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On Computationalism and Qualia Depth
On Computationalism and Qualia Depth
I conclude that Computationalism is almost correct, but because of the nature of consciousness, that means it is exactly incorrect. It is rooted in the seduction of ‘information’ as a concrete pseudosubstance. I think that arithmetic is the ‘flattest’ qualia that we can access, and therefore the most externally universal. Its universality gives us a wide capacity to mechanize objects but assembling machines from parts is the opposite of an organism, which organically divides from a whole.
Human consciousness, by comparison, is a towering accumulation of experiential ‘residues’, or perceptual inertia which I understand to be negentropy or significance; a concentration of qualitative richness. Interior phenomenology cannot ex-press its proliferation as increasing sophisticated forms nested in space, so it impresses itself as increasingly meaningful experiences, themes, and narratives. Not merely more complex or sophisticated, but seemingly more important and more real.
Computationalism leans almost exclusively on complexity (as a machina ex deus if you will) to impress itself into overlooking the impossibility of forms in space generating meaningful experience through time. What it fails to understand is that the richness of qualia is not complex, it is simple. Blue is blue. Pain is pain. There is no Fourier transform required to appreciate them. The key is to understand the symmetry:
(Sense + Motive) time = significance || (matter – energy) / space = entropy
Just as evolutionary biology grew the brain faster than the skull to cause cortical folding, the corresponding subjective capacity became exponentially more aesthetic. The will became more insistent on projecting itself externally. We became human.
Integrating Will Into Physics
Another stab at describing the idea I was talking about in this post. Trying to get across the notion that will or motive begins as a five dimensional feeling (relative to a 3+1 dimensional physical exterior universe). Five dimensional because a single intention (here represented by a blue glowing F*) spans an entire intentional gesture. The intentional gesture can be thought of as being squeezed through a figurative funnel which condenses the subjective impulse from 5-D to 4-D. The impulse to exert effort extends beyond the Cartesian space and time vectors with qualitative experience.
Like the fourth dimension of time, feeling is independent of the other dimensions. A 2-D cartoon does not need to turn into a 3-D sculpture to exist in time. Time is understood then as a fourth dimension but not the fourth dimension. Feeling works the same way, it is another first dimension, so that it charges times, places, objects etc with a non-computational, qualitative significance. This significance has it’s own properties which makes sense of massive computations in terms of unique and concrete sensorimotive phenomenology. A 5d quality like ‘pain’ is in some way the same but in some way specific to each individual type of painful experience and each instantiation of that experience.
By reversing this many-to-one figurative sensitivity to qualia, we can model a one-to-many literal projection of will. Our method of output, will or attention, is an all purpose qualia of engaging our active participation in the narrative of our life. One form of stimulation which we apply to everything we ‘try’ and ‘do’.
Getting this feeling out of our heads and into the world of our body entails something like a parallel to serial signal translation. The intention which arises from the cumulative entanglement of a lifetime of experience and outcomes, has no meaningful 3-D expression on it’s own. All you can see from the outside is (represented by the red F’s in the subject’s head) would be 4D electromagnetic patterns in the 3D brain. These patterns form 4-D chain reactions across 3-D tissues, limbs, and finally objects. The decision to initiate this whole chain reaction however, is not accessible from the outside. The ‘why’ is a single top-level conscious impulse which, like Mass exploding into energy, explodes into many simultaneous and sustained ‘what’ and ‘how’ events of mass acceleration…different ‘where’ and ‘when’ coordinates in time space, etc.
*Blue F = Subjective sensorimotive stimulation to pull the crate.
Red Fs = Electromagnetic view of the Blue F. What is lost in 5d figurative significance is gained in 4d linear, literal power.
Black Fs = Force. Tension applied to the crate by muscle fibers, bone, rope, etc.
m = mass of the crate
Meaningful Groupings of the Multisense Syzygy
Essential Thesis
Emphasizes Subject Realism: Sensorimotive Perception & Participation
Existential Antithesis
Emphasizes Object Realism: Electromagnetic & Quantum Mechanism
Oriental Synthesis
Be Here Now. Abstract celestial themes.
Occidental Analysis
Instrumental Reasoning. Concrete material themes.
