Reading notes: After Finitude, Number and Numbers
i) To think Number “in its being” is to nominate an ontological schema in which numbers (whole, real, infinitesimal…) are given. There is no way to “think Number” without such a gesture of nomination: attempts to derive the being of Number from some other given (the extensionality of concepts; the totality of the thinkable; the permutations of a syntax) either founder in contradiction or yield only a castrated, procedural numericality. A novel axiomatic is required.
ii) Ontological thought is not divination, but nomination. To think something in its being is not to intuit, via some extra-rational means, its eternal essence, perceiving it as it might appear in divine ideation, but to determine what there is within the ontological situation (the count-as-one of the resources of ontology in general) that delivers it to thought.
iii) Through the inscription of a new schema within the ontological situation, we are able to separate Number, thought in its being, from those numbers – numerical beings – that are accessible to our thought. We are able to think a great profusion of numbers, but our thinking of Number tells us that the numbers we are presently able to think are an immeasurably tiny subset of the numbers that there are.
iv) Not even a subset, because the numbers that there are do not form a set. The being of Number is an inconsistent multiplicity: no consistent presentation of all of Number is possible. Our access to Number is through this or that numerical situation, this or that consistent presentation of numericality. No such presentation can exhaust the being of Number.
v) What is presented within the ontological situation, wherein Number is thought in its being through the inscription of an ontological schema, is not the being of Number (which cannot be consistently presented) but the thinking of Number in its being. The ontological schema of Number is a being, a consistent multiplicity (in this case, the doctrine of “surreal numbers”). That of which it is the schema is not a being, but the inconsistent multiplicity of the being of Number itself.
vi) There is no mystery about this. In mathematics there are sets, which must be well-founded and consistent, and proper classes, which are “larger” than sets in that no set can “contain” them. A proper class may be regarded as supplying a “law of the count” for all of the sets that can be drawn from the class; but this “descent” from inconsistent multiplicity to consistent presentation is not the predicative separation of a subset from a set. Neither is it necessarily the determination of a finite section of the infinite. The “largeness” of a proper class is not the vastness of infinity, but the non-containability of the class within any set, even an infinitely large one. A proper class is unpresentable, but the ontological schema of the class (which determines the property that every set within the class must have) is a presentation: what it presents is that there is something which is nevertheless itself unpresentable.
vii) Thus, the question of what is or is not accessible to us of Number is not primarily a question of our limited mental powers – the poverty of our mathematics, its irrecusible subservience to our “species being”, or any such pragmatic or empirical limitation. Such limitations no doubt exist, but the separation we have been speaking of between Number, thought in its being, and the numbers to which any particular numerical presentation may provide access, is not an empirical separation. No being that thinks – that organises its thoughts into consistent multiplicities – can think all of Number at once. But a being that thinks can indeed think that this is so, and for what reasons.
viii) The “ancestral” time prior to the emergence of any animal consciousness is (by definition) inaccessible to thought as something present to it. Thought and the ancestral have never been present to each other, face-to-face. The claim of science to be able to identify the “arche-fossil” (the object residing within the depths of ancestrality) and define its properties does not rest on any powers of mystical divination: the scientist does not presume to be an intimate of the Creator, privileged to share His innermost thoughts. Neither is mathematics conceived of, in neo-Platonist fashion, as a bridge between the human and divine, a means of deciphering the inscription within nature of its maker’s mark. In any case, the unpresentable can no more be present within the Creator’s thoughts than it can within ours.
ix) However, as we have seen, mathematics is able to think that something is that is not thinkable in its totality under the sign of presence. It is this thought that breaks the correlationist circle; for correlationism insists on thinking even the absences in its thought under the sign of presence, as if marking off a register. Its “lacunae” are so many rogues, truants, inscrutable oriental gentlemen; they are not thought in their being, but as components of the being of a thought. The arche-fossil cannot be thought in this way.
x) Neither is it claimed that the arche-fossil is somehow seized by mathematics, which succeeds in apprehending it through the achievement of a higher level of technical refinement than other kinds of thought – smarter detectives, better surveillance equipment. This is not a sales pitch: we are not declaring that mathematics reaches the parts other disciplines cannot reach. What is significant about mathematics is that we may recognise here and there in the work of mathematicians the gesture of inscribing a new form in the ontological situation. Only a gesture of this kind can determine that the arche-fossil is, quite separately from how it is for us.
