Multisense Realism

This is a first draft response to David Roden’s 2013 paper “NATURE’S DARK DOMAIN: AN ARGUMENT FOR A NATURALIZED PHENOMENOLOGY“

Early in the paper the following claim is made:

“phenomenology is in much the same epistemological relationship to its own subject matter as descriptive (i.e.‘phenomenological’) physics or biology are to physical and biological reality”

Any description necessarily exists first as a language artifact (Let’s call that quale 1, so L = Q1) that is interpreted intellectually (I = Q2) to refer our thinking (T = Q3) about some percept (P = Q4). The referential nature of thinking makes it a specialized type of sense modality that participates in semiosis. To think about the sky is (thinking(sky)), a specific example of (accessing concepts(percepts)). 

A description of the sky is thinking about (language(concepts(percepts)), where language itself is (percepts(concepts)). So a description of the sky is a perception of language (written or verbal sense appearances – graphic or phonetic qualia) that refers us to our shareable thoughts about experiences of the sky…including sights, memories, associations, knowledge and communications of all of those from other people and texts.

To the extent that descriptions/language, thoughts, and thoughts-about experiences are different from each other, the difference is in the category of qualia or type of aesthetic presentation. A word is an appearance in the sense modality of sight or sound which can be paired to thoughts in the sense-making modality that I call cogitative. Cogitative qualia are thoughts, communication, understanding, and learning. Words, including descriptions are paired qualia such that experiences of certain visible or aural qualia can be cogitatively connected to (understood to mean) communicable thoughts-about X, where X is percepts (includes concepts and objects).

To the extent that descriptions/language, thoughts, and thoughts-about experiences are the same, the unity is in the continuity of the local experience across multiple modalities of sense and sense-making. This sentence is different from the previous sentence, but both sentences appear within the same larger experience of this written response. 

All of this to say that I agree that in one sense phenomenology is like biology or physics in that it is descriptions of thoughts-about X, but I disagree in another sense because in the case of phenomenology, X is the entire category of percepts-that-appear directly-in-local-experience (X(L(E))) as well as percepts that are received indirectly into local experience from non-local experience ((X(L(E)(NL(E))), such as philosophical texts.

Unlike in physics, where I can never touch a distant planet to verify that it indeed feels like a tangible object, phenomenological discourse can point out that experiences of touching objects exist. Further, I can understand that my direct experience of touching objects means that I have experiences of sensitivity to experiences of tangible qualities. Those two understandings – that I access direct experiences of touching objects and that this means I have access to a tactile-haptic modality of tangibility, which is the sense modality or aesthetic context of tangible textures and sensations – cannot be denied or disqualified from reality. All experiences are real experiences by definition.

Whether in a dream or waking experience, picking up a baseball is presented as a tactile-haptic percept. Physical or biological descriptions, however, are one or more steps removed from certain reality. A point of bright light that we see in the morning sky may be a visible image associated with a distant object, and that distant object may be the planet Phosphorus. A point of bright light that we see in the evening sky may be a visible image associated with the planet Hesperus. We can use measurements and reasoning to further understand that Phosphorus and Hesperus are actually different names for a single planet called Venus. Venus experienced as a visible image from Earth at two different times of day are different experiences with different aesthetic qualities, even though we understand that they are images associated with a single planetary object in outer space.

Even though astronomers are quite certain in 2026, that Venus appears to be a planet in our solar system, astrologers propose that planets appearing in the sky, while being tangible objects in public space, are also like parts of a celestial clock in which cyclically repeating patterns of archetypal themes are expressed individually, socially, and collectively in conscious experience. To an astrologer, the significance of Venus is not its chemical composition, atmosphere, etc but its association with metaphors for themes of social pleasures, personal attraction, sensuality, receiving gifts or nutrition, etc.

The point that I’m getting to is that astrology and astronomy have more in common with each other than phenomenology has with any other discipline. Phenomenology, while including more than only the direct experience (X(L(E))), even the non-local ((X(L(E)(NL(E))) experiences relate specifically to local experience. Disciplines like astronomy, astrology and astrophysics relate specifically to non local experiences that may or may not exist in the way that they are interpreted or perceived locally. They may not exist physically at all. Dark energy for example, may exist only as a scientific concept and not as a tangible phenomenon that influences the motion of tangible objects in outer space. Roden’s claim that “phenomenology cannot tell us what phenomenology is really ‘about’” is therefore false. Phenomenology is about local experience, and local experience necessarily exists. Physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics etc tell us about how local experience relates to non-local experiences that may or may not exist.

