Archive
If consciousness cannot be explained by algorithms, then, by default, would you have to rely on a supernatural explanation?
Answer by Lev Lafayette:
No.
The following is copy-paste, but dammit, I wrote it in the first place and it's (exhaustively) on-topic.
tl;dr. The foundation of consciousness is having shared symbolic values. Whilst consciousness cannot be reduced to physical phenomena, this doesn't mean it doesn't arise from physical phenomena in a social setting (supervenience).
Mary, the Swampy Philosophical Zombie, Is In Your Chinese Room! Problems With Reductionist Theories of Consciousness
(I intend to use this title for a journal article on the subject)
1.0 What Is Consciousness?
"Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon. Nothing worth reading has been written about it."
Stuart Sutherland in the 1989 International Dictionary of Psychology1.1 Consciousness is variously defined along with sentience (from the Latin “to feel”) and sapience (Latin “to know”, or “to be wise”). "Consciousness" derives from Latin conscientia which primarily means moral conscience (knowledge-with, shared knowledge). Descartes was the first to use it in the sense of the individual ego, but which was expanded by Locke to include moral responsibility. Consciousness is typically described in terms of phenomenological subjectivity; awareness, a sense of self, which is also applied in contemporary medicine as a continuum (from being fully alert and cognisant to being disorientated, to delerious, to being unconscious and unresponsive). The historical definition suggested social co-knowledge (con- "together" + scire "to know") suggesting moral reasoning (conscientia, conscience) and language. This original use is still applied in law with the concept of legal responsibility with consciousness.
1.2 Consciousness is distinguished by Ned Block between “phenomenal consciousness” (P-consciousness) of pure experience, sounds, emotions etc., and “access consciouness” (A-awareness) of introspection, memory etc. The exploration of consciouness as experience and memory is in the philosophical school and psychology of phenomenology. There is also a theoretical distinction between the "easy problem of consciousness", such as functional responses, perceptual discrimination etc, and the the "hard problems of consciousness" (qualia, such as colours, tastes). The hard problem is answering why physical processing gives rise to an inner life at all (Chalmers, 1995).
1.3 The philosophical concept of consciousness has been criticised from sources as varied as Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault. Marx considered that social relations preceeded consciousness (“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”), whereas Nietzsche reversed the conception of free will and moral action ("they give you free will only to later blame yourself"). Some philosophers, elimintavist physical monists, deny the extistence of consciousness at all.
1.4 There is a strong tie between consciousness and language (in its broadest sense). Medical and legal opinion both agree that assessments of consciousness must include the capacity to engage in communication. A concept of 'self' that is beyond the instinctual is only formulated through language and culture with the handful of 'feral children' (e.g., the Genie experience) serving as evidence. Descartes also argued that the lack of language in animals indicated a lack of lack of access to res cogitans, the realm of thought (although many animals have since been shown to engage in fairly sophisticated communication).
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.", Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), Section 5.62.0 Models of Consciousness
2.1 There are two broad models of consciousness as they relate to the mind-body problem (and related subjects such as materialism and idealism). Monism argues that the mind and the body are the same; dualism argues that they are separate. Within monism is there is essentially two types; idealistic monism and physicalist monism; they have a perhaps surprisingly degree of similarity.
2.2 The former, particularly common in some branches of religion, consider that all is consciousness. A particularly strong example is that of Bishop George Berkeley, who argued for "empirical idealism", who argued (effectively) that the universe, and all that is experienced, is a figment of God's imagination. This is very similar to the Hindu notion of Brahman ("non-dual pure consciousness, indivisible, incorporeal, infinite, and all-pervading"), but distinct from the Buddhist dharmic samara/nirvana dichotomy.
2.3 Physicalist monism argues that there is no distinct mental states from physical brain and nervous-system states. Eliminativism, for example, argues that like astrology and alchemy eventually eliminated false folkloric notions from the sciences of astronomy and chemistry, so to will the mental states of everyday discourse (e.g., intent, belief, desire, love, pain) will be shown to be false, as will the study of psychology. The proposition is argued by philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, Paul and Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett. Some eliminativists, such as Frank Jackson, claim that consciousness does not exist except as an epiphenomenon of brain function; others, such as Georges Rey, claim that the concept will eventually be eliminated as neuroscience progresses.
2.4 A related form of physical monism is reductive materialism, also known "Type Physicalism", argues that that mental events can be grouped into types, and can then be correlated with types of physical events in the brain. Its origins are with the psychologist Edwin Boring (The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness, 1933) and further developed by Ullin Place, Herbert Feigl, and Jack Smart. One conflict that arises in type physicalism is the possibility of the type-token distinction. If type physicalism is true, then mental state M1 would be identical to brain state B1. However token-physicalism, such as argued by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, argues for "multiple realisability"; the same mental state can be produced from many different physical brain states. Experiments with colour recognistion seem to support multiple realisability.
