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Semiotics: What are the implications of the Saussurian sign (signifier/signified) for a theory of meaning?
In my theory of meaning, Saussurian concepts of signifier and signified are a good start, but I propose a fundamental change. In his answer, Keith Allpress offers:
here is where I think we stand:
Shannon removed content from meaning but using bits.
Saussure claimed that language creates meaning.
and points out the limitations of post-modern/relativistic/deconstructionist approaches. I would say that the computationalist approach is similarly limited, in that there is no compelling reason that ‘it from bit’ should apply to all aspects of meaning. I think that what is missing from these two approaches is the same thing, only seen from opposite sides. To understand more about that thing, we can begin by asking:
“What cares about the difference?”
I think where Saussure and modern semiotics in general went too far is in presuming representation without presentation. The error of the computationalist view is even more subtle, as it presumes presentation as an emergent property, thereby taking it outside of the realm of science, but without admitting it. To me, this is a very seductive but misguided approach which leads directly to the Emperor’s emergent clothes.
Taking the term ‘signifier’, we can crack the kernel of truth that semiotics-as-cosmology is based on. Just as it is not incorrect to call someone who is driving a car a ‘driver’, neither is driver a complete description of the role of human beings in the world. What is missing? What *cares* that something is missing? What fills the gap is what I call aesthetic participation, or sensory-motive presence. In my view, before ‘information’ (a difference that makes a difference per Bateson) or sign, there must be the raw sensitivity to detect and interpret such ‘differences’ or ‘signs’ and to *care* about those differences. What we have done, by reifing pattern as objectively real things which are recognized, or de-realizing things as subjectively constructed patterns is to void the existence of sense and sense-making itself.
Not to get too cheeky, but what I propose is that beneath Bateson’s adage is a deeper context from which information and signs emerge: an aesthetic phenomenon which likes its own likeness by making its own differences. I call this primordial pansensitivity, or ‘sense’ and the particular quality of appreciation that it cares about I call ‘significance’. Significance cannot be automated, it must be earned directly through intimate acquaintance. It may sound like I am talking about human intimacy here, but I mean nothing of the sort. By acquaintance (stealing that word from Chalmers), I mean sensory-motive encounters on a fundamental level: before humans, before biology, and before even matter. The universe has to make sense before anything can make sense of it.
The aesthetic agenda is purely hedonistic. It is to develop ever richer textures and modalities of appreciation. While the universe is replete with repeating patterns, it never seems to repeat its particular, proprietary holons. A whirlpool, hurricane, and galaxy all share the same unmistakable topology, but nobody would mistake one for the other. Not just the scale but everything that constitutes their appearance and role in the universe is different. In calling the universe signs or bits we are losing the appreciation and proprietary character. The unique and worthwhile becomes generic and inevitable. It ultimately is to make meaning meaningless.
Names (representations) can be related to each other in ways that nature (presentations) cannot be. The equal sign is itself a name for one of these relations. In nature nothing can be absolutely equal to anything else. All of nature is unrepeatably unique in a literal sense, but will seem to be made of repetition and variation from any particular perspective within it. In this way, the postmodernists are right. We have only the presence of our own ability to feel that can be known absolutely as it is. Everything else that exists for us, within our individually customized experience has some degree of approximation/representation.
What makes this even more complicated and confusing is that there are different levels of sense-making whcih can contradict each other. We would like to think of signs as simply a case of dictionary definitions were signs literally signifiy what we expect they should signify. Even the identity principle of A = A is subject to a deeper degree of expectation about what A and = mean in different contexts. We can look at a surreal painting and say ‘that is a painting of something impossible’, but it is only our expectation that the paint shapes refer to something other than themselves which is being misled. What surrealism signifies is not ‘real’, but neither is it nothing.
Where the computationalists are right is in seeing the uniformity of arithmetic principles across all phenomena which can be measured. Reducing all transactions to bits obviously has been tremendously transformative in this century. By banishing the aesthetic qualities (qualia) to an emergent never-never land, however, we have been seduced by the representation of measure (quanta). Simulation-type theories now abound, in which the entire history of human experience (including the development of science, but shh…) is marginalized as a confabulation/illusion/model and the only true reality one which can never been contacted in any way except through theoretical abstraction. We either live in an unreal world, or the world which we now think is real is not the one that we actually live in. We are being asked to believe that meaning is meaningless and that the only alternative to solipsism is a kind of ‘nilipsism’* in which even our ennui is yet another meaningless function of the program.
