Multisense Realism

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Sense and motive are core concepts within multisense realism which are the experiential correlates of matter and energy. Sense is more of a passive, receptive mode of experience while motive is the active, intentional mode running ‘through’ that experience. This is a huge idea in that it fundamentally reinterprets physics and phenomenology so that rather than introducing a new force or field, it reorganizes our model of matter to accommodate a panpsychic quality or panprotoexperience*.

To be clear, matter and energy are externalizations which are understood in terms of things happening to things in space. Sense and motive are, by contrast, internalizations which can be characterized as stories happening to us through time. Under panprotoexperientialism, ‘us’ probably includes cells, stars, atoms, etc.

Time, in relation to matter and energy is assumed to be a linear duration which scales according to physical properties of density, mass, and velocity. Time in relation to sense and matter is measured qualitatively, so that it can expand and contract according to experiential properties such as significance, meaning, frequency, rhythm, and sequence or story. Time flies when you are having fun. Not literally in the sense that matter or energy will change speeds when you are happy, but in the sense that your awareness literally eats up more time when it is filled with enthusiasm. Time then, is directly experienced only through sense and motive but indirectly inferred or represented by objects in space. For example, we have to draw lines chasing something in a comic that is supposed to be moving.  We have no way to present time directly in space without inferring it through repeating frames on a strip or something that we actually have to experience as moving so that we supply the ‘time’.

Space in contrast cannot be presented directly in time. We can imagine spaces to a degree, but they have no spatial realism. We cannot make precise measurements that sit still. We cannot measure the distance between one imagined object and another in inches. The inches aren’t real. There’s no way to reliably measure them. Our experience of time however, can be understood in terms of sequence. We can usually say with reasonable authority whether one experience, thought, or feeling happened before or after another. When we experience time, it is literally ours. When we experience space it is either a figurative simulation or an experience of out body.

If we want to represent sense and motive in spatiotemporal terms, we could say that sense is ‘timing’. A feeling of being in synch with your experience. In our multiply nested perception, it is a feeling of our sense of timing; our interior inertial frames  coinciding with our outer inertial frames. Timing, as they say, like sense, is everything.

Motive we could say is a sub-category of sense, that is, a timing of movement. It could be internal figurative movement (of changing your mind), or literal external movement (of changing your body’s position), or figurative external movement (of changing the status of your self – rising in significance as a person toward a super-signifying archetype). It could also be internal literal movement (of changing the molecules and cells in the brain directly with your intention). That has to happen too. The internal push to make a change that puts a plan into action now, begins as molecular structures in cells all over your brain changing immediately and in a synchronized pattern. Whether neuroscience calls this charge polarization, action potential, phosphorylation, nerve impulse, brain waves, the result is the same, we do things because of the brain and the brain does things because of us, and this happens directly without a Cartesian theater or homunculus intervening to translate.

Are sense and motive like a field and a force? In a sense yes, if we conceive of those things as purely statistical patterns of real change in real matter, but in that case we could call them matter and energy.  It is proposed that energy is nothing but the potential for matter to make changes to matter  in the present moment, and that this capacity to change matter is nothing other than externally modeled motive.

It is proposed that what sense and motive actually are can only be understood through their native terms of first person experience. Sense is not a floating perimeter of disembodied qualia, it is concrete feelings and experiences which multiply in significance (qualitative greatness, richness, or importance and figurative or associative radiance). Significance can be thought of as the figurative residue that accumulates through repeating sequences-of-sequences of meaningful experiences (which is what time literally is).

Motive is not a current of pseudo-plasmatic psychokinetic power – not ether, élan vital, phlogiston, soul, or chi, (although for some it may help to think of them that way) it is just our desire and ability to directly influence the matter that we embody. You can call it magic if you want, but it seems to be quite ordinary in the countless species of living organisms we see, and maybe in the behavior of matter itself, if you allow that sufficiently simplistic motive produces deterministic patterns by default.

Multisense realism can be understood even without the specialized definitions of sense and motive above. It’s ok to think of sense in the colloquial everyday sense of that word. Sense: as in feeling and sensation, as logical coherence as in making sense. Sense meaning consciousness, as in ‘come to your senses’. Sense as in an intuitive guidance.  Sense as category or order; ‘in any or all of those senses’. If sense is the egg of knitted worldly synchronizations that has accumulated, protecting the interior from the exterior and while providing time to develop, then motive is the flagellum, the spine, appendage, or tentacle providing propulsive control over the organism’s body against other objects in its world. Flagellum or cilia can act as an antenna too, as celestial objects act as radiant transmitters, so the morphology of forms that sense or forms that motivate can range from straight to round and everything in between, but linear and circular do seem to naturally synch with motive and sense respectively.  Motive can also be understood in plain English. The intention to move or change with activity. To want to do something.

The question of whether sense or motive came first can be understood as a non-sequitur when we realize that time and therefore causality itself supervenes, or depends completely on the interplay of sense and motive.

