Multisense Realism

My comments on Joscha Bach & Andrés Gómez Emilsson on the Nature of Consciousness | Part 1 are below.

Starting from 3:04,  Andrés says

“In the QRI world is it where uh your Consciousness is kind of these like qualia bundle these like raw set of sensations that are arranged in such a way that they represent an external environment”.

Is there a way of arranging sensations such that they represent something? I think that it only becomes possible if those sensations are part of a larger conscious experience that can remember and compare sensations, and to imagine other experiences. Sensations have to be presentations in their own right before they can also re-present or become associated with other parts of experience. While our local experience is certainly filtered and altered that does not mean that what is beyond those local filters is anything other than larger sets of conscious experiences. We may have experiences that represent an environment outside of *our* direct personal experience, that doesn’t mean that representational function could justify the fact of appearance in the first place. Further, the assumption of representational function does not mean that there could be something that does not need any sort of appearance (not only visible appearance of course) to exist.

4:17 Joscha says that waking consciousness is the same as dreaming – a “sophisticated hallucination” […] “only it’s tuned to predict your sensory data”.

Here the Hard Problem is important. Neural states need not hallucinate or simulate anything to function predictively. The idea that a mind can discover qualia to model neurological data only adds an additional Hard Problem. In a hypothetical physical universe that exists prior to qualia, there would only be invisible, intangible, silent phenomena that have no awareness or understanding. The expectation of a ‘model’ is meaningless in such a universe. A brain could evolve different physical regions that end up acting as sophisticated switches and timers that connect it to other areas of the brain and body in complicated ways, but that does not lead to those cells or tissues using or conceiving of those physiological events as models of something. A brain certainly has no physical power to cause its own neurological states to manifest some kind of qualitative ‘appearance’ (image, feeling, thought, flavor, etc). It makes no difference whether such a power would confer evolutionary advantage, there’s just nothing physical about it, unless we allow the term ‘physical’ to mean anything, including consciousness.

An appearance (singular = quale) can resemble another appearance but this sense of resemblance is also an appearance. In the case of pareidolia for example, we can see a face appear in a cloud, and both the cloud, face, and face of clouds are visible appearances, but in addition there is an intellectual experience of sense-making that is invisible. This experience of interpretive perception or figuration is more directly or personally participatory compared to passive sight of colors or shapes. The face in the clouds invites us to compare what we see with what we understand beyond raw geometric shapes. The face in the cloud reminds us that perceptions are often mistaken, because a cloud can’t evolve anything biological like an animal’s face. We may also wonder if our seeing of this face image at this time is telling us about our current psychological state as a Rorschach inkblot might, or even deeper, carries some kind of message from the universe, God, or an otherwise transpersonal psychological source. Is the face meaningful? Does it remind us of a particular feeling or archetype?

At 5:06 Joscha asks:

“Does this then relate to the Consciousness as being fundamental right because we are now talking about something that is actually message passing between neurons”

Here we are already leaking physicalism into the discussion. Neurons are physical, tangible structures that are presumed to be unconscious yet Joscha is not talking about molecules passing in and out of cell membranes of cells or passing of electromagnetic charge among molecules, he is talking about something called a “message”. The problem with that bit of linguistic sleight of hand, while probably unintentional, is that it has buried the evidence of the Hard Problem behind an intellectual model of neurology that conflates concrete, tangible phenomena (particles changing position) with something entirely intangible and semantic (messages or ‘signals’). If we are going to say that neurons are passing messages rather than a-signifying physical events causing blind physical chain reactions, then we have already assumed the presence of semiotic significance that has no physical precedent and no justification to be considered possible outside of a conscious experience. Somehow this detail, which I find obvious and critically important, seems to go unnoticed. I call it the “Hard Problem of Signaling” and presented it at a Science of Consciousness conference a few years ago.

at 6:44, Joscha says “my brain seems to be the substrate of um my thinking that is when I bump my head then my thinking will change if I bump hard enough”. 

