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Multisense Combustion
I was thinking about combustion engines and mentally following the sequence from the early step of mixing gasoline with air, then how that mix gets ignited in the gap of the ‘charged’ ends of the spark plug, which then changes the mix into CO2 + H2O steam molecules moving in all directions, only much faster…then those fast moving steam molecules begin to gradually move the dense metal pistons, push the metal gears in the transmission and ultimately rotate the drive train and wheels.
I wanted a video that would show a realistic visualization of combustion at the microstate scale, and this was the closest I could find right now. It’s a good video and I think it works for this, even though I was hoping for more of a scientific CGI simulation than a cartoon.
I’m doing this to help explain my understanding of how the Hard Problem of Consciousness can be transcended using sense-centric model of metaphysics.
Some key points to get from the simple explanation of the video to my Multisense Realism view:
Energy is an abstract concept that stands in for what we would call stimulating feelings or sensations. Stimulating meaning that besides the sensation of kinetic movement that would be assumed under physics (but not defined as a sensation), the event would includes another sensation of desire/motivation (call it motive) to act physically to discharge the quality of that initial feeling, because it is in some sense, uncomfortable or stressful. I propose that is all that ‘energy’ is – a felt sensory-aesthetic quality that causes a motive to experience a complementary sensory-aesthetic quality of release/return by turning the motive affect into motor effect – physical motion. The idea of potential energy is replaced by the more familiar experience of stress/strain and the idea of kinetic energy is replaced by the release of that stress through the physical act of acceleration.
The video does a great job of simplifying the conventional thermodynamic theory with a curve on a graph where potential energy of the fuel molecule decreases as it is transformed into the lower energy (more ‘relaxed’) molecules of water and carbon dioxide plus acceleration and light. In reality, there is no curve of potential energy being lost to kinetic energy. That is an abstraction to help us understand a theory of chemistry rather than a description of the event.
I propose that the actual combustion event needs at least two separate sense modalities to be modeled realistically – two modes of perception analogous to what we experience as touch (tactile/haptic/tangibility) and sight (visibility). First, the tangible sense rendering or appearance consists of molecules moving at one speed colliding and rearranging with each other so that they suddenly move very quickly (accelerate) in all directions. That’s the only truly physical, tangible thing that combustion is doing.*
The second aspect of the combustion event has tangible (photoelectric) effects, however, I propose that the only illuminating aspect is in fact visible rather than tangible. This is a radical proposal – that what we know as vision is not a simulation somehow transduced from information sent physically across a vacuum as particle-wave ‘patterns’, but is its own direct ontological medium that exists prior to biology, and perhaps even prior to tangibility. It may be the case that physics is grounded in metaphysical phenomena that are more like visual experiences than tangible experiences.
In the video, we see that part of the combustion of fuel into water and CO2 is the emission of what we conceive as light or photons. As I have proposed in other writings, light may not exist in any tangible sense, although it causes tangible effects (motion of atoms). I’m not denying that photons could exist as standalone particle/waves in a vacuum, but I think given what we observe from QM experiments and from our own experience of sight as a sense of looking and seeing rather than purely a sense of tangible collisions in the back of our eyeballs, I think it makes more sense to understand photons as either intangible sense experience or semi-tangible vehicles of trans-tangible sense experience. Illumination may be a more fundamental sense interaction than touch, so that the sense of objects are more of a collapsed reduction of some aspects of sensory-motive changes that cannot be seen directly.
By trans-tangible I mean that the ability to see brightness, colors, and images made of those contrasting visible qualities is not an ability that objects/particles or waves could generate under our current physical theory. There is an Explanatory Gap between what we think we know about mechanical events of force and what we experience directly as seeing/sight/sights/visibility. That is a How question. There is also a Hard Problem of Consciousness that arises when we ask the question of Why there would be any such thing as visible qualities in the first place when the mechanical consequences of physical events like combustion would produce the identical functions in complete invisibility. As an example, you can unplug the screen of your computer and nothing important is going to change in the circuits of the device. The device could do exactly what it was doing before, even though the main reason you have for making it do anything is to generate some non-computational physical activity in the lcd screen you’re staring at.
