Where Is This Video?
The reducibility of our body to elementary functions and forms does not necessarily have to reduce us to forgeries. There is another possibility, which is that there is something to be forged that is precisely the opposite of a copy. As hinted at in the video, each experienced moment is a kind of unrepeatable performance. Instead of focusing on the absence of a concrete physical object, we can look at the aesthetic content of the experience itself as the concrete phenomenon – not a simulacrum (pronounced sim-you-lah-crum) but a localized fragment of authenticity itself. Is color basically a bad copy of white light? Is the universe basically a bad copy of nothingness?
Humans are not bad copies of anything, but the degree to which we are unique snowflakes is relative to the proximity of our scope of consideration. Within our own frame of reference, we are absolutely unique. Within a social frame of reference, we are stereotyped culturally. Moving out from the human context, an individual human becomes more and more generic – a mammal, an animal, a biological organism, a chemical reaction, etc. This variance is, in my view, what the universe is ‘made of’, so that no one context of description is the final ‘real’ description.
In other words, this commentary is literally “here”, and that video is actually “there”, and that is what relativity ultimately means…perception itself – awareness, is the ultimate frame of reference, and without perception, there is nothing to frame.
Multisense Realism 
Does reality happen to you or do you act? Is sense epiphenomenal or functional?
> Does reality happen to you or do you act?
Both
> Is sense epiphenomenal or functional?
Not epiphenomenal, it is concretely real and purely fictional, but functionality, in my view, is only one facet of sense that exists to serve a fundamental agenda which is aesthetic and participatory rather than mechanistic.
Is sense designed?
It’s ambiguous because on the primordial frame, there is not any spacetime, so it can be both undesigned, designed, and partially designed. The balance that is achieved locally, in our neck of the woods seems to be that it is design-fertile on the inside and design-averse on the outside.
x
Being designed is only one of the qualities of sense. Sense is primordial. All qualities are senses.
>>Joe: Does reality happen to you or do you act?
>Craig: Both
How do I tell the difference?
>Joe: Is sense epiphenomenal or functional?
>Craig: Not epiphenomenal, it is concretely real and purely fictional, but functionality, in my view, is only one facet of sense that exists to serve a fundamental agenda which is aesthetic and participatory rather than mechanistic.
Joe: If this sense-on-the-inside exists to serve a purpose, sense-on-the-outside is not functional?
>How do I tell the difference?
If you can’t tell the difference, then I don’t think there is a difference.
>Joe: If this sense-on-the-inside exists to serve a purpose, sense-on-the-outside is not functional?
Sense doesn’t exist to serve a purpose, it is purpose which is the insistence of sense. In the absolute view, function serves the cause of extending experiential richness.
>>Joe: Is sense designed?
>Craig: It’s ambiguous because on the primordial frame, there is not any spacetime, so it can be both undesigned, designed, and partially designed. The balance that is achieved locally, in our neck of the woods seems to be that it is design-fertile on the inside and design-averse on the outside.
Joe: The outside seems to be. Does seeming make it so? Like the concrete, the outside is another purely fictional reality.
If sense on the inside, and sense on the outside are fictional, what is real?
>Does seeming make it so?
Just the opposite. Nothing is necessarily “so”, there is only a hierarchy of seeming.
>Like the concrete, the outside is another purely fictional reality.
The outside is fictional in the absolute view, but factual in the local view. The inside is more than factual and less than factual in the local view but makes more sense than the outside in the absolute view.
>If sense on the inside, and sense on the outside are fictional, what is real?
Realism is a quality of experience through which the density and scale of primordial commitments on various levels is communicated. Nothing is ‘real’ except the fact of sense. The rest, the contents of sense, vary in realism depending on the frame of reference, modalities of perception, etc.
> Nothing is necessarily “so”,
Putting “so” in quotes is confusing. What do you mean by doing it?
How can there be nothing? How do you know anything?
Sense is not necessarily so.
>The outside is fictional in the absolute view,
How did you come to know that? Do you have a line of valid premises leading you to that conclusion, or some kind of evidentiary support?
>Putting “so” in quotes is confusing. What do you mean by doing it?
I mean that the expectation of objectivity is founded on sense, so we can never know it it holds true outside of sense, or if anything can exist outside of sense.
>Sense is not necessarily so.