To turn the page on this era of de-presentation**, I suggest that we look at the roots of semiotics more deeply, and recognize that signs themselves depend upon a deeper context of sensation and sense-making which goes beyond even physics or human experience.
*a word I made up to describe the philosophy that the self (ipse) must be reduced to a non-entity.
**another neologism that I use to refer to what Raymond Tallis calls the ‘Disappearance of Appearance’…the overlooking of the phenomenon of aesthetic presence itself.
Quora Question on Entropy
Help me understand this. If entropy is about signal transmission, and is measured by “how much information is missing,” it implies a transmitter and receiver – in other words, a relationship. Entropy is an appealing notion because at first glance the receiver of the information cannot suddenly know more than what is transmitted. But the amount of information the receiver can receive seems to be highly relative and transformable.This is if I understand correctly that entropy is not a measurement of a system’s physical properties, but of how much information is missing when that system is observed. For sure, a system will emit is information, and there will be a less than 100% reception of that signal for any system observing it. That number cannot be 101%…. But there are two sides to a relationship, and a system’s entropy is not related to some total “information” it “contains”… So there are simple workarounds to that 100% threshold.
For example, if I look at a blade of grass that I hold in my hand, I can only receive so much information about it, and I cannot get more information than what it is transmitting to me… Unless I then look at it under a microscope and now the information loss (entropy) has decreased. If entropy were a law of the universe, my act of changing my receptor would be “impossible.”
It seems to me that labeling entropy as an unbreakable law is a naive notion, and instead I see it as a useful property of observation. Does entropy deserve the status of “law of the universe”?
The subject of entropy is, appropriately highly entropic. There are a lot of different ways that the word is used, some more figuratively than others. Thermodynamic entropy is not the same as information entropy, in the sense that if we make an MPEG compressed video of a glass of ice melting into room temperature water, the first half of the movie would take more resources to compress than the last half, given that the last half would feature only a glass of still water. As the thermodynamic entropy of the actual ice increases, the information entropy of the content of the video decreases. The sensitivity of the video camera is limited, so it can’t detect the microstates of the water molecules.
I think this speaks to the question of perception, and how our designation of what constitutes a ‘system’ is more arbitrary than it may seem. All of our instruments and all of our sensing and sense-making capabilities are potentially as limited as the video camera. Our attention is squeezed into an anthropocentric range, so that our window on ourselves and the universe does not allow us to discern ultimately what is ‘a law of the universe, or simply an assumption based on our perceptions’. Everything that we can understand about the universe is furnished to us only by our perceptions, intuitions, and understanding.
Our perception leads us to expect a universe of laws and realities beyond itself, but these too are either ultimately subjective conditions, or else subjectivity itself must include the possibility of transcending itself. The difference between what we presume to be our private perceptions and what we presume to be something more is…. entropy. There is no way to obtain 100% of the information about anything. Even given omniscient access to the entire history of the universe, the nature of the universe may be intrinsically open ended within any given inertial frame.
What I am suggesting is that just as entropy is the gap between what we experience and what we think could be experienced (‘objectively’), what we consider information may only appear to be finite because of the gap between our native perceptual frame of reference and the target frame of reference. Rather than being a true description of what a phenomenon is, ‘information’ may be as fictional in its amputation of subjective qualities as perception is in its failure to pick up on physical properties. The definition of entropy itself can be thought of as gradually reversing or flipping in proportion to the distance (literal and figurative) between two perceptual frames. Take these words for example. If you read English, then your absorption of their meaning is rather loose and general. You get the idea of what I am saying, and even sort of ‘hear’ an inner narrator voice that stands in for me. It’s all rather fuzzy, but it works really well. Entropy is actually what allows you to get the gist of what I am saying or even what I am not saying (reading between the lines).
By comparison, someone who cannot read English at all may have a much clearer view of what these characters ‘actually’ look like (without as much fuzzy interpretive conditioning). In the same way, some people find it easier to draw realistically if they are copying an image upside down. Entropy and significance, subjectivity and objectivity are not functional properties, they are aesthetic ranges. The universe as a whole can, in the same way, be considered primarily an aesthetic phenomenon as a whole, in which any part can reduce another to a functional stereotype using variations on the theme of distance or insensitivity.
What is Time?
How would you define it?
I propose a new way of describing time, which I find clearer and more explanatory than others.
