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The Future of Computing — Reuniting Bits and Atoms
A great presentation on computing with hardware and software which are homomorphic to each other. Logical automata (explained 11:51 to 15:50) is just this sort of a WYSIWYG architecture where the software is executed from a bulk raw material, i.e., not Gb of memory or number of processor cores, but square feet or pounds of programmable matter. Atoms, or groups of atoms, are here used directly as bits.
Gershenfeld compares how our current approach of computing requires multiple stages of compiling disparate formats, but that to more closely match nature, we should strive to imitate nature in the sense of having a consistent zoomable format on every scale.
In nature, the map is the same graphically regardless of the scope of magnification. Marrying these two concepts, the idea is to design shapes which are themselves instructions, i.e. physical interactions with other physical shapes, so that computation is not encoded but rather, embodied. As in biochemistry, the output is a material product, and the machine is itself is a self fabricating machine tool as opposed to a manufacturer of inert objects.
I think that he is probably right that this is the direction of the future in general, “computing aligned with nature” which brings computation into matter. It is compelling to imagine that this kind of embodied computing could be the Holy Grail of nano-engineering, giving us control over virtually anything eventually.
At the same time I can see that there is something which has been overlooked. To quote Deleuze:
“Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single center, a unique and receding perspective, and in the consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilizes and moves nothing.”
– Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p56
(source http://sleepinginthegreenery.blogspot.co.uk/)
To understand why this universe of embodied computation is not the universe that we live in, Difference is the key. An overhead map is only so useful to us. Even if we can zoom down to the human scale level, we really need to switch to a first person street view to make the transition from outside-looking-down to inside-looking-around. To get further into the subjective view, we would have to have access to feelings and thoughts, so that at some level of description the model of zoomable shapes is less than useless. In our personal awareness, the appearance of neurological structures in our view would be hallucination.
The assumption then of this uniformly computational matter, while fantastic for our purposes as human beings, would be a catastrophe for the universe in general. It would be the ultimate monoculture, with everything and anything reinvented as collections of positionable nano-Legos. The problem of conformity to a generic, universal structure is not that it won’t work, but that if it does, there will be no Difference possible.
Given Deleuze’s assertion that representation moves nothing, this intention of “reuniting bits with atoms’ seems to presume that they were united to begin with but doesn’t address why they were ever separated. Indeed, if this method of embodied computation is the way of nature, how and why could it ever seem otherwise? Where have these Different perspectives on different levels emerged from, and for what purpose?
I think that on closer inspection, even though this new approach is brilliant and revolutionary in some important ways, it still is founded on a sloppy assumption. It presumes that hardware which looks and acts like the software is identical to it. If this were the case, instead of images we would see the shapes of ganglia and retinal cells, but we would see the same thing instead of smells, sounds, and feelings. We could not feel dizzy, but rather be informed of some vestibular condition by means of these same shapes – which we think of visually or tangibly, but without the Difference, there really is no reason to assume anything perceptual at all.
Once again, even though I am impressed with the futuristic thinking, it still takes us away from the missing piece in physics – the privacy and interiority and qualia. Buying into the universe as undifferentiated plenum of self-machining bubbles we are betting that there is no difference between biology, chemistry, and physics. It’s all physics, all surfaces and volumes in public spaces. Is that really what the universe is though? Could our experience be understood that way if we didn’t have our own familiarity with it already? I think if we lived in a universe that was really all about universal computation, then we would never have separated bits from atoms in the first place. We never would have approached bits as encoded abstractions because we would have been comfortable already with the universal format.
Instead, the universe appears to be the opposite. On every level, even though there are repeating themes and forms, it is never exactly the same presentation. A whirlpool would not be mistaken for a galaxy and a grain of salt is not the same thing as a cube of ice. In the universe we actually live in, the only thing which seems truly universal is Difference. More universal than mathematics and physics is the variety of sensory qualities and modalities. It is not just formations or embodied information, but direct experience.
Chalmers – Consciousness: The Logical Geography of the Issues
The argument for my view is an inference from roughly four premises:
(1) Conscious experience exists.
(2) Conscious experience is not logically supervenient on the physical.
(3) If there are positive facts that are not logically supervenient on the physical facts, then physicalism is false.
(4) The physical domain is causally closed.
(1), (2), and (3) clearly imply the falsity of physicalism. This, taken in conjunction with
(4) and the plausible assumption that physically identical beings will have identical conscious experiences, implies the view that I have called natural supervenience: conscious experience arises from the physical according to some laws of nature, but is not itself physical.
The various alternative positions can be catalogued according to whether they deny (1), (2), (3), or (4). Of course some of these premises can be denied in more than one way.
Denying (1):
(i) Eliminativism. On this view, there are no facts about conscious experience. Nobody is conscious in the phenomenal sense.
Denying (2):
Premise (2) can be denied in various ways, depending on how the entailment in question proceeds—that is, depending on what sort of physical properties are centrally responsible for entailing consciousness. I call all of these views “reductive physicalist” views, because they suppose an analysis of the notion of consciousness that is compatible with reductive explanation.
(ii) Reductive functionalism. This view takes consciousness to be entailed by physical states in virtue of their functional properties, or their causal roles. On this view, what it means for a state to be conscious is for it to play a certain causal role. In a world physically identical to ours, all the relevant causal roles would be played, and therefore the conscious states would all be the same. The zombie world is therefore logically impossible.
(iii) Nonfunctionalist reductive physicalism. On this view, the facts about consciousness are entailed by some physical facts in virtue of their satisfaction of some nonfunctional property. Possible candidates might include biochemical and quantum properties, or properties yet to be determined.
(iv) Holding out for new physics. According to this view, we have no current idea of how physical facts could explain consciousness, but that is because our current conception of physical facts is too narrow. When one argues that a zombie world is logically possible, one is really arguing that all the fields and particles interacting in the space-time manifold, postulated by current physics, could exist in the absence of consciousness. But with a new physics, things might be different. The entities in a radically different theoretical framework might be sufficient to entail and explain consciousness.
Denying (3):
(v) Nonreductive physicalism. This is the view that although there may be no logical entailment from the physical facts to the facts about consciousness, and therefore no reductive explanation of consciousness, consciousness just is physical. The physical facts “metaphysically necessitate” the facts about consciousness. Even though the idea of a zombie world is quite coherent, such a world is metaphysically impossible.
Denying (4):
(vi) Interactionist dualism. This view accepts that consciousness is non-physical, but denies that the physical world is causally closed, so that consciousness can play an autonomous causal role.
Then there is my view, which accepts (1), (2), (3), and (4):
(vii) Property dualism. Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical, without supervening logically or “metaphysically”.
There is also an eighth common view, which is generally underspecified:
(viii) Don’t-have-a-clue physicalism: “I don’t have a clue about consciousness. It seems utterly mysterious to me. But it must be physical, as physicalism must be true.” Such a view is held widely, but rarely in print (although see Fodor 1992).
