um and I was thinking about to say to

where things become cohesively

observable.

So, for instance, if you take something

like an elephant and a supernova

they they both are within our range of

being

cohesively observable.

So, they kind of have a a sense of

stability in that in that domain.

Now, I can't really correlate I can't

correlate a elephant to a supernova

particularly well.

Um but I could say perhaps that they're

both

they're kind of they're both admissible

structures in the universe.

So, they've come about they're the but

they they're not correlated as objects,

but they're correlated in the sense that

they're both they're both victim to um

sort of thermodynamic

to entropy and so on and so forth. But

also my my own cohesive

observing of it has thermodynamic cost.

So, I'm wondering the hyper the

hyperchaos sounds to me like

it's almost like it's pre-structure.

Or pre pre pre-structure, therefore pre

to the thermodynamic or the entropy cost

that that these structures have.

And if it's pre that, then it must have

some kind of symmetry to it rather than

asymmetry, which is what an elephant and

a supernova actually has. Mhm. So, I'm

interested what you think in terms of

that

the symmetry of of uh hyperchaos because

it's feel it feels like when I was

reading it it felt like

like it was like like hyperchaos was

kind of reaching for a symmetry but it

also was like it's like trying to

encapsulate a

symmetrical asymmetry. I know this sound

there's a bit contra counterintuitive.

Or an unreasonable reasonableness.

Yeah.

>> Or something along those sort of lines.

Is that is that correct? Is that right?

That's how I read it, too. Um

You know, maybe

one way of kind of clarifying where he's

coming from is to I I

I I think what you said is brilliant. Um

You know, how is an elephant

how can we correlate both an elephant

and a supernova to a kind of the kind

how can we fit them both in a kind of

stable paradigm? Well, we do that

because, you know, you mentioned the

laws of thermodynamics. We have a

particular rational construal or model

of the universe that admits of certain

things and rejects others, right? Um so,

uh

but what Meillassoux is saying is that

that model itself is is inevitably

correlationist.

But at the same time what he wants to

say is that when science does science

when when science mathematizes nature

it's breaking out of the correlation and

getting to a kind of

asymmetrical symmetry behind all the

phenomena that we take to be

uh real that uh and and that asymmetric

symmetry behind all things is actually

what mathematics gives us access to. So,

for for Meillassoux, probably should

have mentioned this, he's a disciple of

Alain Badiou who says uh he argues

that mathematics is ontology. When

you're doing mathematics, you're working

on being itself.

Um so, Even even mathematics has an has

a has a thermodynamic or an entropy cost

to even count, to go from one to two.

>> The practice of mathematics

>> require requires requires energy, yes.

>> The practice of mathematics does, but

mathematics taken from a what I guess

what in the philosophy of mathematics

you call the platonic or platonist

perspective is that mathematics itself

is not subject to entropy.

Uh and is simply the kind of crystalline

um

structuring

non-structure behind all things. Uh

and uh

But then would you say it's prior? Would

you say it's prior to structure in that

case?

It's prior, but not temporally prior.

It's ontologically prior. Um okay. Yeah.

Uh

it gets into you get into paradoxes

pretty quickly because how would this

mathematical

existence obtain without some kind of

manifestation? Now, one of the other

figures that Meillassoux draws out of

hyperchaos, he's he draws

non-contradiction as a necessary

property of hyperchaos, but he also

draws the necessity that hyper

hyperchaos create something.

Hyperchaos cannot produce a nothingness.

Cuz a nothingness that exists would be

contradictory. And therefore, the minute

you have a contradictory entity, it's

necessarily necessary. Anyways, I won't

get into all that. Um but the thing I

wanted to say was this. Meillassoux

wants to get back to the kind of access

to reality that the pre-Kantians had.

People like Leibniz or Descartes or

Thomas Aquinas or Plato. They thought

they were thinking the world as it is.

They thought that all humans could

disappear and you'd still have the realm

of forms. You'd still have all that.

That that thought had privileged access

to the real as such. That ends with Kant

who tells us we can only speak about the

structures by which we cognate the real,

cognize the real.

