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Sole Entropy Well Model
Another way of visualizing the integration of physics and psyche uses the concepts related to Boltzmann’s entropy curve to conceive of the Totality/Singularity/First Cause as a bottomless fractal entropy well, as follows:
Boltzmann’s idea, as I understand it, is to explain Loschmidt’s Paradox, which (also as I understand it) is basically “If the universe is always increasing from low entropy to high entropy, then where did the initial low entropy come from?”
Boltzmann’s hypothesis places the low entropy we know as the Big Bang as just one of many statistically inevitable fluctuations of entropy distribution. It’s a bubble or wave of non-disorder that we find ourselves in anthropically (because such a bubble is the only context that a low entropy phenomenon like human minds could evolve within). Other possibilities include a Big Crunch type negentropy that accounts for the entropy trough that must precede any entropy rise.
What I suggest is a bottomless low entropy, such that the one event in which any negentropy at all occurs would automatically be the singularity into which all subsequent fluctuations would be swept. Sort of like a black hole for negentropy, hogging all possible signals for all time, banishing any rival Multiverse possibility to perpetual delay.
What this does is place Boltzmann himself, his statistical rules, and their physical enactments all within the anthropic condition in which they are possible. Statistical rules, and laws of any kind including those which define entropy are themselves physical structures which can only emerge from a bottomless entropy well. These kinds of laws and their underlying sense of possibility, probability, events, succession, recursion, regularity, comparison, persistence, etc can only be universal if every part of the universe makes some kind of sense – i.e. has some piece of this infinite negentropy.
Entropy then becomes a property like velocity, (which ranges from stillness to c), a fraction of a totality rather than an open ended scalar quantity. Entropy is a relative measure which has meaning only in relation to significance, such that anything less than 100% entropy has some quantity of absolute significance (Totality-Singularity = 0.000…1% entropy)
This way, the Big Bang becomes a perpetually receding event horizon of absolute and eternal negentropy – a Borg-like ‘bright whole’ which tyrannically absorbs and subordinates all potentials and possibilities into a single continuum-schema. This continuum must accommodate all paradoxes which amounts to a lot of fancy plate spinning and superposition, using devices like nesting outer and inner realism within each other on multiple interrelated yet mutually isolated layers or castes. These devices accomplish what I call the Big Diffraction.
In a Nutshell
By request, an attempt to sum up Multisense Realism in jargon-free language:
- The universe will seem to support either faith or reason. Reason requires belief in disbelief and faith requires disbelief in disbelief. In between reason and faith is reality, but neither reason without faith nor faith without reason can make sense of everything. The insistence that it can is ultimately a bias that tends to become crazy and dangerous if acted upon in real life as if it were the whole truth.
- All of the shortcomings of religion and science can be accounted for by each side mistaking objects for subjects and subjects for objects.
- We can fix this by looking at how we look at the universe, so that we take our own experience more literally and physical existence more figuratively. Photons become nothing but atomic experiences. Consciousness becomes the physical inertia of events which tie body, brain, world, and lifetime together.
- Consciousness is what divides the universe into symmetrical parts. It separates being, doing, and time from matter, energy, and space. This division makes it so that the former are presented as interior and ranging widely in quality, realism, and meaning while the latter is presented as exterior, real, and meaningless.
- This division replaces the idea of the Big Bang as an event in time and space, so that the Big Bang is the division of the universe into subjective times in objective places.
- The symmetry is not limited to subjective and objective groupings, so that consciousness can be used to focus on many different ways of making sense of itself and the universe.
Why Light Isn’t Made of Photons
1. Your rod and cone cells are constantly pumping glutamate into the synapse, and when light hits the Vitamin A molecules stuck inside the opsin proteins that make up the rod.
2. The Vitamin A molecule changes from it’s alcohol-shaped isomer to longer aldehyde shape, which pushes the protein around in whatever way it can.
“The molecule undergoes a series of shape changes to try and better fit the binding site. Therefore, a series of changes in the protein occurs to expel the trans-retinal from the protein.”(source)
3. The mechanical changes in the opsin protein cause the rod cell to change its electric charge.
4. Hyperpolarization of the rod cell stops it from releasing glutamate, which has the effect of simultaneously
5. Turning off (hyperpolarizing) the main on-center group of cells that stimulate each ganglion and turns on the surrounding off-center group of bipolar cells that lead to the ganglion. (YouTube)
6. It appears that the elongating of the retinal (Vitamin A isomer) molecule allows the rod cell as a whole to absorb more visible light – so that detecting light makes your eye become more sensitive to light. Sort of like your eyes are opening their eyes.