Time is an abstraction which refers to a general property of experiences which are remembered or recorded as having occurred in a either an irreversible linear sequence, or a repeating sequence (cycle). In my view, time is inherently phenomenal (private, experiential) rather than physical (public, structural), not just because of time dilation under Relativity, but for the more axiomatic reason that time requires memory. Without memory, there can logically be only one eternal moment. It could be repeating forever or be following a pattern or have no pattern and nothing could tell the difference. Time…is experience, or a quality of experience through which private memory can map to public structure. I suggest that time can be understood as taking on three different modal scopes:
I. Micro-phenomenal: This is clock time. Physics. Looking at the development of time keeping, we can see that early devices exploited natural processes which were either continuous and invariant, such as the flow of water or sand into a container, or which cycled reliably, such as a shadow on a sundial. Mechanical clocks offered a marriage of the two, whereby an underlying linear or oscillating effect such as an unwinding spring’s tension or a pendulum’s swing would advance the teeth of a system of gears, one by one.
Each tick/tock is an precisely measured event which is, as much as possible, uniform and generic. As technology has improved, we have refined the clock to a pinnacle of pure abstraction. Both the indivisible and divisible power of nature has been abstracted electronically. A perpetual electrical current drives generic switches to compute a digitally coded readout. Satellite networks deliver synchronized atomic time. Each microsecond like the last, and even though global adjustments to clock or calendar can be made arbitrarily by central authorities, we feel that this kind of time is the ‘real time’.
II. Phenomenal Time: This is natural time. Idioms like ‘time flies when you’re having fun’ or ‘it was the longest night of my life’ reflect that our ordinary sense of time also dilates and contracts through emotional states. Significant events and experiences seem to stand out in our autobiographical memory as not only more timely, but more timeless as well. We claim them, intentionally or unintentionally, as our own. This kind of time is narrative. “I woke up, I ate breakfast, I went to the store”, etc.. There is a story which has a shape – beginnings, middles and ends. It is not just generic oscillation or monotonous duration or arrow of increasing entropy, but a proprietary sequence of participation. This is the kind of time that we might say ‘seems like’ it is real.
If you think of how a story works, the more of the story is told, the more the information entropy decreases. By the middle of the story, we know the characters, the setting, the plot, etc. The number of possible ways the story can continue is relatively limited (even if it is still potentially unlimited in an absolute sense). The significance, however, of the remaining bit of the story is increasingly augmented. If the story is good, you want to hear the end of it, even if you are pretty sure that you know how it will turn out.
After the story ends, it would seem that there is no entropy left. The story has been told in its entirety. In reality, however, the meta-story has just begun. The memory of it survives, creating new opportunities to be applied figuratively in one’s life, as well as sharing it socially and seeing it retold, dramatized, and celebrated in culture as myth.
III. Metaphenomenal Time: Carl Jung famously wrote about the Collective Unconscious, and synchronicity. Experiences which some consider delusional or paranormal. Meaningful coincidences, prophetic dreams, a symbolic language of recurring characters and sagas called archetypes. This is eternal time. Time wound around itself in such a way that some essential, iconic reduction of all that has happened or might happen is in some sense ‘always still here’ and in another sense ‘never really anywhere’.
This is not mystical babbling to me, it is literally the physical reality of what the universe is and what (or who) it does. We have no trouble thinking of eternity in the Platonic sense, as ideal geometric forms or mathematical relations, but because we ourselves are immersed in human phenomena we do not see ourselves as being composed of similarly eternal recurrences.
Because there is no hard line between I, II, and III, all time is actually nested within all three contexts. This can help explain how intuition could work to allow people to sometimes pick up on feelings from a larger scope of time. Events that have great significance especially could theoretically cast a shadow from the III range to the II, so that from the II perspective, it is precognitive.
Animation
Animation doesn’t make sense as a property which emerges from a computation, it is inferred through an expectation which is aesthetic rather than functional. The information content is the same whether there are rapid updates of static frames or whether there is an animated flow, yet our sense of realism is hinges on the sense of continuous motion.
It makes sense to me that when sense is interrupted by another level of sense, the result is a representation which as an artificially static quality. The conversion from a waving over time to a shape of a wave in space is a destructive compression. The wave shape can be strung together with variations of itself, but that doesn’t automatically imply an narrative experience, only a collection of ordered shapes. If computation is the animation of logic, then logic is at once the dis-animation of sense and the automation of sense.
The genuine dynamism of sense is derived not from position and momentum, but from the transformation of effort into satisfaction. Each micro movement we make subconsciously satisfies countless agendas on every scale – neurological, physiological, psychological, intuitive….thousands of sub-personal negotiations being worked out in real time right under our noses. Scratch an itch, shift position. Paying attention to these things can make us nervous and self-conscious. By bringing our personal awareness into the sub-personal, we slip into recursion and undermine our self-confidence – our power to control our effort and satisfy our personal level agendas.
