Multisense Realism

• personal: mental states as functional roles (“Roles”)
• subpersonal: brain states that realize these roles in humans (“Realizers”)

‘autonomy of the mental’ in this philosophical context = ontological autonomy

nonreductive physicalism

cognitive science methodology: explain capacities of cog systems in terms of interacting cog subsystems (like car = sum of interacting car parts). Homuncular analysis-decomposition. Modularized cognition to sub, and sub-sub levels without regress.

in cog sci, whole person = person qua cognitive system

under the cog sci view, sub-personal levels or parts are vehicles for cognitive content, i.e. functionally individuated physical states bearing content. Therefore cognitive subsystems = sub-persons

1978 Steve Stitch labeled these instead of personal and sub-personal as

• doxastic states
• sub-doxastic states

[doxastic logic, like Bp & p to me seems to me an extremely narrow approach to a particular aspect of cognitive consciousness. I think that taking these kinds of programmatic structural views of belief and truth really turn the picture of consciousness upside down and assume binary systems as fundamental when there is no hint that such systems generate fluid wholes without an interpreter]

normative vs non-normative
cognitive whole vs cog parts

sub person level is further divided as being

• accessible to persons
• accessible to sub-persons

in role/realizer relation, higher & lower level properties related by realization relation – instantiated in same individual, share causal power

in the whole/parts relation, higher & lower level properties have different causal powers, instantiated in different individuals. Mereological. Composition. Water has liquidity and wetness that hydrogen and oxygen molecules don’t have.

• Functionalist school in phil of mind – personal level states defined by their functional role.
• cognitive science methodology – personal level capacities are explained by functional analysis.

functionalist metaphysics vs computationalist psychology

Lycan: homuncular functionalism – metaphysics inspired by cog sci methodology

role-realizer/part-whole conflation: who says what realization is? science or metaphysics?

some views claim realization implicit in decomposition [I would call this emergentism]

flat vs dimensioned realization. Science says realizers highly compex property. hardness of a diamond [emergent property]

levels: mereological and realization, supervenience, gnomic? ‘bridge laws’? structures all comport? not necessarily

Conclusion: What is important is to define the nature of realization relation. Who gets to do that? Seems to come down to metaphysical preferences.

Listening to this lecture really underscores for me how different the approach of multisense realism is to anything that is being discussed academically. To my mind, the role/realizer and part/whole relations are analogous to the character in a story – say Alice is trying to describe herself in terms of being composed of either the grammatical structure in the sentences of the story from which she emerges, or whether she is composed of the bleached and pressed wood pulp and ink that are considered page parts of the whole book.

Both approaches are wrong in exactly the opposite way. It is the same with idealism and materialism in general. Nothing means anything without perception and participation to begin with. There is, to my way of thinking, zero possibility of perception or participation experiences emerging from either

• Inked pages in a book (physical parts in a mereological relation realizing the emergent property of the whole)
• Words from the English language in a specific sequence (roles functioning at the personal level being realized by optical character forms configured at the sub-personal level)

The approach that is not even considered is that both the physically privileged page-book mereology and the logically privileged typesetting-linguistic mereology are related to each other only through an agent of perception-participation. This is the multisense realism view. Neither the philosophical functionalist nor the cognitive science computationalist sense of the personal and sub-personal relation can justify the existence of the relation itself. That’s because they leave out perception and participation entirely. It objectifies personal subjects and then pseudo-subjectifies objects as sub-persons without ever anchoring any of it in any kind of experiential realism. The thing that we care about is ignored completely. The hard problem is painted over with a choice of two flavors of the easy problem.

The only way around this, I’m afraid, is through it. Begin with the reality of Alice as the given. We don’t have to believe that she is anything more than a character or that her life is anything other than a story, but if the character and story were really the ground of being for Alice, then the book of pages (brain hardware) and the language typed through those pages (cognitive software) both make sense as ways of stabilizing, controlling, and reproducing aspects of the story. The book is what makes Alice in Wonderland a publicly accessible artifact and the words are what mediate from the public spatial sense to the private temporal sense. The private motive, in turn, to open the book, read the words, and imagine the characters and scenes in the story are what bind the symbols to the private sense experience. Body needs the book, mind needs the words, but story needs the willing self.

What this means is that all of the levels discussed in the lecture are not personal or sub-personal at all, but rather impersonal (surface-topological) and impersonal (syntactic-depth). I propose a whole other half of this picture of consciousness of which, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent. We can however, listen.

We cannot speak about the personal, but we can know what it is to be a person. We can realize ourselves directly, as an autonomous presence without converting ourselves into an external appearance or function. We can let human experience be human experience, and nothing less. The psyche, to continue with the Alice in Wonderland metaphor, has a protagonist – an Alice. It has other characters too, and themes, and a plot, etc…or does it? Does it literally ‘have a plot’, or are stories more of an experience with multiple frequency layers of events, memories, and expectations?

The story is nothing like either the words that relate them or the book that is the vehicle for the words. I can say ‘do you know Alice in Wonderland?’ and you can say yes, and describe some of the memorable scenes or quote lines or whatever – maybe you haven’t even read the book. The many forms that the story has been enacted, plays, cartoons, satire, songs, etc are all neither a part of the story or not a part of the story. The experience, the consciousness is orthogonal to both the physical formations and logical information associated with them. Of course, I am being absolutely literal here. Multisense realism is the idea that realism arises entirely from the orthogonality or perpendicular juxtaposition of private facing perception and public facing participation.

Once we can fully appreciate the magnitude of the shift that this model presents, going all the way up and down the microcosm-macrocosm, physics and phenomenology, we can perhaps expect to apply the orthogonality completely with confidence. Every atom is a page. Every molecule is a book. Every molecule and atom are publications of quantum-electromagnetic literature. Not only is there also a story which is told through that literature filled book, but there is also an omnipotent protagonist-author trying to awaken.This is an entirely different kind of sub-personal level. In the case of human consciousness, these micro-monads are sub-selves. Not things or ideas but influences, feelings, drives and complex dialectical drive-negation-drives, meta-feelings, histories of thought, interminable arguments…psychology, sociology.

This is what can’t be located by a functionalist or computationalist approach because they try to build a self from a bottom-up nothingness rather than a top-down everythingness. It’s not a new idea, but the application of the Absolute (Totality, Singularity, Supreme Monad, Ein Sof, Tao, Om, etc..) to physics in a literal way I think is actually necessary and feasible. From information science we can approach it as the essence of non-repeatability, or what I call solitropy. Start from there. From physics we can approach the cosmology as a Big Diffraction rather than a Big Bang. Recognize that spacetime makes more sense as a virtual incursion into a singularity of mass-energy than an as an explosion of mass-energy into a spacetime plenum which doesn’t exist yet.