Black Hole Sun: On the Materialist Sublime

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sciborg2

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« on: April 11, 2019, 01:19:12 am »
Black Hole Sun: On the Materialist Sublime

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The first image of black hole has just been released today. This is a profound and important aesthetic moment from a new materialist perspective. The image is not beautiful because we enjoy a free play of our imagination as we try to figure out what we are looking at and how it fits with our existing conceptual framework. The image is also not sublime in the sense that a black hole is an infinitely dense singularity that defies all calculation by general relativity, and thus “blows our mind,” as we try to conceptualize the radically unconceptualizable. The black hole is itself a work of art. Nature, according to Kant, cannot be art because nature is passive and mechanistic. Art, for Kant, is radically free because it is a strictly human feeling of our own freedom.

The black hole is an excellent example of the materialist sublime. Nature and matter are not passive or deterministic. They are indeterminate material processes. They perform precisely the sublime that Kant restricts to humans alone. Black holes are not infinitely dense singularities. At the heart of a black hole is a specific (and very small) spatio-temporal region measured by the Planck scale and related to the size of the black hole (its Schwarzschild radius). However, and more importantly, below the Planck level of the black hole there are quantum processes that produce the spacetime of that region. These quantum processes below the Planck unit are fundamentally indeterminate—meaning that they are neither in one spacetime or another. They are the indeterminate material conditions for the emergence of spacetime itself (quantum gravity).

In other words, nature is not just the passive conditions for the human experience of its own aesthetic faculties of beauty or the sublime but itself performs the sublime activity of radical indeterminism without concrete form. Humans have the experience of sublimity only because nature is already performatively and materially sublime.

BeardFisher-King

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« Reply #1 on: April 11, 2019, 02:52:30 am »
A few questions [edited and expanded for clarity]:

1. From what perspective can the photograph of the black hole be described as "beautiful" or "sublime"?

2. If a black hole is a work of art, who is the artist? ("Work" implies a worker)

3. What can it mean for quantum matter to "perform"? Does an oscillating pendulum "perform"?

4. From what perspective can an aesthetic judgment that quantum activity is "performatively sublime" be made?

A very provocative and interesting post from this "new materialist perspective" with which I am not familiar. Thanks for sharing, sciborg2!
« Last Edit: April 24, 2019, 01:26:40 am by BeardFisher-King »
"The heart of any other, because it has a will, would remain forever mysterious."

-from "Snow Falling On Cedars", by David Guterson

Francis Buck

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« Reply #2 on: April 11, 2019, 05:17:32 am »
A few questions:

1. Who finds the photograph of the black hole to be "beautiful" or "sublime"?

2. If a black hole is a work of art, who is the artist?

3. What can it mean for quantum matter to "perform"? Does an oscillating pendulum "perform"?

4. Who is making the aesthetic judgment that quantum activity is "performatively sublime"?

A very provocative and interesting post from this "new materialist perspective" with which I am not familiar. Thanks for sharing, sciborg2!

I think the image is aesthetically pleasing to a certain degree although it would almost certainly not be nearly so if not for the context surrounding it.

I'm lost on the other queries, but then I'm not a materialist. Not sure what a 'new materialist' is either...

H

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« Reply #3 on: April 11, 2019, 12:20:33 pm »
Well, as a strict armchair Kantian and "physicist" (that is, an idiot who reads things he can barely understand) I have no idea what this article is trying to tell us.

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This problem constitutes Kant's principle argument that something else must be going on in the sublime experience other than the mere overwhelmingness of some object. As Kant will later claim, objects of sense (oceans, pyramids, etc.) are called 'sublime' only by a kind of covert sleight-of-hand, what he calls a 'subreption' (sect.27). In fact, what is actually sublime, Kant argues, are ideas of our own reason. The overwhelmingness of sensible objects leads the minds to these ideas.

Now, such presentations of reason are necessarily unexhibitable by sense. Moreover, the faculty of reason is not merely an inert source of such ideas, but characteristically demands that its ideas be presented. (This same demand is what creates all the dialectical problems that Kant analyses in, for example, the Antinomies.) Kant claims that the relation of the overwhelming sensible object to our sense is in a kind of 'harmony' (sect.27) or analogy to the relation of the rational idea of absolute totality to any sensible object or faculty. The sublime experience, then, is a two-layer process. First, a contrapurposive layer in which our faculties of sense fail to complete their task of presentation. Second, a strangely purposive layer in which this very failure constitutes a 'negative exhibition' ('General Comment' following sect.29) of the ideas of reason (which could not otherwise be presented). This 'exhibition' thus also provides a purposiveness of the natural object for the fulfillment of the demands of reason. Moreover, and importantly, it also provides a new and 'higher' purposiveness to the faculties of sense themselves which are now understood to be properly positioned with respect to our 'supersensible vocation' (sect.27) - i.e. in the ultimately moral hierarchy of the faculties. Beyond simply comprehending individual sensible things, our faculty of sensibility, we might say, now knows what it is for. We will return to this point shortly. The consequence of this purposiveness is exactly that 'negative pleasure' (sect.23) for which we had be searching. The initial displeasure of the 'violence' against our apparent sensible interests is now matched by a 'higher' pleasure arising from the strange purposiveness Kant has discovered. Interestingly, on Kant's description, neither of these feelings wins out - instead, the sublime feeling consists of a unique 'vibration' or 'rapid alternation' of these feelings (sect.27).

