Ray Brassier & Thomas Metzinger (A Special Form of Darkness) 2012

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

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• 00:00:00

  Thanks for coming. My name is Ray Brassier and this is Thomas Metzinger and Thomas and I are going to have a conversation principally about his work and the ramifications of his work. Thomas is a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Mainz in Germany and he's the author of several very important…

• 00:11:47

  But what Descartes then says is that the one thing, you know, you cannot doubt that you are doubting, the experience, the subjective experience of bewilderment, or of confusion, is real, has a kind of an indubitable authority. Which is why, you know, Descartes basically, basically argues that, you can be wrong about…

• 00:22:39

  But I think there is in the consciousness community with which I've been very much involved during the last 15 years, there is something like a basic consensus, of course, there's no theory, there is no consensus among philosophers, competitive neuroscientists push different models, but the general idea is that…

• 00:33:23

  Maybe this never goes anywhere. I still think there are major technical obstacles for fully embodying the sense of self in, you know, second bodies. Third bodies or something like that. But I may be wrong. Maybe in 30 years, all these smart people have overcome these obstacles. Are these obstacles, I mean, are they…

• 00:43:48

  For instance, sentences in literature, in poems, they are not true or false. Sentences like, you should not kill, or you should think about what a good state of consciousness is, might also be sentences of this kind, which there is no knowledge in them, because the world is just silent. We kind of ask the world, what…

• 00:54:35

  So precisely this distancing, you know, this kind of distancing, which makes, you know, which I think is, makes thinking in a philosophical sense possible. And I want to ask you then, why is transparency, if transparency is a special form of darkness, then consciousness itself, or brute consciousness is darkness…

• 01:10:14

  So if rationality is a, you know, a function, you know, a function, you know, a function, you know, a function, you know, a function, you know, a function, you know, a function, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know…

• 01:25:53

  It's an understatement. Yeah. Okay. Let us end on an understatement. Okay. Well, I think... Yep. I think we should have a break now. So thanks very much. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.