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Neologisms For Physics
The addition of a sensory-motor primitive in physics would entail new terms to reflect the shift away from thermodynamic and electromagnetic and toward terms which consider the distinction between private-tempo and public-spatial to be more relevant. Thermal qualities of temperature are understood to be tactile reads of the same molecular tempos (frequencies) which are read visually as colors, but they are both private signifying experiences (endophoric).
Kinetic-based measurements such as velocity and pressure are correlated to molecular tempo but from an exterior view. The public consequences of endophoric tempos are received as topographical presentations of an exometric sort (wavelengths and ranges for example). Exometrics can be frozen and analyzed as static positions and vectors.
Endophoric – A privately meaningful signal, affect, or subjective disposition based on frequency of oscillating or cycling through experienced sensory qualities.
Exometric – A public effect on embodied participants and their ‘objective’ positions (relative to one another). Measurement by scale, scope, distance, and mechanical interaction of forms.
The nature of endophorics can be understood in more detail using monochord type models such as the visible spectrum or musical scale, where frequency correlates to a specific sensed quality which cannot be described publicly. The contrast between the mathematical contexts of cardinality vs ordinality are useful here, as well as position vs disposition.
Endophorics: Affect, disposition, appreciation
ordinal qualities (significance > entropy)
cardinal qualities (unique > common)
Exometrics: Effect, position, function
quantified ordinality (consequences of coordinates)
quantified cardinality (consequences of redundancy)
Endophorics can be conceived of as tempos, tropes (to turn, alter, change), or even ‘verses’ (turns, bends). A sense of progress through cycles of tension and relaxation (wag and weigh from PIE). This is the experience sensory input, as through a read head or antenna responding to exterior conditions.
Exometrics by contrast are public measurables, based on literal rigid bodies and their figurative extension into rigid scientific indexes. Navigation, for example, compares known stable positions and ratios to local unknown variables. By isolating invariance, common sense can be established with relative independence of endophoric fluctuations.
Pan vs Pan: The War for What Matters
The debate over the origin and nature of consciousness in the universe, in my analysis, boils down to this:
Panexperientialism vs Panmechanism
We must consider whether it is likely that
- Experience is possible without a mechanism.
At first consideration, many people will immediately disagree.- We are the only thing in the universe which has experience,
- we know that experience relies on a brain,
- and we know that a brain is a biological mechanism.
Case closed.
Or is it?That position seems to inevitably also adhere to the view that there can only be one competing hypothesis; naive idealism. This is typically summed up as “So, if you die, then the universe disappears?” or “So, the Moon disappears if you aren’t looking at it.”*
The implicit assumptions behind this rebuke of idealism are:
a: Human consciousness is the only form of consciousness possible, and
b. Matter itself functions with no possibility of awareness. - Mechanism is possible without some form of experience.
Whether it is planets orbiting the Sun or atoms colliding in a void, there is a logical pattern that can be observed. Rather than every object falling through each other, or turning into an unexpected form, there is a strict coherence of interactions. We speak of ‘Laws of Physics’.If we were to summon a statement of naive counter-idealism, it would take ‘Law’ literally and demand to see the Parliament and legislature, the law enforcement apparatus, and most of all, the law-abiding agents who have received, understood, and retain a capacity to follow ‘laws’ to the letter. In the absence of any proposal for the mechanism of physical law itself, It would seem that the presumption of law is little more than a pacifier for the mind. There are simply things, and they simply do what they do.
This puts the proposition of experience-without-mechanism (EWM) on exactly the same level of religious faith as mechanism without experience (MWE), however the difference is (and it is an important difference), that we personally can verify our own experience and cannot verify the lack of experience in another. We can have a hunch, by the rigor mortis for example, that Zed’s dead, but we still have a cadaver, full of microscopic tributes to the wonder that was Zed’s body. If we want to get really hippie, we can say too that the Earth still has another crumb of lovely fragrant organic matter with which to fertilize the air and soil. Zed is no more, but the body formerly known as Zed is still part of the many stories of biochemistry, history, anthropology, etc that remain.
It seems to me that the assumption of Laws which govern a universe of existence without experience is actually more likely a function of our own naive assumption that our experience relies on automatic laws. In fact, when we turn that assumption on its head, we find that once we let go of the idea of being the only active participant in the universe, any law of physics can easily be understood as a sensory-motor experience, and the dream of pristine non-witnessed mechanism may in fact be the more comforting psychological blanket compared to the brave new universe of en-ploding meaning and significance..
- Anything can be proved or if it matters.
All that the foregoing suggests is that we may be wrong to assume that the capacity to experience appears out of matter, and that it is wrong because such an appearance makes no sense at any point in the history of the universe. We assume that experience is complex or emerges from ‘complexity’ itself, but that may be because our human awareness is complex. In reality, without awareness, there is no quality of ‘complexity’ in the universe. Something has to be able to interpret a given pattern as complex for it to be distinct from just ‘lots and lots of simplicity’. We assume that simple forms of life or matter have no experience, but how would we be able to tell the difference?The answer to whether it matters if we are an accidentally conscious body in a meaningless machine or a human experience in a universe made of meaningful experiences is to me, an obvious yes. The implications of the former vs the latter radiate out in every direction of our personal and social lives. Are we automatons who inexplicably dream of freedom, or are we free agents who are sensibly bound to a multitude of other experiences interdependently?
Since it is potentially such an important issue (really what more important issue for the world as a whole could there be in the long run?) and that the answer could reconcile science, philosophy, and religion if properly understood, the issue of proof is important. Just as modern rationality has become accustomed to the unquestioned assumption of panmechanism, so too have we become accustomed to the corresponding assumption of pan-objectivity.
Like the laws of physics, our law of proof is a disembodied soldier with no home. We have become subjects of proof rather than provers of fact. Having turned the most miraculous epistemological tool in our arsenal on ourselves, we have found a way to lose sight that it is we ourselves who are doing the proving. We have lost our orientation and now face ourselves through our own human idea of a stranger’s eyes. The eyes of a neuron, of collections of cells and ion channels, of spike trains and action potentials. These, we state confidently, are what we really are. These strange microworlds are reality, while the only reality which humanity has ever known before this, has been mere advertisements for the hidden processes that really matter.
