Archive
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! 🙂
A Quantum Analogy with Dice, Fans, and Basketball
This is as much for my own edification as anything else, but I’m trying to get across my understanding of what is called the quantum wave function collapse. After that, it goes off into my usual attempt to say something absolutely particular about absolutely everything in general.
From what I have gathered the quantum wave function is a statistical mean which may or may not correspond to a physical phenomenon.
Now, in QM we try to predict the probability density for a particle’s position (or momentum, or energy, or whatever). We could try to do this by writing an equation for how p(x) changes over time, but it turns out that doesn’t give us enough information; there are situations where particles start with identical p(x) but do different things as time goes on.
It’s found that we do get enough information to make predictions if we write an equation for a complex-valued function ψ(x), and derive the probability density from it as p(x)=ψ∗(x)ψ(x) The way the complex phase of ψ(x) varies from point to point encodes additional information about the particle’s momentum, which is necessary to predict its future behavior. It has units of the square root of a probability density, which is a bit weird but perfectly mathematically acceptable. This is of course the wavefunction, and the equation that determines how it varies is the Schrödinger equation.-source
From another source:
An observable is “something we can observe”, and is it represented in quantum mechanics by an operator, that is, something that operates on a quantum state. A very simple example of an operator is the position operator. We usually write the position operator along the x axis as x^ (which is just x with a “hat” on top of it).
If the quantum state |Ψ⟩ represents a particle, that means that it contains all the information about that particle, including its position along the x axis. So we calculate the following:
⟨Ψ|x^|Ψ⟩
Note that the state |Ψ⟩ appears as both a bra and a ket, and the operator x^ in “sandwiched” in the middle.This is called an expectation value. When we calculate this expression, we will get the value for the position of the particle that one would “expect” to find, according to the laws of probability. To be more accurate, this is a weighted average of all possible positions; so a position that is more probable would contribute more to the expectation value.
However, in many cases the expectation value is not even a value that the observable can get. For example, if the particle can be at position x=+1 with probability ½ or at position x=−1 with probability ½, then the expectation value would be x=0, whereas the particle could never actually be in that position. – source
In the terms of the dice analogy, the table above shows a bell curve function of probability density for the observables of the dice. To make this a metaphor for quantum observations I think it would look more this way:
The difference is that we can’t observe the wave function, we can only think of the set of possible observables for a given system and give it a name. This is important because in my view, quantum theory actually oversteps its mandate as a rational solution to a set of physical problems to become a faith-based solution to a set of metaphysical/mathematical problems.
There can never be any observation of quantum, there can only be qualitative observations from which we can infer quantitative ideas of relation*.
*note that ‘relation’ is itself an aesthetic quality which is dependent upon a preferred sense of grouping. This preference, so far as we can ever know, only occurs within a sensed experience in which aesthetic phenomena are presented as sharing a common quality. Physics in and of itself can have no relations, as general relation qualities cannot be decomposed into fundamental physical forces. No physical mechanism can make quantitative ‘relations’ happen.
What the quotes above are trying to say, in my view, is that
the wave function itself is an imaginary square root of the inferred probability density of the mentally counted sets of actually observed phenomena.
We want to think that quantum particles are the observed dice rolls: a pair of upturned faces of cubes containing a finite number of dots or ‘pips’, and that the wave function is the set of numbers 1 to 6 corresponding to each possible set of dots, but in reality there may not be two dice at all. The observable reality is that when we look at one die, the other one disappears, and we can only see both dice if we don’t look at the dots.
Two more analogies illustrating the reducibility of quantum ‘particles’ to qualitative sense:
1. Looking at a ceiling fan in motion, we can either see a circular blur, or if we follow the blur with our eyes at the same frequency as the fan, we can see the fan blades (or a standing-wave of averaged images of fan blades) but not really the circular blur.
2. I’m in my house and hear noises coming from outside. One sounds like a loud motor, and one sounds like a frequent thumping. I know from experience that the neighbors do like to play basketball in their driveway when the weather is nice. I also know that the neighbors across the street are having their roof replaced which may or may not involve some kind of compressor noise. Finally, I know that Saturday morning is a time when there are a lot of neighbors mowing their lawn.