3.0 Chinese Rooms, Mary The Scientist, Swamp-men and Philosophical Zombies
3.1 Reductive monism, whether physical or ideal, can be challenged by four related thought experiments; the Chinese Room by John Searle (1980), Frank Jackson (1982), Swampman (1987) by Donald Davidson, and Philosophical Zombies by David Chalmers (1996). All three are examples of arguments that emphasise not just the importance of subjectivity and qualia, but also introduce issues relating to understanding, meaning, and language.
3.2 The Chinese Room article is specifically presented as an argument against artificial consciousness, however it is particularly important as a challenge to physicalist monism which, like the AI advocates of computationalism, argue that the mind is a information processing system operating on symbols (c.f., Alan Turing Test). "The Chinese Room" takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Whilst it (being the system, or the individual processing the data) can carry on a conversation, at no point does it understand the characters. As Searle (1999) argues: "The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese".
3.3 One strong response to the Chinese Room argument concedes the example, but challenges it with a robot that has extended sensory system and therefore attaches semantic correlations from sensory input to symbols. The "Robot Reply" has been endorsed at different points by Margaret Boden, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Hans Moravec et al. For Searle, this is just additional input, and whilst it may strengthen the rule-based system, still doesn't provide understanding. Tim Crane eventually ties this criticism with social interaction, something which Searle neglected to make sufficiently explicit – and therefore was prone to accusations that he was begging the question; "… if Searle had not just memorized the rules and the data, but also started acting in the world of Chinese people, then it is plausible that he would before too long come to realize what these symbols mean" (The Mechanical Mind, 1996)
3.4 Frank Jackson's "Mary's Room" is a thought experiment that is aimed against physicalism in particular. Mary is a scientist of the neurophysiology of vision, but who has done all their work in a black-and-white environment. She knows all about the physical properties of colour, wavelengths, the effects on the retina and brain etc., but has never experienced color. Once she experiences color, does she learn anything new? If she does, then not all knowledge is physical knowledge; Mary has learned about qualia; subjective, qualitative properties of experiences. Arguably, Mary has gained an acquantaince to facts or abilities that she already had.
3.5 In the Swampman argument Donald Davidson explores the mind of a replicant: "Suppose Davidson goes hiking in the swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt. At the same time, nearby in the swamp another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules such that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death." Swampman would make noises that his friends and family would interpret as language, but, according to teleological theories (and Davidson's own theory of content) Swampman has no ideas about philosophy, no perceptions of his surroundings and no beliefs or desires about anything at all; Swampman has no intentional states.
3.6 A variant on Swampman is Philosophical Zombies by David Chalmers (although it dates back to Robert Kirk, 1974). It is a being that is physically indistinguishable from a normal human being, even down to neurological effects, however it lacks conscious experience and qualia; "all is silent and dark within" (Iris Murdoch). The strength of the philosophical zombie argument is that (a) we recognise that people have periods without consciousness and (b) that human behaviour to occur automatically (e.g., sleepwalking). Elaborating these to the extreme, philosophical zombies are logically conceivable (even if practically improbable).
3.7 According to the physicalists, everything – including consciousness – is reducible to pure physicality. If physicalism is true, then conscious experience must exist in such all such possible worlds that contain the same physical facts as our world (P). However it is possible to conceive of a possible world (Q) where there is no consciousness (where p-zombies exist), but the physical facts are the same. Therefore, physicalism is false. This is known as modus tollens in predicate logic. If P then Q; not Q, therefore not P.
4.0 Never Mind, It Doesn't Matter; Escaping Monist Reductionism and Avoiding Substance Dualism
4.1 In contrast with monist approaches (whether physicalist or idealist), there are a variety of dualist approaches, which argues that the mind and the brain are ontologically separate categories. There are three basic types; substance dualism, property dualism, and predicate dualism.
4.2 Substance dualism is the argument that the mind and brain are different substances. Originating with Descartes (and famously resulting in "Cartesian dualism" of res cogitans versus res extensa) it argues that the mental universe is not extensible into space, and the material cannot think. It is considered compatible with most theological perspectives that distinguish in substance between the body and the mental "soul". Whilst extremely influential in the history of the mind-body problem, substance dualism is not considered a popular theory due to numerous problems that show that the brain and mind at least have high levels of correlation (e.g., the mental effects of brain damage is indisputable e.g., Phineas Gage).
