“phenomenology is in much the same epistemological relationship to its own subject matter as descriptive (i.e.‘phenomenological’) physics or biology are to physical and biological reality”
Any description necessarily exists first as a language artifact (Let’s call that quale 1, so L = Q1) that is interpreted intellectually (I = Q2) to refer our thinking (T = Q3) about some percept (P = Q4). The referential nature of thinking makes it a specialized type of sense modality that participates in semiosis. To think about the sky is (thinking(sky)), a specific example of (accessing concepts(percepts)).
A description of the sky is thinking about (language(concepts(percepts)), where language itself is (percepts(concepts)). So a description of the sky is a perception of language (written or verbal sense appearances – graphic or phonetic qualia) that refers us to our shareable thoughts about experiences of the sky…including sights, memories, associations, knowledge and communications of all of those from other people and texts.
To the extent that descriptions/language, thoughts, and thoughts-about experiences are different from each other, the difference is in the category of qualia or type of aesthetic presentation. A word is an appearance in the sense modality of sight or sound which can be paired to thoughts in the sense-making modality that I call cogitative. Cogitative qualia are thoughts, communication, understanding, and learning. Words, including descriptions are paired qualia such that experiences of certain visible or aural qualia can be cogitatively connected to (understood to mean) communicable thoughts-about X, where X is percepts (includes concepts and objects).
To the extent that descriptions/language, thoughts, and thoughts-about experiences are the same, the unity is in the continuity of the local experience across multiple modalities of sense and sense-making. This sentence is different from the previous sentence, but both sentences appear within the same larger experience of this written response.
All of this to say that I agree that in one sense phenomenology is like biology or physics in that it is descriptions of thoughts-about X, but I disagree in another sense because in the case of phenomenology, X is the entire category of percepts-that-appear directly-in-local-experience (X(L(E))) as well as percepts that are received indirectly into local experience from non-local experience ((X(L(E)(NL(E))), such as philosophical texts.
Unlike in physics, where I can never touch a distant planet to verify that it indeed feels like a tangible object, phenomenological discourse can point out that experiences of touching objects exist. Further, I can understand that my direct experience of touching objects means that I have experiences of sensitivity to experiences of tangible qualities. Those two understandings – that I access direct experiences of touching objects and that this means I have access to a tactile-haptic modality of tangibility, which is the sense modality or aesthetic context of tangible textures and sensations – cannot be denied or disqualified from reality. All experiences are real experiences by definition.
Whether in a dream or waking experience, picking up a baseball is presented as a tactile-haptic percept. Physical or biological descriptions, however, are one or more steps removed from certain reality. A point of bright light that we see in the morning sky may be a visible image associated with a distant object, and that distant object may be the planet Phosphorus. A point of bright light that we see in the evening sky may be a visible image associated with the planet Hesperus. We can use measurements and reasoning to further understand that Phosphorus and Hesperus are actually different names for a single planet called Venus. Venus experienced as a visible image from Earth at two different times of day are different experiences with different aesthetic qualities, even though we understand that they are images associated with a single planetary object in outer space.
Even though astronomers are quite certain in 2026, that Venus appears to be a planet in our solar system, astrologers propose that planets appearing in the sky, while being tangible objects in public space, are also like parts of a celestial clock in which cyclically repeating patterns of archetypal themes are expressed individually, socially, and collectively in conscious experience. To an astrologer, the significance of Venus is not its chemical composition, atmosphere, etc but its association with metaphors for themes of social pleasures, personal attraction, sensuality, receiving gifts or nutrition, etc.
The point that I’m getting to is that astrology and astronomy have more in common with each other than phenomenology has with any other discipline. Phenomenology, while including more than only the direct experience (X(L(E))), even the non-local ((X(L(E)(NL(E))) experiences relate specifically to local experience. Disciplines like astronomy, astrology and astrophysics relate specifically to non local experiences that may or may not exist in the way that they are interpreted or perceived locally. They may not exist physically at all. Dark energy for example, may exist only as a scientific concept and not as a tangible phenomenon that influences the motion of tangible objects in outer space. Roden’s claim that “phenomenology cannot tell us what phenomenology is really ‘about’” is therefore false. Phenomenology is about local experience, and local experience necessarily exists. Physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics etc tell us about how local experience relates to non-local experiences that may or may not exist.
Another claim: “the domain of phenomenology is not the province of a self-standing, autonomous discipline but must be investigated with any empirically fruitful techniques that are open to us (e.g. computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, etc.).” is a partial non-sequitur. It is true that talking about local experience with each other can assist us in understanding it, it can also increase confusion and misunderstanding. This is doubly true in the case of talking about neurology and computation. It may assist our understanding, or it may lead our understanding completely astray.
The concluding claim “Finally, it entails that while a naturalized phenomenology should be retained as a descriptive, empirical method, it should not be accorded transcendental authority.” takes the partial truth that non-local experience can sometimes help us understand local experience and inflates it to a proscription that is actually deceptive. It implies that local experiences of tangible objects (such as brains and technological devices we use as computers) should be accorded authority that can transcend that of local experience – even when the topic being authorized is local experience. In my view, this is misguided.
