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The Opportunity Principle
A better way to model photons, and other elementary particles would be as opportunities for discernment. Instead of seeing them as entities whose measurement presents uncertainty to us, think of the uncertainty as the entity itself. The photon is like a cursor – it is present where the action is at the moment – it points to the moment, and to the opportunity for interpretation of the moment. Bosons and Fermions are not like forcers and forcees, but more like trails left behind from motivation etching sensation into sense.
Our experience of light is of that which enables visual sense. Vision is a mode of sensory presentation and representation based on aesthetic distinctions. Foreground/background, contrasting color qualities and intensities. Each photon should not be considered a physical phenomenon in its own right, but rather as a fragment of vision or sensation. It is not like a pixel, since the pixel requires an observer to be seen. The photon should not be thought of as a particle or a wave, but as a chance to detect and interpret. Whether we see a light or feel heat, whether it is part of an interference pattern or a collection of wholes composed of no parts, whether it is within our experience or beyond our understanding…all of these possibilities are presented at the elemental level. Each ‘particle’ is a window not just on the Totality, but on the self-masking, self-reflecting, transparency-augmenting nature of nature. The fabric of the universe is both certain, uncertain, and a participation in self-definition.
Logical Positivism and White Light
“Can you link? Perhaps quickly explain?”
Sure. This post relates most directly to transcending Logical Positivism,
Wittgenstein in Wonderland, Einstein under Glass
there are a lot of pages and posts on the site that refer back to how physical and metaphysical assumptions can both be transcended.
Briefly, what I suggest is that rather than assuming physical and mental isolation as objectively true, we should assume the opposite and see isolation as a localization of totality, in the same way that ‘green’ is a localization of white, and white is really transparency or visual sensitivity itself which is too bright for us to see through*.
The universe, consciousness, physics, mathematics, are all understandable as parts of the whole through triangulation of symmetric relations. Rather than spurning the thin air of the metaphysical or the mess of the anthropological, we should understand that their lack of sterile certainty reflects our own proximity to it, and that certainty itself is a function of distance – an illusion of monolithic realism to play against a reality of layered fiction. Physics is not realism, but the capacity to modulate realistic fiction against itself. Physics is participatory sense, and sense has understandable features which cut across all layers and scales of experience.
*This thought deserves to be developed in more depth. What is the color white? We know from basic science that white is a kind of jumble of all of the wavelengths of visible light. If we think about how we encounter white light in nature, however, it is often as a reflection in something transparent or shiny like water or glass. If you have ever tried to paint water, you know that it is about carefully placed contrasts of bright/white and dark paint.
Likewise, the brilliance of a white diamond is a reflection of its high refractive index – its just soo transparent from so many different angles than your eye can’t handle it. Given some level of ambient illumination, the visual sense is opened up beyond the human spec, and there’s too much to see through. It’s meta-transparent. As with all media, when the spec limit is exceeded, the guts of the medium itself begins to be exposed. What happens when there’s too much data on your internet connection? Freezing, pixelation. The digital substrate is exposed. Same thing with lens flares, records skipping, static on the radio, etc. The fabric which is carrying the message bleeds into the message. Light is the same way – too much potential clarity is blinding. Too much positivity and logic obscures the reality of the consciousness which creates it.
Emergent Noumena
Noumenon, plural Noumena, in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) as opposed to what Kant called the phenomenon—the thing as it appears to an observer. Though the noumenal holds the contents of the intelligible world, Kant claimed that man’s speculative reason can only know phenomena and can never penetrate to the noumenon. Man, however, is not altogether excluded from the noumenal because practical reason—i.e., the capacity for acting as a moral agent—makes no sense unless a noumenal world is postulated in which freedom, God, and immortality abide.
