Archive
MSR Legend
A first second draft of a Rosetta Stone for MSR terms, including the debut of new quasi-alchemical code.
Second draft 7/22/13, added Solitrophy and updated the formulas of time and space to clarify.
Breaking The Fourth Wall
Sense (in the Absolute sense) reveals itself reflexively as the Uni-verse, aka monad of non-orientable self-juxtaposition, aka, “the Pansensitive Meta-Lectic Solitrophic-Holarchic Multiphoric-Unametry”, provider of implicit unity (likeness) across multiplicity (private sensory afference) and explicit participation (public motor efference) through intentional animism and automatic mechanism.
reflexive
1. Directed back on itself.involution
entanglement; a spiraling inwards; intricacy
(mathematics) A function, transformation, or operator that is equal to its inverse, i.e., which gives the identity when applied to itself.tessellation
the careful juxtaposition of shapes in a pattern; “a tessellation of hexagons”.non-orientable
A surface S in the Euclidean spaceR3 is orientable if a two-dimensional figure (for example,) cannot be moved around the surface and back to where it started so that it looks like its own mirror image (
). Otherwise the surface is non-orientable.
The Möbius strip is a non-orientable surface
The Ouroboros or Uroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.
The Ouroboros often symbolize self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things such as the phoenix which operate in cycles that begin anew as soon as they end. It can also represent the idea of primordial unity related to something existing in or persisting from the beginning with such force or qualities it cannot be extinguished. While first emerging in Ancient Egypt, the Ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, but has also been frequently used in alchemical illustrations, where it symbolizes the circular nature of the alchemist’s opus. It is also often associated with Gnosticism, and Hermeticism. Carl Jung interpreted the Ouroboros as having an archetypal significance to the human psyche.[citation needed] The Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann writes of it as a representation of the pre-ego “dawn state”, depicting the undifferentiated infancy experience of both mankind and the individual child.
Early alchemical ouroboros illustration. From the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist (Greco-Roman Egypt).Autopoiesis (from Greek auto-, meaning “self”, and poiesis, meaning “creation, production”) refers to a closed system capable of creating itself. The term was introduced in 1972 by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define to the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of systems theory and sociology.
Bootstrapping or booting refers to a group of metaphors which refer to a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help.
The phrase appears to have originated in the early 19th century United States (particularly in the sense “pull oneself over a fence by one’s bootstraps”), to mean an absurdly impossible action, an adynaton.Trompe l’œil (French for deceive the eye) is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that depicted objects exist in three dimensions. Forced perspective is a comparable illusion in architecture.
Breaking the fourth wall is when a character acknowledges their fictionality, by either indirectly or directly addressing the audience. Alternatively, they may interact with their creator (the author of the book, the director of the movie, the artist of the comic book, etc.). This is more akin to breaking one of the walls of the set, but the existence of a director implies the existence of an audience, so it’s still indirectly Breaking The Fourth Wall. This trope is usually used for comedic purposes.
What is Information? Reality as Information – Is there Intrinsic Meaning? Sentient Life & Bits
Dolors Jou Torras: I think all one needs to do is redefine information and then it all clicks into place. Information: a perceived difference that can make a difference. You start with an awareness of a difference (reality differentiating itself and becoming aware of it). Then you move on to an awareness of a difference which in turn makes a difference (this awareness of differentiation enables learning, growth, knowledge, etc).
At some point this ability to perceive a difference becomes able to not only perceive a difference (of states) but can also perceive a difference in such a way that order can be assigned (as in before / after). Time is born – or rather, it evolves (= the ability to perceive a difference + assign order and duration).
You escalate this ability to perceive differences, etc, to an information field which can model consciousness (consciousness being defined in line with self-awareness, ability to self-modify, intelligence, ability to evolve, etc).
Then you get to the point where “physical” universes can evolve (within consciousness “space”) and so space-time and matter evolve… This goes hand in hand with the evolution of individual conscious observers experiencing this physical universes
So the paradigm goes like this: information—> consciousness & time —> laws of physics—> individual observers + space-time & matter
Craig Weinberg: I agree with what you are saying, especially the part about adding the qualifier of “a perceived” to “difference”. I would say though that that makes this capacity to perceive more fundamental than what is perceived. Even if we understand that of course information must be perceived, I still think that the word information carries an implicitly objective connotation. All that information can be is an experience in which some sensory context is informed. This capacity to perceive is already awareness, so that even though we could say that the term ‘consciousness’ refers to an awareness of awareness, I don’t see that such an awareness requires any information at all. All that is required is a quality of awareness in which the presence of awareness is felt. There is no feeling of the absence of awareness, so it is not a matter of discerning a difference or being informed about anything, it is simply an expectation of persistence and participation.
I like to break down the word information into three parts: “in” (which is input-output of sensory-affect/motor-effect), “form” (which is material shapes divided by space), and “ation” (which is recursive functions united through time). Where we are at now I think is to overlook the “in” part entirely and treat formations as the primitive context, when in fact the formations are the objects of appreciation and participation of the true primitive capacity for sense.
Dolors Jou Torras: Defining information and consciousness differently is what makes the descriptions of what is ultimately primary different… I completely understand what you are saying, when I put myself inside your theoretical framework Don’t disagree at all, but I can see that it all boils down to the precise details of how one defines information, awareness, consciousness and so on.
Craig Weinberg: Yes, for most contexts it is more useful to talk about information in the traditional sense. I think it’s only when we need to really get a maximum close up on that boundary between firstness and secondness or between the front and back end of the snake who is eating its tail. We are very much on the same page about the semiotic relation. I would suggest to consider that information is not non-physical, so much as physics is experiential and information is part of experience.
