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The Matter of Objects and The Idea of Subjects
The Matter of Objects
What do we mean by an object? As usual, the term can be used both literally and figuratively. A friend of mine who insists that the universe can be boiled down to objects or concepts* and that the definition of object is simply ‘that which has a shape’.
I argue that this is, (like all pure dichotomies) too simplistic, and that both objects and concepts are more like bookends on a spectrum-continuum of what could be called percepts. We can dream in shapes and places of varying levels of realism, we can see a phantom image which has a light bulb shape when we look at a light bulb. Likewise we can encounter the objective reality of humidity or a foul odor without being aware of any shape associated with them. This is a pretty clear indication to me that shape can be abstract or concrete. We have no trouble talking about a circle and a cycle in the same breath, even though one is a shape and one is a ‘concept’. The unity between them seems at least as relevant as the distinction, especially if we are reducing the universe to the most primitive principles possible**.
The word object is also used as a verb. “I object!”, which implies the intentional assertion of personal will into a public social context. When we use subject figuratively, it is in a lowly political sense, or at least a passive sense. When we are subject to laws or another person’s will, we may not be able to object, or not effectively anyhow. On the other hand, if nobody is subject to our influence, then nobody cares what we object to, and we are just as ineffective as if we were being passive subjects.
Looking at this slide from Kelvin Abraham’s Tetryonics,
I started thinking about how his distinction between 3D matter and 2D mass-energy translates into MSR sensory-motive terms. I see the sensory-motive primitive as the commonality between both the 2D and 3D phenomena, with the 2D mass-energy being sensory-motive (temporal) and the 3D being 2D-once-removed (spatialized publicly).
If we think about our naive experience of what solid matter, it could be defined as a “sense of invariant insensitivity” – a relatively static obstruction within a public facing sensory modality. We mostly rely on optical and tactile sense to navigate the public space, so solid objects are mostly defined a phenomena that is tangible and visible. If I had to define object in the way that I think that we literally mean it, it might suffice to day that an object is any phenomena which can be removed without being destroyed.
With the ghost silhouette of the light bulb for example, which has a shape and a location relative to my field of vision, I cannot take that shape from my vision and put it somewhere else. I can’t give it to someone and nobody can take it from me. It seems that objecthood is tied more to a conserved identity of public position than anything else. Obstruction of sense and conserved identity may really mean the same thing. Obstruction or sensitivity-of-insensitivity provides the iconic reflection that relates back to the totality.
If you have ever programmed a computer game with moving avatars, you know that collision detection is not just automatic. You need to have the program check to see whether the pixels are adjacent to each other and then define that as ‘touching’ to initiate a bounce or splat or whatever. The sense of touch or tangible boundaries is not a given. It takes a perception, a sensory interpretation to motivate object-like behavior. The object must object!, but it must object in the presence of others who can detect the objection and who ‘care’ enough to respond, or whose response is the primitive ancestor of what we call care. Significance. Reading a signal as a signal and integrating it as distinct from noise or nothing (entropy).
The difference between geometry and topology is relevant as well:
If a structure has a discrete moduli (if it has no deformations, or if a deformation of a structure is isomorphic to the original structure), the structure is said to be rigid, and its study (if it is a geometric or topological structure) is topology. If it has non-trivial deformations, the structure is said to be flexible, and its study is geometry.
Because matter doesn’t have to be literally rigid, and clearly occupies space in non-solid, self-deforming states, I would suggest that it could be topo-genic, and that the rigidity or ‘topo-cality’ of matter is a continuum from the semi-topological fluid to the nearly-topological solid. The 3-dimensionality of matter is, by contrast, not a continuum. It either has volume or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t have volume than it must be energy (mass) only. It could be said that mass-energy is 2+1 dimensional, as it is the source of experienced ‘time’, but matter qua matter may have no dimension of time. It is 3D bodies divided across space. The animation we experience of matter is all subjective (or “conceptual” if you are an RSM fan).
If Abraham is right, and matter is 3D mass, it may be redundant to say that matter has mass. Matter may add to mass-energy-time only volume-related scalars like pressure. The contrast between the 2D and the 3D also may only be conceivable within a 5D (individualized) privacy, which is biological life. The biological is also a continuum, like the topological, which is bio-genic rather than fixed. The kingdoms of biology are comparable to the physical states of matter. They evolve through embodied experiences, unlike matter which are (pre-somatic) experiences over an unlimited time that we perceive in limited cross-sections as matter.
