Introductory Remarks

§3 In this chapter we present the subject of the book, our approach to the problems presented, and discuss the implications of the work.

The Work

The subject, scope, and composition of the book.

Explaining Experience In Nature

The content of the book and its objectives.

§4 The present inquiry explores a constructive explanation of consciousness in nature determined by natural laws and developed from first principles¹. Our goal is to illustrate how consciousness comes into existence, the role that it plays in nature, and the mechanics of the broad range of behaviors that are its products.

§20 The foundation of this new construction is a novel account of experience in nature.

§22 By the term “experience” we refer to the basis of consciousness. It is that which is most familiar. It is common to all senses. It is the first thing and the last thing for each of us. Though strictly, according to the model we will present, the first and the last thing for each of us is a sense, the primitive we will propose characterized by biophysical structure.

§23 From the beginning we take the existential status of experience seriously. It is something that exists in the world.

§31 All the world derives from primitive nature. Primitive nature is currently inaccessible but three aspects of it are apprehensible and universally covariant: these are mass/energy, gravitation, and a primitive of experience. The current work explores the introduction of this last aspect of primitive nature as a necessary distinction for the explanation of the world that includes consciousness.

§34 In our model this universal primitive is an aspect of the world that affects physical assembly simply by its presence. Although this primitive is inert, in the same way that gravitation is inert, it is the root of all complexity.

§37 The new mechanics we propose characterizes the products of a natural assembly against² this previously unconsidered primitive.

§39 By analogy this new primitive has the same existential status as gravitation and mass/energy. It is a universal aspect of primitive nature just as gravitation³ is universal; and it is inert as gravitation is inert. Most important of all for us here, like gravitation it has a characterizable effect upon the formation of physical structure.

§41 As we proceed we will examine the behaviors associated with consciousness as described by a new mechanics. These behaviors are the emergent products of the unfolding world naturally engineered by this mechanics and the evolutionary principle of natural selection. They include the obvious products of experience: the variety of sense, the behavior of organisms, and the forms of intelligence that underlie them.

§47 On our journey we will develop foundations for the formal characterization of the range of behaviors that we consider. In that effort we develop a calculus for this new mechanics, inclusive of biophysics. The objective of this calculus is to enable us to reason rigorously about the formation of sensory and motile structures, and their operation. With this understanding of individual organisms we are then able to suggest a model for reasoning about their behavior in groups.

§51 We must navigate significant challenges before we can formalize our model. We will defend a claim that the established foundations of logic and geometry contain assumptions that, if left unchallenged, limit our formal inquiry. This is because the intuitions upon which they are based relate directly to our subject, they are assumptions concerning the nature of apprehension.

§52 These claims will lead us inevitably to review assumptions in the foundations of mathematical physics. And these challenges are difficult because they reject cherished beliefs.

§53 For example, we will argue that the “orthogonality” pervasive in our mathematics⁴ is false and has the effect of misdirecting problem solving behavior in physics. And so we challenge the conventional notion of unlimited dimensions in contemporary physics.

§57 We argue that the Turing implementation of logic as computation is false and constrained by limits that are fundamental to the world. To support this argument we show that the Turing implementation of logical machines is unlike the biophysical implementation and unable to compete with the efficiency found there. To this end we offer a conjecture concerning the Church-Turing thesis. This conjecture illustrates how and why systems built with Turing Machines will produce behaviors, our measure of results, that differ from the behaviors produced by our mechanics.

§58 We will have made progress on our journey if we can demonstrate that the new calculus can predict biophysical sensory and motile function. We will have proof of these theories in practice if we can use the mechanics described to implement new sensory and motile technologies, machines that experience.

The Field Of Endeavor

A summary of our field of inquiry.

§59 When consideration of logic goes beyond the effective techniques of syntax and semantic rules in symbolic systems to include the essential basis of apprehension and operation of the mind it is more rightly called “semeiotic theory,” the study of “signs” .

§66 Semeiotic theory, the subject of logical positivism and pragmaticism, is a field of inquiry that develops general theories of signs and we develop such a theory here. The theory is built constructively upon the natural mechanics of sense and motility that we propose.

§68 There is some diversity and ambiguity in the literature concerning the exact definition of a sign. We adopt the simplest and least ambiguous definition: a sign is simply a differentiated experience.

§69 In his essay concerning human understanding the English philosopher John Locke divides the objects of our understanding into three distinct areas of intellectual consideration: Physics, Ethics, and Semeiotic⁵.

§74 He puts it this way ^[1]:

§76 Locke saw these as three distinct areas of study.

§78 We will show, however, that these three are not distinct. An intellectual understanding of one is intrinsically dependent upon an intellectual understanding of the others. Put another way, we will show that there exists a continuum from elementary physics through biology, covariant with the embodiment of signs, and the inevitable and volitional behaviors that arise.

§79 We will show that the behaviors of organisms are the natural product of genetic disposition in its environment, mitigated by the embodiment of conventions, the embodiment of signs.

§80 Thus, for us, semeiotic theory is naturally first among sciences. It is through semeiotic theory that we infer the physical basis of nature as well as the operation of individuals and behavior of those individuals in groups.

§81 It is semeiotic theory that leads us to a sense that captures an understanding of the world. The product of this semeiosis, the semeiotic process embodied by an individual, are the marks, the subjects of signs, that represent our expression and analysis of that sense⁶.

Against Prevailing Views

Our model and approach challenges prevailing views.

§90 The present work challenges a number of prevailing views. In particular, we make the following observations:

1. §91 The failure of a logical reduction cannot lead to supernatural conclusions. By necessity such failures lead us to reconsider, and ultimately revise, the basis of the logical construction in which the reduction failed.

2. §92 The mechanism of logical differentiation in biophysical structures produce results that differ from those produced by the mechanism of logical integration.

   §93 This difference arises in implementation at scale and is due to the distinct mechanisms of logical differentiation and integration.

   §94 In essence the primitive we propose enables a fundamentally different computational mechanics: a manifold, with no storage required, of parallel “computation” against which nonlocal differentiated results form in a physical structure closely bound to associated action potentials in a system of recognition.

   §95 The classical logic of integration is limited and unable to compete with this simple efficiency.

   §96 This is a controversial claim and, if it holds, it is a negative result for computer science.

3. §97 This same mechanism also produces results that differ from those of “computational complexity” in explanations of physical behavior involving sentience.

   §98 “Computational complexity,” the product of uniform classical mechanics, has no differentiating physics or logical constraint. Without such constraint the behavior arising from computational complexity is different than that predicted in our model.

   §99 This too is a controversial claim and will be a negative result for computer science. Later we discuss the implications of these claims to the Church-Turing Thesis.

4. §100 There remains the question as to whether heuristic machines in efficient switching materials are more or less efficient for certain end results than the mechanisms referred to above.

   §101 Despite this, and despite the manifest success of chess playing machines, we conjecture that conventional machines implementing heuristics cannot ultimately solve problems involving recognition for reasons that are fundamental to the world. By this we refer to the basic ability of organisms, that is proportional to their size and complexity, to consistently recollect similarity in their environment and act appropriately.

5. §102 Certain basic notions in the language of mathematics, derived from received authority, are false intuitions. One such notion is the geometric notion of perpendicular “orthogonality” that leads to unconstrained dimensions in analytic algebra.

   §103 We will not present it in these introductory remarks but later we present an experimental geometry as the basis of our calculus that does not use the conventional notion of orthogonality; instead of an unlimited dimensional geometry that starts with “point,” “line,” “plane” we begin with “length” and derive “plane” and “point” as necessary distinctions. This geometry was considered in part earlier by Ernst Mach as a geometry in which length is the fundamental metric^[2]. The geometry is unrestricted by perpendicular orthogonality yet it still provides solids, planes, and unique points. It provides a new coordinate system well suited to our task.

6. §104 A resulting bias in the foundations of mathematics, the acceptance of an unlimited “dimensionality” in analytic algebra, leads to the misdirection of problem solving behavior in mathematical physics.

7. §105 As a consequence we argue, consistent with Einstein, and Godel^[3], that the notion of “time” is merely a way of speaking about the world. It follows then, consistent with Mach^[4] and Einstein, that the notion of “space” is also. For us “spacetime” is simply a way of speaking about mass/energy.

8. §106 Finally, and perhaps most controversial, we claim a necessary extension of physics, a universal basis of experience whose role in nature is the production of physical complexity.

§107 In the following sections we address each of these observations in sufficient detail to justify their further investigation.

Rescuing Reductionism

§109 The present work advocates the return of certain scientific principles^[5] and the rejection of metaphysics, in the pursuit of a systematic and rigorous logical construction of the world. We pursue the development of such a construction.

§110 Logical constructions of this kind approximate the way things are with increasing degrees of completeness; in a continuous refinement that eliminates contradiction and defers to the evidence.

§111 Reductions within such frameworks must lead to verifiable predictions about the behavior of the world. The failure of such reductions by evidence or contradiction cannot lead us to supernatural conclusions. By necessity such failures lead us to reconsider and ultimately revise the basis of the construction in which the reduction failed.

§112 This view, surprisingly perhaps, is contrary to prevailing views in contemporary science proposed by several leading emergence theorists and some physicists.

§113 Advocates of these views include mathematicians Stephen Wolfram^[6] and Gregory Chaitin^[7], biologist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman^[8], and cognitive theorist Douglas Hofstadter^[9], all of whom have written books on the subject. However, the argument itself is not new^[10].

§119 According to these accounts the basis of experience is not universally primitive but is solely a product of the evolved parts assembled. Typically, it is manifest in these arguments as an identity with some observable phenomenon. And it is important to note immediately that experience in these theories has no role in the world.

§120 Emergence theories of experience echo the philosophy of mind known as identity theory attributed to Herbert Feigl (1950s)^[11][12] and others⁷.Feigl is also a member of “the Vienna Circle” that we will come to hear much about in our historical narrative. These theories argue that there is not only a one-to-one correspondence between conscious events and physical events but that the physical events are in fact the conscious events. In these models there is no mystery to the physical events involved they are simply the product of conventional mechanics.

§123 An older and frequent alternative argument made by some philosophers is that experience is an epiphenomenon^[13], a phenomenon that arises as the extra product of known mechanics and evolutionary theory.

§124 Here we will treat theories of identity and epiphenomena in the same way. We do so because the two theories are logically indistinguishable. Whether experience is the incidental product of evolved mass/energy or the events of mass/energy themselves simply cannot be detected. What is more, if one or the other is in fact the case then the matter here can never be resolved.

§125 In both models no aspect of experience is existent prior to the physical assembly that embodies it and experience plays no role in the mechanics of observable events. Experience is simply along for the ride. As long as these theories provide no role for experience in nature they amount to a form of dualism and no real progress on the matter has been made.

§126 The unspoken premise of these models is materialism. We take the view of materialism to imply a belief that our physical models are complete in all important respects. According to this view contemporary physical theory captures all the essential things of the world.

