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Questioning the Sufficiency of Information
Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment tends to be despised by strong AI enthusiasts, who seem to take issue with Searle personally because of it. Accusing both the allegory and the author of being stupid, the Systems Reply is the one offered most often. The man in the room may not understand Chinese, but surely the whole system, including book of translation, must be considered to understand Chinese.
Here then is simpler and more familiar example of how computation can differ from natural understanding which is not susceptible to any mereological Systems argument.
If any of you have use passwords which are based on a pattern of keystrokes rather than the letters on the keys, you know that you can enter your password every day without ever knowing what it is you are typing (something with a #r5f^ in it…?).
I think this is a good analogy for machine intelligence. By storing and copying procedures, a pseudo-semantic analysis can be performed, but it is an instrumental logic that has no way to access the letters of the ‘human keyboard’. The universal machine’s keyboard is blank and consists only of theoretical x,y coordinates where keys would be. No matter how good or sophisticated the machine is, it will still have no way to understand what the particular keystrokes “mean” to a person, only how they fit in with whatever set of fixed possibilities has been defined.
Taking the analogy further, the human keyboard only applies to public communication. Privately, we have no keys to strike, and entire paragraphs or books can be represented by a single thought. Unlike computers, we do not have to build our ideas up from syntactic digits. Instead the public-facing computation follows from the experienced sense of what is to be communicated in general, from the top down, and the inside out.
How large does a digital circle have to be before the circumference seems like a straight line?
Digital information has no scale or sense of relation. Code is code. Any rendering of that code into a visual experience of lines and curves is a question of graphic formatting and human optical interaction. With a universe that assumes information as fundamental, the proximity-dependent flatness or roundness of the Earth would have to be defined programmatically. Otherwise, it is simply “the case” that a person is standing on the round surface of the round Earth. Proximity is simply a value with no inherent geometric relevance.
When we resize a circle in Photoshop, for instance, the program is not transforming a real shape, it is erasing the old digital circle and creating a new, unrelated digital circle. Like a cartoon, the relation between the before and after, between one frame and the “next” is within our own interpretation, not within the information.
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.
A Formula for Qualia
To derive the formula for qualia or sensory affect, solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and bridge the Explanatory gap, I suggest that we try converting the mass-energy equivalence E=mc² from the public orientation and transpose it inward to the private orientation.
Energy (E) becomes w² which is “was and will be” (w = was or will be)
The Speed of light (c) becomes t = time = (still or never) = now or realism
Light* (c²) becomes t² “still and never again” or “stereo realism of now”
Mass (M) becomes æ = qualia = “like it”
Qualia = “like it was and will be, still and never again” =
another wording
Qualia = “Eternally signifies its past and future now”
This is about what Milan Kundera called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That our experience of the universe is either perpetually suspended above the paradox of an existence which is both perpetually vanishing forever in some sense and repeating forever in another. If c is the still ‘speed’ of here and now, then c² is the acceleration of here and now, the enrichment of the local now through the collective presence and absence of eternity
- Motive effect or will:
To derive will or motive: 
If qualia is “like it”, then square root of æ is what joins and divides the ‘like’ and the ‘it’. It is the dipole charge of ‘liking’ and ‘it-ing’ which we call desire or preference. The greater the liking, the more significance is projected onto the object, which is the imagined realization of a goal in time. Intention projects into the future, builds, and guides qualia.
Will = “(Maybe, or maybe not)(now or never)” = w = √æ t
Turning the private translation outward to Public/Western psychology so that interiority is undersignified as emergent epiphenomena, we get:
= Experience is simply what may and may not be happening for some time.
and
= Choosing = Right or wrong this time
The public-facing view of privacy reduces it to information processing. To those who have a private-facing view this is a flat and inadequate characterization. The former view is optimized for realizing spatial intelligence while the latter is optimized for appreciating timeless wisdom.
- Quality and Equality
Since qualia is about likeness and local equivalents, it can be said that qualia equals the differential between equality and all inequalities... æ = ‘d=’.
The kicker is that since equality is itself a quale (the spelling of e-quality is a clue), we can conceive of ‘=’ as quality which is externalized**, i.e. the differential is collapsed and the entire range of what it “is like” is interpreted as what “it actually is”. The Western-facing mind naturally prefers that which only tells it ‘like it is‘, so that public physics and information science will filter out as noise all that tries to tell ‘what it is like‘ (paging Ludwig Wittgenstein…). This commercialization of residential qualities has had many benefits, but it is a philosophy which has blinded itself, and intimidated many into ignoring the true nature of consciousness. It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s how private physics works. It’s how sense is made.
