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.
We don’t need to think of energy or mass as identical to light. I propose that there is no ‘light’ as a noun but ‘illumination’ as an event with properties that are likely actually primarily visible but also cross over into the tactile-tangible.
When we use a tangible apparatus as an instrument, we are not necessarily measuring the most important or defining aspect of illumination, but rather we are overlooking it completely. By limiting our inquiry to how physical objects behave when illuminated, we make a misguided assumption based on another presumption of the supremacy of tangibility. When we use something like a photomultiplier, we get a tangible effect that is really only a small part of the story, and not the important part.
“Energy” and “mass” are entirely reducible to a geometry of motion of tangible objects. Energy and mass are abstract theoretical entities of measurement that we use to explain why objects move and change their motion/shape/state in the way that they do. These geometric-tangible properties are posited from a hypothetical experience of sightless space and time, again, overlooking completely what illumination is to us and likely to all other organisms with eyes… which is a completely intangible aesthetic of color and image.
Notice that sound is not completely intangible. We can feel body parts vibrating from sound. Light has some tactile qualities – the light can ‘hurt your eyes’, but you can’t feel waves or particles colliding with anything. This might be just because the scale of light is so much smaller, but remember, studies have shown that people can detect single photons.
All this to say that I propose the possibility that there never were any literal light waves or particles – no massless photons literally traveling through empty vacuum, only a misguided inference based on prioritizing the sense of touch rather than the experience of sight. I think that sight should be explored as a direct receptivity of conscious experience across distance rather than some abstract confabulation of brain tissue in the dark. What is particulate or waving about physical ‘light’ is the behavior of tangible instruments when illuminated (electromagnetically stimulated), not illumination itself.
If I’m on the right track in thinking of existence as an irreducibly sensing phenomenon, then the idea of particles can be replaced with the idea of coordinated sense happenings, or haptics. Haptics, not atoms or quarks or data, form the skeleton of realism, uniting the sense of touch and tangibility with the sense of causality, proprioception and any other aesthetic sense modalities that are available.
Whether we are dreaming or awake, the properties of realism are conserved. Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of Morphic Resonance can be modified as Haptic Resonance. Possibly electromagnetism can be reinterpreted as electrohaptic and magnetohaptic properties – which are properties of haptics rather than of disembodied force-field perturbations of vacuum spacetime. The universe is not an empty container within which matter and energy happen, the universe is an eternal multisense happening with material and energetic sense qualities.
Appeal to the Stone (Argumentum ad lapidem) “The name of this fallacy is derived from a famous incident in which Dr. Samuel Johnson claimed to disprove Bishop Berkeley‘s immaterialist philosophy (that there are no material objects, only minds and ideas in those minds) by kicking a large stone and asserting, “I refute it thus.”
I suspect that even now, this fallacy secretly remains the foundation of physicalism. Of course, the problem with Johnson’s demonstration is that kicking a rock could occur just the same way in a dream or in our imagination. We can understand that a rock in a dream has no need to seem to be composed of physical substances like silicon or basalt. A dream rock may be ‘composed’ of one’s hard feelings toward the menial tasks being assigned to someone at work. Just being able to experience kicking a rock says nothing about that rock, or any rock being real in some other way besides the reality of the experience. All dreams are real dreams.
Being open to the idea of matter as imaginary in an ultimate or absolute sense does not have to bring us to solipsism or creationism. All that we know is that we can dream or imagine matter, but we do not know that it is our imagination that is responsible for all dreams, nor do we know that any person or super-person including ourselves or God is not also “imaginary”. All that we know is that imagination itself is real.
If I were to rewrite Decartes’ Cogito, I would leave “I” and “think” out of it and just say something like “everything can be an illusion of conscious experience except conscious experience itself”. From there, I might derive “Therefore there can be no escape from conscious experience except into another conscious experience.”. After all, if we say that we experience unconsciousness, we cannot have been completely unconscious. If we were, then we can only infer such a non-existent experience as an inference when we return to consciousness.
To sum up:
Everything – including ourselves, God, matter, space, time, even mathematics can be “imaginary”.
