Commentary from Tina Röck on today’s post from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (MIT Press).

One way to read this book is to consider it a discussion of the limitations in our ability to understand hyper-complex, dynamic objects like the brain. In her more metaphysical chapters (2 and 8), which frame the more detailed and analytic chapters investigating neuroscience, Chirimuuta presents a process ontological stance, namely that reality is not stable, static, nor inherently substantial. Our world is like the brain: a hyper-complex, interrelated and dynamically evolving system (35). And in such systems, there are no “‘ready-made’ knowable objects” (pg.47), but constantly changing, adapting and evolving processes or interactions, that need to be made sense of. Thus we do not live in a fundamentally simple and thus mathematizable Leibnizian world, she argues, instead we live in “one in which intelligibility to human reason is not built into the fabric of things.” (56)

Scientists make sense of such complex processes through practices of simplification. Chirimuuta notes that these practices amount to “a purposeful distortion of the target of representation” (13), but they render the target understandable. Considering these distorting qualities of commonplace scientific practices, the role of science can’t be to find truth. Instead, science is the practice of making “things intelligible to the scientist by making things that are intelligible to the scientist.” (211) This ‘creation’ is not purely subjective but the result of an embodied, haptic engagement with the processes of the world. Thus haptic realism, as she names her position, combines and balances both activity of the knower and the fact that this activity responds to what is, rendering a realist position: “the sense of touch requires contact and purposeful exploration on the part of the perceiver, it is obvious that with touch one apprehends an extradermal reality in virtue of and not in spite of its interactive and interested nature.” (Chirimuuta, 2016, p. 746)

Ultimately science is not a disinterested endeavour, it is an attempt to create understanding that, she argues, is aimed at manipulation: “science is to be conceived as a project of domestication in which wild things and processes are altered, reconstructed, so that they are knowable and usable for some people’s purposes.”(52)  In the case of neuroscience this practical aim takes the form of rendering controllable through predictive power. However, she notes, predictive power is losing its moorings from understanding – if the complexity of the brain is reduced/modelled in a way that is simple enough for us to understand, this leads to “a disturbing loss of predictive accuracy”.(228) Non-reductive approaches like machine learning, on the other hand, yield predictive power, but they do not allow us to understand the processes involved in making these predictions. This status quo might indicate that there is an internal limit to the project of scientific domestication: hyper-complex dynamic systems might only allow for either understanding or relatively accurate predictive power/control.

Here Chirimuuta’s delimitation of the powers of traditional science is an invitation to renegotiate the role of science, philosophy and cultural practice and their contribution to understanding. It invites us to ponder how a science of domestication could be combined with epistemic practices of re-wilding. I think Chirimuuta’s idea of haptic realism could be employed in this direction. One way to do so is to use her Kantian clarification of the limitation of the powers of current scientific practice, to allow room for other approaches that cannot compete with science for its predictive power – but could ground ways of intra-actively understanding hyper-complex systems in ways currently not available to science.

One area to consider here could be indigenous or local knowledge, which “reflects the dynamic way in which the residents of an area have come to understand themselves in relationship to their natural environment and how they organize that folk knowledge of flora and fauna, cultural beliefs, and history to enhance their lives”. (Semali & Kincheloe, 1999) This account is largely in line with the account of haptic realism presented above. Both describe an embodied and embedded creation of understanding for the people and societies that need that understanding. I am suggesting that haptic realism could help characterise and make sense of the validity of indigenous ways of knowing, not in competition with scientific results interested in manipulation, but as its supplement interested in human and more-than-human flourishing.

Acknowledging that the “acquisition of knowledge is as much about structuring as it is about the detection of structures” (48) in an engaged/embodied/haptic way implies a sensorial responsiveness to the complex dynamic unfolding world that shapes scientific conceptualisation and its linguistic expression. Similarly indigenous ways of knowing are “empirical relationships with local ecosystems, and Indigenous languages are an expression of these relationships.” (Henderson, 2000) Such ‘wild’ ways of understanding, do not tie understanding to power and manipulation – to domination or mitigation of the forces of nature, but instead tend to reflect an attempt to be guided by the natural world, to live in accordance with what is. Exploring such wild ways of knowing could allow us to find new ways to situate and use understanding in a way to undercut the presupposed “ontological distinction between humanity and nature that was foundational to the birth of” modern science. (De La Cadena, 2015, p. 93)

References

Chirimuuta, M., 2016. Vision, Perspectivism, and Haptic Realism. Philosophy of Science, pp. 746-756.
Chirimuuta, M., 2024. The Brain abstracted. Cambridge: MIT.
De La Cadena, M., 2015. Earth beings. Ecologies of Practice across the Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mistry, J., Jafferally, D., Ingwall-King, L. & Mendonca, S., 2020. Indigenous Knowledge . In: International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. s.l.:Elsevier, pp. 211-215.
Semali, L. & Kincheloe, J., 1999. What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy.. New York: Falmer Press.