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Sketch for a New Physics
Using a topographical metaphor, this diagram shows the relation of significance in direct proportion to the dimorphism of space and time. I call this eigenmorphism. For example, as human beings, our native frame is the Autobiographical level (top). Our experience has a high significance, which means
1) rich qualia – larger nows and more nesting of personal, sub-personal, and super-personal frames allow for deeper sensory vocabularies.
2) a highly divergent space-time presentation (space and time are opposite for us, but identical for quantum phenomena or astrophysical phenomena).
3) a highly divergent spectrum of realism. The Matroyshka dolls with reflection underneath represent this range of clear/real, vs blurred/intuitive, and reflective/fiction. By contrast, the entangled reflections of the microphysical level of physics are neither real nor fictional. With space and time fused, matter and energy become interchangeable foregrounds for information processing.
Beyond Probability
What is the probability that “pattern” can exist at all?
Can’t be calculated.
Because we cannot empirically calculate it, or because it is ontologically incalculable? Are there other comparably incalculable examples, or do all incalculables share a common ‘absolute’ quality (relating to primordial origins, consciousness, etc)
Ontologically incalculable. There is no way to measure the total possible outcomes.
In another way, it is super-calculable. Only one outcome results in the possibility of measurement. The probability of pattern existing in a universe in which the question of probability can be asked would be 100%…or even “infinitely greater” than 100%, as there is no possibility at all of measurement in a context that is devoid of pattern.
In another sense, the possibility of pattern is the most improbable condition in the sense that no ‘probability’ can precede pattern. Probability is an expectation of a particular type of pattern so by definition, pattern is not just incalculable, but pre-calculation (calculations are also pattern recognition).
Fair enough…
How do evolutionary psychology and neuroscience compare as popular theories to “explain everything” about human nature?
“These two theories are the biggest explanatory frameworks at the current time, with neuroscience rising and evolutionary psychology looking a bit threadbare. And they are quite different.
I don’t mean, are these valid theories scientifically, but how good are they as a way for people to tell meaningful stories to each other about human nature? What do we become through that telling? What gets left out?”
Answer by Craig Weinberg:
In Raymond Tallis’ book Aping Mankind, he describes the over-reaching of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology and names them “Neuromania” and “Darwinitis”. While this assessment is likely seen as inflammatory or offensive to the many dedicated and brilliant professionals who have devoted their lives in pursuit of understanding human nature scientifically, his criticisms are quite defensible. Tallis, a neuroscientist himself, argues that both disciplines contribute to what I call de-presentation, and he calls ‘the disappearance of appearance’.
When neuroscience looks at human nature, it does so from the outside – as the behavior of cellular and molecular bodies, of organs and networks of ‘connections’. Evolutionary biology also looks at human nature from the outside, as the behavior of zoological ecosystems, species, and inherited bodies. Taken together, these super-personal systems and sub-personal systems can be de-ranged to completely subsume the personal, the private, and most significantly human aspects of human nature.
It is a bit like looking at human nature under a blacklight. With most of the frequencies in the dark, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have done a fantastic job of illuminating some hidden aspects of ourselves – how and where we fade into subconscious and unconscious mechanisms. We have glimpsed some of our own biases and seen behind the curtain of many misperceptions. We have not yet, however dared to turn this critical lens on itself. We have not seen how neuroscience and evolutionary biology themselves are excluded from the general distrust and marginalization of awareness. Somehow, the totality of our human experience can be written off as a solipsistic simulation or ’emergent property’ of ‘information’ processing, yet the mechanisms of science are presumed immune from the politics of our species and the unreality of the brain’s twitchings in the dark. Sam Harris actually said something to the effect of “certain kinds of thinking” extend outside of the bubble of human delusion (but without saying how).
What gets left out, according to Tallis, is humanity. Arts, literature, civilization. While he goes on in the second half of his book, to argue the profound difference between human beings and other species, I would argue that does make human beings more special than others on Earth, I would not say that it makes us an exception to zoology, or physics. Instead, I would argue for a radical reinterpretation of physics in which privacy and aesthetic appreciation are seen as more fundamental cosmological influences than public, functional mechanisms.
Prime Spiral
The prime spiral, also known as Ulam’s spiral, is a plot in which the positive integers are arranged in a spiral with primes indicated in some way along the spiral. Unexpected patterns of diagonal lines are apparent in such a plot. This construction was first made by Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1986) in 1963 while doodling during a boring talk at a scientific meeting. While drawing a grid of lines, he decided to number the intersections according to a spiral pattern, and then began circling the numbers in the spiral that were primes. Surprisingly, the circled primes appeared to fall along a number of diagonal straight lines or, in Ulam’s slightly more formal prose, it “appears to exhibit a strongly nonrandom appearance”
In the above variation of the Ulam spiral, red squares represent prime numbers and white squares represent non-primes.