What makes an experience seem ‘physical’ is that it is out of bounds of our intimate sensory range. That which is too fast, too slow, too large, too small, or too unlike us in another sense is experienced in increasing degrees of dissimilarity to experience. Experience is the sense of who we are and the motive of why we do what we do, but matter is bodies nested within larger bodies. Matter is the what and how, the re-presentation of first person presentations.
Information is when one level of experience exploits another, more distant (and therefore more matter-like; discrete positions, subject to public inspection, etc) level. We take a sheet of cellulose molecules, which on their own level are holding on to each other, oxidizing slowly, etc and we inscribe a quantity of ink (also an experiential reality on its native fluid-molecular level). This inscription can be modeled as a trade off of entropy, we are fixing our private ideas and expressions on various levels, conscious and subconscious in public spacetime. Public spacetime freezes private sense into public form and private motive into public function. The information entropy of the writer’s idea is discharged in the act of writing, a process to be revisited in reverse when the reader understands what has been written. The low entropy signal of the written word is traded for an aesthetic entropy increase in the reader’s experience – they imagine, they think, their mental experience reverberates and ‘warms up’, creating novelty and creativity. This is significance. Significance lights up previous memories and pulls them together, bringing a sense of integration within. (Understanding = entero-standing…inner settling).
information is not physical in the sense that the effect of being informed is experiential, but information media is physical, which means that it is down-rev experiential, so to speak. We use experiences which are dumber and smaller than we are to carry our messages. Thinking of it this way brings matter, mind, and meaning together as one ecosystem of sense-making.
Dolors Jou Torras: I will cover the physical vs non-physical debate in another video soon, but defining information as essentially non-physical has to do with several factors:
– I relate information to qualia (perception, experience)
– That in this “physical” universe, in general we need to embed or engrave information in physical matter or energy via symbols or signs, does not make information itself physical.
The laws of physics do not preceed information hence information is not bound by physical laws (information is primary)
There is compelling evidence, in my opinion, that non-local effects point in the direction that our physical universe (space-time plus matter) is a subset of a larger reality. What is “physical” is a moving target
Information (in theory) can be used as a basic currency to describe any reality, not only what our current physics can describe (or is attempting to describe).
Information therefore can be used to move away from duality… “Physical” vs “non-physical” is not a matter of substance dualism; these are purely subjective terms that we mostly associate with what our current science can measure with its instruments.
Craig Weinberg:
“defining information as essentially non-physical has to do with several factors:
– I relate information to qualia (perception, experience)”
I agree in the conventional sense of ‘physical’, information would be non-physical, but I think that in an absolute sense, the physical and non-physical can only be different perspectives (private-facing and public-facing orientations) of the same thing. What I am trying to pioneer is the idea that this thing is sense: the universal capacity for aesthetic participation, aka the capacity to generate, experience, and appreciate qualia.
“- That in this “physical” universe, in general we need to embed or engrave information in physical matter or energy via symbols or signs, does not make information itself physical”
Right, symbols or signs are independent of matter, but not independent of the capacity to experience (sense). A particular piece of information, such as a page in a book, can obviously exist without my experience of it, but it cannot exist without some capacity for interpretation somewhere in the universe.
The question that I put to you, however, is ‘can awareness exist without information?’. I think that it can. I think that a feeling need not inform us. I think that information is always a reflection or representation of sense, and never the genuine presentation itself. Eating a meal is not simply an information processing event where knowledge of nutritional conditions are stored in the body and in our understanding, it is a concretely visceral, mouth watering, chewing, gobbling, licking, swallowing orgy of sensual participation. We can extract information from the experience, but when we do, that extraction is inevitably reductive. It is an accounting of events from a hypothetical voyeur’s perspective rather than the genuine and indispensable experience.
In my view, qualia is not a representation, it is a presentation – an aesthetic presence. Information is a particular kind of qualia, a presentation in which another presentation has been abstracted as an a-signifying, quantifiable figure. Such a figure is public-facing and communicable, so long as the receiver of the communication can re-signify some of what has been frozen as a spatial-form/temporal-function.
“The laws of physics do not preceed information hence information is not bound by physical laws (information is primary)”
Because you are including the aesthetic experience of information as information, I agree with you here too. Matter-Space/Energy-Time would be types of information (Form-Sense/Function-Motive). If we conflate information with sense, however, then we would have to explain why sentience does not emerge from information itself. Why can’t we write a story which has feelings itself? Why do we react unfavorably to impersonated entities like mannequins and automatons (uncanny valley effect)? Part of my contribution here is to get very specific and show how the relation between sense, information, and matter can be juxtaposed to yield unity or contrast but that sense is the essential commonality. Information can be forged and copied, it is generic and implicitly impossible to truly own. Sense is absolutely proprietary and authentic, ineffable, unreproducible.
Information is the manifestation of the intention to circulate publicly, but sense is the private anchoring of a disposition between the sensor/self and the universe. This opposition relation of sense and information is recapitulated and exteriorized as the relation between matter and energy, and matter-energy/space-time. It’s the same theme of reflection through orthogonal juxtaposition. It’s very tricky of course, because we can toggle foreground/background from any perspective. Einstein grabbed mass-energy and it gave him space-time. If you grab information-sense, it gives you physical machines and non-physical machines. My proposal is to grab sense-motive and get all of the others: form-matter-space::function-energy-time. Square that and you get public entropy::private significance.
