Multisense Realism

To integrate physics and psyche on the cosmological or Absolute level, I use a concept related to Boltzmann’s entropy curve. The idea, called “Diffractivity” is to conceive of the Totality/Singularity/First Cause as a bottomless, fractalizing, “entropy well”:

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 lowest entropy we know as the Big Bang in a larger context, so that our Big Bang is just one of many statistically inevitable fluctuations of entropy distribution. Our universe would be a bubble or wave of non-disorder that we find ourselves in by the anthropic principle, because such a bubble is the only context that a low entropy phenomenon like human minds could evolve within. Other possibilities include a periodic Big Crunch type negentropy that accounts for the entropy trough that must precede any entropy rise.

What is suggested here instead is a bottomlessly decreasing low entropy, such that the one event in which any “order” (negentropy) at all occurs would automatically be the singular signal into which all subsequent fluctuations would be swept. The first signal must become the only possible protocol for all signals, with any rival protocols being pruned literally ‘before they start’. This frees us from the need for Multi-World Interpretations that I consider to be an “Occam’s catastrophe”. The universe isn’t a machine that produces all possibilities, it is instead a creator and collapser of singular narratives of experience. Statistically this can be thought of as a ‘black whole’, hogging all possible signals for all time, banishing any rival Multiverse possibility through perpetual deferment. By perpetual deferment I mean that the sole entropy well literally starves any competing sources of time so that they can never attain even the status of a possibility. There is only time enough for one universe, although that time is eternal.

What this approach does is place Boltzmann himself, his statistical rules, and their physical enactments all within the anthropic condition in that they are not only possible by definition, but retroactively inevitable. Statistical rules, and laws of any kind including those that define entropy must themselves be sensory-physical structures that can only emerge from the sole bottomless well of ever-decreasing entropy. As the initial signal (which is the signal of the possibility for all signals) keeps generating entropy within itself (in the form of spaced-timed diffraction, or scale-frequency framing), the signal itself implicitly grows “longer”, increasing in significance. Like a genetic code or piece of literature, the longer the words and phrases, the richer the vocabulary, and the more impressive the ideas, relations, structures, and experiences that can be conveyed. Entropy, the vacuuming out of sense, is the conjugate to rising significance. Entropy is the gravity to significance’s electromagnetism, so that the collapse of forms is the exhaust (literally exhaustion of significance in a given frame of perception) while significance* is the saturation of forms and aesthetic richness as it builds on itself in a virtuous cycle or self-enriching upward spiral.

This kind of framework can only be universal if every part of the universe makes some kind of sense – i.e. has some piece of this infinite escalation of negentropy and significance. Entropy then becomes a ratio of decreasing from one frame of sensory phenomena to another. Entropy would have an absolute limit, as c is the absolute limit for velocity. Velocity is a relative value that ranges from stillness to c, and in the same way, I am proposing that entropy (H) is always a finite fraction of a fixed-but-expanding totality of entropy-significance. It is comparable to switching from degrees to radians. We think that entropy is increasing in the world of our bodies, but the entire world outside of our minds is a reflection of the complementary increase in significance that is generated by the very perception and participation that all natural phenomena are engaged in.

Entropy is a measure that has meaning only in relation to significance, such that anything less than 100% entropy has some quantity of absolute significance. Pansensitivity or Aesthetic Foundationalism is the assumption that there can be no universe that begins with zero capacity for awareness. In mathematical terms the Absolute Totality is the frame of reference which contains an ever plummeting 0.000…1% entropy. The minimal possible deviation from total entropy is the creation of the only universe that can ever be, which is the same as saying that consciousness can be created only by consciousness. Whatever happens in the universe, its still only a fragment of everything that happens in the universe. It’s still connected to and absorbed by sense itself.

In this way, the Big Bang becomes a perpetually receding event horizon of absolute and eternal negentropy; a sweeping ‘bright whole’ nexus of inclusion that generously creates, lovingly preserves, and tyrannically absorbs all possible phenomena into a single schema of its own sense. This schema must accommodate all paradoxes, even if it means cheating on the edges of realism (i.e. supernatural and paranormal). The consequences of this amount to a lot of fancy plate spinning and superposition, using devices like nested layers of outer and inner realism. These devices accomplish what I call the Big Diffraction.

The Big Diffraction can be conceived as the inversion of Hume’s Bundle theory of objecthood. Where Hume has objects as bundles of properties, MSR sees objects as derived partitions within the whole. Turning Bundle theory inside out, MSR says that experiences bundle subtractively, that is to say, they are a dis-bundling or fissure of sensory unity that occurs through a mismatch of perceptual ranges and sampling rates. These anti-bundles would not have ‘properties’ but rather they would be a proprietary framing of universal sensory-motive experience.

*Significance is not exactly the same as negentropy. Significance is more like negentopy squared. Significance generates entire ranges of novel signal-to-noise-ratios, it is not just a lack of noise/uncertainty. More on the nature of experiential entropy here, and here.

The fact that this model coincides with a number of other cosmic concepts is unintentional, but need not be denied:

To the idea that the universe is merely a mechanism that has evolved as a consequence of randomness, I say this:

If the universe were random, nothing could ‘gain’ anything, and there could be no ‘accidents’. Randomness would have no continuity for time, space, matter, or energy to persist, much less biological life. If we assign the power of universe creation to ‘random’, then we are reinventing an omnipotent deity through inversion. What can’t randomness do? If disorder can create life, why not also create a form of life that is a God who creates ordered universes?

The key is that order cannot come from absolute disorder, sense cannot come from pure nonsense. Notice the prefixes. We do not say dis-chaos or un-nonsense. Our intuition toward disorder being a corruption of a prior state of order may not have to be true of the universe as a whole, but the part of the universe that insists on being cared about the most by us, seems to make sense only as the origin of the universe that contains it.

In other words, given that it is only possible to care about that which is meaningful, and that care itself can only have significance for us if it relates to our personal intention, then the possibility of a universe that is entirely unintentional belongs to a different circumstance other than the one that humanity can ever find itself in, by definition.

The Sole Entropy Well model is a way of affirming the primacy of sense, and extrapolating the consequences of randomness as an appearance within sense, rather than the other way around. The universe that we live in is not a universe from unexperienced nothingness, but a universe from experiential everythingness.