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Asperger’s, Autism, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness
This test was also originally devised by Wellman and Estes, and involves asking the child what the brain is for. They found that normal 3-4 year olds already know that the brain has a set of mental functions, such as dreaming, wanting, thinking, keeping secrets, etc., Some also knew it had physical functions (such as making you move, or helping you stay alive, etc.). In contrast , children with autism (but who again had a mental age above a 4 year old level) appear to know about the physical functions, but typically fail to mention any mental function of the brain (Baron-Cohen, 1989a)
This paper on autism and theory of mind really shines a light on the most intractable problem within philosophy of mind. In particular
…children from about the age of 4 years old normally are able to distinguish between appearance and reality, that is, they can talk about objects which have misleading appearances. For example, they may say, when presented with a candle fashioned in the shape of an apple, that it looks like an apple but is really a candle. Children with autism, presented with the 5 same sorts of tests, tend to commit errors of realism, saying the object really is an apple, or really is a candle, but do not capture the object’s dual identity in their spontaneous descriptions (Baron-Cohen, 1989a).
This cartoon from a Psychology Today article illustrates the kinds of tests that show whether children have developed what is called a theory of mind; an understanding of the contents of other people’s experience:
“Children with autism are virtually at chance on this test, as likely to indicate one character as the other when asked “Which one knows what’s in the box?””
So often it becomes clear to me in debating the issues of consciousness that they are missing something which cannot be replaced by logic. The way that many people think, especially those who are very intelligent in math and physics, only includes a kind of toy model of experience – one which fails to fully realize the difference between the map and the territory. It makes a lot of sense to be that having a very low-res, two dimensional theory of mind would correlate with having a philosophy of mind which undersignifies privacy and oversignifies mechanistic influences. The low res theory of mind comes with a built in bias toward behaviorism, where all events are caused by public conditions rather than private feelings and experiences.
There are several other interesting findings in the (brief) paper. Autistic children find it difficult to tell the difference between what they meant to do and what they actually did, so that when they shoot at a target and miss, they don’t understand that they intended to hit it but ended up missing it and say that they meant to miss. Overall, the list of deficits in imagination, pragmatics, social mindreading, etc has been called mindblindness. This is not to say that everyone who doesn’t understand the hard problem has mindblindness, but I would say it is very likely that having mindreading-empathy deficits on the autistic spectrum would tend to result in a strong bias against idealism, panpsychism, free will, or the hard problem of consciousness.
Part II
When Kant wrote:
‘Being’ is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, as existing in themselves.
he brings up a point of distinction which I think can be resolved when we consider consciousness to absolutely primitive in the universe. When we say that something exists or that it simply is, we are invoking an unacknowledged sense of omnipotence. When we say for example that a circle exists, we are really exporting our own experiences of seeing circular patterns, or of participating in circular motions, repeating processes, etc into a hypothetical experience which hypothetically does not belong to us.
To say that the circle exists does not add anything to the description of a circle. We cannot imagine that there is a ‘circle which does not exist’ and expect it to be meaningful, since there is nothing that it means not to exist other than to be absent from consideration in the first place. It is upon this minor slip of epistemology into pseudo-ontology that the entire criticism of idealism hinges. George Berkeley’s phrase Esse est percipi (“To be is to be perceived”) encapsulates this recognition that the notion of being is a fallacy when it is separated from perception. Unfortunately, Berkeley was in my opinion too far ahead of his time to escape being misunderstood, and he himself had a conception of human psychology which was too simplistic to recover the principle without appeal to religion. He did not consider separating out perception from a perceiver or distinguishing human perception from non-human perception. The famous garbling of Berkeley’s ideas which we know as ‘If a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody around to here it, does it make a sound?’.
This of course was not very close to the philosophy that Berkeley had in mind since it opens a huge loophole that we find to be silly on the face of it. Of course a tree falling in a forest makes a sound – animals hear it, the ground shakes, etc. To say that none of that exists just because no human being is around would be insane. When we consider, however, that the nature of hearing is such that the event of the tree falling is part of a chain reaction that includes compression waves in the air, and our ears, and isomorphic waves of biochemical activity in the nervous system and brain, it is difficult to say what it is that is a ‘sound’ and how much a sound can really be separated from the experience of hearing.
Even if we can’t hear, the vibration of a tree falling is something that we can feel throughout our body. Informally we might say that we felt the vibration, or that we could feel the that the tree fell, but ultimately it is our own feeling of our body which is vibrating. We feel the world through our body, but the body, world, feeling, and vibration are different levels of description of the same thing. There is no vibration, tree, or body which exists independently of a sensory experience in which those things are presented. It is my suspicion that our conception of electromagnetism as a sort of vibration in a vacuum is mistaken because of the failure to consider the kinds of ideas that Kant and Berkeley were talking about.
In part I, I made the connection between poor theory of mind skills and the denial of the hard problem of consciousness. The cartoon about Ann and Sally can give some important insight as to fundamental differences in how people understand perception and reality. In the autism cases, children tend not to be able to understand that Sally will not know that Ann has put the ball in the box since they, the reader of the cartoon, knows that Ann put it there. This ‘mindblindness’ is exactly what Berkeley and Kant were each trying to overcome in their own way. Kant pointed out that the concept of existence or being without perceptual essences is purely conceptual, while Berkeley saw that perceptual essences are in fact identical with being. Our seeing Ann put the ball in the box does not give Sally access to that experience. Writing a program which displays the cartoon does not give the computer an experience of seeing it.
The interesting thing about awareness is that it is a real predicate. Unlike the idea of ‘being’ or existence, awareness isn’t merely the idea that X is a “thing” but that X is a concrete perceptual encounter. It has aesthetic qualities like hot or cold, loud or quiet, etc. Even the feeling of being a perceiver of X can be understood as a kind of feeling, so that we need not think of the entire universe as miniature souls as Leibniz thought (monads), but a vast exchange and development of perceptions. Beginning from there, we can see how quantitative structures could emerge from variations in aesthetic qualities and how those structures could be used as mechanical shortcuts for prediction and control, yet without ever developing additional qualities of experience on the machine level.
Searle’s Chinese Room and the other Symbol Grounding arguments are attempts to bring Kant and Berkeley’s insights into artificial intelligence. They show how a computer can function on a syntactic level, passing recorded relations of data back and forth, without having any higher level understanding. There doesn’t appear to be any special level of sophistication at which a machine that is built to imitate functions of the mind becomes a genuine experience of its own. As long as we look for a magic formula to create a ‘being’, we are making the mistake of confusing a ‘dozen’ with a thing that can be built out of eggs.
