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Being No One – Thomas Metzinger
A very good, concise presentation. I disagree with his ultimate conclusions, not because of faulty reasoning, but because of the same overlooked assumptions which most contemporary thinkers miss. Despite the appeal to transparency of modeling to explain the existence of subjective qualities, there really is no connection offered at all. A model is a cognitive index through which one instance of experience or presentation can be encapsulated within another. This is a re-presentation. Data which moves from one table to another, which is concatenated or compressed, is not a model unless a conscious entity interprets it that way. A DVD full of laser pits is not a color and sound recording unless it is decoded to a video screen by a DVD player. The DVD player is not playing a movie unless a movie-literate audience is available to watch it.
The problem with the idea of the phenomenal self model, as I see it, is that there is no computational benefit or physical resource which could account for the extra-physical, extra-informational presentation of the ‘model’ to the unmodeled system. In Raymond Tallis’ book ‘Aping Mankind’, he talks about the obvious disadvantages to such an introduction of conscious presentation into unconscious systems, which, after all, have successfully driven the rest of the universe, from the synthesis of nucleic acids to the neutralization of countless pathogens in our immune system. For something as important as executive control of the organism as a whole, an error ridden, self-deluded agent is the last thing that you would want sitting in the cockpit. Imagine if your digestive system relied on such a volitional dreamer to assimilate your nutrients or remember to regulate the pH of your blood.
No, I’m afraid that no information-based architecture can be used to thoroughly explain subjective experience, although it can explain how the particular human quality of subjective experience can be repaired, augmented, manipulated, etc. With information, we can’t even emulate human consciousness, but we can emulate some important products of it, IMO.
I think that I have found a better way to approach phenomenal facts. Rather than assuming that the experience of seeing red is indirect and non-physical I propose instead that physics has a private and a public range (which themselves have overlapping and underlapping regions).
I suggest that experience of seeing red is not synonymous with factual knowledge, but rather all factual knowledge is a category of direct sensory-motor experience. Experience or sense is primary, beneath matter, energy, spacetime, quantum, information, and arithmetic. Not human sense, but sense as universal fundamental.
As human beings, we are staggeringly complex, multilevel organisms. Our direct experience encompasses nested sub-personal experiences and super-personal signifiers as a recapitulation or compound direct experience. The experience of seeing red is a simpler experience, not because it is an illusion or functionally expedient representation, but because it is, on the native level of a whole person, a direct and ‘pre-factual’ physically real presence. Physical reality referring specifically to that which has both privately and publicly ranged presentation.
It’s a complete reworking of physics, I admit, but I humbly say that I think that it reconciles physics, philosophy, subjectivity, and information theory.
Niall McLaren’s Dual Aspect Theory
This video lecture series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjABUhyu6dw does a good job showing how a psychiatrist, Niall McLaren, argues toward a dual aspect theory. I recomend his books: http://www.niallmclaren.com/bibliography
I like that he clearly sees the limitations of the other approaches, but he does not yet see the problems with the assumption of ‘information’ and the ‘semantic realm’. He is modeling experience logically in space rather than naturalistically through time.
His view overlooks the same issue all the way down the line:
2. Logic gates, in his view, “coopt the mechanical function to acquit the semantic function of defining relationships”.
We are exploiting the public physics of the logic gate’s form to generate a more subtle level of public physics which we read as signs. In other words, we exploit the public facing forms and functions of the gate to exploit our own public facing forms and functions (optical patterns to tease the eye, acoustic patterns to call to the ear), allowing a sharing and communication of experience in spite of forms and functions, which are completely hidden from the conscious spectacle. In fact no ‘information’ is exchanged, except metaphorically. What is exchanged is concretely real and physical, although physics and realism of course, should only be thought of as a range of scaled or scoped experience based on time-like frequencies on space-like obstructions.
3. His view focuses on the logic of the mind rather than the richness of qualia.
4. His view conflates grammatical structure for meaning.
While it is important to model thought backwards through communication like he does for purposes of AI development, it is a mistake to apply the model the ontology that way. The horse is not an assembly of carts, so to speak. The cart without the horse is useless. The words and sentences are empty carts without the personal experience of semiosis, which is not included in physics or information theory. Experience is the key.
5. His views on personality and mental disorder are the weakest parts of the presentation in my opinion. They are normative and nakedly behaviorist, mistaking again public behaviors for private realities. What he sees as simply a collection of habits, I see as a vast interiority of identity and influence rooted in the sub-personal, super-personal and super-signifying bands of sensory-motive experience.
