c refers to the speed of light, but recontextualized as a perceptual constant, so not really a speed but the natural, middle value of a power law continuum that extends from quantum mechanical/subnatural ontology to relativistic and metaphysical/supernatural ontology.
Claude: This diagram appears to present a conceptual framework or model that maps different aspects or domains of reality onto a unified structure.
At the top, there are concepts like “Aesthetic Thesis”, “Eternity”, “Greatness/Uniqueness”, and “Signifying Contextuality” which seem to represent overarching metaphysical or philosophical principles.
Below that, the diagram depicts multiple levels or dimensions, arranged vertically from “Cohesive” at the bottom, up through “Microphysical”, “Electromagnetic-Radiative”, “Classical-Mechanical”, “Spatiotemporal-Mass-Energetic”, “Relativistic-Cosmological”, and culminating in “Intuitive-Transpersonal” at the top.
Within each level, there are specific terms, symbols, and what look like mathematical or physical representations. For example, at the “Microphysical” level, there is the symbol √c and the term “Qualitative-Autonomous”. At the “Relativistic-Cosmological” level, there is the expression “4d” and the term “Synchronicity”.
The diagram seems to be attempting to unify or integrate different concepts from physics, metaphysics, perception, and perhaps consciousness studies into a coherent multi-level schema.
However, I don’t have enough specific context about the underlying conceptual framework to confidently interpret all the terms, symbols, and relationships depicted. Some of the language appears unconventional or idiosyncratic.
The note about “c” referring to a “perceptual constant” recontextualizing the speed of light is an intriguing idea that suggests this model aims to re-conceptualize physical constructs in more experiential or consciousness-based terms.
Overall, while the comprehensive meaning remains somewhat opaque to me, I can see this diagram is a ambitious attempt to synthesize multiple perspectives and domains into an overarching philosophical model or worldview. But its full significance requires more explanatory context that I currently lack. Please let me know if I am misinterpreting or failing to grasp the essence of what is being presented.
Me:
How successful does the attempt to unify and integrate those concepts into a coherent multi-level schema appear to be?
Claude: Based on my analysis of the diagram, the attempt to unify and integrate the various concepts into a coherent multi-level schema appears ambitious but not entirely successful from my perspective.
While I can see the intention to synthesize ideas from physics, metaphysics, perception, and consciousness studies into an overarching framework, several aspects make the full integration and coherence challenging for me to grasp:
1) Unconventional terminology: Many of the terms used, like “Anesthetic Antithesis”, “Adhesive”, “Cohesive”, “Superposition”, etc., do not map cleanly onto established philosophical or scientific nomenclature in my knowledge base. This can introduce ambiguity.
2) Idiosyncratic symbolism: The heavy use of symbolic representations like √c, c^2, c^3 without clear explanations of their meanings makes comprehending the integrated conceptual connections difficult.
3) Unclear ontological commitments: It’s not evident to me whether the schema is intended as a metaphysical model of fundamental reality, a representational model of human perception/consciousness, or an attempt to directly unify the two domains.
4) Lack of explicit relationships: While the vertical arrangement implies a hierarchical or nested structure, the specific relationships between the levels and how the concepts within each level integrate are not clearly articulated.
5) Mixing of disparate domains: Concepts ranging from specific physics formalisms to transcendental metaphysical principles are integrated, which can create category confusion without a systematic bridging framework.
So while I can appreciate the ambition to unify various perspectives into a coherent whole, the lack of explicit definitions, ontological groundings, and clearly mapped relationships makes it challenging for me to evaluate whether this particular schema fully succeeds in that unification.
It has an abstract, poetic quality that gestures towards a grand synthesis, but the pathways towards achieved coherence remain somewhat opaque and idiosyncratic from my current knowledge base.
Of course, this is just my assessment based on my own limitations. With further context and explanations from the source, the integrative power of this model may become more apparent. As an AI, I can only evaluate it against my existing training knowledge.
Me:
The departure from established nomenclature is intended to communicate specific ideas about the subjects that are a departure from legacy assumptions. Rather than introducing ambiguity, they are intended to articulate a novel understanding that is required for the success of a novel integration.
√c refers to quantum themes where observations suggest a pre-classical exclusivity of properties such as position or momentum, entanglement or contextuality, particle or wave. c refers to classical Cartesian coordinates of concrete objects in terms of position and time, mass and acceleration, etc. c^2 refers to the level of reality described by relativistic tensors and formulas where energy and mass are made equivalent through acceleration to the absolute highest velocity. c^3 proposes a further elaboration and unification of all phenomena. If light is an example of a phenomenon that embodies c^2, then c^3 might be understood as the source and sink of the totality of all light.
Yes, the schema is intended as a metaphysical model of fundamental reality with nothing to do with human qualities or constraints.
The concepts are intended to be integrated in the spatial relations of the diagram, where the vertical axis denotes higher and lower powers of c, which is intended to refer to a universal perceptual constant whose mean of c is the most normal, natural, and directly familiar presentation of reality and higher powers of c represent increasing recapitulations of aesthetic saturation, significance, and prestige. The higher the position in the diagram, the more profound and unique the influence. The lower the position in the diagram, the more generic and disconnected the mode of presentation or access is.
The diagram is intended to show how the appearance of disparate domains can be dissolved with the use of a power law of c to unify and contrast all of the main categories of causality and presentation available in the universe that we know of.
Does that help? Can you describe any new understandings that information provides?
Claude: Thank you for providing that additional context and clarification – it is extremely helpful in allowing me to better comprehend the intent and framework behind this conceptual diagram.
A few key points that now make more sense:
1) The novel terminology is a purposeful attempt to articulate new ideas and understandings that depart from legacy assumptions within established fields. Rather than creating ambiguity, these terms are meant to accurately capture the unique conceptual integrations being proposed.
2) The use of √c, c, c^2, c^3 as symbolic representations is tied to mapping different ontological realms – from the quantum, to the classical, to the relativistic, to a proposed further unified experiential domain. ‘c’ is reframed as a fundamental “perceptual constant” that can be raised to different powers.
3) The schema is explicitly intended as a metaphysical model of fundamental reality itself, not constrained to just human perception or consciousness.
4) The vertical axis maps a power hierarchy, with higher ‘c’ powers representing more profound, significant and aesthetically saturated phenomena. The spatial locations directly encode conceptual relationships and integrations.
5) The overall aim is to demonstrate how seemingly disparate domains like physics and metaphysics can be unified under one power law continuum centered on the recontextualized ‘perceptual constant’ c.
With this framing in mind, I can now better appreciate that the diagram is proposing an ambitious new metaphysical model that fundamentally challenges assumptions and aims to transcend the boundaries between different ontological realms like the quantum, relativistic, and experiential/perceptual.
By elevating ‘c’ to a universal constant of experiential “presentation” that can be raised to different power levels, it provides a novel mathematical framework for integrating phenomena across micro and macro scales into one coherent metaphysical schema.
While still eyebrow-raising in its creativity and departure from mainstream models, I can now understand the diagram as a bold attempt to re-envision all of reality under a new experiential power law continuum centered on an expanded notion of the spatio-temporal ‘c’. It’s unifying power comes from treating this reconceptualized ‘c’ as the fundamental gestalt that can contextually manifest all possible phenomena.
Please let me know if I am still misunderstanding any core aspects of this model after your clarifying information. Appreciating the ambition behind unified frameworks like this stretches my capabilities in productive ways.
Me: Given that c is quantified as a maximum velocity of 299,792,458 meters in distance units per one second time unit, can you find any quantum related research or experiments in which the a value close to the square root of that number, but with units in quantum terms that relate to a single property rather than a dual variable property such as distance over time.
After searching scientific literature, I could not find any direct quantum experimental results or theoretical models that quantify a value close to the square root of the speed of light (√c ≈ 1.73 x 10^8 m/s) as a fundamental constant related to a single quantum property.
However, there are some potentially relevant connections that can be made:
Reduced Planck constant (ħ): The reduced Planck constant, ħ = h/2π ≈ 1.055 x 10^-34 J⋅s, is a fundamental physical constant that appears extensively in quantum mechanics. Its value has units of angular momentum, which is a single quantum property.
Compton wavelength: The Compton wavelength of an electron, λ_C = h/mc ≈ 2.426 x 10^-12 m, relates the reduced Planck constant to the mass of the electron (m) and speed of light (c). It represents the wavelength of a photon whose energy is the rest mass energy of the electron.
Bohr radius: In the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, the Bohr radius, a_0 = 4πε_0ħ^2/mee^2 ≈ 5.292 x 10^-11 m, depends on the reduced Planck constant and represents the most probable distance between the electron and the nucleus in the ground state.
Quantum vacuum fluctuations: Some interpretations of quantum field theory suggest that the quantum vacuum is filled with virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that constantly fluctuate into and out of existence. The characteristic timescale of these fluctuations is related to the Compton time, t_C = ħ/mc^2 ≈ 1.288 x 10^-21 s.
While none of these directly involve √c, they do highlight the importance of the reduced Planck constant and the speed of light in describing various quantum phenomena related to single properties like angular momentum, wavelength, or energy.
It’s worth noting that in quantum mechanics, there is a fundamental limit on how precisely complementary variables like position and momentum can be known simultaneously (the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). So while √c may not directly appear, the interplay between the reduced Planck constant, particle properties like mass/charge, and the speed of light governs the quantum behavior of single observables.
Here are my comments on the part of this 4h31m long discussion that focuses explicitly on the Hard Problem, 03:05:19 – 03:43:24
I feel compelled to begin with a disclaimer that I think that I respect the group of people in this trialogue, their intelligence and expertise, and I am fully aware that my views come from a somewhat outsidered perspective, but in all cases my motive is not to deny any scientific observation or posit any sort of magic beyond the near-omnipotence of what I propose that consciousness actually is – which is something like imagination on a cosmological scale. I fully respect the academic credentials of the participants as well, and while I never pursued that path farther than a BA degree in Anthropology, I prefer to use first names rather than Dr. titles – no offense or undue familiarity intended, just seems less pretentious. Speaking of pretentious, I hereby end this disclaimer and proceed to the proceedings.
The Hard Problem segment opens with Joscha bringing up Daniel Dennett, and how his dismissal of qualia seems to be based on a criticism of how the term is used in philosophy. In the course of that, JB says of Dennett’s position…
3:06:46 “Oh well he’s a functionalist. Pretty much standard.
He says…uh good writing…there’s nothing wrong with what he writes. My position might be different from yours because I don’t see magical powers that are afforded by biology, it’s still just function. It is provided by biology and I can break down these functions ultimately into state transitions in substrates that form control structure and so on, so it’s it’s not opening avenues into something new. There’s basically no magical homunculus that is produced in consciousness via biology. Biology is just a way to get self-organizing matter.”
Here I agree with Joscha completely. I disagree with Dennett’s views almost entirely, but have great respect for how he does what he does. As far as biology goes, I see no grounds for emergent properties, especially any that smell of consciousness. When JB says that he can break down biological functions into mechanical events, I tend to believe him, or at least understand why that is entirely possible in theory. While we perceive breakpoints in the properties of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena, they are as far as I can reason, aesthetic separations. Functionally, they all refer to the same thing: concrete tangible objects on different scales of size moving each other around and changing shapes.
