Archive
I/O w/o O/I
A little note on the difference between Gods and Monsters. As ever, I return to the symmetry of the continuum, where we find the far end to seem unfeeling and unnatural. The monster is driven by relentless urges. It is all Output and no Input. Insensitive power, and the power of the insensitive. All that is mindless or heartless and artificial can be mythologized as monstrous. A freak of nature, or a Frankensteinian attempt to transcend nature.
If the monster is an embodied urge, then a god is the opposite; a disembodied personality whose output is that of unbounded teleos. The spirit world is supernatural and all knowing. There can be a god of faith, which receives prayer and devotion as Input, but whose Output is only indirect as signs, miracles, and other synchronistic effects. The supernatural emerges from the seemingly unexplainable unfolding of events and conditions or projection of reasoned intention. The power of the supernatural is figurative and must be inferred by genuine belief. It has no motive power of its own and must borrow that of individuals to worship and serve, whether out of hope and gratitude or fear and dread.
This relates to a conversation about information vs sensation, where I tried, as ever, to make the case for sense as the progenitor of all phenomena, including information-theoretic phenomena. I thought that a straightforward way of understanding this is that turning on a computer or turning the gears of a machine is not substitutable. There can be no symbolic code which has an effect to stop or start a Turing machine, except virtually. Software cannot turn on its own hardware once it has been turned off completely. This comes up a lot in managing server farms at data centers. If you remote into a server and accidentally shut it down rather than reboot. You may have to make a call to someone to physically walk down to your cage and push the button to turn it back on. Even if you’ve got layers of fault tolerance built in, with power switches that can be remotely controlled, it is still inevitable to find yourself calling for a manual reset when that software fails.
This is what I think distinguishes the sensory-motive from input/output. I/O can be virtual – it designates a flow of information in a theoretical topology, but sense must always be literally present at the lowest and most fundamental level of the universe. It can only be a uniquely experienced event which occupies a fixed spacetime coordinate relative to all experiences in the history of the universe. It cannot be simulated or emergent from code. Without genuine sense, the motive power of mechanical output is a monster or zombie. Blind automation. Without genuine motive, an aesthetic sense is bound to the mytho-poetic realm of fiction or psychic intuition.
There is no Objective Color thread
That’s really interesting, too much for me to all read but I appreciate the effort put into this.
I do disagree on your first point though. There is such a thing as objective color. Photons have wavelengths, and specific wavelengths are specific colors, regardless of how our eyes and brains interpret them.I read a part of the article you linked, and if you do take into account how the eye and brain interpret colors, there is still objective color. Apparently we do all have different ratio’s of red vs green vs blue cone cells, but as the article says, our brains are still in agreement over what exactly is yellow. So our eyes might be different, but our brains correct that difference.
Think about the nature of the visible spectrum. We perceive it as being composed of soft but distinct bands of hues, usually seven or eight: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, indigo, violet, and sometimes fuchsia, which is not a spectral color. Colors such as grey, white, brown, beige, and pink do not correspond to any one frequency, so they cannot be said to map to the wavelength of any particular photon, yet we perceive them as discernible colors.
The color palette is of course, also a wheel in which colors are seen as ‘opposite’ to each other, and which generate various effects when placed adjacent to each other, as seen in various optical ‘illusions’:
I put scare quotes around the word illusions because this information has helped me understand that what we see is never an illusion, only our cognitive expectations about what we see can be illusory. By manipulating the various layers of sensation and perception to expose their conflicts, we can tease out the truth about color, and by extension consciousness. There is no ‘actually’, there is only ‘seems like from some perspective’. The experiment showed that our color perception can be altered for weeks after subjects return to an unaltered optical state*. Our brains correct the difference because they are not translating the wavelength of photons but mimicking relations within the optical experience as a whole.
Now think about the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Does it have seven soft bands or is it an absolutely smooth quantitative continuum? Does the continuum form a wheel with primary and secondary oppositions, or is it an unbounded linear progression? Does it repeat in octaves, where one frequency suddenly recapitulates and merges the beginning and ending of a sequence, or does it monotonously extend into the invisible spectrum?
