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Theory of Everything Quora
My answer to the Quora “What is your Theory of Everything?”
Explain your own Theory of Everything or mention your favorite Theory of Everything and JUSTIFY it if you can?
I call my Theory of Everything Multisense Realism. The name is intended to convey the idea that the whole of what we call reality is sourced entirely to a single unifying principle, which is the multiplicity of sense. Matter is that which feels like matter, which is seen to act like matter, and which seems to imply certain sensibilities. All phenomena are similarly known to us through chains of nested experiences which all ultimately begin and end in expectations which seem self-evident. Blue simply looks blue, and pain simply feels painful, regardless of any mechanical processes associated with them. It is not necessary to learn how to feel pain, nor could any such learning help us discover pain if we could not feel it to begin with. No equation resolves to equal the feeling of pain.
Since sense is both the capacity to discern difference from indifference as well as to discern unity across multiplicity, the term multisense refers to the nesting of sense within multiple levels of itself. It is important to understand that by discernment, what is meant is a participatory experience in which the fact of difference or unity is not only detected, but appreciated as an aesthetic quality. Even without the appearance of Homo sapiens or blue green algae on planet Earth, the universe would still be made entirely of aesthetic conditions of some kind or another. It’s not necessary to speculate on non-human awareness, but suffice it to say that our own consciousness can only realistically be composed of letters from an alphabet of possible experiential qualities which is older than the stars. While our particular sense of a physical event is a human version of that event, there can be no doubt that the sense we make of a star overlaps in some important ways with the sense that the star makes without us looking at it. The universe must, it seems, make sense before we can make sense of it.
However abstract or sentimental, concrete or direct, the one thing that all phenomena have in common is that they can be detected through sense or inferred through ‘sense-making’. By the same token, nothing can be real if it can never be detected or inferred in any way by anything. That which cannot be sensed by anything in any way or make sense any way cannot be considered to ‘exist’ or to have any connection to anything that does exist. Sense cannot arise from non-nonsense, just as order cannot arise from dis-chaos. Being that we are made out of sense experience that makes sense, it is not natural for us to see sense itself as the foreground. What we see in the foreground as human beings is opportunities for sense. We are often preoccupied with battling against the reverse side of sense – entropy, disorder, stagnation.
Where MSR excels is to identify the difference between the local realism which frames our human experience and an understanding the absolute frame of all experience. In the former, we experience being a person in a physical world, both of which appear bound by nothingness. In the latter, nothingness is not an option, since nothingness can only be an expectation of something about the hypothetical absence of everything. Time and space too are dissolved without a particular locus of participation and perception. Scale and duration are meaningless without being anchored in a comparison to some particular scope of ‘here’ and ‘now’. From the absolute perspective then, we must begin with the assumption not of a universe from the augmentation of nothingness, but a universe of everythingness diffracted. While this idea was not consciously modeled after any religion or philosophy, it does coincide with several traditional conceptualizations of the ultimate. Singularity producing multiplicity as the color white produces the spectrum – not as a mechanical process, but as an aesthetic revelation of unity deferred. Rather than the creation myth inspired by the Big Bang in which an explosive device appears in null-spacetime to detonate spacetime using mass as an accelerant, MSR begins from the absolute frame of reference. From this vantage point, with no relativistic measure to make the first instants of the Big Bang seem any longer or shorter than all of the rest of history put together, the Big Bang is reoriented within matter and eternity rather than an event within spacetime. The Big Bang becomes the Big Diffraction, an experiential masking and dividing of the Absolute. This is, again, a familiar theme in Eastern philosophy and Western mysticism. The difference is that MSR has rehabilitated this notion, grounding it in basic principles of modern physics and information theory.
The result has been a prodigious amount of writing over the past few years, connecting the dots between matter-energy, space-time and sense-motive (affect-effect), entropy-significance. It has provided what I think are radical insights into the nature of information, mathematics and energy as well as resolving the most stubborn mysteries of philosophy relating to consciousness, meaning, morality, and free will. Each of these requires a lot of explanation even to impart the glimpse that my TOE can offer, but for the purposes of this Quora, I’ll offer these teasers.
1. The nature of information: Not, as Bateson famously said ‘a difference that makes a difference’ but ‘a perception of a perception’. This clarifies the status of information as entirely dependent upon sense and sense-making, not as an independent entity which spawns realism in a vacuum (memes, simulations, computations, etc).
2. The nature of mathematics and AI: Mathematics refers to the common sense which relates to two distinctly different (opposite) things:
- A private experience of imagined sensory symbol-figures which accompany a motive of quantitative reasoning.
- A collection of public objects interacting in a logical, causal way, without any private representations, as a consequence of the shapes of multiple rigid bodies.
Because mathematics bridges the gap between 1 and 2 (private and public) it is considered profound and absolute – and it is, but only in a one dimensional sense. Mathematics represents relations but cannot appreciate them or initiate them. Math doesn’t think or feel, math is an internal appreciation of the sense of the external. Because mathematics is grounded in the abstraction of generality rather than the concrete and proprietary uniqueness of undiffracted sense, it is a rootless imposter – the antithesis of authenticity and feeling. The realization of the absolute difference between genuine participation as a being in the ongoing story of the universe and the imitation of being by a set of a-signifying programmatic functions helps substantiate human intuitions about the emptiness of machine intelligence. While many strong AI enthusiasts will react with hostility to this idea, I think that rather than just suggesting that there will never be a conscious computer, it opens the door to a future of services which extend our intelligence and serve our interests. The MSR view frees us from any ethical concern for laboratory abuses of accidentally sentient programs, as well as insures that no technology will ever learn how to want to take over the world.
3. The nature of energy. In perhaps my most crackpot conjecture, I have proposed that with sense as the universal primitive, quirky effects which have been attributed to photons and other subatomic particles may suggest that our assumption of energy as something which is independent of matter is false. Photons, like ‘profits’ do not literally exist. Through MSR, “energy” is interpreted as simply motives which are not our own. We have private feelings which inspire us to act publicly, and so does everything else. Because of the kind of perceptual relativity that I propose, the more that the feelings and motives of other participants in the universe differ from our own in terms of scale and history, the more those dispositions seem impersonal and involuntary to us. MSR suggests that voluntary and involuntary are relativistic terms – two sides to the same coin which flips between private and public perspectives. Energy is conceived of not a pseudosubstance propagating literally across a vacuum of space as wave-particles but as felt expressions which define power relations of public interaction. What light does in the microcosm does is the same kind of thing that it does for us – it illuminates public experiences – it is ‘the news’. Space is fundamentally a pantomime projected as perceptual gaps between public facing surfaces of matter. Those gaps, while real in the local frame, are absent on the absolute frame of sense. From the perspective of the Absolute and of light, space has not yet been invented. It is the oscillation and modulation of feeling which gives rise to the second order fabric of public spacetime.
4. The Hard Problem of Consciousness: Is understood as part of the larger Presentation Problem, which includes –
- Hard Problem = Why is X presented as an experience? (X = “information”, logical or physical functions, calcium waves, action potentials, Bayesian integrations, etc.)
- Explanatory Gap = How and where is presentation accomplished with respect to X?
- Binding Problem = How are presented experiences segregated and combined with each other? How do presentations cohere?
- Symbol Grounding = How are experiences associated with each other on multiple levels of presentation? How do presentations adhere?
- Mind Body Problem = Why do public facing presences and private facing presences seem ontologically exclusive and aesthetically opposite to each other?
MSR solves the Presentation Problem by recognizing the connection between aesthetic participation, significance, authenticity, and the justaposition of spatial extension, temporal attenuation, and insignificance. In short, the universe in which any sense can possibly exist can only originate in sense itself. The appearance of aesthetic qualities can only arise from a universe which is grounded in an aesthetic agenda, even though those agendas are necessarily masked and combined semi-indifferently on any particular local level. Is there meaning in the universe? Yes, there is nothing but meaning, but meaning in one local context cannot have exactly the same meaning outside of its context.
