YouTube: Is There Really a Hard Problem of Consciousness?
Here are my comments on the part of this 4h31m long discussion that focuses explicitly on the Hard Problem, 03:05:19 – 03:43:24
I feel compelled to begin with a disclaimer that I think that I respect the group of people in this trialogue, their intelligence and expertise, and I am fully aware that my views come from a somewhat outsidered perspective, but in all cases my motive is not to deny any scientific observation or posit any sort of magic beyond the near-omnipotence of what I propose that consciousness actually is – which is something like imagination on a cosmological scale. I fully respect the academic credentials of the participants as well, and while I never pursued that path farther than a BA degree in Anthropology, I prefer to use first names rather than Dr. titles – no offense or undue familiarity intended, just seems less pretentious. Speaking of pretentious, I hereby end this disclaimer and proceed to the proceedings.
The Hard Problem segment opens with Joscha bringing up Daniel Dennett, and how his dismissal of qualia seems to be based on a criticism of how the term is used in philosophy. In the course of that, JB says of Dennett’s position…
3:06:46 “Oh well he’s a functionalist. Pretty much standard.
He says…uh good writing…there’s nothing wrong with what he writes. My position might be different from yours because I don’t see magical powers that are afforded by biology, it’s still just function. It is provided by biology and I can break down these functions ultimately into state transitions in substrates that form control structure and so on, so it’s it’s not opening avenues into something new. There’s basically no magical homunculus that is produced in consciousness via biology. Biology is just a way to get self-organizing matter.”
Here I agree with Joscha completely. I disagree with Dennett’s views almost entirely, but have great respect for how he does what he does. As far as biology goes, I see no grounds for emergent properties, especially any that smell of consciousness. When JB says that he can break down biological functions into mechanical events, I tend to believe him, or at least understand why that is entirely possible in theory. While we perceive breakpoints in the properties of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena, they are as far as I can reason, aesthetic separations. Functionally, they all refer to the same thing: concrete tangible objects on different scales of size moving each other around and changing shapes.
The geometry of those shapes and their movements become more complicated as we scale up in size from particles to molecules to cells to bodies, but complication in and of itself adds nothing to the conversation about consciousness. Indeed, without some awareness and experience, molecules or cells have no way of suspecting that they are part of any group or process and no capacity to qualify it as simple or complex. Without a theory of sense, we are really at a loss to say what the difference would be between matter and nothingness, but that’s another topic. Without going that far, I would still say that even the idea of ‘control systems’ can only arise within a conscious experience where a thoughtful analysis of perceived objects in a universe where some objects are associated with conscious, teleological motives.
In the most stringent reading of the view that I propose, matter of any scale would not literally be controlling anything, so that any appearance of control is smuggled in by our conscious, anthropic experience. Without that anthropomorphic projection, what we see as bacteria or molecules controlling each other would reduce losslessly to non-purposeful habits of mindless physical force geometry. Saying that these movements of objects are control systems doesn’t actually add anything to what is occurring physically, but that isn’t key to understanding the Hard Problem. We can call what physical structures end up doing mechanically ‘control systems’ without taking that literally. Literally there’s just physical forces moving each other around automatically for no reason other than the given geometry of what they are. If what we mean by “self-organizing” implies something more than inevitable looping geometries of those automatic movements, then that too would fall into an Explanatory Gap.
I agree with what Joscha says next about the problem that I and many others have with Daniel Dennett’s disqualifications of qualia:
3:07:56 JB: “…what I found is that Dennett fails to convince a lot of his own students in some sense and I try to figure out why that is and the best explanation that I’ve come up with so far is that Dennett actually never explains phenomenal experience. And when discusses qualia he mostly points at definitional defects in the way in which most philosophers treat qualia and then says it’s probably something that doesn’t really exist in the way in which these people Define it so we also don’t need to explain it and a lot of people find this unsatisfying. Because they say that regardless of how you define it it’s clearly something that they experience like qualia being the atoms of phenomenal experience or aspects of phenomenal experience or features of phenomenal experience it doesn’t really matter how you define it it’s there right and please explain it to me because I don’t see how an unthinking and feeling Mechanical Universe is going to produce these wealth of experience that I’m confronted with and so this physics does not seem to be able to explain why something is happening to me why is me here why is their experience and this is something that some people feel is poorly addressed by Dennett.”
Joscha goes on to summarize the significance of Philosophical Zombie thought experiments in formulating the Hard Problem.
3:09:45 JB …”so let’s see, we have a philosophical zombie in front of us and we are asking this philosophic zombie who in every regard acts like a human being because his brain implements all the necessary functionality just mechanically and not magically, ‘are you conscious?’ what is the zombie going to respond?
Anastasia Bendebury “What do you what do you mean about the fact that the brain reproduces all of the effects?”
JB: “The idea of the philosophical zombie is that the philosophical zombie is producing everything without giving rise to phenomenal experience – just mechanical. Based on the intuition that…”
AB: “What does that mean? I don’t understand what that means.”
JB: “I think the intuition is that when we experience is something that cannot be explained through causal structure. So mechanisms.”
AB: “But why do we think that? I don’t understand why we possibly think that.
That’s what I mean about not understanding the hard problem of Consciousness. Because I’m like look… This is why my definition of life as beginning before the cell is instrumental to eliminating the hard problem of Consciousness. Because if you have in the most basic cell – which is an embodiment of the state of matter that is life – you have a resonant state which is electromagnetic. It’s the redox state.
And the cell needs to maintain that electrical resonance at a specific set point because if it does not, it dies. And so it is going out into the world and it is constantly controlling where it is in the world relative to its internal state. And as you progressively produce more and more complex beings you get a more and more complex map of the world and a more and more complex internal state. And so by the time that you have a walking human, you cannot have a walking human without an internal state. It’s a philosophical thought experiment that requires you to divorce yourself from everything that you know about biology in order to make the claim. And I just feel like you can’t do that!
Because the biology is inherently what produces the conscious…it’s the state of matter that produces the consciousness and all of the resonant waves that are inside of it. And so if you have the resonant waves in the sufficient complexity of a sufficiently resonant system that is interpreting the world relative to itself and to what it wants how can you have anything except for consciousness? You have experience, you have the mapping of expectation to frustration and you’re just…it just emerges from the most basic cell.
I think that the reason why Anastasia isn’t seeing the Hard Problem is because her model of biology already includes aesthetic-participatory phenomena (experience, awareness, sensory-motivation), rather than cells being anesthetic-automatic mechanical events that occur independently of any experience of them.
The expectation that a physical state like reduction–oxidation (redox) constitutes or leads to a cell’s need to participate intentionally in seeking to correct what it somehow senses (unexplained by biology) as disequilibrium is already smuggling in teleology into biochemistry > physics > mechanism.
