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A Conversation Thread About Multisense Realism
This is a Facebook exchange between myself and an individual I’ll call GM where GM asks me to explain my quote “MSR understands natural appearances to reflect the meso-scale of consciousness where phoric and morphic qualities are maximally dichotomous.”
My response: I think its easier to conceptualize with visual diagrams
In this early image, I was trying to express the relationship between supernatural (top down) natural, and unnatural (bottom up) perspectives.
1. Beginning in the center, we see a cartoon version of the natural world as we see if visibly on a human scale. So there’s the sun, a rabbit eating a carrot, trees, birds in the sky, etc.
2. The bottom panel is a visualization of scientific concepts that are in some way causally related to the natural things seen in the panel above. Instead of the sun, we see some equations describing the nuclear fusion reaction that powers stars like the Sun. We see formulas for formulas from electromagnetic theory and general relativity radiating out.
So this bottom panel depicts the concepts that we understand describe invisible phenomena that are supposed to be beneath or behind the visible, naive presentation of natural phenomena. The description and what is being described are ‘semaphoric’ – they are semaphores of language and quantitative variables, minimalistic parts that we presume ‘add up to’ the natural (‘phoric’) experience of the physical (‘morphic’) world of nested objects on various scales.
The explanatory gap is boundary between the semaphoric and the phoric | morphic is blurred by the mental alchemy that I call ‘substitution’. One example of substitution is the idea that something like pleasure simply “is” the chemistry of dopamine molecules being metabolized by the nervous system. Of course they are two very different things. Chemistry is tangible molecules moving in public space. Pleasure is a family of trans-tangible qualia that is presented without any obvious empirical or rational connection to molecules.
“Emergence” is a kind of magic word that misguided scientists have coined to blur this boundary and hide the explanatory gap. It is sub-stitution, which I understand to be the conjugate of super-stition, that is, a compulsion to disqualify naive experience as a mere consequence of some other level of reality that is invisible to us except through our conceptual understanding (of science) or intuitive grasp (of transpersonal psychology, mysticism, spirituality, etc).
In its justified negative reaction to politically enforced superstition in premodern times, science has developed its own unjustified pathology that mirrors superstition. Call it reductionsm, mechanism, physicalism, scientism, computationalism. I call it substitution (or substition if you like).
3. Moving to the top panel, we see a visualization of archetypal concepts that are metaphorically related to the center panel’s natural appearances. Instead of the Sun, we see a mandala with inscriptions referring to the Tetragrammaton and Trinity. It’s an entirely different way of conceptualizing the nature as caused from the top down by emanation of diversity from unity. It’s a different kind of ‘fusion’ that is figurative rather than literal or theoretical.
Instead of an entire rabbit, we see only an enlarged view of a rabbit eye, connoting that we are talking about the experience of seeing and experiencing life as a rabbit rather than looking at a rodent body from a distance. Instead of one carrot, there is a group of whole carrots, sort of suggesting a multiplicity of desires and their possible fulfillment. Instead of physical trees, we see repeating images of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life. We see Hindu deities representing the Sun and abundance in states of bliss.
If you prefer a more explicit diagram, this more recent one depicts not only the three vertical layers of the spectrum (metaphoric, phoric, and semiphoric), but the appearances that reflect them (synchronistic-relativistic, morphic-metric, and hemi-morphic-probabilistic).
This diagram also brings in topologies of time/causality, and how they can be understood to map to c², c, and √c. At the phoric-morphic-metric level, space and time are perpendicular coordinates that can be used to plot the location and movement of objects (morphe) over time (duration experienced directly through perception of observed changes, or indirectly through inference from recorded observations). That’s c.
c² is the eternal now of block-time at light speed. It is timeful and spaceful but not limited to unfolding according to linear expectations. Future and past are nothing but the leading and trailing edge of a given window of limited awareness/consciousness. The transpersonal topology of causality is a syzygy. It is both a mandala of emanation of novelty, a cycle of repeating archetypal characters and themes, and a spiral of cumulative variations that synthesize both.
√c describes how quantum mechanical descriptions flatten the space ⊥ topology to one that exists only in spatial *or* temporal terms – as particle OR wave, position OR momentum, entanglement OR contextuality. Again, this is a semaphoric lensing of reality that we have translated into our personal understanding indirectly, thorough our local filters of sense and sense-making about conditions that we imagine exist outside of the limits of that local sensitivity.
GM: “Are you saying aspects of the quale “pleasure” are “subpersonal and impersonal”? If so, what are these aspects and what would be “personal” aspects?”
That’s a good question. I’m saying that pleasure can refer to a category of experience that presents intrapersonally (I feel emotions like joy, release, excitement) and personally (I am euphoric today).
That’s a good question. I’m saying that pleasure can refer to a category of experience that presents intrapersonally (I feel emotions like joy, release, excitement) and personally (I am euphoric today).
If we zoom in on the intrapersonal emotions we find that they are associated with subpersonal qualia… sensations in the chest and throat that increase along with the emotion but are less subject to our personal will. Someone may personally try to suppress the intrapersonal emotion that they are personally having but their success depends on whether the momentum associated with the subpersonal sensations is too great. We may not be able to stop our body from producing tears even though we would personally rather not cry from joy in public.
So on this subpersonal scale of experience the qualia are of a type that do not belong to you personally or even limited to human experience. Any animal body that can shed tears probably feels some similar body-facing sensations when that happens. They sense that their eyes are getting we but not because the feel joy or sadness. I suspect and propose that the conscious experience associated with other mammalian species probably only rises to the level that would be intrapersonal (mood, emotion). That’s why they aren’t people. Some animals may not perceive themselves as entities having feelings, they may only perceive the feelings themselves. To them, body sensations are equivalent to human feeling, and their mood is equivalent to human personality.
Further, something like a flower may be a body or part of a body that is associated with a conscious experience that we would experience intrapersonally. The life experience of a rose my be more along the lines of a single emotional note of ecstacy that plays out on a longer timescale. Instead of a human conscious experience where a person feels joy for a few seconds or minutes, that same kind of feeling may happen all day, or all season from our perspective. The beauty of a flower is something we can see and feel about what we see, but that may only be a narrow snapshot of the beauty that the entire species of flowering plant actually ‘is’ in the larger scale of time and space of something like the Earth’s entire hydrosphere.
Getting back to the relationship of subpersonal qualia to physiology though, what I’m saying is that when we feel choked up from joy, that sensation is only our personal scale snapshot we are glimpsing from a different scale of time and space. We are also getting snapshots through our sense of touch and sight, and when we amplify those senses with tangible instruments like a microscope, then we see living cells. The sensation of getting choked up is a snapshot in the low level of our interiorized qualia (making it semaphoric) and the perception of seeing cells through a microscope is a snapshot in the mid/meso level of exteriorized qualia (making it morphic).
Under physicalism, we (falsely) assume that semaphoric, interiorized qualia must ’emerge’ from the aggregation of morphic, exteriorized qualia on the biological scale. Concepts like animal magnetism and humours were superseded by even more objectified concepts like ‘neurotransmitter reuptake gradients’ or ‘depolarization’ that bring us even close to the assumption of strict bottom-up causality that physicalism itself (falsely) projects onto nature in the first place. The circular reasoning of physicalism begins here…with the language and concepts learned second hand from medical descriptions, and with the dismissal of other direct and indirect accounts of ‘medicine’ as placebo, psychosomatic, primitive superstition, coincidence etc.
What I propose under MSR is that the appearance of bottom-up relations are only one of many influences that determine causality. The biochemical events aren’t the cause of sensations, they are actually our sensory snapshot of sensations on the micro- timescale. On that scale we, nor our body exist. Both the subpersonal semaphores of our throat-choke sensations and the micro-morphic appearances of cellular activity are snapshots we receive from a scale of nature that we cannot experience directly while we are alive. We don’t exist on that scale just like Hamlet doesn’t exist in the ink that makes up what we see as words on a page if paper. Hamlet doesn’t ever emerge from ink. Yes, there are particular shapes of ink that we perceive as the word Hamlet if we are reading Shakespeare in a book, but we are only able to make the dialogue and character ’emerge’ from our own access to personal and interpersonal ranges of consciousness.
Hamlet the play need not be written in ink on paper. It need not even exist in any sort of persistent document/file/data. It can exist purely as a performance of actors in front of an audience of conscious people. If we zoom in on the ink and paper, the binding of the book, the library, etc we are not going to explain Hamlet at all. This is what physicalist explanations have been doing with conscious the whole time… moving the goalposts: “Hamlet doesn’t emerge from ink on paper, he emerges from the whole system of publishing and libraries!”
Wrong.
My response to David Roden’s “NATURE’S DARK DOMAIN: AN ARGUMENT FOR A NATURALIZED PHENOMENOLOGY”
This is a first draft response to David Roden’s 2013 paper “NATURE’S DARK DOMAIN: AN ARGUMENT FOR A NATURALIZED PHENOMENOLOGY“
Early in the paper the following claim is made:
“phenomenology is in much the same epistemological relationship to its own subject matter as descriptive (i.e.‘phenomenological’) physics or biology are to physical and biological reality”
Any description necessarily exists first as a language artifact (Let’s call that quale 1, so L = Q1) that is interpreted intellectually (I = Q2) to refer our thinking (T = Q3) about some percept (P = Q4). The referential nature of thinking makes it a specialized type of sense modality that participates in semiosis. To think about the sky is (thinking(sky)), a specific example of (accessing concepts(percepts)).
A description of the sky is thinking about (language(concepts(percepts)), where language itself is (percepts(concepts)). So a description of the sky is a perception of language (written or verbal sense appearances – graphic or phonetic qualia) that refers us to our shareable thoughts about experiences of the sky…including sights, memories, associations, knowledge and communications of all of those from other people and texts.
To the extent that descriptions/language, thoughts, and thoughts-about experiences are different from each other, the difference is in the category of qualia or type of aesthetic presentation. A word is an appearance in the sense modality of sight or sound which can be paired to thoughts in the sense-making modality that I call cogitative. Cogitative qualia are thoughts, communication, understanding, and learning. Words, including descriptions are paired qualia such that experiences of certain visible or aural qualia can be cogitatively connected to (understood to mean) communicable thoughts-about X, where X is percepts (includes concepts and objects).
To the extent that descriptions/language, thoughts, and thoughts-about experiences are the same, the unity is in the continuity of the local experience across multiple modalities of sense and sense-making. This sentence is different from the previous sentence, but both sentences appear within the same larger experience of this written response.
