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Making Sense of Computation
In my view, matter and energy are the publicly reflected tokens* of sense and motive respectively. As human experiences, we are a complicated thing to try to use as an example – like trying to learn arithmetic by starting with an enormous differential equation. When we look at a brain, we are using the eyes of a simian body. That’s what the experience of a person looks like when it is stepped all the way down from human experience, to animal experience, to cellular experience, to molecular experience, and all the way back up to the animal experience level. Plus we are seeing it from the wrong angle. If I’m right, experience is a measure of time, not space, so looking at the body associated with an experience that lasts 80 or 100 years from a sampling rate of a few milliseconds would be a radically truncated view, even if we were looking at it in its native, subjective form. Every moment we are alive, we are surfing on a wave that has been growing since our birth – growing not just in synch with clock time, but changing in response to the significance of the experiences in which we participate directly. This is what I mean by sense. A concretely real accumulation of experience, a single wave in constant modulation as the local surface of an arbitrarily deep ocean.
Information is not sense, and neither is it matter or energy. Information is the shadow of all of these, of their relation to each other, which is cast by sense. Information is like sense as far as it being neither substantial nor insubstantial, but it is the opposite of sense also. Matter, energy, and information are all opposite to each other and opposite to sense. They are the projections of sense. If you break down the word information into three bites, the “in” would be sensory input, the ‘form’ would be ‘matter-space’ and the ‘ation’ would be ‘energy-time’. When most people think about information though, they undersignify the input/output aspect, the “in”, – which is sense, and conflate consciousness with senseless formations. Formations with no participating perceiver are non-sense and no-thing.
The difference between sense and information is that sense is anchored tangibly in the totality of events in all of history. It is the meta-firmament; the Absolute, and it potentially makes sense of itself in every sense modality. Information only makes sense from one particular angle or method of interpretation. It is a facade. As soon as information is removed from its context, its ungrounded, superficial nature is exposed. Information so removed does not react or adapt to make itself understood – it is sterile and evacuated of feeling or being. It is purely a feeling being’s idea of doing or knowing and does not exist independently of its ‘host’. Because of this it is tempting to conceptualize information as self-directing memes, but that would only be true figuratively. In an absolute sense, memes are a figure-ground inversion, i.e it puts the cart before the horse and sucks us into strong computationalism and the Pathetic fallacy. From what I can see, information has no autonomy, no motive. It is an inert recording of past motives and sensations.
Previously, I have written about computation, numbers, mathematics as being the flattest category of qualia. Flattest in the sense of being almost purely an tool for knowing or doing that has to borrow rely on being output in some aesthetic form to yield any feeling or ‘being’.
Computation can be represented publicly through material things like positions of beads on an abacus, the turns of mechanical gears, the magnetic dispositions of microelectronic switches, the opening and closing of valves in a plumbing system, the timing and placement of traffic signals on a street grid, etc. All of these bodies rely on the ability to detect or sense each others passive states and to respond to them in some motor effect. It makes no difference how it is represented, because the function will be the same. This is precisely the opposite of consciousness, in which rich aesthetic details provide the motivation and significance. Evolutionary functions are never nakedly revealed as a-signifying generic processes. For humans, food and sex are profoundly aesthetic, social engagements, not just automatic functions.
Computation can also be represented publicly through symbols. One step removed from literally embodied aesthetics, computation can be transferred figuratively between a person’s thoughts and written symbols through the sensory-motor medium of mathematical literacy. We can imagine that there is a similar ferrying of meaning between the mathematician’s thoughts and some non-local source of arithmetic truth. Arithmetic truth seems to us certain, rational, internally consistent, universal but it is also impersonal. Arithmetic laws cannot be made proprietary or changed. They are eternal and unchanging. We can only borrow local copies of numbers for temporary use, but they cannot be touched or controlled. They represent disembodied knowledge, but no doing, no being, and no feeling.
In the first sense, mathematics is represented by mechanical positions of public bodies, and therefore almost completely ‘flat’ qualitatively. Binary interactions of go/on-stop/off have no sense to them other than loops and recursive enumeration. In the second sense, a written mathematical language adds more qualia, clothing the naked digital states in conceptual symbols. The language of mathematics allows the thinker to bridge the gap between public doing of machines and private knowing of arithmetic truth.
