Pub Date : 2021-10-14DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190664350.003.0001
M. Bernini
After radical blows inflicted by empiricist or pragmatist thinkers like David Hume or William James, cognitive science is today largely rejecting Descartes’ view of the self as an internal and unified “thing” or substance. The growing amount of books by foremost philosophers of mind (Metzinger 2009) and neuroscientists (Hood 2012; Gazzaniga 2012) on the so-called “illusion of self” (Albahari 2006; see also Siderits et al. 2011) is the most tangible sign of how the current dominating theory is rather that we are not who we feel or think we are. If hardly anybody questions that our common phenomenological sense of being or having a self is real, the illusion would reside precisely in a misalignment between this phenomenological feeling and a different underlying ontology. This debate has led to a vital new “tradition of disagreements” (Gallagher 2012, 122–127), with a variety of competing or complementing explanatory models attempting to account for what is illusory about the self, for what is not, and for how this illusion is generated. These models will be progressively reviewed throughout this chapter, as the theoretical ground against which to understand and analyze Beckett’s own variety of modeling solutions in exploring what he also called, in a letter to George Duthuit on July 27, 1948, “the illusion of the human and the fully realised” (BL II, 86).
在经历了大卫·休谟和威廉·詹姆斯等经验主义或实用主义思想家的激进打击之后，认知科学今天在很大程度上拒绝了笛卡尔的观点，即自我是一个内部的、统一的“事物”或实体。最重要的心灵哲学家(Metzinger 2009)和神经科学家(Hood 2012;Gazzaniga 2012)关于所谓的“自我幻觉”(Albahari 2006;另见Siderits et al. 2011)是当前主导理论的最明显迹象，而不是我们感觉或认为我们是谁。如果几乎没有人质疑我们对存在或拥有自我的共同现象学感觉是真实的，那么这种错觉就恰恰存在于这种现象学感觉与另一种潜在本体论之间的错位中。这场辩论导致了一个重要的新“分歧传统”(Gallagher 2012, 122-127)，各种相互竞争或互补的解释模型试图解释什么是自我的幻觉，什么不是，以及这种幻觉是如何产生的。这些模型将在本章中逐步回顾，作为理解和分析贝克特自己的各种建模解决方案的理论基础，以探索他在1948年7月27日给乔治·迪图伊的一封信中所称的“人类和完全实现的幻觉”(BL II, 86)。
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Pub Date : 2021-10-14DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190664350.003.0002
M. Bernini
The ubiquitous presence of ambiguous voices in Beckett’s work remains an enduring mystery. The narrative work is no exception, to the point that Beckett’s fiction after Murphy (1938) can be read as, to quote The Unnamable (1953), “entirely a matter of voices; no other metaphor is appropriate” (319). Given the alien qualities of these voices, their intrusive independent agency, and their sometimes tormenting phenomenology, two frameworks of interpretation have so far prevailed. On the one hand, there are narratologists such as Brian Richardson (2006) who have proposed an “unnatural” reading of these voices, by arguing that these alien, multiple, sourceless voices cannot be traced back or ascribed to any actual experience within the human domain; that they cannot be “naturalized” (Culler 1975; 2018; see also Fludernik 1996) by the reader. On the other hand, there is a long-standing “pathological” framework, which sees voices in Beckett’s work as a fictional rendering of a wide range of experiences associated with mental illnesses, mostly of auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVHs) typical of schizophrenia. This chapter suggests that an alternative, natural, and non-pathological experience is the target of Beckett’s fictional cognitive models having voices as core modeling elements. By drawing on contemporary cognitive research on inner speech (roughly speaking, the activity of silently talking to, with and within oneself), it is advocated that voices in Beckett’s models target the working of inner speech, only defamiliarized or, as we shall see, “detuned” as a modeling alteration to explore its functioning within human cognition.