The relationship of noumenon to phenomenon in Kant’s philosophy has engaged philosophers for nearly two centuries, and some have judged his passages on these topics to be irreconcilable. Kant’s immediate successors in German Idealism in fact rejected the noumenal as having no existence for man’s intelligence. Kant, however, felt that he had precluded this rejection by his refutation of Idealism, and he persisted in defending the absolute reality of the noumenal, arguing that the phenomenal world is an expression of power and that the source from which this power comes can only be the noumenal world beyond.
A central thesis of my approach is that the assumption of noumena should also be assumed to be a ‘thing as it appears to an observer’. In the case of our own experience, we are the observer – really the participant. Even the term observer smuggles in a way of framing ontology to imply non-phenomenal facts.
In my view, Locke’s assumption of qualities like color and feeling as Secondary, while properties like position and shape are Primary, while true from the local perspective, should be (like the image on our retina) considered inverted from an absolute perspective. It’s easy to turn colors or feelings into numbers and points on a graph, just by counting them and arranging what has been counted. It’s impossible, however, to derive colors from structures or information alone.
What this means is that the capacity to discern noumena from phenomena is itself a phenomenal property. It varies by both degree and kind. This quality is often known by names like ‘sanity’ and ‘common sense’, and while our access to it as individuals depends on local neurological conditions, local neurological conditions probably depend on an even lower level of sanity on the microphenomenal scale to maintain the integrity of the microphysical world which cells and neurons inhabit.
If that’s true, and what we call sanity, a kind of preservative inertia of sensory and meta-sensory interpretation goes all the way down, then physics itself should be described as the modulation of that sanity. A superposition of superpositions if you will, as locality which generalizes and re-localizes what it has generalized. If we think of the Newtonian-Cartesian universe as made of ideal particles in a void, the Einsteinian universe idealized the void, and the Quantum universe turned the particles into bubbles un-disappearing in that void. What I propose is to put see bubbling itself as a property of reflection and contrast. Drill down into the surface of the bubble and see that it is nothing but aesthetics derived from some perspective and mode of detection. It is the possibility of phenomena that matters. Noumena without phenomena is identical to nothingness, but phenomena without noumena changes nothing, provided that phenomena diverges from its own sensory-motive properties, rather than emerges from abstract non-phenomena.
Electricity and Magnetism
Animated diagram showing the operation of a tuned circuit (LC circuit). The capacitor stores energy in its electric field E and the inductor stores energy in its magnetic field B (green). This jerky animation shows “snapshots” of the circuit at progressive points in the oscillation. The oscillations are slowed down; in an actual tuned circuit the charge oscillates back and forth tens of thousands to billions of times per second.
In electronics an LC circuit, also called a resonant circuit, tank circuit, or tuned circuit, consists of two electronic components connected together; an inductor, represented by the letter L, and a capacitor, represented by the letter C. The circuit can act as an electrical resonator, an electrical analogue of a tuning fork, storing energy oscillating at the circuit’s resonant frequency.
This is one of the clearest ways that I have come across to visualize the relationship between electricity and magnetism. On the right, the capacitor plates emphasize the polar nature of EM, so that electric force is a metaphor for binary switching – a bridging across a gap which inverts and imitates.
On the left, the induction coil emphasizes the ‘tropic’ nature of EM. The magnetic field arises as a summary of the turns, like a squaring of all of the possible orientations and angles. The turningness is juxtaposed against the flowing-ness, which are both juxtaposed against the separation and ratio-ness of the Electric side.
Of course, through Relativity, we can understand (or try to) that both the Electric and Magnetic fields are identical except that they are observed through perpendicular frames of reference. If you are synchronized to the current flow, then it is an electric circuit of positive and negative charge interactions. If you are synchronized to the resistance of the flow, then it is a magnetic field of North/South attraction-repulsion.
