Multisense Realism

I am always trying to sum up multisense realism in a simple way, as I think it ultimately is pretty simple, but it is hard to put it simply because it requires that we overturn some core assumptions about how we look at the self and the universe.

It is my conjecture that realism, matter, and public events are derived from a universal foundation which is sensory rather than logical. Reality is the dream of eternity made temporarily public, not a collection of objects making temporary illusions.

I consider my model to be neither dualist nor monist, but an “Oroboran” monism, meaning that physics itself is the capacity for sensory experience and discernment and that it is involuted in a reflexive, “umbilical” relation to itself. The idea is that experience and matter are the private and public ranges of physical phenomena. The involution (like a Klein bottle or Möbius strip) refers to the orthogonal or perpendicular juxtaposition between sensorimotive-based private experience and spacetime-based public realism.

If we begin with this diagram which I have pilfered from memeengine:

and then progress, like those schizophrenic cat portraits,  into the mind bending rabbit hole that is Multisense Realism…

Here, I am trying to introduce the notion of a continuum between the three ‘ism’s above, to indicate that the cosmos supports all three inherently because it is that juxtaposition/symmetry which is actually more primary than any of them. Not the symmetry itself – which is more of a mathematical relation that is somewhat abstract, but the capacity to detect and respond to patterns like symmetry – the capacity to sense and participate in the universe. What I wound up with was more of a yin yang taijutsu arrangement which maybe hints at an East side where experience is purely subjective, a West side which is all representations of what is presumed purely objective, and a midrange which is about perception as a body in the world of comparably scaled bodies.

Not content with that, I went on to try to get more of the flavor of it with nested scale bodies in a Cartesian grid of blue vector arrows representing energy and function (the disowned idealism of the West haunts the machine as ‘energy’ and ‘information’). On the East side, there is the solipsistic fisheye distortion which is all cluttered up with my conceptions of sub-personal, super-personal, and the arrow of motive power.

Wrapping this mess up, I put the atomic dots where they belong, on the inside surface of the experiential bubble of the Absolute. Make sense? Haha.

In Multisense Realism, all of physics is understood to relate to the capacity to discern between public and private views of phenomena. Public physics appears to us as  ‘matter and energy’ on the outside and ‘perception and participation’ on the inside. The gap which makes this involution or twist possible is the modulation between the presence and absence or sensory presence, with the absence being what is called entropy or spacetime (which become essentially the same thing under this model of physics). To make things more confusing, this modulation of entropy and sensitivity is nested within many layers of itself, as a fractal. A cell encapsulates a world of molecular interaction. An organ encapsulates a world of cells, etc.

What started as an observation about the common positions that people seem to take within philosophy of mind debates became a hypothesis about the continuum of public and private sense experience, a re-interpretation of light, cosmology, consciousness, and the introduction of new concepts like significance and solitropy.

Here are a few diagrams to try to capture the overall picture of how all major features of the cosmos can smoothly fit together.

(This last diagram shamelessly stolen and modified from a paper called Natural World Physical, Brain Operational,and Mind Phenomenal Space-Time.)

I suppose that the key insight is that rather than an ideal or material primitive which all things share, it is the capacity to sense (to discern and participate) which is irreducible and universal. Through this framework which highlights the symmetric qualities of public and private, cardinal and ordinal, generic and proprietary, spatial and experiential, etc, the big picture comes into focus as a flexible, self-involuting experience of experiences. Sense is the authentic presentation in which we participate directly, within which indirect experiences are re-presented as public bodies within bodies.

Multisense Realism is a set of ideas about how consciousness can be integrated with the physical universe. It is rooted in a consideration of what is ultimately necessary for a universe such as our own to exist, without disqualifying subjectivity. If we acknowledge from the start that all subjective experiences are by definition phenomena which are part of the cosmos, then we can dispense with the prejudice of contemporary approaches which rely on an assumption of ‘illusions’. In reducing the universe to basic concepts such as function, substance, and experience, it appears that beneath any possible function or substance there must be a capacity for discernment and experience of any functions or substances. When compared with the other two possibilities – of a universe of substance which gives rise to experiential functions arbitrarily, or a universe of functions which gives rise to substances and experiences superfluously. In both cases, it appears that there is no plausible explanation for why either substance or function should generate any sort of experience. The remaining possibility is that the universe we live in is fundamentally based on experience (aka sense, or perception-particpation) rather than substances or functions.

