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Metaphor, Electricity, Sun and Moon…
Electrophoric Magnetemorphism
If you had walked up to someone living in prehistoric times and had a conversation about the Sun and the Moon, it would probably be an easy way of talking about the concept of opposites. It’s an embodied metaphor which is almost absurdly plain. The Sun, a featureless disk of blinding radiance, unchanging yet burning – it looks like it could be a circular window into pure and infinite energy. The Moon is like everything that the Sun is not like. Its changing phases reveal shapes and features on the surface, sometimes orb-like, sometimes disc-like. The Moon’s darkness reveals that it reflects and receives the Sun’s light rather than produces its own, and because of that, and its association with the night and the tides, seems cool, and silvery to the sun’s golden warmth. Moonlight isn’t bright enough to allow us to see color, as noted in that Moody Blues song:
Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is gray and yellow, white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion
How surprised a prehistoric astronomer would be to travel into the 21st century AD and find that all of that is complete horseshit. We now understand that most of what makes the Sun and Moon perfectly alike and unlike, from their similar apparent size to their duality, to their role in marking time and mytho-poetic extremes are purely coincidental. We just so happen to orbit one star, and be orbited by one natural satellite. The ratio of distance to size just happens to equal out so that the discs in the sky can often appear to be the same size, especially in conjunction. Indeed, the Sun is not only just an unremarkable star, but stars are just balls of exploding gas – huge spheres that have life cycles of their own.
There are some things that both the archaic and modern astronomer could use as a basis to preserve some symmetry of comparison. The Earth is to the Sun as the Moon is to the Earth as far as orbits are concerned. The Earth metabolizes the Suns energy with a biosphere generated atmosphere, where the Moon mainly reflects it.
The way that we treat the Sun and Moon now, compared to the way that humans had always treated them before science can be understood as a four dimensional dipole – a circuit through time, or really a meta-circuit since the dipole begins with a polar mytho-poetic understanding and ends with an elliptical mass-energetic understanding. Which leads me to some crazed ideas about electrostatic and magnetic force.
Notes on magnetism:
Watching the Khan Academy Introduction to Magnetism, I feel like I am finally making some headway into understanding the difference between electric and magnetic force. As he explains in the video, magnetic fields have are dipoles, they have North and South poles no matter how you break them up*. Electrostatic force is about positive and negative charge, but they can stand alone…at least (I’m thinking), alone at any given time.
What’s the difference? If we think of magnetic force as a spatial dipole, because its polarity is always adjacent, then why not think of electric charge as a dipole across time? But wait, it gets better. Because time is not fixed and is open ended, the electric metaphor poses charge like a question which can be answered at any time, and which wants to be answered and asked again and again. For the positively charged mass, negative charge exists as an image, an expectation of a presence which is currently absent but must eventually be present in the fullness of time (eternity, if necessary).
It could be said that the electric force, figuratively if not literally (but maybe literally, given a rehabilitated view of physics), creates time. It is the animation of circuitry. Electricity is algebraic and logical as it arcs from vector to vector directly, like a lightning bolt, hopping across gaps in logical steps. It is a path finder and path maker.
The magnetic force would then make sense as the creator or projector of space. It is the container of time, flattening cycles to circles. The magnetic force doesn’t draw lines, it aligns and orients, receives and presents spatial aesthetics to and from surrounding territories. If electricity is sensory motivation, then magnetism is motive sensation – a spatial feeling and knowing to match electrostatic being and doing.
Through Maxwell and then Einstein, we understand that these two modalities of interaction are the same thing but phase shifted by relativistic frame of reference. My understanding now leans toward seeing electricity as marking the “arctic” polar extremes in reference frames; the Innermost Metaphorical and the Outermost Binary kinds of relation, while magnetism presents the “tropic” counterpoint, describing how smaller and larger scaled bodies are nested within each other. Current flowing through a wire creates a magnetic force around the wire, it’s about the embodiment of the wire as a whole and how it relates to other macroscopically. The electric force is universal and infinitesimal, but it has no sense of figure and form, no orientation (needs a Ground).
This nugget came across my screen recently…it kind of makes sense, but I’ll leave that to you to interpret.
In Larry Niven’s story “The Kiteman,” we learn that the most important maxim in the Smoke Ring is: “East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East. North and South bring you back.”
