Absolut PacMensch
Sense, Essence, and Existence
A ManifesTOE of the Over-Examined Life
Absolut PacMensch
Craig Weinberg’s answer: Let’s say for moment that you were an alien scientist from a planet which was powered entirely by geothermal energy and on which no creatures had evolved eyes. You cannot see light, but have other senses which are very highly developed instead. With your instruments, you…
http://boingboing.net/2013/04/29/bruce-sterling-on-startups-r.html
“Bruce excoriates the startup world for its complicity with the conspiracy of the global investor class to vastly increase the wealth of a tiny minority, and describes the role that “design fiction” has in changing this.”
Starting around 06:00 in particular…
I posted a diagram recently that shows the words that have changed the least in the greatest number of languages. The top words include only pronouns and numbers: I, Who, 2, 3, 5.
I and Who are key words in the Multisense Continuum, and in the Multisense Syzygy, since they represent the component of sense itself in its purest form. Participatory presence. There are some super-signifying (i.e. meaningful yet delusional, supernatural) themes that I have played with using I, Eye, and Aye, Third Eye, I and I, etc. The homophone Aye represents the extension of participation. To affirm positively is to lend one’s participation publicly with a single bit of information: Yes, or binary 1. The Eye of Horus, third eye, and I and I reflect psychic-spiritual connections to divinity or consciousness itself. A literal Eye is for seeing light, etc..
Who is the interrogative reference to I. In the list of Wh- questions I map it to sense itself. It is the only one of that list which corresponds to a personal phenomenon.
Who = Sense, Why = Motive
Where = Space, When = Time
What = Matter, How = Energy
Which = Significance
As for the numbers, they are like bookends of I and Who, as numbers are the impersonal shadows - the dehydrated residue of personal experience projected outwardly. These numbers, 2,3,5 in particular are interesting as they are the intersection of the Fibonacci sequence and prime number sequence. They also add up to 10 and power to 32768 (binary 1000 0000)
Fibonacci 0,1,1,2,3,5,…
Prime numbers 2,3,5,…
Adds to 10
2^3^5 = 8-bit byte
Strung together, I who two three five says to me (again from a super-signifying view with the apophenia aperture wide open), something like “I am the multiple layers of sense expressed in arithmetic. Sort of an artist’s signature in hidden in the corner.
If this kind of thing is not your speed, it still is interesting from an evolutionary perspective. This set of prime pronouns and prime numbers are the most stable + popular and they don’t refer to anything related to hominid survival. They aren’t words for water, food, or baby. They refer to immaterial things.
“a. You confirm once again that YOU propose that there were no atoms, rocks, moons, planets, stars, gases…”
No, you are Straw-Manning my position. I propose that there were AT LEAST what we know as atoms, rocks, moons, planets, stars, gases…, but there was also the entire experiential history which relates to those human appearances. What we see is the tip of the iceberg. We see an acorn rather than the life of every oak forest for the last 65 million years. The universe doesn’t necessarily see what a person sees - our sample rate is between .01 seconds and 100 years, and a similarly narrow range of scale relations by size. If we use my premise of the universe as experience, as perceptual participation, then our little atoms, rocks, moons, planets, stars, gases are a TOY MODEL of the top level universal experience, and a very idiosyncratic model compared to any other one that might have been around before biology.
“So, YES! YOU are suggesting that there was no Universe before life.”
No, I would say that you are suggesting that. If the universe could already exist perfectly well as an unseen, unfelt, silent, senseless mechanism, then there is no plausible justification for the ‘emergence’ of any such ‘concepts’ or qualia. That experience could accidentally and spontaneously begin exist in such a mechanism is absurd. It’s superfluous, it’s irrelevant, and it’s unexplainable except with arguments from ignorance, and deus ex probability.
“b. Every living creature is comprised of atoms. Did living entities begin their journey simultaneously with atoms, planets, stars? Or were atoms there as the raw material assembled to become alive?”
Every non-living phenomenon is comprised of atoms also. Atoms which flow and freeze and collide and fuse. Atoms grew in kind by multiple nuclear fusion and grew in meta-kind by molecular bonding. Those are experiences which we can infer just from the little bit of what we can measure with instruments used by the monkey body. The atoms were the raw material, but more importantly the experiences which are represented by the atoms are the raw material still. We are still atoms.