Our eyes tend to differ, and photons might be the same, but color is not photons. In fact, photons from the outside world only do one thing in our retina, and that’s isomerize rhodopsin molecules – meaning that the proteins in our rod and cone cells are studded with vitamin A molecules which stretch out in the presence of visible light. From there, the folded proteins in the cells sort of swell open and actually cut off what is know as ‘Dark Current’ – the continuous flow of glutamate which is interpreted as seeing light *in its absence*. Physical light, in a sense turns our experience of darkness off.
Once we let all of this information sink in, it should be clear that the experience of color is just that – an experience. It correlates to optical conditions, but it also correlates to conditions in which there are no optical inputs at all. Even where it is isomorphic to exterior measurements, there are no colored photons inside of the brain that we are seeing. We are seeing the same neural conditions that we feel, smell, taste, and hear, and synesthesia confirms that as well. This does not mean that neural conditions are a solipsistic simulation, however, but that’s a whole other conversation (which I have my own ‘crackpot’ theory for 🙂 http://multisenserealism.com)
*http://color.psych.upenn.edu/brainard/papers/AIC01.pdf
The Matter of Objects and The Idea of Subjects
The Matter of Objects
What do we mean by an object? As usual, the term can be used both literally and figuratively. A friend of mine who insists that the universe can be boiled down to objects or concepts* and that the definition of object is simply ‘that which has a shape’.
I argue that this is, (like all pure dichotomies) too simplistic, and that both objects and concepts are more like bookends on a spectrum-continuum of what could be called percepts. We can dream in shapes and places of varying levels of realism, we can see a phantom image which has a light bulb shape when we look at a light bulb. Likewise we can encounter the objective reality of humidity or a foul odor without being aware of any shape associated with them. This is a pretty clear indication to me that shape can be abstract or concrete. We have no trouble talking about a circle and a cycle in the same breath, even though one is a shape and one is a ‘concept’. The unity between them seems at least as relevant as the distinction, especially if we are reducing the universe to the most primitive principles possible**.
The word object is also used as a verb. “I object!”, which implies the intentional assertion of personal will into a public social context. When we use subject figuratively, it is in a lowly political sense, or at least a passive sense. When we are subject to laws or another person’s will, we may not be able to object, or not effectively anyhow. On the other hand, if nobody is subject to our influence, then nobody cares what we object to, and we are just as ineffective as if we were being passive subjects.
Looking at this slide from Kelvin Abraham’s Tetryonics,
I started thinking about how his distinction between 3D matter and 2D mass-energy translates into MSR sensory-motive terms. I see the sensory-motive primitive as the commonality between both the 2D and 3D phenomena, with the 2D mass-energy being sensory-motive (temporal) and the 3D being 2D-once-removed (spatialized publicly).
If we think about our naive experience of what solid matter, it could be defined as a “sense of invariant insensitivity” – a relatively static obstruction within a public facing sensory modality. We mostly rely on optical and tactile sense to navigate the public space, so solid objects are mostly defined a phenomena that is tangible and visible. If I had to define object in the way that I think that we literally mean it, it might suffice to day that an object is any phenomena which can be removed without being destroyed.
With the ghost silhouette of the light bulb for example, which has a shape and a location relative to my field of vision, I cannot take that shape from my vision and put it somewhere else. I can’t give it to someone and nobody can take it from me. It seems that objecthood is tied more to a conserved identity of public position than anything else. Obstruction of sense and conserved identity may really mean the same thing. Obstruction or sensitivity-of-insensitivity provides the iconic reflection that relates back to the totality.
If you have ever programmed a computer game with moving avatars, you know that collision detection is not just automatic. You need to have the program check to see whether the pixels are adjacent to each other and then define that as ‘touching’ to initiate a bounce or splat or whatever. The sense of touch or tangible boundaries is not a given. It takes a perception, a sensory interpretation to motivate object-like behavior. The object must object!, but it must object in the presence of others who can detect the objection and who ‘care’ enough to respond, or whose response is the primitive ancestor of what we call care. Significance. Reading a signal as a signal and integrating it as distinct from noise or nothing (entropy).
The difference between geometry and topology is relevant as well:
If a structure has a discrete moduli (if it has no deformations, or if a deformation of a structure is isomorphic to the original structure), the structure is said to be rigid, and its study (if it is a geometric or topological structure) is topology. If it has non-trivial deformations, the structure is said to be flexible, and its study is geometry.
