Reading Notes and Thoughts Merleau-Ponty
What is the enigma of painting he describes?
Why would Descartes come to the conclusion that the observer is not objective if he had thought about painting more??
What is a Cartesian view of the world and why does it conflict with the author’s?
It separates self from the world, objects from subjects, where subjects can view objects without being affected by them in turn
“Secondary qualities” such as color have no intrinsic meaning and only by acting on us can they evoke meaning, so you cannot ignore the body in the process of observation
Why does the painting “look” back at us
What is this obsession with vision over all other senses
Descartes imagines a world without senses to mislead us still has subjective experience – “I think, therefore I am” – a “blind irreducible experience” but to Merleau philosophy maintains that this is not possible because you cannot experience without a body and senses
Bodybuilding is an art, is painting, an act of painting and repainting, forming and reforming that does not cease
Bodybuilders understand Ahmed’s claim – that we shape the environment, we change the structure of the world outside the self and it reflects back in ourselves. And again. We lift the weight, the weight leaves its little tears in us and its little prickle of sweat on our brow and the cerebral footprint of the heavy iron pressed against hot hands. And the weight goes up; and the sweat drips down; and the self is in both.
Philosophy is an academic discipline and ingrained in academic funding, taught by professors whose livelihood is doled by academia, and perpetuated by students within such institutions. Although the self professed goals of many philosophers, particularly Marxist scholars, is the plight of the proletariat, the commoner, and the dismantling of oppressive structures, the inscrutable nature of their writing is borne of the traditions of academia: to be beyond critique and reproach of the uneducated, to cite and build on the foundations of earlier academics, to write using scholarly dialect. Because philosophy cannot make testable predictions or build models with evidence to achieve these goals of academia, it appropriates the goal of inscrutability to give reprieve from harsh reproach.
Let us analyze the phenomenology of philosophy: largely perpetuated by privileged French white males who taught at privileged white schools and gained respect by studying and citing their predecessors (need I describe them too?). Their philosophy developed not with the goal of being understood by the masses, which would in fact stand in opposition to long academic traditions. In fact, if they were to be understood it would undermine the legitimacy of the legacy of philosophy as rife with contradictions beyond reconciliation and reveal the minute progression of the field.
The first defense to the latter assertion is an attack on the idea of progression of a field at all, which was embodied in Merleau’s work “
Instead they lay claim to logocentrism to push themselves further beyond common reproach and comprehension
Which is absurd because anyone who thinks they don’t believe in logic is lying to themselves, as every practical action we take lies in this foundation of logic. You drink water today? You used implicit logic and statistics to figure that you need water to survive.
And good god deconstructionism. You don’t have to describe deconstructionism in a deconstructionist way. Really. Deconstructionism IS a way of blurring lines of categories and concepts. DONE.
It is no wonder that philosophers born outside of this bubble forge more unique paths, and are begrudgingly given some respect, correlating roughly to what degree they abide by the academic philosophical institutions’ rules – Is Sara Ahmed a widely respected philosopher? Well she does cite Foucault, so we’ll give her some clout, but she also writes with the intent to be understood to some degree, so let’s not take her too seriously. After all, we understand more than 50% of what she’s arguing. And those who seriously deviate from this tradition are no longer considered philosophers. They are relegated to figures of “pop culture”, or fictive writers. See David Foster Wallace. See Octavia Butler. Why? Because, academia gasps, the masses understand what they’re saying. They’re also more diverse. Why? Because people born outside the academic philosophical institutions’ privileged circle develop more meaningful goals than reproducing the academic philosophical institution.
All this is not to say that those French guys (and non French, non guys, who incorporated enough to find credibility) haven’t had interesting, impactful ideas. Of course they have. That does not invalidate the points above describing the nature of arriving at these ideas, and why they tend to be characterized by inaccessibility.

Sara Ahmed
What does she mean by new folds
Why does inhabitance orient
Why does a blindfold imply disorientation?
We cannot predict the input to our other senses, at least initially without taking compensatory input from other senses like touch or hearing, because we do not know where we are relative to “other” reachable, interactive surroundings
Similarly, if you were numb all over and told to find the heater, you are disoriented with respect to the gradients of temperature, you cannot place yourself relative to it
Are we sure that we should equate familiar with not lost, or with oriented
Do we really need to know left and right sides of body to be oriented? Is this not a binarization of a gradient?
“Orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extensions of the body into space”
“Goose bumps, textures on the skin surface, as body traces of the coldness of the air”
Are there any absolute coordinates? What implications does this have? She holds that we need absolute coordinate system (longitude and latitude eg) to know where we are / something fixed, but those are just relative to something other than ourselves – the earth.
“Body gets directed in some ways more than others”
“One becomes a subject through turning around when hailed by the police” – I do not understand this argument at all, are you not both the object, acted upon by the police, and subject as you experience yourself as the
Is the “subject” of a sentence or “address” the same as “subjective” experience??
Paths reproduce themselves
“Lines become the external trace of an interior world, as signs of who we are on the flesh that folds and unfolds before others” – this viewpoint leads to contentious claims: that we can diagnose depression from facial expressions, that certain cultures look a certain way, that behavioral practices can be read from exterior appearances. Justifies many stereotypes. Not that it is necessarily untrue for that though
“Orientation is a matter of how we reside, or how we clear space that is familiar… then take time” Embodiment implies time and spatial constraints and we cannot pretend to live in any other disembodied world because those thoughts come from an embodied one
“Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabi­ tance, as well as “who” or “what” we direct our energy and attention toward.”
“For a life to count as a good life, then it must return the debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as a social good, which means imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along a life course. A queer life might be one that fails to make such gestures of return.”

Summary
Merleau-Ponty
Science should learn from painting how to incorporate the science of itself into its predictions. Merleau-Ponty believes painting does this in a fundamental way that is grounded in the body of the painter, and unlike science, does not try to view things “from above”; “Every [painting] technique is a… metaphysical structure of our flesh”.

Sara Ahmed
To be oriented is to know where one is. This may imply familiarity with surroundings, and the process of becoming oriented may transfer unfamiliar to familiar. Moreover, that process requires a body, and interacting with the disorienting environment (inhabiting) in order to establish a relative ordering and map. Because we desire to be oriented, and Ahmed sees this as linked to familiarity, we tend to take paths which others have already oriented themselves toward, that have already shaped the world in familiar ways. Social expectation can imply that one must further an already taken path, to orient more along this axis in the future. It can be difficult to veer from a path and face the failure to meet this expectation.

Compelling Points
It is ignorant to ignore the effects of the objects we observe on our subjective experience, and thus observation (truism)
Orientation does not merely consist of determining left from right sides of the body, instead it is a process of placing oneself relative to many different relative coordinate systems,
“Goose bumps, textures on the skin surface, as body traces of the coldness of the air”
I think this quote captures the essential compelling points of both essays for me. The body forms and is formed by the shape of the environment, and the body of the environment is traced by the bodies and objects in it.

Implications
Free will – Merleau-Ponty’s view that everything begins from a single point of being and emanates, observing the world, being shaped by observation, and forming from there seems to leave little room for free will, whereas Descartes’ mystic, unaffected observer does because how one’s own mind changes is not addressed and can be explained by free will instead of interactions with surroundings
Definition of reproduction and theory of natural selection
How do you reproduce the self if the self extends into space
We all understand “self” without this complication: it ends at the barrier of the skin, and the skin represents a threshold beyond which the similarity of a reproduced self is essentially zero.
Differential equations – while it might be tempting to conclude that because we cannot observe “from above”, and what we observe changes us and our observation, that it is impossible to observe in a “scientific way”, or that our observations are nondeterministic. I disagree, I think this just complicates the notion of observation by reframing it as a differential equation, wherein the variable we solve for is in itself a part of the equation describing the variable. These equations are sometimes solvable, or at the least, can be approximated with deterministic degrees of precision. So the conclusion that a variable affecting the equation which describes it creates a nondeterministic system would be a mistaken assumption.
To recognize the self as extended in space is self-transcendent and breaks down notions of anthropomorphized self importance and challenges divine creation