“c. How do atoms and life spontaneously appear from… from… from what? Please explain what alternative there was before life and atoms suddenly self-created themselves from whatever. What other assumption can you make?”
The universal experience is, was, and always will be, a unified presence which multiplies itself internally as subdivided experiences. Within any given subroutine experience all other experiences appear as public bodies separated by space. As you get down to the early cosmological shit, the divisions by kind that we are accustomed to - outer bodies v inner experience, thermodynamic irreversibility v subjective will, etc - become increasingly less discernible. This is the catastrophe of QM. We are detecting the feelings of atoms using other atoms - giving us the false impression of exclusively digital phenomena. Any interaction between material instruments and matter is going to polarize/truncate into a tokenized record of that interaction. The actual interaction is a sense interaction, but we aren’t those atoms so we can’t feel what happened, we can only look at the evidence that something happened.
To get to the real cosmological origin, I think that you have to factor in the origin of ontology itself - of sense. For that, I have a little bit of (maybe true) insanity: http://multisenserealism.com/2012/06/27/sole-entropy-well-model/
“And what do they look like if we do NOT look at them? Indeed, now that you looked at them, please draw an H atom or point to one anywhere on the Internet. What does an electron look like? What does light look like now that you’ve ‘experienced’ it?”
They might look-feel like light-heat to each other. As molecules assemble, they maybe have proto-sounds and smells also. I mean molecules have to acquire these qualities at some point. Even if our human flavors and colors are a trillion times more rich than these kind of microcosmic qualia, there still is no reason to suspect that there was no precedent for what we experience. Just suddenly a palette of colors appears in a brain’s experience after billions of years of darkness? Eh? Doubt it.
I don’t know that an ‘electron’ can be absolutely separated from the atoms of the measuring device. It’s like asking what a bank transaction looks like. Subatomic anything I am very suspicious of (what I said about the phenomenal partitions we expect as humans becoming indiscernible and quasi-fused.) Nothing that small has eyes, so there is no focused shape necessarily, just an experience of contraction and relaxation, a modulation of difference and indifference between public and private libraries of experience.
In my view, matter and energy are the publicly reflected tokens* of sense and motive respectively. As human experiences, we are a complicated thing to try to use as an example - like trying to learn arithmetic by starting with an enormous differential equation. When we look at a brain, we are using the eyes of a simian body. That’s what the experience of a person looks like when it is stepped all the way down from human experience, to animal experience, to cellular experience, to molecular experience, and all the way back up to the animal experience level. Plus we are seeing it from the wrong angle. If I’m right, experience is a measure of time, not space, so looking at the body associated with an experience that lasts 80 or 100 years from a sampling rate of a few milliseconds would be a radically truncated view, even if we were looking at it in its native, subjective form. Every moment we are alive, we are surfing on a wave that has been growing since our birth - growing not just in synch with clock time, but changing in response to the significance of the experiences in which we participate directly. This is what I mean by sense. A concretely real accumulation of experience, a single wave in constant modulation as the local surface of an arbitrarily deep ocean.
Information is not sense, and neither is it matter or energy. Information is the shadow of all of these, of their relation to each other, which is cast by sense. Information is like sense as far as it being neither substantial nor insubstantial, but it is the opposite of sense also. Matter, energy, and information are all opposite to each other and opposite to sense. They are the projections of sense. If you break down the word information into three bites, the “in” would be sensory input, the ‘form’ would be ‘matter-space’ and the ‘ation’ would be ‘energy-time’. When most people think about information though, they undersignify the input/output aspect, the “in”, - which is sense, and conflate consciousness with senseless formations. Formations with no participating perceiver are non-sense and no-thing.
The difference between sense and information is that sense is anchored tangibly in the totality of events in all of history. It is the meta-firmament; the Absolute, and it potentially makes sense of itself in every sense modality. Information only makes sense from one particular angle or method of interpretation. It is a facade. As soon as information is removed from its context, its ungrounded, superficial nature is exposed. Information so removed does not react or adapt to make itself understood - it is sterile and evacuated of feeling or being. It is purely a feeling being’s idea of doing or knowing and does not exist independently of its ‘host’. Because of this it is tempting to conceptualize information as self-directing memes, but that would only be true figuratively. In an absolute sense, memes are a figure-ground inversion, i.e it puts the cart before the horse and sucks us into strong computationalism and the Pathetic fallacy. From what I can see, information has no autonomy, no motive. It is an inert recording of past motives and sensations.
