One way of approaching the difference between knowledge and learning (so profound in our opinion that, despite their entanglement, there can be postulated neither a material nor conceptual ground which could ever serve to unify them) is by considering that even while wholly disparate, they are not in the least opposed for that reason. To learn and to know are two divergent operations, contrapositive dynamisms, which are nevertheless always both active simultaneously, as the “cutting edges” or ungrounding machines of cognition. A thought is grounded not in abstract oppositions, but in concrete forces traversing real problematic fields.

Knowledge is classically represented as a heterogeneous assemblage — our minds are far too imperfect to clearly perceive the pure, homogeneous Truth — which is self-totalizing and self-regulated by an internal learning process, charged with traversing its own experiences (as they are represented and reactivated as memories of varying intensities.) In this sense, abstract oppositions emerge only as variables of these mixed compositions of energetic and entropic flows. This is the illusion of hyper-diagrammatism (implying a kind of super-diagram of “all” thought.) We must try and see that thought isn’t about models and copies, not about identity and ideology — but rather about lines along which interminglings are operative, as though “between” concrete and abstract flows of energy — food for words, money for sex, death for love, virtue for pain, and on and on…

What is produced in this process of establishing communication between incommensurable problematic fields — or learning — should certainly not be characterized as a pure memory, but rather a decentralized and a-subjective cognitive process. “Thought” is not the difference between learning and knowledge, but rather an abstract machine which underlies them while nevertheless separating them, almost as though by an absolute divergence. Learning fights dullness and emptiness with lightning and fire, mortally threatening the stasis and death of “serious knowledge,” which would otherwise totally consume the brave and fiery heart of discovery. So let’s stop asking what “knowledge” and “learning” mean in themselves (and trying to ‘deduce’ the ‘difference’ — and thereby, most likely, only serving to overcode it by an all-too-serious line of death); let’s rather ask: how do these operations work?

“That knowledge can be described”; this is, in a way, the implicit assertion of every “knower,” that a definition can be provided of the known’s own structure. Although the knower asserts his knowledge exists rigorously — that is, in such a way that its structure can be defined –nevertheless, the organizing or individuating drives supporting the knowledge (the hidden forces beneath the idea) must be grasped intuitively before we can “know” the knowledge itself (the pure idea, or form of the problematic field.) Otherwise knowledge and learning would be absolutely impossible, i.e., would have only an internal origin based on identity.

On the contrary, this prior recognition of a “problematic” structure — knowledge’s cautious but deliberate self-ungrounding — is paradoxically the driving urge towards discovery, the wild and infinite energy-overcoming-entropy we experience in learning. Though certainly knowledge misleads us, quite deliberately, as to the nature of this process! (It is easy enough for “knowers” to cover up, even to themselves, the unconscious, a-subjective lightning flash of intuition experienced directly “as” the subjective struggle in the world to learn.)

For knowledge is superficially calm and sure of itself, at least when observed in its close-to-equilibrium state: we must admit of a certain strange feeling of “possession” of an organized (i.e., received) truth, a smooth tabulation of events into neatly ordered columns and rows. Learning, on the other hand, is turbulence itself. Pre-organized knowledge is constitutionally incapable of questioning, or even apprehending as such, the underlying structures upon which its coherence depends.

This paradox could perhaps be formulated as follows. We must know the limits of our knowledge in order to be certain of our certainty. But — and this is, in some sense, Wittgenstein’s most important contribution to Western philosophy — “knowing the limit of our knowledge” entails already knowing both sides of it, that is, to know both the already-known, organized side with which we are familiar, as well as the unknown, unorganized side of which we know little — if anything at all.

Ignoring the obvious inadequacies of a functionalist line of thinking–namely it’s inability to conceive of reality as anything else than a series of static points connected by lines of force–let’s here call forth a question that allows itself to momentarily detained as a function, even if it ultimately shall cause our functionalizing schema to splinter: What is the nature of cognition? Is it a fundamental process or a secondary production? What is the relation between thought and desire? How do society and multiplicity relate to cognition?

If cognition is social, then thinking is desiring, characterized functionally by its intensity and distance from a fixed point of thought, a pre- or meta-cognitive axiom, a cognum. But these sort of automatically meaningful axioms are granted us only relatively, thus thinking is not just the mental production of what is desired (as wish fulfillment) but rather thinking is the production of a cognitive horizon, thought is the opening of a space for itself in an already overcoded information stream. The intensity of the “surgical” implantation is a matter of the degree of disjunction from the (pre-)cognitive horizon. It is as though each thought were the first, and as if even the most brave, flowing and free of thoughts were always pressed against an interminable emptiness and aporia. Thought is an artists’ cut, a deliberate scrambling of the message, a recoding of the code. Thought erupts afresh anywhere there is an interruption in the smooth function of the body-machine, but it is only at the extreme edge of realities where thinking at long last traverses negation, approaches the sickeningly steep abyss of a-subjective emptiness and a boundless dark beyond barely perceived, which is to say that the being of the cognum consists in the differential intensity of a structural (ontological) transformation of the active presence of being into a passive absence. Thus, thinking has it’s opposite, anti-thinking as it were: a re-naturalization of artifical desire.