All of this to say that I agree that in one sense phenomenology is like biology or physics in that it is descriptions of thoughts-about X, but I disagree in another sense because in the case of phenomenology, X is the entire category of percepts-that-appear directly-in-local-experience (X(L(E))) as well as percepts that are received indirectly into local experience from non-local experience ((X(L(E)(NL(E))), such as philosophical texts.
Unlike in physics, where I can never touch a distant planet to verify that it indeed feels like a tangible object, phenomenological discourse can point out that experiences of touching objects exist. Further, I can understand that my direct experience of touching objects means that I have experiences of sensitivity to experiences of tangible qualities. Those two understandings – that I access direct experiences of touching objects and that this means I have access to a tactile-haptic modality of tangibility, which is the sense modality or aesthetic context of tangible textures and sensations – cannot be denied or disqualified from reality. All experiences are real experiences by definition.
Whether in a dream or waking experience, picking up a baseball is presented as a tactile-haptic percept. Physical or biological descriptions, however, are one or more steps removed from certain reality. A point of bright light that we see in the morning sky may be a visible image associated with a distant object, and that distant object may be the planet Phosphorus. A point of bright light that we see in the evening sky may be a visible image associated with the planet Hesperus. We can use measurements and reasoning to further understand that Phosphorus and Hesperus are actually different names for a single planet called Venus. Venus experienced as a visible image from Earth at two different times of day are different experiences with different aesthetic qualities, even though we understand that they are images associated with a single planetary object in outer space.
Even though astronomers are quite certain in 2026, that Venus appears to be a planet in our solar system, astrologers propose that planets appearing in the sky, while being tangible objects in public space, are also like parts of a celestial clock in which cyclically repeating patterns of archetypal themes are expressed individually, socially, and collectively in conscious experience. To an astrologer, the significance of Venus is not its chemical composition, atmosphere, etc but its association with metaphors for themes of social pleasures, personal attraction, sensuality, receiving gifts or nutrition, etc.
The point that I’m getting to is that astrology and astronomy have more in common with each other than phenomenology has with any other discipline. Phenomenology, while including more than only the direct experience (X(L(E))), even the non-local ((X(L(E)(NL(E))) experiences relate specifically to local experience. Disciplines like astronomy, astrology and astrophysics relate specifically to non local experiences that may or may not exist in the way that they are interpreted or perceived locally. They may not exist physically at all. Dark energy for example, may exist only as a scientific concept and not as a tangible phenomenon that influences the motion of tangible objects in outer space. Roden’s claim that “phenomenology cannot tell us what phenomenology is really ‘about’” is therefore false. Phenomenology is about local experience, and local experience necessarily exists. Physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics etc tell us about how local experience relates to non-local experiences that may or may not exist.
Another claim: “the domain of phenomenology is not the province of a self-standing, autonomous discipline but must be investigated with any empirically fruitful techniques that are open to us (e.g. computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, etc.).” is a partial non-sequitur. It is true that talking about local experience with each other can assist us in understanding it, it can also increase confusion and misunderstanding. This is doubly true in the case of talking about neurology and computation. It may assist our understanding, or it may lead our understanding completely astray.
The concluding claim “Finally, it entails that while a naturalized phenomenology should be retained as a descriptive, empirical method, it should not be accorded transcendental authority.” takes the partial truth that non-local experience can sometimes help us understand local experience and inflates it to a proscription that is actually deceptive. It implies that local experiences of tangible objects (such as brains and technological devices we use as computers) should be accorded authority that can transcend that of local experience – even when the topic being authorized is local experience. In my view, this is misguided.
The honest application of authority over matters of local experience belongs to local experience itself. That is not to say that non-local experience cannot add to and deepen our understanding of local experience, but it should never transcend it completely. Whether the light we see in the sky is associated with the hypothetical planet Hesperus or the measured, photographed planet Venus or astrological archetype Venus changes nothing about the original fact of the visible appearance of a point of light in the sky. Phenomenology should always and only refer to that original fact and not be recontextualized by non-local experiences inferred through physical instruments, logical measurements, scientific reasoning, etc. Aesthetic qualia should not be disqualified and replaced by concepts of anesthetic properties, regardless of whether those properties happen to also exist aesthetically or not.
Moving on to the Introduction section of the paper:
“Naturalists think that human knowledge is the product of fallible animals whose biology does not equip them to reliably track the structure of reality”
This makes me wonder if naturalists subject themselves to this same judgment. If naturalists are humans, then their biology too does not equip them to reliably track the structure of the reality even of naturalism. It’s the same mistake as above – failing to recognize that the grounding of all experience is experience itself, not the specific experiences of measuring and analyzing certain features of certain experiences and applying them to nature in general.
“They regard earlier attempts to carve out foundational truth claims secure from revision by the findings of science, history and observation as conspicuous failures, for they misinterpret anthropological facts about how we are disposed to think as necessary truths”
But how do they know that their contemporary attempts to disqualify previous claims in that way are not also misinterpretations based on their own fallible biases and assumptions? Once we introduce epistemological doubt into local experience itself, how can we place our own sophisticated non-local extensions to local experience above local experience in matters that should pertain only to local experience? Naturalists are, to borrow a trope, sawing off the branch that they are sitting on.
” James Ladyman and Don Ross remark ‘Naturalism is, among other things, the metaphysical hypothesis that the objective world is not constrained by any reasons or standards of reasonableness’.”
How can that be considered scientific? It seems like a reasonable-sounding way of giving open ended authority to unreasonable conclusions. Reason cannot negate itself or it was never reason in the first place.
“For example, speculations about the physical basis of conscious experience are frequently held to be irrelevant to describing ‘how it feels’”
The language here telegraphs an injection of naturalism. To use the phrase “how it feels” opens the door to an entity outside of feeling where none may exist. The feeling is presented directly. Any other associations with physical appearances in other sense modalities such as touch, sight, or cogitation are different perceptions…different ways of ‘feeling’ that exist in parallel rather than as a rationally or empirically necessary consequence of each other.
Let’s say that we feel our mood become more euphoric. The phenomenologist accepts that fact on its face, while the naturalist may begin by saying that this mood change is caused by a release of dopamine in the brain (somehow), and then further extrapolate euphoria as ‘simply how dopamine feels in the brain’.
In the final disqualification, the naturalist feels that the authority of objectively measurable work on dopamine transcends merely subjective reports of feeling euphoric altogether and that ‘how dopamine feels’ is an ’emergent property’ (somehow) of neurochemistry, or worse, an ‘illusion’ that needs no scientific explanation and is irrelevant to our understanding of nature. In a sense, the defense of naturalism in Roden’s paper attempts to do the same thing to phenomenology as a whole. It is to legitimize the position that naturalism is justified in treating phenomenology as a possibly illusory study of illusions mistaken for transcendental facts of nature.
“The closure assumption implies that a neural network model explaining how our experience of time is generated could throw no light on what that experience is like”
It’s not that a neural network model can’t throw light onto the nature of experience; it is that it can only add additional associations to the experience, not replace the fact of the local experience with the hypothesis of another non-local experience. In addition, the use of the idiom “what (that experience) is like” opens the same door to a chain of disqualification as “how it feels” with the implication of a separate ‘it’ that ‘is’ (really) what feeling refers to. If we apply the same language to physics, for example, we would say that energy is what part of an equation “is like”, or “how it feels for matter moving against inertial forces”. Naturalism just as easily disqualify itself as a branch of phenomenology about a branch of mistakenly objectified phenomenology (natural science).
I did not intend to go through each sentence of this paper with a fine-toothed comb, but it seems necessary to point out the instances where language is loaded with subtle bias. Continuing here…
“These can be phenomenologically described by suspending ordinary assumptions about the mind-independent existence of objects and directing attention to how we are aware of objects as mind independent.”
I object here to the use of the term ‘ordinary’. For most people in most places in human history, there was nothing ordinary about assuming that anything in the natural world was mind-independent. Animism and shamanism are common examples of ordinary views of nature for thousands of years. Events in the natural world were treated as expressions of supernatural influence: the will of God/gods, or a reflection of a universe that is cosmopsychist rather than mind-independent.
It is only the more recently developed Western ideologies of dualism and physicalism that assume the possibility of mind-independent phenomena, which are assumed to include objects. On closer inspection however, even the assumption of mind-independence applies only to the subset of objects perceived during waking states of conscious experience and not to dreams or visions.
Even under physicalism, objects that are mind-dependent are quite ordinary, it’s just that physicalism assumes that waking states of consciousness acquaint us more directly with reality than dreaming does. Because of this, we can truthfully say that 1) even the assumption of mind-independence is certainly mind-dependent, and 2) the possibility of mind-independence is forever hypothetical.
Contemporary naturalism seems to place its descriptions and reasoning outside of both phenomenology and anthropology, as if it were an immaculate conduit to facts independent of all means of fact acquisition (sense and sense-making in conscious experience).
“One form of this is that phenomenological claims don’t have to be scientifically or theoretically-informed as long as the things they describe are pre-theoretically or ‘intuitively’ given to the conscious subject.”
Here I take issue with the false equivalence of pre-theoretic claims with intuition. Intuition is only one form of perception. The color blue is a pre-theoretic visible appearance, but blue is not intuitive, nor is the claim of seeing blue intuitive. Blue is presented directly – not necessarily only to a ‘subject’ but perhaps in visibility itself.
While typical states of human consciousness include a sense of separation between private and public facing perceptions, some states of consciousness include no such strong boundary. It is possible to see a blue shape without also experiencing a sense of subjectivity or being a private self. There is no convincing reason to presume that visible qualia such as color are any more closely associated with subjectivity or intuition than intellectual qualia such as arithmetic. My 2+3 could vary slightly from your 2+3 just as my green could vary from your green. The possibility of some subjective variation doesn’t make numbers or colors subjective. Naturalism is no less vulnerable to conflation with subjectivity and intuition than phenomenology. If it seems otherwise, that too is phenomenological/subjective/intuitive.
Moving on to the Raffman discussion, my view on qualia diverges from what is stated in the paper as the classic quale:
“The classic quale is a simple, intrinsically subjective, intuitable property of experience.”
