Archive
Response to Pawel Pachniewski’s hard problem of metaphysics, part one
This is part one of my response to just the very beginning of Pawel’s essay (or post or whatever we are calling what we’re doing here). It was getting too long and melting my brain so I decided to just get it out in parts as I can find more time and energy to absorb and respond. It may not even be necessary to go further since my response is really directed only at the problems I see with the unacknowledged premises prior to the beginning of the argument. I may not take issue with the argument itself, if we lived in a universe where those premises were true.
I apologize also for proceeding in this insufferable manner of dissecting Pawel’s excellent writing sentence by sentence. Obviously that is not optimal, it’s just too much for my mind to hold on to at one time any other way.
Without further ado then…
>“then what else could there be out there that could be hidden in plain sight like consciousness hides in plain sight for the non-conscious?”
https://mentalcontractions.com/2022/10/27/the-hard-problem-of-metaphysics/
As far as I can tell, there is no non-conscious. I propose that what we imagine or assume is non-conscious, like a rock, is actually part of a conscious experience on a much different timescale. In our brief lifetime, and even briefer capacity of perceptual attention, the Earth and its minerals appear as concrete objects, or more precisely tangible presentations… in the tactile sense modality… of a personal conscious experience.
While we are having a human life experience, we cannot experience geological timescales directly, but experience only parts of them as aesthetically frozen snapshots within an anthropological > zoological perceptual time window. We experience a rock because we cannot experience the spectacular history of this planet and solar system in its native geological timescale. that timescale of eons is much too slow relative to our direct perceptual window. For the same reason, we can’t experience the minerals that the rock is composed of in their native chemical timescale: it’s too fast for our perceptual window.
The scale of size is a hint also, with geological timescales corresponding to phenomena that we see as physically larger than we can experience directly. Changes to entire planets and changes to single molecules correspond to phenomena that we experience as being physically larger and smaller than we can perceive directly.
I call this relativistic lensing Eigenmorphism and have tried to clarify what I think it should mean.
So no, the rock we see and touch is not conscious, but it isn’t a thing-that-is-non-conscious in an absolute sense. We experience a rock as an appearance (a tangible appearance in the tactile sense, and also as a three-dimensional-seeming image with clear boundaries and surfaces in our stereoscopic visual sense) but there is nothing that the universe is like for that appearance we see.
Likewise there is nothing that the universe is like for any of the objects we can touch or images we can see – not planets, not bodies, not brains, not cells, not vast arrays of transistors, not emojis or stuffed animals, or numbers. In my understanding, there are no ‘things-that-are-conscious’ in an absolute sense, there are only conscious experiences that ‘thingify’ each other.
All of the appearances we perceive to be tangible objects or intangible concepts (like numbers) are, I propose, eigenmorphic snapshots of conscious experiences on timescales that are extremely disparate from our own. The degree of eigenmorphism accounts for the difference between objects that we see as alive versus inanimate. Inanimate is an illusion in an absolute sense, but real in practice locally. As long as the conscious experience we are using is a human experience, the inanimate appearances we encounter are for all practical purposes, faithful and real. We can’t walk through a wall just because its solidity isn’t presented in all timescales and modes of perception. In the timescales of perception that our body exists (zoological > biological > chemical > physical), that wall (chemical > physical) has no choice but to resist merging with our body. The resistance is happening at the level of chemical timescale awareness…too fast for us to experience directly just as the screen image of an old TV or CRT appears stable rather than as a single illuminated pixel tracking horizontally across each vertical line of the screen mask.
> “From a complete description of the universe we seem to be able to exhaustively derive a totality of all facts about the universe, save for one key phenomenon: consciousness.”
Again, this presumes that there is any other phenomenon besides consciousness – which is an assumption that seems very natural, almost undeniable, from our perspective. The question though is whether that undeniable seeming assumption is due to the nature of reality, or of the nature of consciousness in general, or to the nature of OUR limited scope of perception within consciousness. I’m arguing for the latter. If it is true that appearances of non-consciousness are a lensing artifact of the *limits* of our sense (insensitivity) and not of sense in general, then it would stand to reason that we would fail to assume consciousness outside of that scope. In my view, the whole point of having a mortal, limited, zoological experience of having an animal body is to escape the fact of the eternal totality of consciousness. We’re here on a sort of anti-vacation-vacation to taste some of the aesthetic treasures of concentrated deprivation and reunification.
>“Scientifically and philosophically, it is broadly accepted that humans are conscious in the sense that we have inner phenomenal lives – a what-its-likeness to our existence or at the very least, according to some, an illusion thereof.”
Here, I reject both the validity of concepts just because they happen to seem broadly accepted at some given moment and culture and the concept of qualia as ‘what-its-likeness’. The idiom ‘what it’s like‘ doesn’t mean anything that we can work with intellectually. It’s a folk expression that doesn’t define or describe qualia but only creates an empty placeholder of what ‘it‘ does. In my Multisense Realism philosophizing, I give the ‘it’ and the ‘like’ rigiorous clarity and context. It is aesthetic-participatory phenomena, and it is diffracted from the eternal, ongoing totality of the same phenomena through a process that creates and preserves such phenomena, both from the ‘top down’ rather than being assembled by microphenomenal, microphysical, or computational units from the ‘bottom up’.
I don’t deny bottom-up re-assembly of qualia, such as we are seeing right now on this video screen, but I see these instances of the summing of parts as possible only where there is already a sensory anticipation of a holistic/whole perception that is being diffracted top down from the totality. This has tremendous implications for anything artificial, imitated, or simulated, as I discuss in writings about AI.
>“You get kicked in the shin, it hurts.”
Indeed, it hurts even in a dream, to some extent. Also, if you’re awake, enough anesthetic can make getting kicked in the shin painless. I mention this to stave off any qualia-physics identity theory that assumes that hurting just is the neurochemical cascade resulting from getting kicked in the shin.