{"title":"A Brain Listening to Itself","authors":"M. Bernini","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190664350.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190664350.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"The ubiquitous presence of ambiguous voices in Beckett’s work remains an enduring mystery. The narrative work is no exception, to the point that Beckett’s fiction after Murphy (1938) can be read as, to quote The Unnamable (1953), “entirely a matter of voices; no other metaphor is appropriate” (319). Given the alien qualities of these voices, their intrusive independent agency, and their sometimes tormenting phenomenology, two frameworks of interpretation have so far prevailed. On the one hand, there are narratologists such as Brian Richardson (2006) who have proposed an “unnatural” reading of these voices, by arguing that these alien, multiple, sourceless voices cannot be traced back or ascribed to any actual experience within the human domain; that they cannot be “naturalized” (Culler 1975; 2018; see also Fludernik 1996) by the reader. On the other hand, there is a long-standing “pathological” framework, which sees voices in Beckett’s work as a fictional rendering of a wide range of experiences associated with mental illnesses, mostly of auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVHs) typical of schizophrenia. This chapter suggests that an alternative, natural, and non-pathological experience is the target of Beckett’s fictional cognitive models having voices as core modeling elements. By drawing on contemporary cognitive research on inner speech (roughly speaking, the activity of silently talking to, with and within oneself), it is advocated that voices in Beckett’s models target the working of inner speech, only defamiliarized or, as we shall see, “detuned” as a modeling alteration to explore its functioning within human cognition.","PeriodicalId":267886,"journal":{"name":"Beckett and the Cognitive Method","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116652029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-14DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190664350.003.0004
M. Bernini
Beckett’s fictional minds are pensive and tensive cognitive agents. If rumination feels to many of them a task to be performed or a “pensum to discharge” (U, 304), it is the way they think, however, that sparks a sustained and unsolvable cognitive differential or tension: a state of liminality due to the fact that they are not yet, or not anymore, endowed with what it takes to navigate the world effortlessly and meaningfully. The twilight atmosphere of Beckett’s boundary storyworlds or innerscapes therefore exponentially resonates with the wavering cognitive processes of what this chapter will define as liminal minds. After an overture section reinforcing how liminality is a structural principle that applies to many of Beckett’s storyworlds on several domains, the chapter heads on to the cognitive functioning of Beckett’s fictional minds. The second section focuses on Beckett’s alteration of the enactive scaffolding co-operation of language, narrative, and motility in human development. The third section analyzes his lesioning of human teleological dispositions on the motivational and emotional level, as well as the malfunctioning of predictive processes. In the final section, it addresses what kind of readerly experience results from engaging with cognitive liminalism, where liminal minds are constantly occupied by the activity of sense-making without the functional possibility of making sense.
{"title":"Cognitive Liminalism","authors":"M. Bernini","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190664350.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190664350.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Beckett’s fictional minds are pensive and tensive cognitive agents. If rumination feels to many of them a task to be performed or a “pensum to discharge” (U, 304), it is the way they think, however, that sparks a sustained and unsolvable cognitive differential or tension: a state of liminality due to the fact that they are not yet, or not anymore, endowed with what it takes to navigate the world effortlessly and meaningfully. The twilight atmosphere of Beckett’s boundary storyworlds or innerscapes therefore exponentially resonates with the wavering cognitive processes of what this chapter will define as liminal minds. After an overture section reinforcing how liminality is a structural principle that applies to many of Beckett’s storyworlds on several domains, the chapter heads on to the cognitive functioning of Beckett’s fictional minds. The second section focuses on Beckett’s alteration of the enactive scaffolding co-operation of language, narrative, and motility in human development. The third section analyzes his lesioning of human teleological dispositions on the motivational and emotional level, as well as the malfunctioning of predictive processes. In the final section, it addresses what kind of readerly experience results from engaging with cognitive liminalism, where liminal minds are constantly occupied by the activity of sense-making without the functional possibility of making sense.","PeriodicalId":267886,"journal":{"name":"Beckett and the Cognitive Method","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123789086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-14DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190664350.003.0003
M. Bernini
When we speak of an “inner world,” we are trying to capture something that is to some extent more than metaphorical. We allude to the phenomenologically rich (and worldlike) sensation of being situated in the perspectival unfolding of spatiotemporal relations with inner sounds, images, past or imagined experiential settings. On the other hand, our inner experience has an elusive, underdetermined, and vaporous quality (Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel 2007). How can we build on the similarities between outer and inner worlds so that the latter can be enactively navigated as the former? This chapter argues that narrative, as a mean of extended introspection (see chapter 1.3), can have a role in stabilizing perceptual elements in inner experience into a worldlike ecology. The scope of this chapter is to provide a theory of Beckett’s narrative terraforming engineering, which transforms the mind into a perceptual, embodied, multisensory ecology or what the author terms an enactive innerscape. Once transformed into a world, however, Beckett’s mental kingdom acquires its own natural laws, such as the cross-sensory synaesthetic activation of sounds and voices. A reading of Beckett’s innerscapes as the result of introspective modeling terraforming might cast some additional light on this perceptual principle. The chapter begins by introducing the scientific debate about the use of spatial or geographical mind metaphors: on their possibilities or limitations in capturing the nature of mind and inner experience.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-14DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190664350.003.0005
M. Bernini
The chapter argues that Beckett’s exploration of the mind is not just complicated, but targets non-linear, interacting, networking dynamics in cognition that, according to contemporary theories of complexity, classify the mind as a proper complex system. Within contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind, it is increasingly suggested that the brain should be regarded as a complex system (see, e.g., Gazzaniga 2012): as the physical site of decentralized interactions and distributed, looping causality among its neurons. Within this complex account of human cognition, also the mind and its mental properties, including consciousness and a sense of self, have been interpreted through the conceptual lenses of complex system theory. Theories of complexity in cognition, therefore, can help us thread together, and collectively reconsider, all the cognitive dynamics, patterns of emersions, and laws of the mind that Beckett has modeled when exploring consciousness and subjective experience. An emergentist reappraisal of prior chapters should give us a more complex, more global interpretation of Beckett’s early call for a formal access to (as a modeling exploration of) the “recondite relations of emergal” (D, 16) within human cognition. Also, it should support an interpretive shift from a view of Beckett as a complicated author to an account of him as an explorer of the mind’s complexity. The chapter begins by addressing the kind of problems complexity poses to modeling in general, and to narrative modeling in particular.
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