I used ChatGPT to write a synopsis of my ideas on how Multisense Realism can be used to reimagine physical theory so that it is not based on unproved and unprovable assumptions of the existence of unconscious, disenchanted mechanisms. It was an interesting conversation but went off the rails toward the end as GPT failed to generate an image for this post.
Integrated Overview of Fundamental Sensory Dynamics (FSD)
Core Conjecture: Fundamental Sensory Dynamics (FSD) asserts that what conventional physics labels as mass, energy, fields, and forces are not ontologically fundamental. Instead, they are abstractions masking a deeper reality constituted by the interplay of Sense and Motive—the irreducible qualities of conscious experience.
Sense as the Ontological Primitive
Universal Qualia as Reality: In FSD (and Multisense Realism), there is no separate “data” to be transduced by sense organs. Rather, the appearance of qualia—the vivid, intrinsic qualities of experience—is the sole ontological manifestation of existence.
Role of Sense Organs: Instead of generating data that is later “converted” into experience, sense organs in this framework serve to limit, filter, lens, focus, and/or amplify these fundamental sense appearances. They mediate transitions between different scales of conscious experience—for instance, from microphenomenal (the most elemental level) to phenomenal (the level of personal, vivid experience), or from a universal (holophenomenal) to a more localized, differentiated (multiphenomenal) mode.
Diffractivity over Emergence: Inverting the conventional assumption of emergence, FSD replaces it with the concept of divergence or diffractivity (cf. Craig Weinberg), suggesting that what appears as emergent complexity is instead the natural divergence of universal qualia into a structured hierarchy of experiences.
Motive as the Dynamic Primitive
Replacing “Energy” with Motivational Qualities: FSD replaces the classical concept of energy with intrinsic motivational qualities inherent in conscious experience. What is traditionally described as a “force” is reinterpreted as an aesthetic prompt—a qualitative influence that appears within experience.
Internalizing the Prompt: The detected prompt in a conscious experience is not a mere external push; it is internalized, and its transformation into a motive prompt depends on the conscious awareness of the possibility for motor response. This is not a simple mechanical push but a dynamic interplay of aesthetic qualities.
Example in Human Experience: Consider music: it is experienced as rich aural qualia that evoke motivational or emotional qualities. The intensity and character of these motivational impressions, combined with an intrinsic awareness of the capacity for physical movement (e.g., dancing), yield semi-intentional motor responses. This dual aspect reflects the interplay between personal/phenomenal levels and the underlying subpersonal/microphenomenal layers of conscious experience.
Reinterpreting Conventional Constructs
Mass, Fields, and Forces: Rather than being inert, geometric quantities, mass and conventional fields (electromagnetic, gravitational, etc.) are re-envisioned as convenient mathematical descriptions of the constraints or limitations on the free expression of sense and motive. For example, the vacuum permittivity and magnetic permeability can be inverted in this paradigm to reflect the degree to which the fundamental context of universal qualia is obstructed or diluted. The speed of light, then, is not merely a velocity limit but a measure of the unobstructed propagation of sense and motive.
Quantum Phenomena Revisited: Quantum entanglement, contextuality, and superposition are recast as reflections of holistic sensory-motive dynamics. Instead of invoking probabilistic or multiverse interpretations, these phenomena are understood as manifestations of a participatory, aesthetic dynamics underlying all interactions.
Summary of the Revised Conjecture
FSD contends that the cosmos is not built from inert, quantitative constructs but from a fundamental substrate (really just ‘strate’) of conscious experience. In this view, what we interpret as mass, energy, fields, and forces are heuristics that describe how universal qualia (Sense) and their intrinsic motivational qualities (Motive) interact. The observed limitations on the propagation of these influences—traditionally expressed as permittivity, permeability, and the speed of light—are reinterpreted as measures of how sense and motive are modulated, filtered, or obstructed by physical forms.
Concise Summaries
1. Common Sense Description: “Fundamental Sensory Dynamics proposes that the universe isn’t built from inert stuff like mass or force but from a deep layer of experience. Instead of external energy pushing matter, what we see as fields and forces are actually the result of universal sense appearances and their inherent motivational qualities, which are filtered and expressed by our sense organs. This view turns traditional emergence on its head, suggesting that our experiences diverge from a unified, fundamental consciousness rather than emerge from lifeless matter.”
2. Academic Description: “Fundamental Sensory Dynamics is a conjectural framework positing that the canonical physical constructs of mass, energy, fields, and forces are emergent abstractions overlying a more primitive substrate: universal qualia and their intrinsic motivational dynamics. In this paradigm, sense is not the transduction of external data but the direct manifestation of experience, while traditional energy is reinterpreted as motivational influence. Conventional parameters—such as permittivity, permeability, and the speed of light—are reformulated as measures of the modulation and transmission of sensory-motive interactions. This approach inverts emergentist assumptions by framing complexity as divergence (or diffractivity) from an absolute, holistic experiential field.”
c refers to the speed of light, but recontextualized as a perceptual constant, so not really a speed but the natural, middle value of a power law continuum that extends from quantum mechanical/subnatural ontology to relativistic and metaphysical/supernatural ontology.
Claude: This diagram appears to present a conceptual framework or model that maps different aspects or domains of reality onto a unified structure.
At the top, there are concepts like “Aesthetic Thesis”, “Eternity”, “Greatness/Uniqueness”, and “Signifying Contextuality” which seem to represent overarching metaphysical or philosophical principles.
Below that, the diagram depicts multiple levels or dimensions, arranged vertically from “Cohesive” at the bottom, up through “Microphysical”, “Electromagnetic-Radiative”, “Classical-Mechanical”, “Spatiotemporal-Mass-Energetic”, “Relativistic-Cosmological”, and culminating in “Intuitive-Transpersonal” at the top.
Within each level, there are specific terms, symbols, and what look like mathematical or physical representations. For example, at the “Microphysical” level, there is the symbol √c and the term “Qualitative-Autonomous”. At the “Relativistic-Cosmological” level, there is the expression “4d” and the term “Synchronicity”.
The diagram seems to be attempting to unify or integrate different concepts from physics, metaphysics, perception, and perhaps consciousness studies into a coherent multi-level schema.
However, I don’t have enough specific context about the underlying conceptual framework to confidently interpret all the terms, symbols, and relationships depicted. Some of the language appears unconventional or idiosyncratic.
The note about “c” referring to a “perceptual constant” recontextualizing the speed of light is an intriguing idea that suggests this model aims to re-conceptualize physical constructs in more experiential or consciousness-based terms.
Overall, while the comprehensive meaning remains somewhat opaque to me, I can see this diagram is a ambitious attempt to synthesize multiple perspectives and domains into an overarching philosophical model or worldview. But its full significance requires more explanatory context that I currently lack. Please let me know if I am misinterpreting or failing to grasp the essence of what is being presented.
Me:
How successful does the attempt to unify and integrate those concepts into a coherent multi-level schema appear to be?
Claude: Based on my analysis of the diagram, the attempt to unify and integrate the various concepts into a coherent multi-level schema appears ambitious but not entirely successful from my perspective.