Looking at sense in this new way, as a universal version of ordinary afferent and efferent experience, a new view of the universe is revealed. In this view, both  ‘information’ and matter are derived from more fundamental values of generating sensation and significance. This then, is an attempt to help others who may be interested in understanding the surprisingly simple (though convoluted to discuss) relations between ordinary awareness, matter, energy, time,  and space.

Some have said that it is easier to understand after they have heard me explain it:

** Video Interview **

A couple of different informal views here. Above, the categories of Root and Meta are mingled with Sub-Super and Hyper-Hypo to illustrate some conjectures about the nature of how form and content are nested. The bright vs subdued color panels emphasize that the universality of Realism, i.e. public impersonal worlds stacked within each other by material size, are also narrow in another sense. Although the specificity of the public is precise (molecular configurations are exact, etc), the differences overall are generic and limited to quantitative descriptions, positions, shapes, functional relations as in gears and teeth.

Below, in the shoelace causality model, the same kinds of levels and symmetries are expressed in a more linear fashion, indicating the depth of the ontological shift.

On the left side (or West end) are the levels of organization associated with material bodies, from micro to mega. On the East side, by making it negative, wavy, and diagonal, I tried to emphasize that the juxtaposition between East and West is truly orthogonal (or orthomodular) and not simply different. Where the Western view promises local certainty with interlocking gears of mechanism, the Eastern view submerges certainty into holistic, idiopathic acausality which commands from eternity.

Condensed Overview on Quora

Following is a visual survey of popular consciousness theories to highlight the similarity and difference between multisense realism and established approaches.

Multisense Realism explores sense as a neutral monism rooted in reflexively derived relativism (verses). Sense is conceived of as the fundamental capacity for derived capacities, aka, the Uni in Universe.

The primary juxtaposition of ‘verses’ in the universe are proposed as:

1) Multisense (Private physics)

Qualitative presentation: Private sensory-perception and motive-participation

Like the ordinary awareness which we have as human beings, our afferent dispositions and their expression as efferent changes in position can be scaled out to the level of microcosm and astronomical macrocosm. All forces and field dynamics can be flipped around to an intersubjective orientation of tension and release rather than interobjective automatism.

2) Realism (Public physics)

Quantitative representation: Public bodies and objective perspectives solidify and mechanize experience. The need for realism arises as a kind of accounting schema or political stabilizer among experiences. Matter and energy are presentations within our sense experience, but ultimately they are representations of other sense experiences. Objectivity is a secondary verse but what it lacks in primordial authenticity it makes up for through the power of modulation by proximity: metered extension.

Multisense Syzygy:

Phenomenology and realism are not merely a dualism of separate or unrelated ‘substances’, they are the two opposite expressions of sense, and they are opposite in every conceivable way. What they share is their opposition to each other – their orthogonality, which reveals the sense that gives rise to their distinction, and to distinction itself.

Multisense Realism asserts that realism, including matter and mind, arises as a multiplicity of sense participation. Sense, as the receptive modality and participation as the active modality are two aspects of the same underlying universal primitive, the inherent potential for meta juxtaposition of self/non-self which is also intentionally referred to as ‘sense’.

The conjecture is that these self-juxtapositions, weave qualitatively rich channels of sense which make sense themselves as  a continuum or spectrum between interior and exterior realism. This realism has been addressed historically as dualism of extremes in philosophy, generally with the logic of one side arguing to subsume the other, so that materialism seeks to invalidate interior realism (reducing consciousness to mechanism) and idealism seeks to disqualify exterior realism (reducing physics to solipsism).

Multisense Realism takes this dualistic opposition in philosophical thought to be a non-coincidental revelation of the nature of consciousness and cosmos itself as a continuum of potential sense channels of realism, ranging from literally nested layers of forms, structures, and bodies in space to figuratively layered experiences of feelings, meanings, and perceptions through time.

This multisense continuum is conceived as a range which can be pinched and prodded, so that applying any philosophical, scientific, or religious sense to any part of it amounts to an instructive yet unreal distortion to the whole. Even our ordinary waking human consciousness is an assertion of prejudice which manipulates the entire range of possible truths. To the typical person buying fish in the supermarket, the profound descriptions of reality of the quantum mechanical microcosm or the macrocosmic inflation of meditative transcendence seem distant and irrelevant fantasy. Likewise, to the physicist or the zen master, the reality of buying groceries is De-emphasized.

