Soundtrack: Koyaanisquatsi, “Prophesies”

This is another article exploring Identity, Self & Social Networks within the context of various western philosophers. A previous article entitled “Heidegger 2 Twitter, Technology, Self and Social Networks,” was written previously and exists antecedent to this article. The goal of these blog postings is to find placement of our current circumstances within the traditions of modern philosophical thought, as it were.

“Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois.”

—Tom Wolfe (The Painted Word. Stated in regard to Andy Warhol.)

Esse Is Percipi

George Berkeley is probably the philosopher in the Western tradition who most fully anticipates our current ideas about our experience of reality on social networks. He notoriously argues that esse is percipi: to be is to be perceived. In his own time, Berkeley was merely taking the doctrine of empiricism to its logical extreme. If our minds contain nothing but atomistic perceptions – which is to say, ideas or representations-then it is superfluous to posit, in addition, a material world out there that would be independent of these ideas, although supposedly giving rise to them. Mental representations themselves are enough, says Berkeley, especially since — according to our initial assumptions — we can never get beyond them in any case. Berkeley’s argument reads like an unintended reductio ad absurdum of what Richard Rorty calls “the ‘idea’ idea”: the Cartesian notion that the mind is like a theater in which consciousness is a detached spectator that contemplates and manipulates special objects of inner sense (ideas or representations). The major philosophical question then becomes that of how our mental representations relate to their corresponding objects in the material world.

The genius of Berkeley is to simply short-circuit this whole dilemma, by negating the material world altogether. His radical conclusions follow logically and powerfully from his dubious initial premises. Now, nearly all of the important twentieth-century philosophers reject “the ‘idea’ idea” in the first place. But the representationalist approach remains alive and well in other fields, most notably in AI (artificial intelligence) research and in cognitive science. Cognitive scientists start from the assumption — not that computers should be understood by comparison to human minds, but rather that human minds themselves can already be understood in terms of computers. This is more than just “some rough analogy,” says Andy Clark; “it is not that the brain is somehow like a computer,” but that it “actually is some such device”. This means that cognitive scientists conceive minds, on the model of digital computers, as information processors that work by performing logical operations upon internal representations of external phenomena. This is why Berkeley is still relevant today. In twenty-first century terms, his argument may be rephrased as the claim that our experience of existence is already virtual. And that is indeed what the cognitive scientists say. They claim that the “real world” of our perceptions is in fact largely a construction of our own inner cognitive processes. “You and I, we humans, we mammals, we animals, inhabit a virtual world…the brain works as a sophisticated virtual reality computer” wrote Dawkins in “Unweaving the Rainbow.” Our sense of reality is the product of simulation. It only remains for the cognitive scientists to follow Berkeley all the way down that road and jettison the “outer world” altogether as an extravagant, unnecessary hypothesis. I have become my Twitter personality @semanticwill and there is no need for Will Evans in meat-space.There will then be no escaping the control of the social network.

Eyes Wide Fucking Shut.

Berkeley is surprisingly unperturbed by the obvious objection that, if his theory were correct, then objects would cease to exist whenever we stopped looking at them. He dismisses this worry on a number of grounds, all of which apply just as well to our current conceptions of reality in social networks. First of all, Berkeley says, if things exist only as perceptions or representations in the mind, then that tree yonder just as surely exists when i am thinking of it with my eyes closed as it does when I am looking at it directly. In either case, the tree is being perceived as an idea by my inner sense. Berkeley brackets the whole question of the cause of perception; what matters is only its effect within my mind. But this is the very principle of virtual reality; as Deleuze puts it, “simulation designates the power of producing an effect” even in the absence of anything that is supposed to be  a cause. In the second place, Berkeley says, the fact that I may only perceive a given object intermittently doesn’t impugn the consistency of the object. There is no reason why the object shouldn’t have the same features and appear in the same place whenever I do happen to perceive it or think of it. There is no more reason for me to worry that the tree will be uprooted because I took away from it than there is for me to worry that the objects of a virtual world, or the icons on my desktop, will dissipate because I turn off my computer. In either case– when I look back at the tree, or when I turn the computer on again–I will find that everything is exactly the way I left it. In the third place, and most importantly for Berkeley, just because a given idea is no longer present in my mind does not mean that it is likewise absent from all other minds just as when I turn off Tweetdeck, most of my virtual connections still exist — and many continue to converse even in my absence.

