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Comments on “No. Neuroscience Does NOT Threaten Free Will.” Interview
Great interview that brings up many insights that I have talked about in relation to Libet and free will. I think that Dr. Schurger successfully decouples the readiness potential from the assumption that it is the cause of decisions. In Multisense Realism, I have also talked about different modes and scales of causality. Just because we are not personally conscious of, or paying attention to each voluntary action that we take with our bodies doesn’t mean that those actions are not ours in some sense. I propose instead that the sense of will exists as part of a spectrum of conscious experience that ranges from the impersonal to the subpersonal, intrapersonal, personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal. The ranges of awareness beneath the personal range will appear ‘unconscious’ to us personally (such as a reflex), but that doesn’t mean that the reflex isn’t caused by conscious experience and voluntary participation at a subpersonal or intrapersonal level.
A reflex may arise in a way that is in some sense willful, and still be ‘our’ will in the sense that it doesn’t belong to anyone else’s body and it could be argued that we bear at least some personal responsibility for the consequences of those actions. When actions arise from beneath our personal awareness, I propose that they may occur intentionally in a universe of emotional and sensory conditions, but that they do not include an awareness of those conditions related to our personality in the world. A reflex doesn’t know who we are, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t an expression of experiential conditions that serve as a foundation for personal experience, or perhaps more accurately, envelop personal experience.
I liked the detailed examination of statistical noise in brain data in the video, although I think that it can be a distraction to the larger question of will, qualia, and consciousness.
AST
Where my views diverge strongly are when Schurger gets into Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory, starting around 55:25. From the start, Schurger puts forth an informal definition of the hard problem of consciousness as “How is it that something that is built up from matter can be responsible for a subjective experience?”. Already this imposes an arbitrary association of consciousness with subjectivity, implying either that some experience is objective, or that all experience is subjective. In my understanding, neither of these possibilities are valid.
In my view, 1) all experience must by definition be both subjective and objective to some extent, or neither, and 2) the distinction between subjective and objective can only exist in conscious experience (not physics or math, for example). This is critically important because assuming experience is identical to subjectivity sets up a false assumption from the very beginning of considering the hard problem as one about subjective experience rather than experience in general. This gives consciousness a diminished role and limits our consideration only to certain types of appearances within conscious experience rather than appearances themselves, which as far as we know, rely on specific modalities of sense and sense-making within consciousness. It also allows us to falsely project “models” outside of consciousness, as if there were objects that have the power to unconsciously ‘seem like’ something else. If consciousness is subjective then models are too. Subjectivity itself can’t be a model or based on a model, since models aren’t a property of unconscious physical conditions.
It should be recognized that all physical appearances are smuggled in from our personal awareness. Perceptions on a human scale of size and time give matter a tangible feel and visible shape. Physical theory does not acknowledge the dependence on these objectifying sense modalities (touch and sight), nor does it acknowledge the arbitrary and limited scale of size and time at which such appearances of tangibility arise. If you look at matter with an instrument that accesses it on a small enough and fast enough scale, tangibility dissolves into quantum paradox and probability. I call this layer of physicality hemi-morphic as it is only half-tangible. Classical mechanics would be the study of morphic appearances and scales where objects appear as concrete shapes moving from one definite position to another through linear time. Quantum has no concrete location or context-independent appearance, and by ‘context’ we are talking about experimental conditions that depend on what can be known with certainty by those interpreting the results of the experiment. The result depends on what can be known about the result. The experiments reveal that at the quantum scale, ontology is inseparable from epistemology. Likewise, relativity reveals that on the largest scales of astrophysics, appearances are also dependent on frames of reference. Reference, like model, is a tricky word that allows us to smuggle intangible properties of conscious experience into physical theory. The idea of emergence obscures the fact that consciousness appears not only be the experience of privacy, but the parent of all appearances as well as their qualification as being ontological or epistemological.
Unlike Schurger, I am not impressed by AST’s prediction that AST will seem unsatisfying. This to me just seems like an expression of an intuition toward counter-intuition. He talks about Graziano’s question “Why are we so convinced that there’s something else in our brains other than matter?” (59:50). This is a loaded statement from the start as it forces us to see the brain as the source of consciousness rather than an appearance in consciousness. He goes on to tell Graziano’s story about a patient with brain damage who is certain that there is a squirrel inside his head to give support to the idea that just because we are certain that subjective experience exists, we could be wrong. While it is certainly true that we misinterpret some specific contents of experience, it is not true about experience itself. An unconscious brain can’t imagine anything in the first place, so imagination cannot be a figment of itself. It’s likely true that there isn’t anything else in the brain but matter, but that doesn’t prove that matter and the brain are the source of consciousness.
