Why can’t the world have a universal language?
Answer by Marc Ettlinger:
To answer this question we need to consider why we have multiple languages in the first place.
Presumably at some point, about 100,000-200,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens started using language in the way we mean language now. At the time, we were spread out over a relatively confined space on the globe and it is practically impossible that language spontaneously arose in more than a handful of places.
Our route out of Africa
So, at one point, there were some limited number of languages among groups of people that had some amount of geographic proximity. It could have been relatively easy for one language to emerge then or that everyone all spoke the same mother tongue anyway and for things to have stayed that way till now.
But that didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened. As humans spread across the globe and popultion growth exploded exponentially, so too did the number of languages. In fact, it’s estimated that there were approximately 10,000 languages spoken only a couple of hundred years ago.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that languages change. The second is that language is identity.
It’s easy to see that languages change. Remember struggling through Shakespeare? Yeah, me too, and that demonstrates the change that English has undergone over the past few hundred years. When that continues to happen and the same language changes in different ways in different geographical regions, you eventually get new languages. The most obvious example is Vulgar Latin dialects turning into the Romance Languages. From one language to many.
So, the first part of the answer is that the general tendency is for languages to propagate and diverge.
Your response may be that we are in a new world order, now, with globalization homogenizing the entire world into one common culture, facilitated by internet technology. America’s melting pot writ large.
The world as melting pot?
This is where part two of the answer comes in. Language is not simply a means for communicating. Language is also identity. We know that people communicate more than ideas with their language, they communicate who they are, what they believe and where they’re from. Subconsciously. So the obstacles to one language are similar to the obstacle to us all wearing the same clothes. It would certainly be cheaper and more efficient, but it’s not how people behave. And we see that empirically in studies of how Americans’ accents have not homogenized with the advent of TV (Why do some people not have accents?).
The same applies with languages — in the face of globalization, we see renewed interest in native languages, for example the rise of Gaelic (Irish language) in the face of the EU.
Having said that, colonialism and statism have lead to a decline in number of languages from its peak of 10,000 to about 6,000+ today, which you can read about here: Is English killing other languages?
Therein you’ll also see discussion of your question. The conclusion there, and what I’d similarly suggest here is that “so long as countries exist, English won’t encroach further.” In other words, the world doesn’t really want a universal language.
As long as humans aspire to have their own distinct identities and form different groups, the same aspirations that drive them to wave different flags, root for different teams, listen to different music and have different cultures, they’ll continue to have different languages.
S33: Interesting to think about how language changes prolifically even though what language represents often doesn’t change. I’ll have to think about that, re: diffraction of private experience into public spacetime. The cognitve level is more generic than the emotional level of expression – a more impersonal aesthetic. Ironically, the intent is to make gesture more enduring and objective, yet the result is more changes over time and space, while the language of gesture is more universal. Of course, verbal expression offers many more advantages through its motility through public media.
Mathematical Musings
Here are some of the more mathematical concepts related to Multisense Realism.
Position on Mathematics
Mathematics does not exist on its own. It does not haunt the vacuum of space. It does not manifest as public objects or substances. It has no will or motivation.
Mathematics is two distinctly different (opposite) things:
1) A private experience of imagined sensory symbol-figures which accompany a motive of quantitative reasoning.
2) A collection of public objects interacting in a logical, causal way, without any private representations, as a consequence of the shapes of multiple rigid bodies.
The problem with functionalist expectations is that they seduce us into a shell game so that when we look at math ‘out there’ (2), we smuggle in the meaning from ‘in here’ (1), and when we look at meaning in here (1) we mis-attribute it to the blind enactment of material bodies.
We assume that the world outside of our minds runs on math not because it actually does, but because our awareness of the public arena is a grossly reduced, indirect logical construction. The universe without, like the universe within, runs on qualitative sensory-motor experiences.
Turning the functionalist expectations around then, we find that the activity of the brain is not the source of human experience, but rather the effect of many kinds of experience on many levels (physical, chemical, biological). These experiences are not generated by information or mathematics, but rather information is an analysis of experiences by someone who knows almost nothing about them first hand.
We are used to thinking of ‘data’ in terms of digital vs analog. Consider however that both of these categories are a-signifying formats. I would like to propose a principle by which subjective, signifying experience is introduced – a qualitative instrumentality of being.
Think of the number line – abstract, linear, literal. A conception of pure quantitative non-awareness. It’s a semantic artifact from which all qualitative content has been stripped. It’s like a Supremetist work of art, really.
The act of measurement itself is to invert qualitative experience – to collapse it into value coordinates on a numberline, allowing us to treat it as a hypothetical object, aka, a figure.
Ordinal position applies to the literal, outward facing specifications of rank. This is where the universe gets the ideas for front and back (anterior and posterior) and interior exterior. As in Chess, rank refers to the relative power of the piece – the order of their significance to the game.
