Unified Formulation
If you want a formula, here’s what I’ve got for you at this point. I’m not saying it’s pretty (to everyone), but think of what calculus looked like to Newton’s critics (not to compare myself to Newton):
The United Formulation for the equivalence of proprietary temporal-algebraic signifying phenomenology (ℵ↔Ω) and public spatio-topological relativity (ωª) is
ॐ ⊇ { ((ℵ↔Ω) ↑ºt ) ⊥ (ωª ↓ (H←d)) }
or
“Everything is the superset or equal to {(Psyche (multiplying through time) as ordinal qualities) juxtaposed (aka ‘versed’) against (Cosmos dividing Psyche through telescopically scaled relativistic spatial cardinality)}
TL;DR to follow:
*ॐ* stands for Asolute Totality-Singularity: A proposed maximum inertial frame : an Everythingness which exists as ground of being in contradistinction to it’s own self-diffraction. The formula explains the self-diffraction as a private phenomenological multiplication through time and public morphological division across space.
“ℵ↔Ω”
refers to the expansion of the range of possible experiences along an x axis from eidetic-metaphorical to entopic-literal phenomenology.
“↑ ºt”
refers to the elevation of qualitative rank through time. The universe which contains human society presumably contains the potential for deeper and richer experiences – more fantastic and more awful than a universe of only simple organisms or inorganic systems.
“⊥”
reflects the orthogonal/perpendicular nature between the temporal-subjective side of the equation and the spatial-objective side.
“ωª ↓”
is anomalously symmetric to ℵ↔Ω, such that ω is the bottom-up, outside-in perspective of fundamental particles which are nested within each other telescopically (ª), from microcosmic to astrophysical scales of mechanism. This reductive determinism (↓) presents the mirror image to the intentionality of “↑ ºt”, which motivates with promise (high º) and threat (high negative º).
“H←d”
describes thermodynamic entropy (H) and the arrow of time (←) which relentlessly crushes or grinds all somethings into anythings and nothings. The role of distance (d) or space is to magnify this process, allowing larger, denser accumulations of mass and wider fields of dispersal into dust.
From an information entropy perspective, “d” would be understood as the metaphorical ‘distance’ instead; the mismatch of sense channels across different scales leads to a loss of intelligibility that increases exponentially from the microcosmic scales up, so that what is perceived as space on the macro scale is literally a failure to communicate on lower levels. It is the accumulated gating of sensory-motive uncertainty (noise).
Meta and Root
Here are some proposed scale/scope relations between interior phenomenology and exterior realism. The idea that mathematics is the root of quantum physics should be clear enough without much explanation. Taking that relation literally and applying it throughout, the sense of the whole picture can maybe be understood.
Math is to QM as Physics is to Math, as Chemistry is to Physics, etc. These, I propose are convenient break points on the ‘impersonal’ range of the universal continuum. These are nested algebraic topologies in spacetime. They are the exteriorized representations of the personal range experiences. There is a presentation-representation and agent-world relation here, so that the world in which a person relates to other persons is scoped as physics (classical mechanics and thermodynamics) chemistry and genetics. The impersonal view of a person is that: genetic, chemical, and physical activity in the body. Biology, ecology, and evolution extend this world into broader dis-identification categories – evolutionary species, environmental ecology, biological anatomy.
The impersonal side deals with structures extended in public space. The corresponding agents to these large scale worlds are the ephemeral, super-personal levels of awareness. Less real, but potentially more personally meaningful; characters, influences from culture, myth, family, etc are tied to ideas of the afterlife and luck – experiences above and beyond individual control.
Taking it down to the bottom third of the chart, the correlations work here too. Quantum is the world of emotion (which I describe as quorum mechanics – quantum is ‘atomic mood’), Math is the world of qualia (i.e. the interqualitative space – trigonometric functions, symmetries, algebraic equivalence), and Logic is the world of sense (the inevitable shadow of sense cast by the interaction of multiple participants).
