Withdrawal

“…the only decisive proof of the fertility of ideas or of a new vision is that of time. Fertility is recognizable by offspring, not by honors. A calamity will befall the world that despises dream. Dream is deeper than all the other roots of ourselves… the best of that I had managed to make in mathematics, everything that I worked upon with genuine zeal, had come to me by itself.”
Alexander Grothendiek (Crops and Seeds)

“Again, to extend Russell’s analogy further, we know that the eye of a fly is so constituted that the single images we see appear to the fly as multiple images. We think that the fly’s vision of the world is inaccurate because it doesn’t correspond to our vision; but how do we know that our vision accurately pick up the signals the world sends out? In fact, we know that it doesn’t: the human eye is incapable of registering ultra-violet or infra-red colours, just as the human ear is incapable of receiving the high-pitched sounds that a bat can hear.”
Ralph Blumenau (Kant and the Thing In Itself)

“He does not give anything to or teach the pupil, the mureed, for he cannot give what the latter already has; he cannot teach what his soul has always known. What he does in the life of the mureed is to show him how he can clear his path towards the light within by his own self.”
Hazrat Inayat Khan (The Sufi Message)

“Diseases ARE. We do not make or unmake them at will. We are not their masters. They make us, they form us. They may even have created us.”
Blaise Cendrars (Moravagine)

This (below) is from a paper Apple published.

“In this paper, we systematically examine frontier Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) through the lens of problem complexity using controllable puzzle environments. Our findings reveal fundamental limitations in current models: despite sophisticated self-reflection mechanisms, these models fail to develop generalizable reasoning capabilities beyond certain complexity thresholds. We identified three distinct reasoning regimes: standard LLMs outperform LRMs at low complexity, LRMs excel at moderate complexity, and both collapse at high complexity. Particularly concerning is the counterintuitive reduction in reasoning effort as problems approach critical complexity, suggesting an inherent compute scaling limit in LRMs. Our detailed analysis of reasoning traces further exposed complexity dependent reasoning patterns, from inefficient “overthinking” on simpler problems to complete failure on complex ones. These insights challenge prevailing assumptions about LRM capabilities and suggest that current approaches may be encountering fundamental barriers to generalizable reasoning. Finally, we presented some surprising results on LRMs that lead to several open questions for future work. Most notably, we observed their limitations in performing exact computation; for example, when we provided the solution algorithm for the Tower of Hanoi to the models, their performance on this puzzle did not improve. Moreover, investigating the first failure move of the models revealed surprising behaviors. For instance, they could perform up to 100 correct moves in the Tower of Hanoi but fail to provide more than 5 correct moves in the River Crossing puzzle.”
Parshin Shojaee, et al (The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity)

For some reason the people in Silicon Valley are calling these conclusions ‘surprising’. I can tell you I am not surprised. What is interesting is that the research employed ‘math problems’ that were invented in the 1880s (Tower of Hanoi, though clearly the same puzzle is found in north Vietnam lore, millennia back, with the belief that a temple on the Ganges in Benares has priests carrying out the solutions of the puzzle, on a larger scale, using sixty four disks — which at a rate of a move per second would not get finished for billions of years…roughly, or the same as the age of the Universe — mythologically speaking. Hence the alternate name of the puzzle, The Tower of Benares). The second puzzle is the so called ‘River Crossing’ (first found in the medieval Latin text Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes). Regardless, these puzzle models were used and while LRMs are great at moderately complex reasoning (of math problems, but really more just counting problems) they totally collapsed past a certain complexity.

All this reminded me of Alexander Grothendieck, a notable math visionary who eventually withdraw from urban and university life to live in a remote village in the Pyrenees. The biography of Grothendieck has been written about a good deal, often with not quite factual details or with a romantic frame — the entire lone genius idea that is very attractive to the western bourgeoisie. That said, Grothendieck ‘was’ a remarkable and solitary (to a large degree) genius, at least in terms of math. Nonetheless, allow me a short few biographical details.