While I can see the intention to synthesize ideas from physics, metaphysics, perception, and consciousness studies into an overarching framework, several aspects make the full integration and coherence challenging for me to grasp:
1) Unconventional terminology: Many of the terms used, like “Anesthetic Antithesis”, “Adhesive”, “Cohesive”, “Superposition”, etc., do not map cleanly onto established philosophical or scientific nomenclature in my knowledge base. This can introduce ambiguity.
2) Idiosyncratic symbolism: The heavy use of symbolic representations like √c, c^2, c^3 without clear explanations of their meanings makes comprehending the integrated conceptual connections difficult.
3) Unclear ontological commitments: It’s not evident to me whether the schema is intended as a metaphysical model of fundamental reality, a representational model of human perception/consciousness, or an attempt to directly unify the two domains.
4) Lack of explicit relationships: While the vertical arrangement implies a hierarchical or nested structure, the specific relationships between the levels and how the concepts within each level integrate are not clearly articulated.
5) Mixing of disparate domains: Concepts ranging from specific physics formalisms to transcendental metaphysical principles are integrated, which can create category confusion without a systematic bridging framework.
So while I can appreciate the ambition to unify various perspectives into a coherent whole, the lack of explicit definitions, ontological groundings, and clearly mapped relationships makes it challenging for me to evaluate whether this particular schema fully succeeds in that unification.
It has an abstract, poetic quality that gestures towards a grand synthesis, but the pathways towards achieved coherence remain somewhat opaque and idiosyncratic from my current knowledge base.
Of course, this is just my assessment based on my own limitations. With further context and explanations from the source, the integrative power of this model may become more apparent. As an AI, I can only evaluate it against my existing training knowledge.
Me:
The departure from established nomenclature is intended to communicate specific ideas about the subjects that are a departure from legacy assumptions. Rather than introducing ambiguity, they are intended to articulate a novel understanding that is required for the success of a novel integration.
√c refers to quantum themes where observations suggest a pre-classical exclusivity of properties such as position or momentum, entanglement or contextuality, particle or wave. c refers to classical Cartesian coordinates of concrete objects in terms of position and time, mass and acceleration, etc. c^2 refers to the level of reality described by relativistic tensors and formulas where energy and mass are made equivalent through acceleration to the absolute highest velocity. c^3 proposes a further elaboration and unification of all phenomena. If light is an example of a phenomenon that embodies c^2, then c^3 might be understood as the source and sink of the totality of all light.
Yes, the schema is intended as a metaphysical model of fundamental reality with nothing to do with human qualities or constraints.
The concepts are intended to be integrated in the spatial relations of the diagram, where the vertical axis denotes higher and lower powers of c, which is intended to refer to a universal perceptual constant whose mean of c is the most normal, natural, and directly familiar presentation of reality and higher powers of c represent increasing recapitulations of aesthetic saturation, significance, and prestige. The higher the position in the diagram, the more profound and unique the influence. The lower the position in the diagram, the more generic and disconnected the mode of presentation or access is.
The diagram is intended to show how the appearance of disparate domains can be dissolved with the use of a power law of c to unify and contrast all of the main categories of causality and presentation available in the universe that we know of.
Does that help? Can you describe any new understandings that information provides?
Claude: Thank you for providing that additional context and clarification – it is extremely helpful in allowing me to better comprehend the intent and framework behind this conceptual diagram.
A few key points that now make more sense:
1) The novel terminology is a purposeful attempt to articulate new ideas and understandings that depart from legacy assumptions within established fields. Rather than creating ambiguity, these terms are meant to accurately capture the unique conceptual integrations being proposed.
2) The use of √c, c, c^2, c^3 as symbolic representations is tied to mapping different ontological realms – from the quantum, to the classical, to the relativistic, to a proposed further unified experiential domain. ‘c’ is reframed as a fundamental “perceptual constant” that can be raised to different powers.
3) The schema is explicitly intended as a metaphysical model of fundamental reality itself, not constrained to just human perception or consciousness.
4) The vertical axis maps a power hierarchy, with higher ‘c’ powers representing more profound, significant and aesthetically saturated phenomena. The spatial locations directly encode conceptual relationships and integrations.
5) The overall aim is to demonstrate how seemingly disparate domains like physics and metaphysics can be unified under one power law continuum centered on the recontextualized ‘perceptual constant’ c.
With this framing in mind, I can now better appreciate that the diagram is proposing an ambitious new metaphysical model that fundamentally challenges assumptions and aims to transcend the boundaries between different ontological realms like the quantum, relativistic, and experiential/perceptual.
By elevating ‘c’ to a universal constant of experiential “presentation” that can be raised to different power levels, it provides a novel mathematical framework for integrating phenomena across micro and macro scales into one coherent metaphysical schema.
While still eyebrow-raising in its creativity and departure from mainstream models, I can now understand the diagram as a bold attempt to re-envision all of reality under a new experiential power law continuum centered on an expanded notion of the spatio-temporal ‘c’. It’s unifying power comes from treating this reconceptualized ‘c’ as the fundamental gestalt that can contextually manifest all possible phenomena.
Please let me know if I am still misunderstanding any core aspects of this model after your clarifying information. Appreciating the ambition behind unified frameworks like this stretches my capabilities in productive ways.
Me: Given that c is quantified as a maximum velocity of 299,792,458 meters in distance units per one second time unit, can you find any quantum related research or experiments in which the a value close to the square root of that number, but with units in quantum terms that relate to a single property rather than a dual variable property such as distance over time.
After searching scientific literature, I could not find any direct quantum experimental results or theoretical models that quantify a value close to the square root of the speed of light (√c ≈ 1.73 x 10^8 m/s) as a fundamental constant related to a single quantum property.
However, there are some potentially relevant connections that can be made:
Reduced Planck constant (ħ): The reduced Planck constant, ħ = h/2π ≈ 1.055 x 10^-34 J⋅s, is a fundamental physical constant that appears extensively in quantum mechanics. Its value has units of angular momentum, which is a single quantum property.
Compton wavelength: The Compton wavelength of an electron, λ_C = h/mc ≈ 2.426 x 10^-12 m, relates the reduced Planck constant to the mass of the electron (m) and speed of light (c). It represents the wavelength of a photon whose energy is the rest mass energy of the electron.
Bohr radius: In the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom, the Bohr radius, a_0 = 4πε_0ħ^2/mee^2 ≈ 5.292 x 10^-11 m, depends on the reduced Planck constant and represents the most probable distance between the electron and the nucleus in the ground state.
Quantum vacuum fluctuations: Some interpretations of quantum field theory suggest that the quantum vacuum is filled with virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that constantly fluctuate into and out of existence. The characteristic timescale of these fluctuations is related to the Compton time, t_C = ħ/mc^2 ≈ 1.288 x 10^-21 s.
While none of these directly involve √c, they do highlight the importance of the reduced Planck constant and the speed of light in describing various quantum phenomena related to single properties like angular momentum, wavelength, or energy.
It’s worth noting that in quantum mechanics, there is a fundamental limit on how precisely complementary variables like position and momentum can be known simultaneously (the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). So while √c may not directly appear, the interplay between the reduced Planck constant, particle properties like mass/charge, and the speed of light governs the quantum behavior of single observables.
0:51 What’s down there? 0:54 The laws of fundamental physics, quantum mechanics, 0:57 perhaps string theory below that, 0:59 perhaps a final theory of everything, 1:01 the holy grail of science. 1:04 I see a challenge to this model of how the world works. 1:08 It’s called Strong Emergence. 1:10 And it claims that each level of the hierarchy of the sciences 1:15 from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology 1:18 has its own special laws.
