The reflexivity mentioned above refers to the idea that the supervenience can also be nested. Chemistry is nested physics. Biology is nested chemistry. Zoology is nested biology. Vertebrates are nested zoology. So a vertebrate would be a conscious experience that draws from the interiority of six levels of significance filtered and modified by five levels of physical structure.

It does not have to be the case that we are locked up inside the brain and communicate to the outside world by signalling down our spine and out of our nervous system and muscles. We are just as much a human brain as a story of a person’s lifetime.There is one layer where certain conditions are literally true about physiology, but that is a very small, fast, and sub-personal level on which no whole person exists. On that level there are only tissues and cells. On our native, personal level of description, we do not experience microseconds or nanometers but faces and feelings and full body interactions. On that level bodily processes and brain processes are a lens or filter through which whole-person psychological phenomena are directly presented to the public view.

Executive Summary

In the history of attempts to understand consciousness there has been much debate over what is conscious, what is not, and what the relation is between the two categories. In simplistic terms, idealism conceives of matter as a phenomenon derived from consciousness while materialism conceives of consciousness as emerging from unconscious functions of matter. Dualism conceives of matter and consciousness as two fundamentally different categories of phenomena. Neutral Monism conceives of both mental and material phenomena as derived from a more fundamental property.

Multisense Realism begins with the Neutral Monism view in which there is a meta-property from which all other discernment and relation is derived. Rather than an invisible field, energy, or realm, the MSR conjecture is that this root property could be meaningfully described as ordinary ‘sense’. There are more detailed terms to be applied, but the gist of them is very close to all of the ordinary things that we mean by sense. Consciousness is to sense and to make sense (of what has been sensed and might be sensed).

The first question that MSR asks is, can we make sense of a universe which does not make sense already? At this point rigid definitions of what sense is should be avoided – not to make it easier on ourselves, but to discourage jumping to conclusions. Intolerance and impatience are perhaps the two most formidable obstacles to to understanding this new approach. MSR is not an anti-scientific ideology, but unlike scientific theories about objective phenomena in nature, the audience’s state of mind actually correlates to their capacity to evaluate it without prejudice. This tends to be more difficult than it might seem. There is nothing being sold here, but to the mind which is intent upon skepticism at all costs, the notion of a theory of consciousness which requires one to change their consciousness already sets off psychological defense mechanisms which cannot be overcome without great effort.

The intention of MSR is to open a door to a synthesis of all empirically real phenomena, which, under MSR, includes all qualities of conscious experience. This new view, while shocking in some ways, promises to reconcile both the Western and Eastern frameworks for explaining consciousness and physics. This reconciliation is accomplished by dissolving both mind and body in a continuum of what could be called universal common sense or pansensitivity. Pansensitivity is proposed as a universal phenomenon, not limited to human beings or even living organism. In all other ways however, pansensitivity is identical to what we mean by ordinary ‘sense’…but what do we mean by that word? What can we say about sense?

