Multisense Realism

The addition of a sensory-motor primitive in physics would entail new terms to reflect the shift away from thermodynamic and electromagnetic and toward terms which consider the distinction between private-tempo and public-spatial to be more relevant. Thermal qualities of temperature are understood to be tactile reads of the same molecular tempos (frequencies) which are read visually as colors, but they are both private signifying experiences (endophoric).

Kinetic-based measurements such as velocity and pressure are correlated to molecular tempo but from an exterior view. The public consequences of endophoric tempos are received as topographical presentations of an exometric sort (wavelengths and ranges for example). Exometrics can be frozen and analyzed as static positions and vectors.

Endophoric – A privately meaningful signal, affect, or subjective disposition based on frequency of oscillating or cycling through experienced sensory qualities.

Exometric – A public effect on embodied participants and their ‘objective’ positions (relative to one another). Measurement by scale, scope, distance, and mechanical interaction of forms.

The nature of endophorics can be understood in more detail using monochord type models such as the visible spectrum or musical scale, where frequency correlates to a specific sensed quality which cannot be described publicly. The contrast between the mathematical contexts of cardinality vs ordinality are useful here, as well as position vs disposition.

Endophorics: Affect, disposition, appreciation
ordinal qualities (significance > entropy)
cardinal qualities (unique > common)

Exometrics: Effect, position, function
quantified ordinality (consequences of coordinates)
quantified cardinality (consequences of redundancy)

Endophorics can be conceived of as tempos, tropes (to turn, alter, change), or even ‘verses’ (turns, bends). A sense of progress through cycles of tension and relaxation (wag and weigh from PIE). This is the experience sensory input, as through a read head or antenna responding to exterior conditions.

Exometrics by contrast are public measurables, based on literal rigid bodies and their figurative extension into rigid scientific indexes. Navigation, for example, compares known stable positions and ratios to local unknown variables. By isolating invariance, common sense can be established with relative independence of endophoric fluctuations.

The debate over the origin and nature of consciousness in the universe, in my analysis, boils down to this:

Panexperientialism vs Panmechanism

We must consider whether it is likely that

1. Experience is possible without a mechanism.
   At first consideration, many people will immediately disagree.
   • We are the only thing in the universe which has experience,
   • we know that experience relies on a brain,
   • and we know that a brain is a biological mechanism.

   Case closed.
   Or is it?

   That position seems to inevitably also adhere to the view that there can only be one competing hypothesis; naive idealism. This is typically summed up as “So, if you die, then the universe disappears?” or “So, the Moon disappears if you aren’t looking at it.”*

   The implicit assumptions behind this rebuke of idealism are:
   a: Human consciousness is the only form of consciousness possible, and
   b. Matter itself functions with no possibility of awareness.

2. Mechanism is possible without some form of experience.
   Whether it is planets orbiting the Sun or atoms colliding in a void, there is a logical pattern that can be observed. Rather than every object falling through each other, or turning into an unexpected form, there is a strict coherence of interactions. We speak of ‘Laws of Physics’.

   If we were to summon a statement of naive counter-idealism, it would take ‘Law’ literally and demand to see the Parliament and legislature, the law enforcement apparatus, and most of all, the law-abiding agents who have received, understood, and retain a capacity to follow ‘laws’ to the letter. In the absence of any proposal for the mechanism of physical law itself, It would seem that the presumption of law is little more than a pacifier for the mind. There are simply things, and they simply do what they do.

   This puts the proposition of experience-without-mechanism (EWM) on exactly the same level of religious faith as mechanism without experience (MWE), however the difference is (and it is an important difference), that we personally can verify our own experience and cannot verify the lack of experience in another. We can have a hunch, by the rigor mortis for example, that Zed’s dead, but we still have a cadaver, full of microscopic tributes to the wonder that was Zed’s body. If we want to get really hippie, we can say too that the Earth still has another crumb of lovely fragrant organic matter with which to fertilize the air and soil. Zed is no more, but the body formerly known as Zed is still part of the many stories of biochemistry, history, anthropology, etc that remain.

   It seems to me that the assumption of Laws which govern a universe of existence without experience is actually more likely a function of our own naive assumption that our experience relies on automatic laws. In fact, when we turn that assumption on its head, we find that once we let go of the idea of being the only active participant in the universe, any law of physics can easily be understood as a sensory-motor experience, and the dream of pristine non-witnessed mechanism may in fact be the more comforting psychological blanket compared to the brave new universe of en-ploding meaning and significance..