“There is compelling evidence, in my opinion, that non-local effects point in the direction that our physical universe (space-time plus matter) is a subset of a larger reality. What is “physical” is a moving target”
I agree completely, although I think that the larger reality is the sum-total of all sensory experiences in the history of the universe. The larger reality is experiential while space+matter is a frozen slice – a tokenized representation of part of that reality as experienced from a particular perspective and presented as a public context. Physical to means only that something is intended as a concrete presentation rather than a pure representation. The idea of a train is physical, in the sense that ideas are physical experiences, but the train which is confabulated within the idea is not physical. Non-local? Certainly. Locality is a low level sense protocol. I think that’s part of what the atoms are doing on the microcosm, sending each other messages (we call quantum) to generate locality through spacetime coordinates. The universe is inside the big bang/Abolute, and all space is a presentation within it’s sense.
“Information (in theory) can be used as a basic currency to describe any reality, not only what our current physics can describe (or is attempting to describe).”
Yes, but only if you are assuming that information includes sense. Think of how the same information on a DVD can be heard as music or seen as a video though. A computer reads that DVD anesthetically, as data. Low level electronic sensation in all likelihood, but the data is not giving the DVD player an experience of watching a movie.
“Information therefore can be used to move away from duality… “Physical” vs “non-physical” is not a matter of substance dualism; these are purely subjective terms that we mostly associate with what our current science can measure with its instruments.”
Yes, in the absolute sense, but if we don’t explain that subjective polarization and connect it to public and private presentations, then we have not really explained the universe that we live in. With my view, all dualisms, monisms, and multiplicities fall out naturally from the capacities of sense and motive to diffract entropy spatiotemporally and recover significance experientially.
Universal Schemas, Eternal Schisms
Having been introduced to Kent Palmer’s General Schemas Theory on Quora, I noticed some interesting overlap with my own under Multisense Realism*. In particular his use of a The paper identifies an emergent ontological hierarchy (of schemas) as follows:
· Pluriverse
· Kosmos
· World
· Domain
· Meta-system
· System
· Form
· Pattern
· Monad
· Facet
The paper also identifies an ontic hierarchy: “which might include gaia, social, organisms, organs, cells, molecules, atoms, particles, quarks, strings”. The paper goes on to explain that “any of the ontological schemas can be applied to any of the ontic hierarchy thresholds”. This is a very point, and while I have not explicitly talked about it in MR, part of the multi-sense aspects of implicitly includes this kind of portable mereology which applies to the continuum of public physics.
I’m not convinced that the ontological hierarchy terms he suggests are as different from each other as is implied…is a pattern different from a monad or form? Is a world something other than a meta-meta-meta system? My sense is that whatever qualitative differences are implied by this hierarchy are leaking in by association with the ontic hierarchy. We talk about worlds because we have the example of planets and forms because we have the example of macrocosmic objects that we can see and touch with our body.
I like the idea of the ontic vs ontological hierarchy and hope he doesn’t mind if I borrow it on occasion. I would describe the ontological hierarchy as a generalization of the ontic hierarchy such that the overall shape and design of public physics is preserved as an abstraction which can be applied to any level of any nested hierarchy. What separates the levels in the first place is a slightly different matter, one which I hope Multisense Realism helps illuminate: Science should not take these ‘leveling’ breakpoints, in which there is an aesthetic shift of attention from a complex multiplicity to a higher order of simplicity.
This shift does not happen out in space somewhere, it is not an objective mechanism, rather it is a natural relation of coherence which emerges from participants and parts as much as it is recovered from the whole. This spectrum-like quality of aesthetics is universal and is, in my view, the backbone of the cosmos – it is Sense in the grandest sense; a sanity which is truly uni-versal. I suspect that this unity of all ‘verses’ is what multiverse theories fail to factor in, as they neglect to investigate the role that wholeness has in experience and what role experience plays in the whole. I would therefore feel comfortable in clipping off the Pluriverse level of the ontological hierarchy.
The MR version of the ontological hierarchy seeks a purely quantitative sense:
· Meta systems (Mega-system, Giga-system, Tera-system…)
· System
· Root systems (micro-system, nano-system, pico-system…)
However, in addition to the ontic hierarchy, MR offers a perpendicular conjugate holarchy which relates to interior, qualitative phenomena. The physics of privacy is seen not as a parallel dimension to public physics, but rather that the continuum of sense is an Ouroboran monad in which endophoric and exometric polarities are only one of the fundamental discernments. The ontic schema of Multisense Realism is a matrix that ‘eats its own tail’ as well as pairs up the largest and smallest levels. The reason that the largest and smallest levels are paired is to reflect the order in which systems have been established. Rather than a chain of events on the micro level leading to cosmological scale events, it must be understood that without a human scale orientation to divide and compare against, the two scales are the same thing.
I propose instead that the evolution of the Cosmos or Kosmos (please stop me before I use the word Qosmos) is a ‘tunneling within’ nested systems, so that the outermost systems are the most distant from our human privacy. Regardless of the scale difference, our understanding of astrophysical meta-systems (Cosmos, Galaxy, Solar System) has a lot in common with our understanding of nuclear physics (atom, quantum, strings). The modeling of both relies on the same mathematical and logical principles, the same assumptions of eternal force-relations and statistical laws. The Western physical approach to both cosmology and microcosmology is identical and presents a united front of impersonal mechanisms. This outermost frame is generally considered to be the sine qua non of science and engineering. All causes and conditions are presumed to follow from the presence of these initial ontic realities and ontological-mathematical principles.