In short, thought subsists in the splintering of its own plane of functionality, it is an excess that overflows the presence of things; moreover, thinking in the most abstract is the intense erasure of what-is and what-ought, it consists in forgetting. At the limit of the void thought conjugates its own limitations with the infinite multiplicity of desire and at last becomes itself, a becoming-conscious and a becoming-machine at once, as a propulsion and a suction: thinking founds itself upon a vacuum called forth into existence only by the taut potency of expectation. Thinking in general follows a twisted logic of exploding dualism (by abstraction and deriving contradiction); thus thought can be said to annul its law (of non-contradiction.) Being, striving, wondering; wrenching away, forgetting, thinking: energy flows disperse particles of sensation over the smooth, slippery surface of the pre-cognitive subject, the universal one-multiple. Thought is a juncture away from a continuous boundary: a tangent or trace, a derivative function, a function of the difference in intensities between flows, or within a circuit.

The fractality of cognition is an assertion that thought is ir-regular, slips into gear only when instincts and drives fail to maneuver properly. Awareness is awakened as a process only when smaller-scale local organizations are unable to directly cope with either the amount or kind of information they are receiving. A thought-process has a sort of scale-invariance, or, put another way, cognition preserves justification across transformations, given that all these transformations reproduce an endlessly deep self-similarity. Relations to the exterior are folded deep inside the innermost recesses of a fractal set. Does thought reflect even in its unconscious structure the infinite divergence of fractal boundaries?

Every epoch is haunted by a series of paradoxes: every social formation, every expression or formulation of knowledge is structured by that which it cannot integrate into itself. The epoch defines the series, but the paradoxes structure the limit-boundary of the epistemic situation. There is no radical exterior to a given ‘psycho-situation.’

The ‘outside of knowledge’ is not merely clouded in ignorance, obscurity, but is, in fact, paradoxically absent. There is no ‘outside’ of the historical-linguistic situation, or rather, the position of the unnameable or ‘uncounted’ within the situation is already the structure of a paradox from the standpoint of that historical epistemic formation.

I must immediately clarify that I am not trying to establish a scheme for the division of historical eras; rather, I mean to investigate the series of human cognitive acts as an intentional evolution of the relationship between language and power. The question of what we shall call a ‘psychosituation’ is that of the interdependent reproduction of forms of truth-expression and systems of truth-repression. In other words, the epistemological schema is interwoven into the socio-political organizations as conflict; in fact, they emerge only later, as a result this paradoxical struggle, as separate, self-perpetuating, atheoretical forms of knowledge or historical formations of power. The question which can only be answered within a later psychosituation (as it is always an unresolved paradox within the episteme) is about the relationship between the ‘accidental’ multiplicity of sociality and conversation and the ‘deliberate’ generality of knowledge forms and power-relations, whether pyramidal and axiomatic or dis-associated and subtractive. Thus we are asking an epistemo-technological as much as a sociohistorical question. The boundaries of the psychosituation are formally paradoxical, which is equivalent to the impossibility of traversing, from within the given social formation or epistemological paradigm, any rational structure which is paradoxical from within the psychosituation. Since the relation between knowledge and the social (‘real’) situation exposes radically the inextricable bondage of cognitive potentiality to political, cultural and biological forms, how do we account for the true, episteme-shattering act of cognition which represents an authentic yet radical break with the traditional forms of knowledge tradition?

We shall say a psychosituation is the functioning of language/power as it (subjectively) investigates/dominates truth/the real. The psychosituation is only traversed paradoxically, that is, it is traversed at the same time it is traversed e process of technological progress as it relates to real historical development is essentially paradoxical. This is because the psycho-situation is the most real, functional unit of progress, that is, an epistemic co-ordinate: a mapping of power and technology to knowledge and ‘truth’ in a society. The given “psychosituation” is always particular, unique, an historical accident, but also an inevitable result of the resolution of earlier ‘paradoxes’ (and we’ll get into what exactly we mean by that in a second); thus the psychosituation is the multiplicity of the social relation. Thus it is a singular multiplicity; the birth of the psychosituation is the inauguration of a new language, the ground or staging for a new set of paradoxes.

The question of historical analysis, then, would seem to revolve around reconstructing narratives of previous epochs around the new psychosituation–in a sense, we see them clearer because we have the benefit of hindsight, of having many of the paradoxes which haunted earlier eras resolved. Psychosituational analysis means considering the relationship between tools, power, language, etc., and the ‘real’ web of social organization. The primary hypothesis is that we must view historical social organizations (inevitably) as positive, creative formations–the criterion is as always never whether the formation (the idea, the act, the organization or the technology) is good or bad in itself, but whether it successfully reproduces its own mode of existence, i.e., as the resolution of a paradox and the staging of new paradoxes. The present moment is an accidental conjuncture, a nonsensical sense-event, which is produced as the disjunctive epicenter of dual, interlocking corridors of non-symmetrical paradox. The structure of the paradox is both delightful and humorous as much as it is alien and horrifying because it is an epistemologically-directed ‘logic bomb.’ It is aimed at the heart of what we can and can’t know, and blurs the distinction so that no traversal is possible within the structure of the paradoxical narrative; it is a description, nonetheless, of a particular though somehow logically inconsistent universe, which causes the very reason which enabled us to comprehend the structure somehow unable to continue. The paradox does not aim to point out a contradiction in anything but truth itself; hence the convoluted ‘dual’ structure where its very particularity implies its address is universal, extending from the tiniest particles in the universes to the black holes our galaxies spin around.