“Alexander Grothendieck was born to a Russian-Jewish father, a revolutionary anarchist named Schapiro, and a German mother, a left-wing activist named Grothendieck (as you can see, he has his mother’s last name). His father was incarcerated from 1906 to 1917 for participating in the revolution against Czar Nicolas II. The couple emigrated to France as Hitler rose to power, leaving their child Alexander (he was six years old at the time) in Germany in the care of a foster family – with a pastor who practiced the Frénet method and promoted the “back to the land” movement.”
Gerard Lebrun (Grothendiek the Secret Genius of Mathematics)

Grothendiek came out of that cauldron of cultural upheaval that both an introduction to WW1, and a post script. I am reminded, perhaps for not good reasons, of Blaise Cendrars, who had nothing to do with math or science, but who arrived as a visionary literary outlaw, following the first world war. That particular war, more than the second, has, in retrospect, come to seem like the rupturing event, the chasm that straddled the ideas of ‘progress’ (The englightenment) with the dawn of psychoanalysis, and the destruction of a second world war, Hiroshima, and all the colonial violence running throughout the century.

“After taking part in the Spanish Civil War, his parents returned to France in 1938 with a refugee status and reunited with their child (he was then ten years old). But in 1939 they were deemed “suspicious” because of their nationality and their activities: his father was first interned in the Vernet camp (Ariège), after which he was handed over to the Nazis by the Vichy authorities and would eventually die in Auschwitz; his mother was interned with her child at Rieucros camp (Lozère). From 1942 to 1944, young Alexander was hidden in Chambon-sur-Lignon at the”Cevennes College”, administered by Pastor Trocmé who had been leading resistance efforts aimed at rescuing Jewish children. { } He graduated from the “Collège Cévenol” and became a student at Montpellier in 1945 { } Recruited and promoted to the CNRS, he spent a few years abroad (in Sao Paulo) after completing his thesis. His return ushers in what will be his most productive period, stretching from 1958 to 1970, a period that coincides with the Bourbaki group’s best years. His lucky break came with the opening of the IHES institute [Bures-sur-Yvette Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques] where he and Dieudonné were jointly offered a chair in mathematics. That’s where Grothendieck’s great adventure began.”
Gerard Lebrun (Ibid)

Ok, what followed was a circuitous journey through the highest corridors of academic math and science. And multiple breaks with institutional authority. And eventually a semi retirement in which he took on the qualities of Tolstoy in his later years, and also reminiscent of Ted Kaczynski, another math prodigy. Interestingly in 1968 Grothendiek, after addressing protesting students at Orsay University, remarked to a friend ‘they see me as a Mandarin”. Adorno met the same fate at roughly the same time. This begins to feel like an indictment of many leftists today.

“The idea of comparing my contribution to the mathematics of my time with Einstein’s contribution to physics came to me for two reasons: First, both of our accomplishments rely on the transformation of our conception of “space” (a mathematical conception in my case, but a conception of physics in his); and both take the form of a unifying vision that encompasses a wide variety of events and situations that previously seemed unconnected. I think that the spirit of my work and his work are indeed related.”
Alexander Grothendiek (Ibid)

“A talented boxer, fanatical about Beethoven’s final quartets and Bach, he loved nature and venerated “the humble and long-lived olive tree, full of sun and life”, but above all the things of this world, including mathematics, he had a devotion to writing that bordered on the fanatical. { } “In 1958, the French millionaire Léon Motchane built the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies on the outskirts of Paris to serve Grothendieck’s ambitions. There, Grothendieck, who had just turned thirty, announced a work programme that would re-establish the foundations of geometry and unify all the branches of mathematics. An entire generation of professors and students subjugated themselves to Grothendieck’s dream. He would preach aloud while they took notes, expanded his arguments and wrote out drafts for him to correct. The most devout of all his collaborators, Jean Dieudonné, would get up at five in the morning, even if the sun had not yet risen, to review the transcripts from the previous day before Grothendieck burst into the classroom at eight on the dot, developing a fresh set of ideas that he had already begun debating with himself as he climbed the stairs of the institute. Grothendieck’s seminar produced twelve volumes, more than twenty thousand pages that manage to bring together geometry, number theory, topology and complex analysis. ”
Benjamin Labatut (When We Cease to Understand the World)

What interests me about Grothendiek is (as Labatut notes) a quality of pan psychism in his work. In his later more reclusive last years, when he wandered the Pyrenees, dressed in burlap robes and in sandals, Grothendiek feared (in a sense Einstein did, too) numbers, feared there was a realm ‘behind’ them. Labatut writes of reclusive Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, who travelled to find Grothendiek in his final days, quite possibly because he shared this same fear of a hidden/secret dark reality lurking in the last shadows of higher math. American Mathematician Leila Schnaps visited Grothendiek, too, as he lay in hospital.