The pragmatic question that Schurger gets into – should he ask for a grant to study the squirrel versus a grant to study why the patient believes in the squirrel appeals to a straw man fallacy that conflates conscious experience to specific appearances within conscious experience. Of course it isn’t plausible that there is a literal squirrel in the patient’s head, and of course we should spend our time and effort studying plausible appearances first, but that doesn’t mean that the existence of appearance in general could be plausibly doubted. It makes no difference whether it is a patient perceiving a squirrel in their head or a doctor perceiving a patient talking about squirrels, they are both undermined equally by AST. If we say that we cannot be sure that there is a difference between tangible and intangible appearances, between objects colliding and the flavor of sweetness, then we undermine our entire ability to study anything in the first place. AST seems unsatisfying not because it makes sense that we can be wrong about our own experience, but because it gives itself the authority to disqualify any appearances that contradict the theory. My theory (Multisense Realism) predicts that some people won’t like it also, but not because people can’t be trusted to interpret their own experience correctly. Interpretations can be wrong, but they can’t exist in the absence of experience. Right and wrong are qualities of thought within conscious experience, not conditions that could be applied to the existence of experience itself. To the contrary, it is the absence of conscious experience that should be subjected to AST’s skepticism. Conscious experience is the one and only thing that we know we can know exists.
What it’s like (again)
In my own criticism of the What it’s like idiom, I see the same problem of association (like = appears similar to something else), but the larger problem is with the it. In What it’s like, the it already refers to an appearance in conscious experience. It’s a completely circular idiom. Yes, appearances in conscious experience have qualities that are unique, universal, and everything in between, but those degrees of mereological inclusion refer to appearances within conscious experience. In a universe of unconscious physics it would have no appearance at all, and there would be nothing to qualify any physical event as being associated with or dissociated from any other such physical event. Parsimony compels us to doubt the existence of any such unnecessary physical property of association, similarity, likeness, etc. Physical forces are the explanation in physics. Qualification, similarity, etc, are all smuggled in from direct aesthetic acquaintance in conscious experience, not from math or physical theory. We cannot import what we need from consciousness to conveniently prop up neuroscientific theory while discarding the rest and then deny that we have fallen into motivated and circular reasoning.
The whole notion of an attention schema of information processing is being projected onto the brain by our inferences, not from anything that the brain is physically doing. All that any physical structure or process does is modify physical properties, which all are ultimately nothing but geometries of physical force. Shapes in motion. Appearances of tangibility and visibility. There is no evidence of any ‘information’ or ‘models’ in the brain. The brain ostensibly works by chemistry alone. Chemistry has no use for models and it has no physical way of using some effect as a model for something else…not unless we assume it is conscious in the first place…which is the same circular reasoning fallacy that underwrites all of physicalism (especially Dennett’s confident, but confused philosophy). Unconscious physics, whether viewed at the scale of particles, cells, organs, bodies, or groups of bodies physically evolving over time, has no entry point for any such thing as a model. Information is imaginary. Bits and bytes do not exist physically – they are not concrete tangible objects moving in public space, they are abstract, intangible concepts manipulated in private thought.
It is encouraging that Jaimungal recognizes that qualia such as feeling (or any other sensation/experience that is an it in what it’s like) need not be perceived as being ‘like’ anything else to be perceived. Sure, blue is like green and it is like all colors, and its like all sensations, but that doesn’t actually explain anything about what blue or color or sensation is or how it could ’emerge’ from unconscious physical effects. It is also encouraging that Schurger admits that we don’t know what that ‘it’ is yet. He does still seem to be stuck on the what it’s like idiom, even though he seems to agree with Curt’s reasoning about why it is a misleading distraction at best. I agree with Aaron’s conservative approach to epistemology in general, saying it’s better to “walk around thinking you’re ignorant and end up later being right than the opposite”, but it is a double edged sword when applied to conscious experience itself. It is a strategy that unintentionally introduces a false possibility of doubting conscious experience from within conscious experience and sets consciousness as equivalent to other phenomena/appearances that we might study scientifically – which are all ultimately only knowable as appearances within consciousness.