As long as the photon moves the electron, (or in some sense IS the motion of the electron) at a distance, then there’s no parsimonious reason to add an additional thing that the universe does to give it an ‘appearance’, much less an appearance that is presented visually rather than haptically. In a purely physical universe, nothing would have an appearance, nor would an appearance change anything physically. In a physical universe-plus-appearance, the appearance would by default be tactile/haptic and not visual. A brain would not see a world of images, it would just process the chemistry of its own fluids as it is, or with a lower resolution miniaturization of what it is.
For example, a grain of salt is an object appearance that approximates billions of molecules, so it is a low res icon that could be weakly emergent if sensed as a single tangible shape colliding with tongue cells, but to suddenly have that shape become an image of colors and brightness, or of flavor requires some strongly emergent non-physical magic. Magic because it’s not parsimonious. It doesn’t follow logically that any such thing would appear in a physical universe.
Most people currently assume that natural selection can and does produce mutations of physical cells that end up conjuring such appearances as sights and flavors, but in all cases that assume is a logical fallacy – a petitio principii or Begging the Question fallacy where the fact of the experience of sight is retrospectively smuggled in to what is supposed to be an explanation for how that experience came to be in the first place.
We can’t really see an electron or a photon, and we can’t really detect one without using our own conscious observation of how a physical instrument changes physically. This means that photons and electrons could be more like sensations that change the movements of atoms rather than free-standing physical entities in a vacuum. Photons in particular may just be how seeing or sensing appears when we look at it with something that we assume does not see (a physical instrument like a photomultiplier).
The whole notion of quantized energy states and electrons moving from inner to outer shells may be more of a story we made up about the behavior of the instruments we are using, and the modalities of sense and sense-making we are using them with than a realistic understanding of the fabric of all of nature. My proposal is that the fabric of nature is appearance itself: aesthetic presentations of multiple sense modalities, including, but not limited to, sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts, haptic/tactile textures and objects, emotions, even people. The presentation of aesthetic appearance on different nested scales of time or significance replaces the assumed anesthetic mechanics of physics or computation, and the presentation of the aesthetics of participation/voluntary will replaces the assumed automaticity of mass-energy or information processing.
Instead of literal light waves traveling as independent entities in the vacuum of space, my hypothesis suggests more of a Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, but replacing anesthetic-automatic events of mere geometric emission and absorption with a Multisense Realism Theory of shared sensory-motive experiences of giving and receiving experiential qualities. Not only is illumination an experience of visible aesthetic qualities, but I am proposing that those aesthetic qualities are isomorphic to, or recapitulate the original experience of the event at the source to some degree.


In the Multisense Realism view of combustion, the idea of a subatomic particle leaving an atom and joining another is replaced by the idea of atomic scale experiences sharing a contagious sense of oscillating excitement-relaxation among existing conscious experiences. We render these experiences as movements of atoms only when we are using tangible instruments to detect their tangible side effects. Otherwise these events can be rendered in any modality – feelings, thoughts, flavors, colors, etc. There is no thing-that-is “light” other than the shared experience of illumination. Further, the experience of illumination is not only the wedding of separated experiences of generic stimulation through the sending and receiving of a sensation, but it is an experience of awareness of some aspect of the nature of that experience as it relates to all other experiences. Illumination is not only an increase in the visible quality of brightness, but within that brightness is a record OF the event that caused it. Light/illumination can be informative but it is not mere information. It is not just generic ‘news’ or signal but it news-OF an aesthetic-participatory event that is recapitulated aesthetically. A presentation that can re-present itself to itself, aka a form of consciousness.
*That’s the only thing that metabolism is doing also – in the stomach, in the blood, even in the brain. There is no standalone thing that is ‘energy’ in the universe. Energy is whatever quality of sensation that stimulates a desire to change or spread that sensation. It’s not a generic thing, but it can be modeled that way, quantified and understood enough to exert control over physical and chemical reactions.