Power Over The Known Universe
“Physics is the study of the structure of consciousness. The “stuff” of the world is mindstuff.” – Physicist Sir Arthur Eddington
I agree. Where I disagree with computationalism is that I see the stuff of the mind as not just numberstuff, but sense. Not only no stuff at all, but the antithesis of stuff. Not emptiness (the lack of stuff), but the insoluble solvent of stuffness itself. Where arithmetic is represented as methodical encoding, sense guesses and makes it up as it goes along.
It seems enigmatic and mysterious because it is a thesis which is blind to itself except through its reflected antithesis, which is not mysterious or enigmatic but public and declarative. This does not mean that we can’t understand what it is and communicate effectively about that understanding.
We can use the symmetry as a mirror to reflect light into the dark of our blind thesis. Both comp and materialism ignore the symmetry and assume that subjectivity is part of a material or an arithmetic thesis, which leads to the Explanatory Gap, Hard Problem, and Symbol Grounding problem. Instead, if we focus on the symmetry itself we can infer the qualities of the Hard Solution, which is of course, inference and symmetry themselves. This is what sense is all about. Connecting the dots. Taking a leap of faith. Bridging the gap. It is not a wild ass guess, but a puzzle to be solved, an itch to be scratched, a need to be filled.
How I think it works is through a multisense realism. Inferences accumulate a figurative history which is retained in the now. What we learn is stored literally in our ongoing perception. These living histories or channels of sense are woven together as worlds or perceptual inertial frames. The trick is that weaving such a world elevates the subjective perception above what they have woven, so that they can see through the motives of worlds beneath them while the subject becomes invisible or opaque (also glamorous, magnificent) to the less significant subjects. What it looks like to the elevated subject is determinism. Knowledge and power.
By seizing or appropriating this power over lesser worlds, the subject disenchants her antithesis and amplifies her own – in the form of increasingly effective motive force. The power to see through things brings a power to see things through. Decisiveness, strategic foresight, intelligence. Transparency informs the eye, the aye, and the I to progress its own preferences and willfulness. It takes the reigns and questions what used to be a simple public fact (‘man cannot fly’) and turns it into private ideas (‘seems like maybe man can fly with a propeller and wings’) until eventually one of those ideas lead to other ideas that ultimately transform a private history of thought into new public fact. Using knowledge for power is what technology is.
The idea of betting on something important is a simple way of remembering what sense and motive is all about. Having something of value to bet is the first requirement. You have to be able to care about the difference between winning and losing. There needs to be a sense of meaning or significance. Being able to exercise some causally efficacious participation in the world is the other requirement. To make a leap of faith, to guess. Qualia and free will. Signs and designs. When viewed from a distance however, we mechanemorphize it electromagnetically as current and power. Physically as mass and acceleration or matter and energy (which I think means that ‘light’ is really acceleration, btw). Mass is significance made literal, as perceived indirectly from an elevated frame. If perceived directly instead, weightiness and power are figurative qualities of experienced intensity.
Henry Markram: Supercomputing the brain’s secrets
I’m very much in favor of this kind of research but I find it telling that the speaker mentions at the beginning one of the reasons why simulating brains is important. He says that we can’t keep testing on animals forever. A noble sentiment only if we presume that the computational simulation is in fact ‘less than’ an animal. Here is revealed the truth about computationalism, that it doesn’t take itself seriously. The pretense that life and feeling can be emulated mechanically is only possible when we think of consciousness in the terms of a toy model. This model sees consciousness as ‘what a brain does’ from the beginning, without any comprehension of the chasm between that set of neurological activities and the invisible world which is experienced through those activities.
If the brain simulation were capable of functioning as a living brain, any change in the program or manipulation of the simulation could result in loops of unimaginable suffering for the simulation. Studying the effects of torture on such a simulation of would logically be no better than torturing an animal, even worse, since the poor digital creature would never die or escape the captivity of it’s torturers.
Obviously this is not a serious consideration for AI. Nobody actually believes that what they are assembling out of coded symbols is literally alive or aware, despite how convincingly they claim to have proved it to themselves. It is a model.
When we seek to reverse engineer a conscious experience from the material mechanisms of neurology, we can rightfully expect to learn many important things about consciousness, but as the blurry images in the video might foreshadow, we can’t learn who it is that is conscious, how their world feels, etc.