6. I disagree too that neurons “pass information mindlessly”.
The three pronged plug that he says we are looking for is sensory-motive participation (or ‘sense’). The three prongs are (I) private experience, (II) public bodies, and (III) the potential for significance-entropy to be generated through the multiple levels of spacetime-body::timespace-experience interaction.
I was sure to mention that I do appreciate his work. I think that he is doing a great job, and I probably disagree with his model less than I do most scientific models.
* to be precise, impersonal public presentations are representations from a fundamental or absolute perspective, while personal private presentations are representations from a derived or secondary perspective. This is very confusing, but something like a chair which is objectively real is fundamentally a representation within the experience of whoever is encountering it. The chair seems like a presentation to us because that is the function of the representation – to warn us of the presence of something completely outside of ourselves.
Morphoria and The Deconstruction of Arithmetic
isomorphism:
1. Biology Similarity in form, as in organisms of different ancestry.2. Mathematics A one-to-one correspondence between the elements of two sets such that the result of an operation on elements of one set corresponds to the result of the analogous operation on their images in the other set.3. A close similarity in the crystalline structure of two or more substances of similar chemical composition.“Homology, then, is the relation between abstract objects (descriptions, or representations of real world objects) where the formal description allows a mapping function between them.”
“Analogous relations are still a kind of isomorphism, but the mapping is not between sets of objects, but between the form of the objects themselves”
“If I discover that Raptor X has enzyme E, then I can infer that all other members of the Raptor group have E as well! That’s an enormous amount of inductive warrant. Interestingly, if I tell you that a raptor is a predator, you cannot infer that all raptors are (some are scavengers). Homology does not license analogical claims. But it may bracket them, as I will later argue. We can summarize the difference here by saying that classifications by homology are inductively projectible, while classifications by analogy are deductive only. Moreover, analogies are generally model-based. The choice of what properties to represent usually depend upon some set of “pertinent” properties, and this is not derived from an ignorance of what matters, or some unobtainable theory-neutrality. In order to measure similarity, you need to know what counts.”
Anamorphic drawings are distorted pictures requiring the viewer to use a special, often reflective device to reconstitute the image.
-phore: Bearer or carrier of.
Semaphore: Borrowed in 1816 from French sémaphore, coined in French from Ancient Greek σῆμα (sêma, “sign”), and -φωρος (-phoros), from φέρω (férō, “to bear, carry”
Euphoria: An excited state of joy, a good feeling, a state of intense happiness.
Metaphor:
- A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
- A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, esp. something abstract.
anaphor: 1. a word (such as a pronoun) used to avoid repetition; the referent of an anaphor is determined by its antecedent. 2. An expression refering to another expression. In stricter uses, an expression referring to something earlier in the discourse or, even more strictly, only reflexive and reciprocal pronouns.
The difference between morphic (shape) and phoric (carrier) is a good way of grabbing on to the essential difference between public and private phenomena. Metaphors or other ‘figures of speech’ can have a wide gap between one reference and another. Similarity, as the blog quoted above mentions, is notoriously hard to pin down. The author mentions “Hamming Distance, Edge Number and Tversky Similarity” but these approaches to defining similarity rely on lower level methods of pattern recognition. In all cases, similarity requires some capacity to detect, compare, discern criteria from the comparison, and cause an action which can be detected publicly. In other words, similarity requires that something can generate sensory-motive participation.
The infocentric definitions of similarity do not adequately address the private sense of similarity at all, rather they confine the consequences of theoretical object interactions to demonstrable sets of criteria. Edge number does not apply to something such as whether a feeling is like another feeling or not. To me all of this really highlights the bias of the Western approach of reducing science to the taxonomy of rigid public bodies. The experience even of fluid, gaseous, or plasma phenomena are virtually inaccessible unless reduced to a microcosmic level at which only rigid object properties are considered and all smoothness is abstracted into ’emergent properties’.
This relates back to the analog and mathematics. If we look at a basic arithmetic operation like 4 x 5 = 20, and get beneath the surface, I think what we might find something like “If four things were just like one thing, then five of those four-ish things would be just like ten two-ish things, or two ten-ish things, which would be one twenty-ish thing”. In a previous post, I got into ratio as the root of reason, and how the radius can be adjusted between tighter and looser rationality. How figurative do you want to get is the question which determines how universal, public, and ‘Western-scientific’ you want to get. Quantitative analysis of course, is the ultimate rationalization, the ultimate reduction of ‘just like’ to ‘exactly the same as’. The ‘=’ condenses all subjectivity into a single semaphore, a flag which refers to precise equivalence, or absolute universal similarity. Similar in all ways that count. What counts is presumed in advance by the Western mind, to be reliable public function, aka objective realism.
