Multisense Realism

I think like most people, the idea of inanimate objects having consciousness to be a prospect that at best seems hard to swallow.  I don’t rule it out as impossible, but I think that something else is going on.

Objects in the Anthrocosm – In the last century, physics has been whittling away at naive realism to an almost perverse degree. For most sane adults during waking hours, the conditions of our experience are defined to a great degree by moving our body around in the context of solid objects, yet after the revelations of quantum mechanics, we are increasingly being put upon to accept that not only is this not exactly as it seems, it is exactly the opposite. Rather than solid bodies separated by a void of space, science sees a universe where the void is filled with staggering amounts of energy. Vacuum fluctuation. Virtual particles. Not to mention dark matter and dark energy, black holes, and a host of wave-particles that challenge the notion of existence.

Likewise, contemporary physics assures that solid matter itself is almost completely empty space (99.999999999999%), and that any residual substance is really more of charged, spinning tendencies to exist that tend to occur probabilistically. Despite many good theories and interpretations, the transformation from this microcosmic un-world of overflowing vacuums and particles spun out of nothing but charge into the familiar human scale world remains an open question.  The hard problem of matter is the same as the hard problem of consciousness. Why should there be any experience or events or wavefunction collapse at all?

This is where panpsychism comes in as well. The puzzle of the extent to which we, as human beings are qualified to pass judgment on what is or is not a being is questionable. Indeed, the human race has had an abysmal record of recognizing its own common humanity even within its own species, let alone other organisms. When it comes to understanding inorganic systems, some of which are quite complex (imagine some of these growing in time-lapse over thousands of years), our intuitions about them may be no more accurate than our view of our own world is in matching the underlying physical reality.

Sample Rate – As with most things in physics and in consciousness, frequency and scale are critical. A crystal looks static to our naked eye, but we know they grow over time. A rock looks like a generic non-entity, but we know that it is part of vast mineral deposits that have accumulated in the Earth’s crust over geological spans of time. What we see as human beings would be like an instantaneous snap shot in the ‘life’ of the Earth as a whole, which itself might appear even more majestically Gaian at 1000 human year frames per second. By the same token, to something on a bacterial scale, our body might appear as a vast ancient landscape of somatic canyons and cellular rivers.

I would stop short of claiming any kind of ‘Horton Hears A Who’ full-scale anthropomorphism though. I would not discount our sense that despite the recurring themes of isomorphism in nature, we never encounter an exact re-run. Ants and bees have their sophisticated civil colonies and perform many human-like functions, but they don’t appear to be building any satellite dishes or microwave ovens. There are differences that seem to go beyond aesthetics or phylogenetic prejudice. It seems absurd and it seems like there is a good reason that it seems that way. That isn’t a logical argument, but it is the argument that makes sense to us nonetheless. It isn’t so clear cut when we get into deciding what or who we should feel comfortable eating, but there too, individual sense seems to have a way of guiding us eventually to more sane practices.

One of the most fundamental metrics that we use to determine what is ok to eat vs pet vs makes friends with has to do with size and frequency. People have generally liked to eat animals with four legs that are smaller than an elephant and larger than a rat, which are also slower than a hummingbird. Things that are very large and change slowly, like a mountain, are hard to relate to as a subject. With our complex, fast organic nervous system, very few things in the natural world could probably relate to us as a subject.

Our native conscious awareness sampling rate probably ranges between 10 Hz and 0.001 Hz, but if I’m right, it is perception which ultimately defines time and not the other way around. This is not to say that if we feel time is slowing down that other things will act like they are slowing down too compared to each other, but that our lives are made up of moments of our conscious attention which expand and contract the now as they relate to our inner narrative. Significance distorts the density of experienced time, not only in the moment but in the recollections and reverberations, the retelling and rehearsing. To signify is to present in figurative deceleration (increasing metaphorical mass or import with more cycles per second to saturate qualia more deeply), and to re-present with reflected luminosity (longevity, intensity, and recursiveness in memory).