Ordinal disposition applies to the figurative, inward facing qualities associated with rank. This is where the universe gets the ideas for best and worst (superior and inferior). Feeling like a King or Queen, being treated like royalty, having access to first choice in dividing the spoils, etc. Ordinal disposition is about the experiential privilege of rank while ordinal position is about the mechanics associated with delivering or deriving that privilege.
by contrast, Cardinal position I am saying refers to the relative size of a real public phenomenon. The range here is along an axis from the micro to the mega, and can refer to increasing scopes and scale or increasing quantitative complexity. This is about structures nested within structures, separated by spaces of varying size. Rather than in/out, front/back, or high/low-superior/inferior, cardinal position is about spatial-topological extension – long/short, large/small.
Cardinal disposition rounds out the four as an evaluation based on rarity. Like the pawns in chess, their generic abundance relative to the two unique pieces and the three duplicated pieces indicates their disposable rank. This is different from ordinal disposition in that superiority/inferiority derives not from order in a sequence, but from degree of commonality. Where cardinal position is about space and geometry, cardinal disposition is about feelings derived from time and algebra; frequency. How often. Sooner/later. Cheap/dear. Ordinary/exotic. The magic here is in pattern recognition. ‘Three in a row’ is an example of how low caste occurrences can ascend to uncommon value.
The terms for the columns and rows in chess, rank and file, are useful here. The rank can be seen as the vertical axis of qualitative position and disposition, while the single-file of pawns exemplifies the horizontal axis of quantitative position and disposition. Poker hands are a good metaphor to see this as well. Pairs, three and four of a kind, flushes display cardinal significance, straights, high cards, and Royal flushes display ordinal significance. The other hands, full house, straight flush, demonstrate an appreciation of the cardinal disposition of combined cardinal and ordinal values.
Causation Diagram
I suggest that consciousness isn’t built up from nothing by tiny parts, it is recovered from everything by sensitivity. Unlike traditional causation models, Multisense Realism posits a radiant centripetal locus (‘here and now’) divided into lower (interior) and upper (exterior) sense conjugates. The blue and yellow connote the mirroring of the conjugates, signifying that subjective and objective modalities are not merely different but are opposite, or orthomodular ontologies:
Yellow: Interior significance (doing*being)(timespace) and
Blue: Exterior entropy (matter/energy)/spacetime
In the lower yellow half, the subjective experience of ‘now’ (M1) represents the tip of an iceberg of mental events (M) through constraints on experiential scope . The scope of a human experience is limited on the ‘near’ end by sampling rate and on the ‘far’ end by long term memory. The event horizon of the M1 now degenerates from proprietary availability toward Mφ (totality of experience, significance, or consciousness itself) along a proposed fractional Fibonacci ratio.
The blue upper half, by contrast, depicts the counterpart to M1 as ΣP, or the sum of all physical presentations relative to any given M stack. Note that physical presentations (P) are understood to be the ‘back end’ of mental presentations (M), i.e. a better symbol for physical presentations here might be shaped like a W to mirror M.
In the blue half of the diagram, the fading nested ellipses represent a different, public kind of constraint on sense – obstruction and scale. Beginning from the outside at P1 (the Big Bang) and proliferating into smaller and more granular forms. The spread between the cosmic and the microcosmic pushes out from the middle.
Degree of figurativeness in qualia equates to privacy of qualia.
1. Subjects necessarily have access to more qualia which applies to their autobiographical experience than qualia which refers to external, publicly accessible experience.
2. It is proposed that the more strictly personal a quale is, the greater the set of interconnected psychological associations that exists for the individual and the richer and more imaginative those associations can be.
3. Mathematically, the more personal an experience is to us, the more ways we can shift its meaning, making qualitative floridity and associative fluidity directly proportional to privacy.
Sole Entropy Well Model
Loschmidt’s Paradox, which as I understand it is basically “If the universe is always increasing from low entropy to high entropy, then where did the initial low entropy come from?” can be approached in a different way than what has been suggested so far. Boltzmann’s entropy curve proposes that our universe’s Big Bang is only one of many bubbles or waves which we find ourselves in anthropically.
What I propose instead is a single well of bottomless low entropy, which perpetually lengthens as all possible Boltzmann entropy waves are anticipated and absorbed before they can threaten the negentropic monopoly of the well.
In this view, the range of possible kinds of signals becomes quantitatively bound on one extreme by the Absolute (where all signals are fused in singularity of significance) and spacetime (where all signals are divided in absolute cardinality or insignificance). Like velocity, which ranges from stillness to c, the phenomenon of significance actually defines the parameters of its own measure. Entropy has meaning only in relation to expected significance, such that anything less than 100% entropy has some portion of Absolute significance. The most insignificant event can still only have 99.999…% entropy, and even the negentropic monopoly of the Absolute can only ever attain 0.000…1% entropy.
