Multisense Realism

It is my conjecture that ‘Nature’ can be defined as ordinary sense. Sense as in sensation, in cognitive orientation, in intuition, and in categorization (in which sense?). The word sense is just a word, so it is not exactly what I mean, but the ‘sense’ which is conveyed through all of those ‘senses’ gives a good hint of what is behind it. The capacity to feel and to do and to discern the difference between them. That fundamental physical capacity is beneath all form, all function – it is being itself; perception and participation. Without perception (sense, detection), there can be no possibility of participation, and therefore no matter, energy, or time.

Right now, largely because of the success of computers, it is popular to believe that information (‘data’) is the underlying reality behind physics. In my view, this is almost true, but in this case, being almost true means being exactly false. Data is not sense, it is not presentation, not aesthetic nor participatory. To the contrary, information without the presence of a sensory-motor experience is anesthetic, theoretical, and re-presentational. Information is a conceptual entity which we derive by projecting our own experience of being informed onto disembodied functions. It is not real. No byte of data has ever done anything, felt anything, known anything, or been anything on its own.

Math requires a host, as it is the orthogonal reflection of all of sense. Where sense is proprietary and signifying, math is universal and generic. Sense takes place ‘here’ and ‘now’, while math can only be used by sense to address ‘then’ and ‘there, there, and there’. Math is position without disposition – a skeletal inference abstracted from logical vectors. It is this anesthetic universality which makes it so powerful for science – it is the essence of mechanism, of impersonality – pure extension with no intention. It is nature’s perfect imposter.

Continues on The Competition page.