2: Dreams and a Sense of the Sacred
Are dreams for prediction machines to process information and rehearse for possible future scenarios? Or is there evidence that they may be for something more?
Homo Narratiosus’s Reduction to Homo Economicus
When Homo Narratiosus is reduced to Homo Economicus, then its reduced intention is for, and therefore composed of, predictive processes, which in modern times is about the exchange value of economic transactions with the world. Most non-determinist do not reject the material reduction, but they also do not think that it is exhaustive, or without remainder. A non-determinist generally believes that there is a remainder of indeterminate possibility beyond the material reduction to the necessary and sufficient reasons of material causality, and that this remainder contains limited, yet sufficient, degrees of freedom to allow for an actual choice. However useful beauty, wonder, and awe might be, actual degrees of freedom might allow for an intention beyond use. Homo Narratiosus chooses to ingress aesthetic values into being’s story of becoming not only because of Homo Economicus’s love of a good value, but also because of the story lover’s aesthetic intention for what is invaluable.
Beauty, wonder, and awe have their own necessary and sufficient reasons to which all other necessary and sufficient reasons are subordinate. Love cannot be reduced to its material causes, because love by definition contains degrees of freedom. Compelled or coerced love isn’t love. And what love intends must also be free. Love intends beauty, wonder, and awe. None of these is anything if not free. They disappear as soon as they are transacted or valued for their usefulness. This is not to deny that beauty, wonder, and awe aren’t valuable or useful, but only to say that their material causality is not their necessary and sufficient reason, love is. In the end the material reduction is useful, but it cannot tell you what something is, only love can because love gives being to itself as beauty, wonder, and awe, which necessarily includes the degrees of freedom for the awful.
Biological anthropologists have reduced evolution to niche construction. Not all niches require much capacity for predictive processing. But for those niches that do, particularly those fulfilled by an animal with a central nervous system, the general measure of predictive processes is the accuracy of their outcomes relative to an intention. Some intentions do not seem to be about survival or reproduction. These other intentions may be about the body, but not directly about its material flourishing. Freud was both a materialist and a determinist, but he “discovered” embodied intentions, at least in enlanguaged beings, for something other than beneficial ends, which he called “Death Drive.” The “Death Drive” was the drive beyond the “Pleasure Principle.”
The Pleasure Principle was the principle by which sentient bodies maintained homeostasis by decreasing bodily intensities. For example, as the tension or irritation of hunger pangs increases, the embodied intention is for food to decrease these unpleasant intensities. The Pleasure Principle worked well for explaining intentions motivated by bodies maintained at a high above equilibrium steady state. But Freud kept coming across patients with other intentions, especially in their dreams, which is why he changed his general thesis about dreams being about wish-fulfillment to dreams being about unacceptable, repressed intentions. Death Drive is not necessarily the desire for death. In a strange twist, if one desire’s death to end the intensities of living, then his intention accords with the Pleasure Principle. Death Drive was the intention to disrupt the pleasant homeostasis of equilibrium, so it was a kind of intention for the unintended. This intention to increase intensities was unacceptable to the individual and to their society, and so it was generally repressed only to be discovered in ticks, slips, symptomatic repetitions, and dreams.
However, Death Drive is also discoverable in plain sight whenever an increase in bodily intensities is intented. Putting spices on food is a simple example of something that at first appears to accord with the pleasure principle, but which upon further inspection has more to do with the Death Drive. Spices seem to assist in digestion by making food taste better, so they might be reduced to the material cause of bodily health. However, spices are not related to nutrition per se. Particular ones may contain some nutritional value, but they are not consumed primarily for that reason. Spices are generally added to food for their aesthetic value and not for their nutritional value. It is not necessary to deny that they may have nutritional value to make the case that their primary value is aesthetic and not material health.