The most interesting implication of these ideas to me is that of one of the central tenets of biology: evolution. How does one reproduce the self if the self extends into space? What does reproduction mean if the self is some sort of continuum with no real separable boundary between “it” and “other”? I am not entirely sure how to answer these questions, but I can make a few observations.

We all vaguely understand what we mean by self. It stops at the skin because the degree of control we have past this boundary sharply drops. Moreover, what we maintain and reproduce throughout space and time is generally contained within this boundary, if reproduction can be described by a function computing the similarity of what was and what is within a defined physical space. In a looser definition of reproduction, less centered on biology, maybe that defined space is physical, or maybe that defined space is a set of possible actions. Maybe things that act similarly but are physically different is just as valid a form of reproduction as the converse. Maybe it is a power set of the two spaces. Maybe it is a way of computing similarity that I cannot right now imagine. I would contend that this type of reproduction is a gradient which originates from some center of self, and defines the self not in terms of “is” or “is not” but instead as how similar points in

Is a self defined by ability to reproduce?
Or is it defined by agency and manipulation?

Reproduction needs some material basis, a thing upon which to act to produce another thing which is in some sense similar.

How can we “reproduce” but still differentiate our selves from our children??
This is not reproduction. It is production. The thing most faithfully reproduced is a human. It is only a partial reproduction of the parents’ traits. Since we do not call our children a part of our self, we should better understand reproduction as that of the human self, and not of our individual self.

But if we reproduced something exactly like us, there would then be two selves, not just one merged self, so then the self cannot be defined entirely by reproduction.

If reproduction is to make an exact copy of itself then the word becomes meaningless because it describes almost nothing. So then there must exist a continuum of similarity to the original which defines reproduction in the sense that we understand it.

If two things that are materially disparate but have the exact same action set exist, are they a copy? If one produced the other, is it reproduction?
Is it possible to have two materially disparate things with the exact same action set or do different materials inherently endow different properties such that there are at least minute differences in action sets and how the thing moves through the world?
No, it is not possible, because by definition we stated the materials are different. How do we detect differences? Interactions with the world. Therefore different materials give rise to different action sets.

But at the same time, computing the similarity of the materials doesn’t say much about the similarities of the whole, for example comparing the similarities of monkey and human genomes.
No, this example just illustrates the powerful effect of extremely high information materials, such that tiny differences in materials can result in drastically different action sets.

Thus, reproduction of self-reproducing action sets is the process of evolution, and this results in reproducing materially similar selves such that the action sets resulting are similar.

Thus the self is defined by copies: redundancies of behaviors and interaction patterns. This is in turn a computation of material similarity between centers of self.

What if there is you and you’re looking at an ad and it has some particular effect, and there’s you later and you’re smelling something that reminds of that ad. Are those similarities in effect on your self accounted for in this model?
Yes because the firing of particular neurons will have material similarities so the selves at the two particular instances in which the environmental self was similar will be reflected.

You can check if something has reproduced by seeing how materially similar centers of self are, but that is not what the self is. The self can be seen as a collection of things that reproduce??

Reproduction implies a self but a self does not imply reproduction. Exists reproduction, then exists self. Cannot use reproduction to define self. Then self is defined by agency? Loci of control? Must start from conceding that there is not a hard barrier between self and world, but that there IS an understandable, discernible difference.

If I have a group of skin cells bumping against air molecules, how can I tell that border? The skin cells exert more pressures, force-fields, interactions between each other than with the air molecules. More information exchanged between, at a higher rate, than with the air molecules. Keep drawing this