Under my Multisense Realism (MSR) framework, qualia are aesthetic appearances of any kind. They are the minimal and maximal fabric of existence in all possible universes. Objectivity as well as subjectivity are classes of qualia, as is intuition and dark or non-intuitive presentations. In my determination, the idea of classic quale as stated by Roden derives from a history of idealistic philosophy that conflated conscious experience with subjectivity, the mind, thinking, or intuition.
In a true nondual, cosmopsychist framework, and specifically in MSR, qualia are glimpses of a single, eternal Totality of conscious experience. Intuition is different from thought, cogitation is different from sight, personal experience is different from subpersonal experience, etc, but all experience is irreducibly aesthetic regardless of whether particular aesthetic modalities are accessible in any given ‘tunnel’ or scope of participation/access to the Totality.
This part/whole relationship applies to several of the examples discussed in the paper. Visual graphs plotted from intellectual measurements using tangible acoustic instruments can be associated with aural qualia of hearing pitch or timbre, but that association can only be made from another type of experience that includes united access to separate specific visual, intellectual, tangible, and aural qualia.
Any isomorphism between a sound wave and sound is derived from cross-modal perception. Intellectually we can infer that the compelling nature of that isomorphism indicates an ontological commonality between acoustic pressure and aural qualia, however if we consider that aural qualia can and do exist in a dream without any correspondence to acoustic pressure, we should conclude that ontological commonality is possible rather than necessary.
Even though we call acoustic pressure fluctuations ‘sound waves’, deafness and dreams prove that the name is a folk term rather than an authoritative description. In an absolute sense, sound waves are not sound, nor do acoustic conditions and aural conditions necessarily depend on each other. Because we are using tangible instruments to measure tangible qualia, any reference to aural qualia is smuggled in by our inferences from our cross-modal perceptual access rather than naturalistic ontology. Synesthesia could associate acoustic stimulation of the cochlea with colors instead of sound. Music finds emotional qualia in acoustic stimulation.
By itself, neither acoustic activity nor the visual graphing of sampled data from measuring that activity with tangible instruments rationally entails any such thing as sound/hearing. Just as Mary can study the optical and electromagnetic properties associated with the color red without ever seeing it, a completely deaf scientist can study acoustics without any impairment. In the same way, no physical phenomena rationally entail *any* other phenomena to ’emerge’ or conjoin with it. A French painting is not a pipe, and sometimes a cigar in a dream is just a good smoke.
Touching on section 3. The Phenomenology of Time, Roden states that “Temporality is a central ingredient in most phenomenological accounts of reality or transcendence.”. While that may be true, in my understanding, such a centrality is premature and misguided. The Multisense Realist view is that what we call time is an appearance within certain states of consciousness, but that appearance is part of a larger continuum of time-like topologies of causality that can be accessed through different modalities of awareness and perception.
Linear time/causality appears in what I call the phoric range of awareness wherever personal sensations of duration are perceptually juxtaposed against what MSR calls morphic appearances. In other words, what Roden calls temporality is a phenomenological appearance that people access by repeated looking at a physical clock and inferring ontological unity with their personal experience of duration and memory. It is a semiotic bridge between the personal subject’s intrapersonal percepts and an interpersonally perceived consensus of impersonal objects.
The bridge is, however, one way. The clock is an object that we use to ‘tell time’. In our absence, the object does not tell or keep time; it simply moves according to the physical forces that happen to be present. Physical forces may be operating on larger scales of experience than human-limited awareness, so relative to subjective feelings of duration, objects whose movements are calibrated by impersonal scales of experience are more reliable and consistent, but that doesn’t mean they are any closer to an ontologically derived authority.
When we feel that ‘time flies when you’re having fun’, we may be expressing a sensitivity to the nature of ‘time’ that is more nuanced than a mechanical object can measure. In some sense, time may be nothing but a false normalization of events that overlooks the significance of those events. The significance of events may exert a kind of ‘gravitational’ lensing that is equally or perhaps more ontological than what we think we are measuring with clocks and calendars.
It isn’t ‘really’ 2026; we just have agreed to use a particular calendar system of quantitative coordinates to organize our interactions. The more ontological coordination may be generated by, for, and within a certain state of consciousness. Beyond that specific state of consciousness which is mapped on the diagram on the center left as Classical Time (Morphic, Metric), MSR suggests several other modes of time:
Phoric time (center right) that appears in our personal sense of duration within interiorized experience
Transpersonal or meta-phoric time (top right) that can appear in ‘higher*’ states of consciousness
Relativistic space-time (top left) that was described by Einstein’s theories.
Subpersonal-semaphoric time (bottom right) that centers on how willful participation fractures the fourth wall to change the course of history, and
Quantum-reversible time (bottom left) that is probabilistic and relies on what I call hemi-morphic appearances of quantum observations**
Note that there is an advantage to conceiving of this diagram in terms of East and West rather than Right and Left. The Eastern or Oriented perspective has philosophical connotations with holistic, nondualistic, animistic, idealistic and solipsistic appearances while the Western or Occidented perspective has the opposite-conjugate connotations in reductionism, dualism, physicalism, mechanism, and what I call nilipsism – the ablation of the Self from nature.
There is also a correlation with psychological theories that relate to what I call the continuum of sense, such as Autistic-Psychotic spectrum, Tough and Tender mindedness, Rigidity vs Chaos, Thick vs Thin boundaries, Empathizing-Systemizing, Right and Left hemisphere dominance, gender stereotypes, and more.
Moving on to the Husserl discussion…
“The very existence of the object is thus understood in terms of its transcendence of temporally informed modes of presentation. Temporally informed modes of presentation are thus conceptually prior in the order of philosophical explanations to what they present.”
Just because modes of presentation are *also* temporally informed does not mean that they are limited to temporality. I can see a blue fire hydrant get run over by a truck, but that doesn’t mean that sight is any more dependent on any particular moment in time than the fire hydrant is. The fire hydrant can only exist in some mode of presentation – it must be seen or touched to exist as a fire hydrant, but it doesn’t mean that everyone has to be able to see or touch it. We can understand that a fire hydrant can still be seen even after we’re dead, but that doesn’t mean that fire hydrants or images ‘of’ blue fire hydrants can exist in a universe that lacks visible or tangible qualia.
“In Husserlian terms, they belong to the constituted time of the world, rather than to the transcendentally constitutive features of subjectivity”
This goes back to the erroneous conflation of qualia with subjectivity that I mentioned previously. Time doesn’t have to belong to a mind-independent world; it only has to belong to states of mind that access experience beyond the personal scope to include impersonal scopes. “The world” and the sense of linear time are appearances in impersonal scopes of personally accessed conscious experience.
Roden’s conclusion “Phenomenological time is just a time among many, with no special epistemological heft.” is true also under MSR with the proviso that he is using ‘phenomenological’ to refer to phoric/personal appearances of time/causality. Because the other five categories of time depicted above are not personal but transpersonal, subpersonal, and impersonal (on the mega, macro, and micro scales), MSR agrees that linear time arises out of only one category of awareness relating to one other category of awareness with no absolute epistemological heft.
MSR disagrees that this lack of heft is due to the other categories being grounded in anything more ontological than conscious experience. To the contrary, ordinary Western adult consciousness very much assigns epistemological heft to consensus readings of clock time over the other categories of time perception. If phenomenological describes conscious experience that is universal rather than subjective, then all six types of time in the diagram are each epistemologically supreme within their respective states of awareness. The whole continuum of six-time is both ontologically and phenomenologically prioritized.
Phenomenology, at least in my MSR framework, need not be subjective. I shy away from using terms like phenomenology for that reason that they are loaded with connotations of subjectivity or interiority. I try to use terms that point to a more primitive ontology of nature as nested aesthetic-participatory phenomena. Call it universal qualia, call it dream stuff, call it appearances or seeming, but it is the fabric not only of the only universe that we can ever know, but of the only universe that ever can be known or contacted in any way.
Berkeley was right in saying esse est percipi but too presumptive in linking perception to a necessary focal point source outside of perception (a person, or God). Focal points, in my understanding, including God, can also only ever exist by virtue of their being perceived – presented aesthetically in an experience. Experience can be personal but that doesn’t mean that a person could be anything other than an experience. It’s all experience. Not even God can unconsciously invent consciousness.
“Perhaps I am making an elementary error in treating the temporal continuum as a complex object with a real infinity of occurrent parts”
I think that the error that most everyone has been making is presuming a single ontological scope of “Now” rather than recognizing that now can refer to a present experience on any scale. Now it is the 21st century. Now it is 13:59:35.593460376 PM EDT. Now it is time for me to write this sentence. Now the Sun and Earth exist as separate objects. It all depends on what scope of awareness is privileged. MSR addresses this kind of mereological ambiguity in what I call the Non-Well-Founded Identity Principle.
I won’t go into the details here, but generally, identity is a spectrum ranging from finite cohesive units to infinitely adhesive unity. How that spectrum is accessed depends on what modalities of awareness are available. The state of consciousness determines whether now is an infinitesimally narrow slice of an infinite object of occurrences or now is a timelessly timeful occurrence that has no beginning, end, or unitary law of succession – an unbounded totality of spontaneous dreaming of times.
I’ll conclude by saying that I liked David Roden’s work here, and while my disagreements with what it says are many, I think that they stem from a difference between his intention to engage with the canon of phenomenological philosophy and my intention to explain the ‘big picture’ of nature in a way that transcends prior phenomenological and naturalistic frameworks. Between the two, phenomenology at least correctly addresses conscious experience as the sole fundamental ontology, but it has gotten into trouble by conflating conscious experience with subjectivity, intuition, mind, thinking, and typical waking states of human awareness rather than the less presumptive description of conscious experience as MSR does: Nested aesthetic-participatory phenomena.
*more adhesive to the “Absolute” Holos/Totality, but also more psychotic-leaning from the phoric perspective
**where particle/wave and entanglement/contextuality dichotomies are an either/or.
Critique and Revision of A Unifying Principle Diagram
Based on Raymond de Lacaze‘s post at https://infobiotecnologia.blogspot.com/2026/06/from-void-to-mind-universe-as-process.html I made some revisions to illustrate the Multisense Realism view. I borrowed some of the generated graphic and design elements that he used and added a few of my own from Chat GPT.
What I am illustrating are the following similarities and differences:
Lacaze’s diagram describes “The Unifying Principle”, whereby “energy” becomes “information” by organizing. In his view, self-organizing energy generates complexity, which then evolves from universe to life to mind/consciousness by adding more and more complexity. It is complexity, he says, that “gives rise to awareness, reflection, and understanding (consciousness)”.