Here is another instance where physicalism is smuggled into the conversation without acknowledgement. When we are awake we may suffer cognitive consequences from brain damage, but when we are dreaming we may not even seem to have a brain, and bumping our head may have no consequences. It can only be verified that waking experience is ‘more real’ than dream experience from within the waking experience. In a dream it may seem just as certain that our brain is a wad of chewing gum and the seat of our consciousness is in our fingernails. There would be no way to disprove that within the dream. If consciousness is fundamental, then the appearance of a brain, while important in one mode of awareness, may not even exist in another. Dream worlds do not have to be considered real for us to understand that epistemology cannot necessarily survive a change of consciousness. Epistemology must be understood to arise only within a particular set of conscious states. Not all states of consciousness even support an expectation of ‘knowing’ anything. If we are in a dream and we want to wake up, none of our neuroscientific understanding can necessarily help us. States of consciousness determines what worlds we have access to, and whether there is an “I” or body or brain that appears there.

7:09 Andrés:

“I would say that probably a photon is like a tiny Speck of qualia that is uh kind of like being dislodged from one pocket somewhere and it’s uh being um absorbed by another pocket uh kind of like this packet of energy would be at the fundamental level kind of like a speck of qualia that is migrating from one pocket to another”

I think that photons are ultimately a useful heuristic concept rather than an ontological fact. If photons are taken to exist as physical entities, they have no theoretical upper size limit. If you build an antenna as large as a galaxy, you could theoretically broadcast and receive EM radiation with galaxy sized wavelength photons. It is also a bit misleading to conceive of photons as packets of energy (even though this is of course a very popular belief). Energy is property that particles or waves have rather than are made of. Like mass, position, or velocity, energy is a quantitative abstraction that refers to concrete behaviors of physical motion. Energy is said to be the capacity to perform work, which is force against inertial conditions. Energy is a phantom behind formulas that describe the geometry of motion. In a ‘photon’, the ‘energy’ is the amount of vigor with which some material instrument used to detect EM physically oscillates its position. How wavy are the waves? By default we tend to anthropomorphize energy as a feeling of stimulation that leads to taking physical action, or with other aesthetic qualities like brightness, loudness, colorfulness, excitement, etc. These are qualities of conscious experience that have no place to exist inside of a physics equation. All that we can show of energy existing physically is that the way that matter appears to move itself around has a kind of economic rigor to it. We imagine a transaction that happens in a collision or absorption which changes when and how much matter moves. If we use a cosmology that assumes fundamental conscious experience, then legacy concepts like energy and photons can be collapsed into the universal dynamism of qualia. There doesn’t have to be a literal transfer of an energy from one object to another, it can just be a way of understanding how experiences influence each others qualities.

Further, I think that it is important to understand that conceiving of qualia as bundles or other topological appearances adds another layer of qualia in between the appearance of something like a brain and the appearance of something like the flavor ‘sweet’. While I agree that it might prove useful to have this layer of non-physical or pseudo-physical geometry as part of our neuroscience, it may create more problems than it solves. In my cosmopsychist view, there is nothing but qualia, so there is no backdrop of emptiness within which qualia have to bundle together. The rainbow doesn’t need to be built by adding colors in sequence. All qualia may instead already be part of one eternal, universal bundle, so that the parsing into localized and temporalized conscious experiences may be accomplished through the modulation of relative *insensitivity*. I call this Diffractivity. Our experience is a filtered or diffracted subset of ‘the’ experience, rather than a group of isolated pieces of experience adding up to a larger sense of self and world that has experiences. The self and world are already qualia. Any exotic topology or emergent property of physics would also be qualia. If we are not talking about nothingness, then we are talking about qualia or hypothetical qualia, whether we acknowledge it or not.

As the video continues, I agree with Andrés explanation of qualia as having simpler manifestations that are like pixels of sensation (I would say they are just sensations) rather than arising out of a computational loop of representation. By 9:25, Joscha deflects this possibility by appealing to the topic of word definitions. By saying “I think we need further translation to understand each other um typically avoid the word qualia because it’s a concept that has been developed by a number of competing philosophers…”, JB is trying to sideline idealistic arguments by forcing the language to cede to physicalist assumptions. While it is true that some philosophers think of qualia as intrinsically subjective, there is no logical entailment that they must be. Andrés has already pointed out that many states of consciousness do not include any sense of self and that qualia appear to persist independently of that. If that is true, then Joscha’s stance of qualia as a representational language of a program that exists to give a body predictive mechanisms would be undermined. Instead of considering that possibility, Joscha tries to disqualify the term qualia, but without offering any replacement (appearance? aesthetic presentation? quality of experience? I can think of several). The appearances disappear, leaving only mechanisms that have no use for any such thing as appearance.