*The speed of light is c, but c², if taken literally, can be understood as light itself, reality, or making sense: producing stereo (solid) realism.
**Physically publicized, cropped, framed, stereotyped, commercialized, hardened to endure against the changing feelings that make up private time.
Physics in English
My current preoccupation. It kind of reads like a Magic 8 Ball…which seems like a good sign?
Tessellated Relativity
Whether it is material movement across space or sensory excitement through time, energy must always be a verb. We call it force or work, but that is a shortcoming of the Western fetish for nouns. Really, in my view all energy must be a *forcing* or *working* verb. While I fully appreciate the accusation that this is naive realism, I suggest that this is a foundational symmetry which can be inverted only for figurative purposes. No real energy should be considered noun-like, and all standard model visualizations which contradict this should be regarded as unreal. For this reason, I think that the assumption of the photon as an entity is an obstacle to rehabilitating the standard model to one which integrated the physics of privacy. In an ironic twist, we will have to re-educate ourselves to get used to the idea that the qualia of light and color is real, and photons are imaginary descriptions from an impossible frame of reference (the voyeur public subject).
What are the consequences of energy like? Radiance. Flow. Waves. What are waves? Either a frequency through time or a repeating shape across space. We know, however, that we don’t see photons as oscillating shapes, we see them as a shining, glowing, reflecting, or gleaming in our vision or a warming or burning in our feeling. That’s all about time. Looking at the sun, the intensity increases over time as our retina becomes more and more stimulated. The same is not true of mass. Mass ‘just sits there’ at some position in space. Unlike looking at the sun, the intensity of mass does not increase by itself over time, but rather it increases inversely to distance through space (gravity).
In a post energy particle model, mass and energy modify structures (matter in space) and qualify experiences (sensation through time), and are not free standing quantities emerging from a vacuum. Mass is convergent on a point within a structure, and energy is divergent from c (non-space, non-time) as a frequently recurring stimulus. I was thinking of calling this module of MSR “Tessellated Relativity”, as the inertial frames swing spacemass-ward and time-energyward, yielding the position v momentum exclusivity.
If that’s all true – and I think that it might be on the right track, then it can be used to illuminate the workings of how qualia and sensitivity are equivalent to transparency/entanglement with larger frames of time and higher spatial perspectives.
Happy New Physics
This is an attempt to model my understanding of some aspects of Relativity as it stands now. I make no guarantees of its accuracy or completeness, and I’m not trying to ‘do physics’, but rather to attain a simple grasp of how the concepts of relativity work together. (Feel free to correct me of any glaring errors though).
On the right, there are three atoms, a heavy, medium, and light one. I’m using Uranium, Iron, and Hydrogen just to keep it simple, again, I don’t know what to expect realistically to a Uranium atom that is near an Iron atom which is accelerating with a Uranium atom in the same inertial frame, but I’m including heavy and light atoms just so the difference between fission and fusion can be compared.
On the right side of the diagram, I’m contrasting how it is that both fission and fusion release “energy” (pointed arrows) but in opposite ways. Fission is when a heavy particle is accelerated until its nuclear configuration destabilizes, producing smaller particles and losing resting mass in the process. It takes mass-energy to maintain a large nucleus so there is a release of energy since the sum of the before mass is greater than the sum of the after-mass. Mass can be thought of as the sideways view of energy, cutting across space horizontally rather than longitudinally through time. Energy takes time, as it is momentum: a vector of changing distance over time. Mass requires more of a spatial notion of position or invariance which is publicly measurable at any given instant, rather than a shared history over time.
Fusion, of course, is about lighter particles being accelerated until their collisions cause nucleons to share a nucleus, delivering an energetic bang for the opposite (and seemingly paradoxical) reason. Particles which are lighter than iron ‘want’ to form larger particles, so that even though they are not freeing up energy from not having to hold together a giant nucleus, they still free up even more energy from not having to hold themselves together, by themselves. It could be said that matter loves company, but hates crowds. When matter frees itself from overcrowding or isolation, all of the matter senses the difference and responds by imitating that sensation.