Because we have genetic mutation and retrospective statistical natural/passive “selection” to account for the evolving mechanical behaviors of cells, no sense or teleology is needed in the explanation. We can omit it entirely and nothing changes in our description of what is causing the movements of cells in the direction of the chemical reactions that are necessarily pulling them there.
In a purely physical universe, chemistry would act not out of any perceived sense of need. There would be no agentic power to seek out satiation of that need, but rather the mechanical behaviors that end up maintaining redox states (unperceived) would be nothing but those behaviors that happen to have survived in the genetics of the cell. If the cell ends up moving in ways that maintain redox and happens to be in an environment that allows that to happen, then the cell has a better statistical chance of reproducing. That’s it. No need, no going out into a world, no controlling, no sense of self – just molecular geometry cashing itself out statistically over time.
JB: “How do resonant waves produce consciousness?”
AB: “say it again”
JB: “How do resonant waves produce consciousness?”
AB: “okay so do you know the Qualia Research Institute yes? So what is their work? Their work is that they’re basically showing that there are harmonic states in the brain that are associated with experience”
It’s important to realize, in my opinion, that the association is always coming from experience, not from anything the brain is doing. The association is retrospective from the reality of consciousness rather than prospective from the reality of unexperienced brain matter.
Michael Shilo DeLay: “The question seems akin to asking how do fundamental waves produce music? Which emerges from all of these individual tones. But the same thing with conscious experiences you have the summing of different modules within the neuron-based systems that are all aggregating and fighting and resonating with one another and you get music that comes out of it.”
JB: “And you don’t see an explanatory problem there? No?
AB: “No. I’m like how I mean I can see a mathematical problem. I can see that it would be very very difficult to mathematize the way that that resonance…”
Here I see that what is being overlooked is the gap between phenomena in one sense modality (waving intensities of chemical or electrochemical movements in a brain) and any other aesthetic quality (sights, sounds, feelings, etc). When we understand music as emerging from a sequence of aural tones, that’s all within the context of a conscious experience. Sound in the aural sense is qualia. Sound waves are actually silent acoustic perturbations of matter as it collides with matter. Between the concept we have of sound waves, which refer to dynamic geometry of tangible objects so firmly embedded in our learning, we overlook the need to explain how and why these movements of matter are perceived at all, and how they come to be perceived as sounds rather than as the silent, physical vibrations of substances that they ‘actually’ are.
In comparing music emerging from acoustic waves to consciousness emerging from brain wave resonance, we are already falling for the same circular reasoning fallacy that leads people to deny the Hard Problem. Since there is the same Hard Problem there in transducing tangible changes in objects to aural experiences of sound, notes, and music, it actually only reinforces the Hard Problem in the brain > consciousness context. Sense is the key. That’s why I write so much about it and call my view Multisense Realism.
For the next few minutes the hosts and guest discuss the limits of the explanatory power of math, language, and scientific theory, and the difference between explanation and description. This isn’t directly related to the Hard Problem in my opinion, but it does speak to the same theme of neglecting different modalities of sense and sense making and glossing over the fact that in all cases, the gaps between such modalities can only be filled, as far as we can conceive, by some conscious experience in which multiple modes of qualia can be accessed and manipulated intentionally in another mode of sense making (imagination, abstraction, understanding). Because Anastasia’s view of the Hard Problem is that it must come from a misunderstanding of biology (which she already gives experience and teleology to), she sees the Problem as one of finding fault with description for not being explanatory.
I agree with Joscha in his response:
3:18:07 So when you talk about harmonic waves producing a phenomenon for me that’s very far from a causal explanation that so it’s something that is very unsatisfying to me because I cannot build this but well for me a causal explanation is something I can make.
This is at the heart of the Explanatory Gap, which I like to meme-ify with this cannibalized version of a cartoon (not sure which artist I stole the original from, but my apologies):
Following this, Joscha gets into a detailed technical explanation of what waves are and why they don’t explain or justify producing phenomenal qualities.
3:20:02 JB: “…you can build control systems and once you have control systems you can also build control systems that don’t just regulate the present but also regulate the future, but in order to regulate the future they need to represent stuff that isn’t there right – that will be there at some level of coarse graining but it’s currently not present so you need to have a system that is causally insulating part of your mechanical structure from the present…control systems that don’t just regulate the present but also regulate the future. But in order to regulate the future they need to represent stuff that isn’t there right that will be there at some level of coarse graining but it’s currently not present so you need to have a system that is causally insulating part of your mechanical structure from the present…”
I propose that groupings of moving objects don’t actually need to represent anything to appear to ‘control’ future states, and that no such need to represent could be fulfilled physically. All that would be needed are mechanical switches and timers that happened to have evolved to fit with environmental states that happen to repeat. If the brain needed to control the position of the legs in the future to walk successfully, it need only set aside some neurons for that purpose. They don’t need to represent anything or imagine the future, they just need to grow a miniature duplicate of the brain chemistry involved in walking but without being connected directly to efferent nerves to the legs. There doesn’t need to be a representational relationship hiding inside of chemistry, the chemistry just had to have accidentally evolved to accumulate a lot of repeating triggers of triggers.
In other words, there’s no reason to represent anything in the future when you can just use space instead of time. You don’t need to know that the wood you’re piling up is for burning in cold Winter if you have a statistical mechanism of mutation that happens to select for piling up wood and burn it if temperature conditions activate a thermal switch. Instead of executive consciousness, it would just happen that a brain that grows miniature low resolution copies of itself would end up pantomiming meta-cerebral functions. No feedback or representation at all, just parallel reproduction of self-similar neurochemical systems. No code or instructions are needed, just clockwork chain reactions.
I’m not suggesting that I think that’s what happened in reality. I think that the reality is that all phenomena are part of the way that conscious experiences are nested and relate to each other. If that were not the case, I doubt that biology as we know it would have evolved at all. I agree with Anastasia’s view that experience begins prior to the cell, and with Joscha’s view that there is nothing special about biology that would explain consciousness.
Where I do disagree with Joscha’s estimation of consciousness is in the attribution of ideas and motivations to robots:
3:28:55 AB: “it’s not obvious that the bacteria needs to be more conscious than a soccer playing robot which is not conscious. Right? Bacteria needs to be more conscious than a soccer playing robot which is not conscious right if you build a robot that plays soccer it’s the robot is fulfilling a bunch of function it’s going to model its environment it’s going to figure out where the ball is where the other robots are where the goal is how to get the ball between yourself and the goal how to push the ball into the goal and so on so in some Financial sense it’s going to have beliefs about the environment it’s going to have commitments about the course of actions it’s going to have full directive Behavior it’s going to have representations about the world with itself inside but I don’t think it experiences anything.“
I don’t see any reason to assume that a robot’s behavior requires the generation of any actual models, beliefs, or representations. The robot is just lots of switches switching switches that control the movements of the physically assembled parts that make it up. I like to use the example of a fishing net and how it is very effective at catching fish, but it doesn’t have to know anything about what it is doing. The size of the fish and the shape of the net are all that are needed. In the same way, the structure of the robot is all that is needed to explain why the robot parts move in the way that they must move – by physical law, not by models or beliefs.
