In June 2005, I presented a new artwork at the ASSC 9 conference at Caltech. There, I gave a talk about a new kind of poetry repurposing some of the tropes of postmodernism as a quasi-system of doing autophenomenology. The goal is not to pursue a first-person science, but to show how a self-inquiry, using my new shorthand and set of folk-psychological terms, can be slightly less slow, leading, and intrusive than everyday language - and can empower people to understand and model their own conscious experience.
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Working in collaboration with other philosophers and artists, I have produced
a work that uses visual, musical, and written forms to mirror the pandemonium of
activity in the brain, in which different layers of activation operate
simultaneously--and often 'at odds' with one another. After performing a piece
of my work Strangers’ Gallery, I will discuss it as a rendering of how the
clamor of competing voices, within the parliamentary chamber of the mind, can
yield the experience of consciousness.
The artwork illustrates the problems David Chalmers lists in giving a
“first-person perspective” report on mental states. I hope to show how one can
create a shorthand of notation while avoiding two pitfalls that Chalmers notes
as obstacles in developing “methodologies for investigating first-person data
and of formalisms for expressing them”: the fact that verbal productions are
linear, and slow. Perhaps, then, the piece can serve to provide what is
“missing” to fill in the gaps, which Chalmers sees as being an important
function of novelists and artists.
I will also show how, through a new system of notation, "tagging" procedures as
activated or tabled can illustrate Daniel Dennett’s “Cerebral celebrity” (“Fame
in the Brain”) amplification of the Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness. By
taking into account emergent developments that can lead to “strikingly different
sequels” with losing competitors “unable to recruit enough specialist attention
to achieve self-sustaining reverberation,” an artwork can be "pushed" to
illustrate the “multitrack” nature of the “processes of interpretation and
elaboration of sensory inputs.”
Finally, I hope that the discussion will show how that fragmented, abstract
forms can be used to refer to simultaneous events that occur in the brain over
very small time frames, and that flexibly varying the depth of polyphonic
structures can illustrate the ebb and flow of activation, attention, and
simultaneity in multiple streams of consciousness.
At philosophy conferences, many pay homage to poetry through its uses as
entertainment (TSC's notorious "poetry slams"), "filling in the gaps"
(Chalmers), or meditative activity (Susan Blackmore's calls to "quiet the
mind"). Here, however, in addition to the work's function as metaphor, I will
provide a glossary of some of the techniques and shorthand I have used to notate
and illustrate the "stream" in the work and will discuss its creation. In the
end, if this interpretation of my work proves as unreliable as a laboratory
subject's first-person phenomenal reports, it remains my hope to have created a
work that will delight and inform the scientific and artistic community.
selections from Phenomenological Grammar
By way of a prolegomena to a glossary to the Grammar