Of course, anesthetics work by interrupting the neurochemical cascade, but we can still clearly separate the tactile and visible qualities of those tangible appearances (molecular objects staying in the cell body rather than being released into a synapse, etc), from the painful qualities that makes us feel like we need to scream. Indeed pain is not an empty carrier of instructions to scream*, it is a vivid, visceral aesthetic reality – one that I am saying is as fundamental a part of the totality of aesthetic phenomena as galaxies and atoms.
>“it doesn’t seem like its existence can in principle be derived or known from any description of the universe”
I think that is because the totality of qualia IS the universe, and consciousness is qualia describing (qualifying and signifying) itself to itself, or to the diffracted experiences of itself.
>“To know of experience, one must undergo experience. It is only by this metaphysical relation we bear to consciousness that we know of it.”
Sure, and we should remember that knowing is also nothing but an experience itself. Unconscious processes would have no way to ‘know’ anything, or any reason to try. We can only know of the appearance of non-consciousness through undergoing experience also. We are conscious of consciousness because we are consciousness on one level experiencing the limits of its own sensitivity.
>“Stated more broadly, it cannot be easily ruled out that in fact other potentially significant phenomena are entirely obscured from us”
Certainly, however, it also cannot be ruled out that all phenomena that are obscured from us are not just more qualia beyond our local scope of sensitivity.
>“This argument rests on consciousness as a phenomenon only being knowable through being itself – that it cannot be inferred through other means.”
My response to that argument is that there may not be any other means. No phenomenon can be knowable through ‘being’ itself unless that phenomenon, including its ‘being’ is already consciousness/qualia. All ‘means’ are participatory appearances within conscious experiences. If we aren’t directly participating in our own timescale/sensitivity scope then the participatory appearance may be elided to some degree and replaced by the voyeuristic transformation/objectification as mere mechanism or function, motion, etc.
>“That when we scream in pain there are not just observable signals that travel from A to B in our body triggering behaviors”
Here too, I reject the use of the term ‘signals’ that are something that can be observed. What is actually observed is a non-narrative collection of events that seem to us to occur in a sequential chain from some scope (usually microscopic) of sense (usually sight). Molecules are released from cell A and then cell B releases molecules, not because of any signal or trigger, but just because of the consequences of what physical properties do to other physical properties.
We don’t know why that’s happening. It could be that it simply happens, or that there is a physical but unexperienced ‘force’ like electromagnetism making it happen, or that what we see as cells, are, like rocks, are part of a vast ocean of conscious experiences on other timescales (biological, chemical rather than our native personal, anthropological timescales). If it’s happening because of an unexperienced mechanical force, then there IS NO “SIGNAL”. There is no “triggering” of behaviors. Why would there be, and how would it be generated mechanically/anesthetically? Electromagnetism, in a purely physical universe, would not need to signal itself to magnetize. It would not need to choose to move toward or away from itself, it would automatically act that way.
The idea of biological or physical signals is an anthropomorphic projection that we use to unintentionally smuggle sensitivity into phenomena that we are assuming have no sensitivity and need no sensitivity. In an unexperienced physical world (setting aside for the moment the impossibility of that, since in my understanding, there is no physical world other than the totality of conscious experience that share common sensitivity scopes), a rock rolling down a hill to collide with another rock would not ‘trigger’ the second rock to roll, as no signal would be required from the first. There would already be a-signifying (not signals), automatic properties like mass and force to explain the exchange of apparent velocities. The appearance of an additional signal or trigger would be no less of a non-sequitur than an elephant appearing whenever rocks collide.
The alternative that I propose is that ‘signals’ are always and only qualitative/aesthetic-participatory by ontological necessity, and that they are indeed the fabric of all possible real phenomena. Qualia is the ontological substrate of the ontos.
To be continued…
*Physically, screaming would just be another unexperienced chain reaction of muscle tissue contraction, expulsion of air, vibration of larynx tissues and error that has no sound unless experienced by a conscious experience using a body that includes organs that will vibrate acoustically and then a perceptual capacity to experience those tangible vibrations in the entirely different aesthetic modality of hearing/sound, and further in the zoological aesthetic modality of hearing + feeling + understanding another animal’s scream.
A Multisense Realism Syllogism and Meme

P1. Every subjective feeling and thought is actually a chemical change in the brain.
P2. Every objective observation of the world is actually a chemical change in the brain.
C1. The physical world that you can know about is only something that appears in your conscious experience.
C2. Brains are part of an observed world that C1 has determined to be an appearance in consciousness.
C3. Conclusion 2 replaces ‘brain’ with ‘appearance in consciousness’ in premises 1. and 2, yielding:
C3a. P3. Every subjective feeling and thought is actually an appearance in consciousness.
C3b. P4. Every objective observation of the world, including the activity of brains in skulls, is actually an appearance in consciousness.
C4. Premises P4+P5 reveal that subjectivity and objectivity themselves are also only aesthetic appearances in consciousness that have no physical basis or effect.
C5. The boundary between subjectivity and objectivity is a distinction that can only exist in consciousness, not in a brain or physical world.
C6. If a physical world exists, it is a phenomenon completely outside of our consciousness.
C6a. Such a phenomenon need not have any appearance that we are familiar with.
C6b. Such a phenomenon need not have any appearance at all.
C6c. Such a phenomenon has no need for any consciousness to generate appearances.
C6d. Any capacity to generate appearances would be unknowable to the physical world, since knowing and sensing are functions of consciousness.
C6e. The capacity to generate or evolve consciousness can only come from consciousness.
P6. There is no use case for consciousness in an organism or brain that would not be equivalent to unconscious physical mechanisms.
P6a. Any organic use that consciousness could have would only be a result of an assumed causal power from consciousness to make changes in the organism.
P6b. Any higher dimensional control mechanism of behaviors in an organism would easily be accomplished by physically instantiating that hierarchy in additionally created cells of the organism.
P7. There is no current theory for how consciousness could physically evolve that does not negate itself with circular a priori assumptions of consciousness.
P7a. Any retrospective theory of biologically evolved consciousness would be completely replaceable by a theory of biologically evolved unconscious regulation mechanisms.
P7b. Any prospective theory of biological evolution leading to consciousness must explain how and why unconscious mechanisms such as force and charge were not used instead.