Another claim: “the domain of phenomenology is not the province of a self-standing, autonomous discipline but must be investigated with any empirically fruitful techniques that are open to us (e.g. computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, etc.).” is a partial non-sequitur. It is true that talking about local experience with each other can assist us in understanding it, it can also increase confusion and misunderstanding. This is doubly true in the case of talking about neurology and computation. It may assist our understanding, or it may lead our understanding completely astray.

The concluding claim “Finally, it entails that while a naturalized phenomenology should be retained as a descriptive, empirical method, it should not be accorded transcendental authority.” takes the partial truth that non-local experience can sometimes help us understand local experience and inflates it to a proscription that is actually deceptive. It implies that local experiences of tangible objects (such as brains and technological devices we use as computers) should be accorded authority that can transcend that of local experience – even when the topic being authorized is local experience. In my view, this is misguided.

The honest application of authority over matters of local experience belongs to local experience itself. That is not to say that non-local experience cannot add to and deepen our understanding of local experience, but it should never transcend it completely. Whether the light we see in the sky is associated with the hypothetical planet Hesperus or the measured, photographed planet Venus or astrological archetype Venus changes nothing about the original fact of the visible appearance of a point of light in the sky. Phenomenology should always and only refer to that original fact and not be recontextualized by non-local experiences inferred through physical instruments, logical measurements, scientific reasoning, etc. Aesthetic qualia should not be disqualified and replaced by concepts of anesthetic properties, regardless of whether those properties happen to also exist aesthetically or not.

Moving on to the Introduction section of the paper:

“Naturalists think that human knowledge is the product of fallible animals whose biology does not equip them to reliably track the structure of reality”

This makes me wonder if naturalists subject themselves to this same judgment. If naturalists are humans, then their biology too does not equip them to reliably track the structure of the reality even of naturalism. It’s the same mistake as above – failing to recognize that the grounding of all experience is experience itself, not the specific experiences of measuring and analyzing certain features of certain experiences and applying them to nature in general.

“They regard earlier attempts to carve out foundational truth claims secure from revision by the findings of science, history and observation as conspicuous failures, for they misinterpret anthropological facts about how we are disposed to think as necessary truths”

But how do they know that their contemporary attempts to disqualify previous claims in that way are not also misinterpretations based on their own fallible biases and assumptions? Once we introduce epistemological doubt into local experience itself, how can we place our own sophisticated non-local extensions to local experience above local experience in matters that should pertain only to local experience? Naturalists are, to borrow a trope, sawing off the branch that they are sitting on.

” James Ladyman and Don Ross remark ‘Naturalism is, among other things, the metaphysical hypothesis that the objective world is not constrained by any reasons or standards of reasonableness’.”

How can that be considered scientific? It seems like a reasonable-sounding way of giving open ended authority to unreasonable conclusions. Reason cannot negate itself or it was never reason in the first place.

“For example, speculations about the physical basis of conscious experience are frequently held to be irrelevant to describing ‘how it feels’”

The language here telegraphs an injection of naturalism. To use the phrase “how it feels” opens the door to an entity outside of feeling where none may exist. The feeling is presented directly. Any other associations with physical appearances in other sense modalities such as touch, sight, or cogitation are different perceptions…different ways of ‘feeling’ that exist in parallel rather than as a rationally or empirically necessary consequence of each other.

Let’s say that we feel our mood become more euphoric. The phenomenologist accepts that fact on its face, while the naturalist may begin by saying that this mood change is caused by a release of dopamine in the brain (somehow), and then further extrapolate euphoria as ‘simply how dopamine feels in the brain’.

In the final disqualification, the naturalist feels that the authority of objectively measurable work on dopamine transcends merely subjective reports of feeling euphoric altogether and that ‘how dopamine feels’ is an ’emergent property’ (somehow) of neurochemistry, or worse, an ‘illusion’ that needs no scientific explanation and is irrelevant to our understanding of nature. In a sense, the defense of naturalism in Roden’s paper attempts to do the same thing to phenomenology as a whole. It is to legitimize the position that naturalism is justified in treating phenomenology as a possibly illusory study of illusions mistaken for transcendental facts of nature.