[Hypo-Impersonal] Evolution :: Meta (Super-Personal) Absolute
[Hypo-Impersonal] Ecology :: Meta (Super-Personal) Archetypes
[Hypo-Impersonal] Biology :: Meta (Super-Personal) Intuition
[Impersonal] Genetics :: (Personal) Significance
[Impersonal] Chemistry :: (Personal) Consciousness
[Impersonal] Physics :: (Personal) Instinct
[Hyper-impersonal root] Quantum :: (Sub-personal root) Emotion
[Hyper-impersonal root] Math :: (Sub-personal root) Qualia
[Hyper-impersonal root] Logic :: (Sub-personal root) Sense
Data and Dualism
“Define “dualist” and “supernatural.”
Many years ago, I participated in a USENET discussion about whether data structures in computers existed. The debate raged on. One side argued that they did, because look, there they are in the code. The other side argued that they did not, because at the machine level, it was just 1’s and 0’s represented by voltage levels. No consensus emerged.
Now, we know everything about computers, and if we cannot answer such a question about them, what hope do we have about the brain and mind, about which we know almost nothing?”
Not to dredge up any bad memories from USENET, but I think my framework provides a conclusive way of understanding the issue. Unfortunately my model also predicts that many people, because of their specialized intellectual focus, may not be able to understand the model.
The question of whether data structures exist in computers can be resolved this way:
1. Since we are not the computer, we can only talk about the behavior of the device on different levels. With our own mind, we can go much further.
2. In the case of computer data, we can say that voltage levels (which are really statistical averages of electromagnetic dynamism…the extent to which matter pushes and pulls matter) exist in a geometric sense of bodies across space. This is the literal presentation of microelectronic structure. If we anchor our intellectual inertial frame in exterior geometric realism, then it is the 1’s and 0’s which are the representations – unreal except for our labeling of them. There are no literal ones or zeroes in a computer, rather they are in the story which we tell ourselves to enable our control over semiconductor arrays.
3. If we anchor our intellectual inertial frame in the algebraic-sequential presentation instead, then the logic behind the Boolean instructions are the relevant reality as they can be exported into many different mechanisms. The specific materials and geometry which are used to execute instructions are only there to serve the encoded information.
This should explain why both sides are correct and incorrect in their own way, but neither side understands the other’s point of view. The issue of our own consciousness escalates this problem to a new level, as not only is there the same antagonism between geometric-topological materialists and information-theoretic idealists, but both of them together are equally blind to a whole other axis of non-commutative qualities related to perception and participation.
For the Explanatory Gap, we really have two orthogonal dualisms, Western arithmetic-physicists who see the universe from the outside in and what I might call Eastern spiritualist-idealists who see the universe from the inside out. The same principles of reconciliation apply here, but the application of them is even more inflammatory. The solution involves a profound relativism which recontextualizes the literal and figurative, fact and fiction, in a way which challenges many (all?) established religious, philosophical, and scientific assumptions, birthing an entirely new view of cosmos and psyche. It is a hard sell, but I suspect that unfortunately it may be the only solution which can actually work.
Leibniz and Life Thread
I agree with what you say, but there’s no need to humanizethe coffee filters nor humanize intelligence or consciousness.I’m not talking here about IQ. My point (speaking here as Leibniz) is thatnature down to the lowliest beings (a grain of sand) has intelligenceof some sort. Nature is alive, and life is intelligence.
My point though is just because we put fibers into a mold or dots on a page into a form we can recognize doesn’t mean that we have created new life and intelligence. There is a difference between assembling something from tiny spatial-object parts and something reproducing itself from teleological-experiential wholes. A mannequin is not a person. The plaster and steel the mannequin is made of may certainly have a quality of experience, and although it is hard to speculate on exactly what kinds of experiences those are or what level of microcosm or macrocosm they are associated with, one thing that I am quite certain of is that the plaster and steel mannequin is not having the experience of a human person, no matter how convincing of a mannequin it looks to us to be. The same goes for cartoons, drawings, photos, movies..those things aren’t alive or intelligent, but they are made of things which, on some level, are capable of sense participation. Computers are just a more pronounced example. As they improve they may be more convincing imitations of our human intelligence, but that quality of awareness is only a recorded reflection of our own, it is not being generated by nature directly and it is neither alive nor intelligent.
