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Chthonic Tree
(Double Ankh = “Illumination” or “Deeply Examined Life”).
Square Spiral Diagram
This square spiral logo is coming in handy, but my apologies if it is getting monotonous. This is an informal flow chart of what might be called cosmological metabolism. The interplay between H and Σ describe the catabolic and anabolic principles (Entropy and Significance). The idea here is that the primordial identity or principle behind everything is sense, and that through the alienation or diffraction of sense, followed by re-uniting, significance is gained.
Sense can be understood as accumulating from the bottom up, as complexity and sophistication of experience, and also as a splitting off from the Totality. Consciousness can be understood as a nesting of coincidence which accelerates itself. Time is a comparison of coincidences in which a logical distance is inferred, while space is presented as a logical context within which objects or forms coincide directly. Clock time, therefore is a spatialization of our inner experience – a masking of private, lifelong harmonics which are semantic and quasi-narrative. The gaps of time give structure to the autobiographical dream.
Sense bridges the gap between one time and another, across distance or separation, connecting public and private. Sense tears itself down so it can build improvement. Our public view of physics eradicates meaning inadvertently by hiding coincidence. Because sense is the primordial identity, coincidence can be thought of as the existential expression of what is essentially transformations of meaning and aesthetic quality. When we spread it out over space and time, it looks like coincidence, but if we keep spreading it out, it looks like unrelated incidents. The refinement of these unrelated incidents into generic, meaningless functions, is what is physics and math are about – however, because the nature of sense is self-reflective and self-revealing, the blueprint of its grandest coincidences can be seen, even in their absence.
Why an Atom is More Like a Person Than a Doll Is
Another thing that really puzzles me is the way that you agree with me that nothing is inanimate, and yet you repeatedly use arguments that are based on the premise that some things are inanimate. Is this just an *apparent* contradiction because we use the term ‘inanimate’ in fundamentally different ways, or is it a contradiction in your thinking? Could you perhaps explain this?
It makes sense that it would seem contradictory, as this issue is really a more advanced concept that goes beyond accepting the initial premises which we agree on. Lets say that we want to create a whole other Everything from scratch. In my view, as long as we keep things relatively simple, as in no complex organic life, our views are pretty much interchangeable. It doesn’t matter whether information processes are irreducibly animate as you say, or whether information processes are actually the self-diffracted gaps in the primordial identity pansensitivity, as I suggest. The effect is indistinguishable and we have cool stuff going on, with physics, aesthetics, entropy all naturally falling out as parameters.
The question of primordial identity begins to seem more important as multicellular life begins and we have to choose to bet on whether the body of any dividing cell is type identical to the experience associated with the organism as a whole, or whether there are multiple layers of experience going on. If there are multiple layers of awareness going on, does one of the layers act as an umbrella for the others, and if so, is it a summary/identity layer as the color white would be to the visible spectrum of colors, or is it an emergent layer which is produced by transfers of quantitative results, so that the cellular experiences are a priori ‘real’ and the macrophenomenal experiences are generated as a kind of projection which is less than primitively real.
What I do with MSR is to assume that the primary relation is perceptual relativity. This means that spacetime is scaled to the significance of experiences rather than fixed to a scalar index. By this I mean that the cell level microphenomenal experience is simultaneous with the organism level macrophenomenal experience, but that their simultaneity is asymmetric, as the macro appears smeared across time from the micro perspective. When we use microscopic scales to poke around in the body and brain, we are essentially driving a wedge between the macro and micro, but without recognizing that microphysical effects refer only to microphenomenal affects and not macrophenomenal affects.
At the level of the cell or molecule, the organism as a whole, if it is a complex organism, does not exist. Literally. There is no {your name here} to your DNA. Its a completely different level of description in which the public side relates mechanically (molecules must functionally produce cells and be produced by cells), and the private side relates *metaphorically*. It’s a complete divergence which does not appear prominently in pre-biotic phenomena. Each organism is evolving separately on the inside than it is on the outside, and that dimorphism is getting exponentially more pronounced as it evolves. The public body side appears to be physically recapitulating itself as a growing, multiplying, dividing structure in space, while the private experiential side has no appearance and is felt as the invariant nexus of a story about the world which appears to be repeating in nested cycles and progressing in a linear narrative.