Curiously, when simple figures are animated into cartoons (the word cartoon comes from the canvas or cards that artists would use to draw them on), the aesthetic of realism is charged with what could be called ‘levity’. Watching a cat chase a mouse in real life might elicit anxiety or agitation, but as a cartoon, the figures of mice and cats are recontextualized as delightful or hilarious. The idea that this is an emergent property of computation alone is technically possible, but only if we have already given computation the benefit of the doubt of producing all of these functionally superfluous aesthetic qualities. It seems to work better the other way. In animation, we see that which is closer to what we are made of – we see imagination ‘brought to life’.
From Scott McCloud’s excellent Understanding Comics, he points out the cartoonists mastery of the palette of subjectivity and objectivity. The more realistic detail is added, the more information there is – the more that has been calculated and measured, and the more that it reflects the power of reality to arrest consciousness. The unrealistic face promotes an informal state of mind, where the vacuum of information does not stand empty as it would in RAM, but is instead filled in with self-identification.
Othello
“Othello” is a code that exists in a variety of forms, including ink on paper and binary digits on electronic storage. When this code is processed by human minds, it evokes some specific sensations. For instance, it causes our mirror neurons (and other brain modules) to run simulations of characters and situations.
The sensations “Othello” evokes in two different brains will usually be similar enough that the owners of those brains will be able to have a meaningful discussion about the play.
What I propose is that you turn your description of Othello as a code inside out. The code idea is a good one, and one that makes a lot of sense, but I have found that it makes more sense to view it this way:
“Othello” is many different but related phenomena:
0) Elementary level
- +0) a human experience that can be accessed through particular states of conscious and subconscious attention (proto-sensory)
- -0) a symbolic code that can be modulated and demodulated through a variety of communication channels (logical-quantitative or pseudo-sensory)
1) Sub-Personal level
- +1) a series of audio-phonetic and psycho-acoustic sensations which are fragments of aesthetically richer experiences. (sensory-qualitative*)
- -1) a series of electro-magnetic and neuro-chemical state changes which through which a computational isomorphism arises between syntactic structures and functional semantics. (microphysical)
2) Personal Level
- +2) a production of subjective feelings and thoughts in which one is theatrically immersed. This does not occur because of 1), but rather because of the essential psychological unity of the human experience that is being tapped into (+3) at a personal and social level of understanding (+2).
- -2) an enactment or rendition of a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story Un Capitano Moro (“A Moorish Captain”)
3) Super-personal Level
- +3 ) an artistically customized sampling of mytho-poetic inspirations, in which timeless human themes are clothed in specific anthropological, sociological, and psychological metaphors (metaphoric).
- -3 ) Part of a body of work which arose through the English Renaissance Period or Elizabethan Era reflecting a resurgence of interest in the humanities. It serves as an archeological artifact to add to our knowledge about everything from European history to political science, art, language, racial relations etc. (I call this meta-theoretic to contrast with the metaphoric…intellectual rather than aesthetic)
∞) Absolute Level
- +∞) A harmonic** integration of all of the above, so that each level makes sense in its own context and in conjunction with others. To arbitrarily choose one level of description would be a destructive compression if taken literally. (Telic)
- +∞) An impressive, though ultimately inevitable product of mathematical and physical laws plus statistically random mutations. (Ontic)
*I call this ‘semaphoric’ – meaning simple, repetitive meanings as would be produced by signal flags or digital codes. Intended to evoke a contrast to metaphoric, which are numerous complex figurative meanings extracted from a single communication. The personal, ‘phoric’ level would be between the semaphoric and metaphoric.
**or what I call ‘holotrophic’ – a productive extension of tendencies toward wholeness.
If the universe was going to be destroyed, and we had to recreate it based on some general description, I would say that my list of five, dual aspect levels is the minimum reduction that would be useful.
The idea that it can all be reduced to codes and simulations I consider to be a folly of the turn of this century in which low level functions are confused with generators of high level phenomena rather than the other way around.
