Essay: The Phonograph Metaphor (Part 1)

[Federica]

Exactly, emphasizing the concentricity of outer perceptual qualities within the imaginative curvature. I like the 'psychological card' as an intro. Perhaps a video illustration of real-time rendering of space and objects in a video game context could help. I suppose this is a go-to metaphor for many cognitive scientists, except they imagine the source of the visual output is the brain.





On the left is the imaginative curvature (or configuration space) in which our spiritual activity flows and we are partly active, yet which also embeds many forces we are not responsible for, such as the computer hardware, the 'substance' of the pixels, the electromagnetic currents, the designed software, and so forth. All of these latter forces/substances/interfaces make it possible for us to modulate the images and concepts on the left. Some domain of this modulated curvature is rendered in real-time as our outer sensory experience at any given time, on the right. The rendering process is all taking place within the depths of our inner life on the same temporal side.

It would need to be emphasized the imaginative curvature is not simply a replica of the sensory-perceptual experience except in 'bare bones' form, as in the video above, neither is it some object on the 'other side' of our inner life like the brain. Rather, the left side is a symbol for the life of ideas/concepts that filter what sort of rendering takes place from the infinite potential of possibilities. The imaginative curvature is only the last stage of the formative rendering process after the ideal qualities of beingness and life have been condensed through the World grooves, analogous to the many ages of natural and cultural development that finally allowed for human intelligence to harness natural forces and fashion computer hardware, software, etc. by which to render the digital images.

This would all need to be fleshed out much further to be useful, of course, with concrete examples to make it more aligned with phenomenology rather than merely abstract technical descriptions.

Oh, this looks like one of your semi-metaphors! There is surely great explanatory potential in this type of rendering, though It requires some 'cognitive bandwidth', to enter in the details of the illustration while continuously preventing thinking from defaulting back into dualism. I am sure I'll soon get sore thinking muscles for this effort
I wonder if it's possible to simplify it more, maybe with a more 'abstract' 'end-user experience' that distracts less? I'll think about it, whenever I get somewhat fitter.

Not yet sure exactly how, but maybe some useful simple video material could come from channels such as this one, that I bumped into while I was searching a metaphor for something else: https://www.youtube.com/@bradleyanimation120/videos

[Güney27]

Cleric,
I can't realy grasp the movie metaphor in you essay.
Yes, we live in a world of metamorphosing things, like the day and night cycle, the seasons, ect.
We are the cause for some metamorphosing events, for example, when i feel the desire to watch a movie, I perform certain movements which transform a part of my visual field.
But I can't intuit the movie metaphor, I don't know the reasons for this.

[Güney27]

For ex., someone like Hoffman would say the transformation of perceptions which we experience as 'stone falling through curvature of spacetime' is simply how some unknown mathematical architecture (experiential, in his case, but could also be non-experiential for the materialist) projects into our cognitive sensory interface. This situation could be crudely depicted as follows:





On the left side is the default intuition, where we are perceiving a sensory world 'out there' and behind the perceptual shapes and qualities are something unperceived (blue lines) that should explain what is perceived. The latter can take all sorts of exotic abstract forms, experiential or non-experiential. On the right side is the intuition that the perceptions, our thinking "I"-eye, and the causes of both those are all on the 'same side'. We have to represent this spatially, of course, but by 'same side' we are really speaking of temporal structure. The spectrum of sensory qualities (not the ideal relations themselves) is nested within the imaginative curvature which is nested within the more expansive intuitive curvatures of the World groove, the 'blurry part' of the intuitive context merged in the background.

For ex., seconds, minutes, and hours could all be said to exist on the same temporal side - they are nested one within the other. The states of being that unfold in a 'second' are a limited aperture of the states of being that unfold in a 'minute', which is a limited aperture of those that unfold in an 'hour'. We are speaking of essentially the same palette of states that have been funneled down into more and more limited apertures. In that sense, what we perceive on the sensory screen is a limited aperture of the more holistic states we experience in imagination, and these are in turn a limited aperture of more holistic states we can experience through higher-order spiritual activity. We always live at the edge of the event horizon at the eternal transition between the unknown and unmanifest into the known and perceptible.

But normally the blue lines on the right are experienced to be insubstantial, subjective, and contained within a tiny spatial location of our head (the "I" identifies its thinking consciousness with the physical body). So I am wondering how to address this default experience and point attention to why it isn't as solidified as it first seems.

Alright, thanks! I was wondering why cognitive scientists should be better placed to understand. With the DH example it's clear. You say: beyond the standard view that perceptions (the dashboard) are on the other side of our thinking, people like DH could at least see that the thing-in-itself (the experiential real-reality behind the dashboard) is on the same side as our thinking, as idealists. But in fact they don’t.

I think your suggestion could help: putting into timeful perspective the balance between the sensory world and the imaginative, to show how much smaller than expected the former is. This comes down to actually organizing the content within each world-state frame. Instead of only pointing at the fact that it comprises everything, every element of our conscious experience in each frame, you would point at the concentricity of perceptions nested within thinking.

I believe this could work for the flexible thinkers, the mathematicians and the quantitative scientists, those who have a developed habit to inverse relations, doing undoing and redoing conceptual seams, resequencing things starting from any points, ect. For the more generic thinkers, I would maybe prepare more of a psychological card.

One could frame it by saying that, as idealists in a world ruled by materialists, we are constantly at risk of being overpowered by the dominant paradigm. Leveraging the popular theories of unconscious bias, one could say: "We are constantly under the threat of defaulting back to a physical-first vision of reality. That happens to us unconsciously. It's a known mechanism that we need to bring into much better psychological focus. So we need to actively address the bias and remind ourselves that our imagined curvature (our inner perspective on the phenomenon) is as much of a reality as the perception of the curve, and we need to keep them side by side, since both share the quality of being conscious experiences, and that’s what matters. We don’t want to discriminate against the imaginative curve, just because the culture around us pushes us to do it" In this sense, they are on the same side of our conscious experience.