Um and he's trying to get back to that,

but he can't get back under those old

terms. He needs to find new terms for

it. And he does it by radicalizing

correlation and finding within it the

point where it breaks, which is it needs

to think even if itself is contingent.

And therefore, he can affirm out of of

absolute contingency. So, he replaces

God

the rational creator of the old

metaphysics with hyper chaos, the

irrational or pre-rational

power for anything to exist for any

reason or no reason at all.

I Yeah, I don't know what the religious

affordances are of this,

um but that's where he ends up.

Isn't that close to Demiourgos or

something like that?

It's a There are in Gnosticism you know,

the idea Well, the Demiurge in

Gnosticism is a

He's derived from

the true God.

But the true God for the Gnostics was

not a rational beneficent creator.

He was goodness because he was pure

non-being, you know, in so far or he was

pure being but non-existent. Anyways,

um the

So, yes, there are coming kind of

Gnostic shades to Meillassoux's

philosophy

uh that we are subject to the whims of a

completely I'm using the term

technically a completely idiotic divine

power.

Um and this is a direct reference or a

very indirect oblique reference to

Meillassoux to a creation of HP

Lovecraft, the great weird fiction

writer

who

conceived of a being in his fiction

called Azathoth the idiot God.

Um or the demon sultan Azathoth who is

this kind of seething chaotic

uh

power or at the center of the universe

which needs to be placated constantly by

these weird monstrous flute players who

have to play music to keep them under

control cuz if they stop playing the

music, he would just devour all reality.

So, there's something of that in in

Meillassoux's

uh idea of hyper chaos. But what what I

think he's trying to do here, he's

trying to pack some some affective punch

in his idea to make us feel this kind of

irrational potentiality that all of our

thoughts presuppose. The very fact that

I can theorize or hypothesize about

lightning means that my mind has direct

access to this kind of seething this

this this primal power of the real

itself to generate all kinds of worlds,

not just the one we happen to think we

live in.

So, the the question if I can ask you,

Jeff, um

is that if if the hyper chaos

is possibly pre-structural

or atemporal

how are we as human beings able to

access that as a reality?

Through reason.

Uh and how do we explain Okay, well,

through reason. Meillassoux believes

that he's a rationalist, uh as I said at

the beginning, and he he really believes

axiomatically

that

reason can guide us to truth.

But the truth that reason guides us to,

for him, is not the principle of

sufficient reason which would crown

reason as the guiding and directive

principle of all possible universes or

all possible worlds.

It guides us to what he calls the

principle of unreason.

Reason ultimately shows even its own

contingency such that only pure

contingency

is absolute and necessary and our

thought can access this.

It's always accessing it unconsciously.

But it can access it consciously when we

use reason to perform the kind of

philosophical steps that he lays out

and we get there.

Is there Actually, I Sorry, yeah, go.

Sorry. Does he does he acknowledge that

insanity or madness

exists or or does he think it's all fair

game? There's no such thing Oh, that's a

No, he he really believes that sanity

exists, but Meillassoux is incredibly um

Well, I was asking about insanity, not

madness.

>> Yeah, yeah. No, no, he believe Well, he

believes that sanity insanity I'm sure

he does. He doesn't comment on that. Um

he does believe that ultimately

uh I mean, at one point in the paper

that I shared with you, he calls time he

calls reality or hyper chaos a mad time.

So, he uses the word mad to describe

ultimate reality. So, ultimately, I

think he does believe that uh

to be

to to grok hyper chaos is in a sense to

attain to a kind of madness in so far as

madness is defined as disordered

thinking. Because you're you're you're

accessing the

complete contingency of all order.

At the same time, he is very aloof. He

doesn't comment on politics or ethics at

all in his in his work. He is

simply doing pure ontology, so it's very

hard to know what his take would be say

on like

uh

insanity versus sanity. My intuition is

that he would say

that to look at reality soberly and to

be able to

absorb the revelation of hyper chaos is

the definition of

of sanity or wisdom in the philosophical

tradition.

Um

Yeah.

It reminds me a little bit of the

theater of the absurd and the theater of

chaos which was a theatrical movement in

in uh

which was partly started or supported by

Jodorowsky

in Chile.

