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Philosophy of Mind Flowchart
The idea here is that if we want to take the full spectrum of phenomena into account, we have to either begin with a reductionist realism and work upward, or a holistic idealism and work downward.
When we suppose that consciousness is a phenomenon that arises out of unconscious phenomena, we are saying that mechanism, through some act of emergence (generally by complexity), the mechanism in question (generally physical or computational mechanism) becomes enchanted with itself. In this case, as David Chalmers famously points out, there would have to be some threshold beyond which it would be impossible to tell the difference between a real person and a machine which acts just like a real person (a philosophical zombie). Finding this unacceptable, he suggests instead some variety of panpsychism should be explored, including perhaps, what I would call a promiscuous or ‘leaky’ panpsychism in which devices such as thermostats would have to be considered aware in some sense.
Finding both of these alternatives unacceptable, I suggest that we move over to the right side and begin with a downward facing ideal absolute. For the spiritually inclined, this could be called by any number of theistic names, however, it can also be conceived of equally well in completely non-spiritual, atheistic terms. When we suppose that awareness itself is inescapable and inevitable in all possible or theoretical universes, we are saying that through some divergence or illusion, awareness takes on a temporary solid appearance. In MSR, I suggest that this is a more plausible option than brute emergence from nothingness…modulated constraint within everythingness.*
Rather than positing an appeal to future scientific understanding to explain the emergence of aesthetic realism from mechanism, the divergence of mechanism from total awareness can be made palatable through a nested modulation of insensitivity. Intentionally partitioning intention itself so that it appears unintentional given a certain amount of insensitivity. This could be viewed either in the religious sense of ‘God’s divine plan is not visible to us’, or in a more conservative sense of ‘Shit happens coincidentally, but coincidental shit also happens to be meaningful from some perspective’.
If anyone is interested in what the crazy pink cone and all that is, I can explain in more detail, but briefly, if we take the MSR road from disenchanted idealism (the conservative ‘Shit happens’ option), then instead of the Chalmers dilemma of zombies vs leaky panpsychism, we get a continuum in which local sense is selectively blinded to the sense of non-human experiences, through a combination of frame rate mismatch (time scale difference cause entropy and local sense approximates) and distance (literal spatial scale difference, as well as experiential unfamiliarity).**
The other ten dollar words there, ‘tessellated monism’ and ‘eigenmetric diffraction’ both refer to the juxtaposition of sensitivity and insensitivity, through which a kind of metabolism of accumulating significance (solitrophy) in the face of fading sense (entropy) and fading motive (gravity).
*I call this cosmology the Sole Entropy Well hypothesis and it has to do with reversing Boltzmann’s solution to Loschmidt’s paradox so that entropy is a bottomless absolute, like c, in which local ranges of entropy and extropy stretch and multiply in a fractal-like reproduction.
**I call this aspect of MSR Eigenmorphism, which has to do with things appearing to be more doll-like and less familiar from a distance. This makes, for example, the presence of atoms and solar systems in our experience more similar to each other than either of them seems like a tree or a cell. The limits of our perception coincide with the simplicity of ontology, and they are, in a sense, the same thing (given eigenmorphism). As a rule of thumb, distance = the significance of insignficance.
Metaphysical vs Metaphenomenal
One of the most contentious areas in philosophy revolves around what I consider to be a misconception about the relation between the physical and phenomenal. In particular, the term ‘metaphysical’ forces supernatural connotations onto what would otherwise be non-ordinary but natural experiences and states of mind. I think that the problem is in failing to recognize the physical and phenomenal as each having their own ranges which both overlap and oppose each other. What I mean is, synchronicity and precognition are not metaphysical, they are metaphenomenal. The surprising part is that this means that the ordering of events in which we participate is actually a subjective experience nested within many other subjective and perhaps trans-subjective subjective experiences on different scales. Einstein talked about the relativity of simultaneity, and the metaphenomenal (aka collective unconscious) works in a similar way.
