Multisense Realism

On Computationalism and Qualia Depth

I conclude that Computationalism is almost correct, but because of the nature of consciousness, that means it is exactly incorrect. It is rooted in the seduction of ‘information’ as a concrete pseudosubstance. I think that arithmetic is the ‘flattest’ qualia that we can access, and therefore the most externally universal. Its universality gives us a wide capacity to mechanize objects but assembling machines from parts is the opposite of an organism, which organically divides from a whole.

Human consciousness, by comparison, is a towering accumulation of experiential ‘residues’, or perceptual inertia which I understand to be negentropy or significance; a concentration of qualitative richness. Interior phenomenology cannot ex-press its proliferation as increasing sophisticated forms nested in space, so it impresses itself as increasingly meaningful experiences, themes, and narratives. Not merely more complex or sophisticated, but seemingly more important and more real.

Computationalism leans almost exclusively on complexity (as a machina ex deus if you will) to impress itself into overlooking the impossibility of forms in space generating meaningful experience through time. What it fails to understand is that the richness of qualia is not complex, it is simple. Blue is blue. Pain is pain. There is no Fourier transform required to appreciate them. The key is to understand the symmetry:

(Sense + Motive) time = significance || (matter – energy) / space = entropy

Just as evolutionary biology grew the brain faster than the skull to cause cortical folding, the corresponding subjective capacity became exponentially more aesthetic. The will became more insistent on projecting itself externally. We became human.