Numbers therefore, could be called isophors. Carriers of one to one correspondence. The caliper of the drafting compass of reason is set to minimum tolerance – to the point of points; digital-Boolean logic. At this point, even geometry is superfluous, and computation is revealed to be a spaceless function of connection and disconnection. Whether electronic or mechanical, computers are based on contact and detection first and foremost. Contact (a connection of ranged position) influences physical change (thermodynamic disposition). Despite the assumptions of both AI and QM, I am confident that this is a property of matter, not of vacuum space or ‘information’.
Moving from numbers to geometry and algebra is a matter of making isophors into meta-isophors. We understand that just as a twenty is four fives or five fours, or two tens, so does any number enumerating itself twice is a square, and a squared hypotenuse relates to the square of the sides of a triangle as the squared radius of a circle times pi is its area. The transfer of integers into variables is a squaring of the isomorphic function, making all of mathematics a psychological model of modeling itself. It is no surprise then, that at this point of maximum Western influence over science, we should mistake our own concretely physical experiences of conscious life for a ‘model’ and the world in which we live for a Matrix.
Of course, when all of the logical analysis and quantitative analogs are stripped away, it is only the morphic, the phoric, and the sense to tell the difference which are genuinely real. Logic is not the isophor of sense however, or even a homophor. I would say that maybe logic is the public facing hemisphor of sense. It is the half of sense which can be generalized externally.
All You Touch and All You See
“All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.” – Pink Floyd
Beginnings
Option 1: In the beginning, there was X. At some point, some iteration of X(X) bridged the presumably senseless world of X to the real world which we know.
Option 2: In the beginning, there was X and X was sentient.
Option 3: In the beginning, there was sense.
Option 4: The idea of beginning is a function of sense, so that sense is more fundamental than beginnings and sequences.
Option 5: The universe could be a perpetual collection of conditions without any fundamental capacities or beginnings.
Sense from the senseless
To see a universe as brought into being by senseless effects such as the spontaneous appearance of physical ‘forces’ or as a permanent physical fact leaves sense itself unexplained. How do several things operate as a ‘group’, simply by spatial proximity? What makes a pattern or signal different from noise? What really is a ‘beginning’ other than a distinction made from an expectation of sequence?
This may seem to be a silly issue, but I think that whether or not we take sense for granted guides the entire future of science. From physics to neuroscience to computer science, our assumptions about the capacity to sense and makes sense lead us either to discover a fundamental physical principle of orientation uniting subjectivity and objectivity, or drives us further into alienation. Without sense, we are forced to double down on either the primacy of object-hood or the primacy of disembodied simulation, either route leading inevitably to an orphaning of the self – a ghost-machine within a machine-ghost.
Digital Oblivion
Understanding the relation between symbols and reality is notoriously difficult, partly because our experience of reality is overrun symbols to the extent that the vast majority of what we consider real has been mediated through symbolic description rather than direct experience. Our appreciation for direct experience has naturally tended to atrophy in adaptation to this environment so that we no longer consider ourselves to be an authoritative source on any subject. We define our own presence in terms of learned knowledge to the extent that many people find it impossible to separate their actual sensory-motor experience from the understanding of neurology. The former is relegated to the trash heap of ‘illusion’ or ‘models’ and the latter is elevated to the status of objective reality.
Giulio Tononi’s recent Integrated Information Theory, (covered in a SciAm article by Christof Koch) takes a good first step at measuring consciousness by quantifying in formulas the degree to which information is integrated, but by working from the outside in, it fails to grasp the absolute authenticity of awareness itself, and the role that it plays in putting the ‘in’ into ‘in-formation’.
For example, from the Wiki, the diagram showing how to decompose systems into overlapping complexes assumes some primitive level of association that just comes built in with math, or physics, or reality.
Unfortunately this oversight really makes the question of what consciousness is fade out completely, as we have already assumed some sort of discernment and attachment among digits, bytes, or other theoretical ensembles of data.
