What is the connection between consciousness and the body it resides in?
Answer by Craig Weinberg:
After a Long Debate On The Evolutionary Justification of Awareness with another user who deleted and locked the thread, I thought that I would reiterate the points that I made.
There is no intrinsic difference between the nature of the computations performed by simple organisms in the microcosm and animals which we are more comfortable calling conscious. While we would expect the size difference of the larger animal to engender a certain degree of computational overhead, there is nothing to suggest that complexity alone magically conjures qualities like color, flavor, and feeling out of thin air to better manage processing. We would not seek out such a thing if we were designing such a process, and indeed, there would be no reason to expect that such a thing would be available in the universe to begin with.
If we were to create a program to run a Sims Homo sapiens avatar as an AI which would develop a dashboard of indicators and controls to best secure its survival and reproduction, there is no reason to assume that this dashboard would be orders of magnitude more complex than that of a Sims octopus, a Sims dust mite, or even a Sims eukaryote. Though our aesthetic awareness is vastly richer than a single cell organism, the basic program of seeking nutrition, avoiding threats, and securing reproductive success is not very different in a petri dish than it is on the savanna. It seems to me the height of anthropocentrism to presume that there is something about our human survival condition which is billions of times more complex than anything that has to move and eat and learn what to avoid.
The question of why any dashboard would be needed at all is even more significant. The Hard Problem of Consicousness, as it has been called, recognizes that graphic interfaces and the like are what computer users need to operate a computer, but the computer itself gains no benefit and suffers no problems related to having the data it processes manifest somewhere in a form which can be see, felt, tasted, etc. Indeed, computers are useful to us precisely because any computer can reduce anything into pure data without any encumbrance from experiential requirements. The computer doesn't care if the DVD looks like a movie to you or a bunch of music, databases, whatever. To the computer it's all the same twitching semiconductor states.
Therefore, we must seek other solutions to the Mind Body problem. My solution involves recognizing the odd number of symmetrically opposite qualities of awareness and bodies. Here are a few.
Body
- public extension
- discrete shapes
- unconscious
- seems deterministic or random
- a-signifying, meaningless
- generic
- nested geometric bodies divided by space and scale
- forms and functions
- literal positions (location coordinates)
- inferred dispositions (energy, momentum)
- doing, knowing
Mind
- private intention
- continuous non-shapes
- conscious
- ranges from reflex to voluntary
- signifying, creative
- proprietary
- experiences united by time and subject
- appreciation and participation
- literal dispositions (attitudes)
- inferred positions (personality revealed over time)
- feeling, being
These have made me curious as to the nature of symmetry and aesthetics, and what function they have in the universe. After a lot of consideration, my hypothesis is that there is no plausible explanation for these phenomena and that the most likely solution is that what we call the universe actually emerges from them rather than the other way around. By this I mean that the fabric of the universe is the capacity to sense and make sense. Rather than assuming that matter or laws can simply exist independently of awareness, my understanding is that the universe is a strictly participatory experience.
It's going to sound absurd to most people, but that is exactly as I would expect, since we are already a human experience, made of countless other experiences in a context of a single eternal experience. Experiences nested this way only work if they are are kept relatively partitioned from each other, yet translucent enough to remain all part of a single uni-verse of sense. The way that I think that this is accomplished is through perceptual relativity. General relativity is really only conceivable with a subjective participant doing the relating anyhow, but Einstein did not get around to explaining exactly what observation entails and how it gets to change the nature of space and time. In my estimation, relativity is a special case of the more universal capacity to relate, which is sense itself.
What this means is that the bodies that we experience are themselves subjective experiences, but on a distant perceptual inertial frame. When one experience is so much slower and older than than another, or smaller and faster, then they two stories are tokenized within each others range. We see that which is on a very different scale from us as machine like and objectified, or supernatural and fictionalized. In both cases, our experience of them is rendered in such an alien way because that is in fact an appropriate default presentation for the significance of such an impersonal influence. We don't have much to do with what goes on at the geological scale personally, but our bodies can use minerals for a lot of purposes and we can build structures, etc.
Just because this is our experience of minerals does not mean that this is an impartial view of what the mineral experience is in the universe. Indeed, on a scale where time is vastly more accelerated, the universe had been perfectly content to spin fantastic quantities of mineralized orbs for thoudands of millennial. It is only from the perspective of hairy little dirt-fish on Earth that these celestial parties seem static and sterile. This is not to say that every rock and planet is a being, only that what we see of the experience which is taking place in the universe leaves a footprint within our inertial frame that presents its nature to the extent that it can be to us.
Rosetta Codex
Following up on the Tree of Life post and MSR Legend post.