“They spent the afternoon together. Schneps asked him why he had isolated himself. Grothendieck told her he did not hate human beings, nor had he turned his back on the world. His isolation was neither an escape nor a rejection; he had done it for the protection of mankind. Grothendieck said that no one should suffer from his discovery, but he refused to explain what he meant when he spoke of “the shadow of a new horror”.”
Benjamin Labatut (Ibid)

It is worth nothing that once Grothendiek withdrew from public life, from institutional life, he became a school teacher — in a grammar school in a small village. Wittgenstein did the same identical thing. Ted Kaczynski more informally the same thing. I also think Grothendiek and Mochizuki, and no doubt Wittgenstein and Einstein and probably several others, recognized something terrifying in the direction progress had taken. Although that is far too vague. They found horror in that, too, but there was something else ‘hiding’. A secret which they did not yet know, but which haunted them. And perhaps all philosophy and all science, and most all art — arrive at this same place, this same spot, and in the various theories about a singularity lurk almost an entire history of allegory and symbol. All re-calibrated their focus toward Nature, even if all admitted this was a vague concept. And I think the lurking shadow here is found both in post internet digital tech, and in the pure form of theoretical physics, the post Nuclear Bomb physics. But there is another aspect of this ‘withdrawl’ of the geniuses — as it were– and that is they follow an already rather well trod narrative. And this is a story, with variations, found in everything from the Bible to Roger Corman’s Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963). It is also a variant of Dr.Jeckll and Mr Hyde. And in another sense this withdrawl and fear is expressed in the inability to finish books and writings.

“Like other appeals to “artificial intelligence”—a confused and confusing term that is inseparable from racist ideologies—these framings invite imperialist experts to offer their non-solutions. Rather than fight the entities responsible for genocide and support the Palestinian resistance, these experts want us to blame the genocide on “misuses” of computers—misuses they promise to “fix” through their partnerships with the US government, corporations, and academia (the institutions that have enabled the genocide in the first place).”
Yarden Katz (The Genocide in Palestine Is Powered by Zionism, Not “AI”, MR 2025)

I digress slightly here: AI itself is a marketing campaign more than a science. This entire data center explosion, which cant really continue for obvious reasons, then makes one ask why the propaganda? The fear mongering? Same with AI. I have seen articles (well, in fact many articles on social media) claiming AI can read minds and control your thoughts. This was a staple of 1950s and 60s science fiction. Also in cold war cautionary tales like The Manchurian Candidate.

I have written before about das ding, in the Freudian sense. But there are versions of this idea in other thinkers. In Heidegger for one. But this idea originated with Kant. (Ok, let me amend that. This is an idea dating back to antiquity. It is an idea as old as pharaonic Egypt.) But the modern sense of the term began with Kant. I want to put a hold on that for a second, in light of the earlier talk about AI etc. Now Thomas Metzinger is a well known scientist and researcher of consciousness. Professor Emeritus of theoretical philosophy (sic) at the University of Mainz, and an author of multiple books on consciousness and neuroscience, particularly focusing on neurotechnology, and on A.I. Metzinger is proposing the idea that consciousness is a process and not a thing in any sense of the word, and that consciousness is biological and an evolving biological phenomenon. Now I bring up Metzinger because while I think he is wrong about everything, I also think he’s a thinker who is serious and comes out of a branch of scientific research on mind that is worth discussing.