7. “The nerves reach the optic chasm, where the nerve fibers from the inside half of each retina cross to the other side of the brain, but the nerve fibers from the outside half of the retina stay on the same side of the brain.” (each side of your brain gets a compete stereoscopic image, one L+R and the other R+L. It’s really a stereo stereo image.
This is just a casual overview. Feel free to correct me if I have it wrong.
The impression I get only makes me more convinced of my interpretation that photons cannot be considered light in any way. Photons are quorum synchronized reciprocal changes among atoms.
What our visual cortex would ‘see’ is nothing more than interruptions in the flow of glutamate in bipolar cells, which in turn are nothing more than responses of a stack of protein sheets to the adjustments in the shape of Vitamin A molecules. What is tickling our nervous system is not photons, but orchestrations of symmetric changes in cellular biochemistry.
The claims of vision being a transduction of optical information is misleading. It implies that we are getting a directly anamorphic imprint of photon impacts, when in fact, our visual experience, even if it could be described in biochemical terms, is quite indirect. What the brain detects is like news coverage of an electoral college voting on an issue in another country.
Of course, none of this begins to address the hard problem. Photons, molecule, cells and brains would have no way of producing seemingly non-molecular qualia like color, orientation, and beauty if they were the simple mechanical objects that we presume. The brain does not need to make an image out of glutamate fluctuation to be functionally informed by it. The data is already there, what more would be required?
Light is not a representation of photons, or glutamate, or cell polarizations, it is an anthropological scale sense of visual relation. Not a substance or an ‘energy’ but a sensitivity to objects being energized. As the so called ‘dark current’ of our retinal cells suggest, it is the job of our eyes to silence the noise of our brain and to open the bidirectional pathways of sense and motive; of receptive understanding, and projection of attention.
Listen to my radio debut yesterday:
- Awareness of awareness
- Blindsight
- Color qualia
- Sapir-Whorf, language and color
- Layered protocols
- Bent pencil
- Mind-Body dualism & paradox
- Artificial Intelligence
- Quorum Sensing
- assembled parts and divided wholes
- Information and sense
- Symbol grounding problem
- Complexity and consciousness
- Consciousness as accident, emergence, perceptual bias
- Significance of potential and similarity
- Intuiting truth and evolutionary obligation
- Space, time, and consciousness
- Panpsychism and sense
- Who, why, what, how
- scale & frequency
- fly story
- Big bang
- Randomness and symmetry
Quora on Soul
Soul is a legacy term for awareness or consciousness (I would say sense-motive phenomenology). Awareness doesn’t literally exist in space, but it figuratively insists “here” and “there” and it literally produces time, or rather subdivides time from the totality of potential awareness.
To say that the soul exists in your imagination is not incorrect either. The nature of subjectivity is such that the more interior and personal the subject, the deeper, richer, and more meaningful and enduring qualities it can have. The ‘soul’ would be the subject themselves, and therefore the most meaning-laden and enduring (life-long or even longer if you want to speculate on Earthly legacy or celestial brownie points) subject of all.
The relation of time to space is inversely proportionate, so that the body which does exist literally in space is constantly changing; growing, aging, and dying, but it is the public presentation of ‘what and how’ (matter and energy) realism. The body of the moment is an ephemeral occurrence, but the self who is represented by all of our body shapes throughout our life is single occurrence – an identity. The presentation of the body is real in it’s own right as a complex object seemingly frozen in time, but it also represents the private ‘who and why’ (sense and motive) realism which we experience through direct realism.
In the same way, the qualia we experience, the colors, sounds, stories of our life indirectly represent complex material configurations in space, but they are also direct presentations of sense-motive experiences which are no less real than hydrogen or spheres. They are real in a different way though – meaning multiplied through time rather than objects divided across space.
Note – I say that soul is a legacy term because I think it misrepresents awareness subtly by projecting it as a pseudo object. It makes ‘I’ a thing in space rather than letting it be the agency who defines and redefines all ‘things’.
Feeling Real in the World of Sense
We have this idea, these days, that there is a real world outside of us which exists. It exists not because we experience it, but because it’s ‘just there’. The simple existence it has is thought to be absolutely real, but absolutely meaningless and unconscious. It is almost unanimously assumed that there was nobody home in the universe at all before living organisms were born on Earth (or maybe other life-friendly planets).