Uh and you just didn't know what was

going to happen next. But out of that

chaos came something

not reasonable, but something

understandable.

Yeah, something of of some perhaps even

moral

value, something of uh

of ethical import or something. So,

yeah, I mean,

there are

connections, I think, with uh

Like in his short little book that he

wrote later on,

it's called In English, it's called

Science Fiction and Extra-Science

Fiction.

He kind of approaches the same problem.

He's talking about science fiction as a

type of fiction that imagines possible

world that are by definition rational

and rationalizable. Then he's

speculating. He says, do we have fiction

that gives us a truly hyper chaotic

world? A world where changes happen

without reason.

Um

And do we have Is it possible to write a

fiction of that kind without the fiction

breaking up into a kind of madness, into

a kind of incoherence?

And it's weird. He seems to think that

that fiction doesn't fiction doesn't yet

exist, but I just reread

J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World.

Uh and I think that Ballard's fiction is

a perfect example of what I would call

extra-science fiction, a fiction that

belongs to the age after science, which

isn't to say that it negates science.

It's just it's thinking of the

metaphysical implications of what

science reveals.

And it gives us a world that is um very,

very strange. Uh where changes in the

environment, for example, might occasion

complete changes in our cognitive powers

for better and for worse. Suddenly, what

we thought was important, like for

example, I think it's important to do

physics, to investigate the physical

nature

of the universe.

Well, that's I mean, before you start

doing science, that's simply an a kind

of axiological position. You just decide

that it's important to do that. There's

no reason why it's important. You might

give a reason, but those reasons are

contained within a human world where

certain enterprises and certain

activities have value. And so, what if

uh suddenly this crystallization process

that begun begins in Alpha Centauri then

bleeds into Earth and start to starts to

change us into crystalline beings. Well,

suddenly maybe doing physics won't seem

that important anymore. The entire

framework of our valuation will

completely shift. And this type of like

really kind of vertiginous infinite

possibility that Ballard explores in his

fiction, I think is a little bit very

similar to what Meillassoux's trying to

get at in his philosophy.

I am

I noticed, you know, his his main

conclusion from the hyper chaos

um of the start of his project to ground

the natural sciences of

non-contradiction.

Um

I was noticing the non-contradiction

works super usefully within a

mathematical structure and mathematical

structures are useful for modeling parts

of reality. But I was definitely

noticing again resistance to taking that

on as kind of axiomatic because And this

is just in my experience in general when

philosophical traditions make claims

like, you know, Socrates is a man, you

know, all men are more mortal, therefore

Socrates is mortal. And I like I take

issue with the authority of each of

those statements cuz we know like the

contingency of the definition, the

maleness, and the contingency of like

who even is Socrates.

So, it's like

there's a way in which when I look to

experience

um

it seems like A and not A is completely

possible. So, the idea that that's the

foundational thing that we're proving,

that's the one thing that we're

grounding out of hyper chaos, I'm like

that's the one thing that seems kind of

obviously not necessarily true. Like you

give me the example of the is the Could

the apple be red and not red? And I'm

like, yeah, of course it could be. I

could look at it and be like, yeah, it's

it's

it's reddish and there's a contingency

to it doesn't feel absolute, you know

what I mean? I I know what you mean, but

I would just push a little bit against

that because I get what I get that a

lot. I think people are a little bit

very um reluctant these days to

um affirm the principle of

non-contradiction. There's a lot of

paralogics and that sort of thing going

on in philosophy where

But Meillassoux has a long footnote in

After Finitude about that and rejecting

the paralogicians or what do you call

it? There's another term term for that

type of logic that affirms kind of

contradiction and as possibility.

>> The Catuskoti is the Indian philosophy

and Buddhist

>> Sure. version of like A, not A, A and

not A, neither A nor not A. Yeah.

But I I think that a lot of these

debates get lost because they lose a

very important nuance, which is the

nuance of sense.

Uh which I think the book to read for

this is Gilles Deleuze's book Logic of

Sense.