P7c. Any prospective theory of physical mechanisms that could generate conscious appearances of any kind must not rely on conscious appearances, including knowable appearances of physical worlds and brains.
C7. There can be no physical explanation for appearances of consciousness or within consciousness or within a physical universe that does not undermine itself with circular reasoning.
Multisense Taoism
I’ll take a crack at translating the gist of the translations of Chapter 14 of the Tao Te Ching into the terms of my theory of Multisense Realism.

Awareness of seeing is invisible.
Awareness of hearing is silent.
Awareness of touching is intangible.
These three awarenesses are part of one indivisible personal awareness.
Personal awareness exists beyond both entropy and negentropy, it cannot seek itself or avoid itself by trying with direct personal effort.
To succeed in harmonizing mortal personal awareness with eternal transpersonal awareness, remain sensitive to sensitivity and aware of awareness, divesting from seeking or avoiding direct personal effort.
Commentary:
I didn’t want to jargon up my translation too much, but it’s worth mentioning that the passage begins by talking about how sights, sounds, and objects are being provided to us invisibly, silently, and intangibly. Here I think “Lao Tzu” (老子) is telling us how to tease out sense itself from what is being sensed. It goes on to explain that because sense cannot sense itself through the very same modality that it uses to render a sense appearance of other things, personal awareness has no appearance in subpersonal terms (sights, sounds, etc) or in intrapersonal and interpersonal terms (the personal self is beyond emotion and communication).
Here I think that Taoism makes a decision to conflate the absence of subpersonal qualities of personal consciousness with an assumed absence of sensed qualities in sense itself. While I think this is false in an absolute or scientific sense, it is true enough locally that it is quite profound and leads to a useful philosophy for living our personal lives. This is the “Eastern Way” toward the attainment of a fully satisfied selfless self, in diametric opposition to the “Western Way” toward material attainment by a forever unsatisfied self that is selfishly ‘full of itself’.
Going back to the re-interpreted text, I think that the advice given is that to follow the Tao, aka seek ‘flow states’, one should, seemingly paradoxically, neither try nor avoid trying to take personal action. Perhaps it is the opposite of the Western sentiment attributed to Thomas Paine and George Patton “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” The Eastern sentiment could be read as “Do not seek to lead or follow. Get out of the way.” The idea is to use personal motivation to integrate itself with transpersonal sense and motives rather than to assert its personal agenda onto the rest of the (interpersonal, subpersonal, impersonal, transpersonal) universe.
In MSR (MultiSense Realism) terms, I see my above new translation of Chapter 14 of the Tao Te Ching (道德经) text as alluding to the relationship between subpersonal aesthetics (sights, sounds, objects), and their source in awareness itself, which has no appearance. I think that while the Tao Te Ching is correct in its identification of the disappearance of sense modalities within their own scope of sensitivity, I think that this is actually an artifact of the way that our local human scopes of awareness are nested relative to each other rather than the whole truth about consciousness. I propose that a more complete understanding of consciousness identifies that the appearance of nothingness is actually a local condition. It is the ‘game of mortality’ that conjures the illusion of absence to stand in for that of which we have no direct access to at any given moment. For example, if I were to try to see through the back of my head, there is nothing that I can see. Rather than seeing a field of blackness behind my eyes all of the time, I don’t see anything at all.
MSR proposes that while it is true that our personal cocoon of insensitivity causes a disconnection with all other conscious experiences, this disappearance of consciousness is no enigmatic ‘non-existence’ or ‘suchness’ as Taoism suggests. MSR suggests that beyond the sensory cataract of personal experience is not a grand nothingness to which all sense returns, but one lone Holos or totality within which all experience is preserved forever in some sense (similar to the concept of the Akashic Records).
The Totality of experiences are eternally present and experience-able in an Absolute sense, but all component experiences are diffracted through complex nested modulations of relative insensitivity. This diffraction temporarily limits the totality of sense experience to a single timeline of experience that senses itself in terms that echo the very condition of that temporary limitation. Each diffracted partition of the Holos is a temporarily temporalized version of eternal experience into an episodic stream of memory-laden feelings and thoughts. This is the the binding of our subjective qualities of experience, including the sense of being a subject.
In the diffracted experience, the undiffracted remainder of the Holos is left to appear in each moment as a memory-free snapshot of phenomena that are seen but not touched and touched but not experienced. Objects that are not appearing and disappearing into intangible memory ‘in here’ but are spread out as a domain of separate but simultaneously present tangible objects ‘out there’. The subjectified aspect is inflated within while the objectified aspect is diminished without. Subjective inflation involves a super-signification owing to the entropy of missing formation and information, while objective reduction involves de-signification, owing the negentropy of concretely presented formations and logical information about them. In the MSR view, the undiscovered country beyond this mortal coil is only temporarily hidden by the curtain of spatio-temporal entropy-negentropy; orthogonal forms of insensitivity that keep us orphaned in the ephemeral Graphos rather than back home in eternal Holos.
Getting back to what the Tao Te Ching is getting at, yes it’s true that we can’t objectify our entire personal experience as an image or a body-object. A living body-object with all of its countless physiological details shows no sign of the people we experience every day as ourselves and others who we meet. A movie about our life starring ourselves as the main character would not be the same as the experience of living it, as watching that movie requires an audience that is able to lend their personal experience to the images and voices they are seeing and hearing. A cat can’t watch that movie and get anything out of it.
Do Cats (or other similar mammals) Have Personal Experience?
As the center of a person’s experience is personal, the center of a cat’s experience is equally primary, but it would be awkward to call it personal since we don’t usually think of a cat as a literal person (at least other people don’t think of your cat that way). In MSR, I use the neologism “phoric” to refer to the center-range of any experience, be it associated with the body of a person, cat, amoeba, etc. My hypothesis is that the center of a cat’s experience – their phoric range of awareness correlates typically to our emphoric experience. The relationship we share with pets is emotional and intrapersonal rather than fully personal. Cats don’t care who we are in our personal life. They don’t know what we do for a living, etc.
