Where Is This Video?
The reducibility of our body to elementary functions and forms does not necessarily have to reduce us to forgeries. There is another possibility, which is that there is something to be forged that is precisely the opposite of a copy. As hinted at in the video, each experienced moment is a kind of unrepeatable performance. Instead of focusing on the absence of a concrete physical object, we can look at the aesthetic content of the experience itself as the concrete phenomenon – not a simulacrum (pronounced sim-you-lah-crum) but a localized fragment of authenticity itself. Is color basically a bad copy of white light? Is the universe basically a bad copy of nothingness?
Humans are not bad copies of anything, but the degree to which we are unique snowflakes is relative to the proximity of our scope of consideration. Within our own frame of reference, we are absolutely unique. Within a social frame of reference, we are stereotyped culturally. Moving out from the human context, an individual human becomes more and more generic – a mammal, an animal, a biological organism, a chemical reaction, etc. This variance is, in my view, what the universe is ‘made of’, so that no one context of description is the final ‘real’ description.
In other words, this commentary is literally “here”, and that video is actually “there”, and that is what relativity ultimately means…perception itself – awareness, is the ultimate frame of reference, and without perception, there is nothing to frame.
The 99.999%
There is something about the narrowness of consciousness that makes the relativity of all experience necessary. In some way, the universe can only experience all of itself if each episode of awareness has its own kind of zero-gravity bubble of perceptual bias. Every frame of reference is screening out shades of so many others, but fills in the gaps with its own connectivity to events and phenomena which are local. We are walking around in a predominantly human life in a human context, only barely noticing the other 99.999..% of the universe as a cartoonish/mechanical caricature.
1+1=2
The question that I pose is whether 1+1=2 because it makes sense, or whether our minds make sense because truths like 1+1=2 exist independently of all experience.
If it is the latter, then 1+1=2 stands in for a fundamental set of rules and relations for which consciousness serves to glorify, either accidentally or inevitably.
If it is the former, then that which ‘makes sense’ stands in for a perceptual acquaintance with qualities of undeniable coherence.
It is significant to notice that when we get down to elementary statements such as 1+1=2, we have slipped beneath the realm of logic and numbers without even realizing it. To say that one can be ‘added’ to one and that they are now equal to a group of two is entirely a matter of naming perceptions. There is no real arithmetic going on, we are saying only that when something is to be considered individually we call its individuality “one”, and when we want to consider the presence of one as being adjacent to one other, we call that adjacency “two”. The underlying properties which are being named are conceptually abstracted perceptions. There is no actual “information” named one or two, rather there is a language through which we generalize stereotypical features of our perception – particularly visual and tangible perception. Trying to apply mathematical models to perceptions like flavors and odors is less ‘informative’. They don’t really add up to be enumerable flavors as much as they involve us in a sensory experience in which flavors are both merged and independent.
Lemon + Lime does not necessarily equal two flavors, but can be just as easily thought of as Lemon-lime. Either lemon or lime could be broken down each into multiple flavors including sweet, sour, and citrus, but there remains an idiosyncratic note as well which identifies lemon as one flavor and lime as a different single flavor. Even if we isolate the compounds associated with these flavors, or synthesize artificial compounds with entirely different molecular profiles, there is a huge variation in our perception of any ‘one’ flavor. Lime jelly bean flavor is not the same as key lime pie flavor, yet in another sense, the similarity is self-evident, especially once we give it the name of ‘lime’. It is not a name that is arrived at through a computation or reasoning. Like ‘one’ and ‘equals’, lime is a subjective experience which we can point to but cannot define through a mathematical function.
Does it make more sense, given that the axioms of mathematics as well as physics are defined by subjective expectations (about objective conditions), that we should rule out the idea that all axioms are intrinsically perceptual? We might also ask, if mathematics and information were truly axiomatic, would it be possible to make errors? If our entire conscious experience were made of trillions of precise mathematical reflexes, why is the subject of mathematics even necessary to teach? Wouldn’t it make more sense that we would be able to perform comparatively simple algebras more easily than we can identify whether the flavor of a lime is natural or artificial?
