Processual Pessimism. On the Nature of Cosmic Suffering and Human Nothingness

Speculative Realism

When speaking of the contemporary rejection of an anthropocentric view of philosophy and being, one immediately recalls Speculative Realism – a movement in philosophy that has attracted attention and, at least for a time, raised high hopes. The movement is defined as a constellation of philosophical positions, often in disagreement with one another, that challenge correlationalism and affirm the autonomy of object-being with respect to human cognitive activity. Within this tendency tasks are formulated that aim to construct an ontology oriented toward the “world-in-itself” and, in some cases, toward the “world-without-us.” The principal problem requiring analytical clarification is the relation of such ontological demands to the criteria of investigatory admissibility and explanatory rigor. There are many variations and participants – speculative materialism proper, object-oriented ontology, transcendental materialism, and also transcendental nihilism. Here I will concentrate only on the tenets of Speculative Realism as interpreted by Eugene Thacker and Ray Brassier, as the thinkers closest to the concerns of this work. Both insist on the necessity of thinking the world beyond the subjective perspective by emphasizing the “world-without-us.” Eugene Thacker, in his series of essays and monographs, the best known of which is In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy (2011), employs the idea of the “world-without-us” as a methodological and aesthetic provocation, revealing the limits of anthropocentric thought. He writes that “to abandon the anthropological view means that the world must be considered not merely as a world-for-us or a world-in-itself, but as a world-without-us.” Ray Brassier develops an ontological line under the banner of strict scientific naturalism; his conclusions are set out in Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007). Brassier seeks to bring philosophy into alignment with the results of the natural sciences and to call into question teleological or transcendental interpretations of being.

One must note several positive contributions of Speculative Realism. First, the movement refocused philosophy on the problem of how ontological claims depend on the conditions of human cognition: it raised the question of how much our ontological constructions are conditioned by the character of human experience, language, and epistemic practices. Second, for Thacker the idea of the “world-without-us” became a powerful tool for criticizing anthropocentrism in the humanities tradition, exposing the rhetorical and methodological privileges of the human perspective. Third, Brassier proposed a variant of naturalistic reflexivity that urges philosophy to take account of the findings of the natural sciences and to refrain from unverifiable teleologies.

The first limitation concerns the very enunciation of a world outside the subject. Formulations that purport to declare the world as existing “outside” the subject are themselves produced in a language that, by its nature, belongs to the subject. This fact generates an epistemological dilemma. The assertion of a “world-without-us” simultaneously appeals to and is constructed through subjective methodological procedures.

Thacker presents the “world-without-us” as a way of revealing the limits of subjectual understanding and as a “mode of the world’s existence.” In addition to this mode he distinguishes: the “world-for-us” – the ordinary, humanly intelligible world – and the “world-in-itself,” a paradoxical notion that, the moment we think about it and attempt to affect it, ceases to be a world-in-itself and becomes a world-for-us. Thacker’s formalization is productive for diagnostic tasks and for posing questions about the place of human thought within a broader picture of being. The empirical applicability of his position is limited by the absence of criteria congenial to scientific methods of inquiry. Claims about the impersonality of the world remain within rhetoric unless accompanied by the development of distinguishing criteria and procedures for testing ultimate hypotheses.

Brassier, for his part, argues for aligning philosophical language with the results of the natural sciences, and in this domain his approach achieves a high degree of productivity. Conceptual consistency leads to the recognition of the large-scale impersonality of cosmic processes. The force of his argument lies in liberating philosophy from aprioristic assumptions about the teleology of the world. To build a more complete theory, however, interdisciplinary connections are required – to information theory, to the thermodynamics of information recording and erasure, and to studies of self-regulation in nonlinear systems – further development of which I did not find in Brassier’s writings. Thacker emphasizes aesthetic, literary, and generic devices (horror, demonic metaphor, cultural texts) in order to put the question of the “world-without-us,” yet he also does not derive firm conclusions about the existence of a “world-without-us” without resort to metaphysical means.

In the question of the “thing-in-itself” and the “world-for-us” the only proposition one can assert with certainty is that we can neither prove its existence nor describe it. Any construction formulated within our world, by the mere fact of its existence, already distances us from whatever may or may not lie beyond its bounds. Everything we name will be incorrect. At the same time, in our physical world there are numerous processes and differentiating systems continuously exchanging information with their environment. The anthropocentric perspective is undermined by the fact that our own experiences are regarded merely as particular instances of processes. Consciousness ceases to be an “inner theatre” or the source of experience; consciousness is an illusion insofar as its “existence” is reduced to unconscious neural computations that do not require a separate observer (which, in turn, broadly correlates with Brassier’s rationalist nihilism). In a sense, the process establishes criteria for the correspondence of ontological claims to experimental knowledge.

