Multisense Realism

The shocking blind spot that is common to so many highly intellectual thinkers, the failure of AI, and the lack of understanding about what consciousness is are different aspects of the same thing.

The intellectual function succeeds because it inverts the natural relation of what I would call sensory-motive phenomena. Natural phenomena, including physical aspects of nature, are always qualitative, participatory exchanges of experience. Because the intellect has a special purpose to freely hypothesize without being constrained by the rest of nature, intellectual experience lacks direct access to its own dependence on the rest of nature. Thinking feels like it occurs in a void. It feels like it is not feeling.

When we subscribe to a purely intellectual view of life and physics as information processing, we disqualify the aesthetic dimension of nature, which is ultimately the sole irreducible and irreplaceable resource from which all phenomena arise – not as generic recombinations of quantum-mechanical states but as an infinite font of novel aesthetic-participatory diffractions of the eternal totality of experience. This is what cannot be “simulated” or imitated…because it is originality itself.

Numbers and logic can only reflect the creativity of that resource, not generate it. No amount of binary math can replace the colors displayed on a video screen, or a conscious user that can see it. It need not be anything mystical or religious – it’s just parsimony. Information processing doesn’t need any awareness, it just needs isolated steps in a chain reaction on some physical substrate that can approximate the conditions of reliable but semi-mutable solidity. Gears, semiconductors, a pile of rocks…it doesn’t matter what the form is because there is no sense of form going on. All that is going on is low level generic changes that have no capacity to add themselves up. There’s no ’emergent properties’ outside of consciousness. Math and physics can’t ‘seem like’ anything because seeming is not a logical/mathematical or physical function.