Because matter doesn’t have to be literally rigid, and clearly occupies space in non-solid, self-deforming states, I would suggest that it could be topo-genic, and that the rigidity or ‘topo-cality’ of matter is a continuum from the semi-topological fluid to the nearly-topological solid. The 3-dimensionality of matter is, by contrast, not a continuum. It either has volume or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t have volume than it must be energy (mass) only. It could be said that mass-energy is 2+1 dimensional, as it is the source of experienced ‘time’, but matter qua matter may have no dimension of time. It is 3D bodies divided across space. The animation we experience of matter is all subjective (or “conceptual” if you are an RSM fan).
If Abraham is right, and matter is 3D mass, it may be redundant to say that matter has mass. Matter may add to mass-energy-time only volume-related scalars like pressure. The contrast between the 2D and the 3D also may only be conceivable within a 5D (individualized) privacy, which is biological life. The biological is also a continuum, like the topological, which is bio-genic rather than fixed. The kingdoms of biology are comparable to the physical states of matter. They evolve through embodied experiences, unlike matter which are (pre-somatic) experiences over an unlimited time that we perceive in limited cross-sections as matter.
The Idea of Subjects
I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with mine eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny, is that which philosophers call matter or corporeal substance. And in doing of this, there is no damage done to the rest of mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it. – George Berkeley
In all of the arguments that I have had about physics and metaphysics, I have never heard from any strong critic who would be able to understand what Berkeley meant in the above quotation. In every case, their argument makes it clear that they are psychologically incapable of differentiating Idealism from Solipsism. Several times each week I go through the same rebuttal to their straw man of idealism in which I supposedly deny that the Moon or some other object exists when I am not looking at it. Each time, my correction of their misrepresentation passes right through their ears without any apparent effect. Instead, they go on, again and again, pushing against this paper pussy cat of nobody’s solipsism, regardless of how many different ways that I try to explain that idealism need not deny the reality of the experience of matter, only that matter is fundamentally interactive and experiential rather than an entity which is independent of *all* perspective. Nobody is saying that matter doesn’t exist independently of any particular perspective or sense modality, but that it could be independent of all possibilities of sensation is really an abstraction that is even more naive than naive realism. It’s a purely unconsidered presumption of existence-ness without any connection to aesthetics. Berkeley understood that even a description of nature without awareness such as Whitehead’s; “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless.” would be much too generous. There could be no hurrying or material without some perspective in which those qualities were being presented.
John Locke (Berkeley’s predecessor) states that we define an object by its primary and secondary qualities. He takes heat as an example of a secondary quality. If you put one hand in a bucket of cold water, and the other hand in a bucket of warm water, then put both hands in a bucket of lukewarm water, one of your hands is going to tell you that the water is cold and the other that the water is hot. Locke says that since two different objects (both your hands) perceive the water to be hot and cold, then the heat is not a quality of the water.
While Locke used this argument to distinguish primary from secondary qualities, Berkeley extends it to cover primary qualities in the same way. For example, he says that size is not a quality of an object because the size of the object depends on the distance between the observer and the object, or the size of the observer. Since an object is a different size to different observers, then size is not a quality of the object. Berkeley rejects shape with a similar argument and then asks: if neither primary qualities nor secondary qualities are of the object, then how can we say that there is anything more than the qualities we observe? – Wiki
Berkeley sees that there is no difference in kind, but only a difference in degree between the so called primary and secondary qualities, and that if anything, the more impersonal qualities make more sense as secondary reductions of the more personal qualities than the other way around.
We cannot see carbon dioxide gas, but that doesn’t mean that there is no aspect of our extended sub-personal sensitivity which is not embodied (from our perspective) by cellular and molecular interactions. We don’t see it or smell it, but we feel our lungs distress when it can’t get rid of it fast enough. If it were the other way around, and the more public facing qualities were primary, then we get all of the problems of Philosophy of Mind that have to do with binding and the Explanatory Gap. There’s not any plausible justification for personal qualities to emerge from the impersonal. Privacy could only be a subset of public conditions, and rather than emotions or sensations, we should have only shapes and positions which represent a sum of more complex shapes and positions.
