Multisense Realism

Q. Are we a body dreaming or are we a dream bodying?
A. Neither. Body and dream are two opposite sides of the same coin. We are the coin itself; the sense of the two sides opposition to and unity with each other.

Q. Is this Panpsychism?
A. Close, but not exactly. I use the term Pansensitivity. Panpsychism can imply that a rock has human-like experiences. My hypothesis can be categorized as panexperientialism because I do think that all forces and fields are figurative externalizations of processes which literally occur within and through ‘matter’. Matter is in turn diffracted pieces of the primordial singularity. It’s confusing for us because we assume that motion and time are exterior conditions, but if my view is accurate, then all time and energy is literally interior to the observer as an experience. What I think is that matter and experience are two symmetrical but anomalous ontologies – two sides of the same coin, so that our qualia and content of experience is descended from accumulated sense experience of our constituent organism, not manufactured by their bodies, cells, molecules, interactions. The two are both opposite expressions – a [(what & how) of (matter and space) and a {who & why} of {experience and time}] of the underlying sense that binds them to the singularity (where & when).

Q. Why do you focus exclusively on electromagnetism as the fundamental correlation of “sensorimotive”?  Wouldn’t strong and weak nuclear forces have the same basic “sensorimotive” properties?
A. I use electromagnetism because it has an iron clad association with sensroimotive experience. That is the main symmetry I want to get across. Once we understand that, all forces, strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational would be different inertial frames of reference of the same thing. They make sense in different ways, as would be appropriate when you are talking about density of large objects versus charge of atoms or how atoms are held together and fall apart, but to me these are just computational details. It’s *all* sensorimotive-electromagnetism.

The most provocative possibility of this is that rather than a Classical limit in the microcosm at which QED supersedes Newton, there is a Copernican limit at which we stop detecting objects per se and begin detecting our own instruments sensitivity itself. Atoms are antennas, and quantum mechanics are the exterior most aspects of the broadcasts. The form of the broadcasts looks electromagnetic to us (from the outside) but feels sensorimotive to us from the inside. Not that our perception is literally atomic, just as TV programs aren’t only pixels, but our perception is figuratively meta-meta-meta-meta atomic.

Charge is unexplained by physics but it may be more understandable as a sensorimotive quality that is experienced on many levels. Electromagnetic behaviors are predictable from mathematical models, but the fact of electromagnetism itself may arise from the microcosmic version of what we experience as autobiographical narrative as human beings. The stories of atoms may be less significant than our own in absolute or relative terms, but ultimately our stories are made of the same thing. Rhythmic changes of mood/activity.

IV. Cosmology: The Big Diffraction

Rather than a Big Bang, which conceives of the origin of timespace as an event in time in which matter expands into space (neither of which could exist yet) that there is instead a ‘Big Diffraction’.

A Big Diffraction would yield the same observation of expansion as our measurements suggest, it would not be the result of a real expansion into an infinite vacuum that exists independently, but instead it would be a shrinking of the scale ratio of matter to space. Matter would be receding into itself, but this would not be observable by material bodies within that process.

The idea of a Big Bang as an explosion into emptiness (as seen from a distance by a hypothetical voyeur) is actually as much of a fantasy as any pre-scientific creation myth, since at the beginning of time and space in this universe, there could be no exterior. All observations can only occur from within the singularity and have no exterior or temporal divisions. The singularity is then a timeless (i.e. it happens always and never) and undivided initial condition – an ‘everythingness’ and nothingness both. As such, causality itself supervenes upon the singularity rather than the other way around. Divisions and symmetries, such as matter and energy, time and space, subjective perception and objective relativity are reconciled in the primordial undiffracted whole.

