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Breaking The Fourth Wall
Sense (in the Absolute sense) reveals itself reflexively as the Uni-verse, aka monad of non-orientable self-juxtaposition, aka, “the Pansensitive Meta-Lectic Solitrophic-Holarchic Multiphoric-Unametry”, provider of implicit unity (likeness) across multiplicity (private sensory afference) and explicit participation (public motor efference) through intentional animism and automatic mechanism.
reflexive
1. Directed back on itself.involution
entanglement; a spiraling inwards; intricacy
(mathematics) A function, transformation, or operator that is equal to its inverse, i.e., which gives the identity when applied to itself.tessellation
the careful juxtaposition of shapes in a pattern; “a tessellation of hexagons”.non-orientable
A surface S in the Euclidean spaceR3 is orientable if a two-dimensional figure (for example,) cannot be moved around the surface and back to where it started so that it looks like its own mirror image (
). Otherwise the surface is non-orientable.
The Möbius strip is a non-orientable surface
The Ouroboros or Uroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.
The Ouroboros often symbolize self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things such as the phoenix which operate in cycles that begin anew as soon as they end. It can also represent the idea of primordial unity related to something existing in or persisting from the beginning with such force or qualities it cannot be extinguished. While first emerging in Ancient Egypt, the Ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, but has also been frequently used in alchemical illustrations, where it symbolizes the circular nature of the alchemist’s opus. It is also often associated with Gnosticism, and Hermeticism. Carl Jung interpreted the Ouroboros as having an archetypal significance to the human psyche.[citation needed] The Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann writes of it as a representation of the pre-ego “dawn state”, depicting the undifferentiated infancy experience of both mankind and the individual child.
Early alchemical ouroboros illustration. From the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist (Greco-Roman Egypt).Autopoiesis (from Greek auto-, meaning “self”, and poiesis, meaning “creation, production”) refers to a closed system capable of creating itself. The term was introduced in 1972 by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define to the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of systems theory and sociology.
Bootstrapping or booting refers to a group of metaphors which refer to a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help.
The phrase appears to have originated in the early 19th century United States (particularly in the sense “pull oneself over a fence by one’s bootstraps”), to mean an absurdly impossible action, an adynaton.Trompe l’œil (French for deceive the eye) is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that depicted objects exist in three dimensions. Forced perspective is a comparable illusion in architecture.
Breaking the fourth wall is when a character acknowledges their fictionality, by either indirectly or directly addressing the audience. Alternatively, they may interact with their creator (the author of the book, the director of the movie, the artist of the comic book, etc.). This is more akin to breaking one of the walls of the set, but the existence of a director implies the existence of an audience, so it’s still indirectly Breaking The Fourth Wall. This trope is usually used for comedic purposes.
Immediation Riff
One of the trickiest hurdles to get around in considering consciousness is the assumption of qualia as a medium for communication. It is a natural mistake, particularly in the contemporary media-saturated culture which we inhabit, to see our visual experience as a kind of neurologically generated video screen, and our feelings and thoughts as the user level output of the brain’s biochemical computations.
There are two problems with this – one is that it cannot be true, and the second is that it may not be possible for everyone to understand why it cannot be true. The second problem is perhaps the most debilitating, as any argument I can give will be preaching to the choir for those who understand and will not make much sense to those who don’t (or can’t). After so many long debates with people who do not understand why it is impossible to have representation without presentation, or why it makes no sense to put a beautiful dashboard inside a computer driven car, I can say that I have still never seen it happen that someone is able to suddenly or even gradually ‘see the light’. Like gender preference, handedness or the ability to see Magic Eye 3D images, the trait of being able to conceptualize the irreducibility of qualia appears to be innate rather than learnable. There may be exceptions, but for the most part, people who are very interested in scientific approaches to consciousness are fixated on consciousness as a medium through which zoologically relevant facts are communicated, rather than the pervasively immediating pansensitivity that we call reality.
To be clear, human consciousness is not immediate relative to all other scales and layers of consciousness. Our personal awareness is mediated by countless other sub-personal micro sensitivities and super-personal meta-sensitvities, but every sense context is also irreducible on its own level. Every sensation is a direct participation with all that is. While it is true that our personal experience acts to mediate these other levels of experience, the last mile can only be immediate. If that were not the case, then there would have to be an infinite regress of translators and sub-translators, Cartesian theaters and their homuncular audiences, etc. It some point something has to feel something directly.
