[Bill Benzon]: “But who’s going to develop a discourse of freedom and dignity in the context of the computational sophistication of the cognitive sciences? What would that look like?” (Slavoj Žižek, a Note)
{AK}: If “the computational sophistication of the cognitive sciences” operates with specifiable variables, in a specifiable context, producing specifiable computations: then there is a specific layer of mechanism, a limited arrangement, that can be distinguished by the very fact of its specificity. Such limitation and specificity necessarily indicates a limited governance, too. Though its field of “computational play” may be infinitely productive, to the extent of perhaps exceeding and subsuming its very nature as a ‘structural origin’, this subsequent proliferation of moments retains the traces of ‘limited governance’, so long as it is seen through the optic of ‘specifiable computation’, the metaphoric of mechanism. In no way, however, does it follow that such systems of computation exhaust their own contexts of emergence, that which was not specified during their constitution. It is here, in these ‘contexts of emergence’, lacking systematic specification, that the essence of “freedom” resides. For it is here, that all specifications are ‘selected’, that all orders and arrangements are built. To understand this is to see infinite understandings without limit, ‘worlds’ without end. This ‘understanding’, never exhausted by specifications, systems, presences, or meanings, yet traversing them all, constitutes perhaps the only “dignity” worth having.