5. Free Will: As with the existence of aesthetic presentation, the presence of free will, even as an “illusion” is impossible under strict determinism. The whole point of determinism is to ground all phenomena in a firmament of strict parsimony. The idea is that things just don’t happen willy-nilly, they are the consequences of physical or mathematical laws. Such a universe has no room for machines with parts which present themselves to other parts as an illusion of effectiveness. Certainly in the real world, our personal estimation of the effectiveness of our will and of our opportunities to exercise its freedom may not be all they are cracked up to be, however, the very consideration of whether or not to ‘believe in free will’ is predicated on the implicit expectation that in fact our belief supervenes upon our voluntary participation in some materially important way. All arguments against free will are ultimately arguments against the possibility of participating in any kind of argumentation in the first place.
All of these facets of the theory stem from reversing the core assumption of the Western worldview, that consciousness is a product of an animal’s brain rather than that the entire universe is a staggeringly elaborate nesting of participatory sense experiences. This is not an anthropomorphic concept, as it does not elevate human experience, biological experience, or even the sense of a self as being fundamental. Instead, sense itself is seen as the producer of its own augmentation, via spacetime diffraction, which yields private significance and public entropy.
Mechanemorphism
(*update to The Competition page)
Antrhopmorphism and Mechanemorphism
1. What is meant by mechanemorphism?
Anthropomorphize = To attribute human form or personality to things not human
Mechanemorphize = To attribute machine form or impersonality to things not mechanical.
The Multisense Realism perspective is grounded in a philosophy of science which seeks to be more objective about objectivity itself. In Western models of consciousness, experience is generated by the objective mechanism, the forms and functions of the brain. As a result, the subjective experience itself, which does not seem mechanically necessary, becomes orphaned. I have heard it referred to as an illusion, an emergent property, epiphenomena, or even a spandrel (evolutionary side effect which plays no role in further developments). These kinds of terms are necessary to overlook the dualism which mechanemoprhism creates. It is a way of silencing or explaining away the very phenomenon which give rise to the inquiry into consciousness in the first place. This phenomenon of human inquiry is very much the opposite of mechanism. It is a personal participation which arises from meaning and motive rather than blind energy. It is a ‘Why?’ as well as a ‘How’.
When we, as upstanding citizens of the Western scientific consensus, mechanemorphize ourselves it is because we are considering only the public facing aspects of {the total phenomenon that we are} and finding them mechanistic. The conjecture of MSR is that because consciousness is more likely to use mechanism for differentiation and extension than machines are to use consciousness for anything (why would they?), we should not assume the public presentation of our own mechanism is the fundamental phenomenon. MSR suggests that perceptual relativity itself, the sense of the contrast between private qualia and public quanta, is in fact the most likely universal primitive. While human perception may be local to this planet during a relatively short era, perceptual relativity as a phenomenon is larger, older, and more universal than physics. Mechanism must be learned. Feeling and being is innate.
If we examine the nature of mechanism carefully, we should see that the essence of mechanism is unconsciousness. What is an automaton? What does it mean to automate a process? It means that we squeeze out all requirements for our own participation. It is a function which happens without us.
Why is that important? Because a machine will serve whatever master that it is constructed to serve. It will do the same thing over and over until it breaks, because it can’t tell the difference and it can’t care. The machine itself {the totality of the phenomenon that is the machine} has no presence as a genuine whole which is independent of our expectations of it. Outside of our uses of it, it is only an assembly of unrelated parts.
Natural phenomena are not assembled unconsciously, they are spun off and broken out from larger wholes. They are conceived through fusion and fission of their own sense and motive. As a result, the awareness of something like a human being, which is self-elaborated to an almost perverse degree, has a footprint in many different levels of awareness and interaction. While the public effect of what we are seems mechanistic to us, the private affect of who we are does not seem that way. If we were to recreate the universe and we wanted to recreate it faithfully, we would have to include this non-mechanistic experience, as it is the primary experience of the universe for ourselves, and perhaps for all participants in the universe as well.
To say that someone is ‘robotic’, or ‘acting like a machine’ is to say that they are impersonal, cold, relentless, unfeeling. These meanings are not there by accident, they are universal intuitions. As impartial scientists, we should recognize that it is no more scientific to presume that the universe is fundamentally mechanistic than it would be to presume that it is fundamentally anthropomorphic. We have many indications in non-ordinary consciousness, the placebo effect, quantum mechanics, synchronicity, and the anthropopological universality of spiritual concepts that objectivity is not a matter of what “simply is” but may in fact be, on a more primitive level, the complex interplay of “what seems to be the case”. There is no evidence that this ‘seeming’ can be taken for granted in a physical or mathematical system. There is no argument that I know of which should persuade a neutral party why mechanemorphism deserves more consideration than anthropomorphism as a default ontological assumption. Instead, MSR argues that this contrast of extremes known as anthropomorphism and mechanemorphism are a clue as to the template of the underlying nature of nature – that it is in fact an aesthetic agenda from which human subjectivity is directly descended.
What is Information? Reality as Information – Is there Intrinsic Meaning? Sentient Life & Bits
Dolors Jou Torras: I think all one needs to do is redefine information and then it all clicks into place. Information: a perceived difference that can make a difference. You start with an awareness of a difference (reality differentiating itself and becoming aware of it). Then you move on to an awareness of a difference which in turn makes a difference (this awareness of differentiation enables learning, growth, knowledge, etc).
At some point this ability to perceive a difference becomes able to not only perceive a difference (of states) but can also perceive a difference in such a way that order can be assigned (as in before / after). Time is born – or rather, it evolves (= the ability to perceive a difference + assign order and duration).
You escalate this ability to perceive differences, etc, to an information field which can model consciousness (consciousness being defined in line with self-awareness, ability to self-modify, intelligence, ability to evolve, etc).
Then you get to the point where “physical” universes can evolve (within consciousness “space”) and so space-time and matter evolve… This goes hand in hand with the evolution of individual conscious observers experiencing this physical universes
So the paradigm goes like this: information—> consciousness & time —> laws of physics—> individual observers + space-time & matter
Craig Weinberg: I agree with what you are saying, especially the part about adding the qualifier of “a perceived” to “difference”. I would say though that that makes this capacity to perceive more fundamental than what is perceived. Even if we understand that of course information must be perceived, I still think that the word information carries an implicitly objective connotation. All that information can be is an experience in which some sensory context is informed. This capacity to perceive is already awareness, so that even though we could say that the term ‘consciousness’ refers to an awareness of awareness, I don’t see that such an awareness requires any information at all. All that is required is a quality of awareness in which the presence of awareness is felt. There is no feeling of the absence of awareness, so it is not a matter of discerning a difference or being informed about anything, it is simply an expectation of persistence and participation.
I like to break down the word information into three parts: “in” (which is input-output of sensory-affect/motor-effect), “form” (which is material shapes divided by space), and “ation” (which is recursive functions united through time). Where we are at now I think is to overlook the “in” part entirely and treat formations as the primitive context, when in fact the formations are the objects of appreciation and participation of the true primitive capacity for sense.
Dolors Jou Torras: Defining information and consciousness differently is what makes the descriptions of what is ultimately primary different… I completely understand what you are saying, when I put myself inside your theoretical framework Don’t disagree at all, but I can see that it all boils down to the precise details of how one defines information, awareness, consciousness and so on.
Craig Weinberg: Yes, for most contexts it is more useful to talk about information in the traditional sense. I think it’s only when we need to really get a maximum close up on that boundary between firstness and secondness or between the front and back end of the snake who is eating its tail. We are very much on the same page about the semiotic relation. I would suggest to consider that information is not non-physical, so much as physics is experiential and information is part of experience.