• 1. Sensation links our personal awareness with our body and with the outside world. What we see, touch, hear, taste, etc of the world are all aesthetic qualities of our various human sensitivities. Sensation provides us with experiences that inform us about our world through their ‘likeness’ – that is, there is sense of similarity between what is presented to our senses, such as when the matter that our body is composed of contacts matter of another object and the tactile sensation of our skin being touched by something hard or soft, round or sharp, etc.
  • 1a. This is a sticky point for those who approach philosophy of mind from the ‘Western’ mind-brain identity view. Being accustomed to the idea of algebraic substitution, it is overwhelmingly tempting to think of the relation between physical conditions (matter colliding with matter) and an abstract algebraic variable. In the Western mode, we take our sensation of touch, of roundness and sharpness for granted. The phenomenal qualities are obviously isomorphic to the shapes and textures of the material that our neurons are interacting with, so there is no need to postulate any additional phenomenal qualities (qualia) that stand between the world and our internal representations of the world – which are presumed to be simply arbitrary artifacts or emergent properties of what it is like to detect such-and-such a material condition if you are a Homo sapien.
  • 1b. The sticky part is to recognize that this view overlooks the obvious, which is that flavors, colors, sounds, etc do not intrinsically resemble objects in space by any objective measure – they only contain some overlapping quantitative correspondence, but all the rest, the important part of the phenomenal quality, is in fact not indicated by logic or predicted by mechanical interactions. There is a long history within philosophy of making this point, from Leibniz Mill to Searle’s Chinese Room. Even Plato’s Cave, in its way speaks to the gap between our direct experience and the natural world which we may not encounter directly. The simple fact is that there is something that it is like to taste pineapple or see a flower which is not explained by the physical or biochemical mechanisms of neurons alone. Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room and Thomas Nagel’s ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?‘ thought experiments and David Chalmers elucidation of the Hard Problem of Consciousness help to bring this very subtle, but crucially important topic into focus. It is one thing to say that being able to detect that a strawberry might be good to eat from a distance is a good survival adaptation to have, but it’s quite another to conjure up the color and flavor of strawberry just from the cold fact of molecular configurations or photon frequencies. Certainly if we built a robot to detect strawberries, it wouldn’t serve any function to develop some flavors and colors only to have those functions easily managed by ordinary flavorless, colorless electromagnetic signals in the brain. It’s one thing to see or touch a shape of a berry, we could imagine that there is some map of that data spread across the brain, but it is another thing entirely to conjure up ‘flavor’. We could imagine that our visual cortex contains something like screen RAM which naturally ‘looks like’ a strawberry because of how the data is organized, but that doesn’t work for flavors or emotions. Even in the case of seeing, we know that there is no actual place in the brain where visual data is organized the final image that we see, so that there is always going to be a gap between what things actually look like to us and what the brain looks like it’s doing.
  • 1c. Now that we have established that we don’t have any objective basis from which to assume that what we feel and perceive are simply inevitable aspects of physical functions, the phenomenon of representation becomes even more impressive. Not only do we seem to have a reasonably reliable way of learning things about our environment through presented phenomena that are unlike what they are supposed to represent, but the coherence of those representations is such that we can continue to add to those representations in ways that further remove us from the world outside of our awareness. Every language has not only developed a way to make verbal sense out of perceptual sense of the world, but those languages can make sense of each others’ similarities and differences as well. We can make even further sense of the relations between our sensory presentations and representations, and we can also analyze those relations to learn things about what we like, what we are like and what is like us. Likeness it seems, likes to make more likeness. Sense is contagious.
  • 1d. It is through sensation that we discern the self-evident contrast between public and private contexts. Dualism may not be supportable in scientific terms, however any valid theory of consciousness must account for the dramatic polarization between that which appears outside (objects in relative motion/stasis) and that which appears ‘inside’ (everything else).
• 2. When we say that something ‘makes sense‘ or makes ‘perfect sense‘, we imply agreement with a universality of semantic
  coherence. There is an implied context-of-all-sensible propositions, at least figuratively. It seems to be part of our interior life that we expect a certain unity of truth, reason, and logic. Sanity is presumed to hang together as a kind of lattice of reliability in thought, experience, and physical fact.
  • 2a. When we say that something ‘makes sense to me‘, we imply a local semantic coherence – a harmonious integration with existing perceptions, experiences, and understandings with no contradictions.2b. We intuitively reject contradiction, which can be understood to ultimately be a quality of absolute ‘unlikeness’…an insane proposition which intends to propose two mutually exclusive conditions. Our impulse is to say, for example when someone suggests that a photon is both like a particle and like a wave is to think ‘This cannot be!” A particle, we reason, is very unlike a wave, and that a particle and a wave should be exactly alike seems unlike sanity. We require a great deal of esoteric math to convince ourselves that we should ignore this red flag and allow that some things may make more sense than we can grasp with our imagination alone.
  • 2b. In the same way that we accept quantum mechanical explanations which defy contradictory appearances, the aversion to contradiction itself can be circumvented. Dialetheism is used in Eastern traditions of philosophy and in Western mysticism but strictly avoided in most cases within Analytical Philosophy. In the terms that I have been laying out, the modern Western approach is to dislike dislikeness, while the traditions of Perennial Philosophy often treat ultimate questions of existence and consciousness with zen ambivalence. The appearance of dislikeness, even within contradiction itself, is seen to be transcended by the capacity to discern differences. All discernment, even if opposite in its orientation and seeming disorientation to the other perspective is united in its fundamental unity of seeking orientation. Even nonsense is a kind of sense, and a reflection on the nature of sense itself. Alice in Wonderland makes a good example. Written by  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll, who was an accomplished mathematician and logician, the Alice books contained the kind of nonsense which could only have been constructed by someone who has spent a lot of time trying to understand language and making sense. Ultimately, the concept of difference is a statement of diverging similarity. Black and white are similar in every way except the one way in which they could not be more unlike each other. This is the nature of sense – a continuum of qualitative themes which defines itself spontaneously, eternally, conditionally, and locally.
• 3. When we say ‘in the sense of‘, we refer to categories and contexts. The word sense functions here to disambiguate which of the possible contexts we intend to make relevant or prioritize semantically. Here again we are talking about belonging and likeness. “I mean it like this, not like that.”
• 4. “Coming to our senses” can mean regaining consciousness as well as seeing reason. Senses here refer to the subject’s sense of their own subjectivity, from an objective perspective.
• 5. Intuition is sometimes referred to as a ‘sixth sense‘. Experiences which appear to defy the constraints of time and space, or to convey extraordinary insights which cannot be explained logically point to a transcendent potential of sense. Psychic sensitivity, while excluded from contemporary scientific consensus is, in some form, an anthropological universal. Every culture has a concept of spirits, of mediumship or shamanic vision, so that it cannot be discarded in any through investigation of consciousness. Science may rightfully or not deny the contents of psychic claims, but it cannot deny the ubiquity of the naive expectation of the phenomenon. Like the placebo effect, we should be concerned not only with eliminating that which doesn’t fit our model, but also in explaining what it is precisely that we are excluding and why exactly it is so prevalent.

