Consciousness Enjoying Uncertainty: Lacan, Neuropsychoanalysis, and Dual-Aspect Monism

Hello and welcome. This is Active Inference Guest Stream number 91.1 on November 1st, 2024. We're with John Dalaglio et al. discussing Dual Aspect Monism and the Free Energy Principle. We'll have a presentation by John followed by a panel discussion. So thank you all for joining and John for the presentation. To you. Okay, thanks Daniel and thanks very much to Active Inference Institute for hosting this. And thank you so much to all of my colleagues and people I very much look up to and such brilliant figures in the field for joining for this. So I'm going to be speaking about the Free Energy Principle and Dual Aspect Monism, specifically from a Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic perspective. And I'll say a little bit about what kind of background I'm bringing from the Lacanian viewpoint. It's a particular school of psychoanalysis that has mostly engaged less with contemporary natural sciences. And I think that this engagement is very fruitful and introduces some, not necessarily new ideas, but different sort of angles and perspectives. And so I'm really much hoping for a discussion around these ideas. I'm going to be talking about the Lacanian subject. But to begin with a joke that maybe illustrates some of the ideas. This is actually, this is a joke for the Hegelian subjects, but I think it would equally apply to the Lacanian subject. As the Lacanian subjects or a Hegelian subject, not as something that is a simply straightforward conscious being, but a certain self contradiction or a certain self loop of the diverting out of one's own self. And so, so the joke goes that the subject emerges precisely by way of a reflective self-relating reapplication of a logical operator, as in the worn out joke about the cannibal who ate the last cannibal in the track. So, and, and these sort of twists show up in a lot of the sort of philosophy behind here, but I think that the ideas link quite well to some of the computational concepts that I'll be talking about. So with that, these are some of the sources I'm drawing on. This is a book recently published by the I'm very grateful for Mark and Carl for such kind endorsements and an article that recently came out in the journal Neuropsychoanalysis, discussing some of these ideas and a little more specific philosophical depth. But to begin, I begin with Solmes's work on dual aspect monism and just to give the background, dual aspect monism is a philosophical position coming from Spinoza where it doesn't posits some sort of dualism from this Cartesian tradition. Rather, there's just sort of one stuff in nature. I'm calling it thing in nature, but there's just kind of one thing. Freud called it the mental apparatus and the, and this is the monism part of it. And the dual aspects come from the fact that we have two vantage points for this one part of nature. You can look at this part of nature as a subject, with thoughts, feelings and the like. And you can look at this part of nature as an object, the brain, the thing that you can poke, squeeze, measure, all of those things. And the idea is that neither is more real than the other. These are two perspectives of the same unique part of nature. It's not like the liver, which does all wonderful things of filtering toxins out of the body. But presumably there's not something that's like to be a liver in the way that there's something it is like to be the brain, that there is a subjective experience that the brain has. And likewise, there's a subjective vantage points on this thing in nature. Let me just make, okay, great. So these are two lenses. Neither is necessarily more real than the other. But interestingly, this leaves this kind of question of, okay, well then what is this thing in nature? How can we describe this thing in nature? If it's neither physiological nor subjective, what is it then? How is this ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail…