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Likelihood is the ultimate unlikelihood: Notes on sense as sole synthetic a priori manifestation of improbability
In the contemporary Western model of the universe, mechanism is presumed to be the sole synthetic a priori. The general noumenal schema which can only be considered an eternal given and without which no phenomena can arise. In particular, the mechanism of statistical probability is seen as the engine of all possibility. Richard Dawkins title “The Blind Watchmaker” is an apt description – a kind of deism with no deity. Lawrence Krauss’ “A Universe From Nothing” is another apt title. The implication of both is that the universality of statistical distribution is the inevitable and inescapable self-evident truth of all phenomena.
What is overlooked in these models is the nature of probability itself – the concept of likelihood, and indeed the concept of ‘like’. The etymology of the word probable extends from French and Latin meanings of ‘provable’ and ‘agreeable’, a sense of credibility. What we like and what we find acceptable are similar concepts which both relate to, well, similarity. Agreement and likeness are in agreement. The two words are a-like. What is like alikeness though? What is similar to similarity or equivalent to equivalence?
Consider the equal sign. “=” is a visual onomatopoeia. It is a direct icon which looks like what it represents. Two parallel lines which illustrate precise congruence by their relation to each other. It’s an effective sign only because no further description is possible. So ubiquitous is the sense of comparison by similarity that we can’t easily get under it. It simply is the case that one line appears identical to the other, and when something is identical to another thing, we can notice that, and it doesn’t matter if its a thought, feeling, sensation, experience…anything can be similar to something. It could be said also that anything can be similar to anything in some sense. The universe can’t include something which is not similar to the universe in the exact way in which constitutes its inclusion. Inclusion by definition is commonality and commonality is some kind of agreement.
Agreement is not a concept, it is the agent of all coherence, real and imagined – all forms and functions, all things and experiences are coherent precisely because they are ‘like’ other things and experiences, and that there is (to quote David Chalmers) ‘something that it is like’ to experience those phenomena. Without this ontological glue, this associative capacity which all participants in the universe share, there can be no patterns or events, no consistency or parts, only unrelated fragments. That would truly be a universe from nothing, but it would not be a universe.
The question then of where this capacity for agreement comes from is actually moot, since we know that nothing can come from anything which does not already possess this synthetic a priori capacity for inclusion – to cohere as that which seems similar in some sense to itself in spite of dissimilarity in other ways. Something that happens which is similar to something that happened at a different time is said to be happening again. A thing which is similar to another thing in a different location can be said to be ‘the same kind of thing’. This is what consciousness is all about and it is what physics, mathematics, art, philosophy, law, etc are all about. It is what nature is all about. The unity behind multiplicity and the multiplicity behind unity. Indra’s Net, Bohm’s Implicate Order, QM’s vacuum energy, etc, are all metaphors for this same quality…a quality which is embodied as metaphor itself in human psychology. Metaphor is meta-likeness. It links essential likeness across the existential divide. Metaphor bridges the explanatory gap, not by explanation, but by example. Like the = sign, the medium is the message.
Aside from their duty of ‘ferrying-over meaning’ from the public example to private experience and private example to public application, metaphors tell the story of metaphors themselves. Implicitly within each metaphor is the bootstrap code, the instruction set for producing metaphors. Metaphor is the meta-meme and memes are meta-metaphors. This self nesting is a theme (a meme theme, ugh) of sense, and a hint that sense itself is insuperable. Mathematically, you could say that the axiom of foundation is itself a non-well-founded set. The rule of rules does not obey any rules. Regularity is, by definition, the cardinal irregularity, as it can only emerge from its own absence if it emerges at all. If it does not emerge, then is still the cardinal exception to its own regularity since everything else in the universe does emerge from something. First cause then, by being uncaused itself, is the ultimate un-likelihood. First cause by definition is singular and cannot be like anything else and there can be nothing that it is like to be it. At the same time, everything that is not the first cause is like the first cause and there is something that it is like to be that difference from the first cause – some aesthetic dissimilarity which constitutes some sense of partial separation (diffraction).
To get at the probability which is assumed by the Western mindset’s mechanistic universe, we have to begin with the Absolutely improbable. This is akin to realizing that dark is the absence of light when it was formerly assumed that dark was only something which could be added to a light background. Improbability is the fundamental, the synthetic a priori from which commonality is derived. Statistical analysis is a second or third order abstraction, not a primary mechanism. The primary mechanism is likeness itself, not likelihood. Likelihood follows from likeness, which follows from Absolute uniqueness, from the single all-but-impossible Everythingness rather than a plurality of inevitable nothingness.
Universal Schemas, Eternal Schisms
Having been introduced to Kent Palmer’s General Schemas Theory on Quora, I noticed some interesting overlap with my own under Multisense Realism*. In particular his use of a The paper identifies an emergent ontological hierarchy (of schemas) as follows:
· Pluriverse
· Kosmos
· World
· Domain
· Meta-system
· System
· Form
· Pattern
· Monad
· Facet
The paper also identifies an ontic hierarchy: “which might include gaia, social, organisms, organs, cells, molecules, atoms, particles, quarks, strings”. The paper goes on to explain that “any of the ontological schemas can be applied to any of the ontic hierarchy thresholds”. This is a very point, and while I have not explicitly talked about it in MR, part of the multi-sense aspects of implicitly includes this kind of portable mereology which applies to the continuum of public physics.
I’m not convinced that the ontological hierarchy terms he suggests are as different from each other as is implied…is a pattern different from a monad or form? Is a world something other than a meta-meta-meta system? My sense is that whatever qualitative differences are implied by this hierarchy are leaking in by association with the ontic hierarchy. We talk about worlds because we have the example of planets and forms because we have the example of macrocosmic objects that we can see and touch with our body.
I like the idea of the ontic vs ontological hierarchy and hope he doesn’t mind if I borrow it on occasion. I would describe the ontological hierarchy as a generalization of the ontic hierarchy such that the overall shape and design of public physics is preserved as an abstraction which can be applied to any level of any nested hierarchy. What separates the levels in the first place is a slightly different matter, one which I hope Multisense Realism helps illuminate: Science should not take these ‘leveling’ breakpoints, in which there is an aesthetic shift of attention from a complex multiplicity to a higher order of simplicity.
This shift does not happen out in space somewhere, it is not an objective mechanism, rather it is a natural relation of coherence which emerges from participants and parts as much as it is recovered from the whole. This spectrum-like quality of aesthetics is universal and is, in my view, the backbone of the cosmos – it is Sense in the grandest sense; a sanity which is truly uni-versal. I suspect that this unity of all ‘verses’ is what multiverse theories fail to factor in, as they neglect to investigate the role that wholeness has in experience and what role experience plays in the whole. I would therefore feel comfortable in clipping off the Pluriverse level of the ontological hierarchy.
The MR version of the ontological hierarchy seeks a purely quantitative sense:
· Meta systems (Mega-system, Giga-system, Tera-system…)
· System
· Root systems (micro-system, nano-system, pico-system…)
However, in addition to the ontic hierarchy, MR offers a perpendicular conjugate holarchy which relates to interior, qualitative phenomena. The physics of privacy is seen not as a parallel dimension to public physics, but rather that the continuum of sense is an Ouroboran monad in which endophoric and exometric polarities are only one of the fundamental discernments. The ontic schema of Multisense Realism is a matrix that ‘eats its own tail’ as well as pairs up the largest and smallest levels. The reason that the largest and smallest levels are paired is to reflect the order in which systems have been established. Rather than a chain of events on the micro level leading to cosmological scale events, it must be understood that without a human scale orientation to divide and compare against, the two scales are the same thing.
I propose instead that the evolution of the Cosmos or Kosmos (please stop me before I use the word Qosmos) is a ‘tunneling within’ nested systems, so that the outermost systems are the most distant from our human privacy. Regardless of the scale difference, our understanding of astrophysical meta-systems (Cosmos, Galaxy, Solar System) has a lot in common with our understanding of nuclear physics (atom, quantum, strings). The modeling of both relies on the same mathematical and logical principles, the same assumptions of eternal force-relations and statistical laws. The Western physical approach to both cosmology and microcosmology is identical and presents a united front of impersonal mechanisms. This outermost frame is generally considered to be the sine qua non of science and engineering. All causes and conditions are presumed to follow from the presence of these initial ontic realities and ontological-mathematical principles.
The first order of business then is to wrap the maximum and minimum ends of the schema around, so that the meta-systems of astrophysics meet up with the root-systems of nuclear physics. Notice that the phenomena are entirely related as well. We smash the smallest particles in the largest particle accelerators. The chain reactions of nuclear fusion, which a nearly instantaneous and of course infinitesimally small generate the largest and longest lasting events. This is important because it establishes the principle of perceptual relativity. It’s not merely that things are too large/slow or too small/fast for us to relate to directly, it’s also that the too large-slow/small-fast phenomena are the same things. To get to phenomena which we find familiar, we have to go to the mid-range, to phenomena which last between 0.1 seconds and 24 hours. This kind of range in which direct human perception is appropriate.
To link the meta and root schemas then (and this is for the public facing ‘exometric’ ontic hierarchy) I would offer:
Exometric Ontic Schemas
- Astrophysics ⊇ Quantum Mechanics
- Geology ⊇ Chemistry
- Evolution ⊇ Genetics
- Zoology⊇ Biology
- Anthropology⊇ Sociology
- Neuroscience ⊇ Cognitive-Science
The corresponding revised ontological hierarchy then would be:
Exometric Ontological Schemas
- Maximum ⊇ minimum
- Tera⊇ pico
- Giga⊇ nano
- Mega⊇ micro
- Meta⊇ root
- System/phenomenon
Another change that I would add is to recognize that these hierarchies of external metrics are meaningless without internal experiences which yoke them together along the transverse axis. Every real, whole phenomenon has its roots in the outermost aesthetics of physics (1.) and the innermost idiosyncratic aesthetics of its own experience (6.) The continuity between the two, and the correlation of that continuity with uniqueness and privacy is the perhaps the most revolutionary idea within MR. That uniqueness itself is a physical property, a strange attractor of significance which is perpendicular/orthogonal to generic-cardinality-entropy is radical and exotic at first, but I do suspect that this is the Holy Grail to integrating consciousness with matter. Awareness looks up and down through the nested external hierarchies, as well as within its own internal histories (in the case of humans at least).