This way, the Big Bang becomes a perpetually receding event horizon of absolute and eternal negentropy, – a Borg-like ‘bright whole’ which tyrannically absorbs and subordinates all potentials and possibilities into a single continuum-schema of sense. This continuum must accommodate all paradoxes which amounts to a lot of fancy devices like nesting signals within each other on multiple interrelated layers or castes, and orthomodular juxtapositions such as private-public. These devices accomplish what I call the Big Diffraction.
The initial signal, which is the bootstrap for all sense-motor phenomena, is initiation itself, and as it defines all future coherence, it is perpetually hogging all possible signals for all time, banishing any rival Multiverse by perpetual deferment and delay.
L’existentialisme est un humanisme
One of the benefits of having never been interested in reading other people’s philosophy, is that I get to discover them in digestible bits and pieces over a long period of time. I have always found it impossible to learn anything without first having a curiosity about it – which why public education was always a complete waste of time for me. I can only seem to learn answers to questions when the questions are my own.
This is perhaps not unrelated to my topic here of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism and his use of the phrase “Existence precedes essence” in his 1945 lecture L’existentialisme est un humanisme* (turned later into a book). The terms existence and essence can be confusing, and in some senses are interchangeable. Sartre’s use of existence and essence would actually be nearly opposite to my own sense of those words.
If you read the lecture, in which he defends existentialism from misinterpretations by Communists, who accuse the philosophy of being a bourgeois privilege that promotes ‘quietism’, and by Christians as undermining the authority of God and being generally too abstract and lacking human sentiment. Sartre’s defense is to show how existentialism is, to the contrary, an exaltation of humanism and the vital importance of taking action on behalf of your fellow man. He says
“Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. The word “subjectivism” is to be understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism.”
Looking into the origins of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, I can see that in all likelihood she lifted the name for her ideology from reversing Sarte’s assertion that man is responsible for all men. In 1962, she writes that the Ethics of Objectivism are Self-interest:
3. “Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”
Of course, Rand had her own personal reasons for despising those meddling Marxist do-gooders. Had she been more down with the whole ‘compassion for fellow human beings’ thing, her views would seem strikingly similar to Sartre’s existentialism, especially with his assertion that “Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, he is also only what he wills himself to be”. His use of ‘existence precedes essence’ is to say that human nature is predicated on the freedom to actualize itself intentionally. Human essence is a wildcard to be used as we see fit. Thus, his existentialism is an action oriented ethos, He says “there is no doctrine more optimistic, since man’s destiny is within himself; . . . . It tells him that action is the only thing that enables man to live”
I would not disagree with that, as far as it goes. Although it is not quietism as he felt the Marxists contended, it could be appropriated (as Rand did) for the justification of selfish motives since it seems to de-emphasize the role that the circumstances of one’s birth play in limiting the effect that one’s will can have on self-actualization. I do think that the Christian criticism is more misguided, since existentialism explicitly exalts humanist values. While existentialism does run counter to Christian doctrine, I think that it is not incompatible with concepts of divinity which honor liberation. Bob Marley’s Stand Up For Your Rights expresses this:
“Most people think,
Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. Jah!”
Where it gets muddled for me is on the metaphysical level. When Sartre talks about essence, he is talking about purpose – human purpose. When he is talking about existence is is talking about the existence of the experience of living a human life. This is very different from talking about existence in general, of matter, of forms, etc. When I think about ex-istence in the absolute sense, I am thinking about that which is ex-terior to the subject. That which is independent from our personal thoughts and feelings. Subjectivity is, by contrast, that which literally ‘ins-ists’ and is in-terior by the subject. It could be said informally that our feelings and thoughts exist, that they ‘are’ phenomena which is part of our being, which is a phenomena in the universe, and that is true too. It could further be said that everything that exists in that way, which simply ‘is’ can only appear to be through some insistence of essential forces or energies.
I think that existence and essence in the general, non-human sense are a dialectic rather than a procession through time. They are relativistic terms. To say that one precedes the other can be locally true in either case, but it obscures the deeper truth. It invites us to mistake two levels of human experience – the innate and the intentional, for structural antagonists of the universe as a whole. What I see as more relevant is the juxtaposition between the capacity to discern aesthetic differences like essence and existence and the indifference to such distinctions. That I would say is the true essence: The sense of difference with the logic of unity (i.e. metaphor, presentation and representation). The true essence of existence is the opposite: The sense of indifference with the logic of differentiation (i.e. mechanism, mathematics).
What this does is to slide the dichotomy out from the world of anthropocentric philosophy and into the realm of scientific conjecture. We are no longer talking about only the human condition and human psychology, but talking about the common sense of all phenomena. This is the solution to the Mind Body problem…both Mind and Body are figments of subjective experience, only the body is locally misrepresented as an object (when it is actually trillions of discrete histories dating back to the beginning of the universe) and the mind is misrepresented as a subject of the body or of God (when it is actually eternity focused into a single, human gauged, perceptual inertial frame of ‘now’).