A closer look, however, at that history which we used to think was real and we find the roots of objectivity itself – not handed down by fiat by the unmovable object of matter but by thousands of years of thinking and reasoning, philosophy and mysticism. From the alchemist’s flasks to the monk’s viniculture, and from the astrologer’s star maps to Galileo’s telescope, it has all been a process of human discovery – of trial and error but also of intuition and insight. We have come to this place in history as a function of agreement and disagreement, not of a single inevitable monolith of unquestioned fact or faith.
*this Strawman seems to be based on a misinterpretation of Idealism, perhaps handed down from the successively more superficial readings of George Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
23. But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it; but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call BOOKS and TREES, and the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? BUT DO NOT YOU YOURSELF PERCEIVE OR THINK OF THEM ALL THE WHILE? This therefore is nothing to the purpose; it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind: but it does not show that you can conceive it possible the objects of your thought may exist without the mind.
As Berkeley’s ideas rippled and meandered through the minds of writers and thinkers over the decades, they crossed over from philosophy to science. By 1884, Scientific American echoed Berkeley’s idealism, stating
“Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.”
(reblogging from my If A Philosophical Cliche Falls In A Forest)
Three Layers of Any Message
Excerpts from Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (via Occam’s Beard)
In these examples of decipherment of out-of-context messages, we can separate out fairly clearly three levels of information: (1) the frame message; (2) the outer message; (3) the inner message. The one we are most familiar with is (3), the inner message; it is the message which is supposed to be transmitted: the emotional experiences in music, the phenotype in genetics, the royality and rites of ancient civilations in tablets, etc.
To understand the inner message is to have extracted the meaning intended by the sender.
The frame message is the message “I am a message; decode me if you can!”; and it is implicitly conveyed by the gross structural aspects of any information-bearer.
To understand the frame message is to recognize the need for a decoding-mechanism.
If the frame message is recognized as such, then attention is switched to level (2), the outer message. This is information, implicitly carried by symbol-patterns and structures in the message, which tells how to decode the inner message.
To understand the outer message is to build, or know how to build, the correct decoding mechanism for the inner message.
This outer level is perforce an implicit message, in the sense that the sender cannot ensure that it will be understood. It would be a vain effort to send instructions which tell how to decode the outer message, for they would have to be part of the inner message, which can only be understood once the decoding mechanism has been found. For this reason, the outer message is necessarily a set of triggers, rather than a message which can be revealed by a known decoder.
The formulation of these three “layers” is only a rather crude beginning at how meaning is contained in messages. There may be layers and layers of outer and inner messages, rather than just one of each. Think, for instance, of how intricately tangled are the inner and outer messages of the Rosetta stone. To decode a message fully, one would have to reconstruct the entire semantic structure which underlay its creation— and thus to understand the sender in every deep way. Hence one could throw away the inner message, because if one truly understood all the finesse of the outer message, the inner message would be reconstructible.
What makes us see a frame message in certain objects, but none in others? Why should an alien civilization suspect, if they intercept an errant record, that a message lurks within? What should make a record any different from a meteorite? Clearly its geometric shape is the first clue that “something funny is going on”. The next clue is that, on a more microscopic scale, it consists of a very long aperiodic sequence of patters, arranged in a spiral. If we were to unwrap the spiral, we would have one huge linear sequence (around 2000 feet long) of minuscule symbols. This is not so different from a DNA molecule, whose symbols, drawn from a meager “alphabet” of four different chemical bases, are arrayed in a one-dimensional sequence, and then coiled up into a helix. Before Avery had established the connection between genes and DNA, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger predicted, on purely theoretical grounds, that genetic information would have to be stored in “aperiodic crystals”, in his influential book What is Life? In fact, books themselves are aperiodic crystals contained inside neat geometrical forms. These examples suggest that, where an aperiodic crystal is found “packaged” inside a very regular geometric structure, there may lurk an inner message.
The three levels are very clear in the case of a message found in a bottle washed up on a beach. The first level, the frame message, is found when one picks up the bottle and sees that it is sealed, and contains a dry piece of paper. Even without seeing writing, one recognizes this type of artifact as an information-bearer, and at this point it would take an extraordinary—almost inhuman—lack of curiosity, to drop the bottle and not look further. Next, one opens the bottle and examines the marks on the paper. Perhaps they are Japanese: this can be discovered without any recognition of the inner message being understood—it merely comes from a recognition of the characters. The outer message can be stated as an English sentence: “I am in Japanese.” Once this has been discovered, then one can proceed to the inner message, which may be a call for help, a haiku poem, a lover’s lament…
It would be of no use to include in the inner message a translation of the sentence “This message is in Japanese”, since it would take someone who knew Japanese to read it. And before reading it, he would have to recognize the fact that, as it is in Japanese, he can read it. You might try to wriggle out of this by including translations of the statement “This message is in Japanese” into many different languages. That would help in a practical sense, but in a theoretical sense the same difficulty is there. An English-speaking person still has to recognize the “Englishness” of the message; otherwise it does no good. Thus one cannot avoid the problems that one has to find out how to decipher the inner message from the outside; the inner message itself may provide clues and confirmations, but those are at best triggers acting upon the bottle finder (or upon the people whom he enlists to help).
Similar kinds of problem confront the shortwave radio listener. First, he has to decide whether the sounds he hears actually constitute a message, or are just static. The sounds in themselves do not give the answer, not even in the unlikely case that the inner message is in the listener’s own native language, and is saying, “These sounds actually constitute a message and are not just static!” If the listener recognizes a frame message in the sounds, then he tries to identify the language the broadcast is in— and clearly, he is still on the outside; he accepts triggers from the radio, but they cannot explicitly tell him the answer.
It is in the nature of outer messages that they are not conveyed in any explicit language. To find an explicit language in which to convey outer messages would not be a breakthrough— it would be a contradiction in terms! It is always the listener’s burden to understand the outer message. Success lets him break through into the inside, at which point the ratio of triggers to explicit meanings shifts drastically towards the latter. By comparison with the previous stages, understand the inner message seems effortless. It is as if it just gets pumped in.
Commentary:
In multisense realism, I think of the three levels of GEB semiotics not as absolutes of frame, outer, and inner, but as relative frames of increasingly inner qualities. The bottle is read optically (inner to your visual experience but outer to your body and self), the text is read optically and typographically (inner to your semiotic experience but outer to your ‘self’) and the message is understood linguistically and cognitively (inner to your conscious mental experience or executive/self awareness but outer to your visual experience and absent from your body experience). The letters are more outer to your mind than the words, but not as outer as the optics available through your eyes. It’s all sensory experience and it is all inner, outer, and frame relative to different levels of participation. All sense is a frame making, breaking, and preserving experience which recontextualizes other frames as inner and outer.
