How Self-Reference Builds the World

[Cosmin Visan]

We haven't encountered any alien life forms, much less one with a visual apparatus. We certainly have not interviewed any alien life form, tried to map their colors with ours, etc. The claim that aliens must necessarily see their sun as yellow and sky as blue is baseless, doesn't even rise to the level of wild-eyed speculation.

It doesn't matter. Is like saying that we cannot predict that birds have wings to fly. Sure we can. Is not baseless. I recommend you my paper "The Archeology of Qualia" and "Is Qualia Meaning or Understanding?".

Your suggestion that the apple was gray and then turned red is also baseless . . . unless this is a question of semantics . . . and you are actually referring to the evolution of color vision, not that the apple actually turned red.

Yes, the apple was gray and it turned red. The problem is that you have the materialist mindset that there is an apple "out-there" and that apple "out-there" was the one that was gray and the one that turned red. But that apple doesn't exist. "Apple" is an experience in consciousness. And that experience was initially gray and then turned red. Like the colored cube where the squares in isolation are gray, but when put in certain contexts they turn different colors depending on the meanings required to satisfy that context.

[lorenzop]

We haven't encountered any alien life forms, much less one with a visual apparatus. We certainly have not interviewed any alien life form, tried to map their colors with ours, etc. The claim that aliens must necessarily see their sun as yellow and sky as blue is baseless, doesn't even rise to the level of wild-eyed speculation.

It doesn't matter. Is like saying that we cannot predict that birds have wings to fly. Sure we can. Is not baseless. I recommend you my paper "The Archeology of Qualia" and "Is Qualia Meaning or Understanding?".

Your suggestion that the apple was gray and then turned red is also baseless . . . unless this is a question of semantics . . . and you are actually referring to the evolution of color vision, not that the apple actually turned red.

Yes, the apple was gray and it turned red. The problem is that you have the materialist mindset that there is an apple "out-there" and that apple "out-there" was the one that was gray and the one that turned red. But that apple doesn't exist. "Apple" is an experience in consciousness. And that experience was initially gray and then turned red. Like the colored cube where the squares in isolation are gray, but when put in certain contexts they turn different colors depending on the meanings required to satisfy that context.

You can speculate all you want - your claim about alien visual apparatus is still baseless.

So you are now disagreeing with yourself . . . the apple did not turn red, our experience of apple 'turned red'.

BTW, this has nothing to do with materialism vs idealism . . . or any kind of ism.

[Cosmin Visan]

There is no such thing as "alien visual apparatus". There is only alien consciousness. And that consciousness put in similar contexts will bring into existence similar qualia.

I repeat: there is no apple, there is just the quale of apple.

[AshvinP]

Cosmin said: "If this is what Ben meant by "unnatural effort" indeed it seems there are 2 ways in which forms are produced, effortlessly and with effort. In this case, my model doesn't account for them, but clearly I will keep thinking about these matters."

Yes, thank you. What comes naturally to an individual would be more effortless than what does not. So, for example, someone who loves keeping fit will find the training required to be more effortless than someone who by nature finds physical activity irksome.

That's fine. Disregarding whether what is "by nature" is something with fixed boundaries that must remain for our entire lives, which clearly it isn't in the case of most new skills, do you agree that the person who by nature finds physical activity irksome should not expect to suddenly become fit without that activity, just like another person should not expect the answer for a math problem to pop into their consciousness without mathematical thinking activity?

If so, then it should also be clear why, from our living and practical perspective, the all-known possibilities of the Formless won't simply be 'delivered' into our conscious existence without any corresponding effort. Even if we feel that effort is completely "unnatural" for whatever reason related to our psychic or physical life, we should not expect our personal factors to change the objective formless-form rhythms of spiritual reality. Our capacity for spiritual activity was brought forth by reality with the same necessity by which it brought forth the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. Therefore that capacity-activity is no less critical for the Formless realizing its eternal potential in the domain of form.