Because of the perpendicular symmetry between public and private schemas, private schemas are not only different from public schemas, they are fundamentally different in how they schematize. Public systems are forms and functions which are literally nested within each other by scale. Forms exist within the physical boundaries of other forms and functions are sequential processes which are composed of sub-functions, steps within steps which are timed to different orders of oscillatory magnitude. Private experiences are not only steps and structures but the are the appreciation of phenomena. Experiences inhabit other experiences in ways which are not mathematically well-founded. We can apply a loose, meta ⊇ root hierarchy as follows:
Endophoric Ontic Schemas
- Absolute⊇ Sense
- Archetypes ⊇ Qualia
- Intuition ⊇ Emotion
- Significance⊇ Instinct
- Being⊇ Doing
- Afference⊇ Efference
Unlike the well-founded exometric schemas, the endophoric shemas are a multivalent fugue. The physics of privacy requires precisely the conditions which public physics lacks. There is a law of conservation of mystery which keeps any given experience isolated from others in some senses but united in others. It is an unfolding narrative in which the joke is not revealed until the punchline, but the punchline is implicit in the intent of the joke from the start. Teleology therefore is a function of a larger, more meta endophoric schema exerting its sense, or harmonizing with itself on lower, down-root schemas.
Endophoric Ontological Schemas
- Univeral ⊇ schematic
- Perennial⊇ ephemeral
- Solitary⊇ oscillating
- Essential⊇ existential
- Irreducible⊇ related
- Experience
Putting it all together, the Endophoric and Exometric schemas can be seen to wrap in the horizontal sense as well as the vertical meta/root sense:
- Astrophysics ⊇ Quantum Mechanics ⊥ Absolute⊇ Sense
- Geology ⊇ Chemistry⊥ Archetypes ⊇ Qualia
- Evolution ⊇ Genetics⊥ Intuition ⊇ Emotion
- Zoology⊇ Biology⊥ Significance⊇ Instinct
- Anthropology⊇ Sociology⊥ Being⊇ Doing
- Neuroscience ⊇ Cognitive-Science⊥ Afference⊇ Efference
These can be further consolidated into single Super-Schema formula:
Literally Nested Public Metric ⊥ Figuratively Nested Private Experience
Our Mathematical Universe
I have not read Max Tegmark’s new book, but the argument that mathematics is the ultimate reality of the universe is a strong one that has been around for a long time. I would agree that mathematics is an irreplaceable tool for understanding the universe, and for understanding knowledge, but mathematics alone is not sufficient to derive the actual universe which we experience.
In my view, mathematics can only be an emergent property of representation and therefore ephiphenomenal. The underlying (and overarching) phenomena of presence or presentation is fundamentally aesthetic and consists of sensory-motor experiences. This is not a biocentric view as inorganic matter is also, by my understanding, a tokenization of aesthetic experiences. The universe is a significance-building machine, where significance is the temporal super-saturation and transcendence of sensory qualities.
As far as comparing mathematics to computation, mathematics seems to be a broader category which would embrace ideas which computation cannot, such as irrational numbers and geometric forms. While computation can be used to drive a sensory experience in which geometric forms are inscribed visually or sculpted tangibly, those outputs are irrelevant to the computation itself and are desirable to us purely for aesthetic reasons.
Computation is, however, closer to empirical realism than other kinds of mathematics, since it is rooted in digital interactions which can be reproduced and re-presented in any solid-body/persistent-position form-function. If there is no discrete fundamental unit which is subject to reliable inspection (which is an experiential and aesthetic property that is generally overlooked ) then computation cannot be initiated or preserved.
I get into this a bit here: https://multisenserealism.com/2013/06/06/mathmatical-musings/
Mathematics requires a mind and a brain while computation requires only a brain substitute. By this I mean that the sense of computation is a low level sensory-motor interaction through which higher level interactions can be transported from one location to another. This transportation offers the opportunity for reconstruction only if the receiver has the appropriate frame of reference to imitate the sender’s intents. We use a computer to listen to music or watch a video, but in the absence of human receivers, there would only product would be disconnected instants of acoustic or optical activity.
Mathematics similarly owes its universality to its exploitation of a low level ‘common sense’ which depends on similarly overlooked assumptions about the validity of conceptual realism. Mathematics depends on sanity in the intellectual and logical sense. It presumes an aesthetic minimalism. Where computation can be more clearly seen to depend on concrete mechanisms of read/write/erase, storage, pattern recognition, loops, etc., mathematics seeks a more anesthetic representation – as Baudrillard might have said, a simulacra: A representation without any presentation. In my understanding, mathematics can be thought of as an ultimate reality only in the sense that all of our intellectual models of reality can be rendered in mathematical ways.
Unfortunately, most people conflate the idea of reality with the experience of it, and have developed a misplaced authority for “information” as the progenitor of physics and awareness. This is, in my view, almost correct, but actually upside down as information can only ride on top of an aesthetic exchange of experiences, which involves public to private extractions of significance and private to public export of entropy. Information, by itself, has never done anything. No byte of data will ever feel anything, be anything, want anything, go anywhere, etc. Mathematics deals in figures, which have no form or function but represent forms and functions. What figures cannot represent is presence itself. There is no substitute for experience, and that is why it is experience which is the ultimate reality – the absolute and authentic substrate of the universe is a unique agenda of aesthetics, not a generic consequence of configured figures.
Public Space, Private Time, and the Aperture of Consciousness
In the first diagram, I’m trying to show the relation between public and private physics, and how the aperture of consciousness modulates which range is emphasized. Contrary to the folk model of time that we currently use, multisense realism proposes that time is only conceivable from the perspective of a experiential narrative. Time cannot be translated literally into the public range of experience, only inferred figuratively by comparing the positions of objects.
Through general relativity, we can understand spacetime as a single entity defined by gravity and acceleration – to quote Einstein, a
“non-rigid reference-body, which might appropriately be termed a “reference-mollusk,” is in the main equivalent to a Gaussian four-dimensional co-ordinate system chosen arbitrarily”.
