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The 99.999%
There is something about the narrowness of consciousness that makes the relativity of all experience necessary. In some way, the universe can only experience all of itself if each episode of awareness has its own kind of zero-gravity bubble of perceptual bias. Every frame of reference is screening out shades of so many others, but fills in the gaps with its own connectivity to events and phenomena which are local. We are walking around in a predominantly human life in a human context, only barely noticing the other 99.999..% of the universe as a cartoonish/mechanical caricature.
Bang!
If Big Bang was a singular event that created space, time and matter, then one must view the universe as a rapidly expanding billiards table of N dimensions with all events pre-determined. There can be no intervening force or new element of causality possible. There can be no uncertainty, and any notions of either free will or divine intervention are illusory.
If the Big Bang created time, then I think that it should not be thought of as an event (in time), but rather as the hub that all events have in common. The Big Bang never happened, it did happen, it is still happening, it hasn’t happened yet. Because we are measuring it from inside of spacetime, and using instruments that are limited to only the most generic spatial-quantitative measurements, our results reflect a narrowly defined model of the origin of causality itself. It is the fallacy of the instrument – we have a hammer of physics so everything that physics measures looks like a nail. What I propose instead is a Big Diffraction, where the birth of spacetime is an influx of dissociation into countless semi-permeable perceptual frames of reference that are united beyond spacetime.
If we place ourselves in the moment of the Big Bang, we cannot judge it on a human scale of time, since that scale of time had not been invented yet. If the universe itself is awareness, the first trillionths of a second of the invention of time are no less likely to feel like five minutes than they are an eternity. As the singularity breaks into multiplicity (Tzimtzum for fans of the Kabbalah), it is inventing the possibility of multiplicity for the first time. Eternity is spawning micro-eternities in which each micro-view is stretching out eternity so that it seems both ever longer and slower and seems to have originated in an ever more brief instant. Time is all about comparing frequencies of awareness – beats per measure. Time is relativistic because time is relativity itself – the framing of perceptual reference.
What we see through a telescope is an objectified version of the story of objectification that serves as a creation myth for the anti-mythology of functionalism. Free will was never inside of spacetime to begin with. It was not created, it creates. If free will is illusory, then it is that which is illusory which gives birth to realism and physics, not the other way around. The universe is a single thread of singing, signaling, significance-building experience,weaving and winding through a maze of its own self-imposed alienation. Divinity is optional, and free will is scarce, but the universe is only a billiard table if you limit the vocabulary of inquiry to that of billiard balls.
Nothing is an o…
Nothing is an object in its own frame of reference.
A simple thing to say, but the implications are profound when taken literally. I do take them literally, so that like time and length, objectivity itself is relativistic*. There are no truly objective objects, only experiences which are frozen by distance and unfamiliarity. What is truly objective is, ironically, subjectivity. The sense of perceiving and participating, while nested in an elaborate way for human participants, is, in my view, the simplest possible phenomenon within which all other phenomena are described. The capacity for experience is absolute and irreducible, even though the capacity for human qualities of experience is contingent upon a Matroyshka doll nesting of continuous non-human experiences.
*I call this variation of object and non-object qualities by proximity and similarity ‘eigenmorphism’ (proper form).
Quora Question on Entropy
Help me understand this. If entropy is about signal transmission, and is measured by “how much information is missing,” it implies a transmitter and receiver – in other words, a relationship. Entropy is an appealing notion because at first glance the receiver of the information cannot suddenly know more than what is transmitted. But the amount of information the receiver can receive seems to be highly relative and transformable.This is if I understand correctly that entropy is not a measurement of a system’s physical properties, but of how much information is missing when that system is observed. For sure, a system will emit is information, and there will be a less than 100% reception of that signal for any system observing it. That number cannot be 101%…. But there are two sides to a relationship, and a system’s entropy is not related to some total “information” it “contains”… So there are simple workarounds to that 100% threshold.