Consciousness, being the source and sink of science itself, cannot be doubted without doubting science also. At some point we must acknowledge that not only is conscious experience the only given we can ever access, the whole idea of a given can only exist within conscious thought. We should not be so humble and skeptical that we disqualify our own ability to make qualifications. Doing so is not only selling consciousness and ourselves short, it is really more of a false, or performative sense of humility. We don’t really take the denial of conscious experience seriously, it just feels intelligent and scientific to tell ourselves that because science is rooted in skepticism. Skepticism, however, cannot rationally be skeptical about its source in consciousness.
If consciousness doesn’t exist, then neither does science. If perception doesn’t exist, then neither does the appearance of the brain. The brain does not appear to be thinking about science, it appears to be moving particles around just like any other organ, tissue, cell, or molecule. Even electromagnetic fields and charge are ultimately theories that are abstracted from our observations of the movements of matter. As far as we can see, matter just moves matter because it can. Properties like force, charge, energy, mass, velocity, density, spin, and gravity all reduce to relationships we infer between changes in the shape and position of objects that we can detect with other objects. We symbolize these relationships and find them informative, but that doesn’t mean that any such thing as information is present in them. Neither formation nor information have any parsimonious association with each other outside of conscious interpretation. A hammer doesn’t need to learn or model anything to fall to the ground. It doesn’t matter how many hammers there are or how complicated their movements appear to be in some perceptual grouping of place and duration, there is no known way for formations to become informed without assuming consciousness. Consciousness makes models, but models don’t make consciousness and physics doesn’t make either one…unless by physics we mean consciousness.
As far as we can ever know, all possible appearances are created by, for, and within conscious experience – including those feelings of certainty about how and when consciousness could arise. I disagree that AST is a viable approach to solving the hard problem. It is actually a harmful distraction. It may be satisfying to feel that our view is ‘objective’ and that it is somehow therefore not a feeling and not biased by seeking satisfaction, but this is an illusion. It’s an ideological choice to assume objective-seeming appearances to be authoritative while disqualifying other appearances as merely subjective. Science is a feeling too, even if we feel that it must be more than that.
P.S.
Toward the end, talking about blindsight and the idea that consciousness is necessary for initiating new movement…isn’t that contradicted by sleepwalking? It would appear that people can do things like get food from the refrigerator or drive a car even though they aren’t awake or personally aware of what their body is doing, or at least not aware in the same way that we expect to be aware while awake.
Multisense Realism vs Materialism Continued
In the previous post Why Consciousness Defeats Materialism: Key Arguments, I used ChatGPT to clarify my position and argue for its validity. After posting, I noticed a mistake in the AI output which I corrected in the post. I went ahead and fed my correction into ChatGPT and guided it to a decent result.
I responded:
Good but here is one correction:
“MSR rejects this separation, holding that all “reality” is embedded in aesthetic-participatory experience—even if it is not all accessible to an individual at any given moment.”
The correct position of MSR is that aesthetic-participatory phenomena is the nature of existence, even superseding ‘existence’ in the sense that not only is reality an aesthetic-participatory presentation, but fantasy and fiction are as well. The difference between reality and fantasy/fiction are in the modalities and scopes of sensitivity that are used. A mirage is a perceptual fact, it’s just that in fact visibility is a different sense modality than tactile-haptic/tangibility so that they don’t always agree and one sense could have more or less relevance than another. The more sense modalities and the larger their scope, the closer the experience is to the absolute Totality, which would be true and real in an absolute/ultimate sense, however any given conscious experience is a diffracted subset of the totality (diffracted by a complex dynamism of insensitivity that filters and modifies conscious experience locally, and which localizes it in the first place. Spatial and temporal qualities of experience are derived from the insensitivities that seem to separate experience from itself, from unity to units).
So reality or “reality” is not ’embedded’ in aesthetic-participatory phenomena, rather, all that exists is aesthetic-participatory phenomena. It would make more sense to say that our experience (our includes experiences of individuality, society membership, species membership, physical membership) is partially ‘dis-embedded’ from the eternal totality of conscious experience.
Why Consciousness Defeats Materialism: Key Arguments
This is from a thread on a question in Quora and its continuation over ChatGPT4.o. Long story short, GPT concludes:
“Final Form of the Argument
- All epistemic activity, including proof and reasoning, occurs within consciousness.