The first order of business then is to wrap the maximum and minimum ends of the schema around, so that the meta-systems of astrophysics meet up with the root-systems of nuclear physics. Notice that the phenomena are entirely related as well. We smash the smallest particles in the largest particle accelerators. The chain reactions of nuclear fusion, which a nearly instantaneous and of course infinitesimally small generate the largest and longest lasting events. This is important because it establishes the principle of perceptual relativity. It’s not merely that things are too large/slow or too small/fast for us to relate to directly, it’s also that the too large-slow/small-fast phenomena are the same things. To get to phenomena which we find familiar, we have to go to the mid-range, to phenomena which last between 0.1 seconds and 24 hours. This kind of range in which direct human perception is appropriate.
To link the meta and root schemas then (and this is for the public facing ‘exometric’ ontic hierarchy) I would offer:
Exometric Ontic Schemas
- Astrophysics ⊇ Quantum Mechanics
- Geology ⊇ Chemistry
- Evolution ⊇ Genetics
- Zoology⊇ Biology
- Anthropology⊇ Sociology
- Neuroscience ⊇ Cognitive-Science
The corresponding revised ontological hierarchy then would be:
Exometric Ontological Schemas
- Maximum ⊇ minimum
- Tera⊇ pico
- Giga⊇ nano
- Mega⊇ micro
- Meta⊇ root
- System/phenomenon
Another change that I would add is to recognize that these hierarchies of external metrics are meaningless without internal experiences which yoke them together along the transverse axis. Every real, whole phenomenon has its roots in the outermost aesthetics of physics (1.) and the innermost idiosyncratic aesthetics of its own experience (6.) The continuity between the two, and the correlation of that continuity with uniqueness and privacy is the perhaps the most revolutionary idea within MR. That uniqueness itself is a physical property, a strange attractor of significance which is perpendicular/orthogonal to generic-cardinality-entropy is radical and exotic at first, but I do suspect that this is the Holy Grail to integrating consciousness with matter. Awareness looks up and down through the nested external hierarchies, as well as within its own internal histories (in the case of humans at least).
Because of the perpendicular symmetry between public and private schemas, private schemas are not only different from public schemas, they are fundamentally different in how they schematize. Public systems are forms and functions which are literally nested within each other by scale. Forms exist within the physical boundaries of other forms and functions are sequential processes which are composed of sub-functions, steps within steps which are timed to different orders of oscillatory magnitude. Private experiences are not only steps and structures but the are the appreciation of phenomena. Experiences inhabit other experiences in ways which are not mathematically well-founded. We can apply a loose, meta ⊇ root hierarchy as follows:
Endophoric Ontic Schemas
- Absolute⊇ Sense
- Archetypes ⊇ Qualia
- Intuition ⊇ Emotion
- Significance⊇ Instinct
- Being⊇ Doing
- Afference⊇ Efference
Unlike the well-founded exometric schemas, the endophoric shemas are a multivalent fugue. The physics of privacy requires precisely the conditions which public physics lacks. There is a law of conservation of mystery which keeps any given experience isolated from others in some senses but united in others. It is an unfolding narrative in which the joke is not revealed until the punchline, but the punchline is implicit in the intent of the joke from the start. Teleology therefore is a function of a larger, more meta endophoric schema exerting its sense, or harmonizing with itself on lower, down-root schemas.
Endophoric Ontological Schemas
- Univeral ⊇ schematic
- Perennial⊇ ephemeral
- Solitary⊇ oscillating
- Essential⊇ existential
- Irreducible⊇ related
- Experience
Putting it all together, the Endophoric and Exometric schemas can be seen to wrap in the horizontal sense as well as the vertical meta/root sense:
- Astrophysics ⊇ Quantum Mechanics ⊥ Absolute⊇ Sense
- Geology ⊇ Chemistry⊥ Archetypes ⊇ Qualia
- Evolution ⊇ Genetics⊥ Intuition ⊇ Emotion
- Zoology⊇ Biology⊥ Significance⊇ Instinct
- Anthropology⊇ Sociology⊥ Being⊇ Doing
- Neuroscience ⊇ Cognitive-Science⊥ Afference⊇ Efference
These can be further consolidated into single Super-Schema formula:
Literally Nested Public Metric ⊥ Figuratively Nested Private Experience
Questions About Human Senses
“Thanks for always writing such great responses to my questions.
I was wondering if you could, either as a response here or in a post, comment on sensation itself, that is to say on the sensory modalities we experience as humans. It strikes me that one of the great unasked metaphysical questions is whether the 5 senses that we know exhaust the kinds of sense available to being. Some see a deep truth in this, as 5 is a number closely associated with phi and the Fibonacci sequence (we also have 5 digits on our appendages). Even the existence of the 5 platonic solids makes one wonder if our senses somehow represent a phenomenological analog to this geometric truth. And what does each of the senses make sense of? What sense do the senses make?
Much has been made of echolocation as a possibly alien form of sense (and the basis of serious anti-reductionist arguments in philosophy of mind, as with Nagel’s classic essay) but it’s just as easy to imagine, perhaps easier, that echolocation is simply the bat’s way of generating visual sense, or perhaps some synesthesian fusion of visual and auditory modalities.
Synesthesia itself presents phenomenological conundrums that are worth teasing apart. If synesthesia is possible why have we evolved with such separation to our senses? Does a person with synesthesia loose as much as he gains? And, could a total, radical, singular sysesthesic unitary SENSE be imagined?