Phototheque: A Danceable View of Light
“Thus, the word ‘electron’ should be regarded as no more than a name by which we call attention to a certain aspect of the holomovement, an aspect that can be discussed only by taking into account the entire experimental situation and that cannot be specified in terms of localized objects moving autonomously through space. And of course, every kind of ‘particle’ which in current physics is said to be a basic constituent of matter will have to be discussed in the same sort of terms (so that such ‘particles’ are no longer considered as autonomous and separately existent). Thus we come to a new general physical description in which ‘everything implicates everything’ in an order of undivided wholeness.” – David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order
If you aren’t familiar with physicist David Bohm, he was one of the pioneers of Quantum Physics who dared to go beyond mere calculation. He dared to integrate quantum observations into a cosmology which includes consciousness. In many ways his ideas parallel my own approach. His term holomovement is very similar to what I have looked at in breaking down the word universe to its etymological roots. Both holo and uni refer to singularity-wholeness, the Absolute or solitrope. Verse and movement are related (re-verse, in-verse, ob-verse), although Bohm’s sensibility of holomovement implies a motorized realization of cosmos, while universe is a broader more ‘vers-atile’ ‘vers-ion’, allowing for the full range of information-theoretic-material realizations. Some other obnoxious portmanteau neologisms could include ‘soliwegh’, ‘monoteleos’, ‘unimotive’.
Polarization is interesting to me because it supports what Bohm is saying. We use the term ‘polarizing filter’ for substances with these particular optical properties, but filters would not behave the way that these lenses do. As you can see in the YouTube, when it comes to these kinds of filters, ‘two wrongs can make a right’, so to speak.
In my mind, there is no way that we can honestly describe photons as particles as we see that unlike a conventional filter, the amount of light passing through these lenses can increase as well as decrease the illumination of the target. It’s like having a second coffee filter which undoes half of the effect of the first.
Following is a simple chart showing a conventional understanding of polarized light. Note that the source of the light and the target of the beam are not featured – symptomatic I think of the dominance of the theoretical approach to understanding light. We are meant to imagine quali-invisible waves which make up ‘light’ itself. traveling through the air and undergoing mathematical transformations.
This is indeed a great way of modeling the phenomenon as an idea, but I think that the concrete reality of the thing, keeping in mind Bohm’s words about there not really being fundamental particles which autonomously exist, is obscured. My conjecture takes Bohm seriously and ventures further into realism. This new view suggests that rather than a generalized holomovement or implicate order, the materials themselves – light bulbs, laser diodes, dicrhroic crystal doped lenses and films, ordinary walls and screens…these are the materials which are the actual holodynamic ensemble. What they are made of all have sensory-motor properties which are both generic-universal, chemical-specific, and spatiotemporal-unique. Each element is a presentation of this ontological continuum, with topological peaks as an unrepeatable performance out of the plenum of the inescapable repetition of the permanently generic. Quantum is only half of the picture. Qualia is both the cause and effect of quantum.
This next figure is a diagram to illustrate this idea of light or quantum, not as some mysterious invisible magic, or as a simple mathematical idea, but as a concrete sensory-motor reality. It may not be obvious, but what is intended here is to show that the actual agents are not waves but in illuminated matter: light bulb filament, lens, wall. It is the excitement of the filament which is imitated in different ways by the other participants in this ensemble. Each participating piece of matter is imitating or re-verse imitating, con-verting or di-verting not beams of light but their own energetic disposition. The molecules of the lens are responding in a specific way. The lens is changing its image, not bending a literal beam. The light which we see is a part of us interacting directly with a part of something else, separated only by empty space. Seeing is a way of touching without literally touching.
While Bohm was ahead of his time (quote was from 1980) in recognizing the significance of holistic coherence and going beyond the model of autonomous particles, the view that I propose applies this same radical departure to perception. Just as the polarizing glass can either block out or recover signals, every sense channel we have brings with it its own unique contribution to our sense of realism. Our models of physics would not be the same if human beings were not primarily visually oriented. What we assume and what we question depends entirely on which sense modalities we rely on most.
Consider then, that our human eyes are not special because they are eyes, but because they are eyes which have been executed on a fantastically human scale. Eyes can be simple. In zooplankton, we can see viable eyes composed of just two cells. Let this sink in for a moment. Eyes are simple. Vision is invertebrate simple. Plankton simple. No brain is required. It’s not much of a leap to imagine that rather than eyes being the only way to detect visible events, they are an evolutionary step in division of labor rather than perceptual simulation and optical detection.
Chlorophyll shows us that response to visible light occurs on the molecular level, and ionization suggests this sensitivity is atomic. Neither of these imply, however, a separate currency of photons which autonomously transit between surfaces in a vacuum. Our own optical sense begins and ends at the surface of retinal molecules (vitamin A) embedded in the folded proteins of our rods and cones as they become erect in the presence of light. This is what our neurons are translating, not photons, but the cascading sensory-motor changes among molecules, cells, tissues, and organs that make up the living organism. Rather than a mathematical transduction of ‘information’, there are personal experiences of sub-beings (or sub-personal experiences of one being).
Realize then, that although we as human beings cannot see without eyes, hear without ears, etc, it is arbitrary bias to presume that these human organs are the source of all sensory access in the universe. To the contrary, the multisense realism view proposes that primitive cells, molecules, and atoms, may possess a less differentiated sense capacity. Just as our human night vision loses the discernment of color sensing cone cells, it may be the case that all eukaryotes have a kind of stem-qualia, the root verse from which our hypertrophied modalities of sight, sound, tactile, olfactory-gustatory, kinesthetic-vestibular, etc. senses are descended. The molecular-atomic ‘inorganisms’ could have an even more primordial unisense, to the point of proto-tangibility. A level of experience in which spacetime, unity and diversity, semiosis itself begin to emerge from the void-bottom end of the Absolute.