Yes, it is by definition. In my view, sense is the only thing that can ever be necessarily so.
>How did you come to know that?
I don’t know it, I understand that it makes more sense than the alternatives because I have considered the alternatives and found them to be unsound.
> Do you have a line of valid premises leading you to that conclusion, or some kind of evidentiary support?
An outside view would have no perspective or scope to anchor it, so that phenomena like objects would have no context within which to manifest. There is nothing there which could know whether it exists or not. Evidence of foundational questions can only be supplied rationally. There can be no way to encounter any evidence of a universe beyond our own capacity to encounter, so the expectation of evidence is irrational.
We are sense, experiencing. Do you agree?
Yes, although I would say also that sense and experiencing are the same thing also.
>>Joe: Does reality happen to you or do you act?
>Craig; Both
If both, then we are both. We are sense, experiencing.
>Craig: functionality, in my view, is only one facet of sense that exists to serve a fundamental agenda which is aesthetic and participatory rather than mechanistic.
Functional, aesthetic, and participatory agendas are all experiential. We are sense, experiencing.
>Craig: It’s ambiguous because on the primordial frame, there is not any space-time
Space-time is not, without experience. Space-time is sense experiencing.
>Craig: so it can be both undesigned, designed, and partially designed.
Sense has possibilities, probabilities. It can be undesigned, designed, and partially designed. Those probabilities are basically unpredictable.
>Craig: The balance that is achieved locally, in our neck of the woods seems to be that it is design-fertile on the inside and design-averse on the outside.
My physical self can only speak of the inside, for, my body is sense, experiencing. In what sense do you mean design-averse on the outside. Sense, as you said above, can be undesigned, designed, and partially designed. Sense is not “on the outside”?
>Craig: If you can’t tell the difference, then I don’t think there is a difference.
There is no difference. We are sense, experiencing.
>Craig: In the absolute view, function serves the cause of extending experiential richness.
We are sense, experiencing.
>Craig: Nothing is necessarily “so”, there is only a hierarchy of seeming.
We are sense, experiencing.
>Craig: The outside is fictional in the absolute view, but factual in the local view. The inside is more than factual and less than factual in the local view but makes more sense than the outside in the absolute view.
We are sense, experiencing.
>Craig: Realism is a quality of experience through which the density and scale of primordial commitments on various levels is communicated. Nothing is ‘real’ except the fact of sense. The rest, the contents of sense, vary in realism depending on the frame of reference, modalities of perception, etc.
We are sense, experiencing.
>>Joe Sense is not necessarily so.
>Craig: Yes, it is by definition. In my view, sense is the only thing that can ever be necessarily so.
I happen to think you got this one wrong. But that’s the only one wrong so far. Sense, without experience, has no identity. In the absence of anything else, sense alone is not. So, , as you said, “Nothing is necessarily “so”. Nothing cannot be defined, as there is nothing else relative to it. Therefore, sense is not necessarily so. But, it is sufficiently so.
>Craig: I don’t know it, I understand that it makes more sense than the alternatives because I have considered the alternatives and found them to be unsound.
Yes. Your understanding is based on your experience. We are sense, experiencing.
>Craig; An outside view would have no perspective or scope to anchor it, so that phenomena like objects would have no context within which to manifest.
We are sense, experiencing.
>Craig: There is nothing there which could know whether it exists or not.
As a consequence, we are sense experiencing.
>Craig; Evidence of foundational questions can only be supplied rationally.
Rationality is experience formalized, organized. Ex., If/Then. A implies B. We are sense, experiencing.
>Craig: There can be no way to encounter any evidence of a universe beyond our own capacity to encounter, so the expectation of evidence is irrational.
Hence, we are sense, experiencing.
Simple, eh?
> Space-time is sense experiencing.
I would say that space-time is the division of sense/experience.
>Those probabilities are basically unpredictable.
Whether it is predictable or not is unpredictable.
>Hence, we are sense, experiencing
Other variants to consider: Sense experience is here. Insensitivity is there… We is quality which is experienced in some sense.
Corollary: Sense creates its own experience.
Its sort of like saying thread makes its own clothing…sense is already experience, so it doesn’t necessarily create, it’s that the absence of creation is not possible ontologically.
>sense is already experience
I thought sense was perception. What is sense experiencing? If you are perceiving, you are perceiving something. If you are experiencing, you are experiencing something.