To quickly summarize the situation as I see it: (i) seems to be manifestly false; (ii) and (iii) rely on false analyses of the notion of consciousness, and therefore change the subject; (iv) and (vi) place large and implausible bets on the way that physics will turn out, and also have fatal conceptual problems; and (vi) either makes an invalid appeal to Kripkean a posteriori necessity, or relies on a bizarre metaphysics. I have a certain amount of sympathy with (viii), but it presumably must eventually reduce to some more specific view, and none of these seem to work. This leaves (vii) as the only tenable option.
—David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
My view would require an extra option in between vi and vii –
(vi.5) Oroborean monism. Physics supervenes reflexively on its own (proposed) capacities to experience. Interaction is not logical but self-evident, with multivalent causation to and from private intention and public extension as ordinary sensory-motor participation.
Three Dimensions of Time?
Another way of thinking about subjectivity (as I have modeled it with the multisense continuum as sub-personal, personal, and super-personal ranges of awareness) is that time has three dimensions.
Unlike the three dimensions of space, where the dimensions are presented as converged and simultaneous, the three dimensions of time are more like parallel gears or lenses which are relativistic to the scope of the participant’s awareness rather than to the position of their body. In short, as the structure of space resembles space itself, this new model proposes that the structure of time should be understood in a progressive way, as a multi-stage evolution of structure which is smeared across the totality of interior perception.
If that were true, then my candidates would be as follows, and you can think of them as three levels of description of a clock, oscillation, progression, and orientation.
1. Oscillation. On the lowest level of accurate clocks, there is a recursive sensory-motor engine. Be it a bobbing float, a swaying pendulum, a spring, or a piezo-electric material being stimulated to vibrate, the source of momentum for a clock is the tension between release and restraint, resolved as oscillation. We don’t know that an electric current on a quartz crystal generates an experience of release and restraint, but I suspect that on it’s own molecular scale, there is such an experience, 32,768 times per (human scaled) second.
A very simple water clock could consist of just a leaky measuring cup. In that case, there would not be an oscillation, but a smooth flow. If you watch flowing water, however, it is your awareness which tends to oscillate, tracking between the recursive rushing of the flow through a fixed position and the fluidity of the total motion downstream. In a water clock, the amount of water which leaks out is abstracted quantitatively. When we say, for instance, that there are X number of gallons in a pool, we don’t mean that there are literally gallon-sized units which water comes in that are all squeezed into the pool. We mean there is enough water in the pool to fill X number of gallon jugs if we wanted to. This is a bit of a detour, but it is important because we seem to have forgotten this in physics and now routinely mistake our quantum measurements for the underlying phenomenon which drives that which we believe we are measuring as well as the measuring device itself.
The more relevant point here, is that while the lowest level of time can be either the smooth fluidity of force* or the oscillating dissipation of that force. With the oscillation we get a better sense of the recursive quality of the sub-personal experience. The sub-personal is characterized by its intolerable recursiveness. So generic and monotonous is the stream of identical passing moments of the oscillator that our attention cannot face it for long. We need hands or digits or hash marks on a ruler to help us keep track of their progress indirectly. To a human mind, the experience of the trillions of micro-organic presences which make up our body at any given moment, is recursive madness. The experiential qualities of molecular and quantum levels beneath that, can only be more insanely generic, vast, and uniformly repetitive.
3. Progression. In the middle, personal range of chonometric experience, the hands of a clock are used to denote the wheel of the sun’s progress across sky. Because of the pervasiveness of the sun’s presence, it is only necessary to capture twelve hours at a time, since it should be obvious whether an hour is am or pm by countless perceptual cues internally and externally. The sundial or mechanical clock with round face emphasize the cyclical nature of the progress of time, really a helical sense of second, minute, hour, progressive cycles and day/night oscillating cycles.
In modern time, the worldliness of the solar clock has been shattered in favor of digital time. In digital time, cycle and oscillation are pushed into the sub-personal range of awareness to yield a pure coordinate space. Time no longer passes, rather it is set and synchronized to a satellite signal.
The implications of this psychologically are a double edged sword. Digital time is precise, accurate, and uniform, but its granular nature has replaced the flow of time with dehydrated instants. The meaning of time is purely relative now, an enumerated code tied to geography and policy. Time doesn’t so much ‘march on’ anymore as it does march in place on multiple levels. Time is now an infinite commodity of finite moments, meaningless, disconnected, and interchangeable. We have, in a sense, stopped time while in another sense, we have made time more inescapable and relentless. We are pushing the personal sense of active progress and flow into an impersonal sense of fixed point geosynchronous addressing.
Fortunately we still feel our own lives personally as progress and growth. Our cycles are longer and more spacious than they were a century ago, causing strange red shifting and blue shifting in the extension of childhood, adolescence, and old age but contracting adulthood. Stripping away the superstition of the past has reduced the human life from a pageant of astrological or religious significance ordered by time to its bare bio-genetic mechanisms. Aging is nothing more than a set of symptoms to be banished through medication and cosmetics, diet, and exercise. Otherwise, one year is much the same as the next. Our window of progress has been contracted to match our pay cycle or school schedule. Groundhog Week is always beginning, ending, flying by, or dragging.
Progress is about passing significant milestones. We talk about dates A.D. or B.C. (formerly Before Christ, not secularized as Before Common Era), or characterize them in Ages, Bronze, Iron, Industrial, etc. In our own lives too we think in terms of relationships, residence changes, jobs, or other shifts in the content of our life story – a matrix of befores and afters. These markings in our personal progress are totally unlike the impersonal measures of oscillation and cycle, which are fixed recursively. The chronometry of our lived experience is not so much marked as it is ritually scarred. From the inside, the clockwork thematic and plastic. It retains the irreversible arrow of time, but hyper-extended into aching nostalgic ruins and amputated in chronic disillusion. The retelling of stories and reimprinting of memories smooths out the rough edges, compensates for the incompensible and runs out the clock on personal ages we can’t bear to revisit in their full glory. Memory is a mindfuck. Part propaganda, part revelation…which leads me to.
3. Orientation. Clocks and calendars provide us with a birds-eye view of time. Beyond flow, oscillation, and progress, the wheel or grid of time gives us a presentation of time as universal collection. A science fiction zodiac of possible futures. If oscillation begins with outward flow, then it ends with containment within. Flux and flow persist as perturbations of currency, ripples on the surface of an Akashic plenum of eternity. Finding our way to and from this ocean is perhaps the greatest mystery – one which we have tried to solve with intuition and divination. This is the scientifically despised layer of time which can be described as super-personal, or super-signifying.
Jung talked about the collective unconscious, echoing what every mystic tradition has said about a world beyond time itself – a nexus of hyper-convergence where meaning originates or terminates. Archetypes, symbols from dreams, alchemical models, all point to a kind of absent presence of a divine Totality. Campbell’s ‘hero with a thousand faces’. A bottomless well of teleology and significance – images, encounters, mythic adventures.
