Archive
Topography of Eigenmorphism Part II
Another visual metaphor:
Eigenmorphism visualization part II
This diagram shows how elemental phenomena (bottom image) appear to us to have very little going on inside. Their public properties are not very body-like and their behaviors are imagined not to be very experiential. Eigenmorphism is the idea that as phenomena progress to richer experiential qualities, their interior and exterior nature expands in opposite directions. In biological organisms, the public and private view not only differ by perspective, but the interior perspective can increasingly elaborate itself (spiral grows) without the exterior perspective (square shadow) revealing any change.
It should be noted that this is a metaphor, not a diagram of matter or quantum. What the yellow wall refers to is actually shapeless, as it is the appreciation of and participation in experiences. The increasing elaboration of the shape stands for increasingly rich and varied modalities of sensitivity. MSR suggests that the three dimensional figure in the center is not real at all, and a better diagram would show the shadow from the blue wall and the shadow from the yellow wall gradually morphing into each other in stages.
The difference between the high and low ends of the eigenmorphic spectrum are not only in the degree to which their interior qualities differ from their exterior properties, or in the kinds of qualities which higher experiences contain, but also in ubiquity vs uniqueness. The generic nature of low level phenomena make them comparatively interchangeable and universal, so that physical and mathematical laws have a universal reach. The highest level phenomena can be esoteric to the point of near-solipsism, with meanings that are so multiplexed and poetic that they apply only to a single moment or perspective.
Is Quantum Theory Naive?
To me, the issue with interpreting quantum systems as real is not that they are not observable or that they contradict naive realism, but that the contradiction is not explained.
Our naive realism might tell us that we are surrounded by empty space rather than a mixture of invisible gases and vaporized particles, but it makes sense that our perception has finite limits, so that particles which are too small for us to resolve visually or tangibly would seem identical to empty space to us. There is no paradox in the nature of air, and we can cool it down to a liquid and see that it is in fact matter.
The nature of quantum systems, however, not only challenges our expectations about what can be detected, it really demands that we relinquish expectations altogether. The idea of a formless, unobservable ‘system’ which takes on paradoxical forms contradicts the ontology of form itself. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong – to the contrary, obviously the model is a complete success – however there are many ways to interpret phenomena which are empirically valid but miss the point entirely. I would imagine that a theory of human personality could be derived from correlating traffic patterns in a city and the make, model, and color of vehicles, and given a certain margin of probability, it too would be compelling. That does not, however, mean that we should attribute human personality to automobiles, or that there is a real but unobservable system which is making determinations about which cars belong to what personalities.
All I’m saying is that for many people, it is too soon to decide that QM is settled science that we will just have to accept on its face. For some, it may indeed just be stubborn habits of naive thinking, but for others, I think that it is an intuition that there can also be a such thing as “naive theoreticism” as well. Just because QM is counter-intuitive and complex does not make it sophisticated or insightful. To me, it makes more sense as a consequence of overlooking the fundamental role that sensory-motive participation plays in the universe. Quantum systems are not only observable, they are observation itself – feeling, seeing, knowing, measuring. Seeing quantum as something outside of that only complicates things unnecessarily. Is it not possible that disembodied probabilities are fictional?
Off the Descartes
It’s funny that the last name of Rene Descartes was used to refer to his Cartesian coordinate system, which in turn has became the basis for much of our sense of creating charts.
The word card as well as playing cards themselves appear to have been introduced to Europe by way of Egypt, and China and the Indus Valley before that.*
Latin charta “leaf of paper, tablet,” from Greek khartes “layer of papyrus,” probably from Egyptian
The root of ‘cartoon’ refers to the cardboard (carton) sketches that artists used in the 19th century. This is a bit different from the sense that I get from playing cards and charting coordinates, which is strongly quantitative and digital, like dominoes and dice. The word dice may be related to ‘datum’ (“given”), but the word origins of both domino and dice are hazy. Dice also have a roundabout connection with Descartes and philosophy in general, by way of Platonic solids and three dimensional (x, y, z) geometry.
Ancient Greece, 5th-3rd century BC. The earliest dice! Made from the knuckle-bone of an animal, drilled and filled with lead for weighting.