Gödel of the Gaps
So much of our attention in logic and math is focused on using processes to turn specific inputs into even more specific binary outputs. Very little attention is paid to what inputs and outputs are or to the understanding of what truth is in theoretical terms. The possibility of inputs is assumed from the start, since no program can exist without being ‘input’ into some kind of material substrate which has been selected or engineered for that purpose. You can’t program a device to be programmable if it isn’t already. Overlooking this is part of the gap between mathematics and reality which is overlooked by all forms of simulation theory and emergentism. Without some initial connection between sensitive agents which are concretely real and non-theoretical, there can be no storage or processing of information. Before we can input any definitions of logical functions, we have to find something which behaves logically and responds reliably to our manipulations of it.
The implications of binary logic, of making distinctions between true/go and false/stop are more far reaching than we might assume. I suggest that if a machine’s operations can be boiled down to true and false bits, then it can have no capacity to exercise intentionality. It has no freedom of action because freedom is a creative act, and creativity in turn entails questioning what is true and what is not. The creative impulse can drive us to attack the truth until it cracks and reveals how it is also false. Creativity also entails redeeming what has been seen as false so that it reveals a new truth. These capabilities and appreciation of them are well beyond the functional description of what a machine would do. Machine logic is, by contrast, the death of choice. To compute is to automate and reduce sense into an abstract sense-of-motion. Leibniz called his early computer a “Stepped Reckoner”, and that it very apt. The word reckon derives from etymological roots that are shared with ‘reg’, as in regal, ruler, and moving straight ahead. It is a straightener or comb of physically embodied rules. A computer functionalizes and conditions reality into rules, step by step, in a mindless imitation of mind. A program or a script is a frozen record of sense-making in retrospect. It is built of propositions defined in isolation rather than sensations which share the common history of all sensation.
The computing machine itself does not exist in the natural world, but rather is distilled from the world’s most mechanistic tendencies. All that does not fit into true or false is discarded. Although Gödel is famous for discovering the incompleteness of formal systems, that discovery itself exists within a formal context. The ideal machine, for example, which cannot prove anything that is false, subscribes to the view that truth and falsehood are categories which are true rather than truth and falsehood being possible qualities within a continuum of sense making. There is a Platonic metaphysics at work here, which conjures a block universe of forms which are eternally true and good. In fact, a casual inspection of our own experience reveals no such clear-cut categories, and the goodness and truth of the situations we encounter are often inseparable from their opposite. We seek sensory experiences for the sake of appreciating them directly, rather than only for their truth or functional benefits. Truth is only one of the qualities of sense which matters.
The way that a computer processes information is fundamentally different than the way that conscious thought works. Where a consistent machine cannot give a formal proof of its own consistency, a person can be certain of their own certainty without proof. That doesn’t always mean that the person’s feeling turns out to match what they or others will understand to be true later on, but unlike a computer, we have available to us an experience of a sense of certainty (especially a ‘common sense’) that is an informal feeling rather than a formal logical proof. A computer has neither certainty nor uncertainty, so it makes no difference to it whether a proof exists or not. The calculation procedure is run and the output is generated. It can be compared against the results of other calculators or to employ more calculations itself to assess a probability, but it has no sense of whether the results are certain or not. Our common sense is a feeling which can be proved wrong, but can also be proved right informally by other people. We can come to a consensus beyond rationality with trust and intuition, which is grounded the possibility of the real rather than the realization of the hypothetical. When we use computation and logic, we are extending our sense of certainty by consulting a neutral third party, but what Gödel shows is that there is a problem with measurement itself. It is not just the ruler that is incomplete, or the book of rules, but the expectation of regularity which is intrinsically unexpected.
One of the trickiest problems with the gap between the theoretical and the concrete us that the gap itself is real rather than theoretical. There can be no theory of why reality is not just information, since theory itself cannot access reality directly. Reality is not only formal. Formality is not real. There is a bias within formal logic which favors certainty. This is at the heart of the utility of logic. In mathematician Bruno Marchal’s book “The Amoeba’s Secret”, his view on dreams hints at what is beneath the surface of the psychology of mathematics. He writes
“What struck me was the asymmetry existing between the states of dreaming and of being awake: when you are awake, you can never be truly sure that you are. By contrast, when dreaming, you can sometimes perceive it as such.”
Surely most of us have no meaningful doubt that we are awake when we are awake. The addition of the qualification of being “truly sure” that we are awake seems to assume that there is a deeper epistemology which is possible – as if being awake required a true certainty on top of the mere fact of being awake. To set the feeling of certainty above the content of experience itself is an inversion; a mistake of privileging the expectations of the intellect over the very ground of being from which those expectations arise.
Likewise, to say that we can sometimes perceive our dreaming in a lucid dream is to hold the dream state to a different epistemological standard than we do of being awake. If we could be awake and not really be sure that we are, then certainly we could think that we are having a lucid dream, but could be similarly misinformed. We could be dead and living in an afterlife from which we will never return or some such goofy possibility. Mathematical views of reality seem to welcome a kind of escapist sophism which gives too much credence to rabbit holes and not enough to the whole rabbit.
That we sometimes tell when we are dreaming means only that we are more awake within our dream than usual – not that our usual awareness is any more true or sure than it ever is. If we are uncertain in waking life and certain in dreams, it is because our capacity to tell the difference is real and not a dream or theory. There is no way to prove that we are awake, but neither is there any need to prove it since it is self-evident. Any proof that we could have could theoretically be duplicated in a dream also, but that does not mean that there is no difference between dream and reality. The difference is more than can be learned by ‘proof’ alone.
IIT 3.0 Central Axioms
From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0
The recent publication of new details for Tononi & Koch’s Integrated Information Theory includes the following central axioms, which are “taken to be immediately evident,”:
- Existence: Consciousness exists – it is an undeniable aspect of reality. Paraphrasing Descartes, “I experience therefore I am”.
- Composition: Consciousness is compositional (structured): each experience consists of multiple aspects in various combinations. Within the same experience, one can see, for example, left and right, red and blue, a triangle and a square, a red triangle on the left, a blue square on the right, and so on.
- Information: Consciousness is informative: each experience differs in its particular way from other possible experiences. Thus, an experience of pure darkness is what it is by differing, in its particular way, from an immense number of other possible experiences. A small subset of these possible experiences includes, for example, all the frames of all possible movies.
- Integration: Consciousness is integrated: each experience is (strongly) irreducible to non-interdependent components. Thus, experiencing the word “SONO” written in the middle of a blank page is irreducible to an experience of the word “SO” at the right border of a half-page, plus an experience of the word “NO” on the left border of another half page – the experience is whole. Similarly, seeing a red triangle is irreducible to seeing a triangle but no red color, plus a red patch but no triangle.