Related to this immediation is the idea of the Absolute. The Western view does not grasp the idea of unbound unity. The notion of a singularity is astrophysics in astrophysics and in futurism, but the connotation is mathematical rather than absolute. To understand sense as the Absolute, it must be conceived of as not merely the ‘one’ thing, but ‘the only thing’. Not isolated, but whole. The monad has no windows, not because it is alone but because eternal totality is already within ‘it’. It the same time, the Absolute is ‘solitrophic’ – it builds on its sensitivity to achieve saturation: significance. How can a complete whole build on itself? By restraining itself with its own pantomimed absence. This is spacetime, entropy, attenuation of sense. The catabolic reflection of significance. What feels is juxtaposed against presentations of unfeeling. It is through this alienation or diffraction that we get the appearance of matter and mechanism, as the immediacy of pansensitivity is mediated through metric relativity. Private unity is reflected as public multiplicity, and quality is re-presented through the reductive filter of quantity.
Theory of Everything Quora
My answer to the Quora “What is your Theory of Everything?”
Explain your own Theory of Everything or mention your favorite Theory of Everything and JUSTIFY it if you can?
I call my Theory of Everything Multisense Realism. The name is intended to convey the idea that the whole of what we call reality is sourced entirely to a single unifying principle, which is the multiplicity of sense. Matter is that which feels like matter, which is seen to act like matter, and which seems to imply certain sensibilities. All phenomena are similarly known to us through chains of nested experiences which all ultimately begin and end in expectations which seem self-evident. Blue simply looks blue, and pain simply feels painful, regardless of any mechanical processes associated with them. It is not necessary to learn how to feel pain, nor could any such learning help us discover pain if we could not feel it to begin with. No equation resolves to equal the feeling of pain.
Since sense is both the capacity to discern difference from indifference as well as to discern unity across multiplicity, the term multisense refers to the nesting of sense within multiple levels of itself. It is important to understand that by discernment, what is meant is a participatory experience in which the fact of difference or unity is not only detected, but appreciated as an aesthetic quality. Even without the appearance of Homo sapiens or blue green algae on planet Earth, the universe would still be made entirely of aesthetic conditions of some kind or another. It’s not necessary to speculate on non-human awareness, but suffice it to say that our own consciousness can only realistically be composed of letters from an alphabet of possible experiential qualities which is older than the stars. While our particular sense of a physical event is a human version of that event, there can be no doubt that the sense we make of a star overlaps in some important ways with the sense that the star makes without us looking at it. The universe must, it seems, make sense before we can make sense of it.
However abstract or sentimental, concrete or direct, the one thing that all phenomena have in common is that they can be detected through sense or inferred through ‘sense-making’. By the same token, nothing can be real if it can never be detected or inferred in any way by anything. That which cannot be sensed by anything in any way or make sense any way cannot be considered to ‘exist’ or to have any connection to anything that does exist. Sense cannot arise from non-nonsense, just as order cannot arise from dis-chaos. Being that we are made out of sense experience that makes sense, it is not natural for us to see sense itself as the foreground. What we see in the foreground as human beings is opportunities for sense. We are often preoccupied with battling against the reverse side of sense – entropy, disorder, stagnation.
Where MSR excels is to identify the difference between the local realism which frames our human experience and an understanding the absolute frame of all experience. In the former, we experience being a person in a physical world, both of which appear bound by nothingness. In the latter, nothingness is not an option, since nothingness can only be an expectation of something about the hypothetical absence of everything. Time and space too are dissolved without a particular locus of participation and perception. Scale and duration are meaningless without being anchored in a comparison to some particular scope of ‘here’ and ‘now’. From the absolute perspective then, we must begin with the assumption not of a universe from the augmentation of nothingness, but a universe of everythingness diffracted. While this idea was not consciously modeled after any religion or philosophy, it does coincide with several traditional conceptualizations of the ultimate. Singularity producing multiplicity as the color white produces the spectrum – not as a mechanical process, but as an aesthetic revelation of unity deferred. Rather than the creation myth inspired by the Big Bang in which an explosive device appears in null-spacetime to detonate spacetime using mass as an accelerant, MSR begins from the absolute frame of reference. From this vantage point, with no relativistic measure to make the first instants of the Big Bang seem any longer or shorter than all of the rest of history put together, the Big Bang is reoriented within matter and eternity rather than an event within spacetime. The Big Bang becomes the Big Diffraction, an experiential masking and dividing of the Absolute. This is, again, a familiar theme in Eastern philosophy and Western mysticism. The difference is that MSR has rehabilitated this notion, grounding it in basic principles of modern physics and information theory.
The result has been a prodigious amount of writing over the past few years, connecting the dots between matter-energy, space-time and sense-motive (affect-effect), entropy-significance. It has provided what I think are radical insights into the nature of information, mathematics and energy as well as resolving the most stubborn mysteries of philosophy relating to consciousness, meaning, morality, and free will. Each of these requires a lot of explanation even to impart the glimpse that my TOE can offer, but for the purposes of this Quora, I’ll offer these teasers.