1. Motive creates the arrow of time by dividing and multiplying a plenum of sense, and time creates space by allowing sense to re-present its divided self itself as a body (matter). Energy completes the cycle by externalizing motive. From the outside, motive looks like a pantomime between objective bodies. Sense then re-internalizes these object events among bodies as subjective narrative stories. The next cycle begins as subjective experience weaves its new story in the context of all other stories that make up its history, its inertial frame of experiences. Human inertial frames includes the individual, social, anthropological, mammalian, zoological, biological, chemical, physical levels, as well as semiotic and super-signifying.

∞/0.  Sense is not the first thing, it precedes firstness and thingness. It is everything and nothing. In a way, sense cannot said to exist until it had been created by motive’s change/division/discovery of it, initiating a detection of a difference that makes a difference to something that can tell the difference. Any concept of sameness and difference can only be pattern recognition which can only be some kind of sense. Motive, even though it comes ‘first’ by fertilizing the seemingly inert egg of sense, is actually a tendril of the egg itself – turned inside out to feel like a ‘something that is doing something important to everything’ (instead of an everything/nothing that is just being/not being). Primordial motive is the first male: call him atom or Adam, is born.

2. Dualism arises after sense and motive are dancing, creating sequential presentations (time). Time creates room for a multiplicity of dancing narratives which are re-presented as collections of narratives nested within each other like a fractal, so that fast small stories take place in slower larger stories, making the larger agendas seem like static conditions, ie matter. Changes in these objective volumes in space, driven by the motives among the stories on many higher and lower levels, we infer as ‘energy’. The emergence of bodies and places is sense dividing itself again, symmetrically yet anomalously (hopelessly different seeming) into inner and outer sense. The inner sense and motives are direct participation and the outer sense and motives become the existential stage for the inner, essential narratives.

3. The trinity of sense,  essence (sense-motive building significance through time), and existence (matter and energy dividing through entropy across space) are what multisense realism is all about. This fundamental set, like a transistor with base, emitter, and collector, seems to be the minimum possible reduction of the cosmos. It has been in many religions and philosophies, as a thesis, an antithesis, and synthesis (German idealist terms which may have come from Marx, by way of Fichte, Kant, and Hegel). The sense of how it all works together can be nominally mapped out as a syzygy. A fusion of opposites or a synchronized alignment of separate bodies:

In this image, the white center ‘syzygy’ would also represent ‘significance; and the peripheral qustion marks represent entropy and the undetected. Will is synonymous with motive, and Body with matter.

*Panpsychism is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view. Gustav Theodor Fechner, Friedrich Paulsen,Ernst Heckel, Charles Strong, and partially William James are considered panpsychists.

Panexperientialism, as espoused by Alfred North Whitehead, is a less bold variation, which credits all entities with phenomenal consciousness but not with cognition, and therefore not necessarily with fully-fledged minds.

Panprotoexperientialism is a more cautious variation still, which credits all entities with non-physical properties that are precursors to phenomenal consciousness (or phenomenal consciousness in a latent, undeveloped form) but not with cognition itself, or with conscious awareness. - thoughtfulcynic

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Another crazy looking attempt at organizing the multisense model of perception. The top diagram emphasizes how the contemporary model assumes that all phenomenal interaction is at the particle level, effected via tangible collisions of microcosmic bodies in spacetime. Higher level experiences are imagined to be epiphenomenal abstractions tied to each other through exclusively bottom up logical mechanical functions. In this model, it must be admitted that consciousness can only be a metaphysical layer of unexplained illusion.

In the bottom diagram, the dualism of private experience in white on black, and public spacetime realism in black on white gives an idea of the involuted or ‘Ouroboran’ relation between the two aesthetics. The center region depicts the public stack of spatiotemporal scale relations from microcosm to macrocosm (particles<>cells<>tissues<>sense organs/organisms). The Caduceus like split helix implies a loose hierarchical, bidirectional overlap of interlocking forms and functions on different scales and their implicit interaction with the corresponding private experiences on corresponding levels (personal, sub-personal interiorities corresponds to macrocosmic, microcosmic exteriors).

The label ‘Sensory-Motor Experiences’ at the base designates that the totality can be understood literally as sensory motor phenomena but the label and dashed halo at the top refers to the figurative capacities for empathy, semiosis, social quorum and teleology.

In this model, all layers are phenomenal and physical and consciousness or sense is a fully enfranchised, participant in physics on every level. Interaction is multivalent and multi-directional, bottom up, top down, inside out, outside in, past forward, future back.

I appropriated this chart above, from the Wiki on umwelt, which is similar to my perceptual inertial frame, and adapted it for MR, adding the micro↑↓meso↑↓macro ↵ nesting on the objective cosmic side, and the {⇓ literal ⇔ figurative ⇑} anomalous symmetry on the subjective psyche side.