These seem to be disastrous times, woven together by ideas of all kinds: by unabashed neo-fascists, by assertive platists, by anti-Semitic anti-racists and philosemitic racists, by contradictory beliefs and visions of the world whose absurdity seems to justify reason, and which we no longer know whether they are our projections or phenomena. Impulses clash, and their conflictuality leaves no room for dialogue. No argument seems to have a foothold, and in fact reinforces the opponent’s point of view.
A rationalist might become authoritarian and believe that this confusion of thought, this incessant mixing of any hypothesis with any other, is caused by a lack of education, by ignorance, by irrationality and the evil impulses unleashed by the media. The best response would be to strengthen education to reduce ignorance. This is undoubtedly because we still hope that ignorance is the source of delirium, whereas its source is a certain relationship to knowledge.
What does a platist believe when he declares that the earth is flat? Why, then, do some people hold on to this idea so strongly? It’s probably because the shape of the Earth is an example of the kind of trust that should be placed in rational authorities and knowledge elites. For I believe that none of us has directly experienced the shape of the Earth, because it is disproportionate to our organs of perception, even though we believe its sphericity to be a self-evident truth. We trust in authorities that make up for our limitations, just as we trust in organs outside our bodies. We don’t have to verify that the Earth is flat; others have observed it for us, and we can trust them. So the ground on which I rest is conceived not by the subject himself in his perception, but by an external trust given to a third party most often not known to himself, and by a common sense that mostly grants this trust. When someone cries out that the Earth is flat, he’s not so much describing the state of the Earth as giving the Earth a state in order to regain autonomy in his knowledge, and to get as close as possible to the conditions of his perception and subjectivation. The Earth is flat, because that’s how I experience it, and I don’t want to trust these authorities any more, because they’re anonymous and come from a simple belief. When we say that the Earth is flat, we are seeking to regain our autonomy and reconstitute knowledge determined by our own subjectivity. We find this attitude in xenophobia, which, despite the statistics, repeats that foreigners are the source of all problems. Figures are put forward, and we are told that the problem is obvious, that everyone knows it, that it’s real. This is undoubtedly how we veil our xenophobic perception, preferring common sense as subjectivity to knowledge as rational elaboration.
Perhaps this is one of the products of the history of the subject in the West, which increasingly focuses on itself and ends up losing the general conditions of objectivity. But how can we fail to understand this temptation to identify subjective conditions with possible knowledge? The flat Earth is designated as a state of interiority. But we can’t answer this question by arguing peremptorily and authoritatively about the scientific evidence that should determine our conception. It has to do with what we rely on, and with our foundation, which is determined by a short circuit of subjectivity: what I perceive is real. Any form of scientific knowledge that seems extraordinary, i.e. counter-intuitive, while referring to a close object, will therefore be criticized and an alternative theory will be sought by constituting this new theory not positively, but negatively, i.e. by taking the alleged scientific evidence to task. Moreover, it is remarkable to observe that alternative theories often have the prejudice that science is very authoritarian and wants to impose itself in a homogeneous way, which contradicts the real state of scientific debate.
I believe that a good way of approaching this generalized confusion of thought, where every sign seems to invert into its opposite, or every thing can be interpreted in the opposite way, is to adopt the Bayesian latent space model, which articulates statistical probabilities and the introduction of noise. For there is indeed noise in the state of contemporary subjectivities, the noise of many confused opinions and ideas, the passage from one word to another by proximity correlation (for example, when someone writes on social networks that the Nazis were socialists because they were national socialists). Not only is there this confused noise, but there are also possibilities and probabilities, because every possible thought becomes thinkable not in terms of its truth value and the proofs that are linked to its phenomenology, but because it will cause its interlocutor to react, and we will find in this reaction a reason to rejoice in the truth value of this discourse. So, by declaring that the Earth is flat, I’m not asserting the flatness of the Earth, but I’m endangering the authority and common sense of my interlocutor, and so I’m varying the probability in the latent space, adding another possibility, multiplying the truths in order to find my place in it. The platists’ game of refutation is a slightly absurd treasure hunt, the game of the negativity of proofs that attempts to destroy authority and elitism, whose last word is “I have the right to think what I want”, i.e. “Stop imposing your thoughts on me” or “The value of truth is less important than the emancipation of knowledge through subjectivity”. In other words, ideas are ultimately caught up in a Bayesian space, where I calculate the probability of my idea in relation to what the other believes, or in relation to what the other believes I believe, and so on ad infinitum.