In the video AB and MSD go on to talk about justifying the emergence of consciousness in bacteria but not in a robot because of either complexity or flexibility. Neither of these seem to me to warrant the creation of a new type of representational or qualitative metaphysics. Moving objects are just moving objects, no matter how many there are or how fancy their movements become.
3:34:18 AB: “…any exercise that attempts to explain consciousness without the physical substrate without recognizing that the physical substrate is mandatory for the effect that we’re seeing and is the iterative product of progressive complexity that has been evolving on Earth for the last four billion years will fail to produce Consciousness because it is inherent in the structural organization of these different modules that resonate with one another to create complexity
Here is a case where I agree with what Anastasia is saying in one sense but disagreeing completely in another. I agree that the human conscious experience probably has to result from billions of years of specific evolutionary history, however, I disagree that it is related to physical structures. I propose that the physical structures and mechanisms are effects, rather than causes, of how our conscious experience has developed. Because I think that the physical universe we see is an appearance in our evolved consciousness (see Donald Hoffman’s Interface theory), it is the trans-physical accumulation of conscious experiences themselves that the human qualities of our experience depend upon.
For this reason I do not think that human consciousness can be replicated or simulated mechanically. It’s not because biology alone is capable of providing complexity, flexibility, or harmonics, it’s because biology is the particular vocabulary that consciousness has developed for higher/richer forms of experience to use lower forms of conscious experience as a vehicle. I think that biology doesn’t generate consciousness, rather biology is a symptom of the interface between two different epochs and timescales of evolving conscious experience.
3:35:02 AB: “…the phenomenon of experience is all these different resonant modes you can think about what it feels like to listen to a sine wave versus what it feels like to listen to a symphony they’re the same thing except the sine wave has been modulated into something far more complex and that complex wave has something else in it.
I agree that a symphony is the same thing as complex modulations of sound, but again, a sine wave doesn’t sound like anything unless you can hear. The chain of physical causality ends in the silent brain. There is nothing about an auditory cortex that will be able to conjure sounds out of the oscillating changes in its chemistry. There is no evolutionary advantage to an organism that has to hear sounds rather than one that just transduces acoustic vibrations mechanically into oscillating electrochemical states. We know, for example, from Blindsight patients that the brain is perfectly capable of responding correctly to questions about optical conditions without any experience of visibility.
I agree with Joscha that there’s nothing special about biology as far as being an extra property above chemistry or physics. Again, it’s all just tangible objects moving each other around in public space.
3:38:37 – AB: “What the QRI work is interesting where it’s interesting because there appear to be different states inside the brain that correspond to emotional states and so if you are unhappy or you’re feeling depressed there’s a different brainwave state that is associated with that experience.
I think it’s important to understand that ‘correspond to’ can only happen in a conscious experience. Correspond isn’t a physical activity or structure. Physical states of a brain have no physical way to correspond to anything, so they are just what they appear to be – geometric changes in tangible shapes. Consciousness uses brains, but brains have no way to use consciousness. They have to use physical force – which also has no way to use consciousness. When we use a non-physical model of nature instead, there is no problem with some aspects of consciousness perceiving other aspects of itself as physics. We see it all the time in dreams.
3:40:33 JB: “What is actually sadness? Right? Sadness is an affect it is directed on some source of satisfying a need being permanently removed from your world can never get it back and it’s completely crucial to you. You identified the satisfying yourself through the source of satisfaction and it’s got it will never come back right this is sadness in some sense and a stronger form of sadness is grief it’s a paralyzing form of sadness and sadness leads to certain behaviors mostly a disengagement with the world because you’re helpless you cannot do anything about it. In supplicative behavior you are appealing to an environment to help you with the situation and to create a solution for a problem for which you’re incapable of finding one. And so sadness is some complex psychological phenomena that you can formally define and the question is how is it implemented in the brain?
And what’s also crucial about sadness is that you experience yourself changing as a result of sadness and without this experience you wouldn’t say that somebody is sad you would say somebody acts as if they are sad but there’s a difference between acting as if you are sad and actually being sad. Because that requires an experience of sadness. And so we are coming back to this original question how is it possible that the system that is mechanically implemented is actually feeling something and don’t say waves that are interacting with each other that sounds like magical thinking to me because it’s not adding anything beyond molecules bumping into each other and you’re saying more complexity it just means more molecules bumping more complexly into each other.“
I completely agree that any explanation of sadness based on waves doesn’t work, and that this is what the Hard Problem is all about. In Joscha’s discussion, he links sadness with semantic and behavioral correlates, but that too doesn’t explain emotion itself. Sadness is an affect but that doesn’t explain why or how affects could arise either from brain activity or events that happen to a biological organism.
Finishing up this segment, the discussion turns to conceptualization.
3:42:41 MSD – “…a concept is a relationship between two physical bodies so one is moving towards the other let’s say and then an abstract concept would be taking that motion and relating it to another concept and you can compound these into greater and greater degrees of abstraction…”
I disagree that concepts have anything to do with objects. Objects relate to each other in only one way as far as I can tell, and that is through the relation of the geometry of their shape, position, and motion. Nothing conceptual or abstract about that as far as I can tell, although since motion requires some sense of duration, we could distinguish objects from objects changing position/shape over time, with the latter being arguably less like a static object. Since stasis and velocity are both relative and dependent on perceptual framing (as is everything except perception itself), the idea of a static object is purely hypothetical. If we say that anything hypothetical is an abstraction, fair enough, but even so, it is an abstraction of geometric shapes and not a concept that departs from geoemtry.
Refuting Strong Emergence
0:51 What’s down there?
0:54 The laws of fundamental physics, quantum mechanics,
0:57 perhaps string theory below that,
0:59 perhaps a final theory of everything,
1:01 the holy grail of science.
1:04 I see a challenge to this model of how the world works.
1:08 It’s called Strong Emergence.
1:10 And it claims that each level of the hierarchy of the sciences
1:15 from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology
1:18 has its own special laws.