What makes an experience seem ‘physical’ is that it is out of bounds of our intimate sensory range. That which is too fast, too slow, too large, too small, or too unlike us in another sense is experienced in increasing degrees of dissimilarity to experience. Experience is the sense of who we are and the motive of why we do what we do, but matter is bodies nested within larger bodies. Matter is the what and how, the re-presentation of first person presentations.
Information is when one level of experience exploits another, more distant (and therefore more matter-like; discrete positions, subject to public inspection, etc) level. We take a sheet of cellulose molecules, which on their own level are holding on to each other, oxidizing slowly, etc and we inscribe a quantity of ink (also an experiential reality on its native fluid-molecular level). This inscription can be modeled as a trade off of entropy, we are fixing our private ideas and expressions on various levels, conscious and subconscious in public spacetime. Public spacetime freezes private sense into public form and private motive into public function. The information entropy of the writer’s idea is discharged in the act of writing, a process to be revisited in reverse when the reader understands what has been written. The low entropy signal of the written word is traded for an aesthetic entropy increase in the reader’s experience – they imagine, they think, their mental experience reverberates and ‘warms up’, creating novelty and creativity. This is significance. Significance lights up previous memories and pulls them together, bringing a sense of integration within. (Understanding = entero-standing…inner settling).
information is not physical in the sense that the effect of being informed is experiential, but information media is physical, which means that it is down-rev experiential, so to speak. We use experiences which are dumber and smaller than we are to carry our messages. Thinking of it this way brings matter, mind, and meaning together as one ecosystem of sense-making.
Dolors Jou Torras: I will cover the physical vs non-physical debate in another video soon, but defining information as essentially non-physical has to do with several factors:
– I relate information to qualia (perception, experience)
– That in this “physical” universe, in general we need to embed or engrave information in physical matter or energy via symbols or signs, does not make information itself physical.
The laws of physics do not preceed information hence information is not bound by physical laws (information is primary)
There is compelling evidence, in my opinion, that non-local effects point in the direction that our physical universe (space-time plus matter) is a subset of a larger reality. What is “physical” is a moving target
Information (in theory) can be used as a basic currency to describe any reality, not only what our current physics can describe (or is attempting to describe).
Information therefore can be used to move away from duality… “Physical” vs “non-physical” is not a matter of substance dualism; these are purely subjective terms that we mostly associate with what our current science can measure with its instruments.
Craig Weinberg:
“defining information as essentially non-physical has to do with several factors:
– I relate information to qualia (perception, experience)”
I agree in the conventional sense of ‘physical’, information would be non-physical, but I think that in an absolute sense, the physical and non-physical can only be different perspectives (private-facing and public-facing orientations) of the same thing. What I am trying to pioneer is the idea that this thing is sense: the universal capacity for aesthetic participation, aka the capacity to generate, experience, and appreciate qualia.
“- That in this “physical” universe, in general we need to embed or engrave information in physical matter or energy via symbols or signs, does not make information itself physical”
Right, symbols or signs are independent of matter, but not independent of the capacity to experience (sense). A particular piece of information, such as a page in a book, can obviously exist without my experience of it, but it cannot exist without some capacity for interpretation somewhere in the universe.
The question that I put to you, however, is ‘can awareness exist without information?’. I think that it can. I think that a feeling need not inform us. I think that information is always a reflection or representation of sense, and never the genuine presentation itself. Eating a meal is not simply an information processing event where knowledge of nutritional conditions are stored in the body and in our understanding, it is a concretely visceral, mouth watering, chewing, gobbling, licking, swallowing orgy of sensual participation. We can extract information from the experience, but when we do, that extraction is inevitably reductive. It is an accounting of events from a hypothetical voyeur’s perspective rather than the genuine and indispensable experience.
In my view, qualia is not a representation, it is a presentation – an aesthetic presence. Information is a particular kind of qualia, a presentation in which another presentation has been abstracted as an a-signifying, quantifiable figure. Such a figure is public-facing and communicable, so long as the receiver of the communication can re-signify some of what has been frozen as a spatial-form/temporal-function.
“The laws of physics do not preceed information hence information is not bound by physical laws (information is primary)”
Because you are including the aesthetic experience of information as information, I agree with you here too. Matter-Space/Energy-Time would be types of information (Form-Sense/Function-Motive). If we conflate information with sense, however, then we would have to explain why sentience does not emerge from information itself. Why can’t we write a story which has feelings itself? Why do we react unfavorably to impersonated entities like mannequins and automatons (uncanny valley effect)? Part of my contribution here is to get very specific and show how the relation between sense, information, and matter can be juxtaposed to yield unity or contrast but that sense is the essential commonality. Information can be forged and copied, it is generic and implicitly impossible to truly own. Sense is absolutely proprietary and authentic, ineffable, unreproducible.
Information is the manifestation of the intention to circulate publicly, but sense is the private anchoring of a disposition between the sensor/self and the universe. This opposition relation of sense and information is recapitulated and exteriorized as the relation between matter and energy, and matter-energy/space-time. It’s the same theme of reflection through orthogonal juxtaposition. It’s very tricky of course, because we can toggle foreground/background from any perspective. Einstein grabbed mass-energy and it gave him space-time. If you grab information-sense, it gives you physical machines and non-physical machines. My proposal is to grab sense-motive and get all of the others: form-matter-space::function-energy-time. Square that and you get public entropy::private significance.
“There is compelling evidence, in my opinion, that non-local effects point in the direction that our physical universe (space-time plus matter) is a subset of a larger reality. What is “physical” is a moving target”
I agree completely, although I think that the larger reality is the sum-total of all sensory experiences in the history of the universe. The larger reality is experiential while space+matter is a frozen slice – a tokenized representation of part of that reality as experienced from a particular perspective and presented as a public context. Physical to means only that something is intended as a concrete presentation rather than a pure representation. The idea of a train is physical, in the sense that ideas are physical experiences, but the train which is confabulated within the idea is not physical. Non-local? Certainly. Locality is a low level sense protocol. I think that’s part of what the atoms are doing on the microcosm, sending each other messages (we call quantum) to generate locality through spacetime coordinates. The universe is inside the big bang/Abolute, and all space is a presentation within it’s sense.
“Information (in theory) can be used as a basic currency to describe any reality, not only what our current physics can describe (or is attempting to describe).”
Yes, but only if you are assuming that information includes sense. Think of how the same information on a DVD can be heard as music or seen as a video though. A computer reads that DVD anesthetically, as data. Low level electronic sensation in all likelihood, but the data is not giving the DVD player an experience of watching a movie.
“Information therefore can be used to move away from duality… “Physical” vs “non-physical” is not a matter of substance dualism; these are purely subjective terms that we mostly associate with what our current science can measure with its instruments.”
Yes, in the absolute sense, but if we don’t explain that subjective polarization and connect it to public and private presentations, then we have not really explained the universe that we live in. With my view, all dualisms, monisms, and multiplicities fall out naturally from the capacities of sense and motive to diffract entropy spatiotemporally and recover significance experientially.
Consciousness, in Black and White
It occurs to me that it might be easier to explain my view of consciousness and its relation to physics if I begin at the beginning. In this case, I think that the beginning was in asking ‘What if the fundamental principle in the universe were a simple form of awareness rather than something else?’
Our choices in tracing the lineage of consciousness back seem to be limited. Either it ’emerged’ from complexity, at some arbitrary stage of biological evolution, or its complexity evolved without emergence, as elaboration of a simple foundational panpsychic property.