The honest application of authority over matters of local experience belongs to local experience itself. That is not to say that non-local experience cannot add to and deepen our understanding of local experience, but it should never transcend it completely. Whether the light we see in the sky is associated with the hypothetical planet Hesperus or the measured, photographed planet Venus or astrological archetype Venus changes nothing about the original fact of the visible appearance of a point of light in the sky. Phenomenology should always and only refer to that original fact and not be recontextualized by non-local experiences inferred through physical instruments, logical measurements, scientific reasoning, etc. Aesthetic qualia should not be disqualified and replaced by concepts of anesthetic properties, regardless of whether those properties happen to also exist aesthetically or not.
Moving on to the Introduction section of the paper:
“Naturalists think that human knowledge is the product of fallible animals whose biology does not equip them to reliably track the structure of reality”
This makes me wonder if naturalists subject themselves to this same judgment. If naturalists are humans, then their biology too does not equip them to reliably track the structure of the reality even of naturalism. It’s the same mistake as above – failing to recognize that the grounding of all experience is experience itself, not the specific experiences of measuring and analyzing certain features of certain experiences and applying them to nature in general.
“They regard earlier attempts to carve out foundational truth claims secure from revision by the findings of science, history and observation as conspicuous failures, for they misinterpret anthropological facts about how we are disposed to think as necessary truths”
But how do they know that their contemporary attempts to disqualify previous claims in that way are not also misinterpretations based on their own fallible biases and assumptions? Once we introduce epistemological doubt into local experience itself, how can we place our own sophisticated non-local extensions to local experience above local experience in matters that should pertain only to local experience? Naturalists are, to borrow a trope, sawing off the branch that they are sitting on.
” James Ladyman and Don Ross remark ‘Naturalism is, among other things, the metaphysical hypothesis that the objective world is not constrained by any reasons or standards of reasonableness’.”
How can that be considered scientific? It seems like a reasonable-sounding way of giving open ended authority to unreasonable conclusions. Reason cannot negate itself or it was never reason in the first place.
“For example, speculations about the physical basis of conscious experience are frequently held to be irrelevant to describing ‘how it feels’”
The language here telegraphs an injection of naturalism. To use the phrase “how it feels” opens the door to an entity outside of feeling where none may exist. The feeling is presented directly. Any other associations with physical appearances in other sense modalities such as touch, sight, or cogitation are different perceptions…different ways of ‘feeling’ that exist in parallel rather than as a rationally or empirically necessary consequence of each other.
Let’s say that we feel our mood become more euphoric. The phenomenologist accepts that fact on its face, while the naturalist may begin by saying that this mood change is caused by a release of dopamine in the brain (somehow), and then further extrapolate euphoria as ‘simply how dopamine feels in the brain’.
In the final disqualification, the naturalist feels that the authority of objectively measurable work on dopamine transcends merely subjective reports of feeling euphoric altogether and that ‘how dopamine feels’ is an ’emergent property’ (somehow) of neurochemistry, or worse, an ‘illusion’ that needs no scientific explanation and is irrelevant to our understanding of nature. In a sense, the defense of naturalism in Roden’s paper attempts to do the same thing to phenomenology as a whole. It is to legitimize the position that naturalism is justified in treating phenomenology as a possibly illusory study of illusions mistaken for transcendental facts of nature.
“The closure assumption implies that a neural network model explaining how our experience of time is generated could throw no light on what that experience is like”
It’s not that a neural network model can’t throw light onto the nature of experience; it is that it can only add additional associations to the experience, not replace the fact of the local experience with the hypothesis of another non-local experience. In addition, the use of the idiom “what (that experience) is like” opens the same door to a chain of disqualification as “how it feels” with the implication of a separate ‘it’ that ‘is’ (really) what feeling refers to. If we apply the same language to physics, for example, we would say that energy is what part of an equation “is like”, or “how it feels for matter moving against inertial forces”. Naturalism just as easily disqualify itself as a branch of phenomenology about a branch of mistakenly objectified phenomenology (natural science).
I did not intend to go through each sentence of this paper with a fine-toothed comb, but it seems necessary to point out the instances where language is loaded with subtle bias. Continuing here…
“These can be phenomenologically described by suspending ordinary assumptions about the mind-independent existence of objects and directing attention to how we are aware of objects as mind independent.”
I object here to the use of the term ‘ordinary’. For most people in most places in human history, there was nothing ordinary about assuming that anything in the natural world was mind-independent. Animism and shamanism are common examples of ordinary views of nature for thousands of years. Events in the natural world were treated as expressions of supernatural influence: the will of God/gods, or a reflection of a universe that is cosmopsychist rather than mind-independent.
It is only the more recently developed Western ideologies of dualism and physicalism that assume the possibility of mind-independent phenomena, which are assumed to include objects. On closer inspection however, even the assumption of mind-independence applies only to the subset of objects perceived during waking states of conscious experience and not to dreams or visions.
Even under physicalism, objects that are mind-dependent are quite ordinary, it’s just that physicalism assumes that waking states of consciousness acquaint us more directly with reality than dreaming does. Because of this, we can truthfully say that 1) even the assumption of mind-independence is certainly mind-dependent, and 2) the possibility of mind-independence is forever hypothetical.