Previously, I have written about computation, numbers, mathematics as being the flattest category of qualia. Flattest in the sense of being almost purely an tool for knowing or doing that has to borrow rely on being output in some aesthetic form to yield any feeling or ‘being’.
Computation can be represented publicly through material things like positions of beads on an abacus, the turns of mechanical gears, the magnetic dispositions of microelectronic switches, the opening and closing of valves in a plumbing system, the timing and placement of traffic signals on a street grid, etc. All of these bodies rely on the ability to detect or sense each others passive states and to respond to them in some motor effect. It makes no difference how it is represented, because the function will be the same. This is precisely the opposite of consciousness, in which rich aesthetic details provide the motivation and significance. Evolutionary functions are never nakedly revealed as a-signifying generic processes. For humans, food and sex are profoundly aesthetic, social engagements, not just automatic functions.
Computation can also be represented publicly through symbols. One step removed from literally embodied aesthetics, computation can be transferred figuratively between a person’s thoughts and written symbols through the sensory-motor medium of mathematical literacy. We can imagine that there is a similar ferrying of meaning between the mathematician’s thoughts and some non-local source of arithmetic truth. Arithmetic truth seems to us certain, rational, internally consistent, universal but it is also impersonal. Arithmetic laws cannot be made proprietary or changed. They are eternal and unchanging. We can only borrow local copies of numbers for temporary use, but they cannot be touched or controlled. They represent disembodied knowledge, but no doing, no being, and no feeling.
In the first sense, mathematics is represented by mechanical positions of public bodies, and therefore almost completely ‘flat’ qualitatively. Binary interactions of go/on-stop/off have no sense to them other than loops and recursive enumeration. In the second sense, a written mathematical language adds more qualia, clothing the naked digital states in conceptual symbols. The language of mathematics allows the thinker to bridge the gap between public doing of machines and private knowing of arithmetic truth.
Although strong computationalists will disagree, it seems to me that a deeper understanding reveals of computation reveals that arithmetic truth itself requires an even deeper set of axioms which are pre-arithmetic. The third sense of mathematics is the first sense we encounter. Before there is mathematical literacy, there is counting. Counting to three gives way to counting on fingers (digits), as we learn the essential skills of mental focus required. As we learn more about odd and even numbers, addition and subtraction, the aesthetics of symmetry and succession are not so much introduced into the psyche as foreign concepts, but are recovered by the psyche as natural, familiar expectations. Math, like music, is felt. Before we can use it to help us know essential truths or to cause existential effects, we have to be able to participate in counting and the solving of problems in our mind. When we do these kinds of problems, our awareness must be very focused. We are accessing an impersonal level of truth. Our human bodies and lives are distractions. Machines and computers have always been conspicuously lacking in what people refer to as ‘soul’, or ‘warmth’, feeling, empathy, personality, etc. This is consistent with the view of computation that I am trying to explain. Whatever warmth or personality it can carry must originate in a being - an experience which is anchored in the aesthetic presentation of sense rather than the infinite representation of information.
*or orthomodular inversions to be more precise
S33: I never said that matter was ‘my’ experience. My experience of matter is an experience of things that are not me having experiences - on various scales of time and space.
other guy: “You are saying that given eyes to see with, we can all experience (see) the Moon. Big deal!”
The Moon that we ‘all’ see is not the Moon that plankton in the ocean experience. Our experience of the Moon is the experience common to humans+animals+organisms+substances. If you subtract all of those out, you successively eliminate layers of accumulated sense. Non-human animals lose all of the poetic and scientific understanding. Non-animal organisms lose all of the emotional changes associated with the lunar cycle. Non-organisms lose all of the photosynthetic or seasonal, growth related implications. Non-substances lose everything else. If there is no substance outside of the Moon which relates to it in some sensory-motive participation, then there can be no lunar object. The substance within the Moon would not experience itself as the Moon or part of the Moon, but only as whatever oscillation of sensations over the eons seems like on whatever scale.
What we see is an experience of experiences. There is no *the* Moon, there are just a bunch of different sensations which are represented to different participants in different ways. If you change what you are, the description of the Moon changes, and if there is nothing describe the Moon from the inside or outside, then there it is indiscernible from nothingness. That’s not a real situation of course, as nothingness is impossible, since the universe is an experience and not an emptiness.
