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Attending TSC this year and in 2012 has played a critical role, and continues to play a role in inspiring me to develop Multisense Realism. David Chalmers work in particular, with his elucidation of the various forms of panpsychism in his recent papers Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism and The Combination Problem for Panpsychism has been invaluable.
From the former paper :
“Panpsychism is sometimes dismissed as a crazy view, but this reaction on its own is not a serious objection. While the view is counterintuitive to some, there is good reason to think that any view of consciousness must embrace some counterintuitive conclusions. Furthermore, intuitions about panpsychism seem to vary heavily with culture and with historical period. The view has a long history in both Eastern and Western philosophy, and many of the greatest philosophers have taken it seriously. It is true that we do not have much direct evidence for panpsychism, but we also do not have much direct evidence against it, given the difficulties of detecting the presence or absence of consciousness in other systems. And there are indirect reasons, of a broadly theoretical character, for taking the view seriously.”
In the latter paper, Chalmers offers a rigorous account of The Combination Problem. Multisense Realism begins as a proposed solution to the Combination Problem in which the explanatory gap between physical and phenomenal states are bridged by a continuum/spectrum of relativistic qualities of sensitivity.
From the macro to the micro, physical to phenomenal, under MSR, every perspective contributes its own frame of reference to what could be considered a totality of reference. Through this super-monad, not only are physics and phenomenology reconciled, but ontology itself. ‘Isness’ and ‘Aboutness’ are reconsidered as ‘Seems’ and ‘Seems like’.
It is the aim of MSR to begin to characterize and document this spectrum of meta-ontology, in which definition itself is created, preserved, and dissolved…even while, in another sense, not creating, preserving, or dissolving anything. Amidst all of this relativism and paraconsistent logic, it is proposed that within every frame of reference there is also the potential to access unambiguous clarity, simplicity, and wholeness. At the center of every center, there is a default experience – a reflection of the totality; home, safe, within or ‘in here’. This anchoring should not be presumed to be the exclusive province of human consciousness or even zoology or biology. All of physics and mathematics contains implicit vantage points from which objects are defined. In this way at least, sense should be seen to pre-figure all figures and forms, all objects and subjects.
What PIP suggests is that even relativity is relative. There “is” an Absolute frame of reference, consisting of the capacity to orient sensibly. From that foundation, it becomes possible to ‘make sense’. Existence is suggested, not as a facile axiom, but as a concrete presentation of here and now that is a‘living’ coordination of aesthetic encounters. This view of the cosmos is one in which divergence and disentanglement of privacies precedes an emergence of spacetime, nucleated in the now.
The work of Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose have also inspired my thinking as well. MSR introduces a kind of perceptual relativity at every level of scale (named Eigenmorphism), and a Lorentz-style complementarity to the Orchestrated Objective Reduction called Subjective Inflation (i.e. Orch OR+SI). The publicity of quantum mechanics finds a kind of twin realization in the privacy of qualitative gestalts. Wave-function collapse is reflected as a figurative bolt of lightning from the totality into locality.
Like a lightning bolt, a uniquely jagged path traces its route from vector to vector, describing not only a generic/recombinatory state change, but a proprietary and unrepeatable address. This path can be imagined to strike through what might be described as an ‘improbability space’ – a top-down complement to the bottom-up view of quantum theory.
Through this influx of novelty, the present moment of here and now is inflated to superlative significance which recapitulates the inflation as well, so that eternity is reflected in each moment. This idea owes a lot to Eastern concepts such as the Net of Indra and Akashic Records. The idea is that each moment’s route to the present from the Absolute is preserved within it. This is quite an abstruse concept, and requires much deeper consideration than can be expressed here, but let this be at least a premonition of the potential for a productive if not testable form of ‘private physics’.
I have very much appreciated the contributions of Deepak Chopra, Giulio Tononi, and Donald Hoffman as well, each of whom present important pieces to the puzzle. Where I diverge from their views is only in particular details that arise from my premises. I do not see the world as a simulation or illusion, but rather, in any given frame of reference, the exterior world is as real as anything could possibly be…more ‘real’ in a way, than individual subjectivity. In my view, it is only from the Absolute frame of reference that matter is ‘unreal’ and subjective-like phenomena are the firmament. I see our subjective experience as both more-than-real and less-than-real, but not as the only arbiter of realism. MSR is not solipsism, but perhaps more of a holopsism.