3. Anything can be proved or if it matters.
   All that the foregoing suggests is that we may be wrong to assume that the capacity to experience appears out of matter, and that it is wrong because such an appearance makes no sense at any point in the history of the universe. We assume that experience is complex or emerges from ‘complexity’ itself, but that may be because our human awareness is complex. In reality, without awareness, there is no quality of ‘complexity’ in the universe. Something has to be able to interpret a given pattern as complex for it to be distinct from just ‘lots and lots of simplicity’. We assume that simple forms of life or matter have no experience, but how would we be able to tell the difference?

   The answer to whether it matters if we are an accidentally conscious body in a meaningless machine or a human experience in a universe made of meaningful experiences is to me, an obvious yes. The implications of the former vs the latter radiate out in every direction of our personal and social lives. Are we automatons who inexplicably dream of freedom, or are we free agents who are sensibly bound to a multitude of other experiences interdependently?

   Since it is potentially such an important issue (really what more important issue for the world as a whole could there be in the long run?) and that the answer could reconcile science, philosophy, and religion if properly understood, the issue of proof is important. Just as modern rationality has become accustomed to the unquestioned assumption of panmechanism, so too have we become accustomed to the corresponding assumption of pan-objectivity.

   Like the laws of physics, our law of proof is a disembodied soldier with no home. We have become subjects of proof rather than provers of fact. Having turned the most miraculous epistemological tool in our arsenal on ourselves, we have found a way to lose sight that it is we ourselves who are doing the proving. We have lost our orientation and now face ourselves through our own human idea of a stranger’s eyes. The eyes of a neuron, of collections of cells and ion channels, of spike trains and action potentials. These, we state confidently, are what we really are. These strange microworlds are reality, while the only reality which humanity has ever known before this, has been mere advertisements for the hidden processes that really matter.

   A closer look, however, at that history which we used to think was real and we find the roots of objectivity itself – not handed down by fiat by the unmovable object of matter but by thousands of years of thinking and reasoning, philosophy and mysticism. From the alchemist’s flasks to the monk’s viniculture, and from the astrologer’s star maps to Galileo’s telescope, it has all been a process of human discovery – of trial and error but also of intuition and insight. We have come to this place in history as a function of agreement and disagreement, not of a single inevitable monolith of unquestioned fact or faith.

*this Strawman seems to be based on a misinterpretation of Idealism, perhaps handed down from the successively more superficial readings of George Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)

23. But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it; but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call BOOKS and TREES, and the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? BUT DO NOT YOU YOURSELF PERCEIVE OR THINK OF THEM ALL THE WHILE? This therefore is nothing to the purpose; it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind: but it does not show that you can conceive it possible the objects of your thought may exist without the mind.

As Berkeley’s ideas rippled and meandered through the minds of writers and thinkers over the decades, they crossed over from philosophy to science. By 1884, Scientific American echoed Berkeley’s idealism, stating

“Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.”

(reblogging from my If A Philosophical Cliche Falls In A Forest)

“Thus, the word ‘electron’ should be regarded as no more than a  name  by which we call attention to a certain aspect of the holomovement, an aspect that can be discussed only by taking into account the entire experimental situation and that cannot be specified in terms of localized objects moving autonomously through space. And of course, every kind of ‘particle’ which in current physics is said to be a basic constituent of matter will have to be discussed in the same sort of terms (so that such ‘particles’ are no longer considered as autonomous and separately existent). Thus we come to a new general physical description in which ‘everything implicates everything’ in an order of undivided wholeness.” – David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

If you aren’t familiar with physicist David Bohm, he was one of the pioneers of Quantum Physics who dared to go beyond mere calculation. He dared to integrate quantum observations into a cosmology which includes consciousness. In many ways his ideas parallel my own approach. His term holomovement is very similar to what I have looked at in breaking down the word universe to its etymological roots. Both holo and uni refer to singularity-wholeness, the Absolute or solitrope. Verse and movement are related (re-verse, in-verse, ob-verse), although Bohm’s sensibility of holomovement implies a motorized realization of cosmos, while universe is a broader more ‘vers-atile’ ‘vers-ion’, allowing for the full range of information-theoretic-material realizations. Some other obnoxious portmanteau neologisms could include ‘soliwegh’, ‘monoteleos’, ‘unimotive’.

