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Sensation, Realism, and Consciousness
The sense of image fits into the larger picture between the Subjectively Objectified and Subjectively Subjectified groupings.
Holos (Transpersonal
(Interpersonal (Personal
(Intrapersonal (Perception
(Subpersonal (Subjectified sensation) | Impersonal (Subjectively objectified sensation)
Graphos)
Evan Thompson Live! Consciousness Live! S4 E12 CW comments, part 2
At 57:15 Richard is posing the question of why objects in a simulated world aren’t real objects in a real digital world. To this I say what is being overlooked is sense modality. We have to be as literal as we possibly can be when discussing these topics. Objects, in the most literal sense, are not images or numbers, they are tangible shapes. Solid, liquid, and gaseous volumes in public spacetime. Real objects are composed of molecules that are made up of atoms on the periodic table. Sense experience is the only thing that can generate realism. When we think of a simulation, we are thinking of some artificially stimulated sense experience – a GUI image that *we* see (birds don’t see it, hamsters don’t see it) on screen hardware. Without this, there is nothing begin simulated.
The interface hardware cannot be simulated. There is no software that can be written that will generate colors for the color blind in the way that software could be written to solve math problems for people who aren’t able to do math. No amount of computation or complexity will yield a new primary color. Eventually we will likely have hardware that is wired into the visual cortex directly but we still don’t know how or why changes in the states of cells would ‘seem like’ or ‘appear’ as anything other than what they physically are. If any data is being processed, the changes in the cellular states already ARE the data processing events. If an organ evolved to have a higher, meta-level governance of its own processes, then that too would only be and could only be more cells that are performing cellular functions which only happen to mirror a sampling of the lower level processes. There can be a functional link – for every 100 neurons that fire on a lower level, 2 neurons fire on the meta-level, and that would accomplish the result that our experience of ‘modeling’ allows us to accomplish functionally, but without any such thing as modeling. The relation of the “model” plane and the “actual” plane is metaphorical. They are both physical objects of different size and composition. It is only in human perception and association that one could seem to ‘model’ the other. There are no models in physics, chemistry, or biology, unless we understand those domains (as I do) to be scales of conscious interaction.
I very much agree with what Evan is saying around 1:05 about bits not existing apart from our practices of imposing maps and schemes. This gets us close to the big revelation that I’m pushing all of the time – It’s SENSE that matters. Matter doesn’t sense. Or it wouldn’t, if matter were primitive and real, but matter itself is just a lower rung of sense and motive engagement. That’s why QM and relativity describe the scale limits of physicality, rather than Cartesian coordinate objects. That’s why quantum contextuality and entanglement. The common denominator is always ultimately sense. Not even the sense-of-being-a-sensor or using a sensory, but sense experience itself: qualia. Matter can be qualia, information can be qualia, but neither information or matter can turn themselves into qualia materially or logically, nor can they turn themselves into each other. That’s perhaps the more important clue.
Software cannot find hardware and vice versa. When we ‘compile’ ‘code’, we are performing a physical task that just pushes physical changes in physical circuits. There isn’t a literal ‘conversion’ from ideas to physics, it’s just that the way that we set up the machine seems *to us* (and to the sense and sense making modalities we can access) to be isomorphic. There is no ‘code’ in physics – no concepts, only tangible shapes or regions where tangible shapes move in certain ways.
Electromagnetism can be reduced to that – to changes in the motion of particles. We can undo all notion of fields and forces, undo the intuitions of Maxwell and Faraday, and replace them all with sensory-motive engagements. These are the phenomena from which all laws and forces emerge. Something has to sense something before a change – any change – can be present. Present where? How? What is changing is always and only some sensed quality or property, like position of a tangible shape relative to another shape and to a memory or perception of that position quality being altered. We can look at it the other way around also, with stasis in the background and motion in the foreground. We can think of stillness as an artificial appearance that our sense filtering is presenting, and that without that filter, everything is motion on some timescale. Without sense, no present or presences can be accessed.