Parting shot: Relativity is based on frames of reference, while Quantum Theory uses digital probability – eigenstates. Like magnetism and electricity, they are both the same thing seen from a different frame of reference. Together they describe how ‘reference’ is ‘framed’, but they both share the same blind spot, which is explaining what ‘ference’ is that these frames ‘re-fer’ to. I think that ference can only be one thing – not energy, and not information (which are really metaphors for spatial-magnetic and temporal-algebraic), but awareness itself: sensory-motive aesthetics.
*Some claim there might be magnetic monopoles also.
Breaking the Nth Wall
- Eliminative Materialism: The picture is the only reality, so the artist is an illusion.
- Idealism: The artist is real and the picture is an illusion.
- Dual Aspect: The artist and the painting are two halves of the whole.
- Monotheism: Norman Rockwell is omnipotent and immortal.
- Computationalism: Norman Rockwell is an emergent property of jpeg compression. Any sufficiently complex compression becomes Norman Rockwell.
- Multisense Realism: The picture, artist, audience, illusion, Norman Rockwell, and computation are all sensory experiences which make sense in different but sensibly related ways.
A Couple of Physics Clips
Great short video that fits into the Twins Paradox. If we imagine that which ever set of particles seems to be moving is a small clock or calendar which seems to be slowing, then it helps me make my point about elapsed time not being elastic. For the cat aligned with the electrons, time always passes normally, but for the cat, the positively charged clocks are slowing down as the repulsive force increases and the motion of the particles in space speed up.
This helps me get an intuitive feel for what is supposed to be going on also. This idea of motion being sticky, so that the greater the ratio between your velocities (not just acceleration), the harder that ratio pulls on time…time in the remote frame of reference is tightening up as the spatiotemporal balance tips from temporal equality to spatial inequality.
The paradox is that, as we see, the tightening of time goes both ways, so that for the cat, it is already June but the wire’s calendar says April. For the wire, it is June and the cat’s calendar says April instead. When these two come together, I don’t see how the time difference would be undone, since the untightening of time would not jump ahead and recover elapsed time, it would only return to parity with the other frame of reference.
No account of the Twins Paradox mentions this though, and they all focus on just one of the two reference frames. The twin who comes back to Earth is younger than the one who stayed home. To me that is true only from the Earth twin’s perspective. From the space twin’s perspective, he returns to a relatively younger Earth than he would expect without relativity and a twin who is younger than he is.
I like these better than the other gee-whiz-science or physics videos that I’ve seen. I still have no reason to doubt my view that the whole standard model needs to be re-interpreted so that it bends into virtuality toward the bottom. There should be a new kind of relativity, where the realism of the phenomenon – its publicity, is a relativistic vector rather than a flat axiom. I would like to see a video which focus exclusively on exactly how we are measuring subatomic phenomena with the same level of infinitesimal detail.
This is what science cares about, right? “What is REALLY REAL?”…so, give reality a number, and notice how unreal quarks gluon flux is compared to protons, and how unreal protons are to molecules. Then notice how quarks are real to each other, but not to molecules, etc. This is, in my opinion, what the universe is made of: Not the mathematical invariance which cuts across all frames of reference, but the aesthetic variance of the frames themselves – experience is really real, on every frame of reference, except when the expectations of one frame are projected onto another.
Why Likeness is Not, Like, the Same as Sameness
Why do we like to like the same things, until the thing we liked becomes the same old thing?
Why is there “Good as New” and “Like New”, but not “Same as New”?
I think that the difference between like and same are especially related to consciousness and support the idea of awareness (and therefore attention) as more ‘like’ novelty and ‘like-ness’ than it is ‘the same as’ the integration or processing of information.
Machines are characterized by their ability to do the same thing, over and over. The idea behind digital technology is really to be able to do the exact same thing, over and over and over, forever. Does this kind of behavior wake us up or does it lull us into a stupor? What kinds of things put us to sleep and what kinds of experiences wake us up?
Waking up is not an abstract theory. Waking up instantiates us into the directly and concretely sensed now, into public time. The now and the new are unrepeatable and unique, thus there can be nothing which is ‘the same as’ new without actually being new. When we say that something is ‘the same’ as something else, we are often speaking metaphorically. What we mean is that the difference is not important, and that one thing is functionally equivalent to another.
