The Sense of the Zombie
A couple of things about the Zombie argument.
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.
Multisense Combustion
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.
Multisense Realism Diagram Chronophoria v1.6
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.
A Multisense Realism Syllogism and Meme
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.
Multisense Taoism
I’ll take a crack at translating the gist of the translations of Chapter 14 of the Tao Te Ching into the terms of my theory of Multisense Realism.
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, but one 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.
Joscha Bach, Yulia Sandamirskaya: “The Third Age of AI: Understanding Machines that Understand”
Here’s my comments and Extra Annoying Questions™ on this recent discussion. I like and admire/respect both of them and am not claiming to have competence in the specific domains of AI development they’re speaking on, only in the metaphysical/philosophical domains that underlie them. I don’t even disagree with the merits of each of their views on how to best proceed with AI dev in the near future. What fun would it be to write about what I don’t disagree with though? My disagreements are with the big, big, big picture issues of the relationship of consciousness, information processing, consciousness, and cosmology.
Jumping right in near the beginning…
“The intensity gets associated with brightness and the flatness gets associated with the absence of brightness, with darkness”
Joscha 12:37
First of all, the (neuronal) intensity and flatness *already are functionally just as good as* brightness and darkness. There is no advantage to conjuring non-physical, non-parsimonious, unexplained qualities of visibility to accomplish the exact same thing as was already being accomplished by invisible neuronal properties of ‘intensity’ and ‘flatness’.
Secondly, where are the initial properties of intensity and flatness coming from? Why take those for granted but not sight? In what scope of perception and aesthetic modality is this particular time span presented as a separate event from the totality of events in the universe? What is qualifying these events of subatomic and atomic positional change, or grouping their separate instances of change together as “intense” or “flat”? Remember, this is invisible, intangible, and unconscious. It is unexperienced. A theoretical neuron prior to any perceptual conditioning that would make it familiar to us as anything resembling a neuron, or an object, or an image.
Third, what is qualifying the qualification of contrast, and why? In a hypothetical ideal neuron before all conscious experience and perception, the mechanisms are already doing what physical forces mechanically and inevitably demand. If there is a switch or gate shaped structure in a cell membrane that opens when ions pile up, that is what is going to happen regardless of whether there is any qualification of the piling of ions as ‘contrasting’ against any subsequent absence of piles of ions. Nothing is watching to see what happens if we don’t assume consciousness. So now we have exposed as unparsimonious and epiphenomenal to physics not only visibility (brightness and darkness) and observed qualities of neuronal activity (intensity and flatness), but also the purely qualitative evaluation of ‘contrast’. Without consciousness, there isn’t anything to cause a coherent contrast that defines the beginning and ending of an event.
- 13:42 I do like Joscha’s read of the story of Genesis as a myth describing consciousness emerging from a neurological substrate, however I question why the animals he mentions are constructed ‘in the mind’ rather than discovered. Also, why so much focus on sight? What about the other senses? We can feel the heat of the sun – why not make animals out of arrays of warm and cool pixels instead of bright and dark? Why have multiple modes of aesthetic presentation at all? Again – where is the parsimony that we need for a true solution to the hard problem / explanatory gap? If we already have molecules doing what molecules must do in a neuron, which is just move or resist motion, how and why do we suddenly reach for ‘contrast’-ing qualities? If we follow physical parsimony strictly, the brain doesn’t do any ‘constructing’ of brightness, or 3d sky, or animals. The brain is *already* constructing complex molecular shapes that do everything that a physical body could possibly evolve to do – without any sense or experience and just using a simple geometry of invisible, unexperienced forces. What would a quality of ‘control’ be doing in a physical universe of automatic, statistical-mechanical inevitables?
“I suspect that our culture actually knew, at some point, that reality, and the sense of reality and being a mind, is the ability to dream – the ability to be some kind of biological machine that dreams about a world that contains it.”