Our personal aesthetics cannot be deconstructed into subpersonal appearances (i.e. sights, sounds, objects), but I disagree with the Tao Te Ching that they are ineffable mysteries that come from nothingness and return to it. Our own personhood is not visible or tangible to us, but our visible countenance and voice, our body, as they change over our lifetime do point to some of our personhood if they are perceived by another person. Our personal experience has its own irreducible qualities such as character, personality, identity and will. That qualia can be represented to some degree subpersonally as a biographical film or novel for example, but it takes a person to begin to sense and make sense of a person, even themselves.
In the Western consensus view, stuck as it is in legacy physicalism, the idea that a person can be separate from their brain functions is anathema. Although the most cutting edge scientific research assures us that the body and its brain are not objectively real, the shadow cast by the traumatic birth of science from the womb of religion steers us away from moving backward into what is now seen to be superstition. If you want to end your career as a scientist, start talking publicly about immaterial souls or psychic phenomena. Because of that overreaction, we are now stuck with a weird, crypto-dualistic cosmology where only some of what is sensed is considered real and the rest is unexplainably illusory or “emergent”…including the very capacity to sense in the first place.


As the title of Philip Goff’s book “Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness” implies, we must now begin to replace this outdated view of physicalism that secretly depends on unexplained non-physical appearances with a new science of consciousness that honors the whole of nature, including the consciousness that allows it to have any appearance at all. The Western objectification of sensory-motive experiences into unexperienced units of ‘information’ or wave-particles of mass-energy is an echo of the Ptolemaic/geocentric view of astronomy. We were on the right track, but mistook the local limits of subjectivity for absolute limits of consciousness-in-general. The Western consensus has sought to amputate the universal ‘yin’ of connection to the totality of conscious experience, while at the same time taking it for granted.
In MSR, I critique physical entities like mass and energy as reductionist quantitative abstractions that accidentally deny the underlying universal fabric of qualitative sense affect and motive effect. Primordial sensory affect and motive effect replace mass and energy as the local modes of participation. The physical universe of anesthetic-mechanical appearances is understood to be a kind of shadow of the Aesthetic Holos that reflects the ability of consciousness to partially divide and alienate itself for purposes of multiplying and enriching itself. The physical world is not an illusion, simulation or maya, it is just that reality in the local sense is an inverted reflection of reality in the absolute sense.
In both the local and absolute reality, we are not a program running on the hardware of a brain. The MSR hypothesis is that brain activity is the motive-to-motor inflection point between personal conscious experience and its subpersonal appearance as living matter. Tangible changes in the 3d structures of the physical brain do not cause a simulation in some kind of computational never-never land where we only think that we live. A neuro-computationalist fantasy of that kind undermines itself since such a simulation would have to include the appearance of the brain, its neurons, and any mechanical changes thereof. Hardware and software would both have to be simulated by an unknowable Ur-hardware that has no reason to favor hardware or software appearances. Representing itself in the simulation through cameo appearances, the grand simulator would be just as likely to manifest what seems like magic as it would to run on what seem like computer code.
With the advent of electronic computing, the materialistic view that flowered in the wake of the Early Modern Period (~15th century) has now been souped up with an abstract reincarnation of itself. Computationalism and its ideas of simulation as emergent from logical processes and graphic rendering is a brilliant but misguided journey into surreal reflections of our own alienation from the Holos.
Everything from social media to the Metaverse to AGI is expanding our connection to disconnection. I think that because of that grounding in disconnection, all of these projects are ultimately doomed to failure in the ways that truly matter to us, despite promising exponential success in the ways that Western-Materialist model and its virally expanding institutions have conditioned us to think that we should want. We dreamed of extraterrestrial conquest, and instead we are conquering ourselves with anti-terrestrial nauseas. We have mistaken the uncanny for the sublime.


Escaping the Matrix and the Metaverse
The Taoist approach goes a long way toward the goal of a new science of consciousness if we can integrate it into a view that embraces and transcends its Western-materialistic opposite. I think that this can be done by correcting Lao Tzu’s error of choosing nothingness rather than everythingness as the source of sense and consciousness. The taijitu or symbol of yin and yang in balanced juxtaposition should be understood as representing the wholeness of aesthetic opposites rather than their mutual negation. Nondualism is not the absence of monism or dualism but a synthesis and transcendence of those opposites. Our cosmos is not a physical machine struggling pointlessly against entropy, rather, entropy and negentropy are the yin and yang appearances of our local sense of sensitivity and insensitivity.
In other words, appearances of entropy and negentropy are signals that a given mode of awareness is facing away from its most direct access to the Aesthetic Holos and toward the appearance of disappearance into Anesthetic Graphos. In the MSR view as opposed to the Taoist view, consciousness is trans-tangible not intangible, absolutely everything not absolutely nothing.

In between the subpersonal (MSR term: semaphoric) and the personal (phoric when centered in a personal experience) are appearances that I see as intrapersonal or emphoric. These would be feelings and emotions, perceptions and figurations of selected sensations into coherent perceptions. These emphoric modes of perception connect the phoric or personal range of perception to semaphoric range of perception, which in turn, connects subpersonal experience to the impersonal ‘bottom’ or generic end of the universe. I have called this Graphos in MSR, and it represents the Totality when seen in its most fragmented, isolated, meaningless sense of least empathy.
Graphos is the inverted image of Holos, replacing unity with the proprietary and unrepeatable with a shadow unity of interchangable cohesive units, strung together according to abstract rules of recursive cardinality and ordinality – the essence of spatial negentropy and temporal entropy. The quantized or maximally graphed end of the cosmic experience divides the infinitely rich creativity and novelty of the Holos into nearly absolute insensitivity. If the Graphos end of the Holos of existed literally, it would be a sea of digital monads, stochastic phantoms animated by nothing but their own mathematical inevitability.
This is what MSR calls the extreme OMMM end of the continuum of sense. If Holos is the Absolute thesis, Graphos is the Absolute’s thesis of its own anti-thesis. The Holos is the appearance of the totality of aesthetic phenomena, uniting sensed qualities with sense modalities. Graphos is the appearance of the disappearance of Holos, separating sensed qualities from each other and from Holos as autonomous units of automaticity.