The deeper issue for me is really what is happening underneath all of the arrows and theory. What was actually being observed to oscillate when we first measured the frequency of a beam of light? Is it a needle of a magnetic meter? Unlike sound waves which can be said to be collisions of molecules, the energy of electromagnetic waves seems to be more like a propensity for matter to glow, spark, and change direction. It is the Promethean vibration into sensory awareness and motive expression. Matter becomes more transparent to itself, more able to ignore gaps, resistance, and gravity. What electromagnetism seems to really be is something like ‘the phenomenalization of matter’, or the twisting/stretching of inertial frames.
Chess, Media, and Art
I was listening to Brian Regan’s comedy bit about chess, and how a checkmate is such an unsatisfying ending compared to other games and sports. This is interesting from the standpoint of the insufficiency of information to account for all of reality. Because chess is a game that is entirely defined by logical rules, the ending is a mathematical certainty, given a certain number of moves. That number of moves depends on the computational resources which can be brought to bear on the game, so that a sufficiently powerful calculator will always beat a human player, since human computation is slower and buggier than semiconductors. The large-but-finite number of moves and games* will be parsed much more rapidly and thoroughly by a computer than a person could.
This deterministic structure is very different (as Brian Regan points out) from something like football, where the satisfaction of game play is derived explicitly from the consummation of the play. It is not enough to be able to claim that statistically an opponent’s win is impossible, because in reality statistics are only theoretical. A game played in reality rather than in theory depends on things like the weather and can require a referee. Computers are great at games which depend only on information, but have no sense of satisfaction in aesthetic realism.
In contrast to mechanical determinism, the appearance of clichés presents a softer kind of determinism. Even though there are countless ways that a fictional story could end, the tropes of storytelling provide a feedback loop between audiences and authors which can be as deterministic -in theory- as the literal determinism of chess. By switching the orientation from digital/binary rules to metaphorical/ideal themes, it is the determinism itself which becomes probabilistic. The penalty of making a movie which deviates too far from the expectations of the audience is that it will not be well received by enough people to make it worth producing. Indeed, most of what is produced in film, TV, and even gaming is little more than a skeleton of clichés dressed up in more clichés.
The pull of the cliché is a kind of moral gravity – a social conditioning in which normative thoughts and feelings are reinforced and rewarded. Art and life do not reflect each other so much as they reflect a common sense of shared reassurance in the face of uncertainty. Fine art plays with breaking boundaries, but playfully – it pretends to confront the status quo, but it does so within a culturally sanctioned space. I think that satire is tolerated in Western-objective society because of its departure from the subjective (“Eastern”) worldview, in which meaning and matter are not clearly divided. Satire is seen as both not as threatening to the material-commercial machine, which does not depend on human sentiments to run, and also the controversy that satire produces can be used to drive consumer demands. Something like The Simpsons can be both a genuinely subversive comedy, as well as a fully merchandized, commercial meme-generating partner of FOX.
What lies between the literally closed world of logical rules and the figuratively open world of surreal ideals is what I would call reality. The games that are played in fact rather than just in theory, which share timeless themes but also embody a specific theme of their own are the true source of physical sustenance. Reality emerges from the center out, and from the peripheries in.
*“A guesstimate is that the maximum logical possible positions are somewhere in the region of +-140,100,033, including trans-positional positions, giving the approximation of 4,670,033 maximum logical possible games”
Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception, Donald Hoffman
A very good presentation with lot of overlap on my views. He proposes similar ideas about a sensory-motive primitive and the nature of the world as experience rather than “objective”. What is not factored in is the relation between local and remote experiences and how that relation actually defines the appearance of that relation. Instead of seeing agents as isolated mechanisms, I think they should be seen as more like breaches in the fabric of insensitivity.
It is a little misleading to say (near the end) that a spoon is no more public than a headache. In my view what makes a spoon different from a headache is precisely that the metal is more public than the private experience of a headache. If we make the mistake of assuming an Absolutely public perspective*, then yes, the spoon is not in it, because the spoon is different things depending on how small, large, fast, or slow you are. For the same reason, however, nothing can be said to be in such a perspective. There is no experience of the world which does not originate through the relativity of experience itself. Of course the spoon is more public than a headache, in our experience. To think otherwise as a literal truth would be psychotic or solipsistic. In the Absolute sense, sure, the spoon is a sensory phenomena and nothing else, it is not purely public (nothing is), but locally, is certainly is ‘more’ public.
