Redundancy of a philosophy post I made somewhere else

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I tried posting this somewhere else, while I had fun writing it it's not getting approved. While I don't think there's anything wildly novel in it (although the core concept is one I haven't heard many people say much on) I'd at least like to do the internet equivalent of 'mailing the letter to myself' to timestamp it. While I don't necessarily think it's 'genius' work, these days I have no clue what people are doing so better to be safe than sorry. I also know that even with this being a 'Philosophy' folder, we're not really a 'nosebleed' philosophy kind of forum, that's part of why I didn't post it here first.


Anyway, the title of this is Matryoshka Mind / Haunted Materialism and Lemniscatic Antinomies (and is ChatGPT actually novel?)

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I wanted to discuss a particular lens on the problems of consciousness and matter. This post and my idea to think about all of these things tonight was born out of my absolute frustration with any ability to get a solid ontological fix on where we are, what 'this' is, or which sets of rules you can even trust to govern your sense of the future with when what we receive is a mixed bag of seemingly heterogeneous things that all seem dubious in their own ways - to the point that it easily leaves us in nihilism and absurdity. Almost anything can be turned into a compelling story, particularly if it can't easily be examined, which is even that much more crazy-making.

Leaving the prologue - on one hand consciousness and matter are the best place to start as we're aware that matter, at least as it presents itself to us, is incredibly easy to understand behaviorally except we don't know what it foundationally is, and then mind is this freaky thing that shows up and looks at matter, exerts top-down control over it where the scaling works (like human industry or beavers making dams, add the possibility of consciousness kicking off quantum Darwinism). On the other hand you have other seemingly fixed paradoxes - such as proof for and against the paranormal keeping us in a normal distribution in terms of belief, I think of John Ralston Saul's comments in Voltaire's Bastards where he talks about the cognitive dissonance and state of political and cultural psychosis for a humanity who'd be far more sane if they could either prove conclusively that you either live forever after death or cease to exist but that no such closure ever seems to come (or you have the strange dance of New Atheism and the blooming world of NDE's). I'm also going to add another strange bedfellow to these concepts - the question of how it is that we even exist when it seems like pure replicators would be infinitely more fit for survival - whether that's as Scott Alexander / Slate Star Codex's analogy of an island of rats making art (rat Dubrovnik) being driven by rats who simply forage and eat anything they can and spend all of their time copulating to eat more of the resources - thus in addition to the realization that rats can't do art anyway - even if they could we'd never meet the Dubrovnik rats because they'd be instantly outcompeted for survival / existence by their nearer-to pure replicator cousins.

I'm going to throw a neologism out there because this particular one seems really useful: lemniscatic antinomes.

• Lemniscate - a figure-eight shaped curve whose equation in polar coordinates is ρ2=a2 cos 2θ or ρ2=a2 sin 2θ.

• Antinomy - a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable; a paradox.


So.... I'm going to refer to lemniscatic antinomies as having the following qualities:

• Like normal antinomies they're things that seem to hold their own as far as existence but which seem mutually contradictory and reconciling them proves challenging.
• The lemniscatic part - they have reciprocal dialog where one informs the other informs the first, so sort of like Yin and Yang but more focused on the behavior of such systems.


This is where I feel like I could easily vomit a scrambled encyclopedia and lose everyone so I really don't want to do that. What I'll do instead is put a pile of puzzle pieces in front of you where you can try rolling up your own lemniscatic antinomies as a bit of a game to see how attractive or unattractive the concept is in terms of its utility (also - let me know if this is just renaming a concept that already exists, my problem with assuming it already does is I see too much disparate information out there that some people connect a little bit of but I've never seen the thought completed).

Riffing on Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (I have mixed feelings about this movie) I'm going to call the list below: Ingredients for an Everything Bagel.


Ingredients for an Everything Bagel

• Flower (Matter) - very reliable in behavior, follows mathematical laws, obvious cause and effect lines. Limitations - we know how it behaves but have no idea, at root, what it is or whether the question of 'what it is' ultimately can even have a reasonable answer.