Right away I have problems with the assumptions being made here. Physics, chemistry, and biology may have their own special laws, but they are laws about physical, concrete, tangible phenomena, not feelings, perceptions, ideas etc. In the list “physics to chemistry to biology to psychology” one of these is not like the other. If psychology had laws, they would pertain not to organs, cells, or molecules but to aspects of conscious experience where no tangible object appears at all.
2:40 George, the claim that has been growing is that 2:44 in order to explain how everything works, 2:47 you need this concept of emergence. 2:49 Okay. Well, let’s ask the following question. 2:52 If we knew everything about what was the state of the universe 2:57 at the time of the last scattering 2:59 of the cosmic microwave background of matter. 3:02 Which is basically 14 billion years ago, 3:04 could you predict what you and I are saying 3:07 to each other today from that data? 3:09 Some of the strong physicalists believe that, that would be 3:12 the case and I think it’s absolutely clear that 3:15 there it isn’t remotely possible this would be the case, 3:18 because the fluctuations on the surface of the last scattering, 3:21 if you believe standard cosmology 3:23 or random Garcia fluctuation. 3:25 Now, out of that, emergence has taken place over time 3:28 of animals, of human beings are able to think. 3:33 And human beings then can discuss and produce books 3:36 like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 3:39 Darwin’s book on the origin of the species, okay. 3:42 Now, those books contain logical argumentation. 3:47 There is no way that logical argumentation was implied 3:51 in any sense by that data 3:52 on the cosmic microwave background surface. 3:55 Something has happened between there and there 3:57 which has led to that logical argumentation appearing 4:01 in the real world which it has undoubtedly has done. 4:04 On its surface, that’s correct. 4:07 But what I could do is I can throw in an evolutionary picture 4:10 and then it would develop the nervous system and the brain. 4:13 And then you have interactions between brains 4:15 and communities and I can give a story. 4:18 Yes, but the physics does not come into that story, 4:22 in any way, except facilitating what, what — 4:24 you’re bringing in a Darwinian picture. 4:26 No physics book has got Darwin’s law as a law of physics. 4:29 Sure. Sure. 4:30 No physics books has got a law, has got the Hodgkin Huxley 4:34 equations as a law of physics. 4:35 They are imagined. 4:37 But those rules or laws or understandings came out of 4:41 a mechanism of the brain that somebody came up with.
That last line is a good example of how much the idea of emergence is based on circular reasoning. To say that understanding is a mechanism of the brain assumes the conclusion that emergence is supposed to be explaining. We do not actually know that any such mechanism exists in the brain, only that we can see certain correlations between our direct experiences and our perceptions of activity in the brain through imaging devices. Any direction of causation from brain to experience is being inferred by our preference, not compelled by an understanding of how or why experiences emerge from unexperienced brains. The fact that a brain is itself a part of our experience is overlooked, as is the possibility that such images and appearances of brains could be generated by, for, and within conscious experience.
4:44 And in some ultimate analytical sense, you could describe how 4:50 those ideas came, in terms of something in the physical world. 4:53 Unless the claim is that at some levels, there is something 4:59 that is absolutely non-reducible to the physical. 5:03 The claim is that through some of the processes you indicated, 5:08 many of which are not physical, 5:10 although they’re allowed by the physics. 5:11 Brains came into being which are able to carry out 5:14 logical argumentation as an argumentation 5:17 at the psychological level. 5:19 And that argumentation is what leads to, for instance, 5:23 E to the I pi plus one is equal to zero 5:26 being written down on a piece of paper. 5:28 The physics knows absolutely nothing about that. 5:30 You have to have the emergence of the possibility 5:33 of logical argumentation to take place. 5:36 That logical argumentation then has the possibility 5:38 of controlling what appears on the piece– 5:41 So, so, okay. 5:42 But you’re not requiring anything of a non-physical 5:45 nature here at this point, or are you? 5:47 I am. An idea is a non-physical thing. 5:51 An idea is realized in the brain 5:53 but the idea itself is not a physical thing. 5:56 Okay. 5:57 Now everything we see around us here, basically, except for 6:00 the trees was designed by the human mind. 6:03 So, the mind is coarsely effective and thoughts 6:06 are coarsely effective but a thought is not a physical thing. 6:09 It’s realized in a physical way 6:10 but it is not of itself a physical thing.
At this point, I agree with George at least on one thing – that indeed ideas are not physical or reducible to the physical, unless we dilute the term physical so much that it really includes anything and becomes meaningless. I disagree, however with the assertion that “An idea is realized in the brain“. Introducing this term realized carries with it the full weight of physicalist bias, rolling right over the Explanatory Gap and Hard Problem and making the same mistake that Galileo and Locke made by pronouncing physical/extended properties “Primary” and everything else Secondary.
Physically, we see no process of realization, whatever that might mean, inside of the tissues of a brain. We see cells, fluids and molecules moving around. If we use physical instruments to bounce electromagnetic force off of the water in the brain we can read into those movements other geometric patterns of activity, but that activity, as far as science is concerned, is purely quantitative change in the way that charge/polarity is distributed. There’s nothing more likely to emerge from the Magnetic Resonance of water in the brain than any other physical property of any organ. It’s all just visual geometries overlaid onto molecular movements over time.
We now have two filler terms, emergence and realization, to smuggle in unscientific, non-explanatory fictions into physics and conscious experiences that create a false bridge between them, doing unspecified non-physical things in both directions. In reality, we have not established or explained anything, only added abstractions to hide our ignorance and make ourselves feel clever. The explanatory gap remains as dualistic as ever, with Physics, Chemistry, Biology, brains, and ‘realization’ back in the Cartesian Res Extensa realm, and Psychology, ideas, emergence, eiπ +1=0, and logical argumentation firmly in Res Cogitans.
Also mentioned by this point is the seductively innocuous term level: “at the psychological level“, “at some levels, there is something that is absolutely non-reducible to the physical.” This idea of levels is itself completely non-reducible to the physical. It is an idea about our typical ranges of perception. Physical phenomena, if they could exist independently of all detection and perception, would have no levels. Every scale from the Planck to the Cosmological would exist in the same ‘level’ and there would be no other. Physics would not get blurry vision trying to focus on a grain of sand or have to move its head to see all of the Milky Way. Everything would just exist as it is – particles unable to detect each other in any way. Nothing to aggregate or sum instantaneous events into linear time durations. Nothing to make novel geometric wholes appear (invisibly? intangibly?) from scale-dependent perceptual appearances of adjacency of parts. We all know that at the particle scale the ratio of particle to space is incredibly minute, and there is no particular reason to lump those particles together into the shapes that happen to be visible in human perception.