Flanking the personal or phoric modalities of sense/appearance on the other side (moving in the ACME direction toward Holos from personal awareness rather than toward Graphos) are the apophoric, metaphoric, and holophoric scales of consciousness. Roughly; thinking, insight, and inspiration. So interpersonal thinking (learning, communicating, understanding), transpersonal intuition (psychic experience that extends beyond subjectivity and physics), and what might be called mystical union with the divine or Absolute.
Taking this back to the Tao Te Ching, I propose that Lao Tzu’s error is only an error in the absolute sense, not in a personal sense. While we are alive, the transpersonal conscious experience that envelopes our personal conscious experience is silent, invisible and intangible. We can only get glimpses of it when we’re not looking and our envelope of limited personal awareness is slightly breached such as noticing synchronicity or completely opened up in a life altering event. When those larger breaches occur and the personal intellect is flooded with its version of transpersonal awareness, some contents are necessarily distorted and omitted. Personal awareness correctly identifies its contact with transpersonal awareness as more significant than ordinary experience but without any means to ground it in its ordinary sense-making terms. Hence, to the outside observer, the psychedelic or mystical experience is seen charitably as visionary or uncharitably as psychotic.
To temper that extreme, chaotic end of the spectrum of consciousness, MSR should be seen as only an outer framework of philosophy to point toward the possibility of a new synthesis between the systemizing and empathizing modes of awareness. That possibility would be fulfilled when people free themselves from pathological extremes and find common sense closer to the terrestrial center of our universe and the fully individual and human center of ourselves.








Draft on Information, Entropy, and Negentropy
It is currently popular to equate entropy with information. I have written previously why I do not think this makes sense, citing thought experiments such as running a video of ice melting in reverse. The fact that the amount of bytes of the video does not change demonstrates several concepts:
- Thermodynamic entropy is not equal to information entropy.
- The video image of ice melting is not the chemical process of ice melting.
- Sense modalities matter.
- Qualia cannot be presumed to arise organically from physical facts.
- Simulation is a superficial aspect of overlapping sense modalities rather than a deep fact of nature.
- Information includes both the sign, the unsign, the noise, and the unnoise.
- The sign contains maximum information and the least entropy. The sign is detected, understood, and known to be detected and understood.
- The unsign is the property of a given quale to be disambiguated negatively. The letter A is definitely not a consonant. We could say there is a set of things that A definitely is not. I am calling that the unsign of A.
- The noise is that which is assumed to be outside of the scope of signs but not outside of scope of detection.
- The unnoise is that which is assumed to be outside of the scope of detection, or which can neither be assumed nor ruled out.
- Abstraction is built on sense deployed on the ability to sense that something else has been sensed.
- Entropy and negentropy are qualities related to detecting detection events in the most minimal and generic terms rather than to the qualities that are being sensed themselves.
- The minimal and generic terms of data, such as bits, are the terms of a TEST performed concretely using physical substances and their capacity to detect and change (sensory-motive) each other’s (detectable-by-some-sensory-motive-test) state.
- Information refers to the results of a set of sensory-motive/experiential tests.
- Entropy and negentropy refer to information and qualities of sensory-motive tests.
We mistakenly call these tests and test results read-writes. Mistaken because there is NO decoding of the aesthetic qualities represented through what is being tested/”read”, there is only a copying of parts of sequences of (what we perceive to be) test results from one physical “storage” site to another”. From the perspective of hardware (which has no perspective in reality), there can be no “code”. The hardware event is controllable precisely because it has no meaning or motive of its own that would significantly impact those properties we are testing for.
Because we could dream of different facts relating to video images and chemical processes, neither can be identical to visible and tactile-tangible experiences.
Critique of A Good Idea
Here are my (unfortunately critical but well-intentioned) comments on “Electromagnetism’s Bridge Across the Explanatory Gap: How a Neuroscience/Physics Collaboration Delivers Explanation Into All Theories of Consciousness“, in response to some tweets.
I think that the paper does come up with good plans of action for experimentation, and I take no issue with those. I agree that we should make artificial neurons. I agree that we do experiments that will tease out the most primitive signs of electromagetism emerging from more fundamental physics, and I agree we should think of them as hints about how consciousness provides typical human modes of awareness. My disagreements are with the assumptions made in getting there.
I fully acknowledge that my disagreements are made from my own conjectures and I expect most audiences to consider those conjectures ‘crackpot’ ideas prior to even attempting to understand them fully. That doesn’t bother me in the slightest. My only hope is that there might be some trace left of my ideas on the internet in future decades that could help theorists close improve on or disprove my many hypotheses.
From the start, the issue of consciousness is framed in relation to both First Person qualities of experience and to the sense of their being “inside” of what is being observed as brain and body behaviors.
“Observational correlates are demonstrated to be intrinsically very unlikely to explain or lead to a fundamental principle underlying the strongly emergent 1st-person-perspective (1PP) invisibly stowed away inside them. “
I submit that this is already a rhetorically loaded framing that does not consider the possibility that the sense of privacy and interiority we commonly (but not always) experience is not any more fundamental than the sense of publicity and exteriority, even though those distinctions are widely reported to be transcended in certain states of consciousness.
Nobody has ever seen a first-person (1PP) experience ’emerge’ from a brain in any way. What we have observed is a correlation appearance between experiences with intangible or trans-tangible qualities and experiences of tangible appearances of changes in the brain.
I think that I should break that awkward sentence down further.