These different usages of the word sense can be seen to hint at a common thread with which we can tie together all of the major issues of philosophy of mind. Sense applies within subjectivity about subjectivity as well as to the specific inflection point between subjectivity and objectivity. Sense making bridges thought, communication, math, and language, making explicit the implicit forms and functions common to all form and function. Language in particular is to sense what the telescope and microscope were to astronomy and biology. By paying attention to the naming of words and to the etymology, we can begin to understand what the intuitive impressions of that relation have been, and derive some guidance in how to finally meet science half-way. Language teaches us about consciousness from the inside out, science teaches us about consciousness from the outside in.

For being so universal, sense seems to have a surprisingly consistent fixation on certain underlying themes. Connection and disconnection. Parts and wholes. Symmetry and opposition. Cycles and comparison. So many cultures in human history have found a cosmological anchor in designs and diagrams which feature these themes prominently. From the basic labyrinth pattern to ornate mandalas, to alchemical diagrams, the representation of nature as a graphic illustration of these themes has been unmistakable. In Western traditions in particular, such as those studied by the founders of scientific thought in the 16th and 17th centuries, the interplay between human experience and the physical world was imagined as a kind of geometric hierarchy radiating out from God. Isaac Newton and Descartes, along with GW Leibniz, Francis Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo are credited with freeing the world from this classical-archaic model inherited from Plato and Aristotle, but they were all devout students of this kind of natural philosophy. Nature, freed from the baggage of religion, could begin to be defined in its own terms, which turned out to be more orderly and reliable…to make more sense than all of the flowery designs of the past.

It is not the intention of MSR to propose that we return to a pre-Copernican worldview, nor is it to call for a repeal of any methods of science. To the contrary, MSR seeks to add new tools for science to approach subjectivity on its own terms, doing for private physics in the 21st century what the Enlightenment did for public physics in the 17th century. Where the scientific revolution tapped into the power of quantitative analysis, the next revolution should add to that an appreciation of qualitative identities. This is not as easy as it sounds (and it sounds impossible). It may well require a radical shift, an ontological pivot from an expectation of complexity built up from nothingness to an expectation of simplicity coexisting with fragmentation within a relativistic continuum of sensory ‘everythingness’.

MSR in the context of humanity’s evolving worldview

MSR places itself at the end of the line of advancing human worldviews in which one aspect of nature is philosophically alienated or sacrificed for the sake of another:

Key:

Developmental Stage: Primary entity (method of alignment) – Philosophical effect

•     Archaic/shamanic: Generic natural spirits (magic) – sacrifices objectivity for animism
•     Classical/polytheistic: Named supernatural deities (prayer) – sacrifices direct magic for empathy and devotion.
•     Axial/monotheistic: Absolute supernatural deity (religious devotion) – sacrifices personal moral authority for total devotion.
•     Enlightenment/dualistic: Impersonal deity (reason) – sacrifices animism for rigorous observation
•     Modern/scientific: Impersonal forces and laws* (engineering) – sacrifices subjectivity for abstract formulation.
•     Post-modern/existential: Pure probability** (computation) – sacrifices subjective-objective dualism with pluralistic reconciliation
•     Integral/holistic: Re-enchanted information (signifying pattern) – sacrifices impersonal perspectives with quantized layers of conscious qualities.
•     Ouroboran/reflexive: Multisense perception (motive participation) – sacrifices sacrifice with qualia-quanta reconciliation.

* intentionality becomes evacuated and automatic
**physicality becomes evacuated and theoretic

Each stage involves a stepping out of the previous system. The Integral/holistic stage steps out of all systems by considering them information. The Ouroboran stage steps out of {the system of stepping out of systems} by considering system-making and system-breaking as the final reconciliation of philosophy and physics. Within the multisense continuum, time and space (private unity and public multiplicity) are reconciled as aesthetic-participatory or sensory-motive foundation.