We also have the idea that there is an unreal world inside of us. We feel a sandwich in our hand, but really it is a vast collection of microscopic molecules and living cells, suspended in an even more vast expanse of emptiness. We see a sky above, but really it is a paper thin layer of gas clinging to the planet. Our sun, just another point of light in the oblivion of astronomical emptiness.
In this view, our perception is thought to mediate, to represent a real world that we can’t understand into an unreal experience that we can understand. The psyche is a transformer, turning meaningless reality into meaningful illusion.
Of course, this presents a bit of a problem when confronted with the fact that when we act on our illusions in the world, sometimes we know what we are doing. Sometimes we actually seem to know more than the illusion is showing us, and we are able to make changes in the real world, using only our illusion to guide us. How might that work exactly?
To my mind, the most plausible way that it can work is if the real world is not entirely meaningless and the illusions of our representations are not entirely illusion. The overlap between the two, is, what I would call sense. The overlap between the two I would call realism. That internal sense which agrees consistently with external conditions, and those external conditions which feel consistent with our internal expectations.
Where they don’t overlap, we get sense but not realism. Theory for the sake of theory. Empirical data which cannot be interpreted in way that we can conceive of (like a particle-wave or dark energy). These make sense in either a subjectively meaningful way or an objectively useful way, but not both.
The more I think about this worldview of an unconscious universe that is hogging all of the reality, and conscious illusion that is hogging all of the meaning, the more absurd it seems and the more it reminds me of the distribution of wealth, technology, and happiness in the world (hint: The happiness isn’t concentrated at the top with the money and tech). What an appropriately perverse worldview during such a perversely unbalanced phase of the Earth’s anthropological experiment.
If we can crack the door an inch and see that sense may not have been born anew with blue-green algae a billion years ago, but has been here all along. In the celestial blooms of nebula and the rattling molecular chains. Events. Happening everywhere. Peaceful places, violent times. Everywhere. Not just in our heads. Not an incomprehensible rock hard nothingness tagged and bagged inexplicably by nerve cells for an audience of one who is really a none.
Without that pre-biotic sense, you have 12.7 billion years of mathematical potentials, accumulating and discharging force in silent obscurity. Invisible and without any association with any human image you might have. A universe without a memory, without a here and now. A universe which, at it’s microcosmic level, cannot tell the difference between something and nothing, as it has no feeling, no awareness to know what those things might be.
Imagine instead a world that is as meaningful as you are, and a life as real and persistent in the cosmos as a galaxy. After all, it is only consciousness that makes a galaxy seem large and slow. Without the sense of perspective and scale, all 12.7 billion years before life goes by as an instant or an eternity. There was nobody there to tell the difference. We are here now to tell the difference, and that is what is real for us. That is the only reality that means anything to us. It makes sense and it’s how we make sense. Adding skeptical inquiry to our naive realism only gives us more of what we had before. If our senses are an illusion, then our judgements about our senses only amplify the illusion. If, on the other hand, we can make sense of the world, then we have only begun to scratch the surface of how such a thing is possible.
Panpsychism Refutation Refuted
From Panpsychism thread on Quora
All arguments in favour of panpsychism emanate from the “comprehending mind”. They are the equivalent of a corrupt programme analysing itself for corruption. The corruption resides in the analytic tools so all results are suspect. There are many arguments in favour of panpsychism, as Paul King and Craig Weinberg have noted, but these arguments absolutely depend on a comprehending mind comprehending itself and becoming entangled with not-self. No external arguments support panpsychism. We can see that complexity throws up unexpected results. Consciousness is an unexpected and counterintuitive result of complexity. We simply don’t understand its genesis. But. The alternative is to suppose that nothing exists until you discover it (there was no gravity until Newton was hit by an apple). That is an absurd position. Panpsychism is a semantic byproduct of thought.
The fantastic thing about sense is that everything in the universe, including the universe itself, makes sense in more than one way. Your argument is completely sensible, and I know first hand because I made sense of things that way for most of my life. At some point, however, I discovered that there was a different way to look at it that makes more sense. Consider the following:
If arguments for panpsychism depend on a comprehending mind comprehending itself like a corrupt program analyzing itself, then arguments against panpsychism depend on the same thing: A bug-ridden debugger debugging itself.
“No external arguments support panpsychism. We can see that complexity throws up unexpected results.”
First of all, I’m not sure what an external argument is. All human arguments begin and end in the ‘comprehending mind’ of the human having them. Evidence from outside of our bodies for things that relate to objects outside of our minds, sure, absolutely. But there is no external evidence of consciousness to begin with. You can’t prove to me that you exist and feel like a person.