Is ‘consciousness’ merely another ‘spectrum’ we haven’t yet unraveled?
I sometimes wonder if ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ or ‘enlightenment’ might be terms which relate to a “spectrum” similar to the light, sound, and other ‘spectrums’ we’re familiar with.
Perhaps our “level of understanding” can only attain to certain depths (or heights, depending how we perceive it) because of limitations we have not yet learned how to effectively overcome for purposes of studying and evaluating?
Perhaps there IS a ‘spirit world’ all around is…a ‘quantum-shifted-world’ that we’re just not ‘tuned into’ because our brains cannot yet deal with such things?
What do YOU think?
Yes, I do think that consciousness can be described in terms of a fundamental spectrum from which all other physical and functional phenomena are derived. I call it the multisense continuum and unlike other phenomena with fixed relation, the continuum of sense is interactively relativistic as well as relativistically absolute. This sounds confusing, but think of it like an ambiguous image:
While the image is absolute in the sense that it reliably offers the opportunity to encounter two mutually exclusive visual interpretations, but relativistic in that the viewer of the image is not merely an observer, but a participant on guiding their encounter. It is not a subjective confabulation, but rather a demonstration of how objectivity itself is not what it seems…or that subjectivity is not a reliable measurement of objects. In this way, the ambiguous image leads to an ambiguous interpretation, through which one can confirm their own expectations about either the permeability of reality to consciousness, the fallibility of perception, or both.
If we model the spectrum of consciousness, I would give this polarization of ambiguity in which either the inner or outer frame of reference is assumed to be the fundamental anchor and the opposing frame is assumed to be ‘illusory’ to some extent the role of ‘frequency’. To keep it simple, we could talk about the frequency as the X axis, so that high frequency is more ‘outer’, inclusive of more bodies in public space and the low frequency is more interior, describing amplitudes of private feeling and meaning. The high frequency range can be thought of as an Intelligence space (which I label as ‘Western’ public knowledge) and the low frequency range can be thought of as an orienting hierarchy of private wisdom (the ‘Oriental’ range).
I suggest that there is an inverse relation between the two ranges, so that the higher the frequency, the lower the amplitude. This means that the more distant two perspectives are, the more they are limited to a reduced, mechanized picture of each other. When we fly over a city, for example, we see people and cars from a more detached perspective. It seems possible to me that this relativity of perception through which personal identification is framed, is part of the deepest fabric of the universe, and is in fact responsible for the appearance of the difference between matter and ‘mind’ (subjectivity).
In this way, objectivity itself becomes a relativistic parameter, something like a Lorentz transformation. Adding distance to your perspective increases the frequency and lowers the amplitude of mutual perception so that consciousness is ‘objectified’. Matter is not created, but filtered from nested layers of perception. Within any local inertial frame, there is no matter or objects. We, as human beings, are a very elaborate case, in that our selfhood is a vast window of many frequency bands, so that we have tiered sensation. Visual imagination is more object-like than verbal-cognitive thought, and thought is more object like than emotions and intuition. In the core of our subjectivity however, is that which occupies no dimension, as it observes both spaces and times from a fixed inner ‘eye’.
This eye, having the lowest local frequency can be understood to be the proxy for the absolute lowest frequency, which would I would describe somewhat mystically as one in which eternity must pass before even a single wave cycle can by completed. I suggest that this low frequency range offers the highest amplitude possibilities. Amplitude can be used to distinguish the inner from the outer frequencies as well. On the Western side, high and low amplitude are embodied literally as cosmic and microcosmic scale ranges, and as directions of spin. Amplitude in this sense is associated with magnetic permeability and gravity. On the Oriental side, amplitude is associated with hierarchies of aesthetic prestige. By that I mean the difference between a pawn and a King, and between bad and good, better and best.
