Multisense Realism

This is a Facebook exchange between myself and an individual I’ll call GM where GM asks me to explain my quote “MSR understands natural appearances to reflect the meso-scale of consciousness where phoric and morphic qualities are maximally dichotomous.”

My response: I think its easier to conceptualize with visual diagrams

In this early image, I was trying to express the relationship between supernatural (top down) natural, and unnatural (bottom up) perspectives.

1. Beginning in the center, we see a cartoon version of the natural world as we see if visibly on a human scale. So there’s the sun, a rabbit eating a carrot, trees, birds in the sky, etc.

2. The bottom panel is a visualization of scientific concepts that are in some way causally related to the natural things seen in the panel above. Instead of the sun, we see some equations describing the nuclear fusion reaction that powers stars like the Sun. We see formulas for formulas from electromagnetic theory and general relativity radiating out.

So this bottom panel depicts the concepts that we understand describe invisible phenomena that are supposed to be beneath or behind the visible, naive presentation of natural phenomena. The description and what is being described are ‘semaphoric’ – they are semaphores of language and quantitative variables, minimalistic parts that we presume ‘add up to’ the natural (‘phoric’) experience of the physical (‘morphic’) world of nested objects on various scales.

The explanatory gap is boundary between the semaphoric and the phoric | morphic is blurred by the mental alchemy that I call ‘substitution’. One example of substitution is the idea that something like pleasure simply “is” the chemistry of dopamine molecules being metabolized by the nervous system. Of course they are two very different things. Chemistry is tangible molecules moving in public space. Pleasure is a family of trans-tangible qualia that is presented without any obvious empirical or rational connection to molecules.

“Emergence” is a kind of magic word that misguided scientists have coined to blur this boundary and hide the explanatory gap. It is sub-stitution, which I understand to be the conjugate of super-stition, that is, a compulsion to disqualify naive experience as a mere consequence of some other level of reality that is invisible to us except through our conceptual understanding (of science) or intuitive grasp (of transpersonal psychology, mysticism, spirituality, etc).

In its justified negative reaction to politically enforced superstition in premodern times, science has developed its own unjustified pathology that mirrors superstition. Call it reductionsm, mechanism, physicalism, scientism, computationalism. I call it substitution (or substition if you like).

3. Moving to the top panel, we see a visualization of archetypal concepts that are metaphorically related to the center panel’s natural appearances. Instead of the Sun, we see a mandala with inscriptions referring to the Tetragrammaton and Trinity. It’s an entirely different way of conceptualizing the nature as caused from the top down by emanation of diversity from unity. It’s a different kind of ‘fusion’ that is figurative rather than literal or theoretical.

Instead of an entire rabbit, we see only an enlarged view of a rabbit eye, connoting that we are talking about the experience of seeing and experiencing life as a rabbit rather than looking at a rodent body from a distance. Instead of one carrot, there is a group of whole carrots, sort of suggesting a multiplicity of desires and their possible fulfillment. Instead of physical trees, we see repeating images of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life. We see Hindu deities representing the Sun and abundance in states of bliss.

If you prefer a more explicit diagram, this more recent one depicts not only the three vertical layers of the spectrum (metaphoric, phoric, and semiphoric), but the appearances that reflect them (synchronistic-relativistic, morphic-metric, and hemi-morphic-probabilistic).

This diagram also brings in topologies of time/causality, and how they can be understood to map to c², c, and √c. At the phoric-morphic-metric level, space and time are perpendicular coordinates that can be used to plot the location and movement of objects (morphe) over time (duration experienced directly through perception of observed changes, or indirectly through inference from recorded observations). That’s c.

c² is the eternal now of block-time at light speed. It is timeful and spaceful but not limited to unfolding according to linear expectations. Future and past are nothing but the leading and trailing edge of a given window of limited awareness/consciousness. The transpersonal topology of causality is a syzygy. It is both a mandala of emanation of novelty, a cycle of repeating archetypal characters and themes, and a spiral of cumulative variations that synthesize both.

√c describes how quantum mechanical descriptions flatten the space ⊥ topology to one that exists only in spatial *or* temporal terms – as particle OR wave, position OR momentum, entanglement OR contextuality. Again, this is a semaphoric lensing of reality that we have translated into our personal understanding indirectly, thorough our local filters of sense and sense-making about conditions that we imagine exist outside of the limits of that local sensitivity.

