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My response to David Roden’s “NATURE’S DARK DOMAIN: AN ARGUMENT FOR A NATURALIZED PHENOMENOLOGY”
This is a first draft response to David Roden’s 2013 paper “NATURE’S DARK DOMAIN: AN ARGUMENT FOR A NATURALIZED PHENOMENOLOGY“
Early in the paper the following claim is made:
“phenomenology is in much the same epistemological relationship to its own subject matter as descriptive (i.e.‘phenomenological’) physics or biology are to physical and biological reality”
Any description necessarily exists first as a language artifact (Let’s call that quale 1, so L = Q1) that is interpreted intellectually (I = Q2) to refer our thinking (T = Q3) about some percept (P = Q4). The referential nature of thinking makes it a specialized type of sense modality that participates in semiosis. To think about the sky is (thinking(sky)), a specific example of (accessing concepts(percepts)).
A description of the sky is thinking about (language(concepts(percepts)), where language itself is (percepts(concepts)). So a description of the sky is a perception of language (written or verbal sense appearances – graphic or phonetic qualia) that refers us to our shareable thoughts about experiences of the sky…including sights, memories, associations, knowledge and communications of all of those from other people and texts.
To the extent that descriptions/language, thoughts, and thoughts-about experiences are different from each other, the difference is in the category of qualia or type of aesthetic presentation. A word is an appearance in the sense modality of sight or sound which can be paired to thoughts in the sense-making modality that I call cogitative. Cogitative qualia are thoughts, communication, understanding, and learning. Words, including descriptions are paired qualia such that experiences of certain visible or aural qualia can be cogitatively connected to (understood to mean) communicable thoughts-about X, where X is percepts (includes concepts and objects).
To the extent that descriptions/language, thoughts, and thoughts-about experiences are the same, the unity is in the continuity of the local experience across multiple modalities of sense and sense-making. This sentence is different from the previous sentence, but both sentences appear within the same larger experience of this written response.
All of this to say that I agree that in one sense phenomenology is like biology or physics in that it is descriptions of thoughts-about X, but I disagree in another sense because in the case of phenomenology, X is the entire category of percepts-that-appear directly-in-local-experience (X(L(E))) as well as percepts that are received indirectly into local experience from non-local experience ((X(L(E)(NL(E))), such as philosophical texts.
Unlike in physics, where I can never touch a distant planet to verify that it indeed feels like a tangible object, phenomenological discourse can point out that experiences of touching objects exist. Further, I can understand that my direct experience of touching objects means that I have experiences of sensitivity to experiences of tangible qualities. Those two understandings – that I access direct experiences of touching objects and that this means I have access to a tactile-haptic modality of tangibility, which is the sense modality or aesthetic context of tangible textures and sensations – cannot be denied or disqualified from reality. All experiences are real experiences by definition.
Whether in a dream or waking experience, picking up a baseball is presented as a tactile-haptic percept. Physical or biological descriptions, however, are one or more steps removed from certain reality. A point of bright light that we see in the morning sky may be a visible image associated with a distant object, and that distant object may be the planet Phosphorus. A point of bright light that we see in the evening sky may be a visible image associated with the planet Hesperus. We can use measurements and reasoning to further understand that Phosphorus and Hesperus are actually different names for a single planet called Venus. Venus experienced as a visible image from Earth at two different times of day are different experiences with different aesthetic qualities, even though we understand that they are images associated with a single planetary object in outer space.
Even though astronomers are quite certain in 2026, that Venus appears to be a planet in our solar system, astrologers propose that planets appearing in the sky, while being tangible objects in public space, are also like parts of a celestial clock in which cyclically repeating patterns of archetypal themes are expressed individually, socially, and collectively in conscious experience. To an astrologer, the significance of Venus is not its chemical composition, atmosphere, etc but its association with metaphors for themes of social pleasures, personal attraction, sensuality, receiving gifts or nutrition, etc.
The point that I’m getting to is that astrology and astronomy have more in common with each other than phenomenology has with any other discipline. Phenomenology, while including more than only the direct experience (X(L(E))), even the non-local ((X(L(E)(NL(E))) experiences relate specifically to local experience. Disciplines like astronomy, astrology and astrophysics relate specifically to non local experiences that may or may not exist in the way that they are interpreted or perceived locally. They may not exist physically at all. Dark energy for example, may exist only as a scientific concept and not as a tangible phenomenon that influences the motion of tangible objects in outer space. Roden’s claim that “phenomenology cannot tell us what phenomenology is really ‘about’” is therefore false. Phenomenology is about local experience, and local experience necessarily exists. Physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics etc tell us about how local experience relates to non-local experiences that may or may not exist.
Another claim: “the domain of phenomenology is not the province of a self-standing, autonomous discipline but must be investigated with any empirically fruitful techniques that are open to us (e.g. computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, etc.).” is a partial non-sequitur. It is true that talking about local experience with each other can assist us in understanding it, it can also increase confusion and misunderstanding. This is doubly true in the case of talking about neurology and computation. It may assist our understanding, or it may lead our understanding completely astray.
The concluding claim “Finally, it entails that while a naturalized phenomenology should be retained as a descriptive, empirical method, it should not be accorded transcendental authority.” takes the partial truth that non-local experience can sometimes help us understand local experience and inflates it to a proscription that is actually deceptive. It implies that local experiences of tangible objects (such as brains and technological devices we use as computers) should be accorded authority that can transcend that of local experience – even when the topic being authorized is local experience. In my view, this is misguided.
The honest application of authority over matters of local experience belongs to local experience itself. That is not to say that non-local experience cannot add to and deepen our understanding of local experience, but it should never transcend it completely. Whether the light we see in the sky is associated with the hypothetical planet Hesperus or the measured, photographed planet Venus or astrological archetype Venus changes nothing about the original fact of the visible appearance of a point of light in the sky. Phenomenology should always and only refer to that original fact and not be recontextualized by non-local experiences inferred through physical instruments, logical measurements, scientific reasoning, etc. Aesthetic qualia should not be disqualified and replaced by concepts of anesthetic properties, regardless of whether those properties happen to also exist aesthetically or not.
Moving on to the Introduction section of the paper:
“Naturalists think that human knowledge is the product of fallible animals whose biology does not equip them to reliably track the structure of reality”
This makes me wonder if naturalists subject themselves to this same judgment. If naturalists are humans, then their biology too does not equip them to reliably track the structure of the reality even of naturalism. It’s the same mistake as above – failing to recognize that the grounding of all experience is experience itself, not the specific experiences of measuring and analyzing certain features of certain experiences and applying them to nature in general.
“They regard earlier attempts to carve out foundational truth claims secure from revision by the findings of science, history and observation as conspicuous failures, for they misinterpret anthropological facts about how we are disposed to think as necessary truths”
But how do they know that their contemporary attempts to disqualify previous claims in that way are not also misinterpretations based on their own fallible biases and assumptions? Once we introduce epistemological doubt into local experience itself, how can we place our own sophisticated non-local extensions to local experience above local experience in matters that should pertain only to local experience? Naturalists are, to borrow a trope, sawing off the branch that they are sitting on.
” James Ladyman and Don Ross remark ‘Naturalism is, among other things, the metaphysical hypothesis that the objective world is not constrained by any reasons or standards of reasonableness’.”
How can that be considered scientific? It seems like a reasonable-sounding way of giving open ended authority to unreasonable conclusions. Reason cannot negate itself or it was never reason in the first place.
“For example, speculations about the physical basis of conscious experience are frequently held to be irrelevant to describing ‘how it feels’”
The language here telegraphs an injection of naturalism. To use the phrase “how it feels” opens the door to an entity outside of feeling where none may exist. The feeling is presented directly. Any other associations with physical appearances in other sense modalities such as touch, sight, or cogitation are different perceptions…different ways of ‘feeling’ that exist in parallel rather than as a rationally or empirically necessary consequence of each other.
Let’s say that we feel our mood become more euphoric. The phenomenologist accepts that fact on its face, while the naturalist may begin by saying that this mood change is caused by a release of dopamine in the brain (somehow), and then further extrapolate euphoria as ‘simply how dopamine feels in the brain’.
In the final disqualification, the naturalist feels that the authority of objectively measurable work on dopamine transcends merely subjective reports of feeling euphoric altogether and that ‘how dopamine feels’ is an ’emergent property’ (somehow) of neurochemistry, or worse, an ‘illusion’ that needs no scientific explanation and is irrelevant to our understanding of nature. In a sense, the defense of naturalism in Roden’s paper attempts to do the same thing to phenomenology as a whole. It is to legitimize the position that naturalism is justified in treating phenomenology as a possibly illusory study of illusions mistaken for transcendental facts of nature.
“The closure assumption implies that a neural network model explaining how our experience of time is generated could throw no light on what that experience is like”
It’s not that a neural network model can’t throw light onto the nature of experience; it is that it can only add additional associations to the experience, not replace the fact of the local experience with the hypothesis of another non-local experience. In addition, the use of the idiom “what (that experience) is like” opens the same door to a chain of disqualification as “how it feels” with the implication of a separate ‘it’ that ‘is’ (really) what feeling refers to. If we apply the same language to physics, for example, we would say that energy is what part of an equation “is like”, or “how it feels for matter moving against inertial forces”. Naturalism just as easily disqualify itself as a branch of phenomenology about a branch of mistakenly objectified phenomenology (natural science).
I did not intend to go through each sentence of this paper with a fine-toothed comb, but it seems necessary to point out the instances where language is loaded with subtle bias. Continuing here…
“These can be phenomenologically described by suspending ordinary assumptions about the mind-independent existence of objects and directing attention to how we are aware of objects as mind independent.”
I object here to the use of the term ‘ordinary’. For most people in most places in human history, there was nothing ordinary about assuming that anything in the natural world was mind-independent. Animism and shamanism are common examples of ordinary views of nature for thousands of years. Events in the natural world were treated as expressions of supernatural influence: the will of God/gods, or a reflection of a universe that is cosmopsychist rather than mind-independent.