Berkeley is interesting. He had some ideas which were 200 years before their time. Although his intuitions defied the prevailing Early Modern views, they are right at home in the 20th century with Relativity, Positivism, and Quantum Theory. It makes sense to me that someone like that would of course see Deist philosophy and Classical mechanics as being rooted in a fundamental error of mistaking the form for the content. For him, the content was God, so he cast those who were devoted to that error, the free-thinkers and Enlightenment era mathematicians, as infidels.
In 1732, he published Alciphron, a Christian apologetic against the free-thinkers, and in 1734†, he published The Analyst, an empiricist critique of the foundations of infinitesimal calculus, which was influential in the development of mathematics.
It seems to me that while he was radical and progressive in his prescience of a post-Newtonian, immaterial physics based on relativity, his enthusiasm for this view was too far ahead of his time. His unfortunate rejection of the foundations of modernism put him in on the wrong side of history. He could see clearly the problem of substances which were absolute, but he could only express the alternative solution in pre-scientific terms, which in his tribe meant God and Christianity. He wrote:
“Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.
Here I think that he is making very much the same mistake that he has seen his opponents make when considering his positions. That we cannot change what we see when we open our eyes does not mean that something else must be able to change it, but he jumps to that conclusion because he has not considered the possibility that sense itself could be the parent of God just as it is of heat and matter. A sense which is semi-teleological and semi-mechanistic.
In the 21st century, beginning with a few lone proponents of panpsychism and a growing school of computationalism, I think that we are working our way back to where Berkeley was before he got all churchy in the 1730s. With the intellectual tools provided by figures like Einstein, Planck, Gödel, and Turing, we have all of the pieces necessary to put together the puzzle of a completed physics. It may be still too soon for that. Instead of going forward all the way to a pansensitive physics, we may have to pass through yet another era of compromise, filtering the provocative immanence of primordial qualia through the comparatively familiar neo-Rationalism of information science.
The information revolution is undeniably compelling, however it still orphans the aesthetic qualities of realism into an unacknowledged dualism of ‘emergence’. It may seem like a minor detail, but on the level of the Absolute, this particular detail is all-important. What we see when we open our eyes is not only the Will of God or the mechanism of his absence, not only nested abstract structures and functions, but the sensible awareness in which those frameworks are defined. It is a big picture which can make sense in many ways, and each perspective implicates all that the others seem to lack. To get around the problems of idealism, all that we need to do is to shed the presumption of subjectivity in favor of a physical dimension of privacy. Lose the subject as defining experience, and you have subjectivity itself as one particular kind of sensory-motive participation. One particular dance in the cosmic disco which is shared by this clan of fancy pants hominids. Human experience is subjective, not because all experience is subjective, but because the story of an animal’s life is inherently self-directed. It makes sense that this selfish theme would be hard to separate from awareness itself, but Eastern yogas and Western occultism insist that it is possible to do just that. NDEs, OBEs, and other paranormal phenomena also seem to hint at such disembodied awareness, or they hint at the fallibility and self-deception of the brain, depending on who you are. At this time, going along with the non-subjective view of pansensitivity, I suggest that the pre-scientific notion of souls, like chakras, and God, are better understood as semi-metaphors than literal entities. A soul is the gestalt of autobiographical quality which disperses across time. It is not an energy which animates the body, it is the story which is represented publicly by the body, voice, personality, behaviors, ideas, etc. It’s not a subject or an idea, it is the idea of the subject as an object.
*”and never the twain shall meet”
**There are other examples also. If the object “The Sun” were to move twice as close to the Earth, the relation between the two, which RSM defines as a concept (“concepts are the relations between object”) evidently causes the seas (objects) to boil on Earth. That sounds like the twain are meeting to me. Besides that whole “never the twain shall meet” is really substance dualism, isn’t it? Substance dualism has the homunculus regress…something has to bridge the gap between the twain, which would then have to either be a third substance, or an infinite sandwich of non-meeting ‘twains. Another example is accounting. Accounting has no problem classifying goods (objects) and services (“concepts”) in the same categories of expenses or revenue. It all converts to money, so what is money?
†In 1734 he also became a Roman Catholic Bishop in Ireland (Bishop of Coyne), which is why George Berkeley is also Bishop Berkeley.
Is Quantum Theory Naive?
To me, the issue with interpreting quantum systems as real is not that they are not observable or that they contradict naive realism, but that the contradiction is not explained.