For example, if I look at a blade of grass that I hold in my hand, I can only receive so much information about it, and I cannot get more information than what it is transmitting to me… Unless I then look at it under a microscope and now the information loss (entropy) has decreased. If entropy were a law of the universe, my act of changing my receptor would be “impossible.”
It seems to me that labeling entropy as an unbreakable law is a naive notion, and instead I see it as a useful property of observation. Does entropy deserve the status of “law of the universe”?
The subject of entropy is, appropriately highly entropic. There are a lot of different ways that the word is used, some more figuratively than others. Thermodynamic entropy is not the same as information entropy, in the sense that if we make an MPEG compressed video of a glass of ice melting into room temperature water, the first half of the movie would take more resources to compress than the last half, given that the last half would feature only a glass of still water. As the thermodynamic entropy of the actual ice increases, the information entropy of the content of the video decreases. The sensitivity of the video camera is limited, so it can’t detect the microstates of the water molecules.
I think this speaks to the question of perception, and how our designation of what constitutes a ‘system’ is more arbitrary than it may seem. All of our instruments and all of our sensing and sense-making capabilities are potentially as limited as the video camera. Our attention is squeezed into an anthropocentric range, so that our window on ourselves and the universe does not allow us to discern ultimately what is ‘a law of the universe, or simply an assumption based on our perceptions’. Everything that we can understand about the universe is furnished to us only by our perceptions, intuitions, and understanding.
Our perception leads us to expect a universe of laws and realities beyond itself, but these too are either ultimately subjective conditions, or else subjectivity itself must include the possibility of transcending itself. The difference between what we presume to be our private perceptions and what we presume to be something more is…. entropy. There is no way to obtain 100% of the information about anything. Even given omniscient access to the entire history of the universe, the nature of the universe may be intrinsically open ended within any given inertial frame.
What I am suggesting is that just as entropy is the gap between what we experience and what we think could be experienced (‘objectively’), what we consider information may only appear to be finite because of the gap between our native perceptual frame of reference and the target frame of reference. Rather than being a true description of what a phenomenon is, ‘information’ may be as fictional in its amputation of subjective qualities as perception is in its failure to pick up on physical properties. The definition of entropy itself can be thought of as gradually reversing or flipping in proportion to the distance (literal and figurative) between two perceptual frames. Take these words for example. If you read English, then your absorption of their meaning is rather loose and general. You get the idea of what I am saying, and even sort of ‘hear’ an inner narrator voice that stands in for me. It’s all rather fuzzy, but it works really well. Entropy is actually what allows you to get the gist of what I am saying or even what I am not saying (reading between the lines).
By comparison, someone who cannot read English at all may have a much clearer view of what these characters ‘actually’ look like (without as much fuzzy interpretive conditioning). In the same way, some people find it easier to draw realistically if they are copying an image upside down. Entropy and significance, subjectivity and objectivity are not functional properties, they are aesthetic ranges. The universe as a whole can, in the same way, be considered primarily an aesthetic phenomenon as a whole, in which any part can reduce another to a functional stereotype using variations on the theme of distance or insensitivity.
What is Time?
How would you define it?
I propose a new way of describing time, which I find clearer and more explanatory than others.
Time is an abstraction which refers to a general property of experiences which are remembered or recorded as having occurred in a either an irreversible linear sequence, or a repeating sequence (cycle). In my view, time is inherently phenomenal (private, experiential) rather than physical (public, structural), not just because of time dilation under Relativity, but for the more axiomatic reason that time requires memory. Without memory, there can logically be only one eternal moment. It could be repeating forever or be following a pattern or have no pattern and nothing could tell the difference. Time…is experience, or a quality of experience through which private memory can map to public structure. I suggest that time can be understood as taking on three different modal scopes:
I. Micro-phenomenal: This is clock time. Physics. Looking at the development of time keeping, we can see that early devices exploited natural processes which were either continuous and invariant, such as the flow of water or sand into a container, or which cycled reliably, such as a shadow on a sundial. Mechanical clocks offered a marriage of the two, whereby an underlying linear or oscillating effect such as an unwinding spring’s tension or a pendulum’s swing would advance the teeth of a system of gears, one by one.