My hunch though, is that, like most of us, this "appeal to Kant" is misplaced, as ensconced in the entire Kantian "trancendental idealism" it's preposterous (to me) to make the claim that "Nature, according to Kant, cannot be art because nature is passive and mechanistic."  The very foundation of this claim (which I know not if it is something Kant said or not) but it presupposes that Kant would be saying something of nature as a "thing-in-itself."  Which is exactly what Kant wants us to understand as being unknowable.

So, indeed, nature, of course, is not sublime, in and of itself, it is sublime only in our perception of it.  "The sublime" in other words, would be phenomena not noumena, as a matter of course.  So, nature, as noumena, is not sublime, a priori, the sublime is a posteriori as a matter of course.  I'd think that is a bit like asking if there could be an a priori phenomena, which might be like asking if there is a married bachelor though...
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

BeardFisher-King

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« Reply #4 on: April 11, 2019, 12:37:35 pm »
Well, as a strict armchair Kantian and "physicist" (that is, an idiot who reads things he can barely understand) I have no idea what this article is trying to tell us.

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So, indeed, nature, of course, is not sublime, in and of itself, it is sublime only in our perception of it.  "The sublime" in other words, would be phenomena not noumena, as a matter of course.  So, nature, as noumena, is not sublime, a priori, the sublime is a posteriori as a matter of course.  I'd think that is a bit like asking if there could be an a priori phenomena, which might be like asking if there is a married bachelor though...
Very good. Sublimity resides in the perceiver, not the perceived.
« Last Edit: April 11, 2019, 12:46:53 pm by BeardFisher-King »
"The heart of any other, because it has a will, would remain forever mysterious."

-from "Snow Falling On Cedars", by David Guterson

TaoHorror

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« Reply #5 on: April 11, 2019, 01:07:49 pm »
1. From what perspective can the photograph of the black hole be described as "beautiful" or "sublime"?

From wonder - it's one thing to mathematically discover and quite another to see it with our own eyes. I think it was Einstein who said ( badly paraphrasing ) experiments amaze more than math can. Anything that can generate wonder falls in the category as exciting, sublime ( the Goad? ).

2. If a black hole is a work of art, who is the artist? ("Work" implies a worker)

Unsettled human business - some say "God", others "god", others "nothing", others "don't know" ... that said, the author could've been lazing with this language and simply leveraging artistic verbiage with sublime. I think all the author was saying is the human experience of art need not be limited to human productions, plenty of art in nature.

3. What can it mean for quantum matter to "perform"? Does an oscillating pendulum "perform"?

I took this as experiencing experiments is akin to experiencing art. If this is the point, it explains the usage of artistic verbiage. But I could be wrong, maybe the author is saying quantum is "performing".

4. From what perspective can a aesthetic judgment that quantum activity is "performatively sublime" be made?

Well, all art is in the eye - plenty of "great art" out there many think would be better used for toilet paper. I think all the author is saying is it's valid to stare at this picture with wonder, awe and humility and allow yourself to emotively learn from the experience as we do when viewing art. I'm not agreeing/disagreeing with the author, just what I think the point of the article is.
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« Reply #6 on: April 11, 2019, 01:20:12 pm »
I took this as experiencing experiments is akin to experiencing art. If this is the point, it explains the usage of artistic verbiage. But I could be wrong, maybe the author is saying quantum is "performing".

Well, there is someone of a "scientific sentiment" that exists, that it's possible that quantum things only "do" certain things (or "exist at all") when we look at them (measure them).  I don't know enough of the mathematical structures of such a thing, but I think that is the idea, that in this sort of way, observance is productive of phenomena.  Kant would like that, I think.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

sciborg2

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« Reply #7 on: April 11, 2019, 04:31:34 pm »
Sadly I have no answers, I just found it a bit interesting.

I also don't know what the New Materialism is, will see if I can get more info.

sciborg2

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« Reply #8 on: April 11, 2019, 05:02:47 pm »
Sadly I have no answers, I just found it a bit interesting.

I also don't know what the New Materialism is, will see if I can get more info.