Cartoons are now rendered directly in coordinate geometry, using domino-like computers, which are displayed on card or chart-like screens. The object, symbol, paper and calculation – to plan, like an artist, in hypothesis and rehearsal in advance of the fact. The strategic panopticon of the scientific approach marks and defines before the final will is executed. All possibilities are accounted for beforehand as a Hilbert or configuration space – a containment of physical permutations given an assumption of generic recombination, like hands dealt from a finite deck. This is not the anima, not the giver or the taker, but an animation of the given, data about giving and taking.
When we insist upon looking only at the given ‘data’, we are limited to an outward-facing perspective on public spaces. In this mode, time is fragmented into instants of measurement rather than fluid memories. From binary code to the I Ching, quantum to DNA, our notions of Turing emulation and quantum mechanics hinge on this methodical charting of possible positions and dispositions. This world of information is not our world, it is a world that is perpetually out there, but only ephemerally in here. To join the world out there requires bodies and death. The butterfly must be pinned and dried to be displayed and recorded.
*”The earliest authentic references to playing-cards in Europe date from 1377, but, despite their long history, it is only in recent decades that clues about their origins have begun to be understood. Cards must have been invented in China, where paper was invented. Even today some of the packs used in China have suits of coins and strings of coins – which Mah Jong players know as circles and bamboos (i.e. sticks). Cards entered Europe from the Islamic empire, where cups and swords were added as suit-symbols, as well as (non-figurative) court cards. It was in Europe that these were replaced by representations of courtly human beings: kings and their attendants – knights (on horseback) and foot-servants. To this day, packs of Italian playing-cards do not have queens – nor do packs in Spain, Germany and Switzerland (among others). There is evidence that Islamic cards also entered Spain, but it now seems likely that the modern cards which we call Spanish originated in France, ousting the early Arab-influenced designs.” – source
Sketch for a New Physics
Using a topographical metaphor, this diagram shows the relation of significance in direct proportion to the dimorphism of space and time. I call this eigenmorphism. For example, as human beings, our native frame is the Autobiographical level (top). Our experience has a high significance, which means
1) rich qualia – larger nows and more nesting of personal, sub-personal, and super-personal frames allow for deeper sensory vocabularies.
2) a highly divergent space-time presentation (space and time are opposite for us, but identical for quantum phenomena or astrophysical phenomena).
3) a highly divergent spectrum of realism. The Matroyshka dolls with reflection underneath represent this range of clear/real, vs blurred/intuitive, and reflective/fiction. By contrast, the entangled reflections of the microphysical level of physics are neither real nor fictional. With space and time fused, matter and energy become interchangeable foregrounds for information processing.
Two-photon interferometry and quantum state collapse
From the paper Two-photon interferometry and quantum state collapse:
“In short, for ideal measurements both experiment and standard quantum theory imply an instantaneous collapse to unpredictable but definite outcomes.The MS [measurement state] is the global form of the collapsed state with no need for a separate “process 1” or measurement postulate. The other postulates of quantum physics imply that, when systems become entangled, their observed states instantly collapse into unpredictable but definite outcomes. In particular, Schrodinger’s cat is in a nonparadoxical definite state, alive when the nucleus does not decay and dead when it does. This solution of the problem of outcomes requires no assistance from other worlds, human minds, hidden variables, collapse mechanisms, collapse postulates, or “for all practical purposes” arguments.”
I think that this is a promising study which gives support to the MSR model. Once we take the step of questioning whether there can be any such thing as measurement which is other than a kind of ordinary sensory-motor interaction (even if it is microphenomenal),the hard problem of consciousness and explanatory gap disappear.
Seeing that it is the capacity to feel which, through its interruption, gives rise to the sense of touch, and it is the sense of touch which gives rise to touchable things rather than the other way around, we should take the opportunity to go back and reinterpret all of the particle physics of the last 50 years – not because it is wrong, but because it is right for the wrong reasons.
If photons sense each other, how do we know that photons themselves are anything more than atoms sensing and instructing each other? This study fits with a model of the universe in which all phenomena throughout eternity is, on one level, a simultaneous sensory experience. Within the solitude of that Absolute experience are miniature versions of the same, (such as our own human individual sense of conscious solitude). In the polarization-derived ‘spaces’ or ‘gaps’ in between these homing-monads, cat-experiences and atomic-experiences take their marching orders from each other’s presence, represented as localized ‘homing signals’. Cats and atoms alike, since they are ultimately but frozen appearances within some nesting of the global nature of sense itself (the Absolute), also receive intuitive influence from the overall event of the total interaction.