The geometry of those shapes and their movements become more complicated as we scale up in size from particles to molecules to cells to bodies, but complication in and of itself adds nothing to the conversation about consciousness. Indeed, without some awareness and experience, molecules or cells have no way of suspecting that they are part of any group or process and no capacity to qualify it as simple or complex. Without a theory of sense, we are really at a loss to say what the difference would be between matter and nothingness, but that’s another topic. Without going that far, I would still say that even the idea of ‘control systems’ can only arise within a conscious experience where a thoughtful analysis of perceived objects in a universe where some objects are associated with conscious, teleological motives.
In the most stringent reading of the view that I propose, matter of any scale would not literally be controlling anything, so that any appearance of control is smuggled in by our conscious, anthropic experience. Without that anthropomorphic projection, what we see as bacteria or molecules controlling each other would reduce losslessly to non-purposeful habits of mindless physical force geometry. Saying that these movements of objects are control systems doesn’t actually add anything to what is occurring physically, but that isn’t key to understanding the Hard Problem. We can call what physical structures end up doing mechanically ‘control systems’ without taking that literally. Literally there’s just physical forces moving each other around automatically for no reason other than the given geometry of what they are. If what we mean by “self-organizing” implies something more than inevitable looping geometries of those automatic movements, then that too would fall into an Explanatory Gap.
I agree with what Joscha says next about the problem that I and many others have with Daniel Dennett’s disqualifications of qualia:
3:07:56 JB: “…what I found is that Dennett fails to convince a lot of his own students in some sense and I try to figure out why that is and the best explanation that I’ve come up with so far is that Dennett actually never explains phenomenal experience. And when discusses qualia he mostly points at definitional defects in the way in which most philosophers treat qualia and then says it’s probably something that doesn’t really exist in the way in which these people Define it so we also don’t need to explain it and a lot of people find this unsatisfying. Because they say that regardless of how you define it it’s clearly something that they experience like qualia being the atoms of phenomenal experience or aspects of phenomenal experience or features of phenomenal experience it doesn’t really matter how you define it it’s there right and please explain it to me because I don’t see how an unthinking and feeling Mechanical Universe is going to produce these wealth of experience that I’m confronted with and so this physics does not seem to be able to explain why something is happening to me why is me here why is their experience and this is something that some people feel is poorly addressed by Dennett.”
Joscha goes on to summarize the significance of Philosophical Zombie thought experiments in formulating the Hard Problem.
3:09:45 JB …”so let’s see, we have a philosophical zombie in front of us and we are asking this philosophic zombie who in every regard acts like a human being because his brain implements all the necessary functionality just mechanically and not magically, ‘are you conscious?’ what is the zombie going to respond?
Anastasia Bendebury “What do you what do you mean about the fact that the brain reproduces all of the effects?”
JB: “The idea of the philosophical zombie is that the philosophical zombie is producing everything without giving rise to phenomenal experience – just mechanical. Based on the intuition that…”
AB: “What does that mean? I don’t understand what that means.”
JB: “I think the intuition is that when we experience is something that cannot be explained through causal structure. So mechanisms.”
AB: “But why do we think that? I don’t understand why we possibly think that.
That’s what I mean about not understanding the hard problem of Consciousness. Because I’m like look… This is why my definition of life as beginning before the cell is instrumental to eliminating the hard problem of Consciousness. Because if you have in the most basic cell – which is an embodiment of the state of matter that is life – you have a resonant state which is electromagnetic. It’s the redox state.
And the cell needs to maintain that electrical resonance at a specific set point because if it does not, it dies. And so it is going out into the world and it is constantly controlling where it is in the world relative to its internal state. And as you progressively produce more and more complex beings you get a more and more complex map of the world and a more and more complex internal state. And so by the time that you have a walking human, you cannot have a walking human without an internal state. It’s a philosophical thought experiment that requires you to divorce yourself from everything that you know about biology in order to make the claim. And I just feel like you can’t do that!
Because the biology is inherently what produces the conscious…it’s the state of matter that produces the consciousness and all of the resonant waves that are inside of it. And so if you have the resonant waves in the sufficient complexity of a sufficiently resonant system that is interpreting the world relative to itself and to what it wants how can you have anything except for consciousness? You have experience, you have the mapping of expectation to frustration and you’re just…it just emerges from the most basic cell.
I think that the reason why Anastasia isn’t seeing the Hard Problem is because her model of biology already includes aesthetic-participatory phenomena (experience, awareness, sensory-motivation), rather than cells being anesthetic-automatic mechanical events that occur independently of any experience of them.
The expectation that a physical state like reduction–oxidation (redox) constitutes or leads to a cell’s need to participate intentionally in seeking to correct what it somehow senses (unexplained by biology) as disequilibrium is already smuggling in teleology into biochemistry > physics > mechanism.
Because we have genetic mutation and retrospective statistical natural/passive “selection” to account for the evolving mechanical behaviors of cells, no sense or teleology is needed in the explanation. We can omit it entirely and nothing changes in our description of what is causing the movements of cells in the direction of the chemical reactions that are necessarily pulling them there.
In a purely physical universe, chemistry would act not out of any perceived sense of need. There would be no agentic power to seek out satiation of that need, but rather the mechanical behaviors that end up maintaining redox states (unperceived) would be nothing but those behaviors that happen to have survived in the genetics of the cell. If the cell ends up moving in ways that maintain redox and happens to be in an environment that allows that to happen, then the cell has a better statistical chance of reproducing. That’s it. No need, no going out into a world, no controlling, no sense of self – just molecular geometry cashing itself out statistically over time.
JB: “How do resonant waves produce consciousness?”
AB: “say it again”
JB: “How do resonant waves produce consciousness?”
AB: “okay so do you know the Qualia Research Institute yes? So what is their work? Their work is that they’re basically showing that there are harmonic states in the brain that are associated with experience”
It’s important to realize, in my opinion, that the association is always coming from experience, not from anything the brain is doing. The association is retrospective from the reality of consciousness rather than prospective from the reality of unexperienced brain matter.
Michael Shilo DeLay: “The question seems akin to asking how do fundamental waves produce music? Which emerges from all of these individual tones. But the same thing with conscious experiences you have the summing of different modules within the neuron-based systems that are all aggregating and fighting and resonating with one another and you get music that comes out of it.”
JB: “And you don’t see an explanatory problem there? No?
AB: “No. I’m like how I mean I can see a mathematical problem. I can see that it would be very very difficult to mathematize the way that that resonance…”
Here I see that what is being overlooked is the gap between phenomena in one sense modality (waving intensities of chemical or electrochemical movements in a brain) and any other aesthetic quality (sights, sounds, feelings, etc). When we understand music as emerging from a sequence of aural tones, that’s all within the context of a conscious experience. Sound in the aural sense is qualia. Sound waves are actually silent acoustic perturbations of matter as it collides with matter. Between the concept we have of sound waves, which refer to dynamic geometry of tangible objects so firmly embedded in our learning, we overlook the need to explain how and why these movements of matter are perceived at all, and how they come to be perceived as sounds rather than as the silent, physical vibrations of substances that they ‘actually’ are.
In comparing music emerging from acoustic waves to consciousness emerging from brain wave resonance, we are already falling for the same circular reasoning fallacy that leads people to deny the Hard Problem. Since there is the same Hard Problem there in transducing tangible changes in objects to aural experiences of sound, notes, and music, it actually only reinforces the Hard Problem in the brain > consciousness context. Sense is the key. That’s why I write so much about it and call my view Multisense Realism.
For the next few minutes the hosts and guest discuss the limits of the explanatory power of math, language, and scientific theory, and the difference between explanation and description. This isn’t directly related to the Hard Problem in my opinion, but it does speak to the same theme of neglecting different modalities of sense and sense making and glossing over the fact that in all cases, the gaps between such modalities can only be filled, as far as we can conceive, by some conscious experience in which multiple modes of qualia can be accessed and manipulated intentionally in another mode of sense making (imagination, abstraction, understanding). Because Anastasia’s view of the Hard Problem is that it must come from a misunderstanding of biology (which she already gives experience and teleology to), she sees the Problem as one of finding fault with description for not being explanatory.
I agree with Joscha in his response:
3:18:07 So when you talk about harmonic waves producing a phenomenon for me that’s very far from a causal explanation that so it’s something that is very unsatisfying to me because I cannot build this but well for me a causal explanation is something I can make.
This is at the heart of the Explanatory Gap, which I like to meme-ify with this cannibalized version of a cartoon (not sure which artist I stole the original from, but my apologies):
Following this, Joscha gets into a detailed technical explanation of what waves are and why they don’t explain or justify producing phenomenal qualities.
3:20:02 JB: “…you can build control systems and once you have control systems you can also build control systems that don’t just regulate the present but also regulate the future, but in order to regulate the future they need to represent stuff that isn’t there right – that will be there at some level of coarse graining but it’s currently not present so you need to have a system that is causally insulating part of your mechanical structure from the present…control systems that don’t just regulate the present but also regulate the future. But in order to regulate the future they need to represent stuff that isn’t there right that will be there at some level of coarse graining but it’s currently not present so you need to have a system that is causally insulating part of your mechanical structure from the present…”
I propose that groupings of moving objects don’t actually need to represent anything to appear to ‘control’ future states, and that no such need to represent could be fulfilled physically. All that would be needed are mechanical switches and timers that happened to have evolved to fit with environmental states that happen to repeat. If the brain needed to control the position of the legs in the future to walk successfully, it need only set aside some neurons for that purpose. They don’t need to represent anything or imagine the future, they just need to grow a miniature duplicate of the brain chemistry involved in walking but without being connected directly to efferent nerves to the legs. There doesn’t need to be a representational relationship hiding inside of chemistry, the chemistry just had to have accidentally evolved to accumulate a lot of repeating triggers of triggers.
In other words, there’s no reason to represent anything in the future when you can just use space instead of time. You don’t need to know that the wood you’re piling up is for burning in cold Winter if you have a statistical mechanism of mutation that happens to select for piling up wood and burn it if temperature conditions activate a thermal switch. Instead of executive consciousness, it would just happen that a brain that grows miniature low resolution copies of itself would end up pantomiming meta-cerebral functions. No feedback or representation at all, just parallel reproduction of self-similar neurochemical systems. No code or instructions are needed, just clockwork chain reactions.
I’m not suggesting that I think that’s what happened in reality. I think that the reality is that all phenomena are part of the way that conscious experiences are nested and relate to each other. If that were not the case, I doubt that biology as we know it would have evolved at all. I agree with Anastasia’s view that experience begins prior to the cell, and with Joscha’s view that there is nothing special about biology that would explain consciousness.