The point of this example is to illustrate the common/superficial understanding of the wavefunction collapse would be analogous to me going outside and looking around. By observing, I find out whether there are roofers running some kind of noisy machine and pounding on shingles, or whether there is one neighbor mowing their lawn and another pounding on their fence or something, or whether there’s some combination of things going on which may include a basketball game. By ‘finding out’ what’s going on, I am collapsing the wave function of possibilities because I now know what the noises I heard inside my house refer to outside.
This is not correct as an analogy though either. It cannot be applied to quantum observables. The delayed choice quantum eraser and other experiments show surreal phenomena such as entanglement, contextuality, and the mutual exclusivity of entanglement and contextuality. It would be like me like going outside and seeing that the hammering is definitely coming from the roofers across the street, but then going outside again later and seeing that the there is a dude playing basketball instead and there were never any roofers.
Entanglement/Contextuality would be like if I went out and played basketball with the neighbors then as long as I was playing, suddenly no neighbor could have their roof repaired. In terms of the fan, it would be like if I had two fans in two separate rooms controlled by the same light switch, putting my hand in the way of one fan not only stops the other, but you can tell by filling the rooms with feathers that stopping one fan makes it so no feathers had ever blown around in the other room.
Entanglement and contextuality are opposite orientations of the same thing. The entanglement view focuses on the synchronization of what has been connected experimentally while the contextuality view focuses on the strange contradiction to our expectations about causality extending from the past to the present.
Anyhow, this too is not correct in my view. What is being overlooked is that we are taking for granted that the quality of finality in our experience is identical to the property of factuality. We want to say that because we have actually seen the blades of the fan, they are the physical objects which exist and the circular blur is an optical illusion – true enough in the case of a fan. We want to say that seeing a roofer pounding nails into a shingle is evidence that roofing is what is actually going on and the idea that the sound we heard inside could have been a basketball bouncing was a misperception. This is not what physics is telling us, however. Instead, it is telling us, in my view, that there is no fan or basketball or roofer, nor is there any mistake of misperception, there are only sensory experiences, some of which acquire a higher aesthetic density of ‘realism’ than others. We say ‘seeing is believing’ because visual sense presents such an unambiguous seeming experience most of the time but we know from optical illusions and from comparing binocular differences that even seeing should not be believed.
What we are seeing when we look at something like the double slit experiment is a context in which perception itself is revealed to be
- more fundamental than the ‘object’ which is sensed and
- a revealing of (sense experience) itself as both a self-revealer and a self-concealer.
In the phenomenon of seeing visible light we have a metaphor about the relation between metaphor and non-metaphor which is expressed non-metaphorically. It is a context in which the contextualization of contextuality is presented as an uncontextualized/absolute text. (sense = the sole abtext?)
Philosophically, we should see that it is necessary to reverse the priority assigned by Galileo and Locke to tangible/physical qualities being primary and phenomenal qualities being secondary. Physics should be considered a set of phenomenal qualities which have been reduced by the subtraction of intangible modes of sensitivity. It is only in the intangible modes which nature can be fully appreciated as the self-revealing, self-concealing meta-phenomenon that it is.
Finally, here’s another serendipitous experiment with light. On a polished granite surface I see the reflection of a single overhead light as two separate reflections. With one eye open, I can see the image of the light is on the edge of the surface, while with the other eye open instead, the image of the light is in the center of the surface. Try it next time you see a floor or counter like this and can play with closing one eye or the other. Notice how you can choose between two separate but entangled images of the light which move as your head moves or, you can focus your sight so that there is only a single image of the light.
In the former case, the details of the surface are clear – you can see the patterns of granite and can tell exactly which colored spots seem to be illuminated by the overhead light. In the latter case, you have to look ‘through’ or passed the grain of the stone and focus your visual attention on the image which is reflected from the polished surface. To make the former view real is the materialist orientation. To make the latter view real is the information-theoretic orientation. Both orientations entail the disorientation/de-realization of the other. The materialist says the floor is the real thing being illuminated, while the computationalist says that the floor and light are only generic vehicles for the underlying reality of mathematical laws of relation.