It is only the more recently developed Western ideologies of dualism and physicalism that assume the possibility of mind-independent phenomena, which are assumed to include objects. On closer inspection however, even the assumption of mind-independence applies only to the subset of objects perceived during waking states of conscious experience and not to dreams or visions.
Even under physicalism, objects that are mind-dependent are quite ordinary, it’s just that physicalism assumes that waking states of consciousness acquaint us more directly with reality than dreaming does. Because of this, we can truthfully say that 1) even the assumption of mind-independence is certainly mind-dependent, and 2) the possibility of mind-independence is forever hypothetical.
Contemporary naturalism seems to place its descriptions and reasoning outside of both phenomenology and anthropology, as if it were an immaculate conduit to facts independent of all means of fact acquisition (sense and sense-making in conscious experience).
“One form of this is that phenomenological claims don’t have to be scientifically or theoretically-informed as long as the things they describe are pre-theoretically or ‘intuitively’ given to the conscious subject.”
Here I take issue with the false equivalence of pre-theoretic claims with intuition. Intuition is only one form of perception. The color blue is a pre-theoretic visible appearance, but blue is not intuitive, nor is the claim of seeing blue intuitive. Blue is presented directly – not necessarily only to a ‘subject’ but perhaps in visibility itself.
While typical states of human consciousness include a sense of separation between private and public facing perceptions, some states of consciousness include no such strong boundary. It is possible to see a blue shape without also experiencing a sense of subjectivity or being a private self. There is no convincing reason to presume that visible qualia such as color are any more closely associated with subjectivity or intuition than intellectual qualia such as arithmetic. My 2+3 could vary slightly from your 2+3 just as my green could vary from your green. The possibility of some subjective variation doesn’t make numbers or colors subjective. Naturalism is no less vulnerable to conflation with subjectivity and intuition than phenomenology. If it seems otherwise, that too is phenomenological/subjective/intuitive.
Moving on to the Raffman discussion, my view on qualia diverges from what is stated in the paper as the classic quale:
“The classic quale is a simple, intrinsically subjective, intuitable property of experience.”
Under my Multisense Realism (MSR) framework, qualia are aesthetic appearances of any kind. They are the minimal and maximal fabric of existence in all possible universes. Objectivity as well as subjectivity are classes of qualia, as is intuition and dark or non-intuitive presentations. In my determination, the idea of classic quale as stated by Roden derives from a history of idealistic philosophy that conflated conscious experience with subjectivity, the mind, thinking, or intuition.
In a true nondual, cosmopsychist framework, and specifically in MSR, qualia are glimpses of a single, eternal Totality of conscious experience. Intuition is different from thought, cogitation is different from sight, personal experience is different from subpersonal experience, etc, but all experience is irreducibly aesthetic regardless of whether particular aesthetic modalities are accessible in any given ‘tunnel’ or scope of participation/access to the Totality.
This part/whole relationship applies to several of the examples discussed in the paper. Visual graphs plotted from intellectual measurements using tangible acoustic instruments can be associated with aural qualia of hearing pitch or timbre, but that association can only be made from another type of experience that includes united access to separate specific visual, intellectual, tangible, and aural qualia.
Any isomorphism between a sound wave and sound is derived from cross-modal perception. Intellectually we can infer that the compelling nature of that isomorphism indicates an ontological commonality between acoustic pressure and aural qualia, however if we consider that aural qualia can and do exist in a dream without any correspondence to acoustic pressure, we should conclude that ontological commonality is possible rather than necessary.
Even though we call acoustic pressure fluctuations ‘sound waves’, deafness and dreams prove that the name is a folk term rather than an authoritative description. In an absolute sense, sound waves are not sound, nor do acoustic conditions and aural conditions necessarily depend on each other. Because we are using tangible instruments to measure tangible qualia, any reference to aural qualia is smuggled in by our inferences from our cross-modal perceptual access rather than naturalistic ontology. Synesthesia could associate acoustic stimulation of the cochlea with colors instead of sound. Music finds emotional qualia in acoustic stimulation.
By itself, neither acoustic activity nor the visual graphing of sampled data from measuring that activity with tangible instruments rationally entails any such thing as sound/hearing. Just as Mary can study the optical and electromagnetic properties associated with the color red without ever seeing it, a completely deaf scientist can study acoustics without any impairment. In the same way, no physical phenomena rationally entail *any* other phenomena to ’emerge’ or conjoin with it. A French painting is not a pipe, and sometimes a cigar in a dream is just a good smoke.
Touching on section 3. The Phenomenology of Time, Roden states that “Temporality is a central ingredient in most phenomenological accounts of reality or transcendence.”. While that may be true, in my understanding, such a centrality is premature and misguided. The Multisense Realist view is that what we call time is an appearance within certain states of consciousness, but that appearance is part of a larger continuum of time-like topologies of causality that can be accessed through different modalities of awareness and perception.
Linear time/causality appears in what I call the phoric range of awareness wherever personal sensations of duration are perceptually juxtaposed against what MSR calls morphic appearances. In other words, what Roden calls temporality is a phenomenological appearance that people access by repeated looking at a physical clock and inferring ontological unity with their personal experience of duration and memory. It is a semiotic bridge between the personal subject’s intrapersonal percepts and an interpersonally perceived consensus of impersonal objects.
The bridge is, however, one way. The clock is an object that we use to ‘tell time’. In our absence, the object does not tell or keep time; it simply moves according to the physical forces that happen to be present. Physical forces may be operating on larger scales of experience than human-limited awareness, so relative to subjective feelings of duration, objects whose movements are calibrated by impersonal scales of experience are more reliable and consistent, but that doesn’t mean they are any closer to an ontologically derived authority.
When we feel that ‘time flies when you’re having fun’, we may be expressing a sensitivity to the nature of ‘time’ that is more nuanced than a mechanical object can measure. In some sense, time may be nothing but a false normalization of events that overlooks the significance of those events. The significance of events may exert a kind of ‘gravitational’ lensing that is equally or perhaps more ontological than what we think we are measuring with clocks and calendars.
It isn’t ‘really’ 2026; we just have agreed to use a particular calendar system of quantitative coordinates to organize our interactions. The more ontological coordination may be generated by, for, and within a certain state of consciousness. Beyond that specific state of consciousness which is mapped on the diagram on the center left as Classical Time (Morphic, Metric), MSR suggests several other modes of time:
Phoric time (center right) that appears in our personal sense of duration within interiorized experience
Transpersonal or meta-phoric time (top right) that can appear in ‘higher*’ states of consciousness
Relativistic space-time (top left) that was described by Einstein’s theories.
Subpersonal-semaphoric time (bottom right) that centers on how willful participation fractures the fourth wall to change the course of history, and
Quantum-reversible time (bottom left) that is probabilistic and relies on what I call hemi-morphic appearances of quantum observations**
Note that there is an advantage to conceiving of this diagram in terms of East and West rather than Right and Left. The Eastern or Oriented perspective has philosophical connotations with holistic, nondualistic, animistic, idealistic and solipsistic appearances while the Western or Occidented perspective has the opposite-conjugate connotations in reductionism, dualism, physicalism, mechanism, and what I call nilipsism – the ablation of the Self from nature.
There is also a correlation with psychological theories that relate to what I call the continuum of sense, such as Autistic-Psychotic spectrum, Tough and Tender mindedness, Rigidity vs Chaos, Thick vs Thin boundaries, Empathizing-Systemizing, Right and Left hemisphere dominance, gender stereotypes, and more.
Moving on to the Husserl discussion…
“The very existence of the object is thus understood in terms of its transcendence of temporally informed modes of presentation. Temporally informed modes of presentation are thus conceptually prior in the order of philosophical explanations to what they present.”
Just because modes of presentation are *also* temporally informed does not mean that they are limited to temporality. I can see a blue fire hydrant get run over by a truck, but that doesn’t mean that sight is any more dependent on any particular moment in time than the fire hydrant is. The fire hydrant can only exist in some mode of presentation – it must be seen or touched to exist as a fire hydrant, but it doesn’t mean that everyone has to be able to see or touch it. We can understand that a fire hydrant can still be seen even after we’re dead, but that doesn’t mean that fire hydrants or images ‘of’ blue fire hydrants can exist in a universe that lacks visible or tangible qualia.
“In Husserlian terms, they belong to the constituted time of the world, rather than to the transcendentally constitutive features of subjectivity”
This goes back to the erroneous conflation of qualia with subjectivity that I mentioned previously. Time doesn’t have to belong to a mind-independent world; it only has to belong to states of mind that access experience beyond the personal scope to include impersonal scopes. “The world” and the sense of linear time are appearances in impersonal scopes of personally accessed conscious experience.
Roden’s conclusion “Phenomenological time is just a time among many, with no special epistemological heft.” is true also under MSR with the proviso that he is using ‘phenomenological’ to refer to phoric/personal appearances of time/causality. Because the other five categories of time depicted above are not personal but transpersonal, subpersonal, and impersonal (on the mega, macro, and micro scales), MSR agrees that linear time arises out of only one category of awareness relating to one other category of awareness with no absolute epistemological heft.
MSR disagrees that this lack of heft is due to the other categories being grounded in anything more ontological than conscious experience. To the contrary, ordinary Western adult consciousness very much assigns epistemological heft to consensus readings of clock time over the other categories of time perception. If phenomenological describes conscious experience that is universal rather than subjective, then all six types of time in the diagram are each epistemologically supreme within their respective states of awareness. The whole continuum of six-time is both ontologically and phenomenologically prioritized.
Phenomenology, at least in my MSR framework, need not be subjective. I shy away from using terms like phenomenology for that reason that they are loaded with connotations of subjectivity or interiority. I try to use terms that point to a more primitive ontology of nature as nested aesthetic-participatory phenomena. Call it universal qualia, call it dream stuff, call it appearances or seeming, but it is the fabric not only of the only universe that we can ever know, but of the only universe that ever can be known or contacted in any way.