*L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Nagel, 1946, translation by Frechtman published as Existentialism (also see below), Philosophical Library, 1947, translation by Mairet published asExistentialism and Humanism, Methuen, 1948.
Quora: What effect has the computer had on philosophy?
Quora: What effect has the computer had on philosophy?
What effect has the computer had on philosophy in general and philosophy of mind in particular?
Obviously, computing has facilitated a lot of scientific advances that allow us to study the brain. e.g., neuroscience research would not exist as it does today without the computer. However, I’m more interested in how theories of computation, computer science and computer metaphors have shaped brain research, philosophy of mind, our understanding of human intelligence and the big questions we are currently asking. (Quora)
I’m not familiar enough with the development of philosophy of mind in the academic sense to comment on it, but the influence of the computer on popular philosophy includes the relevance of themes such as these:
Simulation Dualism: The success of computer graphics and games has had a profound effect on the believability of the idea of consciousness-as-simulation. Films like The Matrix have, for better or worse, updated Plato’s Allegory of The Cave for the cybernetic era. Unlike a Cartesian style substance dualism, where mind and body are separate, the modern version is a kind of property dualism where the metaphor of the hardware-software relation stands in for the body-mind relation. As software is an ordered collection of the functional states of hardware, the mind or self is the similarly ordered collection of states of the brain, or neurons, or perhaps something smaller than that (microtubules, biophotons, etc).
Digital Emergence: From a young age we now learn, at least in a general sense, how the complex organization of pixels or bits leads to something which we see as an image or hear as music. We understand how combinations of generic digits or simple rules can be experienced as filled with aesthetic quality. Terms like ‘random’ and ‘virtual’ have become part of the vernacular, each having been made more relevant through experience with computers. The revelation of genetic sequences have further bolstered the philosophical stance of a modern, programmatic determinism. Through computational mathematics, evolutionary biology and neuroscience, a fully impersonal explanation of personhood seems imminent (or a matter of settled science, depending on who you ask). This emergence of the personal consciousness from impersonal unconsciousness is thought to be a merely semantic formality, rather than a physics or functional one. Just as the behavior of a flock of birds flying in formation can be explained as emerging inevitably from the movements of each individual bird responding to the bird in front of them, the complex swarm of ideas and feelings that we experience are thought to also emerge inevitably from the aggregate behavior of neuron processes.
Information Supremacy: One impact of the computer on society since the 1980’s has been to introduce Information Technology as an economic sector. This shift away from manufacturing and heavy industry seems to have paralleled a historic shift in philosophy from materialism to functionalism. It no longer is in fashion to think in terms of consciousness emerging from particular substances, but rather in terms of particular manipulations of data or information. The work of mathematicians and scientists such as Kurt Gödel, Claude Shannon, and Alan Turing re-defined the theory of what math can and cannot do, making information more physical in a sense, and making physics more informational. Douglas Hofstadter’s books such as Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid continue to have a popular influence, bringing the ideas of strange loops and self referential logic to the forefront. Computationally driven ideas like Chaos theory, fractal mathematics, and Bayesian statistics also have gained traction as popular Big-Picture philosophical principles.
The Game of Life: Biologist Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker (following his other widely popular and influential work, The Selfish Gene) utilized a program to illustrate how natural selection produces biomorphs from a few simple genetic rules and mutation probabilities. An earlier program Conway’s Game of Life, similarly demonstrates how life-like patterns evolve without input from a user, given only initial conditions and simple mathematical rules. Philosopher Daniel Dennett has been another extremely popular influence who maintains both a ‘brain-as-computer’ view and a ‘consciousness-as-pure-evolutionary-adaptation’ position. Dawkins coined the word ‘meme’ in The Selfish Gene, a word which has now itself become a meme. Dennett makes use of the concept as well, naming the repetitive power of memes as the blind architect of culture. Author Susan Blackmore further spread the meme meme with her book The Meme Machine. I see all of these ideas as fundamentally connected – the application of the information-first perspective to life and consciousness. To me they spell the farthest extent of the pendulum swing in philosophy to the West, a critique of naturalized subjectivity and an embrace of computational inevitability.
The Interior Strikes Back: When philosopher David Chalmers introduced the Hard Problem of Consciousness, he opened the door for a questioning of the eliminative materialism of Dawkins and Dennett. His contribution at that time, along with that of philosophers John Searle and Galen Strawson has been to show the limitation of mechanism. The Hard Problem asks innocently, why is there any conscious experience at all, given that these information processes are driven entirely by their own automatic agendas? Chalmers and Strawson have championed the consideration of panpsychism or panexperientialism – that consciousness is a fundamental ingredient in the universe like charge, or perhaps *the* fundamental ingredient of the universe. My own view, Multisense Realism is based on the same kinds of observations of Chalmers and Strawson, that physics and mathematics have a blind spot for some aspects, the most important aspects perhaps, of consciousness. Neuroscientist Raymond Tallis’ book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity provides a focused critique of the evidence upon which reductionist perspectives of human consciousness are built.