“Consciousness science has made great progress during the last three decades. We have a lot of data and a much better understanding of the physical correlates of conscious experience. Yet we still see many competing approaches and are not even close to having a single, self-consistent theory of consciousness. Like the Standard Model in particle physics, for example, a convincing Standard Model in consciousness science would have to provide major successes in generating experimental predictions while already naming and classifying a large majority of the truly fundamental factors. But in the consciousness science community, we have a long way to go until anything remotely resembling the Standard Model of particle physics could be written down. Three decades after the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness was founded in 1994, we still do not even know (or cannot agree on) what precisely it is that needs to be explained.”
Thomas Metzinger (The Elephant and the Blind)

My first reaction to the above paragraph (from his introduction to the book) is, well, if after many decades of research there is still nothing like what could be called a Standard Model for consciousness, this ought to tell you something. And here is where philosophy (and art) would seem to intercede. And when I say philosophy I should note this includes mathematics.

“We are not looking for consciousness “under a conceptual representation,” as a modern philosopher of cognitive science might say. When someone talks about experiencing “consciousness as such” or “awareness per se,” they are never referring to some sort of mental act in which they grasp its conceptual essence, thereby forming a thought about consciousness as consciousness. Exactly the opposite is the case, and our target in this book is therefore the entirely nonconceptual awareness of awareness itself.{ } The concept of “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” has a long tradition in the literature on contemplative practices. It is often described as a contentless form of experience, and it has played a great role in Eastern philosophical traditions. Over the centuries, contemplative practice has mostly taken place against the background of religious belief systems like Buddhism or Hinduism, with meditators trying to achieve a goal state like “liberation” or “enlightenment.” Accordingly, the phenomenological taxonomies of such states have often been shaped by traditional metaphysical belief systems and an ancient cultural context.”
Thomas Metzinger (Ibid)

Well, okay. Metzinger then gives us a short list of eastern practices of meditation, from Vedanta to the Upanishads to Tibetan Buddhism.

“..but my working hypothesis is that temporal experience (even the very idea of a “now”), spatially localized body-experience, and the subjective center of experience created by egoic self-awareness are all nonnecessary features of consciousness. If there is an essence, they are not part of it.”
Thomas Metzinger (Ibid)

And herein the problems begin. And the problems are insurmountable. Firstly, there are questions of ancestral history that seem to be of no importance to scientists. I might say, how history speaks to us. Or how history inhabits our consciousness. That history is not outside the lab. And what of our unconscious? Our unconscious is inheritor of our personal history (and perhaps collective) or perhaps it is the creator of our conscious history. I feel there is something essential in this because if not there, what exactly is left?

“Existence is a dream-life, a path, an interpretation of that permanent stuff that is the dream, a stuff woven in the unconscious, the centre and starting-point of any psychoanalytical semantics of dreams: for Sigmund Freud the interpretation of dreams was the highway that brings man to a knowledge of the fundamental riddles that inhabit his mysterious reality. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud studies the unconscious aspect of the dream world and tries to develop a cryptological methodology and an ‘epistemology’ of the unconscious.”
Saloman Resnick (The Theatre of the Dream)

I have noted before that the laboratory is itself an interpretation. And then the language of ‘pure consciousness’ is also a problem. Take, well, ‘pure consciousness’. Computers (and Sean Carrol even agrees with this) are of no use unless the problem is VERY clearly defined. (i.e. laboratory problems). Its very easy to point out the practical ‘successes’ (sic) of lab experiments (The Atom bomb and MRI machines). In fact the MRI machine is perhaps the purest expression of mathematics in the physical world, the world of objects, the world of materialism. One cannot argue with that, I don’t think. But lets return to ‘consciousness’. For this is the hard problem (sic). How is it that light hits our retina and we ‘see’ something? We see red or blue? What does red or blue mean, actually?

“Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist.”
Carlo Rovelli (There is no Hard Problem of Consciousness)

What is this experience of red? So when Metzinger says there is no such thing as subjectivity he needs to find a way to explain (sic) the experience of ‘red’. David Chalmers (the best mullet in the world of science) gave a talk in 1994, in Tucson of all places, in which he coined the term ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The real problem here is that all the tools of science are part of the world they are trying to describe (and control, but more on that later).

“The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body. But this contradicts everything we have learned about nature in the last centuries. The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. We do not need to assume that the circle between epistemology (how we get knowledge) and ontology (what exists) requires a starting point. There is nothing wrong with its circularity: The world I access is the information I have about it, and I am part of that world.”
Carlo Rovelli (Ibid)

But they are not two distinct perspectives on the same event. The external experience of me is not writing this blog. And nobody that I can see is asking that this circle between ontology and epistemology have a starting point. These are odd straw man arguments.