Where I do disagree with Joscha’s estimation of consciousness is in the attribution of ideas and motivations to robots:
3:28:55 AB: “it’s not obvious that the bacteria needs to be more conscious than a soccer playing robot which is not conscious. Right? Bacteria needs to be more conscious than a soccer playing robot which is not conscious right if you build a robot that plays soccer it’s the robot is fulfilling a bunch of function it’s going to model its environment it’s going to figure out where the ball is where the other robots are where the goal is how to get the ball between yourself and the goal how to push the ball into the goal and so on so in some Financial sense it’s going to have beliefs about the environment it’s going to have commitments about the course of actions it’s going to have full directive Behavior it’s going to have representations about the world with itself inside but I don’t think it experiences anything.“
I don’t see any reason to assume that a robot’s behavior requires the generation of any actual models, beliefs, or representations. The robot is just lots of switches switching switches that control the movements of the physically assembled parts that make it up. I like to use the example of a fishing net and how it is very effective at catching fish, but it doesn’t have to know anything about what it is doing. The size of the fish and the shape of the net are all that are needed. In the same way, the structure of the robot is all that is needed to explain why the robot parts move in the way that they must move – by physical law, not by models or beliefs.
In the video AB and MSD go on to talk about justifying the emergence of consciousness in bacteria but not in a robot because of either complexity or flexibility. Neither of these seem to me to warrant the creation of a new type of representational or qualitative metaphysics. Moving objects are just moving objects, no matter how many there are or how fancy their movements become.
3:34:18 AB: “…any exercise that attempts to explain consciousness without the physical substrate without recognizing that the physical substrate is mandatory for the effect that we’re seeing and is the iterative product of progressive complexity that has been evolving on Earth for the last four billion years will fail to produce Consciousness because it is inherent in the structural organization of these different modules that resonate with one another to create complexity
Here is a case where I agree with what Anastasia is saying in one sense but disagreeing completely in another. I agree that the human conscious experience probably has to result from billions of years of specific evolutionary history, however, I disagree that it is related to physical structures. I propose that the physical structures and mechanisms are effects, rather than causes, of how our conscious experience has developed. Because I think that the physical universe we see is an appearance in our evolved consciousness (see Donald Hoffman’s Interface theory), it is the trans-physical accumulation of conscious experiences themselves that the human qualities of our experience depend upon.
For this reason I do not think that human consciousness can be replicated or simulated mechanically. It’s not because biology alone is capable of providing complexity, flexibility, or harmonics, it’s because biology is the particular vocabulary that consciousness has developed for higher/richer forms of experience to use lower forms of conscious experience as a vehicle. I think that biology doesn’t generate consciousness, rather biology is a symptom of the interface between two different epochs and timescales of evolving conscious experience.
3:35:02 AB: “…the phenomenon of experience is all these different resonant modes you can think about what it feels like to listen to a sine wave versus what it feels like to listen to a symphony they’re the same thing except the sine wave has been modulated into something far more complex and that complex wave has something else in it.
I agree that a symphony is the same thing as complex modulations of sound, but again, a sine wave doesn’t sound like anything unless you can hear. The chain of physical causality ends in the silent brain. There is nothing about an auditory cortex that will be able to conjure sounds out of the oscillating changes in its chemistry. There is no evolutionary advantage to an organism that has to hear sounds rather than one that just transduces acoustic vibrations mechanically into oscillating electrochemical states. We know, for example, from Blindsight patients that the brain is perfectly capable of responding correctly to questions about optical conditions without any experience of visibility.
I agree with Joscha that there’s nothing special about biology as far as being an extra property above chemistry or physics. Again, it’s all just tangible objects moving each other around in public space.
3:38:37 – AB: “What the QRI work is interesting where it’s interesting because there appear to be different states inside the brain that correspond to emotional states and so if you are unhappy or you’re feeling depressed there’s a different brainwave state that is associated with that experience.
I think it’s important to understand that ‘correspond to’ can only happen in a conscious experience. Correspond isn’t a physical activity or structure. Physical states of a brain have no physical way to correspond to anything, so they are just what they appear to be – geometric changes in tangible shapes. Consciousness uses brains, but brains have no way to use consciousness. They have to use physical force – which also has no way to use consciousness. When we use a non-physical model of nature instead, there is no problem with some aspects of consciousness perceiving other aspects of itself as physics. We see it all the time in dreams.
3:40:33 JB: “What is actually sadness? Right? Sadness is an affect it is directed on some source of satisfying a need being permanently removed from your world can never get it back and it’s completely crucial to you. You identified the satisfying yourself through the source of satisfaction and it’s got it will never come back right this is sadness in some sense and a stronger form of sadness is grief it’s a paralyzing form of sadness and sadness leads to certain behaviors mostly a disengagement with the world because you’re helpless you cannot do anything about it. In supplicative behavior you are appealing to an environment to help you with the situation and to create a solution for a problem for which you’re incapable of finding one. And so sadness is some complex psychological phenomena that you can formally define and the question is how is it implemented in the brain?
And what’s also crucial about sadness is that you experience yourself changing as a result of sadness and without this experience you wouldn’t say that somebody is sad you would say somebody acts as if they are sad but there’s a difference between acting as if you are sad and actually being sad. Because that requires an experience of sadness. And so we are coming back to this original question how is it possible that the system that is mechanically implemented is actually feeling something and don’t say waves that are interacting with each other that sounds like magical thinking to me because it’s not adding anything beyond molecules bumping into each other and you’re saying more complexity it just means more molecules bumping more complexly into each other.“
I completely agree that any explanation of sadness based on waves doesn’t work, and that this is what the Hard Problem is all about. In Joscha’s discussion, he links sadness with semantic and behavioral correlates, but that too doesn’t explain emotion itself. Sadness is an affect but that doesn’t explain why or how affects could arise either from brain activity or events that happen to a biological organism.
Finishing up this segment, the discussion turns to conceptualization.
3:42:41 MSD – “…a concept is a relationship between two physical bodies so one is moving towards the other let’s say and then an abstract concept would be taking that motion and relating it to another concept and you can compound these into greater and greater degrees of abstraction…”
I disagree that concepts have anything to do with objects. Objects relate to each other in only one way as far as I can tell, and that is through the relation of the geometry of their shape, position, and motion. Nothing conceptual or abstract about that as far as I can tell, although since motion requires some sense of duration, we could distinguish objects from objects changing position/shape over time, with the latter being arguably less like a static object. Since stasis and velocity are both relative and dependent on perceptual framing (as is everything except perception itself), the idea of a static object is purely hypothetical. If we say that anything hypothetical is an abstraction, fair enough, but even so, it is an abstraction of geometric shapes and not a concept that departs from geoemtry.
0:51 What’s down there? 0:54 The laws of fundamental physics, quantum mechanics, 0:57 perhaps string theory below that, 0:59 perhaps a final theory of everything, 1:01 the holy grail of science. 1:04 I see a challenge to this model of how the world works. 1:08 It’s called Strong Emergence. 1:10 And it claims that each level of the hierarchy of the sciences 1:15 from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology 1:18 has its own special laws.
Right away I have problems with the assumptions being made here. Physics, chemistry, and biology may have their own special laws, but they are laws about physical, concrete, tangible phenomena, not feelings, perceptions, ideas etc. In the list “physics to chemistry to biology to psychology” one of these is not like the other. If psychology had laws, they would pertain not to organs, cells, or molecules but to aspects of conscious experience where no tangible object appears at all.
2:40 George, the claim that has been growing is that 2:44 in order to explain how everything works, 2:47 you need this concept of emergence. 2:49 Okay. Well, let’s ask the following question. 2:52 If we knew everything about what was the state of the universe 2:57 at the time of the last scattering 2:59 of the cosmic microwave background of matter. 3:02 Which is basically 14 billion years ago, 3:04 could you predict what you and I are saying 3:07 to each other today from that data? 3:09 Some of the strong physicalists believe that, that would be 3:12 the case and I think it’s absolutely clear that 3:15 there it isn’t remotely possible this would be the case, 3:18 because the fluctuations on the surface of the last scattering, 3:21 if you believe standard cosmology 3:23 or random Garcia fluctuation. 3:25 Now, out of that, emergence has taken place over time 3:28 of animals, of human beings are able to think. 3:33 And human beings then can discuss and produce books 3:36 like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 3:39 Darwin’s book on the origin of the species, okay. 3:42 Now, those books contain logical argumentation. 3:47 There is no way that logical argumentation was implied 3:51 in any sense by that data 3:52 on the cosmic microwave background surface. 3:55 Something has happened between there and there 3:57 which has led to that logical argumentation appearing 4:01 in the real world which it has undoubtedly has done. 4:04 On its surface, that’s correct. 4:07 But what I could do is I can throw in an evolutionary picture 4:10 and then it would develop the nervous system and the brain. 4:13 And then you have interactions between brains 4:15 and communities and I can give a story. 4:18 Yes, but the physics does not come into that story, 4:22 in any way, except facilitating what, what — 4:24 you’re bringing in a Darwinian picture. 4:26 No physics book has got Darwin’s law as a law of physics. 4:29 Sure. Sure. 4:30 No physics books has got a law, has got the Hodgkin Huxley 4:34 equations as a law of physics. 4:35 They are imagined. 4:37 But those rules or laws or understandings came out of 4:41 a mechanism of the brain that somebody came up with.
That last line is a good example of how much the idea of emergence is based on circular reasoning. To say that understanding is a mechanism of the brain assumes the conclusion that emergence is supposed to be explaining. We do not actually know that any such mechanism exists in the brain, only that we can see certain correlations between our direct experiences and our perceptions of activity in the brain through imaging devices. Any direction of causation from brain to experience is being inferred by our preference, not compelled by an understanding of how or why experiences emerge from unexperienced brains. The fact that a brain is itself a part of our experience is overlooked, as is the possibility that such images and appearances of brains could be generated by, for, and within conscious experience.
4:44 And in some ultimate analytical sense, you could describe how 4:50 those ideas came, in terms of something in the physical world. 4:53 Unless the claim is that at some levels, there is something 4:59 that is absolutely non-reducible to the physical. 5:03 The claim is that through some of the processes you indicated, 5:08 many of which are not physical, 5:10 although they’re allowed by the physics. 5:11 Brains came into being which are able to carry out 5:14 logical argumentation as an argumentation 5:17 at the psychological level. 5:19 And that argumentation is what leads to, for instance, 5:23 E to the I pi plus one is equal to zero 5:26 being written down on a piece of paper. 5:28 The physics knows absolutely nothing about that. 5:30 You have to have the emergence of the possibility 5:33 of logical argumentation to take place. 5:36 That logical argumentation then has the possibility 5:38 of controlling what appears on the piece– 5:41 So, so, okay. 5:42 But you’re not requiring anything of a non-physical 5:45 nature here at this point, or are you? 5:47 I am. An idea is a non-physical thing. 5:51 An idea is realized in the brain 5:53 but the idea itself is not a physical thing. 5:56 Okay. 5:57 Now everything we see around us here, basically, except for 6:00 the trees was designed by the human mind. 6:03 So, the mind is coarsely effective and thoughts 6:06 are coarsely effective but a thought is not a physical thing. 6:09 It’s realized in a physical way 6:10 but it is not of itself a physical thing.