Although strong computationalists will disagree, it seems to me that a deeper understanding reveals of computation reveals that arithmetic truth itself requires an even deeper set of axioms which are pre-arithmetic. The third sense of mathematics is the first sense we encounter. Before there is mathematical literacy, there is counting. Counting to three gives way to counting on fingers (digits), as we learn the essential skills of mental focus required. As we learn more about odd and even numbers, addition and subtraction, the aesthetics of symmetry and succession are not so much introduced into the psyche as foreign concepts, but are recovered by the psyche as natural, familiar expectations. Math, like music, is felt. Before we can use it to help us know essential truths or to cause existential effects, we have to be able to participate in counting and the solving of problems in our mind. When we do these kinds of problems, our awareness must be very focused. We are accessing an impersonal level of truth. Our human bodies and lives are distractions. Machines and computers have always been conspicuously lacking in what people refer to as ‘soul’, or ‘warmth’, feeling, empathy, personality, etc. This is consistent with the view of computation that I am trying to explain. Whatever warmth or personality it can carry must originate in a being – an experience which is anchored in the aesthetic presentation of sense rather than the infinite representation of information.
*or orthomodular inversions to be more precise
Bergsonian-Deleuzian Multiplicity and Gaede’s Ropes
Looking at the Bergsonian-Deleuzian concept of multiplicity, I can see that it shares the same underlying dialectic as Multisense Realism. I noticed that if I add some insight from Bill Gaede’s Rope model of the atom (YouTube 04:25), I can map electromagnetism to the Continuous-Discrete framework of Bergson.
Where Gaede conceives of a literal thread across the diameter and around the circumference of the atomic nucleus, I think that it should be flipped. Rather than a literal thread I see a capacity for felt participation: ‘motive’ or maybe ‘efference’. Electricity is not a thread across the atom, it the experience of jumping from one atom to another. The atoms themselves would not look like balls of magnetic yarn, but feel like obstacles within the private sense field or ‘afference’ of each atom. This corresponds to magnetic field and Difference in kind, however, it’s a loose correspondence. Sense and motive is electromagnetism from the inside, but it is also gravity and electromagnetism, feeling and knowing, being and doing. It’s the absolute fundamental.
Electricity, in the Gaede model, would correspond to that which defines the literal, linear, direct aesthetic. The symmetry and juxtaposition across the diameter of the atom appears to us as a quantum gear shifting mechanism. That’s because we are detecting it from the outside with other bodies, so there is always a spacetime gap to be hopped across. The loop-like aspect of the atom, by contrast It is both a spherical range of sensitivity in public space and a circuit of oscillating affect or disposition (private experience). To make a long story story short, the atom, in my model, is an interaction with continuous-private-aesthetic qualities and discrete-public-anesthetic (skipping) qualities, aka qualia and quanta. The larger cosmological picture involves the division of qualia from the Absolute (Qua), the diffraction of quanta from qualia (spacetime existence), and the saturation of reconstituted qualia (quanta existential spacetime entropy stripped out) on return to the Absolute.
This can work for a neuron as well as an atom, but again, loosely. Each frame of reference has its own unique vocabulary. A neuron is figuratively like Bill Gaede’s atom model. A galaxy or a solar system is similar also, as is the alchemical Caduceus, the chakra system, the ankh… None of them are identical, but the theme is similar. Winding and tightening, spinning and accelerating, contracting and relaxing.
Ehh, How Do You Say…
The use of fillers in language are not limited to spoken communication.
In American Sign Language, UM can be signed with open-8 held at chin, palm in, eyebrows down (similar to FAVORITE); or bilateral symmetric bent-V, palm out, repeated axial rotation of wrist (similar to QUOTE).
This is interesting to me because it helps differentiate communication which is unfolding in time and communication which is spatially inscribed. When we speak informally, most people use a some filler words, sounds, and gestures. Some support for embodied cognition theories has come from studies which show that
“Gestural Conceptual Mapping (congruent gestures) promotes performance. Children who used discrete gestures to solve arithmetic problems, and continuous gestures to solve number estimation, performed better. Thus, action supports thinking if the action is congruent with the thinking.”