- Exclusion: Consciousness is exclusive: each experience excludes all others – at any given time there is only one experience having its full content, rather than a superposition of multiple partial experiences; each experience has definite borders – certain things can be experienced and others cannot; each experience has a particular spatial and temporal grain – it flows at a particular speed, and it has a certain resolution such that some distinctions are possible and finer or coarser distinctions are not.
In looking at each of them, I can’t help but want to point out that the opposite of each axiom is also true in a sense. Consider:
Existence: Consciousness is a spectrum of qualities which appear to come in and out of existence. Some qualities of consciousness are ‘barely there’ or arguably resist being defined as existing. We can, for example, dream of a book in which there are sentences which appear to be made out of words and letters, but cannot be read. We might remember someone’s face in a way that seems specific, but when we reach for concrete details, we find that they do not ‘exist’.
Composition: Here too, if we look at other kinds of conscious experience, such as the flavor of a wine, it is not clear that there is an objective structure. We will not necessarily agree that there are earthy notes followed by floral notes, etc. The wine can be experienced as a gestalt which, while containing the potential for nuanced composition to be drawn out, does not necessitate any such formal realization in structure. We need not presume only a combination of discrete units, but we can also model a diffraction from top level simplicities downward.
Information: Conscious contents range from being highly informative to highly repetitious without materially altering their significance. Many addictive behaviors rely on the pure pleasure of the experience without any analytical dimension of uniqueness or learning behind them. Information may only pertain to communication and representation of conscious experience, not to the experience itself.
Integration: I agree fundamentally that in one sense, each experience stands on its own, however, in another sense, every experience is associated with ranges of other experiences to different degrees. If anything, it the modulation between qualities of being integrated, informing, composed, etc and their opposite qualities of disintegration, ignorance, decomposition, etc which are implicated in consciousness.
Exclusion: Here I fundamentally disagree. While any given experience can be isolated intellectually, that partitioning appears to me to be superficial. Experience builds on itself, and every waking moment implicitly contains the presence of all past experiences and hints at future possibilities. Experience can be read on many different levels, so that even though exclusion is a large part of the function of the intellect, that aspect of experience itself is floating on a sea of metaphorical, intuitive, and universal influences. Exclusion is easy to assume in a figurative sense, as far as our typical human attention seems to find a quality of focus whenever it focuses on itself, but I think that in a literal sense, exclusion is impossible.
Speculating on Time as Nested Experience
If we compare two sense modalities, such as seeing vs hearing, we can get a hint of what it might mean for spacetime to be orthogonal to experiential time. Think of the primordial nature of time not as a coherent parameter to be measured, but instead we can see the possibility of time as emerging from experience. A temporal sense which is driven by tempo. Fugues of dream-like, non-orientable perceptual gestalts, with sequential qualities emerging from semantic intensities. If this kind of time were a tent, the tent poles would be significant moments – aesthetically saturated occurrences which resonate into re-occurrence through their cosmological nobility.
For human beings, with a relatively huge psychological bandwidth, we we would experience this prototype to spatialized-time as chronologically ambiguous. Call it a mytho-poetic Dreamtime, collective unconscious, or primordial qualia; a condition where characters and their stories are fused together. The hero makes the journey, and the journey makes the hero. Splitting this atavistic tempo into space and time is the mirroring of unseen perspectives. The hero and journey are polarized into subjects and objects. I would imagine on a pre-biological level, this would be more like position and momentum – less metaphor and more semaphore.
Once the primitive experience takes on a divided perspective there would be opportunities for a sense of hierarchy. Simpler, semaphoric ‘times’ and more developed, metaphorical times are residuated within a densely realized middle ‘place’ as repeating cliches or themes. To broker between these experiential threads, an intermediary sense is used to define boundaries and relations in simple, literal terms. Spacetime, or spatialized time serves to reign in a worldly epoch, and segregate it from the quasi-timeless and quasi-spaceless epoch. The division of fact from fantasy recapitulates the division of space and time, object and subject, body and mind. The reality of space, body and mind is, in the absolute sense, the child of pansensitivity or transrealism. In the local sense, that relation is flipped, and the body is presented as the parent of the subjective mind.
With spacetime, the tent of pansensitive experience is normalized on one end, so that even though the ‘tent poles’ of significance and memory remain as defining the contours of the tent on top, all are now evened out on the bottom. The more primitive, ‘physical’ types of experience have lower amplitudes of significance compared to our experiences, so their variations are collapsed into mere statistical anomalies from our perspective. Our view of their physical time is a mechanical average, generic and lacking any tent-pole significance. Reducing experience to a single quantitative dimension of repetition and duration is the ultimate spatialization of time. With all privacy flattened to be available for public inspection, subjectivity is disenchanted and nomenalized. The figurative and the literal switch roles and the heroes journey is reduced to mere coordinates in a phase space.
The mistake we make is to import this bottom-level generic time into our own high-level proprietary frame. In the most ‘objective’, absolute sense, time radiates from experiential significance as memory and foreshadowing. Time circulates within experience like rhyme does through a poem. Substituting that raw animation for the expectation of rigorous clock-time is not a neutral act. It is an assumption about the universe which cascades through the psyche and civilization, improving and automating our exteriors while our interiority languishes in perpetual angst. Liberation from spacetime literalism might help us find a new way of tapping into larger, more intuitive senses of place and time.
Is the brain the receiver of mind and consciousness, or their generator?
The receiver model of consciousness need not be taken so literally as to presume that mind is exactly like an electromagnetic broadcast. Arguing for a receiver-like role for the brain does not require that we have a good theory of what is being received and how, only that there are other possibilities for the origin of consciousness besides being somehow generated within the tissue of the brain itself.
In a way, philosophy and science can be understood as the academic extensions of mind and body, respectively. Because this concept directly addresses some of the deepest mysteries in both philosophy and science, we should begin, in my view, from a position of Cartesian skepticism…assume nothing except what we cannot doubt, and proceed from there.
What do we really know about the brain? I think that we should all be able to agree that the brain is something which we see and touch with our body, and with technological extensions of our body. Why make a big deal out of that? Because although we can imagine many things in our mind that are true, the details of our own brain is not one of them. Everyone can see a brain with their eyes, but nobody can correctly imagine precise details of their own neurochemical functioning. By the same token, no brain imaging technology can show things like flavors, emotions, and colors being generated in the brain.