The material reduction doesn’t appear to work as well for something that seems biologically unnecessary. Spices have a high cost in terms of the extra time and effort necessary to procure them with relatively little biological pay off. Whatever benefits they have, seem to be mostly psychological. The modern sciences on the whole reduce psychology to biology, so it is possible to say that psychological benefits are biological. However, the most common mechanism by which dietary supplements that don’t have clear nutritional or medicinal value are understood is “placebo.” The concept of placebo fails the material reduction because the mechanism by which a psychological belief causes a biological effect has never been established by a purely material description. The commonly accepted, “scientific” description of spices' “nutritional” value is identical to that of the placebo’s medicinal value. Each, somehow, encourages a salubrious physical state that promotes digestion in the former’s case and healing in the latter’s, but the physical substrate by which this mechanism operates has yet to be identified. Evolutionary biology can reduce spices to their material benefit to a degree, but there is a remainder of irreducible ambiguity about spices that may witness to a few degrees of freedom in the human intention for them. Simply put, spices do not compel their use by some clear causal relation to nutrition.
Evolutionary biologists tend to find some nutritional reason why spices have been adopted by so many human societies. A somewhat recent study proposed the antimicrobial effects of the “spiciness” associated with various sorts of hot peppers. And the study added that the experience of the “heat” that they produced provides a kind of high for those who consume them. However, hot peppers have also recently been found to coincide with higher rates of severe indigestion as well as stomach and esophageal cancer, so their evolutionary advantageousness may be a bit more ambiguous. The evolutionary value of any given spice can be disputed because spices are defined by their lack of necessary and sufficient reasons. Basial, thyme, and oregano are examples of spices that are from green leaves, so their nutritional value is indisputable, but they aren’t consumed for that reason. They are consumed because they make food smell great. Why do Homo Sapiens care about that one way or another? Are there any degrees of freedom in their intentions to make eating beautiful without a material explanation?
When nutritionists present lists of optimal foods for bodily health, they’re relatively basic, something like dark leafy greens, whole grains, and protein. When scientifically designed food is brought into crisis situations to both prevent starvation and provide balanced nutrition, it’s simple, cheap, and effective, usually comprised of some combination of peanut butter and other minor nutritional enhancements. Perfectly balanced nutrition has been known and easily accessible, for some time now, but these food plans have always been spurned by the human palate. Why would Homo Economicus reject such a well-designed diet as regularly happens when “nutritious” menu options are introduced, especially those famously doomed attempts to make school lunches healthy? The answer is that Homo Economicus wouldn’t, unless there were other intentions in human relations besides those of beneficial economic transactions. Human beings have historically had a notably strange relationship to any utilitarian or utopic scheme. They both ardently strive for them in the mode of Homo Economicus and undermining them according to some other hidden intention beyond the Pleasure Principle.
There are other intentions for Homo Sapiens beyond those of Homo Economicus’s transactions with the world as its market. The human fascination with beauty, wonder, and awe may not always enhance our prediction processes because there is an irreducible ambiguity about each of them. Aesthetic values may not always lead us to economic gain. In some instances, they may even distract us from what we should be focused on if we are focused on our advantage. Homo Narratiosus’s emotional intrigue with aesthetic values clearly does benefit us, so no non-determinist would deny how our intention for them materially avails us. Evolutionary Biologists often point out how what is aesthetically pleasing is frequently coupled with use value. However, what is more difficult to explain, from the perspective of the material reduction, is how Homo Economicus’s intention for the useful became its intention for the uselessness of “Exchange Value.” The theory of Exchange Value was formulated to explain why human beings value what cannot be reduced to use. The Evolutionary Biologist must show how what appears to be merely aesthetic can ultimately be traced back to its material benefit. All the elaborate, symbolic games, that human beings play, which seem to be so far removed from survival and reproduction, must be brought back down to their basic biological functions, so that whatever degrees of freedom symbolic concepts seemed to give to human culture beyond mere necessity, can be described in terms of determinate, causal relations.
Exchange Value is a kind of scandal of hyper-conceptual symbolism, sometimes called “Simulacrum” because it is the value of what is imagined to be valuable without material causality. Karl Marx though of Exchange Value as the offense of the “Commodity Fetish” in which a commodity was over-valued, by his estimation, because of the profligacy of capital’s creation of “Surplus Value,” which is the simulacrum of imaginary value not grounded in the “real” equation of value, which was labor’s relation to use. Tying labor back together with use would eliminate the capitalist’s exploitation of surplus value because value would be related again to need rather than to excess.
