Qualia Extinction

Beschreibung

You lie in bed and the audit begins. Was the morning productive? Could the afternoon have been used more efficiently? You did not choose this question. It arrived without being chosen. And it feels so natural that you have never once asked where it came from. You open your calendar app and schedule intimacy with the person you love between two other commitments. You scroll through feeds for an hour that leaves no residue, no memory, no feeling at all. You find an empty afternoon in your schedule and something feels wrong — not fear, but the feeling you get stepping off a train and sensing your bag is not on your shoulder; the reflex of reaching back for something that should be there. Except you cannot say what is missing. Only that something is. This book is about why none of this feels strange. And why it should. Qualia Extinction argues that certain experiences depend on social structures for their very possibility — and that when those structures are destroyed, the experiences don’t just become rare. They become impossible. Gone the way a species goes extinct: not elsewhere, not dormant, not awaiting rediscovery, but permanently foreclosed. The book calls this qualia extinction, and it argues that the process conceals itself from those it affects, because the very capacities you would need to recognise the loss are among the capacities that have been lost. This is a work of philosophy. It builds on Weber, Habermas, Taylor, and Rosa. It develops philosophical concepts — the formatted self, recursive self-occlusion, affective topology — with the precision that philosophical argument demands. It does not offer life hacks or screen time advice. It does not romanticise the past. What it does is name something that has no name. The feeling that something is missing but you cannot say what. The rage that has no adequate object. The grief you cannot mourn because you do not know what you are grieving. The book passes through that grief. It does not end there. It ends with play: the possibility that even within a formatted world, there remain ways of being that are not yet fully captured — absorbed, responsive, alive to what optimisation cannot reach. You already know something is wrong. This book tells you what it is.

Autor*in

Merlin Bittlinger

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Qualia Extinction Formatted Self Critical Social Theory Phenomenology Democracy Discourse Theory Philosophy

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