While space and time can indeed be modeled that way successfully, what has been overlooked is the opportunity to see another profoundly fundamental symmetry. What GR does is to spatialize time. This is a great boon to physics since physics has focused exclusively on public phenomena (for good reason, initially), GR has enabled accurate computations on astronomical scales, taught us how to make cell phone networks work on a global scale, send satellites into orbit, etc. Einstein accomplished this by collapsing the subjective experience of time passing (which can change depending on how you feel about what’s going on) into a one dimensional vector of ‘observation’. Not any special kind of observation, just a point of reference without aesthetic dimensions of feeling, hearing, tasting – only a generic sense of position and acceleration. This is the public perspective of privacy, i.e. not private at all, but a footprint which points to the privacy which has been overlooked but assumed.
This is great for modeling some aspects of public phenomena, but in reality, there is no actual public perspective that we can conceive of. There is no voyeur’s view from nowhere which defines perspectives without any mode of sensory description. That view from ‘out there’ is purely an intellectual abstraction, a hypothetical vantage point. Why is this a big deal? It’s not until you want to really understand subjectivity in its own terms – private terms. By spatializing time, GR strips out the orthogonal symmetry of space vs time which we experience and redefines it as an illusion. Our native experience of time is as much the opposite of space as it is similar. Time is autobiographical, it is memory and anticipation. We can stay in the same place while time passes. Our time also moves with us, with our thoughts and actions.
Space, by contrast, is a public field in which we are tangibly located. If we want our thoughts to stay somewhere, we must leave some material trace – write a note or make a sign. When we want to meet someone, establishing the spatial coordinate for the meeting is based on a literal location – a physical address or reference (by the palm tree in the South Square Mall). The time coordinate is more figurative. We look at clocks with made up numbers which we have intentionally synchronized, or pick an event in our shared narrative experience (after the movie is over). If our watches are wrong, it doesn’t matter as long as they are both wrong in the same way. If we actually need to be a specific palm tree, it doesn’t matter if we are both wrong in the same way, we will still be at the wrong location. Time, in this sense is a social convention, while space is an objective fact.
Looking at the diagram, I have put this sense of time as a social convention in the center right, as the clip art alarm clock. This is the familiar sense of time as personal commodity. Running out of time. The bells emphasize the intrusive nature of this face of time – our behavior is constrained by conflicting agendas between self and others, home and school or work, etc. There is a pie to be allotted and when the clock strikes X, the agenda is expected to follow the X schedule. The label just under this clock marks the point of punctuality, where the time that you care about personally no longer matters, and the public expectation of time takes over.
Above this personal, work-a-day agenda sense of time, I have included a Mayan calendar to reference a super-personal sense of time. Time which stretches from eternity to the eternal now. Time which is measured in fleeting flashes and awe-inspiring syzygies. Time as cosmological poetry, shedding light on experience through experience. This is time as a dance with wholeness.
Beneath the alarm clock I have used the guts of a digital clock to emphasize the sub-personal sense of time. The alarm clock face of time collapses the mandala-calendar’s eternal cycle into personal cycles, but the digital clock breaks down even the numbers themselves into spatial configurations. Time is no longer moving forward or even cycling, but blinking on and off instantaneously.
This all correlates to the diagram, where I tried to juxtapose the public space side of the camera with the private experience side. The subjective disposition of our awareness contracts and dilates to influence our view. At the subjective extreme, the view is near sighted publicly and far sighted privately. For the objective-minded individuals and cultures, the view outside is clear and deep, but the interior view is purely technical. The little icons have some subtle details that came out serendipitously too – with the headless guy on top vs the camera guy on the bottom, but I won’t go into that…rabbit hole alert. The last few posts on psychedelics and language relate…it’s all about how spacetime extends intentionality from private aesthetics to public realism through diffraction of experience.
Mathematical Musings
Here are some of the more mathematical concepts related to Multisense Realism.
Position on Mathematics
Mathematics does not exist on its own. It does not haunt the vacuum of space. It does not manifest as public objects or substances. It has no will or motivation.
Mathematics is two distinctly different (opposite) things:
1) A private experience of imagined sensory symbol-figures which accompany a motive of quantitative reasoning.
2) A collection of public objects interacting in a logical, causal way, without any private representations, as a consequence of the shapes of multiple rigid bodies.
The problem with functionalist expectations is that they seduce us into a shell game so that when we look at math ‘out there’ (2), we smuggle in the meaning from ‘in here’ (1), and when we look at meaning in here (1) we mis-attribute it to the blind enactment of material bodies.
We assume that the world outside of our minds runs on math not because it actually does, but because our awareness of the public arena is a grossly reduced, indirect logical construction. The universe without, like the universe within, runs on qualitative sensory-motor experiences.
Turning the functionalist expectations around then, we find that the activity of the brain is not the source of human experience, but rather the effect of many kinds of experience on many levels (physical, chemical, biological). These experiences are not generated by information or mathematics, but rather information is an analysis of experiences by someone who knows almost nothing about them first hand.
We are used to thinking of ‘data’ in terms of digital vs analog. Consider however that both of these categories are a-signifying formats. I would like to propose a principle by which subjective, signifying experience is introduced – a qualitative instrumentality of being.
Think of the number line – abstract, linear, literal. A conception of pure quantitative non-awareness. It’s a semantic artifact from which all qualitative content has been stripped. It’s like a Supremetist work of art, really.