The bottom line for me is that computers, while wonderful tools, exploit a particular facet of consciousness – counting. The elaboration of counting into mathematics and calculus-based physics is undoubtedly the most powerful influence on civilization in the last 400 years, its success has been based on the power to control exterior bodies in public space. With the development of designer pharmaceuticals and more immersive internet experiences, we have good reason to expect that this power to control extends to our entire existence. With the computer’s universality as evidence that doing and knowing are indeed all there is to the universe, including ourselves, it is nonetheless difficult to ignore that beyond all that seems to exist, there is some thing or some one else who seems to ‘insist’. On further inspection, all of the simulations, games, memes, information, can be understood to supervene on a deeper level of nature. When addressing the ultimate questions, it is no longer adequate to take the omniscient voyeur and his ‘view from nowhere’ for granted. The universe as a program makes no sense without a user, and a user makes no sense for a program to develop for itself.
It’s not the reflexive looping or self-reference, not the representation or semiotics or Turing emulation that is the problem, it is the aesthetic presentation itself. We have become so familiar with video screens and keyboards that we forget that those things are for the user, not the computer. The computer’s world, if it had a world, is a completely anesthetic codescape with no plausible mechanism for or justification of any kind of aesthetic decoding as experience. Even beyond consciousness, computation cannot even justify a presentation of geometry. There is no need to draw a triangle itself if you already have the coordinates and triangular description to access at any time. Simulations need not actually occur as experiences, that would be magical and redundant. It would be like the government keeping a movie of every person’s life instead of just keeping track of drivers licenses, birth certificates, tax returns, medical records, etc. A computer has no need to actualize or simulate – again that is purely for the aesthetic satisfaction of the user.
David Sosa on Free Will in Waking Life
(my comments:
I think that just as free will spans the entire continuum from profound mystery to ordinary fact to most-convincing illusion to least convincing reality, so too does consciousness as a whole.
Will seems to be a self-contained, primordial feature of nature – intentional force. The projection of a single motive sequence from a multiplicity of private motives into a thermodynamically irreversible public consequence. The power to participate in public realism; from motive to motor, emotion to intention to extension as a unified gestalt at the personal level, but smeared across smaller spaces and times at the sub-personal levels (cellular, neurochemical). Will is consciousness oscillating from being to feeling to doing to knowing, an Ouroboran double-binary knot of sensory-motor qualities, pushing and pulling between private times and public spaces.
The ‘free’ part of free will seems more conceptual. Free compared to what? Nevertheless, it too has an aesthetic subtext which is compelling. Freedom is somehow the epitome of will. It suggests self seeking to amplify itself by transcending itself. When people use the expression ‘willful’ there is a sense of being unpredictable or ‘wild’. This connection comes up again and again in philosophy and science and is rejected again and again as well. Vital force. Kundalini. Qi. Animal Magnetism. We are ambivalent about physicalizing this most direct of all experiences – perhaps the only truly direct experience there is.
What I propose is sort of a ‘if you can’t beat em, join em’ strategy. Put the phenomena which we can’t explain in the center of the model. Neither sensory perception nor motive participation can, in my view, be reduced in any way. They are primordial, such that any conceivable physical force or field, any mathematical principle or information process would by definition supervene on some form of aesthetic presentation – some detection-participation capacity. Without such a capacity, nothing which has sense, or is itself defined by sense could possibly contact this non-sensed existence in any way. In this way, we can begin to see that being and sensory-motive participation are ultimately the same thing.
The effects of free will are cumulative, and as we free ourselves again and again from our own collective inertial consequences, initiating novel sequences out of personal preference, we also cut ourselves off from many experiences. We de-cide; kill off possibilities…we make a difference not only by what we choose but what our choice makes us indifferent to. The wild personal impulse gradually pivots to its opposite, and Homo sapiens raw nomadic drive to explore becomes the impersonal impulse of self-domestication. Now that the pendulum has perhaps reached the apogee of its swing, we seek to define the impulse in terms of its absence. This is an opportunity to step out of the system and look at the phenomenon as a whole – as we modulate with it through history. The unexpected truth – that free will and mechanism are two sides of the same oscillating coin is hard to consider, but like free will itself, we should place this enigma in the center of the model rather than try to flatten it into either mechanism or spirituality. Let it be what it is. Let us be who we are.)
Blue Roses, Blue Pills, and the Significance of the Imposter
What makes that which is authentic more significant than that which is fake or ‘false’? Why do proprietary qualities carry more significance than generic qualities? Commonality vs uniqueness is a theme which I come back to again and again. Even in this dichotomy of common vs unique, there is a mathematical meaning which portrays uniqueness as simply a common property of counting one out of many, and there is a qualitative sense of ‘unique’ being novel and unprecedented.