Imagination cannot be imaginary.
Imagination can potentially exist beyond ourselves, God, reality, etc.
Nothing can be shown to be beyond imagination in a way that could not also be imaginary.
That has been the way that we have assumed ‘levels’ manifest…from some kind of inflection point where particles moving in a void just ‘become’ a fluid. What we’re saying is that there is no such inflection point except in perception. It could just as easily be the wet liquid that is the truer level as it is what is presented within our greatest band of sensitivity. When we see blue ocean waves sparkling in the sun, when we hear waterfalls roaring or fish splashing in a river, that is when we encounter water in our fullest and most direct apprehension. That is as close as we can get, and possibly that is as close as anything can get to total access to ‘identity’ of water. That may be closest or even identical to what it is like to *be* water.When we use mechanical instruments to extend our sense of sight and touch, we employ a kind of tunnel vision. Combined with our logical imagination we extract an intangible geometry of microphysical tangibility – particles moving in a void. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈 𝐚𝐦 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐥. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨 ‘𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞’ 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 ‘𝐥𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥’ 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬. The watery qualities of water aren’t fabricated by a brain or by statistics on particles, they are the actual final identity of water.
Emergence is false. The universe does not scale up mechanically from microphysical to physical or physical to phenomenal. It fragments from totality “All Here Now” to countless “theres” and “thens” by degrees of consciousness or scopes of awareness. Connection is Holos, disconnection is graphos. There is no emergence from graphos (mechanism, points in a void) to Holos (gestalt experience)…no encoding and decoding of ‘sense data’ into a whole. These are all assumptions made by over-valuing the sense of tangibility and assuming that what is most distant from our direct awareness is most real simply because the scale of time and space is most extremely different from our own.
Life is almost infinitely cruel and almost infinitely generous.
The night sky presents a view of the universe which is defined by two striking extremities. There is not merely dark and light, or yin and yang, but twinkling brilliance scattered across a pitiless black void. The stars are spread out in a way that presents another set of qualitative extremes – pattern and patternlessness.
The condition of being poised precisely between order and chaos is sometimes known as criticality. It is also, uncoincidentally, the way that brain activity looks to us from the outside. When we look at the world, the degree to which it makes sense is calibrated by our own sensitivity to patterns. That sensitivity, in turn, changes dynamically according to our physiological states and our psychological participation. We can look at the night sky we can see patterns that other people can see also, if they look at them in the same or similar way. Astrology is an example of practices that explore this shared criticality of perception and participation. To see constellations in the stars, and to see in their shapes reflections of your own shared experience and culture is not only the beginning of astrology and astronomy, it is the beginning of religion and science as collective activities around which civilization has been built.
All formal attempts at divination seem to exploit the criticality between discovery and invention. People use cards, coins, tea leaves, dice, etc as a way to access the general probability stream of the moment, and then to intentionally interrupt that stream and freeze it. It is a way of teasing uncoincidence out of coincidence.
When we look at the sky, do we choose to see a ‘bright blessed day’ and the ‘dark sacred night’, or do we prefer to see through such fanciful illusions to a starker, but possibly more accurate truth? Feeling and seeing have their own polarity in thinking and knowing. Using the concept of anthropcentrism, we can reframe the appearance of contrasting qualities as inevitable rather than miraculous. We can look at all dualities as simply the natural consequence of detection methods being employed by body systems. Hot and cold are sensations that signal some proximity to the upper and lower bounds of our body’s biochemical-thermodynamic range. As we acclimate to artificially controlled environments, our body adapts these signals to straddle a much narrower range of ‘comfort’. Even a single degree of deviation in temperature can become uncomfortable for one person, but comfortable to another, even as they live in the same house and relax on the same couch.
Should I try to tie these themes together, and sum them up in some kind of clear point, or is it better to let this stand in criticality? Are questions better than answers? Are meta-questions invitations to criticality or meta-criticalities?
A quick way to clarify what qualia is for those who are opposed to the term on the grounds that it doesn’t mean anything.