The two stories are different. The microphenomenal story appears to relate to physical events, which we can observe in everything from a viral infection to changes in temperature or pressure in the environment. The macrophenomenal story, at least for us, is consumed by history and teleology. We respond to the environment based on our accumulated experience and intention. This so-called mind-body split is actually worse than that. Coming from a time where we had no understanding of microphysics, the simplistic mind-body mapping flattens human awareness into a single horizontal dualism. What I suggest is that dualism is actually an orthogonal monism, but that each horizontal dualism is part of a vertical stack. The cell that is seen by the organism in the organisms world is only a snapshot that it can see during one if its moments. To look at one of your blood cells under a microscope is for the cell to see itself from two different evolutionary times, with the newer, larger experience looking at a moment of the older, smaller experience and seeing it from the outside, as an object or machine. This is how the aesthetics of distance works for us – when we outgrow an experience, the here and now associated with us is recontextualized aesthetically as a there and then which is associated with “it”.
I don’t know if that makes it seem even more confusing, but what I am trying to get at is that the more the universe recapitulates itself as increasingly nested experiences, the more important it is that we see that which is nesting itself as primary and the overall nest as ‘inanimate’. Pragmatically, we can’t walk around the house worried about how the carpet fibers feel, or whether we have underestimated the feelings of the avatar we have created in a computer game. If it is the nesting instead which is primary rather than what is being nested, then we have no justification at all for our intuitions about life and death or organic vs artificial processes and we can only turn to a kind of gradient of probable intelligence based on complexity.
There are a lot of problems with that, not the least of which is that we are required to take the word of any sufficiently sophisticated machine over our own understanding. We become unable to justify any significant difference between an interactive cartoon character that acts like a person, and a fellow human being. A successful stock market trading program would be entitled to staff companies entirely with copies of itself and reduce the entire human population to an unemployed resource liability. I’m just throwing out a few wild examples, but there are many less extreme but undesirable consequences to personifying information processes, as we are starting to see with the rise of corporate personhood in the US. A corporation is an information process, as is a city, but we have to decide whether the employees and citizens ultimately serve the motives of the process or whether the processes are to extend from their motives. If process is primary, then we are mere spectators to the process of our own irrelevance. If sense and motive are primary, then the process is ours to do with it as we wish. Nothing short of the future of the universe hangs in the balance. It is more convenient to work with measurable processes and theories than messy emotions and sensations, yet the universe has found a way to do that, and I think so should we.
If we think of the world that we see through our eyes as an experience in the moment rather than the whole truth of existence, it is no longer a given that configurations and complexity are creators of life. The cellular machinery only relates to extra-cellular machinery on far micro and far macro levels of description. The most dynamic range is the fertile middle. Humans have, as far as we know, the broadest range between the mechanistic ‘out there’ and animistic ‘in here’. This is what makes us human. Any theory which does not clearly understand why that is important is not a complete theory, and is therefore ultimately a theory of the destruction of humanity. I’m not a huge fan of humanity myself, so I say this not as some Cassandra-esque wolf crying, but as a consequence of what seems to be the case when I add up everything to get a big picture. Information cannot feel. These words are not generic patterns produced by inevitable process alone. They are my words, and I am instantiating them directly on my own irreducibly macrophenomenal level.
Mapping the Continuum with Words
This chart of the MSR Continuum highlights symmetric nature of the spectrum. New in this edition is the category of “Theoretical Subject”. This is a piece to the puzzle that has had me curious for several years. The theoretical subject is also know as the view from nowhere – an unacknowledged voyeuristic perspective which is central to science, but which had never perfectly clicked into the continuum before. Now it’s easier for me to understand how thinking relates to objectification of the self, and how math and science amplify and refine that perspective.