Each tick/tock is an precisely measured event which is, as much as possible, uniform and generic. As technology has improved, we have refined the clock to a pinnacle of pure abstraction. Both the indivisible and divisible power of nature has been abstracted electronically. A perpetual electrical current drives generic switches to compute a digitally coded readout. Satellite networks deliver synchronized atomic time. Each microsecond like the last, and even though global adjustments to clock or calendar can be made arbitrarily by central authorities, we feel that this kind of time is the ‘real time’.
II. Phenomenal Time: This is natural time. Idioms like ‘time flies when you’re having fun’ or ‘it was the longest night of my life’ reflect that our ordinary sense of time also dilates and contracts through emotional states. Significant events and experiences seem to stand out in our autobiographical memory as not only more timely, but more timeless as well. We claim them, intentionally or unintentionally, as our own. This kind of time is narrative. “I woke up, I ate breakfast, I went to the store”, etc.. There is a story which has a shape – beginnings, middles and ends. It is not just generic oscillation or monotonous duration or arrow of increasing entropy, but a proprietary sequence of participation. This is the kind of time that we might say ‘seems like’ it is real.
If you think of how a story works, the more of the story is told, the more the information entropy decreases. By the middle of the story, we know the characters, the setting, the plot, etc. The number of possible ways the story can continue is relatively limited (even if it is still potentially unlimited in an absolute sense). The significance, however, of the remaining bit of the story is increasingly augmented. If the story is good, you want to hear the end of it, even if you are pretty sure that you know how it will turn out.
After the story ends, it would seem that there is no entropy left. The story has been told in its entirety. In reality, however, the meta-story has just begun. The memory of it survives, creating new opportunities to be applied figuratively in one’s life, as well as sharing it socially and seeing it retold, dramatized, and celebrated in culture as myth.
III. Metaphenomenal Time: Carl Jung famously wrote about the Collective Unconscious, and synchronicity. Experiences which some consider delusional or paranormal. Meaningful coincidences, prophetic dreams, a symbolic language of recurring characters and sagas called archetypes. This is eternal time. Time wound around itself in such a way that some essential, iconic reduction of all that has happened or might happen is in some sense ‘always still here’ and in another sense ‘never really anywhere’.
This is not mystical babbling to me, it is literally the physical reality of what the universe is and what (or who) it does. We have no trouble thinking of eternity in the Platonic sense, as ideal geometric forms or mathematical relations, but because we ourselves are immersed in human phenomena we do not see ourselves as being composed of similarly eternal recurrences.
Because there is no hard line between I, II, and III, all time is actually nested within all three contexts. This can help explain how intuition could work to allow people to sometimes pick up on feelings from a larger scope of time. Events that have great significance especially could theoretically cast a shadow from the III range to the II, so that from the II perspective, it is precognitive.
Time for Nested Causality
What do you about the simultaneity of cause and effect?
“The greater part of operating causes in nature are simultaneous with their effects, and the succession in time of the latter is produced only because the cause cannot achieve the total of its effect in one moment. But at the moment when the effect first arises, it is always simultaneous with the causality of its cause, because, if the cause had but a moment before ceased to be, the effect could not have arisen…. The time between the causality of the cause and its immediate effect may entirely vanish, and the cause and effect be thus simultaneous, but the relation of the one to the other remains always determinable according to time.” (Kant, 1787, The Critique of Pure Reason)
As the crickets’ soft autumn hum
is to us
so are we to the trees
as are they
to the rocks and the hills.– Gary Snyder
Othello
“Othello” is a code that exists in a variety of forms, including ink on paper and binary digits on electronic storage. When this code is processed by human minds, it evokes some specific sensations. For instance, it causes our mirror neurons (and other brain modules) to run simulations of characters and situations.
The sensations “Othello” evokes in two different brains will usually be similar enough that the owners of those brains will be able to have a meaningful discussion about the play.