An epoch cannot traverse its paradoxes, for once the traversal is made the epoch upon which they depended for their staging disappeared; then the new paradoxes become the old paradoxes, and the stage is set for a new escape. But ultimately this is inadequate, right? Let’s say paradoxicality possesses a rational structure which yet cannot be traversed by reason; you could say paradoxes are post-sensical. There is no escape from the structure of paradox–which we now understand as the entire process of the creation of a space between psychosituations, so there’s no escape from the epistemological present within the epistemological present, we have to go, in a sense, beyond space, beyond time. Multiplicity is the basis of paradox, the infinite depth of the original abyssal contradiction: self-interpretation; yet a paradox, The reproduction of the structure of the singular multiple establish the boundaries between epistemes at the same time it stages questions, disarms and dissolves boundaries in the same, contradictory movement–and this movement is the evolution of reason.

No one has proposed, so far as I know, a correlate in cognitive science to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle: let’s call it the cognition-dissimulation hypothesis. It would state something like “Though there exist a multiplicity of legitimate modes of analyzing cognition, there is an upper limit on how much we can understand about our processes of understanding.” That multiple modes are possible is not incidental; this indicates a single explanatory appartus is insufficient to explain the “breakthough” which occurs in learning or self-awareness. Cognition functions only in the presence of uncertainty, when the solution is not obvious, when we have exhausted all available options. Thus there is a sort of “upper bound” to any explanatory schemata of the cognitive process, since cognition is multiple rather than singular.

A person’s behavior yield to many theoretical models, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Likewise, our thoughts can be analyzed in many ways and according to many paradigms, which leads us to an impasse: because we have no further empirical criteria to go on in terms of an algorithmic model for cognition, we are left with a purely interpretative question. Which is, to put it frankly, just not the sort of thing computer scientists are interested in–a formula, a model, a schematic, OK, but not an interpretative issue. Unless interpretation itself is the critical issue.

The point, basically, is that it would defeat the point to decide in advance what a true AI would be; it would have to be able to decide for itself. The fact that cognitive science is such an interdisciplinary effort is evidence that this interpretative crisis is already widely recognized, namely, that no single theoretical model can bring us there. Yet, we must be clear, the “holy grail” of artificial intelligence is self-interpretation, pure and simply. Thus the problem is reflection, that is, awareness and time. You can think about this self-reflexivity as it relates to time by thinking about the infinite number of cognitive acts which can occur in a finite time, or even simultaneously. For example, right now we’re already not just “thinking” but “thinking-about-thinking” and so on and so on.

Of course, the question of a model (whether a simulation or for a theory) immediately raises the question of structure. But if, as I’ve argued, cognition is non-linear (or, at least, not always or primordially linear,) how are we to understand a structure in thought at the pre-symbolic level (i.e., prior to logic, set theory) where cognition originates? Such a “structure” would have to be radically “de-structured,” in other words, a multiple-and-simultaneous, non-linear, self-reflexive collection of self-evolving processes. How can we understand this? Perhaps a topological analogy can clarify: thinking is situated between itself and what is undetermined. We aim to make complete something which is fundamentally lacking, thus thinking is structured around what is missing in the situation. Thus any hope of algorithmic description seems to suffer from an “infinite ladder” problem–we’d need to know what in particular is “missing” from a given situation before it arises.

Let’s summarize this with a second hypothesis: The structure of cognition is fractal. Thought is continuous but “asymptotic,” that is, always operating at its ultimate limit. The mind that thinks progresses, iteratively, evolving intelligent adaptations in response to pressure, as a “economic” or strategic function. For this same reason, any purely operational thematization of cognition is doomed to failure, for the process(es) are just as much self-deluding as self-critical. Thought is known to unify at least as much as it divides and improves only in order to more completely destroy–and then, of course, to fill the space thus opened up by thinking again. Thinking as the oscillation about the void point (of mystery, the structure of lack which defines a “problem” in the most general sense) and therefore, thought as the asymptotic coincide of subject and object–not emptiness as in a rupture, but positively-charged void. Conceived of in this manner, the process of cognition is pure operation (and is thus universal) and yet pure discourse (and thus subjective); this leads us to hypothesize that thinking is the pure investigation of the truth for yourself. Thus “truth shapes thought” is true only if “thinking is the creation of truth”; thus is thought without place yet also displacement itself. Self-symmetry is fundamental to the essence of cognition itself.