In-Sensed, Out-Sourced: Senseless Senses

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/05/24

The coherent frame conscious experience places on us seems as if a great mystery.

Some problem without solution, a “mystery” in short. It’s in the language, though.

How does vibration come into the ear to form sound in awareness? How does electromagnetic radiation create a full breadth of visual life? How does the touch on a finger tip make a spatial representation in the head and granular sensation of drawing squiggles in beach sands – let alone a differentiation between the space ‘out there,’ the world, and ‘in here,’ the mind?

Why is one thing sweet and another salty, or yet another scalding hot with the automated physiological reaction to produce tears, sweat, and flushed cheeks? All these jiggles on sensory apparatus making cuts in the manifold universe. The universe, as I said in earlier writings, is a unicity.

It has its own uniqueness in singular unified existence and in its generativity, ability to differentiate itself in novelty. The weird apparent paradox may be: These traditional five senses, individually, can be taken as, not mysteries but, problems with solutions, but greater problems than the coherency problem, because of the precision of their aim. Sometimes, the search for the right word is harder than writing a long-form essay, as an analogy.

Namely, the coherent experience of every sense may lie not in the idea of the individual senses, but in the reframing of the processing of the universe in a generalized way – cuts in the manifold. If Nature – the totality of all – can be characterized as an informational construct, why would we be left with anything but the most generalized formulation of information processing and informational process-structure?

Cuts by subjectivities, in it, would be limitations of this generalized formulation, as such. Nature’s surgeons opening Nature and peering inside, scalpel! The narrative or story about separate senses can assist in the comprehension of different degrees of coherent information processing, though. The coherent experience of conscious life presents a sincere problem because this includes the translation, if taking senses as individual, of senses into a common medium presented as a wide range in conscious life. It seems so obvious. How could this not but present a foundational problem?

Maybe, our assumptions are, in fact, wrong.

Sensory information not only presents a different style of receiving input from the world. It presents the information at a different speed per sense. Some senses send information with greater rapidity to the central nervous system than others. That seems like a structural universal for the human organism.

Which raises the question once more, what is it about temporal and experiential apparent coherent experience luring these sensory signals into a coherency – not only an experience at once, but as a happening at the same time? Or, at a minimum, an apparent coherent consciousness of the world around us. Obviously, we evolved in limited contexts with strained resources and definite, though not extreme, pressures to select out particular forms or faults and styles of information processing.

It would require that much more resources to build another system to monitor discrepancies in conscious experience, which makes little sense. Either evolve an organism as if the experience is coherent, so none-the-wiser, or fill-in-the-gaps as with so much else faulty in the organism. “We’re not going for perfect here at God Inc. We’re going for good enough to the next generation.”

Our style of information processing and information harvesting become honed over time. Few people are genuine geniuses. Most people most of the time are some base floor of functional, though, whether exchanges in some casual conversation or acting in some daily activity.

Each sense deals with a sufficient shift from a prior state into an active state and then into something approximating the prior baseline. The sensitivity of each sense is variable. The parts of the world external to the organism each responds is variable and distinct. These only truly become mixed in a phenomena called synesthesia.

Even though, synesthetes, themselves, may harbour a key secret to the entire enterprise of conscious experience, where we can present conscious experience neither as a user illusion nor as separate inputs somehow magically united. That’s a weird thought. What does that even mean? For one, God isn’t; or if God is, then is an engineer, and not a magician, and a somewhat shitty one.

Evolution via natural selection amounts to a good enough engineer – good enough for survival of a host of organisms surviving and reproducing in an environment and co-adapting over long stretches of time and differentiated magnitudes, constantly, for hundreds of millions of years. Human beings, as an organic machine, arose out of this milieu. A differentiation as a species only 100,000 to 250,000 years into the recent fold of deep evolutionary time.

People are a base level functional. Senses can be mixed. Consciousness appears coherent. Yet, we know distinctions exist among people. Senses are assumed as distinct. The facts of sensory input and nerve impulse to neural signal transmission are disparate, different, and variable, in time, in distal location to the brain, and signal speed. What a damnable mess!

