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Mathematical Musings
Here are some of the more mathematical concepts related to Multisense Realism.
Position on Mathematics
Mathematics does not exist on its own. It does not haunt the vacuum of space. It does not manifest as public objects or substances. It has no will or motivation.
Mathematics is two distinctly different (opposite) things:
1) A private experience of imagined sensory symbol-figures which accompany a motive of quantitative reasoning.
2) A collection of public objects interacting in a logical, causal way, without any private representations, as a consequence of the shapes of multiple rigid bodies.
The problem with functionalist expectations is that they seduce us into a shell game so that when we look at math ‘out there’ (2), we smuggle in the meaning from ‘in here’ (1), and when we look at meaning in here (1) we mis-attribute it to the blind enactment of material bodies.
We assume that the world outside of our minds runs on math not because it actually does, but because our awareness of the public arena is a grossly reduced, indirect logical construction. The universe without, like the universe within, runs on qualitative sensory-motor experiences.
Turning the functionalist expectations around then, we find that the activity of the brain is not the source of human experience, but rather the effect of many kinds of experience on many levels (physical, chemical, biological). These experiences are not generated by information or mathematics, but rather information is an analysis of experiences by someone who knows almost nothing about them first hand.
We are used to thinking of ‘data’ in terms of digital vs analog. Consider however that both of these categories are a-signifying formats. I would like to propose a principle by which subjective, signifying experience is introduced – a qualitative instrumentality of being.
Think of the number line – abstract, linear, literal. A conception of pure quantitative non-awareness. It’s a semantic artifact from which all qualitative content has been stripped. It’s like a Supremetist work of art, really.
The act of measurement itself is to invert qualitative experience – to collapse it into value coordinates on a numberline, allowing us to treat it as a hypothetical object, aka, a figure.
Ordinal position applies to the literal, outward facing specifications of rank. This is where the universe gets the ideas for front and back (anterior and posterior) and interior exterior. As in Chess, rank refers to the relative power of the piece – the order of their significance to the game.
Ordinal disposition applies to the figurative, inward facing qualities associated with rank. This is where the universe gets the ideas for best and worst (superior and inferior). Feeling like a King or Queen, being treated like royalty, having access to first choice in dividing the spoils, etc. Ordinal disposition is about the experiential privilege of rank while ordinal position is about the mechanics associated with delivering or deriving that privilege.
by contrast, Cardinal position I am saying refers to the relative size of a real public phenomenon. The range here is along an axis from the micro to the mega, and can refer to increasing scopes and scale or increasing quantitative complexity. This is about structures nested within structures, separated by spaces of varying size. Rather than in/out, front/back, or high/low-superior/inferior, cardinal position is about spatial-topological extension – long/short, large/small.
Cardinal disposition rounds out the four as an evaluation based on rarity. Like the pawns in chess, their generic abundance relative to the two unique pieces and the three duplicated pieces indicates their disposable rank. This is different from ordinal disposition in that superiority/inferiority derives not from order in a sequence, but from degree of commonality. Where cardinal position is about space and geometry, cardinal disposition is about feelings derived from time and algebra; frequency. How often. Sooner/later. Cheap/dear. Ordinary/exotic. The magic here is in pattern recognition. ‘Three in a row’ is an example of how low caste occurrences can ascend to uncommon value.
The terms for the columns and rows in chess, rank and file, are useful here. The rank can be seen as the vertical axis of qualitative position and disposition, while the single-file of pawns exemplifies the horizontal axis of quantitative position and disposition. Poker hands are a good metaphor to see this as well. Pairs, three and four of a kind, flushes display cardinal significance, straights, high cards, and Royal flushes display ordinal significance. The other hands, full house, straight flush, demonstrate an appreciation of the cardinal disposition of combined cardinal and ordinal values.
