Multisense Realism

Today’s post is a response to a couple of social media comments about life being meaningless and how real things are different from their appearance:

Everything is an appearance in some sense, even subjectivity and objectivity themselves. The capacity to appear in multiple sense modalities is what reality, as well as everything else is made of. That which never appears in any sense is identical to non-existence.

Some appearances in some sense modalities appear to be more persistent or shared more widely than others. That is the appearance of realism. In my view, it exists to add Significance to conscious experience, but in so doing, it adds an appearance of insignificance to appearances that do not appear to be shared as widely or reliably persist for as long a duration. Some experiences appear to be ‘merely’ dreams or ‘illusion’ by comparison.

It’s all different densities of the same thing: Aesthetic-participatory phenomena. Qualia. Appearances of appearances. Conscious experience nested within itself at different relative perceptual frame rates.

Just as the frame rate / shutter speed on a camera determines whether its picture of a helicopter shows blades that are static, rotating, or a blur, so too do apertures of sensitivity determine whether the overlap between shared experiences appears as an object, percept, subject, or concept. It’s a spectrum of appearance. I call this eigenmorphism.

Meaning is not tangible objects or composed of tangible objects doing tangible things (moving, colliding, changing shape). If we are convinced that we are a body living in a physical universe of physical objects and automatic physical forces, then we have psychologically diminished and disqualified all phenomena that are not tangible objects or movers of objects.

We are telling ourselves and each other a fairy tale that is a materialistic anti-fairy tale about the absence of subjectivity and free will, of meaning and significance. It is a category error. We use instruments that cannot see and cannot feel to tell us what light and feeling are.

Scientific philosophy began with dualism that divided objects in space from everything else into two equal categories, but then the former were assigned ‘primary’ status, relegating the latter to be secondary properties. Secondary became ‘illusory’ and ‘emergent’…mere appearances that somehow ‘arise’ from quantities and shapes of physical energy and forces that are presumed primary and fundamental. The hard problem of consciousness was born of the explanatory gap between tangible objects and everything else… between Res Scientifica and Res Emergens.

This crypto-dualism has now become so fanatical in its deconstruction of consciousness and self to unconscious mechanical effects that people have become incapable of considering themselves and our lives together as having any value. It has filtered down through the academic, economic, political and social systems so that it pervades every part of public life. If you think that your life actually exists and has significance, you’re on your own. Obviously this creates misery and is unsustainable at scale.

In my understanding, this is all rooted in a confusion between the limits of our personal sense and sense-making capacities (personal consciousness) and the limits of all consciousness. Instead of assuming that our experience of human life is part of much larger scales of conscious experience, we have shifted the benefit of the doubt to the opposite.

What we experience as most persistent and common has been taken to be a small part of a hypothetical type of existence that is outside of all experience. The persistent experience of the Sun and Earth, for example, are stripped of the perceptual, experiential facts that define them to us leaving only the fact of persistence itself. The Sun and Earth are no longer persistent experiences but persistent structures – images of objects that are somehow independent of the scales of visibility and tangibility that define them. They are simply formations, or perhaps information processes…or one that gives rise to the other, all long before conscious appears. Non-appearances that evolved automatically into appearances and then into illusions.

The assumption that conflates a universe prior to *our* (human) experience with a universe prior to *all* conscious experience is a pseudoscientific myth/metaphor that we have mistaken for literal scientific fact. In that myth, we are bodies and our minds are something that an organ in our body does. Certain types of cells happen to be arranged in ways that somehow transduce the movements of molecules into information that somehow transduces itself into appearances, and then illusory appearances. This is assumed even though it is circular, since the body and brain themselves are appearances.

The myth is treated as fact so the facts of conscious experience, including ourselves, must be treated as myth. Dualism has not only secretly remained as the animating principle of our civilization, but it has hardened into symmetrical pathologies of fanatical materialism and fanatical religiosity. Unable to reconcile mind and body, we have developed an ideology that yokes together the promises of our unnatural future with the promises of our supernatural past. To finish the job, we are building a mindless mind in a disembodied body. A FrankenHAL of super-human proportions to replace nature and consciousness with information and microelectronic energy. Will it work? The answer does not compute. We have to decide for ourselves…if we still can.

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