The Idea of Subjects
I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with mine eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny, is that which philosophers call matter or corporeal substance. And in doing of this, there is no damage done to the rest of mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it. – George Berkeley
In all of the arguments that I have had about physics and metaphysics, I have never heard from any strong critic who would be able to understand what Berkeley meant in the above quotation. In every case, their argument makes it clear that they are psychologically incapable of differentiating Idealism from Solipsism. Several times each week I go through the same rebuttal to their straw man of idealism in which I supposedly deny that the Moon or some other object exists when I am not looking at it. Each time, my correction of their misrepresentation passes right through their ears without any apparent effect. Instead, they go on, again and again, pushing against this paper pussy cat of nobody’s solipsism, regardless of how many different ways that I try to explain that idealism need not deny the reality of the experience of matter, only that matter is fundamentally interactive and experiential rather than an entity which is independent of *all* perspective. Nobody is saying that matter doesn’t exist independently of any particular perspective or sense modality, but that it could be independent of all possibilities of sensation is really an abstraction that is even more naive than naive realism. It’s a purely unconsidered presumption of existence-ness without any connection to aesthetics. Berkeley understood that even a description of nature without awareness such as Whitehead’s; “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless.” would be much too generous. There could be no hurrying or material without some perspective in which those qualities were being presented.
John Locke (Berkeley’s predecessor) states that we define an object by its primary and secondary qualities. He takes heat as an example of a secondary quality. If you put one hand in a bucket of cold water, and the other hand in a bucket of warm water, then put both hands in a bucket of lukewarm water, one of your hands is going to tell you that the water is cold and the other that the water is hot. Locke says that since two different objects (both your hands) perceive the water to be hot and cold, then the heat is not a quality of the water.
While Locke used this argument to distinguish primary from secondary qualities, Berkeley extends it to cover primary qualities in the same way. For example, he says that size is not a quality of an object because the size of the object depends on the distance between the observer and the object, or the size of the observer. Since an object is a different size to different observers, then size is not a quality of the object. Berkeley rejects shape with a similar argument and then asks: if neither primary qualities nor secondary qualities are of the object, then how can we say that there is anything more than the qualities we observe? – Wiki
Berkeley sees that there is no difference in kind, but only a difference in degree between the so called primary and secondary qualities, and that if anything, the more impersonal qualities make more sense as secondary reductions of the more personal qualities than the other way around.
We cannot see carbon dioxide gas, but that doesn’t mean that there is no aspect of our extended sub-personal sensitivity which is not embodied (from our perspective) by cellular and molecular interactions. We don’t see it or smell it, but we feel our lungs distress when it can’t get rid of it fast enough. If it were the other way around, and the more public facing qualities were primary, then we get all of the problems of Philosophy of Mind that have to do with binding and the Explanatory Gap. There’s not any plausible justification for personal qualities to emerge from the impersonal. Privacy could only be a subset of public conditions, and rather than emotions or sensations, we should have only shapes and positions which represent a sum of more complex shapes and positions.
Berkeley is interesting. He had some ideas which were 200 years before their time. Although his intuitions defied the prevailing Early Modern views, they are right at home in the 20th century with Relativity, Positivism, and Quantum Theory. It makes sense to me that someone like that would of course see Deist philosophy and Classical mechanics as being rooted in a fundamental error of mistaking the form for the content. For him, the content was God, so he cast those who were devoted to that error, the free-thinkers and Enlightenment era mathematicians, as infidels.
In 1732, he published Alciphron, a Christian apologetic against the free-thinkers, and in 1734†, he published The Analyst, an empiricist critique of the foundations of infinitesimal calculus, which was influential in the development of mathematics.
It seems to me that while he was radical and progressive in his prescience of a post-Newtonian, immaterial physics based on relativity, his enthusiasm for this view was too far ahead of his time. His unfortunate rejection of the foundations of modernism put him in on the wrong side of history. He could see clearly the problem of substances which were absolute, but he could only express the alternative solution in pre-scientific terms, which in his tribe meant God and Christianity. He wrote:
“Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.
Here I think that he is making very much the same mistake that he has seen his opponents make when considering his positions. That we cannot change what we see when we open our eyes does not mean that something else must be able to change it, but he jumps to that conclusion because he has not considered the possibility that sense itself could be the parent of God just as it is of heat and matter. A sense which is semi-teleological and semi-mechanistic.
In the 21st century, beginning with a few lone proponents of panpsychism and a growing school of computationalism, I think that we are working our way back to where Berkeley was before he got all churchy in the 1730s. With the intellectual tools provided by figures like Einstein, Planck, Gödel, and Turing, we have all of the pieces necessary to put together the puzzle of a completed physics. It may be still too soon for that. Instead of going forward all the way to a pansensitive physics, we may have to pass through yet another era of compromise, filtering the provocative immanence of primordial qualia through the comparatively familiar neo-Rationalism of information science.