Where Tononi’s IIT models a topological qualia space, I imagine a stratified but contiguous medium of sedimented experience from which qualia is carved out subtractively. There is simply no space in the universe that is not qualia already, nowhere to build it up from scratch. Instead, qualia is etched out of the local surface to the depths toward its source in the Absolute frame (beneath and beyond).
The flavor of strawberries for example, under MSR, is a kind of gestalt which traces a likeness of all the experience of animals eating fruit, of all fruit bearing plants, etc going back to indefinitely. Qualia is *not* a simple translation from molecular code to phenomenal effect. As humans, we are highly elaborated, so our divided senses can conflict, but this does not mean, in my view, that it is evidence of a faulty and solipsistic simulation. Illusions and misperceptions reveal more, not less, about the full reality of objective and subjective relation, even if the content is incompatible with the local frame of reference. The flavor of strawberries really is the flavor of the actual fruit, not simply a computation of indirectly generated data. One does not cause the other, they reflect different perceptual frame of reference. For this reason I reject all contemporary Strong AI approaches as implausible, since producing a mechanism capable of simulating expected outputs from a given input would be doing so based on mathematical contingencies rather than the kind of hyper-physics of sedimented experience that I suggest.
Donald Hoffman’s Conscious Realism seems to overlap with MSR very closely however here too I propose that even the idea of conscious agents are figments of the interface. If we drop the requirement of ‘agents’ to consciousness, the notion of panpsychism becomes more palatable, and the Combination Problem is eased if not completely transcended. If we see self-ness as the ‘king of qualia’ rather than the price of entry to consciousness, then we open the door to a profoundly interesting universe of ‘dark qualia’ which would, (as it contains the content of both past and future relative to any nested frame) dwarf the scale of dark energy. It seems possible that dark energy is the local footprint of this eternal continuity of experience.
Thanks also to my ideological adversaries in this as well. Susan Blackmore’s no-nonsense approach and commitment to empirical evidence is a welcome influence, as well as Daniel Dennett’s humor and uncompromising cynicism. In many ways, my own view is informed by turning the tables on doubt so that in addition to being skeptical of our interior experience, in favor of exterior scientific evidence, I would add that we must introduce a new skepticism of the presumption of the universality and completeness of even those scientific descriptions. What is true on one level may not be true on another, and each level has its own fundamental truth independent of every other.
Thanks to Jody Weiss and everyone else that I have met here at the conference too, who have also contributed to this ongoing development, both directly and indirectly.
Yours in Consciousness,
Craig Weinberg, @s33light
Multisenserealism.com
Nothing is an o…
Nothing is an object in its own frame of reference.
A simple thing to say, but the implications are profound when taken literally. I do take them literally, so that like time and length, objectivity itself is relativistic*. There are no truly objective objects, only experiences which are frozen by distance and unfamiliarity. What is truly objective is, ironically, subjectivity. The sense of perceiving and participating, while nested in an elaborate way for human participants, is, in my view, the simplest possible phenomenon within which all other phenomena are described. The capacity for experience is absolute and irreducible, even though the capacity for human qualities of experience is contingent upon a Matroyshka doll nesting of continuous non-human experiences.
*I call this variation of object and non-object qualities by proximity and similarity ‘eigenmorphism’ (proper form).
Die Enge des Bewusstseins, ‘the narrowness of consciousness’
To invent, I have said, is to choose; but the word is perhaps not wholly exact. It makes one think of a purchaser before whom are displayed a large number of samples, and who examines them, one after the other, to make a choice. Here the samples would be so numerous that a whole lifetime would not suffice to examine them. This is not the actual state of things. The sterile combinations do not even present themselves to the mind of the inventor. – Henri Poincaré
As part of his response, Albert Einstein writes:
… It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.
…It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness (Enge des Bewußtseins)*.
Here Poincaré and Einstein are discussing the nature of creativity and the particular issue of how our personal awareness both does and does not generate novelty. Like the debate over free will, I see this as largely about the hierarchical flow of subjectivity. The personal level of awareness, as noted by Freud and Jung among others, is sandwiched between what could be called a sub-personal or sub-conscious range (Id) and a super-personal or metaphenomenal range (Collective Unconscious). Jung picked up where Freud left off, seeing that Super-Ego was not necessarily just a facade of social pressures against which the Ego cowers, but a living, trans-personal terrain of archetypal influences. The Jungian view looked at this terrain as being tied up in his idea of synchronicity – meaningful coincidence which can be decoded through a language of cross-cultural metaphor. Joseph Campbell wrote and spoke extensively on this language (‘The Power of Myth, ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’, etc.).