§127 Materialism is justified in a version of emergence theory by taking the position that levels of constructive complexity introduce new phenomena into the world and, to quote Chaitin^[14]:

§130 In correspondence with the author Chaitin says (quoted with permission):

§132 This correspondence illustrates two issues that we will address here. The first is the acceptance of the supernatural, metaphysics. This is due to a failed reduction and a failure to recognize the necessity to review the basis of the construction that leads to it. The second is a semeiotic issue that relates to how assumptions of received authority in our mathematical formalism, in this case in the notion of unlimited orthogonality, has misdirected problem solving behavior in mathematical physics.

§133 The idea of parallel universes or unlimited dimensions is based upon a false intuition, it is a clear and unsupportable fantasy. And while the idea of multiple universes in Inflationary Theory (where expansion of the world leads to units separating at faster than the speed of light) is intriguing there is little justification for any claim that the laws within these “universes” are not precisely the same.

§134 New properties of nature obviously do emerge and there is an equally obvious correspondence, an identity, between the physical assembly that manifests the property and the property itself. However, from the constructive point of view that we will follow in this work nothing new is brought into the world except a new assembly of its essential parts.

Laws and Principles

The uniformity of natural law.

§135 A central premise for us is that the natural laws are uniform, that they are everywhere the same. We argue that this uniformity is profound, the cause of perceived universals. And our model relies upon it.

§136 The world then, in our model, is a natural construction according to the laws of primitive nature (a priori determinants) and the principles (posterior determinants) that arise in the combination of these laws.

§139 In accord with the laws of conservation and equilibrium in thermodynamics these emergent properties transform, their structures change, and these new forms play a continuing role in the physical systems in which they appear.

§140 Yet in the argument we have heard from contemporary emergence theory experience has none of these features. It translates to no other form and it plays no continuing role.

§141 The emergence theory expounded by Chaitin and others is the product of a failed reduction. It is the inevitable logical consequence of a strict adherence to a materialist construction, a construction that forbids discovery in the foundations of the world.

§142 To escape this inevitable conclusion, since it is clearly inadequate, we are required to expand our physical theory, to change the basis of our logical construction of the world as the philosopher of science Rudolf Carnap (as we will hear shortly), and contemporary physicist Roger Penrose^[15][16], have anticipated:

Changing The Operational Basis Of Logic And Apprehension

The mechanisms of sensory differentiation in biophysics necessarily produce results that differ from those produced by the mechanisms of logical integration in traditional theories of computation.

§144 We propose a revision to the operational basis at the foundations of logic. The proposal is not novel. It is, in fact, the dominant view of logicians prior to the current era.

§145 We will present an historical narrative that illustrates this divide in logic, placing the strong locality of computational logic against the nonlocality manifest in our sensory experience. At the center of this narrative, representing each side of the debate, is the work of Alan Turing and Rudolf Carnap.

§146 This divide is mechanistic and fundamental to the implementation of logic. Critically, we claim that the results produced by these two views differ.

§147 There are two aspects of conventional logical machines to consider: integrative logic and computational complexity.

§150 Integrative logic is the logic of computer systems. The results it produces are aggregations of strongly localized truth values. A result is a “truth” value.

§151 The study of “computational complexity” looks at behaviors produced by these systems in the highly parallel case, where there are, at least conceptually, many such logical machines working concurrently and uniformly applying simple rules. Examples are fractals and algorithms such as Conway's game of life^[17]. The result is some characteristic behavior.

§152 The different results produced by differentiation arise at scale because the primitive we propose enables a manifold of parallel “computation” formed against our primitive in a physical structure of sense and associated action potentials. It is unified and storage free implementing cognition and motile behavior. Because it relies on these essential features of our physics it cannot be simulated by conventional machines.

§153 Computational complexity is not constrained in this way. It has no physics of nonlocal differentiation and no logical constraint. There is no point at which the system produces a nonlocal differentiation of the kind seen in sensory architectures.

§154 The converse is the case for logical integration. Logical integration is constrained by the rules of logic and forced to a localized reduction, a final aggregation of the logical parts, a single truth value. In this case logic is forced to take steps too far and is unable reduce across a manifold of the kind we propose.

§155 This difference then derives from the nature of locality in these logical mechanisms and the effect introduced by the primitive we propose. This is aided by the fact that storage, required in the Turing model, is not required in our model because there is a direct covariance between the structure of the physical manifold and cognition/recognition enabled by the primitive.

§156 Since the action of a given manifold will always produce the same sense we also have the basis of memory. And we get the recollection of similarity for free, structures partially reformed will produce a partial sense; providing a foundation for analogy. In such an architecture there is no need for storage.

§157 Action potentials are directly associated with the recollection of similarity. Action behaviors occur either at the point of recognition or when physical circumstances require the organism to modify behavior, a forced collapse to a decision point at which the organism senses what it anticipates and acts accordingly.

§158 We judge this difference then not by some perceived result from conventional symbolic logic but by resulting behavior. Specifically, it is not that the perceived truth values of logical statements differ in the two mechanics but rather that the truth values are concurrent, nonlocal coexisting differentiations distributed across a physical structure, and at scale classical Turing computations cannot deal with this concurrency and nonlocal decision making.

§159 The power of computational complexity is often cited as a sufficient explanation for complex behaviors. We certainly accept the fluid and solid behaviors that arise this way from the uniformity of natural law in classical mechanics. But computational complexity provides no account for the manifest nonlocality in sense, it provides no account of experience in nature. And this should be the most compelling reason to reject computational complexity as the explanation of nonlocal behavior in sensory architectures.

§160 Emergent behavior by the application of simple uniform laws is a necessary part of our explanation but it is logically insufficient if those laws are constrained to those of computation or classical mechanics. The limits of computational complexity are, in fact, that it is not limited by the natural differentiating constraints that we propose.

§161 It is certainly not necessary in biology to integrate all the results before action is taken in our model, the distributed logic in our mechanics is bound to the distributed action potential and constrained by the physical structure. In terms of efficiency Turing computation is unable to benefit from the unified nonlocal differentiations freely available in biophysical structure according to our model.

§162 In other words, the concurrency we suggest is not merely the functional composition of computations but intrinsic to logical differentiation.

§163 To avoid confusion we steer clear of suggesting that this mechanism be called “entanglement,” a term used in Quantum Mechanics to refer to an observer based phenomenon.

§164 If we analyse the concurrency of these manifolds with classic process algebra^[18], and we will use just two processes P and Q to represent two points on our manifold, it suggests the type:

§165 P || Q.

§166 Processes P and Q are concurrent and share events in the set of events they may perform (in their respective “alphabets” ) and these events they must perform together.

§167 However, this type of mechanism is unlikely since it requires a direct implementation of the synchronization involved and a single common event. The synchronization mechanism that we propose here is a uncommon event and the result of physical structure formed against an inert primitive absent in other models. The deformations of this structure characterize sense and construct against it an associated action potential. It is the shaping of this manifold that leads to synchronized behavior in its continuous deformations.

§168 There is then an intrinsic unity across the behavior of the representative processes P and Q born of their physical structure against the primitive we propose. This “action potential,” a complex event of the manifold, leads to a collective unified response.

§169 By analogy this is precisely the same kind of covariant behavior that constrains computational complexity in the gravitational field.

§170 The difference in result then would be illustrated by, for example, the direction an organism takes as the result of a given environmental input. We suggest, essentially, that organisms implemented with Turing machines will fail where organisms implemented with our new mechanics will survive.

§171 Our model suggests a new way to view the structure and architecture of neurons. It suggests that the complex and dynamic manifold constructed by the neuron's cell structure along with the manifolds formed by collections of neurons and other cells is the method of memory and refining thought, a particular manifold configuration corresponding to a differentiated recollection of similarity and motile response. Hence no storage is required in conventional terms.

§172 First we observe a manifest nonlocality in sense that is explicitly unaccounted for in the work of Alan Turing^[19]. This nonlocality is most readily observed in any visual scene of the least complexity. The scene does not reduce to a point. In addition, while observing the scene other senses are present. We can hear the music of Beethoven and taste the sweet honey while observing the sunset. This unified differentiation is not a feature of the Turing model of computation or computational complexity.

§173 Next we observe that sense and motility are covariant. This is not the same as saying that there is an identity but only that the two phenomena are mutually effective in precisely the same sense that the gravitational field and mass/energy exhibit general covariance.

§174 The manifest effect of gravitation characterized by the curvature of Einstein's “spacetime” is that observed by Newton, any two bodies appear to have a mutual attraction that varies, roughly, as the inverse square of the distance between them.

§175 It's important to note here the nonlocal nature of gravitation and our new primitive. The gravitational effect is a covariant differentiation and this is similar to the effect that we propose.

§176 The manifest effect of our proposed primitive, however, is more subtle. Clearly mass/energy is again an equal player in the game. It's structure and behavior in this case is exactly that which characterizes the form of sense just as its structure characterizes the form of the gravitational field.

§177 The manifest effect of our proposed primitive, the role that it plays in nature, is the formation of motile structures constructing, by natural selection, an ever richer characterization of sense.

§178 In other words, natural selection does the rest because richer motile sensory systems provide a survival advantage. If our model holds, an organism will always turn toward the richer characterization of sense, whatever behavior this may imply in the context of the organism in its environment.

§179 The basic elements of these structures are the cellular forms familiar to us in biophysics and an even richer characterization comes from manifolds of these cells when assembled together into membrane structures that develop individuated senses and other motile structures in an organism.

§180 This individuated structure of sense, a physical differentiation against our primitive evolved in the cause of an organism's structure, is dependent upon the structural form of a collection of cells but is independent of the individual cells that form the manifold. Cells can be replaced by equivalent cells and the sensory manifold remains intact.

§181 This individuation is critical and explains why it is that you do not feel what I do despite the universal nature of the primitive⁸. The focus of the sensory structures is directed toward a particular characterization and this effectively isolates that sense to the individual organism. Similarly, in the formation of complex organisms such characterizations can be isolated to subsystems of the structure.

§185 To state the proposal more directly in the familiar case: a flexible sphere in some medium forms a simple manifold of sense, a physical structure in which the primitive we propose can demonstrate its role. A simple deformation of the surface of this sphere, in conjunction with the sense produced by such a deformation, that is beneficial to the survival of the structure in its environment is enough to begin the process of natural selection in that environment that leads to more complex organisms.

§186 On their own these simple manifolds can evolve into single cell microorganisms. Such microorganisms eventually evolve complex receptors, motor skills, and genetic architectures in the support of the various characterizations of sense in deformations of their structures. This mechanism explains, for example, how and why bacteria migrate a glucose gradient. Bacteria possess a simple sensory mechanism characterized by the response to glucose and tied to the motile actions required to stimulate the sense further.

§187 The primitive extends this architecture of sense across many cells so that similar cells can be an element of a larger manifold, a biophysical membrane in which the sense is characterized and the corresponding behaviors supporting motile action exist.

§188 Thus the biophysical implementation of logic by this model is intrinsically bound to the form and behavior of physical structure and cannot be localized into interpretations of bits and bytes.