The information revolution is undeniably compelling, however it still orphans the aesthetic qualities of realism into an unacknowledged dualism of ‘emergence’. It may seem like a minor detail, but on the level of the Absolute, this particular detail is all-important. What we see when we open our eyes is not only the Will of God or the mechanism of his absence, not only nested abstract structures and functions, but the sensible awareness in which those frameworks are defined. It is a big picture which can make sense in many ways, and each perspective implicates all that the others seem to lack. To get around the problems of idealism, all that we need to do is to shed the presumption of subjectivity in favor of a physical dimension of privacy. Lose the subject as defining experience, and you have subjectivity itself as one particular kind of sensory-motive participation. One particular dance in the cosmic disco which is shared by this clan of fancy pants hominids. Human experience is subjective, not because all experience is subjective, but because the story of an animal’s life is inherently self-directed. It makes sense that this selfish theme would be hard to separate from awareness itself, but Eastern yogas and Western occultism insist that it is possible to do just that. NDEs, OBEs, and other paranormal phenomena also seem to hint at such disembodied awareness, or they hint at the fallibility and self-deception of the brain, depending on who you are. At this time, going along with the non-subjective view of pansensitivity, I suggest that the pre-scientific notion of souls, like chakras, and God, are better understood as semi-metaphors than literal entities. A soul is the gestalt of autobiographical quality which disperses across time. It is not an energy which animates the body, it is the story which is represented publicly by the body, voice, personality, behaviors, ideas, etc. It’s not a subject or an idea, it is the idea of the subject as an object.
*”and never the twain shall meet”
**There are other examples also. If the object “The Sun” were to move twice as close to the Earth, the relation between the two, which RSM defines as a concept (“concepts are the relations between object”) evidently causes the seas (objects) to boil on Earth. That sounds like the twain are meeting to me. Besides that whole “never the twain shall meet” is really substance dualism, isn’t it? Substance dualism has the homunculus regress…something has to bridge the gap between the twain, which would then have to either be a third substance, or an infinite sandwich of non-meeting ‘twains. Another example is accounting. Accounting has no problem classifying goods (objects) and services (“concepts”) in the same categories of expenses or revenue. It all converts to money, so what is money?
†In 1734 he also became a Roman Catholic Bishop in Ireland (Bishop of Coyne), which is why George Berkeley is also Bishop Berkeley.
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.
What is a thought?
An elementary thought – not a thought made up of other thoughts.
- What is the nature of a thought?
- What is it made of?
- What is an example of the most basic thought?
As an image is to visual sense, and a sound is to auditory sense, a thought is a unit of cognitive sense. The difference between perceptual senses and cognitive senses is that cognitive senses are directly participatory. While we can imagine a sound or image, the experience resembles a request that is fulfilled behind the curtain, by some faculty of imagination. With thinking, we feel that we ourselves are directly expressing ourselves rather than passively watching a presentation of thought in the mind’s eye.
To me, this suggests that the cognitive level of awareness is a meta-level of perception. It specializes in abstracting sub-personal levels of sensation into a communicable form, and in the rehearsal of hypothetical experiences. In this way, the base level sensory-motive interactions of the body-world experience are extended. Senses can be interpreted with more perspective and intelligence, while motives can be executed with more strategic forethought. Thinking is a way of making an enriched present and future by distilling from the past. The distilling process is inherently sequential, as the oceanic nature of experiential aesthetics is reduced to a sequence of gestures and symbols which can be projected and received not only as sensory-motive presentations, but also as information-theoretic representations.
If a feeling were a cube that is full of some kind of juice of experiential significance, a thought would dehydrate the juice, leaving the cube with just the residue of its former significance. The empty cube can now contain other thoughts and feelings – stacks of them. What thought lacks in experiential qualities, it makes up for in versatility.
What is the nature of a thought? Metaphor. The etymology of metaphor has to do with carrying over, and the root word ‘phor’ is also found as ‘fer’, as in euphoria and inference. If a feeling is an aesthetic quality which we carry (or ferry), then meta-phor implies a stepping outside of the system – a carrying of carrying itself. This is what thought allows us to do – to pick up fragments of our feeling and experience as if we had a mental thumb and forefinger which we can use to arrange into larger re-fer-ences with larger or smaller application. Without the basic capacity to isolate some significant sense from experience and to apply it to another experience as if they were related independently of our intent, there could be no thought. Thought is pretending.
