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But Which Eye Is The Binocular One?
“He must learn that his extreme powers of discrimination do not make him weak and inferior – but rather strong and superior.” – Matthew Oliver Goodwin
“Regione caecorum rex est luscus.” (In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.)
– Desiderius Erasmus
Here is a tale about the ontology of perception, or as I like to call it, the laws of private physics. It takes place not in regione caecorum, but in regione luscus – that is, it takes place in the country or land of the one-eyed rather than the blind. In this land, there was once born someone who claimed to have a second eye, and through it, they could see a kind of “depth” and experience an aesthetic of personal engulfment which could not be accessed or appreciated with only a single eye.
The wise men of the land heard these claims and set out to prove, with their one eyed instruments and one eyed reasoning, whether or not this magical experience of stereoscopic vision could exist. As they suspected, their results confirmed that there was no depth nor sense of “embeddedness” which could be felt visually. Vision, they said, was incapable of representing volume.
Two Eyed Sally protested, but to no avail. It was plain to everyone that volume cannot be communicated without touching an object with your body directly. The eye does not touch objects directly, so sensing depth by vision is a hallucination and Sally is crazy.
One day another person was born who also claimed to have a second eye and could see that Sally had two eyes also but that everyone else had one eye. To this, the wise men responded in their most scientific and rational way, doing the only thing that can be done in such a circumstance…
“Burn the witches!”, they bellowed.
Many years passed, and after many witches were burned, very few people spoke about their second eye experiences anymore. When they did it was, obliquely, through stories and metaphors, or as comedy. Increasingly, the one-eyed view of the world had become more and more successful, explaining nearly everything and producing amazing devices like the split-view monocle which allowed one to have two slightly different views of the same thing, allowing people who learned to use the monocle to become much better coordinated. Two views were better than one.
At this point, one of the wisest wise men accidentally ingested a few micrograms of a semi-synthetic fungal extract, and began to hallucinate that he had a second eye. His perceptual solitude became perforated with the legendary aesthetic depths and subjective embeddedness. He reported his amazing experience, and before he knew it, people all over the world were duplicating his unintentional experiment intentionally.
Around the same time, other wise men were playing with light. For years, they had observed an unexpected interference pattern whenever light was projected through a mask with more than one slit. This reminded some of the more unconventional thinkers of the myth of binocular vision, and for a time it seemed that stereoscopy could be a legitimate phenomenon. Strangely, social events seemed to mirror this loosening of constraint and a kind of renaissance or ‘mind opening’ seemed to be blooming on every front.
The more clear-headed of the wise men however, those whose single eyed vision was particularly sharp and acute, warned of trouble. The very thought of people with double the normal amount of eyes, idling in some kind of sickening optical illusion was revolting and they set out to figure out exactly what was the fucking problem with these patterns and slits, and with the strange reports from the fungus eaters as well.
They devised ingenious experiments in which the stereoscopic patterns could be explained. By using instruments which only could see one thing at a time, the validity of the monoscopic model could be deduced. Terms like ‘wave function collapse’ and ‘decoherence’ were a soothing balm for the anxieties of the wise men.
Gradually the rash of thinkers who took stereoscopic delusions seriously were drummed out of the wise man academy, and depth of field was discredited. Instead of being studied as a strange physical phenomenon, depth perception became something else – an ‘epiphenomenon’. Epiphenomena of this kind are an ’emergent property’ which sort of ‘un-exists’ in a never-never land hidden away in neurons…or maybe calcium ions…or radiological zappity zaps.
Even if some of the sensations of stereoscopic vision felt real to some people, it would be because of the ability of these zappings to compare and extract information about each other. Such information might be useful after all, because it allows more data to be simulated at once and more data about the environment means a better chance at survival and reproduction. It could be that the people with the two eyed delusion were not witches or criminally insane after all, they are just unfortunate mutants who have a disability.
There was still some question, however, about how the light knew which slit was the right one to go through, and about whether it was the second eye which was the defective one or whether it just corrupted the first eye. Interpretations abounded about multiple universes and entangled eyeballs. All of these interpretations had in common the same thing: they concluded by re-asserting the validity of flat vision. They could all agree on one thing – that three dimensional sight was supernatural hogwash. The details of how and why were complicated and esoteric, but they are consistent and verifiable, (as long as you use instruments and experiments which are designed to filter out anything unscientific and ignore your own corrupted judgments).
