Archive
Absolute View vs Western View: Comparing Supreme Ultimate Diagrams
Contrasting two models of consciousness: The Multisense Realism model above uses an Absolute view, which accounts for all known phenomena, subjective and objective. Postulating a root “Qua” (aka, the Absolute, Totality) from which qualia are divided through quanta, Quanta is conceived of as a constraint on Qua, a partition within it. Qua is sense capacity or presence, and so Quanta is the diminished reflection of that capacity…non-sense, entropy, uncertainty, and an expectation of absence. I am trying to show this as the horizontal arrows between qualia, indicating that quanta is nothing more than a kind of negotiation protocol which allows qualia to coexist in the same public space while retaining their private integrity. This is a complete reversal of the Western view, which features Quanta in the role of Qua, as the arithmetic-logical source of all phenomena.
On the left side of the diagram, there is a very general sketch of how Qua recovers itself ‘with interest’ as a qualitative enhancement – a consequence of having reunited on the other side of entropy-disorientation. On a human level, our experience yields a net human significance. Civilization is the residue left behind, a collective perceptual inertial of technology which echoes the individual’s narrative journey of exposure to the exteriorized spaces and the celebrated return home. Significance is literally a promiscuity of association among qualia, a depth of feeling and meaning which compels participation. My view is that this principle motivates on many, if not every level of the cosmos, and is not limited to human beings or animals (even though arguably significance is exponentially more…significant for human beings, at least in our own eyes).
The Western view is a local rather than Absolute view. It does not account for sense or order itself, rather it begins from the assumption of physical matter and works backward to primitive mathematical functions. There are question marks included on the links which seem poorly understood or unjustified by the model as a whole. These include:
Why does geometry exist? I propose this as the Death of Computationalism. Along with the lack of support for Real numbers in computation, the universe or multiverse as a Turing emulation fails to account for the existence of forms like lines, circles, angles, etc. We know from our own computing and calculating devices that it is not necessary to physically draw a triangle in order to approximate correct computations about numbers which could correspond to triangular coordinates, so it really doesn’t make sense that any cosmic computation could or would invent geometric presentations of any kind. We don’t even need to get into questions of qualia, because computationalism fails to explain any sort of aesthetic forms to embody its functions. Mathematics is disembodied and anesthetic, and it works perfectly that way – no need for any strange magical fanfare.
Why do mathematical relations and laws give rise to physics? It’s all very well to have forms and functions mingle with each other as articulate mechanisms, but why should they ‘materialize’ as space-time, matter and energy?
The question of why consciousness exists when it does not appear to have any particular advantage over unconscious mechanism is a mystery. It is very difficult not to smuggle in our own retrospective view of consciousness as having enormous utility for our survival, but this is in no way an endorsement from the prospective view. If our immune system can orchestrate phenomenally complex responses to pathogens without a conscious experience attached to it, then why would a hominid’s humdrum quest for sustenance and reproduction lend itself to such an absurdly ornate aesthetic phenomenon? Indeed, if evolution can make a human brain, with all the trimmings, using unconscious methods, surely the operation of that brain would be better suited to that tried and true option.
The final question mark is related, but not identical. Even if you have consciousness as an option for some reason, and that option works better for humans than turtles or clouds of methane for some reason, why should such a phenomenon as consciousness produce feelings which are other than a record of the physical events which they represent? Why should there be different kinds of sensory experiences when all logical functions can be reduced more effectively to a single binary format of data processing? This alternative to reality is cast aside from the Western view, but what metaphysical never-never land is it cast to? How did we get outside of the real universe and into an ‘illusion’?
Biocentrism Demystified: A Response to Deepak Chopra and Robert Lanza’s Notion of a Conscious Universe.
1. I hope we all agree that our information about facts is incomplete, and will always remain so, at least in the foreseeable future.2. The only reality that makes sense to me is what Stephen Hawking calls ‘model-dependent reality’ (MDR).3. Other uses of the word ‘reality’ (other than MDR) imply ‘absolute reality’. If you disagree with this statement, please try defining ‘absolute reality’ in a logical way, using words which mean the same thing to everybody. My belief is that you will not be able to do that, and that means that MDR is all you have for discussion purposes.4. Naturally, there can be many models of reality. So which of the MDRs is the right one, and who will decide that? In view of (1) above, this is a hopeless situation, and that is why I avoid getting into philosophical discussions.5. At any time in human history, there are more humans favouring a particular MDR over other MDRs. Let us call it the majority MDR (MMDR).
6. An MMDR may well prove to be wrong when we humans acquire more information; from then we have a new MMDR, till even that gets demolished.
7. I believe that materialism is a better MDR than its opposite (called idealism, subjectivism, or whatever). For more on this, please read my article at http://nirmukta.com/2011/06/19/stephen-hawkings-grand-design-for-us/. Here is an excerpt from that article:
‘ There are several umbrella words like ‘consciousness’, ‘reality’, etc., which have never been defined rigorously and unambiguously. H&M argue that we can only have ‘model-dependent reality’, and that any other notion of reality is meaningless.