The pre-Enlightenment models of the universe revered the symmetry of the universe. The creedo ‘As above, so below’, as well as the Eastern concept of yin and yang cite this kind of binary complementarity as fundamental. Even after this schema was abandoned by science, the fixation on binary complementarity remains inevitable. Electromagnetism, Mass-energy, Space-time. Genetics has its interlocking set of bases. That’s only scratching the surface. The periodic table and quantum physics are overflowing with simple patterns, inversions, variations, and cycles. Despite whimsical names such as ‘charm’ and ‘strange’ quarks, the sense of personality in physics is intended ironically. The true nature of physical phenomena is seen to be completely mathematical and devoid of personality, with symmetries arising purely from the expectation of simple rules rather than any vast eternal significance. The universe is assumed to be a machine of generic, interchangeable parts.

Under the Ouroboran monism proposed by MSR, dualism itself is not as important as the capacity to appreciate differences, not only for their property of being different, but for the rich aesthetic qualities which are revealed through that capacity of sense. That capacity is deemed to be Absolute, as that which can never transcended or disconnected from. While many physicists have grasped that all of physics can be reduced to relationships, MSR takes it a critical step further to say that beneath all ‘relationships’ are the capacity to participate and perceive – to relate directly to what is related…and not merely for the purpose of receiving the structural fact of relations, but to appreciate the qualities that relations exist to produce. The purpose of the universe is not merely physical, logical, and spiritual, but overwhelmingly it is aesthetic. The primordial unit of ‘pattern’ must give way to the deeper context of pansensitivity: the gourmet cuisine of pattern creation and consumption.

MSR’s Case Against Emergence

Within the MSR website, there are several entries talking about the inadequacy of the concept of emergence when applied to consciousness emerging from unconsciousness. Briefly, emergence only has any explanatory power when applied to two phenomena which have a logical similarity. We can understand that water molecules which are tightly packed would seem to us to have the emergent property of being ice, where molecules which are contacting each other but sliding around would have the emergent property of seeming to us like a liquid. What is meant when emergence is applied to consciousness however, is not like that at all. There is no arrangement of particles in a void that is isomorphic to a flavor, color, or feeling like dizziness. Emergence which cannot be anticipated by the behavior of the fundamental phenomenon is known as Strong or Brute Emergence, and under the best of circumstances can be dismissed as an argument from ignorance. In the circumstance of consciousness emerging from objects or information processes, we are smuggling in our own evidence of experience as the entire explanation of that experience. To claim emergence of consciousness is to answer the question of why molecules seem like flavors or emotions by shrugging it off as the way that molecules seem…as if seeming could exist in physics in the absence of consciousness.

Here’s a thought experiment to consider:

Let’s say that you have a two dimensional collection of six squares in a cross formation, like this:

Now we know that this could be folded into a cube, however, couldn’t we also have a program which treats the edges as if it were a cube, but use it as a graphic character in a 2d video game? In other words, can’t we show that just because the edges and corners of this figure behave in a way which is isomorphic to a 3d figure, no cube ’emerges’ necessarily? We could run this program in Flatland without folding it up as cube and all of the computational outcomes would be the same.

The emergentist position overlooks the difference between the squares and the cube, claiming the latter not to be anything additional added on top of the flat avatar. The idealist position is that there is a difference between a cube and the avatar, and that this difference is the most important and interesting thing…the whole point is that there doesn’t need to be a cube logically, but yet there is.

Intellectual fads come and go. Even long held scientific frameworks change over time to accommodate new knowledge. For centuries Ptolemaic astronomy was presumed accurate, so much so that when anomalies were found in the predictions of its deferent and epicycle model, the response was famously to ‘add epicycles’ to make finer tuned predictions rather than to suspect what Galileo and Copernicus later found. The heliocentric revolution changed our understanding of our position in the universe from one of divine center or paradise lost to a statistical fluke in a dying cosmos. For the 1200 years between 200 and 1400 AD, why did we stick to the geocentric model? Why was it more natural to think that the universe revolved around us?

Like the fish which has no name for water, or the Flatland square who has no way to conceive of flatness as a dimension which lacks volume, it was difficult for people to doubt those assumptions that they didn’t even know they were making. The Earth feels motionless – as stable and static as anything we can imagine. Who would guess that the very property of motion is a relative condition? Once we have that piece of information, we can find, as Einstein did, examples of it everywhere – on trains, when we can’t tell whether our seat is moving forward at a constant speed or whether the train out the window is moving past us and we are standing still. One favorite thought experiment of mine is to think of a universe in which only one object exists; a smooth, ideal sphere like a ping pong ball. In this universe, nothing can be seen to move. Without making ourselves an invisible voyeur who can look around into the void, there is no true sense of space or change. There is no difference between moving and standing still because there is no frame of reference from which to compare and see that a position has changed. Video games can help us conceptualize this also. The player who pilots a spaceship avatar has only the attitude of their ship to cue their sense of acceleration when traveling through empty space.

