How Self-Reference Builds the World

[Ben Iscatus]

"So taking also precognitions into account, can the case for a theory of higher human purpose still be made ?"

Cosmin, if Time is a feature of form, than from the perspective of the Formless, all enacted possibilities are already known and delivered. Presumably no unnatural effort is required in Form. Wouldn't that be part of your model?

[Cleric K]

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.

But knowing that the conscious sub-stratum is eternal doesn’t guarantee that there will be continuity of consciousness across the threshold of death (which demands integration of memory). In the same manner one can say that quantum fields are eternal so there’s nothing to worry about. But who cares if the sub-stratum is eternal when there's no conscious integration that can overarch the moments corresponding to before and after death?

To be sure, fear of death doesn’t come from the fact that our existence might end. As a matter of fact, if we were completely reasonable in our materialistic philosophy that conscious existence ends at the moment of death, there should be zero fear from it. There could be something to fear about only if there's something to experience it after death. There’s no logic to be afraid of death because we won’t even understand that we have died. We may fear the process of dying leading up until the final event, because it may be accompanied with pain, but this fear could be present even if we believe in afterlife.

So in this sense, fear of death (not the process leading to it) comes not because everything will end but because on some level we’re worried that everything might not end and then the question is how our present life might have prepared the conditions for the after-death state. See, for many people, the idea that existence doesn’t end at death is actually the bad news. They are worried (even if only subconsciously) not that life will end but that it might not end and that they may need to experience in some way the consequences of their Earthly life. So if we're reasonable about this, the only way we can work out this fear is by gaining true knowledge of the conditions after death, how our present life prepares them and how we could work consciously in that preparation. Simple belief in continued existence is not enough. Who knows, maybe that condition will be even worse than our present? Then we should be even more worried than if everything ends at death!

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.

This is actually something that has even less significance than the fear of death. I know people who fear death but I know no one who stays in paralysis, dreading on their philosophical conviction that they lack free will. Such a concern can actually be considered to be only a pathological mental condition for those gone too far in abstract philosophy. The fact is that in practical life even the greatest determinist still uses their spiritual activity to go about. All philosophy about the non-existence of inner agency can be summed up as “Yeah, it’s my philosophical belief that agency is an illusion, yet I have to live as if it is real. Otherwise I can’t even get out of bed.”

But based on your considerations, what extra will be required for a theory, besides eternal life and freedom, to truly be different from materialism ?

The thing is, if it hasn’t become clear already, that I don’t think the problem lies in a theory not being complete enough. The situation can be depicted like this:



In other words, we’re operating at a thin ‘spectral band’ of the recursive hierarchy.  In our normal consciousness we have direct experience neither of the Root of the fractal nor of the elemental bifurcations. So, our situation is rather like this:



There’s darkness above and below but within the light of our thinking we build a miniature model that should account for what is in the dark.

Do you think that your model can somehow be shown to be more certain than the model of a Christian whose intuition of the formless is called God, who believes that the upper band is Heaven and there’s no less consciousness there but even more?

[Cosmin Visan]

"So taking also precognitions into account, can the case for a theory of higher human purpose still be made ?"

Cosmin, if Time is a feature of form, than from the perspective of the Formless, all enacted possibilities are already known and delivered. Presumably no unnatural effort is required in Form. Wouldn't that be part of your model?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. What do you mean "unnatural effort" ?

[AshvinP]

"So taking also precognitions into account, can the case for a theory of higher human purpose still be made ?"

Cosmin, if Time is a feature of form, than from the perspective of the Formless, all enacted possibilities are already known and delivered. Presumably no unnatural effort is required in Form. Wouldn't that be part of your model?

Ben,

Let's take the math problem 47 x 33 = ?. This problem remains a fragmented series of number perceptions until our active effort stirs the ideal waters. No answer that resolves the fragmentation will simply manifest in our consciousness if we patiently stare at the numbers. I guess you wouldnt deny that reality. But when it comes to questions of how the formless, eternal Unity concretizes itself in our living stream of experience, we feel that everything that matters to enact the Unity will manifest of its own accord. We call any creative participation in the process born of ever-expanding insight, "unnatural effort". Is there any justification for this discontinuity?

[Cosmin Visan]

But knowing that the conscious sub-stratum is eternal doesn’t guarantee that there will be continuity of consciousness across the threshold of death (which demands integration of memory). In the same manner one can say that quantum fields are eternal so there’s nothing to worry about. But who cares if the sub-stratum is eternal when there's no conscious integration that can overarch the moments corresponding to before and after death?

But the quantum fields are not conscious. The Self is conscious. Yes, it is indeed hard to imagine the transition between lives if there is no memory present. But however it will be, it will be conscious.

Simple belief in continued existence is not enough. Who knows, maybe that condition will be even worse than our present? Then we should be even more worried than if everything ends at death!

This is also valid. But since we have an infinite number of lives, there will also be good lives among them.