Top mug: Blue qualia image based on electromagnetic radiation near the 490 nanometer range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Center mug: Red Qualia image based on electromagnetic radiation near the 690 nanometer range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Bottom mug: Multicolored Qualia image based on electromagnetic radiation near the 780 nanometer range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
What you see is qualia, not electromagnetic radiation. You can see red qualia in your dreams or visual imagination, but you couldn’t see electromagnetic radiation in the visible range there because it doesn’t physically exist in your brain. Electromagnetism is invisible and is a property transmitted by tangible, mechanical, photoelectric effects on matter in public space.
Visible light is qualia which can be *stimulated to appear* through tangible, mechanical photo-electric effects on matter in public space, but the qualia itself is not that stimulation. The qualia itself is a visible, aesthetic-participatory phenomenon that depends on your ability to access an intangible palette of visible hues, the extent of which is unknowable (there are at least three primary colors, but there may be many more, or infinitely many more, or new ones all the time…we don’t know.)
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).
Great Stuff from Dr. Theise and Sean Webb (The Walrus) Starting from about halfway through, I suggest that the low level randomness of the body is a symptom of greater penetration of consciousness into the physicalized vocabulary either in an absolute sense or relative sense or both, rather than a cause of emergence by something like entropy modulation. In the relative sense, I mean that it may be the case that on a slow enough and large enough scale, even the lowest levels of randomness take on life-like appearances, so that living organisms appear to have more low level randomness to us because we are alive and therefore more sensitive to our own class of ‘likeness’. I propose that like experiences have more access and more nuanced renderings of each other, so that any experiences of a sufficiently similar perceptual sampling rate will be experienced as ‘alive’, or more alive to each other than dissimilarly timescaled experiences.
I also think that the appearance of emergent symptoms in artificial systems need not be an indication of a rich, multi-sensory experience, i.e. that a simulation has begun for the bits or avatar collection of bits, but rather reflects the ‘autistic’ ghost-limb type residuation of the isolated band of intellectualized-game theoretic sense which has put the bit-nursing technology together in the first place. The bits aren’t having an experience, we are using matter as a resonator/reflector to conjure an image of one surface or bounded slice of the continuum of universal perception. Computers mirror an image of intelligence back to that intelligence (such as ours) but are not themselves hosting intelligence. By contrast, the brain is an image (our image shared by macro scale animal experiences) of sub-personal experience that is actually bridging the gap between personal and impersonal (astrophysical) scales of experience. Brain has computational properties but is not computing anything. A computer has low level experiential properties but those are not accumulating a higher order of experience via constitutive, many-to-one emergence. I think that all experiences are a top-down divergence riding on a bottom up pseudo-emergence, as well as a center-out/in expansion. In other words, we are part beast, part angel, and part unique/unprecedented person. The beast part is, in its own context part micro-beast (cell), part sub-person or sub-self (impulses, urges, id), and part person (its ‘God’/superego/trans-subself…how the animal’s body is influenced by its unseen master…our personal will influences our body from the top down via voluntary control over efferent nervous impulses > muscle tissue).
As far as self-organization goes, I would add that while I think all phenomena are conscious experience in some sense and scale, the way that organization emerges or is implemented may not be visible to the experiences whose ‘body’/exterior facing rendering is being organized. It may not be strictly correct to say that unintelligent agents ‘self-organize’, or that the appearance of spontaneous organization is a symptom of the micro-intelligence of what is being organized. We may be observing a teleonomy based, ad hoc statistical organization rather than a teleologically based intent to organize. There may be teleology, but not on the same level as the body appearance of organization.
A nit picky thing, Dr. Theise was talking about mass emerging from fundamental energy, i.e. particles appearing randomly in the primordial quantum context. It seems to me that this connects to what he was saying about figure/ground switching in an ambiguous image (like this famous face-vase one:
Isn’t the difference between mass and energy a figure-ground relation based on frame of reference? So I’m thinking that while from any given perspective/perceptual frame massive particles appear and disappear in a given local scope of perception, those events are reflections of overlap between one part of the scope and another which are appearing and disappearing…freckles of self-impermeability…a sense of self-spatiotemporalizing insensitivities which serve to spatialize and temporalize (objectify and subjectify) the sense of tangibility from tactile sense qualia. Maybe that was sort of implied though.