GM: “Are you saying aspects of the quale “pleasure” are “subpersonal and impersonal”? If so, what are these aspects and what would be “personal” aspects?”

That’s a good question. I’m saying that pleasure can refer to a category of experience that presents intrapersonally (I feel emotions like joy, release, excitement) and personally (I am euphoric today).

That’s a good question. I’m saying that pleasure can refer to a category of experience that presents intrapersonally (I feel emotions like joy, release, excitement) and personally (I am euphoric today).

If we zoom in on the intrapersonal emotions we find that they are associated with subpersonal qualia… sensations in the chest and throat that increase along with the emotion but are less subject to our personal will. Someone may personally try to suppress the intrapersonal emotion that they are personally having but their success depends on whether the momentum associated with the subpersonal sensations is too great. We may not be able to stop our body from producing tears even though we would personally rather not cry from joy in public.

So on this subpersonal scale of experience the qualia are of a type that do not belong to you personally or even limited to human experience. Any animal body that can shed tears probably feels some similar body-facing sensations when that happens. They sense that their eyes are getting we but not because the feel joy or sadness. I suspect and propose that the conscious experience associated with other mammalian species probably only rises to the level that would be intrapersonal (mood, emotion). That’s why they aren’t people. Some animals may not perceive themselves as entities having feelings, they may only perceive the feelings themselves. To them, body sensations are equivalent to human feeling, and their mood is equivalent to human personality.

Further, something like a flower may be a body or part of a body that is associated with a conscious experience that we would experience intrapersonally. The life experience of a rose my be more along the lines of a single emotional note of ecstacy that plays out on a longer timescale. Instead of a human conscious experience where a person feels joy for a few seconds or minutes, that same kind of feeling may happen all day, or all season from our perspective. The beauty of a flower is something we can see and feel about what we see, but that may only be a narrow snapshot of the beauty that the entire species of flowering plant actually ‘is’ in the larger scale of time and space of something like the Earth’s entire hydrosphere.

Getting back to the relationship of subpersonal qualia to physiology though, what I’m saying is that when we feel choked up from joy, that sensation is only our personal scale snapshot we are glimpsing from a different scale of time and space. We are also getting snapshots through our sense of touch and sight, and when we amplify those senses with tangible instruments like a microscope, then we see living cells. The sensation of getting choked up is a snapshot in the low level of our interiorized qualia (making it semaphoric) and the perception of seeing cells through a microscope is a snapshot in the mid/meso level of exteriorized qualia (making it morphic).

Under physicalism, we (falsely) assume that semaphoric, interiorized qualia must ’emerge’ from the aggregation of morphic, exteriorized qualia on the biological scale. Concepts like animal magnetism and humours were superseded by even more objectified concepts like ‘neurotransmitter reuptake gradients’ or ‘depolarization’ that bring us even close to the assumption of strict bottom-up causality that physicalism itself (falsely) projects onto nature in the first place. The circular reasoning of physicalism begins here…with the language and concepts learned second hand from medical descriptions, and with the dismissal of other direct and indirect accounts of ‘medicine’ as placebo, psychosomatic, primitive superstition, coincidence etc.

What I propose under MSR is that the appearance of bottom-up relations are only one of many influences that determine causality. The biochemical events aren’t the cause of sensations, they are actually our sensory snapshot of sensations on the micro- timescale. On that scale we, nor our body exist. Both the subpersonal semaphores of our throat-choke sensations and the micro-morphic appearances of cellular activity are snapshots we receive from a scale of nature that we cannot experience directly while we are alive. We don’t exist on that scale just like Hamlet doesn’t exist in the ink that makes up what we see as words on a page if paper. Hamlet doesn’t ever emerge from ink. Yes, there are particular shapes of ink that we perceive as the word Hamlet if we are reading Shakespeare in a book, but we are only able to make the dialogue and character ’emerge’ from our own access to personal and interpersonal ranges of consciousness.

Hamlet the play need not be written in ink on paper. It need not even exist in any sort of persistent document/file/data. It can exist purely as a performance of actors in front of an audience of conscious people. If we zoom in on the ink and paper, the binding of the book, the library, etc we are not going to explain Hamlet at all. This is what physicalist explanations have been doing with conscious the whole time… moving the goalposts: “Hamlet doesn’t emerge from ink on paper, he emerges from the whole system of publishing and libraries!”

Wrong.