Levi’s post on vicarious causation

He’s riffing on the oil rig myth in Circus Philosophicus, where he is mentioned in passing.

READ LEVI’S POST FOR YOURSELF.

Just two things…

First, Levi expresses surprise that in Circus Philosophicus I refer to him as a detractor of vicarious causation, given that I wrote him excitedly after reading the manuscript of his The Democracy of Objects and said the contrary.

Here Levi is simply forgetting that books appear long after they are written and even long after they are copyedited. In the present case it actually wasn’t too long, because Zero Books tends to do things quickly. Circus was finished in the first few days of January of this year, and was in press by March or April (I’m too bleary-eyed to feel like going to the Zero website to check the exact date). But I didn’t see Levi’s manuscript until late June, if memory serves. It was the summer, at any rate. And true enough, I saw there that (under Luhmann’s influence, not mine) Levi had come to similar conclusions about vicarious causation.

And the second point, related to when Levi says:

“As far as I can tell, the major difference between Graham’s framework and mine on this issue is that I allow for objects to be perturbed by other objects. These perturbations are translated into information that selects system-states. It is this information (differences that make a difference) and system-states (sensual objects) that each system-object properly encounters. However, the manner in which objects are perturbed is strictly defined by the object or system in question. I cannot, for example, be perturbed by infrared light (at least not visually).”

The key possible disagreement is located in here somewhere. When Levi says that objects can be perturbed by other objects, it’s unclear whether he thinks perturbation can be direct, or whether it too must be vicarious. I hold the latter, whereas often Levi seems to think there is some kind of contact that can occur directly between things prior to translation, so that translation is a kind of supplementary feature on top of the direct contact.

And this is what I was getting at in my early February post (I don’t feel like linking to it) when I said I worried that Levi had something like a physical layer of direct contact and then a mental layer of translation on top of that. That rubbed him the wrong way at the time, and he made a combative response, so I withdrew the suggestion. But I wasn’t ever suggesting that he’s a mind/body dualist of some sort. All I meant was that he seems to allow for a twofold world of direct causation and indirect causation, whereas for me it can only be indirect.

Causation can only be indirect between real objects, that is. Direct contact is always possible between the real and the sensual.