Perhaps as the thin trickle of water clock drips out of its vessel, so too does the trickle of possibility drip into our imagination. Unlike the despised drip-drip-dripping of the Sub-Personal level Chinese water torture, the Super-Personal drip into our Personal ‘now’ is generally welcome, if not desperately so. Novelty and variety are precious and we are fiercely proprietary about them. We want to be the first to know, to see, to feel the future for ourselves. ‘What’s next’ is the hope for release from cycles and oscillation – for transcendence and cessation. “Tis a consumation devoutly to be wish’d”.
*flowing from private sensory potentials to public motor presentations (aka thermodynamic entropy, or the arrow of time…a continuous public declaration of pure irreversibility, which is the source of all motive, all expansion, or fractal self-diffraction of the cosmos).
All You Touch and All You See
“All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.” – Pink Floyd
Beginnings
Option 1: In the beginning, there was X. At some point, some iteration of X(X) bridged the presumably senseless world of X to the real world which we know.
Option 2: In the beginning, there was X and X was sentient.
Option 3: In the beginning, there was sense.
Option 4: The idea of beginning is a function of sense, so that sense is more fundamental than beginnings and sequences.
Option 5: The universe could be a perpetual collection of conditions without any fundamental capacities or beginnings.
Sense from the senseless
To see a universe as brought into being by senseless effects such as the spontaneous appearance of physical ‘forces’ or as a permanent physical fact leaves sense itself unexplained. How do several things operate as a ‘group’, simply by spatial proximity? What makes a pattern or signal different from noise? What really is a ‘beginning’ other than a distinction made from an expectation of sequence?
This may seem to be a silly issue, but I think that whether or not we take sense for granted guides the entire future of science. From physics to neuroscience to computer science, our assumptions about the capacity to sense and makes sense lead us either to discover a fundamental physical principle of orientation uniting subjectivity and objectivity, or drives us further into alienation. Without sense, we are forced to double down on either the primacy of object-hood or the primacy of disembodied simulation, either route leading inevitably to an orphaning of the self – a ghost-machine within a machine-ghost.
Digital Oblivion
Understanding the relation between symbols and reality is notoriously difficult, partly because our experience of reality is overrun symbols to the extent that the vast majority of what we consider real has been mediated through symbolic description rather than direct experience. Our appreciation for direct experience has naturally tended to atrophy in adaptation to this environment so that we no longer consider ourselves to be an authoritative source on any subject. We define our own presence in terms of learned knowledge to the extent that many people find it impossible to separate their actual sensory-motor experience from the understanding of neurology. The former is relegated to the trash heap of ‘illusion’ or ‘models’ and the latter is elevated to the status of objective reality.
Giulio Tononi’s recent Integrated Information Theory, (covered in a SciAm article by Christof Koch) takes a good first step at measuring consciousness by quantifying in formulas the degree to which information is integrated, but by working from the outside in, it fails to grasp the absolute authenticity of awareness itself, and the role that it plays in putting the ‘in’ into ‘in-formation’.
For example, from the Wiki, the diagram showing how to decompose systems into overlapping complexes assumes some primitive level of association that just comes built in with math, or physics, or reality.
Unfortunately this oversight really makes the question of what consciousness is fade out completely, as we have already assumed some sort of discernment and attachment among digits, bytes, or other theoretical ensembles of data.
Philosophers seem to have an advantage over many scientists in being able to question pattern recognition itself and to see semiotic relations between minds and matter rather than data as objective facts. Almost without exception, information science and quantum physics theories seem fuzzy on the difference, and often staunchly deny map-territory distinctions at all. Cognitive science and neurology both seem to be unaware or dismissive of the depth of the Explanatory Gap and Hard Problem of Consciousness, which are seen to be purely philosophical indulgences. In fact, the location of meaning in subjective sense capacities rather than objects is an essential key to understanding the relation of consciousness and physics.
Divorced from physics, computational theories posit a Platonic universe of digital perfection, unhampered by tangible resources. Neglecting the fact that all computation we know of occurs as the result of physical interaction, modern information-centric theories have little to bring numbers down to Earth. Rather than seeing numbers as a counting of static, memorable, locatable, digitally addressable objects, the enthusiasm for Boolean logic seems to have transcended materiality altogether and replaced consciousness itself. Every week there seems to be a new article proclaiming the possibility of digital simulation, each one more cavalier than the last in its dismissal of concrete realism. It is as if to say ‘With our simulated awareness of simulated logic, we simulate understanding that the only reality of sense stems from the unreality of senseless imitation (whatever that is).’
Truth or Consequences
My point in all of this is that our straying from realism has been a fruitful excursion this far, but that we are now seem to be approaching a fork in the road where we will have to place our bets on the authenticity of ourselves or that of objects or information. If we continue to define the self in terms of unrelated bits and pieces of not-self, we will have successfully disappeared our opportunity to thrive and explore the universe in favor of an automatic cataloging and curating of emptiness. What difference does it make what we choose for our supreme X, as we have already determined its nature in advance.
For all possible X, be it genetic, quantum-universal, information-theoretic, we can be sure that they will share the same curious quality of not resembling ourselves in any way. Where we are irrational, indecisive, sentimental, X is inevitable, automatic, and without need for aesthetic presence. We envision an endless web of digital patterns, racing around each other, working out probabilistic games by necessity rather than choice. Yet somehow, we remain the ones who see and touch this world – still unexplained perceiving participants; translators between one meaningless ensemble of data and another.
Data and Dualism
“Define “dualist” and “supernatural.”
Many years ago, I participated in a USENET discussion about whether data structures in computers existed. The debate raged on. One side argued that they did, because look, there they are in the code. The other side argued that they did not, because at the machine level, it was just 1’s and 0’s represented by voltage levels. No consensus emerged.
Now, we know everything about computers, and if we cannot answer such a question about them, what hope do we have about the brain and mind, about which we know almost nothing?”
Not to dredge up any bad memories from USENET, but I think my framework provides a conclusive way of understanding the issue. Unfortunately my model also predicts that many people, because of their specialized intellectual focus, may not be able to understand the model.
The question of whether data structures exist in computers can be resolved this way:
1. Since we are not the computer, we can only talk about the behavior of the device on different levels. With our own mind, we can go much further.
2. In the case of computer data, we can say that voltage levels (which are really statistical averages of electromagnetic dynamism…the extent to which matter pushes and pulls matter) exist in a geometric sense of bodies across space. This is the literal presentation of microelectronic structure. If we anchor our intellectual inertial frame in exterior geometric realism, then it is the 1’s and 0’s which are the representations – unreal except for our labeling of them. There are no literal ones or zeroes in a computer, rather they are in the story which we tell ourselves to enable our control over semiconductor arrays.