The effective gestures that they refer to aren’t exactly fillers, because they mimic or indicate conceptual experiences in a full-body experience. The body is used as a literal metaphor. Other gestures however, seem relatively meaningless, like filler. There seems to be levels of filler usage which range in frequency and intensity from the colorful to the neurotic in which generic signs are used as ornament/crutch, or like a carrier tone to signify when the speaker is done speaking, (know’am’sayin?’).
In written language, these fillers are generally only included ironically or to simulate conversational informality. Formal writing needs no filler because there is no relation in real time between participating subjects. The relation with written language was traditionally as an object. The book can’t control whether the reader continues to read or not, so there is no point in gesturing that way. With the advent of real time text communication, we have experimented with emoticons and abbreviations to animate the frozen medium of typed characters. In this article, John McWhorter points out that ‘LOL isn’t funny anymore’ – that it has entered sort of a quasi-filler state where it can mean many different things or not much of anything.
In terms of information entropy, fillers are maximally entropic. Their meaning is uncertain, elastic, irrelevant, but also, and this is cryptic but maybe significant…they point to the meta-conversational level. They refer back to the circumstance of the conversation rather than the conversation itself. As with the speech carrier tone fillers like um… or ehh…, or hand gestures, they refer obliquely to the speaker themselves, to their presence and intent. They are personal, like a signature. Have you ever noticed that when people you have known die that it is their laugh which is most immediately memorable? Or their quirky use of fillers. High information entropy ~ High personal input. Think of your signature compared to typing your name. Again, signatures are occurring in real time, they represent a moment of subjective will being expressed irrevocably. The collapse of information entropy which takes place in formal, traditional writing is a journey from the private perpetual here of subjectivity to the world of public objects. It is a passage* from the inner semantic physics, through initiative or will, striking a thermodynamically irreversible collision with the page. That event, I think, is the true physical nature of public time – instants where private affect is projected as public effect.
Speakers who are not very fluent in a language seem to employ a lot of fillers. For one thing they buy time to think of the right word, and they signal an appeal for patience, not just on a mechanical level (more data to come, please stand by), but on a personal level as well (forgive me, I don’t know how to say…). Is it my imagination or are Americans sort of an exception to the rule, preferring stereotypically to yell words slowly rather than using the ‘ehh’ filler. Maybe that’s not true, but the stereotype is instructive as it implies an association between being pushy and adopting the more impersonal, low-entropy communication style.
This has implications for AI as well. Computers can blink a cursor or rotate an hourglass icon at you, and that does convey some semblance of personhood to us, I think, but is it real? I say no. The computer doesn’t improve its performance by these gestures to you. What we might subtly read as interacting with the computer personally in those hourglass moments is a figment of the Pathetic fallacy rather than evidence of machine sentience. It has a high information entropy in the sense that we don’t know what the computer is doing exactly, if it’s going to lock up or what, but it has no experiential entropy. It is superficially animated and reflects no acknowledgement to the user. Like the book, it is thermodynamically irreversible as far as the user is concerned. We can only wait and hope that it stops hourglassing.
The meanings of filler words in different languages are interesting too. They say things like “you see/you know”, “it means”, “like”, “well”, and “so”. They talk about things being true or actual. “Right?” “OK?”. Acknowledgment of inter-subjective synch with the objective perception. Agreement. Positive feedback. “Do you copy?” relates to “like”…similarity or repetition. Symmetric continuity. Hmm.
*orthomodular transduction to be pretentiously precise
Absolute View vs Western View: Comparing Supreme Ultimate Diagrams
Contrasting two models of consciousness: The Multisense Realism model above uses an Absolute view, which accounts for all known phenomena, subjective and objective. Postulating a root “Qua” (aka, the Absolute, Totality) from which qualia are divided through quanta, Quanta is conceived of as a constraint on Qua, a partition within it. Qua is sense capacity or presence, and so Quanta is the diminished reflection of that capacity…non-sense, entropy, uncertainty, and an expectation of absence. I am trying to show this as the horizontal arrows between qualia, indicating that quanta is nothing more than a kind of negotiation protocol which allows qualia to coexist in the same public space while retaining their private integrity. This is a complete reversal of the Western view, which features Quanta in the role of Qua, as the arithmetic-logical source of all phenomena.