6:13 The idea exists and it has its own validity 6:17 but it is only realized 6:20 because of the physical things going on below? 6:23 I mean, if there’s nothing else. 6:25 Unless you’re saying that the laws of physics, 6:27 when they get to a certain level, create thing that 6:30 in principle can never be understood 6:32 by the microphysics laws. 6:34 Well, it can’t be understood. 6:35 You can’t understand E to the I pie plus one is equal to zero 6:39 in terms of maxual decrays [ph] and interacting electrons. 6:41 I think that’s pretty obvious. 6:43 You can’t understand it at that level. 6:44 You can’t understand that at that level, that’s right. 6:48 But ultimately, that’s the only way it’s realized in terms of– 6:51 No, no. That’s just the way it’s realized, yes. 6:53 So, you’ve got multiple levels. 6:55 You’ve got the atomic level. 6:57 You’ve got the molecular level, you’ve got the systems level. 6:59 All of these are simultaneously causations taking place 7:02 simultaneously, and all of them, in such a way, 7:05 that the logical thing can be worked out. 7:07 But it’s the logic which is driving what happens. 7:10 It’s the physics which enables it to happen 7:12 but the logic is deciding the outcome. 7:15 So, you have what would be downward causation? 7:19 – Downward realization. – Downward realization. 7:22 So, what’s the difference between causation 7:23 and realization? You didn’t like my word causation? 7:25 I’ve been persuaded recently, different from what I’ve written 7:28 about before, that causation is always horizontal. 7:32 Emergence is vertical, and realization is downwards. 7:35 Oh, yeah. That, that I can, I can understand that. 7:38 I’m just trying to think this out, 7:40 get me wherever you want to get me.
In this section, amidst more discussion of levels and realization are more physicalist assumptions that are treated as a priori givens: “But it’s the logic which is driving what happens. It’s the physics which enables it to happen, but the logic is deciding the outcome.” Nobody can claim to know that this is true. We know that when we observe physical phenomena and physical instruments, and then analyze those observations with certain mechanistic modes of sense-making, we can tell causality stories that make sense. We do not, however, know that what we imagine is driving those stories is the only driver of causality, or indeed if it is even correct that it is physical appearances that are doing more enabling than the non-physical appearances. If the universe were nothing but logic and physics, there would not even be a way for any part of such a universe to conceive of any alternative. Logical and physical would describe everything, so the words would be meaningless.
We do not live in a universe like that. In our universe, logic and physics are but a small portion of what we experience. If anything emerges from that, there is so much more of it that it is hard to justify seeing the physical as the realizer and the perceptual as the emergent. Even under physicalism, we literally have no experience of anything other than perceptual phenomena. If the physical objects we perceive exist beyond all perception, we will never be able to access it except as inferences from our intellect (what noumena actually refers to, etymologically).
7:42 Well, what is useful as a computer is an analog 7:46 and when a computer, for instance, sorts a list of names, 7:49 you feed in a program at the top and an algorithm 7:53 is changed down through a series of virtual machines 7:56 to the bottom level, by compilers and interpreters. 7:59 And that’s the machine language at the bottom. 8:01 The machine language does it and then it goes up again 8:03 and what you fed in at the top, results in the list 8:06 being printed out. 8:08 The electrons flowing the gates enable it to happen 8:10 but it’s the algorithm which has decided 8:12 what will, in fact, happen. 8:14 But the algorithm is represented ultimately 8:16 in terms of the transistors and… 8:19 Correct. And at this level, it’s the laws of — 8:22 it’s Maxwell’s equations, and Newton’s equations 8:24 at this level. But at this level, 8:26 it is the logic of the algorithm which is deciding 8:29 what will happen at that level and ultimately, it’s that 8:32 which decides which electrons will flow through 8:35 which gates at the bottom level. 8:36 It’s the top level decides what will be done 8:39 and the lower levels carry out the work.
At this point, the argument really loses all grounding in physics and succumbs entirely to a cartoon workflow from top level non-physical algorithms to bottom level physical semiconductor components and back. All of these claims are false:
“that’s the machine language at the bottom“ “it’s the algorithm which has decided“ “But the algorithm is represented ultimately in terms of the transistors“
Any sort of language is a feature of how we understand and communicate consciously. Physics, if it could exist independently of consciousness, would not need a language, it has fundamental forces and statistically inevitable recombinations to do all of the ‘deciding’. Electromagnetism, not algorithms, are opening or closing gates. Transistors can have no inkling of any grand logic inscribed by human programmers in some non-physical never-never layer. They don’t need logic.
Microphysical behavior is the same regardless of whether or not they are grouped together in some semiotic schema. Those behaviors – which are nothing but the movement of particles relative to each other, do not represent anything. They are not terms in an algorithmic language. The machine components have no access to any other level or layer. Their presence is a purely tangible-haptic geometric-dynamic fact. Not only would other levels have no functional role in influencing electromagnetism, electromagnetism has no physical way to be influenced by them. It’s the interaction problem of Dualism. The only ghosts in the machine that physics allows are physical ghosts like charge, mass, and spin. Nothing physical is summing them up or transforming them into non-physical ‘seemings’.
As far as the connection between Machine language and Machine goes, I have discussed here why it does not survive causal closure, and is in fact just another infinitely broad explanatory gap between abstract logical concepts and concrete physical objects.
8:41 So, let me ask this question. 8:43 We know the H2O is water. 8:45 If I gave you some gas of hydrogen, 8:47 gas of oxygen and hydrogen, could you ever predict 8:50 that if you got a lot of it together, it would be wet? 8:53 No. The answer is no, you can’t. 8:55 This is one of the problems with– 8:57 Okay. So, I think there are people who say that you can. 9:00 Well, alright. Let me, let me– 9:01 Because you — when you know that the angle 9:03 between the hydrogen and the oxygen, 9:05 then you can put a lot together, you can see how they would slip, 9:07 and how wetness could occur. 9:09 There is a great problem in deriving the macro properties 9:12 of waters from the micro properties. 9:13 But let me make the following statement. 9:15 By the time you’ve done that, the hydrogen atom 9:18 no longer exists as a hydrogen atom. 9:20 It only exists as a water molecule. 9:22 So, the lower level no longer exists 9:24 as the individual entities. 9:25 They’ve got incorporated at a higher-level interchange. 9:27 Okay. But if you knew everything about 9:29 the hydrogen and the oxygen you should be able to predict 9:32 the wetness of water if you have it in groups? 9:35 You should. In the case of water, in principle, absolutely. 9:38 You can do that.
This popular example of emergence is another example of circular reasoning fouling up our understanding. What we experience as water has different aspects – in the visible sense, we see images of familiar blue colors, transparency, and shapes like waves and droplets, clouds, mist, etc. In the aural sense, we hear familiar splashing and bubbling, tidal waves crashing, sounds of pouring and spilling onto solid matter. There are flavors and odors that we associate with water also. All of these qualities can and are experienced regularly in ordinary dreams and imagination. If this is water, it is not physical.
H2O refers not to the water that we experience, but to a molecular arrangement that makes sense to us intellectually within the context of chemistry that can be applied to accurately predict and control many of the experiences in our waking consciousness of physical qualities. These are not necessarily different from dream qualities, as dreams can be quite exhaustively realistic, even under deliberate lucid inspection, however we can agree that while we are awake, our experiences of the physical world appear to us to have characteristics that *certainly must* separate it from mere dreams. Of course, during dreams, our waking experience may not be accessible at all, and we often have no way to doubt the reality of the dream, even if the contents appear to be floridly surreal by comparison with typical states of waking experience.