What I propose is that you turn your description of Othello as a code inside out. The code idea is a good one, and one that makes a lot of sense, but I have found that it makes more sense to view it this way:
“Othello” is many different but related phenomena:
0) Elementary level
- +0) a human experience that can be accessed through particular states of conscious and subconscious attention (proto-sensory)
- -0) a symbolic code that can be modulated and demodulated through a variety of communication channels (logical-quantitative or pseudo-sensory)
1) Sub-Personal level
- +1) a series of audio-phonetic and psycho-acoustic sensations which are fragments of aesthetically richer experiences. (sensory-qualitative*)
- -1) a series of electro-magnetic and neuro-chemical state changes which through which a computational isomorphism arises between syntactic structures and functional semantics. (microphysical)
2) Personal Level
- +2) a production of subjective feelings and thoughts in which one is theatrically immersed. This does not occur because of 1), but rather because of the essential psychological unity of the human experience that is being tapped into (+3) at a personal and social level of understanding (+2).
- -2) an enactment or rendition of a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story Un Capitano Moro (“A Moorish Captain”)
3) Super-personal Level
- +3 ) an artistically customized sampling of mytho-poetic inspirations, in which timeless human themes are clothed in specific anthropological, sociological, and psychological metaphors (metaphoric).
- -3 ) Part of a body of work which arose through the English Renaissance Period or Elizabethan Era reflecting a resurgence of interest in the humanities. It serves as an archeological artifact to add to our knowledge about everything from European history to political science, art, language, racial relations etc. (I call this meta-theoretic to contrast with the metaphoric…intellectual rather than aesthetic)
∞) Absolute Level
- +∞) A harmonic** integration of all of the above, so that each level makes sense in its own context and in conjunction with others. To arbitrarily choose one level of description would be a destructive compression if taken literally. (Telic)
- +∞) An impressive, though ultimately inevitable product of mathematical and physical laws plus statistically random mutations. (Ontic)
*I call this ‘semaphoric’ – meaning simple, repetitive meanings as would be produced by signal flags or digital codes. Intended to evoke a contrast to metaphoric, which are numerous complex figurative meanings extracted from a single communication. The personal, ‘phoric’ level would be between the semaphoric and metaphoric.
**or what I call ‘holotrophic’ – a productive extension of tendencies toward wholeness.
If the universe was going to be destroyed, and we had to recreate it based on some general description, I would say that my list of five, dual aspect levels is the minimum reduction that would be useful.
The idea that it can all be reduced to codes and simulations I consider to be a folly of the turn of this century in which low level functions are confused with generators of high level phenomena rather than the other way around.
To sum up and add cool symbols:
0) Elementary
-ℵ Sense, Essential Figurative Unity, +0
ω Information, Existential Logical Units, -0
1) Sub-Personal
æ Affect-Effect, Sensory-Motive Intention, Semaphoric Qualia +1
E Energy, Unintentional Physical Function, Dynamic Analogues -1
2) Personal
Æ Aesthetic Experience, direct, ‘-phoric’ +2
M Material Structure, indirect,’-morphic’ -2
3) Super-Personal
Ψ Psyche, Super-Personal, Meta-phoric, mytho-poetic +3
Φ Noús, Super-Impersonal, Meta-theoretic, algebraic-geometric -3
∞) Absolute (ॐ)
ש Telic, Metaphenomenal, proprietary preferences +∞
Δ Ontic, Automatic, generic axioms -∞
Die Enge des Bewusstseins, ‘the narrowness of consciousness’
To invent, I have said, is to choose; but the word is perhaps not wholly exact. It makes one think of a purchaser before whom are displayed a large number of samples, and who examines them, one after the other, to make a choice. Here the samples would be so numerous that a whole lifetime would not suffice to examine them. This is not the actual state of things. The sterile combinations do not even present themselves to the mind of the inventor. – Henri Poincaré
As part of his response, Albert Einstein writes:
… It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.
…It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness (Enge des Bewußtseins)*.