On the left side of the diagram, there is a very general sketch of how Qua recovers itself ‘with interest’ as a qualitative enhancement – a consequence of having reunited on the other side of entropy-disorientation. On a human level, our experience yields a net human significance. Civilization is the residue left behind, a collective perceptual inertial of technology which echoes the individual’s narrative journey of exposure to the exteriorized spaces and the celebrated return home. Significance is literally a promiscuity of association among qualia, a depth of feeling and meaning which compels participation. My view is that this principle motivates on many, if not every level of the cosmos, and is not limited to human beings or animals (even though arguably significance is exponentially more…significant for human beings, at least in our own eyes).
The Western view is a local rather than Absolute view. It does not account for sense or order itself, rather it begins from the assumption of physical matter and works backward to primitive mathematical functions. There are question marks included on the links which seem poorly understood or unjustified by the model as a whole. These include:
Why does geometry exist? I propose this as the Death of Computationalism. Along with the lack of support for Real numbers in computation, the universe or multiverse as a Turing emulation fails to account for the existence of forms like lines, circles, angles, etc. We know from our own computing and calculating devices that it is not necessary to physically draw a triangle in order to approximate correct computations about numbers which could correspond to triangular coordinates, so it really doesn’t make sense that any cosmic computation could or would invent geometric presentations of any kind. We don’t even need to get into questions of qualia, because computationalism fails to explain any sort of aesthetic forms to embody its functions. Mathematics is disembodied and anesthetic, and it works perfectly that way – no need for any strange magical fanfare.
Why do mathematical relations and laws give rise to physics? It’s all very well to have forms and functions mingle with each other as articulate mechanisms, but why should they ‘materialize’ as space-time, matter and energy?
The question of why consciousness exists when it does not appear to have any particular advantage over unconscious mechanism is a mystery. It is very difficult not to smuggle in our own retrospective view of consciousness as having enormous utility for our survival, but this is in no way an endorsement from the prospective view. If our immune system can orchestrate phenomenally complex responses to pathogens without a conscious experience attached to it, then why would a hominid’s humdrum quest for sustenance and reproduction lend itself to such an absurdly ornate aesthetic phenomenon? Indeed, if evolution can make a human brain, with all the trimmings, using unconscious methods, surely the operation of that brain would be better suited to that tried and true option.
The final question mark is related, but not identical. Even if you have consciousness as an option for some reason, and that option works better for humans than turtles or clouds of methane for some reason, why should such a phenomenon as consciousness produce feelings which are other than a record of the physical events which they represent? Why should there be different kinds of sensory experiences when all logical functions can be reduced more effectively to a single binary format of data processing? This alternative to reality is cast aside from the Western view, but what metaphysical never-never land is it cast to? How did we get outside of the real universe and into an ‘illusion’?
Biocentrism Demystified: A Response to Deepak Chopra and Robert Lanza’s Notion of a Conscious Universe.
1. I hope we all agree that our information about facts is incomplete, and will always remain so, at least in the foreseeable future.2. The only reality that makes sense to me is what Stephen Hawking calls ‘model-dependent reality’ (MDR).3. Other uses of the word ‘reality’ (other than MDR) imply ‘absolute reality’. If you disagree with this statement, please try defining ‘absolute reality’ in a logical way, using words which mean the same thing to everybody. My belief is that you will not be able to do that, and that means that MDR is all you have for discussion purposes.4. Naturally, there can be many models of reality. So which of the MDRs is the right one, and who will decide that? In view of (1) above, this is a hopeless situation, and that is why I avoid getting into philosophical discussions.5. At any time in human history, there are more humans favouring a particular MDR over other MDRs. Let us call it the majority MDR (MMDR).
6. An MMDR may well prove to be wrong when we humans acquire more information; from then we have a new MMDR, till even that gets demolished.
7. I believe that materialism is a better MDR than its opposite (called idealism, subjectivism, or whatever). For more on this, please read my article at http://nirmukta.com/2011/06/19/stephen-hawkings-grand-design-for-us/. Here is an excerpt from that article:
‘ There are several umbrella words like ‘consciousness’, ‘reality’, etc., which have never been defined rigorously and unambiguously. H&M argue that we can only have ‘model-dependent reality’, and that any other notion of reality is meaningless.