Bad segue time, Alan Turing once remarked on not being able to provide any such comfort in the capability of digital machines to replicate anything done by a human being. He seemed extreme decades ago. He appears extreme now. I remain inclined to agree with him, inasmuch as there is a reason to adhere to a natural view of human beings. If Nature as an engineer makes a sense, we can take heed of its marvels.

Nature can engineer a human organism over sufficient deep time from previous forms and generations of species. Similarly, human beings with sufficient capacity and resources, in principle, should be able to deconstruct and re-engineer something approximating a human being in a different chassis, say a digital mind and alloyed frame.

Human beings as a base level functional in most cases can be a minimum bar for such beings, not human being in substrate, but human being in nature, in engineering. If nature is not the engineering in action, what are we to assert tacit in our thought but some magical entity or substance?

That’s precisely the non-scientific thinking creating most of the problems in terms of operational and pragmatic comprehension of human beings. It’s not that we have a necessary detachment from something else in the universe. However, in the context of a functional knowledge of human beings, we are an engineering issue. If Nature was not an engineering problem, then we would not be garnering success in the replication of engineering marvels discovered by Nature for human purposes.

A spirit or non-natural substance explanation is something wholly meant to fill in ignorance with some explanation: Namely, the need for cognitive closure – look it up! I am inclined to agree with Noam Chomsky, Bertrand Russell, and a wide range of others, who are known for piercing some deeper truths. Once the end of the organism, that’s the end of the person, because the engineering deteriorates to the non-functional – so cessation. As with a flame, you do to go anywhere; you cease.

Now, the, typical, perception of machines is a digital processor and then a presentation on a screen, e.g., a tower and monitor. Yet, these can mimic the nature of colour, sound, a sense of depth in vision, motion, interactivity, and so on. The input is the same, electrical signals. What if we developed a more advanced screen with an actual multi-dimensionality in presentation, not simply 2-dimensional with uni-dimensional adjuncts of sound or interactivity, and so on?

That’s more approximating the presentation of a mind in conscious experience, where mind is the agency or the recursion back into the conscious space/the most pertinent information and consciousness is the broad band of information plus the presentation of conscious experience and this ‘agency.’

We make a big stink about qualia, the redness of red, and so on. What prevents this thought about qualia falling into ad infinitum and then to reductio ad absurdum? Here’s what I mean: Why not the redness of the redness of red? Are we talking about a thing in itself when we speak of the redness of red, as if a ghostly essence?

Makes little sense, or, are we talking about an ontological descriptor of a percept repeatable inasmuch as one has patience to the redness of redness of redness… of red? To tacitly or implicitly speak in this manner, we are, in a way, misguided and falling into a user illusion of language. Language is misleading us.

We become bedevilled – ruh-roh – by the descriptors of percepts, language and the colour red, respectively, into a further mirage of the descriptors of percepts of concepts about the percepts, und so weiter. Language is the descriptor. Percept is the immediate presentation to conscious experience. Concept is the first level of abstraction from the immediate perception. So, the first “language is the descriptor” is the same as the “concept” in a linguistic representation.

Does that make sense? Sincerely, I’m not trying to be an ass… this time. I want to make sure the clarity is there. Even the concept itself, it’s grounded in the percepts themselves, so not far removed from the perception. It may be bound to how the mind is architected. To imagine, we must visualize based on a ground state of information, non-generative unoriginal information merely harvested from the world.

I would add language, too, the wordness of words. Essentially, these seem like systems of differentiation on a bland cosmos. No red or a green, but a red to distinguish a green, and vice versa. This seems like a mystery. Something inexplicable, yet, let’s take the more obvious example: Why the word “red” or “green,” or Canadian English in contrast to Hebrew, Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu, or proto-Indo-European?

Binary digital processing appears sufficient to present a multi-modal processing. The current presentations are crude, though, but the current iterations have a distinct differentiation between the processing happening ‘under the hood’ and the information processing screen presented on a computer screen. In a sense, if this multi-modal and multi-dimensional presentation of processing can be evolved, then digital infrastructure could do this too.

In fact, the sense of agency and a recursion back to a computer screen level of simplistic information processing and activity should be, in principle, possible. The subtlety of human thought lies in having the multi-modality and multi-dimensionality of the screen presented to conscious experience and the agency for interaction with this presentation called conscious experience.

