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Scientific Philosophy
An interview with Professor Massimo Pigliucci on the benefits of combining scientific fact gathering with philosophical introspection. He is the author of the book:
Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to A More Meaningful Life
I’m glad to see more consideration for philosophical thought in connection with the interpretation of science. He mentions Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, to point out how the existence of scientific fact does not, in and of itself, compel us toward any particular moral code. No matter what science can tell us something ‘is’, the question of what ought to be done about it still remains up for us to decide.
I am torn between wanting to applaud this effort at synthesizing empirical and rational epistemology, and I do, as far as it goes. Professor Pigliucci seems to express here a voice of well reasoned compatibilism, and to extend this reason to the subject matter itself. It is here where I am more critical of this approach, although in the contemporary context it is very much within the intellectual consensus.
While it is indeed a profound shift from pre-scientific moralism to expound a relativistic-existential world where we are each called upon to build our own meaning and morals, I find that this is not the whole picture. Rather than a neat, compartmentalized notion of reasoning which can be traced back to evolutionary biology and neuroscience in all cases, I see much more of a momentum of perception and participation, with universe as theater. This is not to suggest a naive idealism – indeed genetics and biochemistry are overwhelmingly powerful influences in staging our personal slice of the universal theater, but morality cannot be understood with toy models of social relation. The grip of morality on the individual, society, and species is far more visceral and irrational – made of shame and disgust, of soaring pride and worshipful appreciation of superlative qualities. To understand morality is to plumb the depths of myth – of monstrous crimes and the horrific images associated with them.
I think the distinction between the good, the bad, and the ugly is one which ultimately splits along the primary fault of consciousness, which I call sense and motive, or afferent vs efferent phenomenology. The afferent mode is our sensory input, our receptivity to beautiful and awful feelings, while the efferent mode is our motive output – our projection of selfish or enlightened actions in the world. This dyad-dialectic is primordial and intertwined so that our morality often uses one to justify the other. In movies, evil is typically represented by ugly characters in dark costumes. Throughout history people have been persecuted as witches or subhumans based on aesthetic prejudices.
It is interesting, in the wake of the horrors of the 20th century, despite being bombarded with evidence of the banality of evil, we are still surprised to find the most obscene crimes being committed by seemingly ordinary people, including priests, housewives, and police officers. Despite the noticeable lack of organized violence by fringe groups professing interest in magick, loud anti-social music, and extreme body modification, such otherwise ordinary people are often treated with moral suspicion. This double standard, which I think arises from the unconscious equivalence between taboo perceptual themes and transgressive actions is beyond neurology and evolutionary biology and follows from experience itself.
Evolutionary biology can certainly help explain why the contents of taboo themes, which often deal with morbidity, mortality, and sexuality would tend to be associated with a repulsive affect by default, but it does not explain the specific content of that affect. It does not tell us about what fear is and what it tells us about ourselves. It is great to be able to quiet the mind’s questions with reassurances about neurotransmitter interactions and references to particular regions of the brain, but this approach can also cast us in the role of explaining away ourselves. By oversignifying the sub-personal and super-personal levels of our physical mechanism, the personal level of our native experience is depersonalized and robbed of its significance.
To talk about love and fear in terms of neuropeptide cocktails is all well and good for medical purposes, but the unfolding of a human identity in a human life is not so easily reduced into an exercise of forensic pathology. For anyone who has experienced powerfully significant moments in their life, it is not enough to hold up a molecule or a flowchart of hominid foraging, because the experience goes well beyond how one feels personally. Love and fear appear to operate transpersonally, to ‘warp the luck plane’ as it were, inviting unusual synchronicities and dramatic confrontations with would not occur otherwise. Our life, it would seem, can be known to us as a kind of organism made of events, of significance through time.
At this point, I think it might be career suicide for a scientist or philosopher to bring up these ideas (even though they have enjoyed popularity in the the 20th century), so I do not expect to see them in print. I hope that this will change soon, but in the mean time, I am glad that people are beginning to at least see a glimmer of a role again for the mind of the individual.