[Cleric]

The only conclusion that I can draw is that you still don't understand self-reference. Otherwise you will see how by necessity it leads to qualia. Your model on the other hand just postulates qualia as given. You cannot do that. You need to explain why they are a given.

OK, the problem really seems to stem from the fact that it is not clear what you imply by words like ‘leads to’, ‘creates’, ‘arises’, ‘explains’ and so on.

Let’s first start with the fact that in your view, qualia arise as a result of the spiritual activity of the “I am”. In the primordial case the “I am” refers to itself and as a result experiences the ‘creation’ of the qualia of its self-image. We don’t see literally how the qualia are created as if from some raw precursor materials which assemble themselves like bricks. It’s rather that the spiritual activity of the “I am” is analogous to rubbing wooden sticks (corresponding the will impulse to self-refer) and the qualia emerges as heat, so to speak.

So we have spiritual activity/action/will of the “I am” and the qualia are like the effect, the ‘visualization’ of the action. Would you agree with such a description?

[Cosmin Visan]

OK, the problem really seems to stem from the fact that it is not clear what you imply by words like ‘leads to’, ‘creates’, ‘arises’, ‘explains’ and so on.

Let’s first start with the fact that in your view, qualia arise as a result of the spiritual activity of the “I am”. In the primordial case the “I am” refers to itself and as a result experiences the ‘creation’ of the qualia of its self-image. We don’t see literally how the qualia are created as if from some raw precursor materials which assemble themselves like bricks. It’s rather that the spiritual activity of the “I am” is analogous to rubbing wooden sticks (corresponding the will impulse to self-refer) and the qualia emerges as heat, so to speak.

So we have spiritual activity/action/will of the “I am” and the qualia are like the effect, the ‘visualization’ of the action. Would you agree with such a description?

There are many aspects of self-reference, some of which I keep discovering myself everyday. Even now as I was trying to answer your question I had a new revelation. So self-reference is all there is, and it is itself. So its eternal preoccupation is to be itself. There is no before rubbing the sticks and after rubbing the sticks. The effect happens instantaneously, you just touch the sticks and the fire appears at that very instant. The sticks and the fire are one. To take a concrete example, take again the above colored cube. Is not like consciousness first has the context of the cube and then it wonders itself: "hmmm... what colors should I color the squares?". What happens is that the very moment self-reference finds itself in that particular context, that very moment it also automatically experiences those "gray" squares as yellow and blue. The meanings that it experiences itself to be are the meanings that are required to satisfy the context. So qualia are not "created", they are the form reflection of the formless context in which self-reference finds itself. What you can do with the free will is to orient self-reference to put itself in various contexts, and then those contexts will bring forth their corresponding qualia. And you cannot predict what qualia they will be. Sure, from past experience you might know what happened when you put yourself in certain contexts, but if you put yourself in a new context you cannot know what it will be.

[Cleric]

There are many aspects of self-reference, some of which I keep discovering myself everyday. Even now as I was trying to answer your question I had a new revelation. So self-reference is all there is, and it is itself. So its eternal preoccupation is to be itself. There is no before rubbing the sticks and after rubbing the sticks. The effect happens instantaneously, you just touch the sticks and the fire appears at that very instant. The sticks and the fire are one. To take a concrete example, take again the above colored cube. Is not like consciousness first has the context of the cube and then it wonders itself: "hmmm... what colors should I color the squares?". What happens is that the very moment self-reference finds itself in that particular context, that very moment it also automatically experiences those "gray" squares as yellow and blue. The meanings that it experiences itself to be are the meanings that are required to satisfy the context. So qualia are not "created", they are the form reflection of the formless context in which self-reference finds itself. What you can do with the free will is to orient self-reference to put itself in various contexts, and then those contexts will bring forth their corresponding qualia. And you cannot predict what qualia they will be. Sure, from past experience you might know what happened when you put yourself in certain contexts, but if you put yourself in a new context you cannot know what it will be.