What I have not seen is a physical theory which takes the synchronicity and myth seriously. When we do take it seriously, I think that it meshes perfectly with the implications of the Theory of Relativity, and with what Poincaré and Einstein are talking about with the narrowness of consciousness. All that needs to be done is to relocate the concept of literal inertial frames of reference with a more figurative notion of phenomenal inertial framing. The idea of levels of consciousness is probably one of the most ancient and enduring concepts in mysticism. Whether they are seen as levels which can only be attained through a proscribed path or as introspective potentials which we can all access by ourselves, the desire to partition human experience as a hierarchy seems to be irresistible. Irresistible, that is, until recently. Contemporary psychology has largely moved away from hierarchies and grand schemas, focusing instead (with debatable success) on more modular, pharmacologically addressable functions.
While I appreciate many of the hierarchical maps of consciousness, like those so diligently compiled by Ken Wilber, I suggest that we begin from scratch, with an eye toward simplicity and correlation with general systems. In addition, the foundation for this view should be sensory-motive rather than information-theoretic or material-energetic. By sensory-motive, I refer to what Einstein talks about above. While the effect of creativity is teleological and communicative, the process itself is driven by what he calls combinatory play: ‘the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words’.
Just as this sub-cognitive sensible engagement is overlooked in modern, computational theories of mind, so too is the possibility of microsensory phenomena overlooked in modern physics. I see this not as an accident, but rather the same oversight on a different scale. The idea that our own sensations emerge from a different source than the sensations which are telegraphed from the source to instrument of detection to scientific observer is not necessary if we generalize Einstein’s ‘combinatory play’ to the outer-shell of all of physics.
The MSR hypothesis is called Eigenmorphism. It is that what separates our body from our sub-conscious experience, and our sub-conscious from our personal experience can be understood in terms of a psychophysically extended narrowness of consciousness. There aren’t any inertial frames which simply exist, but only those which can be inferred through the combination of sensed perspectives. Modes of description, whether in the aesthetic of substances, quantities, or qualities are all ultimately narrowed channels of fundamental sense-making, which must be absolutely primordial. The various forms and functions which can be measured publicly are comparable to what Einstein meant about what is logically motivated and communicable, but what the deeper participation cannot be seen as the object of sight. Light, as a the most pervasive version of sense, is not a thing or an energy, but a participation multiplier – a way of being simultaneously here, there, and not literally here or there. I project my narrow attention through a mind which is already narrowed by a hierarchy of sub-personal and super-personal filters, each of which are also narrowed from scales of sensory participation so vast and unfamiliar that I read them only by the mechanical, impersonal traces that they leave. The universe that we live in is not a solipsistic narrowing of consciousness, but a nested universality of aesthetics – a combinatory play.
*The narrowness of consciousness which Einstein mentions is from William James:
“The sum total of our impressions never enters into our experience, consciously so called, which runs through this sum total like a tiny rill through a flowery mead. Yet the physical impressions which do not count are there as much as those that do, and affect our sense-organs just as energetically. Why they fail to pierce the mind is a mystery which is only named and not explained when we invoke die Enge des Bewusstseins, the narrowness of consciousness’ as its grounds.”.
Philosophy of Mind Flowchart
The idea here is that if we want to take the full spectrum of phenomena into account, we have to either begin with a reductionist realism and work upward, or a holistic idealism and work downward.
When we suppose that consciousness is a phenomenon that arises out of unconscious phenomena, we are saying that mechanism, through some act of emergence (generally by complexity), the mechanism in question (generally physical or computational mechanism) becomes enchanted with itself. In this case, as David Chalmers famously points out, there would have to be some threshold beyond which it would be impossible to tell the difference between a real person and a machine which acts just like a real person (a philosophical zombie). Finding this unacceptable, he suggests instead some variety of panpsychism should be explored, including perhaps, what I would call a promiscuous or ‘leaky’ panpsychism in which devices such as thermostats would have to be considered aware in some sense.