1. The nature of information: Not, as Bateson famously said ‘a difference that makes a difference’ but ‘a perception of a perception’. This clarifies the status of information as entirely dependent upon sense and sense-making, not as an independent entity which spawns realism in a vacuum (memes, simulations, computations, etc).
2. The nature of mathematics and AI: Mathematics refers to the common sense which relates to two distinctly different (opposite) things:
- A private experience of imagined sensory symbol-figures which accompany a motive of quantitative reasoning.
- 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.
Because mathematics bridges the gap between 1 and 2 (private and public) it is considered profound and absolute – and it is, but only in a one dimensional sense. Mathematics represents relations but cannot appreciate them or initiate them. Math doesn’t think or feel, math is an internal appreciation of the sense of the external. Because mathematics is grounded in the abstraction of generality rather than the concrete and proprietary uniqueness of undiffracted sense, it is a rootless imposter – the antithesis of authenticity and feeling. The realization of the absolute difference between genuine participation as a being in the ongoing story of the universe and the imitation of being by a set of a-signifying programmatic functions helps substantiate human intuitions about the emptiness of machine intelligence. While many strong AI enthusiasts will react with hostility to this idea, I think that rather than just suggesting that there will never be a conscious computer, it opens the door to a future of services which extend our intelligence and serve our interests. The MSR view frees us from any ethical concern for laboratory abuses of accidentally sentient programs, as well as insures that no technology will ever learn how to want to take over the world.
3. The nature of energy. In perhaps my most crackpot conjecture, I have proposed that with sense as the universal primitive, quirky effects which have been attributed to photons and other subatomic particles may suggest that our assumption of energy as something which is independent of matter is false. Photons, like ‘profits’ do not literally exist. Through MSR, “energy” is interpreted as simply motives which are not our own. We have private feelings which inspire us to act publicly, and so does everything else. Because of the kind of perceptual relativity that I propose, the more that the feelings and motives of other participants in the universe differ from our own in terms of scale and history, the more those dispositions seem impersonal and involuntary to us. MSR suggests that voluntary and involuntary are relativistic terms – two sides to the same coin which flips between private and public perspectives. Energy is conceived of not a pseudosubstance propagating literally across a vacuum of space as wave-particles but as felt expressions which define power relations of public interaction. What light does in the microcosm does is the same kind of thing that it does for us – it illuminates public experiences – it is ‘the news’. Space is fundamentally a pantomime projected as perceptual gaps between public facing surfaces of matter. Those gaps, while real in the local frame, are absent on the absolute frame of sense. From the perspective of the Absolute and of light, space has not yet been invented. It is the oscillation and modulation of feeling which gives rise to the second order fabric of public spacetime.
4. The Hard Problem of Consciousness: Is understood as part of the larger Presentation Problem, which includes –
- Hard Problem = Why is X presented as an experience? (X = “information”, logical or physical functions, calcium waves, action potentials, Bayesian integrations, etc.)
- Explanatory Gap = How and where is presentation accomplished with respect to X?
- Binding Problem = How are presented experiences segregated and combined with each other? How do presentations cohere?
- Symbol Grounding = How are experiences associated with each other on multiple levels of presentation? How do presentations adhere?
- Mind Body Problem = Why do public facing presences and private facing presences seem ontologically exclusive and aesthetically opposite to each other?
MSR solves the Presentation Problem by recognizing the connection between aesthetic participation, significance, authenticity, and the justaposition of spatial extension, temporal attenuation, and insignificance. In short, the universe in which any sense can possibly exist can only originate in sense itself. The appearance of aesthetic qualities can only arise from a universe which is grounded in an aesthetic agenda, even though those agendas are necessarily masked and combined semi-indifferently on any particular local level. Is there meaning in the universe? Yes, there is nothing but meaning, but meaning in one local context cannot have exactly the same meaning outside of its context.
5. Free Will: As with the existence of aesthetic presentation, the presence of free will, even as an “illusion” is impossible under strict determinism. The whole point of determinism is to ground all phenomena in a firmament of strict parsimony. The idea is that things just don’t happen willy-nilly, they are the consequences of physical or mathematical laws. Such a universe has no room for machines with parts which present themselves to other parts as an illusion of effectiveness. Certainly in the real world, our personal estimation of the effectiveness of our will and of our opportunities to exercise its freedom may not be all they are cracked up to be, however, the very consideration of whether or not to ‘believe in free will’ is predicated on the implicit expectation that in fact our belief supervenes upon our voluntary participation in some materially important way. All arguments against free will are ultimately arguments against the possibility of participating in any kind of argumentation in the first place.