3. If we anchor our intellectual inertial frame in the algebraic-sequential presentation instead, then the logic behind the Boolean instructions are the relevant reality as they can be exported into many different mechanisms. The specific materials and geometry which are used to execute instructions are only there to serve the encoded information.
This should explain why both sides are correct and incorrect in their own way, but neither side understands the other’s point of view. The issue of our own consciousness escalates this problem to a new level, as not only is there the same antagonism between geometric-topological materialists and information-theoretic idealists, but both of them together are equally blind to a whole other axis of non-commutative qualities related to perception and participation.
For the Explanatory Gap, we really have two orthogonal dualisms, Western arithmetic-physicists who see the universe from the outside in and what I might call Eastern spiritualist-idealists who see the universe from the inside out. The same principles of reconciliation apply here, but the application of them is even more inflammatory. The solution involves a profound relativism which recontextualizes the literal and figurative, fact and fiction, in a way which challenges many (all?) established religious, philosophical, and scientific assumptions, birthing an entirely new view of cosmos and psyche. It is a hard sell, but I suspect that unfortunately it may be the only solution which can actually work.
Leibniz and Life Thread
I agree with what you say, but there’s no need to humanizethe coffee filters nor humanize intelligence or consciousness.I’m not talking here about IQ. My point (speaking here as Leibniz) is thatnature down to the lowliest beings (a grain of sand) has intelligenceof some sort. Nature is alive, and life is intelligence.
My point though is just because we put fibers into a mold or dots on a page into a form we can recognize doesn’t mean that we have created new life and intelligence. There is a difference between assembling something from tiny spatial-object parts and something reproducing itself from teleological-experiential wholes. A mannequin is not a person. The plaster and steel the mannequin is made of may certainly have a quality of experience, and although it is hard to speculate on exactly what kinds of experiences those are or what level of microcosm or macrocosm they are associated with, one thing that I am quite certain of is that the plaster and steel mannequin is not having the experience of a human person, no matter how convincing of a mannequin it looks to us to be. The same goes for cartoons, drawings, photos, movies..those things aren’t alive or intelligent, but they are made of things which, on some level, are capable of sense participation. Computers are just a more pronounced example. As they improve they may be more convincing imitations of our human intelligence, but that quality of awareness is only a recorded reflection of our own, it is not being generated by nature directly and it is neither alive nor intelligent.
You hit on a weak point. There is no agreed-upon version of Leibniz’s definition of substance.
Leibniz [snip] considers substance as “a being gifted with the power of action”.
visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
I think it’s circular to define a monad as a being gifted with the power of action if we are using the monad hypothesis to try to explain consciousness, which can be considered the power of action in the sense that L intends here. I don’t think that in that sentence he is suggesting that the mechanical automatons which were built in his lifetime would be beings gifted with the power of action. Machines don’t exactly have a ‘power’ of action, but their operation results in the effect of the action of their parts.
In the 17th century, it was easier to say that rather than having the power of actions, machines are simply subject to reaction, and as such are not beings and not monads. However, it can be said that since that time the gap has closed, because
1. Genetics and evolution reveal mechanistic sub-personal and super-personal levels which paint our power of action as dual mechanisms of reaction. Scripted from below and selected naturally from above, we are functionally indistinct from a machine, or so it would seem logically.
2. Nuclear physics reveals a microcosm replete with action-reaction dynamism. If they are monads, then the question of why some of their configurations are gifted beings and others are reactive non-beings becomes the more relevant question.
3. Fully automatic mechanisms; everything from automatic transmissions to Google computer driven cars show that mechanical reactions seem to be a fair substitute in many cases for the functions and behaviors of gifted beings. We now have interactive machines and the promise of robots and even nanobots which can seek out their own energy sources and reproduce.
Those three add up to a pretty strong case for functionalism ruling out any meaningful difference between man, monad, and machine. Most people who understand that case are understandably persuaded that it must be the case, especially with what seems to be a strengthening of the case continuously with studies which seem to undermine the authenticity of free will and the veracity of our personal perception. At the same time, AI would seem to be making gains in the application of mechanically-intelligent systems, at least to a wider and wider range of technologies.
Why I think that this is actually not the whole truth is that because of
1. The Hard Problem and Explanatory Gap. Logically, and with automatic mechanism, there is no reason for any such thing as experience to exist in the universe and no justification for strong emergence. Not only is there no reason for an eyeball to open the brain up to a world of color and images, and nothing for color and images to be made of, and nowhere for them to exist in the universe, even the idea of something like geometric logic to exist in the universe is ultimately as superfluous as consciousness. There is simply no plausible function for any kind of aesthetic richness. There is no material support for any more than a single channel of information transfer, as is revealed by the lack of utility within computers for anything other than invisible, intangible execution of binary coded voltage manipulations. The computer doesn’t need to experience anything visual, you do. But why?
2. The Brain as Reducing Valve. Studies such as the recent one on psilocybin (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/17/1119598109), the 1995 Crick & Koch study showing that the visual cortex doesn’t contain visual experience (http://papers.klab.caltech.edu/26/1/69.pdf), and now this study on neuroimaging trance states (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0049360) are part of a body of evidence suggesting that activity in the brain is not correlated with what we might expect. Complex, aesthetic experiences like a psychedelic trip or composing an intricately worded message seem to coincide with lower activity in the relevant areas of the brain rather than higher levels. The Koch study tells me that the visual cortex is about using our brain to pay attention to visual patterns, but not about actually seeing. The images are not there in the brain, despite those blurry blobs (http://us.gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity) which are being extracted by analyzing the neural evidence of that attention. I think that we are painting digital pictures based on where we are looking, not what we are seeing, and that these blurry images, rather than heralding an age of better and better images lifted from fMRIs of brain activity, should be understood to be the end of the line for phrenological assumptions about the brain where images literally reside inside the brain. This ultimately is no different from looking for small kitchens in the brain where the smells of remembered aromas are cooked up. It’s a category error. Stop it.
3. The Fundamental Wonder of Consciousness. Awareness is not remotely like anything else from our perspective. The visceral depth of realism cannot be easily accounted for by mere arithmetic equivalences. For a computer, ‘trying harder’ simply means allocating more resources to a job. If you want your human robot to lose weight, you simply instruct the robot to do so programmatically, and it will consume less calories and exercise more. What we face as conscious beings is much different. We may logically understand that it is critical to our survival and well being to lose weight, yet in practice, we are loathe to actually do the simple tasks which we know will cause that to happen.
What stops us is a feeling which, like pain or blue, has to be experienced to be understood. We are compelled by a subjective, semantic experience which we not only find unpleasant and therefore modifies our behavior mechanically, but it has qualities that somehow compel the interpretation of the experience as being unpleasant in the first place. The qualities can even be separated out so that we can learn to like the unpleasant sensations and addicted to them as in anorexia or bulimia. Besides the Hard Problem question of ‘Why does experience exist in the universe?’ and the Explanatory Gap of ‘How is qualia appearing from my brain?’, the nature of qualia itself is orders of magnitude more subtle and interesting than any underlying information-theoretic function behind it. It’s like creating a symphony orchestra to play every time a traffic signal turns red, or a thousand traffic signals turn red in a row. Where are these qualities coming from? Why are they so wonderful and awful?