My view under MSR can also be used to describe a flow of a single self-evolving phenomenon, however, I propose that this phenomenon was never a ‘void’ or ‘potential’, nor could it have ever unconsciously informed, ordered, or defined that order as complex. Such qualities are all conscious reactions to consciously experienced aesthetic qualities. Unconscious phenomena, if they could even exist, would be devoid of aesthetic qualities or reactions to them. There would be nothing to see/feel/know or care whether those appearances seem simple or complex, orderly or chaotic, informative or semantically inert. To me, it makes more sense to consider the possibility that the universe was always and only a single, eternal “here and now” of conscious experience in which all phenomena are presented as irreducibly aesthetic and participatory appearances.
Within that Totality or Holos of aesthetic presentations, different variations and versions of the Holos are diffracted or graphed through the modulation of limited insensitivity. Unbounded sense and motive is the thesis, masking by insensitivity (entropy and negentropy are the antithesis of sensitivity), to arrive at a synthesis of conscious experience that are aesthetically saturated (high Significance, proprietary, unique) and desaturated (low Significance, generic, repetitive). In other words, by winnowing down the eternal Now by temporarily allowing only partial access to sense modalities and participatory power, experiences such as mortality and time are made possible as additions within the Totality. Human experience, as well as other types of biologically constrained experience are only some examples of a much larger spectrum of awareness that extends well beyond human scales and modalities of sensitivity. From the human perspective, non-human consciousness appears as zoological or supernatural. Everything else appears as figures and forms on biological, geological, chemical, or astrophysical scales.
What Multisense Realism (MSR) suggests is that these forms are actually only iconic sensory snapshots that retain only those details that minimally overlap across scales and modes of sensory-motor access. We seeing objects, and we are seen as an object, but both the ability to see and the objects that appear in our vision are not objects, they are percepts. Objects are generated by, for, and within perception, not the other way around. Objects can’t bind to percepts or concepts, they can only really do one thing: Change each other’s shape and movement with their own shape and movement. Forces, fields, energy, charge, waves, and other scientific concepts describe only different aspects of when and how those changes to shape and motion occur. Nothing in science explains how geometric changes could begin to inform or allow any such thing as experiences with aesthetic qualities such as order or complexity to emerge. Geometry does not contain any formula to transcend geometry, nor can it without assuming such transcendence as a foregone conclusion from circular reasoning.
Under MSR it is not the body or system that is conscious, it is consciousness that renders itself as having bodies (or cells, molecules, planets, galaxies) or other systemic appearances (math, language, logic, intuition) through a process that I call eigenmorphism and diffractivity. Together, the Aesthetic thesis or Holos and the Anesthetic antithesis or ‘Graphing process’ yield a subtractive synthesis of limited conscious experience, such as the experience of mortality or human personal awareness.
In my cannibalized diagram, I use various prefixes, Holo-, Meta-, hemi-, and sema- to refer to scales of awareness that are beyond and beneath direct personal participation. The scale that is proposed here, then is one that begins with Total awareness (Holophoric Consciousness) nested into multiple subordinated scales and modalities of awareness (Transpersonal and Interpersonal = Metaphoric Consciousness, Personal or individual scales = Phoric Consciousness with Morphic Appearances, and Subpersonal or Impersonal scales = Semaphoric/Hemimorphic Appearances).
The Lacaze view, by contrast, posits consciousness as an end result of a linear process that presumably takes place in the absence of all conscious experience and aesthetic appearances, including any capacity to discern ‘things’ from nothingness, or to care about any such discernments. This, while being the most popular view is, in my understanding, impossible and self-negating. Potential isn’t a necessary phenomenon since consciousness can create appearances of potential or void by invoking various features of masking or insensitivity. Through the partial amnesia of sleep states we are able to sculpt out a sense of successive experiences in linear time. Forgetting and remembering work together to limit our focus and cultivate an appreciation for the significance of each set of aesthetic presentations and how they might relate to each other. I reject the premise of an ontological entity that exists by virtue of its own pure non-existence/void or pure existence-to-be/potential and understand all appearances of void or potential to be artifacts of how subordinated conscious experiences perceive their own limitation relative to themselves and to the Totality. Nothingness, as I like to say, can only ever be something’s idea of the absence of everything. In an absolute sense, there are only conscious experiences of greater and lesser access to the Totality.
Next in the chain, Lacaze points to Energy as being the first thing to be realized out of the pre-realized context of void/potential. I have talked previously about how the term energy is used in other writing on the Multisense Realism site, and while I make no claim of expertise in physical theory, I do think that I understand enough to say that energy ultimately appears to be an abstract concept that reduces to geometry. Energy is the geometry of non-inertial movement of some material substance (concrete objects or shapes…particles, waves) in public space. I find that even those who are experts in physical theory disagree with each other or admit ignorance about what ‘energy’ is, what its powers actually are, and even whether it exists as a concrete ontological presence or an abstract heuristic concept. Because the authority of physical theory ultimately derives from parsimony, it makes sense to me to discard any vague extensions to what energy could be or do as metaphysical speculation. Metaphysical speculation is fine, it just has no business underpinning theoretical physics or assuming academic authority based on associations with physics that are suggested rather than proved.
As far as I can see, energy need not be anything more concrete than the (conscious) observation of how material objects move each other around. Even quantum mechanics is ultimately nothing more than an elaborate algebraic metaphor for the changes in position of geometric appearances we detect with specialized material instruments. I don’t reject the idea of energy as an ontological entity, however, I suspect that it should be rejected in favor of the heuristic interpretation. Further, I suspect that what we call energy is ultimately an expression of conscious experiences intentionally participating in changing shared aesthetic qualities. Energy is a formula to predict the cascade of geometric-mechanical consequences that necessarily must appear from physical change instigated by conscious response to aesthetic stimulation. Energy is consciousness stepping on the accelerator or brakes or turning the steering wheel. If we do consider energy to be a concrete rather than abstract entity, I propose that the entity is a way of turning aesthetic responses (motive affect) to aesthetic stimulation (sense affect) into appearances of mechanical causality (motor effects).
I see Lecaze’s middle phases of the chain; Information, Order, and Complexity as being almost interchangeable semantically. They all refer to the same kind of thing – the clustering together of what I call aesthetic appearances, and their relation to each other and to logical modalities of sense-making within conscious experience. They don’t make sense outside of the assumption of conscious experience, without which nothing could be ‘informed’ in the first place. Unconsciousness can’t value one configuration over another as more orderly or complex. This is not a prejudice against unconsciousness, it is only a reminder that parsimony is a critical ingredient for any theory of everything that borrows its authority from association with established academic ‘hard’ science such as physics or computer science. Getting from energy to information is already impossible without assuming some unacknowledged capacity to inform and be informed that is somehow neither consciousness nor physical mechanism. As we move up the scale from physics to biology, we carried this unacknowledged assumption with us. Organs that we use to concentrate and amplify different types of sensitivity in our conscious experience became ‘sense organs’, as if organs were unconsciously sensing rather than organs being sense appearances in the first place.
Using Occam’s Razor, I see no reason to make a leap of emergent properties from mindless, automatic physical formation to semi-mindful, semi-participatory information. It’s a story that we have invented because of our mental experience of developing and using software, however software only exists for us, not for the hardware that we use to ‘run programs’ on. In reality, computer hardware no more runs software than an abacus does arithmetic or fingers count to ten. This projection of symbolic concepts onto percepts and then from percepts onto physical objects is so widely and deeply misunderstood that it literally undermines all of our efforts to understand consciousness and recognize its primacy. We mistake the local limitation of our own experience for limits of experience in general. This tends to lead us to one of two pathological conclusions – that consciousness arises accidentally out of the unperceived complexity of unconscious mechanism, or that the physical universe is an illusion with illusory mechanisms. With Multisense Realism, I attempt to explain why both extremes of mechanistic physicalism and solipsistic idealism negate themselves and how relativity, quantum mechanics, and transpersonal psychology hint at a larger continuum of conscious experience in which perspectives such as mechanism and solipsism appear as divergent biases of specialized awareness.
A Multisense Realism Syllogism and Meme
P1. Every subjective feeling and thought is actually a chemical change in the brain.
P2. Every objective observation of the world is actually a chemical change in the brain.
C1. The physical world that you can know about is only something that appears in your conscious experience.
C2. Brains are part of an observed world that C1 has determined to be an appearance in consciousness.
C3. Conclusion 2 replaces ‘brain’ with ‘appearance in consciousness’ in premises 1. and 2, yielding:
C3a. P3. Every subjective feeling and thought is actually an appearance in consciousness.
C3b. P4. Every objective observation of the world, including the activity of brains in skulls, is actually an appearance in consciousness.
C4. Premises P4+P5 reveal that subjectivity and objectivity themselves are also only aesthetic appearances in consciousness that have no physical basis or effect.
C5. The boundary between subjectivity and objectivity is a distinction that can only exist in consciousness, not in a brain or physical world.
C6. If a physical world exists, it is a phenomenon completely outside of our consciousness.
C6a. Such a phenomenon need not have any appearance that we are familiar with.
C6b. Such a phenomenon need not have any appearance at all.
C6c. Such a phenomenon has no need for any consciousness to generate appearances.
C6d. Any capacity to generate appearances would be unknowable to the physical world, since knowing and sensing are functions of consciousness.
C6e. The capacity to generate or evolve consciousness can only come from consciousness.
P6. There is no use case for consciousness in an organism or brain that would not be equivalent to unconscious physical mechanisms.
P6a. Any organic use that consciousness could have would only be a result of an assumed causal power from consciousness to make changes in the organism.
P6b. Any higher dimensional control mechanism of behaviors in an organism would easily be accomplished by physically instantiating that hierarchy in additionally created cells of the organism.
P7. There is no current theory for how consciousness could physically evolve that does not negate itself with circular a priori assumptions of consciousness.
P7a. Any retrospective theory of biologically evolved consciousness would be completely replaceable by a theory of biologically evolved unconscious regulation mechanisms.
P7b. Any prospective theory of biological evolution leading to consciousness must explain how and why unconscious mechanisms such as force and charge were not used instead.
P7c. Any prospective theory of physical mechanisms that could generate conscious appearances of any kind must not rely on conscious appearances, including knowable appearances of physical worlds and brains.
C7. There can be no physical explanation for appearances of consciousness or within consciousness or within a physical universe that does not undermine itself with circular reasoning.