But Rovelli is theoretical physicist. He cannot ‘not’ see the laboratory framing that is embedded in language. If we return to Grothendiek and Einstein, or Mochizuki, …or even Wittgenstein, we run into real questions about what ‘math’ is. And I admit I have no idea what higher math actually is or feels like.

“In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claimed he had solved the abc conjecture, a major open question in number theory about the relationship between addition and multiplication. There was just one problem: His proof, which was more than 500 pages long, was completely impenetrable. It relied on a snarl of new definitions, notation, and theories that nearly all mathematicians found impossible to make sense of. Years later, when two mathematicians translated large parts of the proof into more familiar terms, they pointed to what one called a “serious, unfixable gap” in its logic — only for Mochizuki to reject their argument on the basis that they’d simply failed to understand his work.The incident raises a fundamental question: What is a mathematical proof? We tend to think of it as a revelation of some eternal truth, but perhaps it is better understood as something of a social construct.”
Jordana Cepelewicz (Quanta, August 2023)

Yes yes I say.

“The best verification system we have in mathematics is that lots of people look at a proof from different perspectives, and it fits well in a context that they know and believe. In some sense, we’re not saying we know it’s true. We’re saying we hope it’s correct, because lots of people have tried it from different perspectives. Proofs are accepted by these community standards. Then there’s this notion of objectivity — of being sure that what is claimed is right, of feeling like you have an ultimate truth. But how can we know we’re being objective? It’s hard to take yourself out of the context in which you’ve made a statement — to have a perspective outside of the paradigm that has been put in place by society. This is just as true for scientific ideas as it is for anything else. One can also ask what is objectively interesting or important in mathematics. But this is also clearly subjective.”
Andrew Granville (Interview Quanta Aug. 2023)

So we are back at ‘subjectivity’. Why do I wake in the morning and recognize the room I am in, and recognize I am still alive (sigh) and can now sit up and look at my watch and see what time it is? But what is meant by ‘recognize’? I am creating a narrative in my mind, a subjective narrative. This is why Freud (and Nietzsche and Adorno are so important) matters crucially. We, those of you reading this post, are subjectively re-narrating what you are reading. Subjectivity is a narrative machine, as it were. It is also theatre, and also performance, even if only a performance in my mind. (enter stage left, pan-psychism)

But the issue here is ‘I’ — why do ‘I’ wake up. I was dreaming, and I wake. I woke the other night, well, very early morning, and didn’t recognize the room I was in, for a second, or two. I was still in the dream I think. Then ‘I’ began to recognize it. And this is very important. When I taught at the film school we often had exercises with actors about how to show ‘making a decision’. Or how to show recognition. Its a very important aspect of performance, of acting. When I woke confused, I felt a second’s worth of anxiety. Then that feeling receded. I ‘recognized’ my room. That recognition is history. It is historically embedded. If I wake in a hotel room in Palermo I might be confused for a few seconds longer. I don’t know Palermo. But I know rooms and what morning is, and what sleep and waking up mean. I am born into a community with a history. And this is one of the dangers with quantum theory, partly just because its so new. But it is also because it is questioning the idea of proof in some way that is unsettling.

“We’ve moved to a different place, where computers can do some wild things. Now people say, oh, we’ve got this computer, it can do things people can’t. But can it? Can it actually do things people can’t? Back in the 1950s, Alan Turing said that a computer is designed to do what humans can do, just faster. Not much has changed. { } I’m afraid I have a lot of skepticism about the role of computers. They can be a very valuable tool for getting things right — particularly for verifying mathematics that rests heavily on new definitions that are not easy to analyze at first sight. There’s no debate that it’s helpful to have new perspectives, new tools and new technology in our armory. But what I shy away from is the concept that we’re now going to have perfect logical machines that produce correct theorems. You have to acknowledge that we can’t be sure things are correct with computers. Our future has to rely on the sense of community that we have relied on throughout the history of science: that we bounce things off one another. That we talk to people who look at the same thing from a completely different perspective. And so on.”
Andrew Granville (Ibid)

A.I. is really being sold to the public by the big tech giants like Google and Microsoft, and now Palantir. And a good part of this selling (I suspect because AI is already at a place of diminishing returns) is to scare the public.