The thing is, if it hasn’t become clear already, that I don’t think the problem lies in a theory not being complete enough. The situation can be depicted like this:



In other words, we’re operating at a thin ‘spectral band’ of the recursive hierarchy.  In our normal consciousness we have direct experience neither of the Root of the fractal nor of the elemental bifurcations. So, our situation is rather like this:



There’s darkness above and below but within the light of our thinking we build a miniature model that should account for what is in the dark.

Do you think that your model can somehow be shown to be more certain than the model of a Christian whose intuition of the formless is called God, who believes that the upper band is Heaven and there’s no less consciousness there but even more?

I will answer both questions at the same time. So, as I also stated in the previous post, my initial thoughts were about cases like the duck-rabbit. I didn't start from self-reference as an intellectual game of playing with random definitions. I started from the phenomenology of consciousness: i.e. what is the relation between shades-of-gray and colors? how does understanding work? etc. And the conclusions were that you can explain the phenomenology of consciousness if you have the entity called "self-reference" with all the properties explored in the paper. In this way, you explain the relation between shades-of-gray and colors as inclusion and transcendence of shades-of-gray into colors. Similar for the workings of understanding (you can only understand Pythagoras' theorem if you have prior understandings of triangles, angles, squares, etc.) and duck-rabbit and countless other examples such as the "motion illusions" where the black-and-white qualia include and transcend the level of time and that's how you get motion in those images. So, I don't know what the intuition of a christian is based on, but in my case is not even an intuition, is a theory able to explain some aspect of the phenomenology of consciousness. I don't know if there is another way that can account for the above mentioned phenomenological examples.

So based on this theory of self-reference that results as an attempt to explain the phenomenology of consciousness, it is then deduced that if you keep going down in consciousness: full visual scene -> objects -> shapes -> colors -> shades-of-gray -> black-and-white -> ... eventually you reach the Self. So going down in consciousness you can only get to more primitive states, not more complex. Might there be that state that you describe a Christian to believe in ? Sure it might be. But it will not be the Self, but some high complex structuring of the formless. My theory is about what the fundamentals are: you have self-reference with such and such properties and then an infinite ocean of formless from which self-reference brings forms into existence. Now, to what forms it is capable of giving birth, my theory cannot say. It might be the case that it is a problem for empirical science or even for theoretical science, but that would be well beyond what I am capable to bring to the table. I will leave other people to take the fundamentals that I provided and see what other theoretical conclusions they can draw from them.

Regarding the darkness above and below, is not that dark. What is above (in your drawing, so the Self) is included in our current consciousness by necessity. The sensation of being alive is how the Self feels like in our current consciousness. So we have access to the Self, albeit indirectly. Or when you look at various shades of a color, you are actually experiencing how the shades-of-gray feel like when they are included in that color. Regarding the darkness below, that is indeed an interesting problem that I'm also wondering about. It seems that we are the end of the line. I'm not sure in what kind of consciousnesses that we are not aware of, our consciousness can be further included and transcended and thus our lives being coordinated from the will of those other higher forms of consciousness. Maybe you can give an example of how this would work.

[Cosmin Visan]

Ben,

Let's take the math problem 47 x 33 = ?. This problem remains a fragmented series of number perceptions until our active effort stirs the ideal waters. No answer that resolves the fragmentation will simply manifest in our consciousness if we patiently stare at the numbers. I guess you wouldnt deny that reality. But when it comes to questions of how the formless, eternal Unity concretizes itself in our living stream of experience, we feel that everything that matters to enact the Unity will manifest of its own accord. We call any creative participation in the process born of ever-expanding insight, "unnatural effort". Is there any justification for this discontinuity?

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.

Also, I would take the opportunity of your post to mention that we need to be careful when talking about the formless. Formless is not just form that is not yet shown. For example, when we see red, is not just that the formless red somehow becomes form red. Formless is not just a bag with qualia from which self-reference picks the qualia that it needs and it brings them into form. Formless is something more subtle. To fully appreciate it, a careful reading of the paper is required. Indeed, as you also mention, formless is in a way a unity, is just 1. There are not multiple formlesses, there is just 1 formless. I just wanted to mention this, to make sure that we appreciate what it actually entails.

[Ben Iscatus]

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.

[Cosmin Visan]

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.

There are all sorts of limitations, even regarding phenomena that my theory says they are equivalent. For example, in the case of the duck-rabbit which emerges on top of a shape, we can at will change on the level of the object from duck to rabbit. But at the same time, even though a color emerges on top of shades-of-gray, we cannot at will change the color. We cannot just look at a color and see it as another color. Though in dreams things become more malleable. Maybe you all had the dream in which you look at some numbers and they change before your eyes. Not to mention the overall changing nature of a dream. So it might be the case that these limitations are not something fundamental that might require some extra theory, but might have to do with different ways in which meanings/forms are structured.

