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Cone Cosmogony
The first image is from https://www.facebook.com/headexchange. The second has been modified to include the Multisense Realism model.
Specifically, “Me” has been removed from the center of the mandala and turned into part of the z axis. The center of the wheel is now Form-Function, and Now, indicating that consciousness is at its most pointillistic and fragmented. This would be the sharpest, most systematizing-autistic quality of consciousness, quantitative and reductionistic.*
The diameter of the circles corresponds to space or distance (really wavelength ratio/scale), so that the wheel represents a flat cross section of eternity. Time is the diagonal axis which is can be thought of as the z axis ‘deferred’. If our experience (feeling, thought, etc) extends from eternity to now as a qualitative spectrum (as symbolized by the chakra graphic), then ‘time’ is the interference pattern between eternal experience and fully public, discrete events.
The top of the cone is labeled eternity, although it is eternity in the sense of the eternal moment rather than a linear history of time. Eternity can also be called the Absolute, or God, Tao, Consciousness, Aesthetic Foundation, and many other names. Identifying with the Absolute while still in our body is the opposte end of the consciousness spectrum – the most colorful, florid, artistic-empathic-psychotic range of awareness.
* See previous posts on Imprinted Brain Theory and the Autistic-Psychotic spectrum.
Colorball Diagram Explained
420anorexorcist said: Can you please explain that?
Sure, thanks for asking!
The diagram is based on ideas from my reality theory, Multisense Realism. I have found that many of these ideas coincide with previous concepts in philosophy, but if I’m on the right track, then MSR offers a new and more complete integration of scientific observations and subjective reports.
To make it clearer, I have added a numbering scheme, with negative numbers on the Left or West side, and positive numbers on the East side or Orient. In addition to the version of the colorball diagram that has been posted, there will be another version in a future post which has the same schema but introduces some new terms which qualify the frame set by degree of aesthetic depth rather than kind.
Key I
Teleological-Absolute (+∞) :: Universal-Axiomatic (-∞)
Mytho-Poetic (+3) :: Geometric-Algebraic (-3)
Mental-Emotional (+2) :: Scientific-Mechanical (-2)
Sensory-Motive/Perceptual (+1) :: Electro-Magnetic/Relativistic (-1)
Proto-Aesthetic (+0) :: Quantum-Digital (-0)
Key II
Absolute (+∞) :: Anesthetic (-∞)
Entelethetic (+3) :: Hypothetic (-3)
Aesthetic (+2) :: Exthetic (-2)
Immediate (+1) :: Etheric (-1)
Protosthetic (+0) :: Pseudethetic (-0)
There are a lot of other diagrams that I have done as collages or graphs, but what I was trying to do here is to give a sense of these ranges of aesthetic (sensed, felt, appreciated) qualities as a spherical-banded on one side and flat-concentric on the other. The idea of making the experiential side spherical is that it represents that given the assumption of Pansensitivity that MSR makes, the totality of experience is the largest possibility. The total of all experiences throughout eternity (assuming nested relativistic time frequencies) dwarfs all possible sets of phenomena or structures within that possibility.
It’s a big idea that gets discussed on the website in more detail. Suffice to say, the universe of conscious experience is being compared to a big colorful ball, but has only its surface to express some view of eternity. Thinking of the numbers of the Keys above, the higher the positive integer, the more translucent the surface becomes and the more of what might be called the genius of eternity (the most illuminated views of the past and all future potentials) is illuminated at once. The lower the number, the more opaque and reflective the surface becomes, so that individual sensations ground awareness in the immediacy of the moment.
The negative numbers can be thought of as ignoring the depth and surface of the sphere completely, but adding structure and realism by cutting across the interior. Unlike direct awareness, the power of math and science to help us infer what we cannot see for ourselves is timeless in an entirely different way. The universe of science is the orthogonal cross section of the universe of feeling and experience, so that its formula and theorems emerge from reading between the cracks of experience. The scientific mind tries to subtract themselves out of the picture, to create a perfect experimental vacuum for impartial, unbiased truth. What the Western side lacks in vitality and wisdom, it makes up for with knowledge and intelligence. The concentric circles also represent the way that the most extreme physical conditions (quantum, astrophysics) share the same forces but differ from the kinds of phenomena found in mid-sized, macroscopic scales (medicine, agriculture).