Finally, there is the complicated relation of sensory experience to thought. Though the two are generally conceptually separated (could there be anything seemingly less “sensory” than abstract thinking) I bet the real story is far more complicated. My intuition is that all thought is sensory through and through though the way thoughts, and, in particular, language, represent (experience?) sensation is mind-boggingly subtle. (Is this Hume’s distinction between ideas and impressions again?)
Love to hear your thoughts on the senses. Seems important for MR.”
Thanks for the topic and the interest. Starting with the five senses, I’m not sure that the number is particularly significant. The difference between olfactory and gustatory sense seems to me like a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. There is a lot of overlap between flavors and smells although you could argue that there are some tastes that you cannot smell. Can something smell salty? Something can smell sour or bitter but not ‘upside down’ or ‘high pitched’.
There are also categories of sensation which do not fall easily into the five. Vestibular-kinesthetic sense and proprioception can maybe be considered forms of tactile ‘feeling’, but your skin can’t feel dizzy and the relation between your body and the world can’t really itch or hurt. Then there’s more metaphorical kinds of sense, but are they really metaphorical or are they just deeper within the context of personal experience? Sense of humor, moral sense, sense of gratitude, intuition, business sense…these are arguably irreducible to general awareness or some other sense modality.
If I were to apply an alchemical read of the senses, I would go with more of a tetragrammaton view with the masculine elements corresponding to aural and tactile sense and the feminine corresponding to visual and olfactory-gustatory sense. This four-way symmetry provides a rich vein of fun associations to ponder…the stereotypical masculine preference for fast vehicles and loud noises vs the feminine stereotype ‘candy and flowers’ offering give a hint. A five point comparison has more of a person-hood connotation – like the five digits on our hands or the five appendages radiating from our torso, the emphasis is on the utility of sense as they pertain to our agency in the world. In MR I am dealing not so much with human sense modalities in particular but the underlying phenomena of sensory presentation. I can see how the number five would have interesting numerological and mathematical properties, although all of the other integers do as well. Five is the recapitulation of one, the middle number, associated with qualities of growth and constraint. Five suggests ratios and leverage in a way that the first four integers do not. The thumb rules over the fingers as the head rules over the limbs, etc. Perhaps it characterizes the relation of the conscious self to the more mechanistic (four-like) subconscious.
“If synesthesia is possible why have we evolved with such separation to our senses? Does a person with synesthesia loose as much as he gains? And, could a total, radical, singular sysesthesic unitary SENSE be imagined?”
Synesthesia is very interesting to me because it really deflates the assumption that the aesthetic presentation of our subjective experience is simply a package deal which emerges from the characteristics of data. We see that indeed sounds can be smelled, numbers and days of the week can have colors, but also that syneasthetes do not share the same bundlings of sense. This suggests to me that aesthetics are not in fact generated by the brain, but rather appreciated through the brain, body, and the body’s environment, as well as subjective experience augmenting itself over time. Congenitally blind people do not see visual phenomena when their visual cortex is stimulated, they feel tactile stimulation instead. This debunks the assumption that sensory modalities simply correspond to brain region.
As for what a synesthete gains or loses, I can only guess. From the accounts I have read it seems like it is mostly benign, occasionally spectacular (one case gave a man the ability compose music visually…a head injury I think). Some seem to feel a bit insecure about it. Being a person is strange enough as it is without seeing or tasting things that nobody else does.
As far as a unitary sense, I suspect that just as the human body corresponds to a particular palette of sense capacities, a human stem cell might correspond to a more undifferentiated palette. That could be explored experimentally with the right technology. My hypothesis is that the unitary sense is a continuum between tight-stress-high frequency, loose-relaxed, low frequency oscillation.
“My intuition is that all thought is sensory through and through”
I agree. My working model is that thought is cognitive quality sensation, and that it is essentially a feeling in which other feelings are represented. As algebraic variables are to actual values, thoughts are transparent containers for reflected icons of hypothetical experiences. An understanding of audio sense in comparison to sight is revealing I think, given that our thoughts typically persist as interior verbal presentations. Sound waves, unlike light, require matter to propagate from node to node, so there is an inference that I make about acoustics being a body-to-body interaction. The cochlea and the dual role of the inner ear for hearing and balance seems particularly three dimensional – a sense of volumes of matter. Musical instruments are sculptural and tangible, and acoustic sensation pierces the ear the high end and engulfs the body on the low end. Thought is similarly about encapsulation, it is a semiotic pre-packaging which is formulated for public distribution. It paradoxically frees subjectivity from the subject while encoding the subject’s intention as an independent form. Maybe this is why William S. Burroughs and others have described language in alien terms, as viruses and memes.
I hope that made enough sense to be worthwhile. Thanks again.
Why can’t the world have a universal language?
Answer by Marc Ettlinger:
To answer this question we need to consider why we have multiple languages in the first place.
Presumably at some point, about 100,000-200,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens started using language in the way we mean language now. At the time, we were spread out over a relatively confined space on the globe and it is practically impossible that language spontaneously arose in more than a handful of places.
Our route out of Africa
So, at one point, there were some limited number of languages among groups of people that had some amount of geographic proximity. It could have been relatively easy for one language to emerge then or that everyone all spoke the same mother tongue anyway and for things to have stayed that way till now.
But that didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened. As humans spread across the globe and popultion growth exploded exponentially, so too did the number of languages. In fact, it’s estimated that there were approximately 10,000 languages spoken only a couple of hundred years ago.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that languages change. The second is that language is identity.