I don’t have much to add about the rest of the talk. I think it gets close to where my view begins to take shape, as far as Kant, Husserl, and Whitehead questioning the distinction of subjective and objective categories, etc. I agree that is the right direction to go in. Where I end up with it is that objectivity and noumenality are relative rather than absolute, and that existence itself is phenomenological, without being subjective or objective. The appearance of subjective and objective seeming qualities are artifacts of a particular scope of awareness, typically is divided and nested by timescale and distinction of modality. Scope of awareness lens each other to appear in these kinds of aesthetic categories. What we understand as the geological timescale is so slow compared to our own that we can’t empathize with it or directly access its flow. It seems static. The laws of physics, hold forever as far as we are concerned, but in an absolute sense, they may be more of a set of useful habits from which the longest and shortest timescale events are built.
Here’s a terrible hack set of images to try to illustrate what I mean:
Got it? Spacetime scales are nested inward so that astropysical timescales (longest and shortest duration, largest and smallest size) envelope geo-molecular (next longest and next shortest duration and next largest and smallest size), which envelope the most medium scaled durations and size (eco-cellular).
Now think of that in an orthogonal relation to the other half of the universe, which correlates to size and duration, but is defined by intensity of aesthetic-participatory richness, aka Significance.
The main takeaway that I can offer as a response to the video, if nothing else, is the idea that
1. The distinction between anesthetic-participatory and anesthetic-mechanical is more fundamental than phenomenal/noumenal or subjective/objective.
2. Anesthetic mechanisms are either concrete (geometric mass-energetic force-field operations) or abstract (algebraic information-processing functions)3. Anesthetic mechanisms do not exist on their own and are in all cases a reduced, exteriorized reflection between two disparately scaled modes of aesthetic-participation.
Matthew Forrest: Linear time is an illusion
Great video Matthew. I agree mostly, but I don’t think that we need to conclude that linear time is (only) an 𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙤𝙣, any more than we can conclude that photons are 𝒏𝒐𝒕 an illusion.
I see illusion itself as more illusory, a function of the perceptual sense of realism which is a hierarchical, power-law relation across multiple modes and scales of perceptual access.
For example, in the perceptual reality of all small flying insects such as a mosquito, the surface tension of water allows one to stand on top of a pond. The world at that scale is just a different world than it is at the scale of a human body.
I propose that in addition to having access to different qualities of the exterior (seeming) world by virtue of that world’s body size scale differences, mosquito experience also likely includes access to a corresponding set of interior (seeming) features (such as sensory and perceptual qualities) that human experience does not. The mosquito may not experience the world in anything like the stunning degree of aesthetic richness that human consciousness affords.
The mosquito’s life may be devoid of deep pain and pleasure as we know them, of a sense of self as separate from all of mosquito-kind, etc. It’s a different game of life at that scale – possibly more about geometry of feelings rather than the geometry of crystal clear objects we can touch and see with human scale sense.
Our scope of access changes as we grow and age, but also remains the same as far as it remains the experience of an individual human being, which is divided out of a larger collective experience of family, species, order, class, phylum, kingdom, etc. I propose that experience goes beyond biological kingdoms even, and into geo-chemical and astro-nuclear scales of 𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆 size and relative sample frequency rate.
It makes sense to me that because perception or consciousness is necessarily and literally 𝙜𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙧 than reality, and includes sole access to all facts and fictions, facts are literally a localized/localizing subset of universal fiction rather than the other way around.
What we perceive to be stable facts (and which 𝙖𝙧𝙚 stable facts 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚, physical constants etc,) can be understood as established, ongoing fact-fiction experiences of a greater or lesser scale of significance than our own ongoing fact-fictions.
I propose that the relation of the scales of significance are the basis of the perceptual quality of realism, as well as gravity, both of which are the same power law relation of universal perception only interiorized and exterioirzed respectively.
We can have dreams that are more realistic or less realistic than our waking experience, but within any given dream or period of waking awareness, we can accept any degree of strangeness and surreality as factual reality. Only the experience of waking up, which is a perceptual shift in perceptual context, can change the relations to cast one set of experiences as dream and another as reality.
If you never wake up from a dream, that dream is your real life. The only difference is that real life is a dream that shares more context of common sense (sense that is literally common across more relative scales and sample rate frequencies, modalities, and quantities of individualized experiences).
There Has Always Been a Better Case for Matter Being Imaginary Than Imagination Being Material
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.