4.3 Property dualism argues that whilst there is but one type of substance (physical or ideal), but two types of properties that result; physical and mental; non-physical, mental properties (such as beliefs, desires and emotions) correlate in some physical substances (the brain), but are not reducible to these. Examples include emergentism or supervenience, with advocates ranging as far as John Stuart Mill and Jaegwon Kim. In this model mental states emerge or depend on brain states, but cannot be reduced to brain states as they have different properties. Emergence and supervenience is notably popular among biological scientists (e.g. Philip Kitcher, Elliot Sober, Alexander Rosenberg). Property dualist can be further split into epiphenomenalism and interactionism. In the former, physical states can give rise to mental states, but not the reverse. Interactionism, claims that mental states can produce material effects (and vice-versa).
4.5 Predicate dualism, advocated by Donald Davidson and Jerry Fodor, argue that while there is only one ontological category of substances and properties of substances, the predicates that we use to describe mental events cannot be reduced physical predicates of natural languages. Another description of predicate dualism, used by Donald Davidson, is "anomalous monism" (Mental Events, 1970). The theory states that (a) mental events are identical with physical events, (b) the mental events are anomalous, and are not regulated by strict physical laws. Davidson also developed the notion of supervenience to answer critics that noted that this wasn't really a form of physicalism.
4.6 A final argument against reductive physicalism is that its pragmatically impossible. Physicalism can only provides statements of facticity; quantity and spatio-temporal location. It cannot provide any information on moral norms or aesthetic expressions. Although physical facts, moral norms, and aesthetic expressions all depend, or emerge, from empirical foundations, any one approach cannot provide answer to the others; they are pragmatically incommensurable; David Dennet's Consciousness Explained, 1991, is particularly noteworthy for this category error. It is as risible to argue that morals and aesthetics are reducible to facts as it is to suggest that aesthetics or facts are reducible to moral norms etc.
What is the connection between consciousness and the body it resides in?
Answer by Craig Weinberg:
After a Long Debate On The Evolutionary Justification of Awareness with another user who deleted and locked the thread, I thought that I would reiterate the points that I made.
There is no intrinsic difference between the nature of the computations performed by simple organisms in the microcosm and animals which we are more comfortable calling conscious. While we would expect the size difference of the larger animal to engender a certain degree of computational overhead, there is nothing to suggest that complexity alone magically conjures qualities like color, flavor, and feeling out of thin air to better manage processing. We would not seek out such a thing if we were designing such a process, and indeed, there would be no reason to expect that such a thing would be available in the universe to begin with.
If we were to create a program to run a Sims Homo sapiens avatar as an AI which would develop a dashboard of indicators and controls to best secure its survival and reproduction, there is no reason to assume that this dashboard would be orders of magnitude more complex than that of a Sims octopus, a Sims dust mite, or even a Sims eukaryote. Though our aesthetic awareness is vastly richer than a single cell organism, the basic program of seeking nutrition, avoiding threats, and securing reproductive success is not very different in a petri dish than it is on the savanna. It seems to me the height of anthropocentrism to presume that there is something about our human survival condition which is billions of times more complex than anything that has to move and eat and learn what to avoid.
The question of why any dashboard would be needed at all is even more significant. The Hard Problem of Consicousness, as it has been called, recognizes that graphic interfaces and the like are what computer users need to operate a computer, but the computer itself gains no benefit and suffers no problems related to having the data it processes manifest somewhere in a form which can be see, felt, tasted, etc. Indeed, computers are useful to us precisely because any computer can reduce anything into pure data without any encumbrance from experiential requirements. The computer doesn't care if the DVD looks like a movie to you or a bunch of music, databases, whatever. To the computer it's all the same twitching semiconductor states.
Therefore, we must seek other solutions to the Mind Body problem. My solution involves recognizing the odd number of symmetrically opposite qualities of awareness and bodies. Here are a few.
Body
- public extension
- discrete shapes
- unconscious
- seems deterministic or random
- a-signifying, meaningless
- generic
- nested geometric bodies divided by space and scale
- forms and functions
- literal positions (location coordinates)
- inferred dispositions (energy, momentum)
- doing, knowing
Mind
- private intention
- continuous non-shapes
- conscious
- ranges from reflex to voluntary
- signifying, creative
- proprietary
- experiences united by time and subject
- appreciation and participation
- literal dispositions (attitudes)
- inferred positions (personality revealed over time)
- feeling, being
These have made me curious as to the nature of symmetry and aesthetics, and what function they have in the universe. After a lot of consideration, my hypothesis is that there is no plausible explanation for these phenomena and that the most likely solution is that what we call the universe actually emerges from them rather than the other way around. By this I mean that the fabric of the universe is the capacity to sense and make sense. Rather than assuming that matter or laws can simply exist independently of awareness, my understanding is that the universe is a strictly participatory experience.