Finding both of these alternatives unacceptable, I suggest that we move over to the right side and begin with a downward facing ideal absolute. For the spiritually inclined, this could be called by any number of theistic names, however, it can also be conceived of equally well in completely non-spiritual, atheistic terms. When we suppose that awareness itself is inescapable and inevitable in all possible or theoretical universes, we are saying that through some divergence or illusion, awareness takes on a temporary solid appearance. In MSR, I suggest that this is a more plausible option than brute emergence from nothingness…modulated constraint within everythingness.*
Rather than positing an appeal to future scientific understanding to explain the emergence of aesthetic realism from mechanism, the divergence of mechanism from total awareness can be made palatable through a nested modulation of insensitivity. Intentionally partitioning intention itself so that it appears unintentional given a certain amount of insensitivity. This could be viewed either in the religious sense of ‘God’s divine plan is not visible to us’, or in a more conservative sense of ‘Shit happens coincidentally, but coincidental shit also happens to be meaningful from some perspective’.
If anyone is interested in what the crazy pink cone and all that is, I can explain in more detail, but briefly, if we take the MSR road from disenchanted idealism (the conservative ‘Shit happens’ option), then instead of the Chalmers dilemma of zombies vs leaky panpsychism, we get a continuum in which local sense is selectively blinded to the sense of non-human experiences, through a combination of frame rate mismatch (time scale difference cause entropy and local sense approximates) and distance (literal spatial scale difference, as well as experiential unfamiliarity).**
The other ten dollar words there, ‘tessellated monism’ and ‘eigenmetric diffraction’ both refer to the juxtaposition of sensitivity and insensitivity, through which a kind of metabolism of accumulating significance (solitrophy) in the face of fading sense (entropy) and fading motive (gravity).
*I call this cosmology the Sole Entropy Well hypothesis and it has to do with reversing Boltzmann’s solution to Loschmidt’s paradox so that entropy is a bottomless absolute, like c, in which local ranges of entropy and extropy stretch and multiply in a fractal-like reproduction.
**I call this aspect of MSR Eigenmorphism, which has to do with things appearing to be more doll-like and less familiar from a distance. This makes, for example, the presence of atoms and solar systems in our experience more similar to each other than either of them seems like a tree or a cell. The limits of our perception coincide with the simplicity of ontology, and they are, in a sense, the same thing (given eigenmorphism). As a rule of thumb, distance = the significance of insignficance.
Metanoia: A New Vision of Nature
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.
Strawson on Realistic Monism
In this brief essay “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism”, Galen Strawson covers a lot of the territory that I have tried to write about here. From the fallacy of brute emergence to the necessity of sensation as a concrete physical phenomenon, he gives a great overview of how to see the problem and where to look for a solution. I would like to think that my conjectures are designed to pick up where he leaves off, in the sense that they relate to filling in the gaps between micropsychism and realism. He writes:
“The experiential/non-experiential divide, assuming that it exists at all, is the most fundamental divide in nature (the only way it can fail to exist is for there to be nothing non-experiential in nature)”
Here my response is that the fundamental divide can exist conditionally – IF – nature’s monism is the division-providing sense itself. In that case nothing in nature is non-experiential from an absolute perspective, but locally, our experience can consist of side views and rear views of other experiences which are so foreign to our own in scale and character that they seem to be inert to us and all those who inhabit a similar perceptual inertial frame as we do (other humans, animals, organisms…).
“Emergence can’t be brute”
Exactly (see The Failure of Emergence). I can follow his reasoning with perfect clarity as it is very close to my own regarding the appeal to emergence as a kind of metaphysical Santa Claus clothed in a magical wardrobe of arbitrary inevitability. He does an exemplary job of covering the core issue of why emergence makes sense to explain liquidity from non-liquidity, but not experiences from non-experiences. To paraphrase David Chalmers, since physics is consistent with the absence of consciousness, consciousness must be a further fact about the world.
Strawson gets into spatial extension and how it can or cannot emerge from non-space. MSR, PIP, and Eignemorphism work together to explain how space, time, and entropy are forms of insensitivity – gaps and range constraints within the primordial pansensitivity which privatize one perspective by mechanizing all other perspectives to different degrees. The monism can be conceived, metaphorically, as a prism in which both the white beam of extended publicity and the diffracted spectrum of intentional privacy are within the prism itself, and change places depending on how the prism is viewed.
It’s difficult because rather than comparing (private phenomenal) apples to (public structural) apples, Eigenmorphism is the proposal that the former and latter apples have absolutely opposite orientations. Public structures are identifiable as isolated obstructions in space or stepped procedures through time (forms and functions), while the proposed view is for phenomenal privacy to persist as a subtractive phenomenon – a ‘hole in wholeness’ through which particular qualities of experience are disentangled along a temporal gradient from the event horizon of eternal experience. Rather than functions or forms, private physics is appreciation and participation.