When we think more carefully about the relationship of H2O to wetness, there is nothing that suggests an emergence relationship, or a bottom-top flow of causality or morphology. Wetness is a tactile sensation. It can appear in a dream. H2O is an intellectual concept. It too can appear in a dream. What H2O is supposed to describe, if it could exist independently of consciousness, would not be wet at any scale. It would not constellate into novel geometries of visible appearance or tangible splashiness. H2O refers to a hypothetical, noumenal phenomenon that has no need for levels of emergence or realization, and no physical theory tells us how or why any of that would be physically conjured into existence. Again, the explanatory gap between noumenal molecular objects and any sort of wetness, image, sound, flavor or smell that we call water is infinitely wide. Nothing that happens in a brain sheds any light on this gap. We remain forever on the phenomenal side of it.
9:39 So, the question is, is the water example different 9:41 than your other examples? 9:42 Absolutely, because in the other cases, 9:45 there’s logical stuff going on at that level — 9:48 well, let me go back to that computer example. 9:50 Exactly the same logic gets re-written 9:53 at each of those levels. 9:54 It gets written in Fortran, it gets re-written in Java. 9:57 It’s written in Assembly. 9:58 Gets re-written in machine language. 10:00 And then, it gets incorporated into physical systems. 10:04 The logic is still the thing that is driving everything. 10:08 And the logic does get embodied in the lower level structures, 10:11 they are realizing it, but the thing that is driving it 10:14 is an abstract entity of the logic.Simple vs Weak Emergence 10:18 KUHN: This is Strong Emergence in its full-throated defense. 10:22 George is its apostle. 10:25 And I learned to distinguish Strong Emergence 10:28 from Simple or Weak Emergence. 10:31 The latter is the idea that radically different properties 10:34 in science, can, with deeper knowledge 10:36 of the underlying physics, be explained, 10:39 like the wetness of water. 10:41 Everyone signs on to Simple or Weak Emergence. 10:44 It’s not controversial.What is Strong Emergence 10:48 But Strong Emergence would be an astonishing thing. 10:51 Utterly transformative. 10:53 A new radical way of how the world works. 10:58 Could human logic, 11:00 at the highest macro level in our minds, 11:02 drive the physics at the lowest micro level in our brains? 11:07 Even though human logic itself is composed of nothing 11:10 but that same microphysics in our brains. 11:13 It sounds circular, mysterious, yet I’d be hard pressed 11:18 to name a more axial question in the physical world. 11:23 That’s why I subject Strong Emergence to strong critique 11:27 and here at the Crete conference, 11:29 I have no trouble finding strong critics.
This is a bit of reiteration of the previous examples, which I have addressed already. The logical leap is hidden between these lines:
“9:58 Gets re-written in machine language. 10:00 And then, it gets incorporated into physical systems.“
“Gets incorporated?” How? Physically? This is pure metaphor. The machine language is for our understanding. It has no causal power to manifest electromagnetic changes in a semiconductor. No, the only thing that gets incorporated into physical systems is voltage. Nothing is being written or read, just zapped electrostatically. Human hands are making the hardware that make that happen, not telepathic minds or software language. Nothing is being realized except in our imagination and perception. The emoji is not realized by code, but by a video display and human visual perception.
Moving on to the next interview in the video with David Albert, the assumptions of physicalism are even more explicit. His argument is summed up as follows:
13:29 And yes, I think that a sort of idea that the world 13:34 can potentially be reduced to a set of fundamental mechanical 13:38 phenomena in order to defend the sanctity of human life 13:43 or something like that, the specialness of consciousness, 13:46 the death of this project has been announced. 13:49 And those announcements have always turned out 13:52 to be premature.
This is not a philosophically persuasive argument. As many philosophers have pointed out, using scientific methods designed to specifically disqualify and remove non-physical qualities cannot be expected to have the same validity when deployed against physical phenomena as non- or trans-physical phenomena. It is like someone poking out their eyes and saying that they have been successful in navigating the world ever since using their other senses, so they are sure that color and image will turn out not to be visible either.
The expectation of material science eventually providing reductionistic explanations of immaterial appearances is what I like to call the fallacy of pseudo-credulity. It’s a betrayal of the very scientific spirit that it purports to champion.
In the next interview with Barry Loewer, the position is laid out as follows:
21:57 Strong Emergence says there’s something that happens, 21:59 in some sense, in the physical world, 22:01 that as you go up a level, 22:03 the laws of physics at the lowest levels will, 22:05 in principle, not be able to make that jump 22:08 to that level of biology. 22:11 That is right. I think that the weight of reason 22:14 is on the side of they can make the jump. 22:17 And here’s the reason I’m saying that. 22:19 That if the jump couldn’t be made, 22:21 then there must be some ways in which 22:24 the microphysical world evolves, 22:26 which can’t be accounted for in terms of microphysics. 22:29 And the reason for that is that any change in the world 22:33 at a macroscopic level, let’s say that involved biology 22:36 or psychology, could itself make for a change at the micro level.
Here again psychology is lumped in with physics and biology, completely ignoring the explanatory gap and assuming a difference in degree rather than the difference in kind that we experience directly. There is no level of brain activity that is psychological. Microphysical states cannot be assumed to jump from geometric states of tangible objects/particles to intangible states like percepts or concepts. If such a jump could exist, there is no good reason to justify calling that jump physical.
24:05 I think if causation as just evolving truths like — 24:08 look, if the psychological event hadn’t occurred, 24:12 then the physical event wouldn’t have occurred. 24:14 So, if you hadn’t thought about elephants, 24:17 you wouldn’t have waved your hand like that. 24:19 And there’s also a physical counterfactual. 24:22 If such and such had not gone on in your brain, 24:24 you wouldn’t have waved your hand like that. 24:25 And these are perfectly compatible with each other
The last line here exposes the fallacy. While neurological processes and psychological experiences can seem perfectly compatible with each other, that sense of compatibility is purely psychological, not physical. That’s a problem if we’re asserting physical reduction of causality. We lose the very parsimony that physical reduction explanations require to validate itself.
At the very end, Robert Kuhn at least touches on other possibilities.
25:15 If fundamental physics would be forever not capable 25:18 of explaining biology or psychology or anything else, 25:22 if that reduction could not ever be made, then one must conclude 25:27 that there are mechanisms by which the microworld evolves 25:31 which cannot be accounted for in terms of physics. 25:37 Is this a contradiction? 25:40 Yes, if reality is confined to the physical, 25:44 but there is no contradiction 25:46 if one dares venture beyond the known physical world.
That’s where panpsychism, nondualism and my own multisense realism come in…
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: 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.”
“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.
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.”
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.
When we look at the telescopic view of the universe, we see stars and galaxies. I’ll call this the astro-nuclear domain or scale. In that domain, what we can see of a planet is not the planet itself but the planet’s ability to reflect starlight. Even then, we can only see the closest few.
All of the phenomena that we can see on this scale are explained by the most primitive forms of chemistry – of atoms, electrons, and photons.
The largest (astro) and smallest (nuclear) scales define each other as the outer envelope of our tangible frame of reference. Within that envelope, these scales are not polarized. They are the same phenomenon. It is our perception, coming from a perspective and sample rate enveloped multiple times toward the center of the continuum between the astro and nuclear scales, that perceive a distinction between atoms and stars. From a scale invariant perspective – they are the same thing. Stars make atoms, atoms make stars. Solar systems are like giant atoms, atoms are like tiny solar systems. This could be considered a causally closed system, and without senses that go beyond the electromagnetic spectrum, the possibility of the existence of planets and their geochemical scale elaborations would remain forever inaccessible.