Does an object exist when we are not viewing it? Suppose there are two opposite models or theories for answering this question (and indeed there are!). Which model of ‘reality’ is better? Naturally the one which is simpler and more successful in terms of its predicted consequences. If a model makes my head spin and entangles me in a web of crazy complications and contradictory conclusions, I would rather stay away from it. This is where materialism wins hands down. The materialistic model is that the object exists even when nobody is observing it. This model is far more successful in explaining ‘reality’ than the opposite model. And we can do no better than build models of whatever there is understand and explain.
In fact, we adopt this approach in science all the time. There is no point in going into the question of what is absolute and unique ‘reality’. There can only be a model-dependent reality. We can only build models and theories, and we accept those which are most successful in explaining what we humans observe collectively. I said ‘most successful’. Quantum mechanics is an example of what that means. In spite of being so crazily counter-intuitive, it is the most successful and the most repeatedly tested theory ever propounded. I challenge the creationists and their ilk to come with an alternative and more successful model of ‘reality’ than that provided by quantum mechanics. (I mention quantum mechanics here because the origin of the universe, like every other natural phenomenon, was/is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. The origin of the universe was a quantum event.)
A model is a good model if: it is elegant; it contains few arbitrary or adjustable parameters; it agrees with and explains all the existing observations; and it makes detailed and falsifiable predictions.’
>”Other uses of the word ‘reality’ (other than MDR) imply ‘absolute reality’. If you disagree with this statement, please try defining ‘absolute reality’ in a logical way,”
Absolute reality is the capacity for perceptual participation, aka, sensory-motor presentation, aka qua(lia-nta). That is the bare-metal prerequisite for all forms of order or matter, subject or object. Not only metaphysics but meta-ontology. The cosmos is not something which is, the cosmos actually invents “is” by “seeming not to merely seem”.
Please try defining ‘model’ in a way that does not assume some form of sensory presentation and participation. What is a model except a sensory experience which seems to refer our minds to another?
While I agree that no participant within a given experience has an absolute perspective of that experience, I disagree that the MDR is a solipsistic ‘model’ which is generated locally. The fact that we recognize the relativism of perceptual inertial frames (PIF = my term for MDR) is itself a clue that the deeper reality is this very capacity for relativism of perspective. Although the relativism itself may be the only final commonality among all perspectives, that commonality is not a tabula rasa. We can say things about this ‘common sense’ – things which have to do with contrasts and inverted symmetry, with proximity and intensity, relationship, identity, and division. These principles are beneath all forms and functions, all sensations and ideas, substances and patterns, and through them, we can infer more elusive fundamentals. Pattern recognition which is beyond pattern. Gestalt habits which are beyond mereology or cardinality…higher octaves of simplicity. Trans-rational, non-quantitative properties.
All mechanisms and all physics rely on a root expectation of sanity and continuity – of causality and memory, position, recursive enumeration, input/output, etc. If you are going to get rid of absolute reality, then you have to explain the emergence of the first MDR – what is modeling? Why does the universe model itself rather than simply ‘be’ what it is?
My solution is to accept that this assumed ‘modeling’ is physics itself, and that physics is experienced-embodied relativity. In the absolute sense, matter a special case of a more general (non-human) perception or sense. Not a continuum or a ZPE vacuum flux, but ordinary readiness to experience private sensory affects and produce (intentionally or not) public facing motor effects. What the universe uses to model is not a mathematical abstraction floating in a vacuum, but a concrete participatory phenomena, which we know as human beings to be sensory-motor participation. Not everything is alive biologically, but everything that seems to us to exist naturally as matter probably has a panexperiential interaction associated with it on some level of description. It’s about turning the field-force model inside out, turning away from the de-personalized objectivity of the last few centuries and toward a realization of personal involvement in genuine presentations (customized and filtered though they may be) rather than assembled representations.
The MMDR should not embrace materialism or idealism by default because one seems simpler than the other. We should accept only a solution which honors the full spectrum of possible experiences in the cosmos, from the most empirically public to the most esoterically private. This does not mean weighting the ravings of one lunatic the same as a law of gravity, but rather acknowledging that if there is a lunatic, then the universe is in some sense potentially crazy also, and within that crazy is something even more interesting and universal than gravity…an agenda for aesthetic proliferation… a Multisense Realism.
Illusion is a meaningless term in science as far as I can see. Illusion is about an experience failing to meet expectations of consistency across perceptual frames (models)…except that we know that inconsistency is likely the only such consistency, beyond the root common sense. Whatever illusions we experience as people are not necessarily absent on other levels of inspection. Quantum illusions, classical illusions, biological illusions, etc. Every instrument relies on conditions which create their own confirmation bias, including the human mind. We should not, however, make the mistake of allowing non-human, inanimate instruments tell us what our reality is. They can’t see our consciousness in the first place, remember? Our human equipment is not as sensitive in detecting public phenomena, we cannot see more than a small range of E-M, etc, but neither is a gas spectrometer sensitive in detecting human privacy.
We see that when we adopt the frame of mechanism, idealism seems pathologically naive and if we adopt the frame of idealism, mechanism seems pathologically cynical. This should be regarded along the lines of the double-slit test: evidence that our assumptions are not the whole story, and to seek a deeper unity than mechanistic or idealistic appearances.
