How Self-Reference Builds the World

[Cosmin Visan]

I invite you to discover my new paper, "How Self-Reference Builds the World", in which I explain how the entire world is created by self-reference looking-back-at-itself, world which of course is consciousness:

https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan

[Cleric K]

I invite you to discover my new paper, "How Self-Reference Builds the World", in which I explain how the entire world is created by self-reference looking-back-at-itself, world which of course is consciousness:

https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan

Hi Cosmin, thank you for sharing your work. I’ve read both parts and I’m glad that such ideas are breaking through. We have discussed here various attempts in which the intellect tries to break the strictly physical framework. One example is the work of Michael Levin. Recently Eugene referenced Justin Riddle, who you may find much closer to your vision (if you haven’t stumbled upon him already).

I’m especially glad that you brought the question of Time-Memory. This is something which still lies in the blind spot of many thinkers. We have spoken about this here many times too. It’s interesting how simple things are, yet how strongly the thinking habits of the past hold. For example, science still tries to figure out why time flows in one direction and not the other. There’s some movement in this area too, for example Carlo Rovelli attempts to explain time as a macroscopic effect of otherwise directionless time. Yet things become much clearer at the moment we stop thinking of reality as something that exists in itself, having the direction of time as an intrinsic feature which consciousness simply acknowledges. When we look at Time in the way you indicate in your article, it is obvious that time can be experienced only in a direction of integration of memory. This is as obvious as the anthropic principle. If every next state had less and less content, this wouldn’t be an experience of existence through time but movement from forgetfulness to even more forgetfulness. And we wouldn’t even be able to realize that this is happening since there’s nothing in the lesser state that suggests that we have dropped there from a higher state. We don’t need to assume as some law of the universe that time should flow in that particular way. If we want, we may even imagine that state transitions in all directions do happen. Yet only those states which embed the echoes of the previous ones can be experienced as a stream of existence.

I don’t know if you have been drawing inspiration from other sources but the principle of self-reference have been known and explored in the mystery centers through the ages. For example, in the Rosicrucian stream these initial reflections are a meditative way to approach the mystery of the Trinity – the three Logoi.

Today we are in an age where anyone who thinks things through, will inevitably reach some version of this primal self-reference. This is the natural outcome when our ego probes its thinking space sufficiently. When we encompass our thinking world we reach the experience of being at the center of a conceptual fractal. Every concept can be traced to the center. The next step is simply to conceive that this experience is self-similar to the Cosmic fractal.

Fichte’s philosophy was precisely one where the Self is the fundamental reality which is both the source and the limit of all knowledge. This translates one-to-one to what you call the form (the limits of any formalized knowledge) and the formless, which is the source (Everything and Nothing). From this perspective also naturally comes his thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad (often mistakenly attributed to Hegel). This is completely expected if we conceive that the Self is the unitary source. It’s necessary that any manifoldness should be traceable to a higher unity, culminating in the singularity of all.

Hegel went a step further by recognizing that not even the Self can be considered as the foundation. Why not? Because after all, what we call ‘the Self’ is really a concept within the thinking process. We can infer something like a self, which we imagine acts as a container of thinking, but this inference is already a product of thinking and as such it doesn’t get us any closer to the reality of the self. For such reasons, Hegel felt that in the concepts of thinking we live in a more fundamental process of reality.

I know that this may sound very false at first. You’ve built your whole fractal starting from the self. But try to feel what you are doing when you spin that theory. You are thinking. I know that you can say here “Of course, these are only thoughts, but they point at realities. Thinking is not fundamental, it results only when the self-recursion has reached much deeper levels.” This is all good. But in the end this hierarchy is spun only like a conceptual mockup of the supposed true reality.

This is easy to see. Even though we imagine that self-reference produces all qualia, we can’t repeat that process in our thoughts. For example, no matter how we recurse our thoughts, we can’t reach the experience of a color that we have never seen.