Something that he mentioned in the presentation had to do with linear algebra and using a matrix of columns which add up to be one. To really jump off into a new level of understanding consciousness, I would think of the totality of experience as something like a matrix of columns which add up, not to 1, but to “=1”. Adding up to 1 is a good enough starting point, as it allows us to think of agents as holes which feel separate on one side and united on the other. Thinking of it as “=1” instead makes it into a portable unity that does something. Each hole recapitulates the totality as well as its own relation to that recapitulation: ‘just like’ unity. From there, the door is open to universal metaphor and local contrasts of degree and kind.
*mathematics invites to do this, because it inverts the naming function of language. Instead of describing a phenomenon in our experience through a common sense of language, math enumerates relationships between theories about experience. The difference is that language can either project itself publicly or integrate public-facing experiences privately, but math is a language which can only face itself. Through math, reflections of experience are fragmented and re-assembled into an ideal rationality – the ideal rationality which reflects the very ideal of rationality that it embodies.
Epistemology and Ontology
“I think you’re conflating with Ontology/Metaphysics with Epistemology.”
Epistemology only becomes possible with a degree of ontological distance. Within our own most immediate experience, there can be no question of anything hidden or unhidden. “Here and now” is self-evident – it is maximally predictable and maximally unpredictable. It is only when we have the space of “There and then” that we can speculate on what and how knowledge/information differs from chaos/entropy. It is insensitivity which opens a breach of possibility and theory.
Questioning the Sufficiency of Information
Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment tends to be despised by strong AI enthusiasts, who seem to take issue with Searle personally because of it. Accusing both the allegory and the author of being stupid, the Systems Reply is the one offered most often. The man in the room may not understand Chinese, but surely the whole system, including book of translation, must be considered to understand Chinese.
Here then is simpler and more familiar example of how computation can differ from natural understanding which is not susceptible to any mereological Systems argument.
If any of you have use passwords which are based on a pattern of keystrokes rather than the letters on the keys, you know that you can enter your password every day without ever knowing what it is you are typing (something with a #r5f^ in it…?).
I think this is a good analogy for machine intelligence. By storing and copying procedures, a pseudo-semantic analysis can be performed, but it is an instrumental logic that has no way to access the letters of the ‘human keyboard’. The universal machine’s keyboard is blank and consists only of theoretical x,y coordinates where keys would be. No matter how good or sophisticated the machine is, it will still have no way to understand what the particular keystrokes “mean” to a person, only how they fit in with whatever set of fixed possibilities has been defined.
Taking the analogy further, the human keyboard only applies to public communication. Privately, we have no keys to strike, and entire paragraphs or books can be represented by a single thought. Unlike computers, we do not have to build our ideas up from syntactic digits. Instead the public-facing computation follows from the experienced sense of what is to be communicated in general, from the top down, and the inside out.
How large does a digital circle have to be before the circumference seems like a straight line?
Digital information has no scale or sense of relation. Code is code. Any rendering of that code into a visual experience of lines and curves is a question of graphic formatting and human optical interaction. With a universe that assumes information as fundamental, the proximity-dependent flatness or roundness of the Earth would have to be defined programmatically. Otherwise, it is simply “the case” that a person is standing on the round surface of the round Earth. Proximity is simply a value with no inherent geometric relevance.
When we resize a circle in Photoshop, for instance, the program is not transforming a real shape, it is erasing the old digital circle and creating a new, unrelated digital circle. Like a cartoon, the relation between the before and after, between one frame and the “next” is within our own interpretation, not within the information.
Multisense Realism 
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