Chthonic Tree
(Double Ankh = “Illumination” or “Deeply Examined Life”).
Electricity and Magnetism
Animated diagram showing the operation of a tuned circuit (LC circuit). The capacitor stores energy in its electric field E and the inductor stores energy in its magnetic field B (green). This jerky animation shows “snapshots” of the circuit at progressive points in the oscillation. The oscillations are slowed down; in an actual tuned circuit the charge oscillates back and forth tens of thousands to billions of times per second.
In electronics an LC circuit, also called a resonant circuit, tank circuit, or tuned circuit, consists of two electronic components connected together; an inductor, represented by the letter L, and a capacitor, represented by the letter C. The circuit can act as an electrical resonator, an electrical analogue of a tuning fork, storing energy oscillating at the circuit’s resonant frequency.
This is one of the clearest ways that I have come across to visualize the relationship between electricity and magnetism. On the right, the capacitor plates emphasize the polar nature of EM, so that electric force is a metaphor for binary switching – a bridging across a gap which inverts and imitates.
On the left, the induction coil emphasizes the ‘tropic’ nature of EM. The magnetic field arises as a summary of the turns, like a squaring of all of the possible orientations and angles. The turningness is juxtaposed against the flowing-ness, which are both juxtaposed against the separation and ratio-ness of the Electric side.
Of course, through Relativity, we can understand (or try to) that both the Electric and Magnetic fields are identical except that they are observed through perpendicular frames of reference. If you are synchronized to the current flow, then it is an electric circuit of positive and negative charge interactions. If you are synchronized to the resistance of the flow, then it is a magnetic field of North/South attraction-repulsion.
The deeper issue for me is really what is happening underneath all of the arrows and theory. What was actually being observed to oscillate when we first measured the frequency of a beam of light? Is it a needle of a magnetic meter? Unlike sound waves which can be said to be collisions of molecules, the energy of electromagnetic waves seems to be more like a propensity for matter to glow, spark, and change direction. It is the Promethean vibration into sensory awareness and motive expression. Matter becomes more transparent to itself, more able to ignore gaps, resistance, and gravity. What electromagnetism seems to really be is something like ‘the phenomenalization of matter’, or the twisting/stretching of inertial frames.
Chess, Media, and Art
I was listening to Brian Regan’s comedy bit about chess, and how a checkmate is such an unsatisfying ending compared to other games and sports. This is interesting from the standpoint of the insufficiency of information to account for all of reality. Because chess is a game that is entirely defined by logical rules, the ending is a mathematical certainty, given a certain number of moves. That number of moves depends on the computational resources which can be brought to bear on the game, so that a sufficiently powerful calculator will always beat a human player, since human computation is slower and buggier than semiconductors. The large-but-finite number of moves and games* will be parsed much more rapidly and thoroughly by a computer than a person could.
This deterministic structure is very different (as Brian Regan points out) from something like football, where the satisfaction of game play is derived explicitly from the consummation of the play. It is not enough to be able to claim that statistically an opponent’s win is impossible, because in reality statistics are only theoretical. A game played in reality rather than in theory depends on things like the weather and can require a referee. Computers are great at games which depend only on information, but have no sense of satisfaction in aesthetic realism.
In contrast to mechanical determinism, the appearance of clichés presents a softer kind of determinism. Even though there are countless ways that a fictional story could end, the tropes of storytelling provide a feedback loop between audiences and authors which can be as deterministic -in theory- as the literal determinism of chess. By switching the orientation from digital/binary rules to metaphorical/ideal themes, it is the determinism itself which becomes probabilistic. The penalty of making a movie which deviates too far from the expectations of the audience is that it will not be well received by enough people to make it worth producing. Indeed, most of what is produced in film, TV, and even gaming is little more than a skeleton of clichés dressed up in more clichés.
The pull of the cliché is a kind of moral gravity – a social conditioning in which normative thoughts and feelings are reinforced and rewarded. Art and life do not reflect each other so much as they reflect a common sense of shared reassurance in the face of uncertainty. Fine art plays with breaking boundaries, but playfully – it pretends to confront the status quo, but it does so within a culturally sanctioned space. I think that satire is tolerated in Western-objective society because of its departure from the subjective (“Eastern”) worldview, in which meaning and matter are not clearly divided. Satire is seen as both not as threatening to the material-commercial machine, which does not depend on human sentiments to run, and also the controversy that satire produces can be used to drive consumer demands. Something like The Simpsons can be both a genuinely subversive comedy, as well as a fully merchandized, commercial meme-generating partner of FOX.
What lies between the literally closed world of logical rules and the figuratively open world of surreal ideals is what I would call reality. The games that are played in fact rather than just in theory, which share timeless themes but also embody a specific theme of their own are the true source of physical sustenance. Reality emerges from the center out, and from the peripheries in.