Great, this makes it much clearer.

In a proper phenomenological approach this is all that we can safely say: We exercise our spiritual activity and we recognize that certain phenomena/qualia manifest or disappear from our field of consciousness.

As you can see, in both your and my model one can’t go behind qualia. Now we have settled that ‘creation’ of a quale doesn’t refer to how its experiential essence is 'built up’ from something else, but to what we need to do with our spiritual activity in order for it to appear/disappear.

As a whole, in phenomenology we need to be very careful with the way we frame our statements. Today we carry a lot of inertia from the centuries of purely abstract philosophy. The type of question that we need to be most vigilant about is of the kind “X is simply Y” where X is some quale. If we introspect closely what we’re doing when we think in this way, we’ll see how we distance from the actual experience of X and lay on top of it some abstract thoughts Y. Every time we catch ourselves thinking in this way we need to inquire: “By doing this am I getting closer to the essence of the purely experiential X? Or I’m actually obscuring X with my thoughts about Y, and I become so intoxicated by them that I come to believe that I have reached the ‘explanation’ of X.” It is very easy to see the fallacy of the latter but it’s very difficult to overcome the philosophical inertia that keeps throwing us into such lines of thought. Even if we’re fully aware of this fallacy it may happen that without noticing we run down the track again, and we weave layers and layers of abstract mental images which practically stand between us and the pure quale.

These habits are much more treacherous than it may seem. For example, above you say “The sticks and the fire are one”. I understand why you would say this but it is precisely a case where our abstract thinking takes over without noticing. To understand this we have to make a distinction.

When we think, we’re engaged in spiritual activity. For example, we can imagine a triangle and move it around in our imagination. We can feel very closely how our intuitive intents are reflected in the movements of the triangle. Or we can experiment with our thinking voice. Here once again we have ideal intents, and we experience their qualitative (in this case auditory) manifestations. Our ideal exertion corresponds to the willing of the movement of the sticks, the qualia of the voice or the triangle are the fire. So far so good. We’re on secure phenomenological ground. We simply put into artistic expressions our inner experience.

But let’s introspect what happens when we think “The sticks and the fire are one”. At the moment we think that, it feels as if we stand on a higher ground and we encompass from a third-person perspective our will and imagination. Then we declare “They are one”. But what is “they” in this case? They are only a new mental image, a new fire, which we forget that we ignite through our new ideal movement. In other words, the activity that we try to encompass from above is not the real activity. It’s only an artistic image, a representation, a symbol for our real ideal movement. In a sense, we’re in the following situation:



Let’s say we’re drawing a triangle. Then we decide to be self-aware and try to make a new picture of ourselves drawing the triangle. We want to include ourselves in the picture, not only the triangle. But the moment this picture takes shape it is already obsolete. It no longer represents reality because now the new reality is that we’re drawing a picture of “ourselves drawing a triangle.” We can try to draw that too but the same situation repeats. In a way, when we try to introspect our own thinking activity, the image is always one step in the past compared to our present invisible activity, which draws the image but is not yet itself included in it.

It is obvious how we make a gross error if by drawing such a picture we forget about our real hands and believe that the hands we see in the picture are the same thing. This seems absurd in the case of drawing with our hands – how could we forget about our real hands? Yet this is exactly what happens when we think. We’re so intoxicated by the images that we weave that we completely forget about the actual ideal activity that gives them form. And the real problems start when we begin to philosophize about our pictured hands as if we’re beholding the real thing. Only from such a perspective it is possible to say that our hands and the picture are one and the same. Yes, indeed our pictured hands and the picture are one and the same but what about the real invisible activity that draws them? We have no phenomenological justification to equate in such a way our true ideal activity with the images. They simply feel different. The exertion of our thinking feels different from the qualitative reflection that we experience in response. We can only equate them if we disregard the real experience of our ideal activity and picture two abstract mental images between which we place the = sign.