    A. Primordial syzygy

Consider that the entire cosmos is, in its most universal sense,  a monad; a boundless and implicit firmament through which objects and experiences are diffracted.  The primordial dynamic is not mechanism but stillness and stasis, like a spectrum to a prism. Anchored in that stable unity, matter is the more direct representation of this singularity (ie the many alchemical references to ‘stone’) than mechanical dynamism. Realism arises from the solidity of this insoluble substrate. A prism is not a machine, it is an object which reveals the essential coherence of visual qualia to visual subjects.

B. Anomalous Symmetry – Sense, Essence, Existence

Space is an an experiential relation between objects. In a universe of one object, there can be no space.

Time is memory and repeating sequence within perception. Without memory, there is only an eternal now.

Information and computation are sensorimotive artifacts of cognition which formalize natural sense figures. They are not concretely real but can be used by a conditioned agent to inform other physical agents, thereby impersonating the real.

Sensorimotive-Electromagnetism is the concretely real universal primitive, with the relation between the two opposing ontological (private-signifying-experiential and public-general-topological) perspective ranges being governed by their anomalous symmetry or ‘sense’ of each other.

Perception : Relativity
Significance = Energy * Time :  Matter / space = Entropy

Slight statistical advantage for uncommon/unexpected outcomes at significant moments allows significance to persist and intensify. Like attracts like.

Q. What is time?
A. Time is an aggregate measure of physical change modeled in a linear fashion. It has no existence of it’s own beyond our sense of sequential causality (which evaporates predictably under altered states of consciousness – dreams, drugs, trance, etc). We are the ones who interpret the digits on the clocks and the calender squares as a shared temporal text. In reality, there are no days, just astrophysical orientations woven together by our memories and monitoring of regular oscillating patterns.

Like space, time can only be as discrete or continuous as the substances and processes we use to measure it. What we are measuring is not an objective condition, but our own normalized intersubjective detection of relations between patterns of energy/change.

Q.  Is consciousness just electromagnetic patterns in the brain?
A. Only if we allow that electromagnetic patterns are always symptoms of detection and response (sensorimotive) experiences. It makes more sense to consider consciousness and electromagnetic patterns in the brain in the same way that we consider the self and the body: two sides of the same coin. One side is public, generic, literal, and understandable as relations between biological and chemical objects and the other side is private, proprietary, figurative, and understandable as experienced events and perceptions through time.

Q. How is time related to electromagnetism?
A. If we understand that our own experience can be described in two opposite ways, we can understand that electromagnetism in general can be understood in two opposite ways as well. Viewed from the outside, electromagnetism is a pattern of coordinated activity among multiple objects in space, and another, a single, private continuity of detection and response. We are used to understanding the exterior patterns in terms of forces and fields, however, like time, it would be a mistake to consider this inference to be literally true.

It is the hypothesis of Multisense Realism that electromagnetism does not exist as an independent force in a vacuum across space, but as a shared experience among material objects – atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, planets, stars, etc. Atoms do not stick together because of an external field that exists between them, it makes more sense that they stick together because what they inherently are mutually drawn together from the inside. We look at this from a distance, and disqualifying any possibility of sensorimotive content, model it as a mechanism through which space propagates waves of, or is penetrated by particles of ‘energy’.

Once we update our model so that matter detects and moves itself in relation to matter, that detection and motion comes to define energy. The implications of this are tremendous, as something like color and light can be understood as a visual experience of the human nervous system relating to a human universe rather than an independent particle-wave. Light is not just how we see, but it is how matter sees. Electromagnetism is not just how our brains feel, it is how matter feels. Once we can understand that, we can see that feeling and seeing is also what matter itself actually is.

The two sides of the coin are symmetrical and anomalous so that even though they are really the opposite sides of the same thing, each side perceives the other as unrelated. This is because one side is quantitative and topological and the other side is qualitative and narrative so they are not related one to one. You can’t look at a person’s brain and be able to tell what they are thinking because you would need to know the specifics of the entire story of their life first. The brain is many neurological ‘whats and hows’ but the self is a continuous fugue of signifying moments of ‘who  and why’.

