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Speculating on Time as Nested Experience
If we compare two sense modalities, such as seeing vs hearing, we can get a hint of what it might mean for spacetime to be orthogonal to experiential time. Think of the primordial nature of time not as a coherent parameter to be measured, but instead we can see the possibility of time as emerging from experience. A temporal sense which is driven by tempo. Fugues of dream-like, non-orientable perceptual gestalts, with sequential qualities emerging from semantic intensities. If this kind of time were a tent, the tent poles would be significant moments – aesthetically saturated occurrences which resonate into re-occurrence through their cosmological nobility.
For human beings, with a relatively huge psychological bandwidth, we we would experience this prototype to spatialized-time as chronologically ambiguous. Call it a mytho-poetic Dreamtime, collective unconscious, or primordial qualia; a condition where characters and their stories are fused together. The hero makes the journey, and the journey makes the hero. Splitting this atavistic tempo into space and time is the mirroring of unseen perspectives. The hero and journey are polarized into subjects and objects. I would imagine on a pre-biological level, this would be more like position and momentum – less metaphor and more semaphore.
Once the primitive experience takes on a divided perspective there would be opportunities for a sense of hierarchy. Simpler, semaphoric ‘times’ and more developed, metaphorical times are residuated within a densely realized middle ‘place’ as repeating cliches or themes. To broker between these experiential threads, an intermediary sense is used to define boundaries and relations in simple, literal terms. Spacetime, or spatialized time serves to reign in a worldly epoch, and segregate it from the quasi-timeless and quasi-spaceless epoch. The division of fact from fantasy recapitulates the division of space and time, object and subject, body and mind. The reality of space, body and mind is, in the absolute sense, the child of pansensitivity or transrealism. In the local sense, that relation is flipped, and the body is presented as the parent of the subjective mind.
With spacetime, the tent of pansensitive experience is normalized on one end, so that even though the ‘tent poles’ of significance and memory remain as defining the contours of the tent on top, all are now evened out on the bottom. The more primitive, ‘physical’ types of experience have lower amplitudes of significance compared to our experiences, so their variations are collapsed into mere statistical anomalies from our perspective. Our view of their physical time is a mechanical average, generic and lacking any tent-pole significance. Reducing experience to a single quantitative dimension of repetition and duration is the ultimate spatialization of time. With all privacy flattened to be available for public inspection, subjectivity is disenchanted and nomenalized. The figurative and the literal switch roles and the heroes journey is reduced to mere coordinates in a phase space.
The mistake we make is to import this bottom-level generic time into our own high-level proprietary frame. In the most ‘objective’, absolute sense, time radiates from experiential significance as memory and foreshadowing. Time circulates within experience like rhyme does through a poem. Substituting that raw animation for the expectation of rigorous clock-time is not a neutral act. It is an assumption about the universe which cascades through the psyche and civilization, improving and automating our exteriors while our interiority languishes in perpetual angst. Liberation from spacetime literalism might help us find a new way of tapping into larger, more intuitive senses of place and time.
A Formula for Qualia
To derive the formula for qualia or sensory affect, solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and bridge the Explanatory gap, I suggest that we try converting the mass-energy equivalence E=mc² from the public orientation and transpose it inward to the private orientation.
Energy (E) becomes w² which is “was and will be” (w = was or will be)
The Speed of light (c) becomes t = time = (still or never) = now or realism
Light* (c²) becomes t² “still and never again” or “stereo realism of now”
Mass (M) becomes æ = qualia = “like it”
Qualia = “like it was and will be, still and never again” =
another wording
Qualia = “Eternally signifies its past and future now”
This is about what Milan Kundera called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That our experience of the universe is either perpetually suspended above the paradox of an existence which is both perpetually vanishing forever in some sense and repeating forever in another. If c is the still ‘speed’ of here and now, then c² is the acceleration of here and now, the enrichment of the local now through the collective presence and absence of eternity
- Motive effect or will:
To derive will or motive: 
If qualia is “like it”, then square root of æ is what joins and divides the ‘like’ and the ‘it’. It is the dipole charge of ‘liking’ and ‘it-ing’ which we call desire or preference. The greater the liking, the more significance is projected onto the object, which is the imagined realization of a goal in time. Intention projects into the future, builds, and guides qualia.
Will = “(Maybe, or maybe not)(now or never)” = w = √æ t
Turning the private translation outward to Public/Western psychology so that interiority is undersignified as emergent epiphenomena, we get:
= Experience is simply what may and may not be happening for some time.
and
= Choosing = Right or wrong this time
The public-facing view of privacy reduces it to information processing. To those who have a private-facing view this is a flat and inadequate characterization. The former view is optimized for realizing spatial intelligence while the latter is optimized for appreciating timeless wisdom.
- Quality and Equality
Since qualia is about likeness and local equivalents, it can be said that qualia equals the differential between equality and all inequalities... æ = ‘d=’.