Does an object exist when we are not viewing it? Suppose there are two opposite models or theories for answering this question (and indeed there are!). Which model of ‘reality’ is better? Naturally the one which is simpler and more successful in terms of its predicted consequences. If a model makes my head spin and entangles me in a web of crazy complications and contradictory conclusions, I would rather stay away from it. This is where materialism wins hands down. The materialistic model is that the object exists even when nobody is observing it. This model is far more successful in explaining ‘reality’ than the opposite model. And we can do no better than build models of whatever there is understand and explain.
In fact, we adopt this approach in science all the time. There is no point in going into the question of what is absolute and unique ‘reality’. There can only be a model-dependent reality. We can only build models and theories, and we accept those which are most successful in explaining what we humans observe collectively. I said ‘most successful’. Quantum mechanics is an example of what that means. In spite of being so crazily counter-intuitive, it is the most successful and the most repeatedly tested theory ever propounded. I challenge the creationists and their ilk to come with an alternative and more successful model of ‘reality’ than that provided by quantum mechanics. (I mention quantum mechanics here because the origin of the universe, like every other natural phenomenon, was/is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. The origin of the universe was a quantum event.)
A model is a good model if: it is elegant; it contains few arbitrary or adjustable parameters; it agrees with and explains all the existing observations; and it makes detailed and falsifiable predictions.’
>”Other uses of the word ‘reality’ (other than MDR) imply ‘absolute reality’. If you disagree with this statement, please try defining ‘absolute reality’ in a logical way,”
Absolute reality is the capacity for perceptual participation, aka, sensory-motor presentation, aka qua(lia-nta). That is the bare-metal prerequisite for all forms of order or matter, subject or object. Not only metaphysics but meta-ontology. The cosmos is not something which is, the cosmos actually invents “is” by “seeming not to merely seem”.
Please try defining ‘model’ in a way that does not assume some form of sensory presentation and participation. What is a model except a sensory experience which seems to refer our minds to another?
While I agree that no participant within a given experience has an absolute perspective of that experience, I disagree that the MDR is a solipsistic ‘model’ which is generated locally. The fact that we recognize the relativism of perceptual inertial frames (PIF = my term for MDR) is itself a clue that the deeper reality is this very capacity for relativism of perspective. Although the relativism itself may be the only final commonality among all perspectives, that commonality is not a tabula rasa. We can say things about this ‘common sense’ – things which have to do with contrasts and inverted symmetry, with proximity and intensity, relationship, identity, and division. These principles are beneath all forms and functions, all sensations and ideas, substances and patterns, and through them, we can infer more elusive fundamentals. Pattern recognition which is beyond pattern. Gestalt habits which are beyond mereology or cardinality…higher octaves of simplicity. Trans-rational, non-quantitative properties.
All mechanisms and all physics rely on a root expectation of sanity and continuity – of causality and memory, position, recursive enumeration, input/output, etc. If you are going to get rid of absolute reality, then you have to explain the emergence of the first MDR – what is modeling? Why does the universe model itself rather than simply ‘be’ what it is?
My solution is to accept that this assumed ‘modeling’ is physics itself, and that physics is experienced-embodied relativity. In the absolute sense, matter a special case of a more general (non-human) perception or sense. Not a continuum or a ZPE vacuum flux, but ordinary readiness to experience private sensory affects and produce (intentionally or not) public facing motor effects. What the universe uses to model is not a mathematical abstraction floating in a vacuum, but a concrete participatory phenomena, which we know as human beings to be sensory-motor participation. Not everything is alive biologically, but everything that seems to us to exist naturally as matter probably has a panexperiential interaction associated with it on some level of description. It’s about turning the field-force model inside out, turning away from the de-personalized objectivity of the last few centuries and toward a realization of personal involvement in genuine presentations (customized and filtered though they may be) rather than assembled representations.
The MMDR should not embrace materialism or idealism by default because one seems simpler than the other. We should accept only a solution which honors the full spectrum of possible experiences in the cosmos, from the most empirically public to the most esoterically private. This does not mean weighting the ravings of one lunatic the same as a law of gravity, but rather acknowledging that if there is a lunatic, then the universe is in some sense potentially crazy also, and within that crazy is something even more interesting and universal than gravity…an agenda for aesthetic proliferation… a Multisense Realism.