It's going to sound absurd to most people, but that is exactly as I would expect, since we are already a human experience, made of countless other experiences in a context of a single eternal experience. Experiences nested this way only work if they are are kept relatively partitioned from each other, yet translucent enough to remain all part of a single uni-verse of sense. The way that I think that this is accomplished is through perceptual relativity. General relativity is really only conceivable with a subjective participant doing the relating anyhow, but Einstein did not get around to explaining exactly what observation entails and how it gets to change the nature of space and time. In my estimation, relativity is a special case of the more universal capacity to relate, which is sense itself.
What this means is that the bodies that we experience are themselves subjective experiences, but on a distant perceptual inertial frame. When one experience is so much slower and older than than another, or smaller and faster, then they two stories are tokenized within each others range. We see that which is on a very different scale from us as machine like and objectified, or supernatural and fictionalized. In both cases, our experience of them is rendered in such an alien way because that is in fact an appropriate default presentation for the significance of such an impersonal influence. We don't have much to do with what goes on at the geological scale personally, but our bodies can use minerals for a lot of purposes and we can build structures, etc.
Just because this is our experience of minerals does not mean that this is an impartial view of what the mineral experience is in the universe. Indeed, on a scale where time is vastly more accelerated, the universe had been perfectly content to spin fantastic quantities of mineralized orbs for thoudands of millennial. It is only from the perspective of hairy little dirt-fish on Earth that these celestial parties seem static and sterile. This is not to say that every rock and planet is a being, only that what we see of the experience which is taking place in the universe leaves a footprint within our inertial frame that presents its nature to the extent that it can be to us.
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.
Cross Modal Synesthetic Abstraction
From a worthwhile thread on Quora.
“Below are two shapes. One of them is called Kiki and the other is called Bouba.
Almost all respondents when asked say that the jagged one is kiki and the rounded one is bouba. This can be observed across cultures. This is an innate ability of our brain by which one mode of sensation can cross over into another.”
This is a useful little nugget for MSR. A computer would have to be programmed specifically to correlate the names with the shapes, and such a correlation would be arbitrary from a programmatic perspective. By contrast, our cross-modal, cross-cultural preferences cohere intrinsically, by feel. Feeling is not a collision of objects, it is an aesthetic presence – it is our own participation in a discernment of subjects. The anthropological universality of certain linguistic-phonetic qualities and their association with other kinds of qualities (hard sounds, hard angles, sharp edges, etc) are rooted in deeper universals of sense – deeper than evolution, deeper than matter even. If it didn’t run that deep, (to the absolute bottom/top), then there would be no sense in sense at all. We would be like a computer, linking syntactic fragments together arbitrarily by statistical relevance rather than experiential content.
Theory of Everything Quora
My answer to the Quora “What is your Theory of Everything?”
Explain your own Theory of Everything or mention your favorite Theory of Everything and JUSTIFY it if you can?
I call my Theory of Everything Multisense Realism. The name is intended to convey the idea that the whole of what we call reality is sourced entirely to a single unifying principle, which is the multiplicity of sense. Matter is that which feels like matter, which is seen to act like matter, and which seems to imply certain sensibilities. All phenomena are similarly known to us through chains of nested experiences which all ultimately begin and end in expectations which seem self-evident. Blue simply looks blue, and pain simply feels painful, regardless of any mechanical processes associated with them. It is not necessary to learn how to feel pain, nor could any such learning help us discover pain if we could not feel it to begin with. No equation resolves to equal the feeling of pain.
Since sense is both the capacity to discern difference from indifference as well as to discern unity across multiplicity, the term multisense refers to the nesting of sense within multiple levels of itself. It is important to understand that by discernment, what is meant is a participatory experience in which the fact of difference or unity is not only detected, but appreciated as an aesthetic quality. Even without the appearance of Homo sapiens or blue green algae on planet Earth, the universe would still be made entirely of aesthetic conditions of some kind or another. It’s not necessary to speculate on non-human awareness, but suffice it to say that our own consciousness can only realistically be composed of letters from an alphabet of possible experiential qualities which is older than the stars. While our particular sense of a physical event is a human version of that event, there can be no doubt that the sense we make of a star overlaps in some important ways with the sense that the star makes without us looking at it. The universe must, it seems, make sense before we can make sense of it.