Polarization is interesting to me because it supports what Bohm is saying. We use the term ‘polarizing filter’ for substances with these particular optical properties, but filters would not behave the way that these lenses do. As you can see in the YouTube, when it comes to these kinds of filters, ‘two wrongs can make a right’, so to speak.

In my mind, there is no way that we can honestly describe photons as particles as we see that unlike a conventional filter, the amount of light passing through these lenses can increase as well as decrease the illumination of the target. It’s like having a second coffee filter which undoes half of the effect of the first.

Following is a simple chart showing a conventional understanding of polarized light. Note that the source of the light and the target of the beam are not featured – symptomatic I think of the dominance of the theoretical approach to understanding light. We are meant to imagine quali-invisible waves which make up ‘light’ itself. traveling through the air and undergoing mathematical transformations.

This is indeed a great way of modeling the phenomenon as an idea, but I think that the concrete reality of the thing, keeping in mind Bohm’s words about there not really being fundamental particles which autonomously exist, is obscured. My conjecture takes Bohm seriously and ventures further into realism. This new view suggests that rather than a generalized holomovement or implicate order, the materials themselves – light bulbs, laser diodes, dicrhroic crystal doped lenses and films, ordinary walls and screens…these are the materials which are the actual holodynamic ensemble. What they are made of all have sensory-motor properties which are both generic-universal, chemical-specific, and spatiotemporal-unique. Each element is a presentation of this ontological continuum, with topological peaks as an unrepeatable performance out of the plenum of the inescapable repetition of the permanently generic. Quantum is only half of the picture. Qualia is both the cause and effect of quantum.

This next figure is a diagram to illustrate this idea of light or quantum, not as some mysterious invisible magic, or as a simple mathematical idea, but as a concrete sensory-motor reality. It may not be obvious, but what is intended here is to show that the actual agents are not waves but in illuminated matter: light bulb filament, lens, wall. It is the excitement of the filament which is imitated in different ways by the other participants in this ensemble. Each participating piece of matter is imitating or re-verse imitating, con-verting or di-verting not beams of light but their own energetic disposition. The molecules of the lens are responding in a specific way. The lens is changing its image, not bending a literal beam. The light which we see is a part of us interacting directly with a part of something else, separated only by empty space. Seeing is a way of touching without literally touching.

While Bohm was ahead of his time (quote was from 1980) in recognizing the significance of holistic coherence and going beyond the model of autonomous particles, the view that I propose applies this same radical departure to perception. Just as the polarizing glass can either block out or recover signals, every sense channel we have brings with it its own unique contribution to our sense of realism. Our models of physics would not be the same if human beings were not primarily visually oriented. What we assume and what we question depends entirely on which sense modalities we rely on most.

Consider then, that our human eyes are not special because they are eyes, but because they are eyes which have been executed on a fantastically human scale. Eyes can be simple. In zooplankton, we can see viable eyes composed of just two cells. Let this sink in for a moment. Eyes are simple. Vision is invertebrate simple. Plankton simple. No brain is required. It’s not much of a leap to imagine that rather than eyes being the only way to detect visible events, they are an evolutionary step in division of labor rather than perceptual simulation and optical detection.

Chlorophyll shows us that response to visible light occurs on the molecular level, and ionization suggests this sensitivity is atomic. Neither of these imply, however, a separate currency of photons which autonomously transit between surfaces in a vacuum. Our own optical sense begins and ends at the surface of retinal molecules (vitamin A) embedded in the folded proteins of our rods and cones as they become erect in the presence of light. This is what our neurons are translating, not photons, but the cascading sensory-motor changes among molecules, cells, tissues, and organs that make up the living organism. Rather than a mathematical transduction of ‘information’, there are personal experiences of sub-beings (or sub-personal experiences of one being).

Realize then, that although we as human beings cannot see without eyes, hear without ears, etc, it is arbitrary bias to presume that these human organs are the source of all sensory access in the universe. To the contrary, the multisense realism view proposes that primitive cells, molecules, and atoms, may possess a less differentiated sense capacity. Just as our human night vision loses the discernment of color sensing cone cells, it may be the case that all eukaryotes have a kind of stem-qualia, the root verse from which our hypertrophied modalities of sight, sound, tactile, olfactory-gustatory, kinesthetic-vestibular, etc. senses are descended. The molecular-atomic ‘inorganisms’ could have an even more primordial unisense, to the point of proto-tangibility. A level of experience in which spacetime, unity and diversity, semiosis itself begin to emerge from the void-bottom end of the Absolute.