Here Poincaré and Einstein are discussing the nature of creativity and the particular issue of how our personal awareness both does and does not generate novelty. Like the debate over free will, I see this as largely about the hierarchical flow of subjectivity. The personal level of awareness, as noted by Freud and Jung among others, is sandwiched between what could be called a sub-personal or sub-conscious range (Id) and a super-personal or metaphenomenal range (Collective Unconscious). Jung picked up where Freud left off, seeing that Super-Ego was not necessarily just a facade of social pressures against which the Ego cowers, but a living, trans-personal terrain of archetypal influences. The Jungian view looked at this terrain as being tied up in his idea of synchronicity – meaningful coincidence which can be decoded through a language of cross-cultural metaphor. Joseph Campbell wrote and spoke extensively on this language (‘The Power of Myth, ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’, etc.).
What I have not seen is a physical theory which takes the synchronicity and myth seriously. When we do take it seriously, I think that it meshes perfectly with the implications of the Theory of Relativity, and with what Poincaré and Einstein are talking about with the narrowness of consciousness. All that needs to be done is to relocate the concept of literal inertial frames of reference with a more figurative notion of phenomenal inertial framing. The idea of levels of consciousness is probably one of the most ancient and enduring concepts in mysticism. Whether they are seen as levels which can only be attained through a proscribed path or as introspective potentials which we can all access by ourselves, the desire to partition human experience as a hierarchy seems to be irresistible. Irresistible, that is, until recently. Contemporary psychology has largely moved away from hierarchies and grand schemas, focusing instead (with debatable success) on more modular, pharmacologically addressable functions.
While I appreciate many of the hierarchical maps of consciousness, like those so diligently compiled by Ken Wilber, I suggest that we begin from scratch, with an eye toward simplicity and correlation with general systems. In addition, the foundation for this view should be sensory-motive rather than information-theoretic or material-energetic. By sensory-motive, I refer to what Einstein talks about above. While the effect of creativity is teleological and communicative, the process itself is driven by what he calls combinatory play: ‘the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words’.
Just as this sub-cognitive sensible engagement is overlooked in modern, computational theories of mind, so too is the possibility of microsensory phenomena overlooked in modern physics. I see this not as an accident, but rather the same oversight on a different scale. The idea that our own sensations emerge from a different source than the sensations which are telegraphed from the source to instrument of detection to scientific observer is not necessary if we generalize Einstein’s ‘combinatory play’ to the outer-shell of all of physics.
The MSR hypothesis is called Eigenmorphism. It is that what separates our body from our sub-conscious experience, and our sub-conscious from our personal experience can be understood in terms of a psychophysically extended narrowness of consciousness. There aren’t any inertial frames which simply exist, but only those which can be inferred through the combination of sensed perspectives. Modes of description, whether in the aesthetic of substances, quantities, or qualities are all ultimately narrowed channels of fundamental sense-making, which must be absolutely primordial. The various forms and functions which can be measured publicly are comparable to what Einstein meant about what is logically motivated and communicable, but what the deeper participation cannot be seen as the object of sight. Light, as a the most pervasive version of sense, is not a thing or an energy, but a participation multiplier – a way of being simultaneously here, there, and not literally here or there. I project my narrow attention through a mind which is already narrowed by a hierarchy of sub-personal and super-personal filters, each of which are also narrowed from scales of sensory participation so vast and unfamiliar that I read them only by the mechanical, impersonal traces that they leave. The universe that we live in is not a solipsistic narrowing of consciousness, but a nested universality of aesthetics – a combinatory play.
*The narrowness of consciousness which Einstein mentions is from William James:
“The sum total of our impressions never enters into our experience, consciously so called, which runs through this sum total like a tiny rill through a flowery mead. Yet the physical impressions which do not count are there as much as those that do, and affect our sense-organs just as energetically. Why they fail to pierce the mind is a mystery which is only named and not explained when we invoke die Enge des Bewusstseins, the narrowness of consciousness’ as its grounds.”.
Multisense Realism 
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