§189 This is true even though we are able to invent such interpretations as the produce of reason, as ways of speaking about the world. Such symbolic systems, based upon a conception of truth that reduces to a cognitive point representing a decision or proof, are unable to perform the direct connection between highly distributed unified sense and action that comes for free in natural implementations in the manifolds that we describe. In other words, something essential is lost in such an interpretations.

§190 There remains the question of whether heuristic machines in fast switching materials perform with more or less efficiency than the mechanics described above. We conjecture that they cannot. Specifically, we claim that despite the success of chess playing machines; heuristic machines cannot ultimately solve the problems of recognition for the reasons, fundamental to the world, described above.

§191 This intuition is based upon the obvious benefits of sensory differentiation that is bound to motile action and requires no storage architecture, against the disadvantage of the need to scatter and gather results in concurrent systems that implement classical logic. We consider the nature of a formal proof of this claim.

Identifying Bias In The Foundations Of Mathematics

Certain basic notions, such as conventional “orthogonality,” in the language of mathematics, derived from received authority, are false.

§192 To enable a new mechanics that provides the characterization of the model we have just outlined we must first address issues in the foundations of mathematics that relate to apprehension. Certain notions in the language of mathematics, derived from received authority, contain assumptions about our apprehension of the world that our model can inform. If left in place these false intuitions will compromise our calculus.

§193 The first and perhaps most significant of these notions is that of perpendicular “orthogonality.”

§194 We will define “orthogonality” here broadly as the logical relation of one concept to another that asserts that the concepts do not intersect anywhere in their development, though they have a common conceptual “starting” point. The example analogy is the notion of intersecting lines.

§195 This notion is a familiar foundation in geometry and algebra, generally pervasive in our mathematics, and intrinsic to Cartesian systems. It is a notion that derives from our earliest mathematical considerations. But the justification for this notion is an intuition nurtured solely by received authority.

§196 Here we will argue that this orthogonality, leading to unlimited geometric “dimensions,” is a false intuition and simply a way of speaking about the world.

§197 We will describe an experimental geometry that has a different orthogonality with naturally finite dimensions; equally capable of characterizing physical structure. It is a geometry predisposed to characterizing cellular forms and their structure as manifolds. From this same geometry we will introduce a number theory that eliminates infinities and provides an analytical algebra that we currently propose as the basis of our calculus. Instead of an unlimited dimensional geometry that starts with “point,” “line,” “plane” we begin with “length” and derive “plane” and “point” as necessary distinctions.

§198 For this mathematics to gain acceptance it must apply to all physical systems. However, we will not require that it be convenient to apply to human affairs. In addition to our new mechanics, therefore, it should be possible using the new geometry to re-characterize General Relativity but it is not necessary, for example, for the derived new formalism to be convenient to use in trade and commerce.

§199 We will also investigate the implication of our proposal to conventional logic. In particular, we look into the implication to formal logic of nonlocal differentiation distributed across unified manifolds. This may enlighten us, for example, concerning the nature and apprehension of formal completeness.

§200 We will find other issues in the foundations of mathematics but, for the most part, these have been explored by others. In particular, when dealing with what we will call “inevitable behavior,” the kind of determinism, unavoidable behaviors, produced by our mechanics, we will take a position that probability is epistemic. That is, we will adopt the view that probability theories are a way of speaking about the world.

Epistemic Primacy

The source of that which is most certain is the refinement of concepts as necessary distinctions and ways of speaking.

§201 In everything that we describe here, as there must be in all scientific work, there are base assumptions concerning the content of what we say, the way we speak about the world and the existential status of that referred to. So to be clear we briefly state our epistemic model here and we will explore it in more detail in the following section on our model of existence.

§202 We place epistemic primacy, the source of that which is most certain, with the refinement by the mechanics we propose of “necessary distinctions” and note that such a distinction must be drawn between necessary distinctions themselves and their expression as “ways of speaking” about the world. “Necessary distinction” is itself a necessary distinction and “way of speaking” is itself a way of speaking and the distinction between the two is a necessary one.

§207 A necessary distinction is distinguished by its “force” upon us. A way of speaking is distinguished by its “force” upon the world.

§208 It should be clear that ways of speaking do not possess the existential inferences of necessary distinctions. And it should also be clear that all that we say is a way of speaking about the world until the distinctions to which that speech refers, the necessary distinctions that are claimed, have impressed themselves upon us. And this must not be achieved merely by the force of what we say but by the evident truth. Thus necessary distinctions and ways of speaking are both products of apprehension in our mechanics. They are elements of our epistemology.

§209 Let us briefly draw here an example from the work that will follow. We will claim that mass/energy, gravitation, and the primitive that we propose are necessary distinctions, aspects of primitive nature; while we will claim that space and time are simply ways of speaking about mass/energy.

§210 How are we to distinguish one from the other? In some cases it is easy enough, “house” is a necessary distinction while “home” is a way of speaking, often about houses. Often we feel ways of speaking are necessary distinctions because they represent cherished beliefs. We defer to received authority, as here we claim is the case for the notion of unlimited orthogonal dimensions.

§211 We will contend here that a necessary distinction can always be distinguished from a way of speaking by the definition we have provided above. A necessary distinction is distinguished by its “force” upon us independent what people say.

§212 You may hesitate and say that the three primitive aspects of the world mentioned above do not themselves have a force upon us since nowhere can they be found in distinction. Nowhere can I find mass/energy alone or gravitation or even the primitive we propose. Surely they are not distinctions but are also ways of speaking about the world, the product of reason alone?

§213 The answer is that they are indeed necessary distinctions, for without them there are no other distinctions. Thus necessary distinctions are the elements and components of a logical construction referencing an existential status that is not born of ways of speaking about the world.

§214 Ways of speaking about the world can be a very useful means of making progress in areas of uncertainty but it is of paramount importance that we call them out and do not endow that which they reference with an undue status.

§215 As a practical matter do not let this concern you too much. However, it is mentioned here because we will use this distinction between necessary distinctions and ways of speaking throughout and in a very particular way in our inquiry.

The Misdirection Of Problem Solving Behavior In Physics

This bias in the foundations of mathematics leads to the misdirection of problem solving behavior in mathematical physics.

§216 Combined, these observations suggest that problem solving behavior in mathematical physics has been misdirected by the formal language that it uses.

§217 In particular, the acceptance of unconstrained “dimensionality” as the basis of formal physical description is often given the existential status of a necessary distinction when this has no basis.

§218 Despite words of caution from many, including Einstein and Godel, there is wide acceptance that time is a necessary distinction and that the perpendicular “dimensions” of space are more than a simple pragmatic, a useful way of speaking about the world.

§219 The way we teach physics, General Relativity in particular, indoctrinates students and the general public with the notion. For most students and public “spacetime” is an existent phenomenon and not simply a convenient way of speaking about the world as Einstein had suggested in his original presentation of the subject^[20].

§220 The received authority of unlimited dimensionality has led to serious and intriguing mathematics, much of which has proven useful, but it has also led to physical proposals that would otherwise be rejected as simple nonsense.

§221 “Many-worlds” theories and some “parallel universe” theories, relying upon the authority of unlimited orthogonality, abound. These fantasies have entered into popular culture as plausible conceptions of the world and yet they have no obvious merit beyond their entertainment value.

§222 The force of received authority at these fundamental levels has led many physicists, and mathematicians such as Chaitin, into a Wonderland as rich in fancy as any faced by Alice^[21].

§223 The worst of it is Quantum Mechanics itself where we deal entirely with the past and the future and not at all with the present, failing to observe the necessity that consideration of the past and the future is physically vacuous.

§224 The results of Quantum Mechanics are, in our view, simply a matter of record.

Existential Thinking

An existential model that includes experience as more than a spectator.

Uniformity and Distinction

The uniformity of natural law and existential distinction in our model.

§225 If dualism^[22] then is to be rejected, and experience is not to be dismissed, there is a necessity that in our new construction an element of that which we liberally label consciousness is a primitive aspect of the world. This being the case our new primitive must play a role in the formation of physical structures.

§226 Like gravitation, the effect of this aspect of primitive nature do not become manifest until later in the development of the universe. Since this effect appears much later in the evolving cosmology this primitive aspect must be considered a much “weaker” influence than the gravitational field.

§227 As discussed in the previous section, these effects can be characterized as a sensory and motile manifold.

§228 In the model of natural law that we will follow here the features of the world derive their existence, their existential status, from a strict functional dependence⁹. Ultimately that dependence reduces to aspects of primitive nature.

§231 This strict dependence implies that the universal properties of the world are existentially distinctthe product of this uniformity alone.

§233 This uniformity of natural law is a base assumption of our model. We argue for this uniformity by observing the absence of observable discontinuity in the laws of nature. Nowhere is there an observable discontinuity in natural law and our model would be falsified by the discovery of one. For example, if we discover galaxies that function according to different laws then this would be an observable discontinuity and our model will be falsified by it.

§234 The uniformity of natural law is the sole reason that there are similar things in the world.

§235 Two diamonds, therefore, are existentially distinct. They form in nature independently and that they are at all similar is clear testimony to the uniformity of natural law. A diamond and a tree are existentially distinct in exactly the same way.

§236 In our model each “molecule” of water in a body of water is existentially distinct. A body of water is a reflection not of any relation between the molecular parts but simply of this great uniformity.

§237 Natural properties of this kind are the product of this uniformity, functionally dependent on a construction from primitive nature but the elements of that property are strictly independent; quantum phenomena not withstanding.¹⁰.

Relations And Epistemology

A relation is entirely the product of apprehension.

§239 In our model relations are solely the product of apprehension. They are ways of speaking about the world. They are present only as the result of the biophysical mechanics of sentience that we will present.

§242 Relations can be apprehended, they have epistemological status, but they do not exist in the world beyond apprehension in the mechanics we describe.

§243 The product of invention, a television for example, emerges from the assembly of its parts. There is clearly an identity between the apprehension of television-ness, that which defines a television, and the apprehension of the physical assembly of a television, what it is to be a television.

§244 Television-ness is an essential property of the apprehended assembly alone. It is not a property of the world as a whole. Television-ness has epistemological status but a television has no existential status beyond its apprehension. A television is not actually existent in the world. The physical assembly of a television corresponds merely to an apprehensible assembly of parts.

§245 Properties like television-ness and experience are in distinct categories. Television-ness, in particular, is a property dependent upon the existence of experience not only in that one has to possess experience for it to have any relevance in the world, but also in that it is the product of conscious intelligence. A television does not exist if there is no-one to apprehend it.

§246 Television-ness is also distinct from the properties of the world that emerge from the uniformity of natural law. What we call “fluid” and “solid” exist without our participation in the world. In our model they have existential status in deference to their construction from primitive nature alone. Any perceived relation is entirely the product of apprehension.

The Uniqueness of Experience

The distinct place of experience in the world.