It’s easy to see that languages change. Remember struggling through Shakespeare? Yeah, me too, and that demonstrates the change that English has undergone over the past few hundred years. When that continues to happen and the same language changes in different ways in different geographical regions, you eventually get new languages. The most obvious example is Vulgar Latin dialects turning into the Romance Languages. From one language to many.
So, the first part of the answer is that the general tendency is for languages to propagate and diverge.
Your response may be that we are in a new world order, now, with globalization homogenizing the entire world into one common culture, facilitated by internet technology. America’s melting pot writ large.
The world as melting pot?
This is where part two of the answer comes in. Language is not simply a means for communicating. Language is also identity. We know that people communicate more than ideas with their language, they communicate who they are, what they believe and where they’re from. Subconsciously. So the obstacles to one language are similar to the obstacle to us all wearing the same clothes. It would certainly be cheaper and more efficient, but it’s not how people behave. And we see that empirically in studies of how Americans’ accents have not homogenized with the advent of TV (Why do some people not have accents?).
The same applies with languages — in the face of globalization, we see renewed interest in native languages, for example the rise of Gaelic (Irish language) in the face of the EU.
Having said that, colonialism and statism have lead to a decline in number of languages from its peak of 10,000 to about 6,000+ today, which you can read about here: Is English killing other languages?
Therein you’ll also see discussion of your question. The conclusion there, and what I’d similarly suggest here is that “so long as countries exist, English won’t encroach further.” In other words, the world doesn’t really want a universal language.
As long as humans aspire to have their own distinct identities and form different groups, the same aspirations that drive them to wave different flags, root for different teams, listen to different music and have different cultures, they’ll continue to have different languages.
S33: Interesting to think about how language changes prolifically even though what language represents often doesn’t change. I’ll have to think about that, re: diffraction of private experience into public spacetime. The cognitve level is more generic than the emotional level of expression – a more impersonal aesthetic. Ironically, the intent is to make gesture more enduring and objective, yet the result is more changes over time and space, while the language of gesture is more universal. Of course, verbal expression offers many more advantages through its motility through public media.
Making Sense of Computation
In my view, matter and energy are the publicly reflected tokens* of sense and motive respectively. As human experiences, we are a complicated thing to try to use as an example – like trying to learn arithmetic by starting with an enormous differential equation. When we look at a brain, we are using the eyes of a simian body. That’s what the experience of a person looks like when it is stepped all the way down from human experience, to animal experience, to cellular experience, to molecular experience, and all the way back up to the animal experience level. Plus we are seeing it from the wrong angle. If I’m right, experience is a measure of time, not space, so looking at the body associated with an experience that lasts 80 or 100 years from a sampling rate of a few milliseconds would be a radically truncated view, even if we were looking at it in its native, subjective form. Every moment we are alive, we are surfing on a wave that has been growing since our birth – growing not just in synch with clock time, but changing in response to the significance of the experiences in which we participate directly. This is what I mean by sense. A concretely real accumulation of experience, a single wave in constant modulation as the local surface of an arbitrarily deep ocean.
Information is not sense, and neither is it matter or energy. Information is the shadow of all of these, of their relation to each other, which is cast by sense. Information is like sense as far as it being neither substantial nor insubstantial, but it is the opposite of sense also. Matter, energy, and information are all opposite to each other and opposite to sense. They are the projections of sense. If you break down the word information into three bites, the “in” would be sensory input, the ‘form’ would be ‘matter-space’ and the ‘ation’ would be ‘energy-time’. When most people think about information though, they undersignify the input/output aspect, the “in”, – which is sense, and conflate consciousness with senseless formations. Formations with no participating perceiver are non-sense and no-thing.
The difference between sense and information is that sense is anchored tangibly in the totality of events in all of history. It is the meta-firmament; the Absolute, and it potentially makes sense of itself in every sense modality. Information only makes sense from one particular angle or method of interpretation. It is a facade. As soon as information is removed from its context, its ungrounded, superficial nature is exposed. Information so removed does not react or adapt to make itself understood – it is sterile and evacuated of feeling or being. It is purely a feeling being’s idea of doing or knowing and does not exist independently of its ‘host’. Because of this it is tempting to conceptualize information as self-directing memes, but that would only be true figuratively. In an absolute sense, memes are a figure-ground inversion, i.e it puts the cart before the horse and sucks us into strong computationalism and the Pathetic fallacy. From what I can see, information has no autonomy, no motive. It is an inert recording of past motives and sensations.
Previously, I have written about computation, numbers, mathematics as being the flattest category of qualia. Flattest in the sense of being almost purely an tool for knowing or doing that has to borrow rely on being output in some aesthetic form to yield any feeling or ‘being’.
Computation can be represented publicly through material things like positions of beads on an abacus, the turns of mechanical gears, the magnetic dispositions of microelectronic switches, the opening and closing of valves in a plumbing system, the timing and placement of traffic signals on a street grid, etc. All of these bodies rely on the ability to detect or sense each others passive states and to respond to them in some motor effect. It makes no difference how it is represented, because the function will be the same. This is precisely the opposite of consciousness, in which rich aesthetic details provide the motivation and significance. Evolutionary functions are never nakedly revealed as a-signifying generic processes. For humans, food and sex are profoundly aesthetic, social engagements, not just automatic functions.
Computation can also be represented publicly through symbols. One step removed from literally embodied aesthetics, computation can be transferred figuratively between a person’s thoughts and written symbols through the sensory-motor medium of mathematical literacy. We can imagine that there is a similar ferrying of meaning between the mathematician’s thoughts and some non-local source of arithmetic truth. Arithmetic truth seems to us certain, rational, internally consistent, universal but it is also impersonal. Arithmetic laws cannot be made proprietary or changed. They are eternal and unchanging. We can only borrow local copies of numbers for temporary use, but they cannot be touched or controlled. They represent disembodied knowledge, but no doing, no being, and no feeling.
