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Metanoia: A New Vision of Nature
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff1Z8nGGebs
It’s great to hear someone make liberal use of the words ‘sensible’ and ‘sense making’ in describing nature. I like the point that he makes about simulations of evolution improve when the software and hardware improves. He seems to share my view that ‘the universe has to make sense before we can make sense of it’. He even hints at what I call eigenmorphism in saying that “if we only focus on the random changes in the code underlying a virtual organism, we will only see chance at work, whereas if we focus on the entire system, we will see intelligence at work.” 23:30
I would disagree with the idea that ‘consciousness’ evolves, unless we are using that word to mean ‘the set of hypertrophied human psychological traits’. Also I use ‘pansensitivity’ rather than ‘natural intelligence’ because I think that the foundation of nature is semi- rather than fully teleological. Intelligence to me implies a cognitive sensibility of intentional learning, where I would attribute the morphological consequences of evolution to sensual responsiveness. I doubt that sea slug is engrossed in aloof deliberation about when the most judicious time to squirt ink all over the place, I would be more inclined to assume that the gap between intuition and urge is much thinner than in our own human experience. Intelligence seems to me a state which arises out of the midrange between the sub-personal desires and the super-personal hunches. Intelligence puts the brakes on the excesses of both ranges, but evolution itself seems to have no such restraint.
These are minor differences though, overall, great stuff, impressive production – check it out.
So the followin…
So the following disjunctive conclusion is inevitable: Either mathematics is incompletable in this sense, that its evident axioms can never be comprised in a finite rule, that is to say, the human mind (even within the realm of pure mathematics) infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine, or else there exist absolutely unsolvable diophantine problems of the type specified . . . (Gödel 1995: 310)
Minds, Machines and Gödel, First published in Philosophy, XXXVI, 1961, pp.
The Lucas-Penrose Argument about Gödel’s Theorem, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
To me it’s clear from the above quote that Gödel understands incompleteness as revealing that mathematics is not completable in the sense that it is not enough to contain the reality of human consciousness. I disagree with those who use incompleteness to suggest the opposite position, that incompleteness demonstrates the incompleteness of the powers of human approximation to contain the grandeur of computable truth. Certainly human understanding is limited, but that our understanding of the limitations of arithmetic mechanism is part of what falls outside of that limit.
Proving that we cannot prove ourselves consistent assumes, erroneously, that doubt is not also a form of belief which depends on an expectation of consistency. The mistake that is often made, in the Western mind’s eye, is that since belief in belief is the ultimate bad, then belief in disbelief must be the ultimate good. This bit of Manichean simplicity is exacerbated when the skeptic no longer sees their own skepticism as a form of belief, and takes it for granted that absolute doubt is possible, reasonable, and independent of unscientific bias.
Even the term ‘belief’ is a second order logic which presumes a first order doubt beneath any given feeling, thought, understanding, intuition, etc. We can see that we should question our own authority, but we forget that authority includes the very authority to question itself, and that such an inescapable authority can only be more primitive than either fact or fiction. Before fact can be wrestled from fiction, or fiction can be confabulated from fact, there must be a capacity to discern one from the other, and that capacity cannot be fiction. Descartes, in my view, didn’t go far enough in saying “Je pense donc je suis”, because it doesn’t specify whether I exist in thought, whether thought exists in me, or whether, as I suggest, thought and I are distinctions of sense which are within the primordial pansensitivity that underlies both uni- and -verse.
Instead of seeing the limits of our human perspective as evidence that all privacy is solipsistic and isolated, I suggest that our perspective is imperfect only to the extent that it is human. When we compare human perceptions to the low level common behaviors of measured objects, then there is a lot that we can learn from physics which we could not learn from human introspection alone.
The fallacy is to conflate our human ignorance with the superiority of measurement to sensation and to overlook that the ontology of measurement supervenes on some form of sensation. Once we compare (absolute experiential) apples to (absolute measurable) apples, we find that the latter cannot be more complete than the former. Physics and math are more complete than human experience, but as they are only experiences in which other experiences are reduced and measured to a generic abstraction, they are less complete than experience itself. No map of France actually leads to Paris, no matter how precise the directions are. A map of France can only contain a map of Paris, and a map of Paris can’t be Paris itself, because it is only a pattern built from generic measurements which do not know anything about Paris itself.