You know this, of course, and you went in details to explain the formless, or rather to show how any explanation of the formless only leads us away from its ungraspable essence. And that’s perfectly fine. The whole point is to have a very lucid sense that from our current conscious perspective, the first thing that emerges from the formless is the thinking process - not a self that can be beheld. Our whole attempt to explain the formless, including speaking of the self-referring self, is already further manifestation of the thinking process and as such is even more remote from the essence of the formless.

This is very easy to introspect if we try: our thoughts about the self-referring self, we can phenomenologically backtrack to our thinking voice. We can certainly say “I speak forth these thoughts about the “I am “I am …””” But then our tracing reaches a halt. As soon as we reach our thinking voice we can’t find anything within the contents of our consciousness from whence that voice is seen to emerge. We can of course, philosophize about it, we can imagine self-referencing selves, which somehow produce the thinking process, but in doing this we easily forget that it is still that same thinking voice which philosophizes. The whole theory is still only an assembly of thoughts that we have produced.


About two years ago you were talking with Ashvin about similar things. I wonder if in this meanwhile you have tried to approach this question more closely. I guess it is quite clear that any kind of intellectual modelling leaves us on the formed side (even if we assume that the model points at the true formless reality). In a sense, the formless is behind the back of our head, the borderline is the precipitating thinking process in the head, and the finished spoken out thoughts are all the way in front of us. In other words, are we destined to forever arrange formed thoughts through which we try to imagine the hidden reality of the formless? Or true progress of humanity consists in gaining deeper direct consciousness (not deeper philosophizing, which will only increase the amount the formed words in front of us) of the way the so far invisible essence of the formless guide the formative process? In other words, have you considered the possibility to understand more about the cognitive process that spins the theory? Not by doing even more theorizing (which keeps the true process in the blind spot) but by reaching some more fundamental form of consciousness which lives in the reality of that which is otherwise only described in mental pictures?

[Cosmin Visan]

I don’t know if you have been drawing inspiration from other sources but the principle of self-reference have been known and explored in the mystery centers through the ages.

The way I got to the idea of self-reference was by thinking at cases such as the duck-rabbit: there is a shape on the paper and then you see that shape as a duck or as a rabbit. So I asked myself what is the relation between the experience of seeing a rabbit and the experience of seeing a mere shape. And it took quite a while to figure out what was going on, the reason being that I was stumbling upon the effects of the formless basically and I couldn't make sense of the process in the way we are used to, namely only in terms of forms. The problem was that even though I figured out that the quale of rabbit must include in itself the quale of shape while transcending it at the same time, the problem was that this process was happening in my own consciousness, so it was not only the fact that the quale of the rabbit included and transcended the quale of shape, but my own consciousness was the one that was including and transcending itself (my consciousness in the form of rabbit was including and transcending my consciousness in the form of shape, so itself). And it didn't make sense to me for a long time (3-4 months of thinking daily about it) how can the same "thing" include itself. And eventually I had to give up on thinking in terms of "things" and then I had the first glimpses of the formless. This was 6 years ago and I still consider it the greatest intellectual achievement of my life. The realization happened between the papers "The Emergent Structure of Consciousness" and "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness". First I wrote "The Emergent Structure of Consciousness" after I gathered years of experiences of seeing cases such as the duck-rabbit and understanding the holarchy of consciousness of levels including and transcending lower levels. And then I tried to find an explanation for how this process of inclusion and transcendence happens. And the result was "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness". Of course, in the meantime I refined the way of seeing and presenting the ideas, but the decisive event happened between those 2 papers.