The profound edges of the continuum then (the extremely mathematical-physical-exterior and the extremely anthropomorphic-animistic-subjective) are as opposed to each other as they are united in their opposition against the naturalistic (or ‘pedestrian’) center of the continuum. Realism, in turn, is defined by its sequestering against the unrealism of profound theory. This is a shorthand map of how cosmos and consciousness relate – an informal compass which quantifies perspectives of universal qualities.

The unstated implication of the multisense continuum is that every range of sense categories is a presentation in its own right as well as a representation of all of the other sense categories, but in a diminished or even inverted way. Just as the reality of the grocery store minimizes the reality of the profound, all experiences manifest and define themselves in sensible relation to all other experience. True believers in external realism necessarily and compulsively casts spirituality as solipsistic fantasy, while interior realism devotees are compelled to characterize science as misguided and blind materialism.

This conjecture ultimately extends to a re-interpretation of physics which preserves the truth of experimental observations, but challenges fundamental definitions of force, field, energy, matter, time and space. External realities and internal realities are seen to be symmetric in some sense, disjunct in others, so that human or anthropological consciousness has developed through an interior evolution of sense rather than a purely exterior evolution of physical mechanism, deepening gradually and suddenly (a punctuated equilibrium) from ancestral forms; perhaps mammalian feeling, animal perception, biological awareness, chemical sensitivity, and physical detection-response.  This means that the function of a human brain may not be transferable to inorganic structures such as contemporary data processing equipment. It is certainly possible to extend human consciousness with technology, but the position advocated here is that human consciousness, or indeed any other kind of evolved awareness cannot be reversed engineered to physical mechanism or substituted entirely. It is a different thing to have a bionic leg than it is to have a bionic brain. If we replace the brain, we replace the person.

Our assumption of cosmologically primitive forces, fields, time and space are reinterpreted to be analytical constructs rather than structurally real substances. All are the consequences of direct perception and participation (or sense and motive) experienced privately through time, or third person indirect perceptions of public matter and ‘energy’ (spatial generic rather than temporal proprietary perspective)

A photon, for example, may be a unit of sensitivity within the instrument of detection to an external change in another material condition rather than a free standing particle-wave in space. What we are looking at with subatomic particles may in fact be the common sense through which the abstractions of space and time are generated. Matter is a semiotic vocabulary of bottom-level event relation rather than an independent ‘stuff’ so that human consciousness is an example of high-level poetry and drama for which the low level language was developed. Quarks could be understood more like atomic level doorbells – chords played as chimes by one ensemble in the presence of another visiting ensemble.

Materialism and Idealism: Making Sense of Consciousness
Podcast from June 12, 2012.

Earlier interview on psychtalkradio.com – May 30, 2012 My radio debut talking about consciousness with Jose Drost-Lopez. I get into some of the ideas of Multisense Realism.

Multisense Realism began as a framework to model conflicting approaches to Philosophy of Mind, but evolved into a new interpretation of mind/body dualism and the Hard problem of consciousness.  By seeing the human experience of mind and body as a special case of a deeper, more universal principle of interior and exterior forms of sense, Multisense Realism reinterprets some of the fundamentals of physics and cosmology.

In a nutshell:

1. Experience of the universe will seem to support and encourage both spiritual and material perspectives, even though they both appear to present mutually exclusive sets of ultimate truths. Reason requires belief in disbelief and faith requires disbelief in disbelief. In between reason and faith is reality, but neither reason without faith nor faith without reason can make sense of everything. The insistence that it can is ultimately a bias that tends to become crazy and dangerous if acted upon in real life as if it were the whole truth.
2. All of the shortcomings of religion and science can be accounted for by each side mistaking objects for subjects and subjects for objects.
3. We can fix this by looking at how we look at the universe, so that we take our own experience more literally and physical existence more figuratively. Photons become nothing but atomic experiences. Consciousness becomes the physical inertia of events which tie body, brain, world, and lifetime together.
4. Consciousness is what divides the universe into symmetrical parts. It separates being, doing, and time from matter, energy, and space. This division makes it so that the former are presented as interior and ranging widely in quality, realism, and meaning while the latter is presented as exterior, real, and meaningless.
5. This division replaces the idea of the Big Bang as an event in time and space, so that the Big Bang is the division of the universe into subjective times in objective places.
6. The symmetry is not limited to subjective and objective groupings, so that consciousness can be used to focus on many different ways of making sense of itself and the universe.