What is left out of both of these views is the connection to the eye and the experience of seeing. The eye’s location is what is telling my experience of where the image of the light’s reflection appears to be. Indeed, that appearance *is* the actual location of the lights reflection as seen through one eye. When seen through the other eye, there is a different actual location. When seen through both eyes, there are either two semi-actual locations or there is one actual light reflection against a single blurred semi-actual location.
I cannot emphasize this enough: Quantum theory is about perceiving perception. It tells us not that the reality of nature is inconceivably weird and unfamiliar, but that nature is more than ‘reality’. The different concepts of wave function, probablility density, and observables map to quantum contextuality, quantum entanglement, and classical (collapsed) realism respectively. QM is about how appearances acquire density of realism by consensus of accumulated limits. For a quantum phenomenon (which is totally abstract) to begin to seem concretely ‘real’, the sense of contextuality or entanglement must in one frame of reference seem to be shared as an isomorphic sense in every other frame of reference, without contradiction. Thus there is no mysterious ‘classical limit’ at which quantum decoherence occurs, and no magical ‘emergent properties’ which appear out of nowhere to turn intangible figments of math into concrete objects – there is only a dynamic aesthetic phenomena (sense experiences or qualia) which merge and diffract as aesthetic meta-phenomena (veridical perceptions or ‘shared reality’). There is no ‘finding out’ what really happened, there is only an adding of dimensions of realism by sacrificing qualities that extend beyond realism.
This goes for our own consensus of sense modalities as well as a consensus among peer-reviewed scientific papers. The sense of realism arises from the multiplicity of limited perspectives, which then divides the total entropy of doubt/uncertainty. With only one slit or sense or scientific mind, any given phenomenon is presented as-is – an observed effect only. With multiple senses or slits or peers, we observe a different effect which enables a cross-reference that goes beyond the observation itself to an observation of the observation process. This opens the door not only to theories which connect the particular observations but which can apply to many other kinds of observations, as well as to theories of observation in general. In this way, the general/rational/contextual/illuminating and the particular/empirical/textual-entangled/illuminated can be reconciled as opposite ends of a single spectrum of sense/aesthetic/ab-textual/visibility.
Does consciousness emerge from the brain?
Continuum of Sense
I have been writing for a long time now about what I call the Multisense Continuum, or the ACME-OMMM duality. In the course of developing this hypothesis, I have learned about other such efforts, detailed below, including a recent paper:
Rigidity-chaos semantic continuum
Drawing on network models, this is a promising approach, however the irony was apparent to me in the choice of terms. To see the opposite of psychological rigidity as chaos may be trivially true, however, it may also be that the chaos is a projection of the rigid, systemizing approach.
The model that I propose sees chaos as only one aspect, and not the most important aspect of the opposite of rigidity. This continuum is so universal, that I think it extends beyond ‘reality’ to embrace all of nature.
Here are some other variations:
Tough-Minded vs. Tender-Minded (William James)
interpreted the European divide between empiricists/positivists on the
one hand and German idealists/rationalist on the other hand in a
psychological way. He talked of the “tender-minded” and the
“tough-minded.” The tender-minded are the German idealists and
rationalists. (this linked source is gone, see new link for James’ original work)
The Divided Brain (Iain McGilchrist)
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes the real differences between the
left and right halves of the human brain. It’s not simply “emotion on
the right, reason on the left,” but something far more complex and
interesting.