In considering which of these two is more likely, I suggest that we first consider the odd, unfamiliar option. The phenomenon of contrast as a good place to start to characterize the theme of awareness. Absolute contrasts are especially compelling. Full and empty, black and white, hot and cold, etc. Our language is replete with evidence of this binary hyperbole. Not only does it seem necessary for communication, but there seems also to be an artistic satisfaction in making opposites as robust as possible. Famously this tendency for exaggeration clouds our thinking with prejudice, but it also clarifies and makes distinction more understandable. In politics, mathematics, science, philosophy, and theology, concepts of a balance of opposites can be found as the embodiment of its essential concepts.
For this reason alone, I think that we can say with certainty that consciousness has to do with a discernment of contrasts. Beneath the linguistic and conceptual embodiments of absolute contrasts are the more zoological contrasting pairs – hungry and full, alive and dead, tired and alert, sick and healthy, etc. At this point we should ask, is consciousness complex or is it simple? Is the difference between pain and pleasure something that should require billions of cellular interactions over billions of years of evolution to arrive at accidentally, or does that seem like something which is so simple and primordial that nothing could ever ‘arrive’ at it?
Repetition is a special form of contrast, because whether it is an event which repeats cyclically through a sequence or a form which repeats spatially across a pattern, the underlying nature of what repeats is that it is in some sense identical or similar, and in another sense not precisely identical as it can be located in memory or position as a separate instance.
I use the phrase “repeats cyclically through a sequence” instead of “repeats sequentially through time” because if we take our beginning premise of simple qualities and capacities of awareness as preceding even physics, then the idea of time should be grounded in experience rather than an abstract metric. Instead of conceiving of time as a dimension in which events are contained, we must begin with the capacity of events to ‘know’ each other or in some way retain their continuity while allowing discontinuity. An event which repeats, such as a heartbeat or the circadian rhythms of sunlight, is fundamentally a rhythm or cycle. That is the actual sense experience. Regular, frequent, variation. Modulation of regularity.
Likewise, I use the phrase “repeats spatially across a pattern” instead of “repeats as a pattern across space” because again, we must flip the expectation of physics if we are to remain consistent to the premise of sense-first. What we see is not objects in space, it is shapes separated by contrasting negative shapes. What we can touch are solids, liquids, and gases separated from each other by contrasting sense of their densities. Here too, the sense of opposites dominates, separating the substantial from the insubstantial, heavy from light, hard from soft.
An important point to make here is that we are adapted, as human beings with bodies of a particular density and size, to feel the world that relates appropriately to our body. It is only through the hard lessons like plague and radiation that we have learned that indeed things which are too small for us to see or feel can destroy our bodies and kill us. The terror of this fact has inspired science to pursue knowledge with an aggressive urgency, and justifiably so. Scientists are heroes, informing medicine, transportation, public safety, etc as never before in the history of the world and inspiring a fantastic curiosity for knowledge about reality rather than ideas about God or songs about love. The trauma of that shattering of naive realism haunts our culture as whole, and has echoes in the lives of each generation, family, and individual. Innocence lost. The response to this trauma varies, but it is hard to remain neutral about. People either adapt to the cold hard world beyond themselves with fear or with anger. It’s an extension of self-consciousness which seems uniquely human and often associated with mortality. I think that it’s more than confronting their own death that freaks out the humans, it’s the chasm of unknowable impotence which frames our entire experience on all sides. We know that we don’t really know.
The human agenda becomes not merely survival and reproduction, but also to fill the existential chasm with answers, or failing answers, to at least feel fulfilled with dramatic feelings – with entertainments, achievements, and discoveries. We want something thrilling and significant to compensate for our now unforgettable discovery of our own insignificance. With modernism came a kind of Stockholm syndrome turn. We learned how to embrace the chasm, or at least to behave that way.
At the same time that Einstein began to call the entire foundation of our assumptions about physics into question, the philosophy of Neitzsche, along with the science of Darwin and Freud had begun to sink in politically. Revolutions from both the Left and Right rocked the world, followed in some nations by totalitarianism and total war. The arts were transformed by an unprecedented radicalism as well, from Duchamp, Picasso, and Malevich to Stravinsky and Le Corbusier. After all of the pageantry and tradition, all of the stifling politeness and patriarchy, suddenly Westerners stopped giving a shit about the past. All at once, the azimuth of the collective psyche pitched Westward all the way, toward annihilation in a glorious future. If humans could not live forever, then we will become part of whatever does live forever. The human agenda went transhuman, and everyone became their own philosophical free agent. God was indeed dead. For a while. But the body lives on.
The point of this detour was to underscore the importance of what we are in the world – the size and density of our body, to what we think that the world is. Not only do we only perceive a narrow range of frequencies of light and sound, but also of events. Events which are too slow or too fast for us to perceive as events are perceived as permanent conditions. What we experience exists as a perceptual relativity between these two absolutes. Like the speed of light, c, perception has aesthetic boundaries. Realism is personal, but it is more than personal also. We find agreement in other people and in other creatures which we can relate to. Anything which has a face earns a certain empathy and esteem. Anything that we can eat has a significance to us. Sometimes the two overlap, which gives us something to think about. Consciousness, at least the consciousness which is directed outwardly from our body, is all about these kinds of judgment calls or bets. We are betting that animals that we eat are not as significant as we are, so we enjoy eating them, or we are betting that such a thought is immoral so we abstain. Society reflects back these judgments and amplifies them through language, customs, belief systems, and laws. Since the modernist revolution, the media has blanketed the social landscape with mass production of cliches and dramatizations, which seems to have wound up leaking a mixture of vanity and schadenfreude, with endless reenactments, sequels, and series.
It is out of this bubble of reflected self-deflection that the current philosophies rooted in both reductionism and emergentism find their appeal. Beginning with the assumption of mechanism or functionalism as the universal principle, the task of understanding our own consciousness becomes a strictly empirical occupation. Though the daunting complexity of neuroscience cannot be overstated, the idea is that it is inevitable that we eventually uncover the methods and means by which data takes on its fancy experiential forms. The psyche can only be a kind of evolutionary bag of tricks which has developed to serve the agenda of biological repetition. Color, flavor, sound, as well as philosophy and science are all social peacock displays and data-compressing virtual appendages. The show of significance is an illusion, an Eloi veneer of aesthetics over the Morlock machinations of pure function.
To see oneself as a community of insignificance in which an illusion of significance is invested is a win-win for the postmodern ego. We get to claim arbitrary superiority over all previous incarnations, while at the same time claiming absolute humility. It’s a calculated position, and like a game theory simulation, it aims to minimize vulnerability. Facts are immutable and real, experiences are irrelevant. From this voyeuristic vantage point, the holder of mechanist views about free will is free to deny that he has it without noticing the contradiction. The emergent consciousness can speak glowingly out of both sides of its mouth of its great knowledge and understanding in which all knowledge and understanding is rendered void by statistical mechanics. Indeed the position offers no choice, having backed itself into a corner, but to saw off its own limbs with one hand and reattach them with another when it is not looking.
What is gained from this exercise in futility beyond the comfort that comes with conformity to academic consensus is the sense that whatever happens, it can be justified with randomness or determinism. The chasm has been tamed, not by filling it in or denying it, but by deciding that we are simply not present in the way that we think. DNA acts, neurons fire, therefore we are not thinking. Death is no different than life which has paused indefinitely. An interesting side effect is that as people are reduced to emergent machines, machines are elevated to sentient beings, and the circle is complete. We are not, but our products are. It seems to me the very embodiment of suburban neuroses. The vicarious society of invisible drones.
Just as 20th century physics exploded the atom, I would like to see 21st century physics explode the machine. Instead of releasing raw energy and fragmentation, I see that the blasting open of mathematical assumptions will yield an implosion into meaning. Pattern recognition, not information, is the true source of authenticity and significance. They are the same thing ultimately. The authenticity of significance and the significance of authenticity speak to origination and individuation over repetition. Not contrast and dialectic, not forces and fields, but the sense in which all of these facets are yoked together. Sense is the meta-syzygy. It is the capacity to focus multiplicity into unity (as in perception or afference) and the capacity for unity to project into multiplicity (participation or efference).