“The closure assumption implies that a neural network model explaining how our experience of time is generated could throw no light on what that experience is like” 

It’s not that a neural network model can’t throw light onto the nature of experience; it is that it can only add additional associations to the experience, not replace the fact of the local experience with the hypothesis of another non-local experience. In addition, the use of the idiom “what (that experience) is like” opens the same door to a chain of disqualification as “how it feels” with the implication of a separate ‘it’ that ‘is’ (really) what feeling refers to. If we apply the same language to physics, for example, we would say that energy is what part of an equation “is like”, or “how it feels for matter moving against inertial forces”. Naturalism just as easily disqualify itself as a branch of phenomenology about a branch of mistakenly objectified phenomenology (natural science).

I did not intend to go through each sentence of this paper with a fine-toothed comb, but it seems necessary to point out the instances where language is loaded with subtle bias. Continuing here…

“These can be phenomenologically described by suspending ordinary assumptions about the mind-independent existence of objects and directing attention to how we are aware of objects as mind independent.”

I object here to the use of the term ‘ordinary’. For most people in most places in human history, there was nothing ordinary about assuming that anything in the natural world was mind-independent. Animism and shamanism are common examples of ordinary views of nature for thousands of years. Events in the natural world were treated as expressions of supernatural influence: the will of God/gods, or a reflection of a universe that is cosmopsychist rather than mind-independent.

It is only the more recently developed Western ideologies of dualism and physicalism that assume the possibility of mind-independent phenomena, which are assumed to include objects. On closer inspection however, even the assumption of mind-independence applies only to the subset of objects perceived during waking states of conscious experience and not to dreams or visions.

Even under physicalism, objects that are mind-dependent are quite ordinary, it’s just that physicalism assumes that waking states of consciousness acquaint us more directly with reality than dreaming does. Because of this, we can truthfully say that 1) even the assumption of mind-independence is certainly mind-dependent, and 2) the possibility of mind-independence is forever hypothetical.

Contemporary naturalism seems to place its descriptions and reasoning outside of both phenomenology and anthropology, as if it were an immaculate conduit to facts independent of all means of fact acquisition (sense and sense-making in conscious experience).

“One form of this is that phenomenological claims don’t have to be scientifically or theoretically-informed as long as the things they describe are pre-theoretically or ‘intuitively’ given to the conscious subject.”

Here I take issue with the false equivalence of pre-theoretic claims with intuition. Intuition is only one form of perception. The color blue is a pre-theoretic visible appearance, but blue is not intuitive, nor is the claim of seeing blue intuitive. Blue is presented directly – not necessarily only to a ‘subject’ but perhaps in visibility itself.

While typical states of human consciousness include a sense of separation between private and public facing perceptions, some states of consciousness include no such strong boundary. It is possible to see a blue shape without also experiencing a sense of subjectivity or being a private self. There is no convincing reason to presume that visible qualia such as color are any more closely associated with subjectivity or intuition than intellectual qualia such as arithmetic. My 2+3 could vary slightly from your 2+3 just as my green could vary from your green. The possibility of some subjective variation doesn’t make numbers or colors subjective. Naturalism is no less vulnerable to conflation with subjectivity and intuition than phenomenology. If it seems otherwise, that too is phenomenological/subjective/intuitive.

Moving on to the Raffman discussion, my view on qualia diverges from what is stated in the paper as the classic quale:

“The classic quale is a simple, intrinsically subjective, intuitable property of experience.”

Under my Multisense Realism (MSR) framework, qualia are aesthetic appearances of any kind. They are the minimal and maximal fabric of existence in all possible universes. Objectivity as well as subjectivity are classes of qualia, as is intuition and dark or non-intuitive presentations. In my determination, the idea of classic quale as stated by Roden derives from a history of idealistic philosophy that conflated conscious experience with subjectivity, the mind, thinking, or intuition.

In a true nondual, cosmopsychist framework, and specifically in MSR, qualia are glimpses of a single, eternal Totality of conscious experience. Intuition is different from thought, cogitation is different from sight, personal experience is different from subpersonal experience, etc, but all experience is irreducibly aesthetic regardless of whether particular aesthetic modalities are accessible in any given ‘tunnel’ or scope of participation/access to the Totality.

This part/whole relationship applies to several of the examples discussed in the paper. Visual graphs plotted from intellectual measurements using tangible acoustic instruments can be associated with aural qualia of hearing pitch or timbre, but that association can only be made from another type of experience that includes united access to separate specific visual, intellectual, tangible, and aural qualia.