[Cleric K]

My theory is about what the fundamentals are: you have self-reference with such and such properties and then an infinite ocean of formless from which self-reference brings forms into existence. Now, to what forms it is capable of giving birth, my theory cannot say. It might be the case that it is a problem for empirical science or even for theoretical science, but that would be well beyond what I am capable to bring to the table. I will leave other people to take the fundamentals that I provided and see what other theoretical conclusions they can draw from them.

This is precisely the problem I pointed at few posts ago. By laying fundamental in this way you sweep the hard problem from your field and leave it to others to bang their heads against. Now you may say that your theory doesn’t suffer from a hard problem because it is all consciousness through and through, there’s no dualism between conscious experience and some non-conscious stuff of reality. However, the hard problem of consciousness is only an instance of a more fundamental hard problem which applies to every attempt to explain existence through an intellectual model.

To understand this problem we need to shift our attention from the particulars of the theory towards what we are doing with our thinking. What is hard problem of consciousness becomes the hard problem of qualia in your theory. Now you may object again “Haven’t you read my paper? It’s all about explaining how qualia arise!” But the key here is what does it mean to explain something?

Intellectual models today are ones of correspondences. They are mappings between intellectual thought-forms and other experiential conscious phenomena. The physicalist says “matter in such and such configuration corresponds to experience of red.” Your theory says “self-reference in the form of {{}..} corresponds to the experience of red.” But what is matter in the first case? It’s really mental images, intellectual thought-forms in the mind of the physicist. What is self-reference in the other case? Once again intellectual thought-forms. So at the foundation of intellectual thinking – no matter in what kind of theory it casts itself – the problem is that we can in no way recombine our intellectual thought-forms not in order to map but to reach the experience of some conscious phenomena. No matter how I juggle the mental images of photons, waves and frequencies, the experience of red won’t emerge from the construction. No matter how I play with recursion, the experience of red won’t emerge. In the end I’m left with exactly what I juggle with – mental images. Then I say “well, I can’t produce the experience of red but I can pretend that this configuration of mental images corresponds to it.”

This holds true for any theory that tries to build a thought-model of reality. They all suffer from some kind of hard problem and if we trace these hard problems to their root cause we inevitably reach the hard problem of abstract thinking – the fact that the intellect wants to build reality from its thought-forms but unable to do so, it has no choice but put up with mere correspondences.

This hard problem becomes obvious when we try to move from the abstract modelling to reality. For example, can we apply your theory, swirl the recursions and produce in our consciousness qualia of a color that we have never seen before. This is what I would call ‘explanation’ of qualia in the full sense. Otherwise we’re left with an abstract map of correspondences and we don’t even know how to pass from correspondences to realities.


Now that you mentioned the duck-rabbit again, we can connect that with the previous topic about intellectual bases. The duck-rabbit illusion switches perceptions but our sense of self remains intact. When we switch intellectual bases, however, things feel much more intimate. It is as if something of the geometry of our self changes. This is not very comfortable, especially if we have spent a lot of time to show that reality is a rabbit and not a duck (or vice versa).

For example, we can reproject our experience of reality on a pan-psychistic intellectual basis. Instead of starting with “I am” singularity, we start with infinite plurality, like infinitely fine lattice of units of consciousness. Then higher order conscious states appear as kind of standing waves (see cymatics) or alternatively – as Bose-Einstein condensate as it were. Now we understand the “I am” potential as inherent in every unit but when they cohere in a condensate this “I am” is experienced in a macro state.

Now you may say: “but these are completely different theories. In one there’s fundamental unity from which everything emerges, while in the second there’s fundamental plurality. Surely only one of them can be right!” But is this so? Either rabbit or duck – only one can be right?

This was just for an example that as long as we remain in completely abstract metaphysics we can reproject our experience in many different ways and in the end there’s no way to say which is right. In the end it will turn out into a confrontation of purely personal tastes and preferences. Some like fluffy things so they’ll see rabbits as more true. Others – the other way around.

But this is not even the primary problem. The thing is that both reprojections suffer from the same problem described above – they all remain abstract schemas with no conceivable way to move from the map to the real territory.

[Cosmin Visan]

So the main problem that you raise is how to see a new color. My theory accounts for this, and I even mentioned it in the paper: if you want to know how it is to ride a roller-coaster you need to ride a roller-coaster. But maybe this is trivial and you want specifically to know how to see a new color. And the most general answer is: you need to put yourself in the necessary context. Of course, you want something concrete, you want me to tell you exactly what that context is so you can put yourself into and see the new color. The problem is that it might even be inaccesible from present consciusness form. Is like wanting to know how it is like to be a bat. And the answer is: be a bat! You need to reconfigure your entire consciousness through evolutionary processes. Mind you, it might not be possible to achieve that by simply modifying your "brain". You have to go through the real deal, through the real evolutionary forces to get there.

So yes, as you can see, my theory accounts for this. For a revealing way of how you might try to do this in practice, see my paper "Telepathy: A Real-World Experiment" which is precisely about this problem of how to force qualia in your consciousness. Also, for a general treatment of how qualia appeared through evolution see "The Archeology of Qualia" and "Is Qualia Meaning or Understanding?".