When we make time physical without acknowledging the role that phenomenology has in producing both the form and content of “time”, we introduce a false universal voyeur which effectively flattens all aesthetic qualities and participation into a one dimensional vector in one direction. By taking the term metaphysical, we unintentionally validate this flattened view of the universe in which physics is nature, and phenomenology, particularly deep or non-ordinary phenomenology, can only be non- or meta- physical and therefore supernatural, aka superstitious, aka illusory. If we look at how physics treats its own non-ordinary phenomena, such as quantum entanglement, quasars, and dark energy, we do not see the term ‘illusion’ or ‘folk astronomy’ being thrown around. Their strangeness is acknowledged in a way which invites curiosity rather than fear. The mystery is safely projected into the impersonal realm of physics and the super-impersonal realm of theoretical physics. By contrast, the metaphenomenal range is super-personal or transpersonal, containing experiences which challenge our conventional expectations about the realism of physical bodies, locality, and time.
It is not incorrect to say that for these reasons the metaphenomenal can be considered metaphysical, however I think that is where we are placing the emphasis on the wrong set of properties. Instead of using experiences such as intuition, synchronicity, and even divination as scientific clues to a super-personal range of awareness, we are distracted by the apparent contradiction to physics (as if ordinary awareness did not contradict physics already). To rehabilitate our perspective, I suggest considering the relation between the different ranges of physical (ontic) and phenomenal (telic) phenomena in this way:
The term ‘paranormal’ is, like supernatural and metaphysical, the same kind of misnomer. If we see physics as a product of more primitive phenomenal sense, then it is consciousness itself which is doing the normalizing, so that it cannot be considered ‘normal’ itself. In another sense, since it is our consciousness which is defining normalcy, it does indeed identify its own regularity and meta-regularities and challenges those definitions as well. The metaphenomenal serves not only as an extension of the personal psyche into the collective unconscious, but also as a line in the sand beyond which sanity is not guaranteed.
Microphysical and Microphenomenal
The same thing occurs in another way, in an opposite way, on the bottom end of my chart. The sub-personal roots of microphenomenology and the sub-impersonal seeds of microphysics are the bottom up layers of causality and are more directly related than the top layers. The sub-personal (sub-conscious, id) urges and the microphysical (binary, semaphore-digital) are low level signs which are used to literally motivate and control. It is a common language of pushing things around.
To be able to exercise control it is necessary first to be able to see that which is to be controlled as separate in some sense from that which controls. There must be a way to sense them as ‘things’ or as a kind of inertial field which resists your intentions to cause a sensible effect. This experience of ‘things outside the self’ is the beginning of motivation, desire, intelligence, etc. In this way, motive and mechanism are born. The teeth in your mouth and the teeth of a gear exploit the same mechanical power to physically endure and prevail.
In the schema I propose, the fabric of the universe is tessellated or braided into these levels of nested counterpoint. The higher level objectifies the lower level into things because the higher level enjoys a more complete, but distanced panoramic view. The predator’s perspective engulfs the prey’s perspective. Biological organisms also objectify other living things and their own living body as higher than non-living things. Organisms with nervous systems take it one step beyond, seeing their own lives as a kind of meta-thing to direct as separate from the body. The human brain corresponds to a further, and perhaps ultimate mutation on the theme of self-reflection. There are physical implications for all of this but they have to do with time more than materials and structure. The expansion of time gives us more raw experiential material, more moments and more awareness of past and future within each moment. Technology and leisure make a virtuous cycle, bringing innovations which give us more things to do with our minds and bodies, and with the world.
Robert Anton Wilson wrote about the Jumping Jesus phenomenon – that it took X number of years for the first person to be born who had the impact of a Jesus or a Buddha, and how we now have several of them living at any particular moment. Buckminster Fuller and Terrence McKenna are among those who had this hyper-enthusiasm for the future which underlies today’s Singularity ethos. The ever ‘tightening gyre’, the transcendental object at the end of history, etc. It would seem, however, that at the same time, this enthusiasm is somehow perpetually deluded, and forever producing time wasting, leisure robbing coercions as well. As the acceleration increases, so does the mass, and a kind of stalemate plus or minus is maintained.