What exactly is our life?
Quora: What exactly is our life?
How do you see the life?
Your philosophical explanation. How should one look at what he experiences, he sees, he thinks? How to live it?
What is the purpose of life we have been given and how to find it? How do you make most out of it?
In one sentence and explanation of this sentence. What is life, really?
Our life is perception and participation in experiences of particular aesthetic qualities.
Perception and participation are, in my opinion, opposing modes of a universal primitive, which I call sense.
Who and what we are is the product of countless nestings and interleavings of experiential capacities, diffractions of sense. As Homo sapiens, we are a centuryish long experience, seemingly ‘folded in on ourselves’ on several levels: Personally, socially, culturally, anthropologically, zoologically, biologically, chemically, and materially. That’s not including possible super-personal ranges of sense. More important than the complexity and the holarchy however is the simplicity and identity.
Contrary to both Western-mechanistic views which under-signify subjectivity and Eastern-spiritual views which I think over-signify subjectivity, I propose that life is always in the juxtaposition of the generic anesthetic of public bodies and the proprietary aesthetic of private experiences. My conjecture here is somewhat panpsychic or panexperiential – matter, cells, organisms, etc are all associated with some kind of interior experience which are hidden from each other by physics. Physics is actually perceptual relativity – nature defining and describing itself in an expanding array of sense modalities, and simultaneously contracting and obscuring sense through spatial attenuations such as scale incompatibility, distance, crushing and scattering.
The point of all of this as pertains to the question is that with the Western view, we have lost our native coherence as beings in our own right. Instead human presence is decomposed and de-presented into aggregates of sub-personal and impersonal behaviors; evolutionary, biological, computational. My view is that just because we find it easier to pin down forms and functions outside of our own subjective experience does not mean that the universe finds our personal day-to-day experience any less of a legitimate phenomenon than the comings and goings of quarks or galaxies. In our success at having graduated from religion and philosophy by focusing on our own insignificance and flawed sense, we have unintentionally turned our erstwhile objectivity into an anti-anthropomorphic anthropomorphism. We reject all that is personally significant in favor of an a-signifying, anesthetic, mechanism…which unfortunately has, in my opinion, begun to show some unpleasant side-effects for human life.
If you ask me, then, what we should do with this life as human beings in this place at this time, I think that it is to reclaim our authentic status as whole participants in a significant human life. We are to understand, now, that although the exterior of the universe is mechanistic and entropic, the interior is quite the opposite. The human condition is extremely tricky, and it seems that everyone seems to be missing some important piece to their own puzzle so that it is not so simple to say ‘Carpe diem’ and save the world. Everything fights back and slips through your fingers, ignores you and dissolves into regret…or else rockets into success leaving your unable to appreciate the struggles of others. It’s… weird. Isn’t it?
Updated Introduction
3. Overview
I am always trying to sum up multisense realism in a simple way, as I think it ultimately is pretty simple, but it is hard to put it simply because it requires that we overturn some core assumptions about how we look at the self and the universe.
I consider my model to be neither dualist nor monist, but an “Ouroboran” monism, meaning that physics itself is the capacity for sensory experience and discernment and that it is involuted in a reflexive, “umbilical” relation to itself. The idea is that experience and matter are the private and public ranges of physical phenomena. The involution (like a Klein bottle or Möbius strip) refers to the orthogonal or perpendicular juxtaposition between sensorimotive-based private experience and spacetime-based public realism.
If we begin with this diagram which I have pilfered from memeengine:
and then progress, like those schizophrenic cat portraits, into the mind bending rabbit hole that is Multisense Realism…
Here, I am trying to introduce the notion of a continuum between the three ‘ism’s above, to indicate that the cosmos supports all three inherently because it is that juxtaposition/symmetry which is actually more primary than any of them. Not the symmetry itself – which is more of a mathematical relation that is somewhat abstract, but the capacity to detect and respond to patterns like symmetry – the capacity to sense and participate in the universe. What I wound up with was more of a yin yang taijutsu arrangement which maybe hints at an East side where experience is purely subjective, a West side which is all representations of what is presumed purely objective, and a midrange which is about perception as a body in the world of comparably scaled bodies.
Not content with that, I went on to try to get more of the flavor of it with nested scale bodies in a Cartesian grid of blue vector arrows representing energy and function (the disowned idealism of the West haunts the machine as ‘energy’ and ‘information’). On the East side, there is the solipsistic fisheye distortion which is all cluttered up with my conceptions of sub-personal, super-personal, and the arrow of motive power.
Wrapping this mess up, I put the atomic dots where they belong, on the inside surface of the experiential bubble of the Absolute. Make sense? Haha.
In Multisense Realism, all of physics is understood to relate to the capacity to discern between public and private views of phenomena. Public physics appears to us as ‘matter and energy’ on the outside and ‘perception and participation’ on the inside. The gap which makes this involution or twist possible is the modulation between the presence and absence or sensory presence, with the absence being what is called entropy or spacetime (which become essentially the same thing under this model of physics). To make things more confusing, this modulation of entropy and sensitivity is nested within many layers of itself, as a fractal. A cell encapsulates a world of molecular interaction. An organ encapsulates a world of cells, etc.