§247 In our existential model, fluids and solids arise in the world because of a great uniformity in natural law. They are features of the world that recur widely and this recurrence is testimony to that great uniformity.

§248 They are not constant. In their own state they transform under the laws of nature and they may transform under those laws from one to another, fluids become solids and vice versa.

§249 These are features that continue to play a role in the world.

§250 Emergence theorists^[23] have argued that experience may arise in nature in the same manner as fluids and solids¹¹.

§252 For this to be true in any model experience would have to be the consequence of the uniformity of natural law. It would have to transform to other forms and play a continuing role in the physics of the world. Yet experience in emergence models has no such role. It is merely present, a dualism. It is a logical construction that ends with the claim “and then magic happens here.”

§253 The position of emergence theory is logically inadequate and amounts to a direct appeal to magic. As Penrose suggested earlier, there is nothing in our current physical models that leads us, logically and constructively, to experience as a property arising from some assembly.

§255 Unlike solids and fluids there is no transformation in emergence theory from experience to any other form. There is no logical reduction or constructive route to experience and no role given to it. Whereas, the appearance of fluids and solids, while picturesque, is clearly not magical and these forms continue to play a role in the physics of the world.

§256 Experience is a necessary distinction. And while we will argue here that the various forms of sense are in fact characterized by forms of mass/energy, we find a clear necessary distinction for the essence from which those senses arise and a role for it in the formation of physical structure.

§257 A failure to consider the revision of our physical models has led emergence theorists to suggest that “When you go to a higher level, the lower level may be irrelevant.” The suggestion is that, by this failure of reduction within the limited materialist construction, we abandon the rigorous systematization of nature by science and break the natural chain of functional dependence to produce a supernatural account.

The Rise of Complexity

Where does all the complexity of the things we call “living” come from?

§258 Consider a final example: an apple.

§259 Clearly an apple is not a product of intelligence, as all things in our model it derives in a construction from primitive nature according to natural law. But apple-ness is not at all like television-ness. Nor is its form readily explained by the brute force and uniformity in physics that produces the elements or fluid forms of them.

§260 The diversity of apples, of fruit and of all living forms, suggests that something else is going to disrupt the great uniformity in natural law as seen in the partial cosmology that includes fluids and solids.

§261 Where does all the complexity of “living” things manifest on this planet come from? What brings it about? How are we to describe the mechanics that enables nature to produce the variety of sense?

§262 Frustration over hard questions like these has led emergence theorists to consider the possibility of “and then magic happens here.” But, from our point of view, to consider such magic viable is to undermine the principles of good science. It is an act of desperation.

§263 Oh, we have some inductive expectation that apples are constructed in the same way that fundamental elements are, in a continuum of increasing complexity, but this expectation has weak foundations.

§264 We understand many of the mechanisms involved in the assembly of an apple and its function. We know that it is a product, at least in part, of the substantive essence, of energy/mass. We know that its form is, at least in part, the product of gravitation.

§265 However, the origin of an apple is not readily explained by our established ideas. There is something else going on, a different kind of mechanics, that is not evident in the formation of the elements and their solid or fluid forms. These are simply the product of nature's brute force and the uniformity of natural law. There is something more delicate and subtle going on.

The Business of Thinking

Experience and logical machines.

§266 All of science relies upon the nature of logic and apprehension. Indeed, human understanding of any kind, be it philosophic, religious, or scientific, relies upon our base assumptions of what is happening when we apprehend the world. It relies upon our assumptions about what is really going on when we sense the world.

§267 We make natural inferences, we anticipate, we predict. Those predictions are intimately bound to action, to our response. Conventions of all kinds shape the nature of this anticipation and action to form the foundation of our individual understanding and our behavior.

§268 The foundations of logic are built upon our understanding of apprehension and what is apprehensible. This understanding relies upon how we view the existence of experience and what we consider to be its place in the world. This foundation is fundamental to our navigation of and survival in the world. It is the basis of any epistemology.

§269 Yet experience itself cannot logically be apprehended. Simply, we cannot experience experience. Experience cannot be the subject of experience. We simply experience.

§270 For all of this, contemporary logic, and most especially its manifestation in computer science, has no place and no role for experience. It has reduced to nominalism¹² and the mechanics of symbolic integration. It has disregarded the original foundations of logic from George Boole to Rudolf Carnap, a reduction to experience, sense.

§275 At best, due primarily to the work of Gottlob Frege, logic has accepted subjectivism, a form of dualism in which experience is an end in itself and otherwise provides a conception of meaning that has no role in the world.

§277 Our advances in the utilization of symbolic computation and our stalled consideration of the foundations of logic have left behind an unfulfilled promise. That promise was best articulated at the birth of computer science by Charles Sanders Peirce. In 1887 he noted the opportunity that the invention of logical machines afforded.

§281 The machines that Peirce refers to here are the early machines, constructed mainly of wooden mechanisms, by William Stanley Jevons and Peirce's student Allan Marquand. They utilized the first physical representations of Boole's logic¹³.

§283 Computing machines have certainly thrown light upon the nature of reasoning processes and they have endowed us with productive mathematical and social tools. Yet the question of the identity of that part of thinking that must be left for the living mind is neglected, widely considered irrelevant or the subject of fantastic invention.

§284 The opportunity that Peirce foresaw is unfulfilled and the frustration it affords in best reflected in comments made some years later made by Rudolf Carnap and first published in 1928^[24].

§288 These comments reflect the frustration of our position as it continues today.

Our Story

A summary of the historical narrative.

§289 This brings us to the narrative that we will present. It concerns the distinction between two world views in mathematical logic, the distinction between logic as the integration of the parts and logic as a differentiation from the entirety of sense. The conflict in these world views is represented by the two most influential logicians of the twentieth century: Rudolf Carnap, and Alan Turing.

Rudolf Carnap

The rise of positivism.

§290 Before the 1950's the existence of experience was taken seriously by logicians and scientists. For the mathematicians interested in questions of apprehension in the foundations of geometry such as Henri Poincaré^[25], for pragmatists influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce^[26], for the logical positivists and empiricists of the renowned Vienna Circle and Berlin Schools, and for physicists such as Ernst Mach and those later concerned with interpretations of quantum theory, the existence of experience was a central and dominant concern.

§292 Both positivism¹⁴ and empiricism necessarily imply a reduction to experience, though the nature of that final reduction has never been clear.

§294 In particular, the advocacy of physicalism by logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap rests upon a pragmatic and fundamental understanding. It is an understanding that appeals to the scientific method and that reduced to characterized experience, to sense. The physicalism advocated by Carnap sought a naturalistic basis and anticipated extensions to our physical models as we made new discoveries about perception. These discoveries he anticipated would allow an explanation of experience in nature.

§296 The physicalism of Rudolf Carnap is not materialism. As noted earlier, the materialism of modern conception assumes that we have identified all the essential things of the world.

§298 In our unqualified use of the term “physicalism” here we refer to the physicalism of Rudolf Carnap. This we qualify as liberal physicalism and not the type physicalism of identity theory advocated by Carnap's colleague Herbert Feigl.

§301 Carnap took the first thesis of physicalism to be simply that claims about the world can be confirmed by others. He rejected the idea that you can have private knowledge, gifts from God, that cannot ultimately be shared, rigorously systematized, and confirmed. He took the second thesis of physicalism to be that the laws of nature, including those for organisms and their behaviors, are logical consequences of natural physical laws.

§302 He clarified this by saying:

§305 This is a view that allows for new discovery.

§306 He goes on to affirm my own rejection of claims in emergence theory^[27]:

§308 It should be clear then that the physicalism expressed by Carnap reflects a monist view that there are no fundamental divisions and a positive view that all is open to a unified scientific explanation. Carnap takes experience seriously as existentially essential. He simply did not know how to proceed.

Alan Turing

Excitement over computation and the rise of objectivism.

§309 In the 1950s a ruthless and supernatural objectivism began to take hold in which, despite the mandate of empiricism, the existential questions surrounding experience are marginalize and eliminated from the agenda of science.

§310 This happens primarily because logical techniques, that had Carnap made significant contributions to, provided immediate benefits that enabled the revolution in computing devices and the economic benefits they brought with them.

§311 The advantages of the effective techniques established in the work of Alan Turing^[28], Alfred Tarski^[29][30], and Claude Shannon^[31] seemed so powerful and so productive that they appeared to be able to solve quite literally everything¹⁵.

§316 Alan Turing offered a useful notion of computation and took a first step toward reasoning about intelligence without recourse to sense or experience^[32]. Alfred Tarski offered a notion of truth, eliminating experience in his definitions^[33]. Claude Shannon developed a mathematical theory of communication that led to the foundation of information theory^[34]. None ever found, or in Shannon's case needed, a place for experience in their developments. And perhaps all of them are victims of subsequent over simplification and a generalization that neglects the goals and boundaries of their original inquiry.

§317 Alan Turing's influence is the most profound. His broad consideration to the questions of consciousness is widely misrepresented^[35].

§318 Turing's objectives are practical and more modest than are widely reported. He was challenged by the presence of experience and recognized the limits of his proposals. He sought primarily to take clear and rigorous first steps toward understanding the problem of the mind. He took up Peirce's vision. Unfortunately, subsequent advocates have conveniently ignored Turing's own separation of issues and acknowledgment that questions remained unanswered.

§319 Turing felt that certain mysteries related to consciousness did not need to be explained before the question he sought to address could be answered. That question was whether a machine could be as intelligent as you or I:

§321 We will argue that this was, in fact, a fundamental mistake that is unmitigated by the practical success of his models. As a result, we will argue that there are fundamental limits to Turing's model of computation.

Reclaiming Experience

Reclaiming the existential necessity of experience.

§322 The central point of this narrative is that while the practical contributions of Turing and others had clear and immediate benefits. After all they lay the ground for the technological advances of the twentieth century.

§323 However, a consideration that had been of principal concern in science and more particularly in the foundations of logic was subsequently neglected. That consideration had simply been put aside by Turing for purely practical reasons, in the interest of more immediate progress.

§324 Unfortunately, in the sixty year period since 1950 the field of logic has stagnated with questions at the foundations of logic that have remain neglected. The product of that neglect is systemic. Despite the flurry of interest around computer science, logic is generally considered “a done deal” with little more to be said except in those uninteresting (sic) quiet and unfunded corners of the foundations of mathematics.

§325 In the past sixty years Logic has made no advance as profound as those in the previous one hundred years since Boole. Logic proper, following Frege and Lewis not Peirce or Carnap, has mostly (as far as I can tell) resolved to a subjectivist philosophy of intension. One that makes no difference in the world beyond its change to sense. And with no conception of how such a difference relates to action.

§327 Before 1950 science took the existential questions surrounding experience seriously. Led by people like Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle and its advocacy of a logical positivism, the sentences of science were viewed as marks describing structure and behavior that can be verified by an individual's experience of the world.

§328 This strict solipsism, the view that one's own sense is all that can ultimately be relied upon, was later rejected. It was not rejected because solipsism is fundamentally wrong but simply because logical inference is more powerful than at first considered.