The light bulb filament’s molecules may themselves be bright and hot, maybe they are screaming and smell of ozone, all at once, but diluted into the catastrophe of fragments. On this least unified yet least diversified layer of uni-verse, the rules of community and locality are likely beyond our recognition. Every atomic whisper and supernova blast may be equally present in some sense at the bottom of the semantic event horizon. As Einstein warped spacetime and quantum mechanics digitized energy, this model extends that ambition to the Absolute. Perceptual relativity, seen as the ultimate and sole cosmological constant, crushes its own ontology at the periphery. Isness – being, collapses in on itself with the exhaustion of discernment.
Quantum Zeno Twilight Zone
The Quantum Zeno Effect
It is easy to show using standard theory that if a system starts in an eigenstate of some observable, and measurements are made of that observable N times a second, then, even if the state is not a stationary one, the probability that the system will be in the same state after, say, one second, tends to one as N tends to infinity; that is, that continual observations will prevent motion …
— Alan Turing
“…an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay. One can “freeze” the evolution of the system by measuring it frequently enough in its (known) initial state.” – Wiki
It’s so strange to me that in all of the incredibly exotic implications of quantum mechanics and relativity, including the obliteration of matter and time, the possibility that what is being measured is measurement itself is never considered. We would rather assume that we are telepathically controlling the outcome of subatomic events than imagine that perhaps the events we are witnessing are the atoms which compose the measuring instruments which are imitating, in their own language, our intention to witness and objectify.
Think of it like a mirror image of divination. If you have played at all with the I Ching or Tarot cards, you will find that whatever insights they might seem to provide about your situation, they seem to present an even more insightful mirror to your question itself. Unlike quantum mechanics, we can see that divination can be falsified. Or can it? Like any cold reading sham psychic, we can pull the wool over our own eyes and reinterpret any previous prophecy which turns out false and find that on another level it could seem true, or that we had to believe that false prophecy at the time in order for some more important thing to happen, etc.
There was a Twilight Zone where William Shatner is trapped by his own obsessive superstition, unable to leave the room because of a tabletop oracle’s innuendos.
Nick of Time, 11/18/1960
Shatner: “Does anything exciting ever happen around here?”
Mystic Seer: “It is quite possible”.
“Am I gonna be promoted, for Pete’s sake?” is Shatner’s second question.
“It has been decided in your favor” is the response from the card from the box underneath the bobble headed Old Nick.
His fiancee fondles his keychain with a rabbit’s foot and four leaf clover and as Shatner calls his office and validates the oracle’s prophecy, he falls into a compulsive dependency on the oracle’s increasingly menacing fortunes.
Superficially, this reads as a simplistic cautionary tale of confirmation bias and the perils of superstition, but if it were that simple, all ideas of luck and fate would little appeal in this post modern age. Instead, it seems that more than ever people openly express gratitude to divine providence for their ‘blessings’.
Shatner’s insistence on using the same machine at the same table reflects this kind of proprietary intimacy with the super-personal. Superstition, or over-personal sense-making is a kind of inflammation of the pattern recognition faculties on the top end, the executive end of the psyche. The surprising thing, however, and the thing which can throw us into a recursive paranoia or delusional optimism if we are not careful, is that our capacity to see and know is not completely separate from the fabric of events themselves. In the moment of divination, there is inherently a kernel the truth of that moment, and in subsequent moments, the narrowness of that truth is exposed, just as all conditional truths of any moment are eventually exposed in the infinity of the unconditional.
Serling: “Two people permanently enslaved by the tyranny of fear and superstition, facing the future with a kind of helpless dread. Two others facing the future with confidence, having escaped one of the darker places in The Twilight Zone*.”
What does this have to do with Quantum Mechanics?
If my conjecture is right, then photons and other particle/wave functions are not literally objects, in the same way that exchanging smiles is not a literal exchange of projectiles across space. The exchange of smiles is procedural-semantic. It is to see and imitate an expression of subjective feeling which cannot be meaningfully broken down. The contortion of facial muscles, baring of teeth, etc has some evolutionary roots, sure, yes it does. The activity of neurotransmitters, ion pumps, and contracting proteins in sequence from the brain to those muscle fibers also presents an impersonal mechanism, relative to us, which can be credited for producing the smiles – mirror neurons, oxytocin, dopamine, sex hormones also after puberty, all kinds of microscopic amazing that we would not care at all about if it did not theoretically explain something personal about ourselves.
The teeth baring and the synapse doping are the meta and root impersonal perspectives respectively. The former posits a behavioral cause built on stochastic extractions of accumulated chance (the opposite of Shatner’s Nick, which is driven by unfalsifiable retro-correspondence – overly tele teleology which projects a future based on an ungrounded relativism of the past) while the latter posits a deterministic cause built on inevitable consequences of static universal law (math and physics). In the chart below, I try to show how these levels form the top and bottom of only half of the picture – the Realism half. Occidental reasoning is objective and impersonal, squeezing all of consciousness and identity into a mosaic of digital permutations and Bayesian feedback loops.
The missing half of quantum mechanics is the Eastern half or Orientverse. In order for logic to exist, something has to make sense of it. There has to be some capacity for discernment to detect, compare detections, and cause changes based on those comparisons. There has to be choice. This isn’t some sentimental appeal for naive anthropocentrism, this is, in my understanding, an inescapable ontological axiom – *the* axiom beneath all axioms.
How to discern on our own level then, between superstition and coincidence? How can we know anything for sure if we are in some sense participating in the creation of our own reality. What the Quantum Zeno Effect really is, finally, is a clue to how participation itself drives significance in the identical way that motion drives mass. It ‘matters’ how much you do and how much you care – it is what makes things matter. We can’t help but wanting to matter, and that means wanting to participate in something that matters.
What matters is generally located on the Eastern, Multisense side of the chart: Peer involvement. Consciousness is that ego driven stream of thoughts and intentions – the means through which subconscious instincts must be conditioned by hand into significance. Significance is accessed through language and ideas, in memory and esteem. It’s that charismatic glow and undeniable glamor of substantial power. Something that matters, not just to my own mind, but to everyone. Whether they like it or hate it, significance cannot be ignored – literally. Significance is the personal experience of signal promiscuity, a contagious association factor which runs through our experience longitudinally, connecting the dots through our days, years, and lives. To signify is literally to arrest one’s attention. To reduce personal choice over one’s own interest is an invasion (often a welcome invasion) of sorts.
This is what the Zeno Effect is all about: The equivalence of attention, significance, and time.
