Multisense Realism

I’m about halfway through Lynne McTaggart’s “The Field”, which is worthwhile even if a little New Agey in style for my current tastes. She does a good job of telling the stories of scientists who have been studying consciousness, and painting a picture of a universe of quantum coherence that consciousness can tune like a radio. In many ways I agree. If I had to flatten my model of the universe, it would probably look just like The Field. I can almost accept a universe of vacuums full of energy and matter as charged space, but I think with a simple inversion, we can find ourselves in a universe of sense and reality, rather than simulation and holography.

I feel that Multisense Realism picks up where The Field leaves off. The notion of zero-point field and holographic transformation of wave interference patterns through microtubule quantum superposition being responsible for human consciousness is visionary, and I think almost true, but it still doesn’t jump from the easy problem to the hard problem. This view doesn’t explain why, if you have holographic interference patterns that contain tremendous amounts of information, why would it get transformed into anything other than what it is? Why does the transmission and reception of zero-point light feel like something?

If we turn this model inside out however, we might say that it is not wave interference patterns that are transformed holographically into experience, but multidimensional experience casting a 3-D shadow as holographically interrelated waving objects. It’s not wave patterns being reconstituted as a simulation or projection, but fantastically rich experiential realism that is being stepped down into flat quantitative mechanisms across space.

In the same way, the observation that “Consciousness at it’s most basic, was coherent light” would make more sense as “Light, at it’s most basic, is coherence (sense)”. Instead of this metaphysical notion of matter being eddies in a cosmic sea of light, we should ask why it is that our naive realism always seems to show us the opposite – a universe of objects in space, islands of light and coherence in a field of emptiness. We should ask why it is that tiny bits of substance can profoundly impact our minds and bodies, but rhythms and frequencies don’t seem to have much of a universal semiotic consistency. Seeing a graphic visualization of  music has only vaguely consistent association with the aural experience of it. I’m not advocating naive realism, but rather than a counterintuitive metaphysics of quantum mechanical waves in space time creating a holographic consciousness, I suggest a counterintuitive physics of matter creating time and space by waving at itself. We are who is waving. Hollow, boundary-less, and eternal, but concrete and real – local temporal confinements of a timeless experiential firmament. There is no ‘light’ in space, only in our experience. Our ability to sense visually is activated through illumination of the sense organs themselves.

Where we are now, most of us can only conceive of an exteriorized universe. Even though our every moment of life is clearly spent as an interior narrative of an exterior circumstance, we assume that this is limited to living creatures. If we extend the possibility of interiority to all matter, we find that the external symptoms of consciousness – energy, coherent light, patterns, zero point field, etc is only the surface layer that is available to us through the stepped down architectures of our body and the instruments we have made for it. In a universe where matter is literally experience, the temporal distortions of General Relativity can give us a clue as to how different kinds of perception might co-exist, nested within each other, not just holographically but holotemporally. Time within time that can be modeled as inertial frames of scale from microcosm to macrocosm, confined to particular ranges of experience by frequency and wavelength. Not energy in space pretending to be matter, pretending to feel, but feeling through time re-presenting itself as energized matter across