What is it made of? In my view, all things are ‘made of’ what I call sense. The power to perceive and participate in perception. Thought seems different from electromagnetism or mass-energy because we are directly within it. Physics presents our body with features of other experiences as external bodies. The results of that exteriorized view, are, in my view, responsible for the alienation that we encounter when we try to re-absorb our own subjectivity after we have objectified it as physical forms and functions. In particular, thoughts are made, as far as we know, of the experiences of Homo sapiens or perhaps earlier hominids as well. Honey is made of bees sense and motive, thought is made of human sense and motive.
What is an example of the most basic thought? If we look at what infants seem to be thinking about, “mama” seems popular. They seem to want a lot of help and attention. When we wake up in the morning, there seems to be a sense of remembering where we are and what has been going on. Likewise, before falling asleep, our hynagogic state of consciousness seems to hinge on dissolving our sense of locality and memory. We can slip in and out of fragmented dream states until the figure-ground relation seems to tessellate us into a less thoughtful and more relaxed mode of being. Thought then, like a birds tweet, may begin as a localizing beacon. To think is to encapsulate your experience and to consider whether to alert others about it. We weave a web of memories within ourselves and our social group – externalizing, perhaps, the process which is represented by our own neurology.
Prime Spiral
The prime spiral, also known as Ulam’s spiral, is a plot in which the positive integers are arranged in a spiral with primes indicated in some way along the spiral. Unexpected patterns of diagonal lines are apparent in such a plot. This construction was first made by Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1986) in 1963 while doodling during a boring talk at a scientific meeting. While drawing a grid of lines, he decided to number the intersections according to a spiral pattern, and then began circling the numbers in the spiral that were primes. Surprisingly, the circled primes appeared to fall along a number of diagonal straight lines or, in Ulam’s slightly more formal prose, it “appears to exhibit a strongly nonrandom appearance”
In the above variation of the Ulam spiral, red squares represent prime numbers and white squares represent non-primes.
I can’t decide if I care about prime numbers. On the one hand, the idea of indivisibility is interesting as it relates to consciousness. In some sense, I think that the universe, and each experience of it, is a one-hit-wonder. All appearances of repetition are local to some frame of reference. If someone is color blind, they may see alternating red and green dots as a repeating grey dot. If you listen to someone speaking a language that you can’t understand, it can seem, on some level, that they are saying the same kinds of sounds over and over again.
I wondered if any random constraint would appear to contain pattern when mapped as a spiral like that. This one above is yellow hex if the number spelled out contains the letter i. Writing these out I noticed how the language we use to name the numbers is isomorphic above ten. A trivial observation, I know, but I think that this logical version of onomatopoeia reveals some insights about recursive enumeration, and its foundation in an expectation of the absolutely generic.
To someone who is fascinated by prime numbers (often in a hypnotic, compulsive kind of way, as these spirals suggest), part of the appeal may be that the patterns that they seem to make defy this expectation of generic, interchangeability as the basis of counting. Three isn’t really supposed to be different from two or one, it’s just “the next one after two”. Finding these cosmic Easter eggs by poring over mathematics is, as the movie Pi dramatized, a weird kind of quasi-religious calling. Seeking to sleuth out a hidden intelligence where neither intelligence nor secrecy would seem possible. Numbers are supposed to be universal; publicly accessible. There shouldn’t be any proprietary codes lurking in there.
Maybe there aren’t? Without mapping primes into these spirals to look at with our eyes, the interesting sequences and ratios in mathematics would not be so interesting. Mathematics may provide the most neutral and bland medium possible for the projection of patterns. Like a supernatural oracle or Rorschach inkblot, an ideal medium for pareidolia and conjuring of simulacra from the subconscious.
Math is haunted alright, but by pattern recognition – sense making, rather than Platonic essences. Because math is an ideal conductor and insulator for sense, it does end up reflecting sense in a clear and concise way, however I think it is mainly a reflection. Math is not the heart of the universe, not the whole, but the hole in the whole – a divider which shaves off differences with the power of indifference.
Defining Consciousness, Life, Physics
One of the more popular objections to any proposal for explaining consciousness is that the term consciousness is too vague, or that any explanation depends on what way the term is used. I disagree. The nature of electricity does not depend on what people think the word means, and I don’t think that consciousness does either. When someone is knocked unconscious, there is little doubt about what it means. In general terms, it means that they are not personally present. They are not personally affected by their environment, nor can they intentionally cause any effects on their environment.
Is that an agreeable place to start for everyone?
Can we agree also, in light of the physiology of the brain-stem, which consists of sensory neural pathways and motor neural pathways, that the concept of consciousness is at least closely identified with input/output?