xi) This act of recognition Badiou calls an evental nomination: the decision that such and such an axiomatisation shall be determined as fixing the being of that which it axiomatises. Meillassoux emphasises the groundlessness of any such decision: it is certainly possible to think the being of Number otherwise than through the schema of the “surreal numbers”, or being in general otherwise than through the Z-F axiomatisation of sets. This emphasis on the contingency of nomination is detectable in the name that Meillassoux gives to the venture of ontological thought: speculative realism materialism.
xii) Speculative realism materialism is a realism materialism because it concerns what is, and not merely what our thought is able to grasp in its totality under the sign of presence (but does this sentence still work, once we replace “realism” with “materialism”?). It is speculative because there is no possible ground for the act of evental nomination on which its procedure depends: it must set out anew the terms of its investigation, and proceed on the basis of a fidelity to those terms. We are still in a sense in the situation Lyotard described as that of postmodern science: that of legitimation by paralogy, oriented towards a thought of the sublime.
May 15th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Inasmuch as 5 days have passed, I’ll assume that the following quote from Stephen Hawking won’t derail the conversation:
I would say that I’m a realist in the sense that I think there is a universe out there waiting to be investigated and understood. I regard the solipsist position that everything is the creation of our imaginations as a waste of time. No one acts on that basis. But we cannot distinguish what is real about the universe without a theory. I therefore take the view, which has been described as simple-minded or naive, that a theory of physics is just a mathematical model that we use to describe the results of observations. A theory is a good theory if it is an elegant model, if it describes a wide class of observations, and if it predicts the results of new observations. Beyond that, it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory. This view of scientific theories may make me an instrumentalist or a positivist — as I have said above, I have been called both… In my opinion, the unspoken belief in a model independent reality is the underlying reason philosophers of science have with quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle…
May 15th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Meillassoux distanced himself with the moniker ’speculative realism’ at his seminar in Middlesex, preferring the ’speculative materialism’ he coins in his book.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Yes, I realized later on that “speculative realism” wasn’t his phrase, and that After Finitude speaks of “speculative materialism” instead. Did he say why he prefers the one to the other?
May 15th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Oops: … is the underlying reason for the difficulties philosophers of science have with quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle…
May 15th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Sophist!
May 15th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
So to assert the empirical validity of, say, 11-dimensional string theory, in this framework, does one assert that the number 11 in this situation is an instantiation of a number spawned by Number the Real source of all multiplicity. And this instantiation of 11 — is it a specific manifestation of Real Number in the material brain, or in the material universe, or both? Presumably 11 appears in the universe itself if it’s going to offer a glimpse of the Real in the arche-fossil, independent of cognition. The arche-fossil isn’t “seized by mathematics;” rather, number is intrinsic to the arche-fossil itself and mathematics is the human tool for grappling with number? But if we can apprehend number only through mathematics, aren’t we in the same boat as the instrumentalist? We can’t know number in itself; we can only know number through the mathematical tools humanity has contrived for that purpose.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Yes, he said he preferred SM. He didn’t really go into why, just quoted some obscure Foucault reference where F said something to the effect, “I’m a materialist because I don’t know if reality exists.”
May 16th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Oh, my point had to do with the fact that I don’t think Meillassoux is much of a realist. At least not in the way that Ray is a realist. For him there are realities that simply are and that is what is interesting (the principle of facticity), not the realness itself (if one can put it that way).
May 16th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
So to assert the empirical validity of, say, 11-dimensional string theory, in this framework, does one assert that the number 11 in this situation is an instantiation of a number spawned by Number the Real source of all multiplicity.
When you say “this situation”, are you referring to the situation of 11-dimensional string theory (i.e. the theory itself, qua multiple) or the cosmic texture specified by that theory? I feel quite confident in saying that the number 11 really appears in the theory, and is an instance of Number. I don’t think there are all that many number 11s in the real cosmos, though.