If we take our body’s word for what consciousness is, all that we can see is that the brain is the organ which can cause changes to behavior. If we image our own brain, we can learn that it is the organ through which we cause changes in our body. It is through the activity of the brain that the mind can cause changes in the world. It should be noted that this world is the world that we ordinarily perceive to be outside of our mind, however even the advance of science has not prevented significant portions of the population from continuing to report various sorts of out of body experiences and experiences in which the world is not separated from the self.
In light of these conditions of uncertainty about mind and body, it may be premature to pronounce that 1) it is the body alone which produces mind and 2) the body is produced by something which is not like consciousness. If we dig down into the latter, I think that we find the most important possibility. When we think about the vast undertaking that is entailed in the division of a single zygote into a living human body, complete with central nervous system, brain, immune system, etc, the complexity is arguably far greater than what has been technologically achieved in human history thus far. Within the body, for example, there are countless critical processes which are maintained under dynamically changing conditions. It begs the question – if this fantastic orchestration of physiology can take place without minds or some kind of awareness, then why would the humble hominid develop this elaborate, metaphysical quality of ‘conscious’ experience just to keep up with the daily demands of food foraging and mate selection? What is it that would be so special about a human life that it would be the sole being which is capable of experiencing the universe?
Surely we don’t mean to say that no other animal experiences the universe, and as time goes on, we are finding fewer and fewer ways that human beings are different from other species in an unqualified way. It seems that at best, Homo sapiens recapitulates the features of a lot of different species, and has developed some of those feature to an elaborate degree. If what we see of other creatures is so limited by our own perception, so too might our scientific instruments amplify our limitations as well as our understanding. The more that we study our body, the less we remember that the body is only the exterior of our mind. The more we study other bodies in the world, the more that we define them by their behaviors. Cells and especially molecules and atoms are seen increasingly as mechanistic puppets, behaving according to principles which are also mechanical. What we have failed to see is the role that perceptual relativity plays in how our world is portrayed. We have learned to disregard our own direct view of the universe, trusting instead the view of the universe which is given to us when we look through microscopes and telescopes. The problem with that is that we define the significance of our own subjectivity from a perspective which has been filtered by our subjectivity to negate itself. When we construct this relatively objective worldview, subjectivity is zeroed out by necessity. Our enlightenment has literally blinded us to the ontologically ‘nocturnal’ phenomena in the universe.
In Steve Harris‘ answer, he says ‘You can’t damage a mere receiver to a normal intelligent mind in a way that mimics all common symptoms of dementia.’
A very good point. I agree that the brain is not like a receiver in the sense of being passive. To the contrary, the brain is more like a transceiver, and in my view, it is made of cellular transceivers, and molecular transceivers. The internet is not contained in my computer, but if my local computer is damaged, I might not be able to get into certain websites. That, in turn, might affect my ability to effectively use other online services, and that in turn might affect my desire to continue using the internet at all (and then its lights out).
I propose that actually what we see as molecules, cells, and bodies are more like obstructions or standing waves within a primordial context of perception and participation that is very different from our own. Matter is not a separate substance, but rather a phenomenal presence which is encountered from a particular sensory perspective. Just as we can see different reflections with polarized filters, or a rainbow appears from one vantage point but not another, matter, cells, brains, and bodies are a way of looking at the collective history of our history as an organism from an ‘edge-on’ view, as it were. All that we are and all that we are not are distorted as through a fisheye lens before our eyes and behind them.
Philosophy and science, like mind and brain offer us two perspectives, each of which is unique in some sense and which together make a deeper kind of sense. Both philosophy and science formalize methods of inquiry into nature, but whereas science emerged as a kind of ‘performance enhancing’ philosophy specializing in nature, philosophy itself extends into metaphysics, ethics, politics, mathematics, etc. Following science back to philosophy is like following the brain back to the mind, and the mind itself as the accumulation of discipline and learning on an even more primordial animism of emotion and sensation.
I no longer see any reason to be afraid of a model of the universe in which brains and not minds physically exist, or in which science and not philosophy is allowed to contribute to the progress of human civilization. In light especially of the revelations of people like Einstein, Godel, and Heisenberg, we no longer need to think of the fabric of the universe as body-like. From pioneers like Jung and Leary and Ken Wilber, we no longer need to see the nature of consciousness as only mind-like. The inner universe and the outer universe seem to overlap, to share, and to diverge wildly, however ultimately, to me, it is brain-like structures which seem more plausible to ‘materialize’ within a sensory context than the other way around. There is no likelihood, as far as I can imagine, of unconscious matter to build bodies and brains, but then for brains to suddenly develop a need for something that is not physics to explain itself to itself.
What is the basis of reality: matter or consciousness? Why?
My answer on Quora
I. What is the basis of reality?
A. Is it Matter?
1. Matter is thought to emerge from fundamental physical forces.
a. The strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and gravity are considered to be the as-yet-irreducible ingredients of matter. We do not really understand what forces themselves are made of, or could be made of, so they are considered axiomatic. Known forces, fields, and the particle-wave effects which are produced by them can explain all of the scientific observations that we have, or so it would seem.
b. Not included in these physical fundamentals are ideal influences, such as geometry. How does a wave become wavy? Where does waving come from? Why are there geometric shapes when information processing of geometric problems can more easily be solved using binary math? This is a good way of showing that the hard problem of consciousness extends beyond biology and into metaphysics, since a universe which arose purely out of unconscious function would not be indicated by the symptom of being filled with figures and forms that require conscious sense modalities and perspectives to define.
If the universe were blind and intangible, and needs conscious beings to compose it into visible and tangible phenomena, then how can we say that what we think of as reality is composed by matter? Reality, as we have ever known it, is tangible (touchable) substance, with forms that often reveal characteristics of those substances. Certainly human consciousness is not what defines the universe, but how can we say what a universe would be without any definition from any consciousness? If such a ‘reality’ could exist, what would be the difference between that and nothingness, except that it is a nothingness which somehow leads to the birth of consciousness of an experienced reality?
B. Is it Consciousness?
1. What is beneath consciousness is debatable.
a. Some say that consciousness is information processing which is substrate independent. Subjective qualities like color and flavor are emergent from the complexity of arithmetic relations and exist for functional purposes (labeling or compressing data). If we recreate the complex interactions in silico, or even in a large network of pipes and mechanical valves, experiences such as the flavor of pineapple would emerge, just because that is what must happen.
b. Some say that it is the product of neurochemical functions, which could either be a computation which is substrate dependent for an unknown reason, or it could be a non-computational biological product such as digestion. A computer program could simulate digestion, but it can’t digest physically real food.