The act of measurement itself is to invert qualitative experience – to collapse it into value coordinates on a numberline, allowing us to treat it as a hypothetical object, aka, a figure.
Ordinal position applies to the literal, outward facing specifications of rank. This is where the universe gets the ideas for front and back (anterior and posterior) and interior exterior. As in Chess, rank refers to the relative power of the piece – the order of their significance to the game.
Ordinal disposition applies to the figurative, inward facing qualities associated with rank. This is where the universe gets the ideas for best and worst (superior and inferior). Feeling like a King or Queen, being treated like royalty, having access to first choice in dividing the spoils, etc. Ordinal disposition is about the experiential privilege of rank while ordinal position is about the mechanics associated with delivering or deriving that privilege.
by contrast, Cardinal position I am saying refers to the relative size of a real public phenomenon. The range here is along an axis from the micro to the mega, and can refer to increasing scopes and scale or increasing quantitative complexity. This is about structures nested within structures, separated by spaces of varying size. Rather than in/out, front/back, or high/low-superior/inferior, cardinal position is about spatial-topological extension – long/short, large/small.
Cardinal disposition rounds out the four as an evaluation based on rarity. Like the pawns in chess, their generic abundance relative to the two unique pieces and the three duplicated pieces indicates their disposable rank. This is different from ordinal disposition in that superiority/inferiority derives not from order in a sequence, but from degree of commonality. Where cardinal position is about space and geometry, cardinal disposition is about feelings derived from time and algebra; frequency. How often. Sooner/later. Cheap/dear. Ordinary/exotic. The magic here is in pattern recognition. ‘Three in a row’ is an example of how low caste occurrences can ascend to uncommon value.
The terms for the columns and rows in chess, rank and file, are useful here. The rank can be seen as the vertical axis of qualitative position and disposition, while the single-file of pawns exemplifies the horizontal axis of quantitative position and disposition. Poker hands are a good metaphor to see this as well. Pairs, three and four of a kind, flushes display cardinal significance, straights, high cards, and Royal flushes display ordinal significance. The other hands, full house, straight flush, demonstrate an appreciation of the cardinal disposition of combined cardinal and ordinal values.
Causation Diagram
I suggest that consciousness isn’t built up from nothing by tiny parts, it is recovered from everything by sensitivity. Unlike traditional causation models, Multisense Realism posits a radiant centripetal locus (‘here and now’) divided into lower (interior) and upper (exterior) sense conjugates. The blue and yellow connote the mirroring of the conjugates, signifying that subjective and objective modalities are not merely different but are opposite, or orthomodular ontologies:
Yellow: Interior significance (doing*being)(timespace) and
Blue: Exterior entropy (matter/energy)/spacetime
In the lower yellow half, the subjective experience of ‘now’ (M1) represents the tip of an iceberg of mental events (M) through constraints on experiential scope . The scope of a human experience is limited on the ‘near’ end by sampling rate and on the ‘far’ end by long term memory. The event horizon of the M1 now degenerates from proprietary availability toward Mφ (totality of experience, significance, or consciousness itself) along a proposed fractional Fibonacci ratio.
The blue upper half, by contrast, depicts the counterpart to M1 as ΣP, or the sum of all physical presentations relative to any given M stack. Note that physical presentations (P) are understood to be the ‘back end’ of mental presentations (M), i.e. a better symbol for physical presentations here might be shaped like a W to mirror M.
In the blue half of the diagram, the fading nested ellipses represent a different, public kind of constraint on sense – obstruction and scale. Beginning from the outside at P1 (the Big Bang) and proliferating into smaller and more granular forms. The spread between the cosmic and the microcosmic pushes out from the middle.
Degree of figurativeness in qualia equates to privacy of qualia.
1. Subjects necessarily have access to more qualia which applies to their autobiographical experience than qualia which refers to external, publicly accessible experience.
2. It is proposed that the more strictly personal a quale is, the greater the set of interconnected psychological associations that exists for the individual and the richer and more imaginative those associations can be.
3. Mathematically, the more personal an experience is to us, the more ways we can shift its meaning, making qualitative floridity and associative fluidity directly proportional to privacy.
Sole Entropy Well Model
Loschmidt’s Paradox, which as I understand it is basically “If the universe is always increasing from low entropy to high entropy, then where did the initial low entropy come from?” can be approached in a different way than what has been suggested so far. Boltzmann’s entropy curve proposes that our universe’s Big Bang is only one of many bubbles or waves which we find ourselves in anthropically.
What I propose instead is a single well of bottomless low entropy, which perpetually lengthens as all possible Boltzmann entropy waves are anticipated and absorbed before they can threaten the negentropic monopoly of the well.
In this view, the range of possible kinds of signals becomes quantitatively bound on one extreme by the Absolute (where all signals are fused in singularity of significance) and spacetime (where all signals are divided in absolute cardinality or insignificance). Like velocity, which ranges from stillness to c, the phenomenon of significance actually defines the parameters of its own measure. Entropy has meaning only in relation to expected significance, such that anything less than 100% entropy has some portion of Absolute significance. The most insignificant event can still only have 99.999…% entropy, and even the negentropic monopoly of the Absolute can only ever attain 0.000…1% entropy.