Instead of seeing photons as the foregrounded units, all of the evidence seems to point to the idea that the opposite might be true. As Hobson mentions, “The photons “knew” each others’ phase angles, despite their arbitrarily large separation. This certainly appears to be nonlocal, and indeed, the results violate Bell’s inequality, verifying nonlocality” The so called measurement state would make more sense as the fundamental capacity of the Absolute to pretend at photon, atom, or dead cat forms. This paper takes the step of entangling the outcome of the cat and the outcome of the particle’s decay with the overall measurement state. I think a good next step is to entangle the entire presentation of cats and particles and even ‘outcomes’ to the participant’s sensory nature. It’s all entangled, even entanglement itself. In our case, as human beings, we sense cats more directly than we can sense a particle’s decay, but not as directly as we can make sense of our own thoughts and feelings about them.
Primordial identity pansensitivity (PIP) is the proposition that the capacity to experience, to participate perceptually is the ultimate irreducible universal. In Kantian terms, the sole synthetic a priori. In relativistic terms, the maximally inclusive inertial frame. Other philosophers have used terms like Absolute, Totality, Transcendental Signifier, and Supreme Monad.
The difference between PIP and theism is that PIP does not presume a human-like, or entity-like subject associated with the Absolute. Neither is it presumed that the Absolute is a field, force, vacuum, or information-theoretic phase space. The Absolute is neither local nor nonlocal, but rather the parent of that distinction, and therefore orthogonal to it .
Under PIP, the Absolute is understood to be the meta-phoric firmament within which the three ‘verses’ are diffracted. The three verses, following a Hegelian-type dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis* are phoric (directly experienced), morphic (embodied presence), and metric (abstract relation of the other two verses). In one sense, the Absolute is more closely aligned with the phoric+morphic, i.e. the collection of all presence with no absence.
From this there is a sense of omniscience, as all times and places would be ‘here and now’. Take the universe as we know it, multiply it by eternity, see all of it from every perspective possible, and remove all of the space and time from it and we would have the PIP absolute – a timeless everythingness which transcends the difference between novelty and repetition. If mortality is marked by an unbearable lightness of being, in which all experience is either meaninglessly fleeting or meaninglessly repeating, the immortality of the Absolute is marked by an unbearable saturation of meaning. All is absolutely unique and absolutely generic at once.
Ordinary sense is, on every level, what diffracts/diverges/disentangles one state from another, and one level of sensory interpretation from another. The sensation is the fundamental physical presentation, the measurement of alienated sensations (measured as photons, atoms, bodies) is derived representation. Notions of space, time, and information are meta-representations – concepts and abstractions, which themselves reflect the unity of the Absolute, but in a skeletal and figurative way.
*note that the dialectic itself is a metric abstraction which cannot be directly experienced or embodied. The actual thesis which physically exists is the phoric thesis: sensory-motive-time. Matter-energy-space is the morphic antithesis. Entropy-Significance-Aion (eternity) is the synthesis.
Comparing Worldviews
Side by side comparison of what seems to be the prevailing cosmology (above) and MSR (below). In the consensus worldview, aka Western post-modern view, quantitative function replaces all other modalities of sense and sense itself is absorbed into automatism. Energy is merged with matter as ‘particle-waves’ or ‘probability wave functions’, just as space is merged with time through relativity. Rather than a universe of concrete participation, the illusion of realism ’emerges’ from the evolving complexity of statistical interactions. At what level this emergence occurs, why it occurs, or how are left to future generations to explore.
Conspicuously absent are all traces of subjectivity, participation, and significance. Motive effect is understood only as a caused effect – the playing out of inevitable mechanical agendas which stem from a few ‘simple rules’. All forms of privacy are unknown and entropy is divorced from sensory interpretations. All sensations are thought to be partial revelations of an objective truth, so that any deviation from that empirical fact is considered an error.
MSR sees the absence of sense as a the gaping hole in this schema. While emergence is appropriate for understanding how many phenomena which appear to be novel are often found to be inevitable upon further inspection, it is entirely an entirely inappropriate machina ex deus for phenomena which have no plausible origin from the known functions of the system. The consequences of overlooking the key principle which unites all phenomena (sense), are that we wind up with an impoverished worldview, a Straw Man of cosmology in which we ourselves have no possible place.
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.
Multisense Realism 
Recent Comments