Aesthetic values have often been associated with surplus. They are considered materially unnecessary, so that they are linked with excess, which in moral terms has been equated with profligacy and decadence. However, the sciences have reduced aesthetics to their “original” uses so that they can be accounted for by the material reduction to necessary and sufficient reasons. Sometimes you hear scientists speak as if they are giving permission for indulging the unavailing nonsense of aesthetics because they once served a now obscured material end. One common instance of this, particularly relevant to the present conversation of Homo Narratiosus’s unaccountable love of story, is when myth and mythological traditions are “justified” by explaining how fantastical stories, especially those that seem to contain little instruction for practical living, are “actually” useful because telling stories together creates a social bond. Yuval Harari took a position like this about religion in his book Sapiens. Religion is a collect of bullshit stories that bond a group together in proportion to the amount of bullshit in them. The more bullshit, the deeper the bond.
For the Evolutionary Biologist, beauty, wonder, and awe generate an intention for beneficial personal and social transactions. However, they also generate a “motivated” intention that just as often leads to all kinds of biased and therefore poor decisions. If myths are used to cohere a group, they can also be used to distinguish that group over and against others, which might justify unnecessary and costly conflicts. Whatever economic justification “wires” us to recognize something as beautiful, beauty is famously never a reliable indication of economic value. One of the more annoying platitudes about beauty is that it is the “ruin of man.” Likewise, wonder may be the curiosity that leads to new discoveries, but it leads one astray as often as it results to some salubrious outcome. Perhaps, the most banal of cliché’s is “Curiosity killed the cat.” And awe can be just as awful as it is awesome. It is no coincidence that “awful” and “awesome” are both rooted in “awe.”
Whatever is of benefit to holding aesthetic values can also be a detriment. Homo Economicus’s desire for the transactional efficiency of beneficial interactions with the world is better served by the “cold” calculations of Large Language Models because they have no “skin in the game.” Predictive processors without bodies are “free” because they are “blind” to the affective concerns of embodied ones. They learn without the motivations of pleasure and pain, and therefore, without the motivated aboutness of beauty, wonder, and awe, all of which corrupt the purity of digitized knowing. It is little wonder why we increasingly turn to LLMs with our quandaries because they are clearly better prediction machines than the organic prediction machines crudely molded by the forces of evolution.
And perhaps, another benefit to LLMs is that they do not dream. The aboutness of dreams may be about the consolidation and processing of information, and the rehearsal of possible future scenarios, which are the functions that LLMs are programed to perform. But there is also something else that dreams seem to be about as well, especially in the dreams commonly called “nightmares.” Nightmares are not about correct predictions or any other form of self-mastery. They are about the intractable contradictions that cannot be uttered within hearing distance of the egoic economic transactions of the day. The subject of nightmares does not transact in economic value, but in the irreducible ambiguity that destroys economies. The subject of nightmares directly “enjoys,” in the Lacanian sense of excessive enjoyment, or of “jouissance,” the horror of the lack of self-mastery, which is to enjoy the lack of transactable value of the non-transactable self, which is the enjoyment more typically associate with the Freudian Death Drive. There was an often-expressed sentiment in the 90’s by the lovers of exotic piercings and excessive tattoos that went, “I’m reclaiming my body from corporate America.” The joke now is that capital has done what it always has and includes these “exotic excesses” as a part of its “apparatus of capture.” However, the original intention of “reclaiming” a body from economic transactability expresses the intention for an irreducible ambiguity beyond Homo Economicus’s intentions.