These both take the modus ponens approach to logic, where a proposition that is the same as something true is also true: Since we can taste pineapple, and we are made of a brain process, anything that performs the same process well enough must yield the same result.
If we take the modus tollens approach to logic, which is equally viable, we would say that since there is no logical justification for the flavor of pineapple to exist in either a computer program or a neurochemical function, and since a computer program or neurochemical function could conceivably be created that matches our brain to an arbitrary degree of precision, then it is false that consciousness can be defined purely in terms of biology and computation.
c. Some say that consciousness is of divine origin, or unexplained, or unexplainable. Others say that consciousness could have no origin. In my view, this makes the most sense, since the idea of an origin does not seem native to mathematics or physics, and originality appears to be a quality within consciousness rather than the other way around. In fact, every quality that we experience seems to emerge from beyond the rational limits of arithmetic or pure functions. In a universe of only material process, the idea of emergent flavors or colors, feelings, etc.seems no more plausible than divine Creation. The deeper that I have looked into the physics of perception, the more it is clear to me that our current models lack a deep understanding of the reality of consciousness, and rather assume a linear, toy model made of black boxes and behaviorism.
C. What is reality?
Typically this question takes a detour into what I consider a philosophical dead end, of trying to prove that illusions are real or reality is an illusion. The fact that we can tell the difference between illusion and reality, or that we can even conceive of a difference suggests to me that reality is category of sensory qualities – enduring sensations which are harder, heavier, more complex and filled with interrelated truths than we could have imagined. The universe that we experience, however, includes much more than that. Besides the qualities of realism, we have surreal fantasies, dreams, fiction, etc. We have fiction intended as fiction, and fiction intended as reality (like money). If we have spun for ourselves a cocoon of ’emergent’ human illusions, we must either acknowledge that such an emergence is either metaphysical, or we must expand our definition of physics to include these private and social phenomena. Looking at it objectively, something like the idea of money is causing more changes on this planet than any function of matter alone.
Isn’t it really a human bias to think that physics only includes what came before humans? If the basis of reality were matter, there seems to be no good argument for why it wouldn’t stay that way. Appealing to ‘complexity’, emergence, and randomness is to me very clearly circular thinking, as it assumes that such things are both physical yet free from the requirement of physical explanation. They indicate instead that the materialistic view has focused on the nature of physical surfaces and functional skeletons…spaces and dimensions composed of purely abstract measurement or purely concrete objects, with nothing in between. Consider that a universe of matter is one which exists from the outside in – a place ‘out there’ which only recently developed a sense of ‘in here’. Without some kind of experience which makes sense, all of the functions of nature become abstractions; un-realities which have no good excuse for ever becoming ‘realized’.
Trial Epilogue on MSR
In the course of writing about Multisense Realism, I have had the unusual experience of discovering what my influences have been without having ever been directly influenced by them. As a whole, MSR seems to unintentionally brings together concepts common to Relativity, Semiotics, Depth Psychology and Hermetic Philosophy and applying them to the problems of consciousness. In these ideas I have found breadcrumb trails leading back to Whitehead, Leibniz, Deleuze, and Spinoza among many others all the way back to the Axial age. I have been accused of being Aristotelian, Hegelian, postmodernist, Creationist, solipsist, Chalmers-ite, and a Chopran, but in truth, my view can find strong agreement and strong disagreement with almost every slant on physics, philosophy, and phenomenology. MSR points to a tessellated monism of relative absolutes and relative relatives. Here then is an attempt to encapsulate a more objective view of this view and how it fits in to the larger perspective of current models.
Privilege and Privacy
The concept of ‘frames of reference’ is used in Relativity for making objective predictions about the physical universe, but it hinges on the assumption of perspectives which, as far as I can imagine, are possible only when defined by subjective awareness of some kind. How can there be a perspective without some experience in which that perspective is presented?
In physics, the observer is a one dimensional vector, whose only function is as a fixed-point receiver of various coordinated conditions. The Berkeleyan in me calls a foul on that, since we have no evidence that any such abstract receiver can exist without some form of perception – some mode of sensory relation is assumed for the observer but it is not acknowledged. The mode of observation itself is unrecognized and overlooked except for a generic, and typically pseudo-optical fact of a means of relating factual data from a distance. What has been proposed here is that without some specific modality of concrete aesthetic experience, the notion of relativity quickly becomes incoherent. Contemporary physics assume properties and positions, but overlooks the necessity for a method of detection and comparison in the absence of sensory awareness. The question is how, if not through some form of conscious appreciation, some multiple of ‘sense’, can a frame of reference come to privilege itself as ‘here’ rather than ‘there’ or ‘now’ rather than ‘then’? What, in physical or functional terms, accounts for ‘privilege’, and it’s more familiar human expression ‘privacy’?
To answer that question, one approach that I have stumbled upon is to conceptually reverse existing models. Instead of particles in a void, think of dynamic bubbles in a plenum, or ‘whorlicles’. Instead of a literal plenum or field, think of a range of sensory acquaintance – a figurative anti-field in which the entropy of spacetime disentanglement is collapsed..
Applying this inside-out cosmology to mathematics, the number zero can only be a local temporary condition which can only exist between disconnection from and reconnection with the whole. Zero is the idea that something has about the absence of everything. If that’s true, then the underlying default-state of all nature that is not ‘nothingness’ a centering self-attraction. The Cartesian grid of spacetime becomes a polar graph which dissolves substance dualism.
From this trick of turning math and physics assumptions on their head, a primordial identity which I call ‘pansensitivity’ can be imagined. Pansensitivity is neither a physical form nor mathematical function, not an immaterial process, but a capacity through which forms and functions are aesthetically appreciated. It is the foundational possibility for sanity as a sole reality through which all other continuations can possibly arise.
Both physics and math overlook the role of aesthetics/participation. If we ask why, it could be because they are about answering questions within the world or beyond the world, rather than questioning worldliness itself. Math-physics begins with the axioms given that there simply must be a such thing as a force or quantities. It is never seriously asked whether these givens can exist independently of some context of sensitivity.
This perspective is not wrong, and is entirely sensible given the purpose of math and physics to bring certainty and order to our understanding and control of the world. ‘Shut up and calculate’ works for physics because it never has to deal with conditions that are outside of sense. If we can’t get ever get away from consciousness, then consciousness is zeroed out. It is only when we want to question what it is that we can’t get away from that the axioms of objectivity must be challenged. Also we must consider that if it were possible that computations and physical interactions could occur entirely as objects, without awareness of any kind, then it begs the question of why it would ever be the case that awareness would or could arise at all.