These are only metaphorical descriptions of function however. What sense really is and what it does can only be experienced directly. You make sense because everything makes sense…in some sense. That doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t mean there has to be a human-like deity presiding over all of it, to the contrary, only half of what we can experience makes sense intentionally, the other half (or slightly less) makes sense unintentionally, as a consequence of larger and smaller sequences which have been set in motion intentionally. We are the evidence. Sense is evident to us and there is nothing which can be evident except through sense and sense making.
The Elephant In Every Room
Above: The Multisense Realism take on the Blind Men and The Puzzle of the Elephant. (Original art below borrowed from here).
In this version, the small elephants can see what the parts of the elephant actually are – their sense is empirically valid. They are not blind men who mistake the trunk for a snake, but they are so focused on what they see that they do not notice that each of them are part of the large, blind elephant.
The blind elephant is the totality/Absolute. Not a perfect omniscient deity, but a flawed singularity which sees indirectly through the smaller sighted elephants. Meanwhile, the interior of the Absolute reveals the elephant dreaming of fictional impressions…seeing not the public parts of the body from the outside, but seeing the totality of all of the experiences in a compressed and mythic form.
The mandala illustrates the continuity between the endophoric and exometric verses, the head and tail of Ouroboran monism.
Likelihood is the ultimate unlikelihood: Notes on sense as sole synthetic a priori manifestation of improbability
In the contemporary Western model of the universe, mechanism is presumed to be the sole synthetic a priori. The general noumenal schema which can only be considered an eternal given and without which no phenomena can arise. In particular, the mechanism of statistical probability is seen as the engine of all possibility. Richard Dawkins title “The Blind Watchmaker” is an apt description – a kind of deism with no deity. Lawrence Krauss’ “A Universe From Nothing” is another apt title. The implication of both is that the universality of statistical distribution is the inevitable and inescapable self-evident truth of all phenomena.
What is overlooked in these models is the nature of probability itself – the concept of likelihood, and indeed the concept of ‘like’. The etymology of the word probable extends from French and Latin meanings of ‘provable’ and ‘agreeable’, a sense of credibility. What we like and what we find acceptable are similar concepts which both relate to, well, similarity. Agreement and likeness are in agreement. The two words are a-like. What is like alikeness though? What is similar to similarity or equivalent to equivalence?
Consider the equal sign. “=” is a visual onomatopoeia. It is a direct icon which looks like what it represents. Two parallel lines which illustrate precise congruence by their relation to each other. It’s an effective sign only because no further description is possible. So ubiquitous is the sense of comparison by similarity that we can’t easily get under it. It simply is the case that one line appears identical to the other, and when something is identical to another thing, we can notice that, and it doesn’t matter if its a thought, feeling, sensation, experience…anything can be similar to something. It could be said also that anything can be similar to anything in some sense. The universe can’t include something which is not similar to the universe in the exact way in which constitutes its inclusion. Inclusion by definition is commonality and commonality is some kind of agreement.
Agreement is not a concept, it is the agent of all coherence, real and imagined – all forms and functions, all things and experiences are coherent precisely because they are ‘like’ other things and experiences, and that there is (to quote David Chalmers) ‘something that it is like’ to experience those phenomena. Without this ontological glue, this associative capacity which all participants in the universe share, there can be no patterns or events, no consistency or parts, only unrelated fragments. That would truly be a universe from nothing, but it would not be a universe.
The question then of where this capacity for agreement comes from is actually moot, since we know that nothing can come from anything which does not already possess this synthetic a priori capacity for inclusion – to cohere as that which seems similar in some sense to itself in spite of dissimilarity in other ways. Something that happens which is similar to something that happened at a different time is said to be happening again. A thing which is similar to another thing in a different location can be said to be ‘the same kind of thing’. This is what consciousness is all about and it is what physics, mathematics, art, philosophy, law, etc are all about. It is what nature is all about. The unity behind multiplicity and the multiplicity behind unity. Indra’s Net, Bohm’s Implicate Order, QM’s vacuum energy, etc, are all metaphors for this same quality…a quality which is embodied as metaphor itself in human psychology. Metaphor is meta-likeness. It links essential likeness across the existential divide. Metaphor bridges the explanatory gap, not by explanation, but by example. Like the = sign, the medium is the message.
Aside from their duty of ‘ferrying-over meaning’ from the public example to private experience and private example to public application, metaphors tell the story of metaphors themselves. Implicitly within each metaphor is the bootstrap code, the instruction set for producing metaphors. Metaphor is the meta-meme and memes are meta-metaphors. This self nesting is a theme (a meme theme, ugh) of sense, and a hint that sense itself is insuperable. Mathematically, you could say that the axiom of foundation is itself a non-well-founded set. The rule of rules does not obey any rules. Regularity is, by definition, the cardinal irregularity, as it can only emerge from its own absence if it emerges at all. If it does not emerge, then is still the cardinal exception to its own regularity since everything else in the universe does emerge from something. First cause then, by being uncaused itself, is the ultimate un-likelihood. First cause by definition is singular and cannot be like anything else and there can be nothing that it is like to be it. At the same time, everything that is not the first cause is like the first cause and there is something that it is like to be that difference from the first cause – some aesthetic dissimilarity which constitutes some sense of partial separation (diffraction).
To get at the probability which is assumed by the Western mindset’s mechanistic universe, we have to begin with the Absolutely improbable. This is akin to realizing that dark is the absence of light when it was formerly assumed that dark was only something which could be added to a light background. Improbability is the fundamental, the synthetic a priori from which commonality is derived. Statistical analysis is a second or third order abstraction, not a primary mechanism. The primary mechanism is likeness itself, not likelihood. Likelihood follows from likeness, which follows from Absolute uniqueness, from the single all-but-impossible Everythingness rather than a plurality of inevitable nothingness.
Universal Schemas, Eternal Schisms
Having been introduced to Kent Palmer’s General Schemas Theory on Quora, I noticed some interesting overlap with my own under Multisense Realism*. In particular his use of a The paper identifies an emergent ontological hierarchy (of schemas) as follows:
· Pluriverse
· Kosmos
· World
· Domain
· Meta-system
· System
· Form
· Pattern
· Monad
· Facet
The paper also identifies an ontic hierarchy: “which might include gaia, social, organisms, organs, cells, molecules, atoms, particles, quarks, strings”. The paper goes on to explain that “any of the ontological schemas can be applied to any of the ontic hierarchy thresholds”. This is a very point, and while I have not explicitly talked about it in MR, part of the multi-sense aspects of implicitly includes this kind of portable mereology which applies to the continuum of public physics.
I’m not convinced that the ontological hierarchy terms he suggests are as different from each other as is implied…is a pattern different from a monad or form? Is a world something other than a meta-meta-meta system? My sense is that whatever qualitative differences are implied by this hierarchy are leaking in by association with the ontic hierarchy. We talk about worlds because we have the example of planets and forms because we have the example of macrocosmic objects that we can see and touch with our body.
I like the idea of the ontic vs ontological hierarchy and hope he doesn’t mind if I borrow it on occasion. I would describe the ontological hierarchy as a generalization of the ontic hierarchy such that the overall shape and design of public physics is preserved as an abstraction which can be applied to any level of any nested hierarchy. What separates the levels in the first place is a slightly different matter, one which I hope Multisense Realism helps illuminate: Science should not take these ‘leveling’ breakpoints, in which there is an aesthetic shift of attention from a complex multiplicity to a higher order of simplicity.