You hit on a weak point. There is no agreed-upon version of Leibniz’s definition of substance.
Leibniz [snip] considers substance as “a being gifted with the power of action”.
visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
I think it’s circular to define a monad as a being gifted with the power of action if we are using the monad hypothesis to try to explain consciousness, which can be considered the power of action in the sense that L intends here. I don’t think that in that sentence he is suggesting that the mechanical automatons which were built in his lifetime would be beings gifted with the power of action. Machines don’t exactly have a ‘power’ of action, but their operation results in the effect of the action of their parts.
In the 17th century, it was easier to say that rather than having the power of actions, machines are simply subject to reaction, and as such are not beings and not monads. However, it can be said that since that time the gap has closed, because
1. Genetics and evolution reveal mechanistic sub-personal and super-personal levels which paint our power of action as dual mechanisms of reaction. Scripted from below and selected naturally from above, we are functionally indistinct from a machine, or so it would seem logically.
2. Nuclear physics reveals a microcosm replete with action-reaction dynamism. If they are monads, then the question of why some of their configurations are gifted beings and others are reactive non-beings becomes the more relevant question.
3. Fully automatic mechanisms; everything from automatic transmissions to Google computer driven cars show that mechanical reactions seem to be a fair substitute in many cases for the functions and behaviors of gifted beings. We now have interactive machines and the promise of robots and even nanobots which can seek out their own energy sources and reproduce.
Those three add up to a pretty strong case for functionalism ruling out any meaningful difference between man, monad, and machine. Most people who understand that case are understandably persuaded that it must be the case, especially with what seems to be a strengthening of the case continuously with studies which seem to undermine the authenticity of free will and the veracity of our personal perception. At the same time, AI would seem to be making gains in the application of mechanically-intelligent systems, at least to a wider and wider range of technologies.
Why I think that this is actually not the whole truth is that because of
1. The Hard Problem and Explanatory Gap. Logically, and with automatic mechanism, there is no reason for any such thing as experience to exist in the universe and no justification for strong emergence. Not only is there no reason for an eyeball to open the brain up to a world of color and images, and nothing for color and images to be made of, and nowhere for them to exist in the universe, even the idea of something like geometric logic to exist in the universe is ultimately as superfluous as consciousness. There is simply no plausible function for any kind of aesthetic richness. There is no material support for any more than a single channel of information transfer, as is revealed by the lack of utility within computers for anything other than invisible, intangible execution of binary coded voltage manipulations. The computer doesn’t need to experience anything visual, you do. But why?
2. The Brain as Reducing Valve. Studies such as the recent one on psilocybin (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/17/1119598109), the 1995 Crick & Koch study showing that the visual cortex doesn’t contain visual experience (http://papers.klab.caltech.edu/26/1/69.pdf), and now this study on neuroimaging trance states (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0049360) are part of a body of evidence suggesting that activity in the brain is not correlated with what we might expect. Complex, aesthetic experiences like a psychedelic trip or composing an intricately worded message seem to coincide with lower activity in the relevant areas of the brain rather than higher levels. The Koch study tells me that the visual cortex is about using our brain to pay attention to visual patterns, but not about actually seeing. The images are not there in the brain, despite those blurry blobs (http://us.gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity) which are being extracted by analyzing the neural evidence of that attention. I think that we are painting digital pictures based on where we are looking, not what we are seeing, and that these blurry images, rather than heralding an age of better and better images lifted from fMRIs of brain activity, should be understood to be the end of the line for phrenological assumptions about the brain where images literally reside inside the brain. This ultimately is no different from looking for small kitchens in the brain where the smells of remembered aromas are cooked up. It’s a category error. Stop it.