Following are materials from my poster presentation at the 2012 TSC Conference:

40 The Elephant in Every Room: A Proposed Theory of Multisense Realism

Craig Weinberg

Multisense realism defines a new approach to bridge the Explanatory Gap between neurological observation and first hand conscious experience. This is a hypothesis of consciousness, elementary physics, and ultimately cosmology which requires no belief in non-ordinary reality yet which honors the full spectrum of the psyche and self. It consists of new interpretations of established scientific and common sense observations rather than a contradiction of them. It is proposed that consciousness, rather than being either a metaphysical epiphenomenon of matter, or a Cartesian dualism alongside matter, is more like a frequency range within a continuous spectrum which includes both subjective and objective phenomena. Rather than a simple graduated continuum like the electromagnetic spectrum, it should be conceived of as an ‘involuted continuum’ which twists into an interior and exterior topology like a Möbius strip. The common denominator (the strip) is the sense which arises from through symmetry, similarity, circuity, and divergence between the various nested perspectives on interiority and exteriority. Sense is the underlying primitive. That is what the cosmos, and we ourselves are “made of’”. Not mind or matter, but the capacity for the two to be both separate in one sense and the same thing in another. Sense is a universal dance of presentation and representation. Without either subject or object – there cannot be a sense of ‘reality’ or realism. Realism arises from this involuted continuum between opposite ontological expressions.

Discussion:

Q. Are we a body dreaming or are we a dream bodying?
A. Neither. Body and dream are two opposite sides of the same coin. We are the coin itself; the sense of the two sides opposition to and unity with each other.

Multisense Realism:

If we are to take our contemporary scientific understanding seriously, Whitehead’s famous quote would have to be literally true. All meaning and qualities which we appreciate in the universe would arise completely within our own human neurology, making the world beyond our mind a web of unconscious and intangible transactions; “the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless”. It is thought that the only other alternative is to regress to a pre-scientific model based on blind faith. Herein I attempt to sketch out a third option which presents a model of consciousness and cosmos as a coherent whole arising from a fundamentally symmetric dynamism which I call ‘sense’. Sense as sensation as well as the sense of coherence of groups of sensations or percepts, and finally sense ‘in the sense of’ modulation and categorization of attention/consideration. All three senses of sense are, in my view, essential elaborations of unifying awareness.

I. ACME-OMMM: Anthropomorphism vs Mechanemorphism

ACME stands for Anything Can Mean Everything, and OMMM = Only Material Matter Matters. They mark the extremes of the philosophical bias toward anthropomorphism or mechanemorphism. Each of these diametrically opposed psychologies stereotypes the other such that they constitute a monosense extremism. In other words, it seems that the human mind tends to interpret its relation with the universe in ways which can lead to hyperpersonalization (ACME) at the cost of de-realism or hyperrealism (OMMM) at the cost of de-personalization.

It is the goal of multisense realism to supersede and replace these twin pathological projections with a continuum or spectrum which seamlessly unites subjective and objective ontologies as well as preserves their division. The continuum is conceived as an involuted monism, like a Mobius strip, which honors both the realism and unrealism of consciousness and the universe on every level.

   A.  Seat Belt Metaphor and the Elephant in Every Room:

The absolute ubiquity of consciousness precludes objectivity by definition. Consciousness is the elephant (or rhinoceros) in every room. “Wherever I go, there you are.” – Buckaroo Banzai

When trying to understand the relationship between car and the driver, the OMMM materialist concludes that the seat belt must be the driver since every time we get out of the car to look, we only see the seat belt where we think the driver should be. Anyone who does not accept that the driver is nothing more than a seat belt is accused of being soft minded anthropomorphism.

When trying to explain the same relationship, the ACME idealist concludes that the seat belt is a kind of umbilical cord that translates the driver’s wishes into the car’s various parts. Neither view notices considers that both the driver and car are necessary.

      B. The Symmetry Solution:

Avoiding either one of these unrealistic extremes, multisense realism finds the symmetry in their mutually exclusive denial of the other to be significant. The deeper reality is not a dualism of two separate universes for the material and the ideal, but many symmetrical views of the same universe which blend material and ideal realism to different degrees. The result can be thought of as a single unified continuum (monism) which reflects itself as a dualism on the outside and has no reflection on the inside (subjectivity).

The subject object relationship is the true ‘atom’ and is preserved up and down the cosmos. Our trouble arises from assuming that the cosmos is either objects which only seem subjective or subjects which are intended to seem objective.

     C. Multisense Continuum:

Spanning the spectrum between cosmological absolutes, the multisense continuum represents every shade of subjectivity and objectivity though which the self and the universe are defined.