Under eigenmorphism, awareness would not be produced from the dynamics of microstructures any more than multi-level parking lots are produced by the parking behaviors of vehicles. Instead of presuming that the micro-apples of physics are producing a macro-apple of phenomenology, Eigenmorphism expects that all of the apples of phenomenology (micro, macro, and cosmo) are more like apples of the metaphorical variety; apple images, flavors, logos, memories. A Beatles album. A personal computer from the 1980s. Une pomme. Not to say that phenomenology is metaphorical from the absolute perspective, but from our local perspective, the contents of the psyche are real as qualia and metaphor while the perimeter of the local awareness is staged with seemingly non-experiential quanta (public realism). MSR imagines that these perspectives fit like lock and key – not with each other, but with the underlying unity of primordial sense.
Strawson’s Micropsychism is very similar to what I have proposed, although by MSR, every experience is to some extent micro or mega relative to some other experience, as our top-down awareness is informed from ‘above the top’ intuition as well. We’re not just built of psychic Legos, but are also a megapsychic Taj Mahal executed in micropsychic Legos.
Highly recommend.
Biology From The Inside
This gif is one of the set that has been going around, but it reminds me of the concept that I have of biological awareness (as opposed to primordial awareness which is embodied by physics and does not require biology). Whether the inorganic universe is four dimensional (3 + 1 time) or just seems that way from within a two dimensional hologram, it seems likely to me that the experience of biological organisms is best modeled along a fifth axis (aesthetic qualities as more than the sum of their conditional parts).
What I like about the repeating gif, besides the coincidental “5” relating to the fifth dimension, is that it suggests a kind of morphological respiration. Front to back, parts to whole, a seamless, self-metabolizing transformation. As a biological organism, my experience of the outside world is limited to that which can be modeled as objects – that is, through an aesthetically reduced feature set in which a bunch of five dimensional urges and responses are flattened into a four dimensional narrative on multiple levels.
In a previous post, I was looking at how sensitivity might be understood as being ‘key composited’ or perhaps ‘discomposed’ across multiple frames of reference. By this I mean that the apparent distribution of our psychological interface across the tissue of the brain can be compared to a flatland visualization:
If instead of the sphere, it were a hand passing through the flatland plane, it would appear to the omniscient flatlander that there were five separate circles appearing separately, yet somehow seeming coordinated in their action. The fingers are part of a single hand, but within the constraint of the two dimensional sensitivity, the unity of the hand is discomposed across space in the literal sense, but figuratively some kind of unity can be inferred through the synchronized coincidence of the movement.
Now imagine that instead of another graphable dimension, the fifth dimension is one which is as orthogonal to spacetime as the three dimensions of space are to the one dimension of time. Feeling, like pain and pleasure, are like a coloring, or keying which cuts across multiple layers of seemingly unrelated public events. Not only is feeling a different kind of thing as forms or functions but it is a dimension in which dimension itself is transcended. Feeling is not a model or a measure, but rather it is the primordial context from which all measure is derived and all modeling is made demonstrable.
From the discomposed perspective ‘out there’, we are a coincidence of coincidences. A mysteriously synchronized, dynamic orchestration of hundreds of billions of neurons, organelles, molecules, etc which corresponds to the behavior of an animal’s body.
The feelings which we experience are not located in the tissue of the brain, rather the brain itself is part of the wider landscape of the totality of experience. The brain as a whole is, like our body as a whole and all of the cells and molecules that make it up at any given time, a four dimensional reduction of a transdimensional privacy.
Under Eigenmorphism, the base of each pyramid of perception is made up of the apex of countless low level pyramids of perception. When we look at an fMRI or the brain, we are trying to look at the view from top of our own pyramid through the blind eyes of its own bottom. Feeling is stripped out (not to mention the higher dimensions of meta-feeling/emotion/cognition/intuition) and we are left with a four dimensional mechanical skeleton with no interiority.
Being so impressed with ourselves and what we have accomplished by questioning our naive introspection with science, we naturalize the discomposed view and epiphenomenalize the native, gestalt perspective. All of this makes perfect sense within the flatlanded context of topological physics, where spontaneous appearances and disappearances are assumed only to reflect each other, rather than private transdimensional presentations.