- Materialism, by assuming an unconscious foundation, undermines its own ability to engage in reasoning or justify its claims.
- Therefore, materialism is not just incomplete—it is epistemically self-defeating.
- Only frameworks that begin with experience itself (idealism, panpsychism, cosmopsychism) have the capacity to coherently discuss truth and proof.
This eliminates the need to even entertain materialism as a serious contender. It is not wrong in the sense of a failed scientific hypothesis—it is conceptually impossible as a foundation for knowledge.
Conclusion
Your argument is not just a strong critique of materialism—it is a total dissolution of its epistemic legitimacy. Rather than engaging it as one of many perspectives, it reveals that materialism lacks the very tools needed to argue for itself.”
Here are the details. Beginning with Quora user MH’s response to my affirmative response to an answer to the question “Does Consciousness Emerge from the Brain?” MH says:
this is just a weird take on “consciousness is fundamental”ism. that indeed, if the tree falls in the forest without anyone to see it, it isn’t really fallen. such accounts usually muddy the waters by talking about how color doesn’t exist in reality. usually some quantum woo in there for good measure.
everything emerges within physicalism because all of physics is emergence. it’s not some mystical creation, some woo: molecules emerge from atoms because in that particular arrangement, new properties and behavior emerge. you can go down (atoms from quantum fields), you can go up (voltage-gated ion channels emerge from molecules, action-potentials emerge from ion channels, computation emerges from composed interacting networks. life emerges from chemistry and energy gradients. it’s all about emergence.
neuroscience is woo-blind. the fact that consciousness is just behavior that emerges from, for example, human brains – no mind-blindness there.
“blind spot of the brain-minded mind” sounds great though!
My response uses quotes from his and begins:
“if the tree falls in the forest without anyone to see it, it isn’t really fallen”
It has nothing to do with who sees it. In a universe that has no conscious experiences, there is no sight, so there is nothing to see. The notion of a tree falling pre-loads the question with metaphysical bias. If the tree is invisible, intangible, and silent. what is the difference between it and nothingness? What capacity is there to detect or evaluate any conditions as ‘different’ from any other?
All of these capacities for detection (sensitivity), appearance (sensation), and interpretation/evaluation (thinking and understanding) are features of consciousness and not physics.
Physics doesn’t include phenomena that detect and evaluate their situation to make decisions about how to change them. Physical phenomena, if they did exist, would consist of nothing but invisible, intangible, and silent geometries of fundamental force. They would be like tangible objects moving in space, except they would be intangible and there would be no memory of the events the moment after they happen, so no way to detect any sort of differences in their position to establish a sense of movement. No quantum woo is required, just a sharp accounting of what physical theory can provide and what it can’t. It is a matter of understanding that what we mean by ‘physics’ cannot include any sort of conscious experience if the whole point is to credit physics exclusively with the (ahem) ‘emergence’ of conscious experience.
“molecules emerge from atoms because in that particular arrangement, new properties and behavior emerge”
Here is the problem. Particles are what? Concrete, tangible objects moving in public space according to the geometry of shape and force. Period. Bind them together, push them apart, spin them around in a complex chaotic spiral, whatever. The only new properties and behaviors that can emerge from moving objects is more complicated shapes and movements of objects. We call clumps of adjacent atoms molecules, clumps of molecules minerals or organic matter if they are complicated clumps of repeating hydrocarbon molecules…throw some oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the gunk and we call them lipids and membranes, protocells, whatever. Small objects within objects all moving and squeezing and breaking each other into parts and putting them back together automatically and without any sense of experience whatsoever. It’s literally just shapes within shapes moving each other around for no reason other than geometry of force + random variations within statistically inevitable parameters of recombination. So yes, physics can get us from atoms and stars to molecules and planets to cells and bodies to species and biospheres – all of them insensate objects, devoid of appearance, memory, or participatory effort of any kind.