All of these facets of the theory stem from reversing the core assumption of the Western worldview, that consciousness is a product of an animal’s brain rather than that the entire universe is a staggeringly elaborate nesting of participatory sense experiences. This is not an anthropomorphic concept, as it does not elevate human experience, biological experience, or even the sense of a self as being fundamental. Instead, sense itself is seen as the producer of its own augmentation, via spacetime diffraction, which yields private significance and public entropy.
Mechanemorphism
(*update to The Competition page)
Antrhopmorphism and Mechanemorphism
1. What is meant by mechanemorphism?
Anthropomorphize = To attribute human form or personality to things not human
Mechanemorphize = To attribute machine form or impersonality to things not mechanical.
The Multisense Realism perspective is grounded in a philosophy of science which seeks to be more objective about objectivity itself. In Western models of consciousness, experience is generated by the objective mechanism, the forms and functions of the brain. As a result, the subjective experience itself, which does not seem mechanically necessary, becomes orphaned. I have heard it referred to as an illusion, an emergent property, epiphenomena, or even a spandrel (evolutionary side effect which plays no role in further developments). These kinds of terms are necessary to overlook the dualism which mechanemoprhism creates. It is a way of silencing or explaining away the very phenomenon which give rise to the inquiry into consciousness in the first place. This phenomenon of human inquiry is very much the opposite of mechanism. It is a personal participation which arises from meaning and motive rather than blind energy. It is a ‘Why?’ as well as a ‘How’.
When we, as upstanding citizens of the Western scientific consensus, mechanemorphize ourselves it is because we are considering only the public facing aspects of {the total phenomenon that we are} and finding them mechanistic. The conjecture of MSR is that because consciousness is more likely to use mechanism for differentiation and extension than machines are to use consciousness for anything (why would they?), we should not assume the public presentation of our own mechanism is the fundamental phenomenon. MSR suggests that perceptual relativity itself, the sense of the contrast between private qualia and public quanta, is in fact the most likely universal primitive. While human perception may be local to this planet during a relatively short era, perceptual relativity as a phenomenon is larger, older, and more universal than physics. Mechanism must be learned. Feeling and being is innate.
If we examine the nature of mechanism carefully, we should see that the essence of mechanism is unconsciousness. What is an automaton? What does it mean to automate a process? It means that we squeeze out all requirements for our own participation. It is a function which happens without us.
Why is that important? Because a machine will serve whatever master that it is constructed to serve. It will do the same thing over and over until it breaks, because it can’t tell the difference and it can’t care. The machine itself {the totality of the phenomenon that is the machine} has no presence as a genuine whole which is independent of our expectations of it. Outside of our uses of it, it is only an assembly of unrelated parts.
Natural phenomena are not assembled unconsciously, they are spun off and broken out from larger wholes. They are conceived through fusion and fission of their own sense and motive. As a result, the awareness of something like a human being, which is self-elaborated to an almost perverse degree, has a footprint in many different levels of awareness and interaction. While the public effect of what we are seems mechanistic to us, the private affect of who we are does not seem that way. If we were to recreate the universe and we wanted to recreate it faithfully, we would have to include this non-mechanistic experience, as it is the primary experience of the universe for ourselves, and perhaps for all participants in the universe as well.
To say that someone is ‘robotic’, or ‘acting like a machine’ is to say that they are impersonal, cold, relentless, unfeeling. These meanings are not there by accident, they are universal intuitions. As impartial scientists, we should recognize that it is no more scientific to presume that the universe is fundamentally mechanistic than it would be to presume that it is fundamentally anthropomorphic. We have many indications in non-ordinary consciousness, the placebo effect, quantum mechanics, synchronicity, and the anthropopological universality of spiritual concepts that objectivity is not a matter of what “simply is” but may in fact be, on a more primitive level, the complex interplay of “what seems to be the case”. There is no evidence that this ‘seeming’ can be taken for granted in a physical or mathematical system. There is no argument that I know of which should persuade a neutral party why mechanemorphism deserves more consideration than anthropomorphism as a default ontological assumption. Instead, MSR argues that this contrast of extremes known as anthropomorphism and mechanemorphism are a clue as to the template of the underlying nature of nature – that it is in fact an aesthetic agenda from which human subjectivity is directly descended.
What is Information? Reality as Information – Is there Intrinsic Meaning? Sentient Life & Bits
Dolors Jou Torras: I think all one needs to do is redefine information and then it all clicks into place. Information: a perceived difference that can make a difference. You start with an awareness of a difference (reality differentiating itself and becoming aware of it). Then you move on to an awareness of a difference which in turn makes a difference (this awareness of differentiation enables learning, growth, knowledge, etc).