§329 Intuitive inference arising from genetic disposition, inductive inference arising from what we have sensed before, and deductive inference arising from rigorous and systematic methods allow us to expand beyond a dependence on direct experience. To discover new truths from the truths we apprehended before.

§330 We will show that there is nothing magical about prediction, inference in all its forms is a natural product of the mechanics we propose.

§331 The techniques of Shannon, Tarski, and Turing in logic and computation has proved useful. They have allowed us to apply effective techniques of thinking in mechanized symbolic systems. But we have become over excited by our success and this usefulness has distracted us from the fundamental issue. We appear to have forgotten that empiricism fundamentally relies upon the existence of experience and that existence warrants explanation.

§332 For a generation of logicians and physicists the existential challenge of experience has become an inconvenient and embarrassing fact. It is manifest to all of us. Yet it is difficult to deal with or to identify any role that it may play.

§333 Contemporary optimism, in the practice of Artificial Intelligence for example, is founded upon the premise that our physical models are complete. These expectations, based on the premises of emergence already discussed, cannot be met for reasons that are fundamental to the world.

§334 The technological “singularity” of Ray Kurzweil is merely a technologist's fantasy^[36]. There is no imminent artificial intelligence comparable to the capabilities of our species. And this is quite simply because this intelligence is not merely heuristics or self-reference. There is something fundamental to cognition and recognition that is unaccounted for in this work. Human-level intelligence requires that we first understand the basis of intelligence: the deeply connected mechanisms of sense and motility in biology.

§336 We appear to have missed the obvious and simple fact that an explanation of the existence of experience requires that we identify a role for experience in the formation of the world. There must be a role for the essence of experience in the formation of organisms in general and senses in particular. For if we cannot identify such a role then it is simply beyond scientific explanation and the matter here can never be resolved.

§337 This is a position we stubbornly refuse to accept.

The Approach

Our method of attack, including and informal discussion and summary of the formal approach.

A Constructive Approach

An essential statement of our approach.

§338 Our approach to the explanation of the world is constructive. Our goal is to formalize this logical construction in a calculus, a new mechanics, that allows us to reason about structures and its behavior.

§339 Unlike earlier constructions ours includes an atomic distinction, one that is a necessary aspect of primitive nature. This “primitive of experience” allows us to include in our construction all sensory and motile structures and to reason about their behavior.

§340 We develop a model of the world inductively by starting from the observation of the necessary distinctions that the world forces upon us and distinguishing them from simple ways of speaking about the world.

§341 We then identify the components and elements of these distinctions. We undertake this identification by intuitively inferring first principles. Among these are the assumptions that:

1. The laws of nature are everywhere uniform.
2. When reductions fail, by evidence or contradiction, it is the premises of our logical construction that must be reviewed, such reductions cannot lead to supernatural conclusions.
3. The world is a construction from primitive nature and while primitive nature itself may not be immediately accessible the essential aspects of primitive nature present themselves.

§342 Of primitive nature we can apprehend three covariant aspects: energy/mass, gravitation and the primitive that we propose we take to be the three atomic distinctions of our model. They are the accessible essential aspects of primitive nature in which they are unified.

§343 We then proceed in a logical manner to explore the implications of those principles and use them to predict the formation and operation of motile physiological structures that embody sense and ultimately “the mind.”

§344 Finally, with this thorough understanding of individuals we consider the behavior of such individual structures in groups.

§345 Essentially our approach is a logical construction of the world consistent with traditional logic and mathematics with one important exception. The subject of our inquiry includes the existential nature of experience and apprehension of the world that it enables.

§346 This approach is compatible with the objectives of the liberal physicalism and constructive epistemology advocated by Rudolf Carnap and presented in his work “The Logical Structure of the World” (known widely as the “Aufbau” ¹⁶) published in 1928, and the subsequent work published in 1938 of Hans Reichenbach in “Experience and Prediction.”^[37] Though we will develop a manifest affinity with the work of Rudolf Carnap and the earlier semeiotic work of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Our Construction

The constructive characterization we propose.

§350 This approach provides the foundation of three models that describe the construction of the world from primitive nature.

1. §351 The first model is one of general sense and motility.

   §352 In this model we characterize the construction of sense and motility in organisms. We explain the physical engineering of sentience, how sentient entities come into existence and senses evolve.

2. §353 The second model is one of semeiosis.

   §354 In this model we characterize the higher-order processes that process the content of experience and produce behavior. It can be viewed as the operation of individuals.

3. §355 The third model enables reasoning about behavior in social networks.

   §356 This model enables the characterization of behavior of individuals in groups. The model provided is simple: in it social behavior is the product of genetic disposition mitigated by convention.

§357 We seek to provide a single coherent view of nature in which our species arises and in which all can eventually be apprehended by minds that may themselves eventually be within our power to artificially construct.

Developing the Formal Model

How we will develop of the theory.

§358 In the core of this work we use the presence of the primitive aspect of nature that we propose as the basis of a formal explanation. We develop a new mechanics in the form a calculus that describes the physical structures associated with sense and motility.

§359 Our initial direction, the one that we will present here, uses an experimental geometry that excludes traditional conceptions that relate to apprehension. We do this because intuitively a calculus of apprehension will ultimately be limited by such assumptions.

§360 In particular, we eliminate unlimited orthogonality for the reasons we discussed earlier. We argue that perpendicular orthogonality is not a necessary distinction but simply a way of speaking about the world. Our intuitions concerning it are founded in received authority. It is one of the first geometric notions that we are taught.

§361 To explain the continuity of experience in our model, and encouraged by our rejection of unlimited orthogonality, we also eliminate time.

§362 This is consistent with General Relativity^[38]. Spacetime is not a necessary distinction; it is a way of speaking about the world. The world does not force the concept of spacetime upon us, we force it upon the world.

§363 Transformations in our model then are solely the product of energy in the transforming structure. Our differential calculus therefore is modified to accommodate both the new coordinate system and the mass/energy in a structure.

§364 With this new geometry we assemble a new analytic algebra that can express structures and their behavior.

§365 Given the nature of this new algebra, it must ultimately describe the physiological structures that embody logical operations, it should ultimately unify geometry and logic.

§366 If successful this formalism will provide a mathematical foundation for the physical engineering of sentience. This will, in turn, provide the basis of an operational model of individuals and the basis for reasoning about the behavior of those individuals in groups.

§367 We use as a precedence for our formal approach the description of the gravitational field as a primitive aspect of the world in the general theory of relativity. Like the gravitational field the effect of the new primitive is covariant with the behavior of mass/energy.

§368 Let us not misunderstand covariance as something that simply takes us back to identity theory. The solution is mutually affective, in which one primitive aspect of the world shapes the other.

§369 The formal characterization of the primitive then must play a role similar to the role played by gravitation in the curvature of spacetime described by General Relativity.

§370 Simplicity is our goal. However, we should note that Einstein was very lucky. The curvature of spacetime is stunningly convenient.

§371 Are we ignoring Quantum Mechanics? Well, not exactly.

§372 It should be clear that to achieve our goal, given our premise of a universal primitive, it is impossible to construct a model of sentience if we begin with particles. As we have noted earlier, quantum theory deals with the past and the future and has nothing to say of the present.

§373 Our new mechanics is all about “the present.”

§374 Quantum Mechanics is viewed by us, in general, as a matter of record since the entire nature of particles is the product of record.

§375 Where does that leave us with phenomena like the photoelectric effect?

§376 We have no doubt that there are quantum effects and that Planck's quantum of action is a convenient and useful tool for the characterization of mass/energy. As is often noted, the Standard Model is very successful.

§377 We acknowledge these effects, for example, where natural constrains of physical structure produce quantum behavior and it may indeed be the case that Planck's constant is a necessary minimum of such measures. But any particle physics, in our model, is necessarily explained as a record of differentiation in field physics, a product of apprehension. It is a record in which we, effectively, push an event from the present into the record of events.

§378 As a result particle physics can only ever deal with particles, records of events in the world. This suggests a semeiotic problem, a problem of apprehension; since, by this view, gravitation is inaccessible to particle theory or any attempt to model it through particle physics. We have here again the problem of the strong locality of logical integration through the notion of particles versus a non-local differentiation, the effect of gravity.

§379 To be clear, our model requires a view the is neither the classical continuum nor atomic. However, it is more like conceptions of the continuum and, for us, a length is indeed continuous. However, there is no “flow of time” in our model. Mass/energy, gravitation, and the primitive we propose are mutually effective covariant features of a continuous field that is primitive nature.

§380 There are no particles and there are no waves. Waves are also a matter of record, the record of fluctuations in the states of primitive nature. Primitive nature is eternal and constant in the variety of states that include the origins of the observable universe and every other state “before” and “after.”

§381 There is only what we will call “the eternal moment” in which all transformations are the product of energy within the structures that exist. Our notions of the past and the future are simply ways of speaking about events. Events, states of primitive nature, and records of events are the necessary distinctions.

§383 This approach is essential to our explanation of the continuity of experience.

§384 The uniformity of natural law plays a central role in our model. It is the basis of our construction of existence. This view of strong uniformity requires that all the aspects of primitive nature are of the same type. It would not permit, for example, a quantum theory in which particles existed, in which the world is atomic. For our model to be consistent mass/energy has to be a universal primitive aspect of the world like the primitive we propose and like gravitation. The structure of the world is simply a differentiation from the whole.

§385 Our primary goal is not to reinvent all of physics. We seek only to formulate a set of equations that accurately predicts the formation of biophysical structures and the behavior of mass/energy that results from the presence of the primitive we have proposed. These equations need to describe the mechanisms of sense and motility.

§386 But clearly if our model is to hold the methods and techniques we use are validated by their application to traditional questions in physics. The formalism should, for example, be able to express General Relativity.

§387 However, as a practical matter we make no accommodation for this fact. We make no promise that our approach will be convenient for the expression of other physical phenomena.

Physically Engineering Sentience

Our approach to the physical engineering involved.

§388 In this section we provide a brief summary of the semeiotic model and our approach to the physical engineering of sense and motility. A summary of our formal approach is given in a following section.

§389 An impression is the physical trace of a mark, the subject of a sign, upon the sentient form, against the primitive we propose.

§390 We use the notion “against” here in the same way that we may speak of constructing a shelter against a wall or consider how the structure of mass/energy is affected when assembled “against” the gravitational field.

§391 There exists an inert presence, the basis of experience, such that, when mass/energy is assembled against it, provide the covariant physical characterization of sense; and a characteristic action potential.

§392 We develop formally the topological notion of a sensory manifold that is an element of the physical structure that characterizes sense and motile behavior.

§393 In this geometry we use a novel finite coordinate system that is not cartesian in nature, it eliminates the conventional notion of the unlimited orthogonal by removing the associated constraint while still enabling the expression of unique relative points. Instead of an unlimited dimensional geometry that starts with “point,” “line,” “plane” we begin with “length” and derive “plane” and “point” as necessary distinctions.