Our naive realism might tell us that we are surrounded by empty space rather than a mixture of invisible gases and vaporized particles, but it makes sense that our perception has finite limits, so that particles which are too small for us to resolve visually or tangibly would seem identical to empty space to us. There is no paradox in the nature of air, and we can cool it down to a liquid and see that it is in fact matter.
The nature of quantum systems, however, not only challenges our expectations about what can be detected, it really demands that we relinquish expectations altogether. The idea of a formless, unobservable ‘system’ which takes on paradoxical forms contradicts the ontology of form itself. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong – to the contrary, obviously the model is a complete success – however there are many ways to interpret phenomena which are empirically valid but miss the point entirely. I would imagine that a theory of human personality could be derived from correlating traffic patterns in a city and the make, model, and color of vehicles, and given a certain margin of probability, it too would be compelling. That does not, however, mean that we should attribute human personality to automobiles, or that there is a real but unobservable system which is making determinations about which cars belong to what personalities.
All I’m saying is that for many people, it is too soon to decide that QM is settled science that we will just have to accept on its face. For some, it may indeed just be stubborn habits of naive thinking, but for others, I think that it is an intuition that there can also be a such thing as “naive theoreticism” as well. Just because QM is counter-intuitive and complex does not make it sophisticated or insightful. To me, it makes more sense as a consequence of overlooking the fundamental role that sensory-motive participation plays in the universe. Quantum systems are not only observable, they are observation itself – feeling, seeing, knowing, measuring. Seeing quantum as something outside of that only complicates things unnecessarily. Is it not possible that disembodied probabilities are fictional?
On Human Specialness
Often, it comes up in arguments that the idealistic position stems from a mental weakness – a sentimental attachment to all things human and familiar and a deep-seated fear of losing self-worth. When the term ‘special’ is brought up, it has a pejorative connotation*. The disdain for specialness makes sense to me as the mechanistic ideology is founded (under Multisense Realism) in the supremacy of the generic and impersonal. The fundamentals of the cosmos are spoken in terms of units of measure, not unique and unrepeatable aesthetic experiences. Underneath this scientific impartiality however, I maintain that there is another level of unacknowledged specialness. To see the universe as it is rather than as we wish it to be is a romantic idea of the anti-romantic. To become purely logical and reasonable is ultimately a kind of ethnic cleansing of the psyche. Transhumanist specialness is even more special because we think that we have outgrown trying to be special.
I think there’s more to the idea of human specialness than it might seem.
I see an important differences between:
- “Specialness” as a measure of aesthetic prestige.
- Human superiority as a function of ego projection.
- Human exceptionalism as a function of species comparison.
The quality of specialness is not limited to human beings. I think that significance in the sense of aesthetic prestige is a universal property, from the subatomic level to the cosmological level. The particular content and intensity of significance varies widely, but the fact of significance is not a fictional invention of Homo sapiens. The problem with machines is that they lack any aesthetic awareness at all. What may seem to some to be a pure, unselfish quality which falls out of mathematics is actually, in my view, merely pre-selfish.
This admiration for the unseflish qualities of pristine objects is, I think, ultimately a romantic simplification. It is like dreaming a blind world as a better world, since so many terrible things are rooted in valuing appearances over realities. The impulse to move beyond selfish forms of human awareness is indeed noble, necessary, and inevitable, but I think that part of that involves a deeper consideration of self. We cannot transcend the self by amputating it.
As far as human exceptionalism goes, I completely agree with transhumanists – humans are not so great, and not so different from other species. The extent to which we are objectively ‘better’ than other organisms, even if it could be ascertained, is dwarfed by our exaggeration of it. That’s not what the issue that I’m bringing up at all though. What I’m talking about is true even if Homo sapiens had never existed.
I sometimes use inflammatory language to describe machines as stupid not because I don’t like them, but to make clear that my position is that what a machine does for us is precisely the opposite of what our own awareness is. It’s about the ontology of unity, multiplicity, and spacetime positions vs experiential dispositions.