Right away I have problems with the assumptions being made here. Physics, chemistry, and biology may have their own special laws, but they are laws about physical, concrete, tangible phenomena, not feelings, perceptions, ideas etc. In the list “physics to chemistry to biology to psychology” one of these is not like the other. If psychology had laws, they would pertain not to organs, cells, or molecules but to aspects of conscious experience where no tangible object appears at all.
2:40 George, the claim that has been growing is that
2:44 in order to explain how everything works,
2:47 you need this concept of emergence.
2:49 Okay. Well, let’s ask the following question.
2:52 If we knew everything about what was the state of the universe
2:57 at the time of the last scattering
2:59 of the cosmic microwave background of matter.
3:02 Which is basically 14 billion years ago,
3:04 could you predict what you and I are saying
3:07 to each other today from that data?
3:09 Some of the strong physicalists believe that, that would be
3:12 the case and I think it’s absolutely clear that
3:15 there it isn’t remotely possible this would be the case,
3:18 because the fluctuations on the surface of the last scattering,
3:21 if you believe standard cosmology
3:23 or random Garcia fluctuation.
3:25 Now, out of that, emergence has taken place over time
3:28 of animals, of human beings are able to think.
3:33 And human beings then can discuss and produce books
3:36 like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity,
3:39 Darwin’s book on the origin of the species, okay.
3:42 Now, those books contain logical argumentation.
3:47 There is no way that logical argumentation was implied
3:51 in any sense by that data
3:52 on the cosmic microwave background surface.
3:55 Something has happened between there and there
3:57 which has led to that logical argumentation appearing
4:01 in the real world which it has undoubtedly has done.
4:04 On its surface, that’s correct.
4:07 But what I could do is I can throw in an evolutionary picture
4:10 and then it would develop the nervous system and the brain.
4:13 And then you have interactions between brains
4:15 and communities and I can give a story.
4:18 Yes, but the physics does not come into that story,
4:22 in any way, except facilitating what, what —
4:24 you’re bringing in a Darwinian picture.
4:26 No physics book has got Darwin’s law as a law of physics.
4:29 Sure. Sure.
4:30 No physics books has got a law, has got the Hodgkin Huxley
4:34 equations as a law of physics.
4:35 They are imagined.
4:37 But those rules or laws or understandings came out of
4:41 a mechanism of the brain that somebody came up with.
That last line is a good example of how much the idea of emergence is based on circular reasoning. To say that understanding is a mechanism of the brain assumes the conclusion that emergence is supposed to be explaining. We do not actually know that any such mechanism exists in the brain, only that we can see certain correlations between our direct experiences and our perceptions of activity in the brain through imaging devices. Any direction of causation from brain to experience is being inferred by our preference, not compelled by an understanding of how or why experiences emerge from unexperienced brains. The fact that a brain is itself a part of our experience is overlooked, as is the possibility that such images and appearances of brains could be generated by, for, and within conscious experience.
4:44 And in some ultimate analytical sense, you could describe how
4:50 those ideas came, in terms of something in the physical world.
4:53 Unless the claim is that at some levels, there is something
4:59 that is absolutely non-reducible to the physical.
5:03 The claim is that through some of the processes you indicated,
5:08 many of which are not physical,
5:10 although they’re allowed by the physics.
5:11 Brains came into being which are able to carry out
5:14 logical argumentation as an argumentation
5:17 at the psychological level.
5:19 And that argumentation is what leads to, for instance,
5:23 E to the I pi plus one is equal to zero
5:26 being written down on a piece of paper.
5:28 The physics knows absolutely nothing about that.
5:30 You have to have the emergence of the possibility
5:33 of logical argumentation to take place.
5:36 That logical argumentation then has the possibility
5:38 of controlling what appears on the piece–
5:41 So, so, okay.
5:42 But you’re not requiring anything of a non-physical
5:45 nature here at this point, or are you?
5:47 I am. An idea is a non-physical thing.
5:51 An idea is realized in the brain
5:53 but the idea itself is not a physical thing.
5:56 Okay.
5:57 Now everything we see around us here, basically, except for
6:00 the trees was designed by the human mind.
6:03 So, the mind is coarsely effective and thoughts
6:06 are coarsely effective but a thought is not a physical thing.
6:09 It’s realized in a physical way
6:10 but it is not of itself a physical thing.
At this point, I agree with George at least on one thing – that indeed ideas are not physical or reducible to the physical, unless we dilute the term physical so much that it really includes anything and becomes meaningless. I disagree, however with the assertion that “An idea is realized in the brain“. Introducing this term realized carries with it the full weight of physicalist bias, rolling right over the Explanatory Gap and Hard Problem and making the same mistake that Galileo and Locke made by pronouncing physical/extended properties “Primary” and everything else Secondary.
Physically, we see no process of realization, whatever that might mean, inside of the tissues of a brain. We see cells, fluids and molecules moving around. If we use physical instruments to bounce electromagnetic force off of the water in the brain we can read into those movements other geometric patterns of activity, but that activity, as far as science is concerned, is purely quantitative change in the way that charge/polarity is distributed. There’s nothing more likely to emerge from the Magnetic Resonance of water in the brain than any other physical property of any organ. It’s all just visual geometries overlaid onto molecular movements over time.
We now have two filler terms, emergence and realization, to smuggle in unscientific, non-explanatory fictions into physics and conscious experiences that create a false bridge between them, doing unspecified non-physical things in both directions. In reality, we have not established or explained anything, only added abstractions to hide our ignorance and make ourselves feel clever. The explanatory gap remains as dualistic as ever, with Physics, Chemistry, Biology, brains, and ‘realization’ back in the Cartesian Res Extensa realm, and Psychology, ideas, emergence, eiπ +1=0, and logical argumentation firmly in Res Cogitans.
Also mentioned by this point is the seductively innocuous term level: “at the psychological level“, “at some levels, there is something that is absolutely non-reducible to the physical.” This idea of levels is itself completely non-reducible to the physical. It is an idea about our typical ranges of perception. Physical phenomena, if they could exist independently of all detection and perception, would have no levels. Every scale from the Planck to the Cosmological would exist in the same ‘level’ and there would be no other. Physics would not get blurry vision trying to focus on a grain of sand or have to move its head to see all of the Milky Way. Everything would just exist as it is – particles unable to detect each other in any way. Nothing to aggregate or sum instantaneous events into linear time durations. Nothing to make novel geometric wholes appear (invisibly? intangibly?) from scale-dependent perceptual appearances of adjacency of parts. We all know that at the particle scale the ratio of particle to space is incredibly minute, and there is no particular reason to lump those particles together into the shapes that happen to be visible in human perception.
6:13 The idea exists and it has its own validity
6:17 but it is only realized
6:20 because of the physical things going on below?
6:23 I mean, if there’s nothing else.