Notice how ocean waves stop moving when seen from high above.

(Sound gif, Source)

The shift that is proposed by MSR would twist our view of the universe, so that the universe itself becomes a kind of twisting or gyrating between different ways of experiencing.

Yeats System

Yeats, like Locke and Galileo before him, conceived of the worldly half of the universe as “Primary”, which is perfectly natural considering that when we are awake we find ourselves surrounded by a physical world which is so much larger and more durable than ourselves. MSR proposes not that we invert this relation into solipsism, where internal phenomena are primary and the external world is secondary, but to see our own subjectivity as just one tier in a continuum which is much more vast and durable than even physics. Under MSR, both the dualistic Western and non-dualistic Eastern views both exist within the total continuum of sense.

The Yeats system is multiplied so that it is realism which is emergent rather than subjectivity. The aesthetic objectives of Yeats are no longer the antithesis, but the thesis and meta-thesis.

Multisense realism = The elaboration of sense into layers and modes which objectify and subjectivity.

Another way of conceiving this is as the Aumwelt.

Which brings us to Multisense continuum.

Another, earlier attempt to illustrate all of this.

---

Multisense Continuum

Multisense Realism  proposes that the cosmos is an involuted, reflexive, tessellated or ‘Ouroboran Monism’ – a non-neutral monism in which experienced presence defines itself by the projection of  its own pretended absence. What is proposed is a universal sense which modulates itself through various kinds of insensitivities; delays, maskings, distortions and diffractions. Such insensitivities or entropies, are, in their purest form, what we know to be space and time. To be clear, time is not clock time (which are measurements of spatial changes in public physical phenomena), but rather the sense of narrative sequence, of evolving stories which spiral or gyrate thematically rather than merely repeat.

It is thorough these nested diffractions of experienced sense that matter and energy can be understood as alienated experiences – experiences which have become unfamiliar to each other on some level over the history of the universal diffraction.

The primary polarity of sense is identified as a mechanistic exteriority which is

• distant or spatially extended, public, discretely embodied tangible shapes
• unconscious, deterministic, entropic (forms decay), generic
• Occidental – Western, empirical, sophisticated realism
• Logical functions driven by physical, material forces
• exomorphic effects (outer forms operating on each other publicly)
• unintentional causality, anesthetic qualities, quantitative measures
• extrinsic relations, existential quantities, observation, experimentation, doing, knowing

and an oriental or animistic interiority which is

• intimately presented, private, continuously disembodied or semi-embodied intangible phenomena
• conscious, self-determining or uncertain, signifying (appreciation develops), proprietary
• Oriental – Eastern, trans-rational, naive idealism
• Changing experiences synchronistically express different faces of eternity.
• endophoric affects (inner influences combine and separate as private feelings and thoughts)
• intentional-voluntary causality, aesthetic and immeasurable qualities.
• intrinsic properties, essential qualities, direct participation, interpretation, feeling, being

While the duality of the continuum is easy to focus on, the idea of MSR is really to transcend it in favor of more flexible and novel ways to map out other geometries and projections so that more sense is revealed:

The above diagram emphasizes the interplay between matter, energy and spacetime as functions of the diffraction of sense into qualia (personal sense), quanta (impersonal sense) and motive effect (projective sense from the personal to the impersonal). This is an alchemical type of diagram which contrasts concepts and essences. Below, the the same pattern is expressed in a hierarchical view by scale of size and frequency.

Here this flat model of the cosmos from the first person perspective has been modified to

(credit for image)

add a third dimension of multisense qualities, and their relation to scales of time and size:

Another scale or frame nested diagram of the multisense continuum:

Cosmological Formula and Frame Set View

For those who prefer symbols and/or more rigorous definitions, the MSR model of the universe can be expressed in single formula

This also maps to the frame set schema below:

Left hand Column (H←d)

The left hand columns describes the “Entropic Frames”, so called because they are governed by entropic tendencies of matter as it cools and scatters across public space. We call these phenomena ‘physics’, but under MSR, physics cannot be considered completely separate from consciousness. Our feelings and thoughts drive our actions and our actions are reflected as changes in our brain, body, and external world. MSR generally follows a convention of placing the public-physical aspects of nature on the left side of diagrams, in keeping with the sense of material science being associated with the geographical-historical-cultural turn to the West. Mainly this makes it easier to keep things straight, as it is a reminder of the West as a turning away from the naive orienting principle of subjectivity and toward a skeptical outlook of scientific exploration. The left hand column is the column of ‘disenchanted’ objects, ranging in scale from atoms to galaxies.