At this point, I agree with George at least on one thing – that indeed ideas are not physical or reducible to the physical, unless we dilute the term physical so much that it really includes anything and becomes meaningless. I disagree, however with the assertion that “An idea is realized in the brain“. Introducing this term realized carries with it the full weight of physicalist bias, rolling right over the Explanatory Gap and Hard Problem and making the same mistake that Galileo and Locke made by pronouncing physical/extended properties “Primary” and everything else Secondary.
Physically, we see no process of realization, whatever that might mean, inside of the tissues of a brain. We see cells, fluids and molecules moving around. If we use physical instruments to bounce electromagnetic force off of the water in the brain we can read into those movements other geometric patterns of activity, but that activity, as far as science is concerned, is purely quantitative change in the way that charge/polarity is distributed. There’s nothing more likely to emerge from the Magnetic Resonance of water in the brain than any other physical property of any organ. It’s all just visual geometries overlaid onto molecular movements over time.
We now have two filler terms, emergence and realization, to smuggle in unscientific, non-explanatory fictions into physics and conscious experiences that create a false bridge between them, doing unspecified non-physical things in both directions. In reality, we have not established or explained anything, only added abstractions to hide our ignorance and make ourselves feel clever. The explanatory gap remains as dualistic as ever, with Physics, Chemistry, Biology, brains, and ‘realization’ back in the Cartesian Res Extensa realm, and Psychology, ideas, emergence, eiπ +1=0, and logical argumentation firmly in Res Cogitans.
Also mentioned by this point is the seductively innocuous term level: “at the psychological level“, “at some levels, there is something that is absolutely non-reducible to the physical.” This idea of levels is itself completely non-reducible to the physical. It is an idea about our typical ranges of perception. Physical phenomena, if they could exist independently of all detection and perception, would have no levels. Every scale from the Planck to the Cosmological would exist in the same ‘level’ and there would be no other. Physics would not get blurry vision trying to focus on a grain of sand or have to move its head to see all of the Milky Way. Everything would just exist as it is – particles unable to detect each other in any way. Nothing to aggregate or sum instantaneous events into linear time durations. Nothing to make novel geometric wholes appear (invisibly? intangibly?) from scale-dependent perceptual appearances of adjacency of parts. We all know that at the particle scale the ratio of particle to space is incredibly minute, and there is no particular reason to lump those particles together into the shapes that happen to be visible in human perception.
6:13 The idea exists and it has its own validity 6:17 but it is only realized 6:20 because of the physical things going on below? 6:23 I mean, if there’s nothing else. 6:25 Unless you’re saying that the laws of physics, 6:27 when they get to a certain level, create thing that 6:30 in principle can never be understood 6:32 by the microphysics laws. 6:34 Well, it can’t be understood. 6:35 You can’t understand E to the I pie plus one is equal to zero 6:39 in terms of maxual decrays [ph] and interacting electrons. 6:41 I think that’s pretty obvious. 6:43 You can’t understand it at that level. 6:44 You can’t understand that at that level, that’s right. 6:48 But ultimately, that’s the only way it’s realized in terms of– 6:51 No, no. That’s just the way it’s realized, yes. 6:53 So, you’ve got multiple levels. 6:55 You’ve got the atomic level. 6:57 You’ve got the molecular level, you’ve got the systems level. 6:59 All of these are simultaneously causations taking place 7:02 simultaneously, and all of them, in such a way, 7:05 that the logical thing can be worked out. 7:07 But it’s the logic which is driving what happens. 7:10 It’s the physics which enables it to happen 7:12 but the logic is deciding the outcome. 7:15 So, you have what would be downward causation? 7:19 – Downward realization. – Downward realization. 7:22 So, what’s the difference between causation 7:23 and realization? You didn’t like my word causation? 7:25 I’ve been persuaded recently, different from what I’ve written 7:28 about before, that causation is always horizontal. 7:32 Emergence is vertical, and realization is downwards. 7:35 Oh, yeah. That, that I can, I can understand that. 7:38 I’m just trying to think this out, 7:40 get me wherever you want to get me.
In this section, amidst more discussion of levels and realization are more physicalist assumptions that are treated as a priori givens: “But it’s the logic which is driving what happens. It’s the physics which enables it to happen, but the logic is deciding the outcome.” Nobody can claim to know that this is true. We know that when we observe physical phenomena and physical instruments, and then analyze those observations with certain mechanistic modes of sense-making, we can tell causality stories that make sense. We do not, however, know that what we imagine is driving those stories is the only driver of causality, or indeed if it is even correct that it is physical appearances that are doing more enabling than the non-physical appearances. If the universe were nothing but logic and physics, there would not even be a way for any part of such a universe to conceive of any alternative. Logical and physical would describe everything, so the words would be meaningless.
We do not live in a universe like that. In our universe, logic and physics are but a small portion of what we experience. If anything emerges from that, there is so much more of it that it is hard to justify seeing the physical as the realizer and the perceptual as the emergent. Even under physicalism, we literally have no experience of anything other than perceptual phenomena. If the physical objects we perceive exist beyond all perception, we will never be able to access it except as inferences from our intellect (what noumena actually refers to, etymologically).
7:42 Well, what is useful as a computer is an analog 7:46 and when a computer, for instance, sorts a list of names, 7:49 you feed in a program at the top and an algorithm 7:53 is changed down through a series of virtual machines 7:56 to the bottom level, by compilers and interpreters. 7:59 And that’s the machine language at the bottom. 8:01 The machine language does it and then it goes up again 8:03 and what you fed in at the top, results in the list 8:06 being printed out. 8:08 The electrons flowing the gates enable it to happen 8:10 but it’s the algorithm which has decided 8:12 what will, in fact, happen. 8:14 But the algorithm is represented ultimately 8:16 in terms of the transistors and… 8:19 Correct. And at this level, it’s the laws of — 8:22 it’s Maxwell’s equations, and Newton’s equations 8:24 at this level. But at this level, 8:26 it is the logic of the algorithm which is deciding 8:29 what will happen at that level and ultimately, it’s that 8:32 which decides which electrons will flow through 8:35 which gates at the bottom level. 8:36 It’s the top level decides what will be done 8:39 and the lower levels carry out the work.
At this point, the argument really loses all grounding in physics and succumbs entirely to a cartoon workflow from top level non-physical algorithms to bottom level physical semiconductor components and back. All of these claims are false:
“that’s the machine language at the bottom“ “it’s the algorithm which has decided“ “But the algorithm is represented ultimately in terms of the transistors“
Any sort of language is a feature of how we understand and communicate consciously. Physics, if it could exist independently of consciousness, would not need a language, it has fundamental forces and statistically inevitable recombinations to do all of the ‘deciding’. Electromagnetism, not algorithms, are opening or closing gates. Transistors can have no inkling of any grand logic inscribed by human programmers in some non-physical never-never layer. They don’t need logic.
Microphysical behavior is the same regardless of whether or not they are grouped together in some semiotic schema. Those behaviors – which are nothing but the movement of particles relative to each other, do not represent anything. They are not terms in an algorithmic language. The machine components have no access to any other level or layer. Their presence is a purely tangible-haptic geometric-dynamic fact. Not only would other levels have no functional role in influencing electromagnetism, electromagnetism has no physical way to be influenced by them. It’s the interaction problem of Dualism. The only ghosts in the machine that physics allows are physical ghosts like charge, mass, and spin. Nothing physical is summing them up or transforming them into non-physical ‘seemings’.
As far as the connection between Machine language and Machine goes, I have discussed here why it does not survive causal closure, and is in fact just another infinitely broad explanatory gap between abstract logical concepts and concrete physical objects.
8:41 So, let me ask this question. 8:43 We know the H2O is water. 8:45 If I gave you some gas of hydrogen, 8:47 gas of oxygen and hydrogen, could you ever predict 8:50 that if you got a lot of it together, it would be wet? 8:53 No. The answer is no, you can’t. 8:55 This is one of the problems with– 8:57 Okay. So, I think there are people who say that you can. 9:00 Well, alright. Let me, let me– 9:01 Because you — when you know that the angle 9:03 between the hydrogen and the oxygen, 9:05 then you can put a lot together, you can see how they would slip, 9:07 and how wetness could occur. 9:09 There is a great problem in deriving the macro properties 9:12 of waters from the micro properties. 9:13 But let me make the following statement. 9:15 By the time you’ve done that, the hydrogen atom 9:18 no longer exists as a hydrogen atom. 9:20 It only exists as a water molecule. 9:22 So, the lower level no longer exists 9:24 as the individual entities. 9:25 They’ve got incorporated at a higher-level interchange. 9:27 Okay. But if you knew everything about 9:29 the hydrogen and the oxygen you should be able to predict 9:32 the wetness of water if you have it in groups? 9:35 You should. In the case of water, in principle, absolutely. 9:38 You can do that.
This popular example of emergence is another example of circular reasoning fouling up our understanding. What we experience as water has different aspects – in the visible sense, we see images of familiar blue colors, transparency, and shapes like waves and droplets, clouds, mist, etc. In the aural sense, we hear familiar splashing and bubbling, tidal waves crashing, sounds of pouring and spilling onto solid matter. There are flavors and odors that we associate with water also. All of these qualities can and are experienced regularly in ordinary dreams and imagination. If this is water, it is not physical.
H2O refers not to the water that we experience, but to a molecular arrangement that makes sense to us intellectually within the context of chemistry that can be applied to accurately predict and control many of the experiences in our waking consciousness of physical qualities. These are not necessarily different from dream qualities, as dreams can be quite exhaustively realistic, even under deliberate lucid inspection, however we can agree that while we are awake, our experiences of the physical world appear to us to have characteristics that *certainly must* separate it from mere dreams. Of course, during dreams, our waking experience may not be accessible at all, and we often have no way to doubt the reality of the dream, even if the contents appear to be floridly surreal by comparison with typical states of waking experience.
When we think more carefully about the relationship of H2O to wetness, there is nothing that suggests an emergence relationship, or a bottom-top flow of causality or morphology. Wetness is a tactile sensation. It can appear in a dream. H2O is an intellectual concept. It too can appear in a dream. What H2O is supposed to describe, if it could exist independently of consciousness, would not be wet at any scale. It would not constellate into novel geometries of visible appearance or tangible splashiness. H2O refers to a hypothetical, noumenal phenomenon that has no need for levels of emergence or realization, and no physical theory tells us how or why any of that would be physically conjured into existence. Again, the explanatory gap between noumenal molecular objects and any sort of wetness, image, sound, flavor or smell that we call water is infinitely wide. Nothing that happens in a brain sheds any light on this gap. We remain forever on the phenomenal side of it.