4. Multisense Realism. I have put together what I think is a better explanation which makes sense of all of the above. By placing sense or experience itself as the fabric of the cosmos (not matter, not information, not quantum), then it makes sense that aesthetic richness rather than pure function would be the primary product of the cosmos. This product, which I call significance is accomplished through the juxtaposition of one kind of presentation (of private sequential experiences of a highly plastic, dynamic, and multivalent nature) with its opposite (a public spatial relativity of objects in discrete, static, literal positions and scales).
This juxtaposition of presentations and nested meta-presentation levels give rise to analytic geometry vs algebra on one ‘side’, and synthetic metaphor and gestalt on the other. The interplay not only created significance in the form of more meaningful subjective experiences for evolved living organisms, but a more magnificent collection of objects on the exterior side. The felt ordinality of our superior interiority (we’re number one!) is matched in some ways by the known cardinality of our place in an increasingly vast exteriority.
The quantitative and qualitative sides both make their own aesthetic contribution, but ultimately it is the aesthetics of the thing and not the computable function of the thing which is worthwhile. Without the subjective experience, the vastness of stars in the universe or molecules in a grain of sand on a beach is indistinguishable from nothing at all. Without either the sense of a universe within us or a universe without us, there would be no possibility of what we know as ‘realism’. Significance alone can create a beautiful experience, but without the appearance of entropy and loss, that significance can gain no traction, grounding. I suspect that it’s not the Higgs Boson or any other particle, but external realism itself which ‘causes’, or rather embodies gravity.
Mathematics of Mind
“This is your sense of consciousness – it’s a mathematical relationship among causal elements, and so the mindfulness of the monk or the agony of the cancer patient, those are all different polytropes in this very high dimensional space, and you measure the size of them, the size of the conscious repertoire by the number phi (Φ).” –
Christof Koch on the Neurobiology and Mathematics of Consciousness
Good stuff for the Easy Problem…still no Hard Problem solution. If high dimensional polytropes can represent agony or mindfulness – why have agony or mindfulness? What translates them into experience and why?
I still have not seen anyone recognize that the assumption of impersonal micro-structures translating into personal non-structures might be unfounded. When we underestimate consciousness, it becomes a synthetic product rather than the ground of being from which we cannot escape. Mathematics exists in consciousness, but consciousness, if it could exist in mathematics, would have no reason to exist in any perceptual forms. Data is data. Why would mathematical functions do all of this decoration?
I suggest that consciousness isn’t built up from nothing by tiny parts, it is recovered from everything by sensitivity.
Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, Part I
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
Some quotes from the book and comments.
“It is only by breaking open the circle, as in the case of the Möbius strip, by unfolding and untwisting it, that the dimension of sense appears for itself, in its irreducibility, and also in its genetic power as it animates an a priori internal model of the proposition.”
Some important themes here: The irreducibility of sense, the connection with closure and involution, topology and animation. There is a sense of the meta-juxtaposition of self-similarity that is at the heart of the universality and specificity of sense.
“It is surprising to find that Carroll’s entire logical work* is directly about signification, implications, and conclusions, and only indirectly about sense – precisely, through the paradoxes which signification does not resolve, or indeed which it creates. On the contrary, the fantastic work is immediately concerned with sense and attaches the power of the paradox to it. This corresponds to the two states of sense, de facto and de jure, a posteriori and a priori, one by which the circle of the proposition is indirectly inferred, the other by which it is made to appear for itself, by unfolding the circle along the length of the border between propositions and things.”
*Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Dodgson, who also published mathematical literature under that name.
The multisense model has been to try to simplify this cleaving and reconciling. By identifying private time as the direct form of sensemaking and public space as the indirect form, the orthogonality between the two is also their union. I appreciate his pointing out of the two sides of Lewis Carroll, and how they speak to direct and indirect sense.
Quoting from Carroll:
He thought he saw an Elephant
That practiced on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
“At length I realize,” he said,
“The bitterness of Life!”He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
His Sister’s Husband’s Niece.
“Unless you leave this house,” he said,
“I’ll send for the Police!”He thought he saw a Kangaroo
That worked a coffee-mill:
He looked again, and found it was
A Vegetable-Pill.
“Were I to swallow this,” he said,
“I should be very ill!”He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four
That stood beside his bed:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bear without a Head.
“Poor thing,” he said, “poor silly thing!
It’s waiting to be fed!”
…
He thought he saw a Garden-Door
That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
A Double Rule of Three:
“And all its mystery,” he said,
“Is clear as day to me!”He thought he saw an Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
“A fact so dread,” he faintly said,
“Extinguishes all hope!”– Lewis Carroll, The Mad Gardener’s Song
The poem is discussed early on, with its rhythmic juxtaposition of buoyant fantasy and grim realism, or perhaps mania and depression. The analysis offered brings out deeper duality between concrete entities in the world and spoken words…how the abstraction of words contains and deflates the broad absurdity of imagination. Words silence the child’s inner world with the adulteration of logic. Direct sense is overpowered by circumspection of logical, indirect sense through time and experience.
“The duality in the proposition is not between two sorts of names, names of stasis and names of becoming, names of substances or qualities and names of events; rather, it is between two dimensions of the proposition, that is, between denotation and expression, or between the denotation of things and the expression of sense. It is like the two sides of a mirror, only what is on one side has no resemblance to what is on the other.”
That last line is perhaps the most critical point of the multisense realism approach. I have referred to it as anomalous symmetry. A dual aspect monism where the sense of public space is a reflection of the sense of private time, but in a completely different – really orthogonal way.
“The philosopher Avicenna distinguished three states of essence: universal in relation to the intellect which thinks it in general; and singular in relation to the particular things in which it is embodied. But neither of these two states is essence itself. An animal is nothing other than an animal (“animal non est nisi animal tantum”) being indifferent to the universal and to the singular, to the particular and to the general. The first state of essence is essence signified by the proposition, in the order of the concept and of conceptual implications. The second state of essence is essence as designated by the proposition in the particular things in which it is involved. But the third state of essence is essence as sense, essence as expressed – always in this dryness (animal tantum) and this splendid neutrality. It is indifferent to the universal and to the singular, to the general and to the particular, to the personal and the collective; it is also indifferent to affirmation and negation, etc. In short, it is indifferent to all opposites. This is so because all of these opposites are but modes of the proposition considered in its relations of denotation and signification, and not the traits of the sense which it expresses. Is it, then, the status of the pure event, or of the fatum which accompanies it, to surmount all the oppositions in this way? Neither private nor public, neither collective nor individual…, it is more terrible and powerful in this neutrality, to the extent that is all of these things at once.”