Multisense Taoism
I’ll take a crack at translating the gist of the translations of Chapter 14 of the Tao Te Ching into the terms of my theory of Multisense Realism.
Awareness of seeing is invisible.
Awareness of hearing is silent.
Awareness of touching is intangible.
These three awarenesses are part of one indivisible personal awareness.
Personal awareness exists beyond both entropy and negentropy, it cannot seek itself or avoid itself by trying with direct personal effort.
To succeed in harmonizing mortal personal awareness with eternal transpersonal awareness, remain sensitive to sensitivity and aware of awareness, divesting from seeking or avoiding direct personal effort.
Commentary:
I didn’t want to jargon up my translation too much, but it’s worth mentioning that the passage begins by talking about how sights, sounds, and objects are being provided to us invisibly, silently, and intangibly. Here I think “Lao Tzu” (老子) is telling us how to tease out sense itself from what is being sensed. It goes on to explain that because sense cannot sense itself through the very same modality that it uses to render a sense appearance of other things, personal awareness has no appearance in subpersonal terms (sights, sounds, etc) or in intrapersonal and interpersonal terms (the personal self is beyond emotion and communication).
Here I think that Taoism makes a decision to conflate the absence of subpersonal qualities of personal consciousness with an assumed absence of sensed qualities in sense itself. While I think this is false in an absolute or scientific sense, it is true enough locally that it is quite profound and leads to a useful philosophy for living our personal lives. This is the “Eastern Way” toward the attainment of a fully satisfied selfless self, in diametric opposition to the “Western Way” toward material attainment by a forever unsatisfied self that is selfishly ‘full of itself’.
Going back to the re-interpreted text, I think that the advice given is that to follow the Tao, aka seek ‘flow states’, one should, seemingly paradoxically, neither try nor avoid trying to take personal action. Perhaps it is the opposite of the Western sentiment attributed to Thomas Paine and George Patton “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” The Eastern sentiment could be read as “Do not seek to lead or follow. Get out of the way.” The idea is to use personal motivation to integrate itself with transpersonal sense and motives rather than to assert its personal agenda onto the rest of the (interpersonal, subpersonal, impersonal, transpersonal) universe.
In MSR (MultiSense Realism) terms, I see my above new translation of Chapter 14 of the Tao Te Ching (道德经) text as alluding to the relationship between subpersonal aesthetics (sights, sounds, objects), and their source in awareness itself, which has no appearance. I think that while the Tao Te Ching is correct in its identification of the disappearance of sense modalities within their own scope of sensitivity, I think that this is actually an artifact of the way that our local human scopes of awareness are nested relative to each other rather than the whole truth about consciousness. I propose that a more complete understanding of consciousness identifies that the appearance of nothingness is actually a local condition. It is the ‘game of mortality’ that conjures the illusion of absence to stand in for that of which we have no direct access to at any given moment. For example, if I were to try to see through the back of my head, there is nothing that I can see. Rather than seeing a field of blackness behind my eyes all of the time, I don’t see anything at all.
MSR proposes that while it is true that our personal cocoon of insensitivity causes a disconnection with all other conscious experiences, this disappearance of consciousness is no enigmatic ‘non-existence’ or ‘suchness’ as Taoism suggests. MSR suggests that beyond the sensory cataract of personal experience is not a grand nothingness to which all sense returns, but one lone Holos or totality within which all experience is preserved forever in some sense (similar to the concept of the Akashic Records).
The Totality of experiences are eternally present and experience-able in an Absolute sense, but all component experiences are diffracted through complex nested modulations of relative insensitivity. This diffraction temporarily limits the totality of sense experience to a single timeline of experience that senses itself in terms that echo the very condition of that temporary limitation. Each diffracted partition of the Holos is a temporarily temporalized version of eternal experience into an episodic stream of memory-laden feelings and thoughts. This is the the binding of our subjective qualities of experience, including the sense of being a subject.
In the diffracted experience, the undiffracted remainder of the Holos is left to appear in each moment as a memory-free snapshot of phenomena that are seen but not touched and touched but not experienced. Objects that are not appearing and disappearing into intangible memory ‘in here’ but are spread out as a domain of separate but simultaneously present tangible objects ‘out there’. The subjectified aspect is inflated within while the objectified aspect is diminished without. Subjective inflation involves a super-signification owing to the entropy of missing formation and information, while objective reduction involves de-signification, owing the negentropy of concretely presented formations and logical information about them. In the MSR view, the undiscovered country beyond this mortal coil is only temporarily hidden by the curtain of spatio-temporal entropy-negentropy; orthogonal forms of insensitivity that keep us orphaned in the ephemeral Graphos rather than back home in eternal Holos.
Getting back to what the Tao Te Ching is getting at, yes it’s true that we can’t objectify our entire personal experience as an image or a body-object. A living body-object with all of its countless physiological details shows no sign of the people we experience every day as ourselves and others who we meet. A movie about our life starring ourselves as the main character would not be the same as the experience of living it, as watching that movie requires an audience that is able to lend their personal experience to the images and voices they are seeing and hearing. A cat can’t watch that movie and get anything out of it.
Do Cats (or other similar mammals) Have Personal Experience?
As the center of a person’s experience is personal, the center of a cat’s experience is equally primary, but it would be awkward to call it personal since we don’t usually think of a cat as a literal person (at least other people don’t think of your cat that way). In MSR, I use the neologism “phoric” to refer to the center-range of any experience, be it associated with the body of a person, cat, amoeba, etc. My hypothesis is that the center of a cat’s experience – their phoric range of awareness correlates typically to our emphoric experience. The relationship we share with pets is emotional and intrapersonal rather than fully personal. Cats don’t care who we are in our personal life. They don’t know what we do for a living, etc.
Our personal aesthetics cannot be deconstructed into subpersonal appearances (i.e. sights, sounds, objects), but I disagree with the Tao Te Ching that they are ineffable mysteries that come from nothingness and return to it. Our own personhood is not visible or tangible to us, but our visible countenance and voice, our body, as they change over our lifetime do point to some of our personhood if they are perceived by another person. Our personal experience has its own irreducible qualities such as character, personality, identity and will. That qualia can be represented to some degree subpersonally as a biographical film or novel for example, but it takes a person to begin to sense and make sense of a person, even themselves.
In the Western consensus view, stuck as it is in legacy physicalism, the idea that a person can be separate from their brain functions is anathema. Although the most cutting edge scientific research assures us that the body and its brain are not objectively real, the shadow cast by the traumatic birth of science from the womb of religion steers us away from moving backward into what is now seen to be superstition. If you want to end your career as a scientist, start talking publicly about immaterial souls or psychic phenomena. Because of that overreaction, we are now stuck with a weird, crypto-dualistic cosmology where only some of what is sensed is considered real and the rest is unexplainably illusory or “emergent”…including the very capacity to sense in the first place.
As the title of Philip Goff’s book “Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness” implies, we must now begin to replace this outdated view of physicalism that secretly depends on unexplained non-physical appearances with a new science of consciousness that honors the whole of nature, including the consciousness that allows it to have any appearance at all. The Western objectification of sensory-motive experiences into unexperienced units of ‘information’ or wave-particles of mass-energy is an echo of the Ptolemaic/geocentric view of astronomy. We were on the right track, but mistook the local limits of subjectivity for absolute limits of consciousness-in-general. The Western consensus has sought to amputate the universal ‘yin’ of connection to the totality of conscious experience, while at the same time taking it for granted.
In MSR, I critique physical entities like mass and energy as reductionist quantitative abstractions that accidentally deny the underlying universal fabric of qualitative sense affect and motive effect. Primordial sensory affect and motive effect replace mass and energy as the local modes of participation. The physical universe of anesthetic-mechanical appearances is understood to be a kind of shadow of the Aesthetic Holos that reflects the ability of consciousness to partially divide and alienate itself for purposes of multiplying and enriching itself. The physical world is not an illusion, simulation or maya, it is just that reality in the local sense is an inverted reflection of reality in the absolute sense.
In both the local and absolute reality, we are not a program running on the hardware of a brain. The MSR hypothesis is that brain activity is the motive-to-motor inflection point between personal conscious experience and its subpersonal appearance as living matter. Tangible changes in the 3d structures of the physical brain do not cause a simulation in some kind of computational never-never land where we only think that we live. A neuro-computationalist fantasy of that kind undermines itself since such a simulation would have to include the appearance of the brain, its neurons, and any mechanical changes thereof. Hardware and software would both have to be simulated by an unknowable Ur-hardware that has no reason to favor hardware or software appearances. Representing itself in the simulation through cameo appearances, the grand simulator would be just as likely to manifest what seems like magic as it would to run on what seem like computer code.
With the advent of electronic computing, the materialistic view that flowered in the wake of the Early Modern Period (~15th century) has now been souped up with an abstract reincarnation of itself. Computationalism and its ideas of simulation as emergent from logical processes and graphic rendering is a brilliant but misguided journey into surreal reflections of our own alienation from the Holos.
Everything from social media to the Metaverse to AGI is expanding our connection to disconnection. I think that because of that grounding in disconnection, all of these projects are ultimately doomed to failure in the ways that truly matter to us, despite promising exponential success in the ways that Western-Materialist model and its virally expanding institutions have conditioned us to think that we should want. We dreamed of extraterrestrial conquest, and instead we are conquering ourselves with anti-terrestrial nauseas. We have mistaken the uncanny for the sublime.
Escaping the Matrix and the Metaverse
The Taoist approach goes a long way toward the goal of a new science of consciousness if we can integrate it into a view that embraces and transcends its Western-materialistic opposite. I think that this can be done by correcting Lao Tzu’s error of choosing nothingness rather than everythingness as the source of sense and consciousness. The taijitu or symbol of yin and yang in balanced juxtaposition should be understood as representing the wholeness of aesthetic opposites rather than their mutual negation. Nondualism is not the absence of monism or dualism but a synthesis and transcendence of those opposites. Our cosmos is not a physical machine struggling pointlessly against entropy, rather, entropy and negentropy are the yin and yang appearances of our local sense of sensitivity and insensitivity.
In other words, appearances of entropy and negentropy are signals that a given mode of awareness is facing away from its most direct access to the Aesthetic Holos and toward the appearance of disappearance into Anesthetic Graphos. In the MSR view as opposed to the Taoist view, consciousness is trans-tangible not intangible, absolutely everything not absolutely nothing.