Contemporary naturalism seems to place its descriptions and reasoning outside of both phenomenology and anthropology, as if it were an immaculate conduit to facts independent of all means of fact acquisition (sense and sense-making in conscious experience).
“One form of this is that phenomenological claims don’t have to be scientifically or theoretically-informed as long as the things they describe are pre-theoretically or ‘intuitively’ given to the conscious subject.”
Here I take issue with the false equivalence of pre-theoretic claims with intuition. Intuition is only one form of perception. The color blue is a pre-theoretic visible appearance, but blue is not intuitive, nor is the claim of seeing blue intuitive. Blue is presented directly – not necessarily only to a ‘subject’ but perhaps in visibility itself.
While typical states of human consciousness include a sense of separation between private and public facing perceptions, some states of consciousness include no such strong boundary. It is possible to see a blue shape without also experiencing a sense of subjectivity or being a private self. There is no convincing reason to presume that visible qualia such as color are any more closely associated with subjectivity or intuition than intellectual qualia such as arithmetic. My 2+3 could vary slightly from your 2+3 just as my green could vary from your green. The possibility of some subjective variation doesn’t make numbers or colors subjective. Naturalism is no less vulnerable to conflation with subjectivity and intuition than phenomenology. If it seems otherwise, that too is phenomenological/subjective/intuitive.
Moving on to the Raffman discussion, my view on qualia diverges from what is stated in the paper as the classic quale:
“The classic quale is a simple, intrinsically subjective, intuitable property of experience.”
Under my Multisense Realism (MSR) framework, qualia are aesthetic appearances of any kind. They are the minimal and maximal fabric of existence in all possible universes. Objectivity as well as subjectivity are classes of qualia, as is intuition and dark or non-intuitive presentations. In my determination, the idea of classic quale as stated by Roden derives from a history of idealistic philosophy that conflated conscious experience with subjectivity, the mind, thinking, or intuition.
In a true nondual, cosmopsychist framework, and specifically in MSR, qualia are glimpses of a single, eternal Totality of conscious experience. Intuition is different from thought, cogitation is different from sight, personal experience is different from subpersonal experience, etc, but all experience is irreducibly aesthetic regardless of whether particular aesthetic modalities are accessible in any given ‘tunnel’ or scope of participation/access to the Totality.
This part/whole relationship applies to several of the examples discussed in the paper. Visual graphs plotted from intellectual measurements using tangible acoustic instruments can be associated with aural qualia of hearing pitch or timbre, but that association can only be made from another type of experience that includes united access to separate specific visual, intellectual, tangible, and aural qualia.
Any isomorphism between a sound wave and sound is derived from cross-modal perception. Intellectually we can infer that the compelling nature of that isomorphism indicates an ontological commonality between acoustic pressure and aural qualia, however if we consider that aural qualia can and do exist in a dream without any correspondence to acoustic pressure, we should conclude that ontological commonality is possible rather than necessary.
Even though we call acoustic pressure fluctuations ‘sound waves’, deafness and dreams prove that the name is a folk term rather than an authoritative description. In an absolute sense, sound waves are not sound, nor do acoustic conditions and aural conditions necessarily depend on each other. Because we are using tangible instruments to measure tangible qualia, any reference to aural qualia is smuggled in by our inferences from our cross-modal perceptual access rather than naturalistic ontology. Synesthesia could associate acoustic stimulation of the cochlea with colors instead of sound. Music finds emotional qualia in acoustic stimulation.
By itself, neither acoustic activity nor the visual graphing of sampled data from measuring that activity with tangible instruments rationally entails any such thing as sound/hearing. Just as Mary can study the optical and electromagnetic properties associated with the color red without ever seeing it, a completely deaf scientist can study acoustics without any impairment. In the same way, no physical phenomena rationally entail *any* other phenomena to ’emerge’ or conjoin with it. A French painting is not a pipe, and sometimes a cigar in a dream is just a good smoke.
Touching on section 3. The Phenomenology of Time, Roden states that “Temporality is a central ingredient in most phenomenological accounts of reality or transcendence.”. While that may be true, in my understanding, such a centrality is premature and misguided. The Multisense Realist view is that what we call time is an appearance within certain states of consciousness, but that appearance is part of a larger continuum of time-like topologies of causality that can be accessed through different modalities of awareness and perception.
Linear time/causality appears in what I call the phoric range of awareness wherever personal sensations of duration are perceptually juxtaposed against what MSR calls morphic appearances. In other words, what Roden calls temporality is a phenomenological appearance that people access by repeated looking at a physical clock and inferring ontological unity with their personal experience of duration and memory. It is a semiotic bridge between the personal subject’s intrapersonal percepts and an interpersonally perceived consensus of impersonal objects.
The bridge is, however, one way. The clock is an object that we use to ‘tell time’. In our absence, the object does not tell or keep time; it simply moves according to the physical forces that happen to be present. Physical forces may be operating on larger scales of experience than human-limited awareness, so relative to subjective feelings of duration, objects whose movements are calibrated by impersonal scales of experience are more reliable and consistent, but that doesn’t mean they are any closer to an ontologically derived authority.