II. Closing the Explanatory Gap and Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness:

Instead of trying to explain away consciousness, or jump to a conclusion of fully animistic panpsychism, the explanatory gap can be understood as the problem of mismatching the interior experience of our native perceptual inertial frame with the exterior appearances of all other inertial frames. To steal from Karl Popper and George Harrison, we are trying to explain the ‘cloudy’ universe within us in terms of the clockwork universe without us.

The realization of multisense realism is that the cloud-clock symmetry constitutes realism itself. We can understand that the clock can exist without us, but it can’t exist without some kind of ‘us’ detecting the clock on some aspect of the clock on some level. A universe that is all unconscious, undetectable mechanism is not a real universe. It has no real qualities. Likewise a universe of pure ideal plasticity is imaginary. It has no recursive automatism to lend it reality through time.

   A. The Universe Makes Sense

The revolutionary conclusion of this line of thinking must be (or might be, depending on how cloudy or clock-like one’s perspective is) that sense itself is the universal primitive of reality and transcends causality itself. Cause and effect are a particular kind of sense making, a phenomenal experience rooted in objective reasoning and sequential perception. Without these sensorimotive underpinnings, causality literally makes no sense. The word cosmos means order, but order is only possible in a cosmos where pattern recognition is an inherent possibility. It has to be possible for the universe to make sense before we can make sense of it.

    B.  The Stack: Perceptual Relativistic Inertial Frames
Distant frames are perceived as discrete parts of a universe that ‘simply is’, while proximal frames are perceived increasingly as continuous participatory phenomena that ‘seems like’ subjective interpretation.

      C.   Sense conditioning

                1.  Specular Reflection: Perception integrates indirect perception into direct perception.
Implications for Artificial Intelligence, zombies, simulations or other unpersons: Subjectivity cannot be simulated, it can only be imitated. The uncanny valley phenomenon hints at this, as does blindsight and synesthesia hind at a lack of support for functionalism as an explanation for qualia.

            2.  Subtractive Coherence: Perception elides gaps to present coherence.

“ScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2011) — Conventional wisdom would say that blocking a hole would prevent light from going through it, but Princeton University engineers have discovered the opposite to be true. A research team has found that placing a metal cap over a small hole in a metal film does not stop the light at all, but rather enhances its transmission.”

There is a recent study on psilocybin which supports Huxley’s intuition that the brain is like a reducing valve:

“Psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling between the mPFC and PCC. These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain’s key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition.”

Less information going through the key areas of the brain = richer qualia. This doesn’t prove that qualia is possible in the absence of all brain activity, but it supports the counter-intuitive theme that sense a function not of the presence of stimulation but of the gaps between them, e.g. “dark current“:

“The subsequent cascade of events leads to a decrease of cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) which closes the ionic channels on the plasma membrane of the rod outer segment. This channel normally is open, which allows entry of sodium into the rod outer segment in the dark, with a compensatory extrusion of potassium from the rod inner segment to balance the net charge within the cell. This circulating “dark current” between the inner and outer segments maintains the rod in a relatively depolarized state. Closure of the cGMP-sensitive channel by light interrupts the dark current. Interrupting the influx of sodium, which carries positive charge into the cell, causes the photoreceptor to hyperpolarize. This intracellular voltage change is conveyed to the synaptic terminal, where the visual signal is transmitted to the bipolar and horizontal cells.

To a first-time student of retinal neurophysiology, these events initiated by light may appear the reverse of what would be expected. Rather than initiating a positive response in the rod, light actually suppresses a current that exists in the dark.”

                 3. Wholes through holes

understand
O.E. understandan “comprehend, grasp the idea of,” probably lit. “stand in the midst of,” from under + standan “to stand” (see stand). If this is the meaning, the under is not the usual word meaning “beneath,” but from O.E. under, from PIE *nter- “between, among” (cf. Skt. antar “among, between,” L. inter “between, among,” Gk. entera “intestines;” see inter-).

• Connecting the dots.
• Solving a problem.
• Finishing a puzzle.
• Filling in the blanks.
• Answering a question.
• Figuring it out.
• Putting it together.
• Getting from A to B.