Berkeley was right in saying esse est percipi but too presumptive in linking perception to a necessary focal point source outside of perception (a person, or God). Focal points, in my understanding, including God, can also only ever exist by virtue of their being perceived – presented aesthetically in an experience. Experience can be personal but that doesn’t mean that a person could be anything other than an experience. It’s all experience. Not even God can unconsciously invent consciousness.
“Perhaps I am making an elementary error in treating the temporal continuum as a complex object with a real infinity of occurrent parts”
I think that the error that most everyone has been making is presuming a single ontological scope of “Now” rather than recognizing that now can refer to a present experience on any scale. Now it is the 21st century. Now it is 13:59:35.593460376 PM EDT. Now it is time for me to write this sentence. Now the Sun and Earth exist as separate objects. It all depends on what scope of awareness is privileged. MSR addresses this kind of mereological ambiguity in what I call the Non-Well-Founded Identity Principle.
I won’t go into the details here, but generally, identity is a spectrum ranging from finite cohesive units to infinitely adhesive unity. How that spectrum is accessed depends on what modalities of awareness are available. The state of consciousness determines whether now is an infinitesimally narrow slice of an infinite object of occurrences or now is a timelessly timeful occurrence that has no beginning, end, or unitary law of succession – an unbounded totality of spontaneous dreaming of times.
I’ll conclude by saying that I liked David Roden’s work here, and while my disagreements with what it says are many, I think that they stem from a difference between his intention to engage with the canon of phenomenological philosophy and my intention to explain the ‘big picture’ of nature in a way that transcends prior phenomenological and naturalistic frameworks. Between the two, phenomenology at least correctly addresses conscious experience as the sole fundamental ontology, but it has gotten into trouble by conflating conscious experience with subjectivity, intuition, mind, thinking, and typical waking states of human awareness rather than the less presumptive description of conscious experience as MSR does: Nested aesthetic-participatory phenomena.
*more adhesive to the “Absolute” Holos/Totality, but also more psychotic-leaning from the phoric perspective
**where particle/wave and entanglement/contextuality dichotomies are an either/or.
Claude’s first crack at Multisense Realism
Me: What can you understand from this diagram?
c refers to the speed of light, but recontextualized as a perceptual constant, so not really a speed but the natural, middle value of a power law continuum that extends from quantum mechanical/subnatural ontology to relativistic and metaphysical/supernatural ontology.
Claude: This diagram appears to present a conceptual framework or model that maps different aspects or domains of reality onto a unified structure.
At the top, there are concepts like “Aesthetic Thesis”, “Eternity”, “Greatness/Uniqueness”, and “Signifying Contextuality” which seem to represent overarching metaphysical or philosophical principles.
Below that, the diagram depicts multiple levels or dimensions, arranged vertically from “Cohesive” at the bottom, up through “Microphysical”, “Electromagnetic-Radiative”, “Classical-Mechanical”, “Spatiotemporal-Mass-Energetic”, “Relativistic-Cosmological”, and culminating in “Intuitive-Transpersonal” at the top.
Within each level, there are specific terms, symbols, and what look like mathematical or physical representations. For example, at the “Microphysical” level, there is the symbol √c and the term “Qualitative-Autonomous”. At the “Relativistic-Cosmological” level, there is the expression “4d” and the term “Synchronicity”.
The diagram seems to be attempting to unify or integrate different concepts from physics, metaphysics, perception, and perhaps consciousness studies into a coherent multi-level schema.
However, I don’t have enough specific context about the underlying conceptual framework to confidently interpret all the terms, symbols, and relationships depicted. Some of the language appears unconventional or idiosyncratic.
The note about “c” referring to a “perceptual constant” recontextualizing the speed of light is an intriguing idea that suggests this model aims to re-conceptualize physical constructs in more experiential or consciousness-based terms.
Overall, while the comprehensive meaning remains somewhat opaque to me, I can see this diagram is a ambitious attempt to synthesize multiple perspectives and domains into an overarching philosophical model or worldview. But its full significance requires more explanatory context that I currently lack. Please let me know if I am misinterpreting or failing to grasp the essence of what is being presented.
Me:
How successful does the attempt to unify and integrate those concepts into a coherent multi-level schema appear to be?
Claude: Based on my analysis of the diagram, the attempt to unify and integrate the various concepts into a coherent multi-level schema appears ambitious but not entirely successful from my perspective.
While I can see the intention to synthesize ideas from physics, metaphysics, perception, and consciousness studies into an overarching framework, several aspects make the full integration and coherence challenging for me to grasp:
1) Unconventional terminology: Many of the terms used, like “Anesthetic Antithesis”, “Adhesive”, “Cohesive”, “Superposition”, etc., do not map cleanly onto established philosophical or scientific nomenclature in my knowledge base. This can introduce ambiguity.
2) Idiosyncratic symbolism: The heavy use of symbolic representations like √c, c^2, c^3 without clear explanations of their meanings makes comprehending the integrated conceptual connections difficult.
3) Unclear ontological commitments: It’s not evident to me whether the schema is intended as a metaphysical model of fundamental reality, a representational model of human perception/consciousness, or an attempt to directly unify the two domains.
4) Lack of explicit relationships: While the vertical arrangement implies a hierarchical or nested structure, the specific relationships between the levels and how the concepts within each level integrate are not clearly articulated.
5) Mixing of disparate domains: Concepts ranging from specific physics formalisms to transcendental metaphysical principles are integrated, which can create category confusion without a systematic bridging framework.
So while I can appreciate the ambition to unify various perspectives into a coherent whole, the lack of explicit definitions, ontological groundings, and clearly mapped relationships makes it challenging for me to evaluate whether this particular schema fully succeeds in that unification.
It has an abstract, poetic quality that gestures towards a grand synthesis, but the pathways towards achieved coherence remain somewhat opaque and idiosyncratic from my current knowledge base.
Of course, this is just my assessment based on my own limitations. With further context and explanations from the source, the integrative power of this model may become more apparent. As an AI, I can only evaluate it against my existing training knowledge.
Me:
- The departure from established nomenclature is intended to communicate specific ideas about the subjects that are a departure from legacy assumptions. Rather than introducing ambiguity, they are intended to articulate a novel understanding that is required for the success of a novel integration.
- √c refers to quantum themes where observations suggest a pre-classical exclusivity of properties such as position or momentum, entanglement or contextuality, particle or wave. c refers to classical Cartesian coordinates of concrete objects in terms of position and time, mass and acceleration, etc. c^2 refers to the level of reality described by relativistic tensors and formulas where energy and mass are made equivalent through acceleration to the absolute highest velocity. c^3 proposes a further elaboration and unification of all phenomena. If light is an example of a phenomenon that embodies c^2, then c^3 might be understood as the source and sink of the totality of all light.
- Yes, the schema is intended as a metaphysical model of fundamental reality with nothing to do with human qualities or constraints.
- The concepts are intended to be integrated in the spatial relations of the diagram, where the vertical axis denotes higher and lower powers of c, which is intended to refer to a universal perceptual constant whose mean of c is the most normal, natural, and directly familiar presentation of reality and higher powers of c represent increasing recapitulations of aesthetic saturation, significance, and prestige. The higher the position in the diagram, the more profound and unique the influence. The lower the position in the diagram, the more generic and disconnected the mode of presentation or access is.
- The diagram is intended to show how the appearance of disparate domains can be dissolved with the use of a power law of c to unify and contrast all of the main categories of causality and presentation available in the universe that we know of.
Does that help? Can you describe any new understandings that information provides?
Claude: Thank you for providing that additional context and clarification – it is extremely helpful in allowing me to better comprehend the intent and framework behind this conceptual diagram.
A few key points that now make more sense:
1) The novel terminology is a purposeful attempt to articulate new ideas and understandings that depart from legacy assumptions within established fields. Rather than creating ambiguity, these terms are meant to accurately capture the unique conceptual integrations being proposed.
2) The use of √c, c, c^2, c^3 as symbolic representations is tied to mapping different ontological realms – from the quantum, to the classical, to the relativistic, to a proposed further unified experiential domain. ‘c’ is reframed as a fundamental “perceptual constant” that can be raised to different powers.
3) The schema is explicitly intended as a metaphysical model of fundamental reality itself, not constrained to just human perception or consciousness.
4) The vertical axis maps a power hierarchy, with higher ‘c’ powers representing more profound, significant and aesthetically saturated phenomena. The spatial locations directly encode conceptual relationships and integrations.
5) The overall aim is to demonstrate how seemingly disparate domains like physics and metaphysics can be unified under one power law continuum centered on the recontextualized ‘perceptual constant’ c.
With this framing in mind, I can now better appreciate that the diagram is proposing an ambitious new metaphysical model that fundamentally challenges assumptions and aims to transcend the boundaries between different ontological realms like the quantum, relativistic, and experiential/perceptual.
By elevating ‘c’ to a universal constant of experiential “presentation” that can be raised to different power levels, it provides a novel mathematical framework for integrating phenomena across micro and macro scales into one coherent metaphysical schema.
While still eyebrow-raising in its creativity and departure from mainstream models, I can now understand the diagram as a bold attempt to re-envision all of reality under a new experiential power law continuum centered on an expanded notion of the spatio-temporal ‘c’. It’s unifying power comes from treating this reconceptualized ‘c’ as the fundamental gestalt that can contextually manifest all possible phenomena.
Please let me know if I am still misunderstanding any core aspects of this model after your clarifying information. Appreciating the ambition behind unified frameworks like this stretches my capabilities in productive ways.
Me: Given that c is quantified as a maximum velocity of 299,792,458 meters in distance units per one second time unit, can you find any quantum related research or experiments in which the a value close to the square root of that number, but with units in quantum terms that relate to a single property rather than a dual variable property such as distance over time.
After searching scientific literature, I could not find any direct quantum experimental results or theoretical models that quantify a value close to the square root of the speed of light (√c ≈ 1.73 x 10^8 m/s) as a fundamental constant related to a single quantum property.