Joscha 14:28
This is what I find so frustrating to me about about Joscha’s view. It is SO CLOSE to getting the bigger picture but it doesn’t go *far enough*. Why doesn’t he see that the biological machine would also be part of the dream? The universe is not a machine that dreams (how? why? parsimony, hard problem) – it’s a dream that machines sometimes. Or to be more precise (and to advertise my multisense realism views), the universe is THE dream that *partially* divides itself into dreams. I propose that these diffracted dreams lens each other to seem like anti-dreams (concrete physical objects or abstract logical concepts) and like hyper-dreams (spiritual/psychedelic/transpersonal/mytho-poetic experiences), depending on the modalities of sense and sense-making that are available, and whether they are more adhesive to the “Holos” or more cohesive to the “Graphos” end of the universal continuum of sense.
“So what do we learn from intelligence in nature? So first if first if we want to try to build it, we need to start with some substrates. So we need to start with some representations.”
Yulia 16:08
Just noting this statement because in my understanding, a physical substrate would be a presentation rather than a re-presentation. If we are talking about the substrates in nature we are talking about what? Chemistry? Cells made of molecules? Shapes moving around? Right away Yulia’s view is seems to give objects representational abilities. I understand that the hard problem of consciousness is not supposed to be part of the scope of her talk, but I am that guy who demands that at this moment in time, it needs to be part of every talk that relates to AI!
“…and in nature the representations used seem to be not distributed. Neural networks, if you’re familiar with those, multiple units, multi-dimensional vectors represent things in the world…and not just (you know) single symbols.”
Yulia 16:20
How is this power of representation given to “units” or “vectors”, particularly if we are imagining a universe prior to consciousness? Must we assume that parts of the world just do have this power to symbolize, refer to, or seem like other parts of the world in multiple ways? That’s fine, I can set aside consciousness and listen to where she is going with this.
17:16: I like what Yulia brings up about the differences between natural and technological approaches as far as nature (biology really). She says that nature begins with dynamic stability by adaptation to change (homeostasis, yes?) while AI architecture starts with something static and then we introduce change if needed. I think that’s a good point, and relate it to my view that “AI is Inside Out“. I agree and go further to add that not only does nature begin with change and add stasis when needed but nature begins with *everything* that it is while AI begins with *nothing*…or at least it did until we started using enormous training sets of training data from the world.
- to 18:14: She’s discussing the lag between sensation and higher cognition…the delay that makes prediction useful. This is a very popular notion and it is true as far as it goes. Sure, if we look at the events in the body as a chain reaction in the micro timescale, then there is a sequence going from retina to optical nerve to visual cortex, etc – but – I would argue this is only one of many timescales that we should understand and consider. In other ways, my body’s actions are *behind* my intentions for it. My typing fingers are racing to keep up with the dictation from my inner voice, which is racing to keep up with my failing memory of the ideas that I want to express. There are many agendas that are hovering over and above my moment-to-moment perceptions, only some of which I am personally aware of at any given moment but recognize my control over them in the long term. To look only at the classical scale of time and biology is to fall prey to the fallacy of smallism.
I can identify at least six modes of causality/time with only two of them being sequential/irreversible.
The denial of other modes of causality becomes a problem if the thing we’re interested in – personal consciousness, does not exist on that timescale or causality mode that we’re assuming is the only one that is real. I don’t think that we exist in our body or brain at all. The brain doesn’t know who we are. We aren’t there, and the brain’s billions of biochemical scale agendas aren’t here. Neither description represents the other, and only the personal scale has the capacity to represent anything. I propose that they are different timescales of the same phenomenon, which is ‘consciousness’, aka nested diffractions of the aesthetic-participatory Holos. One does not cause the other in the same way that these words you see on your screen are not causing concepts to be understood, and the pixels of the screen aren’t causing a perception of them as letters. They coincide temporally, but are related only through a context of conscious perception, not built up from unconscious functions of screens, computers, bodies, or brains.
- to 25:39 …cool stuff about insect brains, neural circuits etc.