When we feel that ‘time flies when you’re having fun’, we may be expressing a sensitivity to the nature of ‘time’ that is more nuanced than a mechanical object can measure. In some sense, time may be nothing but a false normalization of events that overlooks the significance of those events. The significance of events may exert a kind of ‘gravitational’ lensing that is equally or perhaps more ontological than what we think we are measuring with clocks and calendars.
It isn’t ‘really’ 2026; we just have agreed to use a particular calendar system of quantitative coordinates to organize our interactions. The more ontological coordination may be generated by, for, and within a certain state of consciousness. Beyond that specific state of consciousness which is mapped on the diagram on the center left as Classical Time (Morphic, Metric), MSR suggests several other modes of time:
Phoric time (center right) that appears in our personal sense of duration within interiorized experience
Transpersonal or meta-phoric time (top right) that can appear in ‘higher*’ states of consciousness
Relativistic space-time (top left) that was described by Einstein’s theories.
Subpersonal-semaphoric time (bottom right) that centers on how willful participation fractures the fourth wall to change the course of history, and
Quantum-reversible time (bottom left) that is probabilistic and relies on what I call hemi-morphic appearances of quantum observations**
Note that there is an advantage to conceiving of this diagram in terms of East and West rather than Right and Left. The Eastern or Oriented perspective has philosophical connotations with holistic, nondualistic, animistic, idealistic and solipsistic appearances while the Western or Occidented perspective has the opposite-conjugate connotations in reductionism, dualism, physicalism, mechanism, and what I call nilipsism – the ablation of the Self from nature.
There is also a correlation with psychological theories that relate to what I call the continuum of sense, such as Autistic-Psychotic spectrum, Tough and Tender mindedness, Rigidity vs Chaos, Thick vs Thin boundaries, Empathizing-Systemizing, Right and Left hemisphere dominance, gender stereotypes, and more.
Moving on to the Husserl discussion…
“The very existence of the object is thus understood in terms of its transcendence of temporally informed modes of presentation. Temporally informed modes of presentation are thus conceptually prior in the order of philosophical explanations to what they present.”
Just because modes of presentation are *also* temporally informed does not mean that they are limited to temporality. I can see a blue fire hydrant get run over by a truck, but that doesn’t mean that sight is any more dependent on any particular moment in time than the fire hydrant is. The fire hydrant can only exist in some mode of presentation – it must be seen or touched to exist as a fire hydrant, but it doesn’t mean that everyone has to be able to see or touch it. We can understand that a fire hydrant can still be seen even after we’re dead, but that doesn’t mean that fire hydrants or images ‘of’ blue fire hydrants can exist in a universe that lacks visible or tangible qualia.
“In Husserlian terms, they belong to the constituted time of the world, rather than to the transcendentally constitutive features of subjectivity”
This goes back to the erroneous conflation of qualia with subjectivity that I mentioned previously. Time doesn’t have to belong to a mind-independent world; it only has to belong to states of mind that access experience beyond the personal scope to include impersonal scopes. “The world” and the sense of linear time are appearances in impersonal scopes of personally accessed conscious experience.
Roden’s conclusion “Phenomenological time is just a time among many, with no special epistemological heft.” is true also under MSR with the proviso that he is using ‘phenomenological’ to refer to phoric/personal appearances of time/causality. Because the other five categories of time depicted above are not personal but transpersonal, subpersonal, and impersonal (on the mega, macro, and micro scales), MSR agrees that linear time arises out of only one category of awareness relating to one other category of awareness with no absolute epistemological heft.
MSR disagrees that this lack of heft is due to the other categories being grounded in anything more ontological than conscious experience. To the contrary, ordinary Western adult consciousness very much assigns epistemological heft to consensus readings of clock time over the other categories of time perception. If phenomenological describes conscious experience that is universal rather than subjective, then all six types of time in the diagram are each epistemologically supreme within their respective states of awareness. The whole continuum of six-time is both ontologically and phenomenologically prioritized.
Phenomenology, at least in my MSR framework, need not be subjective. I shy away from using terms like phenomenology for that reason that they are loaded with connotations of subjectivity or interiority. I try to use terms that point to a more primitive ontology of nature as nested aesthetic-participatory phenomena. Call it universal qualia, call it dream stuff, call it appearances or seeming, but it is the fabric not only of the only universe that we can ever know, but of the only universe that ever can be known or contacted in any way.
Berkeley was right in saying esse est percipi but too presumptive in linking perception to a necessary focal point source outside of perception (a person, or God). Focal points, in my understanding, including God, can also only ever exist by virtue of their being perceived – presented aesthetically in an experience. Experience can be personal but that doesn’t mean that a person could be anything other than an experience. It’s all experience. Not even God can unconsciously invent consciousness.
