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On Human Specialness
Often, it comes up in arguments that the idealistic position stems from a mental weakness – a sentimental attachment to all things human and familiar and a deep-seated fear of losing self-worth. When the term ‘special’ is brought up, it has a pejorative connotation*. The disdain for specialness makes sense to me as the mechanistic ideology is founded (under Multisense Realism) in the supremacy of the generic and impersonal. The fundamentals of the cosmos are spoken in terms of units of measure, not unique and unrepeatable aesthetic experiences. Underneath this scientific impartiality however, I maintain that there is another level of unacknowledged specialness. To see the universe as it is rather than as we wish it to be is a romantic idea of the anti-romantic. To become purely logical and reasonable is ultimately a kind of ethnic cleansing of the psyche. Transhumanist specialness is even more special because we think that we have outgrown trying to be special.
I think there’s more to the idea of human specialness than it might seem.
I see an important differences between:
- “Specialness” as a measure of aesthetic prestige.
- Human superiority as a function of ego projection.
- Human exceptionalism as a function of species comparison.
The quality of specialness is not limited to human beings. I think that significance in the sense of aesthetic prestige is a universal property, from the subatomic level to the cosmological level. The particular content and intensity of significance varies widely, but the fact of significance is not a fictional invention of Homo sapiens. The problem with machines is that they lack any aesthetic awareness at all. What may seem to some to be a pure, unselfish quality which falls out of mathematics is actually, in my view, merely pre-selfish.
This admiration for the unseflish qualities of pristine objects is, I think, ultimately a romantic simplification. It is like dreaming a blind world as a better world, since so many terrible things are rooted in valuing appearances over realities. The impulse to move beyond selfish forms of human awareness is indeed noble, necessary, and inevitable, but I think that part of that involves a deeper consideration of self. We cannot transcend the self by amputating it.
As far as human exceptionalism goes, I completely agree with transhumanists – humans are not so great, and not so different from other species. The extent to which we are objectively ‘better’ than other organisms, even if it could be ascertained, is dwarfed by our exaggeration of it. That’s not what the issue that I’m bringing up at all though. What I’m talking about is true even if Homo sapiens had never existed.
I sometimes use inflammatory language to describe machines as stupid not because I don’t like them, but to make clear that my position is that what a machine does for us is precisely the opposite of what our own awareness is. It’s about the ontology of unity, multiplicity, and spacetime positions vs experiential dispositions.
The machine does not serve WalMart any more than they do a disservice to the displaced worker. It serves whatever agenda that it is being employed by. It is only because of our profound lack of compassion that we allow what should be a celebration of freedom from work to become a liability. Losing a job, ontologically means gaining freedom. It is only we who equate that with being undeserving of the benefits of civilization, and we who back that up with real deprivations. Machines are stupid because they don’t care. They don’t care whether they are burning baby kittens or diesel fuel to run.
WalMart is stupid for the same reason (and it is no less a machine than any computer). WalMart does not think that it is special, it simply executes a program which privatizes profits and socializes costs. The program can’t wake up though. It can’t fix itself. We are the only ones who can recover the positive side of our exceptional sensitivity…a sensitivity which just happens to be human in this particular case, but which in all cases is the polar opposite of mechanism/insensitivity.
*”special pleading” is a logical fallacy which gets thrown around a lot too, with the same sort of condescension.
Destroying the “World”
Borrowing this nice diagram (above) from a post by Ethan Hein, I have cannibalized it to show how the concept of the “world” can be transcended.
John Locke’s decision to make properties of bodies in space “primary” and properties of experience “secondary” reveals the Western bias toward the public and away from the private. In this way, all bodies are assumed to have an independent presence outside of any perspective from which they might be viewed, and experiences are assumed to be entirely dependent upon the interaction of physical bodies.