Top Down Influence – My conjecture is that sense-motive experience may originate not only through ordinary feed-forward causation from the past to the present, but that awareness is also drawing us forward from outside of time (or outside of our time). If we think of the cosmos one level as a single gigantic moment, (and there is nothing to make us suppose that it doesn’t exist as that outside of our human frame of reference), then our being embedded in that moment requires that our lives be shaped in some way by the larger agendas as well as the smaller ones. Just as our bodies are enveloped by the biosphere, atmosphere, solar system, and galaxy, so too our ~100 yr lives are nested within larger cycles which correspond not only to astrophysical frequencies, but cultural, social, and personal frequencies.

We are enmeshed in a multi-speed anthrocosm, which extends internally as the personality, mind, subconscious, and unconscious psyche. The deep unconscious seems to merge with the transpersonal, foreshadowing with intuition, apprehension, enthusiasm, etc. Luck. In this way, panpsychism follows not as a kind of charge in matter but as a charge in experience. That charge is significance, working, as mentioned above, by saturating qualitative depth using apparent temporal deceleration (giving you more time to prevaricate before getting on the doomed plane, etc), figurative luminosity (spiritual ‘glow’, ‘shine’, ‘light’, etc), and other signifiers which ring out with earvurm-like reverberation.

Synchronicity – What all this means to me about synchronicity is that what you might interpret as fate or God communicating with you (known as ideas of reference as a symptom of schizophrenia or delusional mania) is actually about the gears of your life, so to speak, meshing with the gears of all other beings on all other scales of time – some of which are, relative to your conscious mind, insisting from ‘the future’. This is not so much a communication as a sensitivity to the rhythms of sentience pushed into overdrive.  Not to say that synchronicity, as a meaningful coincidence, can’t be a valid persuasion to the conscious mind, but that it isn’t necessarily a sign that you are on the right track or are being guided intentionally. It can often be just the opposite, leading to many catastrophic decisions which defy common sense.

How I think it might work is that the relation between repetition, variation, and augmentation are what make signalling and significance possible. From reproductive success in biology to things like celebrity (the etymology of celebrate links notions of praise, popularity, and frequency) and beauty, we are programmed to pay attention to superlative sense experiences. We concentrate on what is concentrated already. For us to allow novelty into our awareness, as when a long term cycle of our life is ending or beginning, it tends to happen through synchronous foreshadowing. No just coincidence that you notice but coincidences that you notice that you notice more than usual.

We can still think of this as God whispering in our ear if we like, or angels protecting us, or meaningless noise, but if I’m on the right track, we can also look at it as the chime of an inner clock striking a new hour.  If we listen for every chime, every tick of the clock, we court madness. If we dismiss it altogether, we won’t know what time it is and may not appreciate the full richness of our own narrative and its connection with the events of the world.

A deja vu experience, even as a neurologically caused event, has the phenomenological experience that is the same thing as synchronicity. Like an acoustic vibration that surrounds us, the larger inertial frames of our perception (our lifetime, family history, evolution, etc) can resonate through resonance from either the future or the past. Like an earthquake, the changes which have accumulated may shift under our feet, erupting in perceptions which expose some distant strata of our psyche.

Taken together, the ideas of panspychism and synchronicity can both be seen as different aspects of the how subjectivity may propagate through spatio-temporal echo. A universe of worlds within worlds which nonetheless presents the wholeness of the totality within each world must have some bleed-through among the various forms and layers.  I suggest that significance and entropy act as conductor and insulator respectively, of this capacity to experience wholeness. The experience itself can be modeled in terms of a continuum between literal (flat signal) objectivity and metaphorical (deep signal) subjectivity. In a human psyche, too much crosstalk or bleed through of this sensitivity can result in naive or magical thinking, while too much insulation can result in a lack of compassion and a dogmatic approach. At one extreme, the panpsychism of the cosmos and the synchronicity of one’s own life become too literally real, while at the other, all vitality and meaning are sequestered and compulsively denied.