Topography of Eigenmorphism Part II
Another visual metaphor:
Eigenmorphism visualization part II
This diagram shows how elemental phenomena (bottom image) appear to us to have very little going on inside. Their public properties are not very body-like and their behaviors are imagined not to be very experiential. Eigenmorphism is the idea that as phenomena progress to richer experiential qualities, their interior and exterior nature expands in opposite directions. In biological organisms, the public and private view not only differ by perspective, but the interior perspective can increasingly elaborate itself (spiral grows) without the exterior perspective (square shadow) revealing any change.
It should be noted that this is a metaphor, not a diagram of matter or quantum. What the yellow wall refers to is actually shapeless, as it is the appreciation of and participation in experiences. The increasing elaboration of the shape stands for increasingly rich and varied modalities of sensitivity. MSR suggests that the three dimensional figure in the center is not real at all, and a better diagram would show the shadow from the blue wall and the shadow from the yellow wall gradually morphing into each other in stages.
The difference between the high and low ends of the eigenmorphic spectrum are not only in the degree to which their interior qualities differ from their exterior properties, or in the kinds of qualities which higher experiences contain, but also in ubiquity vs uniqueness. The generic nature of low level phenomena make them comparatively interchangeable and universal, so that physical and mathematical laws have a universal reach. The highest level phenomena can be esoteric to the point of near-solipsism, with meanings that are so multiplexed and poetic that they apply only to a single moment or perspective.
The Keys to Sensitivity
Chroma key compositing typically uses a green or blue screen to key a particular color to be recorded as transparent. In the example above, I have placed green keys on a cosmic (astrophysical + microphysical) background to give an idea of how to conceive of the relation between publicized and privatized experience.
The green of the keys represents the intrinsically singular sensitivity which is ‘behind’ the key silhouettes, just as wearing a green shirt on camera in front of a green screen chroma key will, in a sense, portray your shirt as a ‘receiver’ of the composite image.
This metaphor is closer to what I propose for psychophysical unity – not so much a Receiver theory of consciousness where the brain acts as an antenna for metaphysical signals, or an Emergent theory of consciousness where brain functions accumulate as a representation of signals, but as a Divergent theory in which sensitivity is whole within its private frame of reference, but fragmented across what appears to be space and time from the perspective of a similarly keyed sensitivity*.
Consider that if you are far enough away from a mosaic, it looks like an image, but if you are very close, you see only colored tiles. The difference in spatial ratios on our visual sense influences whether we see the artist private-personal intentions to express the picture’s content, or their public-impersonal technique in placing tiles. If instead of a static mosaic tiles, we think of it as a dynamic television screen of pixels, the metaphor can be extended through narrative time. The pixels do not tell a story, but the image does…over time…to a human audience.
The pixels are not “producing” the story, nor are they “receiving” it, although there is both receiving and projecting of electromagnetic sensations on the public-impersonal level. The complexity of the sequence of patterns on the screen also does not produce the story either, and no amount of complication within the hardware will cause stories to be experienced, just as no degree in the complication of a plot will cause the story itself to become sensitive. Patterns are representations within experience, not experiences themselves. Consciousness is not the green of the key, it is the transparent sensitivity that the green represents. If there is receiving or emerging, it is sensitivity receiving sensitivity, and sensitivity emerging from sensitivity.
*Sensitivity here could mean ‘person’ or ‘observer’ but I want to make it clear that what I propose does not depend on human like experience. I see all forms of observation as participation, and I want to break the automatic association that we have between experience and Homo sapiens personal subjectivity. For pansensitivity to replace energy or information as the primordial identity, it must be understood that all objects, forms, and physical conditions diverge from the totality of sense (not just primitive sub-personal sense, but the whole band of sub-personal, personal, super-personal, and impersonal sense).
Deepak Chopra Responds to Pseudoscience Allegations
Deepak Chopra Responds to Pseudoscience Allegations
Another battle of the worldviews thread I have wound up in.