Sense is the experience of everything. We don’t need to make it into an object, it is the absolutely primitive capacity for participation and perception in every way. The expectation that there is an object that we are perceiving is not primitive. We can feel and experience moods, colors, sounds etc without their corresponding to some separate thing that exists somewhere. As human beings, we are used to a very particular and complicated kind of experience which presents us with objects outside of our body, but I think that is a function of how broad the spectrum of human awareness is.
One response you might make would be that sense senses itself. But in order to do that, sense would have to have create an idea about itself.
Why would it have to create an idea?
contd…
Sense must divorce itself from itself, to perceive sense as an object, and to perceive sense as initiated by sense as a result, rather than as a cause of sense’s existence.
I think that sense can partially divorce itself from itself. We can even see this in our ordinary experience. We can pay attention to one sensation in one way while partially ignoring another sensation.
Wow!! No response here. Craig must be tired. Poor baby. : )
I am a little tired from the Conference (which was awesome), but no, I just forgot about this (not awesome) thread.
>I thought sense was perception. What is sense experiencing?
Sense is perception. It is every form of sensory-motive participation (feeling, thinking, seeing, perceiving, awareness, consciousness, sensation, intuition, experiencing, etc). Sense is experiencing aesthetic phenomena…which is sense in various states of relativistic diffraction.
>But in order to do that, sense would have to have create an idea about itself.
Why would it have to create an idea about itself? All that needs to happen is that sense divides itself.Through division, sense can see as well as feel, know as well as do, etc.
>Sense must divorce itself from itself, to perceive sense as an object
Exactly. It divorces itself to the extent that it is possible. The absolute cannot be divorced from itself absolutely, but it can interfere with itself by gaps of scale and frequency (spacetime).
>Sense is perception. It is every form of sensory-motive participation (feeling, thinking, seeing, perceiving, awareness, consciousness, sensation, intuition, experiencing, etc)
How does one have feeling, if there is nothing else to feel? What does one think about, if there is nothing else to think about? What does sense see, perceive, intuit, experience? You don’t seem to have closed the gap between the one sense, and the nature of the many forms of sense, feeling something, seeing something, etc. Using sense to feel, think, see, and perceive sense is circular reasoning.
>which is sense in various states of relativistic diffraction…Why would it have to create an idea about itself?
Unless you see it differently, relativity involves an observer and the observed. What is sense (the observer), observing, if sense is all there is?
Diffraction involves interference, a wave and an object. You might say sense is both. But, “both” implies 2 different identities. How can there be 2 different identities if there is only sense?
And, diffraction involves action. If there is only sense, how can there be 2 identities. If there is only sense, how do you account for the inter-action of the wave and the object.
>How does one have feeling, if there is nothing else to feel?
There is always more to feel. The universe is made of feeling.
>What does one think about, if there is nothing else to think about?
Not possible. You are asking ‘what happens when the universe runs out of universe’.
>What does sense see, perceive, intuit, experience?
Everything and anything.
> Using sense to feel, think, see, and perceive sense is circular reasoning.
Anything that we use as a primordial condition must be circular by definition. If we can explain something in simpler terms, then it isn’t primordial. The advantage that sense over matter and information is that neither matter nor information can plausibly lead to sense, but sense can easily lead to matter and information.
>Unless you see it differently, relativity involves an observer and the observed.
Observation is an obsolete concept. All sensory-motive phenomena is participatory, and the sense of being ‘an observer’ is not necessary for perception (even though it contradicts the expectations of the human ego).
>What is sense (the observer), observing, if sense is all there is?
Stories. Qualia.
>How can there be 2 different identities if there is only sense?
Sensitivity modulates itself with insensitivity. The diffraction is not a wave, it is a bleeding through of feeling across a gap of unfeeling. Think of the spectrum and how it is revealed through a diffraction grating.
> If there is only sense, how do you account for the inter-action of the wave and the object.
The primary incursion of spacetime into pansensitivity likely precedes object/subject, wave-particle formalism. How does a dream work? Eddies of order emerge within a sea of trans-rational delirium. Sense invents waves, not the other way around.
> All that needs to happen is that sense divides itself.
How does sense divide itself? If it acts on itself, where does the ability to act dynamically on itself come from, if sense is all there is.