Of course, the “world-without-us” remains a possible idea. If individual processes are considered as temporal configurations of a single continuous process, then our descriptions capture only local manifestations of that whole, not its essence, which, it seems, we are incapable of naming or describing. In conditions where consciousness is reduced to a functional illusion, the primary process may turn out to be a “thing without us,” and any broad ontological claims about it will remain hypotheses – which returns the problem to an echo of solipsism and deprives us of the possibility of resolving it by scientific means. In this sense the approach corresponds to a cosmic impersonality discussed by speculative realists and, among others, by Eugene Thacker:

“There is only an anonymous, faceless ‘in itself’ of the world, indifferent to us as human beings, despite all our efforts to change, shape, perfect, and even save that world. We could concretize this perspective and designate it not merely as cosmic but as a form of ‘cosmic pessimism,’” but without the poetic component.

Returning to Brassier’s critique of flat ontologies, Brassier rightly directs criticism at a number of vulnerable points: the tendency to collapse the distinction between thought and thing and the fear that “levelling” ontologies will erase all differences, leading to an unacceptable ontological indiscernibility. As he formulates it, “flat ontology denies any ontology of transcendence,” and this denial pushes him toward a cautious conservatism regarding ontological claims. It is important here to distinguish clearly two things that Brassier often conflates: the methodological and the epistemic requirement – how we organize our explanations and which levels of consideration we employ. Flat ontology does not assert that everything is identically “indiscernible” in a practical sense; it asserts that no class of entities enjoys ontological priority as such: it does not abolish differences in power, influence, or organizational complexity; it simply removes metaphysical immunity from one category (the human, consciousness, forms, etc.) vis-à-vis the others. This distinction – between ontological equality and empirical asymmetries – is frequently underestimated in critique. Brassier also raises the problem of individuation: how to single out “real” objects if we abandon transcendental criteria and the primacy of constituting consciousness. He poses the correct question: will the rejection of representation not result in a loss of the ability to correlate our theories with what we actually observe and study? A further point of Brassier’s reproach is that flat ontology allegedly equates thought and thing as identical, erasing the boundary between representation and object. Here he proposes an “alternative to levelling” – to retain the ban on transcendence while preserving an immanent difference between thought and thing. This precaution is useful, but its consistent implementation does not require abandoning flatness: acknowledging differences in modes of emergence and cognition (epistemic differences) is fully compatible with the ontological claim that no category stands “above” others in being. If Brassier fears the loss of justification for scientific practice, that concern is allayed once we acknowledge that ontological equality does not annul causal-experimental differences, methodological levels, and the institutional practices of science.

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1

A hermeneutical misunderstanding is a misinterpretation of the author’s intent.

2

Liminal acceptance – a hypothetical model of a state at the threshold of experience (between the known and unknown); in the first book it was described as conscious dwelling on this boundary, introduced on behalf of Prof. N. in The Experience of the Tragic

3

Bodily signals (sensations), such as rumbling in the stomach and similar signals that influence decision-making. although not always consciously

4

Holotropic breathing and the Buteyko method are breathing techniques with opposite approaches: the first enhances ventilation, the second reduces it to normalize CO₂

5

Exposure therapy (exposure) is a method of behavioral psychotherapy aimed at gradually getting used to a situation or object that causes fear or increased anxiety. The goal is to teach a person to face the source of fear without an acute emotional reaction.

6

Self-referentiality is a property of a statement that refers to itself or to the conditions of its own utterance. In the case of the Cartesian “I think,” its truth is guaranteed by the very act of thinking or uttering it: any attempt to doubt it already presupposes a thinking “I,” thereby making the statement self-validating and resistant to radical doubt.

7

Externalist – approaches or evidence that view a person and his consciousness “from the outside”, from the perspective of an external observer (“from a third person”). These include data from natural sciences (biology, neurophysiology), sociology, historical analysis, etc., which describe thinking as a process that depends on factors external to the subject (body, environment, language, culture)

8

Segregationism is a strategy or position that intentionally creates and maintains a rigid distinction and lack of dialogue between different fields of knowledge.

9

Heterophenomenology (from Ancient Greek ἕτερος – “other,” φαινόμενον – “phenomenon,” and λόγος – “study”) is a term introduced by Daniel Dennett to describe a scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental states of a subject. The essence of this approach consists in the application of anthropological methods in combination with the subject’s self-description of their own state together with all other available evidence, in order to determine their psychological state. The goal of this approach is to understand how the subject sees the world, to assess the correctness of their perception while disregarding inaccuracies in their self-description. Heterophenomenology requires that we, on the one hand, examine the subject’s self-narrative and, at the same time, take into account the other properties and reactions of the subject, including their physical reactions to the surrounding environment. We must understand that the self-narrative may diverge significantly from our conclusions about the subject’s state. For example, we may conclude that the subject sees, that their vision is functioning, even though they claim the opposite.