At some point this ability to perceive a difference becomes able to not only perceive a difference (of states) but can also perceive a difference in such a way that order can be assigned (as in before / after). Time is born – or rather, it evolves (= the ability to perceive a difference + assign order and duration).
You escalate this ability to perceive differences, etc, to an information field which can model consciousness (consciousness being defined in line with self-awareness, ability to self-modify, intelligence, ability to evolve, etc).
Then you get to the point where “physical” universes can evolve (within consciousness “space”) and so space-time and matter evolve… This goes hand in hand with the evolution of individual conscious observers experiencing this physical universes
So the paradigm goes like this: information—> consciousness & time —> laws of physics—> individual observers + space-time & matter
Craig Weinberg: I agree with what you are saying, especially the part about adding the qualifier of “a perceived” to “difference”. I would say though that that makes this capacity to perceive more fundamental than what is perceived. Even if we understand that of course information must be perceived, I still think that the word information carries an implicitly objective connotation. All that information can be is an experience in which some sensory context is informed. This capacity to perceive is already awareness, so that even though we could say that the term ‘consciousness’ refers to an awareness of awareness, I don’t see that such an awareness requires any information at all. All that is required is a quality of awareness in which the presence of awareness is felt. There is no feeling of the absence of awareness, so it is not a matter of discerning a difference or being informed about anything, it is simply an expectation of persistence and participation.
I like to break down the word information into three parts: “in” (which is input-output of sensory-affect/motor-effect), “form” (which is material shapes divided by space), and “ation” (which is recursive functions united through time). Where we are at now I think is to overlook the “in” part entirely and treat formations as the primitive context, when in fact the formations are the objects of appreciation and participation of the true primitive capacity for sense.
Dolors Jou Torras: Defining information and consciousness differently is what makes the descriptions of what is ultimately primary different… I completely understand what you are saying, when I put myself inside your theoretical framework Don’t disagree at all, but I can see that it all boils down to the precise details of how one defines information, awareness, consciousness and so on.
Craig Weinberg: Yes, for most contexts it is more useful to talk about information in the traditional sense. I think it’s only when we need to really get a maximum close up on that boundary between firstness and secondness or between the front and back end of the snake who is eating its tail. We are very much on the same page about the semiotic relation. I would suggest to consider that information is not non-physical, so much as physics is experiential and information is part of experience.
What makes an experience seem ‘physical’ is that it is out of bounds of our intimate sensory range. That which is too fast, too slow, too large, too small, or too unlike us in another sense is experienced in increasing degrees of dissimilarity to experience. Experience is the sense of who we are and the motive of why we do what we do, but matter is bodies nested within larger bodies. Matter is the what and how, the re-presentation of first person presentations.
Information is when one level of experience exploits another, more distant (and therefore more matter-like; discrete positions, subject to public inspection, etc) level. We take a sheet of cellulose molecules, which on their own level are holding on to each other, oxidizing slowly, etc and we inscribe a quantity of ink (also an experiential reality on its native fluid-molecular level). This inscription can be modeled as a trade off of entropy, we are fixing our private ideas and expressions on various levels, conscious and subconscious in public spacetime. Public spacetime freezes private sense into public form and private motive into public function. The information entropy of the writer’s idea is discharged in the act of writing, a process to be revisited in reverse when the reader understands what has been written. The low entropy signal of the written word is traded for an aesthetic entropy increase in the reader’s experience – they imagine, they think, their mental experience reverberates and ‘warms up’, creating novelty and creativity. This is significance. Significance lights up previous memories and pulls them together, bringing a sense of integration within. (Understanding = entero-standing…inner settling).
information is not physical in the sense that the effect of being informed is experiential, but information media is physical, which means that it is down-rev experiential, so to speak. We use experiences which are dumber and smaller than we are to carry our messages. Thinking of it this way brings matter, mind, and meaning together as one ecosystem of sense-making.
Dolors Jou Torras: I will cover the physical vs non-physical debate in another video soon, but defining information as essentially non-physical has to do with several factors:
– I relate information to qualia (perception, experience)
– That in this “physical” universe, in general we need to embed or engrave information in physical matter or energy via symbols or signs, does not make information itself physical.
The laws of physics do not preceed information hence information is not bound by physical laws (information is primary)
There is compelling evidence, in my opinion, that non-local effects point in the direction that our physical universe (space-time plus matter) is a subset of a larger reality. What is “physical” is a moving target
Information (in theory) can be used as a basic currency to describe any reality, not only what our current physics can describe (or is attempting to describe).
Information therefore can be used to move away from duality… “Physical” vs “non-physical” is not a matter of substance dualism; these are purely subjective terms that we mostly associate with what our current science can measure with its instruments.
