9 months ago

"Consciousness Enjoying Uncertainty: Lacan, Neuropsychoanalysis, and Dual-Aspect Monism"
John Dall’Aglio

With: Karl Friston, Mark Solms, Evert Boonstra

The Free Energy Principle has made substantive philosophical claims, insofar as a self- organizing ontology (via Markov blankets) offers an existential basis for “things.” With increasing complexity, this potentially includes conscious subjects. Indeed, the laws of free energy minimization have been proposed as the basis for a monistic informatic ontology with dual- aspect objective and subjective perspectives. Nevertheless, this approach to conscious subjectivity bears a risk of reductive determinism.

Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Mark Solms’s neuropsychoanalytic application of the Free Energy Principle, and transcendental materialist philosophy (especially the work of Adrian Johnston and Slavoj Žižek), I will propose that the nature of conscious, biological self-organizing systems is not a straightforward execution of free energy minimization. This derives from a view of nature itself – and the brain in particular – as not a perfectly unified entity whose laws do not conflict. Rather, there is a categorical refraction and antagonism of free energies within the brain. These qualitatively distinct domains of uncertainty cannot be subsumed under a common denominator. The consequence is a conflict of homeostases – from which emerges the irreducible space of affective consciousness as felt uncertainty. In this sense, consciousness is not simply irreducible to free energy minimization. To be more precise, consciousness is reducible to the point where the laws of free energy minimization conflict. Such antagonism-in- nature is the basis for non-determinate subjectivity arising from nature alone. Brief Bio

John Dall’Aglio is a PhD student in clinical psychology at Duquesne University. His scholarly, clinical, and research interests focus on psychoanalysis and neuroscience, especially Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis. He also teaches undergraduate courses on neuropsychoanalysis. He is the author of several articles on neuropsychoanalysis and is the author of the book A Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis: Consciousness Enjoying Uncertainty (Palgrave). He is the winner of the 2021 New Author Prize from the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

More readings:
John Dall'Aglio (2024) A transcendental materialist frame for neuropsychoanalysis: rethinking dual-aspect monism, Neuropsychoanalysis, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2024.2402287
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15294145.2024.2402287
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-68831-7 A Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis Consciousness Enjoying Uncertainty (John Dall’Aglio)

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