*“A guesstimate is that the maximum logical possible positions are somewhere in the region of +-140,100,033, including trans-positional positions, giving the approximation of 4,670,033 maximum logical possible games”
Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception, Donald Hoffman
A very good presentation with lot of overlap on my views. He proposes similar ideas about a sensory-motive primitive and the nature of the world as experience rather than “objective”. What is not factored in is the relation between local and remote experiences and how that relation actually defines the appearance of that relation. Instead of seeing agents as isolated mechanisms, I think they should be seen as more like breaches in the fabric of insensitivity.
It is a little misleading to say (near the end) that a spoon is no more public than a headache. In my view what makes a spoon different from a headache is precisely that the metal is more public than the private experience of a headache. If we make the mistake of assuming an Absolutely public perspective*, then yes, the spoon is not in it, because the spoon is different things depending on how small, large, fast, or slow you are. For the same reason, however, nothing can be said to be in such a perspective. There is no experience of the world which does not originate through the relativity of experience itself. Of course the spoon is more public than a headache, in our experience. To think otherwise as a literal truth would be psychotic or solipsistic. In the Absolute sense, sure, the spoon is a sensory phenomena and nothing else, it is not purely public (nothing is), but locally, is certainly is ‘more’ public.
Something that he mentioned in the presentation had to do with linear algebra and using a matrix of columns which add up to be one. To really jump off into a new level of understanding consciousness, I would think of the totality of experience as something like a matrix of columns which add up, not to 1, but to “=1”. Adding up to 1 is a good enough starting point, as it allows us to think of agents as holes which feel separate on one side and united on the other. Thinking of it as “=1” instead makes it into a portable unity that does something. Each hole recapitulates the totality as well as its own relation to that recapitulation: ‘just like’ unity. From there, the door is open to universal metaphor and local contrasts of degree and kind.
*mathematics invites to do this, because it inverts the naming function of language. Instead of describing a phenomenon in our experience through a common sense of language, math enumerates relationships between theories about experience. The difference is that language can either project itself publicly or integrate public-facing experiences privately, but math is a language which can only face itself. Through math, reflections of experience are fragmented and re-assembled into an ideal rationality – the ideal rationality which reflects the very ideal of rationality that it embodies.
Epistemology and Ontology
“I think you’re conflating with Ontology/Metaphysics with Epistemology.”
Epistemology only becomes possible with a degree of ontological distance. Within our own most immediate experience, there can be no question of anything hidden or unhidden. “Here and now” is self-evident – it is maximally predictable and maximally unpredictable. It is only when we have the space of “There and then” that we can speculate on what and how knowledge/information differs from chaos/entropy. It is insensitivity which opens a breach of possibility and theory.
Questioning the Sufficiency of Information
Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment tends to be despised by strong AI enthusiasts, who seem to take issue with Searle personally because of it. Accusing both the allegory and the author of being stupid, the Systems Reply is the one offered most often. The man in the room may not understand Chinese, but surely the whole system, including book of translation, must be considered to understand Chinese.
Here then is simpler and more familiar example of how computation can differ from natural understanding which is not susceptible to any mereological Systems argument.
If any of you have use passwords which are based on a pattern of keystrokes rather than the letters on the keys, you know that you can enter your password every day without ever knowing what it is you are typing (something with a #r5f^ in it…?).
I think this is a good analogy for machine intelligence. By storing and copying procedures, a pseudo-semantic analysis can be performed, but it is an instrumental logic that has no way to access the letters of the ‘human keyboard’. The universal machine’s keyboard is blank and consists only of theoretical x,y coordinates where keys would be. No matter how good or sophisticated the machine is, it will still have no way to understand what the particular keystrokes “mean” to a person, only how they fit in with whatever set of fixed possibilities has been defined.
Taking the analogy further, the human keyboard only applies to public communication. Privately, we have no keys to strike, and entire paragraphs or books can be represented by a single thought. Unlike computers, we do not have to build our ideas up from syntactic digits. Instead the public-facing computation follows from the experienced sense of what is to be communicated in general, from the top down, and the inside out.
How large does a digital circle have to be before the circumference seems like a straight line?
Digital information has no scale or sense of relation. Code is code. Any rendering of that code into a visual experience of lines and curves is a question of graphic formatting and human optical interaction. With a universe that assumes information as fundamental, the proximity-dependent flatness or roundness of the Earth would have to be defined programmatically. Otherwise, it is simply “the case” that a person is standing on the round surface of the round Earth. Proximity is simply a value with no inherent geometric relevance.