Many of the diagrams employed here (supreme ultimate diagrams) feature sense ‘surmounting’ essence and existence. This echoes Deleuze noting here the supremacy of sense in its detachment from the oppositions which are generated within it.
p. 35 “…he writes about the addition of impossible propositions to the possible (signification) and the real (denotation). I conceive of absurdity and the far East end of a continuum of sense rather than a category. An absurd proposition makes sense on some levels or parts but presents an abstract disjunction or mutually exclusive juxtaposition. It is a type of nonsense that refers to itself, and therefore makes a kind of negative sense, as opposed to nonsense as noise lacking signal.”
In my view, propositions can be more or less absurd, more plausible, and even more or less concretely real. The so called primary and secondary attributes of Locke suggest a hierarchy of realism which is intuitive. Qualities that can be measured reliably using inanimate objects as instruments are seen to be primary aspects of realism. Secondary are colors, flavors, etc which vary from person to person and culture to culture. They are subjective but still object-facing. It is interesting that he too refers to sense as a continuum with an Eastern end.
p. 53 The distinction is not between two sorts of events, it is between the event, which is ideal by nature, and its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs. The distinction is between event and accident. Events are ideational singularities which communicate in one and the same Event. They have therefore an eternal truth, and their time is never the present which realizes them and makes them exist. Rather it is the unlimited Aion, the Infinitive in which they subsist and insist. Events are the only idealities. To reverse Platonism is first and foremost to remove essences and to substitute events in their place, as jets of singularities.
p.60 For only thought finds it possible to affirm all chance and to make chance into an object of affirmation.
Interesting commentary which can be seen to relate directly to the multisense diagram depicting Sense on the top edge opposing chance or “?” on the bottom. In a way, it is the role of thought to assign the degree of chance affirmation – it is the eye of mandatory intentionality in the hurricane of semi-intentional potentiality. Thought is the capacity to interpret chance, ie to consciously foreground pattern as significant.
p.61 …what is this time which need not be infinite but only “infinitely subdivisible”? We have seen that past, present, and future were not at all three parts of a single temporality, but that they rather formed two readings of time, each one of which is complete and excludes the other: on one hand, the always limited present, which measures the action of bodies as causes and the state of their mixtures in depth (Chronos); on the other, the essentially unlimited past and future, which gather incorporeal events, at the surface, as effects (Aion).
Great stuff. If I understand the terminology correctly, Chronos can be identified with spacetime and Aion as timespace or dreamtime. Aion is the native, direct modality of experience which is interior and metaphorical. Chronos is the involution of Aion, the orthogonal cross-section of the totality as public literal exterior. Chronos is the perpetually fleeting snapshot that cuts through the mechanical interactions of bodies within bodies (inertial frames within frames) as a generic ‘now’. By contrast, the Aion is the uncut flow of multiplexed influences seeking manifestation. The two interact as coherence-decoherence in Chronos spacetime and decoherence-recoherence through Aion dreamtime.
P. 64. Carroll would say that they are the multiplication table and the dinner table. The Aion is precisely the border of the two, the straight line which separates them; but it is also the plain surface which connects them, an impenetrable window or glass.
This gets very esoteric, but my model differs here from Deleuze in that I see two opposite kinds of borders on opposite ends of Aion – one, is the pedestrian fold between, as he says, the multiplication table and the dinner table (figurative vs literal sense of table) and the other I call the profound edge, where the twist between literal and figurative vanishes ‘behind our backs’ as unconscious or trance-like numinous states of unity. This is the eidetic transformation, where hypnotic re-orientation can take place. Here we find the simulacra nature of consciousness, the unrealism of reality is exposed nakedly while we are otherwise occupied. Aion and Chronos are the profound edge and the pedestrian fold, the back door and front door to narrative (temporal) realism.
In Chronos, ambiguity is shunted off into errors of perception and measurement, so that infinite regress is drowned in decoherence. In Aion, paradox is reconciled through unconsciousness – the level upon which paradox is encountered is ultimately evanescent into greater and lesser levels. The dreamer falls asleep or wakes up, ending the dream. The scientist or philosopher cannot end the dream, and must distract the inquiry with argumentation and formalism.
p. 72 It is thus pleasing that there resounds today that sense is never a principle or an origin, but that it is produced. It is not something to discover, to restore, and to re-employ; it is something to produce by a new machinery. It belongs to no height or depth, but rather to a surface effect, being inseparable from the surface which is its proper dimension. It is not that sense lacks depth or height, but rather that height and depths lack surface, that they lack sense, or have it only by virtue of an “effect” which presupposes sense.
Here I disagree. I think that sense here is considered in too narrow of a ‘sense’ in this passage, limited as sensation or cognition at the point of contact. While sensation does indeed transpire at the surface, it is the translucence of sense which lends the significance of the depths beneath it. I can agree that sense is something to produce by a new machinery, but that every part of the machinery is also a sense experience on another layer/scope/frame. It is not the machinery level which produces sense, it is the level from which the machine’s use is initiated which which recovers new sense for itself, not only as a product but as an extension or revelation of the self through the objects of the machinery. New experience opens a window into new worlds of potential experience, and new doors of actual experience by the self. Surface and depth define each other. It is the sense of their contrast which acts as an originating principle. How could it be otherwise? What is sense other than the capacity to appreciate the contrast fully?
What Deleuze may have overlooked is that depth is nothing but an accumulation of surface effects. Indeed, there is nothing else besides sense that could be said to be responsible for the manifestation of the unsensed. The connection that he has not yet made is that what is surface to us is depth to another frame of reference, and vice versa. Marine organisms make sense in liquid, but it is the lighter fluid of air which poses a boundary for their world. Cells within bodies presumably exist in a universe of haptic (tactile perception of shapes) phenomenology. Surface, under multisense realism, is in the eye of the beholder, a naive realism apportioned out by scale ratios and perceptual entropy summation. Sense does not occur at the surface, sense juxtaposes itself as a surface/depth, as space manifold/unfolding time.
p. 81 Sense is always an effect produced in the series by the instance which traverses them. This is why sense, such as it is gathered over the line of the Aion, has two sides which correspond to the dissymmetrical sides of the paradoxical element: one tending toward the series determined as signifying, the other tending toward the series determined as signified.
Nice assimilation between sensation and semiosis. The idea of sense being activated or defining itself through the consequence of a breaching event. Negative mechanism. Dark current. The implicate order becomes explicit under conditions of interruption. The category does not exist until something insists upon defining itself against the schema. Sense as immunomorphic system.
P.87 Body-sieve, fragmented body, and dissociated body – these are the three primary dimensions of the schizophrenic body…In this collapse of the surface, the entire world loses its meaning.