Autistic-Psychotic Spectrum (PDF)
‘Thin-boundares” and “Thick-boundaries”
Significantly thinner boundaries compared to control groups have been
found in art students (Beal, 1989, Hartmann, 1991), music students, and
mixed groups of creative persons (Beal, 1989), frequent dream recallers
(Hartmann, 1991, Hartmann Elkin, & Garg 1991), adults with
nightmares (Hartmann, 1991, Levin, Galin, & Zywiak 1991; Galvin,
1993), adolescents with nightmares (Cowen and Levin, 1995), “lucid
dreamers” (Galvin, 1993), male as well as female fashion models (Ryan
2000), persons with unusual mystical experiences (Krippner,,
Wickramasekera, Wickramasekera, & Winstead, 1998), and persons with a
diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, Schizoid Personality
Disorder or Schizotypal Personality Disorder (Hartmann, 1991).
Interestingly, although art students have much thinner boundaries than
average, this is not true of established artists, who have boundary
scores in the normal range (Beal, 1989).Groups that score significantly “thicker” than average
on the BQ include naval officers, salespersons, lawyers, patients with a
diagnosis of Obsessive-compulsive Personality Disorder, persons
suffering from “Alexythymia” (Hartmann, 1991), and patients (from two
different sleep disorders centers) with a diagnosis of Sleep Apnea
(Hartmann, 1992).
Empathizing-Systemizing Continuum
Empathizing and systemizing traits were independent in women, but
largely dependent in men. In men, level of systemizing skill required by
field of study was directly related to social interactive and
mindreading deficits; men’s social impairments correlated with prolonged
go/no-go response times, and men tended to apply systemizing strategies
to solve problems of empathizing or global processing: rapid perceptual
disembedding predicted heightened sensitivity to facial emotion. In
women, level of systemizing in field was related to male-typical digit
ratios and autistic superiorities in detail orientation, but not to
autistic social and communicative impairments; and perceptual
disembedding was related to social interactive skills but independent of
facial emotion and visual motion perception.
…and my own bloggings:
Zooming in on Reductionism and Extremely Gendered Brains
Ironically, but unsurprisingly, the idea of the continuum of sense itself may only be coherent when approached from the ‘East side’ of the spectrum. This has to do with what is known as Theory of Mind.
A Theory of Aesthetic Diffraction
“If we split the atom cloud into two parts and recombine them after some time, a wave pattern forms” – source article
Yesterday I was looking at the sun on the water and thinking about how it is an analogy for consciousness and the brain and quantum entanglement. Each point of light reflects an image of the same sun, even though it appears disconnected and changing chaotically on the surface waves. At the same time, we can see a larger group coherence and intermediate scale, waves-of-waves coherence.
In the top image we understand that the coherence reflects a single light source onto a changing surface, in the brain we speculate on biochemical mechanisms within the surfaces which are connecting to each other. In the bottom image, we conflate the wave pattern with the surface itself, but then eliminate the surface altogether. What is being reflected or experienced is obscured altogether in the bottom up QM model.
By thinking of the sunlight as a metaphor for the mind-body problem, we can see how the explanatory gap can be closed. Using physics to look for consciousness is the same as looking at the surface of the water to look for the sun. In this case, the ‘sun’ isn’t a distant star, but the immediately present aesthetic experience of conscious.
Ready for some neologisms? Okay, this gets ugly.
A Theory of Aesthetic Diffraction
In my Multisense Realism project, I have tried to piece together some ideas about consciousness and physics. These include:
- Light as sight. Photons are reflected incidents of ‘seeing’ or some other aesthetic acquaintance on the micro-level.
- Aesthetic participation or sense as the root of consciousness, rather than an evolution of survival based intellect, information integration, or biophysics.
- Local aesthetic phenomena (sense modalities as well as sense content) are like puzzle pieces of universal Pansense or Multisense Continuum which includes physics.
- Sense as the absolute frame of reference or ‘Sole Entropy Well’.*
- Space time are the mulitplication/diffraction of sense.
- Sense is aesthetic content, like universal qualia, rather than a subject-object relation.
- Significance is the saturation of sense, and its teleological function.
To these I would now add:
The brain is a Polysynchronizing Aesthetic Diffraction Engine.
(Composed of smaller, neuronal PADEs, which are in turn composed of smaller molecular PADEs.)