However abstract or sentimental, concrete or direct, the one thing that all phenomena have in common is that they can be detected through sense or inferred through ‘sense-making’. By the same token, nothing can be real if it can never be detected or inferred in any way by anything. That which cannot be sensed by anything in any way or make sense any way cannot be considered to ‘exist’ or to have any connection to anything that does exist. Sense cannot arise from non-nonsense, just as order cannot arise from dis-chaos. Being that we are made out of sense experience that makes sense, it is not natural for us to see sense itself as the foreground. What we see in the foreground as human beings is opportunities for sense. We are often preoccupied with battling against the reverse side of sense – entropy, disorder, stagnation.
Where MSR excels is to identify the difference between the local realism which frames our human experience and an understanding the absolute frame of all experience. In the former, we experience being a person in a physical world, both of which appear bound by nothingness. In the latter, nothingness is not an option, since nothingness can only be an expectation of something about the hypothetical absence of everything. Time and space too are dissolved without a particular locus of participation and perception. Scale and duration are meaningless without being anchored in a comparison to some particular scope of ‘here’ and ‘now’. From the absolute perspective then, we must begin with the assumption not of a universe from the augmentation of nothingness, but a universe of everythingness diffracted. While this idea was not consciously modeled after any religion or philosophy, it does coincide with several traditional conceptualizations of the ultimate. Singularity producing multiplicity as the color white produces the spectrum – not as a mechanical process, but as an aesthetic revelation of unity deferred. Rather than the creation myth inspired by the Big Bang in which an explosive device appears in null-spacetime to detonate spacetime using mass as an accelerant, MSR begins from the absolute frame of reference. From this vantage point, with no relativistic measure to make the first instants of the Big Bang seem any longer or shorter than all of the rest of history put together, the Big Bang is reoriented within matter and eternity rather than an event within spacetime. The Big Bang becomes the Big Diffraction, an experiential masking and dividing of the Absolute. This is, again, a familiar theme in Eastern philosophy and Western mysticism. The difference is that MSR has rehabilitated this notion, grounding it in basic principles of modern physics and information theory.
The result has been a prodigious amount of writing over the past few years, connecting the dots between matter-energy, space-time and sense-motive (affect-effect), entropy-significance. It has provided what I think are radical insights into the nature of information, mathematics and energy as well as resolving the most stubborn mysteries of philosophy relating to consciousness, meaning, morality, and free will. Each of these requires a lot of explanation even to impart the glimpse that my TOE can offer, but for the purposes of this Quora, I’ll offer these teasers.
1. The nature of information: Not, as Bateson famously said ‘a difference that makes a difference’ but ‘a perception of a perception’. This clarifies the status of information as entirely dependent upon sense and sense-making, not as an independent entity which spawns realism in a vacuum (memes, simulations, computations, etc).
2. The nature of mathematics and AI: Mathematics refers to the common sense which relates to two distinctly different (opposite) things:
- A private experience of imagined sensory symbol-figures which accompany a motive of quantitative reasoning.
- A collection of public objects interacting in a logical, causal way, without any private representations, as a consequence of the shapes of multiple rigid bodies.
Because mathematics bridges the gap between 1 and 2 (private and public) it is considered profound and absolute – and it is, but only in a one dimensional sense. Mathematics represents relations but cannot appreciate them or initiate them. Math doesn’t think or feel, math is an internal appreciation of the sense of the external. Because mathematics is grounded in the abstraction of generality rather than the concrete and proprietary uniqueness of undiffracted sense, it is a rootless imposter – the antithesis of authenticity and feeling. The realization of the absolute difference between genuine participation as a being in the ongoing story of the universe and the imitation of being by a set of a-signifying programmatic functions helps substantiate human intuitions about the emptiness of machine intelligence. While many strong AI enthusiasts will react with hostility to this idea, I think that rather than just suggesting that there will never be a conscious computer, it opens the door to a future of services which extend our intelligence and serve our interests. The MSR view frees us from any ethical concern for laboratory abuses of accidentally sentient programs, as well as insures that no technology will ever learn how to want to take over the world.
3. The nature of energy. In perhaps my most crackpot conjecture, I have proposed that with sense as the universal primitive, quirky effects which have been attributed to photons and other subatomic particles may suggest that our assumption of energy as something which is independent of matter is false. Photons, like ‘profits’ do not literally exist. Through MSR, “energy” is interpreted as simply motives which are not our own. We have private feelings which inspire us to act publicly, and so does everything else. Because of the kind of perceptual relativity that I propose, the more that the feelings and motives of other participants in the universe differ from our own in terms of scale and history, the more those dispositions seem impersonal and involuntary to us. MSR suggests that voluntary and involuntary are relativistic terms – two sides to the same coin which flips between private and public perspectives. Energy is conceived of not a pseudosubstance propagating literally across a vacuum of space as wave-particles but as felt expressions which define power relations of public interaction. What light does in the microcosm does is the same kind of thing that it does for us – it illuminates public experiences – it is ‘the news’. Space is fundamentally a pantomime projected as perceptual gaps between public facing surfaces of matter. Those gaps, while real in the local frame, are absent on the absolute frame of sense. From the perspective of the Absolute and of light, space has not yet been invented. It is the oscillation and modulation of feeling which gives rise to the second order fabric of public spacetime.