The machine does not serve WalMart any more than they do a disservice to the displaced worker. It serves whatever agenda that it is being employed by. It is only because of our profound lack of compassion that we allow what should be a celebration of freedom from work to become a liability. Losing a job, ontologically means gaining freedom. It is only we who equate that with being undeserving of the benefits of civilization, and we who back that up with real deprivations. Machines are stupid because they don’t care. They don’t care whether they are burning baby kittens or diesel fuel to run.
WalMart is stupid for the same reason (and it is no less a machine than any computer). WalMart does not think that it is special, it simply executes a program which privatizes profits and socializes costs. The program can’t wake up though. It can’t fix itself. We are the only ones who can recover the positive side of our exceptional sensitivity…a sensitivity which just happens to be human in this particular case, but which in all cases is the polar opposite of mechanism/insensitivity.
*”special pleading” is a logical fallacy which gets thrown around a lot too, with the same sort of condescension.
Destroying the “World”
Borrowing this nice diagram (above) from a post by Ethan Hein, I have cannibalized it to show how the concept of the “world” can be transcended.
John Locke’s decision to make properties of bodies in space “primary” and properties of experience “secondary” reveals the Western bias toward the public and away from the private. In this way, all bodies are assumed to have an independent presence outside of any perspective from which they might be viewed, and experiences are assumed to be entirely dependent upon the interaction of physical bodies.
The twentieth century should have given us a clue. With Freud and Jung revealing that the depths of human psychology transcended our conscious expectations, and Einstein proving the relativity of mass, energy, time, and space, the surprises of Quantum Mechanics very nearly opened the door to a fully integrated worldview in the 20th century. As if mirroring the turning of the political tide, the 1980s began to turn progressive relativity on its head, and restore a kind of digital absolute. Instead of profound principles of contextual aesthetics, the revolution in physics championed a model of blind probability and computation.
The model that I propose does not contain a “world” which is independent of concrete aesthetics. What we see and feel is not the entirety of what can be seen and felt, but neither is it a “model” of an unfelt, unseen “world.” It is easy to think of parts of our brain as mapping to a model of our body. Different regions of the brain correspond to particular regions of the body. The same is true, however, of our emotions and thoughts. To be consistent, our emotions and thoughts would also have to be models, not of the brain (because the brain is part of the body, which is only a model), but just models period.
There is a double standard that leaks in with the Western-Lockean model. If we say that the body we experience is a model of the body in the world, then we are stuck with the consequence that the mind we experience is also a model of part of that same body in the world. Except that it clearly isn’t. What we think about is not modeled isomorphically in the activity of the brain. There is no computation that looks like cranberry sauce tastes, certainly not without one of these imaginative/imaginary “minds” to make the connection.
If we instead take the unreality of our model seriously, it makes more sense to turn the whole configuration inside out. If our experience models the brain’s activities, then so too must our experience of the world be a model. Since it is in that modeled world that we find the brain in the first place, we now have no reason to believe that the primary properties of bodies in space are really primary. In fact, the whole notion of primary and secondary, interior and exterior, could only be part of the modeling process. There is no indication of any kind of noumenal ‘world’ other than the inferences which we make through phenomenal experience.
To the contrary, all reports from explorers of consciousness report a deep unity of awareness – a vastness of united presence or absence which underlies all phenomena. We do not see a Platonic factory of disembodied mathematics behind the curtain of secondary forms. In fact, forms themselves are completely irrelevant to mathematics. Geometry as we know it, shapes and angles and lines, is entirely superfluous to a quantum-digital universe. Geometry is the stuff of visual presentation and tactile, tangible manipulation. There is no geometry in a vacuum, no visible ‘bits’ or digital bodies which must draw these characters as you see them on the screen. What point could there be of modeling the invisible with the visible? What computer needs to see itself compute?
It works much better if we flip the model over, and see that the glue which holds mathematics together is consciousness. When we infer that a quantity is diminishing toward zero, we are inferring that intellectually. It is a practice of intuition or telepathy – a logical feeling that we have about patterns and what they imply. Bohm’s implicate order, I would say, can be understood more clearly as private physics. Not a disembodied order, but the precipitation of lower order sense within higher order sense. The emergence of cymatic patterns, for instance, in a layer of salt on a vibrating drum, is not a higher geometry which unites the salt, it is an exposure of more primitive logics – repetitive, dumb representations. Cosmic wallpaper.