Maybe you could try it on Discord, as a last resort, though I don't imagine you having that kind of discourse (I am not finding how to define it fittingly)

Cleric has emphasized the other entry point into the concentricity of the 3 nested layers (perceptual, inner, and real-at-large): our inner perspective as a smaller aperture within the World groove. Maybe, once the discussion is engaged with real people, the rewiring of thinking habits can be addressed as necessary, perceptions-first, world-groove-first, or with an accent on concentricity, as you suggest.

Exactly, emphasizing the concentricity of outer perceptual qualities within the imaginative curvature. I like the 'psychological card' as an intro. Perhaps a video illustration of real-time rendering of space and objects in a video game context could help. I suppose this is a go-to metaphor for many cognitive scientists, except they imagine the source of the visual output is the brain.





On the left is the imaginative curvature (or configuration space) in which our spiritual activity flows and we are partly active, yet which also embeds many forces we are not responsible for, such as the computer hardware, the 'substance' of the pixels, the electromagnetic currents, the designed software, and so forth. All of these latter forces/substances/interfaces make it possible for us to modulate the images and concepts on the left. Some domain of this modulated curvature is rendered in real-time as our outer sensory experience at any given time, on the right. The rendering process is all taking place within the depths of our inner life on the same temporal side.

It would need to be emphasized the imaginative curvature is not simply a replica of the sensory-perceptual experience except in 'bare bones' form, as in the video above, neither is it some object on the 'other side' of our inner life like the brain. Rather, the left side is a symbol for the life of ideas/concepts that filter what sort of rendering takes place from the infinite potential of possibilities. The imaginative curvature is only the last stage of the formative rendering process after the ideal qualities of beingness and life have been condensed through the World grooves, analogous to the many ages of natural and cultural development that finally allowed for human intelligence to harness natural forces and fashion computer hardware, software, etc. by which to render the digital images.

This would all need to be fleshed out much further to be useful, of course, with concrete examples to make it more aligned with phenomenology rather than merely abstract technical descriptions.

It is hard for me to follow.
Do you realize that this goes into an abstract domain of thinking ?
Or do you find the written in your phenomenological studie of your experience, like the fact that we feel active and know the reason of our metamorphosis in our thinking life?

[Cleric K]

Cleric,
I can't realy grasp the movie metaphor in you essay.
Yes, we live in a world of metamorphosing things, like the day and night cycle, the seasons, ect.
We are the cause for some metamorphosing events, for example, when i feel the desire to watch a movie, I perform certain movements which transform a part of my visual field.
But I can't intuit the movie metaphor, I don't know the reasons for this.

I don't know either. Maybe you're just trying to read too much into it? It's just a synonym for the "world of metamorphosing things" (where your inner life is also present). If you grasp that, then you grasp the movie.

[AshvinP]

This would all need to be fleshed out much further to be useful, of course, with concrete examples to make it more aligned with phenomenology rather than merely abstract technical descriptions.

It is hard for me to follow.
Do you realize that this goes into an abstract domain of thinking ?
Or do you find the written in your phenomenological studie of your experience, like the fact that we feel active and know the reason of our metamorphosis in our thinking life?

Yes, it is quite abstract and technical as presented, hence the part quoted above. It is simply speaking symbolically to the contextual layers of the World state, as also described at the beginning of the essay.

We can use as a foundation the essay Fundamentals of the Human Condition (FoHC). There we established that we experience a state of existence going through continuous metamorphosis. Here we can go further and say that this state is really a relative perspective of the World state. Even though the part of the World state which corresponds to our brain, sense organs, and so on, feels to be the major contributor to our conscious experience, it’s still true that this part could never exist in isolation. It is what it is only because the rest of the World state is just the way it is. For example, our organs would not exist without the Earthly and Cosmic environment from whose elements the bodily form has been built up. Our inner life wouldn’t be what it is without the social environment of the whole human civilization. Our present thinking wouldn’t be what it is without the linguistic forms in which we express our thoughts, and without all the understanding that humanity has brought to light in time. So, in our context, we should take our state of being as a narrow aperture within the World state.

Our sensory experience could only be what it is at any given time within the nested contexts of the World state, which all exist on the 'same side' as our inner life of concepts/ideas. We can only approximate what it is like to feel active and know the reasons for the metamorphosis of these contextual layers at first. That will be elucidated more in Cleric's upcoming essays. In all cases, we are speaking of ideal and intentional activity, nothing mechanical or instinctive.

But don't worry about my musings above for now. It is much more important to orient your intuition to what Cleric metaphorically presented in the essay. That is, how our metamorphosing conscious experience consists of both the playback of the movie through the World groove and our spiritual activity recording in that groove, which we have the clearest intuition of in our thinking (such as the stream of inner voice). Once we orient to this basic principle of our first-person stream experientially, we can gradually bring more parts of the World groove into our intuitive thinking focus.

[Federica]

To get ready to understand reality, I, from within my human condition, must be open to the possibility that my ingrained implicit attitude may need reversal. It is not that I am the experiencer who applies thinking as a tool by which I draw sketches of reality, including sketches of the activity of thinking. Rather, I - in my current human condition - am the tool through which thinking-reality draws thought-images of itself - me and all my worldly concerns included.

In the grace of this openness, my I-am-will - who was not born in my human condition, who was not known inside it - can descend in it, wake it up, and hold it tight in a lifebuoy of knowing light. In other words, I must move from real submission to real mastery of matter, including my own materiality, and from illusory mastery, to real submission to the mystery of being, that will save me.