The notion of authenticity seems to carry a certain intensity all by itself. Like consciousness, authenticity can be understood on the one hand to be almost painfully self-evident. What does it really mean though, for someone or something to be original? To be absolutely novel in some sense?
The Western mindset tends toward extremism when considering issues of propriety. The significance of ownership is exaggerated, but ownership as an abstraction – generic ownership. Under Western commercialism, rights to own and control others are protected vigilantly, as long as that ownership and control is free from personal qualities.
The thing which makes a State more powerful than a Chiefdom is the same thing which makes the Western approach so invested in property rather than people. In a Chiefdom, every time the chief dies, the civilization is thrown into turmoil. In a State, no one person or group of people personifies the society, they are instead public officials holding public office for a limited time. Political parties and ideologies can linger indefinitely, policies can become permanent, but individual people flow through it as materially important, yet ultimately disposable resources.
The metaphysical and social implications of this shift from the personal to the impersonal are profound. The metaphysical implications can be modeled mathematically as a shift from the cardinal to the ordinal. In a Chiefdom, rule is carried out by specific individuals, so cardinality is the underlying character. In a State, ordinality is emphasized, because government has become more of a super-human function. It’s an ongoing sequential process, and the members within it (temporarily) are motivated by their own ambitions as they would be as part of a Chiefdom, but they are also motivated to defend the collective investment in the permanence of the hierarchy.
At the same time, cardinality can apply to the State, and ordinality would apply to a Chiefdom (or gang). The state imposes cardinality – mass producing and mass controlling through counting systems. Identification numbers are produced and recorded. Individuals under a State are no longer addressed as persons individually but as members of a demographic class within their databases. Lawbreaker, head of household, homeowner, student, etc. This information is never explicitly woven into a personal portrait of the living, laughing, loving person themselves, but rather is retained as skeletal evidence of activities. Addresses, family names, employment history, driver’s license, dental records. It is essential for control that identity be validated – but only in form, not in content. The personality of the consumer-citizen (consumiten?) is irrelevant, to an almost impossible degree – yet some ghost of conscience compels an appearance of sentiment to the contrary.
World War II, which really should be understood as the second half of the single war for control of human civilization on a global level for the first time, was a narrative about embodied mechanization and depersonalization. The narrative we got in the West was that Fascism, Communism, and Nazism were totalitarian ideologies of depersonalization. The threat was of authentic personhood eclipsed permanently by a ruthlessly impersonal agenda. Different forms of distilled Statehood, three diffracted shadow projections of the same underlying social order transitioning into cold automatism The mania for refining and isolating active ingredients in the 20th century, from DNA to LSD to quantum, ran into unexpected trouble when it was applied to humanity. Racist theories and eugenics, Social Darwinism, massive ethnic cleanses and purges. Were we unconsciously looking for our absent personhood, our authenticity which was sold to the collective, or rather, to the immortal un-collective? Did we project some kind of phantom limb of our evacuated self into the public world, hiding in matter, bodies, blood, and heredity?
So what is authenticity? What is an imposter? Does a blue rose become less important if it is dyed blue rather than if it grew that way? Why should it make a difference? (we tell ourselves, with our Westernized intellect, that it shouldn’t). If you never found out that the rose was ‘only’ dyed blue, would you be wrong for enjoying it as if it were genuine? Why would you feel fooled if you found out that you were wrong about it being genuine but feel good if you found out that you were wrong about it being ‘fake’.
Who is fake? Who is phoney? Who is sold out? (does anyone still call anyone a ‘sell out’ anymore, or are we now pretty comfortable with the idea that there is nobody left who would not happily sell out if they only had the chance?) These are terms of accusation, of righteous judgment against those who have become enemies of authenticity – who have forsaken humanity itself for some ‘mere’ social-political advantage.
There is a dialectic between pride and shame which connects the fake and the genuine, with that good feeling of finding the latter and the disgust and loss of discovering the former. The irony is that the fake is always perpetrated without shame, or with shame concealed, but the genuine is often filled with shame and vulnerability…that’s somehow part of what makes it genuine. It’s authority comes from within our own personal participation, not from indirect knowledge, not from the impersonal un-collective of the Market-state.
Where do we go now that both the personal and impersonal approaches have been found fatally flawed? Can we regain what has been lost, or is it too late? Does it even matter anymore? If mass media is any indication, we have begun not only to accept the imposter, but we have elevated its significance to the highest. What is an actor or a model if not a kind of template, a vessel for ideal personal qualities made impersonal? It is to be celebrated for acting like yourself, or being a character – a proprietary character, made generic by mass distribution of their likeness. Branded celebrity. A currency of deferred personalization – vanity as commodity. Perhaps in the long run, this was the killer app that the Nazis and the Russians and the Japanese didn’t have. The promiscuous use of mass media to reflect back super-saturated simulations of personhood to the depersonalized subjects of the Market-state.