This shift does not happen out in space somewhere, it is not an objective mechanism, rather it is a natural relation of coherence which emerges from participants and parts as much as it is recovered from the whole. This spectrum-like quality of aesthetics is universal and is, in my view, the backbone of the cosmos – it is Sense in the grandest sense; a sanity which is truly uni-versal. I suspect that this unity of all ‘verses’ is what multiverse theories fail to factor in, as they neglect to investigate the role that wholeness has in experience and what role experience plays in the whole. I would therefore feel comfortable in clipping off the Pluriverse level of the ontological hierarchy.
The MR version of the ontological hierarchy seeks a purely quantitative sense:
· Meta systems (Mega-system, Giga-system, Tera-system…)
· System
· Root systems (micro-system, nano-system, pico-system…)
However, in addition to the ontic hierarchy, MR offers a perpendicular conjugate holarchy which relates to interior, qualitative phenomena. The physics of privacy is seen not as a parallel dimension to public physics, but rather that the continuum of sense is an Ouroboran monad in which endophoric and exometric polarities are only one of the fundamental discernments. The ontic schema of Multisense Realism is a matrix that ‘eats its own tail’ as well as pairs up the largest and smallest levels. The reason that the largest and smallest levels are paired is to reflect the order in which systems have been established. Rather than a chain of events on the micro level leading to cosmological scale events, it must be understood that without a human scale orientation to divide and compare against, the two scales are the same thing.
I propose instead that the evolution of the Cosmos or Kosmos (please stop me before I use the word Qosmos) is a ‘tunneling within’ nested systems, so that the outermost systems are the most distant from our human privacy. Regardless of the scale difference, our understanding of astrophysical meta-systems (Cosmos, Galaxy, Solar System) has a lot in common with our understanding of nuclear physics (atom, quantum, strings). The modeling of both relies on the same mathematical and logical principles, the same assumptions of eternal force-relations and statistical laws. The Western physical approach to both cosmology and microcosmology is identical and presents a united front of impersonal mechanisms. This outermost frame is generally considered to be the sine qua non of science and engineering. All causes and conditions are presumed to follow from the presence of these initial ontic realities and ontological-mathematical principles.
The first order of business then is to wrap the maximum and minimum ends of the schema around, so that the meta-systems of astrophysics meet up with the root-systems of nuclear physics. Notice that the phenomena are entirely related as well. We smash the smallest particles in the largest particle accelerators. The chain reactions of nuclear fusion, which a nearly instantaneous and of course infinitesimally small generate the largest and longest lasting events. This is important because it establishes the principle of perceptual relativity. It’s not merely that things are too large/slow or too small/fast for us to relate to directly, it’s also that the too large-slow/small-fast phenomena are the same things. To get to phenomena which we find familiar, we have to go to the mid-range, to phenomena which last between 0.1 seconds and 24 hours. This kind of range in which direct human perception is appropriate.
To link the meta and root schemas then (and this is for the public facing ‘exometric’ ontic hierarchy) I would offer:
Exometric Ontic Schemas
- Astrophysics ⊇ Quantum Mechanics
- Geology ⊇ Chemistry
- Evolution ⊇ Genetics
- Zoology⊇ Biology
- Anthropology⊇ Sociology
- Neuroscience ⊇ Cognitive-Science
The corresponding revised ontological hierarchy then would be:
Exometric Ontological Schemas
- Maximum ⊇ minimum
- Tera⊇ pico
- Giga⊇ nano
- Mega⊇ micro
- Meta⊇ root
- System/phenomenon
Another change that I would add is to recognize that these hierarchies of external metrics are meaningless without internal experiences which yoke them together along the transverse axis. Every real, whole phenomenon has its roots in the outermost aesthetics of physics (1.) and the innermost idiosyncratic aesthetics of its own experience (6.) The continuity between the two, and the correlation of that continuity with uniqueness and privacy is the perhaps the most revolutionary idea within MR. That uniqueness itself is a physical property, a strange attractor of significance which is perpendicular/orthogonal to generic-cardinality-entropy is radical and exotic at first, but I do suspect that this is the Holy Grail to integrating consciousness with matter. Awareness looks up and down through the nested external hierarchies, as well as within its own internal histories (in the case of humans at least).
Because of the perpendicular symmetry between public and private schemas, private schemas are not only different from public schemas, they are fundamentally different in how they schematize. Public systems are forms and functions which are literally nested within each other by scale. Forms exist within the physical boundaries of other forms and functions are sequential processes which are composed of sub-functions, steps within steps which are timed to different orders of oscillatory magnitude. Private experiences are not only steps and structures but the are the appreciation of phenomena. Experiences inhabit other experiences in ways which are not mathematically well-founded. We can apply a loose, meta ⊇ root hierarchy as follows:
Endophoric Ontic Schemas
- Absolute⊇ Sense
- Archetypes ⊇ Qualia
- Intuition ⊇ Emotion
- Significance⊇ Instinct
- Being⊇ Doing
- Afference⊇ Efference
Unlike the well-founded exometric schemas, the endophoric shemas are a multivalent fugue. The physics of privacy requires precisely the conditions which public physics lacks. There is a law of conservation of mystery which keeps any given experience isolated from others in some senses but united in others. It is an unfolding narrative in which the joke is not revealed until the punchline, but the punchline is implicit in the intent of the joke from the start. Teleology therefore is a function of a larger, more meta endophoric schema exerting its sense, or harmonizing with itself on lower, down-root schemas.
Endophoric Ontological Schemas
- Univeral ⊇ schematic
- Perennial⊇ ephemeral
- Solitary⊇ oscillating
- Essential⊇ existential
- Irreducible⊇ related
- Experience
Putting it all together, the Endophoric and Exometric schemas can be seen to wrap in the horizontal sense as well as the vertical meta/root sense:
- Astrophysics ⊇ Quantum Mechanics ⊥ Absolute⊇ Sense
- Geology ⊇ Chemistry⊥ Archetypes ⊇ Qualia
- Evolution ⊇ Genetics⊥ Intuition ⊇ Emotion
- Zoology⊇ Biology⊥ Significance⊇ Instinct
- Anthropology⊇ Sociology⊥ Being⊇ Doing
- Neuroscience ⊇ Cognitive-Science⊥ Afference⊇ Efference
These can be further consolidated into single Super-Schema formula:
Literally Nested Public Metric ⊥ Figuratively Nested Private Experience
Our Mathematical Universe
I have not read Max Tegmark’s new book, but the argument that mathematics is the ultimate reality of the universe is a strong one that has been around for a long time. I would agree that mathematics is an irreplaceable tool for understanding the universe, and for understanding knowledge, but mathematics alone is not sufficient to derive the actual universe which we experience.
In my view, mathematics can only be an emergent property of representation and therefore ephiphenomenal. The underlying (and overarching) phenomena of presence or presentation is fundamentally aesthetic and consists of sensory-motor experiences. This is not a biocentric view as inorganic matter is also, by my understanding, a tokenization of aesthetic experiences. The universe is a significance-building machine, where significance is the temporal super-saturation and transcendence of sensory qualities.
As far as comparing mathematics to computation, mathematics seems to be a broader category which would embrace ideas which computation cannot, such as irrational numbers and geometric forms. While computation can be used to drive a sensory experience in which geometric forms are inscribed visually or sculpted tangibly, those outputs are irrelevant to the computation itself and are desirable to us purely for aesthetic reasons.
Computation is, however, closer to empirical realism than other kinds of mathematics, since it is rooted in digital interactions which can be reproduced and re-presented in any solid-body/persistent-position form-function. If there is no discrete fundamental unit which is subject to reliable inspection (which is an experiential and aesthetic property that is generally overlooked ) then computation cannot be initiated or preserved.
I get into this a bit here: https://multisenserealism.com/2013/06/06/mathmatical-musings/
Mathematics requires a mind and a brain while computation requires only a brain substitute. By this I mean that the sense of computation is a low level sensory-motor interaction through which higher level interactions can be transported from one location to another. This transportation offers the opportunity for reconstruction only if the receiver has the appropriate frame of reference to imitate the sender’s intents. We use a computer to listen to music or watch a video, but in the absence of human receivers, there would only product would be disconnected instants of acoustic or optical activity.