To sum up and add cool symbols:
0) Elementary
-ℵ Sense, Essential Figurative Unity, +0
ω Information, Existential Logical Units, -0
1) Sub-Personal
æ Affect-Effect, Sensory-Motive Intention, Semaphoric Qualia +1
E Energy, Unintentional Physical Function, Dynamic Analogues -1
2) Personal
Æ Aesthetic Experience, direct, ‘-phoric’ +2
M Material Structure, indirect,’-morphic’ -2
3) Super-Personal
Ψ Psyche, Super-Personal, Meta-phoric, mytho-poetic +3
Φ Noús, Super-Impersonal, Meta-theoretic, algebraic-geometric -3
∞) Absolute (ॐ)
ש Telic, Metaphenomenal, proprietary preferences +∞
Δ Ontic, Automatic, generic axioms -∞
Syzygy Integrals and Other Neoquantisms
Syzygy Integral
Syzygy Integral with labels
When applying the syzygy integral to a sense modality such as vision, the Δæ would refer to the difference in the microphenomenal qualities, such as pixel hue, saturation, value, or contrast/edge detection, etc.. the entire palette of what I would call entopic or generic visual encounters. As shown in optical illusions, these elemental graphic features depend on their surrounding context, and two pixels or shaded regions which are measured to be optically identical can be perceived quite differently.
For this reason and others, I suggest that the fundamental nature of all phenomena is only definable in terms of specific properties, but of a pseudo-specific quorum of detectable differences. It looks like a lighter grey on the bottom because of the adjacent contrasts, and it is my conjecture that this kind of pseudo-specificity is at the heart of all measurements, particularly those which we have used to define subatomic particles.
On the top of the integral, the ∇Æ would refer to an entirely different, top-down mode of visual perception. Instead of a delta (Δ) to stand for a the difference of generic micro-phenomenal qualia, the nabla symbol (∇) is used to stand for a divergence from a larger perceptual context. This relates to the binding problem, i.e., when we see two dogs walk behind the same fence, we do not perceive them as becoming the same dog – the narrative continuity does for our overall understanding what the ‘illusory’ plasticity does on a microphenomenal level. To see the ) as a smile in the emoticon : – ) requires both a low level fudging of pixels into a curve, as well as the ability for our expectation of a face to be projected from the top down. The emoticon is a minimalist example, but a better example would be something like this:
Terms like pareidolia, apophenia, simulacra, and eidetic hallucination all have in common this potential to misread a more proprietary, macrophenomenal text on top of a relatively generic, microphenomenal context.
What the syzygy integral is supposed to model is that any given sense modality is a special kind of integration between top-down or holotrophic orientation and bottom up, entropic orientation. In the case of visual sense, the top-down images are encountered like those in an Rorschach inkblot, as endless wells of imaginative psychosexual association. The personal range of the psyche is here encountering influences from the super-personal range of the overall presence of this moment in relation to their lives, and their lives in relation to eternity.
The bottom-up ‘entopic’ confabulation (entopic hallucinations are those which are geometric designs, etc as opposed to eidetic hallucinations which are images such as specific faces) is where the personal psyche encounters the sub-personal influence of neurological, biological, and chemical events as it impinges on them visually. An entopic hallucination presumably maps much more directly to neurochemical patterns in the visual cortex, whereas the eidetic, storytelling hallucinations would be much more obscure and proprietary. A hallucination of Darth Vader or Dick Cheney might be hard to tell apart from looking at an fMRI, but it should not be so difficult to get a fix on zig zag patterns vs concentric circles, etc.
The syzygy integral of vision then would be this continuum between the sub-phenomenal adhesive that holds the graphic canvas together and the cohesive that renders the meta-phenomenal meanings and figures phenomenally visible. It’s not an ordinary integral, since it has an encircled triple bar in the center, which denotes a participatory intent (motive effect), and an aesthetic contour (sense affect). The term syzygy, an old favorite of mine (its a real word), refers to a union of opposites, either figuratively as in yin-yang, or literally as in an solar eclipse where the Moon is opposite to the Sun behind the Earth.
In the syzygy integral for vision, the vast sweep of possible interpretations from the meta to the micro level is interrupted by the inflection point of the moment as it is localized from eternity (the absolute). That which is seen had been both filtered from above and built up from below, but the visual encounter is defined even in opposition to that. The seeing is not the seen. All visual forms are opposed to an equally rich continuum of possible ways to appreciate those forms and images. The syzygy integral is not just a map of what there is ‘there and then’ but the entire domain of what each and every there and then still means ‘here and now’.
As the syzygy integral can be used to describe vision (vision = the participatory integration of graphic differences and imaginative likeness) or sound (sound = the participatory integration of phonic differences and psychoacoustic likeness), so too should it be able to describe the character of all phenomena. The underlying formula (Grand syzygy ingegral) uses the * asterisk and # pound to denote the limit of infinite figurative unity and the limit of literal, finite granularity respectively. In this case, the encircled triple bar refers to the Primoridal Identity Pansensitivity, from which all other syzygies are diffracted.