Craig Weinberg:
“defining information as essentially non-physical has to do with several factors:
– I relate information to qualia (perception, experience)”
I agree in the conventional sense of ‘physical’, information would be non-physical, but I think that in an absolute sense, the physical and non-physical can only be different perspectives (private-facing and public-facing orientations) of the same thing. What I am trying to pioneer is the idea that this thing is sense: the universal capacity for aesthetic participation, aka the capacity to generate, experience, and appreciate qualia.
“- That in this “physical” universe, in general we need to embed or engrave information in physical matter or energy via symbols or signs, does not make information itself physical”
Right, symbols or signs are independent of matter, but not independent of the capacity to experience (sense). A particular piece of information, such as a page in a book, can obviously exist without my experience of it, but it cannot exist without some capacity for interpretation somewhere in the universe.
The question that I put to you, however, is ‘can awareness exist without information?’. I think that it can. I think that a feeling need not inform us. I think that information is always a reflection or representation of sense, and never the genuine presentation itself. Eating a meal is not simply an information processing event where knowledge of nutritional conditions are stored in the body and in our understanding, it is a concretely visceral, mouth watering, chewing, gobbling, licking, swallowing orgy of sensual participation. We can extract information from the experience, but when we do, that extraction is inevitably reductive. It is an accounting of events from a hypothetical voyeur’s perspective rather than the genuine and indispensable experience.
In my view, qualia is not a representation, it is a presentation – an aesthetic presence. Information is a particular kind of qualia, a presentation in which another presentation has been abstracted as an a-signifying, quantifiable figure. Such a figure is public-facing and communicable, so long as the receiver of the communication can re-signify some of what has been frozen as a spatial-form/temporal-function.
“The laws of physics do not preceed information hence information is not bound by physical laws (information is primary)”
Because you are including the aesthetic experience of information as information, I agree with you here too. Matter-Space/Energy-Time would be types of information (Form-Sense/Function-Motive). If we conflate information with sense, however, then we would have to explain why sentience does not emerge from information itself. Why can’t we write a story which has feelings itself? Why do we react unfavorably to impersonated entities like mannequins and automatons (uncanny valley effect)? Part of my contribution here is to get very specific and show how the relation between sense, information, and matter can be juxtaposed to yield unity or contrast but that sense is the essential commonality. Information can be forged and copied, it is generic and implicitly impossible to truly own. Sense is absolutely proprietary and authentic, ineffable, unreproducible.
Information is the manifestation of the intention to circulate publicly, but sense is the private anchoring of a disposition between the sensor/self and the universe. This opposition relation of sense and information is recapitulated and exteriorized as the relation between matter and energy, and matter-energy/space-time. It’s the same theme of reflection through orthogonal juxtaposition. It’s very tricky of course, because we can toggle foreground/background from any perspective. Einstein grabbed mass-energy and it gave him space-time. If you grab information-sense, it gives you physical machines and non-physical machines. My proposal is to grab sense-motive and get all of the others: form-matter-space::function-energy-time. Square that and you get public entropy::private significance.
“There is compelling evidence, in my opinion, that non-local effects point in the direction that our physical universe (space-time plus matter) is a subset of a larger reality. What is “physical” is a moving target”
I agree completely, although I think that the larger reality is the sum-total of all sensory experiences in the history of the universe. The larger reality is experiential while space+matter is a frozen slice – a tokenized representation of part of that reality as experienced from a particular perspective and presented as a public context. Physical to means only that something is intended as a concrete presentation rather than a pure representation. The idea of a train is physical, in the sense that ideas are physical experiences, but the train which is confabulated within the idea is not physical. Non-local? Certainly. Locality is a low level sense protocol. I think that’s part of what the atoms are doing on the microcosm, sending each other messages (we call quantum) to generate locality through spacetime coordinates. The universe is inside the big bang/Abolute, and all space is a presentation within it’s sense.
“Information (in theory) can be used as a basic currency to describe any reality, not only what our current physics can describe (or is attempting to describe).”
Yes, but only if you are assuming that information includes sense. Think of how the same information on a DVD can be heard as music or seen as a video though. A computer reads that DVD anesthetically, as data. Low level electronic sensation in all likelihood, but the data is not giving the DVD player an experience of watching a movie.
“Information therefore can be used to move away from duality… “Physical” vs “non-physical” is not a matter of substance dualism; these are purely subjective terms that we mostly associate with what our current science can measure with its instruments.”
Yes, in the absolute sense, but if we don’t explain that subjective polarization and connect it to public and private presentations, then we have not really explained the universe that we live in. With my view, all dualisms, monisms, and multiplicities fall out naturally from the capacities of sense and motive to diffract entropy spatiotemporally and recover significance experientially.