The low frequency amplitudes are ‘moving’ from the inside out. The model of chakras used in yogic practice is one of many tree-of-life models of what I am calling here the amplitude of human consciousness. With consciousness, we are talking about sensory-motive capacity, so that a high amplitude consciousness implies both a high quality of sensory affect and a highly effective motivation. Higher positive amplitudes motivate from acceptance and inspiration, while high negative amplitudes motivate from urgent compulsion. There is a connection here with mortality as well, as the highly ‘negative’ states are rooted in the desires of the body and of the selfish ego. The ‘positive’ states are supposed to be motivated by gentle, patient influences which waft upward toward the eternal.
Even though the kind of Lorentz frame relation that I described earlier makes it harder to know whether a snail’s awareness just seems low compared to ours because of our ‘distance’ from them, I prefer to think that there is also an absolute dimension to consciousness in addition to the relativistic effect which makes human life more aesthetically rich and significant than that of a snail. The alternative would be more radically anthropic, in which every species enjoys a universe that features them at center stage. That view could conceivably be possible, but it has implications that seem likely to be very dangerous.
If the high/low frequency divide determines whether phenomena are encountered directly as inner sensations or sensed through the body as separate bodies, the high/low amplitude divide determines whether phenomena are valued highly or rejected. For human beings, we tend to place ourselves above other species of animals, and animals above insects and plants. High end states of being are considered ‘high class’ or ‘high and mighty’; celebrities, heroes, monarchs, spiritual entities etc. Even the self (itself) transforms along with the amplitude which it conveys, so that low amplitude version is like an animal ‘eye’, the mid-range is a human ‘I’, and the high end is third eye or ‘aye’ – a connection with transcendent or divine states of awareness and acceptance.
This layout is just a rough speculation of course. I find parallels with electromagnetism here that make me think that a more formal connection with physics could be made. In that case, I would not insist that frequency or amplitude be applied literally – they could be reversed, or even set liminocentrically so that high-low frequencies or high-low amplitudes could serve as the contrast to mid-range frequency-amplitudes instead.
Misrepresentation of “Reality”?
//consciousness /is/ a misrepresentation of reality.//
In order for consciousness to mis-represent reality, there would have to be a possibility of a proper representation to exist /without/ consciousness. If that is true then you have unconscious representation, which means philosophical zombies eat Strong AI.
If that is not true, and reality can only be found within consciousness and never beyond it, then we must accept that reality and consciousness are either the same thing, or that reality is a subset of consciousness rather than the other way around (since we know that we can imagine immaterial alternatives to reality at will). Just from that alone I think common sense would lead us in the direction of idealism and panpsychism.
There really seems to be no good case for material realism to produce consciousness, except for the case which we build from the unshakable conviction of the objectively real appearance of the contents of a neurological simulation which is known to be defective in rendering even itself. Ironically, it is those who so mistrust direct perception who have absolute faith in indirect perception.
Dark Math and the Vanishing of Zero
Some bits of Facebook conversations that I have been waiting to have about math. I don’t claim to be even a little bit competent as a mathematician, but I do feel like there is a chance that these ideas might just happen to be so absurd that they are profound. Among these ideas has been the consequences of making zero disappear, and redefining the number one so that it is the container of mathematics itself.
There was another idea that I proposed today of “Dark Math”. I asked the question “Does math have a language/theory to represent its own opposite (independent of consciousness even, just like imaginary numbers, but imaginary anti-math instead)?”
If we turn Incompleteness around, for example, we get something like intuition. Any informal-non-system contains unanticipated reflections of formality..surprising quasi-truthful insights from out of thin air, like an oracle. If we turn Church-Turing around, we get non-universal, non-machines = unique individuals. My suspicion is that such a language would help define or model previously undefinable phenomenological conditions. Anti-numbers, (names which are intrinsically semi-proprietary?), Anti-operators (metaphorical and synchronistic?)
Then the zero idea came up again…
OH: A complex number z is said to be purely imaginary. If it has no real part, i.e., R[z] = 0. The term is often used in preference to the simpler “imaginary” in situations where z can in general assume complex values with nonzero real parts, but in a particular case of interest, the real part is identically zero. 0 is a pure imaginary number .