Us, the Virus, and Multisense Metaphysics
In my view, there are three distinct, contrasting layers of causality:
1. Subpersonal (mechanical, generic, repetitive, statistical, meaningless)
2. Personal (dualistic, intentional, autobiographical, semi-meaningful)
3. Transpersonal (transcendental, synchronistic, archetypal, super-meaningful)
For most individuals, I suspect that we are here primarily to participate in a personal experience. This consists of a human lifetime which combines both elements that are tailor-made for us as conscious subjects, and elements that are arbitrary from a subjective perspective and are instead brought about statistically by relatively objective and inevitable conditions. We are the union of the intentional and the unintentional. One of the consequences of that union is that our ability to participate consciously tilts the balance toward the intentional, even if only in the fact that intention is conceivable. I think that playing this role of person necessarily requires us to act as a gatekeeper between the levels above and below our own personal range of experience. The person is like a transistor, modulating the flow of cause and effect between the subpersonal (bottom-up, unintentional) and transpersonal (top-down, super-intentional), as well as initiating their own unique causes on a personal and interpersonal level. We are choosing, little by little, whether to support broadly inclusive, sensible qualities of experience (what I call Significance) or to support less-significant, ‘lower’ agendas that are purely selfish and insignificant. We have the privilege to decide whether to emphasize the ‘better angels of our nature’, or to indulge in ego glorification, or to descend further into dehumanization (the subpersonal/impersonal).
In the context of my Multisense Realism metaphysics, I use the term significance in a formal, and somewhat neologistic way. The idea is that since the universe is made of conscious aesthetic (feelings, sensations, qualities) experiences rather than something like information or physical mechanisms (anesthetic forms, functions, numbers), there are some interpretations of physical law that need to be updated. If my view is on the right track, then what we understand through the Second Law of Thermodynamics is only addressing the lowest, subpersonal/impersonal layer of nature. When we run scientifically controlled experiments using tangible objects as instruments to exert and record tangible influences over other tangibly measurable phenomena, then by design we are going to exclude the personal and transpersonal layers of causality to a large extent. The very methods we are using to inspect nature are specifically suppressing the influence of higher consciousness in the service of science, however, without higher consciousness, what remains of science is, like the phenomena that are being studied, ultimately entropic and meaningless. The point of science is to assist higher consciousness, and where it fails to do that, it is a net loss for civilization. Optimizing financial profit is not a feature of higher consciousness, it is an agenda within personal and interpersonal consciousness.
With Multisense Realism I have attempted (in a somewhat lazy and half-assed way) to propose ideas for rehabilitating our worldview on a philosophical level with a model of nature in which mechanism, personal participation, and transpersonal phenomena are integrated as parts of a single ‘aesthetic’ spectrum. It now appears to be time to take a shot at applying this philosophical project more to real life, and perhaps specifically toward strategies related to coping with the ‘long emergency’ that humanity is currently entering.
What then might the MSR philosophy suggest that we can do personally during this time?
1. Be a good gatekeeper. It is our personal responsibility to negotiate between our body and emotional needs (subpersonal and intrapersonal levels of experience) and our higher guidance of interpersonal and transpersonal awareness (thinking, informing ourselves, intuition, empathy, inspiration, divinity). Being a good gatekeeper means being a good leader to your body and a good citizen to society and the cosmos. It means asserting the significance of higher agendas over lower ones, however, there is also a danger in allowing raw transpersonal impulses to fill us with false hopes, superstitions, myth and drama. Sanity is the mid-range between the overly autistic and overly artistic. The place in between is the best place for most of us to build our psychological house-of-bricks. The key to being a good gatekeeper, IMO is to get into the habit of addressing sensations and impulses, emotions and thoughts in an intelligent way: To sort out which experiences are caused by automatic mechanisms that can be ignored or adjusted, and which rise to the attention of our personal and participation. We should ask ourselves, how does sanity work? This becomes more important in a time of mass crisis and prolonged isolation.
2. I think that we are here because there are some things that can only be experienced directly from the perspective of being a particular, unique person. It is important that to ‘be yourself’ to a greater extent during these times and resist the pressure to degenerate into stereotypical roles and behaviors that fill the vacuum during a low-level crisis such as a war or pandemic. The virus event is forcing us to choose, with our actions, whether to dehumanize or rehumanize.