§394 This novel approach to specifying biophysical manifolds is experimental but has certain advantages. We recognize that the approach will be validated only if it finds more general use. This approach to the inquiry, however, ensures that we are not misled by the ungrounded premises concerning apprehension in existing geometric models.

§395 A set of such manifolds can be considered to represent the cells and membranes of an organism.

§396 Our formal development also aims to capture the thermodynamic and genetic behavior involved in the hierarchical structure of these dynamic sensory systems. Sensory manifolds are not static or uniform structures. They carry a variety of properties that can be described as surface functions and stimulate translations or deformations of the sensory manifold.

§397 Sensory manifolds rely upon the presence of the primitive we propose that has the following properties:

1. The primitive provides a non-local affect¹⁷ against which physical structure can produce a sensory manifold.
2. The nonlocal affect is across the collection of sensory manifolds corresponding to the physical structure and characterized sense of an individual.
3. A differentiated experience (a sign) corresponds to one or more states of the individual's sensory manifolds.
4. Such differentiations are from the entirety of sense.
5. The natural selection of sensory manifolds, and the consequent evolution of metabolism and genetic machinery, is a result of covariance between states of the sensory manifold and motile responses that do not diminish the organism's survival or are mutations that provide benefits in the changing environment.
6. A particular conformance of a sensory manifold corresponds to a particular sense. This provides the basis of memory.
7. Sensory manifolds of similar conformance correspond to senses of similarly¹⁸.

8. §401 A recollection of similarity increases associated action potentials. The conformance that provides a complete recognition state produces action. Physical circumstances that compel an action in the organism produce actions that have the highest potential and, at least momentarily, the manifolds conform to the highest potential recognition state.

§402 Translations of these sensory manifolds represent the operation of the organism.

§403 For simplicity we assume that the entire organism is engineered according to the same mechanics. Hence, sensory characterizations and related motile responses covary in form and focus according to genetic disposition, the genetically constructed organism provides an a priori link between sense and motile response.

§404 Once an impression has been formed in the physical structure of the entity it will recollect that mark when it is reformed or recollect a similarity when it is partially reformed. Such reformations take place when a mark is again encountered, when similar marks are encountered, or when the impression is independently reformed in the operation of the organism. This is how and why analogy works in our species.

§405 A recollection of similarity increases action potentials that are associated with the producing conformance. Actions are finally executed when there is a complete recognition state, a state imprinted upon the organism by previous experience or its natural structure. If the organism is in a circumstance in which action is required by other sensory subsystems then the organism will perform the action with the highest action potential and briefly the manifolds conform to those recognition states.

§406 This functionality in complex organisms requires certain physical properties that have been previously noted.

1. §407 There necessarily exists a certain nonlocality manifest in sense and hence in the physical operations of the sensory manifold.

   §408 An impression is an imprint upon a distributed motile physiology. The impression upon the organism coexists with all other impressions to produce the entire embodiment of sense.

2. §409 There is a physical transformation across the physiology that produces motility.

   §410 A physical transformation amplifies by conformance spread, chemotaxis, and other motile functions to provide a richer characterization of sense and produce a larger coordinated motile response.

3. §411 Characterized sense is directed toward the individuated organism structure.

   §412 This individuation is the reason that I do not feel what you feel; despite the universal nature of the underlying primitive.

4. §413 The conditions of the impression are reproducible.

   §414 That is, a particular biological morphology corresponds to a particular memory, when reformed, the sense of it is again manifest. A reproduced impression is familiar to the organism.

§415 The primitive we propose is thus an essential component of the physical substrate and responsible for the engineering of sentience. This same mechanism instantiates complexity and is subjected to the principles of natural selection because its forms may provide survival advantage.

§416 It is important to note that no computational system can replicate this engineering. For the reasons we have discussed it is not computable by current implementations of logic and it provides an economy of engineering that is simpler and more powerful.

§417 However, the apprehension of existing logic can be interpreted in a manner that is compatible with this new model and such an interpretation would be compatible with the view of Rudolf Carnap, in particular, and the logical positivists in general. But this is not the interpretation of logic in the Turing mode that makes reductions highly localized.

§419 To summarize, we suggest that the primitive aspect of nature we propose enables an economy of engineering not present in Alan Turing's model of computation. We introduce a necessary nonlocality in physical structure associated with this engineering that enables the non-local coordination of physical behavior. We propose that a physical structure, a manifold of sense, against this primitive embodies the representation of states in the world relevant to the organism and that this physical structure is evolved by natural selection in an association with the motile responses that it evokes. And further, that these simple mechanisms lead inevitably to the assembly of what is familiar to you and I as “the mind.”

A Methodological Solipsism

The systematic and rigorous inquiry into our experience of the world.

§420 We identify “sense” as the physical structure characterizing a primitive aspect of the world, introduced by us here, and give a role to this natural characterization, the formation of sense, in the development of all complexity.

§421 Our model allows transcendence to be described constructively and maintain functional dependence while truly being “the sum that is more than the parts.” For us, natural selection is such a transcendent principle of the world; we refer to it here because it is a principle that should be familiar to all.

§422 Principles are posterior determinants, a latent potential in the world described by our model. Each are formed by and are subject to exactly the same mechanics. They are functionally dependent upon these mechanics and they play a role in the behavior of the world. Without these mechanics they do not exist.

§423 In these terms our view is not exceptional; there is nothing that does not derive from primitive nature yet transcendence exists in the arising principles of the world. These are the force of “sums that are greater than the whole.” They arise from the uniformity of natural law and they are entirely unexpected.

§424 Principles are a surprise to any first creator ¹⁹.

§427 Anticipation itself derives from and is characterized by our mechanics. Anticipating structures are the inevitable product of our mechanics and cannot exist before them. It is therefore meaningless to apply intuitions about anticipation in the world before this. In particular, it is meaningless to ask why gravitation and the primitive we propose exist if these primitive aspects of the world have no immediate effect.

§428 Some principles will surprise you. Empathy, the ability of an organism to apprehend the predicament of another and to modify their behavior accordingly, is such a principle. It is less broad than natural selection, arising solely from the mechanics of sense and motility. It is the product of apprehension and the drive toward richer experience fashioned by natural selection. It is a principle of the same kind as natural selection although it obviously is a principle that specifically involves experience.

§429 Intelligent behavior is also a principle manifest in the mechanics of sense and motility. By its means organisms, through an understanding of their experience, develop effective methods for dealing with the world. The pinnacle of these methods is attempted in the discipline of logic.

§430 In undertaking this inquiry we have asked a simple question: what would be required to enable a formal explanation of experience?

§431 We begin with the assumption that not only is the formal explanation of behaviors involving experience desirable but that it is both scientifically necessary and logically possible. Simply put, this approach is born of a stubborn refusal to accept that an explanation of the psychophysical, mind/body, problem is beyond science.

§432 We then set about the task of identifying the necessary and sufficient basis for such a formalization such that it describes the biophysical models that engineer sentience and is compatible with known thermodynamics^[39].

§433 The principal distinction then between our approach to logical construction and the one proposed by Carnap is that we provide the natural basis that Carnap could not identify. We are not concerned with epistemology alone but with existential questions also. We extend physical models to include a necessary primitive basis of experience. This primitive aspect is given a role in the physical assembly and mechanics of the world not found in earlier work.

§434 We think that Carnap would approve. The basis of his epistemology he described as a methodological solipsism, a systematic and rigorous inquiry into our experience, and our work derives from such an intellectual approach. In our terms he asserted that the differentiation of characterized experience is the basis of all apprehension. The entire embodied characterization of experience has epistemic primacy. It is derived by differentiation from the entirety of sense and not assembled from the logical parts.

§435 Our approach is also solipsist in the sense that it is the product of inferences from experience characterized by physical structures in an individual. We extend this view of epistemology first to a general model of sentience that applies to all species and then further generalize the notion so that the term knowledge can be defined simply as that which determines subsequent action.

§437 We take one further step and assert that the mechanisms of apprehension are observable in the dynamic structures of the physical engineering that we propose. In particular this implies that the physical mechanisms of the familiar mind can be identified.

§438 We give an constructive existential account of this new mechanics and eliminate any separation of epistemology. As a result our final epistemology is not anthropic; anthropic knowledge is simply a subset of a more generalized notion.

§439 Our conception of knowledge is intrinsic to our view of how the world is constructed and traditional metaphysics is eliminated²⁰.

§441 This approach to knowledge, our generalized conception of it, is similar to that proposed by Francisco Valera and Humberto Maturana. This and the associated definition of “information” as that which contributes to knowledge and identifies cause, in-formation, are points of conceptual intersection with the work of Valera and Maturana on autopoiesis^[40]. However, unlike Maturana and Valera we reject emergent explanations of experience.

§445 Our methodology relies upon a construction from primitive nature, the simple composition of nature's primitive aspects, and the natural laws and principles that evolve structure. This is undertaken by a methodological solipsism, a rigorous and systematic inquiry in which the existential nature of our experience is primary. It focuses upon and extends constructively through the assembly of organisms, sense and motile structures, to the behaviors of individuals.

§446 Such a method illustrates how physical assemblies in a world otherwise constructed by classical mechanics eventually form to characterize sense and assemble into the range of forms that are familiar to us. These are the forms that we call “complex” or “living” and they manifest behaviors that transcend their substantive basis without loosing their functional dependence. Such principles are generally covariant.

On Formal Language

On syntax and meaning.

§447 We adopt Rudolf Carnap's definition of a formal language^[41].

§449 In other words, it is our goal to provide a syntactic framework that captures the variety of constructions and behaviors we propose and, independent of any intermediate interpretation, provide semantic rules that enable a rigorous systematization in our model.

§450 We shall utilize a precise and pragmatic definition of the term “meaning.” Meaning is exactly the behavior that is the product of the mechanisms of apprehension according to our model.

§452 So that if one is to ask the meaning of a particular syntax it is exactly the behavior it produces as the produce of its apprehension. We may now speak distinctly of the behavior a sign produces in the organism that constructed the mark, should there be one, that is the subject of the sign. We can also speak of the behavior produced in others by marks that we create.

§453 A brief clarification of this definition will be helpful.

§454 Consider a computer program written by an individual of our species. What is the meaning of the program?

§455 Clearly, the behavior of the machine executing the program is not the behavior of the programmer; even if the abstract behavior observed by a third party is similar, for example “turn left.” It should thus be clear that any consistency of meaning relies upon the similarity of the apprehender.

§456 A computer program “means” precisely the same thing to two machines of the same type and it means precisely the same thing to two computer programmers of the same type. If the machines are not the same, let us say that the two machines utilize different instruction sets or programming languages, then it may be said that the meaning of the computer program differs to each machine.

§457 Similarly, if two programmers are not the same, one understanding one language and the other another, then it may be said that the meaning differs to each programmer.

§458 In each case, whether apprehended by a member of our species or a machine, unless their exists a similarity in structure, including embodied conventions, the apprehension of the computer program produces differing behavior, and hence has a different meaning to each.