The twentieth century should have given us a clue. With Freud and Jung revealing that the depths of human psychology transcended our conscious expectations, and Einstein proving the relativity of mass, energy, time, and space, the surprises of Quantum Mechanics very nearly opened the door to a fully integrated worldview in the 20th century. As if mirroring the turning of the political tide, the 1980s began to turn progressive relativity on its head, and restore a kind of digital absolute. Instead of profound principles of contextual aesthetics, the revolution in physics championed a model of blind probability and computation.
The model that I propose does not contain a “world” which is independent of concrete aesthetics. What we see and feel is not the entirety of what can be seen and felt, but neither is it a “model” of an unfelt, unseen “world.” It is easy to think of parts of our brain as mapping to a model of our body. Different regions of the brain correspond to particular regions of the body. The same is true, however, of our emotions and thoughts. To be consistent, our emotions and thoughts would also have to be models, not of the brain (because the brain is part of the body, which is only a model), but just models period.
There is a double standard that leaks in with the Western-Lockean model. If we say that the body we experience is a model of the body in the world, then we are stuck with the consequence that the mind we experience is also a model of part of that same body in the world. Except that it clearly isn’t. What we think about is not modeled isomorphically in the activity of the brain. There is no computation that looks like cranberry sauce tastes, certainly not without one of these imaginative/imaginary “minds” to make the connection.
If we instead take the unreality of our model seriously, it makes more sense to turn the whole configuration inside out. If our experience models the brain’s activities, then so too must our experience of the world be a model. Since it is in that modeled world that we find the brain in the first place, we now have no reason to believe that the primary properties of bodies in space are really primary. In fact, the whole notion of primary and secondary, interior and exterior, could only be part of the modeling process. There is no indication of any kind of noumenal ‘world’ other than the inferences which we make through phenomenal experience.
To the contrary, all reports from explorers of consciousness report a deep unity of awareness – a vastness of united presence or absence which underlies all phenomena. We do not see a Platonic factory of disembodied mathematics behind the curtain of secondary forms. In fact, forms themselves are completely irrelevant to mathematics. Geometry as we know it, shapes and angles and lines, is entirely superfluous to a quantum-digital universe. Geometry is the stuff of visual presentation and tactile, tangible manipulation. There is no geometry in a vacuum, no visible ‘bits’ or digital bodies which must draw these characters as you see them on the screen. What point could there be of modeling the invisible with the visible? What computer needs to see itself compute?
It works much better if we flip the model over, and see that the glue which holds mathematics together is consciousness. When we infer that a quantity is diminishing toward zero, we are inferring that intellectually. It is a practice of intuition or telepathy – a logical feeling that we have about patterns and what they imply. Bohm’s implicate order, I would say, can be understood more clearly as private physics. Not a disembodied order, but the precipitation of lower order sense within higher order sense. The emergence of cymatic patterns, for instance, in a layer of salt on a vibrating drum, is not a higher geometry which unites the salt, it is an exposure of more primitive logics – repetitive, dumb representations. Cosmic wallpaper.
Higher intelligence requires not only adding ‘complexity’ to such dumb representations, or increasing the computing resources, but an increase in sensitivity to implicit depths. The multiplexing of sensory contexts is subtractive to the point of simplicity. Something like pain or red is not a complex representation, but just the opposite, a simple and direct presence. These qualities could not be any more primary, from our perspective. It is through this primordial simplicity that true novelty ‘diverges’ from the absolute. Unrepeatable moments made of unrepeatable moments which are made to seem to repeat when viewed from a distance. The “world” is a creation of distancing, of the alienated perspective of elaborately nested subjectivity.
Off the Descartes
It’s funny that the last name of Rene Descartes was used to refer to his Cartesian coordinate system, which in turn has became the basis for much of our sense of creating charts.
The word card as well as playing cards themselves appear to have been introduced to Europe by way of Egypt, and China and the Indus Valley before that.*
Latin charta “leaf of paper, tablet,” from Greek khartes “layer of papyrus,” probably from Egyptian
The root of ‘cartoon’ refers to the cardboard (carton) sketches that artists used in the 19th century. This is a bit different from the sense that I get from playing cards and charting coordinates, which is strongly quantitative and digital, like dominoes and dice. The word dice may be related to ‘datum’ (“given”), but the word origins of both domino and dice are hazy. Dice also have a roundabout connection with Descartes and philosophy in general, by way of Platonic solids and three dimensional (x, y, z) geometry.