The kicker is that since equality is itself a quale (the spelling of e-quality is a clue), we can conceive of ‘=’ as quality which is externalized**, i.e. the differential is collapsed and the entire range of what it “is like” is interpreted as what “it actually is”. The Western-facing mind naturally prefers that which only tells it ‘like it is‘, so that public physics and information science will filter out as noise all that tries to tell ‘what it is like‘ (paging Ludwig Wittgenstein…). This commercialization of residential qualities has had many benefits, but it is a philosophy which has blinded itself, and intimidated many into ignoring the true nature of consciousness. It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s how private physics works. It’s how sense is made.
*The speed of light is c, but c², if taken literally, can be understood as light itself, reality, or making sense: producing stereo (solid) realism.
**Physically publicized, cropped, framed, stereotyped, commercialized, hardened to endure against the changing feelings that make up private time.
Physics in English
My current preoccupation. It kind of reads like a Magic 8 Ball…which seems like a good sign?
Tessellated Relativity
Whether it is material movement across space or sensory excitement through time, energy must always be a verb. We call it force or work, but that is a shortcoming of the Western fetish for nouns. Really, in my view all energy must be a *forcing* or *working* verb. While I fully appreciate the accusation that this is naive realism, I suggest that this is a foundational symmetry which can be inverted only for figurative purposes. No real energy should be considered noun-like, and all standard model visualizations which contradict this should be regarded as unreal. For this reason, I think that the assumption of the photon as an entity is an obstacle to rehabilitating the standard model to one which integrated the physics of privacy. In an ironic twist, we will have to re-educate ourselves to get used to the idea that the qualia of light and color is real, and photons are imaginary descriptions from an impossible frame of reference (the voyeur public subject).
What are the consequences of energy like? Radiance. Flow. Waves. What are waves? Either a frequency through time or a repeating shape across space. We know, however, that we don’t see photons as oscillating shapes, we see them as a shining, glowing, reflecting, or gleaming in our vision or a warming or burning in our feeling. That’s all about time. Looking at the sun, the intensity increases over time as our retina becomes more and more stimulated. The same is not true of mass. Mass ‘just sits there’ at some position in space. Unlike looking at the sun, the intensity of mass does not increase by itself over time, but rather it increases inversely to distance through space (gravity).
In a post energy particle model, mass and energy modify structures (matter in space) and qualify experiences (sensation through time), and are not free standing quantities emerging from a vacuum. Mass is convergent on a point within a structure, and energy is divergent from c (non-space, non-time) as a frequently recurring stimulus. I was thinking of calling this module of MSR “Tessellated Relativity”, as the inertial frames swing spacemass-ward and time-energyward, yielding the position v momentum exclusivity.
If that’s all true – and I think that it might be on the right track, then it can be used to illuminate the workings of how qualia and sensitivity are equivalent to transparency/entanglement with larger frames of time and higher spatial perspectives.
Colorball II Diagram
Key:
Absolute (+∞) :: Anesthetic (-∞)
Entelethetic (+3) :: Hypothetic (-3)
Aesthetic (+2) :: Exthetic (-2)
Immediate (+1) :: Etheric (-1)
Protosthetic (+0) :: Pseudethetic (-0)
The new terms in this second version are:
- Protosthetic (+0), referring to the minimum quality of awareness as well as the quality of minimum awareness. On a scale of +0* to +∞, this level is the +0 because it represents experiences which have been aesthetically masked to appear imperceptible. This can be thought of as the personal unconscious, as opposed to the collective unconscious, which is the Absolute level that is positioned on top of the diagram, but is actually the entire sphere. It’s number would be +∞.
The entire left half of the sphere can be thought of as a slice within the protosthetic range, just as the greyscale can be thought of as variations on black and white. - Pseudethetic (-0) is the outside-in version of Protosthetic. Where protosthetic phenomena seem alienated or unconscious but are, on some level, a symptom of experience, pseudethetic phenomena are not as conscious as they appear to be. The -0 range is about artifice and simulation, and can include anything from a puppet or stuffed animal to a sophisticated AGI system. Protosthetic would include states in which we are personally unconscious, but can be thought of as that which wakes us up from a sub-personal level.
- Exthetic (-2) is a term I’m trying out as the public-facing conjugate to Aesthetic. This is the common sense of structure that the real world generally seems to have. It is the sense of concrete exteriority which we rely on to engage with the world rather than in our mind. The sense of fixed mass objects in space and linear causality, and all of the other macroscopic cues that pervade classical physics, as well as all of the hard sciences.
- Entelethetic (+3) is intended to refer to a level of hyper-aesthetic dreams, symbols, and archetypes. Also knows as the collective unconscious or Dreamtime, this band of sensitivity is super-natural and trans-personal (yet still private). The word borrows from Entelechy, which has to do with a drive toward self-actualization, which is apt considering the visionary nature of this ‘third eye’ view.