Consciousness, in Black and White
It occurs to me that it might be easier to explain my view of consciousness and its relation to physics if I begin at the beginning. In this case, I think that the beginning was in asking ‘What if the fundamental principle in the universe were a simple form of awareness rather than something else?’
Our choices in tracing the lineage of consciousness back seem to be limited. Either it ’emerged’ from complexity, at some arbitrary stage of biological evolution, or its complexity evolved without emergence, as elaboration of a simple foundational panpsychic property.
In considering which of these two is more likely, I suggest that we first consider the odd, unfamiliar option. The phenomenon of contrast as a good place to start to characterize the theme of awareness. Absolute contrasts are especially compelling. Full and empty, black and white, hot and cold, etc. Our language is replete with evidence of this binary hyperbole. Not only does it seem necessary for communication, but there seems also to be an artistic satisfaction in making opposites as robust as possible. Famously this tendency for exaggeration clouds our thinking with prejudice, but it also clarifies and makes distinction more understandable. In politics, mathematics, science, philosophy, and theology, concepts of a balance of opposites can be found as the embodiment of its essential concepts.
For this reason alone, I think that we can say with certainty that consciousness has to do with a discernment of contrasts. Beneath the linguistic and conceptual embodiments of absolute contrasts are the more zoological contrasting pairs – hungry and full, alive and dead, tired and alert, sick and healthy, etc. At this point we should ask, is consciousness complex or is it simple? Is the difference between pain and pleasure something that should require billions of cellular interactions over billions of years of evolution to arrive at accidentally, or does that seem like something which is so simple and primordial that nothing could ever ‘arrive’ at it?
Repetition is a special form of contrast, because whether it is an event which repeats cyclically through a sequence or a form which repeats spatially across a pattern, the underlying nature of what repeats is that it is in some sense identical or similar, and in another sense not precisely identical as it can be located in memory or position as a separate instance.
I use the phrase “repeats cyclically through a sequence” instead of “repeats sequentially through time” because if we take our beginning premise of simple qualities and capacities of awareness as preceding even physics, then the idea of time should be grounded in experience rather than an abstract metric. Instead of conceiving of time as a dimension in which events are contained, we must begin with the capacity of events to ‘know’ each other or in some way retain their continuity while allowing discontinuity. An event which repeats, such as a heartbeat or the circadian rhythms of sunlight, is fundamentally a rhythm or cycle. That is the actual sense experience. Regular, frequent, variation. Modulation of regularity.
Likewise, I use the phrase “repeats spatially across a pattern” instead of “repeats as a pattern across space” because again, we must flip the expectation of physics if we are to remain consistent to the premise of sense-first. What we see is not objects in space, it is shapes separated by contrasting negative shapes. What we can touch are solids, liquids, and gases separated from each other by contrasting sense of their densities. Here too, the sense of opposites dominates, separating the substantial from the insubstantial, heavy from light, hard from soft.
An important point to make here is that we are adapted, as human beings with bodies of a particular density and size, to feel the world that relates appropriately to our body. It is only through the hard lessons like plague and radiation that we have learned that indeed things which are too small for us to see or feel can destroy our bodies and kill us. The terror of this fact has inspired science to pursue knowledge with an aggressive urgency, and justifiably so. Scientists are heroes, informing medicine, transportation, public safety, etc as never before in the history of the world and inspiring a fantastic curiosity for knowledge about reality rather than ideas about God or songs about love. The trauma of that shattering of naive realism haunts our culture as whole, and has echoes in the lives of each generation, family, and individual. Innocence lost. The response to this trauma varies, but it is hard to remain neutral about. People either adapt to the cold hard world beyond themselves with fear or with anger. It’s an extension of self-consciousness which seems uniquely human and often associated with mortality. I think that it’s more than confronting their own death that freaks out the humans, it’s the chasm of unknowable impotence which frames our entire experience on all sides. We know that we don’t really know.
The human agenda becomes not merely survival and reproduction, but also to fill the existential chasm with answers, or failing answers, to at least feel fulfilled with dramatic feelings – with entertainments, achievements, and discoveries. We want something thrilling and significant to compensate for our now unforgettable discovery of our own insignificance. With modernism came a kind of Stockholm syndrome turn. We learned how to embrace the chasm, or at least to behave that way.
