Multisense Realism

(In response to the view of mechanical feedback being responsible for emotion.)

To my mind, this kind of ‘outside-in’ model of emotions has three fatal flaws. First, by the Behaviorist logic employed in the concept of ‘valences’, we should expect that if we create a machine that makes enough electric wheeled robots, eventually they will learn to seek sources to recharge itself. Since most people would agree that seems absurd, what I would call a ‘Deus ex Complexity’ counterargument would be compelled to plug the hole – something like ‘there is a minimum level of sophistication required before machines learn to adapt themselves’, but no real mechanism is offered to get from statistical randomness to the initial threshold of teleological motivation, nor a reason how such a threshold exists a priori, i.e. why does this magic recipe exist in the first place that changes repeating a-signifying flux into proprietary sequential signals?

Second, whether or not such a threshold exists, any subjective experience of emotion would be completely superfluous. If machines made of sticky ping pong balls eventually learn to avoid ping pong paddles, why should something feel some way about that avoidance? If we are going to go with this logic of physical mechanism, what is this redundant ‘sentiment’ doing suddenly inhabiting the process?

Third, even if such a sentiment could somehow improve the odds of success for machines (which to me again seems obviously absurd), how could such a thing come to pass? Where does it physically exist? How is it bound to matter and energy? If it’s some kind of metaphysical ’emergent property’ then how does the outside-in model have any explanatory power at all? Why not just say God did it?

I think that the only way we can entertain information-based theories of consciousness is by taking consciousness as a given, and extrapolating a Just-so story to convince ourselves that the some of the products of consciousness (information, behavior) could be it’s ultimate source. Running the scenario forward however yields no sign of a possible invention of experience in the exchange of automatic physical interactions. There really is no logical use for machines or arithmetic processes to benefit from experience over unconscious procedure calls. What seems ironic to me is that the cognitive biases which are so readily projected onto teleological arguments are somehow unquestioned with this bit of wishful thinking. Why is the mechanical puppeteer is never suspected of a Pinocchio complex?

Tracing back the etymological roots of words related to mental processes reveals some interesting patterns. The words understanding and interesting, for instance,  have almost the identical root. Under_, in this case, derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *nter, as does inter_, meaning between and within. As in ‘international’ or ‘under these conditions’, *nter conveys a connection between things which are in one sense ‘apart’ from each other and in another sense ‘a part’ of a larger whole.

To say ‘I don’t understand’ is passive: ‘I fail to internalize’, whereas ‘I am not interested’ invokes conscious intent: ‘I don’t care to internalize’. The difference between the root words stand and est refer us to this distinction between setting or settling within and being (es, is, essence) within. Interesting and understanding, like many terms we use for phenomenological processes* deal directly with the psyche’s ability to embrace things internally or to be captured or captivated by (taken within) something.

The question is, what interests us? What causes us to pay attention? The answer seems to be more complex, more in-volved, than we might assume.  A mechanistic approach might lead us to focus on things like acceleration of changes in amplitude of sensory input or the introduction of novelty against an established sensory pattern. These things can be easily studied with quantitative analysis and simulated through computation. There seems to be, however, another more important aspect which is not as easily studied because it is qualitative, synthetic, and figurative rather than literal.

I propose a direct correlation with interest level and personal identification, such that there is a continuum ranging from trivial interest to profound personal interest:

1. Universal attention-grabbing devices: To amplify the superficial physical form of a message. Raising the volume, increasing the size, color, animation, etc. Note that this generates only a short term interest, so that it must be repeated with high frequency.
2. Lowest common denominator solicitation methods: To exploit physiological references to figuratively amplify the effectiveness of a message through commonality. Food, sex, violence, broad comedy, socio-political identification.
3. Niche marketing: Targeting particular groups based on their shared behaviors and experiences. The more targeted the message, the more impact it can potentially interest the members of the group.
4. Biographical selection: An individual’s life experience can be thought of as a cumulative web or intertial frame of semantic constructs which both qualifies experience as it happens as well as identifies personally with it in an idiosyncratic way. This inertial build-up contributes to who we are by giving us reasons why we should or should not care about one thing or another. The more deeply something resonates with ourselves and our lives as a whole, the more it generates an abiding, long term interest.

*such as introspection, insight, intuition, importance, perception, apprehension, comprehension, attention, involving, engaging, informing

interest (n.)

mid-15c., “legal claim or right; concern; benefit, advantage;” earlier interesse (late 14c.), from Anglo-Fr. interesse “what one has a legal concern in,” from M.L. interesse “compensation for loss,” noun use of L. interresse “to concern, make a difference, be of importance,” lit. “to be between,” from inter- “between” (see inter-) + esse “to be” (see essence). Cf. Ger. Interesse, from the same M.L. source. Form in English influenced 15c. by Fr. interest “damage,” from L. interest “it is of importance, it makes a difference,” third person singular present of interresse. Financial sense of “money paid for the use of money lent” (1520s) earlier was distinguished from usury (illegal under Church law) by being in reference to “compensation due from a defaulting debtor.” Meaning “curiosity” is first attested 1771. Interest group is attested from 1908; interest rate by 1959.

interest (v.)