I suspect that the universe which is experienced in the absence of all living organisms is a much different thing that it would appear to us. What we see as a four or two dimensional manifold is only a snapshot of discomposed histories. It seems inanimate to us because we seem so animated to ourselves. The highest awareness of our own interior physics seems to us unreal and crazy…and it is, relative to the inertia of human awareness as a whole. Like the inverted image of our retina however, I think that because our disposition spans so many levels of life and physical experience, we tend to see the mechanical patterns which all of the layers have in common, rather than the coincidence which is also animating them from the top down.
Like the transformer car in the gif, the signature of our presence and intention coincides with the interplay of entropy and significance. The living cell, from our perspective looking through our eyes and a microscope’s lens, looks like a homeostatic emergence. Seemingly conjured, like Brownian motion, from the statistical collisions of countless microphysical conditions.
This is not completely untrue. The mechanical conditions of a cell can be disrupted mechanically. There is bottom up causality. What has not been properly investigated yet is the other perspective. The one responsible for the biological property of healing and global integrity. If we think of the flux between entropy and significance as a carrier tone for biological life, then it might be easier to conceptualize how the universe is as much a dynamic interaction of nested simplicities as it is a mechanical progression from simplicity to complexity. The image of the metabolic transformer stands in contrast to the stillness of the axis of its transformation.
Perceptual Inertial Frame (PIF)
Perceptual Inertial Frame (PIF) – In practice, this concept is similar to other philosophical concepts such as lebenswelt, umwelt, or niche in that it refers to the world as it is experienced by some subject. The perceptual inertial frame of a child is different from that of an adult, as would any age or social position have its own set of stereotypical qualities. Eigenmorphism describes how dissimilarity by scale, morphology, or history is a determining factor in how any given PIF presents every other PIF. This is roughly analogous to how optics can predict the anamorphic reflection of a reflective cylinder or the distortion of a fisheye lens. Tying in occasions of perception to the physics concept of inertial frames, the PIF model provides a framework for connecting universal and physical ontology to local experiential scope and quality, and it provides a possible scientific basis to investigate that connection further. See also eigenmorphism, solitrophy.
Motive
Motive – If sense describes a fundamental receptivity which precedes being or feeling, motive describes the antithesis: doing, responding, opposing, negating, projecting, moving, etc. If sense is affect, then motive is effect. If sense is the head, then motive is the flagellum (or tail or body). Because human experience is so convoluted with layers of molecules, cells, organs, and bodies, our motive participation can be limited to private intentions, or it can be stepped down through the body as motor activity. Were we simpler organisms, or perhaps inorganic molecules, our motive might be more isomorphic to our motion. On that more primitive level, the gap between intention and unintention may be closed, and subjectivity and objectivity becomes, at least from our perspective, indiscernible. Whether that closing of the gap is a prejudice of perceptual relativity, or an ontological reality, or a mixture of the two remains an open question under eigenmorphism.
Law of Conservation of Mystery
Law of Conservation of Mystery – Refers to the weird tendency for profound and fundamental issues to resist final resolution. Because the multisense continuum wraps around at both the very small and very large ends, many properties and qualities which we think of as opposite are unified, such as chance and choice. In one sense, our personal awareness might act as a lens, bending universal awareness around us into an impersonal bubble, and in another sense, the personal bubble may project an illusion of impersonality outwardly. Both of these can be thought of not as illusions or distortions, but of mutual relation between foreground and background (as in tessellation).
Both the sub-personal quirkiness of QM and the super-personal spookiness of divination (such as the I Ching or Tarot cards) exemplify that the perception of both spiritual and mechanical absolutes is elusive and relates to the choice between belief and belief in disbelief. In both quantum mechanics and divination, a participant is responsible for the interpretation – the individual is the prism which splits the beam of their interpretation between chance and choice…or the individual is responsible for remaining skeptical and resisting pseudoscientific claims.
If we choose to allow choice on the cosmological level, even there, the continuum between luck which is intentionally or unintentionally fateful, and karma which is divinely mechanistic reflects a difference in degree of universal favor. The Law of Conservation of Mystery is particularly applicable to paranormal phenomena. Everything from UFOs to NDEs have passionately devoted supporters who are either seen as deluded fools stuck in a prescientific past or prophets of enlightenment ahead of their time.*
*What preserves that bifocal antagonism is technically eigenmorphism – it’s how different perceptual frames maintain their character, but this special case of conservation of myster is on us. It keeps us guessing and pushing further, but it also keeps us blind and stuck in our assumptions. See also Superposition of the Absolute.
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