Ancient Greece, 5th-3rd century BC. The earliest dice! Made from the knuckle-bone of an animal, drilled and filled with lead for weighting.
Cartoons are now rendered directly in coordinate geometry, using domino-like computers, which are displayed on card or chart-like screens. The object, symbol, paper and calculation – to plan, like an artist, in hypothesis and rehearsal in advance of the fact. The strategic panopticon of the scientific approach marks and defines before the final will is executed. All possibilities are accounted for beforehand as a Hilbert or configuration space – a containment of physical permutations given an assumption of generic recombination, like hands dealt from a finite deck. This is not the anima, not the giver or the taker, but an animation of the given, data about giving and taking.
When we insist upon looking only at the given ‘data’, we are limited to an outward-facing perspective on public spaces. In this mode, time is fragmented into instants of measurement rather than fluid memories. From binary code to the I Ching, quantum to DNA, our notions of Turing emulation and quantum mechanics hinge on this methodical charting of possible positions and dispositions. This world of information is not our world, it is a world that is perpetually out there, but only ephemerally in here. To join the world out there requires bodies and death. The butterfly must be pinned and dried to be displayed and recorded.
*”The earliest authentic references to playing-cards in Europe date from 1377, but, despite their long history, it is only in recent decades that clues about their origins have begun to be understood. Cards must have been invented in China, where paper was invented. Even today some of the packs used in China have suits of coins and strings of coins – which Mah Jong players know as circles and bamboos (i.e. sticks). Cards entered Europe from the Islamic empire, where cups and swords were added as suit-symbols, as well as (non-figurative) court cards. It was in Europe that these were replaced by representations of courtly human beings: kings and their attendants – knights (on horseback) and foot-servants. To this day, packs of Italian playing-cards do not have queens – nor do packs in Spain, Germany and Switzerland (among others). There is evidence that Islamic cards also entered Spain, but it now seems likely that the modern cards which we call Spanish originated in France, ousting the early Arab-influenced designs.” – source
Deepak Chopra Responds to Pseudoscience Allegations
Deepak Chopra Responds to Pseudoscience Allegations
Another battle of the worldviews thread I have wound up in.
My response (top) to a diagram that I came across (lower). Some differences include:
- Outer edge is a continuum between “Everything” and “Almost Nothing” rather than “Nothing”
This reflects the idea that nothing cannot exist except as an expectation that something has about the absence of everything. It is therefore presence, rather than absence which is the primordial identity, and all phenomena are defined by substitutable gaps in pansensitivity. Awareness is localized by entropic masking or insensitivity rather than mechanical projection on top of “nothing”.
- Art – Aesthetics shares equal if not slightly greater prominence with Law – Mathematics
This overturns the Western assumption that appreciation of phenomena is a side effect of functionality. While locally true, for example, that humans like sugar because of its evolutionary value, the specific pleasure of sweet flavor is not itself describable by function, nor can it be assembled mechanically. That the universe is fundamentally an aesthetic agenda which works in order to play rather than the other way around is one of the major consequences of Primordial Identity Pansensitivity. The universe is a feeler of experiences, not just a producer of unfelt mechanisms.
- Color vs Greyscale connotes the relation between the concrete-experiential and the abstract-measured as one of reductionism rather then essentialism.
The idea here is that the rational is only a higher octave of the empirical, and the empirical is only an objectified reduction of the subjective-aesthetic. There is one continuous spectrum of sensitivity which reflects itself as desaturated forms and functions.
The top down and bottom up arrows show the circulation of intentional sequence and unintentional consequence throughout the continuum. From the pansensitivity pole on the top, where all substitutable gaps of sensitivity have been filled in and sense is total, to the pan-entropy pole on the bottom, where the ratio of gap to connection is almost infinitely great, a picture of cosmos emerges as a hyperplasticity of perspective.