Monochord
On the East side of the colorball, the prismatic banding emphasizes a loose hierarchy of what could be called aesthetic prestige. Besides just modulating how much of the eternal experience can come to the surface of awareness, there nature of privacy is such that there is a hierarchy significance. Even if we wanted to, it would be hard to take the life of a flea or dandelion to be as interesting or important as a person. Each band signifies a ‘leveling up’ or ascending within the totality of awareness. There is a ton of legitimate and flaky stuff out there about this kind of thing of course (Ken Wilber’s work has extensive correlations of these kinds of systems) so I try not to dwell on what its about, but generally, my system tries to simplify and science-ify the whole thing, so that it does seem as likely to relate only to the experiences of human beings.
Roughly mapping to the Chakra system and other monochord designs, the journey of improving sense can be compared to language. The basic unit would be phenomena in the orange Sensory-Motive (+1) range and can be compared to [letters or syllables] in a word. These would be raw sensations and sensory qualities, aka the root nature of qualia.
Going up the ranks, the yellow Mental-Emotional (+2) range would be like [words and paragraphs] to the +1 [letters and syllables]. This level is the garden variety waking state of mind for most people. Getting things done, thinking, and being a person. It’s the range we could call Natural and Aesthetic.
When consciousness becomes so elevated that realism begins to become transparent, past and future mingle and the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The Mytho-Poetic (+3) band corresponds to ideas like the collective unconscious and archetypes, but also just regular old imagination and fictional stories. This level would correspond to [paragraphs and stories], and it is super-personal in the sense of it reaches for the heroic and divine. It is also cultural and prophetic, psychedelic, delusional. etc. As the integer increases and the surface becomes more illuminated, the interconnectedness of things is revealed as metaphor and coincidence.
The monochord can be thought of as a logarithmic scale of relative time as well. The ‘now’ of a sensation can be less than a second, but to think and feel like a person in the world requires a larger ‘now’, of hours. The Mytho-Poetic seems supernatural to us because I think that it represents our sensitivity into the larger now of weeks, years, and lifetimes. Under heightened conditions of consciousness, it is common to experience the feeling that time has stopped, whereas under sedative or narcotic masking of consciousness, time can seem to be lost or forgotten. Because higher consciousness dilates experienced time, high states can be visionary and far-sighted, or just ‘far-out’. The Mytho-Poetic level is notoriously ambiguous and deceptive, possibly because because we are glimpsing experiences which are, from our local perspective, still half-baked.
The Teleological-Absolute (+∞) can be God, if we prefer a Western metaphor. In that case it would correspond to the [author or artist] writing the stories, that are made of words, that are made of letters.Teleological = Top Down, like I am writing this from a single intention which cascades down through my wording mind, through the finger-tapping keys and the bit-byte-ing computer hardware that we share.
If, like me, you don’t resonate so much with an anthropomorphic God, the Totality can be the Absolute inertial frame instead, and the authors and artists are themselves written by the art – by sense itself. It sounds crazy, but it makes sense to me as a next step after ‘We are spiritual beings having a human experience’ to just say, ‘we are a human experience’. I call this Primordial Identity Pansensitivity.There are many concepts within Eastern philosophy and Western mysticism which reflect this kind of non-deity generator of everythingness, but I think that it is important that we understand this as physics – the physics of privacy.
If the East side is about time and experience, the West side is about scales of space and experiences in which we deduce and infer hidden patterns which explain our experience. This is Science rather than Art, and Science begins in the opposite way as the Teleological Absolute – it begins with a blank slate…or does it? The universe of space is based on laws which are taken to be axiomatic. The Universal-Axiomatic (-∞) means that when we want to get real and we have to stop looking for metaphysical truths, and instead accept that ‘stuff exists’, including laws which guide and propagate changes in the cosmos.
The Geometric-Algebraic (-3) range is the most ancient range of the Western thesis. Classical mathematics and philosophy are inseparable, and like the +3 Mytho-Poetic, range that it opposes, it has to do with perfection. Where the +3 phenomena are perfectly actualized expressions of timeless themes and characters, the -3 phenomena are elegant in their purity. This is not sense for the sake of sensation, but sense-making for the sake of permanence. +3 has its dragons and goddesses, but -3 has Pi, and Euler’s Identity, hypoteneuse, etc.
As Geometry and Algebra become more sophisticated, Trigonometry and Calculus ushered in the Enlightenment Era and modernism in science. The Scientific-Mechanical (-2) level splits Science from Philosophy, with Descartes, Copernicus, Leibniz and Newton, among others building on Renaissance advances since Galileo. The Reformation echoes the philosophical break, with top-heavy Roman Catholicism and angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin Scholasticism yielding to the rise of classical mechanics, empiricism and the industrial revolution.