Higher intelligence requires not only adding ‘complexity’ to such dumb representations, or increasing the computing resources, but an increase in sensitivity to implicit depths. The multiplexing of sensory contexts is subtractive to the point of simplicity. Something like pain or red is not a complex representation, but just the opposite, a simple and direct presence. These qualities could not be any more primary, from our perspective. It is through this primordial simplicity that true novelty ‘diverges’ from the absolute. Unrepeatable moments made of unrepeatable moments which are made to seem to repeat when viewed from a distance. The “world” is a creation of distancing, of the alienated perspective of elaborately nested subjectivity.
Off the Descartes
It’s funny that the last name of Rene Descartes was used to refer to his Cartesian coordinate system, which in turn has became the basis for much of our sense of creating charts.
The word card as well as playing cards themselves appear to have been introduced to Europe by way of Egypt, and China and the Indus Valley before that.*
Latin charta “leaf of paper, tablet,” from Greek khartes “layer of papyrus,” probably from Egyptian
The root of ‘cartoon’ refers to the cardboard (carton) sketches that artists used in the 19th century. This is a bit different from the sense that I get from playing cards and charting coordinates, which is strongly quantitative and digital, like dominoes and dice. The word dice may be related to ‘datum’ (“given”), but the word origins of both domino and dice are hazy. Dice also have a roundabout connection with Descartes and philosophy in general, by way of Platonic solids and three dimensional (x, y, z) geometry.
Ancient Greece, 5th-3rd century BC. The earliest dice! Made from the knuckle-bone of an animal, drilled and filled with lead for weighting.
Cartoons are now rendered directly in coordinate geometry, using domino-like computers, which are displayed on card or chart-like screens. The object, symbol, paper and calculation – to plan, like an artist, in hypothesis and rehearsal in advance of the fact. The strategic panopticon of the scientific approach marks and defines before the final will is executed. All possibilities are accounted for beforehand as a Hilbert or configuration space – a containment of physical permutations given an assumption of generic recombination, like hands dealt from a finite deck. This is not the anima, not the giver or the taker, but an animation of the given, data about giving and taking.
When we insist upon looking only at the given ‘data’, we are limited to an outward-facing perspective on public spaces. In this mode, time is fragmented into instants of measurement rather than fluid memories. From binary code to the I Ching, quantum to DNA, our notions of Turing emulation and quantum mechanics hinge on this methodical charting of possible positions and dispositions. This world of information is not our world, it is a world that is perpetually out there, but only ephemerally in here. To join the world out there requires bodies and death. The butterfly must be pinned and dried to be displayed and recorded.
*”The earliest authentic references to playing-cards in Europe date from 1377, but, despite their long history, it is only in recent decades that clues about their origins have begun to be understood. Cards must have been invented in China, where paper was invented. Even today some of the packs used in China have suits of coins and strings of coins – which Mah Jong players know as circles and bamboos (i.e. sticks). Cards entered Europe from the Islamic empire, where cups and swords were added as suit-symbols, as well as (non-figurative) court cards. It was in Europe that these were replaced by representations of courtly human beings: kings and their attendants – knights (on horseback) and foot-servants. To this day, packs of Italian playing-cards do not have queens – nor do packs in Spain, Germany and Switzerland (among others). There is evidence that Islamic cards also entered Spain, but it now seems likely that the modern cards which we call Spanish originated in France, ousting the early Arab-influenced designs.” – source
What is a thought?
An elementary thought – not a thought made up of other thoughts.
- What is the nature of a thought?
- What is it made of?
- What is an example of the most basic thought?
As an image is to visual sense, and a sound is to auditory sense, a thought is a unit of cognitive sense. The difference between perceptual senses and cognitive senses is that cognitive senses are directly participatory. While we can imagine a sound or image, the experience resembles a request that is fulfilled behind the curtain, by some faculty of imagination. With thinking, we feel that we ourselves are directly expressing ourselves rather than passively watching a presentation of thought in the mind’s eye.
To me, this suggests that the cognitive level of awareness is a meta-level of perception. It specializes in abstracting sub-personal levels of sensation into a communicable form, and in the rehearsal of hypothetical experiences. In this way, the base level sensory-motive interactions of the body-world experience are extended. Senses can be interpreted with more perspective and intelligence, while motives can be executed with more strategic forethought. Thinking is a way of making an enriched present and future by distilling from the past. The distilling process is inherently sequential, as the oceanic nature of experiential aesthetics is reduced to a sequence of gestures and symbols which can be projected and received not only as sensory-motive presentations, but also as information-theoretic representations.