Teleological-Absolute (+∞) :: Universal-Axiomatic (-∞)
Mytho-Poetic (+3) :: Geometric-Algebraic (-3)
Mental-Emotional (+2) :: Scientific-Mechanical (-2)
Sensory-Motive/Perceptual (+1) :: Electro-Magnetic/Relativistic (-1)
Proto-Aesthetic (+0) :: Quantum-Digital (-0)
Metaphor, Electricity, Sun and Moon…
Electrophoric Magnetemorphism
If you had walked up to someone living in prehistoric times and had a conversation about the Sun and the Moon, it would probably be an easy way of talking about the concept of opposites. It’s an embodied metaphor which is almost absurdly plain. The Sun, a featureless disk of blinding radiance, unchanging yet burning – it looks like it could be a circular window into pure and infinite energy. The Moon is like everything that the Sun is not like. Its changing phases reveal shapes and features on the surface, sometimes orb-like, sometimes disc-like. The Moon’s darkness reveals that it reflects and receives the Sun’s light rather than produces its own, and because of that, and its association with the night and the tides, seems cool, and silvery to the sun’s golden warmth. Moonlight isn’t bright enough to allow us to see color, as noted in that Moody Blues song:
Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is gray and yellow, white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion
How surprised a prehistoric astronomer would be to travel into the 21st century AD and find that all of that is complete horseshit. We now understand that most of what makes the Sun and Moon perfectly alike and unlike, from their similar apparent size to their duality, to their role in marking time and mytho-poetic extremes are purely coincidental. We just so happen to orbit one star, and be orbited by one natural satellite. The ratio of distance to size just happens to equal out so that the discs in the sky can often appear to be the same size, especially in conjunction. Indeed, the Sun is not only just an unremarkable star, but stars are just balls of exploding gas – huge spheres that have life cycles of their own.
There are some things that both the archaic and modern astronomer could use as a basis to preserve some symmetry of comparison. The Earth is to the Sun as the Moon is to the Earth as far as orbits are concerned. The Earth metabolizes the Suns energy with a biosphere generated atmosphere, where the Moon mainly reflects it.
The way that we treat the Sun and Moon now, compared to the way that humans had always treated them before science can be understood as a four dimensional dipole – a circuit through time, or really a meta-circuit since the dipole begins with a polar mytho-poetic understanding and ends with an elliptical mass-energetic understanding. Which leads me to some crazed ideas about electrostatic and magnetic force.
Notes on magnetism:
Watching the Khan Academy Introduction to Magnetism, I feel like I am finally making some headway into understanding the difference between electric and magnetic force. As he explains in the video, magnetic fields have are dipoles, they have North and South poles no matter how you break them up*. Electrostatic force is about positive and negative charge, but they can stand alone…at least (I’m thinking), alone at any given time.
What’s the difference? If we think of magnetic force as a spatial dipole, because its polarity is always adjacent, then why not think of electric charge as a dipole across time? But wait, it gets better. Because time is not fixed and is open ended, the electric metaphor poses charge like a question which can be answered at any time, and which wants to be answered and asked again and again. For the positively charged mass, negative charge exists as an image, an expectation of a presence which is currently absent but must eventually be present in the fullness of time (eternity, if necessary).
It could be said that the electric force, figuratively if not literally (but maybe literally, given a rehabilitated view of physics), creates time. It is the animation of circuitry. Electricity is algebraic and logical as it arcs from vector to vector directly, like a lightning bolt, hopping across gaps in logical steps. It is a path finder and path maker.
The magnetic force would then make sense as the creator or projector of space. It is the container of time, flattening cycles to circles. The magnetic force doesn’t draw lines, it aligns and orients, receives and presents spatial aesthetics to and from surrounding territories. If electricity is sensory motivation, then magnetism is motive sensation – a spatial feeling and knowing to match electrostatic being and doing.
Through Maxwell and then Einstein, we understand that these two modalities of interaction are the same thing but phase shifted by relativistic frame of reference. My understanding now leans toward seeing electricity as marking the “arctic” polar extremes in reference frames; the Innermost Metaphorical and the Outermost Binary kinds of relation, while magnetism presents the “tropic” counterpoint, describing how smaller and larger scaled bodies are nested within each other. Current flowing through a wire creates a magnetic force around the wire, it’s about the embodiment of the wire as a whole and how it relates to other macroscopically. The electric force is universal and infinitesimal, but it has no sense of figure and form, no orientation (needs a Ground).
This nugget came across my screen recently…it kind of makes sense, but I’ll leave that to you to interpret.
In Larry Niven’s story “The Kiteman,” we learn that the most important maxim in the Smoke Ring is: “East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East. North and South bring you back.”
Parting shot: Relativity is based on frames of reference, while Quantum Theory uses digital probability – eigenstates. Like magnetism and electricity, they are both the same thing seen from a different frame of reference. Together they describe how ‘reference’ is ‘framed’, but they both share the same blind spot, which is explaining what ‘ference’ is that these frames ‘re-fer’ to. I think that ference can only be one thing – not energy, and not information (which are really metaphors for spatial-magnetic and temporal-algebraic), but awareness itself: sensory-motive aesthetics.
*Some claim there might be magnetic monopoles also.
Multisense Realism 
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