3. The Fundamental Wonder of Consciousness. Awareness is not remotely like anything else from our perspective. The visceral depth of realism cannot be easily accounted for by mere arithmetic equivalences. For a computer, ‘trying harder’ simply means allocating more resources to a job. If you want your human robot to lose weight, you simply instruct the robot to do so programmatically, and it will consume less calories and exercise more. What we face as conscious beings is much different. We may logically understand that it is critical to our survival and well being to lose weight, yet in practice, we are loathe to actually do the simple tasks which we know will cause that to happen.
What stops us is a feeling which, like pain or blue, has to be experienced to be understood. We are compelled by a subjective, semantic experience which we not only find unpleasant and therefore modifies our behavior mechanically, but it has qualities that somehow compel the interpretation of the experience as being unpleasant in the first place. The qualities can even be separated out so that we can learn to like the unpleasant sensations and addicted to them as in anorexia or bulimia. Besides the Hard Problem question of ‘Why does experience exist in the universe?’ and the Explanatory Gap of ‘How is qualia appearing from my brain?’, the nature of qualia itself is orders of magnitude more subtle and interesting than any underlying information-theoretic function behind it. It’s like creating a symphony orchestra to play every time a traffic signal turns red, or a thousand traffic signals turn red in a row. Where are these qualities coming from? Why are they so wonderful and awful?
4. Multisense Realism. I have put together what I think is a better explanation which makes sense of all of the above. By placing sense or experience itself as the fabric of the cosmos (not matter, not information, not quantum), then it makes sense that aesthetic richness rather than pure function would be the primary product of the cosmos. This product, which I call significance is accomplished through the juxtaposition of one kind of presentation (of private sequential experiences of a highly plastic, dynamic, and multivalent nature) with its opposite (a public spatial relativity of objects in discrete, static, literal positions and scales).
This juxtaposition of presentations and nested meta-presentation levels give rise to analytic geometry vs algebra on one ‘side’, and synthetic metaphor and gestalt on the other. The interplay not only created significance in the form of more meaningful subjective experiences for evolved living organisms, but a more magnificent collection of objects on the exterior side. The felt ordinality of our superior interiority (we’re number one!) is matched in some ways by the known cardinality of our place in an increasingly vast exteriority.
The quantitative and qualitative sides both make their own aesthetic contribution, but ultimately it is the aesthetics of the thing and not the computable function of the thing which is worthwhile. Without the subjective experience, the vastness of stars in the universe or molecules in a grain of sand on a beach is indistinguishable from nothing at all. Without either the sense of a universe within us or a universe without us, there would be no possibility of what we know as ‘realism’. Significance alone can create a beautiful experience, but without the appearance of entropy and loss, that significance can gain no traction, grounding. I suspect that it’s not the Higgs Boson or any other particle, but external realism itself which ‘causes’, or rather embodies gravity.
8 Great Philosophical Questions That We’ll Never Solve
8 Great Philosophical Questions That We’ll Never Solve
Here is my shot at answering these quickly. I think I have six of the eight solved, but feel free to disagree. (Re-posted from my more informal blog s33light.org)
1. Why is there something rather than nothing?
Nothing doesn’t exist, rather ‘no-thing’ is an idea that a thinking thing has about it its own absence. I suggest that the question should be better worded “Why is there something rather than everything?” The answer to that is because the nature of awareness is to divide and insulate the wholeness of the largest inertial frame (simultaneous eternity) into multiply nested diffracted fragments.