What started as an observation about the common positions that people seem to take within philosophy of mind debates became a hypothesis about the continuum of public and private sense experience, a re-interpretation of light, cosmology, consciousness, and the introduction of new concepts like significance and solitropy.
These two images try to capture the overall picture of how all major features of the cosmos can smoothly fit together.
Chalmers – Consciousness: The Logical Geography of the Issues
The argument for my view is an inference from roughly four premises:
(1) Conscious experience exists.
(2) Conscious experience is not logically supervenient on the physical.
(3) If there are positive facts that are not logically supervenient on the physical facts, then physicalism is false.
(4) The physical domain is causally closed.
(1), (2), and (3) clearly imply the falsity of physicalism. This, taken in conjunction with
(4) and the plausible assumption that physically identical beings will have identical conscious experiences, implies the view that I have called natural supervenience: conscious experience arises from the physical according to some laws of nature, but is not itself physical.
The various alternative positions can be catalogued according to whether they deny (1), (2), (3), or (4). Of course some of these premises can be denied in more than one way.
Denying (1):
(i) Eliminativism. On this view, there are no facts about conscious experience. Nobody is conscious in the phenomenal sense.
Denying (2):
Premise (2) can be denied in various ways, depending on how the entailment in question proceeds—that is, depending on what sort of physical properties are centrally responsible for entailing consciousness. I call all of these views “reductive physicalist” views, because they suppose an analysis of the notion of consciousness that is compatible with reductive explanation.
(ii) Reductive functionalism. This view takes consciousness to be entailed by physical states in virtue of their functional properties, or their causal roles. On this view, what it means for a state to be conscious is for it to play a certain causal role. In a world physically identical to ours, all the relevant causal roles would be played, and therefore the conscious states would all be the same. The zombie world is therefore logically impossible.
(iii) Nonfunctionalist reductive physicalism. On this view, the facts about consciousness are entailed by some physical facts in virtue of their satisfaction of some nonfunctional property. Possible candidates might include biochemical and quantum properties, or properties yet to be determined.
(iv) Holding out for new physics. According to this view, we have no current idea of how physical facts could explain consciousness, but that is because our current conception of physical facts is too narrow. When one argues that a zombie world is logically possible, one is really arguing that all the fields and particles interacting in the space-time manifold, postulated by current physics, could exist in the absence of consciousness. But with a new physics, things might be different. The entities in a radically different theoretical framework might be sufficient to entail and explain consciousness.
Denying (3):
(v) Nonreductive physicalism. This is the view that although there may be no logical entailment from the physical facts to the facts about consciousness, and therefore no reductive explanation of consciousness, consciousness just is physical. The physical facts “metaphysically necessitate” the facts about consciousness. Even though the idea of a zombie world is quite coherent, such a world is metaphysically impossible.
Denying (4):
(vi) Interactionist dualism. This view accepts that consciousness is non-physical, but denies that the physical world is causally closed, so that consciousness can play an autonomous causal role.
Then there is my view, which accepts (1), (2), (3), and (4):
(vii) Property dualism. Consciousness supervenes naturally on the physical, without supervening logically or “metaphysically”.
There is also an eighth common view, which is generally underspecified:
(viii) Don’t-have-a-clue physicalism: “I don’t have a clue about consciousness. It seems utterly mysterious to me. But it must be physical, as physicalism must be true.” Such a view is held widely, but rarely in print (although see Fodor 1992).
To quickly summarize the situation as I see it: (i) seems to be manifestly false; (ii) and (iii) rely on false analyses of the notion of consciousness, and therefore change the subject; (iv) and (vi) place large and implausible bets on the way that physics will turn out, and also have fatal conceptual problems; and (vi) either makes an invalid appeal to Kripkean a posteriori necessity, or relies on a bizarre metaphysics. I have a certain amount of sympathy with (viii), but it presumably must eventually reduce to some more specific view, and none of these seem to work. This leaves (vii) as the only tenable option.
—David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
My view would require an extra option in between vi and vii –
(vi.5) Oroborean monism. Physics supervenes reflexively on its own (proposed) capacities to experience. Interaction is not logical but self-evident, with multivalent causation to and from private intention and public extension as ordinary sensory-motor participation.
Three Dimensions of Time?
Another way of thinking about subjectivity (as I have modeled it with the multisense continuum as sub-personal, personal, and super-personal ranges of awareness) is that time has three dimensions.
Unlike the three dimensions of space, where the dimensions are presented as converged and simultaneous, the three dimensions of time are more like parallel gears or lenses which are relativistic to the scope of the participant’s awareness rather than to the position of their body. In short, as the structure of space resembles space itself, this new model proposes that the structure of time should be understood in a progressive way, as a multi-stage evolution of structure which is smeared across the totality of interior perception.
If that were true, then my candidates would be as follows, and you can think of them as three levels of description of a clock, oscillation, progression, and orientation.
1. Oscillation. On the lowest level of accurate clocks, there is a recursive sensory-motor engine. Be it a bobbing float, a swaying pendulum, a spring, or a piezo-electric material being stimulated to vibrate, the source of momentum for a clock is the tension between release and restraint, resolved as oscillation. We don’t know that an electric current on a quartz crystal generates an experience of release and restraint, but I suspect that on it’s own molecular scale, there is such an experience, 32,768 times per (human scaled) second.