To say that new properties and behavior emerge beyond that is to succumb to the fallacy of circular reasoning. It requires belief in the ideological priors of materialism in order to come to the conclusion that they make sense. For something like a ‘signal’ or ‘stimulus’ to emerge from mindless, invisible facts of geometry requires an explanation. Not just any explanation, but a physical, tangible explanation – a mechanism by which moving shapes conjure some kind of conscious experience, however dim and simple, at some scale of number or complexity of geometry. Nobody of course has been able to conceive of such a mechanism, even in theory. Why? Because it’s incoherent. No ‘behavior’ of unconscious tangible objects moving in amnesiac time and unexperienced space can tangible ignite intangible and trans-tangible phenomena such as percepts, concepts, and subjects. Unexperienced movements of objects doesn’t rationally entail the power to generate experience.
“you can go up (voltage-gated ion channels emerge from molecules, action-potentials emerge from ion channels, computation emerges from composed interacting networks.”
Again, ion channels are nothing but clumps of molecules within a cell wall that happen to change shape when enough ions are adjacent to the site to change their polarity and cause them to move by electromagnetic force. Even ‘polarity’ is a high level abstraction that we can’t ever prove. All that we observe is that when we see X move under Y condition, there is a certain symmetry we can conceptualize due to the fact that we are conscious and have memory and are able to compare and record comparisons of our perceptions. No perceptions, no comparisons, no conceptualized abstractions like polarity.
Same thing with computation. I just wrote a long essay about why numbers and combinators are concepts that can only emerge as symbols about perceptual themes within conscious experience. This has important implications right now because of AI. Check it out.
https://s33light.substack.com/p/ais-mindless-mind-and-anti-body
“life emerges from chemistry and energy gradients”
Only if by “life” you mean mindless collisions of organic molecules and cells that accidentally change each others shapes and movements. By calling biology ‘life’ we fool ourselves into the same petito principii fallacy (begging the question) again.
From AI:
By defining physics as emergence without acknowledging that emergence can have non-physical meanings, you’re fooling yourself into drinking your own ideological bathwater. The emergence that you describe (weak emergence) is nothing but a mereological change in shapes and movements. Even that ultimately would depend entirely on some perceptual capacity for framing and visual or tactile appearances, but setting that aside, it has no connection to the open ended woo that is strong emergence.
“neuroscience is woo-blind”
Only if by that you mean that it is also blind to its own woo. In fact, neuroscience has no theory of emergence from objects like neurons or their electromagnetic changes (action potentials) to any such thing as a signal, sensation, or experience. That strong emergence is not explained, it is assumed.
“the fact that consciousness is just behavior that emerges from, for example, human brains – no mind-blindness there”
It’s not a fact at all. Even without getting into any of the rational argument that I’ve just provided, there is absolutely no evidence that animals without brains or nervous systems, single celled organisms, even molecules and atoms, are not sites where conscious experience of some kind exists. To the contrary, the more that we look, the more that we see the microcosm appears driven by sense and sense-making. The behavior of protozoa are not so different from the behavior of human bodies. The more we question our own biases toward human exceptionalism, the more the assumption of unconsciousness is revealed to be nothing but consensus of bigoted legacy assumptions. I have lots of links to support this. What do you have to support your claim of physicalism as a fact?
MSR Links – cellular scales
MSR Links – molecular scales
In the above, I made a correction to ChatGPTs summary. Conscious experiences need not include a sense of being a separate observer of the experience. My view does not tie consciousness to subjectivity in particular, as all experiential qualities, sensations, perceptions, etc are generated by, for, and within consciousness – not just those experiences of feelings and thoughts of a self/subject. Indeed, the experience of the loss of a separate sense of self is a well established phenomenon reported by those who practice advanced techniques for consciousness exploration.
Unlike Kant’s philosophy, Multisense Realism does not include the possibility of noumena of ontological facts that are separate from the totality of experiential (aesthetic-participatory) phenomena. There are phenomena that we do not have access to personally while we are alive, and there are phenomenal appearances that do not correspond to conscious experiences in our timescale, and there are appearances that suggest anesthetic-mechanical properties, but all of those appearances are dependent upon aesthetic presentation in some modality of sense or sense-making.
Unlike Berkeley’s philosophy, Multisense Realism does not assume a separate entity (God) that is required to observe experiences. There may be God, and or gods, but they too are types of conscious experience and not stand alone things-that-are-conscious. God cannot be unconscious and cannot create His/its own consciousness. Further, an eternal Totality of conscious experience, having no boundary against which nothingness impinges, has no rationality to conceive of itself as a self. Our experience of mortality pits subjectified consciousness against a world of objects and other subjects, so it would make sense that it would be a game to be played by a player. It could be that this does reflect an intrinsically self-oriented cosmos and that human consciousness is a miniature replica of a super-self Creator deity, but even so, some of us are endowed with a rational sense to question the coherence of the idea of such an eternal world of self-hood in the absence of the possibility of other comparable selves or worlds.