Panpsychism (or panprotopsychism) explains this surprisingly well. It’s because evidence is an experience within consciousness and not the other way around (please see my ‘pencil-in-water’ rebuttal: http://www.quora.com/Craig-Weinberg/Consciousness-Insights/160835). You can generate complexity given awareness, but without awareness as an a priori possibility, complexity cannot even generate complexity. Something needs to feel or experience something in order for there to be a difference between simple and complex in the first place. Complexity may throw up results that defy our expectations, but they don’t defy the universe’s expectations if you deny awareness as a primordial ground of being to have expectations within.
“Consciousness is an unexpected and counterintuitive result of complexity.”
Complexity itself is utterly sterile. Without awareness, no amount of stacking of uniform bricks will result in anything other than bricks. Without some form of pattern recognition, we cannot say even how many bricks there might be, what size they are, how long they have been sitting there, etc. There is really no difference between anything and nothing without pattern and experience.
“We simply don’t understand its genesis”
For the same reason that we don’t understand a square circle. Consciousness has no cause, causality is dependent upon experience, memory, and analytical associations among remembered experiences. Without any of those, the universe could only be a single instant of inchoate fragments. To say that we haven’t figured out its genesis yet is to my mind now, a naive assertion of religious faith – wishful thinking in the supremacy of Enlightenment Era approaches to science.
“The alternative is to suppose that nothing exists until you discover it (there was no gravity until Newton was hit by an apple). That is an absurd position.”
No, that is not the only alternative, and yes that position is absurd. It makes the hasty supposition of conflating human consciousness with awareness in general. When applied to criticism of panpsychism, this is a fallacy of begging the question since the panpsychic proposition is itself that awareness is a property that is irreducibly present in the universe, and for me, more importantly *as* the universe. You have to take the next step and realize that even though it wasn’t Newton, there was some first something (an atom? star? spacetime? the singularity?) that experienced gravity, and yes before that experience, gravity as we know it did not exist.
“Panpsychism is a semantic byproduct of thought.”
So are functionalism and materialism. Panpsychism addresses the universe directly, from the inside out. It begins with the Cartesian certainty, that if anything exists for sure around here, it is me. We cannot question that because it will only be ourselves doing the doubting. Only after having faith in our own sense, can we trust ourselves to make sense of empirical evidence from the world of our body. We see people get shot in the head and die. This gives us good reason to believe that a human mind supervenes on a human brain. In the last 500 years we have taken that kind of faith in matter to the extreme. It definitely works on a gross material level…at least until you start choking on the industrial and social backlash.
Now we stand poised on the edge of a next age of Enlightenment. This time the transition may be much more precarious than the last, as unlike in the 17th century, the discoveries are not in-your-face experimental demonstrations of principles that have a chance at shaking bright people out of their religious ignorance. This time, the 21st century discoveries may have to be reinterpretations of what we already thought we understood. We have to face the reality of a world, not that we bring into existence, but which has been brought into existence through billions of years of sense experience on different scales, and which anticipates a temporal unity in which all of those years and all that are to come are but a single moment of totality. This tension, between the retrocausality of the eternal now and the feed forward sense of linear causality, are, I think, where consciousness ‘comes from’. It is not panpsychism that is semantic, it is the entire universe. A sense of significance which divides itself into insignificant fragments which return back to their source on their own. A respiration meta-cycle of meaning and entropy oscillation. Thought is the product of panpsychism. Sense does not emerge from nonsense.
Bent Pencil
“Let us consider the pencil-in-water example. The representation of the pencil in your head is bent. The real pencil is not bent. That which misrepresents reality is, by definition, wrong.”
That is right in one sense, but only when you extend your naive realism (the pencil looks bent) to additional levels of biased realism (I can tell that it only looks bent, and I understand that it is possible for things to seem one way in one sense and a different way in another sense).
What this means is that when you say “The real pencil is not bent. That which misrepresents reality is, by definition, wrong.” you assume that there is a “real pencil” based purely on the bias of perceptual capacities of your human body. Your psychological capacities elevate that low level perception to a more subtle level of interpretation (which is still a form of perception of perception) in which you can entertain a difference between a real pencil and a visual appearance.
I submit that the bent pencil is, in a sense, a much more ‘real’ pencil than the understood straight pencil in that it reflects not only the distant object of physical surfaces of a pencil and water, but it conveys a condensed encyclopedia on optics and perception which lead directly to discoverable neurological truths.
It is the simplistic interpretation of a literal reality that ‘simply is’, independent of a perceptual experience of that reality which seems to be a misrepresentation of reality.