Grand Syzygy Integral
The syzygy integral without the contour circle I am calling the information integral.
Information Integral
Unlike the syzygy integral, which defines every piece of information as an aesthetic encounter or re-acquaintance, the information integral refers only to the skeletal functionality of sense. Locally we may experience novel encounters or acquaintances, but some would argue that all experiences can only be re-acquaintances from the absolute perspective. I think that it may make the most sense to think of even that either-or condition as just another superimposed quality of the absolute. Awareness is infinitely novel, infinitely repeating, and paradoxically non-paradoxical. It is only the disorientation of locality which provides orientation.
The information integral strips away all of the mystical trappings – the supertext and subtext contours, and refers instead to the conventional concepts of information theory. Here, the triple bar is still a participant and intentional arbiter of interpretation between signal and noise, but without the aesthetic complication. This is the standard view of information processing as a functional exercise, only with the additional acknowledgement of a core superposition of telic intention and ontic unintention, absolute improbability and immaculate reliability.
Die Enge des Bewusstseins, ‘the narrowness of consciousness’
To invent, I have said, is to choose; but the word is perhaps not wholly exact. It makes one think of a purchaser before whom are displayed a large number of samples, and who examines them, one after the other, to make a choice. Here the samples would be so numerous that a whole lifetime would not suffice to examine them. This is not the actual state of things. The sterile combinations do not even present themselves to the mind of the inventor. – Henri Poincaré
As part of his response, Albert Einstein writes:
… It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.
…It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness (Enge des Bewußtseins)*.
Here Poincaré and Einstein are discussing the nature of creativity and the particular issue of how our personal awareness both does and does not generate novelty. Like the debate over free will, I see this as largely about the hierarchical flow of subjectivity. The personal level of awareness, as noted by Freud and Jung among others, is sandwiched between what could be called a sub-personal or sub-conscious range (Id) and a super-personal or metaphenomenal range (Collective Unconscious). Jung picked up where Freud left off, seeing that Super-Ego was not necessarily just a facade of social pressures against which the Ego cowers, but a living, trans-personal terrain of archetypal influences. The Jungian view looked at this terrain as being tied up in his idea of synchronicity – meaningful coincidence which can be decoded through a language of cross-cultural metaphor. Joseph Campbell wrote and spoke extensively on this language (‘The Power of Myth, ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’, etc.).
What I have not seen is a physical theory which takes the synchronicity and myth seriously. When we do take it seriously, I think that it meshes perfectly with the implications of the Theory of Relativity, and with what Poincaré and Einstein are talking about with the narrowness of consciousness. All that needs to be done is to relocate the concept of literal inertial frames of reference with a more figurative notion of phenomenal inertial framing. The idea of levels of consciousness is probably one of the most ancient and enduring concepts in mysticism. Whether they are seen as levels which can only be attained through a proscribed path or as introspective potentials which we can all access by ourselves, the desire to partition human experience as a hierarchy seems to be irresistible. Irresistible, that is, until recently. Contemporary psychology has largely moved away from hierarchies and grand schemas, focusing instead (with debatable success) on more modular, pharmacologically addressable functions.
While I appreciate many of the hierarchical maps of consciousness, like those so diligently compiled by Ken Wilber, I suggest that we begin from scratch, with an eye toward simplicity and correlation with general systems. In addition, the foundation for this view should be sensory-motive rather than information-theoretic or material-energetic. By sensory-motive, I refer to what Einstein talks about above. While the effect of creativity is teleological and communicative, the process itself is driven by what he calls combinatory play: ‘the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words’.
Just as this sub-cognitive sensible engagement is overlooked in modern, computational theories of mind, so too is the possibility of microsensory phenomena overlooked in modern physics. I see this not as an accident, but rather the same oversight on a different scale. The idea that our own sensations emerge from a different source than the sensations which are telegraphed from the source to instrument of detection to scientific observer is not necessary if we generalize Einstein’s ‘combinatory play’ to the outer-shell of all of physics.