>It divorces itself to the extent that it is possible. The absolute cannot be divorced from itself absolutely, but it can interfere with itself by gaps of scale and frequency (spacetime).
“To the extent that it is possible”? What does that mean? Saying it interferes with itself is just more circular reasoning isn’t it? Unless you use something else more fundamental, using sense to interfere with sense is circular reasoning. It can interfere with itself by dividing itself, thus creating your gaps of scale and frequency. Sure. But how does sense do that without the ability to act on itself.
You have simply failed to close the gap. You close the gap, and then I will agree with you 100%, with much of what you are saying.
It is one thing to popularize your ideas, andI think it is a good start. But you also have to support them with reasoning that is not circular. Close the gap.
So, for example, Thomas Piketty, in his new book, “CAPITAL”, closes the gap between scholarship and popularization in economics.
>How does sense divide itself?
By self-modulating sensitivity. How are you able to control your own attention? It’s the active mode of sense. You have a sense of control and a sense of effectiveness of that control.
>Saying it interferes with itself is just more circular reasoning isn’t it?
Circular reasoning is unavoidable at the primordial level, but the idea that sense modulates itself with insensitivity isn’t especially circular. A computer does not need anything other than voltage fluctuation to execute binary operations – there doesn’t need to be a separate alternative to voltage.
>But how does sense do that without the ability to act on itself.
Dividing and alienating itself *is* the ability to act on itself. Motive effect is the tail end of sense. It is the first division…the ability to effect divisions.
>You have simply failed to close the gap.
The gap is a misunderstanding of what is meant by absolute. No matter what we use as the foundation, we can always say that there must be a more fundamental layer, but when the fundamental layer is sense, we must see that there can be no deeper layer since it too would have to be sensed and make sense in order to be different from nothing.
>But you also have to support them with reasoning that is not circular.
Why would there be a fundamental resource which is not circular? At some point, we have to acknowledge that in order to move our own arm, we have only to *move* our arm. There is no deeper level of description possible.
Craig,
O.K., so you set an algorithm for understanding consciousness, awareness, etc. I don’t happen to agree that sense is absolutely fundamental, but you seem determined to hold that position. So, let’s see how it runs. Let’s see, as Socrates asks Theaetetus, “Does it have any life in it?”. I was wondering how a couple of different concepts play out in multisense realism. Consider them input to your program. [ Look, if these questions don’t interest you, just ignore me, and I will stop writing. If its not fun, why do it.]
1) Personal identity. Who are you?
2)Free will.
Thanks, Joe
1) Each of us is an inflection point of multiple continuations of sensory experience on many nested levels. We range between aspects which are completely unique and unrepeatable, to collections of more generic influences within zoology, anthropology, biology, etc. as well as archetypal influences.
2) Free will also ranges from the minute but essential libertarian free will component to the more public facing qualities of will which have fewer degrees of freedom. We may not have any or much absolutely free will, but what we do have is enough to potentially make all the difference.
1) a sense inflection point is like Leibniz’s monad?, a narrative of a monads dynamic activity, like throwing a stone, a complete individual concept, into a multi-dimensional pool. You are the point of entry and you are the aspect waves that move out from the point? Is that a good metaphor. That’s what came to mind. This would be a non-dissipative wave. Your personal identity never ends.
2) It seems to follow that sense is the creative source of the inflection point. The qualities and characteristics you have, your nature, is sense’s nature. What is the nature of sense that becomes your nature.
1) More like a porous monad. If the totality of experience were a sheet, then we are like a knot where the sheet is pinched and tied around itself. The personal identity never ends in one sense, but it begins and ends in another.
2) Yes, sense is the sheet and the ability of the sheet to pinch and tie itself in a knot. The nature of the particular knot is your nature, but unlike a real sheet, the knotting expresses a sense which is novel, unique, unrepeatable and proprietary.
O.K., I think I am beginning to understand this.
Could the framework you call multisensesense realism, be used, by others, to help them make decisions regarding their mental and physical aspects, so that their life was better? If so, could you provide an example? If you are depressed you can do this. If you have cancer you can do that. If you want to find a job, etc. Multisense realism says if you want this or want to do this, do this and that, because…
I admit it is difficult to see the world from another person’s perspective. It involves substituting your (Craig’s) explanations for the concepts and meanings that naturally come to my own mind from within me. Basically, I have to “forget” much of what I think I know.