That’s right. Fiction is primordial, fact is contrived.
Is Matter Concentrated Energy?
Would you have any objection to postulating that all matter is a form of concentrated energy (E = mcc), and that all energy is aware-ized?
I agree in a sense but I think we can go further than that. I would say that energy is nothing except awareness in the efferent-output mode (motive), and matter is awareness in the afferent-input mode (sense). E=mc² gives us the measure of how the two modes relate to each other. When we talk about energy, we are referring to a quality of dynamism of experienced events to persist through time and across space. The idea that matter is concentrated energy is more true if we mean concentrated in time than concentrated in space as density.
To say that matter is concentrated energy conjures an image of a bright glowing haze being squeezed into a particle, which I think we could say is figuratively true, but not literally. It is *as if* that were happening as far as particles can be destroyed and there is an explosive dynamism produced in surrounding matter, but I don’t think that there is actually any bright glowing haze to begin with. If we use a sense-based model instead, with energy as nothing more or less than the experience-behavior of things (particles, objects, cells, bodies), so that empty space cannot in any way contain energy, I think it makes more sense in addressing our experience, and no less sense as far as interpreting physics. Energy is a notational concept of how things happen to matter statistically, but I think our mistake is to model it as a pseudosubstance that literally exists.
Instead, energy condenses as matter not through space but through time. It is not frozen energy but an accumulated history which has been perceptually collapsed due to the defining conditions of our subjectivity. We see a slice of the whole history of the thing from the outside as a 3D object.
Remember too that both fission and fusion produce energy. Most of that energy is not from particles being turned into energy but from mass being lost as nuclei either “move into the same apartment together” under fusion and thus save on “rent”, or in fission by breaking up big businesses by selling off divisions. It’s interesting that it works both way – apparently because of the Iron Peak: Matter lighter than iron wants to be heavier – it’s looking for roommates. Matter heavier than iron wants to get rid of employees. That’s my goofy understanding anyhow. I think that particles can actually be lost but the amount of energy generated by that is surprisingly low. The power is in changing the relation of materials, not in converting them directly to energy.
It’s really a whole different way of looking at energy that I’m trying to get across. Once we can let go of our inherited 20th century models of energy and try out the sense-primitive model instead, I think we recover a great deal of our native realism. We experience energy directly. We see light, we feel heat, we hear sound. None of those things can be described in any meaningful way as objects in space. Our instruments and observations only tell us what they are experiencing, how the event changes them. The 20th century gave us a brilliant unifying vision of energy as an underlying quantitative omnipotence, but I think that is only true in the most physical and qualitatively flat sense.
I think a new understanding of energy must recognize the disunity of sense channels; the qualitative deepening of material experiences driven from top down significance attraction as well as bottom up accumulation. By breaking up the monolith of physics, we unify the outermost definition of the cosmos with the definitions which are evolving within (biology, neurology, anthropology, psychology, etc.). By breaking up Einsteinian spacetime relativity into sense-motive perception, we unify qualitative subjectivity with quantitative objectivity.
Consciousness and Rhythm
Brain oscillations reveal that our senses do not experience the world continuously
Testing subsequent visual perception, by using transcranial magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex, revealed a cyclic pattern at the very rapid rate of brain oscillations, in time with the underlying brainwaves. Prof Thut said: “Rhythmicity therefore is indeed omnipresent not only in brain activity but also brain function. For perception, this means that despite experiencing the world as a continuum, we do not sample our world continuously but in discrete snapshots determined by the cycles of brain rhythms.” The research, ‘Sounds reset rhythms of visual cortex and corresponding human visual perception’ is published in the journal Current Biology. More information: Romei et al., Sounds Reset Rhythms of Visual Cortex and Corresponding Human Visual Perception, Current Biology (2012), doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.025 Provided by University of Glasgow
This is more support for what I have been calling subtractive mechanics. The idea that subjectivity is not only built from the bottom up from meaningless parts and pixels but elided from the top down as well.
Just as our optical blindspot is erased through a filling in of high level perceptual expectations, our entire experience of life is a process of extracting signifying themes from many oscillating channels of sense. The realism we experience persists through time, within each moment accumulating the sense of the past and anticipating the intentions of our different sense-motive modalities. We are seeing through the oscillations, bridging each gap in sensation with ourselves – weaving ourselves into our experience .
This is the same thing I mean by the ‘Big Diffraction‘; the presence of everythingness bleeding through the gap between itself and its own absence, seeking to re-member its wholeness.
Multisense Realism 
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