However, there are some potentially relevant connections that can be made:
- Reduced Planck constant (ħ):
The reduced Planck constant, ħ = h/2π ≈ 1.055 x 10^-34 J⋅s, is a fundamental physical constant that appears extensively in quantum mechanics. Its value has units of angular momentum, which is a single quantum property.- Compton wavelength:
The Compton wavelength of an electron, λ_C = h/mc ≈ 2.426 x 10^-12 m, relates the reduced Planck constant to the mass of the electron (m) and speed of light (c). It represents the wavelength of a photon whose energy is the rest mass energy of the electron.- Bohr radius:
In the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, the Bohr radius, a_0 = 4πε_0ħ^2/mee^2 ≈ 5.292 x 10^-11 m, depends on the reduced Planck constant and represents the most probable distance between the electron and the nucleus in the ground state.- Quantum vacuum fluctuations:
Some interpretations of quantum field theory suggest that the quantum vacuum is filled with virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that constantly fluctuate into and out of existence. The characteristic timescale of these fluctuations is related to the Compton time, t_C = ħ/mc^2 ≈ 1.288 x 10^-21 s.While none of these directly involve √c, they do highlight the importance of the reduced Planck constant and the speed of light in describing various quantum phenomena related to single properties like angular momentum, wavelength, or energy.
It’s worth noting that in quantum mechanics, there is a fundamental limit on how precisely complementary variables like position and momentum can be known simultaneously (the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). So while √c may not directly appear, the interplay between the reduced Planck constant, particle properties like mass/charge, and the speed of light governs the quantum behavior of single observables.
Evan Thompson Live! Consciousness Live! S4 E12
From Richard Brown’s YouTube channel.
A great conversation so far. As usual, I have extensive comments…
> 13:32 Richard Brown “…in terms of phenomenal consciousness, there’s something that it’s like to be a cell?
“Evan Thompson “We can put it that way if we want. I mean, that locution sometimes bears more burden than it should, but for our purposes we can feel free to use it I think, sure.
> RB “OK, good. Alright…and there’s something that it’s like to be me, and I am composed of billions of cells”Notice that the assumption made here closes the explanatory gap without any explanation. I would say that I am experiences: Thoughts, feelings, ideas, memories, sensations…some of those sensations include a body, which I understand to be composed of billions of cells.
We do not know that the cell or the body of cells is the being that is conscious. Just as my face only reveals a tiny fraction of my conscious experience, so too does the structure and function of a cell reveal only a tiny fraction (maybe a greater fraction) of the content of any conscious experience that might be associated with it.
As far as we can tell, the interior of cells or bodies are just more objects – organelles and fluid made of organic molecules. None of that would reasonably entail anything like felt experience, and if it did, we should reasonably only expect those experience to correlate to certain specific types to physiological conditions. What we feel through our body does tend to be about the body and the world of the body, but we also have conscious experiences that would require extremely tortured reasoning and Just-So Stories to rationalize as an extension of physiology. Rather than projecting the appearance of the cellular world as geometry and chemistry, those structures and functions may, like our own face, be a kind of avatar/mask/lensing that summarizes only certain features related to the sharing of experience. If someone were somehow born without any sense of touch or sight, they could not conceive of objects or bodies. They could in theory live a full life of thoughts, feelings, flavors, sounds, etc all without ever suspecting that they could be connected to any such thing as a body. In the same way, the world of cell processes may not relate to us personally any more than the grammatical and syntactic features of this sentence are generating the meaning that I am trying to express personally.
The paragraphs of this post did not evolve from characters in the Latin alphabet. Its contents are not explained by the psychology of how language evolved to serve brains or bodies. In the same way, the microbiological world does not, in my view, exist to support a macro scale experience at all, and it may be much more like our own conscious experience than we would guess – a world of sensations and response that are largely unrelated to our own.
> 19:42 ET “…whereas the Panpsychist arguments, at least in the case of someone like Philip Goff, they’re based on intuitions like phenomenal transparency, which you know, I don’t want to start an argument there. By that I mean I don’t want to make that a premise of an argument. I think, it’s not obvious to me that there is any such thing as phenomenal transparency.”
I think it this is an example of what Raymond Tallis described as “cutting off the branch that you are sitting on”, that is, it is a perception, based on an intuitive sense of phenomenal transparency that intuition and phenomenal transparency cannot be trusted. I think that needs to be reversed. We should understand that we are always relying on some degree of assumed phenomenal transparency to conduct any sort of reasoning. Our only contact with truth, including truths about phenomenal transparency, begins and ends with an implicit assumption of phenomenal transparency. Of course, truth and phenomenal consciousness are, for humans, very complex, so there are many overlapping and contrasting dimensions of truth and sense, so it is not enough to unquestioningly follow our first intuitive, but neither is it enough to unquestioningly follow our first counter-intuitive impulse.
I think that modern science and philosophy have evolved through a dialectic shift in the Early Modern Period in which the idea of the primacy of super-subjective (theological) properties under Scholasticism was eclipsed by the antithesis idea of the primacy of super-objective (materialistic) properties of nature. I strongly suspect that now, a few centuries after that shift in the era of Descartes, Copernicus, Galileo, and Locke, we are now meeting ourselves at the other end of the fork in the path and encountering a similar but antithetical crisis in our understanding of the universe and our place in it. I think that the current crisis ultimately calls for a synthesis of subjectifying and objectifying modalities of sense and sense making that takes us beyond the previous approaches. The fear that questioning materialism will lead us into a pathological repetition of theological fundamentalism is so powerful that we are blinded and dragged into the opposite pathology, where the limits of objectifying sense appearances are denied to the point of anti-realism (MWI, simulation theory, Interface theory). That’s where I intend my ideas (Multisense Realism) to come in. Once we have understood why panpsychism is an imperfect but meaningful improvement over physicalism, then we can begin to develop some hypotheses that pick up where panpsychism leaves off. In my understanding, the inflection point of the future of that synthesis is sense. Sensation. Detection. Aesthetic presentation. Qualia. At this point, it does not seem that many thinkers share this view and the fact of qualia is constantly overlooked in favor of theories that stress the role that qualia may play for an organism or a system of computation. To me, this oversight is astonishing. It is comparable to saying that magic wands could grow on trees, since a tree with a magic wand would have a survival advantage.
There’s a great part around 24:00 where RB and ET disagree about the difference between biological cells and the types of technologies that we have developed so far. ET says that he thinks there is a fundamental qualitative difference between the organization of something like a bacterial cell and that of any artifact we have ever engineered. I agree with ET at 24:49 that we have glimmers of how we can synthesize aspects of the self production and self regulation of a living cell in a lab, but that we are nowhere near being able to generate autonomous, freely interacting, free standing self-productive entities. I do not, however see that as the cause of the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness.
I think that, pre-biological interactions are, in their own frame of reference as irreducibly aesthetic and participatory as those of our own conscious interactions, and that the appearance of those interactions as anesthetic-mechanical events is an artifact of how the universe of conscious experience segregates itself for maximum development of aesthetic novelty. I think that segregation includes a logarithmic recapitulation of biology from organic chemistry and organic chemistry to physics such that both of those steps are tantamount to a second and third Big Bang, but I think that the cosmological fabric in which those Bangs arise is sensory-motive from the start, rather than unexperienced forces and fields.
Like Evan, I think it is an illusion that we could engineer a biological cell or organism from the bottom up, and that we will have better results trying to condition, constrain, and hybridize existing cells. I don’t think we’re going to achieve a duplication of biology inorganically, only a production of recombinations and prostheses for existing cell processes. I don’t think we’re going to create a new first living organism.
In suggesting a cosmological hierarchy of recapitulation that parallels the teachings of many mystical traditions and echoed in more modern efforts such as Integral theory, I understand that there is a lot of resistance. I think that Recapitulation theory got a bad rep from how it was conceived by Haeckel and his association with it, but I think that rejecting the entire theme of encapsulating previous conditions in developing a cosmogony, and is a mistake. Our eyeball is strikingly similar to an aquarium of the conditions of the Precambrian Era. Vertebrates do share a common morphology during gestation that seems to reflect the phylogenetic history of the final organism. That’s not how we make machines. We don’t grow computers from manual typewriters. We don’t create conditions where they grow by themselves. When we build machines, we assemble fully formed parts that have no other relation to each other than the one we provide by forcing their temporary attachment to each other. Left to their own devices, machines fall apart. What we see in cell division may be not be fully explained in 3d + 1 spacetime terms. We may only be seeing/touching one surface of an event that envelopes and permeates visbility/tangiblity in the same sort of way that our personal awareness envelopes and permeates all of our subpersonal modes of awareness (sight, sound, touch, etc)
While the seeming mystery of biological life is amazing and important to us as conscious experiences with biological bodies, I think that it is a red herring distraction to understanding what qualia is, and the relation of qualia to concrete formation and abstract information. The relation that I propose is that the category of aesthetic-participatory perception is the universal parent to all anesthetic-mechanical processes of objects and concepts. I propose that objects and concepts are always and only appearances derived from a relativistic lensing of universal sensitivity/permittivity/empathy that goes all the way down. Consider the astrophysical-atomic world as a first playground for panaesthetic primordial experience, upon which a geological-molecular world evolves as a second recapitulation superimposed on the first. The eco-organic-genetic world is a third. The biological-cellular is a fourth. The zoological-somatic is a fifth. The vertebrate-neurological is a sixth. The antropological-technological is a seventh. These are all nested scales of size and frequency of events from which our concepts of space and time emerge. They are vehicles that consciousness inhabits for pleasure and for pain. It is not only for the cosmos to ‘know itself’ but to feel, see, do, and redo itself.