S33: If the part is identically zero, but zero is entirely imaginary, does that mean that its identicality is also imaginary? If we carry through the idea that 0 is imaginary, then any time we qualify something as being ‘not’ we are being figurative, and the reality would always be some infinitessimal fragment. Not would literally be ‘almost not’.
OH: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/IdenticallyZero.html
S33: But what I’m proposing is that vanishing itself is identically zero, then vanishing may be infinitesimally figurative. Nothing can vanish completely in reality, even the difference between A and A.
Can zero be said then to be ‘that which is not anything, *not even itself*. When we apply this to ontology (and I think we should) it means we must accept that nothing has vanished. What happens instead is that things nearly vanish from some set of perspectives. The gap between nearly vanishing and vanishing is entropy. Entropy is how perception compensates, fudges, fills in, etc so that what is for all practical purposes absent (i.e. the past) becomes elided or removed. Even the removal is not total, not real, its just a delay. Eventually all that has been denied must be revealed as unvanished from some perspective or encounter.
The reverse of this entropic clipping of the infinitesimally unvanished would be what I call significance. An augmentation of sensitivity or motive so that a near-vanished experience is encountered first as fiction. In other words, entropy makes things seem to disappear (like the past, coherence, certainty, etc) which really haven’t, and significance makes things seem to appear, but also significance increases the quality of ‘thingness’ beyond the thing. You could say that entropy masks presence to the point of near absence, and significance stretches near-absence to the point of re-presence.
Video Debate on God and Consciousness
Can consciousness be best explained by God’s existence?
Hamza Tzrotzis section:
Very nice presentation, and I can find agreement with much of it. I do find a problem with the idea that theism explains ‘where consciousness comes from’, since God cannot be said to exist prior to God’s consciousness. Can God be unconscious? If not, can we say for sure that consciousness does not create God instead of the other way around?
This goes along with the sentiment expressed earlier in examining the shortcomings of panpsychism, when he asks ‘what is thought without a thinker?’ While this is certainly difficult to imagine in a normal state of mind, I have experienced dream states in which there was a dream, but it was more like a film, and I woke up specifically noticing that I did not find myself in the movie or in the audience. The experience of the movie simply was. In light of this, and the fact that human beings occupy such a minute and idiosyncratic position within the biosphere of this planet, I would not rule out the possibility that our waking experience of human ego might be limited to animals or certain animals, owing to their autonomy of movement. The vast majority of phenomena in the universe may indeed be felt experiences without an experiencer per se.
Even if this is true, the idea that the universe is composed of consciousness (awareness, or to be more technical, aesthetic participation/sensory-motive re-acquaintance), even proprietary qualities of awareness, but without an overriding executive, there could still be God-like influences within or through the larger potential of our human consciousness. Retrocausality, synchronicity, intuition, and other exotic metaphenomenal conditions may indeed flirt with the boundary between reality and surreality to produce veridical insights and delusional obsessions alike. God may be no more than a figment of consciousness, just as we are, but that doesn’t mean that human consciousness does not include some kind of meta-human guidance for some people at some time, although such guidance may be indistinguishable from mental illness.
Professor Simons section:
Opens well, setting the stage for a criterial of success for explanation in science. I hadn’t heard before the origin of the word melancholia before (black-bile). He goes on to look at intentionality and awareness and asserts that there is nothing that it is like to be a stone. I agree superficially, that what we see of a stone does not express any intention, but given the vastly different scale of time between ourselves and geological time, it is conceivable that what we encounter as static minerals are, within another frame of reference, some unfamiliar kind of experience. Rocks don’t have feelings, but they may *be* feelings – slow, or intermittent feelings which perhaps only awaken when there is a significant change in physical state. When rocks collide, something may feel something, even if it is not the rock itself as we experience it.
I like that he embraces being honest about the shortcomings of science in explaining phenomenality (the Hard Problem). His examples of evolved body parts which have been repurposed could apply to consciousness in theory, but I submit that would have to be a very superficial theory that overlooks the completely anti-physical nature of consciousness. Unlike an ear, awareness is not a plausible feature of some unrelated physical system.