At the top, (H←d) represents the relation between distance d and entropy H as one where distance extends in one direction only, so that H← reiterates the second law of thermodynamics. The idea here is that entropy is only ultimately half of the total picture of nature; the half in which pubic experiences are reflected as matter, and also as entropy perpetually and irreversibly grinding down all coherent structures and functions into into incoherence and indifference.

“Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see
Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind” – Kansas

Entropy has become a rather ambiguous term in recent years. It is used in a variety of informal ways, but also in formal ways that overlap either partially or completely within physics and information science, depending on who you ask. Shannon entropy is a statistical measure of how resistant information is to compression.

“English text has fairly low entropy. In other words, it is fairly predictable. Even if we don’t know exactly what is going to come next, we can be fairly certain that, for example, there will be many more e’s than z’s, that the combination ‘qu’ will be much more common than any other combination with a ‘q’ in it, and that the combination ‘th’ will be more common than ‘z’, ‘q’, or ‘qu’. After the first few letters one can often guess the rest of the word. Uncompressed, English text has between 0.6 and 1.3 bits of entropy for each character of message.”

Thermodynamic entropy is a physical measure of how physical differences such as pressure, density, and temperature always tend to average out toward an equilibrium over time. There is a crossover between information entropy and classical entropy in that higher temperatures, for example, require more information to be completely described than lower temperatures. It is easier to compress the description of an ice cube crystal than it is a cloud of steam. Because MSR is focused on perception however, a new kind of aesthetic entropy must be introduced. If we were to make a video tape of a glass of ice melting for example, it would actually require more information to remain uncompressed in an mpeg to describe the image of the ice in its various states of melting than it would to record the glass of still water that ends up sitting there after all of the ice has melted. The transition from measuring microstates of water molecules to measuring optical states of a moving image actually reverses the relation between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy, so that the image of still water has a lower information entropy (more like English than Chinese) than the image of melting ice.

Another example comes from Wikipedia:

“Chinese version Wikipedia points out that Chinese context has much higher entropy than English. Each character of Chinese has about -log2(1/2500)=11.3bits. It is almost three times higher than English. However, the discussion could be much more sophisticated than that simple calculation because of the usage of words, not only characters, and redundancy factors.”

Here we can consider another example where the quality of perception plays a role in entropy. To someone who does not read Chinese, all Chinese characters may seem indistinct. Like the language which Charlie Brown’s teachers speak, communication which is not understood can still be communicated about, but the content of the message is obscured. In a game like Pictionary or Charades, people who can read no Chinese can communicate with each other that a message is in Chinese simply by drawing nonsense characters which they know will remind the other person of Chinese writing. A common stereotype can be called forth with low entropy gestures, even though what is being stereotyped is high entropy such that the shared ignorance of the Chinese language serves to reduce information entropy.

This ties in with Searle’s Chinese Room. We can translate the entire thought experiment in terms of a high entropy conversation going on outside of the room which is being facilitated by a manipulation of low entropy images (really mechanical functions) inside the room. The man inside the room only needs to match up logical-syntactic relations, so that even with a ‘systems reply’ view of the room, the Chinese speaker outside of the room is required to add the additional semantic information.

These examples are only the tip of the iceberg which MSR hopes to melt by recognizing that perceptual sense and cognitive sense-making are the ultimate factors in defining entropy. Rather than being a fixed constant ‘out-there’, MSR models entropy as an intrinsically integrated relation between differing frames of perceptual reference. The measurement of microstates is, after all, a very recent technology for us, and we should not conflate the seeming objectivity of our measuring instruments with the assumption of perception independence. We still only know what our instruments can tell us, and our instruments only know what they themselves are able to detect and record. Under MSR, low level physical states are so distant from our own high entropy quality of awareness that our instruments may also be amplifying our biases. Physics may seem to be a low entropy language of generic mathematical relations, but under the MSR Cosmological formula, that is exactly what we would predict from this ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ view of matter that we have as human beings. Even though our science can translate the Chinese of physics into English it is still only the English version of stereotyped Chinese which is being considered. The remaining semantic content of the cosmos is not only truncated into the unknown, but because we are not aware that anything is missing, the really important stuff becomes an unknown unknown, hidden behind a mirage of causal closure.