Illusion is a meaningless term in science as far as I can see. Illusion is about an experience failing to meet expectations of consistency across perceptual frames (models)…except that we know that inconsistency is likely the only such consistency, beyond the root common sense. Whatever illusions we experience as people are not necessarily absent on other levels of inspection. Quantum illusions, classical illusions, biological illusions, etc. Every instrument relies on conditions which create their own confirmation bias, including the human mind. We should not, however, make the mistake of allowing non-human, inanimate instruments tell us what our reality is. They can’t see our consciousness in the first place, remember? Our human equipment is not as sensitive in detecting public phenomena, we cannot see more than a small range of E-M, etc, but neither is a gas spectrometer sensitive in detecting human privacy.
We see that when we adopt the frame of mechanism, idealism seems pathologically naive and if we adopt the frame of idealism, mechanism seems pathologically cynical. This should be regarded along the lines of the double-slit test: evidence that our assumptions are not the whole story, and to seek a deeper unity than mechanistic or idealistic appearances.
A Deeper Look at Peripheral Vision
Often, when peripheral vision is being explained, an image like the one on the right is often used to show how only a small area around our point of focus is defined in high resolution. The periphery is shown to be blurry. While this gets the point across, I think that it actually obscures the subtle nature of perception.
If I focus on some part of the image on the left, while it is true that my visual experience of the other quadrants is diminished, it is somehow less available experientially rather than degraded visually. At all times I can clearly tell the difference between the quality of left image and the right image. If I focus on a part of the right hand image, the unfocused portion does not blur further into a uniform grey, but retains the suggestion of separate fuzzy units.
If peripheral vision were truly a blur, I would also expect that when focusing on the left hand image, the peripheral boxes would look more like the one on the right, but it doesn’t. I can see that the peripherized blocks of the left image are not especially blurry. No matter how I squint or unfocus or push both images wayy into the periphery of my sight, I can easily tell that the two images are quite different. I can’t resolve detail, but I can see that there is potentially detail to be resolved. If I look directly at any part of the blurry image on the right I can easily count the fuzzies when I look at them, even through they are blurred. By contrast, with the image on the left, I can’t count the number of blocks or dots that are there even though I can see that they are block-like. There is an attenuation of optical acuity, but not in a way which diminishes the richness of the visual textures. There is uncertainty but only in a top-down way. We still have a clear picture of the image as a whole, but the parts which we aren’t looking at directly are seen as in a dream – distinct but generic, and psychologically slippery.
What I think this shows that there are two different types of information-related entropy and two different categories of physics – one public and quantitative, and one private and qualitative or aesthetic. Peripheral vision is not a lossy compression in any aesthetic sense. If perception were really driven by bottom up processing exclusively, we should be able to reproduce the effect of peripheral vision in an image literally, but we can’t. The best we can do is present this focused-in-the-center, blurry-everywhere-else kind of image which suggests peripheral vision figuratively, but the aesthetic quality of the peripheral experience cannot be represented.
I suggest that the capacity to see is more than a detection of optical information, and it is not a projection of a digital simulation (otherwise we would be able to produce the experience literally in an image). Seeing is the visual quality of attention, not a quantity of data. It is not only a functional mechanism to acquire data, it is more importantly an aesthetic experience.
Cracking Intelligence and Wisdom
The difference between intelligence and wisdom, (aside from rolling up an D&D character), parallels the distinctions which have been dividing philosophy of mind from the beginning. Intelligence implies a cognitive ability in a technical and literal sense – a talent for understanding factual relations which apply to the public world. The products of intelligence are transformative, but famously amoral. Frankenstein and 2001’s HAL both embody our fear of the monstrous side of technology, of intelligence ‘run amok’ with hubris. This is a rich vein for science fiction. Beings built from the outside in – an inhuman mind from inanimate substance. Zombies, killer robots, aliens. Giant insects or weaponized planetoids. In all cases the impersonal, mechanistic side of consciousness is out of proportion and humanity is dwarfed or under-signified.