These, as you can tell, exhibit a concretized formulation of ideas seen with a general magical sensibility in many definitions, as if a mystical, distant, ephemeral, spiritual quantity. These can be quantified and differentiated functionally, so architecturally.

If you can gather the general function of a structure, then you can deconstruct, with some effort and ingenuity, the engineering and then reconstruct the same structure for the same general function. Fundamentally, this is to view natural objects as mathematical objects. As we can see with mass simulations in contemporary and simple models, we can create simplistic simulacrums of real objects and forces acting on those objects based on mathematical modelling.

One merely need scale the complexity of these simulations upwards in the factors taken into account, the precision of the models, the real geometry of the objects, and such. These simulations, these mathematical models in a fake time, these pseudo-naturalistic presentations represent the reality of the matter in their false reality; reality’s evolutionarily demonstrated products are, in fact, mathematical objects, but, in the real universe, represent process – so real process-objects, including human beings. We are mathematical process-objects.

What is the point of this part of the conversation?

Describing human beings as mathematical process-objects in the real universe or the set providing raw materials for subsets to be fed into us, this provides a basis for breaking down traditional or contemporary thought barriers, which is to present the “totality of all” as a process-object or a process-set upon which subjectivities intaking informational content about the universe – in whatever form or cut – or from the cosmos are intaking a process-subset: simplifies the entire endeavour vastly.

Now, simulations have been made of the natural universe with the utilization of mathematical models. These mathematical models are constructs, engineered. Human beings are evolved, or engineered by nature. For whatever increases in probability of survival in having some of the most advanced cognition on the planet, human minds make simulations of the processes of the universe. There is a symmetry in mind, in replicating the physics of the world at a medium scale.

For now, the scaled-up simulation complexity examples are human beings. The reason the process-universe can be mathematically modelled, simulated, in a minds’ lived experience and in digital computational devices is because a symmetry exists in the ends, so a probable symmetry in the means.

The precise algorithms or programs and architectures to attain the ends – the mathematical process-models of a world – may differ, even substantially; however, the principle of simulation, of mathematical process-modelling, exists in organic minds, machine information processing, so in a sense in the external world too. No magic here, all non-mechanistic, informational engineering, in a way.

Signification, significance, signifying, meaning-making, is the signal of conscious experience, of an agent. In embodied conscious entities, primarily, we mean emotion, feelings, instincts, motivations, drives – valence. Something sufficiently distinguishing of individual importance to an organism within its ability to make a demarcation, a line in reality, a cut. This subset over that subset.

For whatever true reason for the line drawn, or people’s ‘reasons’ or ad hoc rationales for whatever they have done in self-interest at one point or another, valence makes non-random differentiation, individually. Differentiation can be made in a random way. For instance, a random ‘agent’ decision-making process could be placed into any video game, as a basic example, but the failure to get through the game is made readily apparent. So, in an evolutionary context, the likely outcome is a selection out of the pool of ‘agents.’ Non-random agency becomes more likely to be selected than not, over time.

Why valence as the meaning-making mechanism? More particularly, amongst emotions or feelings, why these emotions or feelings? It is a deep question. Akin to: “Why these instincts and drives and motivations?” There are instincts, motivations, drives, and feelings to make a distinction relevant to the individual mind – organic information processor.

We, individually, have valence, meaning-making. We make meaning or significance of some objects, in mind and of the world, over others. Those subsets chosen over others; informational subsets of mind over others because of the relevance to the entire informational matrix of the organism at a given time.

This process of informational subset signification out of the entire informational matrix of the organism – which remains in flux in organic minds because of the constant shuttling of information internally and flow of information from the external world into the matrix of mind, so a precise total informational estimate must by necessity incorporate a range for practical purposes in estimating at any range of time and over a lifetime – comprises the operational, pragmatic informational equivalence with the idea of meaning when extirpating the non-sense of magical and supernatural instalments into the concept.

What we call an agent could be characterized as precisely this recursive, indefinite process interaction between the signification-maker and the multi-modal multi-dimensional ‘screen’ of conscious experience, the choices, the actions, the descriptors (language, internal and external/vocalized) become directed from the valence.