                    4. Ambiguous Images: ‘Seems like’ emphasizes ‘either/or’ interpretations which can be changed through time.

External objects emphasize unambiguous ‘and’ relations across topological space – they are literal and seem non-figurative.

figure (v) late 14c., “to represent” (in a picture); see figure (n.). Meaning “to shape into” is early 15c.; “to picture in the mind” is from c.1600; “to make an appearance” is c.1600. Meaning “work out a sum” is from 1833, Amer.Eng. Related: Figured; figuring.

figure (n) early 13c., “visible form or appearance of a person,” from O.Fr. figure (10c.) “shape, body, form, figure; symbol, allegory,” from L. figura “a shape, form, figure,” from PIE *dheigh- “to form, build” (see dough); originally in English with meaning “numeral,” but sense of “form, likeness” is almost as old.

Example features of human interior sense frames.

Semiotic model:

III. Sensorimotive Electromagnetism, c = absolute velocity and the end of the Standard Model

    A.  Quorum Sensing

      B.  Telesemantics: This hypothesis questions the existence of subatomic particles as concrete objects.  Let’s say there is no particle, there is inter-molecular sensitivity instead. Contagious charge characteristics which are experienced directly by matter. This would constitute a sensorimotive aspect of electromagnetism which is private and shared between materials, but not publicly in space. This would coincide with our naive perception of energy as experiences in time rather than substances. Light, heat, sound, scale up as events of increasing magnitude and significance, not as physical residues. Contagious node to node subjective states, not independent energy projectiles through space. Vacuum = absolute void.

Q. Is this Panpsychism?
A. Close, but not exactly. Panpsychism can imply that a rock has human-like experiences. My hypothesis can be categorized as panexperientialism because I do think that all forces and fields are figurative externalizations of processes which literally occur within and through ‘matter’. Matter is in turn diffracted pieces of the primordial singularity. It’s confusing for us because we assume that motion and time are exterior conditions, but if my view is accurate, then all time and energy is literally interior to the observer as an experience. What I think is that matter and experience are two symmetrical but anomalous ontologies – two sides of the same coin, so that our qualia and content of experience is descended from accumulated sense experience of our constituent organism, not manufactured by their bodies, cells, molecules, interactions. The two are both opposite expressions – a [(what & how) of (matter and space) and a {who & why} of {experience and time}] of the underlying sense that binds them to the singularity (where & when).

Q. Why do you focus exclusively on electromagnetism as the fundamental correlation of “sensorimotive”?  Wouldn’t strong and weak nuclear forces have the same basic “sensorimotive” properties?
A. I use electromagnetism because it has an iron clad association with sensroimotive experience. That is the main symmetry I want to get across. Once we understand that, all forces, strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational would be different inertial frames of reference of the same thing. They make sense in different ways, as would be appropriate when you are talking about density of large objects versus charge of atoms or how atoms are held together and fall apart, but to me these are just computational details. It’s *all* sensorimotive-electromagnetism.

The most provocative possibility of this is that rather than a Classical limit in the microcosm at which QED supersedes Newton, there is a Copernican limit at which we stop detecting objects per se and begin detecting our own instruments sensitivity itself. Atoms are antennas, and quantum mechanics are the exterior most aspects of the broadcasts. The form of the broadcasts looks electromagnetic to us (from the outside) but feels sensorimotive to us from the inside. Not that our perception is literally atomic, just as TV programs aren’t only pixels, but our perception is figuratively meta-meta-meta-meta atomic.

Charge is unexplained by physics but it may be more understandable as a sensorimotive quality that is experienced on many levels. Electromagnetic behaviors are predictable from mathematical models, but the fact of electromagnetism itself may arise from the microcosmic version of what we experience as autobiographical narrative as human beings. The stories of atoms may be less significant than our own in absolute or relative terms, but ultimately our stories are made of the same thing. Rhythmic changes of mood/activity.

IV. Cosmology: The Big Diffraction

Rather than a Big Bang, which conceives of the origin of timespace as an event in time in which matter expands into space (neither of which could exist yet) that there is instead a ‘Big Diffraction’.

A Big Diffraction would yield the same observation of expansion as our measurements suggest, it would not be the result of a real expansion into an infinite vacuum that exists independently, but instead it would be a shrinking of the scale ratio of matter to space. Matter would be receding into itself, but this would not be observable by material bodies within that process.

The idea of a Big Bang as an explosion into emptiness (as seen from a distance by a hypothetical voyeur) is actually as much of a fantasy as any pre-scientific creation myth, since at the beginning of time and space in this universe, there could be no exterior. All observations can only occur from within the singularity and have no exterior or temporal divisions. The singularity is then a timeless (i.e. it happens always and never) and undivided initial condition – an ‘everythingness’ and nothingness both. As such, causality itself supervenes upon the singularity rather than the other way around. Divisions and symmetries, such as matter and energy, time and space, subjective perception and objective relativity are reconciled in the primordial undiffracted whole.