Quantum anti-Zeno effect studies are interesting too.
“The essence of the quantum Zeno effect is that repeated interrogation if the system is still in the inital state tends to quench the system in this state as the frequency of interrogations grows. The reason for that is that the quantum evolution generated by the hermitian Hamiltonian is time reversible, and hence the probability p(t) of intial state occupancy behaves as p(t) ≃ 1 − (t/ τ)² for short times t, with τ being the characteristic time scale. […] If we make N interrogations within the time T For this reason, the Zeno effect in decay processes is very hard to observe.”
[…]
“Frequent observing if the Schördinger cat is alive, kills it faster. Such experiment requires “tuning” of atomic transition frequency, or the photon band gap edge within the range of, which can be for instance done using external static electromagnetic field and Zeeman, or Stark effect. Summarizing, we have shown that near threshold decay can be exploited to observe the quantum anti-Zeno effect. Typical near threshold decay processes are characterized by ultra short period of quadratic decay, followed by a long phase of non-exponential decay, with a very large rate at the begining, gradually slowing down in the course of the dynamics. Monitoring if the decaying system remains in the initial state, shifts the system back to the fast initial phase of the non-exponential decay. In effect,
more frequent measurement, cause faster decay.”
Not that the Zeno and Anti-Zeno effects do not contradict each other, although it can be confusing. It’s a bit like remembering a car crash, and seeing the car in your memory speeding ahead at 80mph forever. It is frozen at high speed. In the same way, when we look at something which gradually decays less and less, we can make it decay faster by interrogating it more often during it’s high rate of decay phase. At least I think that’s what they are saying here. In the other study it seems like maybe they are using random measurements to accelerate anti-Zeno, but I’m not sure. That could make sense too – shifting the burden of choice onto the receiving/interrogated instrument rather than the transmitting instrument. Either way, I still think it makes more sense to see the measurement of quantum as a complex interaction among instruments rather than literal particles – what is being transmitted is like a smile, not like separate thing-which-is-not-a-thing.
*Twilight Zone trivia – the name comes from the submarine exploration, the point at which the ocean is so deep that sunlight begins to be unable to penetrate it.
Quorum Mechanics: My Non-Standard Model of Particle Physics
I doctored up this illustration to support my answer to how the double slit experiment works (Quora). The main point that I am trying to make (and I think it is, if true, a fundamental, history-of-the-world-changing scientific idea) is that if we suppose that our own sense of perception and participation in the universe has its ancestry in a primitive/primordial form* of sense, then the lowest levels of microcosm may look much different than we assume.
what I am calling quorum mechanics suggests that rather than a mechanical projection of particles from a source to observers, all QM interactions are a two way street. Perhaps that can only be a one-way street at any given moment, but either way, the idea is that all forms of physical being can experience change in its own disposition and through this sensitivity can also infer exterior dispositions through comparing their own dispositions. This comparison is projected subjectively as a an invariant disposition, or “position” objectively.
I don’t know that anyone has fully understood the radical simplicity of this idea and its implications for tying consciousness together with the cosmos, solving the Hard Problem and Explanatory Gap, but I hope that this picture above helps. I’m not even looking at the angles here of the EPR paradox, I’m just taking the arrows out of the space between the observers and source, and making all three into sub-servers experiencing others through their own local range of the infinity within.
My model has some similarities to Relational quantum mechanics (wikipedia.org) and if I stretch it, also to Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory, (because I think that ‘time’ is nested regularities of disposition), but ultimately goes far beyond either one. As far as I know, my model is the only model which suggests a simple and plausible explanation for both matter and experience in the cosmos.
*rather than arising magically at some level of physiological description for no real reason.
(original diagram cannibalized from the EPR Wikipedia entry)
After Einstein’s Mollusk
I’m beginning to realize that Multisense Realism is an extension to the absolute of the approach that Einstein took in developing General Relativity. In doubting the existence of gravity as a product in space, he opened the door to a simpler universe where physical things relate to each other in an ordered way, not because some particular propulsion system is in place, but because the frame of reference of physical order itself is not rigid as we assume. He actually calls this new, flexible relativism of space co-ordinates ‘mollusks’:
“This 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. That which gives the “mollusk” a certain comprehensibleness as compared with the Gauss co-ordinate system is the (really unqualified) formal retention of the separate existence of the space co-ordinate. Every point on the mollusk is treated as a space-point, and every material point which is at rest relatively to it as at rest, so long as the mollusk is considered as reference-body. The general principle of relativity requires that all these mollusks can be used as reference-bodies with equal right and equal success in the formulation of the general laws of nature; the laws themselves must be quite independent of the choice of mollusk.”
– Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory. 1920.
XXVIII. Exact Formulation of the General Principle of Relativity
Einstein’s transcendence of ‘rigid reference bodies’ with flexible and independent inertial frames captures the essence of relativity but only scratches the surface in exposing the rigidity of physics, which, even in the post-Einsteinian era reduces the participant to a zero dimensional vector generic ‘observer’. While this adherence to rigid simplicity is critical for ‘freezing the universe’ into a static frame for computation purposes, it introduces an under-signifying bias to all matters pertaining to subjectivity – particularly emotion, identity, and meaning. In its drive for simplicity and universality, physics inadvertently becomes an agenda for the annihilation of the self and psyche.
Part of the genius of Einstein was to glimpse the tip of the iceberg of this confirmation bias and challenge it successfully through his mastery of field equations. In my view, Einstein’s vision was only partially understood, just long enough to develop a kind of Empire Strikes Back counter-revolution. After the initial flush of Bohr and Heisenberg’s relativistic-probabilistic interpretations of Quantum Mechanics in the 1920’s (The Spirit of Copenhagen), physics seems to have sought out a new level of reductionism. Information science has dissected Einsteins Mollusk into bits and strings, and re-imagining flexibility and independence as phantoms of a Multi-World Matrix. Einstein’s cosmological animism has been transformed into a cosmological animation – a simulation of matter-like information (that doesn’t matter) in a vacuum virtual sea of Dark Energy.
Rather than seeing this as a sign that we have come to a bold new understanding of cosmic existentialism, I see this as a black octagon sign of having mistaken the cul-de-sac for a highway. We have failed to understand ourselves and our universe and need to turn the whole thing completely around. The way to do this, I propose, is to go back to Einstein’s mollusk and pick up where he left off, questioning the rigidity of physical reference bodies.