2. Is our universe real?
Yes, but ‘real’ just means that it makes sense in the most possible ways to the most possible participants. The whole idea of ‘real’ is impossible in a universe of disoriented simulations. Realism is a matter of convergences of multiple channels of sense participation, so that greatest integrity of mutual reinforcement is the local standard, i.e. ‘In the land of the blind, a one eyed man is king’. A dream is real until you wake up into a more real experience. The previous reality is redefined within the richer participation as a dream, illusion, delusion, etc. This is not completely relativistic however, as realism is ultimately anchored in the Absolute inertial frame
3. Do we have free will?
Surprisingly yes, but not nearly as much as we might think. Despite the well-meaning misinterpretations of experiments by Libet and others, the possibility of a universe which is completely deterministic is incompatible with ordinary experience. In reading these words for example, there is no conceivable purpose that would be served if not for the possibility that the reader will consciously evaluate the ideas being expressed for use in their own personal agenda. These sentences do not address the sub-personal or impersonal agendas of neurology or evolutionary biology, but rather the person who is doing the reading. This is a complicated topic since consciousness is by definition held out of its own reach, but my understanding is that free will is no less real than determinism, and that both appearances are opposite-seeming points on a continuum of sense-making. Free will is what determinism is on the inside, determinism is what free will looks like on the outside, and the more we can relate to another, the more ‘inside’ we feel that we both are.
4. Does God exist?
You can call it God if you want to. Or Nature. Sense. Totality, Absolute, Tao, Singularity, Ein Sof, Brahman, Transcendental Signifier. I don’t personally anticipate a human-like face on this kind of ‘everythingness’, but there may be all kinds of alternate forms of intelligence which influence our lives from a ‘larger now’…ourselves in the future? Probably better not to think about it too much unless you really have no choice.
5. Is there life after death?
If time is a figment of awareness, then death could bring about the end of human constraints on time perception and a rejoining with the Absolute. In that case, there could not only be life after death, but many lives or every life after death. It is difficult to think of any circumstance which would satisfy everyone one way or another that there is or is not life after death. I will count this question as the first legitimately unsolvable in the negative. In theory, if we were able to connect the internet up to the afterlife or something so that we could communicate with the dead at will, that would probably satisfy most people.
6. Can you really experience anything objectively?
No. Experience is a juxtaposition of finite sense capacities. Without a subjective perspective, there is no sense, and sense is what defines objects.
7. What is the best moral system?
One which does not value a system over morality. Morality is a sense, and like other senses, some people have more finely developed capacities than others.
8. What are numbers?
Numbers are figures which refer to particular lowest common denominator themes in organization of experiences and objects. They seem enigmatic because all experiences and objects can be understood to ‘cast a quantitative shadow’ but they should not be confused with the concretely real experiences with which we might associate them. Reducing the universe to numbers is like trying to figure out the questions to a crossword puzzle based on the answers. It doesn’t work that way, but it isn’t obvious why. Numbers do not make sense by themselves, something real has to makes sense of them with physical presence and participation. Computers cannot be built out of a vacuum, they require rigid bodies capable of sustaining recursive enumeration operations – not fog or cartoons – only discrete ‘stuff’ can compute.
Mathematics of Mind
“This is your sense of consciousness – it’s a mathematical relationship among causal elements, and so the mindfulness of the monk or the agony of the cancer patient, those are all different polytropes in this very high dimensional space, and you measure the size of them, the size of the conscious repertoire by the number phi (Φ).” –
Christof Koch on the Neurobiology and Mathematics of Consciousness
Good stuff for the Easy Problem…still no Hard Problem solution. If high dimensional polytropes can represent agony or mindfulness – why have agony or mindfulness? What translates them into experience and why?
I still have not seen anyone recognize that the assumption of impersonal micro-structures translating into personal non-structures might be unfounded. When we underestimate consciousness, it becomes a synthetic product rather than the ground of being from which we cannot escape. Mathematics exists in consciousness, but consciousness, if it could exist in mathematics, would have no reason to exist in any perceptual forms. Data is data. Why would mathematical functions do all of this decoration?