This way, the Big Bang becomes a perpetually receding event horizon of absolute and eternal negentropy, – a Borg-like ‘bright whole’ which tyrannically absorbs and subordinates all potentials and possibilities into a single continuum-schema of sense. This continuum must accommodate all paradoxes which amounts to a lot of fancy devices like nesting signals within each other on multiple interrelated layers or castes, and orthomodular juxtapositions such as private-public. These devices accomplish what I call the Big Diffraction.
The initial signal, which is the bootstrap for all sense-motor phenomena, is initiation itself, and as it defines all future coherence, it is perpetually hogging all possible signals for all time, banishing any rival Multiverse by perpetual deferment and delay.
L’existentialisme est un humanisme
One of the benefits of having never been interested in reading other people’s philosophy, is that I get to discover them in digestible bits and pieces over a long period of time. I have always found it impossible to learn anything without first having a curiosity about it – which why public education was always a complete waste of time for me. I can only seem to learn answers to questions when the questions are my own.
This is perhaps not unrelated to my topic here of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism and his use of the phrase “Existence precedes essence” in his 1945 lecture L’existentialisme est un humanisme* (turned later into a book). The terms existence and essence can be confusing, and in some senses are interchangeable. Sartre’s use of existence and essence would actually be nearly opposite to my own sense of those words.
If you read the lecture, in which he defends existentialism from misinterpretations by Communists, who accuse the philosophy of being a bourgeois privilege that promotes ‘quietism’, and by Christians as undermining the authority of God and being generally too abstract and lacking human sentiment. Sartre’s defense is to show how existentialism is, to the contrary, an exaltation of humanism and the vital importance of taking action on behalf of your fellow man. He says
“Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. The word “subjectivism” is to be understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism.”
Looking into the origins of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, I can see that in all likelihood she lifted the name for her ideology from reversing Sarte’s assertion that man is responsible for all men. In 1962, she writes that the Ethics of Objectivism are Self-interest:
3. “Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”
Of course, Rand had her own personal reasons for despising those meddling Marxist do-gooders. Had she been more down with the whole ‘compassion for fellow human beings’ thing, her views would seem strikingly similar to Sartre’s existentialism, especially with his assertion that “Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, he is also only what he wills himself to be”. His use of ‘existence precedes essence’ is to say that human nature is predicated on the freedom to actualize itself intentionally. Human essence is a wildcard to be used as we see fit. Thus, his existentialism is an action oriented ethos, He says “there is no doctrine more optimistic, since man’s destiny is within himself; . . . . It tells him that action is the only thing that enables man to live”
I would not disagree with that, as far as it goes. Although it is not quietism as he felt the Marxists contended, it could be appropriated (as Rand did) for the justification of selfish motives since it seems to de-emphasize the role that the circumstances of one’s birth play in limiting the effect that one’s will can have on self-actualization. I do think that the Christian criticism is more misguided, since existentialism explicitly exalts humanist values. While existentialism does run counter to Christian doctrine, I think that it is not incompatible with concepts of divinity which honor liberation. Bob Marley’s Stand Up For Your Rights expresses this:
“Most people think,
Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. Jah!”
Where it gets muddled for me is on the metaphysical level. When Sartre talks about essence, he is talking about purpose – human purpose. When he is talking about existence is is talking about the existence of the experience of living a human life. This is very different from talking about existence in general, of matter, of forms, etc. When I think about ex-istence in the absolute sense, I am thinking about that which is ex-terior to the subject. That which is independent from our personal thoughts and feelings. Subjectivity is, by contrast, that which literally ‘ins-ists’ and is in-terior by the subject. It could be said informally that our feelings and thoughts exist, that they ‘are’ phenomena which is part of our being, which is a phenomena in the universe, and that is true too. It could further be said that everything that exists in that way, which simply ‘is’ can only appear to be through some insistence of essential forces or energies.
I think that existence and essence in the general, non-human sense are a dialectic rather than a procession through time. They are relativistic terms. To say that one precedes the other can be locally true in either case, but it obscures the deeper truth. It invites us to mistake two levels of human experience – the innate and the intentional, for structural antagonists of the universe as a whole. What I see as more relevant is the juxtaposition between the capacity to discern aesthetic differences like essence and existence and the indifference to such distinctions. That I would say is the true essence: The sense of difference with the logic of unity (i.e. metaphor, presentation and representation). The true essence of existence is the opposite: The sense of indifference with the logic of differentiation (i.e. mechanism, mathematics).
What this does is to slide the dichotomy out from the world of anthropocentric philosophy and into the realm of scientific conjecture. We are no longer talking about only the human condition and human psychology, but talking about the common sense of all phenomena. This is the solution to the Mind Body problem…both Mind and Body are figments of subjective experience, only the body is locally misrepresented as an object (when it is actually trillions of discrete histories dating back to the beginning of the universe) and the mind is misrepresented as a subject of the body or of God (when it is actually eternity focused into a single, human gauged, perceptual inertial frame of ‘now’).
*L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Nagel, 1946, translation by Frechtman published as Existentialism (also see below), Philosophical Library, 1947, translation by Mairet published asExistentialism and Humanism, Methuen, 1948.
Quora: What effect has the computer had on philosophy?
Quora: What effect has the computer had on philosophy?
What effect has the computer had on philosophy in general and philosophy of mind in particular?