Anti-Metaphor
Within the world of mathematics, ‘the same’ or “=” is a metaphor for that which is literally identical or interchangeable in all circumstances. Unlike physical reality, the whole of mathematics is a symbolic abstraction – a metaphor for anti-metaphor:
Where metaphors are ‘like’ conceptual rhymes or semantic likeness which cut across the whole of human intuition poetically and aesthetically, mathematical metaphors are aiming for the opposite effect in which meaning is frozen into position, clear, defined, and unambiguous. This is meaning which has been reflected in the looking glass of thermodynamic irreversibility. It is the privatized essence of publicity.
When we look out of ourselves, we see only that which can be decomposed and measured. Feeling is presented as figures, and figuring them out literally gives us a feeling of transcending the ambiguity, fluidity, and obscurity our own subjective awareness.
I see the opportunity that lies before us is to recover the authenticity of awareness without sacrificing the reliability of its substitute. The worldview that is driven by quantitative formula alone cannot locate the now, other than as a promise that it will eventually be found – under a heap of accidents. Accidents and probability are the inverted image of intention and likeness. They are what you get when sameness is assumed to be primitive. The universe is failed sameness and broken symmetry – serial mutation.
To overcome the prejudices inherent in this worldview, an important step is to understand the irony that the intention behind measurement leads to its own perfect illogical fallacy. To count and codify is to try to escape from personal bias and fuzzy ‘likeness’ which is not the ‘exact same thing’ as truth, but what we have found increasingly, is that we cannot be immune from an equally toxic bias toward the impersonal. As much as we want to be ‘certainly in the right’, and to put ‘everything under the sun’ in tune, the enlightenment of the Western mind is eclipsed by its own insensitivity and denial. The more that we seek out the next product or service to make us feel ‘like new’, the faster it becomes the same old crap.
Free Will Isn’t a Predictive Statistical Model
Free will is a program guessing what could happen if resources were spent executing code before having to execute it.
I suggest that Free Will is not merely the feeling of predicting effects, but is the power to dictate effects. It gets complicated because when we introspect on our own introspection, our personal awareness unravels into a hall of sub-personal mirrors. When we ask ourselves ‘why did I eat that pizza’, we can trace back a chain of ‘because…I wanted to. Because I was hungry…Because I saw a pizza on TV…’ and we are tempted to conclude that our own involvement was just to passively rubber stamp a course of multiple-choice actions that were already in motion.
If instead, we look at the entire ensemble of our responses to the influences, from TV image, to the body’s hunger, to the preference for pizza, etc as more of a kaleidoscope gestalt of ‘me’, then we can understand will on a personal level rather than a mechanical level. On the sub-personal level, where there is processing of information in the brain and competing drives in the mind, we, as individuals do not exist. This is the mistake of the neuroscientific experiments thus far. They assume a bottom-up production of consciousness from unconscious microphysical processes, rather than seeing a bi-directional relation between many levels of description and multiple kinds of relation between micro and macro, physical and phenomenal.
My big interest is in how intention causes action
I think that intention is already an action, and in a human being that action takes place on the neurochemical level if we look at it from the outside. For the motive effect of the brain to translate into the motor effect of the rest of the body involves the sub-personal imitation of the personal motive, or you could say the diffraction of the personal motive as it is made increasingly impersonal, slower, larger, and more public-facing (mechanical) process.
Residential Proprietors and Commercial Pirates
Another metaphor to add to the list of private vs public, experience vs structure, etc. It’s a stretch, but has interesting implications as far as the Westernization of society. Referring generally to categories of real estate, residential and commercial also reflect a broad dialectic of civilization. Early cities were often walled, but even after walls became obsolete, the social context of insiders and outsiders continues under the cosmopolitan aesthetic vs rural aesthetic. Rural inhabitants have long been considered inferior by urbanites. With the exception of projection of their own lost innocence into a noble savage/salt of the Earth archetype, people who live outside of cities or inside of nature are considered rubes and recluses by those who live inside of cities and outside of ‘nature’.