After Einstein’s Mollusk
I’m beginning to realize that Multisense Realism is an extension to the absolute of the approach that Einstein took in developing General Relativity. In doubting the existence of gravity as a product in space, he opened the door to a simpler universe where physical things relate to each other in an ordered way, not because some particular propulsion system is in place, but because the frame of reference of physical order itself is not rigid as we assume. He actually calls this new, flexible relativism of space co-ordinates ‘mollusks’:
“This non-rigid reference-body, which might appropriately be termed a “reference-mollusk,” is in the main equivalent to a Gaussian four-dimensional co-ordinate system chosen arbitrarily. That which gives the “mollusk” a certain comprehensibleness as compared with the Gauss co-ordinate system is the (really unqualified) formal retention of the separate existence of the space co-ordinate. Every point on the mollusk is treated as a space-point, and every material point which is at rest relatively to it as at rest, so long as the mollusk is considered as reference-body. The general principle of relativity requires that all these mollusks can be used as reference-bodies with equal right and equal success in the formulation of the general laws of nature; the laws themselves must be quite independent of the choice of mollusk.”
– Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory. 1920.
XXVIII. Exact Formulation of the General Principle of Relativity
Einstein’s transcendence of ‘rigid reference bodies’ with flexible and independent inertial frames captures the essence of relativity but only scratches the surface in exposing the rigidity of physics, which, even in the post-Einsteinian era reduces the participant to a zero dimensional vector generic ‘observer’. While this adherence to rigid simplicity is critical for ‘freezing the universe’ into a static frame for computation purposes, it introduces an under-signifying bias to all matters pertaining to subjectivity – particularly emotion, identity, and meaning. In its drive for simplicity and universality, physics inadvertently becomes an agenda for the annihilation of the self and psyche.
Part of the genius of Einstein was to glimpse the tip of the iceberg of this confirmation bias and challenge it successfully through his mastery of field equations. In my view, Einstein’s vision was only partially understood, just long enough to develop a kind of Empire Strikes Back counter-revolution. After the initial flush of Bohr and Heisenberg’s relativistic-probabilistic interpretations of Quantum Mechanics in the 1920’s (The Spirit of Copenhagen), physics seems to have sought out a new level of reductionism. Information science has dissected Einsteins Mollusk into bits and strings, and re-imagining flexibility and independence as phantoms of a Multi-World Matrix. Einstein’s cosmological animism has been transformed into a cosmological animation – a simulation of matter-like information (that doesn’t matter) in a vacuum virtual sea of Dark Energy.
Rather than seeing this as a sign that we have come to a bold new understanding of cosmic existentialism, I see this as a black octagon sign of having mistaken the cul-de-sac for a highway. We have failed to understand ourselves and our universe and need to turn the whole thing completely around. The way to do this, I propose, is to go back to Einstein’s mollusk and pick up where he left off, questioning the rigidity of physical reference bodies.
In a way, I am suggesting that we relativize relativity itself. Not in the pop culture appropriation of relativism as merely the principle that ‘everything is relative’, but to understand how relation itself is the principle through which ‘everything’ is realized, and that that principle is identical with ‘sense’, i.e. subjective participation and perception of self and other.
While physical science is perfectly content to predict and control matter, I have no doubt that pursuing this goal exclusively should carry the kind of warning which science fiction has been giving us from the start: We should be careful of developing technology that we can’t handle and the way to handle technology is to evolve our own humanity.
It is for this very reason, that purely mathematical approaches to understanding the universe as a whole and consciousness are ultimately doomed. Their rigidity arises from a reference frame which is intrinsically incompatible with the floridly eidetic and creative frame of human privacy. Where General Relativity envisioned a flexible reference body of spacetime coordinates which contrasted with Galilean-Cartesian uniformity, this new reference frame that should be explored contrasts against both the Classical, Einsteinian, and Quantum frameworks. Multisense realism provides a Meta-Relativistic framework which honors the canonical conjugates of general relativity in proprietary privacy of subjectivity. The universe within, like Bohm’s implicate order, is as alien to spacetime relativism as Einstein’s mollusk was to Newton. The new mollusk is not one of space and time united, but of time and ‘time again’, of literal and figurative significance, symmetry and meta-juxtaposition. The new framework begins with no beginning, but rather an infinite centripetal involution which is accessed directly through intra-corporeal participation and inter-corporeal perception.
The Candle: Looking at Light in a New Way
Conventional assumptions about light infer a particle-wave-beam of ‘energy’ traveling literally through space independently.
The multisense conjecture suggests participatory events which occur at each local material site. Each local perception embodies the local condition and perspective as a gestalt capitulation which includes traces of its relation with the other events.