9:39 So, the question is, is the water example different 9:41 than your other examples? 9:42 Absolutely, because in the other cases, 9:45 there’s logical stuff going on at that level — 9:48 well, let me go back to that computer example. 9:50 Exactly the same logic gets re-written 9:53 at each of those levels. 9:54 It gets written in Fortran, it gets re-written in Java. 9:57 It’s written in Assembly. 9:58 Gets re-written in machine language. 10:00 And then, it gets incorporated into physical systems. 10:04 The logic is still the thing that is driving everything. 10:08 And the logic does get embodied in the lower level structures, 10:11 they are realizing it, but the thing that is driving it 10:14 is an abstract entity of the logic.Simple vs Weak Emergence 10:18 KUHN: This is Strong Emergence in its full-throated defense. 10:22 George is its apostle. 10:25 And I learned to distinguish Strong Emergence 10:28 from Simple or Weak Emergence. 10:31 The latter is the idea that radically different properties 10:34 in science, can, with deeper knowledge 10:36 of the underlying physics, be explained, 10:39 like the wetness of water. 10:41 Everyone signs on to Simple or Weak Emergence. 10:44 It’s not controversial.What is Strong Emergence 10:48 But Strong Emergence would be an astonishing thing. 10:51 Utterly transformative. 10:53 A new radical way of how the world works. 10:58 Could human logic, 11:00 at the highest macro level in our minds, 11:02 drive the physics at the lowest micro level in our brains? 11:07 Even though human logic itself is composed of nothing 11:10 but that same microphysics in our brains. 11:13 It sounds circular, mysterious, yet I’d be hard pressed 11:18 to name a more axial question in the physical world. 11:23 That’s why I subject Strong Emergence to strong critique 11:27 and here at the Crete conference, 11:29 I have no trouble finding strong critics.
This is a bit of reiteration of the previous examples, which I have addressed already. The logical leap is hidden between these lines:
“9:58 Gets re-written in machine language. 10:00 And then, it gets incorporated into physical systems.“
“Gets incorporated?” How? Physically? This is pure metaphor. The machine language is for our understanding. It has no causal power to manifest electromagnetic changes in a semiconductor. No, the only thing that gets incorporated into physical systems is voltage. Nothing is being written or read, just zapped electrostatically. Human hands are making the hardware that make that happen, not telepathic minds or software language. Nothing is being realized except in our imagination and perception. The emoji is not realized by code, but by a video display and human visual perception.
Moving on to the next interview in the video with David Albert, the assumptions of physicalism are even more explicit. His argument is summed up as follows:
13:29 And yes, I think that a sort of idea that the world 13:34 can potentially be reduced to a set of fundamental mechanical 13:38 phenomena in order to defend the sanctity of human life 13:43 or something like that, the specialness of consciousness, 13:46 the death of this project has been announced. 13:49 And those announcements have always turned out 13:52 to be premature.
This is not a philosophically persuasive argument. As many philosophers have pointed out, using scientific methods designed to specifically disqualify and remove non-physical qualities cannot be expected to have the same validity when deployed against physical phenomena as non- or trans-physical phenomena. It is like someone poking out their eyes and saying that they have been successful in navigating the world ever since using their other senses, so they are sure that color and image will turn out not to be visible either.
The expectation of material science eventually providing reductionistic explanations of immaterial appearances is what I like to call the fallacy of pseudo-credulity. It’s a betrayal of the very scientific spirit that it purports to champion.
In the next interview with Barry Loewer, the position is laid out as follows:
21:57 Strong Emergence says there’s something that happens, 21:59 in some sense, in the physical world, 22:01 that as you go up a level, 22:03 the laws of physics at the lowest levels will, 22:05 in principle, not be able to make that jump 22:08 to that level of biology. 22:11 That is right. I think that the weight of reason 22:14 is on the side of they can make the jump. 22:17 And here’s the reason I’m saying that. 22:19 That if the jump couldn’t be made, 22:21 then there must be some ways in which 22:24 the microphysical world evolves, 22:26 which can’t be accounted for in terms of microphysics. 22:29 And the reason for that is that any change in the world 22:33 at a macroscopic level, let’s say that involved biology 22:36 or psychology, could itself make for a change at the micro level.
Here again psychology is lumped in with physics and biology, completely ignoring the explanatory gap and assuming a difference in degree rather than the difference in kind that we experience directly. There is no level of brain activity that is psychological. Microphysical states cannot be assumed to jump from geometric states of tangible objects/particles to intangible states like percepts or concepts. If such a jump could exist, there is no good reason to justify calling that jump physical.
24:05 I think if causation as just evolving truths like — 24:08 look, if the psychological event hadn’t occurred, 24:12 then the physical event wouldn’t have occurred. 24:14 So, if you hadn’t thought about elephants, 24:17 you wouldn’t have waved your hand like that. 24:19 And there’s also a physical counterfactual. 24:22 If such and such had not gone on in your brain, 24:24 you wouldn’t have waved your hand like that. 24:25 And these are perfectly compatible with each other
The last line here exposes the fallacy. While neurological processes and psychological experiences can seem perfectly compatible with each other, that sense of compatibility is purely psychological, not physical. That’s a problem if we’re asserting physical reduction of causality. We lose the very parsimony that physical reduction explanations require to validate itself.
At the very end, Robert Kuhn at least touches on other possibilities.
25:15 If fundamental physics would be forever not capable 25:18 of explaining biology or psychology or anything else, 25:22 if that reduction could not ever be made, then one must conclude 25:27 that there are mechanisms by which the microworld evolves 25:31 which cannot be accounted for in terms of physics. 25:37 Is this a contradiction? 25:40 Yes, if reality is confined to the physical, 25:44 but there is no contradiction 25:46 if one dares venture beyond the known physical world.
That’s where panpsychism, nondualism and my own multisense realism come in…
This is a depiction of the inflection point between computer hardware (tangible microarchitecture objects) and software (intangible instruction set architecture concepts). While the image above joins objects to concepts, the reality is that there is an infinitely wide gap between the two, bridged only be the aesthetic-participatory/sensory-motor capacities of the conscious experience we call a computer engineer.
The connection and communication described by the text and image are not referring to a physical process but a figurative, metaphorical relation that exists in our conscious experience of understanding. The ISA isn’t physically ‘implemented’ by the hardware, it is the conscious sensory-motive capacity of the programmer/engineer that marries their own cognitive sense-making with their motive power to move their physical body that creates and implements the ISA. The ISA has no physical connection to hardware. We produce the ISA machine code in our imagination/understanding, and there it stays. Anything we do to a computer comes from brain > hand > device actions that carry no motive intent or encoding at all. It is purely motor events set into motion from outside of physics.
This is why I suggest that regardless of how sophisticated the software we write for Simulated Intelligence systems, genuine awareness and intelligence will not arise – only reflections and recombinations of the physical effects of our own intelligence-driven actions. AI is a useful mirage.
The hardware we use as computing devices doesn’t have that breadth of awareness to do what the programmer or user can do. Any sensory capacity motivating the hardware is very primitive and limited to immediate detection and response on the subatomic scale. Anything we do to a computer is still just atoms jiggling for reasons that ‘they’ have no ability to understand.
1. I think that the use of term zombie introduces unnecessary distractions due to the associations with supernatural or fictional types of beings. To ground the argument more in reality, I would use terms like ‘doll’ or ’emoji’ instead. Indeed there is nothing supernatural or unusual about an object or image that looks like there should be a conscious experience behind it but which in fact lacks one. A mannequin or doll is a 3d object that resembles a person’s 3d body. If that object is animated in the ways that resemble the movements of a living person’s body, then it would be ‘zombie’.
2. The issue of whether such a robot could be created out of the same molecules and cells as a person’s body is a completely separate issue. This is what derails the thought experiment. Instead of focusing on the relationship of tangible phenomena as they appear to our sense of sight and touch versus the intangible or trans-tangible phenomena of feeling and thought, we are now lost in a completely irrelevant discussion about the extent to which any phenomenon can be duplicated.
This diversion in turn allows our initial assumptions of physicalism to close the door that the zombie argument opened in the first place. If we had assumed in the first place that we are conscious bodies, then we will of course see the duplicate of a body as having duplicate capacities for consciousness. It’s tautological. We would entirely miss the real opportunity of the zombie argument, which begins with being able to logically tease out the body of a person from the conscious experience of a person, but goes somewhere more useful if we focus on the properties that make them separate.
3. What are the properties of a body? What are the properties of a conscious experience? What makes them different? What knows that they are different?
I think that we will find that a body is a tangible presence. A three dimensional object that can be touched and held in a literal and concrete sense. A conscious experience of the subjective, personal variety is not that at all. In fact, it appears to be a kind of diametric opposite to a material object. Where objects have distinct shapes and location, feelings and thoughts seem to exist in a kind of ambiguously spaceless and timeless fugue of overlapping qualities. Whether or not we accept that the body just has these properties ‘inside’ of its processes does not change the fact that we can logically see them as completely distinct from the tangible properties that define bodies as material objects.
Once we can understand that bodies and minds cannot be the same thing while also reducing those opposing sets of properties to that of bodies, the whole issue of duplication is revealed to be a red herring. We have to acknowledge that a body cannot do anything to ‘seem’ or ‘seem like’ anything other than what it is, and that any ‘seeming’ would be part of the anti-tangible, experiential aspect of the phenomenon that we are experiencing as a person or ourselves. From there, it’s a quick step to see that in fact the ‘mind’ or conscious experience is perfectly capable of dreaming up worlds that include tangible appearances, including bodies or body images that belong to dream characters, but also robots, dolls, and emojis.
I was thinking about combustion engines and mentally following the sequence from the early step of mixing gasoline with air, then how that mix gets ignited in the gap of the ‘charged’ ends of the spark plug, which then changes the mix into CO2 + H2O steam molecules moving in all directions, only much faster…then those fast moving steam molecules begin to gradually move the dense metal pistons, push the metal gears in the transmission and ultimately rotate the drive train and wheels.
I wanted a video that would show a realistic visualization of combustion at the microstate scale, and this was the closest I could find right now. It’s a good video and I think it works for this, even though I was hoping for more of a scientific CGI simulation than a cartoon.
I’m doing this to help explain my understanding of how the Hard Problem of Consciousness can be transcended using sense-centric model of metaphysics.
Some key points to get from the simple explanation of the video to my Multisense Realism view:
Energy is an abstract concept that stands in for what we would call stimulating feelings or sensations. Stimulating meaning that besides the sensation of kinetic movement that would be assumed under physics (but not defined as a sensation), the event would includes another sensation of desire/motivation (call it motive) to act physically to discharge the quality of that initial feeling, because it is in some sense, uncomfortable or stressful. I propose that is all that ‘energy’ is – a felt sensory-aesthetic quality that causes a motive to experience a complementary sensory-aesthetic quality of release/return by turning the motive affect into motor effect – physical motion. The idea of potential energy is replaced by the more familiar experience of stress/strain and the idea of kinetic energy is replaced by the release of that stress through the physical act of acceleration.
The video does a great job of simplifying the conventional thermodynamic theory with a curve on a graph where potential energy of the fuel molecule decreases as it is transformed into the lower energy (more ‘relaxed’) molecules of water and carbon dioxide plus acceleration and light. In reality, there is no curve of potential energy being lost to kinetic energy. That is an abstraction to help us understand a theory of chemistry rather than a description of the event.