It’s notable that to live or work ‘inside’ of a city is to be immersed in a world of commercial exteriors. The word commerce denotes a coming together (com-) to trade; market; merchant; merchandise. Commerce is inter-national and inter-cultural. To conduct trade is to travel to a location which is well regulated and protected, yet free from undue political influence. The neutrality and publicity of the milieu makes it a kind of anti-residence. The towering structures which define the skylines of modern cities are largely devoid of personal contents. Even during the hours which they are occupied, the residing (etymologically re-siding is like re-sedentary, a reference to sitting-again (and again)) in an office building is by contract. Sitting around when you are contracted to work standing, or standing around when you are contracted to work sitting, is not permitted. By and large, what happens in an office building is comings and goings. The office building itself is a structure, a monument to the generic and unnatural state of the industry that it unintentionally represents.

The word industry contains the same root as structure, which ties back to the realization of public-facing private agendas rather than private or experiential values. Similarly, the word enterprise contains the prefix enter for within or between, and prise is about taking and reaching (prehensile, apprehend, comprehend). Industry, commerce, and trade are all active motivations. The word trade shares etymology with tread, as in to tread a path. They are literally outgoing and extroverted. It is unsurprising then, that the conquest of the New World and rise of mercantilism are tied together with the dawn of the Enlightenment Era and explosive progress in physics and the physical sciences.
What has happened since the latter half of the 20th century, is that the wheel of progress has turned so as to eclipse the residential values entirely with the commercial. In the last 30 years in particular, we have seen a trend away from public spaces which are hospitable to individual people and toward public facing real estate as a hardened asset. Office ‘parks’ leverage landscaping and architectural techniques to minimize loitering or curious visitors. Pleasant looking bushes and flowers are manicured to disguise as well as subtly amplify the artless emptiness of the place. James Howard Kuntsler has called them ‘nature band-aids‘:
the little juniper shrubs in the universal bark-mulch bed deployed in front of a building so depressing and inept that it would dismay even the criminal class of great-granddads’ day. I call these little landscape fantasias nature band-aids.
Everywhere that we look, change seems to come in the form of increasing inconvenience. Packaging that requires special tools to open. Homes built with features that require industrial equipment to perform basic maintenance. Technology which has no user serviceable parts. Where the 19th and 20th century oversaw the obsolescence of hand made and hand repairable objects, the 21st century has brought a level of commercialization which is mandatory and impenetrable. The future of social interaction suggests a menu-driven, pre-fabricated extension of commercial enterprise into the private ‘space’. Ontologically, it is privacy itself which is been spatialized, auctioned off like the broadband spectrum and privatized like the DNA of designer organisms.
The choices being offered thus far have been to either join in a futile resistance, or to embrace the Borg of commercial domination. Some try to effect a Bartleby-like passive protest, hoping that perhaps their preferences in consuming or slacking will contribute to a wave of imitation. It’s probably not going to be that easy. Unlike the revolutionary crucibles of the past, the Western colonization of mind is so thorough that people no longer recognize their own significance. We have accepted the evidence of our own irrelevance, and of the cheap currency of our lives in exchange for the magic beans of structured realism. Any call to progress beyond commercialism are rejected out of hand as both politically naive and unscientific.
While religious fundamentalism thrives, perhaps the popularity of Pope Francis signals the possibility of a future cavalry to the rescue in the form of rehabilitated spiritual traditions? If the Western Imperial drive can yang so far that it has eaten the yin, maybe the yin can flow into the public mind through the back door? Sit-ins and occupations were one way of reclaiming the Residential, but with a deeper understanding of the physics of privacy, it may be that a revolution of enlightened non-doing is already underway within us.
Strawson on Realistic Monism
In this brief essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism”, Galen Strawson covers a lot of the territory that I have tried to write about here. From the fallacy of brute emergence to the necessity of sensation as a concrete physical phenomenon, he gives a great overview of how to see the problem and where to look for a solution. I would like to think that my conjectures are designed to pick up where he leaves off, in the sense that they relate to filling in the gaps between micropsychism and realism. He writes:
“The experiential/non-experiential divide, assuming that it exists at all, is the most fundamental divide in nature (the only way it can fail to exist is for there to be nothing non-experiential in nature)”
Here my response is that the fundamental divide can exist conditionally – IF – nature’s monism is the division-providing sense itself. In that case nothing in nature is non-experiential from an absolute perspective, but locally, our experience can consist of side views and rear views of other experiences which are so foreign to our own in scale and character that they seem to be inert to us and all those who inhabit a similar perceptual inertial frame as we do (other humans, animals, organisms…).