If we really wanted to see if this is true, I think that there might be a way to begin to find out. A couple of clues:
On the physics side, try turning Permittivity (ε) and Permeability (μ) ‘inside out’, so that we are thinking in terms of electromagnetic effects as reflections of sensory-motive affects rather than causal “fields”. The affect is not itself a field but a spatio-temporal or quantized diffraction…a temporalized, and then spatially dislocated disentanglement from the otherwise boundaryless, absolute context of Pansense.
Looking at the etymology of permit and permeate, we can get another clue in the original sense of the Latin root mittere ‘to send, let go.’ By contrast, permeate is to ‘go through’, from the root meare ‘pass, go’. The expectation of electric and magnetic fields is that they are different ways of looking at the same thing, but the difference is hard to define other than mathematically. I think that as long as we are take the concepts of force and field literally, we will be missing a critical opportunity for understanding nature.
When we turn permittivity and permeability inside out, we go from a Western concept of isolated material objects separated by a vacuum, to an Eastern-like concept of trans-material experiences which are temporarily fragmented from the totality of experience. This fragmentation or diffraction looks like distance or scale and the disappearance of the past, when viewed through the brain.
The Western model conceives of matter as complex nested fields which permit and are permeated by radiant forces. Inverting that takes us from a world of external waves oscillating meaninglessly to a world of felt affects and semi-intentional effects. Behind electromagnetic effects observed within local body frames of reference are phenomenal experiences of ‘going’ and ‘letting go’** in relation to the eternal and trans-local.
The per-mitting of ‘electricity’ translates to the fracturing or branching (think of lightning or a spark) of chaotic motive impulses to release across external frames of reference. The per-meating of ‘magnetism’ translates to a re-cycling or reabsorbing of motive impulses into what Leibniz might have called pre-established harmonies and Sheldrake might call morphic resonance. The difference in what I’m talking about is that what is resonating is not a vacuum or an aether – not a physicalized medium, but ordinary feelings, sensations, and experiences. In this way, relativistic models can be reconciled with quantum models through aesthetic participation as the final transceiving/transducting hyposurface†. This is literally ‘emergence’…the inflection point between these two extremes:
1. The information-based electrodynamic microcosm, which is reflected back to sense as its shadow. The shadow appears to its originator as polarized in terms of automaticity vs chaos-probability. The appearance of the originator can be inferred by inverting the qualities of the shadow, so that rather than crests and troughs of determinism, we can understand ourselves as that which appreciates and creatively determines the shadow.
2. The anchoring frame-based (gravitostatic?) astrocosm derived from the constancy of light speed and gravity. This is the sense of holarchy of scale as well as a hierarchy of importance. Physics can have no preferred frame of reference, so the preferring has to come from:
3. The participation-based mesocosm. Between the two extremes of mindless subatomic computation and mindless block space-time geometry is perception itself. An angle or ray of participation, illuminating and isolating ‘attentions’ while presenting the opportunity to create ‘intentions’.
For us, the mesocosm is reflected back to itself as an elaborate organic chemical hypersurface, nested within another zoological hypersurface. I think that the appearance of neurochemistry as we encounter it objectively is only a single surface or layer of aesthetic presentation which anchors the representation of the larger history of our particular experience as it grew from the physical to the chemical, genetic, biological, zoological, and anthropological frames.
On the perception side, I think that there are clues to be found in researching cross-modal perception and what I might call trans-modal perception. Cross-modal perception is an innate sense of isomorphism across sense modalities such as visual to verbal (Kiki-Bobo effect), onomatopoeia (phonetic to verbal). Trans-modal perception is a term that I propose could be used to talk about such phenomena as sounds which can be felt tangibly (i.e. high pitch sounds are highly localized and penetrating to the ear, while low, booming sounds envelope the entire room, drawing attention to the micro-personal or the oceanic shared transpersonal respectively.)