I also wouldn’t say that Number is the Real source of all multiplicity: Badiou nominates it as the ontological schema of all numericality, but not all multiplicities are numbers (or “made of” numbers).
One thing Badiou says that I am slightly unsure about is that Number is “co-extensive with Being”. Number is “large” enough – being a proper class – that there is no sense in which Being (qua pure inconsistent multiplicity) is “larger” than it; nevertheless, not all of Being is the being of number. “Thinking Number in its being” is certainly not the same as “thinking Being”.
May 18th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I can’t engage very usefully in your thinking here, Dominic, since I’ve not read the speculative realists and I have a hard time thinking than Number can be encountered without the intermediary human tools of logico-mathematics. But I’m intrigued by this idea of the arche-fossil as what the universe is outside of or prior to sentient awareness of it. I don’t think we need to envision the arche-fossil existing in some prehistoric time — on some level the universe remains at least partly arche-fossil to us. This is true for each of us individually, since no one person knows all that is known collectively about the universe. But it’s also true collectively: there are things than no one knows about the universe. So the universe remains at least partly arche-fossil, existing beyond our awareness and understanding. This fact should make it amenable to investigation.
The universe is continually emerging from its arche-fossil status. Based on recent theory and research it seems that maybe 95% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy. It’s barely understood what dark matter is; I think dark energy remains completely mysterious other than its necessity to make certain mathematical models of the universe “work.” But let’s take the materialist position that dark matter/energy really exists in the universe, independent of our awareness and knowledge. What was this dark matter like before it came into human awareness? Not to make light of it, but I don’t think anyone would argue that the real effects of dark matter on the structure and function of the universe changed as a consequence of this new awareness. As I understand it, the awareness came about not through awareness of unexplained observable natural phenomena, but through awareness of irreconcilable anomalies in mathematical equations. But it’s a similar sort of dawning, inasmuch as there was a (recent) time when no human minds were aware of the mathematical problem and of this particular possible solution to it.
So now, in hindsight, it should be possible to say something about the transition of dark matter from arche-fossil to mathematical-phenomenological reality. And I’m wondering what can be said besides this: before we didn’t know of its existence, now we do, but this didn’t awareness didn’t change the nature of the thing itself, which got along fine on its own throughout the history of mankind until just a few years ago.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
(Googling Meillassoux I came across this post at Metastable Equilibrium. After reading it I discovered that it links to this post — which means I can’t expose my ignorance over there and use what I’ve learned here. Besides, based on prior experience here at Poetix I expect I won’t be berated with too much energy or persistence, whereas M. Equilibrium remains an unknown quantity to me.)
There’s the hypothesized singularity from which the Big Bang emerged as the first event, marking the beginning of our multiplex universe and all its matter and energy and N-dimensionality. Then there’s another singularity, a very recent one, from which emerged the human awareness that dark matter/energy (DM/E) might exist. From Badou’s standpoint this new awareness isn’t just a new conceptual-linguistic paradigm, from which one might argue that DM/E didn’t even exist until it was thought of. Rather, for Badiou there are multiple worlds, and whatever it really is to which the phrase “dark matter/energy” refers has existence as Truth in every one of these multiple worlds. However, the true eternal being of DM/E doesn’t make its appearance in equal form or intensity in all possible worlds. In fact, in every world that manifested itself in human history up until very recently, DM/E didn’t appear at all — it wasn’t thought of, recognized in either its presence or its absence. Even in the present world DM/E appears only dimly, darkly, nascently. But it is always already there, always true in every world and in the events that give birth to those worlds, always true. In all those worlds where DM/E doesn’t appear it consists entirely of its excess over any possible conceptualization of it — what I guess Meillassoux calls the arche-fossil of DM/E. This eternally true DM/E has effects on the real operation of the universe even if they’re not apprehended by perception or cognition; e.g., it keeps the universe from expanding, it makes gravity work the way it does, etc.
The first human apprehension of DM/E came not through the dawning awareness of its phenomenal effects but through the realization that something was missing in mathematical equations. At least in this case the idea of Number as the primal essence of the real seems to be supported. DM/E makes its first appearance as an empty set; only later does its multiplicity emerge from its first manifestation as a mathematical void.