I can’t decide if I care about prime numbers. On the one hand, the idea of indivisibility is interesting as it relates to consciousness. In some sense, I think that the universe, and each experience of it, is a one-hit-wonder. All appearances of repetition are local to some frame of reference. If someone is color blind, they may see alternating red and green dots as a repeating grey dot. If you listen to someone speaking a language that you can’t understand, it can seem, on some level, that they are saying the same kinds of sounds over and over again.
I wondered if any random constraint would appear to contain pattern when mapped as a spiral like that. This one above is yellow hex if the number spelled out contains the letter i. Writing these out I noticed how the language we use to name the numbers is isomorphic above ten. A trivial observation, I know, but I think that this logical version of onomatopoeia reveals some insights about recursive enumeration, and its foundation in an expectation of the absolutely generic.
To someone who is fascinated by prime numbers (often in a hypnotic, compulsive kind of way, as these spirals suggest), part of the appeal may be that the patterns that they seem to make defy this expectation of generic, interchangeability as the basis of counting. Three isn’t really supposed to be different from two or one, it’s just “the next one after two”. Finding these cosmic Easter eggs by poring over mathematics is, as the movie Pi dramatized, a weird kind of quasi-religious calling. Seeking to sleuth out a hidden intelligence where neither intelligence nor secrecy would seem possible. Numbers are supposed to be universal; publicly accessible. There shouldn’t be any proprietary codes lurking in there.
Maybe there aren’t? Without mapping primes into these spirals to look at with our eyes, the interesting sequences and ratios in mathematics would not be so interesting. Mathematics may provide the most neutral and bland medium possible for the projection of patterns. Like a supernatural oracle or Rorschach inkblot, an ideal medium for pareidolia and conjuring of simulacra from the subconscious.
Math is haunted alright, but by pattern recognition – sense making, rather than Platonic essences. Because math is an ideal conductor and insulator for sense, it does end up reflecting sense in a clear and concise way, however I think it is mainly a reflection. Math is not the heart of the universe, not the whole, but the hole in the whole – a divider which shaves off differences with the power of indifference.
Defining Consciousness, Life, Physics
One of the more popular objections to any proposal for explaining consciousness is that the term consciousness is too vague, or that any explanation depends on what way the term is used. I disagree. The nature of electricity does not depend on what people think the word means, and I don’t think that consciousness does either. When someone is knocked unconscious, there is little doubt about what it means. In general terms, it means that they are not personally present. They are not personally affected by their environment, nor can they intentionally cause any effects on their environment.
Is that an agreeable place to start for everyone?
Can we agree also, in light of the physiology of the brain-stem, which consists of sensory neural pathways and motor neural pathways, that the concept of consciousness is at least closely identified with input/output?
Can we agree that it could be possible that input/output could be sufficient to describe the fundamental nature of consciousness? Does consciousness need to be something further than that?
Here is where, in my view, the whole dependency of definition comes in. The issue is that input/output can either be conceptualized from the exterior or the interior. The Western perspective, even when it tries to model the interior perspective of i/o, does so from the outside in. It assumes that the proprietary feeling of subjectivity is fundamentally inauthentic – that a system can only be built from generic conditions, laws, processes, etc, and cannot be truly original in any sense. In this way, no neuroscientific account, or cog-sci account, can really claim an inside-looking-out perspective. The Western orientation does not allow for the possibility that person as a whole could act as an irreducibly singular receiver of experience an originator of physical cause. Taking a cue from relativity, however, I suggest that perceptual integrity is identical to inertial framing, so that the frame as a whole can drive the micro-frame conditions within it, and vice versa. This is not vertical emergence from the bottom up, but parallel emergence. Multiple levels of description.
Going back to consciousness being definable in terms of its difference from unconsciousness, we can see that the difference between the two has some similarity between life and death. Can we agree that life too differs from death in that it relates to input/output for an organism and its environment?
We understand that an animal can be unconscious without being dead, but is this a difference in degree or a difference in kind? Could input/output also be sufficient to define “life”. We might say that life includes reproduction and growth, however even a single cell organism which is not reproducing or growing at any given time is considered a form of life. Does that not seem that the quality of environmental sensitivity and the ability to cause biochemical effects in response to that sensitivity are even more essential to defining life?
To sum up then, I am asking:
1) Doesn’t being conscious really just mean the ability to receive sense and project motive?
2) Doesn’t life really mean the same thing on a lower, level?
From there, I would ask
3) Isn’t sense what we really mean by a ‘field’, and motive what we mean by a ‘force’?