• Yeast (Mind) - A kind of self-aware autopoiesis that yields top-down control over matter, whether through physical manipulation such as Babylonian city builders and beavers building dams (sometimes in, sometimes outside of, the proper bucket for what are considered phenotypes) as well as the possiblity of exerting quantum chaining / quantum Darwinism via attention.

• Eggs (Homeostasis) - This isn't a formal definition but what's relevant to me here so it's more of a commentary - the activity of complex, arguably conscious, systems (scale independent) with thermostat-like censors (neurological or otherwise) to keep themselves alive and externalize entropy. You could also import Karl Friston's ideas of Markov blankets, surprise minimization, and free energy reduction for increased certainty (which may explain what consciousness has to do with quantum chaining).

• Warm Water (Physics) - Reliable laws for interaction and causation, even when causation seems less straight-forward or 'spooky' where it's most likely a matter of bundling causation types (scientifically known and unknown).

Spices:

• Poppy Seed (Religion and Spirituality) - On one level religion is a codification of conduct between members of a community where social contract is deeply known and enshrined in the center of civic life (having it's own dedicated day of the week) but also dealing with beliefs in the afterlife, a human soul, divine revelation, and as is popular these days - belief that you can have conversation / communion with spiritual beings.

• Salt (Professional Skeptics) - I think of the work that people like James Randi but various skeptic societies have done to demonstrate that so-called paranormal phenomena cannot survive scientific scrutiny. I, raising a hand, blushing, admitting that I've been gullible in the past, have tried talking to people such as mediums and there's a strange mix of useless trivia that they couldn't have known and a hot pile of crap for future predictions, conceptions of purpose, etc.. Life would actually be much saner, much more easy to digest, if we lived in the world of the rationalist materialist, just that The Trickster loves to blow the raspberry at all that, give the skeptics a wet-willy, and cause as much argument and fractioning as the tower of Babel.

• Caraway Seed (Darwinian Evolution) - Forces a system of tradeoffs between external and internal management, such that pure replicators have to be extreme in their fecundity (like mosquitoes) to survive their simplicity whereas highly rational, self-aware, and cognitive species can fail to procreate by way of environmental sensitivity and risk-hedging behavior being turned up too high.

• Black Sesame (AI / Large Language Models) - LLM's like ChatGPT, Bard, etc. which can have a fluid conversation with you - with apparent comprehension but no conscious experience. I particularly think of Peter Watts' Blindsight and the ship Rorshach which one of the characters identified as a 'fast-talker' and which lead to the conclusion that the ship that was talking to them and its use of language was actually a Chinese Room. The more I think about it - I believe we may have evidence that analogies to LLM's and Chinese Rooms exist in other places in nature.

• Sesame Seed (NDE's) - In my mind it's a fascinating phenomena with a massive hole punched through it. The fascinating phenomena is the degree to which people can have spontaneous remissions from cancer, miraculously fast healing from injury (it's like a psilocybin mushroom trip for the whole body), the out of body experiences - while there's debate as to whether anyone has cleared the bar for evidence of veridical out-of-body this part seems compelling just on how many people are able to give deep, idiosyncratic details like a doctor flapping their arms like a chicken in the OR or reading a serial number on a machine, but after that - particularly if they go through the tunnel - the format is identical to dreaming and DMT trips (which is the hole punch in it, you can't tell if its their brain dreaming / tripping or whether they've stepped into a higher gradient dream such as the dream of the broader physical world).

• Onion (Channeled Messages / Mediumship) - The stereotypical story goes, strongest from Victorian era onward, that a person's been reading a lot of occult metaphysics or has had interest in the topic. They have a series of visions, synchronicities, etc. which push them to grab a pen and start writing faster than they can even think of words, it's like whole texts are fully formed from their unconscious (like the warp speed of Dion Fortune's Cosmic Doctrine delivery or Jane Roberts speaking jocularly to a room full of friends and students as Seth in a heavy accent).