“And so, little by little, a little later
These critics set to work
To make nonsense out of the sense of what we were doing.
And they succeeded.
They destroyed our hero’s faith in himself.
He didn’t have it any more.
After a few, disappointing times
In the big auditorium.
The light gone out of him.
We all stopped going.
And the man who had once seemed so tall
And who now seemed so much smaller
Left our town
Saying no, no, no
[…]
They put us back on the narrow path.
This is the way things have been in our town
For as long as anyone cares to remember.
By the way
How are things in your town?”
After Einstein’s Mollusk
I’m beginning to realize that Multisense Realism is an extension to the absolute of the approach that Einstein took in developing General Relativity. In doubting the existence of gravity as a product in space, he opened the door to a simpler universe where physical things relate to each other in an ordered way, not because some particular propulsion system is in place, but because the frame of reference of physical order itself is not rigid as we assume. He actually calls this new, flexible relativism of space co-ordinates ‘mollusks’:
“This 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. That which gives the “mollusk” a certain comprehensibleness as compared with the Gauss co-ordinate system is the (really unqualified) formal retention of the separate existence of the space co-ordinate. Every point on the mollusk is treated as a space-point, and every material point which is at rest relatively to it as at rest, so long as the mollusk is considered as reference-body. The general principle of relativity requires that all these mollusks can be used as reference-bodies with equal right and equal success in the formulation of the general laws of nature; the laws themselves must be quite independent of the choice of mollusk.”
– Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory. 1920.
XXVIII. Exact Formulation of the General Principle of Relativity
Einstein’s transcendence of ‘rigid reference bodies’ with flexible and independent inertial frames captures the essence of relativity but only scratches the surface in exposing the rigidity of physics, which, even in the post-Einsteinian era reduces the participant to a zero dimensional vector generic ‘observer’. While this adherence to rigid simplicity is critical for ‘freezing the universe’ into a static frame for computation purposes, it introduces an under-signifying bias to all matters pertaining to subjectivity – particularly emotion, identity, and meaning. In its drive for simplicity and universality, physics inadvertently becomes an agenda for the annihilation of the self and psyche.
Part of the genius of Einstein was to glimpse the tip of the iceberg of this confirmation bias and challenge it successfully through his mastery of field equations. In my view, Einstein’s vision was only partially understood, just long enough to develop a kind of Empire Strikes Back counter-revolution. After the initial flush of Bohr and Heisenberg’s relativistic-probabilistic interpretations of Quantum Mechanics in the 1920’s (The Spirit of Copenhagen), physics seems to have sought out a new level of reductionism. Information science has dissected Einsteins Mollusk into bits and strings, and re-imagining flexibility and independence as phantoms of a Multi-World Matrix. Einstein’s cosmological animism has been transformed into a cosmological animation – a simulation of matter-like information (that doesn’t matter) in a vacuum virtual sea of Dark Energy.
Rather than seeing this as a sign that we have come to a bold new understanding of cosmic existentialism, I see this as a black octagon sign of having mistaken the cul-de-sac for a highway. We have failed to understand ourselves and our universe and need to turn the whole thing completely around. The way to do this, I propose, is to go back to Einstein’s mollusk and pick up where he left off, questioning the rigidity of physical reference bodies.
In a way, I am suggesting that we relativize relativity itself. Not in the pop culture appropriation of relativism as merely the principle that ‘everything is relative’, but to understand how relation itself is the principle through which ‘everything’ is realized, and that that principle is identical with ‘sense’, i.e. subjective participation and perception of self and other.
While physical science is perfectly content to predict and control matter, I have no doubt that pursuing this goal exclusively should carry the kind of warning which science fiction has been giving us from the start: We should be careful of developing technology that we can’t handle and the way to handle technology is to evolve our own humanity.
It is for this very reason, that purely mathematical approaches to understanding the universe as a whole and consciousness are ultimately doomed. Their rigidity arises from a reference frame which is intrinsically incompatible with the floridly eidetic and creative frame of human privacy. Where General Relativity envisioned a flexible reference body of spacetime coordinates which contrasted with Galilean-Cartesian uniformity, this new reference frame that should be explored contrasts against both the Classical, Einsteinian, and Quantum frameworks. Multisense realism provides a Meta-Relativistic framework which honors the canonical conjugates of general relativity in proprietary privacy of subjectivity. The universe within, like Bohm’s implicate order, is as alien to spacetime relativism as Einstein’s mollusk was to Newton. The new mollusk is not one of space and time united, but of time and ‘time again’, of literal and figurative significance, symmetry and meta-juxtaposition. The new framework begins with no beginning, but rather an infinite centripetal involution which is accessed directly through intra-corporeal participation and inter-corporeal perception.