Philosophers seem to have an advantage over many scientists in being able to question pattern recognition itself and to see semiotic relations between minds and matter rather than data as objective facts. Almost without exception, information science and quantum physics theories seem fuzzy on the difference, and often staunchly deny map-territory distinctions at all. Cognitive science and neurology both seem to be unaware or dismissive of the depth of the Explanatory Gap and Hard Problem of Consciousness, which are seen to be purely philosophical indulgences. In fact, the location of meaning in subjective sense capacities rather than objects is an essential key to understanding the relation of consciousness and physics.
Divorced from physics, computational theories posit a Platonic universe of digital perfection, unhampered by tangible resources. Neglecting the fact that all computation we know of occurs as the result of physical interaction, modern information-centric theories have little to bring numbers down to Earth. Rather than seeing numbers as a counting of static, memorable, locatable, digitally addressable objects, the enthusiasm for Boolean logic seems to have transcended materiality altogether and replaced consciousness itself. Every week there seems to be a new article proclaiming the possibility of digital simulation, each one more cavalier than the last in its dismissal of concrete realism. It is as if to say ‘With our simulated awareness of simulated logic, we simulate understanding that the only reality of sense stems from the unreality of senseless imitation (whatever that is).’
Truth or Consequences
My point in all of this is that our straying from realism has been a fruitful excursion this far, but that we are now seem to be approaching a fork in the road where we will have to place our bets on the authenticity of ourselves or that of objects or information. If we continue to define the self in terms of unrelated bits and pieces of not-self, we will have successfully disappeared our opportunity to thrive and explore the universe in favor of an automatic cataloging and curating of emptiness. What difference does it make what we choose for our supreme X, as we have already determined its nature in advance.
For all possible X, be it genetic, quantum-universal, information-theoretic, we can be sure that they will share the same curious quality of not resembling ourselves in any way. Where we are irrational, indecisive, sentimental, X is inevitable, automatic, and without need for aesthetic presence. We envision an endless web of digital patterns, racing around each other, working out probabilistic games by necessity rather than choice. Yet somehow, we remain the ones who see and touch this world – still unexplained perceiving participants; translators between one meaningless ensemble of data and another.
Neologisms For Physics
The addition of a sensory-motor primitive in physics would entail new terms to reflect the shift away from thermodynamic and electromagnetic and toward terms which consider the distinction between private-tempo and public-spatial to be more relevant. Thermal qualities of temperature are understood to be tactile reads of the same molecular tempos (frequencies) which are read visually as colors, but they are both private signifying experiences (endophoric).
Kinetic-based measurements such as velocity and pressure are correlated to molecular tempo but from an exterior view. The public consequences of endophoric tempos are received as topographical presentations of an exometric sort (wavelengths and ranges for example). Exometrics can be frozen and analyzed as static positions and vectors.
Endophoric – A privately meaningful signal, affect, or subjective disposition based on frequency of oscillating or cycling through experienced sensory qualities.
Exometric – A public effect on embodied participants and their ‘objective’ positions (relative to one another). Measurement by scale, scope, distance, and mechanical interaction of forms.
The nature of endophorics can be understood in more detail using monochord type models such as the visible spectrum or musical scale, where frequency correlates to a specific sensed quality which cannot be described publicly. The contrast between the mathematical contexts of cardinality vs ordinality are useful here, as well as position vs disposition.
Endophorics: Affect, disposition, appreciation
ordinal qualities (significance > entropy)
cardinal qualities (unique > common)
Exometrics: Effect, position, function
quantified ordinality (consequences of coordinates)
quantified cardinality (consequences of redundancy)
Endophorics can be conceived of as tempos, tropes (to turn, alter, change), or even ‘verses’ (turns, bends). A sense of progress through cycles of tension and relaxation (wag and weigh from PIE). This is the experience sensory input, as through a read head or antenna responding to exterior conditions.
Exometrics by contrast are public measurables, based on literal rigid bodies and their figurative extension into rigid scientific indexes. Navigation, for example, compares known stable positions and ratios to local unknown variables. By isolating invariance, common sense can be established with relative independence of endophoric fluctuations.
Pan vs Pan: The War for What Matters
The debate over the origin and nature of consciousness in the universe, in my analysis, boils down to this:
Panexperientialism vs Panmechanism
We must consider whether it is likely that
- Experience is possible without a mechanism.
At first consideration, many people will immediately disagree.- We are the only thing in the universe which has experience,
- we know that experience relies on a brain,
- and we know that a brain is a biological mechanism.
Case closed.