The proper logical conclusion from the intermittency of my ideas is “not that [sensible objects] have no real existence,” but rather that “there must be some other mind wherein they exist”. Ultimately, for Berkeley, this other mind is God. Today, we are more likely to say that it is the computer, or better, the network, on which the virtual reality simulation is being run , or even, in the case of the ‘other’ instantiated through their Profile on a social network – I am because my profile exists on the social network. Perhaps this is the reason for the proliferation of home pages, blogs, and profiles on social networking sites. To be online is already to be perceived. Even if no one ever visits your website, you are still visible to the network itself. Your Profile is still on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or MySpace. [You] still exist. For the network is the modern instantiation and understanding of G-d, the unsleeping omni-voyeur. The cogito of simulated reality therefore reads: I am connected, therefore I exist.

Long before the internet, Warhol already understood this logic. His film Empire (1964) shows the Empire State Building in a single continuous stationary shot that lasts for over eight hours. Warhol’s stated purpose in making this film was to turn the building into “a star!”. And we must say that he succeeded, just by virtue of having made the film. Nobody actually has to watch Empire in order for the movie to have its effect. As long as the film is rolling through the projector, the virtual, simulacra image is perceived, as it were, by the cinematic apparatus itself; and so the Empire State Building actually is a star.

Appearances, Profiles & Self

Perhaps the oddest thing about Berkeley’s argument is his claim that, in fact, the argument has no pragmatic consequences. “After having wandered through the wild mazes of philosophy,” he writes, we “return to the simple dictates of nature,” and “come to think like other men”. Berkeley indulges in metaphysical speculation, the better to put an end to such speculation. He denies the existence of matter, he says, only in order to refute skepticism and vindicate the assumptions of common sense. This may seem like a crazy, and outrageously backward, way to proceed, but Berkeley’s point is that the best way of “saving the appearances” is to show that there is nothing besides appearances, no real world behind this apparent one. In an immaterial world — or what is the same, a virtual world–nothing is hidden, and everything is precisely what it seems.

In a certain way, then, Berkeley anticipates Nietzsche‘s polemic against those metaphysicians who distrust the senses. Berkeley could easily say, along with Nietzsche, that the senses “do not lie at all…The ‘apparent’ world is the only one; the ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added…”. Berkeley’s critique of skepticism is oddly congruent with Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism. For Berkeley, skepticism arises when we posit the existence of an external, material world, only to discover that we can know nothing about such a world and that we can have no access to it. For Nietzsche, similarly, nihilism arises when we posit the existence of a transcendent “real world,” only to discover that such a world is empty and that we can have no access to it. Of course, it is crucial that Berkeley denies the existence of the transcendent materiality, while Nietzsche denies the existence of transcendent ideality. The radical conclusion Nietzsche draws form his arguments could not be further from the pious conclusions Berkeley draws from his. For Nietzsche, everything changes when we learn to accept appearances – that My Profile == Me; traditional conceptions of self crumble, and everything must be created anew. For Berkeley, in contrast, nothing changes; the order of the world is confirmed, once we realize that everything is just an appearance – My Profile != Me – it is just a projection of self. We can read Nietzsche and Berkeley, therefore, as rival science fiction writers, offering alternative visions of what Michael Heim calls “the metaphysics of simulated instantiations of self,” on social networks.

Tags | Berkeley, conscious, Identity, Nietzsche, semanticwill, SM, social networks