That is, until today.

The one thing I try to continuously remind people is that philosophy is itself a data point, a telling demonstration of what has to be one of the most remarkable facts of our species. We don’t know ourselves for shit. We have been stumped since the beginning. We’ve unlocked the mechanism for aging for Christ’s sake: there’s a chance we might become immortal without having the faintest clue as to what ‘we’ amounts to.

There has to be some natural explanation for that, some story explaining why it belongs to our nature to be theoretically mystified by our nature, to find ourselves unable to even agree on formulations of the explananda. So what is it? Why all the apparent paradoxes?

Why, for instance, the fascination with koans?

Take the famous, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Apparently, the point of pondering this lies in realizing the koan is at once the questioning and the questioned, and coming to see oneself as the sound. For many, the pedagogical function of koans lies in revealing one’s Buddha nature, breaking down the folk reasoning habits barring the apprehension of the identity of subject and object.

Strangely enough, the statement I gave you in the previous post could be called a koan, of sorts:

It is true there is no such thing as truth.

But the idea wasn’t so much to break folk reasoning habits as to alert readers to an imperceptible complication belonging to discursive cognition: a complication that breaks the reliability of our folk-reasoning habits. The way deliberative cognition unconsciously toggles between applications and ontologizations of truth talk can generate compelling cognitive illusions—illusions so compelling, in fact, as to hold the whole of humanity in their grip for millennia.

Wittgenstein, and the pragmatists glimpsed the fractionate specialization of cognition, how it operated relative various practical contexts. They understood the problem in terms of concrete application, which for them was pragmatic application, a domain generally navigated via normative cognition. Impressed by the inability of mechanical cognition to double as normative cognition, they decided that only normative cognition could explain cognition, and so tripped into a different version of the ancient trap: that of using intentional cognition to theoretically solve intentional cognition.

Understanding cognition in terms of heuristic neglect lets us frame the problem subpersonally, to look at what’s going on in statements like the above in terms of possible neurobiological systems recruited. The fact that human cognition is heuristic, fractionate, and combinatory means that we should expect koans, puzzles, paradoxes, apories, and the like. We should expect that different systems possessing overlapping domains will come into conflict. We should expect them in the same way and for the same reason we should expect to encounter visual, auditory, and other kinds of systematic illusions. Because the brain picks out only the correlations it needs to predict its environments, cues predicting the systems requiring solution the way they need to be predicted to be solved. Given this, we should begin looking at traditional philosophy as a rich, discursive reservoir of pathologies, breakdowns providing information regarding the systems and misapplications involved. Like all corpses, meaning will provide a feast for worms.

In a sense, then, a koan demonstrates what a great many seem to think it’s meant to demonstrate: a genuine limit to some cognitive modality, a point where our automatic applications fail us, alerting us both to their automaticity and their specialized nature. And this, the idea would be, draws more of the automaticity (and default universal application) of the subject/object (aboutness) heuristic into deliberative purview, leading to… Enlightenment?

Does Heuristic Neglect Theory suggest a path to the Absolute?

I suppose… so long as we keep in mind that ‘Absolute’ means ‘abject stupidity.’ I think we’re better served looking at these kinds of things as boundaries rather than destinations.