In my example, I am trying to show what happens when an ideal Iron particle (Fe) is accelerated all the way to the speed of light. I’m not sure if that is a realistic scenario, but I am reasoning that since some of the matter as well as mass can be lost in nuclear reactions, it is plausible that such an atom would be converted into energy directly. By showing the Fe particle get narrower, I am trying to show the Lorentz contraction and time dilation, as they would appear from another inertial frame. When all of the mass is converted to energy upon hitting c, what that means to me is that the 4D total potential future of the atom collapses into an instantaneous change in the surrounding atoms.
The loss of 4D time and and 3D matter comes across as 2D a wave of synchronized celebration in the form of acceleration of all matter which is affected throughout the cosmos. When we see a star, it is the molecules of our brain and eye which are, in my view, locally responding to the event which seems remote from our experiential frame of reference. When we go to measure photons, it is my hypothesis that we are actually measuring the local instrument’s description of the event, rather than an independent particle/wave. I think that light may be how matter looks and sees – a sensation and a signal, not something traveling literally through space. The aggregate effect/affect of the (figurative) wave of common sense can be quantified as C² – the range of the effect as a form-function delocalizes. Every inertial frame which can witness the annihilation of a form-function (a presence with a future) manifests that action as an equal and opposite reaction in proportion to its relation. The closer (more local) you are to something which delocalizes, the more powerfully localized you become and the more possibilities there are for a continued future. This is sort of a hybrid of Darwinian and Marxist physics. Collective sharing of sacrificed energy for private gain.
This leads into an even more esoteric discussion about the nature of matter as spatio-geometric qualia and energy as tempo-algebraic ‘phoria’. The next phase is to detail the how qualia and phoria (sensory-motive and mental-emotional) phenomena can be integrated more concretely, such that space, time, entropy, information, matter, and energy can be seen as divergent properties of pansensitivity, which is non-space, non-time, non-entropy, non-information, non-matter, and non-energy, non-vacuum. Pansensitivity is absolute fullness, composed of what can be called qualia, phoria, psyche, nous, significance, and motive. I could be more delusional than usual, but this seems to be coming into a clearer and more communicable synthesis which might be eventually work as a true theory of psychophysical unity.
Reverse Fallacies for Considerations of Consciousness
Special pleading is a formal logical fallacy where a participant demands special considerations for a particular premise of theirs. Usually this is because in order for their argument to work, they need to provide some way to get out of a logical inconsistency – in a lot of cases, this will be the fact that their argument contradicts past arguments or actions. Therefore, they introduce a “special case” or an exception to their rules.
While this is acceptable in genuine special cases, it becomes a formal fallacy when a person doesn’t adequately justify why the case is special.
[…] the “naturalistic fallacy” is close to but not identical with the fallacious appeal to nature, the claim that what is natural is inherently good or right, and that what is unnatural is inherently bad or wrong.
The Normative Fallacy occurs, rather, when someone attempts to argue that something is not the case or is the case based on a set of ideological, ethical, moral, political, or other normative commitments.
Cargo Cult: The speech is reproduced in the book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and on many websites. Feynman based the phrase on a concept in anthropology, the cargo cult, which describes how some pre-scientific cultures interpreted technologically advanced visitors as religious or supernatural figures who brought boons of cargo. Later, in an effort to call for a second visit the natives would develop and engage in complex religious rituals, mirroring the previously observed behavior of the visitors manipulating their machines but without understanding the true nature of those tasks. Just as cargo cultists create mock airports that fail to produce airplanes, cargo cult scientists conduct flawed research that superficially resembles the scientific method, but which fails to produce scientifically useful results.
Here is an excerpt from the book.
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
Feynman cautioned that to avoid becoming cargo cult scientists, researchers must avoid fooling themselves, be willing to question and doubt their own theories and their own results, and investigate possible flaws in a theory or an experiment. He recommended that researchers adopt an unusually high level of honesty which is rarely encountered in everyday life, and gives examples from advertising, politics, and behavioral psychology to illustrate the everyday dishonesty which should be unacceptable in science.
I’m posting this because it should be pointed out that fallacies can run in both directions. The entire array of Western philosophical argumentation is rooted in the deepest assumption of all – that what we feel and think is unreliable, therefore suspicious, but what happens outside of ourselves, or what we agree that we perceive happening outside of ourselves is above suspicion, by definition. Since there can never be a case where we are right and physics is wrong, all who seek to make a hypothesis about the fundamental nature of subjectivity are put in the awkward position of being judged in their own power to participate in conscious experience by the normative expectations of a system of knowledge which specifically and exhaustively removes all possible traces of subjectivity.