I don’t entirely agree. While in a sense the surface of realism fails, I would not say that the world loses its meaning. Rather the world is transparent to any and every possible meaning. I suspect that here Deleuze is taking the often noted word-salad quality of schizophrenic communication too literally. In my opinion, such expression is as much a compulsive syntactic self-stimulation – in rhyme and repetition, as it is revealing of genuine attempts to make coherent sense. It is the depth which collapses into the surface, nakedly exposed without regard to the competing depths represented by social convention.
This commentary on schizophrenic sense strikes me also as stereotyped and idealized. I would imagine that actual diagnosed cases of schizophrenia vary in their linguistic manifestations to some degree. This chapter seems to isolate schizophrenia itself as a single author whose work stands in a particular contradistinction to common sense uses of language.
There may be something that Deleuze is pointing out by idealizing schizophrenic sense which is important. The dichotomy between Carroll’s use of satire to play with sense and the schizophrenic transgressions against sense. He frequently notes the malicious, even violent themes in schizophrenic expression in contrast to the carefully crafted ‘nonsense’ of the Alice stories.
The entire section “Fourteenth Series of Double Causality” seems especially opaque to me. He seems to be voicing vague dissatisfaction with Husserl and Kant but not really offering much in the way of a coherent view of causality. He seems to be struggling with a desire to appease physics while retaining an ambivalent substance dualism “The events of a liquid surface refer to the inter-molecular modifications as their real cause, but also to the variations of a surface tension on which they depend as their (ideational or “fictive” quasi-cause”. He talks about a “double causality, referring on one hand to mixtures of bodies which are its cause and, on the other, to other events which are its quasi-cause”, while maintaining that the corporeal cause is linked through surface dynamics to the incorporeal quasi-cause.
My impression is that Deleuze has a shortsighted view of sense here, eloquently (if obliquely) tuned into many nuances of sense, but still viewing human sense essentially as a monolith. In light of so much recent evidence of sensemaking in other species and in microorganisms, it would seem that there is no reason to presume that what seems like quasi-cause on one level would not be experienced as corporeal cause on another. Not double causality, but multiple intercausality.
Once the incorporeal/ideational is freed from the expectation of pseudosubstantiation, it can be understood as the temporal-private basis from which spatial-public extension is propagated (through sense). The ideational is not incorporeal, rather the corporeal is the orthogonal condensation of subjectivity. Both are physically and concretely real, each being the anomalous reflection of the other. The idea of in incorporeality arises from the reliance of objectification as the primary basis for modeling mistakenly turned on the act of modeling itself, failing to meet its own contrived expectations and subordinating its own efficacy as ‘quasi’ or fictive. When we have the idea to stomp on an anthill, the consequences for thousands of ants are not ‘quasi’ or fictive.
In his Fifteenth Series of Singularities, Deleuze makes a case for phenomenology as a function of surfaces. “the surface is the locus of sense“. He quotes Gilbert Simondon, “To belong to interiority does not mean only to ‘be inside,’ but to be on the ‘in-side’ of the limit…”
I agree that the surface defines the active region of sense, as the functional sense of sense can be described as input/output, the point of contact between sensory singularities (monads/selves/nuclei/bodies) would necessarily be on the periphery or skin. From a more objective point of view, we might say that it is not sense that happens on the surface, but rather surfaceness though which sense presents its most self-reflective presentations.
There is no reason to imagine that the depths of bodies are any less sensitive on their own inertial frame, and it is perfectly reasonable to expect that our aggregate sense of ourselves as human beings would include mainly a skin-deep precipitate of the totality of the experience of our sub-selves. Without any eruptive emergencies from within, the backgrounding of bodily depths in our waking consciousness as complex organisms is unsurprising. There is nothing else other than sense which could theoretically define the depths or connect them sensibly to the peripheries. It is all sense, but not all our sense. The distinction here is not between sense and nonsense but realism and unrealism. The sense which is most real to us is that which has the greatest proximity to our personal, collective, and morphological inertial frame. That which is most distal to our perceptual inertial frame is presented to us as unreal.
In Sixteenth Series of the Static Ontological Genesis, he sketches out a rather convoluted seeming schema of the interrelation of monads, persons, and worlds which I think lacks clarity. The multisense view of selves as temporal privacies casting a spatial public shadow on many levels seems to me a simpler and readily verifiable model.
That’s almost halfway. Time for a break but I plan to come back to this soon.
Book Discussion: Aping Mankind (part two)
As promised, here is part two of my discussion on Raymond Tallis’ Aping Mankind. In part one, I went over how impressed I was with the fact that his reasons for rejecting evolutionary and neuroscientific explanations of consciousness (without involving religious ideas) are the same as my own. I have never read another author who has so closely expressed my views in one place – the underlying weakness of “information” as an objectively real system and the unscientific assumptions that arise from the retrospective (reverse engineered) view of consciousness.
I can’t fault the author for leaving off where he does, sort of painted into a corner where all scientific and spiritual explanations are unworkable. I feel like he spent so much intellectual energy mounting a strong critique of the status quo that he has not had the time or wherewithal to develop a path forward – a path, which I think I have been on.
Midway through the book, Tallis’ views take a turn toward human exceptionalism which leaves little room for relating the human experience to the universe in general – something which to me is the most important part of understanding consciousness. He rightfully defends the humanities against the encroachment of the various neuro-prefixed replacements, pointing out the essential gulf between things like art, literature, religion, law, and what can possibly be modeled from neuroscience or evolutionary biology. He talks about how even if we started out with a world that could be generated by a brain, we have long since transcended that with a whole semiosphere of accumulated inter-brain constructs that can no longer be considered neurological or biological.
The book does a good job, at least for me, of pointing out the fallacy that all of these new sciences make in ‘sawing off the limb that they sit on’ – how science itself can only be a meaningless flood of neurotransmitters evolved into yet another ‘hard wired’ plumage of peacock feathers to attract mates. The author correctly says that talent is not always positively linked to show-off behaviors, and that often times genius goes unappreciated while lesser lights attain celebrity due to their extroversion and marketing efforts.
I agree. If we were to take the “Neuromaniac-Darwinitic” view of humanity seriously, then “truth” itself could only be certain neurotransmitters or truth-correlate signals in a particular area of the brain. In that case, we should no longer require that we do experiments with our flawed perception of a simulated universe, but instead simply dump a few thousand micrograms of some isomer here or there, tweak a bit of brain matter with the right combination of electromagnetic stimulation, and voila – truth must appear, just as the delusion of God appears when we stimulate the “God spot” of the brain.
However, I think that Professor Tallis misses the opportunity to get on the right side of history in recognizing the sentience of other organisms, though they are different and arguably less significant kinds of awareness in comparison to our own. We know about bacteria and plants communicating. We know about the strange properties of entanglement and uncertainty. These understandings I think are not compatible with an isolationist view of psyche. Human psyche, sure, but it’s still on the same continent as other animals. Dolphins understand zero, ants ranch aphids, etc. We also know that the brain isn’t the same thing as a foot. fMRIs don’t predict the existence of consciousness, but once we know what we are looking for, I don’t agree that they will continue to be the blunt instruments that they are now. We won’t be able to live in a hard drive, but we may live to see the day when we computers will help us blur the boundary between our inner and outer worlds – living other lives as other people, producing our own full sensory movies, etc. That’s not the same thing as making a computer that cares or leaving our brain behind to live in a computer program.