From the work of scientists like James Clerk Maxwell and Marie Curie, the nature of Electro-Magnetic/Relativistic (-1) phenomena was brought to light. The electric era, followed by the radio, atomic, and electronic era tap into an invisible, etheric layer of structure. Unlike any of the previous conceptual models based on forms and volumes, the pervasiveness of vibrations and waves constructed only of frequencies and wavelengths is, in my opinion, the correlate to +1 Sensory-Motor/Perceptual phenomena, and I think that there is a lot of indication that this could be true, given the utility that neuroscience has found in electromagnetic access to the brain.
Finally, the Quantum-Digital (-0) level, picking up where Einstein left off, is giving us a taste of an information-theoretic universe. The heroes of Quantum Theory include Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Feynman, etc as well as Turing, Shannon, Bateson, and many others for introducing a probabilistic Wonderland in which reality can only be calculated, but not understood. Each of these levels deserves a dissertation, and then another set of dissertations about how they all relate. Hopefully that is enough to give anyone who has stuck with it this far a taste of that this is all about.
*+0 is rounded off, but it would really be +0.00…1, since absolute zero is impossible under MSR. Same with -0.00…1; rounded off here to -0.
Simpler Format
This latest chart improves on previous versions, hopefully simplifying and clarifying without losing anything important.
Note the comments in parentheses are critical for those who do not understand the basic premise of Pansensitvity, which is that sense* is the Primordial Identity and therefore cannot be truly absent**.
Logic is listed as Indirect Sense, emphasizing that in fact logic relies on local sensation and sense-making but is mediated through distance; rationally or empirically + rationally, experience can be conditioned and refined by observation, deduction, measurement etc. Rationality, like ratio, is always a comparison between known features – a reading between the lines of fact to arrive at a more universal and conclusive truth.
Logic then is sense making which is theoretically independent of sense. It reaches for evidence and what is evidence through the evidence, but it can never be manifested directly without being clothed in some sensible aesthetic. The great mistake of our era, in my opinion, is the failure to recognize and accept this, preferring, as people have done since Plato and beyond, to conceive of a perfect nature beyond sense. A landless land of formless forms, working its magic from behind the scenes. In my view, the key to understanding why this is unlikely is to understand that the possibility of pattern recognition must precede the constellation of the first pattern. That capacity for recognition, that sense, can in theory be other things, feel other ways than as a pattern. It doesn’t need to be coherent, or rational, or subjective or objective, it only needs to participate in making and appreciating aesthetic phenomena. From there, order and forms can follow, but order and forms can’t in and of themselves, invent the sense that they are composed of.
The numbers seem like a good addition also. The 1 row is the the basic unit, so the physical unit is Electro-Magnetic Dynamism and the phenomenal unit is Sensory-Motive Presence. The E-M unit is the Logical equivalent, i.e., it is dependent on Sensory Motive presence and does not exist independently. There was matter around even before biology evolved, but I think only because what we call molecules are, within their own inertial frame, nothing but sensations. The repetition and significance of sensations gave rise to time, not the other way around. There can be no such thing as unconscious particles in a void. That is mistaking the inferences of logic about structure for concrete sensory presentations. Voids in a void unseen by a void-seer is a failed cosmology in my view.
The 0 row is such a void. The digital underpinnings of inference technologies like statistical analysis and computation, allow us to construct artificial aesthetics and prosthetic powers to amplify our motives. My conjecture that the entire subatomic substrate may be in some sense theoretical, or gradually evanescent into inference can seem like a huge red flag for crackpottery, and it could be, but my hunch is that everyone is wrong and I’m right :).
By this I mean that literally atoms are slightly less real than molecules, and sub-atomic particles are perhaps exponentially less real. Because we are pushing the envelope of our own range of participation in the cosmos, our measurements increasingly feed back on themselves, and we are actually doing surgery on the scalpel that we forgot we are using. Ok, that sounds insane, but if you add up everything that we have observed about quantum mechanics – the uncertainty, the entanglement, the particle-wave ambiguity…it is not out of the question that what we are looking at is that the nature of light is actually seeing itself. Again, not human seeing, but molecular seeing, astrophysical seeing…light is sensitivity. That’s why it has an absolute speed in every frame of reference, and why there are reference frames in the first place.
The Row 2 level is where we live most of the time. We feel like a private person in a body which is a form in a world of forms. Can we all agree that most of us feel like that most of the time when we are awake? Waking up, gaining consciousness (or more consciousness) seems to bring us back to where we left off in our world – our public world. The private “world” is ok as a metaphor, but does it really seem like a world, or does it seem more like a fugue of intentions and distractions – of performances and rehearsals. It’s not a world so much as it is a story that you are co-writing with a partner who might not exist. Maybe that’s just me?