- 25:56 talking about population coding, distributed representations. I disagree with the direction that representation is supposed to take here, as far as I think that it is important to at least understand that brain functions cannot *literally* re-present anything. It is actually the image of the brain that is a presentation in our personal awareness that iconically recapitulates some aspects of the subpersonal timescale of awareness that we’re riding on top of. Again, I think we’re riding in parallel, not in series, with the phenomenon that we see as brain activity. I suggest that the brain activity never adds up to a conscious experience. The brain is the physical inflection point of what we do to the body and what the body does to us. Its activity is already a conscious experience in a smaller and larger timescale than our own, that is being used by the back end of another, personal timescale of conscious experience. What we see as the body is, in that timescale of awareness that is subpersonal rather than subconscious, a vast layer of conscious experiences that only look like mechanisms because of the perceptual lensing that diffracts perspective from all of the others. The personal scope of awareness sees the subpersonal scope of awareness as a body/cells/molecules because it’s objectifying the vast distance between that biological/zoological era of conscious experience so that it can coexist with our own. It is, in some sense, our evolutionary past – still living prehistorically. We relate to it as an alien community through microscoping instruments. I say this to point way toward a new idea. I’m not expecting that this would be common knowledge and I don’t consider that cutting edge thinkers like Sandamirskaya and Bach are ‘wrong’ for not thinking of it that way. Yes, I made this view of the universe up – but I think that it does actually work better than the alternatives that I have seen so far.
- to 34:00 talking about the unity of the brain’s physical hardware with its (presumed) computing algorithms vs the disjunction between AI algorithms and the hardware/architectures we’ve been using. Good stuff, and again aligns with my view of AI being inverted or inside out. Our computers are a bottom-up facade that imitate some symptoms of some intelligence. Natural intelligence is bottom up, top down, center out, periphery in, and everything in between. It is not an imitation or an algorithm but it uses divided conscious experience to imitate and systemize as well as having its own genuine agendas that are much more life affirming and holistic than mere survival or control. Survival and control are annoyances for intelligence. Obstructions to slow down the progress from thin scopes of anesthetized consciousness to richer aesthetics of sophisticated consciousness. Yulia is explaining why neuroscience provides a good example of working AI that we should study and emulate – I agree that we should, but not because I think it will lead to true AGI, just that it will lead to more satisfying prosthetics for our own aesthetic-participatory/experiential enhancement…which is really what we’re trying to do anyhow, rather than conjure a competing inorganic super-species that cannot be killed.
When Joscha resumes after 34:00, he discusses Dall-E and the idea of AI as ‘dreaming’ but at the same time as ‘brute force’ with superhuman training on 800 million images. Here I think the latter is mutually exclusive of the former. Brute force training yes, dreaming and learning, no. Not literally. No more than a coin sorter learns banking. No more than an emoji smiles at us. I know this is tedious but I am compelled to continue to remind the world about the pathetic fallacy. Dall-E doesn’t see anything. It doesn’t need to. It’s not dreaming up images for us. It’s a fancy cash register that we have connected to a hypnotic display of its statistical outputs. Nothing wrong with that – it’s an amazing and mostly welcome addition to our experience and understanding. It is art in a sense, but in another it’s just a Ouija board through which we see recombinations of art that human beings have made for other human beings based on what they can see. If we want to get political about it, it’s a bit of a colonial land grab for intellectual property – but I’m ok with that for the moment.
In the dialogue that follows in the middle of the video, there is some interesting and unintentionally connected discussion about the lack of global understanding of the brain and the lack of interdisciplinary communication within academia between neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, neuromorphic engineers. (philosophers of mind not invited ;( ).
Note to self: get a bit more background on the AI silver bullet of the moment, the stochastic Gradient Descent Algorithm.
Bach and Sandamirskaya discuss the benefits and limitations of the neuromorphic, embodied hardware approach vs investing more in building simulations using traditional computing hardware. We are now into the shop talk part of the presentation. I’m more of a spectator here, so it’s interesting but I have nothing to add.
By 57:12 Joscha makes an hypothesis about the failure of AI thus far to develop higher understanding.
“…the current systems are not entangled with the world, but I don’t think it’s because they are not robots, I think it’s because they’re not real time.”