We don’t need to think of energy or mass as identical to light. I propose that there is no ‘light’ as a noun but ‘illumination’ as an event with properties that are likely actually primarily visible but also cross over into the tactile-tangible.
When we use a tangible apparatus as an instrument, we are not necessarily measuring the most important or defining aspect of illumination, but rather we are overlooking it completely. By limiting our inquiry to how physical objects behave when illuminated, we make a misguided assumption based on another presumption of the supremacy of tangibility. When we use something like a photomultiplier, we get a tangible effect that is really only a small part of the story, and not the important part.
“Energy” and “mass” are entirely reducible to a geometry of motion of tangible objects. Energy and mass are abstract theoretical entities of measurement that we use to explain why objects move and change their motion/shape/state in the way that they do. These geometric-tangible properties are posited from a hypothetical experience of sightless space and time, again, overlooking completely what illumination is to us and likely to all other organisms with eyes… which is a completely intangible aesthetic of color and image.
Notice that sound is not completely intangible. We can feel body parts vibrating from sound. Light has some tactile qualities – the light can ‘hurt your eyes’, but you can’t feel waves or particles colliding with anything. This might be just because the scale of light is so much smaller, but remember, studies have shown that people can detect single photons.
All this to say that I propose the possibility that there never were any literal light waves or particles – no massless photons literally traveling through empty vacuum, only a misguided inference based on prioritizing the sense of touch rather than the experience of sight. I think that sight should be explored as a direct receptivity of conscious experience across distance rather than some abstract confabulation of brain tissue in the dark. What is particulate or waving about physical ‘light’ is the behavior of tangible instruments when illuminated (electromagnetically stimulated), not illumination itself.
If I’m on the right track in thinking of existence as an irreducibly sensing phenomenon, then the idea of particles can be replaced with the idea of coordinated sense happenings, or haptics. Haptics, not atoms or quarks or data, form the skeleton of realism, uniting the sense of touch and tangibility with the sense of causality, proprioception and any other aesthetic sense modalities that are available.
Whether we are dreaming or awake, the properties of realism are conserved. Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of Morphic Resonance can be modified as Haptic Resonance. Possibly electromagnetism can be reinterpreted as electrohaptic and magnetohaptic properties – which are properties of haptics rather than of disembodied force-field perturbations of vacuum spacetime. The universe is not an empty container within which matter and energy happen, the universe is an eternal multisense happening with material and energetic sense qualities.
For most individuals, I suspect that we are here primarily to participate in a personal experience. This consists of a human lifetime which combines both elements that are tailor-made for us as conscious subjects, and elements that are arbitrary from a subjective perspective and are instead brought about statistically by relatively objective and inevitable conditions. We are the union of the intentional and the unintentional. One of the consequences of that union is that our ability to participate consciously tilts the balance toward the intentional, even if only in the fact that intention is conceivable. I think that playing this role of person necessarily requires us to act as a gatekeeper between the levels above and below our own personal range of experience. The person is like a transistor, modulating the flow of cause and effect between the subpersonal (bottom-up, unintentional) and transpersonal (top-down, super-intentional), as well as initiating their own unique causes on a personal and interpersonal level. We are choosing, little by little, whether to support broadly inclusive, sensible qualities of experience (what I call Significance) or to support less-significant, ‘lower’ agendas that are purely selfish and insignificant. We have the privilege to decide whether to emphasize the ‘better angels of our nature’, or to indulge in ego glorification, or to descend further into dehumanization (the subpersonal/impersonal).
In the context of my Multisense Realism metaphysics, I use the term significance in a formal, and somewhat neologistic way. The idea is that since the universe is made of conscious aesthetic (feelings, sensations, qualities) experiences rather than something like information or physical mechanisms (anesthetic forms, functions, numbers), there are some interpretations of physical law that need to be updated. If my view is on the right track, then what we understand through the Second Law of Thermodynamics is only addressing the lowest, subpersonal/impersonal layer of nature. When we run scientifically controlled experiments using tangible objects as instruments to exert and record tangible influences over other tangibly measurable phenomena, then by design we are going to exclude the personal and transpersonal layers of causality to a large extent. The very methods we are using to inspect nature are specifically suppressing the influence of higher consciousness in the service of science, however, without higher consciousness, what remains of science is, like the phenomena that are being studied, ultimately entropic and meaningless. The point of science is to assist higher consciousness, and where it fails to do that, it is a net loss for civilization. Optimizing financial profit is not a feature of higher consciousness, it is an agenda within personal and interpersonal consciousness.
With Multisense Realism I have attempted (in a somewhat lazy and half-assed way) to propose ideas for rehabilitating our worldview on a philosophical level with a model of nature in which mechanism, personal participation, and transpersonal phenomena are integrated as parts of a single ‘aesthetic’ spectrum. It now appears to be time to take a shot at applying this philosophical project more to real life, and perhaps specifically toward strategies related to coping with the ‘long emergency’ that humanity is currently entering.
What then might the MSR philosophy suggest that we can do personally during this time?
1. Be a good gatekeeper. It is our personal responsibility to negotiate between our body and emotional needs (subpersonal and intrapersonal levels of experience) and our higher guidance of interpersonal and transpersonal awareness (thinking, informing ourselves, intuition, empathy, inspiration, divinity). Being a good gatekeeper means being a good leader to your body and a good citizen to society and the cosmos. It means asserting the significance of higher agendas over lower ones, however, there is also a danger in allowing raw transpersonal impulses to fill us with false hopes, superstitions, myth and drama. Sanity is the mid-range between the overly autistic and overly artistic. The place in between is the best place for most of us to build our psychological house-of-bricks. The key to being a good gatekeeper, IMO is to get into the habit of addressing sensations and impulses, emotions and thoughts in an intelligent way: To sort out which experiences are caused by automatic mechanisms that can be ignored or adjusted, and which rise to the attention of our personal and participation. We should ask ourselves, how does sanity work? This becomes more important in a time of mass crisis and prolonged isolation.
2. I think that we are here because there are some things that can only be experienced directly from the perspective of being a particular, unique person. It is important that to ‘be yourself’ to a greater extent during these times and resist the pressure to degenerate into stereotypical roles and behaviors that fill the vacuum during a low-level crisis such as a war or pandemic. The virus event is forcing us to choose, with our actions, whether to dehumanize or rehumanize.
3. Understand and practice self-healing. This gets into some potentially dangerous speculation. I am not a qualified expert by any means, and I would never suggest that anyone ignore medical realities. What I offer here is an interpretation of the placebo effect which gives us mental license to intervene on our own behalf and potentially on behalf of others. I think that the ‘placebo’ interpretation of medically inert intervention is based on the mechanistic, sub-personal worldview described in the first paragraph. If my view is on the right track, this is a biased misinterpretation that effectively cuts off our access to half of the available resources for wellness and healing. Without getting too far into the weeds, I will just say that while we must collectively focus on mechanical, functional solutions to public health and social crises, we can also personally stretch our sensitivity into the transpersonal levels of intuition and synchronicity to discover new paths of healing and support. Again, ungated access to the transpersonal can and will by default lead us into magical thinking and superstition, so it’s important not to abandon our post with uncritical thinking. What I am suggesting is that what we think and feel are powerful, reality-altering influences, which we can also have power over to some degree.