“Perhaps I am making an elementary error in treating the temporal continuum as a complex object with a real infinity of occurrent parts”
I think that the error that most everyone has been making is presuming a single ontological scope of “Now” rather than recognizing that now can refer to a present experience on any scale. Now it is the 21st century. Now it is 13:59:35.593460376 PM EDT. Now it is time for me to write this sentence. Now the Sun and Earth exist as separate objects. It all depends on what scope of awareness is privileged. MSR addresses this kind of mereological ambiguity in what I call the Non-Well-Founded Identity Principle.
I won’t go into the details here, but generally, identity is a spectrum ranging from finite cohesive units to infinitely adhesive unity. How that spectrum is accessed depends on what modalities of awareness are available. The state of consciousness determines whether now is an infinitesimally narrow slice of an infinite object of occurrences or now is a timelessly timeful occurrence that has no beginning, end, or unitary law of succession – an unbounded totality of spontaneous dreaming of times.
I’ll conclude by saying that I liked David Roden’s work here, and while my disagreements with what it says are many, I think that they stem from a difference between his intention to engage with the canon of phenomenological philosophy and my intention to explain the ‘big picture’ of nature in a way that transcends prior phenomenological and naturalistic frameworks. Between the two, phenomenology at least correctly addresses conscious experience as the sole fundamental ontology, but it has gotten into trouble by conflating conscious experience with subjectivity, intuition, mind, thinking, and typical waking states of human awareness rather than the less presumptive description of conscious experience as MSR does: Nested aesthetic-participatory phenomena.
*more adhesive to the “Absolute” Holos/Totality, but also more psychotic-leaning from the phoric perspective
**where particle/wave and entanglement/contextuality dichotomies are an either/or.
An illustration based on the finer points of multisense realism. The combination of monochrome, spectral color, multiple scales of halftone, and the nested lensing of scales suggest the primacy of sense. It’s about the relation between different features of consciousness and how they diverge rather than emerge from the totality. The totality is masked into personal and impersonal levels of description, instead of assembled from simple parts.
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.
In order to make the question of philosophical zombiehood more palatable, it is a good idea to first reduce the scope of the question from consciousness in general to a particular kind of awareness, such as visual awareness or sight.
Building on this analogy, we can now say that an equivalent of a philosophical zombie (p-Zombie) as far as sight is concerned might be a person who is blind, but uses a seeing eye dog to ‘see’.
As with blindsight, there seeing eye dog provides a case where a person is informed about optical conditions in the world, but without the benefit of first person phenomenal experience of seeing. The blind person sees no visual qualia – no colors, no shapes, no brightness or contrast, yet from all appearances they may be indistinguishable from a sighted person who is walking their dog.
Staying with the analogy to consciousness in general:
(a p-Zombie) is to (a Blind person w/ guide dog)
as a
(Conscious subject) is to (a person walking dog)
Some might object to this analogy, saying that because a p-Zombie is defined as appearing and behaving in every way like a conscious subject, and a sighted person walking their dog might not always act the same as a blind person with a guide dog. It’s true, in the dark, the sighted person would be at a disadvantage avoiding obstacles in their path, while the blind person might not be affected.
This, however, is a red herring that arises from the hasty definition of philosophical zombie as one who appears identical in every way to a conscious subject, rather than one who can appear identical in many ways. Realistically, there may not even be a way to know whether there is any such thing as a set of ways that a conscious being behaves. A conscious being can pretend to be unconscious, so right away this is a problem that may not resolvable.
Each conscious being is different at different times, so that presuming that consciousness in general has a unique signature that can be verified is begging the question. Even if two simple things seemed to be identical for some period of time, there might be a chance that their behavior will diverge eventually, either by itself, or in response to some condition that brings out a latent difference.
So let’s forget about the strong formulation of p-Zombie and look instead at the more sensible weak formulation of w-Zombie as an unconscious object which can be reliably mistaken for a conscious subject under some set of conditions, for some audience, for some period of time.
By this w-Zombie standard, the guide dog’s owner makes a good example of how one system (blind person + sighted dog) can be functionally identical to another (sighted person + sighted dog), without any phenomenal property (blind person gaining sight) emerging. As with the Chinese Room, the resulting output of the room does not reflect an internal experience, and the separate functions which produce the output do not transfer their experience to the ‘system’ as a whole.
From the guide dog analogy, we can think about bringing the functionality of the dog ‘in house’. The dog can be a robot dog, which can then be miniaturized as a brain implant. In this way a blind person could have the functionality of a guide dog’s sight without seeing anything. It would be interesting to see how the recipient of such an implant’s brain would integrate the input from it. From neuroscientific studies that have been conducted so far, which shows that in blind people’s brains, tactile stimulation such as reading Braille, shows up in the visual cortex. I would expect that the on-board seeing-eye dog would similarly show up, at least in part, in the regions of the brain normally associated with vision, so that we have a proof of concept of a w-Zombie. If we had separate digitized animals to handle each of our senses, we could theoretically create an object which behaves enough like a human subject, even within the brain, that it would qualify as a weak p-Zombie.
As a final note, we can apply this understanding to the oft misquoted philosophical saw ‘If a tree falls in a forest…’. Instead of asking whether a sound exists without anyone to hear it, we can reverse it and ask whether someone who is awakened from a dream of a tree falling in the forest which nobody else heard, was there a sound?
