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Chosen
I wondered about what anyone/everyone thought about the notion of ‘chosenness’ as a way to understand where we are here in the world.
What I propose is that a complete description of the universe must include:
1. The experience of significance.
This speaks to the idea of chosen-ness, of choice, of free will, of improbability as a quality as the subject of appreciation.
2. The experience of the significance of the idea of insignificance.
I word “the significance of the idea of insignificance” in this convoluted way to reflect the natural sequence in which the revelation of objectivity has occurred across all human societies. As far as I know:
a. *all* cultures begin their history steeped in animistic shamanism, divination, creation myths and charismatic deities and
b. *no* cultures develop eliminative materialism, mathematics, and mechanism earlier than philosophy or religion, and
c. *all* individuals experience the development of their own psyche through imaginative, emotional, and irrational or superstitious thought
d. *no* individuals are born with a worldview based only on generic facts and objectivity. Healthy children do not experience their lives in an indifferent and detached mode of observation but rather grow into analytical modes of thought through experience of the public world.
We are so convinced by the sophisticated realism of objective insignificance that we tend to project it into a default position, when in fact, it does not occur naturally that way. It is we who choose subjectively whether or not to project objectivity beneath our own ability to choose it.
The fact is, if were it that simple; were objectivity the final word, then we should have had no reason to be separated from it in the first place. The whole notion of illusion depends on the non-illusory capacity of our own reason to deduce and discern illusion from reality, so that to question our own ability to freely choose, to some extent, how we reason, gives us no possibility of ever contacting any truth to deny.
Looking at 1. and 2. more scientifically, I would link significance with teleology (choice) and insignificance with teleonomy (chance). I have proposed that while these two opposite potentials seem mutually exclusive to us from our subjective experience, that from an absolute perspective, they are in adjacent ranges of the same continuum. I suggest that the subjective experience of sensation, and nested layers of meta-sensation constitute significance, and that this significance is what allows the possibility of choice based on personal preference. It is the choice capacity itself which divides the sense of the world for the chooser between the chosen and the unchosen. This ontological fracture is what gives the impression that there is a difference between chance and choice and creates the possibility of feedback loops in which we can question both:
a. the reality of choice by choosing to adopt the perspective of impersonal chance, as well as
b. the reality of chance by choosing to adopt the perspective of super-personal choice.
In both cases we cannot arrive at a perspective without exercising our will to choose one over the other, even for hypothetical consideration. There is no ontological possibility of our abdicating our choice altogether, although the position which elevates insignificance compels through an appeal to do just that. This is true of contemporary forms of science in general, as the outside-in bias inherently demands compulsory and involuntary acceptance of facts and unambiguous inferences between them rather than recognizing the self-same subjective autonomy which drives the scientific consideration from beginning to end. Science relies on peer-review to enforce the belief in disbelief – the faith that peer-review itself is an unexplained artifact of human weakness, and that the rest of the universe has no need for such deliberations, nor could it generate them even if it were useful.
In practical terms, what this means is that
a. you can choose to pursue the chosen-feeling significance of your experience, but you risk increasing possibility of delusion and conflicting intuitions.
b. you can choose to pursue the unchosen analytical feeling of the significance of insignificance, but you risk cutting yourself off from the most unbelievable experiences of personal truth and participation.
In both cases the potential rewards are equally intense. If you open the door, you open the door to Heaven and Hell. If you close the door, you can be more effective as a practical agent on Earth. Sometimes the choice seems to be coerced by circumstance. Sometimes we open the door in some contexts more often and close it more in others. Our choices can change and evolve. Sometimes it doesn’t matter either way.
The universe that we find ourselves in is chosen on the inside, chance on the outside, but it is only because we are inside that we can discern the difference. Without an inside, nothing can choose to recognize a difference.
Being No One – Thomas Metzinger
A very good, concise presentation. I disagree with his ultimate conclusions, not because of faulty reasoning, but because of the same overlooked assumptions which most contemporary thinkers miss. Despite the appeal to transparency of modeling to explain the existence of subjective qualities, there really is no connection offered at all. A model is a cognitive index through which one instance of experience or presentation can be encapsulated within another. This is a re-presentation. Data which moves from one table to another, which is concatenated or compressed, is not a model unless a conscious entity interprets it that way. A DVD full of laser pits is not a color and sound recording unless it is decoded to a video screen by a DVD player. The DVD player is not playing a movie unless a movie-literate audience is available to watch it.
The problem with the idea of the phenomenal self model, as I see it, is that there is no computational benefit or physical resource which could account for the extra-physical, extra-informational presentation of the ‘model’ to the unmodeled system. In Raymond Tallis’ book ‘Aping Mankind’, he talks about the obvious disadvantages to such an introduction of conscious presentation into unconscious systems, which, after all, have successfully driven the rest of the universe, from the synthesis of nucleic acids to the neutralization of countless pathogens in our immune system. For something as important as executive control of the organism as a whole, an error ridden, self-deluded agent is the last thing that you would want sitting in the cockpit. Imagine if your digestive system relied on such a volitional dreamer to assimilate your nutrients or remember to regulate the pH of your blood.