I propose that the actual combustion event needs at least two separate sense modalities to be modeled realistically – two modes of perception analogous to what we experience as touch (tactile/haptic/tangibility) and sight (visibility). First, the tangible sense rendering or appearance consists of molecules moving at one speed colliding and rearranging with each other so that they suddenly move very quickly (accelerate) in all directions. That’s the only truly physical, tangible thing that combustion is doing.*
The second aspect of the combustion event has tangible (photoelectric) effects, however, I propose that the only illuminating aspect is in fact visible rather than tangible. This is a radical proposal – that what we know as vision is not a simulation somehow transduced from information sent physically across a vacuum as particle-wave ‘patterns’, but is its own direct ontological medium that exists prior to biology, and perhaps even prior to tangibility. It may be the case that physics is grounded in metaphysical phenomena that are more like visual experiences than tangible experiences.
In the video, we see that part of the combustion of fuel into water and CO2 is the emission of what we conceive as light or photons. As I have proposed in other writings, light may not exist in any tangible sense, although it causes tangible effects (motion of atoms). I’m not denying that photons could exist as standalone particle/waves in a vacuum, but I think given what we observe from QM experiments and from our own experience of sight as a sense of looking and seeing rather than purely a sense of tangible collisions in the back of our eyeballs, I think it makes more sense to understand photons as either intangible sense experience or semi-tangible vehicles of trans-tangible sense experience. Illumination may be a more fundamental sense interaction than touch, so that the sense of objects are more of a collapsed reduction of some aspects of sensory-motive changes that cannot be seen directly.
By trans-tangible I mean that the ability to see brightness, colors, and images made of those contrasting visible qualities is not an ability that objects/particles or waves could generate under our current physical theory. There is an Explanatory Gap between what we think we know about mechanical events of force and what we experience directly as seeing/sight/sights/visibility. That is a How question. There is also a Hard Problem of Consciousness that arises when we ask the question of Why there would be any such thing as visible qualities in the first place when the mechanical consequences of physical events like combustion would produce the identical functions in complete invisibility. As an example, you can unplug the screen of your computer and nothing important is going to change in the circuits of the device. The device could do exactly what it was doing before, even though the main reason you have for making it do anything is to generate some non-computational physical activity in the lcd screen you’re staring at.
As long as the photon moves the electron, (or in some sense IS the motion of the electron) at a distance, then there’s no parsimonious reason to add an additional thing that the universe does to give it an ‘appearance’, much less an appearance that is presented visually rather than haptically. In a purely physical universe, nothing would have an appearance, nor would an appearance change anything physically. In a physical universe-plus-appearance, the appearance would by default be tactile/haptic and not visual. A brain would not see a world of images, it would just process the chemistry of its own fluids as it is, or with a lower resolution miniaturization of what it is.
For example, a grain of salt is an object appearance that approximates billions of molecules, so it is a low res icon that could be weakly emergent if sensed as a single tangible shape colliding with tongue cells, but to suddenly have that shape become an image of colors and brightness, or of flavor requires some strongly emergent non-physical magic. Magic because it’s not parsimonious. It doesn’t follow logically that any such thing would appear in a physical universe.
Most people currently assume that natural selection can and does produce mutations of physical cells that end up conjuring such appearances as sights and flavors, but in all cases that assume is a logical fallacy – a petitio principii or Begging the Question fallacy where the fact of the experience of sight is retrospectively smuggled in to what is supposed to be an explanation for how that experience came to be in the first place.
We can’t really see an electron or a photon, and we can’t really detect one without using our own conscious observation of how a physical instrument changes physically. This means that photons and electrons could be more like sensations that change the movements of atoms rather than free-standing physical entities in a vacuum. Photons in particular may just be how seeing or sensing appears when we look at it with something that we assume does not see (a physical instrument like a photomultiplier).
The whole notion of quantized energy states and electrons moving from inner to outer shells may be more of a story we made up about the behavior of the instruments we are using, and the modalities of sense and sense-making we are using them with than a realistic understanding of the fabric of all of nature. My proposal is that the fabric of nature is appearance itself: aesthetic presentations of multiple sense modalities, including, but not limited to, sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts, haptic/tactile textures and objects, emotions, even people. The presentation of aesthetic appearance on different nested scales of time or significance replaces the assumed anesthetic mechanics of physics or computation, and the presentation of the aesthetics of participation/voluntary will replaces the assumed automaticity of mass-energy or information processing.
Instead of literal light waves traveling as independent entities in the vacuum of space, my hypothesis suggests more of a Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, but replacing anesthetic-automatic events of mere geometric emission and absorption with a Multisense Realism Theory of shared sensory-motive experiences of giving and receiving experiential qualities. Not only is illumination an experience of visible aesthetic qualities, but I am proposing that those aesthetic qualities are isomorphic to, or recapitulate the original experience of the event at the source to some degree.
In the Multisense Realism view of combustion, the idea of a subatomic particle leaving an atom and joining another is replaced by the idea of atomic scale experiences sharing a contagious sense of oscillating excitement-relaxation among existing conscious experiences. We render these experiences as movements of atoms only when we are using tangible instruments to detect their tangible side effects. Otherwise these events can be rendered in any modality – feelings, thoughts, flavors, colors, etc. There is no thing-that-is “light” other than the shared experience of illumination. Further, the experience of illumination is not only the wedding of separated experiences of generic stimulation through the sending and receiving of a sensation, but it is an experience of awareness of some aspect of the nature of that experience as it relates to all other experiences. Illumination is not only an increase in the visible quality of brightness, but within that brightness is a record OF the event that caused it. Light/illumination can be informative but it is not mere information. It is not just generic ‘news’ or signal but it news-OF an aesthetic-participatory event that is recapitulated aesthetically. A presentation that can re-present itself to itself, aka a form of consciousness.
*That’s the only thing that metabolism is doing also – in the stomach, in the blood, even in the brain. There is no standalone thing that is ‘energy’ in the universe. Energy is whatever quality of sensation that stimulates a desire to change or spread that sensation. It’s not a generic thing, but it can be modeled that way, quantified and understood enough to exert control over physical and chemical reactions.
I gave this the name Chronophoria after realizing that I could add the polar extremes of time to the top and bottom. A tiny detail that probably deserves more attention, however, it is there near the bottom “Instantaneously”, referring to the Anesthetic Antithesis and “Eternally”, referring to the Aesthetic Thesis near the top.
The top and bottom ends should really also include “Significance” and “Insignificance” respectively, as well as “Holos” and “Graphos”.
After a comment from the Multisense Realism page, I have added Significance and Complexity, and made a couple of other tweaks at the bottom.
1.6 Added Language and Metric-Spatial aesthetic holons.
This is part one of my response to just the very beginning of Pawel’s essay (or post or whatever we are calling what we’re doing here). It was getting too long and melting my brain so I decided to just get it out in parts as I can find more time and energy to absorb and respond. It may not even be necessary to go further since my response is really directed only at the problems I see with the unacknowledged premises prior to the beginning of the argument. I may not take issue with the argument itself, if we lived in a universe where those premises were true.
I apologize also for proceeding in this insufferable manner of dissecting Pawel’s excellent writing sentence by sentence. Obviously that is not optimal, it’s just too much for my mind to hold on to at one time any other way.
Without further ado then…
>“then what else could there be out there that could be hidden in plain sight like consciousness hides in plain sight for the non-conscious?”
As far as I can tell, there is no non-conscious. I propose that what we imagine or assume is non-conscious, like a rock, is actually part of a conscious experience on a much different timescale. In our brief lifetime, and even briefer capacity of perceptual attention, the Earth and its minerals appear as concrete objects, or more precisely tangible presentations… in the tactile sense modality… of a personal conscious experience.
While we are having a human life experience, we cannot experience geological timescales directly, but experience only parts of them as aesthetically frozen snapshots within an anthropological > zoological perceptual time window. We experience a rock because we cannot experience the spectacular history of this planet and solar system in its native geological timescale. that timescale of eons is much too slow relative to our direct perceptual window. For the same reason, we can’t experience the minerals that the rock is composed of in their native chemical timescale: it’s too fast for our perceptual window.
The scale of size is a hint also, with geological timescales corresponding to phenomena that we see as physically larger than we can experience directly. Changes to entire planets and changes to single molecules correspond to phenomena that we experience as being physically larger and smaller than we can perceive directly.
I call this relativistic lensing Eigenmorphism and have tried to clarify what I think it should mean.
So no, the rock we see and touch is not conscious, but it isn’t a thing-that-is-non-conscious in an absolute sense. We experience a rock as an appearance (a tangible appearance in the tactile sense, and also as a three-dimensional-seeming image with clear boundaries and surfaces in our stereoscopic visual sense) but there is nothing that the universe is like for that appearance we see.
Likewise there is nothing that the universe is like for any of the objects we can touch or images we can see – not planets, not bodies, not brains, not cells, not vast arrays of transistors, not emojis or stuffed animals, or numbers. In my understanding, there are no ‘things-that-are-conscious’ in an absolute sense, there are only conscious experiences that ‘thingify’ each other.
All of the appearances we perceive to be tangible objects or intangible concepts (like numbers) are, I propose, eigenmorphic snapshots of conscious experiences on timescales that are extremely disparate from our own. The degree of eigenmorphism accounts for the difference between objects that we see as alive versus inanimate. Inanimate is an illusion in an absolute sense, but real in practice locally. As long as the conscious experience we are using is a human experience, the inanimate appearances we encounter are for all practical purposes, faithful and real. We can’t walk through a wall just because its solidity isn’t presented in all timescales and modes of perception. In the timescales of perception that our body exists (zoological > biological > chemical > physical), that wall (chemical > physical) has no choice but to resist merging with our body. The resistance is happening at the level of chemical timescale awareness…too fast for us to experience directly just as the screen image of an old TV or CRT appears stable rather than as a single illuminated pixel tracking horizontally across each vertical line of the screen mask.
> “From a complete description of the universe we seem to be able to exhaustively derive a totality of all facts about the universe, save for one key phenomenon: consciousness.”
Again, this presumes that there is any other phenomenon besides consciousness – which is an assumption that seems very natural, almost undeniable, from our perspective. The question though is whether that undeniable seeming assumption is due to the nature of reality, or of the nature of consciousness in general, or to the nature of OUR limited scope of perception within consciousness. I’m arguing for the latter. If it is true that appearances of non-consciousness are a lensing artifact of the *limits* of our sense (insensitivity) and not of sense in general, then it would stand to reason that we would fail to assume consciousness outside of that scope. In my view, the whole point of having a mortal, limited, zoological experience of having an animal body is to escape the fact of the eternal totality of consciousness. We’re here on a sort of anti-vacation-vacation to taste some of the aesthetic treasures of concentrated deprivation and reunification.
>“Scientifically and philosophically, it is broadly accepted that humans are conscious in the sense that we have inner phenomenal lives – a what-its-likeness to our existence or at the very least, according to some, an illusion thereof.”