We have to be especially vigilant when we convert phenomenological experiences into abstract philosophy. For example, when we begin to think of the “I am” object we immediately forget that we’re moving the wood. Now all our attention is within the flame where we imagine some nebulous picture of the “I am”, then another picture within the first and so on. This is the thin ice. We can very easily get carried away in this picturing in the flame, start building more and more pictures within pictures, and as a result become even more unaware of the real thinking process that draws the pictures.

Would you agree that in this intimate experience of thinking, where we continually try to picture our activity like the hands drawing hands, we have the most intimate example of the real self-reference that you describe? And then, would you agree that by building complicated pictures within pictures we only accumulate abstractions of the self-reference, while we completely forget about the real activity that thinks the images?

[Cosmin Visan]

Great, this makes it much clearer.

In a proper phenomenological approach this is all that we can safely say: We exercise our spiritual activity and we recognize that certain phenomena/qualia manifest or disappear from our field of consciousness.

As you can see, in both your and my model one can’t go behind qualia. Now we have settled that ‘creation’ of a quale doesn’t refer to how its experiential essence is 'built up’ from something else, but to what we need to do with our spiritual activity in order for it to appear/disappear.

There is still a difference. And that is that qualia being meaning they are not random. They might not "appear/disappear", but their existence is not random, but is structured according to the inclusion and transcendence of meanings of self-reference (colors contain shades-of-gray which contain black-and-white which contains vividness which contains the Self, etc.)

Let’s say we’re drawing a triangle. Then we decide to be self-aware and try to make a new picture of ourselves drawing the triangle. We want to include ourselves in the picture, not only the triangle. But the moment this picture takes shape it is already obsolete. It no longer represents reality because now the new reality is that we’re drawing a picture of “ourselves drawing a triangle.” We can try to draw that too but the same situation repeats. In a way, when we try to introspect our own thinking activity, the image is always one step in the past compared to our present invisible activity, which draws the image but is not yet itself included in it.

Would you agree that in this intimate experience of thinking, where we continually try to picture our activity like the hands drawing hands, we have the most intimate example of the real self-reference that you describe? And then, would you agree that by building complicated pictures within pictures we only accumulate abstractions of the self-reference, while we completely forget about the real activity that thinks the images?

This is precisely the example that I gave in some of the papers, first time in "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness". And I quote from that paper:

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"The unformalizability of self-reference
Because no formalization of self-reference is possible, is better to start with this aspect in order to avoid chasing impossible goals. Let’s see what is self-reference in the vaguest sense and why it is unformalizable. A classic example where self-reference is mentioned is as follow: You first look at a unicorn. Then, you reflect on you looking at the unicorn. This is a trivial and easy to understand example. Fortunately, in order to show the unformalizability of self-reference we don’t need any more complicated examples. Let’s see thus why self-reference cannot be formalized. Let’s say that you want to capture somehow the fact that you are seeing a unicorn. This seems simple. You just take a paper, and you write: “I see a unicorn.”. This is what a formalization of consciousness is supposed to look like and it seems that you just did it. But on a careful second look, you notice that by writing down that sentence, you just took yourself outside of the very quale that you wanted to capture.

Now, instead of being in the state that you wanted to capture, you find yourself in another state, namely: “I write on the paper that I see a unicorn.” So, all of a sudden, you realize that what you thought that was a successful attempt at formalizing consciousness, just slipped through your fingers. One thing that you can do at this moment, is to try again to capture consciousness. So, you take another piece of paper and you write the new state in which you find yourself: “I write on the paper that I see a unicorn.”. But by doing this, you again exited the very state that you tried to capture, and you ended up in the new state: “I write on paper that I write on paper that I see a unicorn.”. Thus, the next realization that you come up to is that no matter how many times you try to capture your current state, the very act of trying to capture that state will take you out of that state. So, you start to envision the possibility that maybe there is something about consciousness that will forever escape formalization.