Can we agree that it could be possible that input/output could be sufficient to describe the fundamental nature of consciousness? Does consciousness need to be something further than that?
Here is where, in my view, the whole dependency of definition comes in. The issue is that input/output can either be conceptualized from the exterior or the interior. The Western perspective, even when it tries to model the interior perspective of i/o, does so from the outside in. It assumes that the proprietary feeling of subjectivity is fundamentally inauthentic – that a system can only be built from generic conditions, laws, processes, etc, and cannot be truly original in any sense. In this way, no neuroscientific account, or cog-sci account, can really claim an inside-looking-out perspective. The Western orientation does not allow for the possibility that person as a whole could act as an irreducibly singular receiver of experience an originator of physical cause. Taking a cue from relativity, however, I suggest that perceptual integrity is identical to inertial framing, so that the frame as a whole can drive the micro-frame conditions within it, and vice versa. This is not vertical emergence from the bottom up, but parallel emergence. Multiple levels of description.
Going back to consciousness being definable in terms of its difference from unconsciousness, we can see that the difference between the two has some similarity between life and death. Can we agree that life too differs from death in that it relates to input/output for an organism and its environment?
We understand that an animal can be unconscious without being dead, but is this a difference in degree or a difference in kind? Could input/output also be sufficient to define “life”. We might say that life includes reproduction and growth, however even a single cell organism which is not reproducing or growing at any given time is considered a form of life. Does that not seem that the quality of environmental sensitivity and the ability to cause biochemical effects in response to that sensitivity are even more essential to defining life?
To sum up then, I am asking:
1) Doesn’t being conscious really just mean the ability to receive sense and project motive?
2) Doesn’t life really mean the same thing on a lower, level?
From there, I would ask
3) Isn’t sense what we really mean by a ‘field’, and motive what we mean by a ‘force’?
4) Using relativity as a intuitive guide, can’t it be said that the concept of ‘field’ or ‘force’ are really metaphors, and that the way we contribute to human society is identical to the way that any vector of sense contributes to its context? Isn’t consciousness just a form of life which is just a form of physics…which is just a form of sensory-motive interaction?
Quora on Conscious and Subconscious
How does the conscious and subconscious speak to you at the same time?
My hypothesis is this: The conscious, subconscious, (and super-conscious) *are* you already. Simultaneity is relative and supervenes on perception. The subconscious (I call sub-personal) generally relates to a smaller, faster inertial frame. Sub-personal impulses are experienced as urges and relate generally to the reality of the body. It is a very small “now”, in the range of microseconds to minutes.
The super-personal or transpersonal feelings are meta-phoric. The root ‘phor’ as in euphoric or ‘fer’ as in ‘confer’, ‘infer’, etc means to carry – to ferry something from one place to another. Metaphor then is to carry over, to jump from one semantic context to another. Just as a symbol or fable can work on multiple levels at once, our conscious personal experience is both rooted in larger ‘nows’ which range in days, weeks, and lifetimes and the sub-personal/microphysical instant.
As human beings, we have a tall window of awareness that extends between the now that is microscopic and the now that is eternal. Confusion sets in when we try to define one in terms of the other. Our expectation that we would not be ‘spoken to’ at the same time is itself a prejudice of the conscious range of awareness.
If human beings are nothing more than matter, why are you conscious as yourself?
If human beings are nothing more than matter, why are you conscious as yourself?
Quora question:
Philosophy: If human beings are nothing more than matter, why are you conscious as yourself?
The implication of materialism is that we are in essence wet robots, without free will, just chemical reactions. But if this is true and we are conscious, then does it logically follow that all chemical reactions have “consciousness” to some degree? If the human mind is just an extremely advanced computer, then at what point does “consciousness” occur?
We don’t know that chemical reactions are unconscious, but if they were, then it makes sense that the entire universe would also be unconscious. It is very tricky to examine the issue of consciousness and to draw parallels within common experience without unintentionally smuggling in our own expectations from consciousness itself. This is the Petito principii or circular reasoning which derails most fair considerations of consciousness before they even begin in earnest.
Unlike a clock which is made up of gears, or a particular sized pile of hay, the addition of consciousness has no conceivable consequence to the physical function of a body. While we can observe a haystack burst into flames because it has grown too hot, we cannot look at the behavior of a human body see any special difference from the behavior of any other physical body. There is complexity, but complexity alone need not point to anything beyond an adjacency of simple parts and isolated chains of effects.
Just as no degree of complication within a clock’s mechanism would suddenly turn into a Shakespearean sonnet, the assumption of universal substitution is not necessarily appropriate for all phenomena, and for consciousness in particular. To get a color image, for instance, we need to print in colored dots, not black and white. Color TV programs cannot be broadcast over a monochrome display without losing their color.