While the human intellect presents an aesthetic context which feels Platonically ‘pure’ to us in the forms of logic and language, there is nevertheless an experience of what it is like to think and figure out calculations. Despite our enthusiasm for the transparency of the medium of scientific thought, we can understand that this purity is ultimately an illusion as well. If our consciousness is nothing but deterministic physical activity being shaped by evolutionary selection, then our scientific axioms can be no better. Either we have to admit that our scientific objectivity is predicated on our sense capacity and those of the instruments which we employ, or we have to admit that our sense capacity has some access to a world which genuine and not a solipsistic simulation.
Oppositivism
Pivoting from logical positivism to aesthetic ‘oppositivism’ may seem absurd, but it is not without precedent. The appeal of opposites and symmetry, especially in association with consciousness and cosmos is widespread.
The opposite of a great truth is also true – Niels Bohr
That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing – Isaac Newton’s translation of the Tabula Smaragdina.
It would seem an unlikely coincidence that so many foundational concepts have to do with opposites. From the periodic table (proton v electron) to parts of speech (nouns v verbs), we see the same expression of aesthetic contrast. It is no surprise that within Philosophy of Mind too there is a core opposition that the idealist has against the materialist and vice versa. Taking my cue from Bohr, I sought to turn the dichotomy of subject and object inside out. Instead of a seeing either an illusory subject in an objective world or a transcendental subject in an illusory world, I propose a Multisense Continuum in which subjectivity and objectivity are co-variant qualities which rise, fall, and find elaboration in nested frequencies of participatory sense. I found that there are simple relations between scale and speed that point to a possible way of scientifically accessing top-down diffraction as well as bottom-up combination.
The technique of aesthetic reversal is shown here being applied to some current science-based theories about consciousness:
IIT
Giulio Tononi’s IIT (Integrated Information Theory) posits consciousness as integrated information. Flipping that to the opposite, we can come up with something like Disintegrated Qualia, assuming my definition of information as the antithesis of qualia. I see ‘information’ as the interqualitative protocols which pansensitivity has developed to separate and reunite itself.
At first, the notion of disintegrated qualia might seem incoherent, however, when we look to the experience of how consciousness is instantiated, there does seem to be something interestingl. Waking up, or being startled into attention is an arresting begins by breaking off of a previous state of awareness (or unawareness). Before we can receive new information about what has captured our attention, the capturing itself occurs as an incoherent encounter; a brief reduction of sanity and control. Integration may be an accurate description of how consciousness functions from an outside perspective, but the subjective experience of disintegrating or dissolving qualia is an interesting way to describe the other half of the story – the subjective half. When we meditate we try to minimize the amount of information and qualia, and we feel intuitively that this is what opens us up to be *more* conscious rather than less.
Infancy and dementia are characterized by delirious qualia which do not merely lack the power to inform truthfully, but take on an otherworldly aesthetic. Insanity is feared not only for the consequences of rational malfunction, but for the fear of losing the sense of self and the world upon which all value depends. Psychosis is a profound dislocation of the frame of reference, but rather than dismissing the fact of mental illness as off-limits to a rational inquiry into consciousness, we should see the extreme alteration of consciousness as the supercollider or telescope of phenomenology.
The disintegration of qualia describes what it is like to experience the beginning and ending of awareness, where a frame of reference is raised to become privileged. Part of the privilege of private consciousness is to control this raising to some extent, or at least to participate in developing that control. As a complex organism, we have multiple levels of privacy and publicity. The human envelope of awareness extends from irresistible urges to relatively free-form imagination, with a whole spectrum in between. There is indeed an integration of information going on, but it can also be seen as the breakdown of a gestalt sense experience into multiple dimensions and modalities.
The measure used by IIT for the quality of consciousness is Φ (phi), which is a measure of qualia space in which probabilities of system states can be mapped as positions. Turning that upside down could add an anti-phi (-Φ) in which qualia is conceived of as improbable or unprecedented dispositions…gestalt phenomena which are both novel and irreducible. Rather than qualities which are emergent from local connections and system states, the anti-phi qualities are divergent from the interference pattern between that which is eternal and that which is unrepeatable.
A song is both an integration of notes, and a reflection of the zeitgeist or collective experience. Where phi is measured in the context of qualia space, anti-phi measures qualia as a spaceless, timeless ‘pinching’ of the totality into a focal presence. The anti-phi is a measure of the degree of aesthetic prestige and significance for the sake of its own appreciation. It is through this aspect of qualia, this ‘dark math’ value which the non-local can be encountered and re-encountered in some likeable likeness. Instead of being built up from scratch, the anti-phi of qualia is diffracted or sculpted out of disintegrated/unbound pansensitivity. Spacetime serves to freeze the dreamtime of the totality, make it real, and use it to build richer qualia upon.
Orch OR, Penrose, and Fermat’s Last Theorem
Adding the reversal technique onto Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction can yield similarly interesting results. The opposite of an Orch OR could be described as a “Subjective Inflation” which is “de-orchestrated”. What the hell does that mean? I’ll tell you. A subjective inflation can be thought of as the stretching of the fabric of the sense of the universe so that there can exist a difference between ‘here and there’, and ‘now and then’, a difference which physics does not seem to be able to locate. What happens during a wave-function collapse is, in addition to being felt as a Bing! of awareness, can also be described from the subjective end as a dilation of privilege which is aesthetic and qualitative. De-ORchestration can be thought of as free will – the individuation of proprietary time against a backdrop frame of generic-universal spacetime. The Orch OR explains what role subjectivity plays in the world from an outside perspective, but the De-Orch SI explains what role the creation of realism plays for the interior perspective.
In Penrose’s interpretations of Gödel’s incompleteness he says:
The inescapable conclusion seems to be: Mathematicians are not using a knowably sound calculation procedure in order to ascertain mathematical truth. We deduce that mathematical understanding – the means whereby mathematicians arrive at their conclusions with respect to mathematical truth – cannot be reduced to blind calculation!
This was echoed in the poster presentation at the TSC conference from James Tagg, in which he made the point of non-computability concrete by applying the spirit of Penrose’s conclusions to compose music based on Sir Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last theorem. Because Hilbert’s 10th problem was answered negatively (by Yuri Matiyasevich in 1970), there is a discrepancy between the proof that no general algorithm can exist to solve Fermat’s last theorem and the fact that a human mathematician was in fact able to resolve it. To resolve that discrepancy, it seems reasonable to conclude that Wiles solved the theorem using methods that go beyond a general algorithm. To quote Tagg:
The existence of creativity within our Universe leads to important consequences for the structure of that Universe. To be creative we must process information within our brains using non-computable and therefore non-deterministic ‘software’. Such ‘software’ must run on non-deterministic ‘hardware’ through all the layers of abstraction, otherwise you could simply examine the more abstract model and determine what the lower layers are going to do. If humans run creative ‘software’ within their brains, the ‘hardware’ of the Universe must be non-deterministic.
