Multisense Realism

Yes, this is close to what I am saying – however, the revolutionary, brain melting, Earth shattering step that is still necessary is to question what ‘information’ or a ‘message’ really is while it is traveling between the sender and a receiver. What is it made of? What laws govern it?

Once you can entertain the idea that ‘information’ is itself an idea that infers how concrete experiences are perceived and interpreted, you can begin to see that it is only a metaphor. There is no actual information there. There is no message-ness flying through space literally. Complex organisms like us have separate channels of experience, so that our thoughts are interpretations of our perceptions, which are interpretations of our sensations, which are interpretations of our cellular and molecular detections, etc, but on the lowest levels of atomic interaction, I suspect that they are all the same thing – Just one sense which detects, orients, projects, and responds, and through that interaction, larger groups of molecules, structures, bodies, and bodies within bodies (organisms) are able to participate in a higher quality of sense interaction.

You are right when you say that a perfectly transparent object doesn’t know how to hear the information, and that it why it cannot be illuminated by it. What I think that really means though, is not that there is a photon passing through it which doesn’t get flagged down and absorbed/reflected but rather it means that the transparent target of the light is simply not sensitive to the source in that range of sensitivity. There is nothing whatsoever in between the source (light bulb) and the target (eye glasses) which the glass molecules are colliding with, rather, the glass itself can ‘see’ the light bulb in some ways, but not in others. This example is an ideal example in a vacuum. In an atmosphere you’ve got gaseous molecules in between which are themselves targets, each receiving and expressing their version of what they have received like a game of telephone. All of these molecules respond however, not by releasing projectiles into space, but by changing their own configuration, and when they do, everything in the universe notices on one level, close things notice on another level, transparent things notice on another level, heavy things notice in other ways, etc.

Everything has its own class of recognition and self-reconfiguration, and the higher the quality of the grouping (experiences of higher organisms), the more unique and idiosyncratic their class is, at least in their own estimation. It is difficult to know whether human individuality is really as many orders of magnitude more significant as say mouse individuality, but that either is a relative bias which is inherent with sense that is complete fiction (which means more of a Horton Hears a Who universe where ever particle of dust is literally like a planet full of human quality citizens) or there is some objective truth to this bias and mice are to some extent lacking in individuality compared to dogs and family members. This really is multisense realism in nutshell. I hope my answer makes some sense, thanks for asking. Feel free to ask more if anything seems unclear. The bottom line is, information and energy are metaphors. They make our equations work out so that we can account for and control effects in our world by impersonal means (rather than directly by personal or sub=personal means, as we control the content of our own attention). What we are really talking about when we say information is that we know that something has been informed by something else. Something’s state has been changed and something can tell the difference. It is happening at the receiving end and refers back to the source but implies no physical collisions, at least not on the very bottom levels which give rise to matter (whether that is at the subatomic level, molecular level, or above). At whatever point we choose, beneath that there is sensemaking taking place. Something is making sense of something. I suspect that it is the subatomic level which is, for us at least (and this goes back to the unacceptable, Horton Hears A Who pan-anthropism) which is the sense of atoms rather than independent structures. I could be wrong. Photons could be separate structures…which are intangible, invisible, massless, ambiguously formless givers of form which travel between surfaces of objects at infinite speed within any inertial frame, but, um, what the hell kind of a structure is that? How does that carry information?

It doesn’t. Emperors New Clothes. Our brains are made of the same atoms as everything else. If I can see and feel someone smiling at me from across the room without pieces of their mouth colliding with my eyeballs, then atoms might be able to do the same thing. They see. Not focused animal vision of a billion years of evolved quality, but what they lack in qualities of focus and intelligibility they make up for in universality. They see it ALL, but only barely (assuming non-pan-anthropism).