In a way, I am suggesting that we relativize relativity itself. Not in the pop culture appropriation of relativism as merely the principle that ‘everything is relative’, but to understand how relation itself is the principle through which ‘everything’ is realized, and that that principle is identical with ‘sense’, i.e. subjective participation and perception of self and other.
While physical science is perfectly content to predict and control matter, I have no doubt that pursuing this goal exclusively should carry the kind of warning which science fiction has been giving us from the start: We should be careful of developing technology that we can’t handle and the way to handle technology is to evolve our own humanity.
It is for this very reason, that purely mathematical approaches to understanding the universe as a whole and consciousness are ultimately doomed. Their rigidity arises from a reference frame which is intrinsically incompatible with the floridly eidetic and creative frame of human privacy. Where General Relativity envisioned a flexible reference body of spacetime coordinates which contrasted with Galilean-Cartesian uniformity, this new reference frame that should be explored contrasts against both the Classical, Einsteinian, and Quantum frameworks. Multisense realism provides a Meta-Relativistic framework which honors the canonical conjugates of general relativity in proprietary privacy of subjectivity. The universe within, like Bohm’s implicate order, is as alien to spacetime relativism as Einstein’s mollusk was to Newton. The new mollusk is not one of space and time united, but of time and ‘time again’, of literal and figurative significance, symmetry and meta-juxtaposition. The new framework begins with no beginning, but rather an infinite centripetal involution which is accessed directly through intra-corporeal participation and inter-corporeal perception.
Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, Part I
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
Some quotes from the book and comments.
“It is only by breaking open the circle, as in the case of the Möbius strip, by unfolding and untwisting it, that the dimension of sense appears for itself, in its irreducibility, and also in its genetic power as it animates an a priori internal model of the proposition.”
Some important themes here: The irreducibility of sense, the connection with closure and involution, topology and animation. There is a sense of the meta-juxtaposition of self-similarity that is at the heart of the universality and specificity of sense.
“It is surprising to find that Carroll’s entire logical work* is directly about signification, implications, and conclusions, and only indirectly about sense – precisely, through the paradoxes which signification does not resolve, or indeed which it creates. On the contrary, the fantastic work is immediately concerned with sense and attaches the power of the paradox to it. This corresponds to the two states of sense, de facto and de jure, a posteriori and a priori, one by which the circle of the proposition is indirectly inferred, the other by which it is made to appear for itself, by unfolding the circle along the length of the border between propositions and things.”
*Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Dodgson, who also published mathematical literature under that name.
The multisense model has been to try to simplify this cleaving and reconciling. By identifying private time as the direct form of sensemaking and public space as the indirect form, the orthogonality between the two is also their union. I appreciate his pointing out of the two sides of Lewis Carroll, and how they speak to direct and indirect sense.
Quoting from Carroll:
He thought he saw an Elephant
That practiced on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
“At length I realize,” he said,
“The bitterness of Life!”He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
His Sister’s Husband’s Niece.
“Unless you leave this house,” he said,
“I’ll send for the Police!”He thought he saw a Kangaroo
That worked a coffee-mill:
He looked again, and found it was
A Vegetable-Pill.
“Were I to swallow this,” he said,
“I should be very ill!”He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four
That stood beside his bed:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bear without a Head.
“Poor thing,” he said, “poor silly thing!
It’s waiting to be fed!”
…
He thought he saw a Garden-Door
That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
A Double Rule of Three:
“And all its mystery,” he said,
“Is clear as day to me!”He thought he saw an Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
“A fact so dread,” he faintly said,
“Extinguishes all hope!”– Lewis Carroll, The Mad Gardener’s Song
The poem is discussed early on, with its rhythmic juxtaposition of buoyant fantasy and grim realism, or perhaps mania and depression. The analysis offered brings out deeper duality between concrete entities in the world and spoken words…how the abstraction of words contains and deflates the broad absurdity of imagination. Words silence the child’s inner world with the adulteration of logic. Direct sense is overpowered by circumspection of logical, indirect sense through time and experience.
“The duality in the proposition is not between two sorts of names, names of stasis and names of becoming, names of substances or qualities and names of events; rather, it is between two dimensions of the proposition, that is, between denotation and expression, or between the denotation of things and the expression of sense. It is like the two sides of a mirror, only what is on one side has no resemblance to what is on the other.”
That last line is perhaps the most critical point of the multisense realism approach. I have referred to it as anomalous symmetry. A dual aspect monism where the sense of public space is a reflection of the sense of private time, but in a completely different – really orthogonal way.
“The philosopher Avicenna distinguished three states of essence: universal in relation to the intellect which thinks it in general; and singular in relation to the particular things in which it is embodied. But neither of these two states is essence itself. An animal is nothing other than an animal (“animal non est nisi animal tantum”) being indifferent to the universal and to the singular, to the particular and to the general. The first state of essence is essence signified by the proposition, in the order of the concept and of conceptual implications. The second state of essence is essence as designated by the proposition in the particular things in which it is involved. But the third state of essence is essence as sense, essence as expressed – always in this dryness (animal tantum) and this splendid neutrality. It is indifferent to the universal and to the singular, to the general and to the particular, to the personal and the collective; it is also indifferent to affirmation and negation, etc. In short, it is indifferent to all opposites. This is so because all of these opposites are but modes of the proposition considered in its relations of denotation and signification, and not the traits of the sense which it expresses. Is it, then, the status of the pure event, or of the fatum which accompanies it, to surmount all the oppositions in this way? Neither private nor public, neither collective nor individual…, it is more terrible and powerful in this neutrality, to the extent that is all of these things at once.”
Many of the diagrams employed here (supreme ultimate diagrams) feature sense ‘surmounting’ essence and existence. This echoes Deleuze noting here the supremacy of sense in its detachment from the oppositions which are generated within it.
p. 35 “…he writes about the addition of impossible propositions to the possible (signification) and the real (denotation). I conceive of absurdity and the far East end of a continuum of sense rather than a category. An absurd proposition makes sense on some levels or parts but presents an abstract disjunction or mutually exclusive juxtaposition. It is a type of nonsense that refers to itself, and therefore makes a kind of negative sense, as opposed to nonsense as noise lacking signal.”