When we look for something in-between the valence or conscious experience for an agent, a “self,” we are looking for a chimera. In this sense, there is no will because there is no self, so there is no will to be supernaturally free – “freedom of the will” or ‘free will’ – from Nature and no self to generate said will, thus no mystery about self or free will in the same manner as there is a historico-geographic mystery about Atlantis.

The problem only exists inasmuch as an individual mistakes the concept – the ‘language as the descriptor’ – for the percept; the percept appears to imply a subjectivity, as in a detached immaterial identity or a self, while this simply comes from the linguistic use of the first-person, in a way. Language weaves magic on mind.

In that sense, a self does not exist. However, to argue for no subjectivity is strange, we agree larger structures emerge out of the universe, similarly with emergent properties of mind then, too. Otherwise, we have an inconsistency in the extended premises and argument as a whole about a subjectivity being non-existent.

A self is process, hence the consistent interaction between valence and conscious experience, thus any pursuit of a fixed self or an immaterial self – e.g., an eternal self or a spirit/magical soul – is bound to fail, but an individual exists inasmuch as signification is present on this rich presentation of the window of conscious life within the wider consciousness (multiplex non-conscious information processing).

Yet, a “self” seems more a product of concepts about the world rather than a reflection of reality. Obviously, a subjectivity exists in another sense because valence or signification – distinguishing, the “this over that” – is present on this narrow window of conscious experience of the world, this filtered presentation from the multiplex.

The subjectivity is the linkage between signification and the narrow conscious bandwidth of consciousness, and subsequent decisions and embodied actions and thoughts following these significations through time, as process, as well as the signification and the narrow conscious bandwidth of consciousness.

It’s the emptiness making a bowl or a bathtub useful, the space between spokes on a wheel, so the space between so as to exist in one sense and to not exist in another, hence its insufferable dual-existence and inability to be pinned down in a process-universe.

It is a linkage so as to mostly envelop once connected. Which would more deeply explain experiences of locked-in syndrome, no externalization of the linguistic landscape, but a subjectivity, based on self-reports, continues to live. Similarly, a blunted subjectivity could be hypothesized with autism spectrum disorders because, based on experiments of viewing images of landscapes and faces, there is a minimal distinction made between faces and environments to them. In other words, the interpersonal failures reflect a deeper-set failure of a different kind of self, a subjectivity.

Crude valence, non-random signification, could be construed in some of the newer generations of basic artificial intelligence, synthetic minds. Integration with the current crude 2-dimensional displays would be a decent step into the exploration of the creation of a disembodied subjectivity.

However, to have a truer sense of human nature as in a human subjectivity or a human agency would require an embodiment connected to this synthetic signification and conscious thought arena, these would be real simulations of the world and an interaction with these simulated realities in a similar manner to the organic simulations of the world displayed before, embodied by us, and integrated with an internal-external language system to communicate.

What in the hell does this have to do with qualia, the senses, and coherency of experience?

We have a system for signification, for conscious experience. We have a subjectivity. We are evolved, embodied. Qualia may be a misnomer. These aren’t necessarily qualities of experience, let alone qualities of the universe. The universe does not give a hoot about you, personally, apparently. Probably, the greatest system of no-fucks-given in the history of the world is the universe.

Computer screens can project a simulation of various colours. We pick these up as red or whatever colour on God’s red Earth. If enforcing this colouring of the world – ours – on autonomous machines of the future, are these true qualities of experience or merely interpretations of subsets of information from the bland universe then differentiated and categorized in an information system?

The redness of red could be exchanged for the greenness of green, or some colour scheme never conceived by human beings or even possible of being perceived by human beings. Maybe, these aren’t qualities of experience inasmuch as frames on reality evolutionarily salient for an organism.

Mutations and errors happen too. Some are colour blind, partially blind, or some other visuospatial impairment altering greater visual perception capabilities. Some seem to have mutations for an apparent incredible visual sense, e.g., da Vinci. We’re always dealing with survival of the most in many circumstances, where “survival of the most” becomes most suitable to an environment.

I would add not only the five traditionally demarcated senses, but also language as part of the full breadth of human qualities of experience or interpretive frames on reality at large: automated interpretive frames on the natural world, internalized models carved and united by the engineering of evolution. So, if we are to speak in the dead end and bore-level frames of the redness of red, or the redness of the redness of red, we’re speaking about the wordness of words referenced earlier, as well.