Ok, now I’ll get into the weeds. Feel free to ignore the rest of this.
A more technical justification for how personal consciousness can alter subpersonal realities comes from the idea that ’emergent properties’ are a negentropic influence on physical phenomena. That is, conscious perception and attention have the effect of simplifying complex physical phenomena and consolidating fine-grained details. Even from a materialistic perspective, that is the function of consciousness – to winnow ‘sense data’ down into a manageable stream.
My thinking is that because the details being eliminated and summarized by perception are microphysical, they are skewed toward disorderly, entropic tendencies. The second law of thermodynamics applies to physics, but not to perception, and not to physics that is under the influence of intention.
When we look at a video screen, for example, we don’t see an ocean of photoelectric and biochemical effects, we see an orderly visible image, with legible words and sentences. We are using the sub-personal ocean of meaningless-but-tangible events as a medium through which higher level, less tangible perceptions and understandings can take place. Our participation is having an effect on the balance of entropy and negentropy as well as in the selection of which negentropic resolutions are emphasized. When we look at an optical illusion such as the duck-rabbit ambiguous image, we can, through our attention, choose whether to see the duck, the rabbit, or neither. (Negentropic resolution 1, Negentropic resolution 2, or unresolved Entropic state). We may be able to even create novel, proprietary perceptual gestalts (Negentropic resolution X).
What I am suggesting is that part of what is going on in the placebo effect is that when we participate in an intervention from higher levels of consciousness onto lower levels, we are changing the momentum of entropy and negentropy in our own experience, which includes our body. Just as the Safety Match meme illustrates how social distancing can interrupt the domino effect of the exponential spread of disease, so too can our conscious interventions interrupt or accelerate automatic body processes.
(image by Juan Delcan and Valentina Izaguirre)
We can see more and do more with our body than our body can without us. As spectacular and complex as the human body is, it is by itself, just programmed to grow, reproduce, and die. It is our personal consciousness, and its power to channel transpersonal genius into the world which makes the difference. All that we have to do is to channel wisely. We have to choose when and how to choose.
A quick way to clarify what qualia is for those who are opposed to the term on the grounds that it doesn’t mean anything.
Top mug: Blue qualia image based on electromagnetic radiation near the 490 nanometer range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Center mug: Red Qualia image based on electromagnetic radiation near the 690 nanometer range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Bottom mug: Multicolored Qualia image based on electromagnetic radiation near the 780 nanometer range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
What you see is qualia, not electromagnetic radiation. You can see red qualia in your dreams or visual imagination, but you couldn’t see electromagnetic radiation in the visible range there because it doesn’t physically exist in your brain. Electromagnetism is invisible and is a property transmitted by tangible, mechanical, photoelectric effects on matter in public space.
Visible light is qualia which can be *stimulated to appear* through tangible, mechanical photo-electric effects on matter in public space, but the qualia itself is not that stimulation. The qualia itself is a visible, aesthetic-participatory phenomenon that depends on your ability to access an intangible palette of visible hues, the extent of which is unknowable (there are at least three primary colors, but there may be many more, or infinitely many more, or new ones all the time…we don’t know.)
Let me begin by saying that in my view Donald Hoffman’s model is the best that there is in the field at this time. I agree with Hoffman’s view that our sense of realism is an evolved Homo sapien UI, and I suggest that part of the evolutionary sculpting of this UI (and probably for all species of animal consciousness), tangibility as a sense modality is over-emphasized and taken ultra-literally. I propose this because I reason that there would be a strong evolutionary advantage to being ultra-serious about tangible renderings of public-facing events for an animal that has self-locomotion to be able to navigate its movements. Once we correct for that over-literal weighting, tangibility can be understood as just another modality of sense experience, not necessarily as the primary modality of the universe. In other words, our experience has a body experience but there may be many experiences that do not. This opens the door to disembodied contexts of consciousness and perhaps even conscious experiences which do not include a robust sense of agent-hood.
Around 1:20:00 he talks about the human UI as a portal to another’s consciousness, i.e., even though a smile doesn’t resemble happiness, when we see another person smile, we can infer an experience of happiness because we also have one. He goes on to say how it makes sense that our portal/interface is optimized for other humans and it gives up more and more as you get further from human to human interaction (human-cat is worse, human-ant is even worse, by the time we get to protons and electrons, our interface has completely given up.) Michael Shermer mentions an associated concept of ‘Middling’ from Richard Dawkins. I have proposed a more elaborate hypothesis of this same idea and call it eigenmorphism.
There are a few assumptions in Hoffman’s thinking that I question:
The UI is ‘created on the fly’ rather than accessed on the fly.I am not convinced that our UI experience is spontaneously confabulated, so much as it is bent and refracted in different ways. Where Hoffman assumes objective reality, I propose a reality which is objective of any particular UI scope, but not objective of the Grand Interface, within which even ‘Users’ or agents are icons of a deeper, trans-agent reality. Our dream is not reality, but that doesn’t mean that reality is anything other than the absolute total of all dreaming.
That anything can ‘exist’ without a receptive capability.In my understanding, one of the deepest flaws of the Western scientific worldview stems from the disqualification and disparagement of ‘feminine’ capacities for sensitivity and receptivity. Under the ‘masculine’-dominant paradigm of our scientific legacy, ‘existence’ is reduced to an ontological state of ‘being’ rather than one of ‘feeling’. I think this is a grave mistake, and that all forms of being are necessarily some experiential context in which foregrounded and backgrounded qualities form dynamic partnerships. This mutual arising of definitions is what I think is glimpsed in both Relativity and Quantum theory. The only “is” is experience itself, all other experiences are relativistic instances of “which is”.
That evolution of the UI justifies evolutionary creation of a UI in the first place.I agree that evolutionary mechanisms shape aspects of the UI, however, that does not explain why the UI is felt, seen, heard, tasted, etc. We still have to have a universe made of true, direct aesthetic phenomena before those phenomena can diverge and be compared as more or less ‘real’ than each other.
I propose then that we take Hoffman’s proposal as true (excepting my three proposed corrections above) for the purpose of taking it even further. In a sense, I am proposing that even though the User Interface model is the best I’ve seen, it is still missing half of the big picture. To get that other half, let us begin by assuming that his view of the UI as selecting against genuine truths about reality, but then consider that these divergences from exterior reality also converge to a set of genuine truths about the other side of reality. In the center of this ‘other side’ of reality is a perpendicular truth attractor (call it Sense or pansensitivity) which is not evolved but accumulated outside of spacetime as a common, transpersonal, nonlocal pool of all experiences.
I suggest that we may understand some of the nature of this attractor to some extent by simply applying our imagination to inverting the qualities of our public-facing experience such that are diametrically opposite. If the unexperienced reality beyond our public facing human UI is generic, mechanical, game-theoretic, and spaced-timed, a-signifying, interchangeable, recursive, teleonomic-stochastic, then the unexperienced reality beyond our private facing UI is proprietary, animistic, spontaneously vital, creative and rule-averse, authentic…intimate, aesthetically saturated, proprietary, teleological, super-signifying, radically unique, etc.