Yes? No? Off the track entirely?
May 20th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
I’m not certain that I know the answers to these questions.
Badiou’s “world” is an order of manifestation; Meillassoux’s “arche-fossil” is a relic from a time anterior to manifestation – so did the arche-fossil have a world or not? To put it another way, do Badiou and Meillassoux mean the same thing by “manifestation”?
If they do, then we must say that any “world” whatsoever is still the correlate of some thought, be it the impersonal thought of a generic humanity (“people think”). The arche-fossil would then be an originally worldless being, transiently enworlded within the time of the correlation, and perhaps destined to a worldless future beyond the horizon of human extinction.
Badiou’s distinction between onto-logy and onto-logy permits one to specify a non-manifest being, something that is without existing. But he also defines inexistence as appearing minimally in a world – having a minimal degree of identity with anything else in that world. With the inexistent being, it is “as if it were not there at all”; but this minimal degree of appearance is determined according to the transcendental of a world – it is a lacuna within manifestation, rather than a lacuna of manifestation itself. If Badiou’s “manifestation” is the appearance of a thing for us, then he is no more capable than any other correlationist of giving an account of the arche-fossil that does not reduce its ancestrality to an “as if”. (This I take it is the way Graham Harman sees it).
I prefer to think that for Badiou “manifestation” is not manifestation for some subject, even a collective subject, but localisation (“being-there”) within a strictly a-subjective order. Thus, the arche-fossil would have had a place (a “neighbourhood”), and varying degrees of in/identity with other existents, even outside the time of the correlation. We are not obliged to think of the arche-fossil as entirely lacking in existential intensity; indeed, the evidence it presents is of a time in which a great many things were simultaneously afoot (without “thought” in any form being included among them). In this case, we can say of DM/E that while its appearance in our cosmology was relatively recent, and foreshadowed by a flickering on the edge of inexistence (the failure of mathematical models to cohere), the world of our cosmology is not the only world to which DM/E has belonged – in learning/theorizing about it, we are learning/theorizing about a cosmos in which DM/E had “always been there” (or almost always).
Note the difference in terms: for Badiou, manifestation is “being there”, localised being, rather than “being for”, being in relation to some subject. The relationships within a world are intensive, based on a degrees of in/identity between existents, rather than extensive, radiating out from a consciousness that apprehends time, space and their contents on the basis of its own prior embodiment. Inexistence is not falling outside the grasp of a subject, appearing only as a gap in experience, but minimal belonging-to-the-world: the being of the inexistent is that of an unanchored multiplicity, the errancy of a spectre (or “undocumented” worker, changing bedsheets in a hotel) passing silently and inconsequentially from room to room.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
And in a related story…
May 21st, 2008 at 10:25 pm
“Badiou’s “world” is an order of manifestation; Meillassoux’s “arche-fossil” is a relic from a time anterior to manifestation – so did the arche-fossil have a world or not?”
Right: that’s why I wondered about the long historical parade of worlds from which DM/E have been entirely excluded from manifestation. We’re talking as though the arche-fossil is an all-or-nothing sort of entity, that as soon any sort of sentience arrives in the universe the arche-fossil from which it emerged disappears altogether, or is inseparably merged with consciousness into a world. But the universe is never fully manifested to human awareness; e.g., even the slightest hint of DM/E as something missing, let alone as something real, never occurred to any human being until sometime in the 20th century. Then and only then did DM/E’s arche-fossil status begin to recede or to be eclipsed by worldly manifestation. In the 19th and all preceding centuries DM/E was either worldless, or else its manifestation in all prior worlds was nill — which are effectively the same I would think. No one at the time knew that DM/E was “a lacuna in manifestation” or “something that is without existing,” or “appearing minimally” in the world: assigning DM/E even this minimal or spectral within-world status is only possible retrospectively, from an observation point after DM/E first entered human awareness.