The answer has to be yes. The subjective experience of a sound was still experienced even though there is no other evidence of it. In the same way, we can dream of seeing sunlight without our eyes receiving photons from the sun. We can say that seeing light or hearing sound does not require a concurrent physical stimulation but we cannot say that physics requires any such qualia as seeing light or hearing sound. To the contrary, we have shown above that there is no empirical support for the idea that physical functions could or would automatically generate qualia.Thus, the case for materialism and functionalism is proved in the negative, and the fallacy of the systems reply to Searle is revealed.
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear.
And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon. – Pink Floyd
My hypothesis is this: The conscious, subconscious, (and super-conscious) *are* you already. Simultaneity is relative and supervenes on perception. The subconscious (I call sub-personal) generally relates to a smaller, faster inertial frame. Sub-personal impulses are experienced as urges and relate generally to the reality of the body. It is a very small “now”, in the range of microseconds to minutes.
The super-personal or transpersonal feelings are meta-phoric. The root ‘phor’ as in euphoric or ‘fer’ as in ‘confer’, ‘infer’, etc means to carry – to ferry something from one place to another. Metaphor then is to carry over, to jump from one semantic context to another. Just as a symbol or fable can work on multiple levels at once, our conscious personal experience is both rooted in larger ‘nows’ which range in days, weeks, and lifetimes and the sub-personal/microphysical instant.
As human beings, we have a tall window of awareness that extends between the now that is microscopic and the now that is eternal. Confusion sets in when we try to define one in terms of the other. Our expectation that we would not be ‘spoken to’ at the same time is itself a prejudice of the conscious range of awareness.
In the first diagram, I’m trying to show the relation between public and private physics, and how the aperture of consciousness modulates which range is emphasized. Contrary to the folk model of time that we currently use, multisense realism proposes that time is only conceivable from the perspective of a experiential narrative. Time cannot be translated literally into the public range of experience, only inferred figuratively by comparing the positions of objects.
Through general relativity, we can understand spacetime as a single entity defined by gravity and acceleration – to quote Einstein, a
“non-rigid reference-body, which might appropriately be termed a “reference-mollusk,” is in the main equivalent to a Gaussian four-dimensional co-ordinate system chosen arbitrarily”.
While space and time can indeed be modeled that way successfully, what has been overlooked is the opportunity to see another profoundly fundamental symmetry. What GR does is to spatialize time. This is a great boon to physics since physics has focused exclusively on public phenomena (for good reason, initially), GR has enabled accurate computations on astronomical scales, taught us how to make cell phone networks work on a global scale, send satellites into orbit, etc. Einstein accomplished this by collapsing the subjective experience of time passing (which can change depending on how you feel about what’s going on) into a one dimensional vector of ‘observation’. Not any special kind of observation, just a point of reference without aesthetic dimensions of feeling, hearing, tasting – only a generic sense of position and acceleration. This is the public perspective of privacy, i.e. not private at all, but a footprint which points to the privacy which has been overlooked but assumed.
This is great for modeling some aspects of public phenomena, but in reality, there is no actual public perspective that we can conceive of. There is no voyeur’s view from nowhere which defines perspectives without any mode of sensory description. That view from ‘out there’ is purely an intellectual abstraction, a hypothetical vantage point. Why is this a big deal? It’s not until you want to really understand subjectivity in its own terms – private terms. By spatializing time, GR strips out the orthogonal symmetry of space vs time which we experience and redefines it as an illusion. Our native experience of time is as much the opposite of space as it is similar. Time is autobiographical, it is memory and anticipation. We can stay in the same place while time passes. Our time also moves with us, with our thoughts and actions.
Space, by contrast, is a public field in which we are tangibly located. If we want our thoughts to stay somewhere, we must leave some material trace – write a note or make a sign. When we want to meet someone, establishing the spatial coordinate for the meeting is based on a literal location – a physical address or reference (by the palm tree in the South Square Mall). The time coordinate is more figurative. We look at clocks with made up numbers which we have intentionally synchronized, or pick an event in our shared narrative experience (after the movie is over). If our watches are wrong, it doesn’t matter as long as they are both wrong in the same way. If we actually need to be a specific palm tree, it doesn’t matter if we are both wrong in the same way, we will still be at the wrong location. Time, in this sense is a social convention, while space is an objective fact.
Looking at the diagram, I have put this sense of time as a social convention in the center right, as the clip art alarm clock. This is the familiar sense of time as personal commodity. Running out of time. The bells emphasize the intrusive nature of this face of time – our behavior is constrained by conflicting agendas between self and others, home and school or work, etc. There is a pie to be allotted and when the clock strikes X, the agenda is expected to follow the X schedule. The label just under this clock marks the point of punctuality, where the time that you care about personally no longer matters, and the public expectation of time takes over.
Above this personal, work-a-day agenda sense of time, I have included a Mayan calendar to reference a super-personal sense of time. Time which stretches from eternity to the eternal now. Time which is measured in fleeting flashes and awe-inspiring syzygies. Time as cosmological poetry, shedding light on experience through experience. This is time as a dance with wholeness.