What we have observed (scientists, doctors, patients with brain injuries, etc)
is a correlation appearance (meaning we see a brain doing something and we hear reports of something else, but they appear to happen at the same time). There is no evidence of causation, no mechanism by which a brain activity transforms into another quality like color, flavor, or privacy. There is only a (veridical) appearance of temporal synchronization.
between experiences with intangible or trans-tangible qualities (I’m trying here to refer to the qualitative phenomena of nature that we tend to associate with and assume arise only within “1PP” privacy, but to explicitly avoid jumping to that logically unnecessary conclusion. I think the relevant thing about feelings, thoughts, flavors, etc is not that they are private but that they are NOT tangible. They are not touchable presences with geometric shape. They can be intangible concepts or phenomena that I call percepts (sensations, feelings, colors, etc) that are not completely intangible or conceptual but cannot be reduced non-destructively to geometric coordinates.)
and experiences of tangible appearances of changes in the brain. (I’m trying to emphasize here that regardless of how real and objective the brain appears, its appearance does depend on the modalities of sight and touch used to detect it. Those appearances cannot be said to be more fundamental than any other appearances that tend to appear to be ‘1PP’).
In consideration of that, I think that it is just as likely that the seemingly third person and seemingly first person qualities of experience ’emerge’, or perhaps better ‘diverge’ from a larger holarchy of conscious experience.
“The brain’s specialized complexity in EM field expression distinguishes it from other organs (such as the liver and the heart) that are also EM field entities from the atomic level up. The consequence is that there is only one natural, fundamental physics correlate of P-Consciousness: EM fields as “electromagnetic correlates of consciousness””
This seems to contradict itself. It is saying that it is the complexity of EM that makes the brain more special than, say the EM object that is the large intestine, or the body as a whole…but then the assertion points to EM fields rather than the specific property of complexity as being correlates of consciousness. I point to single-celled organisms that seem to be no less conscious than human bodies do, but which have no neurons. As the paper goes on to say:
“…for all practical purposes in the science of P-Consciousness, we are electromagnetic field objects in our entirety. As is a car, a computer, lunch, a pile of dirt, a tree, your dog, steam, and the air we breathe.”
So which is it? If everything is electromagnetism then is everything conscious to some degree (what I call promiscuous panpsychism)?, or is the brain conscious because it is so electromagnetically complex? If the latter then the EM aspect seems all but irrelevant.
“For example, atoms form molecules and they jointly aggregate to form cellular organelles. These jointly form whole cells, and so forth.”
Here again, the position of smallism is assumed and the top-down influence is disqualified without consideration. In reality, when we observe how organisms reproduce, they divide as whole cells. We can infer that the first cells were the result of molecules accidentally persisting in more complex collections that would lead to lipid membranes and prokaryotes but our efforts to synthesize cells from ‘scratch’ have thus far been somewhat suspiciously unsuccessful. Our inferences of small-to-large evolution by natural selection may be a huge mistake.
We have not even attempted to factor in the lensing effect of the bubble of our own perceptual limits, and its role in perpetuating an anthropocentric worldview. We have not attempted to estimate the possible consequences to our thinking of a universe in terms that assume our apprehension of human consciousness as the apex form of awareness or sole form of super-awareness. We have not factored in the possibility of timescale relativity and taken five minutes to imagine how much more conscious something like the atmosphere of a planet would assume if we viewed centuries of it in time lapse equivalent to an nMRI video.
In reality, the evolution of forms may proceed not from small to large and young to old, but may at the very minimum, progress from both top and bottom, past and “future”. We may be living in a Natural Containment Hierarchy that is not merely scaled by physical sizes of bodies, but by lensings of perceived causality, aka ‘time’. I have made some efforts to diagram this:

We should not assume that our typical, 21st century, Western conditioned, mid-life, waking consciousness is the universal authority on the ontology of time/causality. The smallest and largest scales of the hierarchy/holarchy may be more unified with each other than with the holons at the center of the hierarchy.

Our willingness to ignore our self-centering view of the containment hierarchy seems to suggest to me that the possibility of an intrinsic lensing property in the way that conscious experiences are diffracted from the totality. The sense of being in the center of the containment hierarchy may be like other types of relativistic frames of reference rather than an objective reflection of the cosmos as it is without our lensing of it, and of ourselves.
I propose that the anthropocentric positioning of ourselves in the containment hierarchy should be considered as a superposition of *both* the self-centered and the self-negating perspectives. In other words, we see ourselves and our lives as midway between Planck scales and cosmological scales both because it is actually true, and because it must always seem true.
By analogy, we find that both the geocentric/flat Earth perspective and the heliocentric round Earth perspective are equally significant to understanding human history, but neither could be predicted as emerging from the other. In the same kind of way, the uncanny similarity in the apparent size of the solar disc and lunar disk in the sky, combined with the happenstance of Earth having only one such natural satellite, makes for a rather fine-tuned condition that made millennia of religious worldviews possible and dominant still for some even in the face of the obvious evidence of the post-Copernican perspective.
What I see is a universe where such fine-tuned superpositions are themselves fine-tuned superpositions in between coincidence and teleology. The coincidences are both coincidental and more than coincidental, and picking one perspective or the other can seem to have cascading ‘choose your own adventure’ or ambiguous image flip consequences. The universe seems to support delusions and solipsism for an unreasonable number of people for an unreasonable amount of time. In my understanding, this property of the universe and consciousness is profoundly important, although that estimation of significance is itself tantamount to choosing the teleological-aesthetic (solipsistic at the extreme) side of the superposition of the absolute over the mechanistic-coincidental (“nilipsistic” at the extreme) side.

“If you deleted (in the sense of “de-organized”) any layer below M, for example, the entire hierarchy disappears from that layer upwards. For example, deleting all atomic particles deletes atoms, molecules, cells, and so forth, all the way to the containing environment. In these cases, none of the deletions eliminate the lower levels, including sub-atomic particles, space, and so forth. This fact reveals the existence of a powerful vertically acting system of constraints that is not within the ambit of any individual scientific discipline.”
Not necessarily. By analogy, if we deleted all characters used in written language, and all phonemes used in verbal language, that does not mean that all human thought and communication would be deleted. All that would happen is that humans would immediately begin inventing new language using those same two sense modalities or other sense modalities if they were also deleted. In our theories, I think that we should not be blinded by the bias known as “smallism” and “big” cosmopsychic theories should be considered equally viable.