In between the subpersonal (MSR term: semaphoric) and the personal (phoric when centered in a personal experience) are appearances that I see as intrapersonal or emphoric. These would be feelings and emotions, perceptions and figurations of selected sensations into coherent perceptions. These emphoric modes of perception connect the phoric or personal range of perception to semaphoric range of perception, which in turn, connects subpersonal experience to the impersonal ‘bottom’ or generic end of the universe. I have called this Graphos in MSR, and it represents the Totality when seen in its most fragmented, isolated, meaningless sense of least empathy.
Graphos is the inverted image of Holos, replacing unity with the proprietary and unrepeatable with a shadow unity of interchangable cohesive units, strung together according to abstract rules of recursive cardinality and ordinality – the essence of spatial negentropy and temporal entropy. The quantized or maximally graphed end of the cosmic experience divides the infinitely rich creativity and novelty of the Holos into nearly absolute insensitivity. If the Graphos end of the Holos of existed literally, it would be a sea of digital monads, stochastic phantoms animated by nothing but their own mathematical inevitability.
This is what MSR calls the extreme OMMM end of the continuum of sense. If Holos is the Absolute thesis, Graphos is the Absolute’s thesis of its own anti-thesis. The Holos is the appearance of the totality of aesthetic phenomena, uniting sensed qualities with sense modalities. Graphos is the appearance of the disappearance of Holos, separating sensed qualities from each other and from Holos as autonomous units of automaticity.
Flanking the personal or phoric modalities of sense/appearance on the other side (moving in the ACME direction toward Holos from personal awareness rather than toward Graphos) are the apophoric, metaphoric, and holophoric scales of consciousness. Roughly; thinking, insight, and inspiration. So interpersonal thinking (learning, communicating, understanding), transpersonal intuition (psychic experience that extends beyond subjectivity and physics), and what might be called mystical union with the divine or Absolute.
Taking this back to the Tao Te Ching, I propose that Lao Tzu’s error is only an error in the absolute sense, not in a personal sense. While we are alive, the transpersonal conscious experience that envelopes our personal conscious experience is silent, invisible and intangible. We can only get glimpses of it when we’re not looking and our envelope of limited personal awareness is slightly breached such as noticing synchronicity or completely opened up in a life altering event. When those larger breaches occur and the personal intellect is flooded with its version of transpersonal awareness, some contents are necessarily distorted and omitted. Personal awareness correctly identifies its contact with transpersonal awareness as more significant than ordinary experience but without any means to ground it in its ordinary sense-making terms. Hence, to the outside observer, the psychedelic or mystical experience is seen charitably as visionary or uncharitably as psychotic.
To temper that extreme, chaotic end of the spectrum of consciousness, MSR should be seen as only an outer framework of philosophy to point toward the possibility of a new synthesis between the systemizing and empathizing modes of awareness. That possibility would be fulfilled when people free themselves from pathological extremes and find common sense closer to the terrestrial center of our universe and the fully individual and human center of ourselves.
Critique of A Good Idea
Here are my (unfortunately critical but well-intentioned) comments on “Electromagnetism’s Bridge Across the Explanatory Gap: How a Neuroscience/Physics Collaboration Delivers Explanation Into All Theories of Consciousness“, in response to some tweets.
I think that the paper does come up with good plans of action for experimentation, and I take no issue with those. I agree that we should make artificial neurons. I agree that we do experiments that will tease out the most primitive signs of electromagetism emerging from more fundamental physics, and I agree we should think of them as hints about how consciousness provides typical human modes of awareness. My disagreements are with the assumptions made in getting there.
I fully acknowledge that my disagreements are made from my own conjectures and I expect most audiences to consider those conjectures ‘crackpot’ ideas prior to even attempting to understand them fully. That doesn’t bother me in the slightest. My only hope is that there might be some trace left of my ideas on the internet in future decades that could help theorists close improve on or disprove my many hypotheses.
From the start, the issue of consciousness is framed in relation to both First Person qualities of experience and to the sense of their being “inside” of what is being observed as brain and body behaviors.
“Observational correlates are demonstrated to be intrinsically very unlikely to explain or lead to a fundamental principle underlying the strongly emergent 1st-person-perspective (1PP) invisibly stowed away inside them. “
I submit that this is already a rhetorically loaded framing that does not consider the possibility that the sense of privacy and interiority we commonly (but not always) experience is not any more fundamental than the sense of publicity and exteriority, even though those distinctions are widely reported to be transcended in certain states of consciousness.
Nobody has ever seen a first-person (1PP) experience ’emerge’ from a brain in any way. What we have observed is a correlation appearance between experiences with intangible or trans-tangible qualities and experiences of tangible appearances of changes in the brain.
I think that I should break that awkward sentence down further.
What we have observed (scientists, doctors, patients with brain injuries, etc)
is a correlation appearance (meaning we see a brain doing something and we hear reports of something else, but they appear to happen at the same time). There is no evidence of causation, no mechanism by which a brain activity transforms into another quality like color, flavor, or privacy. There is only a (veridical) appearance of temporal synchronization.
between experiences with intangible or trans-tangible qualities (I’m trying here to refer to the qualitative phenomena of nature that we tend to associate with and assume arise only within “1PP” privacy, but to explicitly avoid jumping to that logically unnecessary conclusion. I think the relevant thing about feelings, thoughts, flavors, etc is not that they are private but that they are NOT tangible. They are not touchable presences with geometric shape. They can be intangible concepts or phenomena that I call percepts (sensations, feelings, colors, etc) that are not completely intangible or conceptual but cannot be reduced non-destructively to geometric coordinates.)
and experiences of tangible appearances of changes in the brain. (I’m trying to emphasize here that regardless of how real and objective the brain appears, its appearance does depend on the modalities of sight and touch used to detect it. Those appearances cannot be said to be more fundamental than any other appearances that tend to appear to be ‘1PP’).
In consideration of that, I think that it is just as likely that the seemingly third person and seemingly first person qualities of experience ’emerge’, or perhaps better ‘diverge’ from a larger holarchy of conscious experience.
“The brain’s specialized complexity in EM field expression distinguishes it from other organs (such as the liver and the heart) that are also EM field entities from the atomic level up. The consequence is that there is only one natural, fundamental physics correlate of P-Consciousness: EM fields as “electromagnetic correlates of consciousness””
This seems to contradict itself. It is saying that it is the complexity of EM that makes the brain more special than, say the EM object that is the large intestine, or the body as a whole…but then the assertion points to EM fields rather than the specific property of complexity as being correlates of consciousness. I point to single-celled organisms that seem to be no less conscious than human bodies do, but which have no neurons. As the paper goes on to say:
“…for all practical purposes in the science of P-Consciousness, we are electromagnetic field objects in our entirety. As is a car, a computer, lunch, a pile of dirt, a tree, your dog, steam, and the air we breathe.”
So which is it? If everything is electromagnetism then is everything conscious to some degree (what I call promiscuous panpsychism)?, or is the brain conscious because it is so electromagnetically complex? If the latter then the EM aspect seems all but irrelevant.
“For example, atoms form molecules and they jointly aggregate to form cellular organelles. These jointly form whole cells, and so forth.”
Here again, the position of smallism is assumed and the top-down influence is disqualified without consideration. In reality, when we observe how organisms reproduce, they divide as whole cells. We can infer that the first cells were the result of molecules accidentally persisting in more complex collections that would lead to lipid membranes and prokaryotes but our efforts to synthesize cells from ‘scratch’ have thus far been somewhat suspiciously unsuccessful. Our inferences of small-to-large evolution by natural selection may be a huge mistake.
We have not even attempted to factor in the lensing effect of the bubble of our own perceptual limits, and its role in perpetuating an anthropocentric worldview. We have not attempted to estimate the possible consequences to our thinking of a universe in terms that assume our apprehension of human consciousness as the apex form of awareness or sole form of super-awareness. We have not factored in the possibility of timescale relativity and taken five minutes to imagine how much more conscious something like the atmosphere of a planet would assume if we viewed centuries of it in time lapse equivalent to an nMRI video.
In reality, the evolution of forms may proceed not from small to large and young to old, but may at the very minimum, progress from both top and bottom, past and “future”. We may be living in a Natural Containment Hierarchy that is not merely scaled by physical sizes of bodies, but by lensings of perceived causality, aka ‘time’. I have made some efforts to diagram this:
We should not assume that our typical, 21st century, Western conditioned, mid-life, waking consciousness is the universal authority on the ontology of time/causality. The smallest and largest scales of the hierarchy/holarchy may be more unified with each other than with the holons at the center of the hierarchy.
Our willingness to ignore our self-centering view of the containment hierarchy seems to suggest to me that the possibility of an intrinsic lensing property in the way that conscious experiences are diffracted from the totality. The sense of being in the center of the containment hierarchy may be like other types of relativistic frames of reference rather than an objective reflection of the cosmos as it is without our lensing of it, and of ourselves.
I propose that the anthropocentric positioning of ourselves in the containment hierarchy should be considered as a superposition of *both* the self-centered and the self-negating perspectives. In other words, we see ourselves and our lives as midway between Planck scales and cosmological scales both because it is actually true, and because it must always seem true.
By analogy, we find that both the geocentric/flat Earth perspective and the heliocentric round Earth perspective are equally significant to understanding human history, but neither could be predicted as emerging from the other. In the same kind of way, the uncanny similarity in the apparent size of the solar disc and lunar disk in the sky, combined with the happenstance of Earth having only one such natural satellite, makes for a rather fine-tuned condition that made millennia of religious worldviews possible and dominant still for some even in the face of the obvious evidence of the post-Copernican perspective.
What I see is a universe where such fine-tuned superpositions are themselves fine-tuned superpositions in between coincidence and teleology. The coincidences are both coincidental and more than coincidental, and picking one perspective or the other can seem to have cascading ‘choose your own adventure’ or ambiguous image flip consequences. The universe seems to support delusions and solipsism for an unreasonable number of people for an unreasonable amount of time. In my understanding, this property of the universe and consciousness is profoundly important, although that estimation of significance is itself tantamount to choosing the teleological-aesthetic (solipsistic at the extreme) side of the superposition of the absolute over the mechanistic-coincidental (“nilipsistic” at the extreme) side.