It is hopeful to me that they are realizing that it is the electromagnetic patterns themselves which ‘contain’ consciousness, but they still miss completely the deeper implications of this. As it stands now, extraction of semi-coherent images from modeled electromagnetism represents hope for honing in on the formulas to translate EM coordinates into visual qualia (and other qualia by extension) but this hope fails to recognize the infinite regress of the homunculus fallacy. We see the rose, but the simulation does not. The simulation can be paused, copied and pasted, looped, edited, etc, but feeling doesn’t work that way. We have not modeled the sensorimotive experience at all. Instead we have created a dynamic CGI with which we can project our own interpretations about perception. Without those interpretations from our first hand subjective perceptions, there is still no sign of any experience within the model. It’s still only pixels and memory registers switching on and off. I suspect that the further this project progresses, the more we will have to resist the increasingly obvious failure of the model to behave meaningfully like a conscious living organism does. I think it will be fantastic, however, for neurology and for extending and improving our lives.
Everythingness Perturbed: Function, Experience, and Context
Since every organism produces itself from a single dividing cell, it can be said that there is a single history which unites that body back to the cellular level. Atoms do not literally reproduce by themselves so that a machine that is assembled has a no single history to unite it.
This becomes more relevant if we suppose that experience arises as a collected and collective unity of sequence, a many-to-one of integrated participation which is not literal and quantitative, but figurative, qualitative, and iconic. It is meaning and world.
A machine is an abstraction which takes physical history for granted. When executed in a material assembly, there is no literal reproduction, only separate parts brought together unintentionally (from the point of view of the parts) to imitate the function of a specialized organic form.
I think that where comp/functionalist assumptions fail is in the misunderstanding of meaning and world as discrete analytic behaviors rather than continuous synthetic wholes. We can see them as wholes because we are unified beings who can see even cartoon characters and puppets as wholes, but that does not mean that there is any continuous awareness that unifies the parts of the machine. To compensate for this, we generally have to build in a monotonously recursive device, like a clock, pump, or wheel to provide an imitation of continuous flow. This should not be confused with the continuous flow which arises organically in a living body. An organic flow is not a clock to which separate parts are mechanically attached, but a collective rhythm which is synchronized from within the shared motive of the reproduced cell. This is can be seen clearly in the behavior of heart cells as they congregate physically and experientially. Look at what it is:
See the difference?
The cells are pushing a private negentropic agenda, while the clock has no agenda at all. You can see it. It is one dimensional tension in a material like metal or winding down one tick at a time, or an electronic response from a semiconductor material. Neither materials have any native motivation or momentum, they must be wound up or plugged in, wired or bolted together. It is a back door imitation of an organism, artificially integrated to use borrowed power to generate the effect of continuous running.
Consciousness has mechanical aspects as well, and indeed the content of our minds can be said to be running as well, but the difference is that the mind runs on it’s own momentum. More importantly the mind can be quieted so that deeper, unconscious experiences can rise to conscious awareness. These experiences do not seem to arise out of the rapidity of mental syntax as functionalism assumes, but out of deep metaphorical interiority which presents spontaneously and unbidden with insight and prescience rather than deterministically or randomly.
This can be explained by understanding the continuity of psychological experience as the entirety of time being scratched or perturbed by the collective experience of a subset of time. The entity is made of time (really meanings, characters, and worlds…stories. Time is an analytical abstraction that has to do more with objects, space, and density). This may seem mystical or esoteric at first, but I think that is because profound truth about subjectivity must by definition evoke the charms of self fetish. Oriental floridity. Super-signifying Hermeticism. Pageantry. It is who we are and why we are, as distinguished from what and how we are (bodies, cells, cities, planets…Occidental austerity. A-signifying quanta. Physical engineering).
Experienced history then, under multisense realism, is crucial. We are the polar opposite of a tabula rasa. The interiority of the stem cell is not a blank coin to be struck with a cellular role, but a ‘Once upon a time’ from which a spectrum of cellular characters and capacities can be diffracted. This is meaning. This is learning, understanding, loving, and growing (also hating, killing, forgetting and half remembering, making things up, creating etc.)
If experience were mechanical, then a clone could be conditioned with the identical experiences and an identical person would be created. If since strong computationalism is does not ground identity in material at all, we would have to say that a cloned body (machine + program) with cloned experience (runtime) would actually be the same person.
If instead we see experience as a unique and idiosyncratic subset of the totality of experience, there can be no Boys from Brazil strategy – no designer identities. Besides nature, nurture, and random variation, there may be a semantic momentum which opens up a flow of identity like a pinata of experienced history being hit with a series of blows: conception, birth, childhood, etc. It is not a process through which an identity is mechanically assembled or fabricated, but one in which identity is revealed and developed from within the self and within experience.