I suggest that consciousness isn’t built up from nothing by tiny parts, it is recovered from everything by sensitivity.
Quorum Mechanics: My Non-Standard Model of Particle Physics
I doctored up this illustration to support my answer to how the double slit experiment works (Quora). The main point that I am trying to make (and I think it is, if true, a fundamental, history-of-the-world-changing scientific idea) is that if we suppose that our own sense of perception and participation in the universe has its ancestry in a primitive/primordial form* of sense, then the lowest levels of microcosm may look much different than we assume.
what I am calling quorum mechanics suggests that rather than a mechanical projection of particles from a source to observers, all QM interactions are a two way street. Perhaps that can only be a one-way street at any given moment, but either way, the idea is that all forms of physical being can experience change in its own disposition and through this sensitivity can also infer exterior dispositions through comparing their own dispositions. This comparison is projected subjectively as a an invariant disposition, or “position” objectively.
I don’t know that anyone has fully understood the radical simplicity of this idea and its implications for tying consciousness together with the cosmos, solving the Hard Problem and Explanatory Gap, but I hope that this picture above helps. I’m not even looking at the angles here of the EPR paradox, I’m just taking the arrows out of the space between the observers and source, and making all three into sub-servers experiencing others through their own local range of the infinity within.
My model has some similarities to Relational quantum mechanics (wikipedia.org) and if I stretch it, also to Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory, (because I think that ‘time’ is nested regularities of disposition), but ultimately goes far beyond either one. As far as I know, my model is the only model which suggests a simple and plausible explanation for both matter and experience in the cosmos.
*rather than arising magically at some level of physiological description for no real reason.
(original diagram cannibalized from the EPR Wikipedia entry)
Scientific Philosophy
An interview with Professor Massimo Pigliucci on the benefits of combining scientific fact gathering with philosophical introspection. He is the author of the book:
Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to A More Meaningful Life
I’m glad to see more consideration for philosophical thought in connection with the interpretation of science. He mentions Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, to point out how the existence of scientific fact does not, in and of itself, compel us toward any particular moral code. No matter what science can tell us something ‘is’, the question of what ought to be done about it still remains up for us to decide.
I am torn between wanting to applaud this effort at synthesizing empirical and rational epistemology, and I do, as far as it goes. Professor Pigliucci seems to express here a voice of well reasoned compatibilism, and to extend this reason to the subject matter itself. It is here where I am more critical of this approach, although in the contemporary context it is very much within the intellectual consensus.
While it is indeed a profound shift from pre-scientific moralism to expound a relativistic-existential world where we are each called upon to build our own meaning and morals, I find that this is not the whole picture. Rather than a neat, compartmentalized notion of reasoning which can be traced back to evolutionary biology and neuroscience in all cases, I see much more of a momentum of perception and participation, with universe as theater. This is not to suggest a naive idealism – indeed genetics and biochemistry are overwhelmingly powerful influences in staging our personal slice of the universal theater, but morality cannot be understood with toy models of social relation. The grip of morality on the individual, society, and species is far more visceral and irrational – made of shame and disgust, of soaring pride and worshipful appreciation of superlative qualities. To understand morality is to plumb the depths of myth – of monstrous crimes and the horrific images associated with them.
I think the distinction between the good, the bad, and the ugly is one which ultimately splits along the primary fault of consciousness, which I call sense and motive, or afferent vs efferent phenomenology. The afferent mode is our sensory input, our receptivity to beautiful and awful feelings, while the efferent mode is our motive output – our projection of selfish or enlightened actions in the world. This dyad-dialectic is primordial and intertwined so that our morality often uses one to justify the other. In movies, evil is typically represented by ugly characters in dark costumes. Throughout history people have been persecuted as witches or subhumans based on aesthetic prejudices.