6:25 Unless you’re saying that the laws of physics,
6:27 when they get to a certain level, create thing that
6:30 in principle can never be understood
6:32 by the microphysics laws.
6:34 Well, it can’t be understood.
6:35 You can’t understand E to the I pie plus one is equal to zero
6:39 in terms of maxual decrays [ph] and interacting electrons.
6:41 I think that’s pretty obvious.
6:43 You can’t understand it at that level.
6:44 You can’t understand that at that level, that’s right.
6:48 But ultimately, that’s the only way it’s realized in terms of–
6:51 No, no. That’s just the way it’s realized, yes.
6:53 So, you’ve got multiple levels.
6:55 You’ve got the atomic level.
6:57 You’ve got the molecular level, you’ve got the systems level.
6:59 All of these are simultaneously causations taking place
7:02 simultaneously, and all of them, in such a way,
7:05 that the logical thing can be worked out.
7:07 But it’s the logic which is driving what happens.
7:10 It’s the physics which enables it to happen
7:12 but the logic is deciding the outcome.
7:15 So, you have what would be downward causation?
7:19 – Downward realization. – Downward realization.
7:22 So, what’s the difference between causation
7:23 and realization? You didn’t like my word causation?
7:25 I’ve been persuaded recently, different from what I’ve written
7:28 about before, that causation is always horizontal.
7:32 Emergence is vertical, and realization is downwards.
7:35 Oh, yeah. That, that I can, I can understand that.
7:38 I’m just trying to think this out,
7:40 get me wherever you want to get me.
In this section, amidst more discussion of levels and realization are more physicalist assumptions that are treated as a priori givens: “But it’s the logic which is driving what happens. It’s the physics which enables it to happen, but the logic is deciding the outcome.” Nobody can claim to know that this is true. We know that when we observe physical phenomena and physical instruments, and then analyze those observations with certain mechanistic modes of sense-making, we can tell causality stories that make sense. We do not, however, know that what we imagine is driving those stories is the only driver of causality, or indeed if it is even correct that it is physical appearances that are doing more enabling than the non-physical appearances. If the universe were nothing but logic and physics, there would not even be a way for any part of such a universe to conceive of any alternative. Logical and physical would describe everything, so the words would be meaningless.
We do not live in a universe like that. In our universe, logic and physics are but a small portion of what we experience. If anything emerges from that, there is so much more of it that it is hard to justify seeing the physical as the realizer and the perceptual as the emergent. Even under physicalism, we literally have no experience of anything other than perceptual phenomena. If the physical objects we perceive exist beyond all perception, we will never be able to access it except as inferences from our intellect (what noumena actually refers to, etymologically).
7:42 Well, what is useful as a computer is an analog
7:46 and when a computer, for instance, sorts a list of names,
7:49 you feed in a program at the top and an algorithm
7:53 is changed down through a series of virtual machines
7:56 to the bottom level, by compilers and interpreters.
7:59 And that’s the machine language at the bottom.
8:01 The machine language does it and then it goes up again
8:03 and what you fed in at the top, results in the list
8:06 being printed out.
8:08 The electrons flowing the gates enable it to happen
8:10 but it’s the algorithm which has decided
8:12 what will, in fact, happen.
8:14 But the algorithm is represented ultimately
8:16 in terms of the transistors and…
8:19 Correct. And at this level, it’s the laws of —
8:22 it’s Maxwell’s equations, and Newton’s equations
8:24 at this level. But at this level,
8:26 it is the logic of the algorithm which is deciding
8:29 what will happen at that level and ultimately, it’s that
8:32 which decides which electrons will flow through
8:35 which gates at the bottom level.
8:36 It’s the top level decides what will be done
8:39 and the lower levels carry out the work.
At this point, the argument really loses all grounding in physics and succumbs entirely to a cartoon workflow from top level non-physical algorithms to bottom level physical semiconductor components and back. All of these claims are false:
“that’s the machine language at the bottom“
“it’s the algorithm which has decided“
“But the algorithm is represented ultimately in terms of the transistors“
Any sort of language is a feature of how we understand and communicate consciously. Physics, if it could exist independently of consciousness, would not need a language, it has fundamental forces and statistically inevitable recombinations to do all of the ‘deciding’. Electromagnetism, not algorithms, are opening or closing gates. Transistors can have no inkling of any grand logic inscribed by human programmers in some non-physical never-never layer. They don’t need logic.
Microphysical behavior is the same regardless of whether or not they are grouped together in some semiotic schema. Those behaviors – which are nothing but the movement of particles relative to each other, do not represent anything. They are not terms in an algorithmic language. The machine components have no access to any other level or layer. Their presence is a purely tangible-haptic geometric-dynamic fact. Not only would other levels have no functional role in influencing electromagnetism, electromagnetism has no physical way to be influenced by them. It’s the interaction problem of Dualism. The only ghosts in the machine that physics allows are physical ghosts like charge, mass, and spin. Nothing physical is summing them up or transforming them into non-physical ‘seemings’.
As far as the connection between Machine language and Machine goes, I have discussed here why it does not survive causal closure, and is in fact just another infinitely broad explanatory gap between abstract logical concepts and concrete physical objects.
8:41 So, let me ask this question.
8:43 We know the H2O is water.
8:45 If I gave you some gas of hydrogen,
8:47 gas of oxygen and hydrogen, could you ever predict
8:50 that if you got a lot of it together, it would be wet?
8:53 No. The answer is no, you can’t.
8:55 This is one of the problems with–
8:57 Okay. So, I think there are people who say that you can.
9:00 Well, alright. Let me, let me–
9:01 Because you — when you know that the angle
9:03 between the hydrogen and the oxygen,
9:05 then you can put a lot together, you can see how they would slip,
9:07 and how wetness could occur.
9:09 There is a great problem in deriving the macro properties
9:12 of waters from the micro properties.
9:13 But let me make the following statement.
9:15 By the time you’ve done that, the hydrogen atom
9:18 no longer exists as a hydrogen atom.
9:20 It only exists as a water molecule.
9:22 So, the lower level no longer exists
9:24 as the individual entities.
9:25 They’ve got incorporated at a higher-level interchange.
9:27 Okay. But if you knew everything about
9:29 the hydrogen and the oxygen you should be able to predict
9:32 the wetness of water if you have it in groups?
9:35 You should. In the case of water, in principle, absolutely.
9:38 You can do that.
This popular example of emergence is another example of circular reasoning fouling up our understanding. What we experience as water has different aspects – in the visible sense, we see images of familiar blue colors, transparency, and shapes like waves and droplets, clouds, mist, etc. In the aural sense, we hear familiar splashing and bubbling, tidal waves crashing, sounds of pouring and spilling onto solid matter. There are flavors and odors that we associate with water also. All of these qualities can and are experienced regularly in ordinary dreams and imagination. If this is water, it is not physical.