    A. Primordial syzygy

Consider that the entire cosmos is, in its most universal sense,  a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament through which objects and experiences are diffracted.  The primordial dynamic is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a prism. Anchored in that stable unity, matter is the more direct representation of this singularity (ie the many alchemical references to ‘stone’) than mechanical dynamism. Realism arises from the solidity of this insoluble substrate. A prism is not a machine, it is an object which reveals the essential coherence of visual qualia to visual subjects.

B. Anomalous Symmetry – Sense, Essence, Existence

Space is an an experiential relation between objects. In a universe of one object, there can be no space.

Time is memory and repeating sequence within perception. Without memory, there is only an eternal now.

Information and computation are sensorimotive artifacts of cognition which formalize natural sense figures. They are not concretely real but can be used by a conditioned agent to inform other physical agents, thereby impersonating the real.

Sensorimotive-Electromagnetism is the concretely real universal primitive, with the relation between the two opposing ontological (private-signifying-experiential and public-general-topological) perspective ranges being governed by their anomalous symmetry or ‘sense’ of each other.

Perception : Relativity
Significance = Energy * Time :  Matter / space = Entropy

Slight statistical advantage for uncommon/unexpected outcomes at significant moments allows significance to persist and intensify. Like attracts like.

Q. What is time?
A. Time is an aggregate measure of physical change modeled in a linear fashion. It has no existence of it’s own beyond our sense of sequential causality (which evaporates predictably under altered states of consciousness – dreams, drugs, trance, etc). We are the ones who interpret the digits on the clocks and the calender squares as a shared temporal text. In reality, there are no days, just astrophysical orientations woven together by our memories and monitoring of regular oscillating patterns.

Like space, time can only be as discrete or continuous as the substances and processes we use to measure it. What we are measuring is not an objective condition, but our own normalized intersubjective detection of relations between patterns of energy/change.

Q.  Is consciousness just electromagnetic patterns in the brain?
A. Only if we allow that electromagnetic patterns are always symptoms of detection and response (sensorimotive) experiences. It makes more sense to consider consciousness and electromagnetic patterns in the brain in the same way that we consider the self and the body: two sides of the same coin. One side is public, generic, literal, and understandable as relations between biological and chemical objects and the other side is private, proprietary, figurative, and understandable as experienced events and perceptions through time.

Q. How is time related to electromagnetism?
A. If we understand that our own experience can be described in two opposite ways, we can understand that electromagnetism in general can be understood in two opposite ways as well. Viewed from the outside, electromagnetism is a pattern of coordinated activity among multiple objects in space, and another, a single, private continuity of detection and response. We are used to understanding the exterior patterns in terms of forces and fields, however, like time, it would be a mistake to consider this inference to be literally true.

It is the hypothesis of Multisense Realism that electromagnetism does not exist as an independent force in a vacuum across space, but as a shared experience among material objects – atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, planets, stars, etc. Atoms do not stick together because of an external field that exists between them, it makes more sense that they stick together because what they inherently are mutually drawn together from the inside. We look at this from a distance, and disqualifying any possibility of sensorimotive content, model it as a mechanism through which space propagates waves of, or is penetrated by particles of ‘energy’.

Once we update our model so that matter detects and moves itself in relation to matter, that detection and motion comes to define energy. The implications of this are tremendous, as something like color and light can be understood as a visual experience of the human nervous system relating to a human universe rather than an independent particle-wave. Light is not just how we see, but it is how matter sees. Electromagnetism is not just how our brains feel, it is how matter feels. Once we can understand that, we can see that feeling and seeing is also what matter itself actually is.

The two sides of the coin are symmetrical and anomalous so that even though they are really the opposite sides of the same thing, each side perceives the other as unrelated. This is because one side is quantitative and topological and the other side is qualitative and narrative so they are not related one to one. You can’t look at a person’s brain and be able to tell what they are thinking because you would need to know the specifics of the entire story of their life first. The brain is many neurological ‘whats and hows’ but the self is a continuous fugue of signifying moments of ‘who  and why’.