[Cleric K]

The way I got to the idea of self-reference was by thinking at cases such as the duck-rabbit: there is a shape on the paper and then you see that shape as a duck or as a rabbit. So I asked myself what is the relation between the experience of seeing a rabbit and the experience of seeing a mere shape. And it took quite a while to figure out what was going on, the reason being that I was stumbling upon the effects of the formless basically and I couldn't make sense of the process in the way we are used to, namely only in terms of forms. The problem was that even though I figured out that the quale of rabbit must include in itself the quale of shape while transcending it at the same time, the problem was that this process was happening in my own consciousness, so it was not only the fact that the quale of the rabbit included and transcended the quale of shape, but my own consciousness was the one that was including and transcending itself (my consciousness in the form of rabbit was including and transcending my consciousness in the form of shape, so itself). And it didn't make sense to me for a long time (3-4 months of thinking daily about it) how can the same "thing" include itself. And eventually I had to give up on thinking in terms of "things" and then I had the first glimpses of the formless. This was 6 years ago and I still consider it the greatest intellectual achievement of my life. The realization happened between the papers "The Emergent Structure of Consciousness" and "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness". First I wrote "The Emergent Structure of Consciousness" after I gathered years of experiences of seeing cases such as the duck-rabbit and understanding the holarchy of consciousness of levels including and transcending lower levels. And then I tried to find an explanation for how this process of inclusion and transcendence happens. And the result was "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness". Of course, in the meantime I refined the way of seeing and presenting the ideas, but the decisive event happened between those 2 papers.

Thanks for this sharing story, Cosmin. I'm still interested, though, whether you have vision of how eventually we'll move towards the reality of the holarchy? There's something interesting towards the end of your part 2. On one hand you see this discovery as opening the gates for the true potential of humanity. And this is understandable. Basically our being discovers insight about a direction perpendicular to everything we have known so far. But at the same time you mention that hundreds and even millions of years from now, your papers will still be read and the essential truth will be the same, nothing more would have been possible to be added.

I understand quite well the impulse from which such a statement proceeds. As a matter of fact, about twenty years ago I also had written something which I thought was the core of all, and what remained was just to fill out the details. Yet in time it became more and more clear that this would be the case only if we forever remain at the intellectual stage of cognition.

If you follow your own ideas to their ultimate conclusions, it will need to be said that our intellect with its concepts is like a coordinate basis on which the formless is projected. There are many possible such bases. This is similar to the idea of universal computation. We can present it with Turing machines, with Lambda Calculus and so on. These are different intellectual bases, yet on a deeper level they are different projections of the same formless intuition of computation. Yet another example is simply coordinate grids. For example, we can think of space through rectangular, spherical coordinates, and so on. This is particularly interesting in General Relativity, because there we describe the curved spacetime tensor through different coordinate systems. We can also convert from one coordinate system to another. The interesting thing is that in the mathematics we never see the 'true' spacetime manifold. We only have an 'interface' to it through a particular coordinate system. So in a sense, the true spacetime tensor is something invisible, in our context we might say - formless, yet we can have intellectual interfaces to that mathematical idea through different coordinate systems, which give our thinking the 'grip points' through which to get hold on the unknowable tensor.

It is similar with the self-referencing "I". There's a fundamental formless intuition that this intellectual basis tries to express. Yet it is one of the possible projections.

Please, don't take this as some criticism of your work. I'm just sharing experience. I'm not saying that the way you think about reality is wrong, I'm only pointing out that it is not absolute. But there's more. In GR we never grasp in our intellect the spacetime tensor 'as it is' but only through the particular intellectual interface of a coordinate system. Yet, since the tensor object is conceived as a mathematical object, a given coordinate system - even though not the only way to describe it - is still a complete way to describe it. Every coordinate system captures fully the tensor. It's just a question to choose the coordinate system which will make the calculations most convenient for the problem at hand. This is not the same, however, when we think about the essence of reality. Not only that an intellectual basis is not absolute but it can also never fully capture the reality of the formless.

And this should be quite clear also from your own meditations. You know that when you think about the recursion, even though you know that it points to first-person experience, the fact remains that the thoughts themselves are looked upon from a third-person perspective. This places us in a very interesting situation. Imagine you say "OK, enough philosophizing. Now I want not to think about that recursion but really experience it from the inside, I want to see how self-reflection gives birth to worlds and beings." I'm sure you would agree that there's a great difference between thinking how {{} {{} {}}....} corresponds to world-creation and actually experiencing the first-person perspective of a world being born.

