Added this to my site if anyone is interested: *Common Criticisms of Multisense Realism*
The most common issues that people have tend not to be with the content of my ideas themselves, but the way that I present them or argue them. From my perspective, it seems clear that they have no intention of entertaining a new set of ideas about consciousness, so my admittedly wordy and often overwrought writing style becomes the reason why my ideas are objectionable. I generally hear that they 1) don't make any sense, 2) are wrong, and 3) are unfalsifiable. This is an interesting complaint, since they are all mutually exclusive. Ideas which don't make sense can't be wrong, and ideas which are wrong can't be unfalsifiable. Let's begin with *1) They don't make any sense. * I don't expect that *all* of the ideas will make sense to everyone immediately. All of the ideas do, however, make sense to me, even if I come to realize later that the way I wrote about them is in need of editing or re-working. I'm not saying that I'm not crazy, but I have never been so crazy that I have looked back on my own writing and not been able to figure out what I was trying to say. What I write makes sense to me, and it does, believe it or not, make sense to enough people who have expressed to me that they understand it that I am not threatened by this #1 accusation. Ultimately, it is just an accusation, as being unable to make sense of an unfamiliar idea says nothing about the merits of the idea, or the author of the idea. *2) They are wrong.* Once people have tired themselves out yelling about how my writing irritates them, they often will find a way to make enough sense of my writing to announce that I make this or that 'claim' which contradicts this or that Law. Of course that's nonsense. Nothing that I propose here can be construed as contradicting any natural observation. Not only do my ideas about the relation between body and mind or matter and sense not require any additional force within public physics, but they explicitly avoid it by definition. My interpretation is a commentary on the umbilical-symmetric-nested nature of the relation of public bodies and private experience, not a squeezing of private experience into public mechanics. If you cannot grasp this concept, I suggest that you stop reading now. You will never be able to understand Multisense Realism and you will be wasting your time to go on. Another criticism along these lines is the mistaken impression that some make that I am a naive idealist. Because I say that physics and sense are in fact the same thing, and that there is no 'existence' independent of sense, many people cannot get the idea out of their mind that Multisense Realism is built on a Berkeleyan straw man where the tree falls in the forest and doesn't make a sound unless a human being hears it. Not so. Lots of organisms have ears, and the event of a tree crashing to the ground has lots of sensory opportunities with or without he benefit of the presence of Homo sapiens. If you get rid of all ears, however, the you would have eliminated all possible experiences of sound. Physics, in my view, does not merely depend on both public and private transmitter-receivers of experience, physics is that which twists itself into public and private ontologies (or 'verses') in the first place. In the context of Artificial Intelligence, I get a lot of flack for insisting that mechanical approaches to assembling consciousness are doomed to failure. People assume that my ideas are sentimental and reflect some sort of patriotic attachment to human beings, or an aversion to technology. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have always been a both a technophile and a misanthrope so that nothing would please me more than a Kurzweilian singularity in which I could be uploaded out of this nasty human civilization. Unfortunately, in the course of developing Multisense Realism, I could not avoid that the nature of the juxtaposition between private experience and public bodies is such that no experience could ever be generated by bodies alone. Forms and functions both, are a consequence and reflection of sense, not an independent source of it. You can't build a mind out of forms and functions, only a sculpture of a mind - a recording. Without using some kind of biological organism to start, with its own agendas and sensitivity driven values, there can be no artificial intelligence - only simulated intelligence. This position leads people to jump to the conclusion that I am a biocentrist - that I think there is something magical about living cells which allows them to progress to higher quality consciousness than molecules alone. Nope, you can't hang that on me either. It is not the substance of the cells that matters, it is the experience which is represented by the cells. The cell is a game piece, a marker. What it represents is a sub-personal experience which has been around a lot longer than we have been. The fact that only certain organic configurations have led to biological cells should not be taken as a sign that no other forms of life or consciousness can occur - but it should not be ruled out either. Once it is understood that the universe is an experience in which significance is produced, and significance has to do with monopolizing negentropy (signals), then the development of biology as a consequence of nucleic acids can be seen as more akin to a second big bang than a random development. Biology is a single thread and plays a unique role in the cosmos as far as we know. If we have learned anything by being living organisms it is that we are both very adaptable and very finicky. We can eat a million different kinds of roots and leaves, but not even a little serving of arsenic. We should not blow off the difference between life and death, organic and inorganic, until we really know what we are talking about. We still have not made anything live from scratch, even after knowing how to make primordial soup for decades, so it is premature to proclaim that my conservatism here is unwarranted. *3) It is unfalsifiable* In my view, the question here is not so much whether MR is falsifiable or not, but rather how legitimate of an expectation is that. Since the idea of things being true or false or provable is a quality of the mind, it is circular to attempt to use experiences within consciousness to prove something about consciousness itself, especially when we know already that the problem with consciousness is that we can't find any trace of it when we look inside someone's brain. What we find is something like a coral reef, which pulses and throbs with teeming microbiotic events that correspond to subjective reports of consciousness, but without such reports, and our own to draw on, we would certainly be looking at an intra-cranial reef and not a 'person'. If you found this thing growing under your sink, you would not ask it what it is thinking about. I should offer an another ultimatum then. If you can't understand exactly, precisely, why it may never be possible to present a theory of consciousness which is falsifiable to consciousness itself, then you should probably stop reading as you will only waste your time and become frustrated. This does not mean that we can't appeal to other epistemological standards and make more sense of consciousness than has ever been made before, but may mean that this sense-making comes at a cost. We may not expect to receive this understanding with Enlightenment Era methodology, with our arms crossed, waiting to be bowled over by incontrovertible evidence. This new understanding reveals that all physics is participatory to the core. We have to meet the universe halfway, and our theory of consciousness has to meet us half way. We can't be trapped in a corner between some ion channel and an action potential, or squashed under a millions years of hominid evolution. To find consciousness, we must stay put and let the pieces to the puzzle fit together in the best way that they can. The big picture has always been unfalsifiable, but at the same time, it has never required proof. If you can doubt your own existence, then you can't doubt that you are the one who is doubting it. Is that unfalsifiable? Does it matter? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