Because the expectation of science itself, as it is currently practiced, obstructs its own view of consciousness with ideology that is assumed to be inescapable and natural, the logical fallacies which are designed protect science are operating in reverse. Any model which suggests phenomenal awareness is a phenomenon being more primitive than objective structures and laws is rejected out of hand as having no evidence. There is no way to put forth the observation that consciousness cannot be under suspicion when it seems entirely likely that no evidence of consciousness outside of its own reports of itself can ever exist. We must instead examine why, if our own delusion and fallacious reasoning is ultimately a product of neurochemistry and evolutionary biology, should we be able to trust our brain’s folk epistemology called science? We might say, well, we know science works because of the evidence – the technology. True, but where but in our own shared experience can evidence be understood? If nature was making the same kind of mistakes that we do, how would we know? Especially given the nature of recent science, where dark matter and energy can suddenly appear and swallow the known universe, and quantum theory has, in some sense, suspended the rule of non-contradiction.
When it comes to consciousness, the Strong AI project has become a Cargo Cult. By imitating the architecture of the brain or of the logical syntax of its behavior, we hope that the consciousness cargo will show up. Instead of an appeal to nature, we now have a bold and unchallenged appeal to science – The claim that what is testable is inherently real, and that what has not yet been made testable and may not be testable is inherently irrelevant. I propose a new logical fallacy – the Abnormative fallacy, which occurs when someone attempts to argue that something is not the case or is the case based on a set of commitments to doctrines which are cynical, robotic, formalistic and held above suspicion by popular inertia. Finally I propose the fallacy of General Pleading, to expose this normative bias stemming from the privilege and power of the dominant perspective which denies the possibility that consciousness is a special case, or THE special case, by definition.
Colorball II Diagram
Key:
Absolute (+∞) :: Anesthetic (-∞)
Entelethetic (+3) :: Hypothetic (-3)
Aesthetic (+2) :: Exthetic (-2)
Immediate (+1) :: Etheric (-1)
Protosthetic (+0) :: Pseudethetic (-0)
The new terms in this second version are:
- Protosthetic (+0), referring to the minimum quality of awareness as well as the quality of minimum awareness. On a scale of +0* to +∞, this level is the +0 because it represents experiences which have been aesthetically masked to appear imperceptible. This can be thought of as the personal unconscious, as opposed to the collective unconscious, which is the Absolute level that is positioned on top of the diagram, but is actually the entire sphere. It’s number would be +∞.
The entire left half of the sphere can be thought of as a slice within the protosthetic range, just as the greyscale can be thought of as variations on black and white. - Pseudethetic (-0) is the outside-in version of Protosthetic. Where protosthetic phenomena seem alienated or unconscious but are, on some level, a symptom of experience, pseudethetic phenomena are not as conscious as they appear to be. The -0 range is about artifice and simulation, and can include anything from a puppet or stuffed animal to a sophisticated AGI system. Protosthetic would include states in which we are personally unconscious, but can be thought of as that which wakes us up from a sub-personal level.
- Exthetic (-2) is a term I’m trying out as the public-facing conjugate to Aesthetic. This is the common sense of structure that the real world generally seems to have. It is the sense of concrete exteriority which we rely on to engage with the world rather than in our mind. The sense of fixed mass objects in space and linear causality, and all of the other macroscopic cues that pervade classical physics, as well as all of the hard sciences.
- Entelethetic (+3) is intended to refer to a level of hyper-aesthetic dreams, symbols, and archetypes. Also knows as the collective unconscious or Dreamtime, this band of sensitivity is super-natural and trans-personal (yet still private). The word borrows from Entelechy, which has to do with a drive toward self-actualization, which is apt considering the visionary nature of this ‘third eye’ view.
Teleological-Absolute (+∞) :: Universal-Axiomatic (-∞)
Mytho-Poetic (+3) :: Geometric-Algebraic (-3)
Mental-Emotional (+2) :: Scientific-Mechanical (-2)
Sensory-Motive/Perceptual (+1) :: Electro-Magnetic/Relativistic (-1)
Proto-Aesthetic (+0) :: Quantum-Digital (-0)
Multisense Realism 
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