This gestalt capitulation (and I know this sounds like gobbledygook to most everyone but me) can be understood as an apocatastatic algebra (reconstitution, restitution,or restoration to the original or primordial condition) of elliptical simultaneity (elliptical in this sense meaning intuitive gesture which is unspecified yet adequately informative to the receiver; ellipsis ‘…’, ‘see what I mean?’) rather than linear process. It’s the opposite of a linear process – perception is the end point of all process the beginning point of all participation.
Think of this more like feeling your fingers by touching them together. They are all part of your hand in one sense, on one level, but separate on another. Multisense realism proposes that the entire cosmos is like the hand, with each event growing like fingers, each of which are growing fingers, etc. What we experience as matter and bodies is where the fingers touch each other and feel that they are not identical.
Sense, then, or in this case light* is an event communicating essential connection and essential disconnection. Light is like the fingers feeling that they are part of the same hand, making sense of each other in a way which reveals both the conditional truth of their separation (transparency and illumination passing through dense material realism), the unconditional truth of their unity (in rich experiential qualia aka personal significance, poetic ‘light’,’warmth’, ‘divinity’), and the spatio-temporal modulation between the two (precise topological-algebraic formalism)
*heat, motion, sound, force, change, etc are all different qualities of the same thing
Light Has No Speed
At least not in the way that most people would think of it, if they did ever think of it. There is a speed at which a state of illumination radiates from molecule to molecule or body to body which depends on physical qualities of the bodies in question, but I think that it is correct to say that light does not travel ‘through’ a vacuum at all, but figuratively jumps from within bodies sympathetically through perception and imitative participation. It is the behavior of matter which waves and scatters, not independent projectiles or structures of any kind. Light, warmth, color, motion, are experiences, not objects.
Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light with respect to any inertial frame is independent of the motion of the light source, and explored the consequences of that postulate by deriving the special theory of relativity and showing that the parameter c had relevance outside of the context of light and electromagnetism. After centuries of increasingly precise measurements, in 1975 the speed of light was known to be 299,792,458 m/s with a measurement uncertainty of 4 parts per billion. In 1983, the metre was redefined in the International System of Units (SI) as the distance travelled by light in vacuum in 1 ⁄ 299,792,458 of a second. As a result, the numerical value of c in metres per second is now fixed exactly by the definition of the metre.
I’m not an expert by any means, but the thing that makes light interesting is in the first sentence above: “the speed of light with respect to any inertial frame is independent of the motion of the light source”. This is that business of how velocities are added among moving objects, but not with light. Light is always faster than any object, no matter how fast the object is moving. Light is not just the fastest thing, it is the thing that defines faster-than-anything-elseness.
What I think special relativity tells us is that contrary to this conception of light,
what is actually going on looks like this:
This is the tricky part because although my rendition of the entire beam appearing instantaneously is, I think, correct within this hypothetical setup of a human scale train, if this train were millions of times larger, then it could be argued that the beam would actually grow non-instantaneously compared to a human sized observer (i.e. miniscule). Rather than thinking of being able to see light moving, I think we have to anchor ourselves in the fixed Einsteinian constant of c, and understand that the latency which we observe (in a radio transmission between a distant spacecraft and the control center on Earth, for example), is not the result of waves of ‘energy’ traveling through space from antenna to antenna, but rather a reflection of the relative scales of the events involved. When we talk to the spacecraft we have to use a much larger ‘here-and-now’ compared to our own native human scaled time, so that the nesting of smaller and larger nows is reflected as scaled experiences of delay. This is just how matter makes sense of itself on different scales. It is not the speed of light, it is the speed of speed or the speed of sense, matter, or time.
The picture that I propose would be more accurate is this:
As our naive perception suggests, there is no concretely real ‘beam’ of light, rather there is a spot of light present at the target, as well as an illumination at the flashlight source, and in our eyes, and (not pictured) in our upscaled human mind.
In other words, when we think of light as having a speed, we are not really understanding the full ramifications of special relativity and are merely projecting our Newtonian-Cartesian prejudices onto something which is not classical. The reason that it is not classical, however, I propose, is because visible light is not a projectile at all, but rather access to visual sensitivity, i.e. an extension of self-experience to incorporate the appearance of non-self in the visual range of percpeption (as opposed to tactile, aural, olfactory, emotional, or intellectual).
*gifs cannibalized from here.
Multisense Realism 
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