“Contemporary philosophers tend to assume that fundamental things exist at the micro-level. Coleman (2006) calls this “smallism”: the view that facts about big things are grounded in facts about little things, e.g., the table exists and is the way it is because the particles making it up are related in certain extremely complicated ways. However, the work of Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has brought to prominence an alternative picture of reality. According to the view Schaffer calls “priority monism”, facts about little things are grounded in facts about big things. The table’s atoms exist and are the way they are because the table exists and is the way it is; and all things ultimately exist and are the way they are because of certain facts about the universe as a whole. For the priority monist there is one and only one fundamental thing: the universe.
If we combine priority monism with constitutive panpsychism we get:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
Constitutive cosmopsychism—The view that all facts are grounded in/realized by/constituted of consciousness-involving facts at the cosmic-level.
We can also envisage non-constitutive forms of cosmopsychism. On a standard form of layered emergentism (discussed above), human and animal minds are causally dependent on consciousness-involving micro-level facts whilst being fundamental entities in their own right; on the cosmopsychist analogue, human and animal minds are causally dependent on the conscious cosmos whilst being fundamental entities in their own right.”
continuing…
“Layer [M+1] is where the EM field system impressed on space by brain tissue acquires its fully detailed form, including all properties inherited by the constraints, drives, and properties of the deeper layers”
Here I propose that EM fields may not in fact be ‘impressed on space’ at all, and are not even ‘fields’ in an ontological sense. My understanding suggests that electromagnetic activity is irreducibly sensorimotive, and that the inference of fields is based on early methods of detection, measurement, and logical deduction which have become obsolete with the advent of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and familiarity with psi and other exotic states of consciousness.
The universe may be a conscious experience ‘all the way down’ and all the way up, with experiences on any given timescale lensing experiences on distant timescales in objectivized (“nilipsistic“) terms (as fundamental forces, mathematical logic, and tangible topologies, for example). Having read some of Maxwell and Faraday’s original papers defining EM in terms of fields, I am struck with the distinct impression that the conclusions they made would not have been that way if they had access to QM observations like entanglement and contextuality. I think that the field metaphor was a 19th century heuristic that continues to be indispensable, but not because it is an ontological fact.
We now note that the transition from strong to weak emergence is a fundamental feature of the process that science experienced when deconstructing the natural biosphere into the layered descriptions shown in Figure 2B. In Figure 2B this process has been labeled as “reduction.” Before the science was completed, every progression in scientific understanding started as a mystery: a question unanswered. Molecules were mysteriously related to atoms. Atoms were mysteriously emergent from what turned out to be their subatomic constituents. Higher up, we find the mystery of the strongly emergent flight of bumblebees, which turned out to be a weakly-emergent property of turbulence.
I see this as a popular, but nonetheless dangerous and seductive fallacy. It may be true that the history of science can be seen to have repeatedly corralled seemingly strongly emergent phenomena and tamed them into weakly emergent complications, this cannot be presumed to extend from the tangible to the intangible or trans-tangible under that same logic.
This is due to the fact that atoms, molecules, bumblebee bodies, and turbulence are *uncontroversially tangible*. There was never any question but that these phenomena are observed as tangible forms moving in public space. There is in all cases an infinitely wide explanatory gap between all such tangible objects and any such intangible or trans-tangible phenomena as sensations, feelings, perceptions, awareness, colors, flavors, sounds, ideas, symbols, references, interpretations, themes, archetypes, caring, valuing, and on and on.
No amount of moving particles can ‘add up’ to anything other than other groupings or shapes of moving particles without appealing to strong emergence or promissory materialism. There is no comparable problem with particles adding up to shapes such as molecules, surfaces, cells, bodies, planets, etc. They are all 3d topological presences that can be comfortably assigned causal closure that is limited to other 3d topological phenomena (forces, fields, laws of geometry). Things like forces and fields, while superficially ‘intangible’ (and therefore must be imagined to be somehow “imprinted” on the vacuum of space or inevitable consequences of statistics on cosmological constants or standard model, etc) are nonetheless exhaustively describable in tangible terms. They are spatial regions within which some effect is observed to occur.
This kind of in silico empirical approach is simply missing from the science. No instances of in silico-equivalent EM field replication can be found. Artificial neurons created this way could help in understanding EM field expression by excitable cell tissue.
I agree with this. In order to proceed with understanding the Easy Problem of our own neurology, we should be creating artificial neurons.
As the science has unfolded, a single, dominant and promising theory of this kind has emerged. It is the “Information Integration Theory (IIT) of Consciousness” by Tononi (2004, 2008), Balduzzi and Tononi (2008), Oizumi et al. (2014), and Tononi et al. (2016).
That may be true in the sense that there has not been a single competing theory that has been discussed as much in the media coverage of academic discussion in recent years, but I have not encountered many who see IIT as especially promising in reality. At best, some future descendant of IIT might provide some useful indications for determining whether someone is likely to come out of a coma or something, but even that utility may be completely misguided. There are many good critiques of IIT that can be found online:
“In summary, IIT fails to consistently assign consciousness to a system, because the definition is based on hypotheticals, which by definition are not instantiated by the system. Deep down, the troubles arise from the circularity of the definition of information as reduction of uncertainty. Uncertainty refers to a prior state of knowledge, but the notion of knowledge for the subject is never defined. In practice, the knowledge underlying the reduction of uncertainty is the knowledge of the observer who formalizes scenarios and quantifies probabilities of events that the system itself has never lived.”
http://romainbrette.fr/notes-on-consciousness-ix-why-integrated-information-theory-fails
continuing…
From a C1 perspective, this position is rather hard to understand, because C1 tells us there is only one substrate that we know delivers P-Consciousness: EM fields organized in the form of a brain made of atoms.
By this reasoning, only our own personal brain is known to deliver P-Consciousness also. Because we know from our own conscious experience how limited our empathy and theory of mind can be even for members of our own species, there is no reason to assume that P-Consciousness has any more connection to humans or brains or electromagnetism than it does to ‘complexity’ in general, or to biology, or to certain scales of material accumulation.