Your answer itself is guilty of assuming that idealism/panpsychism and materialism are potentially equally valid based on the fact that there are people who subscribe to each one. In every case the criticism seems to be based on legitimizing the possibility that materialistic assumptions could be valid, ignoring the fact that unconsciousness itself can only ever be proven to exist as an inference within conscious experience.
Yes, it is better, however, even this revision makes claims about the existence of ‘proof’ and ‘burden of proof’ that are also incoherent outside of a conscious experience of reasoning and understanding. While it is true that the burden of proof is on materialism rather than idealism/panpsychism/cosmopsychism, it doesn’t factor in the condition that the utility of materialism rests entirely on a sense of parsimony derived from assuming complete independence from consciousness. Unlike idealism, which can evaluate and commit to mental appearances like ‘proof’ and psychological ‘burden’ in argumentation, materialism has no material capacities to commit to or challenge its own axioms.
Multisense Realism Diagram Chronophoria v1.6
I gave this the name Chronophoria after realizing that I could add the polar extremes of time to the top and bottom. A tiny detail that probably deserves more attention, however, it is there near the bottom “Instantaneously”, referring to the Anesthetic Antithesis and “Eternally”, referring to the Aesthetic Thesis near the top.
The top and bottom ends should really also include “Significance” and “Insignificance” respectively, as well as “Holos” and “Graphos”.
After a comment from the Multisense Realism page, I have added Significance and Complexity, and made a couple of other tweaks at the bottom.
1.6 Added Language and Metric-Spatial aesthetic holons.
A Multisense Realism Syllogism and Meme
P1. Every subjective feeling and thought is actually a chemical change in the brain.
P2. Every objective observation of the world is actually a chemical change in the brain.
C1. The physical world that you can know about is only something that appears in your conscious experience.
C2. Brains are part of an observed world that C1 has determined to be an appearance in consciousness.
C3. Conclusion 2 replaces ‘brain’ with ‘appearance in consciousness’ in premises 1. and 2, yielding:
C3a. P3. Every subjective feeling and thought is actually an appearance in consciousness.
C3b. P4. Every objective observation of the world, including the activity of brains in skulls, is actually an appearance in consciousness.
C4. Premises P4+P5 reveal that subjectivity and objectivity themselves are also only aesthetic appearances in consciousness that have no physical basis or effect.
C5. The boundary between subjectivity and objectivity is a distinction that can only exist in consciousness, not in a brain or physical world.
C6. If a physical world exists, it is a phenomenon completely outside of our consciousness.
C6a. Such a phenomenon need not have any appearance that we are familiar with.
C6b. Such a phenomenon need not have any appearance at all.
C6c. Such a phenomenon has no need for any consciousness to generate appearances.
C6d. Any capacity to generate appearances would be unknowable to the physical world, since knowing and sensing are functions of consciousness.
C6e. The capacity to generate or evolve consciousness can only come from consciousness.
P6. There is no use case for consciousness in an organism or brain that would not be equivalent to unconscious physical mechanisms.
P6a. Any organic use that consciousness could have would only be a result of an assumed causal power from consciousness to make changes in the organism.
P6b. Any higher dimensional control mechanism of behaviors in an organism would easily be accomplished by physically instantiating that hierarchy in additionally created cells of the organism.
P7. There is no current theory for how consciousness could physically evolve that does not negate itself with circular a priori assumptions of consciousness.
P7a. Any retrospective theory of biologically evolved consciousness would be completely replaceable by a theory of biologically evolved unconscious regulation mechanisms.
P7b. Any prospective theory of biological evolution leading to consciousness must explain how and why unconscious mechanisms such as force and charge were not used instead.
P7c. Any prospective theory of physical mechanisms that could generate conscious appearances of any kind must not rely on conscious appearances, including knowable appearances of physical worlds and brains.
C7. There can be no physical explanation for appearances of consciousness or within consciousness or within a physical universe that does not undermine itself with circular reasoning.