Or is it?That position seems to inevitably also adhere to the view that there can only be one competing hypothesis; naive idealism. This is typically summed up as “So, if you die, then the universe disappears?” or “So, the Moon disappears if you aren’t looking at it.”*
The implicit assumptions behind this rebuke of idealism are:
a: Human consciousness is the only form of consciousness possible, and
b. Matter itself functions with no possibility of awareness. - Mechanism is possible without some form of experience.
Whether it is planets orbiting the Sun or atoms colliding in a void, there is a logical pattern that can be observed. Rather than every object falling through each other, or turning into an unexpected form, there is a strict coherence of interactions. We speak of ‘Laws of Physics’.If we were to summon a statement of naive counter-idealism, it would take ‘Law’ literally and demand to see the Parliament and legislature, the law enforcement apparatus, and most of all, the law-abiding agents who have received, understood, and retain a capacity to follow ‘laws’ to the letter. In the absence of any proposal for the mechanism of physical law itself, It would seem that the presumption of law is little more than a pacifier for the mind. There are simply things, and they simply do what they do.
This puts the proposition of experience-without-mechanism (EWM) on exactly the same level of religious faith as mechanism without experience (MWE), however the difference is (and it is an important difference), that we personally can verify our own experience and cannot verify the lack of experience in another. We can have a hunch, by the rigor mortis for example, that Zed’s dead, but we still have a cadaver, full of microscopic tributes to the wonder that was Zed’s body. If we want to get really hippie, we can say too that the Earth still has another crumb of lovely fragrant organic matter with which to fertilize the air and soil. Zed is no more, but the body formerly known as Zed is still part of the many stories of biochemistry, history, anthropology, etc that remain.
It seems to me that the assumption of Laws which govern a universe of existence without experience is actually more likely a function of our own naive assumption that our experience relies on automatic laws. In fact, when we turn that assumption on its head, we find that once we let go of the idea of being the only active participant in the universe, any law of physics can easily be understood as a sensory-motor experience, and the dream of pristine non-witnessed mechanism may in fact be the more comforting psychological blanket compared to the brave new universe of en-ploding meaning and significance..
- Anything can be proved or if it matters.
All that the foregoing suggests is that we may be wrong to assume that the capacity to experience appears out of matter, and that it is wrong because such an appearance makes no sense at any point in the history of the universe. We assume that experience is complex or emerges from ‘complexity’ itself, but that may be because our human awareness is complex. In reality, without awareness, there is no quality of ‘complexity’ in the universe. Something has to be able to interpret a given pattern as complex for it to be distinct from just ‘lots and lots of simplicity’. We assume that simple forms of life or matter have no experience, but how would we be able to tell the difference?The answer to whether it matters if we are an accidentally conscious body in a meaningless machine or a human experience in a universe made of meaningful experiences is to me, an obvious yes. The implications of the former vs the latter radiate out in every direction of our personal and social lives. Are we automatons who inexplicably dream of freedom, or are we free agents who are sensibly bound to a multitude of other experiences interdependently?
Since it is potentially such an important issue (really what more important issue for the world as a whole could there be in the long run?) and that the answer could reconcile science, philosophy, and religion if properly understood, the issue of proof is important. Just as modern rationality has become accustomed to the unquestioned assumption of panmechanism, so too have we become accustomed to the corresponding assumption of pan-objectivity.
Like the laws of physics, our law of proof is a disembodied soldier with no home. We have become subjects of proof rather than provers of fact. Having turned the most miraculous epistemological tool in our arsenal on ourselves, we have found a way to lose sight that it is we ourselves who are doing the proving. We have lost our orientation and now face ourselves through our own human idea of a stranger’s eyes. The eyes of a neuron, of collections of cells and ion channels, of spike trains and action potentials. These, we state confidently, are what we really are. These strange microworlds are reality, while the only reality which humanity has ever known before this, has been mere advertisements for the hidden processes that really matter.
A closer look, however, at that history which we used to think was real and we find the roots of objectivity itself – not handed down by fiat by the unmovable object of matter but by thousands of years of thinking and reasoning, philosophy and mysticism. From the alchemist’s flasks to the monk’s viniculture, and from the astrologer’s star maps to Galileo’s telescope, it has all been a process of human discovery – of trial and error but also of intuition and insight. We have come to this place in history as a function of agreement and disagreement, not of a single inevitable monolith of unquestioned fact or faith.