4. The Hard Problem of Consciousness: Is understood as part of the larger Presentation Problem, which includes –
- Hard Problem = Why is X presented as an experience? (X = “information”, logical or physical functions, calcium waves, action potentials, Bayesian integrations, etc.)
- Explanatory Gap = How and where is presentation accomplished with respect to X?
- Binding Problem = How are presented experiences segregated and combined with each other? How do presentations cohere?
- Symbol Grounding = How are experiences associated with each other on multiple levels of presentation? How do presentations adhere?
- Mind Body Problem = Why do public facing presences and private facing presences seem ontologically exclusive and aesthetically opposite to each other?
MSR solves the Presentation Problem by recognizing the connection between aesthetic participation, significance, authenticity, and the justaposition of spatial extension, temporal attenuation, and insignificance. In short, the universe in which any sense can possibly exist can only originate in sense itself. The appearance of aesthetic qualities can only arise from a universe which is grounded in an aesthetic agenda, even though those agendas are necessarily masked and combined semi-indifferently on any particular local level. Is there meaning in the universe? Yes, there is nothing but meaning, but meaning in one local context cannot have exactly the same meaning outside of its context.
5. Free Will: As with the existence of aesthetic presentation, the presence of free will, even as an “illusion” is impossible under strict determinism. The whole point of determinism is to ground all phenomena in a firmament of strict parsimony. The idea is that things just don’t happen willy-nilly, they are the consequences of physical or mathematical laws. Such a universe has no room for machines with parts which present themselves to other parts as an illusion of effectiveness. Certainly in the real world, our personal estimation of the effectiveness of our will and of our opportunities to exercise its freedom may not be all they are cracked up to be, however, the very consideration of whether or not to ‘believe in free will’ is predicated on the implicit expectation that in fact our belief supervenes upon our voluntary participation in some materially important way. All arguments against free will are ultimately arguments against the possibility of participating in any kind of argumentation in the first place.
All of these facets of the theory stem from reversing the core assumption of the Western worldview, that consciousness is a product of an animal’s brain rather than that the entire universe is a staggeringly elaborate nesting of participatory sense experiences. This is not an anthropomorphic concept, as it does not elevate human experience, biological experience, or even the sense of a self as being fundamental. Instead, sense itself is seen as the producer of its own augmentation, via spacetime diffraction, which yields private significance and public entropy.
Mechanemorphism
(*update to The Competition page)
Antrhopmorphism and Mechanemorphism
1. What is meant by mechanemorphism?
Anthropomorphize = To attribute human form or personality to things not human
Mechanemorphize = To attribute machine form or impersonality to things not mechanical.
The Multisense Realism perspective is grounded in a philosophy of science which seeks to be more objective about objectivity itself. In Western models of consciousness, experience is generated by the objective mechanism, the forms and functions of the brain. As a result, the subjective experience itself, which does not seem mechanically necessary, becomes orphaned. I have heard it referred to as an illusion, an emergent property, epiphenomena, or even a spandrel (evolutionary side effect which plays no role in further developments). These kinds of terms are necessary to overlook the dualism which mechanemoprhism creates. It is a way of silencing or explaining away the very phenomenon which give rise to the inquiry into consciousness in the first place. This phenomenon of human inquiry is very much the opposite of mechanism. It is a personal participation which arises from meaning and motive rather than blind energy. It is a ‘Why?’ as well as a ‘How’.
When we, as upstanding citizens of the Western scientific consensus, mechanemorphize ourselves it is because we are considering only the public facing aspects of {the total phenomenon that we are} and finding them mechanistic. The conjecture of MSR is that because consciousness is more likely to use mechanism for differentiation and extension than machines are to use consciousness for anything (why would they?), we should not assume the public presentation of our own mechanism is the fundamental phenomenon. MSR suggests that perceptual relativity itself, the sense of the contrast between private qualia and public quanta, is in fact the most likely universal primitive. While human perception may be local to this planet during a relatively short era, perceptual relativity as a phenomenon is larger, older, and more universal than physics. Mechanism must be learned. Feeling and being is innate.