To this I say it’s because ‘they’ are not real. It’s the same reason why the person in the mirror isn’t actually looking back at you. There is no person there. There is an image in our visual awareness. The mirror doesn’t even see it. There is no image for the mirror, it’s just a plane of electromagnetically conditioned metal behind glass that happens to do the same kind of thing that the matter of our eyeballs does, which is just optical physics that need not have any visible presentation at all.
The problem is the assumption that we are our body, or are in our body, or are generated by a brain/body rather than seeing physicality as a representation of consciousness on one timescale that is more fully presented in another that we can’t directly access. When we see an actor in a movie, we are seeing a moving image and hearing sound. I think that the experience of that screen image as a person is made available to us not through processing of those images and sounds but through the common sense that all images and sounds have with the visible and aural aspects of our personal experience. We see a person *through* the image rather than because of it. We see the ‘whole’ through ‘holes’ in our perception.
This is a massive intellectual shift, so I don’t expect anyone to be able to pull it off just by thinking about it for 30 seconds, even if they wanted to. It took several years of deep consideration for me. The hints are all around us though. Perceptual ‘fill-in’ is the rule, not the exception. Intuition. Presentiment. Precognitive dreams, remote viewing, and other psi. NDEs. Blindsight and synesthesia.
When we see each other as an image of a human body we are using our own limited human sight, which is also limited by the animal body>eyes>biology>chemistry>physics. All of that is only the small illuminated subset of consciousness-that-we-are-personally-conscious-of-when-we-are-normatively-awake. It should be clear that is not all that we are. I am not just these words, or the writer of these words, or a brain or a body, or a process using a brain or body, I am a conscious experience in a universe of conscious experiences that are holarchically diffracted (top down, bottom up, center out, etc). My intelligence isn’t an algorithm. My intelligence is a modality of awareness that uses algorithms and anti-algorithms alike. It feasts on understanding like olfactory-gustatory awareness feasts on food.
Even that is not all of who I am, and even “I” am not all of the larger transpersonal experience that I live through and that lives through me. I think that people who are gifted with deep understanding of mathematics and systemizing logic tend to have been conditioned to use that part of the psyche to the exclusion of other modes of sense and sense making, leaving the rich heritage of human understanding of larger psychic contexts to atrophy, or worse, reappear as a projected shadow appearance of ‘woo’ to the defensive ego, still wounded from the injury of centuries under our history of theocratic rule. This is of course very dangerous, and even more dangerous, you need that atrophied part of the psyche to understand why it is dangerous…which is why seeing the hard problem in the first place is too hard for many people, even many philosophers who have been discussing it for decades.
Synchronistically, I now return to the video at 57:54, where Yulia touches on climate change (or more importantly, from our perspective, climate destabilization) and the flawed expectation of mind uploading. I agree with her that it won’t work, although probably for different reasons. It’s not because the substrate matters – it does, but only because the substrate itself is a lensing artifact masking what is actually the totality of conscious experience.
Organic matter and biology are a living history of conscious experience that cannot be transcended without losing the significance and grounding of that history. Just as our body cannot survive by drinking an image of water, higher consciousness cannot flourish in a sandbox of abstract semiotic switches. We flourish *in spite of* the limits of body and brain, not because our experience is being generated by them.
This is not to say that I think organic matter and biology are in any way the limits of consciousness or human consciousness, but rather they are a symptom of the recipe for the development of the rich human qualities of consciousness that we value most. The actual recipe of human consciousness is made of an immense history of conscious experience, wrapped around itself in obscenely complicated ways that might echo the way that protein structures are ordered. This recipe includes seemingly senseless repetition of particular conscious experiences over vast durations of time. I don’t think that this authenticity can be faked. Unlike the patina of an antique chair or the bouquet of a vintage wine that could in theory be replicated artificially, the humanness of human consciousness depends on the actual authenticity of the experience. It actually takes billions of years of just these types of physical > chemical > organic > cellular > somatic > cerebral > anthropological > cultural > historical experiences to build the capacity to appreciate the richness and significance of those layers. Putting a huge data set end product of that chain of experience in the hands of a purely pre-organic electrochemical processor and expecting it to animate into human-like awareness is like trying to train a hydrogen bomb to sing songs around a campfire.
Multisense Realism 
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