Pine needle. Light micrograph of a transverse section through a leaf (needle) of a pine tree (Pinus sp.). The leaves are needle-like in order to present a large surface area for photosynthesis but prevent too much water loss (transpiration). They have an epidermis (orange) of thick walled cells covered with a thick layer of cuticle. The mesophyll layer (green) under the epidermis is made up of parenchyma cells with in-folded walls, in-between these are resin canals (white circles). The vascular cylinder (centre) is surrounded by the endodermis (blue) which regulates water and mineral movement. Under the endodermis are two vascular bundles made up of phloem sieve cells (blue) and xylem tracheids (red). Magnification: x46 when printed 10 centimetres wide.

Dead Stars

This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the scattered remains of an exploded star named Cassiopeia A. Spitzer’s infrared detectors “picked” through these remains and found that much of the star’s original layering had been preserved.

In this false-color image, the faint, blue glow surrounding the dead star is material that was energized by a shock wave, called the forward shock, which was created when the star blew up. The forward shock is now located at the outer edge of the blue glow. Stars are also seen in blue. Green, yellow and red primarily represent material that was ejected in the explosion and heated by a slower shock wave, called the reverse shock wave.

The picture was taken by Spitzer’s infrared array camera and is a composite of 3.6-micron light (blue); 4.5-micron light (green); and 8.0-micron light (red).

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Minn.

A good visual representation of my hyperconjecture that the development of significance is an accumulation through time and entropy is a dispersal across space. In the case of significance, I think that it originates both at the ‘beginning’ of time and feeds forward (standard causation) as well as originating at the ‘end’ of time and draws backward (retrocausation). I suspect that standard causation is literal and factual, and that retrocausation is actually figurative and ‘fictional’ (both more and less real than fact – foreshadowing, memory, etc).

From these two anchor points of singularity/totality, everythingness is divided and multiplied by nothingness, which can be seen in the division of nuclear-isomorphic/radial symmetric patterns. Multiplicity tends to propagate outward from unity.

Note that these patterns only suggest significance to us because we are conscious human beings who can see them. They may not be very significant to a cat. I would say that is because humans are further up the chain, working with a larger curd of significance that gives us access to the thinner air of esoteric mysteries and technical precision which exist (really insist) higher up the food chain toward the singularity.

In contrast, dead stars, even though they take time to die, could not explode if they were confined to a single space. An explosion occurs in an instant (in star time – ie a single moment in a star’s inertial frame, a scale I’m saying ticks off in terms of events that matter to the experiencer rather than a universal indexical scale like seconds or millenia).

With the pine needle cross section, even though we are only seeing a relatively meaningless moment in time, we can infer something of a biological narrative, building this idiosyncratic, private history which is purposeful-teleological and negentropic. With the pine needle, it seems to us that something cares about what it is doing, while the images of exhausted stars blasting into an oblivion of infinitesimal fragments has more of the sense of release and randomness – a scattering into the void. This is a pattern which seeks the perpendicular axis to the singularity-everythingness. It seeks a-signifying, generic, nullification.

Color, Qualia, and Attention: A Non-standard Interpretation

Austen Clark, University of Connecticut.

Abstract. A standard view in philosophy of mind is that qualia and phenomenal character require consciousness. This paper argues that various experimental and clinical phenomena can be better explained if we reject this assumption. States found in early visual processing can possess qualitative character even though they are not in any sense conscious mental states. This non-standard interpretation bears the burden of explaining what must be added to states that have qualitative character in order to yield states of sensory awareness or sensory experience. I argue that the study of selective attention reveals resources that can be useful in that project. Two traditional objects are briefly considered.

An interesting line of thought on the role of selective awareness or paying attention in defining what we mean by qualia. The author brings up blindsight and describes the difference between the Standard Interpretation (quoting David Chalmers “‘To be conscious’ in this sense is roughly synonymous with ‘to have qualia’…”) and his Non-Standard interpretation which allows for a measure of ‘liquidity’ in sensation as modulated by attention. In this way, Clark explains how phenomena like blindsight can give us functional sight capacities without the phenomenological experience of seeing.

I suggest another Non-Standard interpretation, different from both mentioned views, in which it is not a question of whether it is qualia or not but whose qualia it is. In blindsight, I would say that the subject is not consciously aware of the optical stimuli at all, so there is no qualia for them, but that doesn’t mean that there are not experiences at the sub-conscious, or sub-personal level which have qualia.