I see these assertions of brains as critical to understanding consciousness as based on uncritical anthropocentrism. I expect that our own brain is especially suited to our own kind of conscious experience, but really the brain of any species would seem equally appropriate if we did not have the human brain as an example. The intestines or the immune system, cell nucleus, cytoskeleton, nucleic acids, and many other complicated structures and processes would seem equally hospitable.
GRT focuses on the Oscillatory Correlates of Consciousness (OCC), where the particular “oscillations” most relevant to P-Consciousness are those arising from the brain’s endogenous EM field system
What we need to know though is what is doing the ‘correlating’? There might be all kinds of correlates of consciousness we can find – maybe high dimensional analysis of gross physiological indicators like skin resistance and blood pressure could be used to plot out some correlation too. Good stuff for the Easy Problem and medicine, but does nothing for the Hard Problem or disproving cosmopsychism.
The abovementioned EM account offered by JohnJoe McFadden is the wave-mechanical approach in his “Conscious Electromagnetic Information” (CEMI) field theory (McFadden, 2002a,b, 2006, 2007, 2013, 2020). “I therefore examine the proposition that the brain’s EM field is consciousness and that information held in distributed neurons is integrated into a single conscious EM field: the CEMI field” (McFadden, 2002a).
We have the same interaction problem here, with the theory that information can be somehow ‘held’ in physical topologies we call neurons begs the question of physicalism. As far as I can see, all physical effects can be explained as statistically inevitable recombinatory variations on geometric *formations* and require no such things as information, signals, signs, etc to do what they appear to do. The correlation is smuggled in retrospectively from conscious experience rather than arrived at prospectively from physics.
Our proposition is that the standard model’s scope of scientific deliverables, and the scientific behavior that produces them, is to be expanded to include (ii). We now know that EM field, as depicted by the particular (i) 3PP “laws of appearances”
Sure, I agree with that and have proposed the same kind of thing. EM should be understood to be a single Sensory-Motive-Electro-Magnetic phenomenon. That isn’t the whole story though, but it’s an important start. I have tried to diagram it early on in my Multisense Realism efforts:

let us assume that (ii) involves abstractions describing a universe made of a large collection of a single kind of primitive structural element, say X. This “X” could be perhaps regarded as an “event” or “information mote” or “energy quantum” or all these simultaneously. Its true identity is not our job to specify here.
A seemingly pragmatic approach, but unfortunately I think that there is no way to work from X without understanding what X is in this case. I think that it is our primary job to specify it. In my view, I propose X as a scale-independent (equally micro-unit as cosmo-unity) holos of nested/diffracted aesthetic-participatory (sensory-motive) phenomena. I have elaborate diagrams and explications of how that goes.


The solution to the hard problem, we suggest, has been hard because it must be discovered (not invented) in a completely different realm of descriptions of nature of kind (ii). In effect, the very meaning of what it is that a scientist does to explain nature has itself had to change.
What scientific evidence do we have that it is possible or practical to describe the natural world U in (ii) form? When we look for it, we easily find that we have already been doing it (X descriptions) for decades, but in physics and outside the science of consciousness. They are familiar to all of us. Some examples: X = “string theory” e.g. (Sen, 1998), “loops” e.g. (Rovelli, 2006), “branes” e.g. (Ne’eman and Eizenberg, 1995), “dynamic hierarchies of structured noise” e.g. (Cahill and Klinger, 1998, 2000; Cahill, 2003, 2005), “cellular automata” e.g. (Mitchell et al., 1994; Hordijk et al., 1996; Wolfram, 2002), and “quantum froth” e.g. (Swarup, 2006
This is hard to parse for me. Is it saying that things like branes, strings, loops, etc can just be considered identical to conscious experiences?
The moment a (ii) collection of abstracted X can be found to express EM fields as an emergent behavior of the collection, the physicists involved, by directly comparing the (i) and (ii) depictions of the same nature, would then be able to see, within (ii), that part of the underlying structure of (i) that may be responsible for the 1PP.
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable approach to me, as far as identifying some crucially important features of the origins of our own experience as human individuals, but I still see it as an Easy Problem path that assumes
1) consciousness = “1PP” and
2) 1PP is not closer the underlying phenomenon from which X arises than anything else we could imagine.
It is based on the empirical fact that it is EM fields that ultimately deliver P-Consciousness.
I see this as a problem. First of all, the statement that EM fields deliver P-Consciousness is NOT an empirical fact. It could just as easily be the case that EM fields are P-Consciousness appearances of the nesting of P-Consciousness on particular timescales. Secondly, the paper has already committed to the *complexity* of the EM field complex-that-appears-to-itself-as-a-brain being more important than the ubiquitous presence of EM as every-appearance-in-the-universe.
The correlates of P-Consciousness paradigm must ultimately face the fundamental physics of EM fields if a fully explanatory account of P-Consciousness is to be constructed.
That is an assumption also. A theory based on assuming smallism and anthropocentric identifications with consciousness. I am encouraged by the intentions and directions that are behind the paper, but I see it as still a step before Step One, and that in many ways, the true Step One can be arrived at by considering the diametric opposite of many of the ideas above that are assumed to be true.
Multisense Realism as a Specific Hypothesis of Cosmopsychism
In reality, mass and energy quantitatively describe the way that matter moves matter. There is no ‘nothing’ and physical ‘space’ and matter are just different densities of the same thing, which I think is really an irreducibly sensory-motive, aesthetic-participatory phenomenon that can be understood as tangibility.
Tangibility can further be understood, in my view, as only one band of a universal spectrum of nested aesthetic-participatory phenomena ranging from appearances that are intangible (roughly ‘concepts’) to trans-tangible (‘percepts’) and includes the appearance of tangibility (‘objects’) as a relativistic lensing artifact rather than a fundamental or universal context.It is physical appearances that are ’emergent’ from the temporalizing fragmentation and spatializing reunification of a single Totality or Holos of eternal conscious experience.
Through this anabolic/negentropic-catabolic/entropic invention of novelty/recursion there is a net accumulation of Significance, which is the saturation of aesthetic-participatory phenomena and maximal Holophoric unity expressed through minimal morphographic units.
So there.
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
A Proposal Against Light as Energy
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.
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.
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