Mathematics similarly owes its universality to its exploitation of a low level ‘common sense’ which depends on similarly overlooked assumptions about the validity of conceptual realism. Mathematics depends on sanity in the intellectual and logical sense. It presumes an aesthetic minimalism. Where computation can be more clearly seen to depend on concrete mechanisms of read/write/erase, storage, pattern recognition, loops, etc., mathematics seeks a more anesthetic representation – as Baudrillard might have said, a simulacra: A representation without any presentation. In my understanding, mathematics can be thought of as an ultimate reality only in the sense that all of our intellectual models of reality can be rendered in mathematical ways.
Unfortunately, most people conflate the idea of reality with the experience of it, and have developed a misplaced authority for “information” as the progenitor of physics and awareness. This is, in my view, almost correct, but actually upside down as information can only ride on top of an aesthetic exchange of experiences, which involves public to private extractions of significance and private to public export of entropy. Information, by itself, has never done anything. No byte of data will ever feel anything, be anything, want anything, go anywhere, etc. Mathematics deals in figures, which have no form or function but represent forms and functions. What figures cannot represent is presence itself. There is no substitute for experience, and that is why it is experience which is the ultimate reality – the absolute and authentic substrate of the universe is a unique agenda of aesthetics, not a generic consequence of configured figures.
Questions About Human Senses
“Thanks for always writing such great responses to my questions.
I was wondering if you could, either as a response here or in a post, comment on sensation itself, that is to say on the sensory modalities we experience as humans. It strikes me that one of the great unasked metaphysical questions is whether the 5 senses that we know exhaust the kinds of sense available to being. Some see a deep truth in this, as 5 is a number closely associated with phi and the Fibonacci sequence (we also have 5 digits on our appendages). Even the existence of the 5 platonic solids makes one wonder if our senses somehow represent a phenomenological analog to this geometric truth. And what does each of the senses make sense of? What sense do the senses make?
Much has been made of echolocation as a possibly alien form of sense (and the basis of serious anti-reductionist arguments in philosophy of mind, as with Nagel’s classic essay) but it’s just as easy to imagine, perhaps easier, that echolocation is simply the bat’s way of generating visual sense, or perhaps some synesthesian fusion of visual and auditory modalities.
Synesthesia itself presents phenomenological conundrums that are worth teasing apart. If synesthesia is possible why have we evolved with such separation to our senses? Does a person with synesthesia loose as much as he gains? And, could a total, radical, singular sysesthesic unitary SENSE be imagined?
Finally, there is the complicated relation of sensory experience to thought. Though the two are generally conceptually separated (could there be anything seemingly less “sensory” than abstract thinking) I bet the real story is far more complicated. My intuition is that all thought is sensory through and through though the way thoughts, and, in particular, language, represent (experience?) sensation is mind-boggingly subtle. (Is this Hume’s distinction between ideas and impressions again?)
Love to hear your thoughts on the senses. Seems important for MR.”
Thanks for the topic and the interest. Starting with the five senses, I’m not sure that the number is particularly significant. The difference between olfactory and gustatory sense seems to me like a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. There is a lot of overlap between flavors and smells although you could argue that there are some tastes that you cannot smell. Can something smell salty? Something can smell sour or bitter but not ‘upside down’ or ‘high pitched’.
There are also categories of sensation which do not fall easily into the five. Vestibular-kinesthetic sense and proprioception can maybe be considered forms of tactile ‘feeling’, but your skin can’t feel dizzy and the relation between your body and the world can’t really itch or hurt. Then there’s more metaphorical kinds of sense, but are they really metaphorical or are they just deeper within the context of personal experience? Sense of humor, moral sense, sense of gratitude, intuition, business sense…these are arguably irreducible to general awareness or some other sense modality.
If I were to apply an alchemical read of the senses, I would go with more of a tetragrammaton view with the masculine elements corresponding to aural and tactile sense and the feminine corresponding to visual and olfactory-gustatory sense. This four-way symmetry provides a rich vein of fun associations to ponder…the stereotypical masculine preference for fast vehicles and loud noises vs the feminine stereotype ‘candy and flowers’ offering give a hint. A five point comparison has more of a person-hood connotation – like the five digits on our hands or the five appendages radiating from our torso, the emphasis is on the utility of sense as they pertain to our agency in the world. In MR I am dealing not so much with human sense modalities in particular but the underlying phenomena of sensory presentation. I can see how the number five would have interesting numerological and mathematical properties, although all of the other integers do as well. Five is the recapitulation of one, the middle number, associated with qualities of growth and constraint. Five suggests ratios and leverage in a way that the first four integers do not. The thumb rules over the fingers as the head rules over the limbs, etc. Perhaps it characterizes the relation of the conscious self to the more mechanistic (four-like) subconscious.
“If synesthesia is possible why have we evolved with such separation to our senses? Does a person with synesthesia loose as much as he gains? And, could a total, radical, singular sysesthesic unitary SENSE be imagined?”
Synesthesia is very interesting to me because it really deflates the assumption that the aesthetic presentation of our subjective experience is simply a package deal which emerges from the characteristics of data. We see that indeed sounds can be smelled, numbers and days of the week can have colors, but also that syneasthetes do not share the same bundlings of sense. This suggests to me that aesthetics are not in fact generated by the brain, but rather appreciated through the brain, body, and the body’s environment, as well as subjective experience augmenting itself over time. Congenitally blind people do not see visual phenomena when their visual cortex is stimulated, they feel tactile stimulation instead. This debunks the assumption that sensory modalities simply correspond to brain region.
As for what a synesthete gains or loses, I can only guess. From the accounts I have read it seems like it is mostly benign, occasionally spectacular (one case gave a man the ability compose music visually…a head injury I think). Some seem to feel a bit insecure about it. Being a person is strange enough as it is without seeing or tasting things that nobody else does.
As far as a unitary sense, I suspect that just as the human body corresponds to a particular palette of sense capacities, a human stem cell might correspond to a more undifferentiated palette. That could be explored experimentally with the right technology. My hypothesis is that the unitary sense is a continuum between tight-stress-high frequency, loose-relaxed, low frequency oscillation.
“My intuition is that all thought is sensory through and through”
I agree. My working model is that thought is cognitive quality sensation, and that it is essentially a feeling in which other feelings are represented. As algebraic variables are to actual values, thoughts are transparent containers for reflected icons of hypothetical experiences. An understanding of audio sense in comparison to sight is revealing I think, given that our thoughts typically persist as interior verbal presentations. Sound waves, unlike light, require matter to propagate from node to node, so there is an inference that I make about acoustics being a body-to-body interaction. The cochlea and the dual role of the inner ear for hearing and balance seems particularly three dimensional – a sense of volumes of matter. Musical instruments are sculptural and tangible, and acoustic sensation pierces the ear the high end and engulfs the body on the low end. Thought is similarly about encapsulation, it is a semiotic pre-packaging which is formulated for public distribution. It paradoxically frees subjectivity from the subject while encoding the subject’s intention as an independent form. Maybe this is why William S. Burroughs and others have described language in alien terms, as viruses and memes.
I hope that made enough sense to be worthwhile. Thanks again.
Notes on Privacy
The debates on privacy which have been circulating since the dawn of the internet age tend to focus either on the immutable rights of private companies to control their intellectual property or the obsolescence of the notion of actual people to control access to their personal information. There’s an interesting hypocrisy there, as the former rights are represented as pillars of civilized society and the latter expectations are represented as quaint but irrelevant luxuries of a bygone era.
