Multisense Realism

Hi friends! I’m getting ready for my poster presentation at the Science of Consciousness conference in Interlaken:

Abstract In recent years, scientific and popular imagination has been captured by the idea that what we experience directly is a neuro-computational simulation. At the same time, there is a contradictory idea that some things that we experience, such as the existence of brains and computers, are real enough to allow us to create fully conscious and intelligent devices. This presentation will try to explain where this logic breaks down, why true intelligence may never be generated artificially, and why that is good news. Recent studies have suggested that human perception is not as limited as previously thought and that while machines can do many things better than we can, becoming conscious may not be one of them. The approach taken here can be described as a Variable Aspect Monism or Multisense Realism, and it seeks to clarify the relationship between physical form, logical function, and aesthetic participation.

In Natural Intelligence, intelligence is abstracted from within a full spectrum of aesthetically rich experience that developed over billions of years of evolving sensation and participation.

In Artificial “Intelligence”, intelligence is abstracted from outside the natural, presumably narrow range of barely aesthetic experience that has remained relatively unchanged over human timescales (but has changed over geological timescales, evolving, presumably, very different aesthetics).

What Multisense Realism proposes is more pansensitivity than panpsychism.

The standard notion of panpsychism is what I would call ‘promiscuous panpsychism’, meaning that every atom has to be ‘conscious’ in a kind of thinking, understanding way. I think that this promiscuity is what makes panpsychism unappealing to many/most people.

Under pansensitivity, intelligence 𝒅𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒔 from a totalistic absolute, diffracting through calibrated degrees of added insensitivity. It’s like in school when kids draw a colorful picture and then cover it with black crayon (the pre-big bang) and then begin to scratch it off to reveal the colors underneath. The black crayon is entropy, the scratching is negentropy, and the size of the revealed image is the degree of aesthetic saturation.

So yes, the physical substances that we use to build machines are forms of conscious experience, but they are very low level, low aesthetics which don’t necessarily scale up on their own (since they have not evolved over billions of years of natural experience by themselves).

I think that despite our success in putting our own high level aesthetic experience into code that we use to manipulate hardware, it is still only reflecting of our own natural ‘psychism’ back to us, rather than truly exporting it into the machine hardware.