This places us in a peculiar situation. On one hand we hold our intellectual basis - the preferred coordinate system through which our intellect thinks about the formless. As long as we are interested only in this - to think about the formless - we can stay with our basis as long as we want. But if we decide to step into the true reality of the holarchy, then things begin to become uncomfortable. Inner pressure issues. It is as if we want to squeeze our coordinate system through a pinhole. It begins to crack and coordinate grid lines begin to fly around like splinters. Why is that? Because there's conflict between the first-person experience and our continuous desire to grasp things from above, from a third-person perspective. One aspect tries to assume the central perspective of true experience, another aspect tries to raise above the experience and encompass it in its consciousness.

Imagine the following. If we are a materialist we may be looking at the love of our heart and say "She's just a beautiful pile of atoms. I know that she talks to me sweetly but it is all just electrical activity." In this way, our intellectual grid stands in between ourselves and her soul. We don't want to know her feelings, thoughts and dreams but we project everything on our intellectual grid. If we want to know her reality, our intellectual grid has to fly apart into splinters. The reality simply can't be fully captured in the chosen coordinate systems.

Now we have something similar when we philosophize about the essence of existence. Our intellectual grid bars our way to the experience of the reality of the holarchy. There's a Divine being there that we can't know and love, while we reduce its reality to concepts. Now you may say that we are God, we are the original "I" that self-references itself. And that's true. But what is also true is that we experience of this unlimited potential only that much as can be captured by our thinking grid. And it is a very sparse grid! Almost all of the potential of the Divine "I" is hollowed out, it passes between the grid points without registering. The infinitely rich Divine Being is so thinned out in our perspective that if feels like a ghostly spider web. Only these thin threads are what we have in common with the original Potential. In that sense the Divine is something infinitely more that what we are presently - even though we share the same essence.

The way I express above may seem like I advocate some kind of mystical renunciation of thinking, where we capitulate before the impossibility of the intellect to ever know the formless and we simply merge with the inexplicable. This is not what I suggest, however. In fact, it is about even more profound experience of the way the holarchy is stepped down all the way to the rigid intellectual grid.

So with all this said, how do you view this whole problem? I guess you're quite aware that no matter how much more refined the intellectual basis becomes, as long as we conceive of {{}..}, we're dealing with abstract modelling of reality. The consciousness from whose perspective worlds are born remains somewhere beyond our present state. I hope you grasp how serious this is. I know that the first instinct is to say something like "Well, this theory has just made its appearance! All the possibilities lie ahead, it's too early to think of its limitations." But this would be the same logic as when the neuroscientist says "There's so much more about the brain that we don't yet know! It's too early to dismiss the possibility that consciousness results from purely neural activity." Yet for those who have reached the needed awareness, it is transparently obvious that even if the brain is probed for whole eternity, nothing of the problem will be solved. The problem is not because there's not enough data but in the principle position itself. It's the same here. We need to learn from past mistakes and see whether we're pursuing a dead-ended path right from the start. And I repeat that I'm not calling your attempt to elucidate the intuition of the holarchy through concepts, a dead-end. This is what we must do! But it could be a dead end if the intellectual grid becomes a net of entanglement that prevents us from gaining actual consciousness of the true depth of the recursion.

This is the really important question which won't be resolved even if we fill whole books with {{} {{}}...}: at what point we move from modelling reality, into the true consciousness from within the full gradient of the holarchy? What is your view on that?

[Cosmin Visan]

I'm not sure what you are asking. Regarding just experiencing life, I also mentioned it in the paper, like the example if you want to know how it is to ride a roller-coaster you just have to ride it, you cannot find it by theorizing. Also, if you want to make some empirical science, that will also be possible, but like I also said in the paper, by creating clever patch theories that give pragmatic descriptions of some limited phenomena. But ultimately formless is formless and there is nothing that can be done about it. If you can make your questions more specific I might be able to say more.