No, I’m afraid that no information-based architecture can be used to thoroughly explain subjective experience, although it can explain how the particular human quality of subjective experience can be repaired, augmented, manipulated, etc. With information, we can’t even emulate human consciousness, but we can emulate some important products of it, IMO.
I think that I have found a better way to approach phenomenal facts. Rather than assuming that the experience of seeing red is indirect and non-physical I propose instead that physics has a private and a public range (which themselves have overlapping and underlapping regions).
I suggest that experience of seeing red is not synonymous with factual knowledge, but rather all factual knowledge is a category of direct sensory-motor experience. Experience or sense is primary, beneath matter, energy, spacetime, quantum, information, and arithmetic. Not human sense, but sense as universal fundamental.
As human beings, we are staggeringly complex, multilevel organisms. Our direct experience encompasses nested sub-personal experiences and super-personal signifiers as a recapitulation or compound direct experience. The experience of seeing red is a simpler experience, not because it is an illusion or functionally expedient representation, but because it is, on the native level of a whole person, a direct and ‘pre-factual’ physically real presence. Physical reality referring specifically to that which has both privately and publicly ranged presentation.
It’s a complete reworking of physics, I admit, but I humbly say that I think that it reconciles physics, philosophy, subjectivity, and information theory.
Niall McLaren’s Dual Aspect Theory
This video lecture series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjABUhyu6dw does a good job showing how a psychiatrist, Niall McLaren, argues toward a dual aspect theory. I recomend his books: http://www.niallmclaren.com/bibliography
I like that he clearly sees the limitations of the other approaches, but he does not yet see the problems with the assumption of ‘information’ and the ‘semantic realm’. He is modeling experience logically in space rather than naturalistically through time.
His view overlooks the same issue all the way down the line:
2. Logic gates, in his view, “coopt the mechanical function to acquit the semantic function of defining relationships”.
We are exploiting the public physics of the logic gate’s form to generate a more subtle level of public physics which we read as signs. In other words, we exploit the public facing forms and functions of the gate to exploit our own public facing forms and functions (optical patterns to tease the eye, acoustic patterns to call to the ear), allowing a sharing and communication of experience in spite of forms and functions, which are completely hidden from the conscious spectacle. In fact no ‘information’ is exchanged, except metaphorically. What is exchanged is concretely real and physical, although physics and realism of course, should only be thought of as a range of scaled or scoped experience based on time-like frequencies on space-like obstructions.
3. His view focuses on the logic of the mind rather than the richness of qualia.
4. His view conflates grammatical structure for meaning.
While it is important to model thought backwards through communication like he does for purposes of AI development, it is a mistake to apply the model the ontology that way. The horse is not an assembly of carts, so to speak. The cart without the horse is useless. The words and sentences are empty carts without the personal experience of semiosis, which is not included in physics or information theory. Experience is the key.
5. His views on personality and mental disorder are the weakest parts of the presentation in my opinion. They are normative and nakedly behaviorist, mistaking again public behaviors for private realities. What he sees as simply a collection of habits, I see as a vast interiority of identity and influence rooted in the sub-personal, super-personal and super-signifying bands of sensory-motive experience.
6. I disagree too that neurons “pass information mindlessly”.
The three pronged plug that he says we are looking for is sensory-motive participation (or ‘sense’). The three prongs are (I) private experience, (II) public bodies, and (III) the potential for significance-entropy to be generated through the multiple levels of spacetime-body::timespace-experience interaction.
I was sure to mention that I do appreciate his work. I think that he is doing a great job, and I probably disagree with his model less than I do most scientific models.
* to be precise, impersonal public presentations are representations from a fundamental or absolute perspective, while personal private presentations are representations from a derived or secondary perspective. This is very confusing, but something like a chair which is objectively real is fundamentally a representation within the experience of whoever is encountering it. The chair seems like a presentation to us because that is the function of the representation – to warn us of the presence of something completely outside of ourselves.
Morphoria and The Deconstruction of Arithmetic
isomorphism:
1. Biology Similarity in form, as in organisms of different ancestry.2. Mathematics A one-to-one correspondence between the elements of two sets such that the result of an operation on elements of one set corresponds to the result of the analogous operation on their images in the other set.3. A close similarity in the crystalline structure of two or more substances of similar chemical composition.“Homology, then, is the relation between abstract objects (descriptions, or representations of real world objects) where the formal description allows a mapping function between them.”