We may dream of monsters to learn from them, but not the lessons of prediction processors. Prediction machines do not need monsters to teach them anything about reducing uncertainty. Nightmares are not primarily practice for the commercial successes of the waking world. They may be left over fears from a more primal time, as many Evolutionary Biologist say, but then they are also about a more primal need for stories as well. And even though Homo Economicus has learned to make an industry of the monstrous, that is not what nightmares are for. Nightmares are not for Homo Economicus because they are not about reducing the ambiguity of monsters to their transactable value. Nightmares are about the horror of irreducible ambiguity. They are truly an encounter with the “face of the other,” as Emmanuel Levinas might have put it. And as Levinas taught, the “otherness” of the other is the invaluable irreducibility of the other to transactable value.
Nightmares present their subjects with the inherent contradictions of desire that undermine the determinate intentions of prediction machines. Homo Sapiens are monsters to themselves because they are other to themselves and as such, divided against their own ends always “passing over” into opposition against themselves, which is the creative destruction that Hegel outlined as being passing over into its own nonbeing as the process of becoming. Prediction machines intend beneficial ends, but Homo Narratiosus abhors ends and turns each gesture at an end into the beginning of a new chapter, which is the unending story of what Zizek called the “monstrosity of the undead drive,” which is so monstrous to the ego’s necessary sense of solidity and competency that it must mostly hide in the Freudian unconscious until night. This story lover in us will gleefully undermine the economic ends of prosperity in favor of the awe of the awful because this horror avoids not only the simplistic end of a boring story, but it avoids ending the story altogether. If the “steady state” of the Pleasure Principle’s homeostasis is the proper end of economics, then the end of Homo Narratiosus is to undermine ends. The monstrosity of the undead drive is that while Homo Economicus’s drive is for uncertainty reduction in the mode of a prediction machine, Homo Narratiosus drives uncertainty according to the narratological investments of nonbeing in the story of becoming.
Whatever pattern finding intention binds the algorithms of disembodied prediction machines together, it isn’t intentional in the sense of chosen by the algorithms themselves. And it isn’t like human intention because human, intentional aboutness includes the intention of Homo Narratiosus, which is bound by beauty, wonder, and awe. Our thrall to aesthetic values also may not entirely be chosen, as in some idiotic notion of libertarian freedom, but there are at least some degrees of freedom in aesthetics that make them more like the “lures” of AN Whitehead’s “Process Philosophy" than the determinations of the modern sciences. The lure of beauty may feel ineluctable at times, but it must keep within it the actual possibility of refusal; otherwise, it’s determinate nature will undermine the “could have been otherwise” essence of the phenomena of beauty. All aesthetic phenomena are like this because it is the actual possibility of what isn’t that founds the realized appearance of what is. At least for enlanguaged being, this is how the negativity of Derridean Differánce requires degrees of freedom. Whatever is necessarily beautiful, or couldn’t have been different, according to discoverable material causes, is not beautiful.
Derrida’s famous flip of the primacy of text over speech can be understood in light of this “could have been different” of Differánce. Derridean textuality is the possibility space that presents via absence, which was an unconscious reformulation of Hegel’s classic assertation that being is constituted by its own nonbeing. In the same way, Homo Narratiosus’s love of stories may have preceded its stories as the strange loop of the phenomenological intention emerging from the ground of love of experience for experience's sake. Or, as the student of Derrida, the Catholic Phenomenologist Jean Luc Marion put it, “God is proceeded by His Love,” because He appears as the gift of appearance itself, which is the recursion of the phenomenological intention appearing for itself as experience qua experience. This recursive loop might be put in specifically narratological terms as the ground of stories, which is the love of story appearing to itself as the experience of story. Whatever appears is grounded in awareness, which is the love of appearances that precedes whatever appears. Perhaps, in some Nick Landian “Hyperstitional” way, the evolutionary story of the struggle to survive was only a pretext for the experience of it, and predictive processes were implanted by this love of experience to further the story.