Conditions such as tinnitis, vertigo, epileptic halos, and synesthesia also seem to promise deeper understanding of sense as they point to the possibility of sense modalities as divergent categories of pansense rather than emergent properties of the functioning of sense organs. Just as physics requires instruments to push the limits of speed and detection into super-human ranges, a true study of consciousness requires examples or methods which transcend normal ranges of human experience. Autistic and psychotic spectrum conditions are especially important as a guide for the underlying axis of human sense-making, and I suspect that they can be meaningfully defined in terms of high and low permeability/permittivity (branching out of electricalimpulses, and recycling back to magnetic ground-state).
*This could be thought of as the sole/absolute ‘surface’ of aesthetic diffraction.
**This maps back to a language theme that I come back to frequently from the PIE root words ‘wag’ and ‘wegh’, like yin and yang…a universal oscillation or tessellation between push-pull (electric or sense-mitting phase) and relax-reflect (magnetic or sense-mearing phase) qualities of experience. Magnetic effects can be thought of as in between electric flux and gravitational grounding. Gravity shows us the orientation of mass toward massive frames of reference, while magnetism shows how local disorientation of mass can be accomplished through electric fluctuation (effort or kinetic energy).
† I say hyposurface to say that sense is both the larger context which contains all levels or planes of description as well as transcendent to the idea of planes and surfaces themselves. Sense is trans-spatiotemporal. Space, time, planes, frames, etc are carved out of the totality as a diffraction rather than as an emanation from fore-fields in a vacuum.
Is Time an Infinite Set of Moments?
…or is the whole notion of an infinite set a paradox?
Since a set is by definition a defining of a boundary, whenever we talk about sets which are infinite we are talking about a boundary containing unbounded contents. Such a boundary makes it necessary that boundary-making itself is presumed to be outside of things being bound, i.e. it is taken as axiomatic that boundary making is part of a theory which does not change anything except our own understanding.
Things get murky however, when we consider time an infinite set. In Zeno’s Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles, for example, the idea of an infinite set is used to trick us into thinking that motion is impossible. The logic is that for something to move one unit of distance, it must first move an infinite number of smaller distances. We can reverse this logic, however, and say that to divide one distance into an infinite number of smaller distances in the first place would take an infinitely long time if we had to actually make those measurements in some way, provided each measurement takes a non-zero amount of time.
Here is the difference between the map and the territory. Actually moving across a distance is a ‘territory’; a concrete reality. The idea that there is some number of points in which could be measured along that distance is a theoretical abstraction. When we apply the abstraction of infinity to the reality of concrete phenomena, we get paradox. The tortoise’s lead appears to always be getting smaller and smaller, but is still a nonzero fraction of the total distance ahead of Achilles, no matter how much faster Achilles is. What distracts us is that we are taking our own measurement for granted. Yes, it’s true that each measurement at time t will find the tortoise ahead of Achilles if we keep giving the tortoise a fraction of his original head start after calculating Achilles position, but infinity doesn’t end at that measurement. Infinity means not only that there will always be a measurement where the tortoise is ahead, it also means that there will always be an interval after the measurement where Achilles overtakes the velocity challenged reptile. In short, an infinite set means that the set always will extend beyond itself.
The physical allegory of the infinite set is a universe of stars and galaxies which expands into an infinity of empty space. But can emptiness really envelope things or is it the expansion of things which exists on its own without any envelope? Is the assumption of empty space really a projection of our own intellectual expectations of set-making? I think that it is important to see that Einsteinian spacetime calculations would work the same either way. Spacetime need not be a literal container of mass-energy, if mass-energy is already entangled at superliminal rates. It makes it easy to think of General Relativity as referring to a spatiotemporal entity (a ‘reference mollusk’ as Einstein called it, or a Minkowski space), but the reality may be that spacetime is nothing more than the influence that the entangled consensus of mass-energetic relations has on itself. This way, no envelope of infinite emptiness is required around the Big Bang, and the vacuum can leave its quantum contents behind to revert to a true void. The vacuum energy gets turned inside out…it’s not inside of spacetime, it’s inside of relativity, i.e. universal perceptual entanglement.