“Analogous relations are still a kind of isomorphism, but the mapping is not between sets of objects, but between the form of the objects themselves”
“If I discover that Raptor X has enzyme E, then I can infer that all other members of the Raptor group have E as well! That’s an enormous amount of inductive warrant. Interestingly, if I tell you that a raptor is a predator, you cannot infer that all raptors are (some are scavengers). Homology does not license analogical claims. But it may bracket them, as I will later argue. We can summarize the difference here by saying that classifications by homology are inductively projectible, while classifications by analogy are deductive only. Moreover, analogies are generally model-based. The choice of what properties to represent usually depend upon some set of “pertinent” properties, and this is not derived from an ignorance of what matters, or some unobtainable theory-neutrality. In order to measure similarity, you need to know what counts.”
Anamorphic drawings are distorted pictures requiring the viewer to use a special, often reflective device to reconstitute the image.
-phore: Bearer or carrier of.
Semaphore: Borrowed in 1816 from French sémaphore, coined in French from Ancient Greek σῆμα (sêma, “sign”), and -φωρος (-phoros), from φέρω (férō, “to bear, carry”
Euphoria: An excited state of joy, a good feeling, a state of intense happiness.
Metaphor:
- A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
- A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, esp. something abstract.
anaphor: 1. a word (such as a pronoun) used to avoid repetition; the referent of an anaphor is determined by its antecedent. 2. An expression refering to another expression. In stricter uses, an expression referring to something earlier in the discourse or, even more strictly, only reflexive and reciprocal pronouns.
The difference between morphic (shape) and phoric (carrier) is a good way of grabbing on to the essential difference between public and private phenomena. Metaphors or other ‘figures of speech’ can have a wide gap between one reference and another. Similarity, as the blog quoted above mentions, is notoriously hard to pin down. The author mentions “Hamming Distance, Edge Number and Tversky Similarity” but these approaches to defining similarity rely on lower level methods of pattern recognition. In all cases, similarity requires some capacity to detect, compare, discern criteria from the comparison, and cause an action which can be detected publicly. In other words, similarity requires that something can generate sensory-motive participation.
The infocentric definitions of similarity do not adequately address the private sense of similarity at all, rather they confine the consequences of theoretical object interactions to demonstrable sets of criteria. Edge number does not apply to something such as whether a feeling is like another feeling or not. To me all of this really highlights the bias of the Western approach of reducing science to the taxonomy of rigid public bodies. The experience even of fluid, gaseous, or plasma phenomena are virtually inaccessible unless reduced to a microcosmic level at which only rigid object properties are considered and all smoothness is abstracted into ’emergent properties’.
This relates back to the analog and mathematics. If we look at a basic arithmetic operation like 4 x 5 = 20, and get beneath the surface, I think what we might find something like “If four things were just like one thing, then five of those four-ish things would be just like ten two-ish things, or two ten-ish things, which would be one twenty-ish thing”. In a previous post, I got into ratio as the root of reason, and how the radius can be adjusted between tighter and looser rationality. How figurative do you want to get is the question which determines how universal, public, and ‘Western-scientific’ you want to get. Quantitative analysis of course, is the ultimate rationalization, the ultimate reduction of ‘just like’ to ‘exactly the same as’. The ‘=’ condenses all subjectivity into a single semaphore, a flag which refers to precise equivalence, or absolute universal similarity. Similar in all ways that count. What counts is presumed in advance by the Western mind, to be reliable public function, aka objective realism.
Numbers therefore, could be called isophors. Carriers of one to one correspondence. The caliper of the drafting compass of reason is set to minimum tolerance – to the point of points; digital-Boolean logic. At this point, even geometry is superfluous, and computation is revealed to be a spaceless function of connection and disconnection. Whether electronic or mechanical, computers are based on contact and detection first and foremost. Contact (a connection of ranged position) influences physical change (thermodynamic disposition). Despite the assumptions of both AI and QM, I am confident that this is a property of matter, not of vacuum space or ‘information’.
Moving from numbers to geometry and algebra is a matter of making isophors into meta-isophors. We understand that just as a twenty is four fives or five fours, or two tens, so does any number enumerating itself twice is a square, and a squared hypotenuse relates to the square of the sides of a triangle as the squared radius of a circle times pi is its area. The transfer of integers into variables is a squaring of the isomorphic function, making all of mathematics a psychological model of modeling itself. It is no surprise then, that at this point of maximum Western influence over science, we should mistake our own concretely physical experiences of conscious life for a ‘model’ and the world in which we live for a Matrix.
Of course, when all of the logical analysis and quantitative analogs are stripped away, it is only the morphic, the phoric, and the sense to tell the difference which are genuinely real. Logic is not the isophor of sense however, or even a homophor. I would say that maybe logic is the public facing hemisphor of sense. It is the half of sense which can be generalized externally.
Multisense Realism 
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