Any isomorphism between a sound wave and sound is derived from cross-modal perception. Intellectually we can infer that the compelling nature of that isomorphism indicates an ontological commonality between acoustic pressure and aural qualia, however if we consider that aural qualia can and do exist in a dream without any correspondence to acoustic pressure, we should conclude that ontological commonality is possible rather than necessary.

Even though we call acoustic pressure fluctuations ‘sound waves’, deafness and dreams prove that the name is a folk term rather than an authoritative description. In an absolute sense, sound waves are not sound, nor do acoustic conditions and aural conditions necessarily depend on each other. Because we are using tangible instruments to measure tangible qualia, any reference to aural qualia is smuggled in by our inferences from our cross-modal perceptual access rather than naturalistic ontology. Synesthesia could associate acoustic stimulation of the cochlea with colors instead of sound. Music finds emotional qualia in acoustic stimulation.

By itself, neither acoustic activity nor the visual graphing of sampled data from measuring that activity with tangible instruments rationally entails any such thing as sound/hearing. Just as Mary can study the optical and electromagnetic properties associated with the color red without ever seeing it, a completely deaf scientist can study acoustics without any impairment. In the same way, no physical phenomena rationally entail *any* other phenomena to ’emerge’ or conjoin with it. A French painting is not a pipe, and sometimes a cigar in a dream is just a good smoke.

Touching on section 3. The Phenomenology of Time, Roden states that “Temporality is a central ingredient in most phenomenological accounts of reality or transcendence.”. While that may be true, in my understanding, such a centrality is premature and misguided. The Multisense Realist view is that what we call time is an appearance within certain states of consciousness, but that appearance is part of a larger continuum of time-like topologies of causality that can be accessed through different modalities of awareness and perception.

Linear time/causality appears in what I call the phoric range of awareness wherever personal sensations of duration are perceptually juxtaposed against what MSR calls morphic appearances. In other words, what Roden calls temporality is a phenomenological appearance that people access by repeated looking at a physical clock and inferring ontological unity with their personal experience of duration and memory. It is a semiotic bridge between the personal subject’s intrapersonal percepts and an interpersonally perceived consensus of impersonal objects. 

The bridge is, however, one way. The clock is an object that we use to ‘tell time’. In our absence, the object does not tell or keep time; it simply moves according to the physical forces that happen to be present. Physical forces may be operating on larger scales of experience than human-limited awareness, so relative to subjective feelings of duration, objects whose movements are calibrated by impersonal scales of experience are more reliable and consistent, but that doesn’t mean they are any closer to an ontologically derived authority.

When we feel that ‘time flies when you’re having fun’, we may be expressing a sensitivity to the nature of ‘time’ that is more nuanced than a mechanical object can measure. In some sense, time may be nothing but a false normalization of events that overlooks the significance of those events. The significance of events may exert a kind of ‘gravitational’ lensing that is equally or perhaps more ontological than what we think we are measuring with clocks and calendars. 

It isn’t ‘really’ 2026; we just have agreed to use a particular calendar system of quantitative coordinates to organize our interactions. The more ontological coordination may be generated by, for, and within a certain state of consciousness. Beyond that specific state of consciousness which is mapped on the diagram on the center left as Classical Time (Morphic, Metric), MSR suggests several other modes of time:

Phoric time (center right) that appears in our personal sense of duration within interiorized experience

Transpersonal or meta-phoric time (top right) that can appear in ‘higher*’ states of consciousness

Relativistic space-time (top left) that was described by Einstein’s theories.

Subpersonal-semaphoric time (bottom right) that centers on how willful participation fractures the fourth wall to change the course of history, and

Quantum-reversible time (bottom left) that is probabilistic and relies on what I call hemi-morphic appearances of quantum observations**

Note that there is an advantage to conceiving of this diagram in terms of East and West rather than Right and Left. The Eastern or Oriented perspective has philosophical connotations with holistic, nondualistic, animistic, idealistic and solipsistic appearances while the Western or Occidented perspective has the opposite-conjugate connotations in reductionism, dualism, physicalism, mechanism, and what I call nilipsism – the ablation of the Self from nature.

There is also a correlation with psychological theories that relate to what I call the continuum of sense, such as Autistic-Psychotic spectrum, Tough and Tender mindedness, Rigidity vs Chaos, Thick vs Thin boundaries, Empathizing-Systemizing, Right and Left hemisphere dominance, gender stereotypes, and more.

Moving on to the Husserl discussion…

“The very existence of the object is thus understood in terms of its transcendence of temporally informed modes of presentation. Temporally informed modes of presentation are thus conceptually prior in the order of philosophical explanations to what they present.”