Dreams are particularly extravagant expression of this love of story. These stories have intentions of their own and insist on being told even when we are trying to get some rest. Dreams may be the stories that can no longer be repressed, as Freud would have it, but they are also the stories that tell us who we are beyond the ego that presents itself as if it were the entirety of ourselves when we are awake. The ego rejects the “otherness” that appears in dreams as outside of itself, or “other” than itself, because this nightmarish otherness does not accord with the ego’s intentions for itself, or of what is commonly called our “self-image.” Dreams are the stories that tell us rather than the stories that we tell about ourselves when we are in the ego’s reduced self. The material reduction reduces us to prediction machines, so that our daytime stories are about efficacious, economic transactions, but the horror of the night reveals the destroyer of these waking ambitions.
This half-serious conjecture about story’s having their own intentions is only to show that there is some other, heretofore, unknown self at work in the process of evolution by natural selection where stories are concerned, and one place this “other” self’s intention is revealed is in dreams. The daytime storyteller is the infamous ego, but who’s spinning the yarn when the ego is asleep? Well, it must be ourselves of course, but dreams teach us, like any true teacher, how little we know about ourselves, particularly about the wider self that emerges whenever the ego cannot reduce the world to material benefit. There is a mysterious intention within us that used to be less hidden. In the foregrounding of the evolutionarily advantageous, the actual possibility of aesthetic value withdraws.
Beauty, wonder, and awe may be reducible to their material causality when they are advantageous, but Homo Narratiosus’s love of story isn’t always gainful because it isn’t always about remuneration. The narratological love of experience is the extravagant beyond of the profit motive and of the sensible reduction of uncertainty by prediction machines. Homo Sapien's narratological intentions come before its commercial ones, and even before the biological commerce of its body, which is homeostasis within a boundary. But why bother with the extravagant expenditures of a high above equilibrium steady state? Nothing in the material world could intend for such a thing by accident, unless there was a more primary intention of matter-energy to make gratuitous appearances of itself to itself. The body’s biological commerce is bound to the narratological intention of a whole, but this whole isn’t unified by the intentions of survival and reproduction alone. If natural selection was the only selector for biological bodies, then it would have produced much easier to maintain organisms, like amoebae or whatever, and it hasn’t yet been establish how “blind” principles “selected” for even the most basic life beyond description of its incomprehensibly vast probabilities. The fact of extremely complex, exceedingly difficult to maintain, fearfully high above equilibrium organisms who love to tell stories and make pointless art make one wonder if there wasn’t a value within the original intention of the whole for aesthetics from the beginning.
Bodies are assemblages of mechanisms bound by “Markov Blankets” of some kind. For Homo Narratiosus that binding is the intention of stories. Bodies like objects are unified by the definition of their intentions, which is like saying that wholes contain their parts by the boundary of their identity or what used to be called “essence,” and sometimes still is as long as that essence is a relational essence and not the classical essence of what a thing is in itself. A classical essence’s “Markov Blanket” separated it from its relations so that its intentions were defined over and against its relations. But a relational essence is a relationally defined intention. Evolutionary biology’s switch of emphasis from natural selection to niche construction reflects this difference between a non-relational principle and relationally defined intention. A niche is not determined by its own internal intentions alone, but by the relation between internal intentions and those of external entities or objects.
The boundary of an object may be physical, but it also might be a conceptual intention like an identity or story. In this way an intention, like a classical “essence,” forms a whole of its parts by the definition, or by the goal(s), of a conceptual boundary. Essences were generally discarded as conceptual frameworks because most modern philosophers found them to be too allusive to be useful. This allusivity emerged whenever philosophers tried to pin down the necessary and sufficient reasons of a given object, which would have been an essence, if discoverable, or of whatever it was that held a “substance” together. "Substance” was also discarded as an imprecise term, and both terms were discarded for the same reason. The essence of any substance is relational and not self-contained, or not self-identical, which is a form of the common cliché that the sum of the parts doesn’t equal the whole. This is also the allusivity of “A does not equal A” into which some scientists like to insert the magic of emergence.