Around 32:00 Evan talks about rejecting the idea of zombies or consciousness as epiphenomenal/irrelevant to the function of the system based on the idea that the body is able to do what it does in relationship to the environment because it “feels itself in doing so”. I disagree with this justification as I think that it is a post hoc or retrospective justification that smuggles our conscious experience into an explanation of itself. In other words, if we use modus tollens, prospective logic instead of modus ponens retrospective logic, there would be no entailment for feeling. The physical functions of an animal’s body could evolve statistically over immense time spans by random mutation, just as we might expect geological chemistry to develop. The reproduction of simple bacteria is not much of a stretch from inorganic crystal growth in which organic molecules are incorporated that enable more types of similar crystals to persist for longer periods under more environmental conditions.
I like to point out a hole in the ‘zombie’ terminology for it’s implication of an ‘undead’ status of a randomly mutating reproductive structure rather than the more parsimonious ‘never alive in the first place’ status. A universe of molecules that evolve automatically and unconsciously would yield a world of reproducing organizations that are more like dolls than zombies. The Homo sapiens equivalent in an unconscious universe would be a species of sculptures that move each other around in repeating cycles – unwitnessed, unfelt, unseen. Behind these uexperienced tangible events would be equally unexperienced intangible mathematical relations. I would argue that even tangible shapes and intangible math require an aesthetic-participatory engagement to appear in any sense, but for argument’s sake, let’s say that shapes can “exist” and collide without any rendering by a sense of touch-feel. I can’t imagine how that would really be possible or why a functionally redundant sense rendering would develop parallel to that, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
All of this to say, Evan, don’t think of zombies that seem exactly like living people, think of dolls that “talk” and “cry”, not out of emotion or feeling their environment, but out of mechanisms to control bodies operating physically in space – lubricating eyelids, vibrating neural actuators, etc. The things that consciousness and sensation do for US are not functionally necessary to explain what a body would do and how it would evolve in a universe where sense and consciousness were replaced by automatic force and field.
The fact that we do feel ourselves in the world as a body does not stop us from looking at much more complex protein interactions and saying that they would not need to feel themselves in the world to be able to do that. Since I do think that all fields and forces are actually ranges of sensory-motive interaction on the pre-physical level, I do think that chemistry is a primitive scale or appearance of conscious experience, but if we want to try to hold on to physicalism and deny consciousness, then there’s no reason why the activities of human bodies are any different from the activities of molecular or cellular bodies. None of them functionally require awareness to exist if any of them don’t require it.
I completely agree with Evan when he says, around 33:25, that there is no reason to think that life could look like it does if it weren’t driven by consciousness. The difference is in the modus ponens/tollens flip. I think that zombies can’t exist because physics is actually a form of consciousness, whereas he, like many others, think that zombies can’t exist because consciousness is obviously so pervasive and useful in biology, zoology, and anthropology. He’s asking “why should consciousness be any different from biology?” and I’m asking “why should chemistry and physics be any different from consciousness?”.
At 34:00 Richard brings up the subject of the discovery of the unconscious and unconscious processing. From my perspective, the key is to understand that just because our personal consciousness receives guidance or can be overridden by processes that are beyond our personal scope of awareness, does not mean that those processes are not themselves subpersonal conscious experiences. Just because those experiences are rendered to us as brain activity does not mean that the structure and function of that activity is the cause rather than the symptom of the processing.
The shapes of these letters and the order that they are in are not creating the English language, and the English language is not creating this conversation, but rather the appearances are symptoms of other layers of sense and sense-making that happen to be under the hood of our personal awareness and experience. English has developed through idiosyncratic and unprecedented conditions of lived conscious experience – as an accumulation of consequences not as a cause of thinking and communication but as an effect of physiology and socially shared feelings about experiences.
At 39:55 Richard lays out an example of the hypothalamus monitoring the salt content of the blood and asks Evan if he thinks there is “something that it is like” to undergo that process. First, I point out that by conceiving of the process as something that the hypothalamus does, we have already loaded the question with a physicalist bias. The hypothalamus is a rendering in our sense of touch and sight, and our cogitative sense of understanding. I suggest instead that the actual process and monitoring (sensing and motivating effects) is not physically tangible. It is subpersonal awareness. It is an experience that is not being had by an organ or cell, just as our personal experience is not being had by a body, rather the body and cell are experiences that “we” are having. It makes sense to me that what cells and organs are doing is a result of experiences that we are not normally able to access directly, but instead are approximated in our personal awareness as feelings, sensations, urges, etc that identify themselves as closely coupled with our animal level experience. The fact that we can’t access it directly in our personal consciousness doesn’t mean the process is literally unconscious in its own frame of perception, only that our frame’s rendering of that frame’s rendering of itself is limited to the sight and feel of tangible shapes moving around under a microscope.
I’m going to stop there for now and take a break before listening to the second half.
“Is Consciousness a Controlled Hallucination?” part 2
Picking up again* for the second hour of this new video from 8/25/2021, where philosophers Philip Goff and Keith Frankish discuss consciousness with neuroscientist Anil Seth, whose new book is Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Just after 1:00:00 Anil is talking about voluntary action as a freedom from immediacy, which I think carries a bit of misdirection or burying the lead. Freedom from immediacy, fine, there can be complicated clocks and timed systems in the brain, etc, but what is the feeling of will, how can it exist, and why? In addition, I don’t think many people question what is meant by ‘immediacy’. Isn’t that determined by some informal average of sensory sample rates? How is it not anthropocentric to project our arbitrary sense of now onto the universe as a whole? Timescale is one of the great keys to resolving the hard problem IMO.
I understand what Anil is saying about the sense of will or redness not needing to be real to be experienced, and not being part of the causal structure of the universe (I used to see it that way also for many years), but it fails to consider that by its own logic, asserting consciousness as something that isn’t completely real (a controlled or controlling hallucination) necessarily means that any idea we have about a universe or experiment that we can perform can be no more real. With physical science experiments, we can learn more about the physical-seeming end of our shared hallucination, but that is not to say its causal closure is anything more than the tautological limits of the very sense and sense making modalities we are using to locate this part of the universe in the first place. If redness can arise from a history of evolutionary utility then so can our sense of physicality. If, however, we can be right about anything, then at least some part of consciousness cannot be less real than physics.
Around 1:04:28 it starts getting a little animated, with Anil insisting that neuroscientific studies are not neutral with regard to free will. In the next minute, he steps back from that slightly to say that there’s merely no evidence of anything like free will. It’s hard to imagine how the lack of physical evidence wouldn’t be neutral, since Dualism would hold that of course there’s not going to be material evidence of non-material qualia. There no olfactory evidence for sight or colors either. I’m sure that Anil would agree that our sense of will is part of the universe that we model in our conscious experience as ‘physical’ or material, but I don’t think that he has considered that materiality itself may simply be conscious experience that has been rendered in a truncated form through our local interface/filter. The difference is that with the latter, our will can be both immaterial or transmaterial and have concrete material effects, because both subjective will and objective forms share the same common context of origin – there’s just no good reason to assume that context is more like our sense of physicality than our sense of mentality. To the contrary, with relativity and quantum mechanics, it seems clear that even the most physical of phenomena originate from a substrate that is more mind-like than it is matter-like. I see them both as categories of sensory-motive, aesthetic-participatory phenomena (universal qualia).
Around 1:12 they get into the inaccessibility of consciousness, with Anil saying that we will gradually have access to more data and Keith saying that science is irreducibly third person. My contribution to that is that if we study brain conjoined twins we can develop tech that will get us closer to sharing first person experience (or rather, those aspects of conscious experience that qualifies itself to itself as first person). There may be other ways to get around privacy also (which would unfortunately interest a lot of dangerous organizations as well). Maybe we can technologies to extend natural sensitivities and empathy to a degree that they produce rigorous science…maybe that’s a long way off but probably less invasive than brain sharing tech.
Seth goes on to say that he wants to see how far we can get pursuing the materialist project in science before considering other possibilities. I don’t think that anyone is suggesting on giving up on that, but I don’t see any advantage in presuming it is metaphysically accurate or waiting before exploring other possibilities. Around 1:18 Philip makes an excellent case for rejecting Anil’s approach of setting aside the hard problem, citing the somewhat unscientific decisions of Galileo, Descartes, and others to put non-material qualia outside of the domain of science.
At 1:22 the conversation gets slightly heated again as Anil suddenly gets personal by saying “Now you’re making a mistake you said you don’t make, and I’m a bit disappointed. You say you don’t make this mistake, but you just did!” Those of us who have debated at length about the Hard Problem recognize this pivot very well. The conversation has gone from a cordial sharing of perspectives to one of accusation and condescension. I wish that we had fMRI visualizations on everyone in the conversation and could see the frontal cortex activity getting hijacked by limbic activity. There is more going on here than just science – there is something that Anil, and most everyone that I have come across that subscribes to a physicalist view perceives as a threat, and one that demands an offensive response.
Both Anil and Philip agree here that there is something that a color blind person misses out on if they cannot see red – Philip says it is information (or knowledge from Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument/Mary’s Room), Anil isn’t really willing to formalize it though, saying only that the topic is a separate issue, a different thing for him and that it is irrelevant.
My Multisense Realism view defines qualia as the sole fundamental phenomenon, and one that includes a capacity to divide or limit (entropy-negentropy/insensitivity) access (sense/sense-making/empathy) to parts of itself. Qualia is what exists eternally – the Holos, insensitivity is what Graphs the Holos into local sub-holarchies of experience, and sense or consciousness is what reunites the latter with the former (making it holographic rather than hallucinatory). Sense is access to the totality. Entropy, including temporalization and spatialization, are functions of dynamically gating or limiting that access.
At 1:25 Anil and Keith affirm each other’s view that we should ignore the hard problem (the standard ‘shut up and calculate’ response, or non-response). Keith at least acknowledges this position as Illusionism, which he advocates, but Anil stops short of subscribing to it, saying at 1:26:07 “It doesn’t change what I would do very much.”