I’m also liking the label of “Unnatural” to balance the opposite “Supernatural” category. The uncanny quality of artificial substitutes and robotic behavior fits in well as the extreme end of Nous or mind. The oversignification of psyche is overly proprietary and solipsistic.
Free Will and the Square Root of Entropy
A first draft remix of the previous ortho-lattice diagram.
This view introduces a new factor, the square root of Entropy (√H). If the universe is founded on pansensitivity or Sense (–ℵ), then the initial fracture is between the particular aesthetic qualities which stand out (Qualia æ), and which are anesthetized* (√H).
This primal choice between what gains attention and what loses it is equal to Motive (Ω), and represents the midway oscillation between sense and entropy.
Entropy or Panentropy (H) is defined as the contents of the formula in the box, ω = E/∞.
Quanta (mechanism or minimum possible qualia) equals Energy (E) divided by spacetime,
i.e. when “energy”** it means that a sub-personal sensation is quantified, it is decomposed spatially to position or temporally to disposition. This branching of quanta is also the branching of analog (proprietary likeness) and digital (generic substitution).
This accumulation of ‘live’ experiences taking place here and now is continuously breaking down into the scale nested multiplicity of theres and thens. This breaking down process is quantum/entropy, and it is the conjugate to sensory-motive, which are both together the conjugate of the Absolute (ॐ)
The formula on the top is more or less a rewording of E=MC², only with Matter (M) instead of Mass, and Quanta compressing the notions of energy and spacetime. Adding Significance (Σ)† to the formula makes it about the concrete realism of physical substance, rather than conceptual inertia or drag on acceleration. Unlike mass, matter is a three dimensional presence which is an anesthetized embodiment of significance.
Note the inverted parentheses in the sensory-motive formula denotes its fundamental receptivity and interiority relative to the Matter-Significance formula on the top (denoting exterior forms/bodies).
* Anesthetized = unintentionally ignored, masked, elided, alienated, automated, mechanized, or ablated. To be made ‘other’, impersonal, inanimate, etc.
** Energy = anesthetized motive
† Significance is the sum of sense squared (–ℵ² = ℵ) or cardinality; sense of proprietary motivation – identifiable likeness.
Destroying the “World”
Borrowing this nice diagram (above) from a post by Ethan Hein, I have cannibalized it to show how the concept of the “world” can be transcended.
John Locke’s decision to make properties of bodies in space “primary” and properties of experience “secondary” reveals the Western bias toward the public and away from the private. In this way, all bodies are assumed to have an independent presence outside of any perspective from which they might be viewed, and experiences are assumed to be entirely dependent upon the interaction of physical bodies.
The twentieth century should have given us a clue. With Freud and Jung revealing that the depths of human psychology transcended our conscious expectations, and Einstein proving the relativity of mass, energy, time, and space, the surprises of Quantum Mechanics very nearly opened the door to a fully integrated worldview in the 20th century. As if mirroring the turning of the political tide, the 1980s began to turn progressive relativity on its head, and restore a kind of digital absolute. Instead of profound principles of contextual aesthetics, the revolution in physics championed a model of blind probability and computation.
The model that I propose does not contain a “world” which is independent of concrete aesthetics. What we see and feel is not the entirety of what can be seen and felt, but neither is it a “model” of an unfelt, unseen “world.” It is easy to think of parts of our brain as mapping to a model of our body. Different regions of the brain correspond to particular regions of the body. The same is true, however, of our emotions and thoughts. To be consistent, our emotions and thoughts would also have to be models, not of the brain (because the brain is part of the body, which is only a model), but just models period.
There is a double standard that leaks in with the Western-Lockean model. If we say that the body we experience is a model of the body in the world, then we are stuck with the consequence that the mind we experience is also a model of part of that same body in the world. Except that it clearly isn’t. What we think about is not modeled isomorphically in the activity of the brain. There is no computation that looks like cranberry sauce tastes, certainly not without one of these imaginative/imaginary “minds” to make the connection.