The light bulb filament’s molecules may themselves be bright and hot, maybe they are screaming and smell of ozone, all at once, but diluted into the catastrophe of fragments. On this least unified yet least diversified layer of uni-verse, the rules of community and locality are likely beyond our recognition. Every atomic whisper and supernova blast may be equally present in some sense at the bottom of the semantic event horizon. As Einstein warped spacetime and quantum mechanics digitized energy, this model extends that ambition to the Absolute. Perceptual relativity, seen as the ultimate and sole cosmological constant, crushes its own ontology at the periphery. Isness – being, collapses in on itself with the exhaustion of discernment.

The Quantum Zeno Effect

It is easy to show using standard theory that if a system starts in an eigenstate of some observable, and measurements are made of that observable N times a second, then, even if the state is not a stationary one, the probability that the system will be in the same state after, say, one second, tends to one as N tends to infinity; that is, that continual observations will prevent motion …

— Alan Turing

“…an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay. One can “freeze” the evolution of the system by measuring it frequently enough in its (known) initial state.” – Wiki

It’s so strange to me that in all of the incredibly exotic implications of quantum mechanics and relativity, including the obliteration of matter and time, the possibility that what is being measured is measurement itself is never considered. We would rather assume that we are telepathically controlling the outcome of subatomic events than imagine that perhaps the events we are witnessing are the atoms which compose the measuring instruments which are imitating, in their own language, our intention to witness and objectify.

Think of it like a mirror image of divination. If you have played at all with the I Ching or Tarot cards, you will find that whatever insights they might seem to provide about your situation, they seem to present an even more insightful mirror to your question itself. Unlike quantum mechanics, we can see that divination can be falsified. Or can it? Like any cold reading sham psychic, we can pull the wool over our own eyes and reinterpret any previous prophecy which turns out false and find that on another level it could seem true, or that we had to believe that false prophecy at the time in order for some more important thing to happen, etc.

There was a Twilight Zone where William Shatner is trapped by his own obsessive superstition, unable to leave the room because of a tabletop oracle’s innuendos.

Nick of Time, 11/18/1960

Shatner: “Does anything exciting ever happen around here?”

Mystic Seer: “It is quite possible”.

“Am I gonna be promoted, for Pete’s sake?” is Shatner’s second question.

“It has been decided in your favor” is the response from the card from the box underneath the bobble headed Old Nick.

His fiancee fondles his keychain with a rabbit’s foot and four leaf clover and as Shatner calls his office and validates the oracle’s prophecy, he falls into a compulsive dependency on the oracle’s increasingly menacing fortunes.

Superficially, this reads as a simplistic cautionary tale of confirmation bias and the perils of superstition, but if it were that simple, all ideas of luck and fate would little appeal in this post modern age. Instead, it seems that more than ever people openly express gratitude to divine providence for their ‘blessings’.

Shatner’s insistence on using the same machine at the same table reflects this kind of proprietary intimacy with the super-personal. Superstition, or over-personal sense-making is a kind of inflammation of the pattern recognition faculties on the top end, the executive end of the psyche. The surprising thing, however, and the thing which can throw us into a recursive paranoia or delusional optimism if we are not careful, is that our capacity to see and know is not completely separate from the fabric of events themselves. In the moment of divination, there is inherently a kernel the truth of that moment, and in subsequent moments, the narrowness of that truth is exposed, just as all conditional truths of any moment are eventually exposed in the infinity of the unconditional.

Serling: “Two people permanently enslaved by the tyranny of fear and superstition, facing the future with a kind of helpless dread. Two others facing the future with confidence, having escaped one of the darker places in The Twilight Zone*.”

What does this have to do with Quantum Mechanics?

If my conjecture is right, then photons and other particle/wave functions are not literally objects, in the same way that exchanging smiles is not a literal exchange of projectiles across space. The exchange of smiles is procedural-semantic. It is to see and imitate an expression of subjective feeling which cannot be meaningfully broken down. The contortion of facial muscles, baring of teeth, etc has some evolutionary roots, sure, yes it does. The activity of neurotransmitters, ion pumps, and contracting proteins in sequence from the brain to those muscle fibers also presents an impersonal mechanism, relative to us, which can be credited for producing the smiles – mirror neurons, oxytocin, dopamine, sex hormones also after puberty, all kinds of microscopic amazing that we would not care at all about if it did not theoretically explain something personal about ourselves.