4) Using relativity as a intuitive guide, can’t it be said that the concept of ‘field’ or ‘force’ are really metaphors, and that the way we contribute to human society is identical to the way that any vector of sense contributes to its context? Isn’t consciousness just a form of life which is just a form of physics…which is just a form of sensory-motive interaction?
Quora on Conscious and Subconscious
How does the conscious and subconscious speak to you at the same time?
My hypothesis is this: The conscious, subconscious, (and super-conscious) *are* you already. Simultaneity is relative and supervenes on perception. The subconscious (I call sub-personal) generally relates to a smaller, faster inertial frame. Sub-personal impulses are experienced as urges and relate generally to the reality of the body. It is a very small “now”, in the range of microseconds to minutes.
The super-personal or transpersonal feelings are meta-phoric. The root ‘phor’ as in euphoric or ‘fer’ as in ‘confer’, ‘infer’, etc means to carry – to ferry something from one place to another. Metaphor then is to carry over, to jump from one semantic context to another. Just as a symbol or fable can work on multiple levels at once, our conscious personal experience is both rooted in larger ‘nows’ which range in days, weeks, and lifetimes and the sub-personal/microphysical instant.
As human beings, we have a tall window of awareness that extends between the now that is microscopic and the now that is eternal. Confusion sets in when we try to define one in terms of the other. Our expectation that we would not be ‘spoken to’ at the same time is itself a prejudice of the conscious range of awareness.
If human beings are nothing more than matter, why are you conscious as yourself?
If human beings are nothing more than matter, why are you conscious as yourself?
Quora question:
Philosophy: If human beings are nothing more than matter, why are you conscious as yourself?
The implication of materialism is that we are in essence wet robots, without free will, just chemical reactions. But if this is true and we are conscious, then does it logically follow that all chemical reactions have “consciousness” to some degree? If the human mind is just an extremely advanced computer, then at what point does “consciousness” occur?
We don’t know that chemical reactions are unconscious, but if they were, then it makes sense that the entire universe would also be unconscious. It is very tricky to examine the issue of consciousness and to draw parallels within common experience without unintentionally smuggling in our own expectations from consciousness itself. This is the Petito principii or circular reasoning which derails most fair considerations of consciousness before they even begin in earnest.
Unlike a clock which is made up of gears, or a particular sized pile of hay, the addition of consciousness has no conceivable consequence to the physical function of a body. While we can observe a haystack burst into flames because it has grown too hot, we cannot look at the behavior of a human body see any special difference from the behavior of any other physical body. There is complexity, but complexity alone need not point to anything beyond an adjacency of simple parts and isolated chains of effects.
Just as no degree of complication within a clock’s mechanism would suddenly turn into a Shakespearean sonnet, the assumption of universal substitution is not necessarily appropriate for all phenomena, and for consciousness in particular. To get a color image, for instance, we need to print in colored dots, not black and white. Color TV programs cannot be broadcast over a monochrome display without losing their color.
Unlike chemical or mechanical transformation, the nature of awareness is not implicated in the shuffling of material particles from one place or another. Any natural force can be used to do that. We have no scientific reason to insist that conscious participation and aesthetic appreciation is derived from some simpler functioning of complex systems. To the contrary, ‘complexity’, and ‘system’ can only make sense in the context of a window of perception and attention. Without some teleological intent to see one part as part of a whole, and to compare remembered events with current perceptions, there is no such thing as ‘function’ at all.
There are several important points wrapped up in this question, which I will try to sum up.
1. The failure to consider consciousness metaphysically.
This is the most important and most intractable issue, for three reasons:
- because it is difficult for anyone to try to put their mind outside of mind. It’s annoying, and winds up feeling foolish and disoriented.
- because it is difficult in particular for the very people who need most to get past the difficulty. I have found that most people who are good with logic and scientific reasoning are not necessarily capable of doing what others can. The skillset appears to be neurological, like handedness or gender orientation.
- because those who do have difficulty with thinking this way are often not used to intellectual challenges that escape their grasp, their reaction is so defensive that they react with intolerance. It’s not their fault, but it cannot be cured it seems. Some people cannot see 3-D Magic Eye art. Some cannot program their way out of a paper bag. In this case it is the ability to consider consciousness from a prospective rather than a retrospective view which can prove so inaccessible to so many people, that frothing at the mouth and babbling about unicorns, magic, and the supernatural is considered a reasonable and scientific, skeptical response. Of course, it is none of those things, but it takes a lot of patience and courage to be able to recognize one’s own prejudices, especially when we are used to being the ones telling others about their biases.
2. The taboo against metaphysics, panpsychism, and transrationality
Long after Einstein, Gödel, and Heisenberg shattered the Humpty Dumpty certainties of classical math and physics, we are still trying to piece him back together. Regardless of how much we learn about the strange properties of matter, time, energy, biology, and neurology, there are a huge number of very intelligent people who are convinced that we will only know the truth about the universe when it all looks like a vast deterministic mechanism.