Beneath the alarm clock I have used the guts of a digital clock to emphasize the sub-personal sense of time. The alarm clock face of time collapses the mandala-calendar’s eternal cycle into personal cycles, but the digital clock breaks down even the numbers themselves into spatial configurations. Time is no longer moving forward or even cycling, but blinking on and off instantaneously.
This all correlates to the diagram, where I tried to juxtapose the public space side of the camera with the private experience side. The subjective disposition of our awareness contracts and dilates to influence our view. At the subjective extreme, the view is near sighted publicly and far sighted privately. For the objective-minded individuals and cultures, the view outside is clear and deep, but the interior view is purely technical. The little icons have some subtle details that came out serendipitously too – with the headless guy on top vs the camera guy on the bottom, but I won’t go into that…rabbit hole alert. The last few posts on psychedelics and language relate…it’s all about how spacetime extends intentionality from private aesthetics to public realism through diffraction of experience.
“I listen to lots of audio and try to package some of it for mass consumption on tumblr. I heard something I thought was really interesting today, but that I thought would NOT have mass appeal (the speaker was also… er… well, she was a good academic!). But I thought you would find it interesting.
It was about several different ways to consider “levels” (what I’ve often called “levels of complexity”). The context: a talk from a conference on the Personal vs Subpersonal distinction made by Dennett.
Here are some types of levels as I remember them:
Whole and Parts… somewhat self-explanatory
Functional Definition and Realization. So a mind might be functionally defined by what it does. And the “lower level” brain state is a Realization of that Mind.
Simplification… a SubPerson (at a lower level) is similar to a Person (higher level), only with some simplification to avoid infinite regress (eventually arriving at purely mechanistic processes).
Access. The Person (higher level) only has access to a subset of what the SubPerson has access to (Thus one of my subpersons might be aware of how my visual attention is focussed, while “I” am not, etc).
That’s from memory, so I hope I did the speaker justice (her name was Zoey Dreyson I think).
None of these quite matches what I think of as levels of complexity. I’d say my criteria for “qualifying as a new level” are higher than these. She almost hit it at one point when she suggested Water can be liquid, while H20 cannot… this might be an archetypal level switch for me.
In case you’re interested, here’s the website and the audio. Love to hear what you think, no rush of course.
Chris aka memeengine”
Hi Chris,
Thanks, yes interesting lecture. Here’s some notes and then I’ll throw in my comments:
personal: mental states as functional roles (“Roles”)
subpersonal: brain states that realize these roles in humans (“Realizers”)
‘autonomy of the mental’ in this philosophical context = ontological autonomy
nonreductive physicalism
cognitive science methodology: explain capacities of cog systems in terms of interacting cog subsystems (like car = sum of interacting car parts). Homuncular analysis-decomposition. Modularized cognition to sub, and sub-sub levels without regress.
in cog sci, whole person = person qua cognitive system
under the cog sci view, sub-personal levels or parts are vehicles for cognitive content, i.e. functionally individuated physical states bearing content. Therefore cognitive subsystems = sub-persons
1978 Steve Stitch labeled these instead of personal and sub-personal as
doxastic states
sub-doxastic states
[doxastic logic, like Bp & p to me seems to me an extremely narrow approach to a particular aspect of cognitive consciousness. I think that taking these kinds of programmatic structural views of belief and truth really turn the picture of consciousness upside down and assume binary systems as fundamental when there is no hint that such systems generate fluid wholes without an interpreter]
normative vs non-normative
cognitive whole vs cog parts
sub person level is further divided as being
accessible to persons
accessible to sub-persons
in role/realizer relation, higher & lower level properties related by realization relation – instantiated in same individual, share causal power
in the whole/parts relation, higher & lower level properties have different causal powers, instantiated in different individuals. Mereological. Composition. Water has liquidity and wetness that hydrogen and oxygen molecules don’t have.
Functionalist school in phil of mind – personal level states defined by their functional role.
cognitive science methodology – personal level capacities are explained by functional analysis.
functionalist metaphysics vs computationalist psychology
Lycan: homuncular functionalism – metaphysics inspired by cog sci methodology
role-realizer/part-whole conflation: who says what realization is? science or metaphysics?
some views claim realization implicit in decomposition [I would call this emergentism]
flat vs dimensioned realization. Science says realizers highly compex property. hardness of a diamond [emergent property]
levels: mereological and realization, supervenience, gnomic? ‘bridge laws’? structures all comport? not necessarily
Conclusion: What is important is to define the nature of realization relation. Who gets to do that? Seems to come down to metaphysical preferences.
Listening to this lecture really underscores for me how different the approach of multisense realism is to anything that is being discussed academically. To my mind, the role/realizer and part/whole relations are analogous to the character in a story – say Alice is trying to describe herself in terms of being composed of either the grammatical structure in the sentences of the story from which she emerges, or whether she is composed of the bleached and pressed wood pulp and ink that are considered page parts of the whole book.