“Every so often, an executive from one of the tech monopolies tells the media he’s alarmed that AI is going to replace human beings. Generations of Hollywood blockbusters (2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, Terminator in 1984, The Matrix in 1999, Avengers: The Age of Ultron in 2013, Subservience in 2024, and many more) have trained us to think of AI as something awe-inspiring and terrifying. Over the same time span, Israeli propagandists have put forward a similar image of the Israeli military: an invincible, all-knowing machine full of intelligence and technology. These parallel propaganda trains—of AI and of Israel—have the same goals: puffing up the self-image of imperialists as gods, and inducing despair in those trying to resist genocide. In fact, as anticolonial rebels have shouted through the centuries, our oppressors have nothing that we don’t have. This genocide can be stopped. If it is, it will be stopped by human beings resisting, not by fixing a computer.”
Yarden Katz (Ibid)

AI will never be conscious. Period.

Why are all these data centers being built? This was discussed on the podcast
https://aestheticresistance.substack.com/p/podcast-210

Whatever it is, the reasons will have to do with something about control. About protecting the wealthy 1%. Science meets class struggle. But lets return to the hard problem question. David Chalmers has some additional and interesting thoughts.

“We won’t explain consciousness purely in terms of the brain. In terms of the brain you’ll get a good solution to the easy problems, to the various behaviors and so on, but you’ll never get a full solution to the hard problem: why is all this accompanied by experience? Rather, what we need to do is to take conscious experience itself as primitive, as a fundamental element of the world. It’s the same attitude we take towards space and time and mass in physics: we don’t reduce them to something more fundamental, but then we come up with fundamental laws that govern them and that can explain them. So, in physics, the physicists say we’re looking for a fundamental theory in physics so simple maybe you could write it on the front of a t-shirt. For consciousness, maybe we want a story of the fundamental laws connecting the brain and consciousness so simple we can write it on the front of a t-shirt; the fundamental principles that connect brain processes to consciousness. Right now we don’t know what those fundamental principles might be. Eh, there are some ideas. { } A view I’m attracted to is that consciousness is actually present at a fundamental level inside the brain, and inside all physical processes. This is the traditional philosophical view known as panpsychism: that maybe all of physics involves some element of consciousness at the basic levels. Somehow, all of this composes to yield my consciousness. It’s a beautiful, unified, attractive view of the world where consciousness and the physical world might be integrated all the way down. The big problem for this view is, again, another version of the hard problem, but now in the version “how can these small bits of consciousness at the fundamental level add up to the kind of single, unified conscious experience that I have?” People call this the combination problem: how do the atoms of consciousness combine to yield human consciousness? Nobody, right now, has a solution to that problem, but at least people are thinking about it.”
David Chalmers (The Hard Problem of Consciousness, 2016)

There are several versions of pan-psychism. Mine is the psychoanalytic version I suppose. Its a kind of response to the ‘combination problem’. And one that I feel incorporates desire and the body. The experience of ‘me’ — but this is often a tricky question because it is asked in terms that reflect that laboratory bias. The experiment frame. Because in one sense there is ONLY this experience of me. We feel certain about nothing else, and yet this certainty is interrogated as if it were one question among many. Actually its the only question.

And the experience of ‘me’ is one connected back to our infant selves. The enigma of childhood amnesia. And this takes us back to Freud and das ding. And to Lacan. I am always loathe to launch into Lacan because , well, firstly because he is very frustrating to read, and often impenetrable. But, but, he is also brilliant. Anyway, Lacan saw the Freudian idea of das ding as hugely important. His interpretation was different, to a degree, than Freud. For Freud this ‘thing’, this absence, was — in short form — the Mother. For Lacan it was a primordial lack. Now those two readings are closer than you might think. The absent Mother is the primordial missing ‘thing’. But there are various other approaches to the asking of this enigma or hard problem.