Causation Diagram
I suggest that consciousness isn’t built up from nothing by tiny parts, it is recovered from everything by sensitivity. Unlike traditional causation models, Multisense Realism posits a radiant centripetal locus (‘here and now’) divided into lower (interior) and upper (exterior) sense conjugates. The blue and yellow connote the mirroring of the conjugates, signifying that subjective and objective modalities are not merely different but are opposite, or orthomodular ontologies:
Yellow: Interior significance (doing*being)(timespace) and
Blue: Exterior entropy (matter/energy)/spacetime
In the lower yellow half, the subjective experience of ‘now’ (M1) represents the tip of an iceberg of mental events (M) through constraints on experiential scope . The scope of a human experience is limited on the ‘near’ end by sampling rate and on the ‘far’ end by long term memory. The event horizon of the M1 now degenerates from proprietary availability toward Mφ (totality of experience, significance, or consciousness itself) along a proposed fractional Fibonacci ratio.
The blue upper half, by contrast, depicts the counterpart to M1 as ΣP, or the sum of all physical presentations relative to any given M stack. Note that physical presentations (P) are understood to be the ‘back end’ of mental presentations (M), i.e. a better symbol for physical presentations here might be shaped like a W to mirror M.
In the blue half of the diagram, the fading nested ellipses represent a different, public kind of constraint on sense – obstruction and scale. Beginning from the outside at P1 (the Big Bang) and proliferating into smaller and more granular forms. The spread between the cosmic and the microcosmic pushes out from the middle.
Degree of figurativeness in qualia equates to privacy of qualia.
1. Subjects necessarily have access to more qualia which applies to their autobiographical experience than qualia which refers to external, publicly accessible experience.
2. It is proposed that the more strictly personal a quale is, the greater the set of interconnected psychological associations that exists for the individual and the richer and more imaginative those associations can be.
3. Mathematically, the more personal an experience is to us, the more ways we can shift its meaning, making qualitative floridity and associative fluidity directly proportional to privacy.
Sole Entropy Well Model
Loschmidt’s Paradox, which as I understand it is basically “If the universe is always increasing from low entropy to high entropy, then where did the initial low entropy come from?” can be approached in a different way than what has been suggested so far. Boltzmann’s entropy curve proposes that our universe’s Big Bang is only one of many bubbles or waves which we find ourselves in anthropically.
What I propose instead is a single well of bottomless low entropy, which perpetually lengthens as all possible Boltzmann entropy waves are anticipated and absorbed before they can threaten the negentropic monopoly of the well.
In this view, the range of possible kinds of signals becomes quantitatively bound on one extreme by the Absolute (where all signals are fused in singularity of significance) and spacetime (where all signals are divided in absolute cardinality or insignificance). Like velocity, which ranges from stillness to c, the phenomenon of significance actually defines the parameters of its own measure. Entropy has meaning only in relation to expected significance, such that anything less than 100% entropy has some portion of Absolute significance. The most insignificant event can still only have 99.999…% entropy, and even the negentropic monopoly of the Absolute can only ever attain 0.000…1% entropy.
This way, the Big Bang becomes a perpetually receding event horizon of absolute and eternal negentropy, – a Borg-like ‘bright whole’ which tyrannically absorbs and subordinates all potentials and possibilities into a single continuum-schema of sense. This continuum must accommodate all paradoxes which amounts to a lot of fancy devices like nesting signals within each other on multiple interrelated layers or castes, and orthomodular juxtapositions such as private-public. These devices accomplish what I call the Big Diffraction.
The initial signal, which is the bootstrap for all sense-motor phenomena, is initiation itself, and as it defines all future coherence, it is perpetually hogging all possible signals for all time, banishing any rival Multiverse by perpetual deferment and delay.
L’existentialisme est un humanisme
One of the benefits of having never been interested in reading other people’s philosophy, is that I get to discover them in digestible bits and pieces over a long period of time. I have always found it impossible to learn anything without first having a curiosity about it – which why public education was always a complete waste of time for me. I can only seem to learn answers to questions when the questions are my own.
This is perhaps not unrelated to my topic here of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism and his use of the phrase “Existence precedes essence” in his 1945 lecture L’existentialisme est un humanisme* (turned later into a book). The terms existence and essence can be confusing, and in some senses are interchangeable. Sartre’s use of existence and essence would actually be nearly opposite to my own sense of those words.