A very simple water clock could consist of just a leaky measuring cup. In that case, there would not be an oscillation, but a smooth flow. If you watch flowing water, however, it is your awareness which tends to oscillate, tracking between the recursive rushing of the flow through a fixed position and the fluidity of the total motion downstream. In a water clock, the amount of water which leaks out is abstracted quantitatively. When we say, for instance, that there are X number of gallons in a pool, we don’t mean that there are literally gallon-sized units which water comes in that are all squeezed into the pool. We mean there is enough water in the pool to fill X number of gallon jugs if we wanted to. This is a bit of a detour, but it is important because we seem to have forgotten this in physics and now routinely mistake our quantum measurements for the underlying phenomenon which drives that which we believe we are measuring as well as the measuring device itself.
The more relevant point here, is that while the lowest level of time can be either the smooth fluidity of force* or the oscillating dissipation of that force. With the oscillation we get a better sense of the recursive quality of the sub-personal experience. The sub-personal is characterized by its intolerable recursiveness. So generic and monotonous is the stream of identical passing moments of the oscillator that our attention cannot face it for long. We need hands or digits or hash marks on a ruler to help us keep track of their progress indirectly. To a human mind, the experience of the trillions of micro-organic presences which make up our body at any given moment, is recursive madness. The experiential qualities of molecular and quantum levels beneath that, can only be more insanely generic, vast, and uniformly repetitive.
3. Progression. In the middle, personal range of chonometric experience, the hands of a clock are used to denote the wheel of the sun’s progress across sky. Because of the pervasiveness of the sun’s presence, it is only necessary to capture twelve hours at a time, since it should be obvious whether an hour is am or pm by countless perceptual cues internally and externally. The sundial or mechanical clock with round face emphasize the cyclical nature of the progress of time, really a helical sense of second, minute, hour, progressive cycles and day/night oscillating cycles.
In modern time, the worldliness of the solar clock has been shattered in favor of digital time. In digital time, cycle and oscillation are pushed into the sub-personal range of awareness to yield a pure coordinate space. Time no longer passes, rather it is set and synchronized to a satellite signal.
The implications of this psychologically are a double edged sword. Digital time is precise, accurate, and uniform, but its granular nature has replaced the flow of time with dehydrated instants. The meaning of time is purely relative now, an enumerated code tied to geography and policy. Time doesn’t so much ‘march on’ anymore as it does march in place on multiple levels. Time is now an infinite commodity of finite moments, meaningless, disconnected, and interchangeable. We have, in a sense, stopped time while in another sense, we have made time more inescapable and relentless. We are pushing the personal sense of active progress and flow into an impersonal sense of fixed point geosynchronous addressing.
Fortunately we still feel our own lives personally as progress and growth. Our cycles are longer and more spacious than they were a century ago, causing strange red shifting and blue shifting in the extension of childhood, adolescence, and old age but contracting adulthood. Stripping away the superstition of the past has reduced the human life from a pageant of astrological or religious significance ordered by time to its bare bio-genetic mechanisms. Aging is nothing more than a set of symptoms to be banished through medication and cosmetics, diet, and exercise. Otherwise, one year is much the same as the next. Our window of progress has been contracted to match our pay cycle or school schedule. Groundhog Week is always beginning, ending, flying by, or dragging.
Progress is about passing significant milestones. We talk about dates A.D. or B.C. (formerly Before Christ, not secularized as Before Common Era), or characterize them in Ages, Bronze, Iron, Industrial, etc. In our own lives too we think in terms of relationships, residence changes, jobs, or other shifts in the content of our life story – a matrix of befores and afters. These markings in our personal progress are totally unlike the impersonal measures of oscillation and cycle, which are fixed recursively. The chronometry of our lived experience is not so much marked as it is ritually scarred. From the inside, the clockwork thematic and plastic. It retains the irreversible arrow of time, but hyper-extended into aching nostalgic ruins and amputated in chronic disillusion. The retelling of stories and reimprinting of memories smooths out the rough edges, compensates for the incompensible and runs out the clock on personal ages we can’t bear to revisit in their full glory. Memory is a mindfuck. Part propaganda, part revelation…which leads me to.
3. Orientation. Clocks and calendars provide us with a birds-eye view of time. Beyond flow, oscillation, and progress, the wheel or grid of time gives us a presentation of time as universal collection. A science fiction zodiac of possible futures. If oscillation begins with outward flow, then it ends with containment within. Flux and flow persist as perturbations of currency, ripples on the surface of an Akashic plenum of eternity. Finding our way to and from this ocean is perhaps the greatest mystery – one which we have tried to solve with intuition and divination. This is the scientifically despised layer of time which can be described as super-personal, or super-signifying.
Jung talked about the collective unconscious, echoing what every mystic tradition has said about a world beyond time itself – a nexus of hyper-convergence where meaning originates or terminates. Archetypes, symbols from dreams, alchemical models, all point to a kind of absent presence of a divine Totality. Campbell’s ‘hero with a thousand faces’. A bottomless well of teleology and significance – images, encounters, mythic adventures.