Where it's true that man as a concept is

completely contingent. Is Socrates a

man? Well, you know,

you Who is Socrates? All that. But

that's

All the the problems come at the level

of sense. In what sense is Socrates a

man? In what In what In what's In what

sense is Socrates Socrates? In what

sense is he not?

But at any particular level of sense you

wish to land on,

I think that nonetheless, even what you

just said presupposes a basic

affirmation of the law of

non-contradiction, which is why in

symbolic logic you don't say Socrates is

a man, you say A is not A.

Um Well, you I could say A is not A

because A is a phoneme, it's a sound,

and what I'm seeing here is a printed A.

But here I'm just moving between

different dimensions of sense. So,

you're right though. In actual

existence, everything we see, everything

we touch

uh is um construable as a contradictory

thing because we can always we can only

capture some of its being with our

language and therefore there are other

things that would negate what we said

about it.

But in the realm of pure abstract

symbolic logic,

uh that kind of structuring

of of the possible in logical terms is

still implicit even when we deny, for

example, that Socrates is a man or that

Socrates is a man because

you know, if you even when we reject a a

syllogism. That's a big conversation um

and you know, I

Yeah. But I I I I I hear what you're

saying that when he when he comes to

that, you're like, well,

first of all, his argument for why hyper

chaos can't create a contradictory

entity is itself a bit suspect, I think,

because his argument is that if you had

an entity that's contradictory, for

example, if you had an entity that's A

and not A,

then it would be necessary because it

couldn't change.

That's his argument.

Something that can't change is

necessary. It's It's It's

It's already what it could become and

therefore it's necessary. So, if hyper

chaos is to be hyper chaos, then such

things can't exist. But it seems to me

that something can be

could be contradictory in one of one of

its aspects but not in others.

So,

I'm not sure if the that argument is

quite as

Yeah, I I felt that as well. Yeah.

I'm still finding it intriguing even the

way he conceptualizes time as this

change of attributes. I thought was That

was compelling out of that. Yeah. And

the first moment where you where you

even see why he's making hyper chaos

somehow equivalent to time cuz there's

this idea

that it it's the contingency is time in

some sense. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah.

Um I'm aware of the time. There's just 2

minutes left till the top of the hour.

Um uh we can possibly stick around for a

little bit afterwards. I don't know if

JF has to leave, but now's a great

opportunity for any last unsaid thought

that wants to be said.

Yeah.

Um just check out the link I provided

for historical perspective.

I I'm curious if anybody has any

comments. You can email to the

group discussion

on HiLo or

me personally if you want. I I'm curious

if you think it's relevant or not or

what you get out of it if you

like it.

Okay.

Archdruid Report Mirror? That one?

That one.

Well, we Well, but I'll send a follow-up

email as always. I'll give a link to

that HiLo forum and people can can

engage there.

Um

Yeah, well, just cuz I've

Again, a huge thanks to JF. That was

like masterful as always. Really

appreciating

you sharing. I feel like this has just

been very fruitful in general.

Um this is also the last scheduled

reading of the causality series. So, you

know, we may if ideas come from the

There's lots of things I'm curious to

read that I might lead or might find

others. We may also expand, you know,

Orbital Studies wants to keep doing um

these sort of very challenging reading

groups. I think that's really important

for us to like expand our minds, have a

sense of where the energy is happening

across many different fields. Um and so

this is something that's very important

to me and it's really been a pleasure to

do with all of you. It's much easier to

think together, I find. Um so, I just

really want to thank everybody who's

come to the series so far for your

participation and your presence and your

effort.

Um and

yeah, well, I'll certainly be in touch

about one of the many things we're

always up to and perhaps another

causality thing shows up down the line,

but uh thank you all for participating

in the series.

Yes, thank you for organizing.

>> Thank you very much for organizing it.

It was very

thought-provoking.

Yeah, thank you very much for

organizing.

Thank you for all your efforts,

actually. It's been fantastic. Yes. Yes,

don't stop. It's been fantastic. Thank

you very much.

Okay.

Good luck.

Thank you all. Okay.

Well, you're all you're all liberated.

Thank you very much.