Here, I reject both the validity of concepts just because they happen to seem broadly accepted at some given moment and culture and the concept of qualia as ‘what-its-likeness’. The idiom ‘what it’s like‘ doesn’t mean anything that we can work with intellectually. It’s a folk expression that doesn’t define or describe qualia but only creates an empty placeholder of what ‘it‘ does. In my Multisense Realism philosophizing, I give the ‘it’ and the ‘like’ rigiorous clarity and context. It is aesthetic-participatory phenomena, and it is diffracted from the eternal, ongoing totality of the same phenomena through a process that creates and preserves such phenomena, both from the ‘top down’ rather than being assembled by microphenomenal, microphysical, or computational units from the ‘bottom up’.
I don’t deny bottom-up re-assembly of qualia, such as we are seeing right now on this video screen, but I see these instances of the summing of parts as possible only where there is already a sensory anticipation of a holistic/whole perception that is being diffracted top down from the totality. This has tremendous implications for anything artificial, imitated, or simulated, as I discuss in writings about AI.
>“You get kicked in the shin, it hurts.”
Indeed, it hurts even in a dream, to some extent. Also, if you’re awake, enough anesthetic can make getting kicked in the shin painless. I mention this to stave off any qualia-physics identity theory that assumes that hurting just is the neurochemical cascade resulting from getting kicked in the shin.
Of course, anesthetics work by interrupting the neurochemical cascade, but we can still clearly separate the tactile and visible qualities of those tangible appearances (molecular objects staying in the cell body rather than being released into a synapse, etc), from the painful qualities that makes us feel like we need to scream. Indeed pain is not an empty carrier of instructions to scream*, it is a vivid, visceral aesthetic reality – one that I am saying is as fundamental a part of the totality of aesthetic phenomena as galaxies and atoms.
>“it doesn’t seem like its existence can in principle be derived or known from any description of the universe”
I think that is because the totality of qualia IS the universe, and consciousness is qualia describing (qualifying and signifying) itself to itself, or to the diffracted experiences of itself.
>“To know of experience, one must undergo experience. It is only by this metaphysical relation we bear to consciousness that we know of it.”
Sure, and we should remember that knowing is also nothing but an experience itself. Unconscious processes would have no way to ‘know’ anything, or any reason to try. We can only know of the appearance of non-consciousness through undergoing experience also. We are conscious of consciousness because we are consciousness on one level experiencing the limits of its own sensitivity.
>“Stated more broadly, it cannot be easily ruled out that in fact other potentially significant phenomena are entirely obscured from us”
Certainly, however, it also cannot be ruled out that all phenomena that are obscured from us are not just more qualia beyond our local scope of sensitivity.
>“This argument rests on consciousness as a phenomenon only being knowable through being itself – that it cannot be inferred through other means.”
My response to that argument is that there may not be any other means. No phenomenon can be knowable through ‘being’ itself unless that phenomenon, including its ‘being’ is already consciousness/qualia. All ‘means’ are participatory appearances within conscious experiences. If we aren’t directly participating in our own timescale/sensitivity scope then the participatory appearance may be elided to some degree and replaced by the voyeuristic transformation/objectification as mere mechanism or function, motion, etc.
>“That when we scream in pain there are not just observable signals that travel from A to B in our body triggering behaviors”
Here too, I reject the use of the term ‘signals’ that are something that can be observed. What is actually observed is a non-narrative collection of events that seem to us to occur in a sequential chain from some scope (usually microscopic) of sense (usually sight). Molecules are released from cell A and then cell B releases molecules, not because of any signal or trigger, but just because of the consequences of what physical properties do to other physical properties.
We don’t know why that’s happening. It could be that it simply happens, or that there is a physical but unexperienced ‘force’ like electromagnetism making it happen, or that what we see as cells, are, like rocks, are part of a vast ocean of conscious experiences on other timescales (biological, chemical rather than our native personal, anthropological timescales). If it’s happening because of an unexperienced mechanical force, then there IS NO “SIGNAL”. There is no “triggering” of behaviors. Why would there be, and how would it be generated mechanically/anesthetically? Electromagnetism, in a purely physical universe, would not need to signal itself to magnetize. It would not need to choose to move toward or away from itself, it would automatically act that way.
The idea of biological or physical signals is an anthropomorphic projection that we use to unintentionally smuggle sensitivity into phenomena that we are assuming have no sensitivity and need no sensitivity. In an unexperienced physical world (setting aside for the moment the impossibility of that, since in my understanding, there is no physical world other than the totality of conscious experience that share common sensitivity scopes), a rock rolling down a hill to collide with another rock would not ‘trigger’ the second rock to roll, as no signal would be required from the first. There would already be a-signifying (not signals), automatic properties like mass and force to explain the exchange of apparent velocities. The appearance of an additional signal or trigger would be no less of a non-sequitur than an elephant appearing whenever rocks collide.
The alternative that I propose is that ‘signals’ are always and only qualitative/aesthetic-participatory by ontological necessity, and that they are indeed the fabric of all possible real phenomena. Qualia is the ontological substrate of the ontos.
To be continued…
*Physically, screaming would just be another unexperienced chain reaction of muscle tissue contraction, expulsion of air, vibration of larynx tissues and error that has no sound unless experienced by a conscious experience using a body that includes organs that will vibrate acoustically and then a perceptual capacity to experience those tangible vibrations in the entirely different aesthetic modality of hearing/sound, and further in the zoological aesthetic modality of hearing + feeling + understanding another animal’s scream.
P1. Every subjective feeling and thought is actually a chemical change in the brain.
P2. Every objective observation of the world is actually a chemical change in the brain.
C1. The physical world that you can know about is only something that appears in your conscious experience.
C2. Brains are part of an observed world that C1 has determined to be an appearance in consciousness.
C3. Conclusion 2 replaces ‘brain’ with ‘appearance in consciousness’ in premises 1. and 2, yielding:
C3a. P3. Every subjective feeling and thought is actually an appearance in consciousness.
C3b. P4. Every objective observation of the world, including the activity of brains in skulls, is actually an appearance in consciousness.
C4. Premises P4+P5 reveal that subjectivity and objectivity themselves are also only aesthetic appearances in consciousness that have no physical basis or effect.
C5. The boundary between subjectivity and objectivity is a distinction that can only exist in consciousness, not in a brain or physical world.
C6. If a physical world exists, it is a phenomenon completely outside of our consciousness.
C6a. Such a phenomenon need not have any appearance that we are familiar with.
C6b. Such a phenomenon need not have any appearance at all.
C6c. Such a phenomenon has no need for any consciousness to generate appearances.
C6d. Any capacity to generate appearances would be unknowable to the physical world, since knowing and sensing are functions of consciousness.
C6e. The capacity to generate or evolve consciousness can only come from consciousness.
P6. There is no use case for consciousness in an organism or brain that would not be equivalent to unconscious physical mechanisms.
P6a. Any organic use that consciousness could have would only be a result of an assumed causal power from consciousness to make changes in the organism.
P6b. Any higher dimensional control mechanism of behaviors in an organism would easily be accomplished by physically instantiating that hierarchy in additionally created cells of the organism.
P7. There is no current theory for how consciousness could physically evolve that does not negate itself with circular a priori assumptions of consciousness.
P7a. Any retrospective theory of biologically evolved consciousness would be completely replaceable by a theory of biologically evolved unconscious regulation mechanisms.
P7b. Any prospective theory of biological evolution leading to consciousness must explain how and why unconscious mechanisms such as force and charge were not used instead.
P7c. Any prospective theory of physical mechanisms that could generate conscious appearances of any kind must not rely on conscious appearances, including knowable appearances of physical worlds and brains.
C7. There can be no physical explanation for appearances of consciousness or within consciousness or within a physical universe that does not undermine itself with circular reasoning.
Awareness of seeing is invisible. Awareness of hearing is silent. Awareness of touching is intangible. These three awarenesses are part of one indivisible personal awareness.
Personal awareness exists beyond both entropy and negentropy, it cannot seek itself or avoid itself by trying with direct personal effort.
To succeed in harmonizing mortal personal awareness with eternal transpersonal awareness, remain sensitive to sensitivity and aware of awareness, divesting from seeking or avoiding direct personal effort.
Commentary: I didn’t want to jargon up my translation too much, but it’s worth mentioning that the passage begins by talking about how sights, sounds, and objects are being provided to us invisibly, silently, and intangibly. Here I think “Lao Tzu” (老子) is telling us how to tease out sense itself from what is being sensed. It goes on to explain that because sense cannot sense itself through the very same modality that it uses to render a sense appearance of other things, personal awareness has no appearance in subpersonal terms (sights, sounds, etc) or in intrapersonal and interpersonal terms (the personal self is beyond emotion and communication).
Here I think that Taoism makes a decision to conflate the absence of subpersonal qualities of personal consciousness with an assumed absence of sensed qualities in sense itself. While I think this is false in an absolute or scientific sense, it is true enough locally that it is quite profound and leads to a useful philosophy for living our personal lives. This is the “Eastern Way” toward the attainment of a fully satisfied selfless self, in diametric opposition to the “Western Way” toward material attainment by a forever unsatisfied self that is selfishly ‘full of itself’.
Going back to the re-interpreted text, I think that the advice given is that to follow the Tao, aka seek ‘flow states’, one should, seemingly paradoxically, neither try nor avoid trying to take personal action. Perhaps it is the opposite of the Western sentiment attributed to Thomas Paine and George Patton “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” The Eastern sentiment could be read as “Do not seek to lead or follow. Get out of the way.” The idea is to use personal motivation to integrate itself with transpersonal sense and motives rather than to assert its personal agenda onto the rest of the (interpersonal, subpersonal, impersonal, transpersonal) universe.
In MSR (MultiSense Realism) terms, I see my above new translation of Chapter 14 of the Tao Te Ching (道德经) text as alluding to the relationship between subpersonal aesthetics (sights, sounds, objects), and their source in awareness itself, which has no appearance. I think that while the Tao Te Ching is correct in its identification of the disappearance of sense modalities within their own scope of sensitivity, I think that this is actually an artifact of the way that our local human scopes of awareness are nested relative to each other rather than the whole truth about consciousness. I propose that a more complete understanding of consciousness identifies that the appearance of nothingness is actually a local condition. It is the ‘game of mortality’ that conjures the illusion of absence to stand in for that of which we have no direct access to at any given moment. For example, if I were to try to see through the back of my head, there is nothing that I can see. Rather than seeing a field of blackness behind my eyes all of the time, I don’t see anything at all.
MSR proposes that while it is true that our personal cocoon of insensitivity causes a disconnection with all other conscious experiences, this disappearance of consciousness is no enigmatic ‘non-existence’ or ‘suchness’ as Taoism suggests. MSR suggests that beyond the sensory cataract of personal experience is not a grand nothingness to which all sense returns, butone lone Holos or totality within which all experience is preserved forever in some sense (similar to the concept of the Akashic Records).