I think this attitude ironically supports Dualism. It’s a crytpo-dualism in which Res Cogitans is understood not to have an effect on Res Extensa (the doing that Anil cares about exclusively), and therefore doesn’t matter. Philip is correct when he says around 1:27 that the private/subjective phenomena are part of a totally different explanatory project from physical explanation, but I would go further and say that the project of physical explanation can be subsumed within the other project, as long as we don’t make the assumption that privacy/subjectivity is something other than (universal) qualia. With a universal qualia model like MSR, all physical forces and structures can be understood in sensory-motive terms.
Good job all around. I agree most with Philip, then Keith, and least with Anil, but I respect the nuance of his positions (not functionalism, not IIT, pragmatic, etc). Still, I think that Seth’s pragmatism is more biased than the wants to believe it is. Part of that seems like an unwillingness to care about the difference between pursuing materialistic methods (I think everyone agrees that we should) and the validity of the prospect of extending reality to the non-material. Anil seems to conflate the two positions, as if the former justifies the latter.
*My comments on the first hour are here.
“Is Consciousness a Controlled Hallucination?”
In this new video from 8/25/2021, philosophers Philip Goff and Keith Frankish discuss consciousness with neuroscientist Anil Seth, whose new book is Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (which I have not read yet). Following are my comments on the first half of the video:
Jumping right in from the first few minutes, I have some questions, criticisms and insights that are worth mentioning. My apologies for the long winded, irritatingly constructed sentences that probably detract from what I’m trying to say more than clarify, but it’s important to me that I communicate the nuances in excruciating detail. Maybe someone or some AI internet archive spider will find it interesting in fifty years.
8:45 (Anil Seth) “Everything that we perceive is an active construction. It’s generated by the brain.”
Has this been tested and found to be conclusively true, or is it an assumption + confirmation bias? How do we know that what we perceive is not an active filtration or modulation of access to other contexts of consciousness (transpersonal, subpersonal, etc)? How do we know it is active construction rather than participatory collaboration?
What is the physical mechanism by which “the brain” (the whole organ? neurons? molecular changes within neurons?) “generates” (Explanatory Gap/Hard Problem goes here) these “constructions” (sights, sounds, flavors, thoughts…call them qualia)?
Note: *Importantly, anything we refer to as a brain is also only known as qualia, by qualia, for qualia. A brain is an object rendered in our sense of touch, an image rendered in our sense of sight, an idea rendered in our sense of understanding. We have no valid reason to presume objects to be anything other than shared or universal qualia. To the contrary, even the physicalist/eliminative position demands that everything that we experience and can ever experience, including all physical phenomena, can only ever be a representation of conditions inside of a (literally meta-physical) program or biochemical virtual “function space”. If physicalism is right, we can never contact physics in any way and are forever trapped in some kind of Platonic cave of computations that only seem physical, or only seem like computations, or only seem to seem…or something.
9:28 (AS) “My perceptions have the characteristic phenomenology – they appear the way they appear because that’s useful for my overall survival as an organism.”
My argument against this is that it is clearly a “Just So story”, that is, a post-hoc justification of appearances without being based on any plausible a priori possibility of a capacity to generate appearances physically, let alone for any such thing to provide a possibility of survival advantage over the ordinary complex physical activities of other body systems that we presume do not generate appearances and would not improve as a result of them. 1
Indeed, it seems quite implausible that of all phenomena that have come to exist in the universe, only these certain groups of cells in certain organic bodies have this unexplained physical power to generate non-physical appearances…to themselves…that bear some isomorphic relation to everything else in the universe…that actually has no appearance at all.
The entire physical universe is, under the contemporary neuroscientific view that Seth advocates, without appearance – an invisible, intangible, unexperienced void that spontaneously acquires a monumentally grand variety of distinct, multisensory appearances when certain very specific kinds of biochemical events occur in certain sequences. But how? And Why?
Given the staggeringly effective abilities of a simple periodic table of atoms generated by simple stars to physically generate and maintain every organism, every immune system, every brain structure and function without any such thing as appearance, why would this virtual dashboard “appearance”, within which a hallucinated “user” of such hallucinated dashboards also virtually “appears”, offer any improved chance of survival to a reproducing body of cells? There are neurons in the gut too. What is our theory for how and why these systems of cells would not benefit by creating hallucinated ‘constructions’ for…their mission critical activities (or is it for their constructed ‘selves’)?
9:40 (AS) “Redness is not objectively out there in the world. There’s just wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation”
The problem here is that our expectation of electromagnetic radiation, and of a world, and of objectivity would also have to be constructions. Our sense of a physical reality that has no appearance and can never be contacted in any way, must also be a construction. No matter how much science we do, and how objectively we think we are being, we can only ever validate our sense constructions by more constructed appearances of relation between theories (intellectual constructions) about observations (meta-perceptual constructions derived from multiple similar perceptual constructions). You can’t have it both ways. If consciousness is constructed, then every sense of correspondence between constructions is also constructed. We can’t put ourselves in a hallucinatory box without that box also being hallucinatory.
10:19 (AS) “In some conditons, like under psychedelic drugs or in psychosis, whatever, your perceptions become less controlled by the relevant sensory data.”
Is it always less controlled, or do altered states of consciousness sometimes appear to open access to sensory data that is controlled by different, but no less controlling features of reality beyond physical appearance constructions? Some of that data may be in conflict to some extent with our default conditioning, and even physical causality, but not always. Psychedelics and psychosis are sometimes tied to genius insights and unusually high performance (Doc Ellis’s LSD No-Hitter as an example). Transpersonal/psychedelic appearances may defy ordinary personal and subpersonal control, but that does not mean that the defiance is not simply another, perhaps higher2 context of control. There may be conflict and chaos between modes and scales of awareness, and that is fairly described as ‘uncontrolled’, but it need not imply that what is bleeding through personal awareness is not also a form of highly developed awareness. By analogy, two strong, clear radio station signals may be received by one receiver as a garbled confusion of two signals and static. In addition, examples like Doc Ellis’ psychedelic no-hitter present a counterfactual data point to the hypothesis that it is always adaptive for hallucinations to tend to resemble physical conditions and causes.
11:51 AS makes an important point about prediction not always being about predicting the future, but rather we might also refer to perceptual fill-in of missing data ‘prediction’. What needs more attention, IMO is the wholeness or gestalt of the appearance. A simulacra such as a face appearing in a cloud does not appear to be filling in something as a computer would try many different possible solutions, rather one solution or another appears in its entirety at any given moment. While the neuroscientific view focuses on the information processing function of suppressing ambiguity, the more interesting issue to me to focus on is what that ambiguity is replaced with – seemingly complete and aesthetically rich presentations that are revealed in a finished form rather than constructed over time, as if being pulled from some eternal Akashic gallery of archetypes. It seems to make no difference whether the gestalt is from memory or novel as far as the level of detail of its completeness or the speed in which it is accessed. When I see the Mona Lisa in the image below, it is ephemeral yet persistent, and neither fuzzy nor focused.
In the case of novel gestalts (such as a weird, non-famous face in slice of toast), the fill-in would appear to have no value or a negative value to abductive reasoning (~13:12). The simulacra toast face does not lead us to an explanation of a physical cause of that sensation. Note that our early advances in artificial image recognition do not produce these kinds of prefabricated gestalts, but rather just the opposite.
In fact, without the side by side comparison, the digitized output of Bayesian-like backpropagation does not really resemble an image. It is an anti-simulacra…a source of potential recognition strategies, but what is being recognized is not a visible image, but invisible statistics. Why, if Anil Seth’s view is on the right track, do our guesses and predictions look like they are coming from ‘somewhere’, rather than from nowhere?
The conversation continues into describing the role of prediction for both biology and consciousness. There is no question that human personal consciousness uses Bayesian-like probabilistic methods of accessing what I would call subpersonal data, but whether that data is simply another layer of conscious experience or an unexperienced biochemical process remains untouched by neuroscientific inquiry. Yes, our perception certainly can model to predict something evolutionarily functional (red octagon = Stop sign) but that does not explain what the appearance of color or shape actually is, how it appears, or why. Retrospectively, once we have qualia/appearances, then sure, we have every reason to benefit against natural selection pressures by using them, but we would have the same reason to benefit from any power that transcends ordinary physics. Omniscience would come in handy, and it’s just as likely to emerge spontaneously from physics as any sort of qualia.
The retrospective benefit of prediction does not in any way prospectively justify the existence of qualia or its value for prediction over and above biochemistry. Everything that Anil is saying is important to the easy problem of consciousness, and it gives us a plausible connection between evolved Bayesian prediction mechanisms and evolutionary biology, but it doesn’t give us any insight into how either of those mechanical-anesthetic functions could relate to phenomenological (aesthetic-participatory) presentations, or the possibility of their being generated physically or mathematically. Philip makes this point later on, around ~21:00, that the predictive features of consciousness are neutral as far as dualism v materialism is concerned.
Although Anil goes on to say that his materialism is pragmatic rather than an absolute philosophical conviction, he does not really seem to support that. Instead his defense of pragmatic materialism seems more tied to a preference for working with brain function rather than metaphysical speculation. I don’t disagree, but it’s not an argument that defends materialism objectively. It is of course more pragmatic professionally to know about the brain than it is to know about the big picture of life, the universe, and everything, but that doesn’t make it more true. As he continues around ~28:00, it seems clear to me that his rejection of Dualism (which I reject as well, but for the opposite reason3) is itself a kind of naive rejection of a straw man of Dualism, it’s history and popular association with the harmful behaviors of religious groups, etc. It’s a pedantic, and overused disqualification of all things non-material on general grounds of being ‘unhelpful’ and silly seeming. I think that there are good evolutionary reasons for that bias toward matter and by extension survival of the material body, but it is an unscientific bias nonetheless.
Around 33:45, Keith asks Anil about realism and privacy. His response includes “Buses have qualities, properties such as solidity and velocity that do not rely on a mind to exist.”