Intelligence is supposed to be impersonal and mechanistic though. Its facts and figures are not supposed to be local to human experience. The sophisticated view which developed through Western intelligence not only does not require us to value human subjectivity. It insists, to the contrary, that all human awareness is a contamination to the pristine reality of factual evidence – objects which simply are ‘as they are’ rather than merely ‘seem to be’. All human awareness, that is, except for the reasoning which progresses science itself.
Wisdom, while overlapping with intelligence as set of cognitive talents and skills, is not as clear cut as intelligence. Wisdom does not yield the kind of public results which intelligence is intended to produce, because wisdom is not focused on public objects but on private experiences. Both intelligence and wisdom attempt to step back from the local phenomenal world to seek deeper patterns, but intelligence seeks them from indirect experiences outside of the body, while wisdom seeks within the psyche, within the library of possible personal experiences. The library of wisdom, unlike that of intelligence, is in the language of the personal. Characters and stories which work on multiple levels of figurative association. The privacy of wisdom extends to its own forms, leading to a lot of mystery for the sake of mystery which those minds on the other side of the aisle find deeply offensive. Intelligence only uses symbols as generic pointers – to literally refer to a specific quantifiable variable. Intelligence stacks symbols in sequence as language and formulas. Wisdom uses symbols as poetry and art, evocative images which work on multiple levels of awareness and understanding but not the kind of fixed understanding of intelligence. The understanding of wisdom can be open ended and elliptical, absurd, poignant, etc.
The deepest kinds of wisdom are said to be ‘timeless’. Unlike the high value that intelligence places on up to the minute information, wisdom seems to appreciate with age. Rather than being seen as increasingly irrelevant, ancient stories and turns of phrase are revered and celebrated for their pedigree. There is an almost palpable weight to the anachronistic language and images. The metaphors are somehow more potent when delivered by a long dead prophet. This favoring the dead happens with more modern quotations too. Maybe it’s because they are no longer around to put their quotation in context, or maybe it just takes a while for greatness to make itself known against the background of more ephemeral noise.
In any case, the realm of wisdom is a decidedly human realm of human experience. It is a talent for recognizing and encapsulating common sense and long life, with subtlety and significance for all people and all lives. Wisdom is about being able to appreciate our fortunes as individuals and members of society. Wisdom helps us find an objective vantage point within the history of our personal experience from which to see and evaluate the ups and downs of life passing. Through wisdom, we can see the bigger picture in our own trials and tribulations and the rise and fall of civilizations. We can see how every moment can change seeming fiction into seeming fact and back. Wisdom is subjective and mystical, but so too were many phenomena in the natural world before science. The promise of Western intelligence is to de-mystify they world, to remove subjectivity, but in addressing subjectivity itself the intellect meets its match.
Frustrated with the prospect of decomposing its source into objects, intelligence turns to a kind of inside-out subjectivity in some variety of functionalism. Subjectivity, from the Western perspective of public space as reality, is nullified. It can only be disqualified as an ‘emergent property’ or ‘illusion’ of some other deterministic process of matter or ‘information’ – a side effect somehow, of what already seems to know itself perfectly well and function competently without resorting to any fanciful aesthetic ‘feelings’ or ‘flavors’. If arithmetic or the laws of physics work automatically, then they don’t need a special show of aesthetic phenomena to lubricate their own wheels, yet, thinks the left-brained Western mind, there is simply no other possibility. Consciousness must arise as some sort of accident among colliding collections of complex computations.
This is a problem, since it only pushes dualism from the Cartesian center of tolerance into the ghettos of the untouchable. Subjective experience is now confined in science to untouchable, uncountable metaphysical aethers of simulation; epiphenomenal dead ends which had no meaningful beginning.
The Western mind cannot tolerate being put into a box by any phenomena which it cannot put into a box itself. The irony of modern physics of course, is that all of the boxes which have been piled up so far seem to indicate their origin in circularity. A microcosm of disembodied Cheshire Cat smiles…determinable indeterminisms. On the astronomical scale, suddenly the bulk of the matter and energy in the universe has been re-categorized into darkness. The alchemist caps seem to have reappeared in science, but turned inside out. Western intelligence is no longer explaining the universe which we experience directly as participants, but is devoted to pursuing an alternate universe backstage which just so happens to identify human subjectivity as the only thing in the cosmos which is not actually real.