“Only two possible ways exist to establish a necessary agreement between objects of experience and concepts. It could be that the experience allows these concepts to form or that these same concepts allow the experience to occur. The first is not the case with categories (nor with pure forms of sense intuition), for they are a priori concepts independent of experience. Kant explicitly states that there are only two possible explanations for this necessary correspondence between concepts and objects, generatio aequivoca and epigenesis. Malabou claims there are three: generatio aequivoca, epigenesis, and preformation. The first theory, known as generatio aequivoca, explains the formation of life by distinguishing between the origin of life (inert matter) and the force that caused its emergence (vital initiative).”
Jan Sumiński (Freudian das Ding and the Origin of Kantian Categories)

This is one of literally dozens of approaches, and probably thousands, or tens of thousands of doctoral theses on the topic. Regarding the above, the second is the positing of a ‘creator’ (God) and finally ” Epigenesis is defined as the “development of a plant or animal from an egg or spore through a series of processes in which unorganised cell masses differentiate into organs and organ systems.”

I will conclude here with a sketch of Freud’s ideas on ‘the thing’. This was from a paper Freud never published. He struggled with it for decades. The kernal of this reading is that ‘the thing’ is uncomprehended. This is not a simple observation, and this is what Lacan saw as important. There is a lack of some sort — in the beginning is the lack.

“The beginning of the thought-processes that branched off from practical thinking lies in the process of making judgements. The ego arrived at this through a discovery made in its organization-through the fact (which has already been indicated) that perceptual cathexes partly coincide with reports from the subject’s own body. In this way perceptual complexes are divided into a constant, uncomprehended portion – the “thing” – and a changing, comprehensible portion – the attributes or movements of the thing.”
Sigmund Freud (Project for a Scientific Psychology)

And a couple quotes from an essay of Robert Bly’s (hat tip Dennis Riches) on Carlos Castenada. This may seem off topic but I would argue it is not.

“Castaneda good-naturedly gives the capitalist college students what they want—fantasies of gaining power without becoming more compassionate or more honest. Castaneda’s little essay in the first book on the four enemies of power was lovely and still is. Good little lectures are scattered around all his books. His not-doing is a harmless rephrasing of Taoist ideas. His “tonal-nagual” concept, which describes the gap between the ordinary world and a mysterious nonverbal world, owes a lot to the work of split-brain researchers in rational laboratories and to sophisticates like Robert Ornstein. He then attributed these ideas to an American slang-speaking Mexican native. But his finding of these ideas shows good taste. What I don’t like so well is the air of regression that surrounds the language. The attitude that surrounds all of Castaneda’s teaching is the attitude of the pre-genital stage, the stage Freud identified as the anal. The absence of women in the first four books is striking. There is not a single thinking woman, and not one woman at all lovable in the way the frolicsome men are. Genital energy is not felt anywhere….[What] is curious in Castaneda is that teaching created by men and women climbing a powerful spiritual stair, or by men and women living in a joyful genital stage, are presented in the language of the anal stage. Naturally this shows in content, where no one ever goes off behind the bushes without being noticed. But the regression shows most clearly in the poor vocabulary, the thin texture of language, the poverty of metaphor, the monotonous way people talk, the tawdriness of image. The use of clichés deadens all of Castaneda’s teaching…”
Robert Bly (Carlos Castaneda Meets Madame Solitude, NYRBs 1978)

The lesson here is culture. Language. And I again think of Moretti’s essay on the language of the World Bank. (New Left Review https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii92/articles/franco-moretti-dominique-pestre-bankspeak

And also the inherent anality of all AI discourse. Also with game theory. Bly could be writing of either. The age of smart phone and texting, of American high school students who don’t know how to use capital letters, or cant read a map. Survival is going to be a relearning of analog skills I suspect. And class; just note the two most popular non fiction books on the NYTimes best seller list. First is Suicidal Empathy, by Gad Saad, pop psychologist arguing that empathy is bad. And two Strangers, by Belle Burden. The painfully self pitying and tone deaf story of a divorce among the very wealthy. (and third is a book on UFOs and aliens, by pop science writer Neil deGrasse Tyson). Oh and fourth is something by a FOX News talking head. So there you have it.

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