*this Strawman seems to be based on a misinterpretation of Idealism, perhaps handed down from the successively more superficial readings of George Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
23. But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it; but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call BOOKS and TREES, and the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? BUT DO NOT YOU YOURSELF PERCEIVE OR THINK OF THEM ALL THE WHILE? This therefore is nothing to the purpose; it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind: but it does not show that you can conceive it possible the objects of your thought may exist without the mind.
As Berkeley’s ideas rippled and meandered through the minds of writers and thinkers over the decades, they crossed over from philosophy to science. By 1884, Scientific American echoed Berkeley’s idealism, stating
“Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.”
(reblogging from my If A Philosophical Cliche Falls In A Forest)
Can someone please explain my existence to me?
You are a personal experience within a universe of experiences. Your experience is at once composed of multiple sub-personal experiences (sensations, perceptions and drives ) and super-signifying experiences (social, cultural ideals and inspirations).
There is a corresponding impersonal context in which your personal experience takes place. It’s a bit complicated, but there is a symmetry between public and private, similar to horizontal versus vertical, in which experiences which are not yours personally are presented as objects in spatial relation. In this impersonal, public view scale and size are the relevant factors, so that your ability to participate directly is limited by the proximity of the public bodies to your own body, both in distance and scale.
Together, these two aspects of experience form a single unbroken continuum through which fantastic quantities of interrelated experiences are enacted.
Three Layers of Any Message
Excerpts from Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (via Occam’s Beard)
In these examples of decipherment of out-of-context messages, we can separate out fairly clearly three levels of information: (1) the frame message; (2) the outer message; (3) the inner message. The one we are most familiar with is (3), the inner message; it is the message which is supposed to be transmitted: the emotional experiences in music, the phenotype in genetics, the royality and rites of ancient civilations in tablets, etc.
To understand the inner message is to have extracted the meaning intended by the sender.
The frame message is the message “I am a message; decode me if you can!”; and it is implicitly conveyed by the gross structural aspects of any information-bearer.
To understand the frame message is to recognize the need for a decoding-mechanism.
If the frame message is recognized as such, then attention is switched to level (2), the outer message. This is information, implicitly carried by symbol-patterns and structures in the message, which tells how to decode the inner message.
To understand the outer message is to build, or know how to build, the correct decoding mechanism for the inner message.
This outer level is perforce an implicit message, in the sense that the sender cannot ensure that it will be understood. It would be a vain effort to send instructions which tell how to decode the outer message, for they would have to be part of the inner message, which can only be understood once the decoding mechanism has been found. For this reason, the outer message is necessarily a set of triggers, rather than a message which can be revealed by a known decoder.
The formulation of these three “layers” is only a rather crude beginning at how meaning is contained in messages. There may be layers and layers of outer and inner messages, rather than just one of each. Think, for instance, of how intricately tangled are the inner and outer messages of the Rosetta stone. To decode a message fully, one would have to reconstruct the entire semantic structure which underlay its creation— and thus to understand the sender in every deep way. Hence one could throw away the inner message, because if one truly understood all the finesse of the outer message, the inner message would be reconstructible.
What makes us see a frame message in certain objects, but none in others? Why should an alien civilization suspect, if they intercept an errant record, that a message lurks within? What should make a record any different from a meteorite? Clearly its geometric shape is the first clue that “something funny is going on”. The next clue is that, on a more microscopic scale, it consists of a very long aperiodic sequence of patters, arranged in a spiral. If we were to unwrap the spiral, we would have one huge linear sequence (around 2000 feet long) of minuscule symbols. This is not so different from a DNA molecule, whose symbols, drawn from a meager “alphabet” of four different chemical bases, are arrayed in a one-dimensional sequence, and then coiled up into a helix. Before Avery had established the connection between genes and DNA, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger predicted, on purely theoretical grounds, that genetic information would have to be stored in “aperiodic crystals”, in his influential book What is Life? In fact, books themselves are aperiodic crystals contained inside neat geometrical forms. These examples suggest that, where an aperiodic crystal is found “packaged” inside a very regular geometric structure, there may lurk an inner message.