Perhaps as the thin trickle of water clock drips out of its vessel, so too does the trickle of possibility drip into our imagination. Unlike the despised drip-drip-dripping of the Sub-Personal level Chinese water torture, the Super-Personal drip into our Personal ‘now’ is generally welcome, if not desperately so. Novelty and variety are precious and we are fiercely proprietary about them. We want to be the first to know, to see, to feel the future for ourselves. ‘What’s next’ is the hope for release from cycles and oscillation – for transcendence and cessation. “Tis a consumation devoutly to be wish’d”.
*flowing from private sensory potentials to public motor presentations (aka thermodynamic entropy, or the arrow of time…a continuous public declaration of pure irreversibility, which is the source of all motive, all expansion, or fractal self-diffraction of the cosmos).
Who’s In Control?
About freewill, thought origination, etc. I do not claim to have the answers but share the following observations.
Our experience reflects two phenomena which can be summed up as the totality of our existence. Those two are the physical and the mental. I believe a little further contemplation reveals that the two can be reduced to one. We are aware of the separation and boundaries of the physical, this thing, that thing, etc. However, when it comes to the mental we experience no such separation. Does not the mental comprise it all? If the mental, awareness or consciousness was divided, bounded, separated or limited how could one thing have awareness of the other? If you and I are defined by our awareness, mentality, consciousness, knowing or whatever you wish to call it and are separate how can we be aware of each other and where or what defines the boundary between us? Obviously, our brain does not confine our consciousness. If it did we could not be aware of anything else. By definition there cannot be an Infinite and anything separate.
Does not the fact that I am aware of me, other people, the world and the universe mean that I AM beyond the aforementioned?We are aware of physicality changing, seemingly coming and going, etc. and in a constant state of flux. However, awareness remains changeless, invulnerable and cannot be created or destroyed. Can we not then conclude that there can be no limit, boundary or separation within Consciousness? If so, we can further conclude that there is only Consciousness because if there is no separation in Consciousness there can obviously be nothing existing separate from it. There is only, All that Is and we are IT. Many will say claiming to be God is a flagrant affront to God or a terrible sacrilege. But, in fact, the opposite is actually the case. If we claim to be separate from God we necessarily limit Him/Her/IT. God cannot be infinite or limitless and be separated by other “stuff”.
How then do we explain individuality? Since we have established by deductive reasoning that there can be no separation, we can now conclude that there is no separate you and I. Further, since nothing can exist separate from Consciousness, nothing but Consciousness exists.
Yet we are aware. Can we not now further conclude that we are all that is or the Consciousness that we have already established is all? Taking this line of reasoning a little further, while we have awareness, we are at the same time aware of not being fully aware. We seemingly are aspects of infinite intelligence but not infinite or at least not aware of it.
From here we can only speculate. I suggest that Infinite intelligence chose to express and Its only means of so doing was to project an illusion of physicality or that which we experience as this universe with inhabitants of limited awareness. They could not have full awareness or they would cease to be the projection but the Projector.
The next question then is, do we really have individual thinking, freewill and are we really capable of changing or controlling anything? I am, of course, totally aware of how we think we are and how difficult it is to give up such an idea and I’m not going to make judgment one way or the other at this point except to say I have struggled a lot with the question and will simply throw out some thoughts on the subject.
Back to the physical and the mental. We have already established that the physical does not really exist. Only the mental is capable of creating a thought. The physical is nothing but objects including our body and brain. I do not believe a brain ever created a thought. The physical cannot possibly create. The brain may very well act as some sort of filter or receiver but I do not believe it can ever be creative. Further substantiating this is the fact that we do not have much idea what our next thought will be. Nor can we control what it will be or how long or often it may reoccur. Likewise, we have many thoughts we would rather not have at times. If we were controlling them why would we have undesirable ones? You have no idea what your next thought will be but I do and you cannot possibly avoid it unless you stop reading right now. Your next thought will be visualizing a flying elephant. So, I believe it obvious that our thoughts are originating from somewhere beyond the physical brain.
About control of life otherwise. We did not control when or where we were born. We had no control of who were our parents, siblings or status, financial, fame or otherwise. We had no control of our gender, original health, inherent tendencies, etc. We had no control of our early upbringing, how we were treated, what we were exposed to, nourishment, etc. We had no control of our early education or exposure to outside influences, etc. We had no control whether we were bullied or abused sexually or otherwise.
We now do not control our bodily functions, heartbeat, digestion, respiration, etc. We have little if any control over viruses, infections, immune systems, accidents, etc.
We do not control when, where or how we die. We do not control all those little or sometimes big unexpected events occurring daily in our lives. Yet, we think we are in control of our lives.
Of What?
We think we are making decisions between multiple choices but are we really? We say we could have chosen the other option. But why didn’t we? We weighed the options, consequences, etc and made a decision. In other words it would have required different consequences or circumstances for us to have made a different decision. But only what is, IS. So, was a different decision ever in the picture? Who could deny that things would be a lot different if we were truly determining the events of our lives?