I appreciate Professor Simons call for modesty in consideration of supernatural explanation, but I’m not sure that alone constitutes a refutation. It may be more reckless to insist upon a naturalistic explanation to the exclusion of all explanations which happen to transcend the spatiotemporal aspects of nature.
It seems to me that rather than presuming God as a literal being, we should try thinking of the various theological concepts as a metaphor for being itself – for consciousness. We can learn about consciousness by our own intuitive accounts, written in the native mytho-poetic language of what I call the ‘metaphenomenal’ layer of awareness. God is something like the local, human-shaped shadow of the infinite potential of the future of consciousness. By itself, the universe is only theological and meaningful on the inside. It is up to consciousness, to conscious beings, to imbue the exterior world with divine shades of care and attention. God is not for being, but for becoming.
I liked Simons parting comments about Spinoza and dual-aspect theory. He says, (as most would agree) that consciousness is a process, not a thing. I suggest that consciousness is neither, rather it is the eternal firmament from which processes and things are ‘carved out’ (by time and space…types of entropy or reduced sense). Locally, our human experience is very elaborately enfolded multiple times into spacetime, so that it does actually take on nested process-like characteristics as well. Just as the entire life of our body is the story of a single cell in self-replication/modification, the story of our lives is a single moment stretched out into innumerable sub-moments.
Both critiques of panpsychism I think are ultimately rejections of a straw man. Nobody, Leibniz included I’m sure, thinks that electrons ‘have’ human-like consciousness, but that is completely beside the point, IMO, in considering whether the fabric of nature is more likely sensitive vs physical, information-theoretic, or theological. In those terms, I find it easy to account for physical, informational, and spiritual phenomena as elaborations of sensory experience, but I find no real way to justify any of the others existence in the absence of sense.
Bang!
If Big Bang was a singular event that created space, time and matter, then one must view the universe as a rapidly expanding billiards table of N dimensions with all events pre-determined. There can be no intervening force or new element of causality possible. There can be no uncertainty, and any notions of either free will or divine intervention are illusory.
If the Big Bang created time, then I think that it should not be thought of as an event (in time), but rather as the hub that all events have in common. The Big Bang never happened, it did happen, it is still happening, it hasn’t happened yet. Because we are measuring it from inside of spacetime, and using instruments that are limited to only the most generic spatial-quantitative measurements, our results reflect a narrowly defined model of the origin of causality itself. It is the fallacy of the instrument – we have a hammer of physics so everything that physics measures looks like a nail. What I propose instead is a Big Diffraction, where the birth of spacetime is an influx of dissociation into countless semi-permeable perceptual frames of reference that are united beyond spacetime.
If we place ourselves in the moment of the Big Bang, we cannot judge it on a human scale of time, since that scale of time had not been invented yet. If the universe itself is awareness, the first trillionths of a second of the invention of time are no less likely to feel like five minutes than they are an eternity. As the singularity breaks into multiplicity (Tzimtzum for fans of the Kabbalah), it is inventing the possibility of multiplicity for the first time. Eternity is spawning micro-eternities in which each micro-view is stretching out eternity so that it seems both ever longer and slower and seems to have originated in an ever more brief instant. Time is all about comparing frequencies of awareness – beats per measure. Time is relativistic because time is relativity itself – the framing of perceptual reference.
What we see through a telescope is an objectified version of the story of objectification that serves as a creation myth for the anti-mythology of functionalism. Free will was never inside of spacetime to begin with. It was not created, it creates. If free will is illusory, then it is that which is illusory which gives birth to realism and physics, not the other way around. The universe is a single thread of singing, signaling, significance-building experience,weaving and winding through a maze of its own self-imposed alienation. Divinity is optional, and free will is scarce, but the universe is only a billiard table if you limit the vocabulary of inquiry to that of billiard balls.
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).
Multisense Realism 
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