“Emergence can’t be brute”
Exactly (see The Failure of Emergence). I can follow his reasoning with perfect clarity as it is very close to my own regarding the appeal to emergence as a kind of metaphysical Santa Claus clothed in a magical wardrobe of arbitrary inevitability. He does an exemplary job of covering the core issue of why emergence makes sense to explain liquidity from non-liquidity, but not experiences from non-experiences. To paraphrase David Chalmers, since physics is consistent with the absence of consciousness, consciousness must be a further fact about the world.
Strawson gets into spatial extension and how it can or cannot emerge from non-space. MSR, PIP, and Eignemorphism work together to explain how space, time, and entropy are forms of insensitivity – gaps and range constraints within the primordial pansensitivity which privatize one perspective by mechanizing all other perspectives to different degrees. The monism can be conceived, metaphorically, as a prism in which both the white beam of extended publicity and the diffracted spectrum of intentional privacy are within the prism itself, and change places depending on how the prism is viewed.
It’s difficult because rather than comparing (private phenomenal) apples to (public structural) apples, Eigenmorphism is the proposal that the former and latter apples have absolutely opposite orientations. Public structures are identifiable as isolated obstructions in space or stepped procedures through time (forms and functions), while the proposed view is for phenomenal privacy to persist as a subtractive phenomenon – a ‘hole in wholeness’ through which particular qualities of experience are disentangled along a temporal gradient from the event horizon of eternal experience. Rather than functions or forms, private physics is appreciation and participation.
Under eigenmorphism, awareness would not be produced from the dynamics of microstructures any more than multi-level parking lots are produced by the parking behaviors of vehicles. Instead of presuming that the micro-apples of physics are producing a macro-apple of phenomenology, Eigenmorphism expects that all of the apples of phenomenology (micro, macro, and cosmo) are more like apples of the metaphorical variety; apple images, flavors, logos, memories. A Beatles album. A personal computer from the 1980s. Une pomme. Not to say that phenomenology is metaphorical from the absolute perspective, but from our local perspective, the contents of the psyche are real as qualia and metaphor while the perimeter of the local awareness is staged with seemingly non-experiential quanta (public realism). MSR imagines that these perspectives fit like lock and key – not with each other, but with the underlying unity of primordial sense.
Strawson’s Micropsychism is very similar to what I have proposed, although by MSR, every experience is to some extent micro or mega relative to some other experience, as our top-down awareness is informed from ‘above the top’ intuition as well. We’re not just built of psychic Legos, but are also a megapsychic Taj Mahal executed in micropsychic Legos.
Highly recommend.
Free Will and the Unconscious
The key oversight, in my opinion, in the approach taken by neuroscientific research into free will (Libet et al) is in the presumption that all that is not available to us personally is ‘unconscious’ rather than conscious sub-personally. When we read these words, we are not conscious of their translation from pixels to patches of contrasting optical conditions, to loops and lines, to letters and words. From the perspective of our personal awareness, the words are presented as a priori readable and meaningful. We are not reminded of learning to read in kindergarten and have no feeling for what the gibberish that we are decoding would look like to someone who could not read English. The presentation of our world is materially altered at the sub-personal, but not ‘unconscious’ level. If it were unconscious, then we would be shocked to find that words were made of lines and loops or pixels.
In the same way, a robotic task is quickly anticipated, even 10 seconds ahead of time, without our personality getting involved. This does not mean that it is not ‘us’ making the choice, only that there is no need for such an easy and insignificant choice to be recognized by another layer of ‘us’, and reported by a third layer of ‘us’ to the personal layer of us.
When we work on the sub-personal level of neurons, we are addressing a layer of reality in which we, as persons, do not exist. Because we have not yet factored in perceptual relativity as a defining existential influence, we are making the mistake of treating a human being as if they were made of generic Legos instead of a single unique and unrepeatable living cell which has intentionally reproduced itself a trillion times over – each carrying the potential for intention and self-modifying teleology.






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