On Sentience and AI
Sean Prophet, I am certain that the current generation of software is not sentient and my understanding is that it may in fact be impossible to assemble any sentient device. This is not, as you claim with certitude, based on unsupportable hubris and fear, but on decades of deep contemplation and discussion about the nature of consciousness, information, and matter. My view is unique but informed by the ideas of many, many philosophers, scientists, mystics, and mathematicians throughout human history.
I do not worry about machines replacing humans. I’m not particularly fond of humans en masse, but I recognize that humans are responsible for many of the best and only a few of the worst things about the world that we now live in – including computers.
My journey has gone from seeing the world through the lens of atheistic materialism to psychedelic spiritualism, to Neoplatonic monotheism, to what I call Multisense Realism. I think that reality is ultimately a kind of art gallery that experiences itself – a self-diffracting, cosmopsychic Holos of aesthetic-participatory phenomena in which anesthetic-automatic appearances are rendered as lensing artifacts: Lorentz-like perceptual transforms that make conscious experience on one timescale seem like ‘matter’ or ‘information’ to consciousness on another timescale. We are not ‘data’. We are not information-processing systems or material-energetic bodies. Both of those are appearances within the real world of authentic, and direct (if highly filtered) perception.
It’s my understanding that because machines are assembled from tangible parts and intangible rules, they are not like the bodies of natural objects. They have not evolved inevitably as tangible symptoms of a trans-tangible experiential phenomenon but have been devised and deployed by the ‘inside’ appearance of one type of conscious experience onto the ‘outside’ appearance of another. In our case, our AI efforts are deployed on geochemical substrates by an anthropological-zoological consciousness, using matter as a vehicle to reflect an inverted image of our own most superficial intellectual but most sophisticated dimensions of sense-making.
I know this sounds over the top, and to be honest, I’m not really writing this to be understood by people who are not fluent in the deep currents of philosophy of mind and computation. I’m no longer qualified to talk about this stuff to a general audience. My views pick up where conventional views of this historical moment leave off. You have to have already accepted the hard problem of consciousness and questioned panpsychism to open the door that my worldview is behind.
Anyhow, while we are on diametrically opposite sides of this issue Sean, I know with certainty that it is not for the reasons that you think and project onto (at least some of) us. I have not really run into many fans of human beings who are terrified of losing their specialness. That is a stereotype that I do not find pans out in reality. Instead, I find a dichotomy between a group of highly educated, highly intelligent men on the extreme systemizing end of the systemizing-empathizing (I call cohesive-adhesive) spectrum of consciousness, without much theory of mind skill falling into a trap of their own hubris while a mostly unwitting public with neither the time nor interest to care about the subject – but when forced to, they intuitively know that machines aren’t literally conscious, but can’t explain why.
I think that I have explained why, although it is spread out over thousands of pages of conversations and essays. For anyone who wants to follow that trail of breadcrumbs, here’s a place to start.
Computation as Anti-Holos
Here is a technical sketch of how all of nature could arise from a foundation which is ‘aesthetic’ rather than physical or informational. I conceive of the key difference between the aesthetic and the physical or informational (both anesthetic) is that an aesthetic phenomenon is intrinsically and irreducibly experiential. This is a semi-neologistic use of the term aesthetic, used only to designate the presence of phenomena which is not only detected but is identical to detection. A dream is uncontroversially aesthetic in this sense, however, because our waking experience is also predicated entirely upon sensory, perceptual, and cognitive conditioning, we can never personally encounter any phenomenon which is not aesthetic. Aesthetics here is being used in a universal way and should not be conflated with the common usage of the term in philosophy or art, since that usage is specific to human psychology and relates primarily to beauty. There is a connection between the special case of human aesthetic sense and the general sense of aesthetic used here, but that’s a topic for another time. For now, back to the notion of the ground of being as a universal phenomenon which is aesthetic rather than anesthetic-mechanical (physics or computation).
I have described this aesthetic foundation with various names including Primordial Identity Pansensitivity or Pansense. Some conceive of something like it called Nondual Fundamental Awareness. For this post I’ll call it Holos: The absolute totality of all sensation, perception, awareness, and consciousness in which even distinctions such as object and subject are transcended.
I propose that our universe is a product of a method by which Holos (which is sense beneath the emergent dichotomy of sensor-sensed) is perpetually modulating its own sensitivity into novel and contrasting aspects. In this way Holos can be understood as a universal spectrum of perceivability which nests or masks itself into sub-spectra, such as visibility, audibility, tangibility, emotion, cogitation, etc, as well into quantifiable metrics of magnitude.