The door that I think Tallis has missed – or maybe he tried the doorknob too few times, is panpsychism (or panexperientialism). While he understands perfectly Searle’s Chinese Room and why a computer can never feel like a person feels, he doesn’t look carefully enough at our own blindness to different kinds of consciousness. I talk a lot about how poor the record is of human beings recognizing consciousness even within our own species through history, but even within our own families our prejudice against the consciousness of children is substantial. When we think of human exceptionalism, we really mean adult normative human exceptionalism.
As adults, we routinely dismiss the significance of childhood awareness, seeing it only as a functionally important but materially trivial developmental stage, valid only in relation to the development of productive skills as an adult. As we grow up, we often subject younger people, siblings, classmates, etc to derision – accusing them of immaturity, being a baby, etc. Like a dream or drug experience, we grow to see our childhood hopes and dreams as lacking realism, while our current hopes and dreams are elevated to a more worthwhile status. Of course, children see through adults more than we think. They, more than even adults do, sense just how tremendously boring, hypocritical, and full of crap grown ups really are. They have good memories and are more observant of us than we are of them.
My view is that this is more than a social custom. I think it reveals a structural feature of consciousness itself – not only human consciousness but the scientific nature of what awareness literally is. Awareness is how whole entities care more about the things that are important to them or define them and less about other things. This can’t happen just by giving us an electric shock until we ‘care’ about something. Instead it happens by qualitatively foregrounding channels of experiential content and backgrounding others. This isn’t a process of invention where clever ways of multiplexing data must be developed out of whole cloth in each species or individual. I think that it is a case of attaining larger ‘chips off the old block’; recovering more of the sense of the totality through the juxtaposition of multiple channels of sense. Our presentation of the world is presented to us as a unified experience worth caring about, propped up by tent poles of super-signifying semantic motives. These are not literal props, but narrative devices. Characters, scenes, plot elements.
I think this kind of panpsychism is not at all unlikely. Just as we cannot see microwaves with our eyes, we cannot participate in parts of the universe with which we share no common spatiotemporal scope. We can’t fit the human big-top circus into the flea circus. We can look at an anthill and reluctantly admit that they are doing something intelligent, but I do not think that we should insist, as Tallis does, that ants have nothing more than dovetailed automaticity to explain their behavior. That’s what it looks like to us, and they are likely to be objectively more automatic than we are, but they probably still participate in an ant universe as individual ants. I agree with Tallis that human civilization represents a quantum leap, maybe the final leap in animal evolution, but I don’t think that there is anything objectively improbable about that, given the improbability of life and awareness itself. Tallis makes a lot of presumptuous dismissals of the possibility of animal intelligence which I think are overstated and will not age well as more ecological science comes to pass.
The question for me is not whether human exceptionalism is justified or not but to what degree our feeling of exceptionalism is anthropic (the inevitable feeling that we would wind up having because we are humans and humans are so great) or…’soliopic’ (the experience that every participant in the universe must have as an inevitable consequence of subjectivity and therefore casts their own species-centric universe with inferior seeming characters).
The way human consciousness has proved to be biased in favor of the self and others who in some way seem likeable to us, and with the microcosmic universes opened to us through scientific instruments, I have no trouble understanding how we might be blind to some level of awareness in every piece of the material universe. Speed up a galaxy a million times and it’s like a whirlpool or sparkler in a cosmic fireworks show. Slow down a human voice and it sounds like a whale. It’s all related.
I don’t think that this contradicts human exceptionalism though, it just places it in a context of exponential sensorimotive development – we host a Cambrian Explosion of perceptual depths…condensed histories experienced from a single vantage point – an “I myself”. This exponential explosion is qualitative, not merely quantitative, so that it is like having more spectra of primary colors, not just more black and white pixels. In this sense, we are unique in the universe.
Each person exists on the same level of unrepeatable idiopathy that water or the color read exist on. Original, genuine, root level. More than the sum of our cells and experiences, not just in an emergent way like dry metal bearings would have, in a group, an slippery quality, but in a novel, unprecedented way like blue is to yellow. My conjecture is that these are not emergent properties, but recovered properties – like leveling up in a game.
This is why the internet isn’t going to suddenly become self aware like Skynet. It can’t level up for the same reason that silicon has never leveled up to a single celled organism. It’s either not possible or it hasn’t happened yet. Either way, in the mean time, our Cambrian Explosion of human interiority has subdivided time exponentially into intervals so brief that the evolution of Silicon has seemed to stop in its tracks by comparison (or maybe literally stopped it by being first…there’s that cosmic anthropic principle again). It’s the ‘by comparison’ part that is key. I don’t think we can tell exactly how biased we are as to what constitutes life or awareness but I suspect that the bias is very great and perhaps absolute – i.e. our view of silicon may ultimately be nothing more than that, a view, a character in our story.
Tallis view of panpsychism then, I think is a naive one. He hasn’t really committed to the premise for long enough to find what is behind the front door. He, like most people, are thinking that the idea of panpsychism has to mean that every atom would have to be like an independent living being, instead of a micropsychic experience that might be as foreign to us as a bolt of lightning is compared to our own body. Once we entertain the idea that the symmetry of mind and matter is significant, we can see how interior evolution is much different and more private than anything we could conceive of as a three dimensional material phenomenon. We have to really get down on the floor of existence here and see how the inside of our mind is truly and utterly unlike anything that is outside of the mind. Then we can imagine that our entire interior is but one ‘temporal apartment’ in a universe of interior-temporal solar systems and galaxies. Not talking about literal planets and apartments, but just how your self seems to you now, an ‘apart’-ment. This is what time and space are really made of.
The simple formula of matter-energy-space versus sense-motive-time should give us an idea of how the idea of panpsychism is just the beginning, just the tip of an infinity of icebergs with qualitative experiences more diverse than all of the forms of matter that we can imagine put together. Eternity exists for these subjects to multiply and discover their universe and each other through their experientially acumulated filters.
I think that this is the path forward the author is looking for. A way to honor the depth and realism of human consciousness without falling back on pre-scientific assumptions. We don’t need to go ‘back to the drawing board’ as he suggests – neuroscience and evolutionary biology are not as entirely malignant as he fears, but we do need to recontextualize them in a much, much larger physical universe built on symmetry and sense. Not on matter or information, but on that which is informed and matters. At the same time, we need a much smaller universe which is not built on anything in particular except everythingness and the fragmentation-reconnection-respiration thereof.
Multisense Realism 
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