10

With his image of a demon, able to predict the entire future based on initial conditions

11

On early typewriter models, neighbouring typebars would collide and jam during rapid typing. The QWERTY layout was not designed for speed, but to separate frequently occurring letter pairs (for example “th”, “er”, “in”) across different sides of the keyboard and thereby slightly slow down typing in order to prevent jamming..

12

The concept of determinism, where the overall end of the system is predetermined, but the paths to it are complex and variable, has parallels in eschatological myths such as the Christian Apocalypse and the Scandinavian Ragnarok. In both cases, the final cataclysm and the renewal of the world are presented as an inevitable fate (a deterministic attractor). The responsibility of the participants is not canceled by the fact that the final is known, but becomes part of the pattern leading to its realization.

13

Although Benatar’s work The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions discusses space and the universe, it is still cosmic nihilism.

14

We will talk about this in more detail. Here I need to show how different views are on the cosmic problem of being.

15

For example, Eugene Tucker’s book Cosmic Pessimism (2015). Its volume is 55 pages in large print, and the work itself is more like a collection of aphorisms and quotations. From the real cosmos, it contains only the atoms that make up this book.

16

In addition to the “out of nothing” scenario, there are other hypotheses about the origin of the Universe. For example, the theory of eternal inflation posits that our world is merely one of countless “bubble” universes continually emerging within an infinitely expanding space. Other possibilities include cyclic models, in which the Universe undergoes endless cycles of contraction and expansion, as well as string theory and M-theory. The latter suggests that our three-dimensional reality exists within a world of many more dimensions, and its birth could have been the result of a collision or quantum fluctuation within these invisible structures.

17

The tunneling effect is the overcoming of a potential barrier by a microparticle when its total energy (remaining unchanged during tunneling) is less than the height of the barrier. The tunnel effect is a phenomenon of an exclusively quantum nature, impossible in classical mechanics and even completely contrary to it. An analog of the tunneling effect in wave optics can be the penetration of a light wave into a reflecting medium (at distances of the order of the wavelength of the light wave) in conditions where, from the point of view of geometric optics, complete internal reflection occurs. The phenomenon of tunneling underlies many important processes in atomic and molecular physics, in the physics of the atomic nucleus, solid state, etc..

18

A “classical potential barrier” is a situation where, according to the laws of classical (pre – quantum) physics, a system has no way of moving from one state to another, since there is an insurmountable “energy wall” between them. For example, imagine an electrical circuit with a gap (an air gap between two wires). For an electron, this is a high barrier. Classically, there can be no current, since electrons cannot fly through the air. However, if a sufficiently high voltage is applied, a spark can occur – this is an analog of quantum tunneling, when electrons “leak” through a barrier that is formally insurmountable. In Vilenkin’s cosmology, such an “insurmountable barrier” is the state of “nothing” itself, and the tunneling “particle” is the entire geometry of the future Universe.

19

The de Sitter model is a class of cosmological models that solve general relativity equations with a cosmological constant that describe the vacuum state. The properties of the latter depend on the sign of this constant and strongly distinguish it from the “empty vacuum”.

20

Here, nucleation is understood as the primary formation of a region of space-time (the embryo of the Universe) from a state of “nothing”. If this area overcomes the minimum critical size, it becomes stable and capable of further exponential expansion.

21

A special function of cells aimed at correcting chemical damage and breaks in DNA molecules.

22

The Bekenstein bound in physics is the upper limit of entropy, or the amount of information that can be contained in a given limited area of space with a finite amount of energy. A limit can also mean the maximum amount of information needed to perfectly describe a given physical system down to the quantum level. Named after Jacob Bekenstein

23

The second law of infodynamics and its implications for the simulated universe hypothesis: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/13/10/105308/2915332/The-second-law-of-infodynamics-and-its. In addition to the article, M. Vopson has a book Reality reloaded: the scientific case for a simulated universe, 2023

24

A dissipative system (or dissipative structure; from the Latin dissipatio – “to disperse, to destroy”) is an open system that operates far from thermodynamic equilibrium. In other words, it is a stable state that arises in a nonequilibrium environment under conditions of energy dissipation supplied from outside. A dissipative system is sometimes also referred to as a stationary open system or a nonequilibrium open system. Dissipative systems are characterized by the spontaneous emergence of complex, often chaotic structures. A distinctive feature of such systems is the nonconservation of volume in phase space, that is, the violation of Liouville’s theorem. A simple example of such a system is Bénard cells. More complex examples include lasers, droplet clusters, the Belousov – Zhabotinsky reaction, atmospheric circulation, and biological life. The term “dissipative structure” was introduced by Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his pioneering work on these structures.

25

Any synthetic is artificial. But not every artificial one is synthetic.