Time then, is part of how matter feels, how it makes sense of itself and its role in the universe, and feeling is the sensorimotive ‘heads’ side of the coin that is electromagnetic energy (‘tails’) on the other side. The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Explanatory Gap arise from presuming that the heads side can be explained by figuring out everything about the tails side, when in fact, the two are perpendicular in every way, overlapping only in the synchronization of ‘where and when’ (an impulse in a region wherever the brain activity is associated with particular feelings whenever they are felt). The self extends from birth to death through a semantically charged universe of experienced times, people,  places, and things while the brain extends from spinal cord to cerebrum, described only in a-signifying biochemical terms. It exists in a universe of neurotransmitters, spike trains, and ion channels. The two systems intersect only in the here and now, they are otherwise orthogonal to each other, pursuing opposite agendas of neurophysiology and autobiography.

Q. Are all forces and fields figurative?
A. Yes. From electromagnetism to gravity to the strong and weak force, to love and hate, beauty and morality, all ‘forces’ are the direct and indirect experiences of matter. When we see lightning or an electric spark we are seeing the gases that make up our atmosphere igniting spontaneously in response to interior tensions being released. In a complete vacuum, there is no spark – no atoms to offload the feeling of tension (charge) to. Matter does different things on different scales, and in different arrangements, but it is all ultimately the same protons with the same potential to build feeling and significance as well as unconsciousness, entropy, and death. Multisense realism is really very simple. The universe is a concrete reality which is matter ÷ space on the outside and experience * time on the inside. Space and time are true voids, containing nothing whatsoever except for the capacity to whip up the solitude of primordial potential into a frothy multiplicity of social realities.

Q. Is space or spacetime a field?
A. Not unless we understand that fields are figurative and not literally real. What makes space real is the ability to sense and make sense of objects. If the universe had only one object, there could be no frame of reference to create a space relation with. Space is a sense of proximity and velocity based on scale and position relative to the observer. With only one object, there is no difference between motion or stillness, size, or place. Space is how things feel their exteriority in relation to other exteriors. Both space and time are ways that sense is virtually partitioned. They are gaps or voids which isolate parts of the cosmos from other parts on one level, while they remain part of the same essential continuum on another level.

V. Implications for Free Will and Ethics:

Moral topology arises through an accumulated or multiplied charge on sense and motive. Sense charge is experienced as elevated significance – positively as high quality, heroic, divine – negatively as a threat of low quality, dirty, shameful, ‘evil’ association. The magnitude of this charge follows the general pattern of quality > amplification > embodiment so that the greater the figurative power of the association, the more attractive/repulsive response they engender and the closer to absolute good or evil will the images be.

Motive power is experienced as the capacity to generate outcomes in the world. The topology is that of criminality and success. Sense and motive are intertwined such that people and actions which have accumulated a sufficiently intense repulsive charge associated on them may be persecuted or prosecuted criminally (justified or not by the danger that is literally presented by the consequences of the prohibited motives). Likewise, motives which may pose a threat but have a sufficiently positive reputation are often decriminalized, or are tolerated.

Free will may arise from this amplification > embodiment pattern. Teleology is an inherent primitive, but not all things have equal teleological capacities so that it takes significant sense experiences to accumulate into a sense of embodiment or self awareness. As a rule of thumb, the more sense you make, the more sense you can make, and the more power and foresight you have to change yourself and the world. The feeling of free will, therefore, can only be the promise of possibility for its realization.

Q. Why can’t significance be modeled as a computation? What it is about feelings that cannot be represented as a large set of variables and states with accompanying functions and patterns that are interpreted by the mind as “I feel happy”.

By my reckoning, ‘order’ can only be an aesthetic consideration, which further means that it is dependent on the sensitivity of a given participant. Thermodynamic entropy, therefore, while overlapping on information entropy by some measures, does not in others.

I use the example of compressing a video of a glass of ice melting to illustrate how the image of ice changing over time, being more complex and therefore requiring more resources to compress with a general-purpose video codec, defies the underlying thermodynamic change from low entropy to high entropy. If you compressed a before and after video, the after video would encounter lower information entropy in executing the compression than the melting ice.

All this demonstrates is that not every expression or description of a phenomenon can be reduced to a quantitative expectation. The optical qualities of melting ice from a macroscopic perspective are not isomorphic to other levels, perspectives, and sense modalities.

Anyhow, my conjecture uses a term ‘solitropy’ which refers to the aesthetic drive which you call extropy or Eros, but it is not diametrically opposed to entropy. Simple negentropy would be a reduction in noise, but would not insist on the content of the signal itself improving qualitatively. You can make the type as clear as you like, but that won’t improve what is being said. Solitropy would extend entropy-extropy into a private quality of physics, so that we would be able to formalize in physics, for instance, the difference between the entropy produced by burning down a city and boiling water.