If we examine the nature of mechanism carefully, we should see that the essence of mechanism is unconsciousness. What is an automaton? What does it mean to automate a process? It means that we squeeze out all requirements for our own participation. It is a function which happens without us.
Why is that important? Because a machine will serve whatever master that it is constructed to serve. It will do the same thing over and over until it breaks, because it can’t tell the difference and it can’t care. The machine itself {the totality of the phenomenon that is the machine} has no presence as a genuine whole which is independent of our expectations of it. Outside of our uses of it, it is only an assembly of unrelated parts.
Natural phenomena are not assembled unconsciously, they are spun off and broken out from larger wholes. They are conceived through fusion and fission of their own sense and motive. As a result, the awareness of something like a human being, which is self-elaborated to an almost perverse degree, has a footprint in many different levels of awareness and interaction. While the public effect of what we are seems mechanistic to us, the private affect of who we are does not seem that way. If we were to recreate the universe and we wanted to recreate it faithfully, we would have to include this non-mechanistic experience, as it is the primary experience of the universe for ourselves, and perhaps for all participants in the universe as well.
To say that someone is ‘robotic’, or ‘acting like a machine’ is to say that they are impersonal, cold, relentless, unfeeling. These meanings are not there by accident, they are universal intuitions. As impartial scientists, we should recognize that it is no more scientific to presume that the universe is fundamentally mechanistic than it would be to presume that it is fundamentally anthropomorphic. We have many indications in non-ordinary consciousness, the placebo effect, quantum mechanics, synchronicity, and the anthropopological universality of spiritual concepts that objectivity is not a matter of what “simply is” but may in fact be, on a more primitive level, the complex interplay of “what seems to be the case”. There is no evidence that this ‘seeming’ can be taken for granted in a physical or mathematical system. There is no argument that I know of which should persuade a neutral party why mechanemorphism deserves more consideration than anthropomorphism as a default ontological assumption. Instead, MSR argues that this contrast of extremes known as anthropomorphism and mechanemorphism are a clue as to the template of the underlying nature of nature – that it is in fact an aesthetic agenda from which human subjectivity is directly descended.
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
David Sosa on Free Will in Waking Life
(my comments:
I think that just as free will spans the entire continuum from profound mystery to ordinary fact to most-convincing illusion to least convincing reality, so too does consciousness as a whole.
Will seems to be a self-contained, primordial feature of nature – intentional force. The projection of a single motive sequence from a multiplicity of private motives into a thermodynamically irreversible public consequence. The power to participate in public realism; from motive to motor, emotion to intention to extension as a unified gestalt at the personal level, but smeared across smaller spaces and times at the sub-personal levels (cellular, neurochemical). Will is consciousness oscillating from being to feeling to doing to knowing, an Ouroboran double-binary knot of sensory-motor qualities, pushing and pulling between private times and public spaces.
The ‘free’ part of free will seems more conceptual. Free compared to what? Nevertheless, it too has an aesthetic subtext which is compelling. Freedom is somehow the epitome of will. It suggests self seeking to amplify itself by transcending itself. When people use the expression ‘willful’ there is a sense of being unpredictable or ‘wild’. This connection comes up again and again in philosophy and science and is rejected again and again as well. Vital force. Kundalini. Qi. Animal Magnetism. We are ambivalent about physicalizing this most direct of all experiences – perhaps the only truly direct experience there is.
What I propose is sort of a ‘if you can’t beat em, join em’ strategy. Put the phenomena which we can’t explain in the center of the model. Neither sensory perception nor motive participation can, in my view, be reduced in any way. They are primordial, such that any conceivable physical force or field, any mathematical principle or information process would by definition supervene on some form of aesthetic presentation – some detection-participation capacity. Without such a capacity, nothing which has sense, or is itself defined by sense could possibly contact this non-sensed existence in any way. In this way, we can begin to see that being and sensory-motive participation are ultimately the same thing.
The effects of free will are cumulative, and as we free ourselves again and again from our own collective inertial consequences, initiating novel sequences out of personal preference, we also cut ourselves off from many experiences. We de-cide; kill off possibilities…we make a difference not only by what we choose but what our choice makes us indifferent to. The wild personal impulse gradually pivots to its opposite, and Homo sapiens raw nomadic drive to explore becomes the impersonal impulse of self-domestication. Now that the pendulum has perhaps reached the apogee of its swing, we seek to define the impulse in terms of its absence. This is an opportunity to step out of the system and look at the phenomenon as a whole – as we modulate with it through history. The unexpected truth – that free will and mechanism are two sides of the same oscillating coin is hard to consider, but like free will itself, we should place this enigma in the center of the model rather than try to flatten it into either mechanism or spirituality. Let it be what it is. Let us be who we are.)