Conclusion
By shifting from the ad hoc, monolithic model of phenomenology as a kind of malfunctioning folk physics, or as physics belonging to an illusion that must be overcome spiritually, I propose a sense-based, multivalent view in which the metaphenomenal is understood to be both less than and more than physically real with high orthogonality, and the microphysical is understood to be less than and more than cosmologically meaningful with high isomrophism. The (one) mistake that David Chalmers made, in my opinion, is in accidentally introducing the idea of a zombie rather than a doll to the discussion of AI. Similar to error of the terms metaphysical and supernatural, the zombie specifies an expectation of personal level consciousness which is absent, rather than sub-personal level consciousness which is present on the microphysical levels. We can understand more clearly that a doll is not conscious on a personal level, no matter how many things it can say, or how many ways its limbs can be articulated. On the micro-physical level however, the material which makes up the doll expresses some sensory experience. It can be melted or frozen, broken or burned, etc. The material knows how to react to its environment sensibly and appropriately, and this is how material is in fact defined – by its sensible relations to material conditions. Just as we can assemble a 3D image on a 2D screen out of dumb pixels, so too can be automate a 5D human impostor on a 4D behavior stream of a doll.
By properly locating the micro-level physics beneath the personal-level phenomenology, we can see that beneath the micro-level physics there can be an even more primitive micro-phenomenology. On the top end as well, beyond the ontological truths of mathematics and logic, there are teleological apprehensions of aesthetics and meaning – without necessarily invoking a God personality (although that can work too, I just don’t see it as making as much sense as transpersonal Absolute).
*the super-impersonal is similar to the metaphenomenal in that it is difficult and esoteric, but opposite in that it is extrinsic rather than intrinsic. Where the metaphenomenal uses symbols as archetypes, loaded with metaphor and occult mystery, the superimpersonal (which would be more correct to call metaphysical) uses arcane mathematical and logical expressions. These are a kind of anti-metaphor as they relate to precisely defined, universally understood public information. The whole point is to expose the theory and completely, so that anyone is welcome to try to learn how to understand and use them, without any initiation rituals or strange pictures.
Cookie Cutter Cosmologies
(With apologies to those who are more philosophically literate.)
Something In The Water: Logos and Tao
A superficial read of Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy introduces a dualism of Being and Becoming beginning with the water-based cosmology of Thales of Miletus in the 6th century BCE. Thales conceived of the universe as made of a single material substance: water**. Thales said:
“It is water that, in taking different forms, constitutes the earth, atmosphere, sky, mountains, gods and men, beasts and birds, grass and trees, and animals down to worms, flies and ants. All these are different forms of water. Meditate on water.”
On the other side of the known world, the development of Taoism at roughly the same time spoke of the primacy of water, or the metaphor of water as effortless constant change.
“Water never resists. It accepts all.
It never judges.
Therefore, to be one with Tao, be like water.”– Tao Te Ching
Heraclitus of Ephesus picks up on the theme of nature emerging from a single Logos, but expressed as fire rather than water. Many comparisons can be drawn between Heraclitus and Lao Tzu, as they both speak to a cosmos which is changeless only in its perpetual changing, and grounded in a united harmony of contrasts.*
“The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one.”
“It is an attunement of opposite tension (palintropos harmonie),like that of the bow and the lyre.”
(A Comparison between Heraclitus’ Logos and Lao-Tzu’s Tao pdf)
Being and Becoming
Parmenides of Elea can be seen to comprise something of a philosophical dipole, with Heraclitus seeing (centuries before Process Philosophy [1]) a universe based on change and becoming rather than on fixed forms, and Parmenides asserting that the true nature of the universe is divided between the eternal divine truths and ephemeral local appearances [2]. Parmenides speaks in terms of what-is being what cannot not-be.
“what-is is ungenerable and imperishable,
a whole of a single kind, and unshaking and complete;
nor was it nor will it be, since it is now all together
one, cohesive.”
His emphasis on the significance of what-is (really, really real) as eternal and unchanging coincides with the views of Pythagoreans, such as Philolaus of Croton who venerated the role of number in the cosmos and saw mathematics specifically as that which which joins the unlimiteds and limiters which make up everything.
Plato sharpened the Pythagorean appreciation for ideal forms (including goodness, beauty, equality, bigness, likeness, unity, being, sameness, difference, change, and changelessness) which he saw as eternal. Platonic idealism lends a Parmenidean fixation to the insubstantial Heraclitean flux, but all remain analog and abstract. Democritus, who was in a sense the antithesis of Plato (Aristoxenus said that Plato wished to burn all the writings of Democritus that he could collect), managed to reconcile the flux and fixed in a different way which incorporated the concrete and empirical.
Philosophies of Science
Democritus’ notion of unchanging, irreducible atoms in a void which constantly change configurations is an idea which reconciles both Heraclitus and Parmenides [3]. This model has cast physics in a mold which, even today, remains almost inescapable. The combination of determinism and uncertainty has gone beyond atoms into the subatomic level. Quantum mechanical events are determined to be indeterminable, but governed by formulaic probabilities which are precise and unchanging.