What happens when you talk to someone like Stuart Hameroff?, Alfredo Pereira, Deepak Chopra,or individuals with their perspectives…etc, if you did. Do attitudes change, one funeral at a time?
I do think that people could use MSR to gain some perspective and balance in their spiritual, personal, and physical life. Understanding that we can encounter conditions which are both real and unreal can help us appreciate the full spectrum of our experience without having to reduce it or dismiss it. The whole picture of psychiatry and pharmacology could be informed by an MSR-based bigger picture.
I haven’t been able to talk in depth with anyone that you have mentioned, but what little I have been able to bring up with Stuart or Deepak has been generally accepted as a possibility. I see MSR as a way to bring all of the other approaches together.
O.K. Craig, very good. For what its worth, I agree with much of what you have said.
Again, for what its worth, and certainly in agreement with Deepak Chopra, I don’t think we just sense the world. I think we create it. Experience is the product of the mind, the spirit, conscious thoughts and feelings, and unconscious thoughts and feelings. These together form the reality that we know. We are hardly at the mercy of a reality that exists apart from ourselves, or is thrust upon us. We are so intimately connected with the physical events composing our life experience that we can often not distinguish between the seemingly material occurrences and the thoughts, expectations and desires that gave them birth.
The living picture of the world grows within the mind. The world, as it appears to us is like a three-dimensional painting in which each individual takes a hand. Each color, each line that appears within it has first been painted within a mind, and only then does it materialize without.
You ARE the living picture of yourself. You project what you think you are outward into flesh. Your feelings, your conscious and unconscious thoughts, all alter and form your physical image, and they from your exterior experience in the same way. The events that happen to you are initiated BY you within your mental inner environment.
I see MSR as a portion of that living picture. Thanks for all that. Joe
I would agree that on an absolute level, “we” create the universe, and that on our local level we contribute to the creation of the universe, but I disagree that the reality of our world issues entirely from our introspective responses. Think of aging for example. Certainly it could be said that those who develop their spiritual qualities often are perceived to have a timeless, luminous quality to their appearance, but no matter how radiant the being, no 80 year old sage will be mistaken for a 20 year old. The reality of aging is not independent of subjectivity, but I think that at the same time, our human experience is constrained by commitments which extend far beyond our individual influence. We are part of the story of a species and a planet – that story has some flexibility, but it cannot be wished away…not indefinitely anyways.
I wouldn’t mind if people want to engage their world with a sense of active creation if it had no negative consequences, but unfortunately I think that it becomes easy to dismiss the suffering of others and to mistake one’s own privilege for cosmic entitlement. I think that if we recreated a universe based only on the principles of idealistic monism, we would wind up with a very different world than we experience now. Our powers to shape our world appear much more effective when turned to developing things like air conditioning and indoor plumbing than when we rely purely on transcendent awareness. The shadow side of the Eastern philosophical view can lead us into a kind of Cargo Cult optimism in which good intentions can cross over into delusion. I don’t deny that we can do amazing things using only our consciousness, but I would say that not everyone can do them in every situation. I would say that it is more common to become overly enthusiastic about spiritual approaches and then later come to feel disillusioned. Those whose lives take them in a direction which supports them find it easy to justify it by their sense of connection to higher awareness, but I don’t think that leaves enough room for the indifference of the universe.
>I disagree that the reality of our world issues entirely from our introspective responses.
No. Your right. If you play with fire, you are likely to get burned. As I see it, we choose to enter the physical world, and we do so because we want to know ourselves through experience. You can’t know what pleasure is until you experience the pain of a burn. If you have a better way to know pleasure and pain, make a suggestion. If you know a better way to know what love is, without experiencing the ‘negative consequences” of hate, make a suggestion. Hate is the necessary and sufficient polar compliment of love. Put that way, hate ain’t so “negative”.
That’s why I can say, the Universe is of loving intent. Not indifferent. It allows us to do whatever we want to do, even to experience pain, fear, anger, etc. That puts Hamlets soliloquy in a fresh light:
To be, or not to be–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! — Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.
>That’s why I can say, the Universe is of loving intent. Not indifferent.
Yes, on that ultimate level, I agree that the indifference of the universe is a device to serve the deeper agenda of the universe, which is intentional aesthetic development.
>native hue of resolution
sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
That was the title of my livejournal.