Gaede’s EM Ropes
According to Bill Gaede’s hypothesis, light is “a torque signal propagating from one atom to another along a rope”. MSR defines the universe as being the totality of sensory presence, so that atoms are a localizing partial masking of that presence. Electromagnetism is a torque-like effect in which that masking is partially released or made permeable-permissive so that empathic-imitative sharing arises.
Why Light is Sight (not photons)
A case against photons being necessary and sufficient to explain the experience of light:
There are many examples of scientific studies and first hand experience which implicate human visual perception as the result of neurological and phenomenological states, rather than a direct mapping of photons striking the retina of the eye.
1. What we see cannot be explained by the presence of photons alone.
From this paper, On the Neural Correlates of Visual Perception:
“Neurological findings suggest that the human striate cortex (V1) is an indispensable component of a neural substratum subserving static achromatic form perception in its own right and not simply as a central distributor of retinally derived information to extrastriate visual areas.
[…] elemental visual experiences of punctate white or colored lights called ‘phosphenes’ can be evoked in man by direct electrical stimulation of densely hemianopic striate cortex after severance of its connections to and from the LGN.”
The paper goes on to describe many neurological conditions arising from specific damage to the brain which reveal that the visual conditions which we take for granted, such as identification of shapes and motion, have their neural correlates in diverse areas of the brain. There is no video screen equivalent in the brain which which reconstructs an image from the outside world made of photons.
“Crick and Koch also proposed that explicit representations of visual features, coarse-coded neural representations that correlate with percepts or objects, are a necessary but not sufficient condition for visual experience. I find no reason to disagree with this premise.
[…]figure–ground segregation and object recognition cannot progress in a simple bottom-up serial fashion, but have to occur concurrently and interactively within recursive loops”
[…]In summary, the present model is based on the primacy of phenomenal experience (Humphrey, 1992; Nelkin, 1995; Raffman, 1995) and supports views that any possible explanation of phenomenal experience cannot be formulated solely in terms of its reportability (Chalmers, 1995).”
2. Stimulation of the visual cortex in the congenitally blind results in tactile rather than visual perception (Changes in visual cortex excitability in blind subjects as demonstrated by transcranial magnetic stimulation).
“…phosphenes could be induced in only 60% of subjects in Group 2 (blind subjects with a low degree of residual vision) and in only 20% of subjects in Group 3 (blind subjects without residual vision).
[…] Studies of the functional consequences of visual deprivation in humans have disclosed correlates of cross‐modal plasticity, with a role for the visual cortex in tactile processes (Uhlet al., 1991; Sadatoet al., 1996; Cohenet al., 1997; Büchelet al., 1998).”
“In a PET study we demonstrate that congenitally blind subjects show task- specific activation of extrastriate visual areas and parietal association areas during Braille reading, compared with auditory word processing. In contrast, blind subjects who lost their sight after puberty show additional activation in the primary visual cortex with the same tasks. Studies in blind-raised monkeys show that crossmodal responses in extrastriate areas can be elicited by somatosensory stimulation. This is consistent with the crossmodal extrastriate activations elicited by tactile processing in our congenitally blind subjects. ” – Different activation patterns in the visual cortex of late and congenitally blind subjects.
3. Visual experiences can be produced internally, and outside of the primary visual cortex.
“A phosphene is a phenomenon characterized by the experience of seeing light without light actually entering the eye.”
“this phenomenon of “seeing” without seeing in the traditional sense leads one to believe the ability to receive light is not entirely necessary. In addition, this is not a foreign concept, as when most people close the eyes, they are able to visualize images.” – Dreams: Seeing without seeing
“The results by Knauff and colleagues, also with fMRI, do not support the hypothesis that primary visual cortex is involved in visual mental imagery, but rather that a network of spatial subsystems and higher visual areas appears to be involved (Knauff, Kassubek, Mulack, & Greenlee, 2000). The results support the hypothesis that visual imagery is a function of the visual association cortex.” – Visual imagery without visual perception (Bértolo 2005).