Within MSR entropy is understood to be a symptom of insensitivity, the loss of empathy that corresponds to ‘distance’ in the literal and figurative sense of the word: Alienation, separation, objectification, and unfamiliarity. Originality and uniqueness dissolve into generic stereotyping, or at least it appears that way on this Western side of the cosmic balance sheet.

From an information entropy perspective, d would be understood as the mismatch of perceptual frames of reference. Distance is degradation of sensory unity. The conjecture here is that it is this loss of sensitivity which leads to perceptions of noise and insignificance, but also to the specialization of sense into distinct modalities. It is proposed that the magnitude of this mismatch increases logarithmically, leading to the breakpoints shown as the horizontal bands on the frame set chart above. What is perceived as empty space to us on the macro scale is the summary of sensory gaps on lower microphysical levels that fall beneath the threshold of detection of ourselves and our bodies. H←d is the attenuation of perceived significance and also depletion of autonomy or motive. Things appear to become more automatic and mechanical from a distance. A city seen from the air for instance, does not seem to contain people who we can relate do directly, but rather it appears more like an ant colony, with cars and pedestrians being diminished to an almost equivalent image. This sense of the world as a toy brings up the relation of size in our psychology. Childhood would be very different if we were born as giants and gradually shrank to human size. Our capacity to relate to things and people has a lot to do with scale. Sci-Fi films from the 1950s played on the monstrosity of ants and flies when blown up to an enormous scale. This whole area of scale, distance, empathy, and significance is strangely overlooked in philosophy of mind, but MSR places it at the very center of what and how objectivity arises as the inversion of boundaryless subjectivity.

“ωª ↑”
At the bottom left of the chart, ωª ↑ denotes that frames on this Western side of the chart are controlled by bottom-up determinism, and that they nested within each other by telescoping scales of physical size. The nesting is represented by the symbol ‘ª‘. The intent here is to refer to the literal hierarchy of material forms and functions, from the microcosmic to astrophysical, as well as the immaterial principles of logic and  geometry which are in some sense being embodied as matter. The causal sensibility of this hierarchy appears to be governed by blind indifference and maximum insensitivity is represented by the bottom up (↑) arrow. This is the arrow of unintentional effect, of the mechanical motive to do purely for the sake of doing. In MSR, the entire Western conception of the universe is reduced to this part of the formula: ωª ↑(H←d). Note that in the Cosmological Formula being discussed here, the Western half of the formula actually appears on the opposite side as the charts…which is a function of formulas being Western and read left to right. Confusing, but there is some historical influences coming through there that seem to want to be preserved.

Right hand Column (-ℵ↔Ω)

In the previous “Western” half of the chart, the public half of the universe is seen to be constructing itself probabilistically without effort or awareness. This type of passive causality is known as teleonomy and is the motor of natural selection. Teleonomy is the reverse of teleology in that whatever evolves does so because of inevitable patterns that happen to accumulate over time rather than by conscious intention and planning. This type of causality is exemplified in Laplace distributions, Brownian motion, etc. Randomly moving particles in a void is the very embodiment of the bottom of the left hand column of the chart; the lowest possible ª of ω. (lowest structural level of automatic quantitative forces). In direct contrast to this quantum mechanical picture of the universe decomposed to boiling bits, the perspective of the self is defined by teleology and stability in the face of change. If anything, human awareness resembles nothing less than a collection of randomly colliding particles. Our awareness is presented not as a container of objects in space, but an semi-contained ‘stream’ of phenomenal subjects.

The natural or naive perspective had become so alien and repugnant to science in the previous two centuries that it is still challenging to overcome the stigma. There are good reasons why this is the case, but they are not purely scientific reasons. To the contrary, the disqualification of subjective phenomena has more to do with psychological bias. What began as a perfectly valid concern for rigorous controls in the scientific method has, in some cases, become an ideology of cynicism which does not reflect an interest in objectivity, but rather is an emotional reaction to the frightening unreliability and potential for fantasy inherent in personal awareness. A more neutral position would be to acknowledge that subjective phenomena are every bit as likely to contain valuable information about the universe as any other phenomenon, but that information has been problematic to gather thus far. Even if subjectivity only presides over a hopelessly distorted fisheye lens view of the world that scarcely connects with science, the phenomena that it contains is every bit as defining of nature as physical laws. In the realm of subjectivity, the hard problem of consciousness is no problem at all, and dreams merge surreal landscapes with mind-bridging metaphors. The problems of philosophy are resolved in dreams already, we have only to understand how dreams might have made themselves more real through spatial and temporal extensions.