At the same time that Einstein began to call the entire foundation of our assumptions about physics into question, the philosophy of Neitzsche, along with the science of Darwin and Freud had begun to sink in politically. Revolutions from both the Left and Right rocked the world, followed in some nations by totalitarianism and total war. The arts were transformed by an unprecedented radicalism as well, from Duchamp, Picasso, and Malevich to Stravinsky and Le Corbusier. After all of the pageantry and tradition, all of the stifling politeness and patriarchy, suddenly Westerners stopped giving a shit about the past. All at once, the azimuth of the collective psyche pitched Westward all the way, toward annihilation in a glorious future. If humans could not live forever, then we will become part of whatever does live forever. The human agenda went transhuman, and everyone became their own philosophical free agent. God was indeed dead. For a while. But the body lives on.
The point of this detour was to underscore the importance of what we are in the world – the size and density of our body, to what we think that the world is. Not only do we only perceive a narrow range of frequencies of light and sound, but also of events. Events which are too slow or too fast for us to perceive as events are perceived as permanent conditions. What we experience exists as a perceptual relativity between these two absolutes. Like the speed of light, c, perception has aesthetic boundaries. Realism is personal, but it is more than personal also. We find agreement in other people and in other creatures which we can relate to. Anything which has a face earns a certain empathy and esteem. Anything that we can eat has a significance to us. Sometimes the two overlap, which gives us something to think about. Consciousness, at least the consciousness which is directed outwardly from our body, is all about these kinds of judgment calls or bets. We are betting that animals that we eat are not as significant as we are, so we enjoy eating them, or we are betting that such a thought is immoral so we abstain. Society reflects back these judgments and amplifies them through language, customs, belief systems, and laws. Since the modernist revolution, the media has blanketed the social landscape with mass production of cliches and dramatizations, which seems to have wound up leaking a mixture of vanity and schadenfreude, with endless reenactments, sequels, and series.
It is out of this bubble of reflected self-deflection that the current philosophies rooted in both reductionism and emergentism find their appeal. Beginning with the assumption of mechanism or functionalism as the universal principle, the task of understanding our own consciousness becomes a strictly empirical occupation. Though the daunting complexity of neuroscience cannot be overstated, the idea is that it is inevitable that we eventually uncover the methods and means by which data takes on its fancy experiential forms. The psyche can only be a kind of evolutionary bag of tricks which has developed to serve the agenda of biological repetition. Color, flavor, sound, as well as philosophy and science are all social peacock displays and data-compressing virtual appendages. The show of significance is an illusion, an Eloi veneer of aesthetics over the Morlock machinations of pure function.
To see oneself as a community of insignificance in which an illusion of significance is invested is a win-win for the postmodern ego. We get to claim arbitrary superiority over all previous incarnations, while at the same time claiming absolute humility. It’s a calculated position, and like a game theory simulation, it aims to minimize vulnerability. Facts are immutable and real, experiences are irrelevant. From this voyeuristic vantage point, the holder of mechanist views about free will is free to deny that he has it without noticing the contradiction. The emergent consciousness can speak glowingly out of both sides of its mouth of its great knowledge and understanding in which all knowledge and understanding is rendered void by statistical mechanics. Indeed the position offers no choice, having backed itself into a corner, but to saw off its own limbs with one hand and reattach them with another when it is not looking.
What is gained from this exercise in futility beyond the comfort that comes with conformity to academic consensus is the sense that whatever happens, it can be justified with randomness or determinism. The chasm has been tamed, not by filling it in or denying it, but by deciding that we are simply not present in the way that we think. DNA acts, neurons fire, therefore we are not thinking. Death is no different than life which has paused indefinitely. An interesting side effect is that as people are reduced to emergent machines, machines are elevated to sentient beings, and the circle is complete. We are not, but our products are. It seems to me the very embodiment of suburban neuroses. The vicarious society of invisible drones.
Just as 20th century physics exploded the atom, I would like to see 21st century physics explode the machine. Instead of releasing raw energy and fragmentation, I see that the blasting open of mathematical assumptions will yield an implosion into meaning. Pattern recognition, not information, is the true source of authenticity and significance. They are the same thing ultimately. The authenticity of significance and the significance of authenticity speak to origination and individuation over repetition. Not contrast and dialectic, not forces and fields, but the sense in which all of these facets are yoked together. Sense is the meta-syzygy. It is the capacity to focus multiplicity into unity (as in perception or afference) and the capacity for unity to project into multiplicity (participation or efference).
These are only metaphorical descriptions of function however. What sense really is and what it does can only be experienced directly. You make sense because everything makes sense…in some sense. That doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t mean there has to be a human-like deity presiding over all of it, to the contrary, only half of what we can experience makes sense intentionally, the other half (or slightly less) makes sense unintentionally, as a consequence of larger and smaller sequences which have been set in motion intentionally. We are the evidence. Sense is evident to us and there is nothing which can be evident except through sense and sense making.
Multisense Realism 
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