“to cause to be interested,” c.1600, earlier interesse (1560s), from the noun (see interest (n.)). Perhaps also from or influenced by interess’d, pp. of interesse.

essence

late 14c., essencia (respelled late 15c. on French model), from L. essentia “being, essence,” abstract noun formed in imitation of Gk. ousia “being, essence” (from on, gen. ontos, prp. of einai “to be”), from essent-, prp. stem of esse “to be,” from PIE *es- (cf. Skt. asmi, Hittite eimi, O.C.S. jesmi, Lith. esmi, Goth. imi, O.E. eom “I am;” see be). Originally “substance of the Trinity,” the general sense of “basic element of anything” is first recorded in English 1650s, though this is the base meaning of the first English use of essential.

intelligence (n.)

late 14c., “faculty of understanding,” from O.Fr. intelligence (12c.), from L. intelligentia, intellegentia “understanding, power of discerning; art, skill, taste,” from intelligentem (nom. intelligens) “discerning,” prp. of intelligere “to understand, comprehend,” from inter- “between” (see inter-) + legere “choose, pick out, read” (see lecture). Meaning superior understanding, sagacity” is from early 15c. Sense of “information, news” first recorded mid-15c., especially “secret information from spies” (1580s). Intelligence quotient first recorded 1921 (see I.Q.).

intuition

mid-15c., from L.L. intuitionem (nom. intuitio) “a looking at, consideration,” noun of action from pp. stem of L. intueri “look at, consider,” from in- “at, on” (see in- (2)) + tueri “to look at, watch over” (see tuition).

insight (n.)

c.1200, innsihht, “sight with the eyes of the mind,” mental vision, understanding,” from in + sight. Sense shaded into “penetrating understanding into character or hidden nature” (1580s).

Two more reasons to suspect that consciousness is received through the brain directly as primitive sense rather than decoded as complex information.

“The data from the seven participants were unambiguous. Paying attention to the target consistently and strongly increased the fMRI activity, regardless of whether the subject saw the target or not. This result was expected because many previous studies had shown that attending to a signal reinforces its representation in the cortex. Much more intriguing, though, was that whether or not the stimulus was consciously perceived made no difference to signal strength. Visibility didn’t matter to V1; what did was whether or not selective visual attention focused on the grating. Indeed, the experimentalists could not decode from the signal whether or not the subject saw the stimulus.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=consciousness-does-not-reside-here

“We expected to see the outer bits of brain, the cerebral cortex (often thought to be the seat of higher human consciousness), would turn back on when consciousness was restored following anesthesia. Surprisingly, that is not what the images showed us. In fact, the central core structures of the more primitive brain structures including the thalamus and parts of the limbic system appeared to become functional first, suggesting that a foundational primitive conscious state must be restored before higher order conscious activity can occur”

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/aof-sst040412.php

(Reblogging myself)

The key to understanding what is wrong with the contemporary occidental view of consciousness is that it is so enamored with the idea of representation that it overlooks presentation itself. To say that feeling, seeing, and thinking are mere representations for neurological processes makes perception irrelevant, superfluous, metaphysical, and unexplainable. It makes more sense to me that the neurological processes and the conscious experiences they are associated with are both presentations in their own right, and also representations of each other.

Music is a good example. The experience of hearing music is the presentation that we care about. We can record music by any number of encoding methods, but all of them are only representations of music if they end up being listened to by a person who can hear music. If not, they are meaningless digital etchings or published notations. To say that these generic data sets are the actual music and our enjoyment of the song is just a ‘representation’ of the data or the physical consequence of reconstituting the data through an acoustic mechanism is an arbitrary and unscientific prejudice.

This item that I posted a couple days ago illustrated how dominant the verbal-semantic sense channel is our consciousness:

Our default tendency is to privilege the abstraction of language over the concrete reality of visual sense. This is a clue to how consciousness works, with conflicting agendas and dynamic protocols of influence. The brain is nothing like a digital computer. It has no discrete values and computations stored in registers. It’s made of affiliated groups of living cells which can learn, guess, feel, grow, have preferences, etc.

These affiliations present us and our bodies with many figurative channels through which perception and participation is input and output, shared seamlessly in both bottom-up and top-down interactions. Your eyes tell you B-L-U-E in one sense, but they show you green through another. You have learn to consciously override the default privilege of the cognitive semantic channel, even though it is incorrect by its own logic, to honor the minority voice of the factual perception.