The three levels are very clear in the case of a message found in a bottle washed up on a beach. The first level, the frame message, is found when one picks up the bottle and sees that it is sealed, and contains a dry piece of paper. Even without seeing writing, one recognizes this type of artifact as an information-bearer, and at this point it would take an extraordinary—almost inhuman—lack of curiosity, to drop the bottle and not look further. Next, one opens the bottle and examines the marks on the paper. Perhaps they are Japanese: this can be discovered without any recognition of the inner message being understood—it merely comes from a recognition of the characters. The outer message can be stated as an English sentence: “I am in Japanese.” Once this has been discovered, then one can proceed to the inner message, which may be a call for help, a haiku poem, a lover’s lament…
It would be of no use to include in the inner message a translation of the sentence “This message is in Japanese”, since it would take someone who knew Japanese to read it. And before reading it, he would have to recognize the fact that, as it is in Japanese, he can read it. You might try to wriggle out of this by including translations of the statement “This message is in Japanese” into many different languages. That would help in a practical sense, but in a theoretical sense the same difficulty is there. An English-speaking person still has to recognize the “Englishness” of the message; otherwise it does no good. Thus one cannot avoid the problems that one has to find out how to decipher the inner message from the outside; the inner message itself may provide clues and confirmations, but those are at best triggers acting upon the bottle finder (or upon the people whom he enlists to help).
Similar kinds of problem confront the shortwave radio listener. First, he has to decide whether the sounds he hears actually constitute a message, or are just static. The sounds in themselves do not give the answer, not even in the unlikely case that the inner message is in the listener’s own native language, and is saying, “These sounds actually constitute a message and are not just static!” If the listener recognizes a frame message in the sounds, then he tries to identify the language the broadcast is in— and clearly, he is still on the outside; he accepts triggers from the radio, but they cannot explicitly tell him the answer.
It is in the nature of outer messages that they are not conveyed in any explicit language. To find an explicit language in which to convey outer messages would not be a breakthrough— it would be a contradiction in terms! It is always the listener’s burden to understand the outer message. Success lets him break through into the inside, at which point the ratio of triggers to explicit meanings shifts drastically towards the latter. By comparison with the previous stages, understand the inner message seems effortless. It is as if it just gets pumped in.
Commentary:
In multisense realism, I think of the three levels of GEB semiotics not as absolutes of frame, outer, and inner, but as relative frames of increasingly inner qualities. The bottle is read optically (inner to your visual experience but outer to your body and self), the text is read optically and typographically (inner to your semiotic experience but outer to your ‘self’) and the message is understood linguistically and cognitively (inner to your conscious mental experience or executive/self awareness but outer to your visual experience and absent from your body experience). The letters are more outer to your mind than the words, but not as outer as the optics available through your eyes. It’s all sensory experience and it is all inner, outer, and frame relative to different levels of participation. All sense is a frame making, breaking, and preserving experience which recontextualizes other frames as inner and outer.
Phototheque: A Danceable View of Light
“Thus, the word ‘electron’ should be regarded as no more than a name by which we call attention to a certain aspect of the holomovement, an aspect that can be discussed only by taking into account the entire experimental situation and that cannot be specified in terms of localized objects moving autonomously through space. And of course, every kind of ‘particle’ which in current physics is said to be a basic constituent of matter will have to be discussed in the same sort of terms (so that such ‘particles’ are no longer considered as autonomous and separately existent). Thus we come to a new general physical description in which ‘everything implicates everything’ in an order of undivided wholeness.” – David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order
If you aren’t familiar with physicist David Bohm, he was one of the pioneers of Quantum Physics who dared to go beyond mere calculation. He dared to integrate quantum observations into a cosmology which includes consciousness. In many ways his ideas parallel my own approach. His term holomovement is very similar to what I have looked at in breaking down the word universe to its etymological roots. Both holo and uni refer to singularity-wholeness, the Absolute or solitrope. Verse and movement are related (re-verse, in-verse, ob-verse), although Bohm’s sensibility of holomovement implies a motorized realization of cosmos, while universe is a broader more ‘vers-atile’ ‘vers-ion’, allowing for the full range of information-theoretic-material realizations. Some other obnoxious portmanteau neologisms could include ‘soliwegh’, ‘monoteleos’, ‘unimotive’.
Polarization is interesting to me because it supports what Bohm is saying. We use the term ‘polarizing filter’ for substances with these particular optical properties, but filters would not behave the way that these lenses do. As you can see in the YouTube, when it comes to these kinds of filters, ‘two wrongs can make a right’, so to speak.
In my mind, there is no way that we can honestly describe photons as particles as we see that unlike a conventional filter, the amount of light passing through these lenses can increase as well as decrease the illumination of the target. It’s like having a second coffee filter which undoes half of the effect of the first.
Following is a simple chart showing a conventional understanding of polarized light. Note that the source of the light and the target of the beam are not featured – symptomatic I think of the dominance of the theoretical approach to understanding light. We are meant to imagine quali-invisible waves which make up ‘light’ itself. traveling through the air and undergoing mathematical transformations.