If we instead take the unreality of our model seriously, it makes more sense to turn the whole configuration inside out. If our experience models the brain’s activities, then so too must our experience of the world be a model. Since it is in that modeled world that we find the brain in the first place, we now have no reason to believe that the primary properties of bodies in space are really primary. In fact, the whole notion of primary and secondary, interior and exterior, could only be part of the modeling process. There is no indication of any kind of noumenal ‘world’ other than the inferences which we make through phenomenal experience.
To the contrary, all reports from explorers of consciousness report a deep unity of awareness – a vastness of united presence or absence which underlies all phenomena. We do not see a Platonic factory of disembodied mathematics behind the curtain of secondary forms. In fact, forms themselves are completely irrelevant to mathematics. Geometry as we know it, shapes and angles and lines, is entirely superfluous to a quantum-digital universe. Geometry is the stuff of visual presentation and tactile, tangible manipulation. There is no geometry in a vacuum, no visible ‘bits’ or digital bodies which must draw these characters as you see them on the screen. What point could there be of modeling the invisible with the visible? What computer needs to see itself compute?
It works much better if we flip the model over, and see that the glue which holds mathematics together is consciousness. When we infer that a quantity is diminishing toward zero, we are inferring that intellectually. It is a practice of intuition or telepathy – a logical feeling that we have about patterns and what they imply. Bohm’s implicate order, I would say, can be understood more clearly as private physics. Not a disembodied order, but the precipitation of lower order sense within higher order sense. The emergence of cymatic patterns, for instance, in a layer of salt on a vibrating drum, is not a higher geometry which unites the salt, it is an exposure of more primitive logics – repetitive, dumb representations. Cosmic wallpaper.
Higher intelligence requires not only adding ‘complexity’ to such dumb representations, or increasing the computing resources, but an increase in sensitivity to implicit depths. The multiplexing of sensory contexts is subtractive to the point of simplicity. Something like pain or red is not a complex representation, but just the opposite, a simple and direct presence. These qualities could not be any more primary, from our perspective. It is through this primordial simplicity that true novelty ‘diverges’ from the absolute. Unrepeatable moments made of unrepeatable moments which are made to seem to repeat when viewed from a distance. The “world” is a creation of distancing, of the alienated perspective of elaborately nested subjectivity.
My response (top) to a diagram that I came across (lower). Some differences include:
- Outer edge is a continuum between “Everything” and “Almost Nothing” rather than “Nothing”
This reflects the idea that nothing cannot exist except as an expectation that something has about the absence of everything. It is therefore presence, rather than absence which is the primordial identity, and all phenomena are defined by substitutable gaps in pansensitivity. Awareness is localized by entropic masking or insensitivity rather than mechanical projection on top of “nothing”.
- Art – Aesthetics shares equal if not slightly greater prominence with Law – Mathematics
This overturns the Western assumption that appreciation of phenomena is a side effect of functionality. While locally true, for example, that humans like sugar because of its evolutionary value, the specific pleasure of sweet flavor is not itself describable by function, nor can it be assembled mechanically. That the universe is fundamentally an aesthetic agenda which works in order to play rather than the other way around is one of the major consequences of Primordial Identity Pansensitivity. The universe is a feeler of experiences, not just a producer of unfelt mechanisms.
- Color vs Greyscale connotes the relation between the concrete-experiential and the abstract-measured as one of reductionism rather then essentialism.
The idea here is that the rational is only a higher octave of the empirical, and the empirical is only an objectified reduction of the subjective-aesthetic. There is one continuous spectrum of sensitivity which reflects itself as desaturated forms and functions.
The top down and bottom up arrows show the circulation of intentional sequence and unintentional consequence throughout the continuum. From the pansensitivity pole on the top, where all substitutable gaps of sensitivity have been filled in and sense is total, to the pan-entropy pole on the bottom, where the ratio of gap to connection is almost infinitely great, a picture of cosmos emerges as a hyperplasticity of perspective.
- Synchronic and selective are new additions to the sensory-motive side. I think that it might work to call them electro-synchronic and magneto-selective. Electric force would seem to embody the gap-jumping, meta-phoric principle of sense-making, while magnetic fields are about orientation and masses moving themselves in relation to each other.
Multisense Realism 
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