The current battle over TED, Sheldrake and Hancock is on the front line of the war between public-facing thinkers and private-facing thinkers, between body-space visionaries and life-time visionaries. Both sides play out a reflexive antagonism – a shadow projection which extends beyond the personal. Each side hears the other in their own limited terms, and neither one is able to communicate the missing perspective of the other. The argument continues because both fail to understand the missing piece of their own perspective and their mode of thinking has devolved into an aggressive-defensive vicious circle of un-wisdom and un-intelligence.
At this point in our political and in our intellectual life, the midpoint has been skewed so far from the center (to the West in science, and to the Right in politics), that any proposal which engages other perspectives is seen as extremism. Any new information is mistaken for treasonous compromise. Whether that extremism is in the mechanistic or the animistic direction, the result is very similar.
I would love to see a study done comparing the brain activity of so called ‘militant atheists’ and ‘religious fundamentalists’, to see how really far apart they are. My scientific hypothesis is that no neuroscientist will be able to look at the fMRIs of the two camps in a double blind test and reliably tell the difference. If that were true, what would it mean about protecting science from unscientific ideas if you cannot prove the scientific validity of thoughts from a brain scan?
Improving The Hard Problem
I have been using the term ‘aesthetic’ a lot lately in specifying the qualitative aspects of consciousness, and I feel like it clarifies one of the core issues. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is confusing to people whose mindset is innately compelled to define consciousness as a collection of functions in the first place. It therefore comes out nonsensical when philosophers like David Chalmers talk about questioning why there is such a thing as ‘what it is like’ to have an experience, since for the functionalist, ‘what it is like’ to perform a function is simply the self-same set of events which comprise the function.
Maybe it helps to define ‘what it is like’ in more specific terms, which I think would be scientifically described as private sensory-motive participation but informally can be understood as aesthetic phenomena. The key is to notice the asymmetric relation between aesthetics and function in that function can improve aesthetics, but aesthetics can *never* improve function. The Hard Problem then becomes a problem of how to explain aesthetics (aka qualia) in a universe of functions which can neither benefit by them nor physically generate them as far as we can tell (unless there is a miniature kitchen near our olfactory bulbs baking microscopic apple pies whenever we remember the smell of apple pie).
The fact that aesthetics are not possible to explain in terms of a function, but that functions can be conceived of aesthetically is unfamiliar and those who have that innately functional mindset will balk at the notion of aesthetic supremacy, but this is the future of science – letting go of the familiar, or in this case, rediscovering the literally familiar (ordinary consciousness) in an unfamiliar way (as the fabric of existence).
When we talk about consciousness then, what we really mean is the aesthetic experience of being and doing, of perceiving and participating. This experience is extended publicly as spatio-temporal form-functions (STFF), but those phenomena are not capable of appreciating themselves. Just as a puppet can be made to seem to walk and talk like a person, forms can be made to interact by hijacking their natural low-level aesthetics to represent our high-level expectations. The letters on this screen are just such an example. I am using a lot of technology to generate contrasting pixels on your video screen, which you will experience as letters, words, and sentences.
Each level of description – as typeface, spellings, grammars, evoke aesthetic micro-experiences. The closer these descriptions get to your native scale – the personal scale, the more that your personal experience, feelings, and understanding influences the aesthetics of all of the sub-personal experiences within reading the language. What you see of the letters is because of your experience of learning to read English, not because of any special power that these words have to project meaning. By themselves, these words and letters do nothing to each other. They are figures for use in human communication – they have no functional aspect, i.e. they are *only* aesthetic. This is why a computer has no use for human languages, or even programming languages. Computation requires no figures or forms of any kind, nor can it produce any forms or figures without borrowing some kind of STFF (with u in the middle, heh) from the ‘real world’. Otherwise there is a only the anesthetic concept of pure function – which is the exact opposite of representation by form, image, or quality, but is non-presentation through quantity.
Computation, or ‘Information Processing’ is the unconscious number crunching of automated, logical functionality. Information lacks aesthetic presence by definition – it is a purely conceptual understanding of instructed variables in motion. If there is a capacity for aesthetic appreciation to begin with, then computation can extend it and improve it. If there is no such capacity, then there is certainly no justification for adding it into computation, as automatic function cannot benefit in any way by appreciation of its own activity.
Multisense Realism 
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