Time then, is part of how matter feels, how it makes sense of itself and its role in the universe, and feeling is the sensorimotive ‘heads’ side of the coin that is electromagnetic energy (‘tails’) on the other side. The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Explanatory Gap arise from presuming that the heads side can be explained by figuring out everything about the tails side, when in fact, the two are perpendicular in every way, overlapping only in the synchronization of ‘where and when’ (an impulse in a region wherever the brain activity is associated with particular feelings whenever they are felt). The self extends from birth to death through a semantically charged universe of experienced times, people,  places, and things while the brain extends from spinal cord to cerebrum, described only in a-signifying biochemical terms. It exists in a universe of neurotransmitters, spike trains, and ion channels. The two systems intersect only in the here and now, they are otherwise orthogonal to each other, pursuing opposite agendas of neurophysiology and autobiography.

Q. Are all forces and fields figurative?
A. Yes. From electromagnetism to gravity to the strong and weak force, to love and hate, beauty and morality, all ‘forces’ are the direct and indirect experiences of matter. When we see lightning or an electric spark we are seeing the gases that make up our atmosphere igniting spontaneously in response to interior tensions being released. In a complete vacuum, there is no spark – no atoms to offload the feeling of tension (charge) to. Matter does different things on different scales, and in different arrangements, but it is all ultimately the same protons with the same potential to build feeling and significance as well as unconsciousness, entropy, and death. Multisense realism is really very simple. The universe is a concrete reality which is matter ÷ space on the outside and experience * time on the inside. Space and time are true voids, containing nothing whatsoever except for the capacity to whip up the solitude of primordial potential into a frothy multiplicity of social realities.

Q. Is space or spacetime a field?
A. Not unless we understand that fields are figurative and not literally real. What makes space real is the ability to sense and make sense of objects. If the universe had only one object, there could be no frame of reference to create a space relation with. Space is a sense of proximity and velocity based on scale and position relative to the observer. With only one object, there is no difference between motion or stillness, size, or place. Space is how things feel their exteriority in relation to other exteriors. Both space and time are ways that sense is virtually partitioned. They are gaps or voids which isolate parts of the cosmos from other parts on one level, while they remain part of the same essential continuum on another level.

V. Implications for Free Will and Ethics:

Moral topology arises through an accumulated or multiplied charge on sense and motive. Sense charge is experienced as elevated significance – positively as high quality, heroic, divine – negatively as a threat of low quality, dirty, shameful, ‘evil’ association. The magnitude of this charge follows the general pattern of quality > amplification > embodiment so that the greater the figurative power of the association, the more attractive/repulsive response they engender and the closer to absolute good or evil will the images be.

Motive power is experienced as the capacity to generate outcomes in the world. The topology is that of criminality and success. Sense and motive are intertwined such that people and actions which have accumulated a sufficiently intense repulsive charge associated on them may be persecuted or prosecuted criminally (justified or not by the danger that is literally presented by the consequences of the prohibited motives). Likewise, motives which may pose a threat but have a sufficiently positive reputation are often decriminalized, or are tolerated.

Free will may arise from this amplification > embodiment pattern. Teleology is an inherent primitive, but not all things have equal teleological capacities so that it takes significant sense experiences to accumulate into a sense of embodiment or self awareness. As a rule of thumb, the more sense you make, the more sense you can make, and the more power and foresight you have to change yourself and the world. The feeling of free will, therefore, can only be the promise of possibility for its realization.

Q. Why can’t significance be modeled as a computation? What it is about feelings that cannot be represented as a large set of variables and states with accompanying functions and patterns that are interpreted by the mind as “I feel happy”.

Because you would still need something to interpret the large set of variables as a feeling rather than an a-signifying, generic variable. How long of a player piano roll would you need before the piano started to get up and dance to the music? How many golf balls have to roll down a funnel before it represents sunset on Maui? There is no number. The poker game is not in the cards, it’s in the players experience.