From then on, it’s counter-productive to use rational, i.e. authoritarian, arguments to convince your interlocutor – you won’t be presupposing his good will. Any rebuttal will appear as elitist violence, and will reinforce your interlocutor’s opinion, which is determined by the very questioning of this authority. So, without any pretension, we’ll have to follow this interlocutor’s delirium to the point where, in the midst of the delirium, we’ll find something in common: for example, we’ll talk about the authority of discourse, the elites, failure at school, the pretentiousness of certain people who know everything, we’ll focus less on the idea put forward as a hook to counter the authority of discourse, than on the hook and the position that seeks autonomy and emancipation in a thinkable of the possible. We try to come closer to experience than to knowledge.
In latent space, there is no external position; every proposition is statistically calculable. Each is simply one of the probabilities, since everything exists there. When we speak of latent space and try to make a policy of it, we don’t have an outside view (of the meta type), we are one of the vectors of this space, on an equal footing with all the others. It’s another example of the realism of the possibility of latent space. That’s why we need to be radically inclusive, and statistically flatten out all possible ideas to the point where we can find a phenomenological agreement. Conflictuality is therefore not a resource for dialectical resolution, but merely reinforces the oppositions and symptoms of the critique of authority. This strange, flat tolerance I’m talking about was perhaps the last resource we had to deal with our demons, before we had to fight physically to survive tomorrow.
These seem to be disastrous times, woven together by ideas of all kinds: by unabashed neo-fascists, by assertive platists, by anti-Semitic anti-racists and philosemitic racists, by contradictory beliefs and visions of the world whose absurdity seems to justify reason, and which we no longer know whether they are our projections or phenomena. Impulses clash, and their conflictuality leaves no room for dialogue. No argument seems to have a foothold, and in fact reinforces the opponent’s point of view.
A rationalist might become authoritarian and believe that this confusion of thought, this incessant mixing of any hypothesis with any other, is caused by a lack of education, by ignorance, by irrationality and the evil impulses unleashed by the media. The best response would be to strengthen education to reduce ignorance. This is undoubtedly because we still hope that ignorance is the source of delirium, whereas its source is a certain relationship to knowledge.
What does a platist believe when he declares that the earth is flat? Why, then, do some people hold on to this idea so strongly? It’s probably because the shape of the Earth is an example of the kind of trust that should be placed in rational authorities and knowledge elites. For I believe that none of us has directly experienced the shape of the Earth, because it is disproportionate to our organs of perception, even though we believe its sphericity to be a self-evident truth. We trust in authorities that make up for our limitations, just as we trust in organs outside our bodies. We don’t have to verify that the Earth is flat; others have observed it for us, and we can trust them. So the ground on which I rest is conceived not by the subject himself in his perception, but by an external trust given to a third party most often not known to himself, and by a common sense that mostly grants this trust. When someone cries out that the Earth is flat, he’s not so much describing the state of the Earth as giving the Earth a state in order to regain autonomy in his knowledge, and to get as close as possible to the conditions of his perception and subjectivation. The Earth is flat, because that’s how I experience it, and I don’t want to trust these authorities any more, because they’re anonymous and come from a simple belief. When we say that the Earth is flat, we are seeking to regain our autonomy and reconstitute knowledge determined by our own subjectivity. We find this attitude in xenophobia, which, despite the statistics, repeats that foreigners are the source of all problems. Figures are put forward, and we are told that the problem is obvious, that everyone knows it, that it’s real. This is undoubtedly how we veil our xenophobic perception, preferring common sense as subjectivity to knowledge as rational elaboration.