[Cosmin Visan]

Also, regarding different coordinate systems, you can also read my paper "The "Who Am I?" Question", which basically captures the same Truth, but from a different perspective. It will be interesting if you can also bring some other coordinate systems.

[Cleric K]

I'm not sure what you are asking. Regarding just experiencing life, I also mentioned it in the paper, like the example if you want to know how it is to ride a roller-coaster you just have to ride it, you cannot find it by theorizing. Also, if you want to make some empirical science, that will also be possible, but like I also said in the paper, by creating clever patch theories that give pragmatic descriptions of some limited phenomena. But ultimately formless is formless and there is nothing that can be done about it. If you can make your questions more specific I might be able to say more.

Let's try in the following way. Presently we find ourselves in a deeply convoluted state. The formless potential is folded onto itself many times in a very complicated manner (many many nested {{}} ). The resulting experiential fractal of the first-person "I am" perspective is so complicated that it feels as constrained in the channels of a physical body embedded in a Cosmic environment. The "I am" is like ripped apart over these perceptions, yet it recognizes its existence in its ability to reflect it in mental images (which are like more lightweight sensory perceptions which seem to follow the intuitive intents of the "I am"). For example, such mental phenomena can be arranged in the sequence of sounds "I think, therefore I am". Then the "I am" goes further and arranges thoughts in recursive patterns and understands them as a thought-model of what existence at large is (what you have done in the papers). Of course, this thought model is only possible because we find ourselves in this deeply convoluted state.

But at the same time, the primordial not-so-convoluted states, should also correspond to some experience of existence. Not only that but unlike our human end-user experience, where we find ourselves in an already well-formed environment and bodies, these more primordial states are like Divine creative perspectives. In these early self-recursions, the archetypal blueprint of the Cosmic fractal is laid out.

So we have the following far ends of a spectrum:
- the Divine states of existence are simpler in terms of recursion, yet consist of the largely unconstrained limitless potential of the formless
- our human states are deeply recursed and as such are experienced as highly constrained, extremely manifold and complicated. So complicated that the "I am" can reflect its existence in mental images (like in philosophical thinking) supported by the recursions we know as the brain.

Logically, our human state and these Divine states should lie one some kind of gradient, shouldn't they? If the "I am" could have become so deeply folded, it is only logical that it can also be unfolded.

I hope you will agree that the "I am" in the Divine perspectives, which are much less folded/recursed, cannot possibly think in intellectual thought-images. The godly beings at these heights cannot represent their existence to themselves in the form of a philosophical panorama of mental images like we do when we grasp the thoughts in your paper. But at the same time, these perspectives of the "I am" are in such a position that their willpower folds/recurses the Cosmic potential, creates spiritual worlds and loci of stability from within which the "I am" can become conscious in more convoluted perspectives.

My question now would be, how do you conceive of these Divine states of the "I am"? Do you think, like Schopenhauer, that they should correspond to the World's Blind Will, which is something utterly unconscious and only awakens to its existence when it has reached sufficiently convoluted state, where it can reflect its existence in mental images (like "I think, therefore I am")? Or you anticipate that the godly perspectives are also self-conscious, even though they don't represent their existence to themselves in philosophical thoughts and thus don't have any thought-models about recursing "I am"s?

Depending on your your answer we can go further but let's start from this. As a hint, you may try to follow in meditation the suggested gradient from our present intellectual state towards the Divine. At what point the intellect becomes no longer possible? And what happens with our cognition then?

[Cosmin Visan]

These are good questions and I will have to think about them. Because it is interesting that we are even able to do philosophy in the first place. Why should this be possible at all ? There could have been only animal consciousnesses and that's all. Regarding the spectrum, I don't even think we can call them Divine, since the simpler they are the more animalistic they are. Sure, they are conscious at all levels of complexity, since the Self is eternal, so some sensation is always present. Some describe the Self as absolute love and maybe it really is the case, because having no other qualia to worry about, you might as well just feel love. But I'm not sure how deep that love is. Because there is another thing that people (usually on psychedelics) report, namely feeling that they understand everything, that besides absolute love they also have absolute knowledge. So it might feel deep, what can feel deeper than absolute knowledge, right? But the problem is that after they come out of the psychedelics effects they are unable to share that absolute knowledge. So what I think it might happen is that since on the first looking-back-at-itself it is the one and only time when self-reference sees itself fully, it feels itself complete. Since at that moment there are no split individual consciousnesses, the singular "I am" is all there is. So being all there is, it will indeed be complete knowledge, so indeed the feeling would be that of having absolute knowledge. But that absolute knowledge is just relative to that indeed absolute, but on the other hand very simple, primordial state.