Aristotle had a different perspective on what is essential which seems more grounded in language and relates to the proprietary versus the generic. A horse is an essential substance, whereas the category ‘horse’ is a secondary kind of substance. His hylomorphic compounds conceive of substance as the form of things, or their matter plus essence. It is a top-down kind of holism which contradicts the bottom-up reductionism of Democritus, however Aristotle extends the binary logic of Parmenides rather than the divine flowing harmonies of Heraclitus and Plato.
Galileo applied the Classical dualism of unlimiteds and limiters in a scientific way, defining them in physical terms so that Primary qualities are conceived as being independent of any observer (shape, position, motion, contact, and number) and Secondary qualities are thought to be properties which produce sensations in observers. Galileo had a functionalist view of qualia, so that experiences like colors or feelings had a purpose in guiding our behavior toward God’s design. Locke updated Galileo’s primary and secondary qualities so that primary qualities had a dimension of realism which was not only objective but located in objects themselves; properties of solidity, extension, and figure. His secondary qualities are seen as powers of objects which mechanically produce sensation in us.
Kant’s take on unseen universals and their changing expressions was defined in terms of Noumena and Phenomena. His contrasts of ‘a priori’, ‘a posteriori’, ‘analytic’, and ‘synthetic’ clarify some of the themes of causality common to Locke, Aristotle, and Descartes. Even into the modern era, ultimate questions in philosophy and science lead back to ideal absolutes such as ‘information’ or ‘existence’ versus properties of a Phenomenal world of sensation (’emergent’ or ‘illusory’). Jung and Bateson used the words Pleuroma and Creatura to talk about the difference between the eternal totality which is beyond all experience and qualities, and the living world that is subject to perceptual difference and information.
There are of course, many other philosophers and scientists that should be mentioned. Hobbes and Newton can be said to have continued the reductionist tradition of Democritus, while dialectic and monadic themes in Hegel, Leibniz, and Spinoza recapture the pre-Socratic sense of the Absolute. Aside from this bifurcation of Transcendental Idealism and Empirical Realism, there is also also a progression from science as a discussion about ideals to a realization of empire.The chain of mentoring from Socrates to Plato to Aristotle to Alexander the Great begins with intellectual questioning and ends with the exercise of global political power, with a mastery of form, substance, causality and virtue in between.
Breaking the Mold
Thales’ hylozoism (he believed that matter was alive), and Aristotle’s essentialism fell into strong disfavor during the Early Modern period, however there were a few who challenged the primacy of so called primary qualities. For George Berkeley, all qualities were secondary, and matter was only a representation of the mind:
“The deducing therefore of causes or occasions from effects and appearances, which alone are perceived by sense, entirely relates to reason.”
Even though Berkeleyan idealism can arguably be seen to be supported by the Observer Principle interpretation of Quantum Theory, as well as Simulation Hypothesis, Holographic Universe, and Bohm’s Implicate Order, modern panpsychism has been dogged by the tendency for Idealism to be painted as Solipsism. The cliche “If a tree falls in a forest..” is often used to point out the absurdity of idealism, i.e. that the idea of linking existence to perception is beneath consideration on account of it being childish, superstitious, psychotic, and above all unfalsifiable.
In my view, this is a prejudiced characterization, in which the difference between one’s own individual perception is used to stand in for the principle of perception in general. This mistake is repeated again and again in Functionalism, Computationalism, Structured Realism, Logical Positivism, and Emergentism, among others, which demand a return to reductionist, Democritean models. A similar dismissal of Searle’s treatment of the Symbol Grounding Problem, and Chalmers Hard Problem of Consciousness underscores the commitment to the primacy of fixed, object-like rules rather than rule-making subjects.
Cutting the Cookie
Taking this philosophical evolution into perspective, it is my intent to transcend all of the particulars of the past and see all of the prior philosophical approaches as blind men overlapping in their examination of the proverbial elephant. I side with Berkeley on the primacy of experience, as I see the publicly measurable aspects of the world as a reduced vocabulary which cannot add up to the rich aesthetics which we experience. I would compare qualia as an endless supply of cookie dough, in which cookie cutters could be made from the dough itself. The idea is that the edible can be made hard and inedible, but no amount of cookie-cutting utensils can render an edible cookie.