H2O refers not to the water that we experience, but to a molecular arrangement that makes sense to us intellectually within the context of chemistry that can be applied to accurately predict and control many of the experiences in our waking consciousness of physical qualities. These are not necessarily different from dream qualities, as dreams can be quite exhaustively realistic, even under deliberate lucid inspection, however we can agree that while we are awake, our experiences of the physical world appear to us to have characteristics that *certainly must* separate it from mere dreams. Of course, during dreams, our waking experience may not be accessible at all, and we often have no way to doubt the reality of the dream, even if the contents appear to be floridly surreal by comparison with typical states of waking experience.
When we think more carefully about the relationship of H2O to wetness, there is nothing that suggests an emergence relationship, or a bottom-top flow of causality or morphology. Wetness is a tactile sensation. It can appear in a dream. H2O is an intellectual concept. It too can appear in a dream. What H2O is supposed to describe, if it could exist independently of consciousness, would not be wet at any scale. It would not constellate into novel geometries of visible appearance or tangible splashiness. H2O refers to a hypothetical, noumenal phenomenon that has no need for levels of emergence or realization, and no physical theory tells us how or why any of that would be physically conjured into existence. Again, the explanatory gap between noumenal molecular objects and any sort of wetness, image, sound, flavor or smell that we call water is infinitely wide. Nothing that happens in a brain sheds any light on this gap. We remain forever on the phenomenal side of it.
9:39 So, the question is, is the water example different
9:41 than your other examples?
9:42 Absolutely, because in the other cases,
9:45 there’s logical stuff going on at that level —
9:48 well, let me go back to that computer example.
9:50 Exactly the same logic gets re-written
9:53 at each of those levels.
9:54 It gets written in Fortran, it gets re-written in Java.
9:57 It’s written in Assembly.
9:58 Gets re-written in machine language.
10:00 And then, it gets incorporated into physical systems.
10:04 The logic is still the thing that is driving everything.
10:08 And the logic does get embodied in the lower level structures,
10:11 they are realizing it, but the thing that is driving it
10:14 is an abstract entity of the logic.Simple vs Weak Emergence
10:18 KUHN: This is Strong Emergence in its full-throated defense.
10:22 George is its apostle.
10:25 And I learned to distinguish Strong Emergence
10:28 from Simple or Weak Emergence.
10:31 The latter is the idea that radically different properties
10:34 in science, can, with deeper knowledge
10:36 of the underlying physics, be explained,
10:39 like the wetness of water.
10:41 Everyone signs on to Simple or Weak Emergence.
10:44 It’s not controversial.What is Strong Emergence
10:48 But Strong Emergence would be an astonishing thing.
10:51 Utterly transformative.
10:53 A new radical way of how the world works.
10:58 Could human logic,
11:00 at the highest macro level in our minds,
11:02 drive the physics at the lowest micro level in our brains?
11:07 Even though human logic itself is composed of nothing
11:10 but that same microphysics in our brains.
11:13 It sounds circular, mysterious, yet I’d be hard pressed
11:18 to name a more axial question in the physical world.
11:23 That’s why I subject Strong Emergence to strong critique
11:27 and here at the Crete conference,
11:29 I have no trouble finding strong critics.
This is a bit of reiteration of the previous examples, which I have addressed already. The logical leap is hidden between these lines:
“9:58 Gets re-written in machine language.
10:00 And then, it gets incorporated into physical systems.“
“Gets incorporated?” How? Physically? This is pure metaphor. The machine language is for our understanding. It has no causal power to manifest electromagnetic changes in a semiconductor. No, the only thing that gets incorporated into physical systems is voltage. Nothing is being written or read, just zapped electrostatically. Human hands are making the hardware that make that happen, not telepathic minds or software language. Nothing is being realized except in our imagination and perception. The emoji is not realized by code, but by a video display and human visual perception.
Moving on to the next interview in the video with David Albert, the assumptions of physicalism are even more explicit. His argument is summed up as follows:
13:29 And yes, I think that a sort of idea that the world
13:34 can potentially be reduced to a set of fundamental mechanical
13:38 phenomena in order to defend the sanctity of human life
13:43 or something like that, the specialness of consciousness,
13:46 the death of this project has been announced.
13:49 And those announcements have always turned out
13:52 to be premature.
This is not a philosophically persuasive argument. As many philosophers have pointed out, using scientific methods designed to specifically disqualify and remove non-physical qualities cannot be expected to have the same validity when deployed against physical phenomena as non- or trans-physical phenomena. It is like someone poking out their eyes and saying that they have been successful in navigating the world ever since using their other senses, so they are sure that color and image will turn out not to be visible either.
The expectation of material science eventually providing reductionistic explanations of immaterial appearances is what I like to call the fallacy of pseudo-credulity. It’s a betrayal of the very scientific spirit that it purports to champion.
In the next interview with Barry Loewer, the position is laid out as follows:
21:57 Strong Emergence says there’s something that happens,
21:59 in some sense, in the physical world,
22:01 that as you go up a level,
22:03 the laws of physics at the lowest levels will,
22:05 in principle, not be able to make that jump
22:08 to that level of biology.
22:11 That is right. I think that the weight of reason
22:14 is on the side of they can make the jump.
22:17 And here’s the reason I’m saying that.
22:19 That if the jump couldn’t be made,
22:21 then there must be some ways in which
22:24 the microphysical world evolves,
22:26 which can’t be accounted for in terms of microphysics.
22:29 And the reason for that is that any change in the world
22:33 at a macroscopic level, let’s say that involved biology
22:36 or psychology, could itself make for a change at the micro level.
Here again psychology is lumped in with physics and biology, completely ignoring the explanatory gap and assuming a difference in degree rather than the difference in kind that we experience directly. There is no level of brain activity that is psychological. Microphysical states cannot be assumed to jump from geometric states of tangible objects/particles to intangible states like percepts or concepts. If such a jump could exist, there is no good reason to justify calling that jump physical.
24:05 I think if causation as just evolving truths like —
24:08 look, if the psychological event hadn’t occurred,
24:12 then the physical event wouldn’t have occurred.
24:14 So, if you hadn’t thought about elephants,
24:17 you wouldn’t have waved your hand like that.
24:19 And there’s also a physical counterfactual.
24:22 If such and such had not gone on in your brain,
24:24 you wouldn’t have waved your hand like that.
24:25 And these are perfectly compatible with each other
The last line here exposes the fallacy. While neurological processes and psychological experiences can seem perfectly compatible with each other, that sense of compatibility is purely psychological, not physical. That’s a problem if we’re asserting physical reduction of causality. We lose the very parsimony that physical reduction explanations require to validate itself.