What does ‘within experience’ mean? It means meaning. Significance. The qualitative feeling or message ‘within’ experience. The moral to the story, the lesson learned, the point to be made, etc. Unlike a sequence of instructions or registers in memory, there is no a-signifying transfer of digitally encoded histories. Instead it is a recapitulation of signifying analog wholes. They are not assembled together like a device or dataset, but live with the subject as subjects, growing, changing, and revealing themselves in endlessly new ways through experience and also from within the subject – ripening and flowering, bearing fruit, etc.
Experience is not mere decision trees. Even though the visible shape of a living tree can be modeled in simple mathematical functions, there is no tree experience there. There is no journey from acorn to oak, only from vector to vector or pixel to pixel. There is form but no content. What is so hard to communicate is that the reason for this is counter-counter-intuitive. We expect the truth of subjectivity to be in a counter-intuitive hidden form. That there is some fantastic organization of the brain which gives us human experience. The idea that human experience is literally what it seems to be – a story of human life, grounded in the totality of the cosmic story is anathema to contemporary science. We are looking for the back door, the trick to the illusion, but the trick is that tricks and illusions are the exceptions to the rule. We can only know illusion because we have the sense to know that individual channels of sense can be fooled. That is no trick and no illusion. That is sanity, awareness, and consciousness.
A machine has no such sense. To a Turing machine, all binary feeds are equal. I have no problem at all asserting that there is no meaning and no world experiencing capacity associated with a binary feed. Imitation perception makes up for it’s qualitative superficiality with high speed execution, giving us the illusion of intelligence, but intelligence without meaning or world experience is a different kind of intelligence – one of pure syntax and no semantic kernel to grow and change through experience. There is trivial learning and adaptation, but it is a shadow play through which our own powers of interpretation can fill in the blanks. A humanoid decision tree, constantly running, with no creative iconic depths of its own.
Identical twins have many similarities, but even brain conjoined twins are different individuals. Their histories fundamentally diverge after conception and further diverge with each experience. Their perspectives are different. A machine is just the opposite. An old Macintosh Plus computer could be manufactured today, using the same materials, different materials, or even by virtually emulated on another computer entirely and be exactly the same as any Mac Plus that was ever manufactured. There is no retained history and no world awareness, no difference in perspective. Unlike conjoined twins, networked computers don’t fight with each other. They don’t differentiate themselves. Why? Because there is no self there to differentiate, only a perpetual centralized spinning. This is using space and motion to create the illusion of time – animation.
What we are is neither space, nor motion, nor time, nor information, but informed, moving, waving firmament. Not the wave but that infinitely anchored silent stillness of everythingness itself which is being perturbed in a wavelike manner and making shows within shows which we call time and experience, or, if you like, energy. Energy is a concept of the experience of one show being indirectly experienced in the context of another show. It’s anomalous but sensible. Like the end of Wizard of Oz where the three super-signifying (floridly fictional) characters are re-contextualized as ordinary (naturalistic fictional) farmhand characters in the desaturated aftermath of the dream
Q: In theory, could we predict future behavior if we knew enough about the brain?
In theory, could we predict future behavior if we knew enough about the brain?
The theory that we could predict future behavior if we knew enough about the brain is logically sound, but I think that the underlying assumptions are flawed. The relation between behavior and the brain may in fact *not* be linked by cause and effect but by simultaneous integration. Even the best imaginable auto mechanic cannot predict where the car will be driven (although they can predict things about the car’s ability to function on the road).
What I suggest is that human behavior is driven by semantic conditions within the context of the individual’s experience as a whole as well as physiological-neurolgogical-biochemical conditions of the body’s existence. My hypothesis is that interior experience is a concretely real sensorimotive phenomenology rather than a ‘simulation’, ‘interpretation’, or ’emergent property’ of neurological ‘data’ or ‘information’. As such, our perceptions intensify or diminish, consolidate, branch, negate, etc according to the logic of their significance within the biographical narrative rather than exclusively in the activity that we currently know how to measure in the brain from the ‘outside’.
Knowing everything about a brain would certainly enable many predictions, but without understanding the life of the subject from the inside, it is probably not possible to predict what they are going to think and do for the rest of their lives, even if you could know every possible future of the entire universe. If the universe could do that, it probably wouldn’t go through the formality of actually presenting the universe as the ‘live show’ that it appears to us to be.
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