• Garlic (Trickster Phenomena) - This goes to the awareness of the idea that occult phenomena are real but their content is ******** (BS) - not just in the colloquial sense but in the technical sense that it's very high-salience information that's also a random stream of small truths, falsehoods, and specious concepts as well as Barnum statements which appear like they should be the babblings of an idiot save for very difficult to ignore (even if subtle) manifestations which prove that the break in what we normally think reality is does happen but its an invasion of what appears to be white noise, lies, and flattery and consolidates into reliable influences on human behavior - as Jacques Vallee outlined in the 1970's when dealing with UFO / alien contactees or what George P Hansen talked about in The Trickster and the Paranormal where he used the concept of antistructure for heavy-lifting.


So I get that the recipe might be a bit stacked and maybe other people would have chosen other ingredients that I didn't list (if you can think of anything crucial that I forgot feel free to add it and name the spice). I'm framing it in that manner because these are all integral components to the puzzle I'm chewing on.

Speaking of that... we need some chefs don't we! I can think of a few worthy of mention:

• Iain McGilchrist - Author of The Master and His Emissary as well as The Matter With Things. In particular he looks at the bicameral orientation of the mind and left brain for tool use and environmental exploitation, right brain for environmental scanning both for opportunities and predation. I don't know if it's just me but it seems like we experience self-awareness primarily as the left-brain / tool user, whereas the voice of the 'master' is the 'still small voice' that gets you more through your intuitions, immediate impulses, and if you've designed an imaginary friend / head mate for purposes of communicating with the master you can do that as well. I also think that a lot of the ideas of Holy Guardian Angel, personal daemon (like Socrates), go back to this.

• Michael Silberstein - Big proponent of neutral monism and contextual emergence. He's upfront in his conviction that we are living in an eternal block universe (consciousness as adynamic global constraints) but he also makes a very compelling case for neutral monism to lead somewhere similar to Advaita Vedanta or universe as raw experience.

• Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash - I think their Conscious Realism is also an eternal block universe / Minkowski space theory but the overall gist is the universe / reality at large as a social network of conscious agents which are two-bit at the lowest level but which are subsumed as part of every higher level and, interestingly enough, have multiple participation at every level of complexity (a bit like I could say that a cell could have a solo experience, experience as part of an organ, and experience as part of a human). Theirs is a reifiication, at least to my eyes, of functionalism with multiple realizability - so egregores, occult and 'trickster' phenomena, environment itself seeming to deliberately seek homeostasis - check.

• Stephan Wolfram - He's got a lot of interesting ideas but perhaps most notably (and related to Hoffman and Prakash) his concept of the hypergraph.

• Michael Levin - Aside from his great discoveries in terms of embryo development and cell differentiation, also xenobots, it sounds like he's also making great strides with the combination problem (how cells would pool metadata to create a living organism that experiences a single conscious 'I' experience from its substrate.


So out of the Everything Bagel recipe I posted above I'm going to take my first shot at an example of a lemniscatic antinomy:

I'm going to argue that the way in which conscious minds regulate matter through manual manipulation, attention, quantum chaining / quantum Darwinism, matter in the environment has a return loop to conscious organisms in the way of sprites, ET's, cryptids, mediums, channelers and automatic writers. When I read George P Hansen's The Trickster and the Paranormal, when he describes the strange, skittish, and often downright strange even perverse behavior of paranormal phenomena (as well as people being overshadowed by them turning to things like fraud or, in some tragic cases, noncery) it shows that these phenomena are as warped, profane, and mysterious as consciousness itself and have so many of the same tendencies we do for lies, embellishment, rope-a-dope, it seems very much like a form of realpolitik. Equilibrium systems seek homeostasis in the interest of going concern. If the Amazon rain forest is concerned about neoliberal politics - Mother Ayah to the rescue. If the broader system is concerned you get crop circles with WEF'y messaging.

The open question - is the whole universe filled with consciousness in such a way that it actively talks back to us or are paranormal phenomena a Chinese Room? That's where the cryptic communication makes it almost impossible to tell.


I'll open up the floor to see if anyone has ideas that they wanted to discuss - whether examples of lemniscatic antinomy, feedback between related opposites, maybe someone would add cayenne pepper or other spices to their Everything Bagel, also let me know if the lemniscatic antinomy glasses show you anything else that's interesting.

Can we have your "everything bagel" with some John Lockes, and some cream Nietzsches?