Unlike chemical or mechanical transformation, the nature of awareness is not implicated in the shuffling of material particles from one place or another. Any natural force can be used to do that. We have no scientific reason to insist that conscious participation and aesthetic appreciation is derived from some simpler functioning of complex systems. To the contrary, ‘complexity’, and ‘system’ can only make sense in the context of a window of perception and attention. Without some teleological intent to see one part as part of a whole, and to compare remembered events with current perceptions, there is no such thing as ‘function’ at all.
There are several important points wrapped up in this question, which I will try to sum up.
1. The failure to consider consciousness metaphysically.
This is the most important and most intractable issue, for three reasons:
- because it is difficult for anyone to try to put their mind outside of mind. It’s annoying, and winds up feeling foolish and disoriented.
- because it is difficult in particular for the very people who need most to get past the difficulty. I have found that most people who are good with logic and scientific reasoning are not necessarily capable of doing what others can. The skillset appears to be neurological, like handedness or gender orientation.
- because those who do have difficulty with thinking this way are often not used to intellectual challenges that escape their grasp, their reaction is so defensive that they react with intolerance. It’s not their fault, but it cannot be cured it seems. Some people cannot see 3-D Magic Eye art. Some cannot program their way out of a paper bag. In this case it is the ability to consider consciousness from a prospective rather than a retrospective view which can prove so inaccessible to so many people, that frothing at the mouth and babbling about unicorns, magic, and the supernatural is considered a reasonable and scientific, skeptical response. Of course, it is none of those things, but it takes a lot of patience and courage to be able to recognize one’s own prejudices, especially when we are used to being the ones telling others about their biases.
2. The taboo against metaphysics, panpsychism, and transrationality
Long after Einstein, Gödel, and Heisenberg shattered the Humpty Dumpty certainties of classical math and physics, we are still trying to piece him back together. Regardless of how much we learn about the strange properties of matter, time, energy, biology, and neurology, there are a huge number of very intelligent people who are convinced that we will only know the truth about the universe when it all looks like a vast deterministic mechanism.
The compulsion to reduce awareness to passive mathematical or physical states is ironic, given that the defense of automaticity is often accompanied by very hands on personal intention. Even when it is pointed out that arguing against free will is futile (since someone without free will could not change their own opinion about it even if they wanted to, let alone someone else’s opinion), the mind of the determined determinist will always find a way of insist upon being in the right, even when they are ultimately sawing of the limb that they are sitting on.
When it comes to anything that suggests the possibility of non-human awareness, many people not only become personally uncomfortable, but they become socially uncomfortable as well. The taboo against unconventional views on science (even when backed by anthropological universality) is so pervasive and xenophobic that it is career suicide for a working scientist to publicly acknowledge them in any but the most condescending tones.
3. The pathetic fallacy
The pathetic fallacy is to take a metaphor in which some inanimate object is given a human quality (“The camera loves you”), and take it literally. While I count myself among those who once saw computation and pattern as being the only ingredient necessary for awareness or life, my understanding now is that no pattern can exist without a capacity for pattern recognition. The ability to receive and make sense of the real world is not a matter of generic relations of disembodied bits of “information”, but is in fact the concrete reality of the cosmos. The universe does not exist for us humans, but it cannot exist as silent, unconscious, intangible physics for billions of years and then suddenly invent the whole of sensation, emotion, intuition, cognition, etc, just for some hominids on this backwater planet. It now strikes me as profoundly anthropocentric to imagine that the entire universe could be devoid of perceptual content until life evolved.
In my view, the universe itself is nothing but a continuum of qualities of consciousness. These qualities, however, relate to experienced contexts. We cannot take the human-ness out of a human and put it into a machine. Biology has mechanisms and performs computation, but if that’s all it was doing then the inside of the brain would look like logic, not like sex and violence and musical theater.
The Paranormal
As far as the paranormal goes, my approach is not to insist upon collapsing extraordinary experiences into binary terms of real or unreal. To the contrary, I see realism as a quality within consciousness such that its limitations reflect the nature of consciousness itself. By that I mean that our personal awareness has a sub-personal boundary and a super-personal boundary, both of which involve opposite views of coincidence. At the sub-personal bound, coincidence emerges stochastically and meaninglessly as an assertion of the instantaneous. At the super-personal bound, coincidences diverge synchronistically and teleologically as part of a ‘larger now’. The more super-personal we look, the more the real and unreal are blurred, and the more the experience reflects what I call ‘the physics of privacy’ rather than public physics.