It is interesting, in the wake of the horrors of the 20th century, despite being bombarded with evidence of the banality of evil, we are still surprised to find the most obscene crimes being committed by seemingly ordinary people, including priests, housewives, and police officers. Despite the noticeable lack of organized violence by fringe groups professing interest in magick, loud anti-social music, and extreme body modification, such otherwise ordinary people are often treated with moral suspicion. This double standard, which I think arises from the unconscious equivalence between taboo perceptual themes and transgressive actions is beyond neurology and evolutionary biology and follows from experience itself.
Evolutionary biology can certainly help explain why the contents of taboo themes, which often deal with morbidity, mortality, and sexuality would tend to be associated with a repulsive affect by default, but it does not explain the specific content of that affect. It does not tell us about what fear is and what it tells us about ourselves. It is great to be able to quiet the mind’s questions with reassurances about neurotransmitter interactions and references to particular regions of the brain, but this approach can also cast us in the role of explaining away ourselves. By oversignifying the sub-personal and super-personal levels of our physical mechanism, the personal level of our native experience is depersonalized and robbed of its significance.
To talk about love and fear in terms of neuropeptide cocktails is all well and good for medical purposes, but the unfolding of a human identity in a human life is not so easily reduced into an exercise of forensic pathology. For anyone who has experienced powerfully significant moments in their life, it is not enough to hold up a molecule or a flowchart of hominid foraging, because the experience goes well beyond how one feels personally. Love and fear appear to operate transpersonally, to ‘warp the luck plane’ as it were, inviting unusual synchronicities and dramatic confrontations with would not occur otherwise. Our life, it would seem, can be known to us as a kind of organism made of events, of significance through time.
At this point, I think it might be career suicide for a scientist or philosopher to bring up these ideas (even though they have enjoyed popularity in the the 20th century), so I do not expect to see them in print. I hope that this will change soon, but in the mean time, I am glad that people are beginning to at least see a glimmer of a role again for the mind of the individual.
After Einstein’s Mollusk
I’m beginning to realize that Multisense Realism is an extension to the absolute of the approach that Einstein took in developing General Relativity. In doubting the existence of gravity as a product in space, he opened the door to a simpler universe where physical things relate to each other in an ordered way, not because some particular propulsion system is in place, but because the frame of reference of physical order itself is not rigid as we assume. He actually calls this new, flexible relativism of space co-ordinates ‘mollusks’:
“This non-rigid reference-body, which might appropriately be termed a “reference-mollusk,” is in the main equivalent to a Gaussian four-dimensional co-ordinate system chosen arbitrarily. That which gives the “mollusk” a certain comprehensibleness as compared with the Gauss co-ordinate system is the (really unqualified) formal retention of the separate existence of the space co-ordinate. Every point on the mollusk is treated as a space-point, and every material point which is at rest relatively to it as at rest, so long as the mollusk is considered as reference-body. The general principle of relativity requires that all these mollusks can be used as reference-bodies with equal right and equal success in the formulation of the general laws of nature; the laws themselves must be quite independent of the choice of mollusk.”
– Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory. 1920.
XXVIII. Exact Formulation of the General Principle of Relativity
Einstein’s transcendence of ‘rigid reference bodies’ with flexible and independent inertial frames captures the essence of relativity but only scratches the surface in exposing the rigidity of physics, which, even in the post-Einsteinian era reduces the participant to a zero dimensional vector generic ‘observer’. While this adherence to rigid simplicity is critical for ‘freezing the universe’ into a static frame for computation purposes, it introduces an under-signifying bias to all matters pertaining to subjectivity – particularly emotion, identity, and meaning. In its drive for simplicity and universality, physics inadvertently becomes an agenda for the annihilation of the self and psyche.