What has been damaged is the connection between one area of the brain and another, but rather than a monolithic model of consciousness that sees a short-circuit preventing all access to identifying signals, I suggest a model of human consciousness that uses many overlapping channels of perception and meta-perception. Just as we may know something but have difficulty recalling it into conscious awareness, we feel the connection tantalizingly ‘on the tip of our tongue’. A quick Googling or mention by someone else can yield an instant positive match. There is a continuum of possible extents to which we are aware of what we are aware or not aware of. What falls outside of our direct awareness in one sense modality can manifest in other sense channels or even cached in general intuitive potential sense which does not present itself unless prompted.

Where Clark gets into attending to or directing focus, he says “to ‘pay attention to’ x is to alter the configuration of gates and channels inside one’s head so that representations of x, and not of other things, receive the benefit of further central processing.”. I like the direction he is going with pointing out the inhibitory function of attention and compare it with my own ideas about subtractive mechanics. I would model paying attention as a manipulation of your own ‘tolerance aperture’. The more you pay attention to something, the more tolerant you become to changes outside of your focus so that intense changes can still get your attention but the threshold for it is directly proportional to the intensity of your focus.

In addition to a higher threshold for distraction, I would say that there is a contraction of proprietary investment. We can sit on our leg in a funny way for a long time, vaguely aware of our discomfort, but for that time when we are otherwise mentally occupied, the discomfort is somewhat disowned. We may in fact be passively dissociating our entire leg on a temporary basis.

Besides the nuanced tug of war between personal level or executive processing level of awareness and the subconscious levels, I would have to say that even our top level awareness is part of a larger schema of consciousness than we can empirically test. Just as we may sense that a word is on the tip of our tongue, we may feel that something feels off about the whole day but we don’t know what. We may not even be aware that we feel that way until something happens that crystallizes the foreshadowed event.

These kinds of passive constellations of unfelt feelings or unknown intuitions I include in the concept of inertial frames of perception. Rather than redrawing our life anew every moment, I think that we retain our experiences like a tapestry, we are the embodiment of it in fact, so that when something changes us the part which is changed feels it directly. The memory of who we were and are is addressed directly, as if pulling on the thread that runs through many areas of the weave.

Tying these concepts of selective attention and perception, I turn to my concept of sense-motive dynamics. Clark says “In the guard caught unawares the channels between the receipt of sensory information and the engagement of selective attention, are, unfortunately, closed, or at least attenuated”. The receipt of sensory information corresponds to afferent (incoming) sensation or ‘sense’ while the outbound ‘engagement of selective attention’ is what I call ‘motive’. The transition from passive receipt to active engagement can be understood when we see that the notion of mere receipt of sense data is not adequate. That kind of description only accounts for ‘information’ and not who it is that is being informed. It presumes a modular-fragmented information processing model rather than an integral-gestalt significance model. Experience is not generic ‘input’, it is participatory theater on many levels of simultaneous interpretation.

Where he talks about perceptual representations having a figurative liquidity, I say let it be concrete. What we pay attention to are not representations but presentations in their own right – human scale presentations with anthropological caliber significance. What is increased through the intensity, exclusivity, and proprietary investment of our attention is the motive power of those presentations. This is the interior correlate to energy. I have referred to energy as ‘the show’ – how the vast latent potential of all events is actualized as a ‘here and now’ live show. We do the same thing with our awareness, converting one form of attention to another, concentrating our oceanic sense passivity into a narrow motive sequence.

“because they are based on “common sense” notions that have repeatedly shown to be almost irrelevant”
The idea that a meaningful pattern might be based on what has been repeatedly shown is itself nothing but common sense. Can we cite common sense to invalidate itself?

To me the likely answer is that causality itself is an aspect of sense-making, which is contingent upon time-space expansion (ultimately an inward diffracting experienced internally as time and externally as space). Causality doesn’t need a cause, so that the universe never ‘came into existence’ – rather existence continuously fragments, projecting a figurative inference of unity behind it and heat death ahead of it