In my view, propositions can be more or less absurd, more plausible, and even more or less concretely real. The so called primary and secondary attributes of Locke suggest a hierarchy of realism which is intuitive. Qualities that can be measured reliably using inanimate objects as instruments are seen to be primary aspects of realism. Secondary are colors, flavors, etc which vary from person to person and culture to culture. They are subjective but still object-facing. It is interesting that he too refers to sense as a continuum with an Eastern end.
p. 53 The distinction is not between two sorts of events, it is between the event, which is ideal by nature, and its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs. The distinction is between event and accident. Events are ideational singularities which communicate in one and the same Event. They have therefore an eternal truth, and their time is never the present which realizes them and makes them exist. Rather it is the unlimited Aion, the Infinitive in which they subsist and insist. Events are the only idealities. To reverse Platonism is first and foremost to remove essences and to substitute events in their place, as jets of singularities.
p.60 For only thought finds it possible to affirm all chance and to make chance into an object of affirmation.
Interesting commentary which can be seen to relate directly to the multisense diagram depicting Sense on the top edge opposing chance or “?” on the bottom. In a way, it is the role of thought to assign the degree of chance affirmation – it is the eye of mandatory intentionality in the hurricane of semi-intentional potentiality. Thought is the capacity to interpret chance, ie to consciously foreground pattern as significant.
p.61 …what is this time which need not be infinite but only “infinitely subdivisible”? We have seen that past, present, and future were not at all three parts of a single temporality, but that they rather formed two readings of time, each one of which is complete and excludes the other: on one hand, the always limited present, which measures the action of bodies as causes and the state of their mixtures in depth (Chronos); on the other, the essentially unlimited past and future, which gather incorporeal events, at the surface, as effects (Aion).
Great stuff. If I understand the terminology correctly, Chronos can be identified with spacetime and Aion as timespace or dreamtime. Aion is the native, direct modality of experience which is interior and metaphorical. Chronos is the involution of Aion, the orthogonal cross-section of the totality as public literal exterior. Chronos is the perpetually fleeting snapshot that cuts through the mechanical interactions of bodies within bodies (inertial frames within frames) as a generic ‘now’. By contrast, the Aion is the uncut flow of multiplexed influences seeking manifestation. The two interact as coherence-decoherence in Chronos spacetime and decoherence-recoherence through Aion dreamtime.
P. 64. Carroll would say that they are the multiplication table and the dinner table. The Aion is precisely the border of the two, the straight line which separates them; but it is also the plain surface which connects them, an impenetrable window or glass.
This gets very esoteric, but my model differs here from Deleuze in that I see two opposite kinds of borders on opposite ends of Aion – one, is the pedestrian fold between, as he says, the multiplication table and the dinner table (figurative vs literal sense of table) and the other I call the profound edge, where the twist between literal and figurative vanishes ‘behind our backs’ as unconscious or trance-like numinous states of unity. This is the eidetic transformation, where hypnotic re-orientation can take place. Here we find the simulacra nature of consciousness, the unrealism of reality is exposed nakedly while we are otherwise occupied. Aion and Chronos are the profound edge and the pedestrian fold, the back door and front door to narrative (temporal) realism.
In Chronos, ambiguity is shunted off into errors of perception and measurement, so that infinite regress is drowned in decoherence. In Aion, paradox is reconciled through unconsciousness – the level upon which paradox is encountered is ultimately evanescent into greater and lesser levels. The dreamer falls asleep or wakes up, ending the dream. The scientist or philosopher cannot end the dream, and must distract the inquiry with argumentation and formalism.
p. 72 It is thus pleasing that there resounds today that sense is never a principle or an origin, but that it is produced. It is not something to discover, to restore, and to re-employ; it is something to produce by a new machinery. It belongs to no height or depth, but rather to a surface effect, being inseparable from the surface which is its proper dimension. It is not that sense lacks depth or height, but rather that height and depths lack surface, that they lack sense, or have it only by virtue of an “effect” which presupposes sense.
Here I disagree. I think that sense here is considered in too narrow of a ‘sense’ in this passage, limited as sensation or cognition at the point of contact. While sensation does indeed transpire at the surface, it is the translucence of sense which lends the significance of the depths beneath it. I can agree that sense is something to produce by a new machinery, but that every part of the machinery is also a sense experience on another layer/scope/frame. It is not the machinery level which produces sense, it is the level from which the machine’s use is initiated which which recovers new sense for itself, not only as a product but as an extension or revelation of the self through the objects of the machinery. New experience opens a window into new worlds of potential experience, and new doors of actual experience by the self. Surface and depth define each other. It is the sense of their contrast which acts as an originating principle. How could it be otherwise? What is sense other than the capacity to appreciate the contrast fully?
What Deleuze may have overlooked is that depth is nothing but an accumulation of surface effects. Indeed, there is nothing else besides sense that could be said to be responsible for the manifestation of the unsensed. The connection that he has not yet made is that what is surface to us is depth to another frame of reference, and vice versa. Marine organisms make sense in liquid, but it is the lighter fluid of air which poses a boundary for their world. Cells within bodies presumably exist in a universe of haptic (tactile perception of shapes) phenomenology. Surface, under multisense realism, is in the eye of the beholder, a naive realism apportioned out by scale ratios and perceptual entropy summation. Sense does not occur at the surface, sense juxtaposes itself as a surface/depth, as space manifold/unfolding time.
p. 81 Sense is always an effect produced in the series by the instance which traverses them. This is why sense, such as it is gathered over the line of the Aion, has two sides which correspond to the dissymmetrical sides of the paradoxical element: one tending toward the series determined as signifying, the other tending toward the series determined as signified.
Nice assimilation between sensation and semiosis. The idea of sense being activated or defining itself through the consequence of a breaching event. Negative mechanism. Dark current. The implicate order becomes explicit under conditions of interruption. The category does not exist until something insists upon defining itself against the schema. Sense as immunomorphic system.
P.87 Body-sieve, fragmented body, and dissociated body – these are the three primary dimensions of the schizophrenic body…In this collapse of the surface, the entire world loses its meaning.
I don’t entirely agree. While in a sense the surface of realism fails, I would not say that the world loses its meaning. Rather the world is transparent to any and every possible meaning. I suspect that here Deleuze is taking the often noted word-salad quality of schizophrenic communication too literally. In my opinion, such expression is as much a compulsive syntactic self-stimulation – in rhyme and repetition, as it is revealing of genuine attempts to make coherent sense. It is the depth which collapses into the surface, nakedly exposed without regard to the competing depths represented by social convention.