Part of the genius of Einstein was to glimpse the tip of the iceberg of this confirmation bias and challenge it successfully through his mastery of field equations. In my view, Einstein’s vision was only partially understood, just long enough to develop a kind of Empire Strikes Back counter-revolution. After the initial flush of Bohr and Heisenberg’s relativistic-probabilistic interpretations of Quantum Mechanics in the 1920’s (The Spirit of Copenhagen), physics seems to have sought out a new level of reductionism. Information science has dissected Einsteins Mollusk into bits and strings, and re-imagining flexibility and independence as phantoms of a Multi-World Matrix. Einstein’s cosmological animism has been transformed into a cosmological animation – a simulation of matter-like information (that doesn’t matter) in a vacuum virtual sea of Dark Energy.
Rather than seeing this as a sign that we have come to a bold new understanding of cosmic existentialism, I see this as a black octagon sign of having mistaken the cul-de-sac for a highway. We have failed to understand ourselves and our universe and need to turn the whole thing completely around. The way to do this, I propose, is to go back to Einstein’s mollusk and pick up where he left off, questioning the rigidity of physical reference bodies.
In a way, I am suggesting that we relativize relativity itself. Not in the pop culture appropriation of relativism as merely the principle that ‘everything is relative’, but to understand how relation itself is the principle through which ‘everything’ is realized, and that that principle is identical with ‘sense’, i.e. subjective participation and perception of self and other.
While physical science is perfectly content to predict and control matter, I have no doubt that pursuing this goal exclusively should carry the kind of warning which science fiction has been giving us from the start: We should be careful of developing technology that we can’t handle and the way to handle technology is to evolve our own humanity.
It is for this very reason, that purely mathematical approaches to understanding the universe as a whole and consciousness are ultimately doomed. Their rigidity arises from a reference frame which is intrinsically incompatible with the floridly eidetic and creative frame of human privacy. Where General Relativity envisioned a flexible reference body of spacetime coordinates which contrasted with Galilean-Cartesian uniformity, this new reference frame that should be explored contrasts against both the Classical, Einsteinian, and Quantum frameworks. Multisense realism provides a Meta-Relativistic framework which honors the canonical conjugates of general relativity in proprietary privacy of subjectivity. The universe within, like Bohm’s implicate order, is as alien to spacetime relativism as Einstein’s mollusk was to Newton. The new mollusk is not one of space and time united, but of time and ‘time again’, of literal and figurative significance, symmetry and meta-juxtaposition. The new framework begins with no beginning, but rather an infinite centripetal involution which is accessed directly through intra-corporeal participation and inter-corporeal perception.
The Candle: Looking at Light in a New Way
Conventional assumptions about light infer a particle-wave-beam of ‘energy’ traveling literally through space independently.
The multisense conjecture suggests participatory events which occur at each local material site. Each local perception embodies the local condition and perspective as a gestalt capitulation which includes traces of its relation with the other events.
This gestalt capitulation (and I know this sounds like gobbledygook to most everyone but me) can be understood as an apocatastatic algebra (reconstitution, restitution,or restoration to the original or primordial condition) of elliptical simultaneity (elliptical in this sense meaning intuitive gesture which is unspecified yet adequately informative to the receiver; ellipsis ‘…’, ‘see what I mean?’) rather than linear process. It’s the opposite of a linear process – perception is the end point of all process the beginning point of all participation.
Think of this more like feeling your fingers by touching them together. They are all part of your hand in one sense, on one level, but separate on another. Multisense realism proposes that the entire cosmos is like the hand, with each event growing like fingers, each of which are growing fingers, etc. What we experience as matter and bodies is where the fingers touch each other and feel that they are not identical.
Sense, then, or in this case light* is an event communicating essential connection and essential disconnection. Light is like the fingers feeling that they are part of the same hand, making sense of each other in a way which reveals both the conditional truth of their separation (transparency and illumination passing through dense material realism), the unconditional truth of their unity (in rich experiential qualia aka personal significance, poetic ‘light’,’warmth’, ‘divinity’), and the spatio-temporal modulation between the two (precise topological-algebraic formalism)
*heat, motion, sound, force, change, etc are all different qualities of the same thing
Multisense Realism 
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