It is very obvious that our lives are being greatly influenced if not totally controlled by outside forces.
So, you ask, what then is the point in it all? Why this essay? Why make the effort to be good? Why not just live fast, love hard and die young? You are what you are and you’re not going to deviate from it. Afterall, you’re not really in control!
Does it really matter whether or not we are in control? If it makes us feel better, than fine. What difference does it really make if we get over there and realize that, hey, we weren’t really in control afterall? Will we not just laugh and say, I sure as hell thought I was.
Or could it be that within the projection, the mentality of the inhabitants really does have freedom of choice? It’s all illusion anyway but as Thomas Troward said, even though it is illusion, because it is a projection of the Almighty it is real as far as we’re concerned.
In keeping with the spirit of the question, I will answer it not in the way that I would like to ideally, but in the way that my circumstances seem to compel me. Having to get to sleep soon, I don’t have time to craft a thorough answer, (which nobody will probably bother reading) and if I leave it until tomorrow I might not remember what I was going to say. Here then is my circumstantially compromised, short order version of my contribution. I’ll be happy to go into it in further detail later on if anyone is interested.
1. Mental and physical are neither the same thing nor different things, they are opposite ends of a continuum of sensory-motor participation, which is, in my estimation, the fundamental component of the cosmos.
2. Free will and determinism are similarly not mutually exclusive but are defined by and help to define the aforementioned opposite ends of the universal continuum, which can be best understood as public and private ranges of experiential ontology. Public experiences are based on spatial extension, and private experiences are based on temporal narratives, and the two aspects are orthogonal/perpendicular in every way. They two ends also merge in another range of the continuum, which I call the profound edge, where transcendent experiences blur the boundary of private and public.
3. Physical matter actually is ‘real’ in the sense that the foundation of realism lies in the persistence of matter’s spatial extension, which acts as the single firmament of public interaction. All other interaction is biographical and private.
4. The nature of free will is complicated because our understanding of the nature of human consciousness is still very primitive, made more difficult by the seemingly irreconcilable approaches of what could be called the Oriental program, which places subjectivity as the absolute foundation and materiality as derived illusion, and the Western program which leads to the opposite and mutually exclusive conclusion. In my analysis, the opposition of these two programs to each other is a critically important revelation of the nature of consciousness itself, as the capacity to select either extreme and to dial between them mirrors the function of human culture and individual psychology in general.
In my opinion, strict adherence to either the Eastern or Western extremes tends to lead to a pathological worldview, in the sense that fanatical defensiveness and hypocrisy replace a respect for the plain truth. Moving forward to a new synthesis requires, in my opinion, that we keep the Eastern model of hierarchical levels of awareness (chakras, alchemical monochord, etc) but reconcile it with the Western model of physical scale (molecular, cellular, somatic, geological-evolutionary, astrophysical). The way that I propose arranges the sensory-motor experiences hierarchically so that our personal awareness and participation is flanked by a sub-personal or root range of qualia and a super-personal or meta range of intuition and inspiration flavored feelings, insights, and connections.
Anyhow, yes, our personal will does have a modicum of freedom, which expands in proportion to how deeply ‘within’ the context is. Within our own imagination, we have a fantastic degree of freedom, but are still limited ontologically by our human description and by the physics of privacy itself. The further we get from the immediacy of our private realm, the more that our freedom is constrained by the confluence of our own sub-personal and super-personal agendas as well as the nearly infinite impersonal agendas which surround our body in the public presentation of our world. To make things happen in the public world requires slowing our will down, ordering it strategically and persistently, matching the conditions of our environment, and making all manner of compromises. In the end, we may not see that much is left of what we thought we had intended personally, but nevertheless, we were the ones who had to pay attention and care about the outcome, so that’s something. Besides, often we find that the surprises that we discover in the public world are beyond what we could have intentionally dreamed up for ourselves, for better or worse…and that, I suspect is usually part of the larger (super-personal) agenda… if there is one.
Chosen
I wondered about what anyone/everyone thought about the notion of ‘chosenness’ as a way to understand where we are here in the world.
What I propose is that a complete description of the universe must include:
1. The experience of significance.
This speaks to the idea of chosen-ness, of choice, of free will, of improbability as a quality as the subject of appreciation.
2. The experience of the significance of the idea of insignificance.
I word “the significance of the idea of insignificance” in this convoluted way to reflect the natural sequence in which the revelation of objectivity has occurred across all human societies. As far as I know:
a. *all* cultures begin their history steeped in animistic shamanism, divination, creation myths and charismatic deities and
b. *no* cultures develop eliminative materialism, mathematics, and mechanism earlier than philosophy or religion, and
c. *all* individuals experience the development of their own psyche through imaginative, emotional, and irrational or superstitious thought
d. *no* individuals are born with a worldview based only on generic facts and objectivity. Healthy children do not experience their lives in an indifferent and detached mode of observation but rather grow into analytical modes of thought through experience of the public world.
We are so convinced by the sophisticated realism of objective insignificance that we tend to project it into a default position, when in fact, it does not occur naturally that way. It is we who choose subjectively whether or not to project objectivity beneath our own ability to choose it.