§459 It's worth noting, of course, that obvious physical differences can be mitigated pragmatically if the same conventions are adopted and translated into an abstract behavior. So that while the same exact behavior is not present the desired result is produced. Hence if both organism and machine are able to apprehend the instruction “turn left” and convert it into a behavior they may, indeed, both turn left.

§460 Such behavior is an act of translation in semeiosis with the instruction producing different meanings that have the same overall effect. If a translation behavior is required on apprehension then the act of translation is the meaning.

§461 In addition, there is, in fact, some similarity between programming languages and computer programmers. The languages of certain classes have similar syntactic constructs, are generally written in structured English according to well known logical conventions. Programmers also have a similar capacity to reason endowed by the similarity in their physical structure.

§462 So it will be the case that with some effort the programmer that is unfamiliar with the language of the computer program may be able to apprehend some meaning from it. They will discover the intended meaning, and recognize the nature of the machine required to execute it, as their reasoning makes their internal sentient structures similar to those of the author of the program.

§463 To this end the programmer is, in effect, self modifying. They can increase their degree of similarity with the original author of the program, sufficient to apprehend the meaning²¹.

§465 Contemporary computers have a limited capacity to do this modification of physical structure. To the degree that changes in silicon memory is a modification of physical structure two machines of similar type are more similar when their memory contains the same physical patterns. But it is worth noting that this is insufficient, two machines with precisely the same memory patterns can be entirely different executions if the way those patterns are processed is dissimilar.

§466 These circumstances reflect the situation in the world and it enables us to appreciate the definition of meaning that we will use.

§467 The central point to remember is that meaning is a function of apprehension. There is no static meaning in the world beyond the individual apprehension of signs, individuated experiences.

§468 Consensus is a function of the degree of similarity between us as apprehending entities and meaning is exactly the behavior produced by a sign. When we speak of “understanding” it is this similarity to which we refer.

§469 A formal language is simply a convention. Such languages rely upon the model described here to be uniformly understood; a similarity in physical embodiment. And, as we have seen, translation can bring about the same overall effect while apprehending different meaning.

Proving the Case

How we propose to overcome objections.

§470 Our ultimate goal here is the development of mathematical model and a calculus that enables particular predictions concerning the structure of physiology.

§471 However, the ability to make such predictions is complicated by the fact that all the natural forces play a role in the evolutionary formation of higher-order physiological structures. In other words, the other forces of nature introduce further complexity as their effects are able to have greater influence due to the scale of the unfolding world.

§472 We anticipate therefore that the earliest verification of the theory will come from predictions concerning the simplest and most primitive organisms in which these larger effects are minimized and we take some time to examine the molecular models of bacteria.

§473 Let us set expectations correctly. At the time of writing while we can make general predictions of the kind given in the foregoing, the precise identification of a particular prediction is not available.

§474 By particular prediction we mean that we have not identified something as compelling as a perturbation in the orbit of Mercury that can be explained by the theory. Although it is worth observing that we currently having nothing as sophisticated as Newtonian theory in the biological realm that would enable the modeling of such a perturbation in the first place.

§475 We do suggest that conformance spread of bacterial receptors, chemotaxis and other motility, place-neurons, neuro-plasticity in general, the non-local synchronization of neural behavior, and the role of and behavior of membrane traversing fluid molecules such as nitric oxide are particular behaviors that may be explained.

§476 The how of these mechanisms is becoming clear in the literature and we may be able to offer an explanation of why they occur and indicate exactly what it is they are doing.

§477 We make such suggestions cautiously. The predictions made currently are rather more general conjectures. They concern the instantiation of complexity in general, sense, physiological structure and motile behavior, and the mechanisms of recognition and differentiation.

§478 Our physical proposal is tentative until, in particular, evidence for the economy of engineering in biophysics that we predict is confirmed. We are convinced that other models involving the primitive are conceivable. We have followed intuitively the natural consequence as it appears to us.

§479 We do present what we consider to be a strong argument for the logical necessity of a universal primitive by rejecting the magic of contemporary emergence theory and appealing to a mutually affective covariant construction of primitive aspects of nature²²; but we are not yet at our goal of producing a theory with the robustness of Newton's calculus or Einstein's field equations. And this must be our goal.

§481 We do contend that an informal interpretation of the available evidence and the missing gaps in other theories provides a good intuitive basis for exploring our theory with vigor.

§482 Given these challenges we also propose to prove our case constructively, through the direct application of the theory to new technologies.

§483 Similarly, if this proof-in-practice is applied to competing solutions then these results are interesting for the limits they reveal^[42].

§484 The development of artificial cellular technologies are also likely to be critical to our endeavour. So that engineering based on computational models may also serve to reveal the limits of this engineering and illustrate how the engineering we propose contributes^[43].

§485 Clearly our model predicts the engineering described by computational simulations and the fabrication of cells based upon those simulations is incomplete.

§486 If our proposals are valid then we will be able to develop technology able to solve problems that have proven intractable or impossible in the engineering sciences. These are essentially the problems of recognition and motility and they lie at the convergence of semiconductors and biological systems. The nature of such devices is already suggested by our comments in these introductory remarks.

§487 These methods of proof provide us with a significant advantage and may provide a shorter route to verification than is otherwise available.

The Implications

What it all means.

A Summary of Contributions

A summary of fields to which the work contributes.

§488 The principal contribution of this work lies in the provision of an explanation of experience in nature and the identification of the role that the basis of experience plays in the development of physical structures. No other theory of sentience, of which we are aware, has this property and the implications of the existence of such a theory are broad.

§489 If our model is false, if the physical engineering of sentience does rely upon a materialism of conventional mechanics alone, then there is no role for experience in the formation of physical structure. This would be a disappointing but useful result and it would illustrate that experience is beyond scientific explanation as currently conceived. In any case then the exploration of the theory has merit, the validation or elimination of the theory provides a valuable contribution to the natural sciences.

§490 However, validation offers significant benefits. We offer an explanation of how physics and biology are interrelated in the instance and expansion of complexity. We provide an explanation of the origin of all complexity. Thus we illustrate how physics and biology form a natural continuum.

§491 These contributions unify science and expand evolutionary theory by providing a role for experience in the process of evolution and in the mechanics of natural selection.

§492 Our models inform neuroscience and molecular biology. They contribute explanation to the record of observations in neurological and other biological physical structures. By this contribution we inform medicine, adding an explanation to sensory dysfunction and the effects of drugs and pathogens upon the senses.

§493 There are contributions here also to computer science and related machine engineering. These contributions are two fold.

§494 The first are observations that relate to the limits of computation that account for the failure of purely computational approaches by the Turing model in applications that involve sensory modalities. Our models explain why existing approaches to artificial-intelligence and artificial-life have produced only limited results and why image and speech recognition that mimics the capacity of our species has proved to be intractable.

§495 There is an associated implication that the motile responses, ubiquitous in biology, cannot be emulated by purely computational responses. This would extend the negative result here to robotics.

§496 The second of these contributions is the positive flip-side of these negative results. It relates to the introduction of sentience engineering, the creation of machines-that-experience and motile materials. These are machines that apply the mechanics we propose.

§497 The machines we envision initially are not like the machines envisioned by many contemporary advocates of machine intelligence. We do not expect our designs to suddenly awaken and magically manifest experience because of their degree of complexity.

§498 These machines are the product of sentience engineering and are sentient from the beginning. This allows us to consider a generation of simple sensors and motile materials before we approach the loftier goals of intelligence at the level of our species.

§499 A good example of these simple machines will be motile materials able to sense and respond to a variety of stresses. Imagine a suspension system, for example, for a vehicle that is able to not only provide a smoother ride but that is also able to react to sudden changes during a collision or perhaps able to avoid collisions by more immediate sense and response.

§500 There are certainly contributions here to the foundations of logic and epistemology though much that we have done here in this regard is to affirm the intuitions of logical positivism. These contributions include insights into apprehension and proof. Among the philosophers of science that have contributed to these lines of thought we believe that we have especially confirmed the intuitions of Rudolf Carnap and Charles Sanders Peirce.

§501 We provide a clear model illustrating the existential basis of our epistemology and we also show that there are things that have epistemological status but no existential status beyond apprehension.

§502 We like to believe also that there are contributions here that elucidate issues in the foundations of mathematics, especially in geometry and logic. And although not mentioned in these introductory remarks we also believe that there are related contributions to number theory.

§503 Of necessity, given the physical and foundational nature of our inquiry, we discuss the nature of space and time, the continuum, and atomicity in the semeiotic context of our inquiry and in terms of the physical mechanics we propose. These discussions are contributions to both physical sciences and the foundations of mathematics. They illustrate how a more detailed consideration of apprehension and the mechanics of sentience can be integrated into these disciplines.

Taking Experience Seriously

The proposal has broad explanatory power.

§504 We have restated our proposal several times but let us for a moment call to your attention its novelty. We do this here because we have discovered that no matter how clearly it is stated readers can make erroneous associations.

§505 Let us make it clear first that the proposed primitive does nothing. It is not intelligent in any sense.

§506 One might be tempted to associate it with Taoist conceptions of the “Tao” or the universal forces of any number of religions. It is like nothing that Lao Tzu or George Lucas conceived. It is not like “the force” in Star Wars. An appreciation of it is not going to endow you with special powers expect by those inventions that the application of your intellect to it may apply to it.

§507 If it is like anything, it is like its sibling, gravitation. It is a feature of the world and because it exists in the world the sibling, mass/energy, assembles around it in covariant forms of sense and motility. Just as it assembles around gravitation.

§508 The introduction of this simple primitive enables a model with broad explanatory powers. It provides solutions to problems that have long puzzled existential thinkers. In particular, it solves the so-called mind/body problem. It provides an account of the origins of life and a role for experience in evolutionary theory. It offers an explanation of the evolution of senses and the manner by which motile physiology is engineered.

§509 By providing an explanation for the continuity of experience it also contributes answers to ancient questions concerning the continuum and the nature of time.

A Role for Experience in Nature

The proposal provides a role for experience in nature.

§510 In this section we underscore the importance of providing a role for experience in nature and accepting this as a necessary implication of a rejection of dualism.

§511 Our proposal has a substantive basis and extends earlier physicalist thinking by introducing a necessary and sufficient extension to existing physical models.

§512 We view the physical construction of senses and the familiar mind as an engineering by natural selection of motile sentient physiological structures against the primitive we propose. This provides a role for the characterization of sense in the physical assembly of organisms.

§513 Simply put, physical forms that produce characterizations of this primitive can provide survival advantage. Senses evolve for the richer characterization of experience in conjunction with the motile responses to which they are immediately related. This evolution by natural selection provides survival advantages to organisms in their environment. The rest follows.

§514 There is an economy of engineering in recognition and motile response. Our proposal eliminates across system interaction latencies and integrative functions in computational models and replaces these mechanisms with the mechanics of biophysical differentiation, a reduction from the whole, against the primitive we propose. This provides an effective nonlocal synchronization in biophysical structures.