Obviously, computing has facilitated a lot of scientific advances that allow us to study the brain. e.g., neuroscience research would not exist as it does today without the computer. However, I’m more interested in how theories of computation, computer science and computer metaphors have shaped brain research, philosophy of mind, our understanding of human intelligence and the big questions we are currently asking. (Quora)
I’m not familiar enough with the development of philosophy of mind in the academic sense to comment on it, but the influence of the computer on popular philosophy includes the relevance of themes such as these:
Simulation Dualism: The success of computer graphics and games has had a profound effect on the believability of the idea of consciousness-as-simulation. Films like The Matrix have, for better or worse, updated Plato’s Allegory of The Cave for the cybernetic era. Unlike a Cartesian style substance dualism, where mind and body are separate, the modern version is a kind of property dualism where the metaphor of the hardware-software relation stands in for the body-mind relation. As software is an ordered collection of the functional states of hardware, the mind or self is the similarly ordered collection of states of the brain, or neurons, or perhaps something smaller than that (microtubules, biophotons, etc).
Digital Emergence: From a young age we now learn, at least in a general sense, how the complex organization of pixels or bits leads to something which we see as an image or hear as music. We understand how combinations of generic digits or simple rules can be experienced as filled with aesthetic quality. Terms like ‘random’ and ‘virtual’ have become part of the vernacular, each having been made more relevant through experience with computers. The revelation of genetic sequences have further bolstered the philosophical stance of a modern, programmatic determinism. Through computational mathematics, evolutionary biology and neuroscience, a fully impersonal explanation of personhood seems imminent (or a matter of settled science, depending on who you ask). This emergence of the personal consciousness from impersonal unconsciousness is thought to be a merely semantic formality, rather than a physics or functional one. Just as the behavior of a flock of birds flying in formation can be explained as emerging inevitably from the movements of each individual bird responding to the bird in front of them, the complex swarm of ideas and feelings that we experience are thought to also emerge inevitably from the aggregate behavior of neuron processes.
Information Supremacy: One impact of the computer on society since the 1980’s has been to introduce Information Technology as an economic sector. This shift away from manufacturing and heavy industry seems to have paralleled a historic shift in philosophy from materialism to functionalism. It no longer is in fashion to think in terms of consciousness emerging from particular substances, but rather in terms of particular manipulations of data or information. The work of mathematicians and scientists such as Kurt Gödel, Claude Shannon, and Alan Turing re-defined the theory of what math can and cannot do, making information more physical in a sense, and making physics more informational. Douglas Hofstadter’s books such as Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid continue to have a popular influence, bringing the ideas of strange loops and self referential logic to the forefront. Computationally driven ideas like Chaos theory, fractal mathematics, and Bayesian statistics also have gained traction as popular Big-Picture philosophical principles.
The Game of Life: Biologist Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker (following his other widely popular and influential work, The Selfish Gene) utilized a program to illustrate how natural selection produces biomorphs from a few simple genetic rules and mutation probabilities. An earlier program Conway’s Game of Life, similarly demonstrates how life-like patterns evolve without input from a user, given only initial conditions and simple mathematical rules. Philosopher Daniel Dennett has been another extremely popular influence who maintains both a ‘brain-as-computer’ view and a ‘consciousness-as-pure-evolutionary-adaptation’ position. Dawkins coined the word ‘meme’ in The Selfish Gene, a word which has now itself become a meme. Dennett makes use of the concept as well, naming the repetitive power of memes as the blind architect of culture. Author Susan Blackmore further spread the meme meme with her book The Meme Machine. I see all of these ideas as fundamentally connected – the application of the information-first perspective to life and consciousness. To me they spell the farthest extent of the pendulum swing in philosophy to the West, a critique of naturalized subjectivity and an embrace of computational inevitability.
The Interior Strikes Back: When philosopher David Chalmers introduced the Hard Problem of Consciousness, he opened the door for a questioning of the eliminative materialism of Dawkins and Dennett. His contribution at that time, along with that of philosophers John Searle and Galen Strawson has been to show the limitation of mechanism. The Hard Problem asks innocently, why is there any conscious experience at all, given that these information processes are driven entirely by their own automatic agendas? Chalmers and Strawson have championed the consideration of panpsychism or panexperientialism – that consciousness is a fundamental ingredient in the universe like charge, or perhaps *the* fundamental ingredient of the universe. My own view, Multisense Realism is based on the same kinds of observations of Chalmers and Strawson, that physics and mathematics have a blind spot for some aspects, the most important aspects perhaps, of consciousness. Neuroscientist Raymond Tallis’ book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity provides a focused critique of the evidence upon which reductionist perspectives of human consciousness are built.
The bottom line for me is that computers, while wonderful tools, exploit a particular facet of consciousness – counting. The elaboration of counting into mathematics and calculus-based physics is undoubtedly the most powerful influence on civilization in the last 400 years, its success has been based on the power to control exterior bodies in public space. With the development of designer pharmaceuticals and more immersive internet experiences, we have good reason to expect that this power to control extends to our entire existence. With the computer’s universality as evidence that doing and knowing are indeed all there is to the universe, including ourselves, it is nonetheless difficult to ignore that beyond all that seems to exist, there is some thing or some one else who seems to ‘insist’. On further inspection, all of the simulations, games, memes, information, can be understood to supervene on a deeper level of nature. When addressing the ultimate questions, it is no longer adequate to take the omniscient voyeur and his ‘view from nowhere’ for granted. The universe as a program makes no sense without a user, and a user makes no sense for a program to develop for itself.