So in a sense the "I am" is all-knowing without doing any philosophy like we do, but is all-knowing relative to its singular simplicity. It might feel infinitely deep, but is actually the most shallow state there is. At least that's how I think about these things now. Maybe I should try some hundreds of time psychedelics until I get to that state and maybe I will change my mind.

[Cleric K]

These are good questions and I will have to think about them. Because it is interesting that we are even able to do philosophy in the first place. Why should this be possible at all ? There could have been only animal consciousnesses and that's all. Regarding the spectrum, I don't even think we can call them Divine, since the simpler they are the more animalistic they are. Sure, they are conscious at all levels of complexity, since the Self is eternal, so some sensation is always present. Some describe the Self as absolute love and maybe it really is the case, because having no other qualia to worry about, you might as well just feel love. But I'm not sure how deep that love is. Because there is another thing that people (usually on psychedelics) report, namely feeling that they understand everything, that besides absolute love they also have absolute knowledge. So it might feel deep, what can feel deeper than absolute knowledge, right? But the problem is that after they come out of the psychedelics effects they are unable to share that absolute knowledge. So what I think it might happen is that since on the first looking-back-at-itself it is the one and only time when self-reference sees itself fully, it feels itself complete. Since at that moment there are no split individual consciousnesses, the singular "I am" is all there is. So being all there is, it will indeed be complete knowledge, so indeed the feeling would be that of having absolute knowledge. But that absolute knowledge is just relative to that indeed absolute, but on the other hand very simple, primordial state.

So in a sense the "I am" is all-knowing without doing any philosophy like we do, but is all-knowing relative to its singular simplicity. It might feel infinitely deep, but is actually the most shallow state there is. At least that's how I think about these things now. Maybe I should try some hundreds of time psychedelics until I get to that state and maybe I will change my mind.

So basically, what you say is similar to Schopenhauer's view. Our intellectual self-consciousness emerges from the instinctive existence (animalistic) of the blind will. Now our thoughts flow on the surface of the dark self-referential abyss. Going down there would be a return to an instinctive state, back to diminished animalistic consciousness. So in a sense we're in a situation not too different from what materialism intuits (sans the nature of matter itself). We've got our intellectual existence by chance and now we must fight to preserve it, probably by amplifying it through computers, AI, etc.

In that case, may I ask how do you see the role of your work? For example, in materialism we have multitude of particles swirling in spacetime. In your model we basically have one self-referential psychic particle, from which the World springs. Besides the fact that we have a different model of reality, what do you think the practical aspects of your approach are? Does the struggle to preserve our accidental existence receive some new aspect? Something that can give different meaning to our life and potential new directions to pursue?

[Cosmin Visan]

The practical approach is that we can be less worried about death, given that we are eternal. Sure, I dont know the details of what will happen after death, maybe we reincarnate as animals or as other superior beings. But we can rest assured that it will continue. Also we have free will operating on the world of forms from the world of the formless. Sure, there are some limitations, part of them imposed by evolution, but we have free will. So is not really materialism. But based on your considerations, what extra will be required for a theory, besides eternal life and freedom, to truly be different from materialism ? There is another point to add, that steams from the existence of precognitions. It seems that all possible stories already exist. The web of self-reference is already laid down. And what we do now is to explore the webs. Even though all possibilities already exist, we can still use free will to choose what we want to experience. So taking also precognitions into account, can the case for a theory of higher human purpose still be made ?