This double standard aside, the issue of privacy itself is never discussed. What is it, and how do we explain its existence within the framework of science? To me, the term privacy as applied to physics is more useful in some ways than consciousness. When we talk about private information being leaked or made public, we really mean that the information can now be accessed by unintended private parties. There is really no scientific support for the idea of a truly ‘public’ perspective ontologically. All information exists only within some interpreter’s sensory input and information processing capacity. While few would argue that there is no universe beyond our human experience of it, who can say that there is no universe beyond *any* experience of it? Just because I don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t look like something, but if there nothing can see it can we really say that it looks like something?
Privacy would be more of a problem for theoretical physics than it is for internet users, if physicists were to try to explain it. It is through the problems which have risen with the advent of widespread computation that we can glimpse the fundamental issue with our worldview and with our legacy understanding of its physics. With identity theft, pirated software, appropriated endorsements, data mining, and now Prism, it should be obvious that technology is exposing something about privacy itself which was not an issue before.
The physics of privacy that I propose suggests that by making our experiences public through a persistent medium, we are trading one kind of entropy for another. When we express an aspect of our private life into a public network, the soft, warm blur of inner sense is exposed to the cold, hard structure of outer knowledge. It is an act which is thermodynamically irreversible – a fact which politicians seem slow to understand as the cover-up of the act seems invariably the easier transgression to discover and prove. The cover up alerts us to the initial crime as well as a suggestion of the knowledge of guilt, and the criminal intent to conceal that guilt. The same thing undoubtedly occurs on a personal level as subjects which are most threatening to people’s marriages and careers are probably those which can be found by searching for purging behavior and keywords related to embarrassment.
As the high-entropy fuzziness of inner life is frozen into the low-entropy public record, a new kind of entropy over who can access this record is introduced. Security issues stem from the same source as both IP law issues and surveillance issues. The ability to remain anonymous, to expose anonymity, to spoof identifiers leading to identification, etc, are all examples of the shadow of private entropy cast into the public realm. There’s no getting around it. Identity simply cannot be pinned down 100% – that kind of personal entropy can only be silenced personally. Only we know for sure that we are ourselves, and that certainty, that primordial negentropy is the only absolute which we can directly experience. Decartes cogito is a personal statement of that absolute certainty (Je pense donc je suis), although I would say that he was too narrow in identifying thought in particular as the essence of subjectivity. Indeed, thinking is not something that we notice until we are a few years old, and it can be backgrounded into our awareness through a variety of techniques. I would say instead that it is the sense of privacy which is the absolute: solace, solitude, solipsism – the sense of being apart from all that can be felt, seen, known, and done. There is a sense of a figurative ‘place’ in which ‘we’ are which is separate and untouchable to anything public.
This sense seems to be corroborated by neuroscience as well, since no instrument of public discovery seems to be able to find this place. I don’t see this as anything religious or mystical (though religion and mysticism does seek to explain this sense more than science has), but rather as evidence that our understanding of physics is incomplete until we can account for privacy. Privacy should be understood as something which is as real as energy or matter, in fact, it should be understood as that which divides the two and discerns the difference. Attention to reveal, intention to reveal or conceal, and the oscillation between the three is at the heart of all identity, from human beings to molecules. The control of uncertainty, through camouflage, pretending, and outright deception has been an issue in biology almost from the start. Before biology, concealment seems limited to unintentional circumstances of placement and obstruction, although that could be a limitation of our perception as well. Since what we can see of another’s privacy may not ever be what it appears, it stands to reason that our own privacy may not ever be able to play the role of impartial public observer. Privacy is made of bias, and that bias is the relativistic warping of perception itself.
Privacy and Social Media
Continuing with the idea of information entropy as it relates to privacy, social media acts as a laboratory for these kinds of issues. Before Facebook, the notion of friendship floated on a cushion of consensual entropy – politeness. As the song goes “don’t ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to.”. Whom one considered a friend was largely a subjective matter with high public entropy. Even when declaring friendship openly, there was no binding agreement and it was effortless for sociable people to retain many asymmetric relations. Politeness has always been part of the security apparatus of those who are powerful or popular. Nobility and politeness have a curious relation, as the well heeled are expected to embody exemplary breeding but also have license to employ rudeness and blunt honesty at will. The haughtiness of high position is one of reserving one’s own right to expose others faults while being protected from others ability to do the same.
Facebook, while not the first social network to employ a structure of friendship granting, has made the most out of it. From the start, the agenda of Facebook has been to neutralize the power of politeness and to encourage public declaration of friendship as a binding, binary statement – yes you are my friend or (no response). Unfriending someone is a political act which can have real implications. Even failing to respond to someone’s friend request can have social currency. The result is a tacit bias toward liberal friending policies, and a consequent need for filtering to control who are treated as friends and who are treated as potential friends, tolerated acquaintances, frienemies, etc. Google Plus offers a more explicit system for managing this non-consensual social entropy to more conveniently permit social asymmetry.
Twitter has wound up playing an unusual role in which privacy of elites is protected in one sense and exposed in another. Unlike other social networks, The 140 character limit on tweets, which came from the desire to make it compatible with SMS, has the unintentional consequence of providing a very fast stream with low investment of attention. For a celebrity who wants to retain their popularity and relevance, it is an ideal way to keep in touch with large numbers of fans without the expectation of social involvement that is implied by a richer communication system. It gives back some of the latitude which Facebook takes away – you don’t have friends on Twitter, you have Followers. It is not considered as much of a slight not to follow someone back, and it is not considered as a threat to follow someone that you don’t know. In a way, Twitter makes controlled stalking acceptable, just as Facebook makes being nosy about someone’s friends acceptable.
Hacktivist as hero, villain, genius, and clown.
There is more than enough that has been written on the subject of the changing attitudes toward technoverts (geeks, nerds, dorks, dweebs, et. al.) over the last three decades, but the most contentious figure to come out of the computer era has been the one who is skilled at wielding the power to reveal and conceal. Early on, in movies like Wargames and The Net, there was a sense of support for the individual underdog against the impersonal machine. Even R2D2 in the original Star Wars played David to the Death Star’s Goliath computer while connecting to it secretly. The tide began to turn it seems, in the wake of Napster, which unleashed a worldwide celebration of music sharing, to the horror of those who had previously enjoyed a monopoly over the distribution of music. Since then, names like Anonymous, Assange, and Snowden have aroused increasingly polarized feelings.
The counter-narrative of the hacker as villain, although always present within the political and financial power structures as a matter of protection, has become a new kind of arch-enemy in the eyes of many. It is very delicate territory to get into for the media. Journalism, like nobility, floats on a layer of politeness. To continue to be able to reveal some things, it must conceal its sources. The presence of an Assange or Snowden presents a complicated issue. If they friend the hacker/whistleblower/whistleblower-enabler, then become linked to their authority-challenging values, but if they villify them, then they indict their own methods and undermine their own moral authority and David vs Goliath reputation.
Of course, it’s not just the issues of whistleblowing in general but the specific character of the whistleblower and the organization they are exposing which are important. This is not a simple matter of legal principle since it really depends on who it is in society which we support as to whether the ability to access protected information is good, bad, lawful, chaotic, admirable, frivolous, etc. It all depends on whether the target of the breach is themselves good, bad, lawful, chaotic, etc. In America in particular we are of two minds about justice. We love the Dirty Harry style of vigilante justice on film, but in reality we would consider such acts to be terrorism. We like the idea of democracy in theory, but when it comes to actual exercises of freedom of speech and assembly in protest, we break out the tear gas and shake our heads at the naive idealists.
Twitter fits in here as well. It is as much the playground of celebrities to flirt with their audience as it is the authentic carrier of news beyond the control of the media. It too can be used for nefarious purposes. Individuals and groups can be tracked, disinformation and confusion can be spread. David and Goliath can both imitate each other, and the physics of privacy and publicity have given rise to a new kind of ammunition in a new kind of perpetual war.
Multisense Realism 
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