In the first sense, mathematics is represented by mechanical positions of public bodies, and therefore almost completely ‘flat’ qualitatively. Binary interactions of go/on-stop/off have no sense to them other than loops and recursive enumeration. In the second sense, a written mathematical language adds more qualia, clothing the naked digital states in conceptual symbols. The language of mathematics allows the thinker to bridge the gap between public doing of machines and private knowing of arithmetic truth.
Although strong computationalists will disagree, it seems to me that a deeper understanding reveals of computation reveals that arithmetic truth itself requires an even deeper set of axioms which are pre-arithmetic. The third sense of mathematics is the first sense we encounter. Before there is mathematical literacy, there is counting. Counting to three gives way to counting on fingers (digits), as we learn the essential skills of mental focus required. As we learn more about odd and even numbers, addition and subtraction, the aesthetics of symmetry and succession are not so much introduced into the psyche as foreign concepts, but are recovered by the psyche as natural, familiar expectations. Math, like music, is felt. Before we can use it to help us know essential truths or to cause existential effects, we have to be able to participate in counting and the solving of problems in our mind. When we do these kinds of problems, our awareness must be very focused. We are accessing an impersonal level of truth. Our human bodies and lives are distractions. Machines and computers have always been conspicuously lacking in what people refer to as ‘soul’, or ‘warmth’, feeling, empathy, personality, etc. This is consistent with the view of computation that I am trying to explain. Whatever warmth or personality it can carry must originate in a being – an experience which is anchored in the aesthetic presentation of sense rather than the infinite representation of information.
*or orthomodular inversions to be more precise
The Future of Computing — Reuniting Bits and Atoms
A great presentation on computing with hardware and software which are homomorphic to each other. Logical automata (explained 11:51 to 15:50) is just this sort of a WYSIWYG architecture where the software is executed from a bulk raw material, i.e., not Gb of memory or number of processor cores, but square feet or pounds of programmable matter. Atoms, or groups of atoms, are here used directly as bits.
Gershenfeld compares how our current approach of computing requires multiple stages of compiling disparate formats, but that to more closely match nature, we should strive to imitate nature in the sense of having a consistent zoomable format on every scale.
In nature, the map is the same graphically regardless of the scope of magnification. Marrying these two concepts, the idea is to design shapes which are themselves instructions, i.e. physical interactions with other physical shapes, so that computation is not encoded but rather, embodied. As in biochemistry, the output is a material product, and the machine is itself is a self fabricating machine tool as opposed to a manufacturer of inert objects.
I think that he is probably right that this is the direction of the future in general, “computing aligned with nature” which brings computation into matter. It is compelling to imagine that this kind of embodied computing could be the Holy Grail of nano-engineering, giving us control over virtually anything eventually.
At the same time I can see that there is something which has been overlooked. To quote Deleuze:
“Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single center, a unique and receding perspective, and in the consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilizes and moves nothing.”
– Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p56
(source http://sleepinginthegreenery.blogspot.co.uk/)
To understand why this universe of embodied computation is not the universe that we live in, Difference is the key. An overhead map is only so useful to us. Even if we can zoom down to the human scale level, we really need to switch to a first person street view to make the transition from outside-looking-down to inside-looking-around. To get further into the subjective view, we would have to have access to feelings and thoughts, so that at some level of description the model of zoomable shapes is less than useless. In our personal awareness, the appearance of neurological structures in our view would be hallucination.
The assumption then of this uniformly computational matter, while fantastic for our purposes as human beings, would be a catastrophe for the universe in general. It would be the ultimate monoculture, with everything and anything reinvented as collections of positionable nano-Legos. The problem of conformity to a generic, universal structure is not that it won’t work, but that if it does, there will be no Difference possible.
Given Deleuze’s assertion that representation moves nothing, this intention of “reuniting bits with atoms’ seems to presume that they were united to begin with but doesn’t address why they were ever separated. Indeed, if this method of embodied computation is the way of nature, how and why could it ever seem otherwise? Where have these Different perspectives on different levels emerged from, and for what purpose?
I think that on closer inspection, even though this new approach is brilliant and revolutionary in some important ways, it still is founded on a sloppy assumption. It presumes that hardware which looks and acts like the software is identical to it. If this were the case, instead of images we would see the shapes of ganglia and retinal cells, but we would see the same thing instead of smells, sounds, and feelings. We could not feel dizzy, but rather be informed of some vestibular condition by means of these same shapes – which we think of visually or tangibly, but without the Difference, there really is no reason to assume anything perceptual at all.
Once again, even though I am impressed with the futuristic thinking, it still takes us away from the missing piece in physics – the privacy and interiority and qualia. Buying into the universe as undifferentiated plenum of self-machining bubbles we are betting that there is no difference between biology, chemistry, and physics. It’s all physics, all surfaces and volumes in public spaces. Is that really what the universe is though? Could our experience be understood that way if we didn’t have our own familiarity with it already? I think if we lived in a universe that was really all about universal computation, then we would never have separated bits from atoms in the first place. We never would have approached bits as encoded abstractions because we would have been comfortable already with the universal format.
