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Where the Rubber Hits the Road: ISA =/= Microarchitecture Gap

https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/m/microarchitecture.htm
This is a depiction of the inflection point between computer hardware (tangible microarchitecture objects) and software (intangible instruction set architecture concepts). While the image above joins objects to concepts, the reality is that there is an infinitely wide gap between the two, bridged only be the aesthetic-participatory/sensory-motor capacities of the conscious experience we call a computer engineer.
The connection and communication described by the text and image are not referring to a physical process but a figurative, metaphorical relation that exists in our conscious experience of understanding. The ISA isn’t physically ‘implemented’ by the hardware, it is the conscious sensory-motive capacity of the programmer/engineer that marries their own cognitive sense-making with their motive power to move their physical body that creates and implements the ISA. The ISA has no physical connection to hardware. We produce the ISA machine code in our imagination/understanding, and there it stays. Anything we do to a computer comes from brain > hand > device actions that carry no motive intent or encoding at all. It is purely motor events set into motion from outside of physics.

This is why I suggest that regardless of how sophisticated the software we write for Simulated Intelligence systems, genuine awareness and intelligence will not arise – only reflections and recombinations of the physical effects of our own intelligence-driven actions. AI is a useful mirage.
The hardware we use as computing devices doesn’t have that breadth of awareness to do what the programmer or user can do. Any sensory capacity motivating the hardware is very primitive and limited to immediate detection and response on the subatomic scale. Anything we do to a computer is still just atoms jiggling for reasons that ‘they’ have no ability to understand.
Analogue, Brain Simulation Thread
Tell the difference between a set of algorithm’s in code that can mimic all the known processes for the input and output of a guitar into analogue equipment. The answer is no, because pros cant tell the difference. The entire analogue process has been sufficiently well modeled and encapsulated in the algorithmns. The inputs and outputs are physically realistic where the input and output are important. That is what substrate modelling of brain processes in computational neuroscience is about. i.e. Brain simulations.
Just because our analysis of what is going on in the brain reminds is of information processing does not mean that the brain is only an information processor, or that consciousness is conjured into existence as a kind of information-theoretic exhaust from the manipulation of bits.
What you are not considering is that beneath any mechanical or theoretical process (which is all that computation is as far as we know) is an intrinsic sensible-physical context which allows switches to load, store, and compare – allows recursive enumeration, digital identities,…a whole slew of rules about how generic functions work. This is already a low level kind of consciousness. That could still support Strong AI in theory, because bits being the tips of an iceberg of arithmetic awareness would make it natural to presume that low level awareness scales up neatly to high level awareness.
In practice, however, this does not have to be the case, and in fact what we see thus far is the opposite. The universally impersonal and uncanny nature of all artificial systems suggests the complete lack of personal presence. Regardless of how sophisticated the simulation, all imitations have some level at which some detector cannot be fooled. Consciousness itself however, like the wetness of water, cannot be fooled. No doll, puppet, or machine which is constructed from the outside in has any claim on sentience at the level which we have projected onto it. This is not about a substitution level, it is about the specific nature of sense being grounded in the unprecedented, genuine, simple, proprietary, and absolute rather than the opposite (probabilistic, reproducible, complex, generic, and local). From the low level to a high is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind, even though the difference between the high level and low level is a difference in degree.
What I mean by that is that anything can be counted, but numbers cannot be reconstructed into what has been counted. I count my fingers…1, 2, 3, 4, 5. We have now destructively compressed the “information” of my hand, each unique finger and the thumb, into a figure. Five. Five can apply generically to anything, so we cannot imagine that five contains the recipe for fingers. This is obviously a reductio ad absurdum, but I introduce it not as a straw man but as a clear, simple illustration of the difference between sensory-motive realism and information-theoretic abstractions. You can map a territory, but you can’t make a territory out of a map regardless of how much the map reminds you of the territory.
So yes, digital representations can seem exactly like analog representations to us, but they are both representations within a sensory context rather than a sensory-motive presentation of their own. All forms of representation exist to communicate across space and time, bridging or eliding the entropic gaps in direct experience. It’s not a bad thing that modeling a brain will not result in a human consciousness, its a great thing. If it were not, it would be criminal to subject living beings to the horrors of being developed and enslaved in a lab. Fortunately, by modeling these beautiful 4-D dynamic sculptures of the recordings of our consciousness, we can tap into something very new and different from ourselves, but without being a threat to us (unless we take it for granted that they have true understanding, then we’re screwed).
A Formula for Qualia
To derive the formula for qualia or sensory affect, solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and bridge the Explanatory gap, I suggest that we try converting the mass-energy equivalence E=mc² from the public orientation and transpose it inward to the private orientation.
Energy (E) becomes w² which is “was and will be” (w = was or will be)
The Speed of light (c) becomes t = time = (still or never) = now or realism
Light* (c²) becomes t² “still and never again” or “stereo realism of now”
Mass (M) becomes æ = qualia = “like it”
Qualia = “like it was and will be, still and never again” =
another wording
Qualia = “Eternally signifies its past and future now”
This is about what Milan Kundera called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That our experience of the universe is either perpetually suspended above the paradox of an existence which is both perpetually vanishing forever in some sense and repeating forever in another. If c is the still ‘speed’ of here and now, then c² is the acceleration of here and now, the enrichment of the local now through the collective presence and absence of eternity
- Motive effect or will:
To derive will or motive:
If qualia is “like it”, then square root of æ is what joins and divides the ‘like’ and the ‘it’. It is the dipole charge of ‘liking’ and ‘it-ing’ which we call desire or preference. The greater the liking, the more significance is projected onto the object, which is the imagined realization of a goal in time. Intention projects into the future, builds, and guides qualia.