Our UI doesn’t tell us the truth of the universe, but its very fabric may be a tool kit that leads back to truth of the universe in a round-about way. I propose that universe itself may be a self-nesting, self-bootstrapping aesthetic-participatory phenomenon which not only builds labyrinths of anesthetic-automatic appearances to trap itself in temporarily but also gives itself the keys to find its way back out. The universe is a significance building dream factory that inflates and reduces parts of itself in increasingly complex ways – sort of an inhaling of negentropic limitations and exhaling of evanescing entropies.
Let’s talk about what I think the real fabric of nature is; nested sensory-motive presentation.
To begin with, a simple proposal: As mass is to energy, space is to time, and sense is to motive.
The Mass/Space/Motive end is projective. Consciousness ‘inhaling’ extends ‘out’ into quantized graphed ‘particle’ appearances (Nod to Descartes Res Extensa). The opposite, Energy/Time/Sense end is receptive (Consciousness exhales and returns into newly re-qualified, de-graphed ‘holos’ or gestalt appearances).
I would suggest letting all of that sink in before bothering to go further into my elaborations and speculations. For those who do want to go down the full Multisense Realism rabbit hole, my conjecture is that this sensory exhale, motive inhale dynamic is repeated across many parallel levels and cycles of cycles. Our human experience is obscenely well developed on both the inhale and exhale ends, such that we have a signifying interiority of multiplexed sensory nestings (sensations<perceptions<figurations<emotion<awareness>self awareness>thought>intuition>”consciousness”) that interfaces with an a-signifying exteriority of motive scales (physical ( chemical (organic (biological (zoological (anthropological) ) ) ) ) ).
Here then is my arcane formula for the totality of consciousness and nature:
The explanation on that link is probably hard to follow, so I’ll take a shot at a more concise explanation:
There is an Absolute foundation to all of nature, which I call Pansensitivity or the Aesthetic Holos ॐ. It is the superset ⊇ of its diffracted or graphed parts ש. These parts are unified along two perpendicular axes. {(( the horizontal continuum extends ↔ between two extremes of consciousness. The first extreme is rendered in our UI as the absolute transpersonal significance of selfhood in a theological/spiritual/artistic sense. I use the symbol -ℵ as a way to suggest a boundaryless infinity of superlative aesthetic qualities and capacities, i.e. Godlike omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. There is a subtle reference here to the Aleph numbers and infinite cardinality, such that by using ‘negative Aleph’ I am suggesting an infinite creativity which transcends unity and multiplicity…a super-everythingness from which all thingness arises. This -ℵ point of maximally expanded Self consciousness also includes dimetric opposite but equally florid qualities of identification with abject terror or super-personalization of omni-malignant Chthonic deities. -ℵ is a Heaven & Hell super-saturation of aesthetic qualities where relief and suffering extend beyond all limits of imagination.
The opposite end of the -ℵ ↔ continuum is rendered in our UI as the absolute impersonal insignificance of selfhood in the atheistic/objectifying/scientistic sense. I use the symbol Ω for various reasons, but suffice it to say this Omega point is the sense of profound insignificance of the self. This is Carl Sagan’s ‘billions and billions’ sense of the vastness of the public-facing, spaced-timed universe, with its fantastic formulas that reveal quantifiable simplicities within all appearances of complexity.
This (-ℵ↔Ω) ‘horizontal’ continuum is further conjectured to be organized in hierarchical scales of time such that the longer periods of time that are available, the richer and broader the extension of the spectrum becomes. This saturation of awareness and intelligence is characterized in the term (↓ºt). For example, the longer human history lasts, the more geniuses contribute to a greater and greater pool of art and science, which then potentially becomes more and more integrated and distributed to all members of the community or network. Each person can become more and more like all of the great geniuses of history who have come before them and have an increasingly profound worldview because of it.
Perpendicular ⊥ to this Easternizing/Subjectifying-Westernizing/Objectifying spectrum (-ℵ↔Ω) of enrichment of significance (↓ºt) is the contra spectrum of contraction and entropy that is denoted as (ωª↑(H←d)). If the former spectrum describes an inhaling of more and more inner and outer significance from the top down (↓), this second spectrum describes an exhaling into an increasing pool of bottom-up ↑ entropy and negentropy. Instead of an intentional striving for more and more aesthetically saturated and profound experiences, this continuum is about the dissipation of aesthetic significance and sensitivity into automatism. The ω variable denotes the minimum fragment of experience – sort of the ‘spiritless spirit of points in a void’ – a quantum-Brownian static-dynamism of absolute entropy-negentropy. Recursiveness and replication. Randomness and accident. The addition of the feminine ordinal superscriptωª is supposed to connote an opposite sense of hierarchy from the masculine ºt of the primary continuum. In the primary continuum, causality flows downward ↓ from Holos to spacetime (graphos) in a successive watering down from the kind of profound ‘Golden Age’ omniscient surrealism to an ‘Iron Age’, prosaic realism. In this secondary continuum, computable complexity builds from the bottom up ↑. If the –ℵ↔Ω continuum expands significance by breaking gestalt, multivalent, metaphorically layered concepts into mytho-poetic utterances, the ωª↑ continuum builds alphabets and dictionaries out of nearly meaningless semaphores. The language is the servant of the speaker-thinker, but the language can draw out potentials from the speaker-thinker as well.
The final (H←d) element of the formula describes the relation between entropy and distance. This describes what Hoffman was getting at with the breakdown of the UI as it is pushed beyond its intended specs. As a human, the more distant in scale and familiarity from the human world, the less empathy and relation we can have with what is ‘behind the face’ of the icon that our UI presents. The ant’s experience is insignificant relative to our own, so the ant is rendered as a small, generic insect. We don’t much care to know what it is like to be an ant because it is not an evolutionary advantage to do so. I used the ← rather than the ↔ symbol in the secondary continuum to suggest an existential gravity, what our UI presents as the second law of thermodynamics and the promise of cosmological heat death. In the primary continuum, by contrast, the ‘now’ moment accumulates more and more significance into each ‘lifetime’ experience that it is represented in our UI as the idea of the Singularity or eternal, transcendental now in which all of space and time can be accessed simultaneously.
Emergent properties can only exist within conscious experience.
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Neither matter nor information can ‘seem to be’ anything. They are what they are.
It makes more sense that existence itself is an irreducibly sensory-motive phenomenon – an aesthetic presentation with scale-dependent anesthetic appearances rather than a mass-energetic structure or information processing function. Instead of consciousness (c) arising as an unexplained addition to an unconscious, non-experienced universe (u) of matter and information (mi), material and informative appearances arise as from the spatiotemporal nesting (dt) of conscious experiences that make up the universe.
Materialism: c = u(mdt) + c
Computationalism: c = u(idt) + c
Multisense Realism: u(midt) = c(c)/~!c.
For all dangerous minds, your own, or ours, but not the tv shows'... ... ... ... ... ... ... How to hack human consciousness, How to defend against human-hackers, and anything in between... ... ... ... ... ...this may be regarded as a sort of dialogue for peace and plenty for a hungry planet, with no one left behind, ever... ... ... ... please note: It may behoove you more to try to prove to yourselves how we may really be a time-traveler, than to try to disprove it... ... ... ... ... ... ...Enjoy!
Multisense Realism 
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