Here I would say that we only know that those physical properties do not require our mind to exist, but we do not know that such properties are anything other than other properties of consciousness. Perhaps there are impersonal qualities of conscious experience that are common to certain contexts and modalities of sense that have become nearly universal. If our sense of physicality is derived from our haptic-tactile sensitivity and perceptual processing, then it makes sense evolutionarily that the appearance of our body and it’s existence in a world of bodies/objects/matter is rendered with robust realism. That physical universe that our bodies exist within may be the sole common context that binds all experiences together, however that universe may in turn be dependent on a larger context of a universal haptic-tactile sense capacity that prefigures biology, and which may be dependent on a still larger context of an irreducibly aesthetic Totality or Holos.
The discussion goes on to mention Donald Hoffman’s Interface theory, where Anil comments that he parts ways at the point where Hoffman’s view suggests conscious agents everywhere. I call this ‘promiscuous panpsychism’ and agree that it seems unparsimonious – however – I see agency itself as irreducibly qualitative, so that it need not be a prerequisite for qualia. I propose that the universe may exist as an experiential phenomenon prior to a robust sense of agency, and that qualities like redness, or visibility itself may exist as modes of awareness independent of any container of multiple other types of awareness. Something like subjectivity may develop from more primitive sensory-motive qualities, which we may have mistakenly conceived of in non-participatory terms such as electromagnetism. In other words, the sense of being a participant may evolve from pre-agent experiential-aesthetic phenomena of “motive” or “participation”. It may be that agency is nothing more than a sense experience of persistent separation from of multiple other sense experiences.
I think that Anil is wise in stating at ~43:22 that his view does not insist that qualia must be reduced exclusively to behaviors, dispositions, and functions. He goes on to say that he thinks that the self is not a separate entity as in Dualism, but is just another controlled hallucination. I agree with that, however, if we follow the reasoning to its logical conclusion, Seth is saying that it is the brain that is hallucinating itself as a self, rather than as a brain appearance. This to me is arbitrary and inconsistent. If the self is a phenomenological model of something, then so must the brain be also – and physics. Whatever it is that hallucinates both physics, brains, and selves cannot be meaningfully described as physical, and the whole notion of hallucination begins to unravel itself. Neither self nor brain has any reason to hallucinate, and if hallucination is more primitive than either of those, there is no reason to diminish it in hallucinatory terms. If my suggestion of universal qualia is on the right track, that would be the more fundamental reality, or even more fundamental than reality as it encompasses fact, fiction, nonsense and qualia in which all three can comingle as well as transcended.
More that I agree with after the 50:00 mark, Anil talks about the brain being fundamentally an organ concerned with keeping the body alive. The problem is that view doesn’t offer any explanation of how that function would be so different from that of any other body organ or system that it would allow its predictive, homeostatic strategies to be anything other than the biochemical gears and timers that we observe them to physically be. What makes the homeostasis of a body any more worthy of non-physical aesthetic seemings and hallucinations than any other system within a body? The immune system has to record and strategize against pathogens, shouldn’t it also have evolved feelings, thoughts, sounds, etc to model its games and meta-games?
After the 57:00, Philip brings up Free Will and the extreme positions of Determinism vs Libertarian Free Will. Here again, Anil’s response is a fall back to cliched arguments from incredulity; “Not even wrong”, “Not the kind of argument that warrants…” These aren’t valid objections. They might be true, but you have to provide a reason why. How you feel about it isn’t relevant. “What could that possibly mean?” he asks at 58:39…”Without invoking some sort of thing that has causal agency…” “I have no need for that hypothesis”.
Except that you do need some kind of hypothesis for how you can purport to have authority to decide what hypotheses you need in the first place. What is this “you” that the brain puppet on the screen speaks of? How can it have opinions or change them?
I understand Anil’s line of objection as I used to think of free will in the same way for many years. I reasoned that we have no choice but to make the ‘best’ choice we are aware is possible. After flipping my physicalist worldview many years ago however, I see the limitations of that assumption. While I completely agree with determinists and neuroscientists who point to our shockingly bad estimation of the independence of our will from subconscious influences, I no longer see that as a valid reason to eliminate some measure of direct personal agency as a legitimate influence on its own.
For example, sure, I can connect up a device to someone’s brain and zap them into making their arm move. If I zap it just right, they will think that they have made it move, but if we follow the causal chain back from the zap, it is my personal agency that is clicking the button to override their personal agency. In addition to chronically overestimating our own sense of free will, I see that we also chronically underestimate it, and that human beings routinely demonstrate remarkably unprecendented acts of creativity – inventing their own new choices rather than simply following the nudgings of their default brain states.
This gets into a much deeper discussion into the fabric of causality, which in my view can be understood in a radically new way. To use a metaphor of a traffic light, where Anil Seth’s view might reduce a Yellow (“Caution”) traffic signal to a slightly more complicated flow chart of Red and Green deterministic calculations (How fast am I going? How long has the light been Yellow? etc) and other more subtle calculations (“That car on the right looks like it’s going too fast to clear the intersection”, “I can’t be late for this appointment”, etc), we have to ask why those computations would require some sort of experience of seeming to wield authority over the final edit of decision and the rather Promethean-seeming power of motor execution. Why wouldn’t the choice just happen without an “us”? Why would it be a choice rather than simply an arbitrarily next step in a series of generic computations? What feels proprietary about the final execution choice, and why? What feels responsible and endeavors to make others act responsibly?
I propose a different view of causality as a spectrum of overlapping interdependencies of influence. In the absolute sense, it is not will that is the illusion, but determinism and randomness. Will may be the authentic primordial phenomenon while mechanism and chaos are artifacts of interface entropy/insensitivity. What we see in the behavior of quantum phenomena for example may not be anything other than deeply microphenomenal will, or the distant ancestor of will. Not random, and not the Green Light / Red Light of determinism. Instead of reducing the Yellow Light to a flow chart of Green and Red dichotomies, I flip the assumption and see Green and Red dichotomies as the approximated appearances – collapsed states of Yellow light experiences of will that are not directly accessible to our interface. I’m not suggesting a kind of panpsychism where every electron is agonizing over their destiny like Hamlet, but rather that what we see as an electron is itself only a reflection of many contexts of experience that are ultimately united in superposition of both ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’…the eternal and the eternally ephemeral.
I observe that the strong nature of the objections to taking personal will as ontologically distinct from other influences as, ironically, a reflection of the particular modes of sense and sense-making that we have learned to use and cherish from legacy of scientific Enlightenment thinking. Ironic because we are using our free will to choose to deny free will. Could anything else even have the power to deny itself sincerely? Once we drop the anthropocentric and biocentric bias from our understanding of sense, we no longer have a reason to assume that the haptic-tactile sense of a physical world is the sole authoritative context within which reality is defined. That sense, as well as visibility, may only be specialized modalities of objectifying and separating, so that it would be a category error to look to them to find evidence of will. Will is at the opposite end of the continuum of sense – the most intimate and least objectified influence on reality. You won’t find it in a microscope or photomultiplier. What we do find in our experiments with photomultipliers, however, defy any reasonable expectation of randomness or determinism, proving again and again to be more than either…more like the Yellow Light than either the Red/Green of determinism or the arbitrary blinking of both. It appears to be “uncertainty” all the way down, so how is that not will? If it is will or proto-will, why should we be the sole phenomenon in the universe who posses only an illusion of it?
I’ll stop here at the 1:00:00 mark for now. Will continue watching the second half and post my comments soon. Or I won’t! Depends on what I decide, and what reasons I choose, of the many that influence me from the subpersonal, personal, and transpersonal levels of my awareness to place above other influences. No matter how few degrees of freedom I really have, just the sense that I exist at all, and that will is even conceivable objectively contain more degrees of freedom than a universe in which those experiences/phenomena do not exist.
Part 2 of this is here.
1 See Raymond Tallis excellent book “Aping Mankind“, chapter “The Disappearance of Appearance”. I have also lifted the terms prospective and retrospective from his writing on this topic.
2 More aesthetically rich, seemingly more meaningful, multivalent, synchronistic, and often seemingly more teleologically driven.
3 In my understanding, Dualism is insufficient not because of any ties to superstition or fantasy, but because it doesn’t go far enough, and because I think that Locke and Galileo made a mistake in giving objectified qualia Primary status, relegating trans-tangible and intangible qualia Secondary status for centuries to come. Unlike physical or mathematical law, aesthetic qualia are conserved across all context of realism and surrealism. Even under synesthesia, a word or number may have a color, but the color and the word are merely bound together, not indistinguishable. Red is red whether we are dreaming, hallucinating, or wide awake. Whether visible wavelength photons are present or not. Most qualia is conserved across states of consciousness but many physical laws are not. I may dream of a physical world where gravitational laws are unstable or anti-realistic, but I cannot dream of a world where the color red has no visible appearance.
Wai H. Tsang: Science and Technology. It’s origin & convergence back to Renaissance Religion – Zoom talk 31/03/21
Great stuff from Wai H. Tsang. I’m about halfway through listening to this talk. Here are my comments:
I propose an additional clarification that the fractal, cyclical, and mathematical properties of the Totality are aspects of the Diffraction process or Diversification of the Unity into Universe.
My point in the comparison image is that I think that purpose – the participatory aspect of the Totality in general is not part of mathematics, fractals, etc. To the contrary, counting, and by extension math, computation, geometry, physics are passive instruments of purpose.
Specific purposes are clothed in algorithmic-geometric form, however only as a vehicle for expression of the true Unity of the Totality, which is more like the inversion of mathematics.
I was also inspired by Wai’s discussion and inclusion of this image. Talking about a teleological universe in which a retrocausal attractor is pulling us toward the originating singularity. I agree but to clarify, only in the Uni/Holos sense and not in the Verse/Graphos sense.
It’s complicated but…mortality is like a bubble of conscious perception within the Totality of conscious perception. The perception of the Totality from within that bubble varies from states of transparency, translucence, reflection, refraction, diffraction, and opacity to the Totality.
It’s a focus thing. As we change our focus (or our focus is changed for us), sensitivity to the Totality can be increased so that the self identifies with the Totality and sees no separation. This is profound and true, however, while consciousness is conditioned with mortality, the loss of separation is akin to mania/psychosis. The idealist is correct in the ultimate sense, but impractical and deluded from the mortality-dominated perspective.