“If you deleted (in the sense of “de-organized”) any layer below M, for example, the entire hierarchy disappears from that layer upwards. For example, deleting all atomic particles deletes atoms, molecules, cells, and so forth, all the way to the containing environment. In these cases, none of the deletions eliminate the lower levels, including sub-atomic particles, space, and so forth. This fact reveals the existence of a powerful vertically acting system of constraints that is not within the ambit of any individual scientific discipline.”
Not necessarily. By analogy, if we deleted all characters used in written language, and all phonemes used in verbal language, that does not mean that all human thought and communication would be deleted. All that would happen is that humans would immediately begin inventing new language using those same two sense modalities or other sense modalities if they were also deleted. In our theories, I think that we should not be blinded by the bias known as “smallism” and “big” cosmopsychic theories should be considered equally viable.
“Contemporary philosophers tend to assume that fundamental things exist at the micro-level. Coleman (2006) calls this “smallism”: the view that facts about big things are grounded in facts about little things, e.g., the table exists and is the way it is because the particles making it up are related in certain extremely complicated ways. However, the work of Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has brought to prominence an alternative picture of reality. According to the view Schaffer calls “priority monism”, facts about little things are grounded in facts about big things. The table’s atoms exist and are the way they are because the table exists and is the way it is; and all things ultimately exist and are the way they are because of certain facts about the universe as a whole. For the priority monist there is one and only one fundamental thing: the universe.
If we combine priority monism with constitutive panpsychism we get:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
Constitutive cosmopsychism—The view that all facts are grounded in/realized by/constituted of consciousness-involving facts at the cosmic-level.
We can also envisage non-constitutive forms of cosmopsychism. On a standard form of layered emergentism (discussed above), human and animal minds are causally dependent on consciousness-involving micro-level facts whilst being fundamental entities in their own right; on the cosmopsychist analogue, human and animal minds are causally dependent on the conscious cosmos whilst being fundamental entities in their own right.”
continuing…
“Layer [M+1] is where the EM field system impressed on space by brain tissue acquires its fully detailed form, including all properties inherited by the constraints, drives, and properties of the deeper layers”
Here I propose that EM fields may not in fact be ‘impressed on space’ at all, and are not even ‘fields’ in an ontological sense. My understanding suggests that electromagnetic activity is irreducibly sensorimotive, and that the inference of fields is based on early methods of detection, measurement, and logical deduction which have become obsolete with the advent of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and familiarity with psi and other exotic states of consciousness.
The universe may be a conscious experience ‘all the way down’ and all the way up, with experiences on any given timescale lensing experiences on distant timescales in objectivized (“nilipsistic“) terms (as fundamental forces, mathematical logic, and tangible topologies, for example). Having read some of Maxwell and Faraday’s original papers defining EM in terms of fields, I am struck with the distinct impression that the conclusions they made would not have been that way if they had access to QM observations like entanglement and contextuality. I think that the field metaphor was a 19th century heuristic that continues to be indispensable, but not because it is an ontological fact.
We now note that the transition from strong to weak emergence is a fundamental feature of the process that science experienced when deconstructing the natural biosphere into the layered descriptions shown in Figure 2B. In Figure 2B this process has been labeled as “reduction.” Before the science was completed, every progression in scientific understanding started as a mystery: a question unanswered. Molecules were mysteriously related to atoms. Atoms were mysteriously emergent from what turned out to be their subatomic constituents. Higher up, we find the mystery of the strongly emergent flight of bumblebees, which turned out to be a weakly-emergent property of turbulence.
I see this as a popular, but nonetheless dangerous and seductive fallacy. It may be true that the history of science can be seen to have repeatedly corralled seemingly strongly emergent phenomena and tamed them into weakly emergent complications, this cannot be presumed to extend from the tangible to the intangible or trans-tangible under that same logic.
This is due to the fact that atoms, molecules, bumblebee bodies, and turbulence are *uncontroversially tangible*. There was never any question but that these phenomena are observed as tangible forms moving in public space. There is in all cases an infinitely wide explanatory gap between all such tangible objects and any such intangible or trans-tangible phenomena as sensations, feelings, perceptions, awareness, colors, flavors, sounds, ideas, symbols, references, interpretations, themes, archetypes, caring, valuing, and on and on.
No amount of moving particles can ‘add up’ to anything other than other groupings or shapes of moving particles without appealing to strong emergence or promissory materialism. There is no comparable problem with particles adding up to shapes such as molecules, surfaces, cells, bodies, planets, etc. They are all 3d topological presences that can be comfortably assigned causal closure that is limited to other 3d topological phenomena (forces, fields, laws of geometry). Things like forces and fields, while superficially ‘intangible’ (and therefore must be imagined to be somehow “imprinted” on the vacuum of space or inevitable consequences of statistics on cosmological constants or standard model, etc) are nonetheless exhaustively describable in tangible terms. They are spatial regions within which some effect is observed to occur.
This kind of in silico empirical approach is simply missing from the science. No instances of in silico-equivalent EM field replication can be found. Artificial neurons created this way could help in understanding EM field expression by excitable cell tissue.
I agree with this. In order to proceed with understanding the Easy Problem of our own neurology, we should be creating artificial neurons.
As the science has unfolded, a single, dominant and promising theory of this kind has emerged. It is the “Information Integration Theory (IIT) of Consciousness” by Tononi (2004, 2008), Balduzzi and Tononi (2008), Oizumi et al. (2014), and Tononi et al. (2016).
That may be true in the sense that there has not been a single competing theory that has been discussed as much in the media coverage of academic discussion in recent years, but I have not encountered many who see IIT as especially promising in reality. At best, some future descendant of IIT might provide some useful indications for determining whether someone is likely to come out of a coma or something, but even that utility may be completely misguided. There are many good critiques of IIT that can be found online:
“In summary, IIT fails to consistently assign consciousness to a system, because the definition is based on hypotheticals, which by definition are not instantiated by the system. Deep down, the troubles arise from the circularity of the definition of information as reduction of uncertainty. Uncertainty refers to a prior state of knowledge, but the notion of knowledge for the subject is never defined. In practice, the knowledge underlying the reduction of uncertainty is the knowledge of the observer who formalizes scenarios and quantifies probabilities of events that the system itself has never lived.”
http://romainbrette.fr/notes-on-consciousness-ix-why-integrated-information-theory-fails
continuing…
From a C1 perspective, this position is rather hard to understand, because C1 tells us there is only one substrate that we know delivers P-Consciousness: EM fields organized in the form of a brain made of atoms.
By this reasoning, only our own personal brain is known to deliver P-Consciousness also. Because we know from our own conscious experience how limited our empathy and theory of mind can be even for members of our own species, there is no reason to assume that P-Consciousness has any more connection to humans or brains or electromagnetism than it does to ‘complexity’ in general, or to biology, or to certain scales of material accumulation.
I see these assertions of brains as critical to understanding consciousness as based on uncritical anthropocentrism. I expect that our own brain is especially suited to our own kind of conscious experience, but really the brain of any species would seem equally appropriate if we did not have the human brain as an example. The intestines or the immune system, cell nucleus, cytoskeleton, nucleic acids, and many other complicated structures and processes would seem equally hospitable.
GRT focuses on the Oscillatory Correlates of Consciousness (OCC), where the particular “oscillations” most relevant to P-Consciousness are those arising from the brain’s endogenous EM field system
What we need to know though is what is doing the ‘correlating’? There might be all kinds of correlates of consciousness we can find – maybe high dimensional analysis of gross physiological indicators like skin resistance and blood pressure could be used to plot out some correlation too. Good stuff for the Easy Problem and medicine, but does nothing for the Hard Problem or disproving cosmopsychism.
The abovementioned EM account offered by JohnJoe McFadden is the wave-mechanical approach in his “Conscious Electromagnetic Information” (CEMI) field theory (McFadden, 2002a,b, 2006, 2007, 2013, 2020). “I therefore examine the proposition that the brain’s EM field is consciousness and that information held in distributed neurons is integrated into a single conscious EM field: the CEMI field” (McFadden, 2002a).
We have the same interaction problem here, with the theory that information can be somehow ‘held’ in physical topologies we call neurons begs the question of physicalism. As far as I can see, all physical effects can be explained as statistically inevitable recombinatory variations on geometric *formations* and require no such things as information, signals, signs, etc to do what they appear to do. The correlation is smuggled in retrospectively from conscious experience rather than arrived at prospectively from physics.
Our proposition is that the standard model’s scope of scientific deliverables, and the scientific behavior that produces them, is to be expanded to include (ii). We now know that EM field, as depicted by the particular (i) 3PP “laws of appearances”
Sure, I agree with that and have proposed the same kind of thing. EM should be understood to be a single Sensory-Motive-Electro-Magnetic phenomenon. That isn’t the whole story though, but it’s an important start. I have tried to diagram it early on in my Multisense Realism efforts:
let us assume that (ii) involves abstractions describing a universe made of a large collection of a single kind of primitive structural element, say X. This “X” could be perhaps regarded as an “event” or “information mote” or “energy quantum” or all these simultaneously. Its true identity is not our job to specify here.
A seemingly pragmatic approach, but unfortunately I think that there is no way to work from X without understanding what X is in this case. I think that it is our primary job to specify it. In my view, I propose X as a scale-independent (equally micro-unit as cosmo-unity) holos of nested/diffracted aesthetic-participatory (sensory-motive) phenomena. I have elaborate diagrams and explications of how that goes.
The solution to the hard problem, we suggest, has been hard because it must be discovered (not invented) in a completely different realm of descriptions of nature of kind (ii). In effect, the very meaning of what it is that a scientist does to explain nature has itself had to change.
What scientific evidence do we have that it is possible or practical to describe the natural world U in (ii) form? When we look for it, we easily find that we have already been doing it (X descriptions) for decades, but in physics and outside the science of consciousness. They are familiar to all of us. Some examples: X = “string theory” e.g. (Sen, 1998), “loops” e.g. (Rovelli, 2006), “branes” e.g. (Ne’eman and Eizenberg, 1995), “dynamic hierarchies of structured noise” e.g. (Cahill and Klinger, 1998, 2000; Cahill, 2003, 2005), “cellular automata” e.g. (Mitchell et al., 1994; Hordijk et al., 1996; Wolfram, 2002), and “quantum froth” e.g. (Swarup, 2006
This is hard to parse for me. Is it saying that things like branes, strings, loops, etc can just be considered identical to conscious experiences?