Geoffery LaForte’s criticism of the Penrose-Lucas interpretation typifies the reaction against non-computational arguments. In his conclusion, he writes:
Theorems of the Gödel and Turing kind are not at odds with the computationalist vision, but with a kind of grandiose self-confidence that human thought has some kind of magical quality which resists rational description. The picture of the human mind sketched by the computationalist thesis accepts the limitations placed on us by Gödel, and predicts that human abilities are limited by computational restrictions of the kind that Penrose and others find so unacceptable.
I think that the language here exposes, ironically, an agenda in the service of impersonality in science which is highly emotional and personal (and unscientific). The essence of the objections found in LaForte’s paper are that we cannot prove our own consistency mathematically, so that somehow Penrose’s authority to affirm itself is more objectionable than his own authority to attack itself. What is mistaken for a ‘grandiose self-confidence’ is, in my view, no more than a minimum level of self-trust.
To say that all that resists rational description is magical is itself a petito principii fallacy, in which a foregone conclusion of universal determinism is itself used as the only support for a deterministic view of Gödel. What is overlooked is the fact that any argument against the consistency of human intuition is also an argument against that argument itself. It is to say, “I know with certainty that I cannot know anything with certainty”. That statement is a Gödel sentence whose absurdity oddly never occurs to LaForte as far as I can tell. What results is a straw man of the Penrose position in which human consciousness is reduced to a toy model.
In this toy model of determinsm-mechanism, the myriad of different aesthetic layers and modalities of human awareness are conflated into a single, unreliable process of computation rather than a fundamental creative context in which all notions of reliability are conceived in the first place. Daniel Dennett and others commit a similar mistake when they point out the limitations of perception (optical illusions, change blindness, etc) rather than the overwhelmingly consistent baseline of verdical perception from which we form such expectations. This rather aggressive approach forces line of demarcation such that all perceptions must be either true data from the outside world or solipsistic confabulations. My interpretation is precisely the opposite and can be understood through that opposition. MSR proposes the idea that consciousness and cosmos are a continuum of aesthetic presentation which range between high-amplitude metaphors (semi-local/semi-dual) and low-amplitude semaphores which have strictly contained meaning (thermodynamically irreversible, binary dualism, absolutely local or non-local axiomatic).
Early on in the paper, LaForte asks rhetorically “Now, why does this theorem seem so significant to anti-computationalists like Penrose and Lucas?” To insinuate that anti-computationalists have some kind of special fixation on this theorem is ironic, and representative of a whole class of similar accusations from the mechanistic camp. Mechanism asserts that human thought is reducible to computation, but it invariably carries a shadow assertion that some human thought is inherently corrupted by emotional rather than mathematical content. If we are all really machines, then Penrose is a machine, and if he finds incompleteness to be significant, then that can only mean that his mental process is determined to find it significant. The whole question of where error comes from in a mechanistic universe is recursive. If there is error, then mechanism is failing, and it therefore cannot be perfect. There must be a difference between the ideal of mechanism and the empirical fact of its expression…but how can that difference be generated by ideal mechanism?
The answer to that question is part of what the concept of subjective inflation might provide. De-Orchestrated Subjective Inflation (De-Orch SI*) amounts to the birth of privilege. The privilege to separate from the totality for some period to develop preferences and to care about those preferences. Subjectivity is a proprietary sense of dominion which allows the opportunity for extension – extension of feeling, knowing, doing, and being. This is felt as a kind of radius of involvement, or perhaps a tunnel of experiential inertia. For biological creatures, this inflation may be tied directly to cytoskeletal structure of microtubules. The tunnel is one of orientation and presence, like a cursor, which separates aesthetic dipoles such as here and there, now and then, self and other, etc. The greater the privilege, the more rich and intricate the appreciation of the contrasts can become. Each inflation builds on histories of previous inflations (which ties into a Morphic Resonance or Akashic Record kind of schema) as well as projecting inspirational images into the future.
Global Workspace Theory
Continuing with the theme of reversal, the complement to Bernard J. Baars Global Workspace Theory might be something like “Specialized Instrument Theory”. There is a lot of truth to the GWT idea of consciousness as a receiver/distributor for information, however there is an equal case to be made for consciousness as tool which is used to creatively shape itself into various images and ideas, and to impose those aesthetic forms outwardly. GWT conceives of consciousness as working memory and sensation appearing in an empty/dark theater, but I would extend the metaphor to see the theater also as a structure which protects the local awareness from the outside world. The theater of consciousness can only provide a movie if it first temporarily encloses the audience and screen in sensory isolation. Our phenomenal stream of consciousness connects the dots of sentience, but I suggest that the dots themselves are the tips of icebergs which float on an ocean of amnesia…an amnesia which hides the deeper connection of all dots to the universal history of experience. We have come full circle back to the ‘whorlicle’ model.
Unlike a theater, consciousness does not only lull us into a spectacular solipsism, but connects us directly to a potentially eternal realism and to the capacity to tell the difference. In addition to being a screen for interior simulation, the Mercurial screen of consciousness can be a mirror or a window onto truth. The truth can be fashioned through a pen or weapon, through an idea, image, or symbol. Consciousness is a meta-linguistic, meta-semiotic agency which reports on itself as well as its view of its ‘others’.
What’s Next?
It seems like this project is at a crossroads. It could be the end, or the end of Part I, but it feels like the stage of adding profusely to the MSR thesis is winding down, and in its wake, some clarity about how it might fit in with other theories. I have tried to give a few examples here of what makes MSR different from theories which focus on outside-in views of consciousness, and how they might be married with their opposites to provide a more complete and meaningful picture. I will consider it successful if everyone can find something in it to piss them off and if at least one person is inspired to re-evaluate the totality of existence in some tormented insomniac revelation. I apologize for the density and the high level of noise in what I have been writing, but at least its out here in some form. In the spirit of Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, I say to my critics that I am even stupider and crazier than you think, and that you should spend your time elsewhere. Everyone gets the Multisense Realism that they deserve!
*This sounds like I’m being satirical in calling it that, but I’m trying to show the syzygy.
TSC Notes
TSC Comments
Attending TSC this year and in 2012 has played a critical role, and continues to play a role in inspiring me to develop Multisense Realism. David Chalmers work in particular, with his elucidation of the various forms of panpsychism in his recent papers Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism and The Combination Problem for Panpsychism has been invaluable.