It seems to me that the arche-fossil isn’t just prior to manifestation; it’s complementary to it. To the extent that sentient awareness results in an array and a succession of worlds, to that extent the arche-fossil recedes or is covered over by its own manifestation in these worlds. This receding isn’t once-for-all: to the extent that something like scientific worlds are progressive, extending to include more and more awareness of the universe, to that extent the arche-fossil recedes incrementally. So, the study of the incremental advancement of scientific knowledge affords its complement: the study of the incremental retreat of the arche-fossil. The progressive incremental appearance or manifestation of DM/E in scientific worlds corresponds precisely and inversely to the incremental regression or retreat of the arche-fossil version of DM/E.
Almost certainly there remain features of the universe that no one has ever given thought to, either in its presence or its absence. But if those features too must be regarded as lacunae in contemporary world manifestation, even though we have no idea whatsoever what they might be, then one must regard this world and every other world from some transcendent perspective. Even looking back on the present from the far distant future isn’t good enough, because probably even in the (presumably) long history that remains ahead of humanity, some aspects of the real universe will remain forever outside of the species’ awareness.
“I prefer to think that for Badiou “manifestation” is not manifestation for some subject, even a collective subject, but localisation (”being-there”) within a strictly a-subjective order.”
I’ll have to come back to this and the rest of your comment later, but at first blush I can’t see how an a-subjective order differs at all from the arche-fossil. In the a-sentient universe stuff exists, interacts, transforms, etc. irrespective of the cognitive work which perceives or describes it. That’s the real, the true material universe toward which the term “arche-fossil” points, it seems to me.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:35 pm
“the being of the inexistent is that of an unanchored multiplicity, the errancy of a spectre (or “undocumented” worker, changing bedsheets in a hotel) passing silently and inconsequentially from room to room.”
This statement ought to be commemorated in some form, so that it persists in human awareness for more than an instant.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:28 am
It’s just a decent bit of Badiou pastiche. About all I do nowadays.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:52 am
Hello! This is an interesting thread so I thought I’d post some comments on how I’ve read Meillassoux to see if they’re of any help.
I think that ‘realism’ is a misleading term for Meillassoux’s philosophy because he is not suggesting that the arche-fossil is a certain real out there that we have discovered. He is using the arche-fossil to show that his philosophy, the ‘absolutisation of contingency’ allows him to do something that the correlationists cannot, think the real possibility of the arche-fossil as a reality prior to any form of human subjectivity, or even terrestrial life, at all. However, the arche-fossil is still only a contingent possibility and definitely not eternally true. The only eternal truth is the necessity of contingency.
The absolutisation of contingency means not only that anything could happen, but also that anything could have happened. So when in After Finitude Meillassoux critiques the correlationists for being dangerously like the creationist who think that the universe was made 6,000 years ago fully formed with humans equipped with human consciousness. He is criticising them for not being able to think the possibility that this isn’t true, not that this definitely isn’t true. Given the power of Meillassoux’s ‘hyper-chaos’ which can bring forth anything for no reason. It is just as likely that the earth could have emerged fully formed as it is that it has emerged from something like the big-bang. Anything could have happened. However, we must also be able to think the possibility of the world outside of human existence. Any scientist that tells us that the arche-fossil is definitely true is naïve. The only definite truth is contingency.
As for why Meillassoux prefers to be called a ‘speculative materialist’, I think this is because he claims to be a ‘materialist about matter’ a ‘rationalist’ about matter, and strictly anti-vitalist (a vitalist for Meillassoux is anyone who argues for any kind of necessity in nature!) In ‘Potentiality and Virtuality’, he argues that one of the key vitalist critiques of materialism is that consciousness could not have possibly come from lifeless matter, and he agrees with this. Only through sheer fantasy could we imagine that consciousness comes from matter. However, his conclusion is that consciousness must have come into existence through ‘the power of contingency’ ex nihilo. Contingency can bring forth anything, for no reason. There is no disctinction between absolute potentiality and potentiality conditioned by nature. Anything could happen at anytime for no reason and with no regard to the preceding conditions of nature. Essentially then, Meillassoux is a post-Kantian Cartesian. A Cartesian who has replaced God with the power of contingency.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:02 am
Only through sheer fantasy could we imagine that consciousness comes from matter
I’m surprised at this; obviously I don’t agree…
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:08 am
I was surprised too. It’s a point that he doesn’t make particularly clear in After Finitude, but it’s there in that first Collapse article.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:16 am
I can accept that consciousness might have no reason to be, but I don’t see why it can only spring into being ex nihilo, rather than being contingently assembled on the basis of other contingent existents. In Dennett’s terminology, I don’t believe in skyhooks but I do believe in cranes.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:25 am
Wow. That’s really spooky. I gave a paper on Meillassoux recently and used the same Dennett terminology to illustrate the same point!