The teeth baring and the synapse doping are the meta and root impersonal perspectives respectively. The former posits a behavioral cause built on stochastic extractions of accumulated chance (the opposite of Shatner’s Nick, which is driven by unfalsifiable retro-correspondence – overly tele teleology which projects a future based on an ungrounded relativism of the past) while the latter posits a deterministic cause built on inevitable consequences of static universal law (math and physics). In the chart below, I try to show how these levels form the top and bottom of only half of the picture – the Realism half. Occidental reasoning is objective and impersonal, squeezing all of consciousness and identity into a mosaic of digital permutations and Bayesian feedback loops.

The missing half of quantum mechanics is the Eastern half or Orientverse. In order for logic to exist, something has to make sense of it. There has to be some capacity for discernment to detect, compare detections, and cause changes based on those comparisons. There has to be choice. This isn’t some sentimental appeal for naive anthropocentrism, this is, in my understanding, an inescapable ontological axiom – *the* axiom beneath all axioms.

How to discern on our own level then, between superstition and coincidence? How can we know anything for sure if we are in some sense participating in the creation of our own reality. What the Quantum Zeno Effect really is, finally, is a clue to how participation itself drives significance in the identical way that motion drives mass. It ‘matters’ how much you do and how much you care – it is what makes things matter. We can’t help but wanting to matter, and that means wanting to participate in something that matters.

What matters is generally located on the Eastern, Multisense side of the chart: Peer involvement. Consciousness is that ego driven stream of thoughts and intentions – the means through which subconscious instincts must be conditioned by hand into significance. Significance is accessed through language and ideas, in memory and esteem. It’s that charismatic glow and undeniable glamor of substantial power. Something that matters, not just to my own mind, but to everyone. Whether they like it or hate it, significance cannot be ignored – literally. Significance is the personal experience of signal promiscuity, a contagious association factor which runs through our experience longitudinally, connecting the dots through our days, years, and lives. To signify is literally to arrest one’s attention. To reduce personal choice over one’s own interest is an invasion (often a welcome invasion) of sorts.

This is what the Zeno Effect is all about: The equivalence of attention, significance, and time.

Quantum anti-Zeno effect studies are interesting too.

“The essence of the quantum Zeno effect is that repeated interrogation if the system is still in the inital state tends to quench the system in this state as the frequency of interrogations grows. The reason for that is that the quantum evolution generated by the hermitian Hamiltonian is time reversible, and hence the probability p(t) of intial state occupancy behaves as p(t) ≃ 1 − (t/τ)² for short times t, with τ being the characteristic time scale. […] If we make N interrogations within the time T For this reason, the Zeno effect in decay processes is very hard to observe.”

[…]

“Frequent observing if the Schördinger cat is alive, kills it faster. Such experiment requires “tuning” of atomic transition frequency, or the photon band gap edge within the range of, which can be for instance done using external static electromagnetic field and Zeeman, or Stark effect. Summarizing, we have shown that near threshold decay can be exploited to observe the quantum anti-Zeno effect. Typical near threshold decay processes are characterized by ultra short period of quadratic decay, followed by a long phase of non-exponential decay, with a very large rate at the begining, gradually slowing down in the course of the dynamics. Monitoring if the decaying system remains in the initial state, shifts the system back to the fast initial phase of the non-exponential decay. In effect,
more frequent measurement, cause faster decay.”

Not that the Zeno and Anti-Zeno effects do not contradict each other, although it can be confusing. It’s a bit like remembering a car crash, and seeing the car in your memory speeding ahead at 80mph forever. It is frozen at high speed. In the same way, when we look at something which gradually decays less and less, we can make it decay faster by interrogating it more often during it’s high rate of decay phase. At least I think that’s what they are saying here. In the other study it seems like maybe they are using random measurements to accelerate anti-Zeno, but I’m not sure. That could make sense too – shifting the burden of choice onto the receiving/interrogated instrument rather than the transmitting instrument. Either way, I still think it makes more sense to see the measurement of quantum as a complex interaction among instruments rather than literal particles – what is being transmitted is like a smile, not like separate thing-which-is-not-a-thing.

*Twilight Zone trivia – the name comes from the submarine exploration, the point at which the ocean is so deep that sunlight begins to be unable to penetrate it.