In the 21st century, with Relativity and the Observer principle of quantum mechanics behind us, it is time that we begin to factor in subjectivity on a deep level into our cosmology. We should recognize that all functions of physics and mathematics begin with the unacknowledged presence of an observer or participant in the process. The ‘observer’ in physics is treated as a single abstract point of view or frame of reference which has no properties except to localize some function. With relativity, Einstein saw that the presumption of a single omniscient observer was only a theoretical device, and that observer-dependent perspectives are actually critical to defining physics. No longer a fixed Newtonian clockwork, relativity provided real evidence for frames of reference within the fabric of the universe itself. It is my contention that General Relativity did not go far enough, and that subjectivity is not only a real feature of physics, but that the underlying context that subjectivity is based on is the primary feature of all of nature. The fact of subjectivity as an aesthetic-participatory phenomon literally changes everything, and the universe which contains even a single sensation is, according to MSR’s cosmology of the Sole Entropy Well, the only universe that has ever been or can ever be. Physics exists within sense, not the other way around.

The guiding principle of this Eastern, ‘Orienting’ half of the chart then, is not result of the Western half of matter in space, but is instead the foundation beneath all matter and public appearances. The right hand column is not an epiphenomenon of ωª ↑ but it is the top down principle of (↓) of telos and time, ºt, which precedes all spatial extension. The implication here is that before there was unintention, there was intention, and before there was intention, there was sense (-ℵ). The symbols “-ℵ↔Ω” tell the story of sense and motive, oscillating beyond time to create experiences which in turn create the experience of ‘time’. “-ℵ” plays on the use of Aleph numbers to denote infinite cardinality in mathematics. In MSR, negative Aleph stands for the underlying coherence which precedes cardinality. It is the same as pansensitivity (ॐ), only the -ℵ specifies the aspect of pansensitivity which is like the womb of all information and structure. Pansensitivity is the totality of feeling and experience, but sense is the localization of that universal sense to accommodate discrete, nameable identities. Sense can be thought of as the ‘phoric’ principle, the carrying or ‘ference’ of sensory presence and sense-making ‘references’ or ‘representations’ (all of which are cardinal identities or particles of ℵ) . The “º” glyph is the masculine counterpart to the feminine ordinal symbol “ª“, emphasizing the hierarchical nature of experience isn’t borne of passive accumulation of structures in space, but of an active striving for improvement of experienced qualities.

Rather than distance and entropy, phenomena on the right side is governed by the opposite principles; preferential distinction, perceptual participation, and motivation by both promise (positively charged significance º) and threat (negatively charged significance º). Just as the universe has developed different frames within which the drama of existence takes place, MSR speculates that every experience in the universe is part of a single overall experience. This proposed absolute perceptual frame, which is pansensitivity (ॐ), stands for the Absolute, or Totality, but has many other names in mystical and philosophical traditions, including Brahman, Tao and Ein Sof.  The Ankh sign is related as well, but for those who are not interested in such concepts, the Absolute can be understood simply as ‘Eternity’.

---

The Cosmological Formulation specifies how pansensitivity (ॐ) diffracts itself reflexively into an increasingly tessellated, self-modulating spectrum of aesthetic contexts.

The drawback of this model is that it we lose the parsimony of the Strong version of the hypothesis, since there is now a brute emergence being posited beneath the quantum level. Quantum mechanical observations seem much more in line with what you would see of a sense-motive experience viewed through the back end. It is what thoughts and feelings look like to in a very low resolution, unfiltered form.

• Exotic UPP:
  Particles = Physical symptoms of metaphysical entities, Photon = Particle/Wave
  Classical Limit = In the eye of the beholder.

Atoms or molecules might have some kind of non-local collective presence. As certain trees and fungi are understood to be part of the same organism under the surface, who is to say that all of the gold in the universe doesn’t exist as one thing on some level, especially if what we see as gold is just the tip of the iceberg of what it ‘really’ is.

• Reductio Ad Absurdum UPP:
  Photons = Many Worlds
  Classical Limit = Illusory

In defiance of Occam’s Razor, this scenario proposes an radical proliferation of consciousness throughout the cosmos. As in the Dr. Seuss story “Horton Hears A Who’, any speck of dust could be a planet in miniature, teeming with a civilization of fully developed anthropological-scale beings. Anything and everything could be alive in its own frame of reference, perhaps even patterns themselves, information, empty space, etc.

Pseudo-Retrocausation:

To take the UPP conjecture further into multisense realism, time emerges from phenomenology, so that patterns such as in the double slit experiment (where a single particle probabilistically finds its way into an invisible pattern) would make sense as a teleological or retrocausal phenomenon. Patterns in photodetectors and human minds are drawn out of entropy by a top-down strange attractor, a transcendental object which guides them from beyond our view.