Going beyond cookies and cutters, however, requires a combination of Berkeley’s best arguments, Einstein’s Relativity, and Quantum Mechanical observations. The notion of perspective itself, of inertial frames and the importance of measurement in determining the nature of nature is repudiation of Berkeley. It is perception after all which serves as the master metaphor for all possible “relation”. It is from perception that all phenomena “emerge” and to perception that all phenomena become “evident”. I see no scientific reason not to extend this principle of perception beyond human experience and even beyond biology, so that physics itself is understood to be identical to “sense”. Sensing and sense-making provide a cookie and cutter autopoiesis, within which experience can both return ephemeral Creatura to the Pleroma, and draw eternal forms and fictions into the empirical realm. The cookie and cutter are themselves aesthetic contrasts within the same cookie batter/cook.
*The Tao translates as ‘the way’, and logos “Originally a word meaning “a ground”, “a plea”, “an opinion”, “an expectation”, “word”, “speech”, “account”, “reason”, it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge”.
In my own etymological forays, I have come across a theme which relates a lot of terms having to do with consciousness with the Proto-IndoEuorpean roots “wag” and “wegh”. The combined sense is that of a way of weaving or wagging. Tending to wander or wave, and attending: to wake, watch, and weigh.
**In the 5th c,, Xenophanes linked all physical phenomena with clouds and the sea.
“The sea is the source of water and of wind…
The stars come into being from burning clouds…
The sun consists of burning clouds…
The moon is compressed cloud…
All things of this sort [comets, shooting stars, meteors] are either groups or movements of clouds.”
- “Modern philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include Nietzsche, Heidegger, Charles Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, Robert M. Pirsig, Charles Hartshorne, Arran Gare and Nicholas Rescher. In physics Ilya Prigogine distinguishes between the “physics of being” and the “physics of becoming”. Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science.” – Wiki
- Parmenides prefigures Plato, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza and many others who invoke a Heaven-and-Earth type dualism.
- “Democritus managed to reconcile the Heraclitean theory of flux with the theory of perfect immutability of Parmenides and demonstrate that both theories are truly complimentary for each one explains a different level of reality and do not contradict each other. It is true that, essentially, things do not change (as Parmenides claims), for they are composed of eternal and indivisible particles (atoms), but it is also true that the arrangement of this atoms could be altered resulting in apparent changes (as Heraclitus argued).” – Substantia Primordium: Parmenides and Heraclitus reconciled
Emergent Noumena
Noumenon, plural Noumena, in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) as opposed to what Kant called the phenomenon—the thing as it appears to an observer. Though the noumenal holds the contents of the intelligible world, Kant claimed that man’s speculative reason can only know phenomena and can never penetrate to the noumenon. Man, however, is not altogether excluded from the noumenal because practical reason—i.e., the capacity for acting as a moral agent—makes no sense unless a noumenal world is postulated in which freedom, God, and immortality abide.
The relationship of noumenon to phenomenon in Kant’s philosophy has engaged philosophers for nearly two centuries, and some have judged his passages on these topics to be irreconcilable. Kant’s immediate successors in German Idealism in fact rejected the noumenal as having no existence for man’s intelligence. Kant, however, felt that he had precluded this rejection by his refutation of Idealism, and he persisted in defending the absolute reality of the noumenal, arguing that the phenomenal world is an expression of power and that the source from which this power comes can only be the noumenal world beyond.
A central thesis of my approach is that the assumption of noumena should also be assumed to be a ‘thing as it appears to an observer’. In the case of our own experience, we are the observer – really the participant. Even the term observer smuggles in a way of framing ontology to imply non-phenomenal facts.
In my view, Locke’s assumption of qualities like color and feeling as Secondary, while properties like position and shape are Primary, while true from the local perspective, should be (like the image on our retina) considered inverted from an absolute perspective. It’s easy to turn colors or feelings into numbers and points on a graph, just by counting them and arranging what has been counted. It’s impossible, however, to derive colors from structures or information alone.
What this means is that the capacity to discern noumena from phenomena is itself a phenomenal property. It varies by both degree and kind. This quality is often known by names like ‘sanity’ and ‘common sense’, and while our access to it as individuals depends on local neurological conditions, local neurological conditions probably depend on an even lower level of sanity on the microphenomenal scale to maintain the integrity of the microphysical world which cells and neurons inhabit.