The MSR hypothesis is called Eigenmorphism. It is that what separates our body from our sub-conscious experience, and our sub-conscious from our personal experience can be understood in terms of a psychophysically extended narrowness of consciousness. There aren’t any inertial frames which simply exist, but only those which can be inferred through the combination of sensed perspectives. Modes of description, whether in the aesthetic of substances, quantities, or qualities are all ultimately narrowed channels of fundamental sense-making, which must be absolutely primordial. The various forms and functions which can be measured publicly are comparable to what Einstein meant about what is logically motivated and communicable, but what the deeper participation cannot be seen as the object of sight. Light, as a the most pervasive version of sense, is not a thing or an energy, but a participation multiplier – a way of being simultaneously here, there, and not literally here or there. I project my narrow attention through a mind which is already narrowed by a hierarchy of sub-personal and super-personal filters, each of which are also narrowed from scales of sensory participation so vast and unfamiliar that I read them only by the mechanical, impersonal traces that they leave. The universe that we live in is not a solipsistic narrowing of consciousness, but a nested universality of aesthetics – a combinatory play.
*The narrowness of consciousness which Einstein mentions is from William James:
“The sum total of our impressions never enters into our experience, consciously so called, which runs through this sum total like a tiny rill through a flowery mead. Yet the physical impressions which do not count are there as much as those that do, and affect our sense-organs just as energetically. Why they fail to pierce the mind is a mystery which is only named and not explained when we invoke die Enge des Bewusstseins, the narrowness of consciousness’ as its grounds.”.
Philosophy of Mind Flowchart
The idea here is that if we want to take the full spectrum of phenomena into account, we have to either begin with a reductionist realism and work upward, or a holistic idealism and work downward.
When we suppose that consciousness is a phenomenon that arises out of unconscious phenomena, we are saying that mechanism, through some act of emergence (generally by complexity), the mechanism in question (generally physical or computational mechanism) becomes enchanted with itself. In this case, as David Chalmers famously points out, there would have to be some threshold beyond which it would be impossible to tell the difference between a real person and a machine which acts just like a real person (a philosophical zombie). Finding this unacceptable, he suggests instead some variety of panpsychism should be explored, including perhaps, what I would call a promiscuous or ‘leaky’ panpsychism in which devices such as thermostats would have to be considered aware in some sense.
Finding both of these alternatives unacceptable, I suggest that we move over to the right side and begin with a downward facing ideal absolute. For the spiritually inclined, this could be called by any number of theistic names, however, it can also be conceived of equally well in completely non-spiritual, atheistic terms. When we suppose that awareness itself is inescapable and inevitable in all possible or theoretical universes, we are saying that through some divergence or illusion, awareness takes on a temporary solid appearance. In MSR, I suggest that this is a more plausible option than brute emergence from nothingness…modulated constraint within everythingness.*
Rather than positing an appeal to future scientific understanding to explain the emergence of aesthetic realism from mechanism, the divergence of mechanism from total awareness can be made palatable through a nested modulation of insensitivity. Intentionally partitioning intention itself so that it appears unintentional given a certain amount of insensitivity. This could be viewed either in the religious sense of ‘God’s divine plan is not visible to us’, or in a more conservative sense of ‘Shit happens coincidentally, but coincidental shit also happens to be meaningful from some perspective’.
If anyone is interested in what the crazy pink cone and all that is, I can explain in more detail, but briefly, if we take the MSR road from disenchanted idealism (the conservative ‘Shit happens’ option), then instead of the Chalmers dilemma of zombies vs leaky panpsychism, we get a continuum in which local sense is selectively blinded to the sense of non-human experiences, through a combination of frame rate mismatch (time scale difference cause entropy and local sense approximates) and distance (literal spatial scale difference, as well as experiential unfamiliarity).**
The other ten dollar words there, ‘tessellated monism’ and ‘eigenmetric diffraction’ both refer to the juxtaposition of sensitivity and insensitivity, through which a kind of metabolism of accumulating significance (solitrophy) in the face of fading sense (entropy) and fading motive (gravity).
*I call this cosmology the Sole Entropy Well hypothesis and it has to do with reversing Boltzmann’s solution to Loschmidt’s paradox so that entropy is a bottomless absolute, like c, in which local ranges of entropy and extropy stretch and multiply in a fractal-like reproduction.
**I call this aspect of MSR Eigenmorphism, which has to do with things appearing to be more doll-like and less familiar from a distance. This makes, for example, the presence of atoms and solar systems in our experience more similar to each other than either of them seems like a tree or a cell. The limits of our perception coincide with the simplicity of ontology, and they are, in a sense, the same thing (given eigenmorphism). As a rule of thumb, distance = the significance of insignficance.