As awareness contracts, focus shifts from the Totality to the Locality, and then to the bubble itself – the separation. It’s complicated because I think that what Wai and others are on to is a Unity of Graphos rather than Holos. All separations use similar schemas, but that similarity itself is maximally dissimilar to the true Holos/Absolute/Totality, which we experience mentally as imagination, perceptually as qualia, emotionally as love, somatically as pleasure, egotistically as success, etc. Physicality and mathematics are inversions of sensitivity…they are the concrete and abstract qualia of quanta.
Grelling–Nelson paradox
This is to record a train of thought that began with my posting: “The Map is Not the Territory” is, by its own logic, only a map that may be more or less true than the statement. There may be no maps at all, only different sense phenomena accessing each other in different ways.”
A comment:
And my repsonse…
Thanks, I hadn’t heard of that before. It fits in with a line of thinking that I woke up with. Thinking about mirrors. Do mirrors exist or are there only objects like silvered glass that can be used to reflect something else? Do reflections exist or are they just separate instances of physical light? This leads to a sidebar about the difference between tactile sense and visible sense, and how images transcend the classical limitations of tangibility and can be in more than one place at the same time, weightlessly.
Thinking about looking at the Sun in a mirror and how it is still potentially blinding, and how that illustrates that physical reflection has a tangible component as well as a visible one. A flashlight uses a reflective/mirrored dome to deflect the radiation of the electrified bulb toward the center of the ‘beam’. Mainly though, I’m interested in pointing out how our current/legacy scientific worldview overlooks and disqualifies sense modality.
Physicalism compulsively seeks to reduce the intangible to equations describing the tangible in intangible terms that are in some sense isomorphic or autological to them but in another sense perfectly anti-morphic or heterological to them. If there is one thing that all abstract formula have in common it is that they are the antithesis of all of the concrete substances that can be touched and held. Yet despite the purity of that opposition, some essential unity can be translated intellectually between one and the other
Part of what I try to do with Multisense Realism is to break free of the mania for reduction to maximum tangibility (by means of maximally intangible language) and look instead at the more obvious co-existence of a wide spectrum of multiple aesthetic modalities of sense and sensemaking that seamlessly *and* ‘seamfully’ unite tangible concrete physical objects and intangible abstract ideal concepts under a larger umbrella of trans-tangible aesthetic-participatory sensory-motive percepts*.
So, the Grelling-Nelson paradox is to me another angle on this…another reflection on how our legacy of rigid logical labeling takes language too literally (that is, too concretely) and mistakes words for meanings and meanings for words. When we find these Easter Eggs of contradiction or paradox we are almost surprised that language doesn’t behave like other things in the world. We are offended that language seems to break its own seeming promise to faithfully reflect anything that we aim it at. Of course, this is a mistaken assumption. Language makes no such promise. Semantic paradoxes expose the fact that language itself is syntactic, not semantic, and that at some level we are the conscious agents who are using our power to symbolize and associate metaphorically words into meanings and meanings into words. The words themselves aren’t doing it. The map is its own territory, both faithfully and unfaithfully translating sense and sense making modalities through another sense making modality which is especially designed or conditioned to send and receive but to remain relatively unsent and unreceived themselves.
*seemingly
Sam Harris Interview of Donald Hoffman
Listening to this podcast:
https://samharris.org/podcasts/178-reality-illusion
My view has developed along similar lines as Donald Hoffman’s. One important difference is that I take his observation about the world we perceive being a sensory desktop or data structure contrived from fitness payoffs a step further. I plug that observation back in to itself, so that the expectation of data structures and fitness payoffs are also part of how we are using a sensory desktop.
In other words, after we understand how survival of a tangible, mortal body shapes our entire perception, we can see that this understanding is also biased and contrived by the particular modes of sense and sense making that have evolved since the Early Modern Period.
This means that the desktop we experience is different from the unimaginable ‘real world’ not because it is fabricated but because tangibility is only one aspect of ‘world realization’, and even the unimaginable ‘real world’ is actually only another level and scale of the same sense desktop. Yes, human perception has been shaped by fitness payoffs from animal mortality, and that has been supercharged in the centuries since Galileo and Descartes, but that doesn’t mean that perception in general is shaped ONLY by those anthropological>zoological>biological fitness payoffs, and that does not mean that sense experience itself (sensation>feeling>perception>awareness>personal consciousness) arises FROM fitness payoffs.
If my view is on the right track, it’s *all* a desktop, and there is nothing that can ever exist which is not a ‘user interface’, even if the ‘user’ is a sub-personal or impersonal frame of perception, i.e. a pre-physical sensory-motive event. So yes, I think that our movie is directed by evolution (as presented in our desktop of tangibility/causality/realism/mortality), however even the director’s world that our movie fictionalizes is itself nothing but the larger, older movies that we currently use as a movie *theater* (physics, information).
Notes on “Looking at Kastrup”
I have been following the debate/feud between scientists Bernardo Kastrup, Robin Carhart-Harris, and Enzo Tagliazucchi that centers around the interpretation of brain research in psychedelics. At issue is the fine distinction between whether psychedelic states have been seen to be correlated with increased or decreased ‘brain activity’. A decrease in brain activity would seem to support an Idealist view of consciousness while an increase in activity could give support for the materialist consensus.
In this great article, Playing with Razors… Looking at Kastrup , Q4LT gets into the details. While everyone involved is well aware that ‘increased brain activity’ is too broad of a term for deep understanding, I support Kastrup’s effort to clarify that the kind of activity that has been observed to increase is not consistent with the materialist assumption of conscious experience that is confabulated by an electrochemical phenomenon that is local to the tissue of the brain. Here are my thoughts. (Read the article and watch the videos!).
“The big conundrum at hand is as follows… gamma waves have been observed to coincide with enhanced problem solving and neuronal binding. This would seem to be an important correlation in terms of interpreting brain wave data generated by EEG. Faster oscillatory activity appears to coincide with increased processing potential.”
I can think of a reason why the “Higher pitched” gamma brain activity waves could be correlated with psychedelic/mystical experience without directly accounting for them. My conjecture is that these gamma frequency EM signatures correlate not to the florid aesthetic-semantic content of the experience, but to the intensity of them as they are localized into the personal scope of awareness. In other words, I think the gamma may not be the water coming out of the firehose of the psychedelic experience, but the buffering and caching of the experience of trying to drink from that firehose.
Just as a high pitched sound is heard as highly localized within the ear itself, high pitched brain waves might be localized to the aspects of conscious experience which are most public facing. The gamma buffering/caching might be more of a symptom of rapid and thrilling integration and organization of insights into the existing intellectual-ego framework than the expanded content of personal awareness into transpersonal states. These symptoms would be the inflection point where insights which are potentially useful to the life of the embodied personality, as opposed to the full manifestation of the experience.
“Q4LT’s perspective is that everything that is currently measurable is material.”
“However, we don’t particularly enjoy taking the stance that “consciousness is everything so the details of physicality are all secondary noises that aren’t all that interesting or important”.
““Consciousness” is a tricky topic but our perception of it is that the closest physically measurable layer to better understand the complexity of consciousness has to do with electricity and magnetism. This is why we weren’t completely in agreement with the Kastrup/Kelly stance that blood flow changes via fMRI provided definitive proof of a counter argument against materialism.”
I agree here too about electricity and magnetism, and I have proposed that we should try looking at EM as primordial sensory-motive signaling schemas rather than blind force-field mechanisms. I suggest that EM wave/particles are not literally present in empty space, but rather they are a (slightly misguided or inverted) modeling of deeper perceptual-participatory phenomena. Electromagnetism may not be, in my view, non-stufflike-stuff-traveling-through-spacetime, but rather symptoms of the spatio-temporalizing of non-local experience into local scopes or framings.*
I think that Kastrup/Kelly are justified in wanting to make it clear that in layman’s terms, things that expand consciousness don’t make your brain ‘work harder’ in general. There is a pressing need to communicate this general insight to science writers and their audiences, so that psychedelic research, and consciousness research in general, can be understood as valid and important. It seems like it is now time to begin to spread the understanding that what has been observed about psychedelic states is that they do not suggest a physical organ working hard to produce physiological effects within the tissue itself, but rather a more subtle, quiet level of molecular activity against a background of decreasing overall blood flow/’brain activity’, especially in the regions most active during waking consciousness.
This would, for better or worse, open the door to a view in which the brain is grounded in a context that is larger than subjectivity, but not larger than consciousness-in-general. Psychedelics may, in fact, facilitate access to genuinely transpersonal, non-local experiences rather than mere ‘hallucinations in the head’. This could help recontextualize religious and spiritual views, psi, NDEs, etc as (flawed/folk) intimations of an eternal and pervasive source of subjective consciousness, rather than as an isolated, and all too mortal collection of ephemeral experiences.
*Plato’s ‘moving image of eternity’ might be seen in a more modern light, with electromagnetism as a language governing Lorentz-like, Holos-graphing transformations between public, frames of entanglement and private frames of contextuality. (See quantum entanglement vs quantum contextuality research). We may be looking at quantum mechanics and electromagnetism all wrong; as external phenomena in the physical universe, when they may, in fact, be the modulation of phenomenalization and physicalization from a deeper spectrum which transcends tangible and intangible appearences.
“It’s good except this part… “we should consider the possibility that if we focus only on what can be measured with tangible instruments (extending the body into physical contact with other tangible structures), we may be looking in the wrong direction”.
I’m not looking in any direction in particular. Only wherever instruments that measure layers that correlate somehow with the conscious experience in an effort to better understand emotion and thought from a mechanistic perspective.It’s obvious theres much more to life but if we are to discuss the results of scientific experiments we must immerse ourselves within this framework to a high degree. Scientific discussion is based on what is measurable… that is the focus of Q4LT. Philosophers are free to postulate outside of the scope of what is measurable. It is a different domain than what we are interested in.
Multisense Realism 
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