Obstruction of Solitude: A Guide To Noise
“And then…all the noise! All the noise, noise, noise, noise!
If there’s one thing I hate…all the noise, noise, noise, noise!
And they’ll shriek, squeak, and squeal racing round on their wheels,
Then dance with jin-tinglers tied onto their heels!” – The Grinch“Karma police, arrest this man
He talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge
He’s like a detuned radio” – Radiohead
It might be asked, “Why should we care about noise?” Two reasons come to mind.
1) To reduce, contain, or otherwise avoid it.
2) To understand what isn’t noise, and why we prefer that.
Real Noise
The general use of the word noise refers to an unpleasant sound. Even on this most literal level, there is a sense of denial about the extent to which unpleasant qualities are subjective. The stereotypical parent, upon hearing the stereotypical teenager’s musical taste being played at high volume, may yell something like “Turn off that infernal noise!”. There is a sense that the sound demands to be labeled objectively as a terrible thing to listen to, rather than as a sound which presents itself differently according to one’s state of mind or development.
At the same time, we cannot rule out all objective, or at least pseudo-objective qualities related to signal and noise. A garage recording of a metal band or a jackhammer attacking the pavement can be uncontroversially defined as being ‘noisy’, particularly in comparison to other, more gentle sounds. ‘Real noise’, then, seems to have a range of subjective and objective qualifiers. Loud, percussive sounds are inherently noisy to us humans, and we have reason to assume the same is true for animals and even plants:
“Dorothy Retallack tried experimenting with different types of music. She played rock to one group of plants and, soothing music to another. The group that heard rock turned out to be sickly and small whereas the other group grew large and healthy. What’s more surprising is that the group of plants listening to the soothing music grew bending towards the radio just as they bend towards the sunlight.” – source
Whether we enjoy loud, percussive sounds is a matter of taste and context. Even the most diehard metal fan probably does not want to hear their favorite band blasting at five o’ clock in the morning from a passing car. Being able to control what we listen to contributes to our perception of it as noise.
Obstruction, Distraction, Destruction, and Leaks
Whether a piece of music offends our personal taste, or it is simply so loud that we can’t ‘hear ourselves think’, the experience of being distracted seems central to its status as noise. In the parlance of sound engineers, and later Silicon Valley schmoozers, the ‘signal to noise ratio’ describes this feature of noise to distract or divert attention from the intended communication. Noise not only obstructs access to the signal, the disturbance that it causes also detracts from the quality of the signal itself. If the signal to noise ratio is poor enough, it may not be worth the effort for the receiver to try to interpret it, and communication is destroyed.
This sense of noise as an obstacle to communication extends beyond audio or electronic signals to any context where information is accessed, transmitted, or stored. In his influential work on telecommunications, Clause Shannon described information entropy as those features of a signal which are costly to compress. Typically it is those patterns which cannot be easily discerned as either part of the intentional signal or part of the background noise. Despite the tremendous computational resources available for mobile communication, the signal quality on mobile devices are still generally inferior to land lines. Between microphone gating that clips off conversation instead of ambient street sounds and the loss of packets due to radio broadcast conditions or network routing conditions, it is amazing that it sounds as good as it does, but it is still a relatively leaky way to transmit voices.
Neural Noise and Withdrawal
Every sense has its own particular kind of noise. Vision has glare, blur, phosphene patterns (‘seeing stars’). Touch has non-specific tingling or itching. Olfactory and gustatory senses encounter foul odors or bad aftertastes. Feelings like nausea and dizziness which are unrelated to food or balance conditions are a kind of noise (noise is etymologically related to nausea and noxious). Part of the effect of withdrawal from an addiction that the brain becomes overly sensitized to irritating stimuli in general. It’s almost like an allergic response in that the systems which would ordinarily protect us from threats is distracted by a false threat and turned on itself. Our sensitivity to the environment, having been hijacked by an external supply of pleasurable signals, has built up a tolerance for those super-saturated instructions.
With any kind of addiction, even healthy ones like exercise or washing your hands, the nature of sense is to accommodate and normalize perceptions which are present regularly. Because the addiction provides positive reinforcement regularly, there is an artificially low noise ratio which invites your senses to recalibrate to listen more closely to the noise (which would be quite adaptive evolutionarily, you would want to still hear that tiger or smell that smoke even when you enjoy a lifestyle of hedonism and decadence). When the source of positive distraction is removed, the sensitivity to negative distraction is still cranked up to 11, which of course, taps into the original motivation to escape the negative distractions of life with an addiction in the first place. We want something to soothe our nerves, to numb the sensitivity and quiet the noise.