Light Has No Speed
At least not in the way that most people would think of it, if they did ever think of it. There is a speed at which a state of illumination radiates from molecule to molecule or body to body which depends on physical qualities of the bodies in question, but I think that it is correct to say that light does not travel ‘through’ a vacuum at all, but figuratively jumps from within bodies sympathetically through perception and imitative participation. It is the behavior of matter which waves and scatters, not independent projectiles or structures of any kind. Light, warmth, color, motion, are experiences, not objects.
Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light with respect to any inertial frame is independent of the motion of the light source, and explored the consequences of that postulate by deriving the special theory of relativity and showing that the parameter c had relevance outside of the context of light and electromagnetism. After centuries of increasingly precise measurements, in 1975 the speed of light was known to be 299,792,458 m/s with a measurement uncertainty of 4 parts per billion. In 1983, the metre was redefined in the International System of Units (SI) as the distance travelled by light in vacuum in 1 ⁄ 299,792,458 of a second. As a result, the numerical value of c in metres per second is now fixed exactly by the definition of the metre.
I’m not an expert by any means, but the thing that makes light interesting is in the first sentence above: “the speed of light with respect to any inertial frame is independent of the motion of the light source”. This is that business of how velocities are added among moving objects, but not with light. Light is always faster than any object, no matter how fast the object is moving. Light is not just the fastest thing, it is the thing that defines faster-than-anything-elseness.
What I think special relativity tells us is that contrary to this conception of light,
what is actually going on looks like this:
This is the tricky part because although my rendition of the entire beam appearing instantaneously is, I think, correct within this hypothetical setup of a human scale train, if this train were millions of times larger, then it could be argued that the beam would actually grow non-instantaneously compared to a human sized observer (i.e. miniscule). Rather than thinking of being able to see light moving, I think we have to anchor ourselves in the fixed Einsteinian constant of c, and understand that the latency which we observe (in a radio transmission between a distant spacecraft and the control center on Earth, for example), is not the result of waves of ‘energy’ traveling through space from antenna to antenna, but rather a reflection of the relative scales of the events involved. When we talk to the spacecraft we have to use a much larger ‘here-and-now’ compared to our own native human scaled time, so that the nesting of smaller and larger nows is reflected as scaled experiences of delay. This is just how matter makes sense of itself on different scales. It is not the speed of light, it is the speed of speed or the speed of sense, matter, or time.
The picture that I propose would be more accurate is this:
As our naive perception suggests, there is no concretely real ‘beam’ of light, rather there is a spot of light present at the target, as well as an illumination at the flashlight source, and in our eyes, and (not pictured) in our upscaled human mind.
In other words, when we think of light as having a speed, we are not really understanding the full ramifications of special relativity and are merely projecting our Newtonian-Cartesian prejudices onto something which is not classical. The reason that it is not classical, however, I propose, is because visible light is not a projectile at all, but rather access to visual sensitivity, i.e. an extension of self-experience to incorporate the appearance of non-self in the visual range of percpeption (as opposed to tactile, aural, olfactory, emotional, or intellectual).
*gifs cannibalized from here.
Sole Entropy Well Model
Another way of visualizing the integration of physics and psyche uses the concepts related to Boltzmann’s entropy curve to conceive of the Totality/Singularity/First Cause as a bottomless fractal entropy well, as follows:
Boltzmann’s idea, as I understand it, is to explain Loschmidt’s Paradox, which (also as I understand it) is basically “If the universe is always increasing from low entropy to high entropy, then where did the initial low entropy come from?”
Boltzmann’s hypothesis places the low entropy we know as the Big Bang as just one of many statistically inevitable fluctuations of entropy distribution. It’s a bubble or wave of non-disorder that we find ourselves in anthropically (because such a bubble is the only context that a low entropy phenomenon like human minds could evolve within). Other possibilities include a Big Crunch type negentropy that accounts for the entropy trough that must precede any entropy rise.