At the very end, Robert Kuhn at least touches on other possibilities.
25:15 If fundamental physics would be forever not capable
25:18 of explaining biology or psychology or anything else,
25:22 if that reduction could not ever be made, then one must conclude
25:27 that there are mechanisms by which the microworld evolves
25:31 which cannot be accounted for in terms of physics.
25:37 Is this a contradiction?
25:40 Yes, if reality is confined to the physical,
25:44 but there is no contradiction
25:46 if one dares venture beyond the known physical world.
That’s where panpsychism, nondualism and my own multisense realism come in…
Where the Rubber Hits the Road: ISA =/= Microarchitecture Gap
https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/m/microarchitecture.htm
This is a depiction of the inflection point between computer hardware (tangible microarchitecture objects) and software (intangible instruction set architecture concepts). While the image above joins objects to concepts, the reality is that there is an infinitely wide gap between the two, bridged only be the aesthetic-participatory/sensory-motor capacities of the conscious experience we call a computer engineer.
The connection and communication described by the text and image are not referring to a physical process but a figurative, metaphorical relation that exists in our conscious experience of understanding. The ISA isn’t physically ‘implemented’ by the hardware, it is the conscious sensory-motive capacity of the programmer/engineer that marries their own cognitive sense-making with their motive power to move their physical body that creates and implements the ISA. The ISA has no physical connection to hardware. We produce the ISA machine code in our imagination/understanding, and there it stays. Anything we do to a computer comes from brain > hand > device actions that carry no motive intent or encoding at all. It is purely motor events set into motion from outside of physics.
This is why I suggest that regardless of how sophisticated the software we write for Simulated Intelligence systems, genuine awareness and intelligence will not arise – only reflections and recombinations of the physical effects of our own intelligence-driven actions. AI is a useful mirage.
The hardware we use as computing devices doesn’t have that breadth of awareness to do what the programmer or user can do. Any sensory capacity motivating the hardware is very primitive and limited to immediate detection and response on the subatomic scale. Anything we do to a computer is still just atoms jiggling for reasons that ‘they’ have no ability to understand.
The Sense of the Zombie
A couple of things about the Zombie argument.
1. I think that the use of term zombie introduces unnecessary distractions due to the associations with supernatural or fictional types of beings. To ground the argument more in reality, I would use terms like ‘doll’ or ’emoji’ instead. Indeed there is nothing supernatural or unusual about an object or image that looks like there should be a conscious experience behind it but which in fact lacks one. A mannequin or doll is a 3d object that resembles a person’s 3d body. If that object is animated in the ways that resemble the movements of a living person’s body, then it would be ‘zombie’.
2. The issue of whether such a robot could be created out of the same molecules and cells as a person’s body is a completely separate issue. This is what derails the thought experiment. Instead of focusing on the relationship of tangible phenomena as they appear to our sense of sight and touch versus the intangible or trans-tangible phenomena of feeling and thought, we are now lost in a completely irrelevant discussion about the extent to which any phenomenon can be duplicated.
This diversion in turn allows our initial assumptions of physicalism to close the door that the zombie argument opened in the first place. If we had assumed in the first place that we are conscious bodies, then we will of course see the duplicate of a body as having duplicate capacities for consciousness. It’s tautological. We would entirely miss the real opportunity of the zombie argument, which begins with being able to logically tease out the body of a person from the conscious experience of a person, but goes somewhere more useful if we focus on the properties that make them separate.
3. What are the properties of a body? What are the properties of a conscious experience? What makes them different? What knows that they are different?
I think that we will find that a body is a tangible presence. A three dimensional object that can be touched and held in a literal and concrete sense. A conscious experience of the subjective, personal variety is not that at all. In fact, it appears to be a kind of diametric opposite to a material object. Where objects have distinct shapes and location, feelings and thoughts seem to exist in a kind of ambiguously spaceless and timeless fugue of overlapping qualities. Whether or not we accept that the body just has these properties ‘inside’ of its processes does not change the fact that we can logically see them as completely distinct from the tangible properties that define bodies as material objects.
Once we can understand that bodies and minds cannot be the same thing while also reducing those opposing sets of properties to that of bodies, the whole issue of duplication is revealed to be a red herring. We have to acknowledge that a body cannot do anything to ‘seem’ or ‘seem like’ anything other than what it is, and that any ‘seeming’ would be part of the anti-tangible, experiential aspect of the phenomenon that we are experiencing as a person or ourselves. From there, it’s a quick step to see that in fact the ‘mind’ or conscious experience is perfectly capable of dreaming up worlds that include tangible appearances, including bodies or body images that belong to dream characters, but also robots, dolls, and emojis.
Multisense Combustion
I was thinking about combustion engines and mentally following the sequence from the early step of mixing gasoline with air, then how that mix gets ignited in the gap of the ‘charged’ ends of the spark plug, which then changes the mix into CO2 + H2O steam molecules moving in all directions, only much faster…then those fast moving steam molecules begin to gradually move the dense metal pistons, push the metal gears in the transmission and ultimately rotate the drive train and wheels.
I wanted a video that would show a realistic visualization of combustion at the microstate scale, and this was the closest I could find right now. It’s a good video and I think it works for this, even though I was hoping for more of a scientific CGI simulation than a cartoon.
I’m doing this to help explain my understanding of how the Hard Problem of Consciousness can be transcended using sense-centric model of metaphysics.
Some key points to get from the simple explanation of the video to my Multisense Realism view:
Energy is an abstract concept that stands in for what we would call stimulating feelings or sensations. Stimulating meaning that besides the sensation of kinetic movement that would be assumed under physics (but not defined as a sensation), the event would includes another sensation of desire/motivation (call it motive) to act physically to discharge the quality of that initial feeling, because it is in some sense, uncomfortable or stressful. I propose that is all that ‘energy’ is – a felt sensory-aesthetic quality that causes a motive to experience a complementary sensory-aesthetic quality of release/return by turning the motive affect into motor effect – physical motion. The idea of potential energy is replaced by the more familiar experience of stress/strain and the idea of kinetic energy is replaced by the release of that stress through the physical act of acceleration.
The video does a great job of simplifying the conventional thermodynamic theory with a curve on a graph where potential energy of the fuel molecule decreases as it is transformed into the lower energy (more ‘relaxed’) molecules of water and carbon dioxide plus acceleration and light. In reality, there is no curve of potential energy being lost to kinetic energy. That is an abstraction to help us understand a theory of chemistry rather than a description of the event.