This is indeed a great way of modeling the phenomenon as an idea, but I think that the concrete reality of the thing, keeping in mind Bohm’s words about there not really being fundamental particles which autonomously exist, is obscured. My conjecture takes Bohm seriously and ventures further into realism. This new view suggests that rather than a generalized holomovement or implicate order, the materials themselves – light bulbs, laser diodes, dicrhroic crystal doped lenses and films, ordinary walls and screens…these are the materials which are the actual holodynamic ensemble. What they are made of all have sensory-motor properties which are both generic-universal, chemical-specific, and spatiotemporal-unique. Each element is a presentation of this ontological continuum, with topological peaks as an unrepeatable performance out of the plenum of the inescapable repetition of the permanently generic. Quantum is only half of the picture. Qualia is both the cause and effect of quantum.
This next figure is a diagram to illustrate this idea of light or quantum, not as some mysterious invisible magic, or as a simple mathematical idea, but as a concrete sensory-motor reality. It may not be obvious, but what is intended here is to show that the actual agents are not waves but in illuminated matter: light bulb filament, lens, wall. It is the excitement of the filament which is imitated in different ways by the other participants in this ensemble. Each participating piece of matter is imitating or re-verse imitating, con-verting or di-verting not beams of light but their own energetic disposition. The molecules of the lens are responding in a specific way. The lens is changing its image, not bending a literal beam. The light which we see is a part of us interacting directly with a part of something else, separated only by empty space. Seeing is a way of touching without literally touching.
While Bohm was ahead of his time (quote was from 1980) in recognizing the significance of holistic coherence and going beyond the model of autonomous particles, the view that I propose applies this same radical departure to perception. Just as the polarizing glass can either block out or recover signals, every sense channel we have brings with it its own unique contribution to our sense of realism. Our models of physics would not be the same if human beings were not primarily visually oriented. What we assume and what we question depends entirely on which sense modalities we rely on most.
Consider then, that our human eyes are not special because they are eyes, but because they are eyes which have been executed on a fantastically human scale. Eyes can be simple. In zooplankton, we can see viable eyes composed of just two cells. Let this sink in for a moment. Eyes are simple. Vision is invertebrate simple. Plankton simple. No brain is required. It’s not much of a leap to imagine that rather than eyes being the only way to detect visible events, they are an evolutionary step in division of labor rather than perceptual simulation and optical detection.
Chlorophyll shows us that response to visible light occurs on the molecular level, and ionization suggests this sensitivity is atomic. Neither of these imply, however, a separate currency of photons which autonomously transit between surfaces in a vacuum. Our own optical sense begins and ends at the surface of retinal molecules (vitamin A) embedded in the folded proteins of our rods and cones as they become erect in the presence of light. This is what our neurons are translating, not photons, but the cascading sensory-motor changes among molecules, cells, tissues, and organs that make up the living organism. Rather than a mathematical transduction of ‘information’, there are personal experiences of sub-beings (or sub-personal experiences of one being).
Realize then, that although we as human beings cannot see without eyes, hear without ears, etc, it is arbitrary bias to presume that these human organs are the source of all sensory access in the universe. To the contrary, the multisense realism view proposes that primitive cells, molecules, and atoms, may possess a less differentiated sense capacity. Just as our human night vision loses the discernment of color sensing cone cells, it may be the case that all eukaryotes have a kind of stem-qualia, the root verse from which our hypertrophied modalities of sight, sound, tactile, olfactory-gustatory, kinesthetic-vestibular, etc. senses are descended. The molecular-atomic ‘inorganisms’ could have an even more primordial unisense, to the point of proto-tangibility. A level of experience in which spacetime, unity and diversity, semiosis itself begin to emerge from the void-bottom end of the Absolute.
The light bulb filament’s molecules may themselves be bright and hot, maybe they are screaming and smell of ozone, all at once, but diluted into the catastrophe of fragments. On this least unified yet least diversified layer of uni-verse, the rules of community and locality are likely beyond our recognition. Every atomic whisper and supernova blast may be equally present in some sense at the bottom of the semantic event horizon. As Einstein warped spacetime and quantum mechanics digitized energy, this model extends that ambition to the Absolute. Perceptual relativity, seen as the ultimate and sole cosmological constant, crushes its own ontology at the periphery. Isness – being, collapses in on itself with the exhaustion of discernment.
Multisense Realism 
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