What I suggest is a bottomless low entropy, such that the one event in which any negentropy at all occurs would automatically be the singularity into which all subsequent fluctuations would be swept. Sort of like a black hole for negentropy, hogging all possible signals for all time, banishing any rival Multiverse possibility to perpetual delay.
What this does is place Boltzmann himself, his statistical rules, and their physical enactments all within the anthropic condition in which they are possible. Statistical rules, and laws of any kind including those which define entropy are themselves physical structures which can only emerge from a bottomless entropy well. These kinds of laws and their underlying sense of possibility, probability, events, succession, recursion, regularity, comparison, persistence, etc can only be universal if every part of the universe makes some kind of sense – i.e. has some piece of this infinite negentropy.
Entropy then becomes a property like velocity, (which ranges from stillness to c), a fraction of a totality rather than an open ended scalar quantity. Entropy is a relative measure which has meaning only in relation to significance, such that anything less than 100% entropy has some quantity of absolute significance (Totality-Singularity = 0.000…1% entropy)
This way, the Big Bang becomes a perpetually receding event horizon of absolute and eternal negentropy – a Borg-like ‘bright whole’ which tyrannically absorbs and subordinates all potentials and possibilities into a single continuum-schema. This continuum must accommodate all paradoxes which amounts to a lot of fancy plate spinning and superposition, using devices like nesting outer and inner realism within each other on multiple interrelated yet mutually isolated layers or castes. These devices accomplish what I call the Big Diffraction.
Is Matter Concentrated Energy?
Would you have any objection to postulating that all matter is a form of concentrated energy (E = mcc), and that all energy is aware-ized?
I agree in a sense but I think we can go further than that. I would say that energy is nothing except awareness in the efferent-output mode (motive), and matter is awareness in the afferent-input mode (sense). E=mc² gives us the measure of how the two modes relate to each other. When we talk about energy, we are referring to a quality of dynamism of experienced events to persist through time and across space. The idea that matter is concentrated energy is more true if we mean concentrated in time than concentrated in space as density.
To say that matter is concentrated energy conjures an image of a bright glowing haze being squeezed into a particle, which I think we could say is figuratively true, but not literally. It is *as if* that were happening as far as particles can be destroyed and there is an explosive dynamism produced in surrounding matter, but I don’t think that there is actually any bright glowing haze to begin with. If we use a sense-based model instead, with energy as nothing more or less than the experience-behavior of things (particles, objects, cells, bodies), so that empty space cannot in any way contain energy, I think it makes more sense in addressing our experience, and no less sense as far as interpreting physics. Energy is a notational concept of how things happen to matter statistically, but I think our mistake is to model it as a pseudosubstance that literally exists.
Instead, energy condenses as matter not through space but through time. It is not frozen energy but an accumulated history which has been perceptually collapsed due to the defining conditions of our subjectivity. We see a slice of the whole history of the thing from the outside as a 3D object.
Remember too that both fission and fusion produce energy. Most of that energy is not from particles being turned into energy but from mass being lost as nuclei either “move into the same apartment together” under fusion and thus save on “rent”, or in fission by breaking up big businesses by selling off divisions. It’s interesting that it works both way – apparently because of the Iron Peak: Matter lighter than iron wants to be heavier – it’s looking for roommates. Matter heavier than iron wants to get rid of employees. That’s my goofy understanding anyhow. I think that particles can actually be lost but the amount of energy generated by that is surprisingly low. The power is in changing the relation of materials, not in converting them directly to energy.
It’s really a whole different way of looking at energy that I’m trying to get across. Once we can let go of our inherited 20th century models of energy and try out the sense-primitive model instead, I think we recover a great deal of our native realism. We experience energy directly. We see light, we feel heat, we hear sound. None of those things can be described in any meaningful way as objects in space. Our instruments and observations only tell us what they are experiencing, how the event changes them. The 20th century gave us a brilliant unifying vision of energy as an underlying quantitative omnipotence, but I think that is only true in the most physical and qualitatively flat sense.
I think a new understanding of energy must recognize the disunity of sense channels; the qualitative deepening of material experiences driven from top down significance attraction as well as bottom up accumulation. By breaking up the monolith of physics, we unify the outermost definition of the cosmos with the definitions which are evolving within (biology, neurology, anthropology, psychology, etc.). By breaking up Einsteinian spacetime relativity into sense-motive perception, we unify qualitative subjectivity with quantitative objectivity.
Multisense Realism 
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