Multisense Tree of Life
Multisense Tree of Life
I noticed that this formulation was starting to take on Kabbalistic dimensions, so I put it into that form. There’s some new propositions to consider here that have come out of this. Beginning with sense, which I symbolize as -ℵ (negative Aleph) and as =. This is the fundamental concept of MSR and the idea of ℵ in mathematics as cardinality fits with this definition, since equality ‘is equal to’ anti-cardinality. Sense is the unity which underlies all multiplicity, so that it can indeed be thought of as a kind of negative cardinality – not unity, but pre-cardinality.
Moving up and to the right from sense, there is Qualia, now defined as -ℵ/ש (Aleph over Shin), where ש (Shin) refers to the diffraction of the Absolute ॐ (Om). This means that Q = -ℵ/ש or, private sense is the sense of a share of eternal being – it is “a” being. In Leibniz terms this is a monad, and it is also the origin of origination, and of the number 1. From these two entities, we have the two parts of the Absolute, which mathematically would be “=1”. Eternal being is the likeness of a being, i.e. the ability to pretend. (Insert Joseph Campbell’s myths and Carl Jung’s archetypes, shamanism, imagination, etc..,) Fiction is ‘like something’, just as Qualia is what it is like to be, or what being ‘seems like’.
Rounding out the primordial trinity from sense along with Qualia is Quanta and Motive. I call the Absolute ‘Qua’ to symbolize its relation as the reconciling parent of Qualia and Quanta. Quanta (ω, lower case omega), here meaning the essence of computation, is given the formula √(ℵ),(root of Aleph). This works surprisingly well. Originally I was going with 0.00…1 and then 0.x to represent Quanta, to specify that Quanta is always the tiniest fragment of Qualia – the drive toward absolutely monotonous precision, but always beneath the threshold of unity, of wholeness. All quanta are parts and abstractions; information-theoretic rather than aesthetic/sensory-motive.
This ended up working well with √(ℵ) (root of Aleph) as it makes clear the complementarity-antagonism with Quanta and sense. Computation is the essence of cardinality, of difference. The stepped reckoning of mechanism is an impersonation of sense, it has no capacity to negate the separations and to build feeling from fragmented quantities. Since negative Aleph (-ℵ) corresponds to 1, then Quanta would be the square root of -1, or i. I used the symbol >.< as well, to denote the clipping of sense through measurement: digitization. Quantification is fantastically useful because it paralyzes whatever it fixes its gaze on.
Motive, the third leaf of the sense trinity, has the formula ℵ±ש (Aleph plus/minus Shin), which emphasizes its similarity to Quanta and Qualia but with an irreducible difference, will. Will is the ± (plus/minus) which requires a participant to end what sense started (thus the use of Ω, Omega). To have a motive is to de-cide, to kill off all options except one. This is the ‘waveform collapse’ of QM, but it is also ordinary ‘free will’. Will is the connection between unconscious cardinality and the Absolute. We don’t know how to make our body move or our how to focus our mind’s attention, we simply become our mind or body and the universe does the rest. There is a cost to our efforts, however. In the drive toward Significance (Solitrophy, Φ), entropy is born.
The unchosen path of Motive becomes the unintentional twin of Significance. Significance, -ℵ² (Aleph squared), while mathematically would equal ℵ (Aleph) as 1, there is an irreducible numinosity to the power relation. Significance holds Q not only as the sense of one quality out of the Totality (ש) (Shin, Qua) but it holds one Q as equal to any number of qualities or meta-qualitative relationships. This is semiotics. Not just = but =². Not phoric (sense) but meta-phoric. Quanta is not phoric but metric – it takes the ² nesting of Significance (Σ) (Sigma) but negates the feeling, leaving only the essence of that figurative quality. Significance is sense squared, Quanta is the square root of pretend sense, the meta-phor is inverted. Figurative language is loose. It draws from associations from within the Totality. Quanta is the opposite, drawing from strictly disambiguated logic. It has no phoric or morphic content, no feelings or forms, only the skeletal coordinates associated with them.
If Significance is like the universal bank account of metaphors and of experiences which have meant something in particular, then Entropy is the compost heap of all of the unchosen and unchoosability in the universe. It’s symbol H is taken from Shannon’s Information theory, and its formula here is ॐ/-Ω, (Om divided by negative Omega). Using the ॐ Om rather than the ש Shin is to emphasize that this relates to the ‘return trip’, the catabolic, arterial part of the cosmic circulation. Shin has more of a sense of the diffraction and creativity of the whole. With Entropy, it is the Totality’s raw, untamed nature which is divided by negative motive. This correctly applies to the nature of Entropy as indifferent, literally and figuratively. No motive. This is where the universe doesn’t care.