Ah here we go:

Returning to Lucretius

Thomas Nail

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I recently returned to Lucretius in 2014, when I taught Book II of De Rerum Natura for a class on what I called “the philosophy of movement.” I added Lucretius to the syllabus because he was an overlooked figure in the history of philosophy who wrote about motion. I was excited about the text, but I was also skeptical that anyone who believed in “eternal unchanging atoms” could have motion as their philosophical starting point. What I encountered, however, absolutely shocked me.

There were no atoms. I scoured the whole Latin text. Lucretius never used the word “atom” or a Latinized version of this word—not even once. Translators added the word “atom.” Just as shockingly, I could not find the great isolated swerve in the rain of atoms, for which he is so well-known. In Book II, Lucretius says instead that matter is always “in the habit of swerving” [declinare solerent] (2.221) and if it were not (nisi), “all would fall like raindrops [caderent]” (2.222). The solitary swerve and the rain of matter are therefore counterfactual claims. Lucretius never said there was a rain and then one atom swerved. He says that matter is in the “habit” [solerent] of swerving, meaning that it happens more than once. This, he says, is the only way to avoid the problem of assuming that something comes from nothing—the swerve of matter in the rain. 

This small but significant discrepancy made me wonder what else had been left out of translations and interpretations. Could it be possible that there was a whole hidden Lucretius buried beneath the paving stones of Greek atomism? If there are no atoms and no solitary swerve in Lucretius, can we still make sense of the rest of the book or had a missed something? In 2016 I decided to find out.

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Mechanistic materialism has been throughly criticized across the humanities and sciences, but I think we have been too quick to throw out materialism with the mechanistic bathwater. Lucretius is such a wonderful figure to return to today because he embodies the diffractive relations we need to rediscover between the arts, sciences, and humanities for a new posthumanities and a new materialism. Lucretius was a scientist and philosophical poet. Knowledge today, however, has been so compartmentalized that thinkers like Lucretius are extremely rare. This is a profound loss for most universities.

However, if we are going to address contemporary ethical practice at the global level seriously, we can no longer be merely scientists, philosophers, or poets. It is no longer enough to be merely the scholars of such and such figure or topic; the humanities and sciences need to come back together again. The study of nature unites all theoretical practice. Globalization and climate change demand that we see the big picture—that human activity is completely continuous with natural processes. Humans are geological actors, and the Earth is not a passive stage for our performances. The disconnect between the humanities and natural sciences is part of the same disconnect between humans and nature. We have divided up our knowledges as we have divided up our world, and the consequences have been disastrous. We can no longer study nature as if our acts of inquiry were not already ethical and transformative practices of nature itself.

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Corpora have always moved according to the same motions [motu principiorum corpora] (2.297–8). There never was a cataract. There never was a point in time or space when they started swerving, because it is only their swerving motion that produces time and space in the first place.

This is the hardest idea to think. The swerve is neither determined nor random. It is an indeterminate relational process capable of producing emergent forms. This is what he means when he says there is no oblique causal motion. For Lucretius, there is an immanent self-causality or continuous transformation of the whole of nature at each moment. Each motion comes from another, not in a completely determined or random way. Randomness is merely another version of ex nihilo creation. Lucretius is therefore neither a mechanist or a vitalist.

Wherefore again and again it is necessary that corpora swerve a little, but no more than a minimum, lest we seem to be inventing oblique motions, and the true facts refute it.

TaoHorror

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« Reply #9 on: April 11, 2019, 11:48:13 pm »
This is an amazing read, Sci :)
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sciborg2

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« Reply #10 on: April 13, 2019, 08:29:25 pm »
This is an amazing read, Sci :)

Yeah, I'm glad someone else out there thinks causation that is non-mental also doesn't by necessity fall into a random/determined dichotomy.

The physicist Lee Smolin has talked about something similar IMO, that the Universe may move toward production of "novelty" in a non-conscious sense:

Precedence and freedom in quantum physics

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A new interpretation of quantum mechanics is proposed according to which precedence, freedom and novelty play central roles. This is based on a modification of the postulates for quantum theory given by Masanes and Muller. We argue that quantum mechanics is uniquely characterized as the probabilistic theory in which individual systems have maximal freedom in their responses to experiment, given reasonable axioms for the behavior of probabilities in a physical theory. Thus, to the extent that quantum systems are free, in the sense of Conway and Kochen, there is a sense in which they are maximally free.

We also propose that laws of quantum evolution arise from a principle of precedence, according to which the outcome of a measurement on a quantum system is selected randomly from the ensemble of outcomes of previous instances of the same measurement on the same quantum system. This implies that dynamical laws for quantum systems can evolve as the universe evolves, because new precedents are generated by the formation of new entangled states.