The moment a (ii) collection of abstracted X can be found to express EM fields as an emergent behavior of the collection, the physicists involved, by directly comparing the (i) and (ii) depictions of the same nature, would then be able to see, within (ii), that part of the underlying structure of (i) that may be responsible for the 1PP.
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable approach to me, as far as identifying some crucially important features of the origins of our own experience as human individuals, but I still see it as an Easy Problem path that assumes
1) consciousness = “1PP” and
2) 1PP is not closer the underlying phenomenon from which X arises than anything else we could imagine.
It is based on the empirical fact that it is EM fields that ultimately deliver P-Consciousness.
I see this as a problem. First of all, the statement that EM fields deliver P-Consciousness is NOT an empirical fact. It could just as easily be the case that EM fields are P-Consciousness appearances of the nesting of P-Consciousness on particular timescales. Secondly, the paper has already committed to the *complexity* of the EM field complex-that-appears-to-itself-as-a-brain being more important than the ubiquitous presence of EM as every-appearance-in-the-universe.
The correlates of P-Consciousness paradigm must ultimately face the fundamental physics of EM fields if a fully explanatory account of P-Consciousness is to be constructed.
That is an assumption also. A theory based on assuming smallism and anthropocentric identifications with consciousness. I am encouraged by the intentions and directions that are behind the paper, but I see it as still a step before Step One, and that in many ways, the true Step One can be arrived at by considering the diametric opposite of many of the ideas above that are assumed to be true.
Sensation, Realism, and Consciousness
The sense of image fits into the larger picture between the Subjectively Objectified and Subjectively Subjectified groupings.
Holos (Transpersonal
(Interpersonal (Personal
(Intrapersonal (Perception
(Subpersonal (Subjectified sensation) | Impersonal (Subjectively objectified sensation)
Graphos)
A Sound by any Other Name
What is the difference between thinking that consciousness requires a living body and thinking that sounds have to be made by acoustic instruments?
It seems like the same common sense intuition, and I think in both cases, it happens to be false. From audio recording we learned that we did not need to have someone play a horn to hear a horn sound. We could actually use the sound that a needle makes when scratching over a grooved surface to make a nearly identical sound, as long as the grooves matched the grooves made when the horn was played in the first place.
As audio technology progressed, people discovered that purely electronic changes in semiconductors could be used to drive speakers to drive eardrums. We didn’t need to begin with a horn being played, or acoustic vibrations to propagate from brass to air to a steel needle to a cooling disc of resin. All we needed was electronic switches to rapidly change the flow of current through a speaker in the same pattern that the needle used to make going up and down in the groove. The up and down analog became digital stop and go, all the way up to the point where you have to jiggle people’s eardrums. That could not be done electronically but required a membrane to mechanically push air into the ears.
It seems now that we are getting closer to cutting out the acoustic middleman entirely with the possibility of Neuralink type technology and broadcast music directly into your brain without any physical sound at all. No speakers, no ears…but you still need something that senses something, and you need something that senses that something as sound. Even if we play music and record our dreams electronically, it still doesn’t solve the Hard Problem of consciousness. There remains an explanatory gap between the silent operation of electrical current and the experience of sounds, sights, feelings, thoughts, and the entire material universe of objects…including brains and electronic instruments.
That last sentence is the tricky part that physicalist thinkers can’t seem to stop overlooking. Yes, the entire physical universe that you know, that you read about, that scientists experiment on, can only exist under physicalism as a ‘model’ or ‘simulation’ that simply, um, ’emerges’ from either electromagnetism itself, or electromagnetism in various brain structures, or from the ‘information’ that we imagine is being communicated by any or all of these processes.
Of course, it’s all circular. To say ‘the brain’ is to say ‘my qualitative and cognitive experiences that I call ‘brain”. To say ‘the world’ is to say ‘my’ or ‘our’ qualitative experiences that seem like a world. There is no getting around this. The last mile of any cosmological theory always has to cash out in some experience-of-a-cosmos, with or without a theory of a cosmos-outside-of-some-experience. Noumena are optional and hypothetical. Experiential phenomena, as Decscartes almost said, cannot be deined.
I argue with a lot of people about information and qualia, because it is glaringly obvious to me that this technology based idea of information conflates the purely intellectual and abstract process of learning or communicating with the concrete aesthetics of what it is being communicated. Information or simulation theory says nothing about what is ultimately doing the communicating and what literally happens when a communication is decoded, from the billions of quantifiable microphysical stop/go events in an engineered device or neurological organ to unquantifiable and irreducibly aesthetic sight/sound/objects/feelings/thoughts.
The idea of simulation only pushes the explanatory gap down further in scale, but it is the same gap. It’s not enough that a change in a computing device or brain coincides with a change in direct experience, we have to ask what is doing the correlation in the first place, and how, and why. It’s not just “what breathes fire into the equations?”, but what the hell is fire doing in equations in the first place? Why wouldn’t it make sense to ask what breathes equations into every form of ‘fire’? What could it be other than conscious experience itself? Anything we try to put in between conscious experience and nature always has that same last-mile problem. In the end, you need something eternal that can make sense – some capacity not only to run programs on hardware to manipulate hardware but for either programs or hardware to exist as something aesthetic rather than just invisible facts in an arithmetic void.
Evan Thompson Live! Consciousness Live! S4 E12 CW comments, part 2
At 57:15 Richard is posing the question of why objects in a simulated world aren’t real objects in a real digital world. To this I say what is being overlooked is sense modality. We have to be as literal as we possibly can be when discussing these topics. Objects, in the most literal sense, are not images or numbers, they are tangible shapes. Solid, liquid, and gaseous volumes in public spacetime. Real objects are composed of molecules that are made up of atoms on the periodic table. Sense experience is the only thing that can generate realism. When we think of a simulation, we are thinking of some artificially stimulated sense experience – a GUI image that *we* see (birds don’t see it, hamsters don’t see it) on screen hardware. Without this, there is nothing begin simulated.
The interface hardware cannot be simulated. There is no software that can be written that will generate colors for the color blind in the way that software could be written to solve math problems for people who aren’t able to do math. No amount of computation or complexity will yield a new primary color. Eventually we will likely have hardware that is wired into the visual cortex directly but we still don’t know how or why changes in the states of cells would ‘seem like’ or ‘appear’ as anything other than what they physically are. If any data is being processed, the changes in the cellular states already ARE the data processing events. If an organ evolved to have a higher, meta-level governance of its own processes, then that too would only be and could only be more cells that are performing cellular functions which only happen to mirror a sampling of the lower level processes. There can be a functional link – for every 100 neurons that fire on a lower level, 2 neurons fire on the meta-level, and that would accomplish the result that our experience of ‘modeling’ allows us to accomplish functionally, but without any such thing as modeling. The relation of the “model” plane and the “actual” plane is metaphorical. They are both physical objects of different size and composition. It is only in human perception and association that one could seem to ‘model’ the other. There are no models in physics, chemistry, or biology, unless we understand those domains (as I do) to be scales of conscious interaction.
I very much agree with what Evan is saying around 1:05 about bits not existing apart from our practices of imposing maps and schemes. This gets us close to the big revelation that I’m pushing all of the time – It’s SENSE that matters. Matter doesn’t sense. Or it wouldn’t, if matter were primitive and real, but matter itself is just a lower rung of sense and motive engagement. That’s why QM and relativity describe the scale limits of physicality, rather than Cartesian coordinate objects. That’s why quantum contextuality and entanglement. The common denominator is always ultimately sense. Not even the sense-of-being-a-sensor or using a sensory, but sense experience itself: qualia. Matter can be qualia, information can be qualia, but neither information or matter can turn themselves into qualia materially or logically, nor can they turn themselves into each other. That’s perhaps the more important clue.
Software cannot find hardware and vice versa. When we ‘compile’ ‘code’, we are performing a physical task that just pushes physical changes in physical circuits. There isn’t a literal ‘conversion’ from ideas to physics, it’s just that the way that we set up the machine seems *to us* (and to the sense and sense making modalities we can access) to be isomorphic. There is no ‘code’ in physics – no concepts, only tangible shapes or regions where tangible shapes move in certain ways.
Electromagnetism can be reduced to that – to changes in the motion of particles. We can undo all notion of fields and forces, undo the intuitions of Maxwell and Faraday, and replace them all with sensory-motive engagements. These are the phenomena from which all laws and forces emerge. Something has to sense something before a change – any change – can be present. Present where? How? What is changing is always and only some sensed quality or property, like position of a tangible shape relative to another shape and to a memory or perception of that position quality being altered. We can look at it the other way around also, with stasis in the background and motion in the foreground. We can think of stillness as an artificial appearance that our sense filtering is presenting, and that without that filter, everything is motion on some timescale. Without sense, no present or presences can be accessed.
I don’t have much to add about the rest of the talk. I think it gets close to where my view begins to take shape, as far as Kant, Husserl, and Whitehead questioning the distinction of subjective and objective categories, etc. I agree that is the right direction to go in. Where I end up with it is that objectivity and noumenality are relative rather than absolute, and that existence itself is phenomenological, without being subjective or objective. The appearance of subjective and objective seeming qualities are artifacts of a particular scope of awareness, typically is divided and nested by timescale and distinction of modality. Scope of awareness lens each other to appear in these kinds of aesthetic categories. What we understand as the geological timescale is so slow compared to our own that we can’t empathize with it or directly access its flow. It seems static. The laws of physics, hold forever as far as we are concerned, but in an absolute sense, they may be more of a set of useful habits from which the longest and shortest timescale events are built.
Here’s a terrible hack set of images to try to illustrate what I mean:
Got it? Spacetime scales are nested inward so that astropysical timescales (longest and shortest duration, largest and smallest size) envelope geo-molecular (next longest and next shortest duration and next largest and smallest size), which envelope the most medium scaled durations and size (eco-cellular).
Now think of that in an orthogonal relation to the other half of the universe, which correlates to size and duration, but is defined by intensity of aesthetic-participatory richness, aka Significance.
The main takeaway that I can offer as a response to the video, if nothing else, is the idea that
1. The distinction between anesthetic-participatory and anesthetic-mechanical is more fundamental than phenomenal/noumenal or subjective/objective.
2. Anesthetic mechanisms are either concrete (geometric mass-energetic force-field operations) or abstract (algebraic information-processing functions)3. Anesthetic mechanisms do not exist on their own and are in all cases a reduced, exteriorized reflection between two disparately scaled modes of aesthetic-participation.
Multisense Realism 
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