4. Congenitally blind people can interpret experience graphically.
[…]In conclusion, the congenitally blind are not only able to describe what may be the visual content of their dreams verbally, but they can provide, through drawing, a graphical representation of such content, and a significant negative correlation between the Visual Content of the dreams and the alpha power was found in both groups.” (Bértolo 2005).
5. Color mappings are not entirely caused either by electromagnetic frequency or stimulation of the retina’s cone cells.
a. Some colors are not part of the visible spectrum
Pink and purple are combinations of red with blue or violet. Brown and beige are low intensity orange, olive is low dim green, grays and black are dark whites. – source
“This means that colours only really exist within the brain – light is indeed traveling from objects to our eyes, and each object may well be transmitting/reflecting a different set of wavelengths of light; but what essentially defines a ‘colour’ as opposed to a ‘wavelength’ is created within the brain. ” – Magenta Ain’t A Colour.
b. Color perception can change independently of the retina.
“…the number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina differs dramatically among people—by up to 40 times—yet people appear to perceive colors the same way. The findings, on the cover of this week’s journal Neuroscience, strongly suggest that our perception of color is controlled much more by our brains than by our eyes.
[… That points to some kind of normalization or auto-calibration mechanism—some kind of circuit in the brain that balances the colors for you no matter what the hardware is.” – Color Perception Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: It’s in the Brain
6. Blindsight shows that optical information can be communicated subconsciously without a conscious experience of seeing.
A rare, but much studied condition, blindsight, along with synesthesia and anosognosia reveal that the pairing of visual qualities of experience with optical conditions is not automatic. The functions of information processing, physics, and the qualities conscious experience can all be teased out separately.
Blindsight – the ability to respond appropriately to visual inputs while lacking the feeling of having seen them – might be something which only occurs in cases of brain damage, but seems much more likely to be a significant phenomenon of intact brain function as well. Indeed, it seems likely that blindsight (and similar phenomena in other spheres) is an important ingredient of of a variety of activities where one wants to move quickly and appropriately, without “thinking about it”. – Seeing What You Don’t See
7. Photon interaction begins and ends with the isomerization of rhodopsin.
Optical processing a vast chain of mechanical reactions on multiple levels of description of the nervous system; molecular, cellular, organ, and somatic. From the indications of neurology alone, what our visual cortex would ‘see’ should really be nothing more than interruptions in the flows of glutamate from rod cells, not an array of photons. There is something called ‘dark current‘ which refers to “the depolarizing current, carried by Na+ ions, that flows into a photoreceptor cell when unstimulated” and suggests that our access to optical conditions is triggered by a silencing of ‘off’ signals rather than an instantiation of ‘on’. It might be supposed that photons are not what we see, but rather they are a measure of the initial molecular triggers which stop us from not seeing.
8. Photons with frequencies in the infra-red range are felt as heat rather than seen.
A rather obvious example, but one which reveals that photons themselves need not be seen to be detected. Ultraviolet and infrared radiation are referred to as ‘light’, but they are no more or less ‘illuminating’ than radio waves or gamma rays. Generally when we refer to light and lighting we are specifying a capacity to illuminate our visual perception, not thermal conditions. The use of light to refer to invisible phenomena is not entirely untrue, as it can be stepped down into a visible range using photographic equipment, however, unless the target of such a process is ultimately a visual experience, it is hard to justify the connection to the term, and the word ‘light’ should be considered somewhat figurative. If we refer to brain activity associated with conscious experience to be ‘neural correlates’, then we should likewise refer to physical activity associated with perceptual experience to be ‘electrodynamic correlates’ of light rather than light itself.
9. If light is sight and not photons, what is sight?
Philosophers would call it qualia, neuroscientists might call it ‘sense data’, phenomenal visual experience, or ‘static achromatic form perception’. In short, seeing light is irreducibly experiential. All light is only that which is seen, and photons do not necessarily have any visible qualities.
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