Nowadays this same issue has arisen with identities, as soon as they can be identified, these identities have already broken the boundaries of their intentions, so the concept of “fluidity” contradictorily defines contemporary identities as flows of continual differentiations of new conceptual objects. Stories never really have made sense as static truths, even though they are often used that way, especially when it comes to identifying people groups according to their common stories about themselves. The history of mythology shows that stories are not only about the individuation of conceptual objects through the process of differentiation, but also that the history of the myths themselves is the history of conceptual innovation through the recursive reinterpretations of Hans Gadamer’s “Hermeneutic Circle,” which was itself a reinterpretation of Heidegger’s perspectival shifts between parts and wholes to uncover an essence, or nowadays, uncover an identity. This is the sense in which myths make the people who are defined by them, rather than a people creating their own mythology to represent their “rational” intentions. Only the mythology that emerges from the unconscious’s stories about itself in dreams can define a person, or a people, which is the obstacle that many modern attempts to create meaningful mythologies has run up against. Myths cannot be intended; they must be found in the without-intention of the night. So far only the more savvy of the modern advertisers have been able to capitalized on the unconscious in this way.
Like the people groups that myths “identify,” they are as fluid as the branching tributaries of an unstable flow. Objects flow no matter how solid they may seem because as GW Hegel pointed out, being flows into nonbeing as the flow of becoming. Prediction machines must hold the world as if solid to correctly identify its patterns, or repetitions, so that each “accurate” identification contains the constitutive non-identity of identity within it. Nightmares are not only about the failure to correctly identify but also about the failure of identity itself. Monsters are the creeping otherness that an object “contains” as the undoing of its own identification. Hegel talked about this as the “passing over” of a thing into its opposite, or of being into nonbeing.
Hegel applied this general logic to his enigmatic statement that the “the Thing is I.” Hegel meant that the “I” of first-person subjectivity was constituted by the “otherness” of third-person apprehension. For Hegel concepts determined, or identified, a thing, so that when I identify myself as myself, I make myself an object for myself in the third-person. I am always mediated through the “otherness” of a concept, so that I become myself through the other. This sort of mediation through the other was Hegel’s immediacy because the recursive loop of “the thing is I” was projected back out as the objects that the “I” apprehended on the first-person screen of subjectivity. This recursive loop was what Hegel called “thought thinking itself,” and what Douglas Hoffstetter called the “Strange Loop” of the self. The self is a strange loop of Hegel’s “immediate mediation.”
What is immediate is already mediated by the third-person objectivity of a concept. The intention that marks the boundary that I consider to be myself is relative to the intention of the outside other, which for Lacan was the internalization of the external “Big Other” in the form of the “Symbolic Order.” This is the logic of horror in which I become myself by “becoming other than myself,” or by internalizing the “Big Other” of the Symbolic Order, which is the “Symbolic Castration” of becoming myself by becoming another. Dreams, certain meditative practices, and philosophical inquiry all reveal that there is no substantial self before this castration of the symbolic order that both castrates and constitutes it at the same time, which is why the notion of substances as self-constituting has been roundly rejected in modern philosophy. The essence of a thing is how it flows away from itself into itself. The horror of the external other is reciprocally related to the horror of the other that constitutes me as both other and unsubstantial. For the determinist, this self-positing “I” is determined by the external other. For the non-determinist this self-positing “I” includes some access to degrees of freedom because beauty, wonder, and awe must be indeterminate lures.
This is the horror that must be hidden from the ego, which is that it is not self-constituting because it does not contain its own identity, which accords with the logic of set theory in which a set is not identical to its constituent parts, so that identification is always retroactive and never about what Hegel called the “Indeterminate Immediate” because indeterminacy can’t be seen until it has already “passed over” into a determinate concept, which is why whatever appears, appears according to the logic of Hegel’s “Nachtraglichkeit,” or “afterwardsness.” Hegel refused the false dichotomy between essences and appearances. A thing is what it appears as, in the immediate mediation of afterwardsness, which is an instantaneous, imperceptible “passing over” from indeterminate immediacy into how an essence appears in the determinate present as itself. The appearance of appearance is the “essence” of Hegel’s “thought thinking itself,” or how objects become subjects for other objects in a recursive loop, much like Lacan’s, “a signifier is the subject of another signifier.”