If that’s true, and what we call sanity, a kind of preservative inertia of sensory and meta-sensory interpretation goes all the way down, then physics itself should be described as the modulation of that sanity. A superposition of superpositions if you will, as locality which generalizes and re-localizes what it has generalized. If we think of the Newtonian-Cartesian universe as made of ideal particles in a void, the Einsteinian universe idealized the void, and the Quantum universe turned the particles into bubbles un-disappearing in that void. What I propose is to put see bubbling itself as a property of reflection and contrast. Drill down into the surface of the bubble and see that it is nothing but aesthetics derived from some perspective and mode of detection. It is the possibility of phenomena that matters. Noumena without phenomena is identical to nothingness, but phenomena without noumena changes nothing, provided that phenomena diverges from its own sensory-motive properties, rather than emerges from abstract non-phenomena.
Square Spiral Diagram
This square spiral logo is coming in handy, but my apologies if it is getting monotonous. This is an informal flow chart of what might be called cosmological metabolism. The interplay between H and Σ describe the catabolic and anabolic principles (Entropy and Significance). The idea here is that the primordial identity or principle behind everything is sense, and that through the alienation or diffraction of sense, followed by re-uniting, significance is gained.
Sense can be understood as accumulating from the bottom up, as complexity and sophistication of experience, and also as a splitting off from the Totality. Consciousness can be understood as a nesting of coincidence which accelerates itself. Time is a comparison of coincidences in which a logical distance is inferred, while space is presented as a logical context within which objects or forms coincide directly. Clock time, therefore is a spatialization of our inner experience – a masking of private, lifelong harmonics which are semantic and quasi-narrative. The gaps of time give structure to the autobiographical dream.
Sense bridges the gap between one time and another, across distance or separation, connecting public and private. Sense tears itself down so it can build improvement. Our public view of physics eradicates meaning inadvertently by hiding coincidence. Because sense is the primordial identity, coincidence can be thought of as the existential expression of what is essentially transformations of meaning and aesthetic quality. When we spread it out over space and time, it looks like coincidence, but if we keep spreading it out, it looks like unrelated incidents. The refinement of these unrelated incidents into generic, meaningless functions, is what is physics and math are about – however, because the nature of sense is self-reflective and self-revealing, the blueprint of its grandest coincidences can be seen, even in their absence.
Physics as the Production of Realistic Fantasy and Fantastic Reality
When working with private physics, the operators used are metaphorical and implicit, not explicit. Qualia is LIKE the “mass” of privacy. The will to will is like the “Energy” of privacy, and realism is like the “c²”. In my understanding, the notion that c is the speed of light is really a legacy understanding – a pre-Relativity convention within Relativity. It makes more sense to me now that light just happens to be the fastest quality of sense that we have access to. The true nature of c is as the speed of sense, or experience itself. It is not a speed, but the absolute limit of velocity. The still-here-ness of the universe..
From an absolute view, quantified properties like mass, energy, and spacetime can be considered to be like reality but the only true reality is what experience is like. All conditions of the public universe are contingent upon an aesthetic palette, otherwise it would be implausible that any such palette could exist.
Private physics and public physics provide two different senses or fantasy, and two different senses of reality. Human experience is fantastically rich in an aesthetic sense and fundamentally real because it is the source of our participation in the universe. Our experience of the non-human universe is fantastic in the sense of its overwhelming magnitude and complexity, Its reality is persistent and reliable.
If we are serious about our science, we should consider that being overwhelmed by grandeur is a human experience which reflects the disparity in physical scale between us and the larger exteriority. The Public universe by itself would have no such feeling of grandeur, but what we feel about the inaccessible vastness of the cosmos is equaled by the vast inaccessibility of feeling by public physics.
Something else that has come up through this recent addition of physics to MSR, is the idea that Gravity is time squared, and that time is the square root of gravity. This makes sense to me, if we are talking about the equivalent conjugates of c² and t² as pubic spacetime and private realism. It should work out that Spacetime = the public shadow of Realism, and therefore Spacetime is literally Gravity and Realism is literally figuratively Gravity, as in the grave, serious nature of experience. If c is the constancy of distance and time coordinates, c² is the gravity which warps them from within.
Multisense Realism 
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