Having seen this first example of how consciousness escapes formalization, we can try to pin down more exactly what is the actual reason for consciousness escaping formalization. This reason is the nature of self-reference. Let’s see exactly how this works. First thing to mention, is
that, of course, formalization doesn’t require writing on a piece of paper. It suffices if it is all done in one’s own mind. So, if we want to formalize the act of seeing a unicorn, we need to reflect back on the state of seeing the unicorn, so we need to form the state: “I know that I see a unicorn”. But this has the above mentioned effect of taking us out of the very state that we want to capture. So, let’s write more precisely the two states that we are dealing with.

The first state is: “I am in the state “I see a unicorn”.”
The second state is: “I am in the state that I know that I am in the state “I see a unicorn”.”

So, what we see here is actually an “I” that by trying to capture its current state, it finds itself in another state. The way the “I” is trying to capture its current state, is by reflecting on that state. But since that state is part of itself, the “I” is reflecting on itself, so it is self-reflecting. And here we identify the true reason that consciousness escapes formalization: The act of self-reflection takes the “I”/Self out of that state, so it makes impossible to capture it in a formal manner. This act of self-reflection is what we take a first vague meaning of self-reference to be. Thus, we have our first clue that self-reference is unformalizable. For every “I am X” state in which the Self finds itself, there is always another “I am “I am X”” state that the Self is pushed into, if it tries to formalize the state “I am X”. And the reason is simple: in order to formalize the current “I am X” state, the Self must think about it, but by thinking about it, it becomes that new thought, so it takes the new form “I am “I am X””, which replaces the very state that the Self wanted to formalize.

This is only just the first and easiest example where we spot the unformalizability of self-reference. Throughout the paper, by following along the emergent structure of consciousness, we will spot many other ways in which the unformalizability of self-reference will pop up. Those cases will become more difficult and an increased attention will be required in order to appreciate their true significance.

A note to make here is that even though it might appear that unformalizability represents a dead end in any attempt to gain more knowledge about consciousness, it will be shown that we can actually gain more knowledge about consciousness if we accept this fact. It will be shown that the entire emergent structuring of consciousness is possible precisely because self-reference is unformalizable."
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But precisely because of this impossibility of capturing self-reference, we deduce that is something quite special, namely not an object, but an interplay between form and formless. Even though we cannot understand it, this doesn't forbid us from understanding why we cannot understand it. Scott Roberts from this group also talked about this thing in his Tetralemmic Polarity about form and formless: https://sites.google.com/site/nondualis ... c-polarity

And I quote from him:

"The first observation to make is that there is no denying that tetralemmic polarity cannot be understood, in the usual meaning of the term "understand". But the reason it cannot be understood can be understood, and that is that one pole of the polarity -- formlessness -- is not an object. When we say we understand X, X must be an object. Hence we should not expect that the act of understanding, which is a kind of thinking, can understand itself, much as "seeing" cannot see itself. But we can, so to speak, get used to tetralemmic polarity. It is the stance from which everything else can be understood."

[lorenzop]

I hesitate to recommend a book I have not read, but you might look into the book "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown - he uses math\logic to construct reality and does so with fundamentals more 'primitive' than your model. If interested, you might begin with a set of videos:

The Upanishads also suggest self-referral consciousness, beginning with (using modern terms) Consciousness as Subject and Object
Helpful metaphors: the acorn includes the whole oak tree . . . the sun as self-illuminating

The above 'models' essentially end where your model begins - - with self and qualia.

[Cosmin Visan]

I hesitate to recommend a book I have not read, but you might look into the book "Laws of Form" by George Spencer-Brown - he uses math\logic to construct reality and does so with fundamentals more 'primitive' than your model. If interested, you might begin with a set of videos:

Thanks, I will have a look. But there can be nothing more fundamental than self-reference. Actually, I highly suspect that he will only talk about forms without any insight that you need formless in order to have form, in which case his theory would be incorrect from the very start.