The fact is, if were it that simple; were objectivity the final word, then we should have had no reason to be separated from it in the first place. The whole notion of illusion depends on the non-illusory capacity of our own reason to deduce and discern illusion from reality, so that to question our own ability to freely choose, to some extent, how we reason, gives us no possibility of ever contacting any truth to deny.
Looking at 1. and 2. more scientifically, I would link significance with teleology (choice) and insignificance with teleonomy (chance). I have proposed that while these two opposite potentials seem mutually exclusive to us from our subjective experience, that from an absolute perspective, they are in adjacent ranges of the same continuum. I suggest that the subjective experience of sensation, and nested layers of meta-sensation constitute significance, and that this significance is what allows the possibility of choice based on personal preference. It is the choice capacity itself which divides the sense of the world for the chooser between the chosen and the unchosen. This ontological fracture is what gives the impression that there is a difference between chance and choice and creates the possibility of feedback loops in which we can question both:
a. the reality of choice by choosing to adopt the perspective of impersonal chance, as well as
b. the reality of chance by choosing to adopt the perspective of super-personal choice.
In both cases we cannot arrive at a perspective without exercising our will to choose one over the other, even for hypothetical consideration. There is no ontological possibility of our abdicating our choice altogether, although the position which elevates insignificance compels through an appeal to do just that. This is true of contemporary forms of science in general, as the outside-in bias inherently demands compulsory and involuntary acceptance of facts and unambiguous inferences between them rather than recognizing the self-same subjective autonomy which drives the scientific consideration from beginning to end. Science relies on peer-review to enforce the belief in disbelief – the faith that peer-review itself is an unexplained artifact of human weakness, and that the rest of the universe has no need for such deliberations, nor could it generate them even if it were useful.
In practical terms, what this means is that
a. you can choose to pursue the chosen-feeling significance of your experience, but you risk increasing possibility of delusion and conflicting intuitions.
b. you can choose to pursue the unchosen analytical feeling of the significance of insignificance, but you risk cutting yourself off from the most unbelievable experiences of personal truth and participation.
In both cases the potential rewards are equally intense. If you open the door, you open the door to Heaven and Hell. If you close the door, you can be more effective as a practical agent on Earth. Sometimes the choice seems to be coerced by circumstance. Sometimes we open the door in some contexts more often and close it more in others. Our choices can change and evolve. Sometimes it doesn’t matter either way.
The universe that we find ourselves in is chosen on the inside, chance on the outside, but it is only because we are inside that we can discern the difference. Without an inside, nothing can choose to recognize a difference.
Being No One – Thomas Metzinger
A very good, concise presentation. I disagree with his ultimate conclusions, not because of faulty reasoning, but because of the same overlooked assumptions which most contemporary thinkers miss. Despite the appeal to transparency of modeling to explain the existence of subjective qualities, there really is no connection offered at all. A model is a cognitive index through which one instance of experience or presentation can be encapsulated within another. This is a re-presentation. Data which moves from one table to another, which is concatenated or compressed, is not a model unless a conscious entity interprets it that way. A DVD full of laser pits is not a color and sound recording unless it is decoded to a video screen by a DVD player. The DVD player is not playing a movie unless a movie-literate audience is available to watch it.
The problem with the idea of the phenomenal self model, as I see it, is that there is no computational benefit or physical resource which could account for the extra-physical, extra-informational presentation of the ‘model’ to the unmodeled system. In Raymond Tallis’ book ‘Aping Mankind’, he talks about the obvious disadvantages to such an introduction of conscious presentation into unconscious systems, which, after all, have successfully driven the rest of the universe, from the synthesis of nucleic acids to the neutralization of countless pathogens in our immune system. For something as important as executive control of the organism as a whole, an error ridden, self-deluded agent is the last thing that you would want sitting in the cockpit. Imagine if your digestive system relied on such a volitional dreamer to assimilate your nutrients or remember to regulate the pH of your blood.
No, I’m afraid that no information-based architecture can be used to thoroughly explain subjective experience, although it can explain how the particular human quality of subjective experience can be repaired, augmented, manipulated, etc. With information, we can’t even emulate human consciousness, but we can emulate some important products of it, IMO.
I think that I have found a better way to approach phenomenal facts. Rather than assuming that the experience of seeing red is indirect and non-physical I propose instead that physics has a private and a public range (which themselves have overlapping and underlapping regions).
I suggest that experience of seeing red is not synonymous with factual knowledge, but rather all factual knowledge is a category of direct sensory-motor experience. Experience or sense is primary, beneath matter, energy, spacetime, quantum, information, and arithmetic. Not human sense, but sense as universal fundamental.
As human beings, we are staggeringly complex, multilevel organisms. Our direct experience encompasses nested sub-personal experiences and super-personal signifiers as a recapitulation or compound direct experience. The experience of seeing red is a simpler experience, not because it is an illusion or functionally expedient representation, but because it is, on the native level of a whole person, a direct and ‘pre-factual’ physically real presence. Physical reality referring specifically to that which has both privately and publicly ranged presentation.
It’s a complete reworking of physics, I admit, but I humbly say that I think that it reconciles physics, philosophy, subjectivity, and information theory.
Multisense Realism 
Recent Comments