Just because modes of presentation are *also* temporally informed does not mean that they are limited to temporality. I can see a blue fire hydrant get run over by a truck, but that doesn’t mean that sight is any more dependent on any particular moment in time than the fire hydrant is. The fire hydrant can only exist in some mode of presentation – it must be seen or touched to exist as a fire hydrant, but it doesn’t mean that everyone has to be able to see or touch it. We can understand that a fire hydrant can still be seen even after we’re dead, but that doesn’t mean that fire hydrants or images ‘of’ blue fire hydrants can exist in a universe that lacks visible or tangible qualia.

“In Husserlian terms, they belong to the constituted time of the world, rather than to the transcendentally constitutive features of subjectivity”

This goes back to the erroneous conflation of qualia with subjectivity that I mentioned previously. Time doesn’t have to belong to a mind-independent world; it only has to belong to states of mind that access experience beyond the personal scope to include impersonal scopes. “The world” and the sense of linear time are appearances in impersonal scopes of personally accessed conscious experience.

Roden’s conclusion “Phenomenological time is just a time among many, with no special epistemological heft.” is true also under MSR with the proviso that he is using ‘phenomenological’ to refer to phoric/personal appearances of time/causality. Because the other five categories of time depicted above are not personal but transpersonal, subpersonal, and impersonal (on the mega, macro, and micro scales), MSR agrees that linear time arises out of only one category of awareness relating to one other category of awareness with no absolute epistemological heft.

MSR disagrees that this lack of heft is due to the other categories being grounded in anything more ontological than conscious experience. To the contrary, ordinary Western adult consciousness very much assigns epistemological heft to consensus readings of clock time over the other categories of time perception. If phenomenological describes conscious experience that is universal rather than subjective, then all six types of time in the diagram are each epistemologically supreme within their respective states of awareness. The whole continuum of six-time is both ontologically and phenomenologically prioritized.

Phenomenology, at least in my MSR framework, need not be subjective. I shy away from using terms like phenomenology for that reason that they are loaded with connotations of subjectivity or interiority. I try to use terms that point to a more primitive ontology of nature as nested aesthetic-participatory phenomena. Call it universal qualia, call it dream stuff, call it appearances or seeming, but it is the fabric not only of the only universe that we can ever know, but of the only universe that ever can be known or contacted in any way.

Berkeley was right in saying esse est percipi but too presumptive in linking perception to a necessary focal point source outside of perception (a person, or God). Focal points, in my understanding, including God, can also only ever exist by virtue of their being perceived – presented aesthetically in an experience. Experience can be personal but that doesn’t mean that a person could be anything other than an experience. It’s all experience. Not even God can unconsciously invent consciousness.

“Perhaps I am making an elementary error in treating the temporal continuum as a complex object with a real infinity of occurrent parts”

I think that the error that most everyone has been making is presuming a single ontological scope of “Now” rather than recognizing that now can refer to a present experience on any scale. Now it is the 21st century. Now it is 13:59:35.593460376 PM EDT. Now it is time for me to write this sentence. Now the Sun and Earth exist as separate objects. It all depends on what scope of awareness is privileged. MSR addresses this kind of mereological ambiguity in what I call the Non-Well-Founded Identity Principle.

I won’t go into the details here, but generally, identity is a spectrum ranging from finite cohesive units to infinitely adhesive unity. How that spectrum is accessed depends on what modalities of awareness are available. The state of consciousness determines whether now is an infinitesimally narrow slice of an infinite object of occurrences or now is a timelessly timeful occurrence that has no beginning, end, or unitary law of succession – an unbounded totality of spontaneous dreaming of times.

I’ll conclude by saying that I liked David Roden’s work here, and while my disagreements with what it says are many, I think that they stem from a difference between his intention to engage with the canon of phenomenological philosophy and my intention to explain the ‘big picture’ of nature in a way that transcends prior phenomenological and naturalistic frameworks. Between the two, phenomenology at least correctly addresses conscious experience as the sole fundamental ontology, but it has gotten into trouble by conflating conscious experience with subjectivity, intuition, mind, thinking, and typical waking states of human awareness rather than the less presumptive description of conscious experience as MSR does: Nested aesthetic-participatory phenomena.

*more adhesive to the “Absolute” Holos/Totality, but also more psychotic-leaning from the phoric perspective

**where particle/wave and entanglement/contextuality dichotomies are an either/or.