Eastern and Western Eternity
If the Western view of time is an unlimited set of (limited) moments, then eternity is purely conceptual – the perpetually incomplete ‘set-hood’ of that set. The Western sense of eternity is also of perpetually filling itself with more and more clock ticks. Eastern mystics have promised instead that the fundamental truth of nature is the antithesis of that: A timeless connectedness of all things, or a universal connectability (The Force, Field, Love*, God) from which all ‘things’ are seemingly detached. Such a detachment is described as an illusion or temporary masking of underlying unity which remains eternal and pervasive. From the Eastern view, it is not space and time which contain all phenomena, but rather times and spaces are emergent dissociations within the grand phenomenality.
With the advent of General Relativity, the pendulum of Western thought began unknowingly to swing Eastward. Eternity came to be seen as a universal 4D manifold which distorts rates and lengths of physical processes. The distortions are understood to be relative to frames of reference; they are the ‘appearances’ of each frame to any other rather than a fixed physical property common to all frames. Frames themselves are, like the tortoise, given an unfair advantage of inheriting our ignorance of the nature of perception. Physics has attributed a frame-making capacity from a purely theoretical warrant, a warrant which magically acquires real powers of perceptual transformation (Lorentz contraction/dilation) which define the universe.
Some will complain that inertial or Galilean frames have nothing to do with perception, that they are tied only to linear velocity, however this takes velocity relations for granted in the same way that infinite sets take sets for granted. Here is where Relativity and QM completely agree. They both hinge on the concrete physical fact of measurement as the relation between properties such as space, time, position, and momentum. The measurement is a thing that separates the uncollapsed theoretical wave from the concrete wave-effects which are common to matter.
I submit that measurement itself is only the superficial way of understanding what is going on behind SR, GR, and QM. What makes measurement possible – all measurement – is an intrinsic relatability or sense which pervades all of physics. It is only parsimonious to assume at this point that this relatability is identical to the awareness which underlies our own conscious experience.
As it stands now, theoretical physics must resort to a kind of dualism where the idea of an ‘observer’ is somehow presumed separate from conscious observation. Any deviation from this premise is taboo and treated with antipathy. The Western imagination has been captured by positivism, so that all legitimate phenomena begin with an assumption of being separable from phenomenology. This unfortunately leaves phenomenology itself orphaned from physics, and the purest contents of conscious experience orphaned from legitimacy. We turn to the idea of “emergence” to reclaim some semblance of coherence, but emergence itself is no more physical or derivable from logic than consciousness itself.
Relativity applies to instantaneity as well as simultaneity.
To further bridge the Einsteinian notion of eternity with the Eastern one, I suggest a relativity of instantaneity. We can see from time lapse photography, for example, that different rates of exposure present nature at speeds of time. If we had nanobots we could surely step down our own body motions so that we could interact remotely with nanoscale objects at scales and speeds which would not be possible to us on the macro scale.
We can also see how the ocean appears to slow to a crawl when seen from the air. Interestingly, the trails that boats make in their wake appear to flow against a solid background of standing ocean waves.
In this photo you can’t see it, but next time you are flying over the water, notice how the narrow wake tracks which cross-cross the static ocean shimmer with movement. I’m curious about the physics of this – is it the distance of the plane or the speed which averages out the speed of water, and then the motion of the boat which makes some of the speed visible? Some kind of phase-cancellation?
It is this kind of transformation which I’m referring to as the relativity of instantaneity. The scope of the instant depends on perspective, and physics, having no preferred perspective, can have no way to define any separation between instants or any set which unites them. In this way, emergent properties themselves emerge from perception.