More than nuclear weapons, it was Hollywood, and Mickey Mouse, and Levi’s and Coca Cola which won the world. Nuclear memes. Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. This process too has now become ultra-automated. The problem with the celebrity machine was that it depended on individual persons. Even though they could be disposed of and recycled, it was not until reality TV and the new generation of talent shows that the power to make fame was openly elevated above celebrity itself. Fame is seen to be increasingly elected democratically, but at the same time, understood to be a fully commercial enterprise, controlled by an elite. The solution to the problem of overcoming our rejection of the imposter has been a combination of (1) suppressing the authentic; (2) conditioning the acceptance of the inauthentic, and most importantly, (3) obscuring the difference between the two.
I’m not blaming anyone for this, as much as I might like to. I’m not a Marxist or Libertarian, and I’m not advocating a return to an idealized pre-State Anarchy (though all of those are tempting in their own ways). I’m not anti-Capitalist per-se, but Capitalism is one of the names we use to refer to some of the most pervasive effects of this post-Enlightenment pendulum swing towards quantitative supremacy. I see this arc of human history, lurching back from the collapse of the West’s version of qualitative supremacy in the wake of the Dark Ages, as a natural, if not inevitable oscillation. I can’t completely accept it, since the extremes are so awful for so long, but then again, maybe it has always been awful. Objectively, it would seem that our contemporary First World ennui is a walk in the park compared to any other large group in history – or is that part of the mythology of modernism?
It seems to me that the darkness of the contemporary world is more total, more asphyxiating than any which could be conceived of in history, but it also seems like it’s probably not that bad for most people, most of the time. Utopia or Oblivion – that’s what Buckminster Fuller said. Is it true though anymore, or is that a utopian dream as well? Is the singularity just one more co-opted meme of super-signification? Is it a false light at the end of the sold-out tunnel? An imposter for the resurrection? Is technology the Blue Pill? I guess if that’s true, having an Occidental spirituality which safely elevates the disowned authentic self into a science fiction is a big improvement over having it spill out as a compulsion for racial purity. A utopia driven by technology at least doesn’t require an impossible alignment of human values forever. Maybe this Blue Pill is as Red as it gets?
If “the self” is the product of internal cognitive processes communicating with each other, then where do “attention” and “willpower” com…
If “the self” is the product of internal cognitive processes communicating with each other, then where do “attention” and “willpower” come from?
Who or what is deciding to focus on something, and who or what is asserting one internal view over another (“exerting willpower”)?
As a more general question, how are such purely internal, subjective, yet fully pervasive experiences such as attention as a resource that can be focused, and willpower as a resource that can be used and depleted, explained in terms of an emergent view of consciousness where the self is an illusion?
In my view, the emergent view of consciousness lacks the depth of understanding of subjectivity to be viable. At this time, emergence and the illusory self is seen as a scientific alternative to discredited spiritualist views. This would make sense if we have painted ourselves into a corner, rejecting immaterialism on one hand and embracing the lack of evidence of any ‘feelings of self’ produced in the brain.
There is another option which is not religious, and not based on a disembodied entity haunting the cells of your brain, and I think that is to understand experience itself as a concrete physical conjugate to all forms and functions. Physics becomes the ordering not just of forces and fields in spacetime, but of feelings and beings through experience or lifetime.
In this question for example, willpower could only be a mechanical condition of the brain. How much willpower you have would be a consequence of your genetic capacities and how your brain has developed. In our real world experience however, willpower has at least as much to do with the semantic content of our experience. The conventional wisdom has been, and not without merit, that we are responsible for participating in our own exercise of willpower. It would be argued that whatever we might do to build our focus and discipline would also improve whatever neurological functions are involved, but it seems more like it has to be a push-pull.
In the end, no emergent view of consciousness can plausibly justify the sensory experience of consciousness itself. The idea of the illusory self, while seemingly supported by a consensus of inanimate instruments, can only be accepted or rejected by the self itself. The existence of an epiphenomenal self-model which is experienced aesthetically rather than loops of anesthetic self-referential data processing is really a deal breaker. Regardless of whether our private expectation of the effectiveness of our will match the public effect of it, the fact that there is any such thing as an expectation of self in the first place cannot be explained mechanically. The only way we can even entertain this fallacy is to smuggle our own undeniably real self awareness into the argument without noticing and then using our own minds to consider the idea of their own absence by the very evidence that it is actively weighing. You can’t have it both ways. If you are real enough to do science, then you can’t be irrelevant enough to be illusory.
Making Sense of Computation
In my view, matter and energy are the publicly reflected tokens* of sense and motive respectively. As human experiences, we are a complicated thing to try to use as an example – like trying to learn arithmetic by starting with an enormous differential equation. When we look at a brain, we are using the eyes of a simian body. That’s what the experience of a person looks like when it is stepped all the way down from human experience, to animal experience, to cellular experience, to molecular experience, and all the way back up to the animal experience level. Plus we are seeing it from the wrong angle. If I’m right, experience is a measure of time, not space, so looking at the body associated with an experience that lasts 80 or 100 years from a sampling rate of a few milliseconds would be a radically truncated view, even if we were looking at it in its native, subjective form. Every moment we are alive, we are surfing on a wave that has been growing since our birth – growing not just in synch with clock time, but changing in response to the significance of the experiences in which we participate directly. This is what I mean by sense. A concretely real accumulation of experience, a single wave in constant modulation as the local surface of an arbitrarily deep ocean.