The Sound and Style of Consciousness
In music, timbre also known as tone color or tone quality from psychoacoustics, is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope.
a signal with its envelope marked in red
What I remember from my 7th grade general music class about timbre is that it is what made modern pop and rock different from other forms of music. All of those sound effects that become possible with electric amplification allow us to transform the same kinds of melodies that have always been a part of music into new kinds of sonic textures. Any song can be made into a heavy metal or punk song by cranking up the amplitude and distortion and manipulating the tempo.
The Wiki gives a list of subjective experiences and objective acoustic properties, such as:
Subjective Objective
Vibrato Frequency modulation
Tremolo Amplitude modulation
I think that this a clue that timbre can be used meaningfully as a jumping off point for understanding subjectivity and consciousness. If we think of the red signal envelope as a cross section of a 3D prismatic glacier behind it, the axis of that figurative third dimension would be where private significance (aesthetic quality) intersects public spacetime.
I’m not saying that qualia can literally be reduced to a kind of perpendicular meta-spacetime, but that it can be figuratively thought to cast a shadow which is measurable in those terms. The public universe is flat in comparison to the private universe, even though any particular private experience of eternity is of course orders of magnitude narrower than the totality of all experience. The full extent of our own lives and the lives of others is hidden by the constraint of our insensitivity. Our attention is directed to public facing events, to places and times outside of our private here and now.
Timbre at least recognizes the dipole of subjective and objective dimensions of phenomena and the sensible link between them. Our Western approach of psychoacoustics still reduces the subjective psycho- qualities to a mechanical model which is presumed to be driven by the acoustics only, but what I suggest is that acoustic mechanics are themselves micro-aesthetic experiences which are shared on all phenomenal levels (sub-personal, personal, and super-personal).
Timbre is a word which has been called “the psychoacoustician’s multidimensional waste-basket category for everything that cannot be labeled pitch or loudness”. The difference between a recording of a flute and a recording of a guitar playing the same song could be described in terms of timbre. Each instrument has its own idiosyncratic mixture of tonal and extra-tonal noise-like qualities. When we talk about playing a song on the piano, we are treating the melody as the object. What is being played is an abstract concept of sequenced notes, but what is bringing that abstraction into a concretely realized experience is the acoustic and artistic qualities of the instrument and the performance.
A font or typeface can be seen in a similar way. The invention of customizable fonts was one of the favorite features of early word processors. Instead of being locked into a particular typewriters look, the consumer could now make their printed output look more like published text. Font designers had to painstakingly build the look of each letter in the character set (since a computer would not be much good at guessing what a Helvetica style might be). Soon the entire typographic palette of styles and sizes were available, bringing into sharp distinction the difference between the alphanumeric data (ASCII text), and the font (character set). We can understand, that just as the melody of a song sounds different when it is played on a flute than when it is blasting out of a distorted electric guitar, a phrase written in Times New Roman carries a different meaning when it is written in Comic Sans. The computer, however, does not have any need to differentiate. It doesn’t care what font you write a program in, just as sheet music doesn’t carry instructions for a flute to sound like a flute.
If we use timbre and typeface as metaphors for qualia, we can see how it describes a difference in kind from the skeletal underpinnings of quanta. It’s true that we can use quantitative mechanisms to communicate qualia, but only if the receiver has the right kind of sensory range to match the sender’s intent. The mechanism has no way to appreciate the aesthetic content though, as all such qualities, whether they are fonts, timbre, image, or meaning, are reduced to the same binary digits. Compare this with what we hear, for example, when dragging a stick along the ground. There is the sound of the foot of the stick scraping the ground itself, and then there is the amplified, woody resonance which describes the length, mass, and density of the stick. Both can be felt as well as heard. The effect overall is a unified gestalt. Unlike a computation in which data must be explicitly separated and handled differently (some bits belong to the font, some to the text), natural sound is a feeling for our body and a knowing for our mind that is bound together metaphorically.
There is no mechanical process through which feelings and thoughts are bound. Instead, they are divided, like the spectrum of visible light is divided from white light, from the common sense of all experience. There is no way to simulate that coherence mechanically, but given enough artificial cues, our naturally poetic psyche will confabulate animation into it. We look at the words typed in a romantic script font and get a sense of a voice which might make the words seem pretentious or anachronistic. We hear the distorted guitar strings and feel that the song has become massively and explosively energetic. The ‘information’ which describes the underlying structure of the music or the typeface is non-poetic. It is only pixels and mathematical relations which relate to themselves and to mathematics in general, not to the experience of being alive. For being alive and aware, we need extra-mathematical qualities – the same qualities from which math itself emerges.
Multisense Realism 
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