If you read the lecture, in which he defends existentialism from misinterpretations by Communists, who accuse the philosophy of being a bourgeois privilege that promotes ‘quietism’, and by Christians as undermining the authority of God and being generally too abstract and lacking human sentiment. Sartre’s defense is to show how existentialism is, to the contrary, an exaltation of humanism and the vital importance of taking action on behalf of your fellow man. He says
“Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. The word “subjectivism” is to be understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism.”
Looking into the origins of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, I can see that in all likelihood she lifted the name for her ideology from reversing Sarte’s assertion that man is responsible for all men. In 1962, she writes that the Ethics of Objectivism are Self-interest:
3. “Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”
Of course, Rand had her own personal reasons for despising those meddling Marxist do-gooders. Had she been more down with the whole ‘compassion for fellow human beings’ thing, her views would seem strikingly similar to Sartre’s existentialism, especially with his assertion that “Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, he is also only what he wills himself to be”. His use of ‘existence precedes essence’ is to say that human nature is predicated on the freedom to actualize itself intentionally. Human essence is a wildcard to be used as we see fit. Thus, his existentialism is an action oriented ethos, He says “there is no doctrine more optimistic, since man’s destiny is within himself; . . . . It tells him that action is the only thing that enables man to live”
I would not disagree with that, as far as it goes. Although it is not quietism as he felt the Marxists contended, it could be appropriated (as Rand did) for the justification of selfish motives since it seems to de-emphasize the role that the circumstances of one’s birth play in limiting the effect that one’s will can have on self-actualization. I do think that the Christian criticism is more misguided, since existentialism explicitly exalts humanist values. While existentialism does run counter to Christian doctrine, I think that it is not incompatible with concepts of divinity which honor liberation. Bob Marley’s Stand Up For Your Rights expresses this:
“Most people think,
Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. Jah!”
Where it gets muddled for me is on the metaphysical level. When Sartre talks about essence, he is talking about purpose – human purpose. When he is talking about existence is is talking about the existence of the experience of living a human life. This is very different from talking about existence in general, of matter, of forms, etc. When I think about ex-istence in the absolute sense, I am thinking about that which is ex-terior to the subject. That which is independent from our personal thoughts and feelings. Subjectivity is, by contrast, that which literally ‘ins-ists’ and is in-terior by the subject. It could be said informally that our feelings and thoughts exist, that they ‘are’ phenomena which is part of our being, which is a phenomena in the universe, and that is true too. It could further be said that everything that exists in that way, which simply ‘is’ can only appear to be through some insistence of essential forces or energies.
I think that existence and essence in the general, non-human sense are a dialectic rather than a procession through time. They are relativistic terms. To say that one precedes the other can be locally true in either case, but it obscures the deeper truth. It invites us to mistake two levels of human experience – the innate and the intentional, for structural antagonists of the universe as a whole. What I see as more relevant is the juxtaposition between the capacity to discern aesthetic differences like essence and existence and the indifference to such distinctions. That I would say is the true essence: The sense of difference with the logic of unity (i.e. metaphor, presentation and representation). The true essence of existence is the opposite: The sense of indifference with the logic of differentiation (i.e. mechanism, mathematics).
What this does is to slide the dichotomy out from the world of anthropocentric philosophy and into the realm of scientific conjecture. We are no longer talking about only the human condition and human psychology, but talking about the common sense of all phenomena. This is the solution to the Mind Body problem…both Mind and Body are figments of subjective experience, only the body is locally misrepresented as an object (when it is actually trillions of discrete histories dating back to the beginning of the universe) and the mind is misrepresented as a subject of the body or of God (when it is actually eternity focused into a single, human gauged, perceptual inertial frame of ‘now’).
*L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Nagel, 1946, translation by Frechtman published as Existentialism (also see below), Philosophical Library, 1947, translation by Mairet published asExistentialism and Humanism, Methuen, 1948.
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