East vs West
I suspect that both views of time are reflections of the perspective from which they emerge. Eastern or Empathizing psychologies focus on the unity of categories in the category-making mind itself while Western, Systemizing modes focus on impersonal categories, the origin of which is seen as irrelevant. As the two modes have grown apart, they are no longer able to locate each other without distorting them into a straw man. The Western mind sees the Eastern view as an overestimation of our own presence (including the present moment) while the Eastern mind sees the fatal flaw of the Western effort to deflate the presence of the now and its presenter. Interestingly, the antipathy flips in the assignment of blame, with the Western skeptic taking personal umbrage at the individuals who they see as peddlers of ‘woo-woo’ superstition and postmodern ‘word salad’. By contrast, the Eastern mystic sees the Western resistance as a function of impersonal forces of spiritual immaturity. This dynamic of projection and inversion is a good place to study the lensing of consciousness. The model which I propose suggests that studying how people argue will show that fundamentalist positions on either side will have more in common with each other neurologically than there will be differences. From there we can begin to map the blind spot of the Western approach as it cascades down through academic policies, experiment design, and finally economics, and politics.
The Western approach is intrinsically bottom up in that it begins with a collection of external particulars and then extrapolates generalities and universal laws. Scientific thought is an analytic introspection which is intended to generate a synthetic ‘extraspection’. Our naive, introspective sense of the present time is as Edwin Schrodinger and Ken Wilber point out is “the only thing that has no end”. Meaning that we literally cannot locate within the present any beginning or ending. Only memories within the present which seem to explain things outside of the present can be found:
“We dissipate our energies in fantasy mists of memories and expectations, and thus deprive the living present of its fundamental reality and reduce it to a “specious present”, a slender present that endures a mere one or two seconds, a pale shadow of the eternal Present.”
-Ken Wilber, No Boundary
It seems clear to me that the Western view is dominated by the specific function of the intellect, which is to isolate problems and analyze them sequentially. Using the intellect to analyze itself, we conflate mental kinds of functions with nature in general and have learned to mistake this map of our own map-making for the territory. Because the Western mind identifies with itself rather than with the consciousness behind thought, it inverts our own existence into a ‘specious presence’. First an orphaned soul in an Enlightened machine, then a self-modeling semantic mechanism, the personal presence has now been so aggressively deflated that many insist that it has no existence at all.
If the Western view overlooks the magnitude of significance of the present in its modeling of time, the Eastern view overlooks the overwhelming influence of non-human scales of the present in the universe. The human scale of ‘now’ is overly preferred, so that the Western half of the universe, with its bottom up chains of causality, can be discounted irrationally (hence the woo-woo). This means that the vital and important contributions of science and technology can be dismissed by the Eastern approach, thus losing all credibility with Western thinkers. The sentiment that thoughts create reality is straw-manned to imply that human thoughts create all reality, when the truth is that human influence may be both more powerful and less powerful than we imagine.
Coming Together Over Time
I propose that the way to transcend the problematic notions of time in both the Western and Eastern modes is to see time as the “most common sense” through which eternity ‘pretends’ to be each moment, and how the eternal moment pretends to its own eachness. Time is what limits the unlimited and opens the limited to the possibility of the infinite.
Because the Western view of time has resulted in an all-but-insignificant present, it has contrived an all-but insignificant subjective conscious presence to act as an almost-disposable timekeeper. The ‘observer’ in physics is naught but a convergence of particular coordinates…coordinates which themselves are only defined by there own axiomatic coordination. The cosmos appears as an unorchestrated orchestration…an autoverse rather than universe.
The Eastern view inflates the present and the subjective presence to the absolute extreme, so that the cosmos appears as an unfalsifiably teleological monolith. This infuriates the Western mind, hearing soft-headed homilies of ‘There are no coincidences’ and ‘Everything happens for a reason’ to justify pre-scientific superstition. This would be a solipseverse rather than a universe – a universe which fits into single self. Monotheism splits the difference, with a Unisolipse – a single God self who is not us, but who is like us and can help us and care about us.
What I propose is that each of these models fall out naturally as reflections from a sense-based foundation. The true universe is an orchestration of (orchestration-unorchestration) of perceived qualities and conditions. A paratheistic or ambitheistic society of self-elaborating experiences.
*Love to me seems more human-centric or mammal-centric to me, but I think that Love could be better understood in this context as the most recent form of empathy or sense. Sense allows wholes and parts to partially disconnect and reconnect with the whole.
Multisense Realism 
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