Multisense Realism

Since every organism produces itself from a single dividing cell, it can be said that there is a single history which unites that body back to the cellular level. Atoms do not literally reproduce by themselves so that a machine that is assembled has a no single history to unite it.

This becomes more relevant if we suppose that experience arises as a collected and collective unity of sequence, a many-to-one of integrated participation which is not literal and quantitative, but figurative, qualitative, and iconic. It is meaning and world.

A machine is an abstraction which takes physical history for granted. When executed in a material assembly, there is no literal reproduction, only separate parts brought together unintentionally (from the point of view of the parts) to imitate the function of a specialized organic form.

I think that where comp/functionalist assumptions fail is in the misunderstanding of meaning and world as discrete analytic behaviors rather than continuous synthetic wholes. We can see them as wholes because we are unified beings who can see even cartoon characters and puppets as wholes, but that does not mean that there is any continuous awareness that unifies the parts of the machine. To compensate for this, we generally have to build in a monotonously recursive device, like a clock, pump, or wheel to provide an imitation of continuous flow. This should not be confused with the continuous flow which arises organically in a living body. An organic flow is not a clock to which separate parts are mechanically attached, but a collective rhythm which is synchronized from within the shared motive of the reproduced cell. This is can be seen clearly in the behavior of heart cells as they congregate physically and experientially. Look at what it is:

See the difference?

The cells are pushing a private negentropic agenda, while the clock has no agenda at all. You can see it. It is one dimensional tension in a material like metal or winding down one tick at a time, or an electronic response from a semiconductor material. Neither materials have any native motivation or momentum, they must be wound up or plugged in, wired or bolted together. It is a back door imitation of an organism, artificially integrated to use borrowed power to generate the effect of continuous running.

Consciousness has mechanical aspects as well, and indeed the content of our minds can be said to be running as well, but the difference is that the mind runs on it’s own momentum. More importantly the mind can be quieted so that deeper, unconscious experiences can rise to conscious awareness. These experiences do not seem to arise out of the rapidity of mental syntax as functionalism assumes, but out of deep metaphorical interiority which presents spontaneously and unbidden with insight and prescience rather than deterministically or randomly.

This can be explained by understanding the continuity of psychological experience as the entirety of time being scratched or perturbed by the collective experience of a subset of time. The entity is made of time (really meanings, characters, and worlds…stories. Time is an analytical abstraction that has to do more with objects, space, and density). This may seem mystical or esoteric at first, but I think that is because profound truth about subjectivity must by definition evoke the charms of self fetish. Oriental floridity. Super-signifying Hermeticism. Pageantry. It is who we are and why we are, as distinguished from what and how we are (bodies, cells, cities, planets…Occidental austerity. A-signifying quanta. Physical engineering).

Experienced history then, under multisense realism, is crucial. We are the polar opposite of a tabula rasa. The interiority of the stem cell is not a blank coin to be struck with a cellular role, but a ‘Once upon a time’ from which a spectrum of cellular characters and capacities can be diffracted. This is meaning. This is learning, understanding, loving, and growing (also hating, killing, forgetting and half remembering, making things up, creating etc.)

If experience were mechanical, then a clone could be conditioned with the identical experiences and an identical person would be created. If since strong computationalism is does not ground identity in material at all, we would have to say that a cloned body (machine + program) with cloned experience (runtime) would actually be the same person.

If instead we see experience as a unique and idiosyncratic subset of the totality of experience, there can be no Boys from Brazil strategy – no designer identities. Besides nature, nurture, and random variation, there may be a semantic momentum which opens up a flow of identity like a pinata of experienced history being hit with a series of blows: conception, birth, childhood, etc. It is not a process through which an identity is mechanically assembled or fabricated, but one in which identity is revealed and developed from within the self and within experience.

What does ‘within experience’ mean? It means meaning. Significance. The qualitative feeling or message ‘within’ experience. The moral to the story, the lesson learned, the point to be made, etc. Unlike a sequence of instructions or registers in memory, there is no a-signifying transfer of digitally encoded histories. Instead it is a recapitulation of signifying analog wholes. They are not assembled together like a device or dataset, but live with the subject as subjects, growing, changing, and revealing themselves in endlessly new ways through experience and also from within the subject – ripening and flowering, bearing fruit, etc.

Experience is not mere decision trees. Even though the visible shape of a living tree can be modeled in simple mathematical functions, there is no tree experience there. There is no journey from acorn to oak, only from vector to vector or pixel to pixel. There is form but no content. What is so hard to communicate is that the reason for this is counter-counter-intuitive. We expect the truth of subjectivity to be in a counter-intuitive hidden form. That there is some fantastic organization of the brain which gives us human experience. The idea that human experience is literally what it seems to be – a story of human life, grounded in the totality of the cosmic story is anathema to contemporary science. We are looking for the back door, the trick to the illusion, but the trick is that tricks and illusions are the exceptions to the rule. We can only know illusion because we have the sense to know that individual channels of sense can be fooled. That is no trick and no illusion. That is sanity, awareness, and consciousness.

A machine has no such sense. To a Turing machine, all binary feeds are equal. I have no problem at all asserting that there is no meaning and no world experiencing capacity associated with a binary feed. Imitation perception makes up for it’s qualitative superficiality with high speed execution, giving us the illusion of intelligence, but intelligence without meaning or world experience is a different kind of intelligence – one of pure syntax and no semantic kernel to grow and change through experience. There is trivial learning and adaptation, but it is a shadow play through which our own powers of interpretation can fill in the blanks. A humanoid decision tree, constantly running, with no creative iconic depths of its own.

Identical twins have many similarities, but even brain conjoined twins are different individuals. Their histories fundamentally diverge after conception and further diverge with each experience. Their perspectives are different. A machine is just the opposite. An old Macintosh Plus computer could be manufactured today, using the same materials, different materials, or even by virtually emulated on another computer entirely and be exactly the same as any Mac Plus that was ever manufactured. There is no retained history and no world awareness, no difference in perspective. Unlike conjoined twins, networked computers don’t fight with each other. They don’t differentiate themselves. Why? Because there is no self there to differentiate, only a perpetual centralized spinning. This is using space and motion to create the illusion of time – animation.

What we are is neither space, nor motion, nor time, nor information, but informed, moving, waving firmament. Not the wave but that infinitely anchored silent stillness of everythingness itself which is being perturbed in a wavelike manner and making shows within shows which we call time and experience, or, if you like, energy. Energy is a concept of the experience of one show being indirectly experienced in the context of another show. It’s anomalous but sensible. Like the end of Wizard of Oz where the three super-signifying (floridly fictional) characters are re-contextualized as ordinary (naturalistic fictional) farmhand characters in the desaturated aftermath of the dream