It’s not the reflexive looping or self-reference, not the representation or semiotics or Turing emulation that is the problem, it is the aesthetic presentation itself. We have become so familiar with video screens and keyboards that we forget that those things are for the user, not the computer. The computer’s world, if it had a world, is a completely anesthetic codescape with no plausible mechanism for or justification of any kind of aesthetic decoding as experience. Even beyond consciousness, computation cannot even justify a presentation of geometry. There is no need to draw a triangle itself if you already have the coordinates and triangular description to access at any time. Simulations need not actually occur as experiences, that would be magical and redundant. It would be like the government keeping a movie of every person’s life instead of just keeping track of drivers licenses, birth certificates, tax returns, medical records, etc. A computer has no need to actualize or simulate – again that is purely for the aesthetic satisfaction of the user.
David Sosa on Free Will in Waking Life
(my comments:
I think that just as free will spans the entire continuum from profound mystery to ordinary fact to most-convincing illusion to least convincing reality, so too does consciousness as a whole.
Will seems to be a self-contained, primordial feature of nature – intentional force. The projection of a single motive sequence from a multiplicity of private motives into a thermodynamically irreversible public consequence. The power to participate in public realism; from motive to motor, emotion to intention to extension as a unified gestalt at the personal level, but smeared across smaller spaces and times at the sub-personal levels (cellular, neurochemical). Will is consciousness oscillating from being to feeling to doing to knowing, an Ouroboran double-binary knot of sensory-motor qualities, pushing and pulling between private times and public spaces.
The ‘free’ part of free will seems more conceptual. Free compared to what? Nevertheless, it too has an aesthetic subtext which is compelling. Freedom is somehow the epitome of will. It suggests self seeking to amplify itself by transcending itself. When people use the expression ‘willful’ there is a sense of being unpredictable or ‘wild’. This connection comes up again and again in philosophy and science and is rejected again and again as well. Vital force. Kundalini. Qi. Animal Magnetism. We are ambivalent about physicalizing this most direct of all experiences – perhaps the only truly direct experience there is.
What I propose is sort of a ‘if you can’t beat em, join em’ strategy. Put the phenomena which we can’t explain in the center of the model. Neither sensory perception nor motive participation can, in my view, be reduced in any way. They are primordial, such that any conceivable physical force or field, any mathematical principle or information process would by definition supervene on some form of aesthetic presentation – some detection-participation capacity. Without such a capacity, nothing which has sense, or is itself defined by sense could possibly contact this non-sensed existence in any way. In this way, we can begin to see that being and sensory-motive participation are ultimately the same thing.
The effects of free will are cumulative, and as we free ourselves again and again from our own collective inertial consequences, initiating novel sequences out of personal preference, we also cut ourselves off from many experiences. We de-cide; kill off possibilities…we make a difference not only by what we choose but what our choice makes us indifferent to. The wild personal impulse gradually pivots to its opposite, and Homo sapiens raw nomadic drive to explore becomes the impersonal impulse of self-domestication. Now that the pendulum has perhaps reached the apogee of its swing, we seek to define the impulse in terms of its absence. This is an opportunity to step out of the system and look at the phenomenon as a whole – as we modulate with it through history. The unexpected truth – that free will and mechanism are two sides of the same oscillating coin is hard to consider, but like free will itself, we should place this enigma in the center of the model rather than try to flatten it into either mechanism or spirituality. Let it be what it is. Let us be who we are.)
If “the self” is the product of internal cognitive processes communicating with each other, then where do “attention” and “willpower” com…
If “the self” is the product of internal cognitive processes communicating with each other, then where do “attention” and “willpower” come from?
Who or what is deciding to focus on something, and who or what is asserting one internal view over another (“exerting willpower”)?
As a more general question, how are such purely internal, subjective, yet fully pervasive experiences such as attention as a resource that can be focused, and willpower as a resource that can be used and depleted, explained in terms of an emergent view of consciousness where the self is an illusion?
In my view, the emergent view of consciousness lacks the depth of understanding of subjectivity to be viable. At this time, emergence and the illusory self is seen as a scientific alternative to discredited spiritualist views. This would make sense if we have painted ourselves into a corner, rejecting immaterialism on one hand and embracing the lack of evidence of any ‘feelings of self’ produced in the brain.
There is another option which is not religious, and not based on a disembodied entity haunting the cells of your brain, and I think that is to understand experience itself as a concrete physical conjugate to all forms and functions. Physics becomes the ordering not just of forces and fields in spacetime, but of feelings and beings through experience or lifetime.
In this question for example, willpower could only be a mechanical condition of the brain. How much willpower you have would be a consequence of your genetic capacities and how your brain has developed. In our real world experience however, willpower has at least as much to do with the semantic content of our experience. The conventional wisdom has been, and not without merit, that we are responsible for participating in our own exercise of willpower. It would be argued that whatever we might do to build our focus and discipline would also improve whatever neurological functions are involved, but it seems more like it has to be a push-pull.
In the end, no emergent view of consciousness can plausibly justify the sensory experience of consciousness itself. The idea of the illusory self, while seemingly supported by a consensus of inanimate instruments, can only be accepted or rejected by the self itself. The existence of an epiphenomenal self-model which is experienced aesthetically rather than loops of anesthetic self-referential data processing is really a deal breaker. Regardless of whether our private expectation of the effectiveness of our will match the public effect of it, the fact that there is any such thing as an expectation of self in the first place cannot be explained mechanically. The only way we can even entertain this fallacy is to smuggle our own undeniably real self awareness into the argument without noticing and then using our own minds to consider the idea of their own absence by the very evidence that it is actively weighing. You can’t have it both ways. If you are real enough to do science, then you can’t be irrelevant enough to be illusory.
Multisense Realism 
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