When we resize a circle in Photoshop, for instance, the program is not transforming a real shape, it is erasing the old digital circle and creating a new, unrelated digital circle. Like a cartoon, the relation between the before and after, between one frame and the “next” is within our own interpretation, not within the information.
Playing Cards With Qualia
Here is an example to help illustrate what I think is the relationship between information and qualia that makes the most sense.
Here I am using the delta (Δ) to denote “difference”, n to mean “numbers” or information, kappa for aesthetic “kind” or qualia, and delta n degree (Δn°) for “difference in degree”.
The formula on top means “The difference between numbers and aesthetic qualities is not a difference in degree. This means that there is no known method by which a functional output of a computation can acquire an aesthetic quality, such as a color, flavor, or feeling.
Reversing the order in the bottom formula, I am asserting that the difference between qualia and numbers actually is only a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. That means that we can make numbers out of qualia, by counting them, but numbers can’t make qualia no matter what we do with them. This is to say also that subjects can reduce each other to objects, but objects cannot become subjects.
Let’s use playing cards as an example.
Each card has a quantitative value, A-K. The four suits, their colors and shapes, the portraits on the royal cards…none of them add anything at all to the functionality of the game. Every card game ever conceived can be played just as well with only four sets of 13 number values.
The view which is generally offered by scientific or mathematical accounts, would be that the nature of hearts, clubs, diamonds, kings, etc can differ only in degree from the numbers, and not in kind. Our thinking about the nature of consciousness puts the brain ahead of subjective experience, so that all feelings and qualities of experience are presumed to be representations of more complicated microphysical functions. This is mind-brain identity theory. The mind is the functioning of the brain, so that the pictures and colors on the cards would, by extension, be representations of the purely logical values.
To me, that’s obviously bending over backward to accommodate a prejudice toward the quantitative. The functionalist view prefers to preserve the gap between numbers and suits and fill it with faith, rather than consider the alternative that now seems obvious to me: You can turn the suit qualities into numbers easily – just enumerate them. The four suits can be reduced to 00,01,10, and 11. A King can be #0D, an Ace can be 01, etc. There is no problem with this, and indeed it is the natural way that all counting has developed: The minimalist characterization of things which are actually experienced qualitatively.
The functionalist view requires the opposite transformation, that the existence of hearts and clubs, red and black, is only possible through a hypothetical brute emergence by which computations suddenly appear heart shaped or wearing a crown, because… well because of complexity, or because we can’t prove that it isn’t happening. The logical fallacy being invoked is Affirming the Consequent:
If Bill Gates owns Fort Knox, then he is rich.
Bill Gates is rich.
Therefore, Bill Gates owns Fort Knox.
If the brain is physical, then it can be reduced to a computation.
We are associated with the activity of a brain.
Therefore, we can be reduced to a computation.
To correct this, we should invert our assumption, and look to a model of the universe in which differences in kind can be quantified, but differences in degree cannot be qualified. Qualia reduce to quanta (by degree), but quanta does not enrich to qualia (at all).
To take this to the limit, I would add the players of the card game to the pictures, suits, and colors of the cards, as well as their intention and enthusiasm for winning the game. The qualia of the cards is more “like them” and helps bridge the gap to the quanta of the cards, which is more like the cards themselves – digital units in a spatio-temporal mosaic.
Square Spiral Diagram
This square spiral logo is coming in handy, but my apologies if it is getting monotonous. This is an informal flow chart of what might be called cosmological metabolism. The interplay between H and Σ describe the catabolic and anabolic principles (Entropy and Significance). The idea here is that the primordial identity or principle behind everything is sense, and that through the alienation or diffraction of sense, followed by re-uniting, significance is gained.
Sense can be understood as accumulating from the bottom up, as complexity and sophistication of experience, and also as a splitting off from the Totality. Consciousness can be understood as a nesting of coincidence which accelerates itself. Time is a comparison of coincidences in which a logical distance is inferred, while space is presented as a logical context within which objects or forms coincide directly. Clock time, therefore is a spatialization of our inner experience – a masking of private, lifelong harmonics which are semantic and quasi-narrative. The gaps of time give structure to the autobiographical dream.
Sense bridges the gap between one time and another, across distance or separation, connecting public and private. Sense tears itself down so it can build improvement. Our public view of physics eradicates meaning inadvertently by hiding coincidence. Because sense is the primordial identity, coincidence can be thought of as the existential expression of what is essentially transformations of meaning and aesthetic quality. When we spread it out over space and time, it looks like coincidence, but if we keep spreading it out, it looks like unrelated incidents. The refinement of these unrelated incidents into generic, meaningless functions, is what is physics and math are about – however, because the nature of sense is self-reflective and self-revealing, the blueprint of its grandest coincidences can be seen, even in their absence.
Multisense Realism 
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