- Synchronic and selective are new additions to the sensory-motive side. I think that it might work to call them electro-synchronic and magneto-selective. Electric force would seem to embody the gap-jumping, meta-phoric principle of sense-making, while magnetic fields are about orientation and masses moving themselves in relation to each other.
What is a thought?
An elementary thought – not a thought made up of other thoughts.
- What is the nature of a thought?
- What is it made of?
- What is an example of the most basic thought?
As an image is to visual sense, and a sound is to auditory sense, a thought is a unit of cognitive sense. The difference between perceptual senses and cognitive senses is that cognitive senses are directly participatory. While we can imagine a sound or image, the experience resembles a request that is fulfilled behind the curtain, by some faculty of imagination. With thinking, we feel that we ourselves are directly expressing ourselves rather than passively watching a presentation of thought in the mind’s eye.
To me, this suggests that the cognitive level of awareness is a meta-level of perception. It specializes in abstracting sub-personal levels of sensation into a communicable form, and in the rehearsal of hypothetical experiences. In this way, the base level sensory-motive interactions of the body-world experience are extended. Senses can be interpreted with more perspective and intelligence, while motives can be executed with more strategic forethought. Thinking is a way of making an enriched present and future by distilling from the past. The distilling process is inherently sequential, as the oceanic nature of experiential aesthetics is reduced to a sequence of gestures and symbols which can be projected and received not only as sensory-motive presentations, but also as information-theoretic representations.
If a feeling were a cube that is full of some kind of juice of experiential significance, a thought would dehydrate the juice, leaving the cube with just the residue of its former significance. The empty cube can now contain other thoughts and feelings – stacks of them. What thought lacks in experiential qualities, it makes up for in versatility.
What is the nature of a thought? Metaphor. The etymology of metaphor has to do with carrying over, and the root word ‘phor’ is also found as ‘fer’, as in euphoria and inference. If a feeling is an aesthetic quality which we carry (or ferry), then meta-phor implies a stepping outside of the system – a carrying of carrying itself. This is what thought allows us to do – to pick up fragments of our feeling and experience as if we had a mental thumb and forefinger which we can use to arrange into larger re-fer-ences with larger or smaller application. Without the basic capacity to isolate some significant sense from experience and to apply it to another experience as if they were related independently of our intent, there could be no thought. Thought is pretending.
What is it made of? In my view, all things are ‘made of’ what I call sense. The power to perceive and participate in perception. Thought seems different from electromagnetism or mass-energy because we are directly within it. Physics presents our body with features of other experiences as external bodies. The results of that exteriorized view, are, in my view, responsible for the alienation that we encounter when we try to re-absorb our own subjectivity after we have objectified it as physical forms and functions. In particular, thoughts are made, as far as we know, of the experiences of Homo sapiens or perhaps earlier hominids as well. Honey is made of bees sense and motive, thought is made of human sense and motive.
What is an example of the most basic thought? If we look at what infants seem to be thinking about, “mama” seems popular. They seem to want a lot of help and attention. When we wake up in the morning, there seems to be a sense of remembering where we are and what has been going on. Likewise, before falling asleep, our hynagogic state of consciousness seems to hinge on dissolving our sense of locality and memory. We can slip in and out of fragmented dream states until the figure-ground relation seems to tessellate us into a less thoughtful and more relaxed mode of being. Thought then, like a birds tweet, may begin as a localizing beacon. To think is to encapsulate your experience and to consider whether to alert others about it. We weave a web of memories within ourselves and our social group – externalizing, perhaps, the process which is represented by our own neurology.
Speed of Light: Why is the speed of light not infinite?
Speed of Light: Why is the speed of light not infinite?
Speed of Light: Why is the speed of light not infinite?
The speed of light in a vacuum, 299792458 m/s, is a finite, discrete value. Nothing else can achieve this speed, because it would need infinite energy to propel actual mass. But a photon does not have mass.What is the limiting factor that prevents a photon from exceeding 299792458 m/s?