Row 3 is not only higher on the scale, in the sense of a higher frequency, but higher in the sense of being logarithmic to Row 2. Unlike the Row 0 logic of computation, the Geometric-Algebraic level is equivalent to poetry – it has deep and austere mathematical elegance. Topological forms tie out to Algebraic functions. Perfection is revealed conceptually and with purity that can be demonstrated visibly. You can see the sacredness of sacred geometry, and you can prove the significance of algebra factually. On the ‘East side’ of Row 3 is the equal but opposite aesthetic channel of the mytho-poetic. The counterpoint to masculine mathematical ideal space/world is the floridly eidetic, feminine story. The collective unconscious is a cast of characters, ever changing, but, like strange attractors, chaotically repeating themselves…or else they remain fixed as archetypes and repeat the universe around them chaotically, depending on your frame of reference.
The top row contrasts the West side’s ultimate faith in meaningless knowledge with the East side’s faith in unknown meaning. The supreme irony here is that for all of science’s focus on certainty and skepticism, it’s roots emerge directly from the void. Quantum mechanics represents the ultimate triumph of certainty about uncertainty – a final gasp of human reason before sinking into its own self-negation. QM is the reverse of machina ex deus, or a savior of senselessness, ensuring that the futility of all feelings and even ideas and understanding is a fact, and that mathematical fact is all that there can ever be. The irony on the Spiritual side is that for all the praising of God or Spirit, the identity is a question mark. All of the deep meanings that can be derived from worshiping and communing with the divine gives us almost nothing that we can count on other than faith itself. All of the worlds holy scriptures and prophecies have nothing to say about refrigeration or radio broadcasting. If the spirit is eternally full, it is mainly full of advertisements for itself…which turns out to be the bootstrap that science needs to plug in to its cosmology instead of the ‘fertile void’ concept it has fixated on at the moment.
*sense is the full spectrum of sensation, emotion, participation, appreciation, meaning, but not limited to humans, living organisms, minds, or selves. Pansensitivity is the capacity to present and be present, to experience, project, and represent experience.
**Nothingness can only be an abstraction conceived a posteriori of the existence of something which can conceive of absence. There cannot be a priori nothingness, because the potential to change into something else is not nothing. Nothing at all can come from absolutely nothing, so even if such a nothing were to non-exist, we could never contact it in any way.
I/O w/o O/I
A little note on the difference between Gods and Monsters. As ever, I return to the symmetry of the continuum, where we find the far end to seem unfeeling and unnatural. The monster is driven by relentless urges. It is all Output and no Input. Insensitive power, and the power of the insensitive. All that is mindless or heartless and artificial can be mythologized as monstrous. A freak of nature, or a Frankensteinian attempt to transcend nature.
If the monster is an embodied urge, then a god is the opposite; a disembodied personality whose output is that of unbounded teleos. The spirit world is supernatural and all knowing. There can be a god of faith, which receives prayer and devotion as Input, but whose Output is only indirect as signs, miracles, and other synchronistic effects. The supernatural emerges from the seemingly unexplainable unfolding of events and conditions or projection of reasoned intention. The power of the supernatural is figurative and must be inferred by genuine belief. It has no motive power of its own and must borrow that of individuals to worship and serve, whether out of hope and gratitude or fear and dread.
This relates to a conversation about information vs sensation, where I tried, as ever, to make the case for sense as the progenitor of all phenomena, including information-theoretic phenomena. I thought that a straightforward way of understanding this is that turning on a computer or turning the gears of a machine is not substitutable. There can be no symbolic code which has an effect to stop or start a Turing machine, except virtually. Software cannot turn on its own hardware once it has been turned off completely. This comes up a lot in managing server farms at data centers. If you remote into a server and accidentally shut it down rather than reboot. You may have to make a call to someone to physically walk down to your cage and push the button to turn it back on. Even if you’ve got layers of fault tolerance built in, with power switches that can be remotely controlled, it is still inevitable to find yourself calling for a manual reset when that software fails.
This is what I think distinguishes the sensory-motive from input/output. I/O can be virtual – it designates a flow of information in a theoretical topology, but sense must always be literally present at the lowest and most fundamental level of the universe. It can only be a uniquely experienced event which occupies a fixed spacetime coordinate relative to all experiences in the history of the universe. It cannot be simulated or emergent from code. Without genuine sense, the motive power of mechanical output is a monster or zombie. Blind automation. Without genuine motive, an aesthetic sense is bound to the mytho-poetic realm of fiction or psychic intuition.
Multisense Realism 
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