All horror is about the lack of unified, or determinate, intention, which is the castration the ego’s phallic enjoyment. Symbolic castration is the failure to make whole that is necessary for something to appear as a whole. The whole cannot appear when it is whole, or fully present to itself, because an appearance is a relation. So, a whole must become incomplete, or less directly present, to represent itself to itself. What appears, appears according to an intention of the whole, but this intention is necessarily incomplete in its representation as Kurt Godel proved with his “Incompleteness Theorems.” An object is a whole like a set in “Set Theory” because it is the definition, or intention, of the set that forms the outside, or boundary, of the set by defining what belongs in the set according to the identity of the whole. The definition, identity, or goal(s) of the whole forms a conceptual boundary like an imaginal Markov Blanket, so that the phenomenological intention is comprised of conceptual objects. This imaginal boundary unifies parts into whole objects, so that the intention for the whole forms the inside and the outside of the object, but boundaries of objective wholes, as outlined above, are fluid like Heraclitean rivers. Nightmares are about the failures of intentional boundaries, so that insides appears outside and outsides appears inside. Body horror is about the necessary failure of the body’s intentional boundaries. Demonic possession is about the intentions of the outside other appearing from within. Monsters are about the return of disavowed intentions, and so on.
The relations of the whole to its parts and of the whole to other wholes produce adaptations in covariable, recursive loops. This recursive, or “meta,” aspects of the structures of wholes are what regulate “self-regulating” systems according to intentions. Intentional regulations are covariable relations among the parts and among other wholes and their parts. These covariable relations continually form and break embodied intentions as habitual “repetitions with difference.” Bodies as habitual repetitions “adapt” in covariable relation with other embodied intentions. Natural selection’s “selector” isn’t intentional but “blind,” so it isn’t really a conscious selector but the determinate circuit of a covariable relation. The covariable relations of embodied intentions are given by the history of past covariable relations connected by a principle, rule, or equation.
The problem with the covariable “circuits” of enlanguaged bodies is that their intentions contain the structural failure of language that Lacan called the “Real,” which was what “resisted symbolization absolutely, but was at the same time necessary for symbolization. Covariable circuits work on the positivistic principle of “A equals A,” which is why circuits are binary codes, rather than a language. A language’s semantics are formed by the inequalities of representation, which is through a system of symbolic differences in which “A does not equal A.” Identities are fluid because they reflect enlanguaged, rather than encoded, being. Enlanguaged being is never identical to itself, which is reflected in nature’s own lack of “self-identical-ness" called by the Neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon “Incomplete Nature.” This incomplete nature was reflected in the “mistakes” in replication at the basic “sematic” level of DNA’s failure to replicate itself without error. The horror of genetic mutation is the ground of evolution by natural selection in variation. Being’s intention for new expressions of itself to itself are made possible by the vehicle of variation, which is both the nightmare of the failure of identity and the dream of infinite play.
For Deacon language was the product of the “distance” between a sign and its referent. The literal distance across which the sign had to traverse to find its referent became the conceptual space in which a language users could make new semantic meanings. In information theory this open space was prone to “noise,” or “information loss” in terms of lost “bits” of data, but for language users this open space is a possibility space in which to realize new semantic possibilities. The “noise” of language, as opposed to the purity of a code, is language’s “differed” meanings, which is the “lack” of direct correspondences that allows for the free play necessary to ingress beauty, wonder, and awe into the present. At the heart of Homo Narratiosus’s stories is the intention of the priest called “Homo Religiosus” by Mircea Eliade, who blesses being with sacred difference. Being’s holy creativity is given by its constitutive error, or by the “hole” in being, from which all actual possibility arises. This lack of oneness is reflected in the possibility space given by the distance between the sign and its referent for enlanguaged beings.