It’s like asking, “what is the limiting factor that prevents something which is absolutely still from being even more still?” Whether or not something can exceed the velocity of light or c (recently there was an unsuccessful challenge to light’s absolute status), the concept of c itself should not be considered a velocity, but rather, the physical and ontological limit of velocity itself as it is defined in the universe.
Personally, and this is just my own hypothesis, I think that the coincidence with light and c, along with light’s lack of resting mass gives us reason to question whether photons “exist” as independent entities traveling through a vacuum. I see no reason why it could not be the case that photons, and all radiant energy is actually more like what energy is on the macrophysical level. Our naive experience of classical physics shows us very clearly that energy is merely “what matter does”, rather than a substance of its own.
Energy is a verb which modifies a noun – it moves, heats up, changes, some-thing. Without a thing to move and an experience in which that moving thing can be compared to a memory of its previous position or status, there is no energy. My prediction is that all of the current interpretation in physics which relies on vacuum energy will ultimately have to be re-interpreted. Once we are able to understand that matter and awareness are identical, then energy can be understood as communication within matter which generates space and time. Space and time in turn, will have to be redefined as a property of awareness, or rather, of awareness to gaps in awareness.
The speed of light then is really about the speed of measurement. It is not a measurement of literal particles or waves traveling through a void, it is a measure of the scale of dislocation among multiple inertial frames. It is about the scale of bodies relative to each other, so that c defines both the largest and smallest ratio between frequencies of what these bodies are doing.
Adding on to the previous post Sketch for a New Physics…
At the bottom, lines converge as SpaceTime. In this case, SpaceTime refers to the sense of eternity which is empty of all significance except for the sense of measureability. This would be the Western conception of a universe from “nothing” – mathematics of a pure void. Having no depth of observation, no memory or context, it is a single frame of reference in isolation which is at once instantaneous and perpetual. Time is reversible and space itself is generated through signal attenuation.
Moving up the center line (ladder) of Significance, The Entropy-Repetition range begins to expand as QM gives way to matter, then biology, then “mind”, gaining degrees of freedom and intensity of will. The higher up on the ladder we go, the wider and more bowed its rungs become. This reflects the increasing value that is placed on defying repetition of function and entropic degradation of form. The spectrum near the top (Aeon) end of the ladder represents the fullness of aesthetic potential through higher consciousness. Really the curved arrows of entropy and repetition could be a spiral, as the cycle of creativity builds on the ruins of the past.
Aion is the opposite of SpaceTime in that it represents the sense of eternity that is full and whole – an absolute of aesthetic prestige and generosity rather than the austerity of quantitative measure. On the high end, space (space in red) represents a vast difference between the microphysical and astrophysical scopes. Since this difference can only be sustained by a consensus of orientable experiences of size, it should not be expected at the lower (SpaceTime) levels. Without an experience in which both galaxy and atom can be conceptualized as wholes, they would both be as data in a database – merely more or less contiguous fields of information.
Likewise, the green Time label on the top represents the equivalent stretching of time to reflect the broad gap between a single moment and eternity. The top rungs on the ladder are broad, so broad, that they bend back and circle around like a corkscrew/caduceus.
Sketch for a New Physics
Using a topographical metaphor, this diagram shows the relation of significance in direct proportion to the dimorphism of space and time. I call this eigenmorphism. For example, as human beings, our native frame is the Autobiographical level (top). Our experience has a high significance, which means
1) rich qualia – larger nows and more nesting of personal, sub-personal, and super-personal frames allow for deeper sensory vocabularies.
2) a highly divergent space-time presentation (space and time are opposite for us, but identical for quantum phenomena or astrophysical phenomena).
3) a highly divergent spectrum of realism. The Matroyshka dolls with reflection underneath represent this range of clear/real, vs blurred/intuitive, and reflective/fiction. By contrast, the entangled reflections of the microphysical level of physics are neither real nor fictional. With space and time fused, matter and energy become interchangeable foregrounds for information processing.
Multisense Realism 
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