On Not Being Able to Say Anything

Or, more accurately, on executive dysfunction

Exhibit A: classic case of someone who can’t say anything

The inability to say anything is, of course, functionally equivalent to having nothing to say. That isn’t controversial. Nevertheless, most people would agree with the contention that the two states are distinguished by the intentional states of the relevant individuals; the latter has no intention or self-perceived obligation to say something, whereas the former, as a description, is compatible with either possessing such intentionality or not; it simply doesn’t specify. It seems trite to assert that there are individuals who desire to say something but are prevented from doing so by some intervening personal condition or circumstance. I seem to perceive myself as falling into this exact sort of category. I have numerous creative and intellectual projects I perceive myself as desiring to complete, and yet, due to my prolonged and often debilitating executive dysfunction, I indefinitely defer said projects. This causes me quite pronounced unhappiness, as I represent myself as an intentional agent relative to my (hypothetical) ability to complete certain intellectual tasks. They are the foundational standard against which I constitute my self-representation as a functional individual within the milieu I inhabit. But I don’t function in this way, and so now I find myself as a self incapable of functioning as the kind of self my self represents itself to be. “I”, then, seem to exist as a tautological falsehood. Something utterly lacking in content or referent. A non-self, ironically, given how many times ‘self’ occurred only a few sentences back.

So, naturally, I default to the mainstream account to preserve myself— my inability to function as I represent myself as necessarily having to function is not a failure of what I am, but a result of an “extrinsic” condition (in this instance, executive dysfunction) imposing itself on “me.” As an extrinsic condition, what it affects or retards is by definition not intrinsic to “me”. And thus, what is intrinsic to my self-representation of myself as functioning through literary and intellectual production is not whether or not I actually do so, but whether I simply possess the intentional state of desiring to do so. There. Self saved.

But does this actually work as an account? If we want to take the predictive efficacy of neuroscience seriously, we must be willing to at least theoretically entertain the truth of eliminative materialism— that is, the contention that the irreducibly intentional states we ascribe to individuals in order to explain their behaviour are at risk of supplantation by more comprehensive neurobiological explanations that may not neatly correspond with the descriptive categories of ordinary “folk psychology.” If we accept at least the possibility of this happening, then we have to reckon with the entailed possibility that demarcating certain neurobiological processes (such as those producing executive dysfunction) as “extrinsic” from other neurobiological processes (such as those producing intention) may not be warranted. If this “extrinsicity” isn’t neatly reduced to a precise neurobiological correlate which discretely demarcates these two processes as distinct, then, ultimately, there is no such “extrinsicity.”

If that’s the case, then the statement that opened this piece— the inability to say anything is functionally equivalent to having nothing to say— still is true. It’s just that this functional equivalence also extends to neurobiological, and hence essential, function. If that is so, then there is no salvation for my self. All I am left with is to affirm, with Ligotti, that there is nothing to do; there is nowhere to go; there is nothing to be; there is no one to know.¹

Note: as I was writing this I somewhat inconveniently realised that I had forgotten to take my meds this morning. Took them and feel normal now but I wasn’t going to waste a good twenty minute’s worth of work just for that was I? lol

1. Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (Hippocampus Press, 2010), p. 115.