JB continues, saying after 10:26 that qualia are: “…basically features of an embedding space projected into an observer and the Observer responds as a model of what it would be like if something would experience that“. This is a circular reasoning fallacy that both questions qualia and assumes them. How would an embedding space (set of possible chunks of computational permutation) have any other ‘features’? How could these features become aesthetic presentations like sights and sounds rather than the anesthetic mechanical functions that computation is presumed to sustain? “If something would experience that” doesn’t mean anything unless we are already assuming experience. A computation is exactly the same whether it is ‘experienced’ by “something” (what?) or not.

17:46  Andrés says “I suspect is happening that tetrachromats don’t actually have like additional color qualia they just have kind of like…”. Yes I have confirmed that with a tetrachromat who I know. She says that what she experiences are finer shade distinctions than trichromats, but there is no new primary color that would correspond to the extra cone cell sensitivity. She still sees the same color wheel as trichromats do, there are just many more precise hues as well as more evocative, poetic dimension to each of them. She is also a synesthete so her experience may not pertain to tetrachromacy only, or tetrachromacy may always present with a degree of synesthesia…which would be a great area for further research. Joscha’s assumption that tetrachromats must have another primary color dimension but lack a name for it is false, according to what I was told by a tetrachromat. There is no color that she sees that is invisible to trichromats, there is only richer qualitative significance of what visible to trichromats (RGB, CYMK).

By 20:12, JB floats an idea that I do not think can be supported rationally or empirically. He says “It seems to me that a color is a mathematical object and you can describe it by an intensity and an angle”. No. This is false. Mathematical objects can be described with in intensity and angle without them suddenly becoming visible colors. No amount of math or software can replace a video screen or other hardware to drive our experiences of seeing color. Angle is a completely different quale from color that can and does exist independently of sight or color vision, but it cannot exist independently of some sense experience of shape (either tactile or visible). Here Joscha is letting his certainty in physicalism and computationalism bleed into disinformation. Color cannot be conflated with colorless properties, even if we imagine those colorless properties to be causally responsible (in some unexplained way) for their color appearance. We cannot see a new color just by arranging neural oscillator intensities and angles into a higher dimensional address space.

He goes on to point out the similarity between the mathematical structure of the address space of sound and color, and of melodies and emotion, and I agree that cross modal perceptual isomorphism is an important clue to a common context of origination, but there is no reason to jump to the conclusion that such a common context could be exclusively mathematical. There is no reason for mathematical objects to be ‘encoded’, or if they are, there is no reason why the physical structures and movements of particles would not already constitute the sole encoding. Joscha offers no bridge between mathematics and appearances. To the contrary, his view implies that there is no purpose for appearances at all, and that sounds, sights, melodies and emotions should all just be unexperienced quantities of neural oscillations that are extracted from other unexperienced quantities of neural, physiological, or physical oscillations. Angle alone doesn’t account for the qualitative difference between Red, Yellow, Green and Blue. If it were about angle then we would expect Green to just be a Redder shade of Red, or brighter shade of White. I call these quantitatively unpredictable appearances of dramatically contrasting appearances within a given palette of qualia “The Genius of Palette”.

I did listen through to the end of the, but the discussion focused mainly on neuroscientific particulars of how human brains might process on different layers that influence each other, and how these functions can explain some of the changes experienced as psychedelic effects. These are parts of the ‘Easy Problem’ that are interesting, but to me ultimately distract from the more profound Hard Problems of consciousness and qualia. There is nothing about what a brain or sets of neurons physically do that would physically cause any such thing as a conscious experience or sense appearance. Likewise there is nothing about a set of logical or mathematical programs/procedures/algorithms that would logically cause any such thing as a conscious experience or sense appearance. If we assume that conscious experience exists, then changes in brain or neuron activity, or in mathematical abstractions of that activity can be correlated with changes in experience, but it is clearly a mistake to try to disqualify the distinct reality of each appearance that is being correlated, as well as the capacity to correlate them. Like Dan Dennett’s efforts to explain away consciousness as a physicalist bag of tricks, so too does Joscha Bach try to use the same kinds of philosophical shortcuts to introduce a bias that is ultimately ideological in nature rather than truly scientific. In the end, every physicalist or computational argument derives from the same circular reasoning and is ultimately of the same nonsensical form: “Appearances aren’t really real, they just appear to appear.”