I propose that the actual combustion event needs at least two separate sense modalities to be modeled realistically – two modes of perception analogous to what we experience as touch (tactile/haptic/tangibility) and sight (visibility). First, the tangible sense rendering or appearance consists of molecules moving at one speed colliding and rearranging with each other so that they suddenly move very quickly (accelerate) in all directions. That’s the only truly physical, tangible thing that combustion is doing.*
The second aspect of the combustion event has tangible (photoelectric) effects, however, I propose that the only illuminating aspect is in fact visible rather than tangible. This is a radical proposal – that what we know as vision is not a simulation somehow transduced from information sent physically across a vacuum as particle-wave ‘patterns’, but is its own direct ontological medium that exists prior to biology, and perhaps even prior to tangibility. It may be the case that physics is grounded in metaphysical phenomena that are more like visual experiences than tangible experiences.
In the video, we see that part of the combustion of fuel into water and CO2 is the emission of what we conceive as light or photons. As I have proposed in other writings, light may not exist in any tangible sense, although it causes tangible effects (motion of atoms). I’m not denying that photons could exist as standalone particle/waves in a vacuum, but I think given what we observe from QM experiments and from our own experience of sight as a sense of looking and seeing rather than purely a sense of tangible collisions in the back of our eyeballs, I think it makes more sense to understand photons as either intangible sense experience or semi-tangible vehicles of trans-tangible sense experience. Illumination may be a more fundamental sense interaction than touch, so that the sense of objects are more of a collapsed reduction of some aspects of sensory-motive changes that cannot be seen directly.
By trans-tangible I mean that the ability to see brightness, colors, and images made of those contrasting visible qualities is not an ability that objects/particles or waves could generate under our current physical theory. There is an Explanatory Gap between what we think we know about mechanical events of force and what we experience directly as seeing/sight/sights/visibility. That is a How question. There is also a Hard Problem of Consciousness that arises when we ask the question of Why there would be any such thing as visible qualities in the first place when the mechanical consequences of physical events like combustion would produce the identical functions in complete invisibility. As an example, you can unplug the screen of your computer and nothing important is going to change in the circuits of the device. The device could do exactly what it was doing before, even though the main reason you have for making it do anything is to generate some non-computational physical activity in the lcd screen you’re staring at.
As long as the photon moves the electron, (or in some sense IS the motion of the electron) at a distance, then there’s no parsimonious reason to add an additional thing that the universe does to give it an ‘appearance’, much less an appearance that is presented visually rather than haptically. In a purely physical universe, nothing would have an appearance, nor would an appearance change anything physically. In a physical universe-plus-appearance, the appearance would by default be tactile/haptic and not visual. A brain would not see a world of images, it would just process the chemistry of its own fluids as it is, or with a lower resolution miniaturization of what it is.
For example, a grain of salt is an object appearance that approximates billions of molecules, so it is a low res icon that could be weakly emergent if sensed as a single tangible shape colliding with tongue cells, but to suddenly have that shape become an image of colors and brightness, or of flavor requires some strongly emergent non-physical magic. Magic because it’s not parsimonious. It doesn’t follow logically that any such thing would appear in a physical universe.
Most people currently assume that natural selection can and does produce mutations of physical cells that end up conjuring such appearances as sights and flavors, but in all cases that assume is a logical fallacy – a petitio principii or Begging the Question fallacy where the fact of the experience of sight is retrospectively smuggled in to what is supposed to be an explanation for how that experience came to be in the first place.
We can’t really see an electron or a photon, and we can’t really detect one without using our own conscious observation of how a physical instrument changes physically. This means that photons and electrons could be more like sensations that change the movements of atoms rather than free-standing physical entities in a vacuum. Photons in particular may just be how seeing or sensing appears when we look at it with something that we assume does not see (a physical instrument like a photomultiplier).
The whole notion of quantized energy states and electrons moving from inner to outer shells may be more of a story we made up about the behavior of the instruments we are using, and the modalities of sense and sense-making we are using them with than a realistic understanding of the fabric of all of nature. My proposal is that the fabric of nature is appearance itself: aesthetic presentations of multiple sense modalities, including, but not limited to, sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts, haptic/tactile textures and objects, emotions, even people. The presentation of aesthetic appearance on different nested scales of time or significance replaces the assumed anesthetic mechanics of physics or computation, and the presentation of the aesthetics of participation/voluntary will replaces the assumed automaticity of mass-energy or information processing.
Instead of literal light waves traveling as independent entities in the vacuum of space, my hypothesis suggests more of a Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, but replacing anesthetic-automatic events of mere geometric emission and absorption with a Multisense Realism Theory of shared sensory-motive experiences of giving and receiving experiential qualities. Not only is illumination an experience of visible aesthetic qualities, but I am proposing that those aesthetic qualities are isomorphic to, or recapitulate the original experience of the event at the source to some degree.
In the Multisense Realism view of combustion, the idea of a subatomic particle leaving an atom and joining another is replaced by the idea of atomic scale experiences sharing a contagious sense of oscillating excitement-relaxation among existing conscious experiences. We render these experiences as movements of atoms only when we are using tangible instruments to detect their tangible side effects. Otherwise these events can be rendered in any modality – feelings, thoughts, flavors, colors, etc. There is no thing-that-is “light” other than the shared experience of illumination. Further, the experience of illumination is not only the wedding of separated experiences of generic stimulation through the sending and receiving of a sensation, but it is an experience of awareness of some aspect of the nature of that experience as it relates to all other experiences. Illumination is not only an increase in the visible quality of brightness, but within that brightness is a record OF the event that caused it. Light/illumination can be informative but it is not mere information. It is not just generic ‘news’ or signal but it news-OF an aesthetic-participatory event that is recapitulated aesthetically. A presentation that can re-present itself to itself, aka a form of consciousness.
*That’s the only thing that metabolism is doing also – in the stomach, in the blood, even in the brain. There is no standalone thing that is ‘energy’ in the universe. Energy is whatever quality of sensation that stimulates a desire to change or spread that sensation. It’s not a generic thing, but it can be modeled that way, quantified and understood enough to exert control over physical and chemical reactions.
Multisense Realism Diagram Chronophoria v1.6
I gave this the name Chronophoria after realizing that I could add the polar extremes of time to the top and bottom. A tiny detail that probably deserves more attention, however, it is there near the bottom “Instantaneously”, referring to the Anesthetic Antithesis and “Eternally”, referring to the Aesthetic Thesis near the top.
The top and bottom ends should really also include “Significance” and “Insignificance” respectively, as well as “Holos” and “Graphos”.
After a comment from the Multisense Realism page, I have added Significance and Complexity, and made a couple of other tweaks at the bottom.
1.6 Added Language and Metric-Spatial aesthetic holons.
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