This commentary on schizophrenic sense strikes me also as stereotyped and idealized. I would imagine that actual diagnosed cases of schizophrenia vary in their linguistic manifestations to some degree. This chapter seems to isolate schizophrenia itself as a single author whose work stands in a particular contradistinction to common sense uses of language.
There may be something that Deleuze is pointing out by idealizing schizophrenic sense which is important. The dichotomy between Carroll’s use of satire to play with sense and the schizophrenic transgressions against sense. He frequently notes the malicious, even violent themes in schizophrenic expression in contrast to the carefully crafted ‘nonsense’ of the Alice stories.
The entire section “Fourteenth Series of Double Causality” seems especially opaque to me. He seems to be voicing vague dissatisfaction with Husserl and Kant but not really offering much in the way of a coherent view of causality. He seems to be struggling with a desire to appease physics while retaining an ambivalent substance dualism “The events of a liquid surface refer to the inter-molecular modifications as their real cause, but also to the variations of a surface tension on which they depend as their (ideational or “fictive” quasi-cause”. He talks about a “double causality, referring on one hand to mixtures of bodies which are its cause and, on the other, to other events which are its quasi-cause”, while maintaining that the corporeal cause is linked through surface dynamics to the incorporeal quasi-cause.
My impression is that Deleuze has a shortsighted view of sense here, eloquently (if obliquely) tuned into many nuances of sense, but still viewing human sense essentially as a monolith. In light of so much recent evidence of sensemaking in other species and in microorganisms, it would seem that there is no reason to presume that what seems like quasi-cause on one level would not be experienced as corporeal cause on another. Not double causality, but multiple intercausality.
Once the incorporeal/ideational is freed from the expectation of pseudosubstantiation, it can be understood as the temporal-private basis from which spatial-public extension is propagated (through sense). The ideational is not incorporeal, rather the corporeal is the orthogonal condensation of subjectivity. Both are physically and concretely real, each being the anomalous reflection of the other. The idea of in incorporeality arises from the reliance of objectification as the primary basis for modeling mistakenly turned on the act of modeling itself, failing to meet its own contrived expectations and subordinating its own efficacy as ‘quasi’ or fictive. When we have the idea to stomp on an anthill, the consequences for thousands of ants are not ‘quasi’ or fictive.
In his Fifteenth Series of Singularities, Deleuze makes a case for phenomenology as a function of surfaces. “the surface is the locus of sense“. He quotes Gilbert Simondon, “To belong to interiority does not mean only to ‘be inside,’ but to be on the ‘in-side’ of the limit…”
I agree that the surface defines the active region of sense, as the functional sense of sense can be described as input/output, the point of contact between sensory singularities (monads/selves/nuclei/bodies) would necessarily be on the periphery or skin. From a more objective point of view, we might say that it is not sense that happens on the surface, but rather surfaceness though which sense presents its most self-reflective presentations.
There is no reason to imagine that the depths of bodies are any less sensitive on their own inertial frame, and it is perfectly reasonable to expect that our aggregate sense of ourselves as human beings would include mainly a skin-deep precipitate of the totality of the experience of our sub-selves. Without any eruptive emergencies from within, the backgrounding of bodily depths in our waking consciousness as complex organisms is unsurprising. There is nothing else other than sense which could theoretically define the depths or connect them sensibly to the peripheries. It is all sense, but not all our sense. The distinction here is not between sense and nonsense but realism and unrealism. The sense which is most real to us is that which has the greatest proximity to our personal, collective, and morphological inertial frame. That which is most distal to our perceptual inertial frame is presented to us as unreal.
In Sixteenth Series of the Static Ontological Genesis, he sketches out a rather convoluted seeming schema of the interrelation of monads, persons, and worlds which I think lacks clarity. The multisense view of selves as temporal privacies casting a spatial public shadow on many levels seems to me a simpler and readily verifiable model.
That’s almost halfway. Time for a break but I plan to come back to this soon.
Primordial Syzygy
syz·y·gy
[siz-i-jee] noun, plural -gies.
1.Astronomy . an alignment of three celestial objects, as the sun, the earth, and either the moon or a planet: Syzygy in the sun-earth-moon system occurs at the time of full moon and new moon.
2. any two related things, either alike or opposite.
This is the primordial syzygy for multisense realism. The overlapping RGB regions can be grouped in different ways to bring out different meanings.
The primary spectral hues with the perimeter orientation are juxtaposed with the pastel hues having center-radial orientation. This produces a dialectic of subjective introversion versus objective extroversion as well as a three syzygies:
Subject Thesis (Who & Why, Sense & Motive, Pink & Yellow) minus Space (Subjects are always ‘here’)
Object Antithesis (What & How, Matter & Energy, Green & Red) minus Time (Objects are always ‘now’)
Realism Synthesis (When & Where, Time & Space, Light Blue & Deep Blue) is inferred by triangulating Subject & Object
Using this symmetry to solve the Hard Problem and bridge the Explanatory Gap:
Think of the living brain as the what and how of what we are, and consciousness is the who and the why. Neither supervenes on the other but, neither are they separable entirely. Like the syzygy, they are elements which are separate in some sense, united in some sense, overlapping and underlapping in some sense, defined by each other in some sense, and defining a super-signifying whole which is more than the sum of its parts in another sense.
Consider that of the seven billion people alive today, each one has a different identity and life, yet we all share more or less the same physiology. We cannot expect to locate the who & why of our identity in the what and how terms of our body.
The question marks outside of the circle represent the another dialectic, between the anthropic significance of the syzygy and the a-signifying mechanism of entropy.
”?” is used to connote the unconscious fully. Not merely the absence of awareness but the absence of the capacity for awareness of the absence. There is nothing there to signify a label of nothingness or oblivion, it simply is not anything.
Syzygy vs ?:
acceleration vs inertia
sequence vs consequence
significance vs entropy
pattern vs coincidence
initiative vs randomness
signal vs noise
orientation vs disorientation
teleology (purpose) vs teleonomy (evolution)
animism vs mechanism
augmentation vs cancellation
positive vs negative
multiplication vs division
Tags: consciousness, cosmology, explantory gap, hard problem of consciousness
Multisense Realism 
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