Between H of Entropy and Σ of Significance winds the Φ of what I call Solitrophy. Solitrophy is what makes the difference between something that can care and something that can’t. Burning a pile of garbage and burning down a town might produce the same amount of energy and entropy, but burning down a town has a human cost which doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet. As aesthetic significance accumulates, the range between one outcome and another increases. A human being has more at stake, simply by being a human being with a vastly rich aesthetic experience, than it seem like an ant has, or even an anthill. Solitrophy describes this great anchor of all sanities, and builder of worlds (I call them, perceptual inertial frames or castes).
This leaves Matter, Energy, and Qua itself. Matter and Space are listed together, as are Energy and Time. This is to emphasize their relation in MSR, teasing apart their differences rather than conflating them relativistically. The difference between time and space is Solitrophic. It doen’t show up in physics, because physics, by definition is conducted to reduce Solitrophy to an absolute minimum. Physics is asolirexic. Here. Space is defined ω+H and Time as ω*Φ, so that space is about entropy’s quantitative expansion and time is about the quantification of the growth through Solitrophy. The effect of Quanta on Φ is to limit the ‘size of the now’ – the frequency and range of memory of any given participant. Space and time are perpendicular, so that all of eternity is represented spatially by Quanta’s filtering of sense, but that representation is a vanishingly thin slice. Space, by comparison, allows access to the entire continuum of scales which have been accumulated through Solitrophy, but not in a way which allows us to experience it directly.
Matter’s formula is Σ*H, describing mass – the significance of Entropy. As everything is reflected and juxtaposed within MSR, Matter, mass, and space are aspects of the same thing, They are the unintentional, automatic consequences of all spatial scales, collapsed into a single scale. That’s how you get bodies which collide on one inertial frame, but pass right through each other if they are relevant to vastly different scales. This is obviously a rule of thumb – just a way of understanding how space is really an artifact of matter’s sense of its own non-sense and how time is about how functional tropes (routines), constrain and define energy. Energy, therefore, has the formula Ω ± ω (Omega plus minus lowercase omega), with Ω being Motive, now here given another nesting (Ω is already ±. so Ω ± is ±±) and ω being Quanta. Energy is a motive to motivate, or perhaps from to motorize, i.e. to translate a private effect publicly. The Quanta here emphasizes that this translation from motive to motor involves modulating both the frequency and the amplitude of the effect. Energy turns motive effect into work and power.
Finally, the crown of the tree, is Qua. I have covered this a lot already, but here the relation between sense, Qualia, and the Absolute can be seen. If sense is =, and Qualia is 1, then the Absolute is ‘=1’. The inclusiveness of the Absolute is total. It is the largest possible inertial frame. Our personal experiences are part of the whole, and the whole is every part of us.
MSR Legend 3
One more of these for tonight, as i’m still in a semiotic frenzy, as I’m sure you can tell.
MSR Legend
A first second draft of a Rosetta Stone for MSR terms, including the debut of new quasi-alchemical code.
Second draft 7/22/13, added Solitrophy and updated the formulas of time and space to clarify.
Realism Cartoon
Above, the little person on the cool end of the spectrum is the image that the participant on the warm end of the spectrum has of themselves, or rather of their body as seen by themselves on the scale which is native to the individual (as opposed to looking in the mirror and seeing billions of cells or gazillions of molecules). It is the scale of the participants experience going back to the beginning of the universe (I know this sounds insane), which is ultimately a reflection of its history more than mechanics. My conjecture is that experiential histories develop into perceptual inertial frames, or castes which, like the frequency ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, make visible light phenomena relate to a different modalities and circumstances than say radio waves.
What we see as objects are tokens, snapshots of private disposition which are represented as public positions – forms in places. We can’t relate to some ‘one’ who is as small as a single cell, and what or whoever it is that is represented to us by the cell finds us much too large to relate to. This is a rather fantastic way of utilizing everything subjectively and objectively. Everything gets to be the star of its own show on one level, and to be surrounded by the public facing fragments of every other star to use as props, tools, and worlds.
Comparing Worldviews
Side by side comparison of what seems to be the prevailing cosmology (above) and MSR (below). In the consensus worldview, aka Western post-modern view, quantitative function replaces all other modalities of sense and sense itself is absorbed into automatism. Energy is merged with matter as ‘particle-waves’ or ‘probability wave functions’, just as space is merged with time through relativity. Rather than a universe of concrete participation, the illusion of realism ’emerges’ from the evolving complexity of statistical interactions. At what level this emergence occurs, why it occurs, or how are left to future generations to explore.