Instead, the universe appears to be the opposite. On every level, even though there are repeating themes and forms, it is never exactly the same presentation. A whirlpool would not be mistaken for a galaxy and a grain of salt is not the same thing as a cube of ice. In the universe we actually live in, the only thing which seems truly universal is Difference. More universal than mathematics and physics is the variety of sensory qualities and modalities. It is not just formations or embodied information, but direct experience.
Being No One – Thomas Metzinger
A very good, concise presentation. I disagree with his ultimate conclusions, not because of faulty reasoning, but because of the same overlooked assumptions which most contemporary thinkers miss. Despite the appeal to transparency of modeling to explain the existence of subjective qualities, there really is no connection offered at all. A model is a cognitive index through which one instance of experience or presentation can be encapsulated within another. This is a re-presentation. Data which moves from one table to another, which is concatenated or compressed, is not a model unless a conscious entity interprets it that way. A DVD full of laser pits is not a color and sound recording unless it is decoded to a video screen by a DVD player. The DVD player is not playing a movie unless a movie-literate audience is available to watch it.
The problem with the idea of the phenomenal self model, as I see it, is that there is no computational benefit or physical resource which could account for the extra-physical, extra-informational presentation of the ‘model’ to the unmodeled system. In Raymond Tallis’ book ‘Aping Mankind’, he talks about the obvious disadvantages to such an introduction of conscious presentation into unconscious systems, which, after all, have successfully driven the rest of the universe, from the synthesis of nucleic acids to the neutralization of countless pathogens in our immune system. For something as important as executive control of the organism as a whole, an error ridden, self-deluded agent is the last thing that you would want sitting in the cockpit. Imagine if your digestive system relied on such a volitional dreamer to assimilate your nutrients or remember to regulate the pH of your blood.
No, I’m afraid that no information-based architecture can be used to thoroughly explain subjective experience, although it can explain how the particular human quality of subjective experience can be repaired, augmented, manipulated, etc. With information, we can’t even emulate human consciousness, but we can emulate some important products of it, IMO.
I think that I have found a better way to approach phenomenal facts. Rather than assuming that the experience of seeing red is indirect and non-physical I propose instead that physics has a private and a public range (which themselves have overlapping and underlapping regions).
I suggest that experience of seeing red is not synonymous with factual knowledge, but rather all factual knowledge is a category of direct sensory-motor experience. Experience or sense is primary, beneath matter, energy, spacetime, quantum, information, and arithmetic. Not human sense, but sense as universal fundamental.
As human beings, we are staggeringly complex, multilevel organisms. Our direct experience encompasses nested sub-personal experiences and super-personal signifiers as a recapitulation or compound direct experience. The experience of seeing red is a simpler experience, not because it is an illusion or functionally expedient representation, but because it is, on the native level of a whole person, a direct and ‘pre-factual’ physically real presence. Physical reality referring specifically to that which has both privately and publicly ranged presentation.
It’s a complete reworking of physics, I admit, but I humbly say that I think that it reconciles physics, philosophy, subjectivity, and information theory.
Niall McLaren’s Dual Aspect Theory
This video lecture series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjABUhyu6dw does a good job showing how a psychiatrist, Niall McLaren, argues toward a dual aspect theory. I recomend his books: http://www.niallmclaren.com/bibliography
I like that he clearly sees the limitations of the other approaches, but he does not yet see the problems with the assumption of ‘information’ and the ‘semantic realm’. He is modeling experience logically in space rather than naturalistically through time.
His view overlooks the same issue all the way down the line:
2. Logic gates, in his view, “coopt the mechanical function to acquit the semantic function of defining relationships”.
We are exploiting the public physics of the logic gate’s form to generate a more subtle level of public physics which we read as signs. In other words, we exploit the public facing forms and functions of the gate to exploit our own public facing forms and functions (optical patterns to tease the eye, acoustic patterns to call to the ear), allowing a sharing and communication of experience in spite of forms and functions, which are completely hidden from the conscious spectacle. In fact no ‘information’ is exchanged, except metaphorically. What is exchanged is concretely real and physical, although physics and realism of course, should only be thought of as a range of scaled or scoped experience based on time-like frequencies on space-like obstructions.
3. His view focuses on the logic of the mind rather than the richness of qualia.
4. His view conflates grammatical structure for meaning.
While it is important to model thought backwards through communication like he does for purposes of AI development, it is a mistake to apply the model the ontology that way. The horse is not an assembly of carts, so to speak. The cart without the horse is useless. The words and sentences are empty carts without the personal experience of semiosis, which is not included in physics or information theory. Experience is the key.
5. His views on personality and mental disorder are the weakest parts of the presentation in my opinion. They are normative and nakedly behaviorist, mistaking again public behaviors for private realities. What he sees as simply a collection of habits, I see as a vast interiority of identity and influence rooted in the sub-personal, super-personal and super-signifying bands of sensory-motive experience.
6. I disagree too that neurons “pass information mindlessly”.
The three pronged plug that he says we are looking for is sensory-motive participation (or ‘sense’). The three prongs are (I) private experience, (II) public bodies, and (III) the potential for significance-entropy to be generated through the multiple levels of spacetime-body::timespace-experience interaction.
I was sure to mention that I do appreciate his work. I think that he is doing a great job, and I probably disagree with his model less than I do most scientific models.
* to be precise, impersonal public presentations are representations from a fundamental or absolute perspective, while personal private presentations are representations from a derived or secondary perspective. This is very confusing, but something like a chair which is objectively real is fundamentally a representation within the experience of whoever is encountering it. The chair seems like a presentation to us because that is the function of the representation – to warn us of the presence of something completely outside of ourselves.
Multisense Realism 
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