Will = “(Maybe, or maybe not)(now or never)” = w = √æ t
Turning the private translation outward to Public/Western psychology so that interiority is undersignified as emergent epiphenomena, we get:
= Experience is simply what may and may not be happening for some time.
and
= Choosing = Right or wrong this time
The public-facing view of privacy reduces it to information processing. To those who have a private-facing view this is a flat and inadequate characterization. The former view is optimized for realizing spatial intelligence while the latter is optimized for appreciating timeless wisdom.
- Quality and Equality
Since qualia is about likeness and local equivalents, it can be said that qualia equals the differential between equality and all inequalities... æ = ‘d=’.
The kicker is that since equality is itself a quale (the spelling of e-quality is a clue), we can conceive of ‘=’ as quality which is externalized**, i.e. the differential is collapsed and the entire range of what it “is like” is interpreted as what “it actually is”. The Western-facing mind naturally prefers that which only tells it ‘like it is‘, so that public physics and information science will filter out as noise all that tries to tell ‘what it is like‘ (paging Ludwig Wittgenstein…). This commercialization of residential qualities has had many benefits, but it is a philosophy which has blinded itself, and intimidated many into ignoring the true nature of consciousness. It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s how private physics works. It’s how sense is made.
*The speed of light is c, but c², if taken literally, can be understood as light itself, reality, or making sense: producing stereo (solid) realism.
**Physically publicized, cropped, framed, stereotyped, commercialized, hardened to endure against the changing feelings that make up private time.
Updated Introduction
3. Overview
I am always trying to sum up multisense realism in a simple way, as I think it ultimately is pretty simple, but it is hard to put it simply because it requires that we overturn some core assumptions about how we look at the self and the universe.
I consider my model to be neither dualist nor monist, but an “Ouroboran” monism, meaning that physics itself is the capacity for sensory experience and discernment and that it is involuted in a reflexive, “umbilical” relation to itself. The idea is that experience and matter are the private and public ranges of physical phenomena. The involution (like a Klein bottle or Möbius strip) refers to the orthogonal or perpendicular juxtaposition between sensorimotive-based private experience and spacetime-based public realism.
If we begin with this diagram which I have pilfered from memeengine:
and then progress, like those schizophrenic cat portraits, into the mind bending rabbit hole that is Multisense Realism…
Here, I am trying to introduce the notion of a continuum between the three ‘ism’s above, to indicate that the cosmos supports all three inherently because it is that juxtaposition/symmetry which is actually more primary than any of them. Not the symmetry itself – which is more of a mathematical relation that is somewhat abstract, but the capacity to detect and respond to patterns like symmetry – the capacity to sense and participate in the universe. What I wound up with was more of a yin yang taijutsu arrangement which maybe hints at an East side where experience is purely subjective, a West side which is all representations of what is presumed purely objective, and a midrange which is about perception as a body in the world of comparably scaled bodies.
Not content with that, I went on to try to get more of the flavor of it with nested scale bodies in a Cartesian grid of blue vector arrows representing energy and function (the disowned idealism of the West haunts the machine as ‘energy’ and ‘information’). On the East side, there is the solipsistic fisheye distortion which is all cluttered up with my conceptions of sub-personal, super-personal, and the arrow of motive power.
Wrapping this mess up, I put the atomic dots where they belong, on the inside surface of the experiential bubble of the Absolute. Make sense? Haha.
In Multisense Realism, all of physics is understood to relate to the capacity to discern between public and private views of phenomena. Public physics appears to us as ‘matter and energy’ on the outside and ‘perception and participation’ on the inside. The gap which makes this involution or twist possible is the modulation between the presence and absence or sensory presence, with the absence being what is called entropy or spacetime (which become essentially the same thing under this model of physics). To make things more confusing, this modulation of entropy and sensitivity is nested within many layers of itself, as a fractal. A cell encapsulates a world of molecular interaction. An organ encapsulates a world of cells, etc.
What started as an observation about the common positions that people seem to take within philosophy of mind debates became a hypothesis about the continuum of public and private sense experience, a re-interpretation of light, cosmology, consciousness, and the introduction of new concepts like significance and solitropy.
These two images try to capture the overall picture of how all major features of the cosmos can smoothly fit together.
Q: In theory, could we predict future behavior if we knew enough about the brain?
In theory, could we predict future behavior if we knew enough about the brain?
The theory that we could predict future behavior if we knew enough about the brain is logically sound, but I think that the underlying assumptions are flawed. The relation between behavior and the brain may in fact *not* be linked by cause and effect but by simultaneous integration. Even the best imaginable auto mechanic cannot predict where the car will be driven (although they can predict things about the car’s ability to function on the road).
What I suggest is that human behavior is driven by semantic conditions within the context of the individual’s experience as a whole as well as physiological-neurolgogical-biochemical conditions of the body’s existence. My hypothesis is that interior experience is a concretely real sensorimotive phenomenology rather than a ‘simulation’, ‘interpretation’, or ’emergent property’ of neurological ‘data’ or ‘information’. As such, our perceptions intensify or diminish, consolidate, branch, negate, etc according to the logic of their significance within the biographical narrative rather than exclusively in the activity that we currently know how to measure in the brain from the ‘outside’.
Knowing everything about a brain would certainly enable many predictions, but without understanding the life of the subject from the inside, it is probably not possible to predict what they are going to think and do for the rest of their lives, even if you could know every possible future of the entire universe. If the universe could do that, it probably wouldn’t go through the formality of actually presenting the universe as the ‘live show’ that it appears to us to be.
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