A Recipe For Noise
There seem to be general patterns which are common to many kinds of noise. Noise can either be an obstructing presence, or a conspicuous absence (like the dropouts on a phone call). It can be a public or a private condition which clouds judgment, invites impatience, frustration, and intolerance. Noise can be that which is incoherent, irrelevant, redundant, or inappropriate. Some signals can be temporarily irrelevant or incoherent, while others are permanently so. Besides being too loud, an audio noise can also be soft, such as a hiss or other aesthetic defect that exposes leaky conditions in the recording process. The context is important, as with withdrawal from addiction, our senses are more attuned to the relativity of sensation rather than objective measurement. Grey looks darker next to black than it does next to white.
Our ability to use our attention to pivot from foreground to background is part of what defines the difference between signal and noise, or sense and nonsense. We can all relate to the Charlie Brown effect, where the words that a teacher says are reduced to unintelligible vocalizations. As you read these words now, you may be scanning over so much tedious verbiage that looks like generic wordiness more than any particular message. Any signal can be a noise if you don’t pay attention to it in the right way, and any noise can be used as a meaningful code or symbol. Perhaps there is a way to get over our addictions a little easier if we can learn to see our irritation and cravings as a sign that we are on the right path to restoring our neurological gain.
Many Cures
The destruction of information or the suppression of noise is not as simple as it may seem. Take, for example, the difference between analgesic, anesthetic, and narcotic effects. Pain can be relieved systemically, locally, or simply by being made to seem irrelevant. It can be selectively suppressed or wiped out as part of an overall deadening of sensation. There are other ways to get pain relief besides pharmaceuticals as well. Athletes or soldiers are known to perform with severe injuries, and many people have endured astonishing hardships for the sake of their family without being fully aware of the pain they were in. While there may be endogenous pharmacology going on which accounts for the specific pain suppression, it is ultimately the context which the subject is conscious of which drives the release of endorphins and other neurotransmitters.
Semiotics of Noise
Looking at noise from a Piercean perspective, it can be seen as a failure of semiosis – a broken icon, symbol, or index. A broken index would be something like tinnitus or a phantom limb. The signal we are receiving does not correspond to the referent that we expect, and in fact corresponds only to a problem with the signaling mechanism, or some deeper problem. A signal which is broken as an index but can be understood meaningfully as a symptom of something else (maybe the tinnitus is due to a sinus infection) has reverted from a teleological index to a teleonomic* index. It coincides with a condition, but does not represent it faithfully in any way. It is noise in the sense that the expected association must be overlooked intentionally to get to the unintentional association to a symptom.
A broken index would also be one which we deem irrelevant. This type of noise, which would include the proliferation of automatic alerts, false alarms, flashing lights, spam, etc. There may be nothing wrong with what what the message is saying, but considerations of redundancy, and context inappropriateness makes it clear that what a computer thinks is important and what we think is important are very different things. This type of noise fails at the pragmatic level. It’s not that we don’t understand the message, or that its not for us, it’s that we don’t want to do anything about it.
Broken icons and symbols would similarly be made incoherent, irrelevant, or inappropriate by lacking enough syntactic integrity or semantic content to justify positive attention. Fragmented texts or degenerated signs can fail to satisfy functionally or aesthetically, either on their own, or due to intrusions from outside of the intended communication channel. The overall function of noise is to decompose. Like the odor of something that has spoiled, disorder and decay are symptoms of entropy. In the schema of cosmic metabolism, entropy is the catabolic phase of forms and functions – a kind of toll exacted by space and time which ensures that whatever rises to the threshold of existence and importance, will eventually destabilize, its differences de-tuning to indifference.
What Noise Tells Us About Signals
If we begin with the premise that signal and noise are polar opposites, then it may be useful to look at the opposite of some of the terms and concepts that have just been discussed. If noise is irrelevant, inappropriate, incoherent, and redundant, then the qualities which make something significant or important should include being relevant, appropriate, coherent, and essential. Where noise obstructs, distracts, and destroys, sense instructs, attracts, and constructs. Where noise is noxious and disgusting, signals soothe and give solace.
In the larger picture of self and consciousness, it is our solitude that is threatened by noise. Solitude, like solidity and structure are related to low entropy. It is the feeling of strong continuity and coherence, a silent background from which all moments of sound and fury are foregrounded. It is what receives all signals and insulates all noise. Integrated information? Maybe. The Philosopher’s Stone? Probably.
*teleonomy describes conditions of causality which are driven by blind statistics rather than sensible function. Evolution, for example, is a teleonomy since it does not care which species live or die, it is only those who happen to have been better suited to their ecological niche which end up reproducing most successfully.
Multisense Realism 
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