Abstract Submitted for TSC 2014
Abstract Title: Multisense Realism: Ultimate Topics In Consciousness
Primary Topic Area: [01.02]……..Ontology of consciousness
Secondary Topic Area: [01.07]……..The ‘hard problem’ and the explanatory gap
Abstract: Multisense Realism (MSR) is intended to pick up where panpsychism leaves off. Consisting of an informal framework of core concepts developed from diverse influences such as semiotics, neuroscience, and anthropology, MSR proposes a united continuum of physics and phenomenology. MSR addresses five problems (The Hard Problem of Consciousness, The Explanatory Gap, The Combination or Binding Problem, The Symbol Grounding Problem, and the Mind Body Symmetry Problem) as a single Presentation Problem, while exposing fundamental flaws in popular competing approaches. MSR aspires to be a universal meta-theory which reconciles the plausible and the absurd under the umbrella of a single irreducible synthetic a priori, and in the process reinterprets the number one, the Big Bang, and the ontology of light.
Other Authors:
Key words: consciousness;philosophy;philosophy of mind;physics;metaphysics;cosmology;qualia;panpsychism;theory of everything
My comment on Can we trust our senses?
My comment on Can we trust our senses? :
Strong AI Position
It may not be possible to imitate a human mind computationally, because awareness may be driven by aesthetic qualities rather than mathematical logic alone. The problem, which I call the Presentation Problem, is what several outstanding issues in science and philosophy have in common, namely the Explanatory Gap, the Hard Problem, the Symbol Grounding problem, the Binding problem, and the symmetries of mind-body dualism. Underlying all of these is the map-territory distinction; the need to recognize the difference between presentation and representation.
Because human minds are unusual phenomena in that they are presentations which specialize in representation, they have a blind spot when it comes to examining themselves. The mind is blind to the non-representational. It does not see that it feels, and does not know how it sees. Since its thinking is engineered to strip out most direct sensory presentation in favor of abstract sense-making representations, it fails to grasp the role of presence and aesthetics in what it does. It tends toward overconfidence in the theoretical.The mind takes worldly realism for granted on one hand, but conflates it with its own experiences as a logic processor on the other. It’s a case of the fallacy of the instrument, where the mind’s hammer of symbolism sees symbolic nails everywhere it looks. Through this intellectual filter, the notion of disembodied algorithms which somehow generate subjective experiences and objective bodies, (even though experiences or bodies would serve no plausible function for purely mathematical entities) becomes an almost unavoidably seductive solution.
So appealing is this quantitative underpinning for the Western mind’s cosmology, that many people (especially Strong AI enthusiasts) find it easy to ignore that the character of mathematics and computation reflect precisely the opposite qualities from those which characterize consciousness. To act like a machine, robot, or automaton, is not merely an alternative personal lifestyle, it is the common style of all unpersons and all that is evacuated of feeling. Mathematics is inherently amoral, unreal, and intractably self-interested – a windowless universality of representation.
A computer has no aesthetic preference. It makes no difference to a program whether its output is displayed on a monitor with millions of colors, or buzzing out of speaker, or streaming as electronic pulses over a wire. This is the primary utility of computation. This is why digital is not locked into physical constraints of location. Since programs don’t deal with aesthetics, we can only use the program to format values in such a way that corresponds with the expectations of our sense organs. That format of course, is alien and arbitrary to the program. It is semantically ungrounded data, fictional variables.
Something like the Mandelbrot set may look profoundly appealing to us when it is presented optically as plotted as colorful graphics, but the same data set has no interesting qualities when played as audio tones. The program generating the data has no desire to see it realized in one form or another, no curiosity to see it as pixels or voxels. The program is absolutely content with a purely quantitative functionality – with algorithms that correspond to nothing except themselves.
In order for the generic values of a program to be interpreted experientially, they must first be re-enacted through controllable physical functions. It must be perfectly clear that this re-enactment is not a ‘translation’ or a ‘porting’ of data to a machine, rather it is more like a theatrical adaptation from a script. The program works because the physical mechanisms have been carefully selected and manufactured to match the specifications of the program. The program itself is utterly impotent as far as manifesting itself in any physical or experiential way. The program is a menu, not a meal. Physics provides the restaurant and food, subjectivity provides the patrons, chef, and hunger. It is the physical interactions which are interpreted by the user of the machine, and it is the user alone who cares what it looks like, sounds like, tastes like etc. An algorithm can comment on what is defined as being liked, but it cannot like anything itself, nor can it understand what anything is like.
If I’m right, all natural phenomena have a public-facing mechanistic range and a private-facing animistic range. An algorithm bridges the gap between public-facing, space-time extended mechanisms, but it has no access to the private-facing aesthetic experiences which vary from subject to subject. By definition, an algorithm represents a process generically, but how that process is interpreted is inherently proprietary.
Multisense Realism 
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