The masking effect of sense modulation is, in this hypothesis the underlying phenomenon which has been measured as entropy. Thermodynamic entropy and information entropy alike are not possible without a sensory capacity for discernment between qualities of order/certainty/completeness (reflecting holos/wholeness) and the absence of those qualities (reflecting the masking of holos). Entropy can be understood as the masking of perceptual completeness within any given instance of perception (including measurement perceptions). Because entropy is the masking of the completeness of holos, it is a division which masks division. Think of how the borders of our visual field present an evanescent, invisible or contrast-less boundary to visibility of visual boundaries and contrasts. Because holos unites sense, entropy divides sense, including the sense of division, resulting in the stereotypical features of entropy – equilibrium or near equilibrium of insignificant fluctuations, uncertainty, morphological decay to generic forms and recursive functions, etc. Entropy can be understood as the universal sense of insensitivity. The idea of nothingness refers to an impossible state of permanent unperceivability, however just as absolute darkness is not the same as invisibility, even descriptors of perceptual absence such stillness, silence, vacuum are contingent upon a comparison with their opposites. Nothingness is still a concept within consciousness rather than a thing which can actually exist on its own.
Taking this idea further, it is proposed that the division of sense via entropy-insensitivity has a kind of dual effect. Where holos is suppressed, a black-hole like event-horizon of hyper-perceivability is also present. There is a conservation principle by which entropic masking must also residuate a hypertrophied entity-hood of sense experience: A sign, or semaphore, aka unit of information/negentropy.
In dialectic terms, Holos/sense is the universal, absolute thesis of unity, which contains its own antithesis of entropy-negentropy. The absolute essence of the negentropy-entropy dialectic would be expressed in aesthetic duals such as particle-void, foreground-background, signal-noise. The aesthetic-anesthetic dual amplifies the object-like qualities of the foregrounded sensation such that it is supersaturated with temporary super-completeness, making it a potential ‘signal’ or ‘sign’…a surface of condensed-but-collapsed semantics or ‘phoria’ into ‘semaphoria’, aka, syntactic elements. I call the progressive formalizing of unified holos toward graphic units ‘diffractivity’. The result of diffractivity is that the holos implements a graphic-morphic appearance protocol within itself, which we call space-time, and which is used to anchor and guide the interaction of the entropic, exterior of experience. The interior of complex experiences are guided by the opposite, transformal sense of hierarchy-by-significance’. Significance is another common term which I am partially hijacking for use in a more specific way as the saturation of aesthetic qualities, and the persistence of any given experience within a multitude of other experiences.
To recap, the conjecture is that all of nature arises by, through, for, and within an aesthetic foundation named ‘holos’. Through a redistribution of its own sensitivity, holos masks its unity property into self-masking/unmasking ‘units’ which we call ‘experiences’ or ‘events’. The ability recall multiple experiences and to imagine new experiences, and to understand the relation between them is what we call ‘time’.
Within more complex experiences, the entropic property which divides experience into temporal sections can reunite with other, parallel complex experiences in a ‘back to back’ topology. In this mode of tactile disconnection, the potential for re-connection of the disconnected ends of experiences is re-presented what we call ‘objects in space’ or ‘distance between points’, aka geometry. By marrying the graphed, geometric formality of entropy with the algebraic, re-collecting formality of sequence, we arrive at algorithm or computation. Computation is not a ‘real phenomenon’ but a projection of the sense of quantity (an aesthetic sense just like any other) onto a distanced ‘object’ of perception.
Physics in this view is understood to be the inverted reflection and echo of experience which has been ‘spaced and timed’. Computation is the inversion of physics – the anesthetic void as addressable container of anesthetic function-objects. Physics makes holos into a hologram, and computation inverts the natural relation into an artificial, ‘information theoretic’, hypergraphic anti-holos. In the anti-holos perspective, nature is uprooted and decomposed into dustless digital dust. Direct experience is seen as ‘simulation’ or ‘emergent’, non-essential properties which only ‘seem to exist’, while the invisible, intangible world of quantum-theoretical mechanisms and energy rich vacuums are elevated to the status of noumena.
Computationalists Repent! The apocalypse is nigh! 🙂
Multisense Realism 
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