If “the self” is the product of internal cognitive processes communicating with each other, then where do “attention” and “willpower” com…
If “the self” is the product of internal cognitive processes communicating with each other, then where do “attention” and “willpower” come from?
Who or what is deciding to focus on something, and who or what is asserting one internal view over another (“exerting willpower”)?
As a more general question, how are such purely internal, subjective, yet fully pervasive experiences such as attention as a resource that can be focused, and willpower as a resource that can be used and depleted, explained in terms of an emergent view of consciousness where the self is an illusion?
In my view, the emergent view of consciousness lacks the depth of understanding of subjectivity to be viable. At this time, emergence and the illusory self is seen as a scientific alternative to discredited spiritualist views. This would make sense if we have painted ourselves into a corner, rejecting immaterialism on one hand and embracing the lack of evidence of any ‘feelings of self’ produced in the brain.
There is another option which is not religious, and not based on a disembodied entity haunting the cells of your brain, and I think that is to understand experience itself as a concrete physical conjugate to all forms and functions. Physics becomes the ordering not just of forces and fields in spacetime, but of feelings and beings through experience or lifetime.
In this question for example, willpower could only be a mechanical condition of the brain. How much willpower you have would be a consequence of your genetic capacities and how your brain has developed. In our real world experience however, willpower has at least as much to do with the semantic content of our experience. The conventional wisdom has been, and not without merit, that we are responsible for participating in our own exercise of willpower. It would be argued that whatever we might do to build our focus and discipline would also improve whatever neurological functions are involved, but it seems more like it has to be a push-pull.
In the end, no emergent view of consciousness can plausibly justify the sensory experience of consciousness itself. The idea of the illusory self, while seemingly supported by a consensus of inanimate instruments, can only be accepted or rejected by the self itself. The existence of an epiphenomenal self-model which is experienced aesthetically rather than loops of anesthetic self-referential data processing is really a deal breaker. Regardless of whether our private expectation of the effectiveness of our will match the public effect of it, the fact that there is any such thing as an expectation of self in the first place cannot be explained mechanically. The only way we can even entertain this fallacy is to smuggle our own undeniably real self awareness into the argument without noticing and then using our own minds to consider the idea of their own absence by the very evidence that it is actively weighing. You can’t have it both ways. If you are real enough to do science, then you can’t be irrelevant enough to be illusory.
Bergsonian-Deleuzian Multiplicity and Gaede’s Ropes
Looking at the Bergsonian-Deleuzian concept of multiplicity, I can see that it shares the same underlying dialectic as Multisense Realism. I noticed that if I add some insight from Bill Gaede’s Rope model of the atom (YouTube 04:25), I can map electromagnetism to the Continuous-Discrete framework of Bergson.
Where Gaede conceives of a literal thread across the diameter and around the circumference of the atomic nucleus, I think that it should be flipped. Rather than a literal thread I see a capacity for felt participation: ‘motive’ or maybe ‘efference’. Electricity is not a thread across the atom, it the experience of jumping from one atom to another. The atoms themselves would not look like balls of magnetic yarn, but feel like obstacles within the private sense field or ‘afference’ of each atom. This corresponds to magnetic field and Difference in kind, however, it’s a loose correspondence. Sense and motive is electromagnetism from the inside, but it is also gravity and electromagnetism, feeling and knowing, being and doing. It’s the absolute fundamental.
Electricity, in the Gaede model, would correspond to that which defines the literal, linear, direct aesthetic. The symmetry and juxtaposition across the diameter of the atom appears to us as a quantum gear shifting mechanism. That’s because we are detecting it from the outside with other bodies, so there is always a spacetime gap to be hopped across. The loop-like aspect of the atom, by contrast It is both a spherical range of sensitivity in public space and a circuit of oscillating affect or disposition (private experience). To make a long story story short, the atom, in my model, is an interaction with continuous-private-aesthetic qualities and discrete-public-anesthetic (skipping) qualities, aka qualia and quanta. The larger cosmological picture involves the division of qualia from the Absolute (Qua), the diffraction of quanta from qualia (spacetime existence), and the saturation of reconstituted qualia (quanta existential spacetime entropy stripped out) on return to the Absolute.
This can work for a neuron as well as an atom, but again, loosely. Each frame of reference has its own unique vocabulary. A neuron is figuratively like Bill Gaede’s atom model. A galaxy or a solar system is similar also, as is the alchemical Caduceus, the chakra system, the ankh… None of them are identical, but the theme is similar. Winding and tightening, spinning and accelerating, contracting and relaxing.
Multisense Realism 
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