3. Understand and practice self-healing. This gets into some potentially dangerous speculation. I am not a qualified expert by any means, and I would never suggest that anyone ignore medical realities. What I offer here is an interpretation of the placebo effect which gives us mental license to intervene on our own behalf and potentially on behalf of others. I think that the ‘placebo’ interpretation of medically inert intervention is based on the mechanistic, sub-personal worldview described in the first paragraph. If my view is on the right track, this is a biased misinterpretation that effectively cuts off our access to half of the available resources for wellness and healing. Without getting too far into the weeds, I will just say that while we must collectively focus on mechanical, functional solutions to public health and social crises, we can also personally stretch our sensitivity into the transpersonal levels of intuition and synchronicity to discover new paths of healing and support. Again, ungated access to the transpersonal can and will by default lead us into magical thinking and superstition, so it’s important not to abandon our post with uncritical thinking. What I am suggesting is that what we think and feel are powerful, reality-altering influences, which we can also have power over to some degree.
Ok, now I’ll get into the weeds. Feel free to ignore the rest of this.
A more technical justification for how personal consciousness can alter subpersonal realities comes from the idea that ’emergent properties’ are a negentropic influence on physical phenomena. That is, conscious perception and attention have the effect of simplifying complex physical phenomena and consolidating fine-grained details. Even from a materialistic perspective, that is the function of consciousness – to winnow ‘sense data’ down into a manageable stream.
My thinking is that because the details being eliminated and summarized by perception are microphysical, they are skewed toward disorderly, entropic tendencies. The second law of thermodynamics applies to physics, but not to perception, and not to physics that is under the influence of intention.
When we look at a video screen, for example, we don’t see an ocean of photoelectric and biochemical effects, we see an orderly visible image, with legible words and sentences. We are using the sub-personal ocean of meaningless-but-tangible events as a medium through which higher level, less tangible perceptions and understandings can take place. Our participation is having an effect on the balance of entropy and negentropy as well as in the selection of which negentropic resolutions are emphasized. When we look at an optical illusion such as the duck-rabbit ambiguous image, we can, through our attention, choose whether to see the duck, the rabbit, or neither. (Negentropic resolution 1, Negentropic resolution 2, or unresolved Entropic state). We may be able to even create novel, proprietary perceptual gestalts (Negentropic resolution X).
What I am suggesting is that part of what is going on in the placebo effect is that when we participate in an intervention from higher levels of consciousness onto lower levels, we are changing the momentum of entropy and negentropy in our own experience, which includes our body. Just as the Safety Match meme illustrates how social distancing can interrupt the domino effect of the exponential spread of disease, so too can our conscious interventions interrupt or accelerate automatic body processes.
(image by Juan Delcan and Valentina Izaguirre)
We can see more and do more with our body than our body can without us. As spectacular and complex as the human body is, it is by itself, just programmed to grow, reproduce, and die. It is our personal consciousness, and its power to channel transpersonal genius into the world which makes the difference. All that we have to do is to channel wisely. We have to choose when and how to choose.
Qualia Basics
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.)
Sam Harris Interview of Donald Hoffman
Listening to this podcast:
https://samharris.org/podcasts/178-reality-illusion
My view has developed along similar lines as Donald Hoffman’s. One important difference is that I take his observation about the world we perceive being a sensory desktop or data structure contrived from fitness payoffs a step further. I plug that observation back in to itself, so that the expectation of data structures and fitness payoffs are also part of how we are using a sensory desktop.
In other words, after we understand how survival of a tangible, mortal body shapes our entire perception, we can see that this understanding is also biased and contrived by the particular modes of sense and sense making that have evolved since the Early Modern Period.
This means that the desktop we experience is different from the unimaginable ‘real world’ not because it is fabricated but because tangibility is only one aspect of ‘world realization’, and even the unimaginable ‘real world’ is actually only another level and scale of the same sense desktop. Yes, human perception has been shaped by fitness payoffs from animal mortality, and that has been supercharged in the centuries since Galileo and Descartes, but that doesn’t mean that perception in general is shaped ONLY by those anthropological>zoological>biological fitness payoffs, and that does not mean that sense experience itself (sensation>feeling>perception>awareness>personal consciousness) arises FROM fitness payoffs.
If my view is on the right track, it’s *all* a desktop, and there is nothing that can ever exist which is not a ‘user interface’, even if the ‘user’ is a sub-personal or impersonal frame of perception, i.e. a pre-physical sensory-motive event. So yes, I think that our movie is directed by evolution (as presented in our desktop of tangibility/causality/realism/mortality), however even the director’s world that our movie fictionalizes is itself nothing but the larger, older movies that we currently use as a movie *theater* (physics, information).
Multisense Realism 
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