In the second half, the conversation goes into a direction that really meshes perfectly with what I suggest in MSR:
The main difference is that I’m trying to replace all references to emergence of one level of consciousness from many agents on another level to a model of a kind of parallel divergence into different levels of unity and “unit-y” (disunity). This is not to say that I don’t believe our bodies evolved from biology, or that biology didn’t evolve from chemistry in a sense, but that since I think that the universe is primarily driven by the teleological saturation/signficance-seeking nature of consciousness into richer and richer subjectivity (sensation > perception > consciousness ‘phorologies‘*), the evolution of tangible objects and structures (physical > chemical > biological morphologies) is only an unintended/teleonomical consequence of the separation of otherwise united experience-lines. The ants are causing the ant hill, but the ant hill may or may not be a symptom of ant hill-scale subjectivity. The ant is building the ant hill, but if the ant hill has a conscious experience associated with it, I would expect it to be as much biosphere consciousness from the top down as it is ant consciousness from the bottom up. Yes, at the bottom and the top of the stack (quantum and cosmological scales) there is a dissolving or transcending of the subject-object dualism, but again that appearance and disappearance of dualism is itself perspective-dependent. If I change my perspective, my frequency-scale of permeability-impermeability to the Totality of consciousness, then what I can see as duality and non-duality changes. In a psychologically contracted/focused state, I see diametrically opposed subject-object (phoric-morphic) duality. In a deep trance, psychedelic state, etc, “I” don’t exist except as a metaphor for a particular expression/diffraction of human archetype. Under general anesthetic “I” don’t exist except as a particular sequence of genetic semaphores repeating within a community of cells.
My suspicion is that the boundaries of any conscious experience will be rendered as being driven by quasi-random (bottom facing coincidence) or quasi-fateful (top facing synchronicities). The random/fated appearance is just our own scope’s bias, its ‘red shift’ toward the bottom of its stack or its blue-violet shift toward the top of the stack. In terms of causality, within any given experience, it is the bottom end of the stack that can be controlled by tangible means, technology and instruments which extend the exterior, body-world facing senses of touch-move while the top end of the stack controls us by intangible means…serendipities and synchronicities which open our intuitive sense modalities to be ‘touched’ and ‘moved’ by the transcendent ‘spirit’ world. There is a meta thing I’m doing there also in contrasting the literal and metaphorical sense of touch and move (see diagram above…metaphorical = high end of the stack, ‘semaphorical’ = low end of the stack).
*phorologies = neologism for aesthetic elaborations of direct feeling and sensation, as diametrically opposed to ‘morphologies’, which would be morphological-topological renderings of indirect feeling/sensation.
Top = Transpersonal = Metaphoric
Center = Personal = Phoric
Bottom = Subpersonal = Semaphoric
Emergent properties can only exist within conscious experience.
…
Neither matter nor information can ‘seem to be’ anything. They are what they are.
It makes more sense that existence itself is an irreducibly sensory-motive phenomenon – an aesthetic presentation with scale-dependent anesthetic appearances rather than a mass-energetic structure or information processing function. Instead of consciousness (c) arising as an unexplained addition to an unconscious, non-experienced universe (u) of matter and information (mi), material and informative appearances arise as from the spatiotemporal nesting (dt) of conscious experiences that make up the universe.
Materialism: c = u(mdt) + c
Computationalism: c = u(idt) + c
Multisense Realism: u(midt) = c(c)/~!c.
For all dangerous minds, your own, or ours, but not the tv shows'... ... ... ... ... ... ... How to hack human consciousness, How to defend against human-hackers, and anything in between... ... ... ... ... ...this may be regarded as a sort of dialogue for peace and plenty for a hungry planet, with no one left behind, ever... ... ... ... please note: It may behoove you more to try to prove to yourselves how we may really be a time-traveler, than to try to disprove it... ... ... ... ... ... ...Enjoy!
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