In Dennett’s book (1995:74) ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ he distinguishes between cranes and skyhooks. Cranes are the basic parts of the evolutionary system that help to move it along. Cranes are built out of nature and help it do its basic lifting. For example, sex is a crane. A skyhook would be classed as nature taking a leap. ‘Skyhooks would be wonderful things to have, great for lifting unwieldy objects out of difficult circumstances, and speeding up all sorts of construction projects. Sad to say, they are impossible.’ Meillassoux needs to prove that his recourse to the power of contingency is not simply a skyhook, or even a god of the gaps argument.
I think Meillassoux’s point is that none of the previous contingent existents have really any connection to consciousness. ‘The paradigmatic example of such an emergence… is obviously the appearance of a life furnished with sensibility directly from a matter within which one cannot short of sheer fantasy, forsee the germs of this sensibility, an apparition which can only be thought as a supplement irreducible to the conditions of its advent.’ This seems to be the real consequence of pushing Hume’s problem into the a priori of ontology, which to me seems like a reduction ad absurdum, but not for Meillassoux.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:08 am
It looks like the opposition here is between “a supplement irreducible to the conditions of its advent” and a consequence that would be “reducible to the conditions of its advent”, programmed in advance according to a deterministic scheme. This seems to me to be an argument about whether matter must necessarily give rise to consciousness, or can only do so contingently, rather than an argument that consciousness must arise ex nihilo. In other words, there are three possibilities:
i) Matter contains the “germs” of consciousness – it is already predisposed to produce consciousness, and must in the fullness of time do so through the operation of deterministic laws.
ii) Consciousness cannot emerge from matter, but must spring into being ex nihilo through the direct intervention of contingency (this does indeed sound like a “god of the gaps” argument).
iii) Consciousness can emerge from matter, but can only do so contingently, without in any sense realizing some “germ” that was already present: the “apparation” of consciousness is merely one of the configurations into which matter can happen to fall. “Contingency” here means only that this is possible without being necessary.
I definitely would opt for iii).
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:11 am
Certainly I agree that there is nothing inherently conscious-y about matter, and that there need not be anything inherently conscious-y about matter for consciousness to emerge.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:38 am
iii) definitely seems the most favourable position. I think you’re right, perhaps the problem with Meillassoux is that he writes as if i) and ii) are the only options. iii) would still imply some kind of restriction to potentiality in nature which would undermine his argument for ‘absolute contingency’ and at the same time undermine his argument for the consistency of the laws of nature.
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Absolute contingency would mean that while iii) was possible, the spontaneous springing-into-being ex nihilo of consciousness would be possible as well. I’m not sure that I see Meillassoux saying that the latter is the only way that consciousness could come about, though.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:01 am
“there need not be anything inherently conscious-y about matter for consciousness to emerge.”
This is where I find it difficult to understand how it’s possible to say anything at all about the arche-fossil that’s not contingent on sentience. Consciousness seems essential to apprehending anything about the universe. E.g., there’s nothing to be said about dark energy until you’ve thought it or seen it; you can’t even note its absence until you’ve imagined its possible presence in a way that goes beyond mere flight of fancy. To speculate on what the universe is like stripped of its manifestational character would seem to require that the universe be able to convey the real truth about itself directly to us, without mediation of perception or consciousness or awareness. This sounds like Aquinus’s natural revelation, without even requiring Calvin’s sensus divinitatus. And from what J says, maybe that’s what Meillassoux believes. If sentience can’t come from raw matter, but if sentience exists among material beings, then there must be some sort of sentience present in the arche-fossil that can know itself, reveal itself, transmit itself to matter even in the absence of material sentient beings like humans. It’s a coherent position I suppose.