The compulsion to reduce awareness to passive mathematical or physical states is ironic, given that the defense of automaticity is often accompanied by very hands on personal intention. Even when it is pointed out that arguing against free will is futile (since someone without free will could not change their own opinion about it even if they wanted to, let alone someone else’s opinion), the mind of the determined determinist will always find a way of insist upon being in the right, even when they are ultimately sawing of the limb that they are sitting on.
When it comes to anything that suggests the possibility of non-human awareness, many people not only become personally uncomfortable, but they become socially uncomfortable as well. The taboo against unconventional views on science (even when backed by anthropological universality) is so pervasive and xenophobic that it is career suicide for a working scientist to publicly acknowledge them in any but the most condescending tones.
3. The pathetic fallacy
The pathetic fallacy is to take a metaphor in which some inanimate object is given a human quality (“The camera loves you”), and take it literally. While I count myself among those who once saw computation and pattern as being the only ingredient necessary for awareness or life, my understanding now is that no pattern can exist without a capacity for pattern recognition. The ability to receive and make sense of the real world is not a matter of generic relations of disembodied bits of “information”, but is in fact the concrete reality of the cosmos. The universe does not exist for us humans, but it cannot exist as silent, unconscious, intangible physics for billions of years and then suddenly invent the whole of sensation, emotion, intuition, cognition, etc, just for some hominids on this backwater planet. It now strikes me as profoundly anthropocentric to imagine that the entire universe could be devoid of perceptual content until life evolved.
In my view, the universe itself is nothing but a continuum of qualities of consciousness. These qualities, however, relate to experienced contexts. We cannot take the human-ness out of a human and put it into a machine. Biology has mechanisms and performs computation, but if that’s all it was doing then the inside of the brain would look like logic, not like sex and violence and musical theater.
Unintentional Symbolism: * and #
Part of my approach to making new sense of the universe involves indulging in meditations on unintentional symbolism. Any pattern that catches my attention is a potential subject for intuition voodoo. Usually it pays off eventually, even when it seems absurd at first.
In this case, I was thinking about the # and * symbols that were inserted into our visual culture obliquely, as extra buttons on the telephone which flanked the 0. Taking this as my cue to relate this to the multisense continuum, I compared the symbols graphically, etymologically, and semantically.
The pound sign (hash, hashtag, number sign) seems to me a dead ringer for the Western-mechanistic pole of the continuum, while the asterisk (star) fits quite nicely as the Oriental-animistic pole.
Here’s how it breaks down:
# – number sign, so quantitative and generic. The symbol is one of four lines crossing each other at right angles to yield nine implicit regions of space. The slant provides a suggestion of orientation – a forward lean that disambiguates spatial bias and implies, subliminally, an arrow of time.
In the age of Twitter and Instagram, the hashtag has become an important cultural influence. It is interesting with respect to mechanism in that it refers to accessing a machine’s sorting algorithms. It is a note to the network of how this term should be handled. We have appropriated this satirically so that we recapture it for our own entertainment, but also as a kind of show of affection for and familiarity with the technology.
In direct contrast, the * is am icon which is used to interrupt one level of attention to direct the reader to another level – a footnote. Instead of relating to numbers, the * is a wildcard that can be related to any string. It stands for “all that is preceded by or follows”. Contrary to the cellular modularity of #, the * is a mandala. It implies kaliedoscopic sensibility and fractal elaboration. It is a symbol of radiance, growth, life, unity, etc.
There’s some interesting threads that connect the * with mathematical terms such as Kleene closure (more commonly known as the free monoid construction). Just the words ‘free monoid construction’ ring in my ears as an echo of what I call solitrophy – the constructive progress of teleological unity…the creation and solution of problems.
Also the use of *asterisk* for heightened emphasis links it to the significance of euphoria or magnified feeling (and the euphoria that is associated with significance or magnified prestige/importance). Wikipedia mentions the use of # by editors to represent where space should be added on galley proofs. The use of * is, by contrast associated with repetition of a particular thing – a replication. This is a tenuous but deep connection to the origins of space and time in the difference between syntactic-public sense and semantic-private sense.
The name ‘pound sign’ seems to be fairly mysterious. It does not seem to be related conclusively to either the English currency or the Avoirdupois weight. Both references, however, have very tempting subliminal associations to the Western pole of empirical domination. On the other side, the name asterisk means ‘little star’, from Greek and Latin. I can read into that a reference to ‘as above, so below’, as the twinkling point of light reproduces in miniature that which is the grand solar source of life on Earth.
Multisense Realism 
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