Conspicuously absent are all traces of subjectivity, participation, and significance. Motive effect is understood only as a caused effect – the playing out of inevitable mechanical agendas which stem from a few ‘simple rules’. All forms of privacy are unknown and entropy is divorced from sensory interpretations. All sensations are thought to be partial revelations of an objective truth, so that any deviation from that empirical fact is considered an error.
MSR sees the absence of sense as a the gaping hole in this schema. While emergence is appropriate for understanding how many phenomena which appear to be novel are often found to be inevitable upon further inspection, it is entirely an entirely inappropriate machina ex deus for phenomena which have no plausible origin from the known functions of the system. The consequences of overlooking the key principle which unites all phenomena (sense), are that we wind up with an impoverished worldview, a Straw Man of cosmology in which we ourselves have no possible place.
Cross Modal Synesthetic Abstraction
From a worthwhile thread on Quora.
“Below are two shapes. One of them is called Kiki and the other is called Bouba.
Almost all respondents when asked say that the jagged one is kiki and the rounded one is bouba. This can be observed across cultures. This is an innate ability of our brain by which one mode of sensation can cross over into another.”
This is a useful little nugget for MSR. A computer would have to be programmed specifically to correlate the names with the shapes, and such a correlation would be arbitrary from a programmatic perspective. By contrast, our cross-modal, cross-cultural preferences cohere intrinsically, by feel. Feeling is not a collision of objects, it is an aesthetic presence – it is our own participation in a discernment of subjects. The anthropological universality of certain linguistic-phonetic qualities and their association with other kinds of qualities (hard sounds, hard angles, sharp edges, etc) are rooted in deeper universals of sense – deeper than evolution, deeper than matter even. If it didn’t run that deep, (to the absolute bottom/top), then there would be no sense in sense at all. We would be like a computer, linking syntactic fragments together arbitrarily by statistical relevance rather than experiential content.
Breaking The Fourth Wall
Sense (in the Absolute sense) reveals itself reflexively as the Uni-verse, aka monad of non-orientable self-juxtaposition, aka, “the Pansensitive Meta-Lectic Solitrophic-Holarchic Multiphoric-Unametry”, provider of implicit unity (likeness) across multiplicity (private sensory afference) and explicit participation (public motor efference) through intentional animism and automatic mechanism.
reflexive
1. Directed back on itself.involution
entanglement; a spiraling inwards; intricacy
(mathematics) A function, transformation, or operator that is equal to its inverse, i.e., which gives the identity when applied to itself.tessellation
the careful juxtaposition of shapes in a pattern; “a tessellation of hexagons”.non-orientable
A surface S in the Euclidean spaceR3 is orientable if a two-dimensional figure (for example,) cannot be moved around the surface and back to where it started so that it looks like its own mirror image (
). Otherwise the surface is non-orientable.
The Möbius strip is a non-orientable surface
The Ouroboros or Uroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.
The Ouroboros often symbolize self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things such as the phoenix which operate in cycles that begin anew as soon as they end. It can also represent the idea of primordial unity related to something existing in or persisting from the beginning with such force or qualities it cannot be extinguished. While first emerging in Ancient Egypt, the Ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, but has also been frequently used in alchemical illustrations, where it symbolizes the circular nature of the alchemist’s opus. It is also often associated with Gnosticism, and Hermeticism. Carl Jung interpreted the Ouroboros as having an archetypal significance to the human psyche.[citation needed] The Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann writes of it as a representation of the pre-ego “dawn state”, depicting the undifferentiated infancy experience of both mankind and the individual child.
Early alchemical ouroboros illustration. From the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist (Greco-Roman Egypt).Autopoiesis (from Greek auto-, meaning “self”, and poiesis, meaning “creation, production”) refers to a closed system capable of creating itself. The term was introduced in 1972 by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define to the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of systems theory and sociology.
Bootstrapping or booting refers to a group of metaphors which refer to a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help.
The phrase appears to have originated in the early 19th century United States (particularly in the sense “pull oneself over a fence by one’s bootstraps”), to mean an absurdly impossible action, an adynaton.Trompe l’œil (French for deceive the eye) is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that depicted objects exist in three dimensions. Forced perspective is a comparable illusion in architecture.
Breaking the fourth wall is when a character acknowledges their fictionality, by either indirectly or directly addressing the audience. Alternatively, they may interact with their creator (the author of the book, the director of the movie, the artist of the comic book, etc.). This is more akin to breaking one of the walls of the set, but the existence of a director implies the existence of an audience, so it’s still indirectly Breaking The Fourth Wall. This trope is usually used for comedic purposes.
Multisense Realism 
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