Perhaps this is one of the products of the history of the subject in the West, which increasingly focuses on itself and ends up losing the general conditions of objectivity. But how can we fail to understand this temptation to identify subjective conditions with possible knowledge? The flat Earth is designated as a state of interiority. But we can’t answer this question by arguing peremptorily and authoritatively about the scientific evidence that should determine our conception. It has to do with what we rely on, and with our foundation, which is determined by a short circuit of subjectivity: what I perceive is real. Any form of scientific knowledge that seems extraordinary, i.e. counter-intuitive, while referring to a close object, will therefore be criticized and an alternative theory will be sought by constituting this new theory not positively, but negatively, i.e. by taking the alleged scientific evidence to task. Moreover, it is remarkable to observe that alternative theories often have the prejudice that science is very authoritarian and wants to impose itself in a homogeneous way, which contradicts the real state of scientific debate.
I believe that a good way of approaching this generalized confusion of thought, where every sign seems to invert into its opposite, or every thing can be interpreted in the opposite way, is to adopt the Bayesian latent space model, which articulates statistical probabilities and the introduction of noise. For there is indeed noise in the state of contemporary subjectivities, the noise of many confused opinions and ideas, the passage from one word to another by proximity correlation (for example, when someone writes on social networks that the Nazis were socialists because they were national socialists). Not only is there this confused noise, but there are also possibilities and probabilities, because every possible thought becomes thinkable not in terms of its truth value and the proofs that are linked to its phenomenology, but because it will cause its interlocutor to react, and we will find in this reaction a reason to rejoice in the truth value of this discourse. So, by declaring that the Earth is flat, I’m not asserting the flatness of the Earth, but I’m endangering the authority and common sense of my interlocutor, and so I’m varying the probability in the latent space, adding another possibility, multiplying the truths in order to find my place in it. The platists’ game of refutation is a slightly absurd treasure hunt, the game of the negativity of proofs that attempts to destroy authority and elitism, whose last word is “I have the right to think what I want”, i.e. “Stop imposing your thoughts on me” or “The value of truth is less important than the emancipation of knowledge through subjectivity”. In other words, ideas are ultimately caught up in a Bayesian space, where I calculate the probability of my idea in relation to what the other believes, or in relation to what the other believes I believe, and so on ad infinitum.
From then on, it’s counter-productive to use rational, i.e. authoritarian, arguments to convince your interlocutor – you won’t be presupposing his good will. Any rebuttal will appear as elitist violence, and will reinforce your interlocutor’s opinion, which is determined by the very questioning of this authority. So, without any pretension, we’ll have to follow this interlocutor’s delirium to the point where, in the midst of the delirium, we’ll find something in common: for example, we’ll talk about the authority of discourse, the elites, failure at school, the pretentiousness of certain people who know everything, we’ll focus less on the idea put forward as a hook to counter the authority of discourse, than on the hook and the position that seeks autonomy and emancipation in a thinkable of the possible. We try to come closer to experience than to knowledge.
In latent space, there is no external position; every proposition is statistically calculable. Each is simply one of the probabilities, since everything exists there. When we speak of latent space and try to make a policy of it, we don’t have an outside view (of the meta type), we are one of the vectors of this space, on an equal footing with all the others. It’s another example of the realism of the possibility of latent space. That’s why we need to be radically inclusive, and statistically flatten out all possible ideas to the point where we can find a phenomenological agreement. Conflictuality is therefore not a resource for dialectical resolution, but merely reinforces the oppositions and symptoms of the critique of authority. This strange, flat tolerance I’m talking about was perhaps the last resource we had to deal with our demons, before we had to fight physically to survive tomorrow.