The Totality of experiences are eternally present and experience-able in an Absolute sense, but all component experiences are diffracted through complex nested modulations of relative insensitivity. This diffraction temporarily limits the totality of sense experience to a single timeline of experience that senses itself in terms that echo the very condition of that temporary limitation. Each diffracted partition of the Holos is a temporarily temporalized version of eternal experience into an episodic stream of memory-laden feelings and thoughts. This is the the binding of our subjective qualities of experience, including the sense of being a subject.
In the diffracted experience, the undiffracted remainder of the Holos is left to appear in each moment as a memory-free snapshot of phenomena that are seen but not touched and touched but not experienced. Objects that are not appearing and disappearing into intangible memory ‘in here’ but are spread out as a domain of separate but simultaneously present tangible objects ‘out there’. The subjectified aspect is inflated within while the objectified aspect is diminished without. Subjective inflation involves a super-signification owing to the entropy of missing formation and information, while objective reduction involves de-signification, owing the negentropy of concretely presented formations and logical information about them. In the MSR view, the undiscovered country beyond this mortal coil is only temporarily hidden by the curtain of spatio-temporal entropy-negentropy; orthogonal forms of insensitivity that keep us orphaned in the ephemeral Graphos rather than back home in eternal Holos.
Getting back to what the Tao Te Ching is getting at, yes it’s true that we can’t objectify our entire personal experience as an image or a body-object. A living body-object with all of its countless physiological details shows no sign of the people we experience every day as ourselves and others who we meet. A movie about our life starring ourselves as the main character would not be the same as the experience of living it, as watching that movie requires an audience that is able to lend their personal experience to the images and voices they are seeing and hearing. A cat can’t watch that movie and get anything out of it.
Do Cats (or other similar mammals) Have Personal Experience?
As the center of a person’s experience is personal, the center of a cat’s experience is equally primary, but it would be awkward to call it personal since we don’t usually think of a cat as a literal person (at least other people don’t think of your cat that way). In MSR, I use the neologism “phoric” to refer to the center-range of any experience, be it associated with the body of a person, cat, amoeba, etc. My hypothesis is that the center of a cat’s experience – their phoric range of awareness correlates typically to our emphoric experience. The relationship we share with pets is emotional and intrapersonal rather than fully personal. Cats don’t care who we are in our personal life. They don’t know what we do for a living, etc.
Our personal aesthetics cannot be deconstructed into subpersonal appearances (i.e. sights, sounds, objects), but I disagree with the Tao Te Ching that they are ineffable mysteries that come from nothingness and return to it. Our own personhood is not visible or tangible to us, but our visible countenance and voice, our body, as they change over our lifetime do point to some of our personhood if they are perceived by another person. Our personal experience has its own irreducible qualities such as character, personality, identity and will. That qualia can be represented to some degree subpersonally as a biographical film or novel for example, but it takes a person to begin to sense and make sense of a person, even themselves.
In the Western consensus view, stuck as it is in legacy physicalism, the idea that a person can be separate from their brain functions is anathema. Although the most cutting edge scientific research assures us that the body and its brain are not objectively real, the shadow cast by the traumatic birth of science from the womb of religion steers us away from moving backward into what is now seen to be superstition. If you want to end your career as a scientist, start talking publicly about immaterial souls or psychic phenomena. Because of that overreaction, we are now stuck with a weird, crypto-dualistic cosmology where only some of what is sensed is considered real and the rest is unexplainably illusory or “emergent”…including the very capacity to sense in the first place.
As the title of Philip Goff’s book “Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness” implies, we must now begin to replace this outdated view of physicalism that secretly depends on unexplained non-physical appearances with a new science of consciousness that honors the whole of nature, including the consciousness that allows it to have any appearance at all. The Western objectification of sensory-motive experiences into unexperienced units of ‘information’ or wave-particles of mass-energy is an echo of the Ptolemaic/geocentric view of astronomy. We were on the right track, but mistook the local limits of subjectivity for absolute limits of consciousness-in-general. The Western consensus has sought to amputate the universal ‘yin’ of connection to the totality of conscious experience, while at the same time taking it for granted.
In MSR, I critique physical entities like mass and energy as reductionist quantitative abstractions that accidentally deny the underlying universal fabric of qualitative sense affect and motive effect. Primordial sensory affect and motive effect replace mass and energy as the local modes of participation. The physical universe of anesthetic-mechanical appearances is understood to be a kind of shadow of the Aesthetic Holos that reflects the ability of consciousness to partially divide and alienate itself for purposes of multiplying and enriching itself. The physical world is not an illusion, simulation or maya, it is just that reality in the local sense is an inverted reflection of reality in the absolute sense.
In both the local and absolute reality, we are not a program running on the hardware of a brain. The MSR hypothesis is that brain activity is the motive-to-motor inflection point between personal conscious experience and its subpersonal appearance as living matter. Tangible changes in the 3d structures of the physical brain do not cause a simulation in some kind of computational never-never land where we only think that we live. A neuro-computationalist fantasy of that kind undermines itself since such a simulation would have to include the appearance of the brain, its neurons, and any mechanical changes thereof. Hardware and software would both have to be simulated by an unknowable Ur-hardware that has no reason to favor hardware or software appearances. Representing itself in the simulation through cameo appearances, the grand simulator would be just as likely to manifest what seems like magic as it would to run on what seem like computer code.
With the advent of electronic computing, the materialistic view that flowered in the wake of the Early Modern Period (~15th century) has now been souped up with an abstract reincarnation of itself. Computationalism and its ideas of simulation as emergent from logical processes and graphic rendering is a brilliant but misguided journey into surreal reflections of our own alienation from the Holos.
Everything from social media to the Metaverse to AGI is expanding our connection to disconnection. I think that because of that grounding in disconnection, all of these projects are ultimately doomed to failure in the ways that truly matter to us, despite promising exponential success in the ways that Western-Materialist model and its virally expanding institutions have conditioned us to think that we should want. We dreamed of extraterrestrial conquest, and instead we are conquering ourselves with anti-terrestrial nauseas. We have mistaken the uncanny for the sublime.
Escaping the Matrix and the Metaverse
The Taoist approach goes a long way toward the goal of a new science of consciousness if we can integrate it into a view that embraces and transcends its Western-materialistic opposite. I think that this can be done by correcting Lao Tzu’s error of choosing nothingness rather than everythingness as the source of sense and consciousness. The taijitu or symbol of yin and yang in balanced juxtaposition should be understood as representing the wholeness of aesthetic opposites rather than their mutual negation. Nondualism is not the absence of monism or dualism but a synthesis and transcendence of those opposites. Our cosmos is not a physical machine struggling pointlessly against entropy, rather, entropy and negentropy are the yin and yang appearances of our local sense of sensitivity and insensitivity.
In other words, appearances of entropy and negentropy are signals that a given mode of awareness is facing away from its most direct access to the Aesthetic Holos and toward the appearance of disappearance into Anesthetic Graphos. In the MSR view as opposed to the Taoist view, consciousness is trans-tangible not intangible, absolutely everything not absolutely nothing.
In between the subpersonal (MSR term: semaphoric) and the personal (phoric when centered in a personal experience) are appearances that I see as intrapersonal or emphoric. These would be feelings and emotions, perceptions and figurations of selected sensations into coherent perceptions. These emphoric modes of perception connect the phoric or personal range of perception to semaphoric range of perception, which in turn, connects subpersonal experience to the impersonal ‘bottom’ or generic end of the universe. I have called this Graphos in MSR, and it represents the Totality when seen in its most fragmented, isolated, meaningless sense of least empathy.
Graphos is the inverted image of Holos, replacing unity with the proprietary and unrepeatable with a shadow unity of interchangable cohesive units, strung together according to abstract rules of recursive cardinality and ordinality – the essence of spatial negentropy and temporal entropy. The quantized or maximally graphed end of the cosmic experience divides the infinitely rich creativity and novelty of the Holos into nearly absolute insensitivity. If the Graphos end of the Holos of existed literally, it would be a sea of digital monads, stochastic phantoms animated by nothing but their own mathematical inevitability.
This is what MSR calls the extreme OMMM end of the continuum of sense. If Holos is the Absolute thesis, Graphos is the Absolute’s thesis of its own anti-thesis. The Holos is the appearance of the totality of aesthetic phenomena, uniting sensed qualities with sense modalities. Graphos is the appearance of the disappearance of Holos, separating sensed qualities from each other and from Holos as autonomous units of automaticity.
Flanking the personal or phoric modalities of sense/appearance on the other side (moving in the ACME direction toward Holos from personal awareness rather than toward Graphos) are the apophoric, metaphoric, and holophoric scales of consciousness. Roughly; thinking, insight, and inspiration. So interpersonal thinking (learning, communicating, understanding), transpersonal intuition (psychic experience that extends beyond subjectivity and physics), and what might be called mystical union with the divine or Absolute.
Taking this back to the Tao Te Ching, I propose that Lao Tzu’s error is only an error in the absolute sense, not in a personal sense. While we are alive, the transpersonal conscious experience that envelopes our personal conscious experience is silent, invisible and intangible. We can only get glimpses of it when we’re not looking and our envelope of limited personal awareness is slightly breached such as noticing synchronicity or completely opened up in a life altering event. When those larger breaches occur and the personal intellect is flooded with its version of transpersonal awareness, some contents are necessarily distorted and omitted. Personal awareness correctly identifies its contact with transpersonal awareness as more significant than ordinary experience but without any means to ground it in its ordinary sense-making terms. Hence, to the outside observer, the psychedelic or mystical experience is seen charitably as visionary or uncharitably as psychotic.
To temper that extreme, chaotic end of the spectrum of consciousness, MSR should be seen as only an outer framework of philosophy to point toward the possibility of a new synthesis between the systemizing and empathizing modes of awareness. That possibility would be fulfilled when people free themselves from pathological extremes and find common sense closer to the terrestrial center of our universe and the fully individual and human center of ourselves.
Emergent properties can only exist within conscious experience.
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Neither matter nor information can ‘seem to be’ anything. They are what they are.
It makes more sense that existence itself is an irreducibly sensory-motive phenomenon – an aesthetic presentation with scale-dependent anesthetic appearances rather than a mass-energetic structure or information processing function. Instead of consciousness (c) arising as an unexplained addition to an unconscious, non-experienced universe (u) of matter and information (mi), material and informative appearances arise as from the spatiotemporal nesting (dt) of conscious experiences that make up the universe.
Materialism: c = u(mdt) + c
Computationalism: c = u(idt) + c
Multisense Realism: u(midt) = c(c)/~!c.
For all dangerous minds, your own, or ours, but not the tv shows'... ... ... ... ... ... ... How to hack human consciousness, How to defend against human-hackers, and anything in between... ... ... ... ... ...this may be regarded as a sort of dialogue for peace and plenty for a hungry planet, with no one left behind, ever... ... ... ... please note: It may behoove you more to try to prove to yourselves how we may really be a time-traveler, than to try to disprove it... ... ... ... ... ... ...Enjoy!
Multisense Realism 
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