Information is not sense, and neither is it matter or energy. Information is the shadow of all of these, of their relation to each other, which is cast by sense. Information is like sense as far as it being neither substantial nor insubstantial, but it is the opposite of sense also. Matter, energy, and information are all opposite to each other and opposite to sense. They are the projections of sense. If you break down the word information into three bites, the “in” would be sensory input, the ‘form’ would be ‘matter-space’ and the ‘ation’ would be ‘energy-time’. When most people think about information though, they undersignify the input/output aspect, the “in”, – which is sense, and conflate consciousness with senseless formations. Formations with no participating perceiver are non-sense and no-thing.
The difference between sense and information is that sense is anchored tangibly in the totality of events in all of history. It is the meta-firmament; the Absolute, and it potentially makes sense of itself in every sense modality. Information only makes sense from one particular angle or method of interpretation. It is a facade. As soon as information is removed from its context, its ungrounded, superficial nature is exposed. Information so removed does not react or adapt to make itself understood – it is sterile and evacuated of feeling or being. It is purely a feeling being’s idea of doing or knowing and does not exist independently of its ‘host’. Because of this it is tempting to conceptualize information as self-directing memes, but that would only be true figuratively. In an absolute sense, memes are a figure-ground inversion, i.e it puts the cart before the horse and sucks us into strong computationalism and the Pathetic fallacy. From what I can see, information has no autonomy, no motive. It is an inert recording of past motives and sensations.
Previously, I have written about computation, numbers, mathematics as being the flattest category of qualia. Flattest in the sense of being almost purely an tool for knowing or doing that has to borrow rely on being output in some aesthetic form to yield any feeling or ‘being’.
Computation can be represented publicly through material things like positions of beads on an abacus, the turns of mechanical gears, the magnetic dispositions of microelectronic switches, the opening and closing of valves in a plumbing system, the timing and placement of traffic signals on a street grid, etc. All of these bodies rely on the ability to detect or sense each others passive states and to respond to them in some motor effect. It makes no difference how it is represented, because the function will be the same. This is precisely the opposite of consciousness, in which rich aesthetic details provide the motivation and significance. Evolutionary functions are never nakedly revealed as a-signifying generic processes. For humans, food and sex are profoundly aesthetic, social engagements, not just automatic functions.
Computation can also be represented publicly through symbols. One step removed from literally embodied aesthetics, computation can be transferred figuratively between a person’s thoughts and written symbols through the sensory-motor medium of mathematical literacy. We can imagine that there is a similar ferrying of meaning between the mathematician’s thoughts and some non-local source of arithmetic truth. Arithmetic truth seems to us certain, rational, internally consistent, universal but it is also impersonal. Arithmetic laws cannot be made proprietary or changed. They are eternal and unchanging. We can only borrow local copies of numbers for temporary use, but they cannot be touched or controlled. They represent disembodied knowledge, but no doing, no being, and no feeling.
In the first sense, mathematics is represented by mechanical positions of public bodies, and therefore almost completely ‘flat’ qualitatively. Binary interactions of go/on-stop/off have no sense to them other than loops and recursive enumeration. In the second sense, a written mathematical language adds more qualia, clothing the naked digital states in conceptual symbols. The language of mathematics allows the thinker to bridge the gap between public doing of machines and private knowing of arithmetic truth.
Although strong computationalists will disagree, it seems to me that a deeper understanding reveals of computation reveals that arithmetic truth itself requires an even deeper set of axioms which are pre-arithmetic. The third sense of mathematics is the first sense we encounter. Before there is mathematical literacy, there is counting. Counting to three gives way to counting on fingers (digits), as we learn the essential skills of mental focus required. As we learn more about odd and even numbers, addition and subtraction, the aesthetics of symmetry and succession are not so much introduced into the psyche as foreign concepts, but are recovered by the psyche as natural, familiar expectations. Math, like music, is felt. Before we can use it to help us know essential truths or to cause existential effects, we have to be able to participate in counting and the solving of problems in our mind. When we do these kinds of problems, our awareness must be very focused. We are accessing an impersonal level of truth. Our human bodies and lives are distractions. Machines and computers have always been conspicuously lacking in what people refer to as ‘soul’, or ‘warmth’, feeling, empathy, personality, etc. This is consistent with the view of computation that I am trying to explain. Whatever warmth or personality it can carry must originate in a being – an experience which is anchored in the aesthetic presentation of sense rather than the infinite representation of information.
*or orthomodular inversions to be more precise
Multisense Realism 
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