I think that this is exactly what is going on with the occidental or OMMM view of consciousness. Our ‘west-handed’ objective cognition is so dominant that it has to stop itself from running roughshod over the ‘east-handed’ subjective awareness, even when the subject is subjectivity itself. The occidental mind would rather accept the nonsense proposition that its acceptance or rejection of propositions is random or deterministic than entertain the possibility of the self as genuine agency. By focusing on awareness only as means to an end (evolutionary biology, functionalism, materialism, computationalism) the concrete experience of perception is de-presented to an epiphenomenon in our consideration. It’s similar to religious fundamentalism, even though it is based on belief in disbelief rather than naive belief. Extreme religiosity also advocates a de-presentation of the world to privilege the contrary ontology (idealism). Instead of the self deferring its existence to a-signifying mechanics, religious de-presentation of the self favors of a super-signifying spiritual agenda (heaven, maya, reincarnation, redemption) which has the same result of making the individual an inconsequential fragment of a greater agenda. The occidental true believer, pitched toward some flavor of transhumanism, promises the same paradise of virtualized perception as the oriental true believer; all of the superlative qualities of perception of an external realism but with the absolute safety and omnipotence associated with introspective experience. The best of both worlds.

With multisense realism, we avoid the pathological unrealism of de-presentational monosense and discover the option of being grounded both in the here and now as well as being free and significant in the eternal there and then without confusing or conflating the two. We can enjoy the full range of scientific sophistication without sacrificing any of the magic and mystery of our uniquely wonderful/horrible life journey.

20th Century Perception Model

Visual sense is an ’emergent’ (unexplained) ‘representation’ of neurological computations based on optics and conditioning.
Photons smack into molecules in the rod and cone cells into the retina which mechanically trigger a succession of electrochemical ‘signals’ through the cells of the optic nerve and visual cortex.
The process is deterministic and passive until it gets to the cortex, where the signals are actively interpreted through cognitive associations, memory, innately hardwired pattern matching, etc. The final computations are interpreted in such a way as to somehow re-present a simplified reconstruction of the aggregate distribution of trillions of photons, their energy states, location, and geometric groupings into a dynamic narrative.
What this model fails to consider is that there is no original presentation to be simulated. It takes for granted the very perception process it purports to explain, leaving the ‘Hard Part’ to fend for itself in the dark hole left from the extraction of the cerebral Homunculus. It is not clear why such a representation would be useful if the brain can both encode and decode the information it contains, nor is it explained where this final reconstructive simulation takes place…where do the colors come from?

Multisense Perception Model

Once we turn reality right-side up, so that the information and data is the abstract representation of the concrete images, colors, and forms which present themselves to us visually, we can see that the photon model may not be the best model as far as visual perception is concerned.
In the Multisense model, human scale awareness is parallel and concurrent with the subordinate levels of sense being experienced by organs, cells, and molecules. There are no collisions of photons, only photosensitive molecules responding interactively with the changes in their physical environment. They are blooming and shrinking in synch with all of the exposed surfaces that are illuminating them. We are seeing though our eyes, their cells, and their molecules – all of them direct descendants of a single dividing zygote – all of them parts of ‘us’.
In the picture, the pink represents receptive sensitivity and the yellow is intentional motive. We see someone smile and are able to feel an emotion through the smile just as we are able to see an image through pixels or cells. Our sense capacities bridge the gap – mirror neurons, sure, but mirroring what? Signals are what? Feelings. That’s all they are. Experiences. Ours are big and deep and complicated but I think that the principle is the same all the way down to the atom. We see, we feel, we respond.
There is no quantum smile ensemble that physically travels from one person’s mouth to another person’s eye. It would certainly seem like their must be if we looked at it from a completely foreign perspective. We would assume, as physicists do, a purely literal universe of mechanical possibilities and devise exhaustive analyses to predict smile probabilities. Those probabilities would probably work quite well. It is certainly possible to figure out unifying principles of how often and under what circumstances smiles are returned and how glances become entangled.
If instead we take our own experience as a template for real experiences of electromagnetic activity in a biochemical context (and isn’t that what it really is?) and imagine that it evolved from a hierarchy of simpler subjective forms, we arrive at a microcosm which has a figurative, interpretive side as well as a literal, mechanical side. It’s not that hard to conceive of to me. Matter and space on the outside, sense and time on the inside. What’s the big problem?
The key is to realize that the sense of the inside is very different, 100% opposite in fact, from the sense of the outside. It scales up differently. Interior sense doesn’t accumulate like Lego blocks, adding more and more discrete details on different scales. It works the opposite way, condensing qualitatively so that each moment presents a rich, multiplexed narrative of worlds and characters. It peels away appearances to point to deeper semantic connections.
Think of how we recognize a smile in another person’s face with layers of subtle meaning – projected emotions and motives which we share. We can tell when other primates smile too, but it gets a little more fanciful the further out from our own species we go. It seems like a dog or a dolphin is smiling, but who knows for sure. All we can do is have a sense of what might be sharable.
On an atomic level, I would imagine a much more mathematical range of possibilities, but that could just be anthropocentric. What we see of an atom’s smile through a photomultiplier may not be even 1% of the story, just as the movement of facial muscles and optical recognition circuitry in the brain are not even 1% of who we are and why we smile.