Nightmares are about the necessary failure of symbolic difference that founds enlanguaged beings' intentions. The “Phallus is the signifier of lack” for Lacan because it was the edifice erected against the failure of the “if, then” relations of covariable codes. The phallus is the Lacanian “having ‘All’” of Positivism’s imaginary fixed identities. The imaginary “All” position of a covariable code is castrated by the Derridean “Differánce” by which language functions, or by language’s Lacanian “Lack” of fixity between the signifier and the signified. Nightmares are about the failure of phallic enjoyment, or the failure of Derridean “Logocentrism,” of the “if, then” relations of covariable codes, and the castration of language’s continually differed enjoyment of difference itself. Continually differed enjoyment is the Lacanian “Non-all” position of feminine jouissance. “All” covariable codes fail because of the gap between being and representation, but only the “Non-all” intentions for beauty, wonder, and awe, transform this castrated “noise” into the freedom of play without intention.
Dreams are play without intention, specifically without the phallic intentions of the ego. Covariable relations allow for the recursive intentions of niche construction and thus form the circuitry of possibility spaces, but these intentions are determined by the “if, then” relations of determinate circuits, or by the variables of determinate equations. For a determinist the intention of a body is mechanical because it is determined by the principle of natural selection, so an organism is an assemblage of mechanisms unified by an intention, which is the identity defined by the principle of natural selection. However different an organism may appear, this difference can be reduced to the “A equals A” identification of a differential equation. Differánce is not a diferential equation because its operations are based on a necessary inequality that calculus denies with equivalencies. Differánce is the metaphysical claim that being is not itself, which is not just a claim about the noncoincidence of being and knowing but also about being and itself. Being is not itself because it is being plus the lack of being that is nonbeing. Being itself is text-like, in the Derridean sense, or “structured like a language,” in the Lacanian sense, because being’s enjoyment of itself is differed by irreducible difference. When Deleuze placed difference ontologically prior to whatever appears, he was claiming that the universe came from a basic incompletion, which Zizek called the “less than nothing” of the “One that failed to be at one with itself.”
The intentions of some bodies appear as if they can access irreducible difference through the actual degrees of freedom of thought, but for a determinist, as was previously discussed, this is an illusion. When virtuality appears in conceptual form to a “thinking thing,” it appears as if the structured freedom of actual possibility, but for the determinist, conceptual virtuality has no more access to degrees of freedom than does a physical possibility space. Possibility means covariable determination, whether it is conceptual or physical determination, because both can be reduced to the material concerns of maintaining a high above equilibrium steady state behind a Markov Blanket. For Deacon, whatever increased possibility space language offered by the greater distances its correspondences could travel between a sign and its referent, this distance was still bound by a material intention measurable in terms of accuracy. In Information Theory accuracy is a measure of “noise” reduction in terms of “bits” of information relevant to a given interpretive operation. The quality of communication is how much quantifiable information it contains relative to an interpretive intention. For the determinist, the virtuality of concepts is still determined by material relevance and not by its relevance to beauty, wonder, and awe for their own sake.
Sorren Kierkegaard’s depiction of the human condition as biologically determined but spiritually free is denied by the materialist because whatever spirit is for a material being, it is determined by material conditions. However, nightmares are about the freedom given by the failure of identities to define what we are, which is the failure of covariable codes to determine the relations of signs and their referents. Failure is also built into the circuits of the covariable relations of biological evolution; otherwise, there wouldn’t be any variation from which the “selector” of natural selection could make its “necessary” choices. Failure is the fundamental freedom, given by the Real, which is built into the structure of any system of symbolic difference in enlanguaged intentions.
For Zizek one’s singularity was one’s failure to be interpolated into the Symbolic Order, so that one’s individuation was the difference given by the failure to repeat. This failure is the horror of freedom given by the monstrosity of divergence. The monsters that we meet in nightmares are our own failures to be ourselves, which is the failure built into identification itself. The failure to be ourselves comes to us in the horrible forms of the return of the repressed, which are the disavowed, mangled forms of what does not accord with the ego’s desire to be self-identical. The non-determinist does not reject the blind necessity of the material selector. However, the non-determinist sees evidence for a selector beyond blind necessity, especially in dreams because dreams are without the governance of Freud’s “Reality Principle,” and are thus “freed” to explore aesthetic rather than necessary material ends.