We have a generative linguistic capacity, innately, in a similar manner to the five traditional, base senses. This generative linguistic capacity enters into the conscious arena similarly with the five traditional senses. We generate a simulation of the natural world, informationally, based on those senses or impressions of the natural world, and construct representative, communicative productions about this natural world too.

The representation, the imprints on awareness reflect the further generative capacity. Yet, the generative linguistic capacity mirror more the senses represented in conscious awareness rather than the signification-maker because the language does not make the cuts in the simulation of reality present before awareness. The words, descriptions of objects and operations about objects in the represented simulation of reality present to conscious life, talk about cuts already made in this presentation, this ‘screen.’

In a similar manner as we produce proprioception, as a level built atop the five traditional or base senses, language comprises these two levels, too: A base existence simultaneous with the cuts made by signification, so as to communicate and plant an informational flag (a label), and to describe the innards of individual experience.

Every adaptation of language follows from this simple model: Plans, dreams, visualization, communication of an internal model of the world to another agent as if the real world while to be understood if having the same representative system (language), and so on. They rely upon the foundation close to the natural world: namely, the percepts present in ‘immediate experience’ (awareness) and the cuts made by signification.

If this was not so, individual experience would be too individuated and language would be so even further so as to make communication, likely, nearly impossible person to person. The same species from a similar cognitive enrichment can speak in a similar manner sufficient for mutual comprehension. You can work together. You can survive. You can commonly communicate experiences: ‘plan, dream, visualize,’ etc.

All this says: We neither experience reality nor speak about reality, but approximate a simulation of reality (with some fireworks) and speak about this simulation of reality while the world before words and signification are closer true approximations of reality, itself. We never experience oneness with the universe. Even ecstatic experiences, they are greater than normal processing, but a wider window into reality is still an aperture to reality, not real.

The qualities of experience or the interpretive frame on the natural world should be replicable by digital systems. It’s a matter of the mathematical sync with natural information processing systems seen in homo sapiens as the important step. And if you pause and think about it, the universe is a constant flux. It never stops. It’s a big jiggle, a wiggly waggle.

Each of the five traditional senses could be construed as an adaptation of this to the human organism. There’s a stimulation of each sense to pick a different jiggle out of the wiggly waggle: “a sufficient shift from a prior state into an active state and then into something approximating the prior baseline.” All get transmuted into a common nerve signal and then a neural signal in the central nervous system.

These seem like degrees of sensitivity to multidimensional stimulation provided by the natural world. In a way, a small frame in each. Yet, contrived in one organism as if separate, but, in fact, united, there’s minimal translation necessary, as they come from a common medium, reality, and then require merely one translation from nerve impulse to neural signal in the first place.

So, the unification in conscious experience, in awareness, represents the senselessness of our questions about a lot of these issues. All five traditional conceived senses could be, in some multidimensional way, construed as limitations on a larger potential unified experiential sensory system harvesting information from the world.

So, they’re both supersense limits – jiggle inputs on the wiggly-waggle – and five individual senses described more clinically and colloquially as sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell; they’re folk physiology and psychology with larger theoretical frameworks awaiting their unification, informationally.

The admixture of two or more traditional senses in synesthesia may mark a more proper view of sense in the first place: to see G sharp, to hear black, to smell salty, to taste the scent of a rose, to feel the touch of the sight of the Sun. That’s when lines aren’t artificially drawn in mind.

Consciousness isn’t the cosmos, but the elements of consciousness are, in a way, distributed throughout the universe and then brought together in organisms with signification capacity, awareness grounded in consciousness, and, maybe, embodiment. There does not necessarily need to be a translation for an idea about the coherency of consciousness and of conscious life.

The fragments internalized as models are on a per organism and per species basis, and the coherency happens naturally because they’re wrought under the weight of a common computational mechanism. Thus, we see things with an apparent coherency and simultaneity: No problem. Why? Because it wasn’t a problem in the first place, as with the ‘problems’ of a will and a self defined before. We got lost in the language. A spell was cast.

Eventually, all of these will have informational equivalents, mathematical process-model equivalencies, simulations. It’ll mark an era of distributed consciousness and awareness, language and embodiment decoupled from one chassis, an organic being.

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