From the former paper :
“Panpsychism is sometimes dismissed as a crazy view, but this reaction on its own is not a serious objection. While the view is counterintuitive to some, there is good reason to think that any view of consciousness must embrace some counterintuitive conclusions. Furthermore, intuitions about panpsychism seem to vary heavily with culture and with historical period. The view has a long history in both Eastern and Western philosophy, and many of the greatest philosophers have taken it seriously. It is true that we do not have much direct evidence for panpsychism, but we also do not have much direct evidence against it, given the difficulties of detecting the presence or absence of consciousness in other systems. And there are indirect reasons, of a broadly theoretical character, for taking the view seriously.”
In the latter paper, Chalmers offers a rigorous account of The Combination Problem. Multisense Realism begins as a proposed solution to the Combination Problem in which the explanatory gap between physical and phenomenal states are bridged by a continuum/spectrum of relativistic qualities of sensitivity.
From the macro to the micro, physical to phenomenal, under MSR, every perspective contributes its own frame of reference to what could be considered a totality of reference. Through this super-monad, not only are physics and phenomenology reconciled, but ontology itself. ‘Isness’ and ‘Aboutness’ are reconsidered as ‘Seems’ and ‘Seems like’.
It is the aim of MSR to begin to characterize and document this spectrum of meta-ontology, in which definition itself is created, preserved, and dissolved…even while, in another sense, not creating, preserving, or dissolving anything. Amidst all of this relativism and paraconsistent logic, it is proposed that within every frame of reference there is also the potential to access unambiguous clarity, simplicity, and wholeness. At the center of every center, there is a default experience – a reflection of the totality; home, safe, within or ‘in here’. This anchoring should not be presumed to be the exclusive province of human consciousness or even zoology or biology. All of physics and mathematics contains implicit vantage points from which objects are defined. In this way at least, sense should be seen to pre-figure all figures and forms, all objects and subjects.
What PIP suggests is that even relativity is relative. There “is” an Absolute frame of reference, consisting of the capacity to orient sensibly. From that foundation, it becomes possible to ‘make sense’. Existence is suggested, not as a facile axiom, but as a concrete presentation of here and now that is a‘living’ coordination of aesthetic encounters. This view of the cosmos is one in which divergence and disentanglement of privacies precedes an emergence of spacetime, nucleated in the now.
The work of Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose have also inspired my thinking as well. MSR introduces a kind of perceptual relativity at every level of scale (named Eigenmorphism), and a Lorentz-style complementarity to the Orchestrated Objective Reduction called Subjective Inflation (i.e. Orch OR+SI). The publicity of quantum mechanics finds a kind of twin realization in the privacy of qualitative gestalts. Wave-function collapse is reflected as a figurative bolt of lightning from the totality into locality.
Like a lightning bolt, a uniquely jagged path traces its route from vector to vector, describing not only a generic/recombinatory state change, but a proprietary and unrepeatable address. This path can be imagined to strike through what might be described as an ‘improbability space’ – a top-down complement to the bottom-up view of quantum theory.
Through this influx of novelty, the present moment of here and now is inflated to superlative significance which recapitulates the inflation as well, so that eternity is reflected in each moment. This idea owes a lot to Eastern concepts such as the Net of Indra and Akashic Records. The idea is that each moment’s route to the present from the Absolute is preserved within it. This is quite an abstruse concept, and requires much deeper consideration than can be expressed here, but let this be at least a premonition of the potential for a productive if not testable form of ‘private physics’.
I have very much appreciated the contributions of Deepak Chopra, Giulio Tononi, and Donald Hoffman as well, each of whom present important pieces to the puzzle. Where I diverge from their views is only in particular details that arise from my premises. I do not see the world as a simulation or illusion, but rather, in any given frame of reference, the exterior world is as real as anything could possibly be…more ‘real’ in a way, than individual subjectivity. In my view, it is only from the Absolute frame of reference that matter is ‘unreal’ and subjective-like phenomena are the firmament. I see our subjective experience as both more-than-real and less-than-real, but not as the only arbiter of realism. MSR is not solipsism, but perhaps more of a holopsism.
Where Tononi’s IIT models a topological qualia space, I imagine a stratified but contiguous medium of sedimented experience from which qualia is carved out subtractively. There is simply no space in the universe that is not qualia already, nowhere to build it up from scratch. Instead, qualia is etched out of the local surface to the depths toward its source in the Absolute frame (beneath and beyond).
The flavor of strawberries for example, under MSR, is a kind of gestalt which traces a likeness of all the experience of animals eating fruit, of all fruit bearing plants, etc going back to indefinitely. Qualia is *not* a simple translation from molecular code to phenomenal effect. As humans, we are highly elaborated, so our divided senses can conflict, but this does not mean, in my view, that it is evidence of a faulty and solipsistic simulation. Illusions and misperceptions reveal more, not less, about the full reality of objective and subjective relation, even if the content is incompatible with the local frame of reference. The flavor of strawberries really is the flavor of the actual fruit, not simply a computation of indirectly generated data. One does not cause the other, they reflect different perceptual frame of reference. For this reason I reject all contemporary Strong AI approaches as implausible, since producing a mechanism capable of simulating expected outputs from a given input would be doing so based on mathematical contingencies rather than the kind of hyper-physics of sedimented experience that I suggest.
Donald Hoffman’s Conscious Realism seems to overlap with MSR very closely however here too I propose that even the idea of conscious agents are figments of the interface. If we drop the requirement of ‘agents’ to consciousness, the notion of panpsychism becomes more palatable, and the Combination Problem is eased if not completely transcended. If we see self-ness as the ‘king of qualia’ rather than the price of entry to consciousness, then we open the door to a profoundly interesting universe of ‘dark qualia’ which would, (as it contains the content of both past and future relative to any nested frame) dwarf the scale of dark energy. It seems possible that dark energy is the local footprint of this eternal continuity of experience.
Thanks also to my ideological adversaries in this as well. Susan Blackmore’s no-nonsense approach and commitment to empirical evidence is a welcome influence, as well as Daniel Dennett’s humor and uncompromising cynicism. In many ways, my own view is informed by turning the tables on doubt so that in addition to being skeptical of our interior experience, in favor of exterior scientific evidence, I would add that we must introduce a new skepticism of the presumption of the universality and completeness of even those scientific descriptions. What is true on one level may not be true on another, and each level has its own fundamental truth independent of every other.
Thanks to Jody Weiss and everyone else that I have met here at the conference too, who have also contributed to this ongoing development, both directly and indirectly.
Yours in Consciousness,
Craig Weinberg, @s33light
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