Both approaches are wrong in exactly the opposite way. It is the same with idealism and materialism in general. Nothing means anything without perception and participation to begin with. There is, to my way of thinking, zero possibility of perception or participation experiences emerging from either
Inked pages in a book (physical parts in a mereological relation realizing the emergent property of the whole)
Words from the English language in a specific sequence (roles functioning at the personal level being realized by optical character forms configured at the sub-personal level)
The approach that is not even considered is that both the physically privileged page-book mereology and the logically privileged typesetting-linguistic mereology are related to each other only through an agent of perception-participation. This is the multisense realism view. Neither the philosophical functionalist nor the cognitive science computationalist sense of the personal and sub-personal relation can justify the existence of the relation itself. That’s because they leave out perception and participation entirely. It objectifies personal subjects and then pseudo-subjectifies objects as sub-persons without ever anchoring any of it in any kind of experiential realism. The thing that we care about is ignored completely. The hard problem is painted over with a choice of two flavors of the easy problem.
The only way around this, I’m afraid, is through it. Begin with the reality of Alice as the given. We don’t have to believe that she is anything more than a character or that her life is anything other than a story, but if the character and story were really the ground of being for Alice, then the book of pages (brain hardware) and the language typed through those pages (cognitive software) both make sense as ways of stabilizing, controlling, and reproducing aspects of the story. The book is what makes Alice in Wonderland a publicly accessible artifact and the words are what mediate from the public spatial sense to the private temporal sense. The private motive, in turn, to open the book, read the words, and imagine the characters and scenes in the story are what bind the symbols to the private sense experience. Body needs the book, mind needs the words, but story needs the willing self.
What this means is that all of the levels discussed in the lecture are not personal or sub-personal at all, but rather impersonal (surface-topological) and impersonal (syntactic-depth). I propose a whole other half of this picture of consciousness of which, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent. We can however, listen.
We cannot speak about the personal, but we can know what it is to be a person. We can realize ourselves directly, as an autonomous presence without converting ourselves into an external appearance or function. We can let human experience be human experience, and nothing less. The psyche, to continue with the Alice in Wonderland metaphor, has a protagonist – an Alice. It has other characters too, and themes, and a plot, etc…or does it? Does it literally ‘have a plot’, or are stories more of an experience with multiple frequency layers of events, memories, and expectations?
The story is nothing like either the words that relate them or the book that is the vehicle for the words. I can say ‘do you know Alice in Wonderland?’ and you can say yes, and describe some of the memorable scenes or quote lines or whatever – maybe you haven’t even read the book. The many forms that the story has been enacted, plays, cartoons, satire, songs, etc are all neither a part of the story or not a part of the story. The experience, the consciousness is orthogonal to both the physical formations and logical information associated with them. Of course, I am being absolutely literal here. Multisense realism is the idea that realism arises entirely from the orthogonality or perpendicular juxtaposition of private facing perception and public facing participation.
Once we can fully appreciate the magnitude of the shift that this model presents, going all the way up and down the microcosm-macrocosm, physics and phenomenology, we can perhaps expect to apply the orthogonality completely with confidence. Every atom is a page. Every molecule is a book. Every molecule and atom are publications of quantum-electromagnetic literature. Not only is there also a story which is told through that literature filled book, but there is also an omnipotent protagonist-author trying to awaken.This is an entirely different kind of sub-personal level. In the case of human consciousness, these micro-monads are sub-selves. Not things or ideas but influences, feelings, drives and complex dialectical drive-negation-drives, meta-feelings, histories of thought, interminable arguments…psychology, sociology.
This is what can’t be located by a functionalist or computationalist approach because they try to build a self from a bottom-up nothingness rather than a top-down everythingness. It’s not a new idea, but the application of the Absolute (Totality, Singularity, Supreme Monad, Ein Sof, Tao, Om, etc..) to physics in a literal way I think is actually necessary and feasible. From information science we can approach it as the essence of non-repeatability, or what I call solitropy. Start from there. From physics we can approach the cosmology as a Big Diffraction rather than a Big Bang. Recognize that spacetime makes more sense as a virtual incursion into a singularity of mass-energy than an as an explosion of mass-energy into a spacetime plenum which doesn’t exist yet.
Emergent properties can only exist within conscious experience.
…
Neither matter nor information can ‘seem to be’ anything. They are what they are.
It makes more sense that existence itself is an irreducibly sensory-motive phenomenon – an aesthetic presentation with scale-dependent anesthetic appearances rather than a mass-energetic structure or information processing function. Instead of consciousness (c) arising as an unexplained addition to an unconscious, non-experienced universe (u) of matter and information (mi), material and informative appearances arise as from the spatiotemporal nesting (dt) of conscious experiences that make up the universe.
Materialism: c = u(mdt) + c
Computationalism: c = u(idt) + c
Multisense Realism: u(midt) = c(c)/~!c.
For all dangerous minds, your own, or ours, but not the tv shows'... ... ... ... ... ... ... How to hack human consciousness, How to defend against human-hackers, and anything in between... ... ... ... ... ...this may be regarded as a sort of dialogue for peace and plenty for a hungry planet, with no one left behind, ever... ... ... ... please note: It may behoove you more to try to prove to yourselves how we may really be a time-traveler, than to try to disprove it... ... ... ... ... ... ...Enjoy!
Multisense Realism 
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