If a feeling were a cube that is full of some kind of juice of experiential significance, a thought would dehydrate the juice, leaving the cube with just the residue of its former significance. The empty cube can now contain other thoughts and feelings – stacks of them. What thought lacks in experiential qualities, it makes up for in versatility.
What is the nature of a thought? Metaphor. The etymology of metaphor has to do with carrying over, and the root word ‘phor’ is also found as ‘fer’, as in euphoria and inference. If a feeling is an aesthetic quality which we carry (or ferry), then meta-phor implies a stepping outside of the system – a carrying of carrying itself. This is what thought allows us to do – to pick up fragments of our feeling and experience as if we had a mental thumb and forefinger which we can use to arrange into larger re-fer-ences with larger or smaller application. Without the basic capacity to isolate some significant sense from experience and to apply it to another experience as if they were related independently of our intent, there could be no thought. Thought is pretending.
What is it made of? In my view, all things are ‘made of’ what I call sense. The power to perceive and participate in perception. Thought seems different from electromagnetism or mass-energy because we are directly within it. Physics presents our body with features of other experiences as external bodies. The results of that exteriorized view, are, in my view, responsible for the alienation that we encounter when we try to re-absorb our own subjectivity after we have objectified it as physical forms and functions. In particular, thoughts are made, as far as we know, of the experiences of Homo sapiens or perhaps earlier hominids as well. Honey is made of bees sense and motive, thought is made of human sense and motive.
What is an example of the most basic thought? If we look at what infants seem to be thinking about, “mama” seems popular. They seem to want a lot of help and attention. When we wake up in the morning, there seems to be a sense of remembering where we are and what has been going on. Likewise, before falling asleep, our hynagogic state of consciousness seems to hinge on dissolving our sense of locality and memory. We can slip in and out of fragmented dream states until the figure-ground relation seems to tessellate us into a less thoughtful and more relaxed mode of being. Thought then, like a birds tweet, may begin as a localizing beacon. To think is to encapsulate your experience and to consider whether to alert others about it. We weave a web of memories within ourselves and our social group – externalizing, perhaps, the process which is represented by our own neurology.
Speed of Light: Why is the speed of light not infinite?
Speed of Light: Why is the speed of light not infinite?
Speed of Light: Why is the speed of light not infinite?
The speed of light in a vacuum, 299792458 m/s, is a finite, discrete value. Nothing else can achieve this speed, because it would need infinite energy to propel actual mass. But a photon does not have mass.What is the limiting factor that prevents a photon from exceeding 299792458 m/s?
It’s like asking, “what is the limiting factor that prevents something which is absolutely still from being even more still?” Whether or not something can exceed the velocity of light or c (recently there was an unsuccessful challenge to light’s absolute status), the concept of c itself should not be considered a velocity, but rather, the physical and ontological limit of velocity itself as it is defined in the universe.
Personally, and this is just my own hypothesis, I think that the coincidence with light and c, along with light’s lack of resting mass gives us reason to question whether photons “exist” as independent entities traveling through a vacuum. I see no reason why it could not be the case that photons, and all radiant energy is actually more like what energy is on the macrophysical level. Our naive experience of classical physics shows us very clearly that energy is merely “what matter does”, rather than a substance of its own.
Energy is a verb which modifies a noun – it moves, heats up, changes, some-thing. Without a thing to move and an experience in which that moving thing can be compared to a memory of its previous position or status, there is no energy. My prediction is that all of the current interpretation in physics which relies on vacuum energy will ultimately have to be re-interpreted. Once we are able to understand that matter and awareness are identical, then energy can be understood as communication within matter which generates space and time. Space and time in turn, will have to be redefined as a property of awareness, or rather, of awareness to gaps in awareness.
The speed of light then is really about the speed of measurement. It is not a measurement of literal particles or waves traveling through a void, it is a measure of the scale of dislocation among multiple inertial frames. It is about the scale of bodies relative to each other, so that c defines both the largest and smallest ratio between frequencies of what these bodies are doing.
Multisense Realism 
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