§515 This economy constrains computational complexity in precisely the same manner are computational complexity is constrained by gravitation; except that the product of this constraint is sense and motility.

§516 We construct our model of the world on the basis of three evident aspects of primitive nature: mass/energy, shaped by the evident affects of gravity and the proposed primitive of experience.

§517 For comparison and clarity, the new primitive we propose is inert. Its affect is not a force as one considers electromagnetism a force it is a feature of the world. And, by analogy only, we describe it as inert and present in the same way that the affect of gravity is inert and present in General Relativity.

§518 Gravity can be conveniently characterized as a curvature of spacetime in the presence of mass. We seek a similarly convenient characterization of the engineering of sentience that characterizes sense.

§519 So that we may move beyond identity theories and make predictions that enable the presence of the primitive to be empirically identified it is clearly insufficient to develop a model that can be explained by or corresponds with known mechanics. For our conjecture to hold, the primitive must enable a capability that is otherwise impossible and remain formally describable.

§520 In our model familiar high-order experiences are covariant with motile physiology. Sense is characterized by the motion and form of physiology. Motility and sense are two aspects of the same engineering.

§521 Sentient motile function is selected in evolution because of the survival benefit that sense and motility provides. In other words, it helps if you can both sense and react, so the two features develop together. They are covariant.

§522 The model predicts the birth of complexity and the seeds of evolution by natural selection in which sense plays a role.

The Biophysical Evidence

The proposal informs biophysics.

§523 Some thinkers will, no doubt, rebel against our introduction of a new universal primitive for a variety of reasons. Let us make some obvious observations.

§524 Proposing a new universal primitive has precedent. That precedent is, of course, Issac Newton.

§525 That such a primitive is inert and present also has precedent. That precedent is the Theory of General Relativity created by Albert Einstein.

§526 We will explore objections to our premises early in the book and it is incumbent upon us to present evidence that supports our argument.

§527 We are fortunate. The current understanding of biophysics and the available empirical data is unprecedented in history. In recent decades it has developed at an extraordinary pace. Indeed, there is such a density of current activity that new discoveries are occurring almost weekly.

§528 Many of these discoveries are illuminating. For example, in December 2006 the journal Nature published an article that discloses that pain is the product of an identifiable gene ^[44]. The importance of this article may not be realized for some time but it is important to our considerations. It illustrates that pain is an independently evolved biophysical system unrelated to the other senses and that these senses can operate without the pain mechanism with no discernible ill effects expect the inability to sense when damage is being done to the organism. Pain is not an intensity of sense, highlighting a prediction of our model that experience is characterized and has no magnitude.

§529 The reason for these advances is new technology. These new technologies have been founded in the advanced methodologies of science developed during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. They have allowed us to identify, explore and record the mechanisms of the genetic code. They have enabled us to develop detailed molecular models of biological processes.

§530 It is an illustration of the advantages of fallible science to note that these technologies are in large part due to the advances enabled by Alan Turing whose model we challenge here.

§531 We view this new wealth of data as akin to the explorations of Kepler and Galileo when analyzing the behaviors that Newton would later identify as the product of a universal primitive. In this new data we expect to find evidence to confirm our theory.

§532 For example, we may be able to provide an explanation for receptor conformance, chemotaxis, and other motility^[45] in bacteria. In general, we expect to inform biophysics about the variety of synchronous behavior that appears to be present throughout biophysical systems.

§533 We have learned of lot about what happens in biology and we hope to provide an explanation of why it happens that way.

Extending Science

Extending science as the noble act of our species.

§534 Science as a vehicle of understanding, unlike theology or metaphysics, it equips us uniquely to play a role in the world that is not open to other species^[46]23.

§536 However, when a successful model in science is mistaken for final explanation a problem arises; as is the case with materialism. This is especially true if the model provides a great number of useful applications that drive commerce²⁴.

§537 We grow so familiar with the model that we come to see all the world in its light and we cannot look upon the world without consideration of it.

§538 For us a “religion” is a philosophy, a framework of ideas, such that one cannot look upon the world without consideration of those ideas. By this definition science is itself a religion and the theories that persist within it are effectively the “cults” of science. They are ideas such that their proponents cannot look upon the world without consideration of them.

§540 Yet like most religious cults they abandon essential premises of the parent. The development of these cults is contrary to the central ideas of science that reject assertion and demand fallibility.

§541 As we have noted, Materialism is the belief in physics that we have identified all of the essential things of the world. This is because an adherence to it has led to an appeal to a magic in emergence theory and the return of metaphysics.

§542 Ironically, it seems that materialism persists in the scientific community in part because it leaves room for God.

§543 Contemporary science is suffering a diminished comprehension of constructive methods in part because it is widely perceived that reductionism has failed and materialism is correct. But this is false, reductionism has not failed and materialism provides unnecessary and unscientific limits on our conceptions.

§544 So what exactly is the problem; what of all those reductions that fail?

§545 As we have noted, reductions necessarily have a constructive frame of reference, no matter how poorly defined that is. If a reduction fails it cannot lead to “non-reductive” solutions, it simply indicates that the constructive frame of reference has failed. It cannot lead to behavior that is without cause.

§546 After long inquiry we must ask ourselves the hardest of questions: How are we to extend our premises to enable a new logical construction?

§547 This is the situation that we find ourselves in.

§548 The failure of a reduction simply requires that the constructive frame of reference needs to be reconsidered and ultimately revised to provide a casual chain constructed such that reduction succeeds.

§549 It is by this means that inspired guesswork and empirical induction continually refines the framework within which logical deductions are made.

§550 The end product of this process is the residual product of scientific consideration. For all practical purposes this residual is essentially what remains should the individuals involved in its production be absent. It is captured in the marks generated by those individuals, in the syntax of the language used in its expression and analysis. Intelligent individuals of our species are only able to engage with the existing body of scientific knowledge by engaging with this syntactic medium.

§551 Ultimately we can only hope to extend science by extending the range of explanation provided by this medium. Scientific contributions are ultimately measured by their refinement or extension of this framework. It is present in the common language of science and in its logical and mathematical clarifications. It is most effective when expressed constructively in a well-defined formal syntax of an accessible symbolic language where interpretation is eliminated. Its apprehension by individuals that are unfamiliar with it must rely upon a minimal number of readily accessible premises. Its veracity is measured by the degree to which its predictions coincide with the way things are. Its statements must be consistent and confirmable. Its application is measured by the good and productive changes that it brings to our behavior; the new things that it enables us to do.

§552 Not everything can be known to us because we must always allow for new discovery^[47][48]. To suggest otherwise denies the cornerstone of science. The fallibility of science simply asserts that for predictions to be valid they can never be mere assertions, they must be verifiable and there must always be the potential of new discovery that will enlighten us further.

§553 New discovery assists in the process of refinement and such discovery must always be anticipated. The best that we can hope for from science is that it leads to periods of time where our theories are constantly productive with beneficial effects upon our collective behavior.

§554 These periods of stability must not lead us to complacency.

§555 Nature's goals are manifest. We serve those goals when new scientific breakthroughs increase the potential long-term survival and expansion of the living complexity that has formed upon this planet. In addition, we further nature's goals by placing the life in environments in which it would not otherwise appear.

New Foundations To Logic

The necessary changes at the foundations of logic.

§556 Logic proper really makes no assumptions about implementation. That a logical statement is valid or not is entirely dependent upon the semantic rules of the logical language. Logical statements are perfectly capable of expressing values associated with abstract behaviors such as “turn left.”

§557 Logical statements make no account for the similarity of the apprehender. They require only that the semantic rules are followed to produce a result. By our model then the similarity of the apprehender requires only that they are able to uniformly apply these rules.

§558 Formalized computing machines, Turing Machines^[49], have infinite storage and unlimited time in which to perform their operations. Different types of Turing machine perform different types of computation, the machines are bound to their inputs. In our terms a Turing Machine must apprehend its input correctly to produce a meaningful result, otherwise the meaning is arbitrary.

§559 A Universal Turing machine is programmable and can emulate any Turing computation. A Universal Turing Machine is modifiable so that it can read any input given. More precisely, a computation begins with a specification of the type of Turing Machine that must be applied to its parameters. The implementation of a Universal Turing Machine is approximated in von Neumann's computer architecture, upon which most of our computing machines are based today.

§560 In our terms a Universal Turing Machine is a translation machine, the meaning of every input is an act of translation in which the machine modifies itself, as an apprehender, to be similar to the Turing Machine required to compute a result from the given parameters. The overall effect is the same as giving those parameters to the specified non-universal machine.

§561 Is there a behavior in our mechanics that cannot be performed or that would result in a different abstract behavior when performed by a Turing Machine?

§562 This question relates directly to the Church-Turing thesis ^[50]. To justify our model and what we have already said here we must offer a claim that there is indeed a behavior in our mechanics that will result in different abstract behavior when attempted by a Turing machine.

§563 Recall, specifically we do not claim that there is a processing of logical statements by semantic rules that will produce a dissimilarity in a perceived symbolic result but that a Turing Machine will produce different abstract behaviors, different results, because it's logical operation is different.

§564 Our claim is not as simple as saying that the two mechanics when executing the same computation produce different perceived results. The computational method itself is fundamentally different. The comparison is not between the truth values produced by one and not the other. This is simply because Logic as it stands has nothing to say about implementation and the results we consider are produced by a different method; they are concurrent and because of physical constraints produced by a construction against our primitive they “halt” at a point in the computational process constrained by the physical structure in which they appear.

§565 There are well known computational behaviors^[51] of this kind that appear to mimic nature, Conway's game of life and flocking behavior are examples where complex nonlocal behavior arises from a few highly localized rules.

§566 We agree that there are indeed emergent behaviors of this kind, localized computations constrained by their environment and the uniformity of natural laws. Flocking behavior as illustrated by these computational models, like any other fluid behavior, results from a uniformity of law. Although we will contend that flocks of birds operate as individuals by our mechanics and so the actual behavior of flocks of birds will differ in fact from the computational model. The computational model tells only a part of the story.

§567 So what is different in the physical constraint in our model that supports our claim?

§568 The structural deformations of the manifolds of sense are such that a conformation of the manifold produces states of cognition and recognition in physical architectures of action potential. It is not merely that physical structure brings Turing machines to a halt. It is rather that manifolds presenting cognition are the products of effective action potentials and are so tied.

§569 Responses are tied to recollections and action potentials are increased by the recollection of similarity in these structures. Decision responses are forced by environmental circumstances.

§570 An effective method that produces the result “turn left” in a Turing Machine is produced in a manner that is quite different from the mechanics we propose.

§571 In addition, we conjecture that simulation of our model by a Turing machine is intractable. This is because of the reliance on geometry and cognition in a complex environment of physical behavior, the quantified characterization of the manifold of sense requires a characterization of the manifold itself with none of the advantages of the new architecture. In particular, it requires unnecessary storage and an absent distributed synchronization that are, at best, difficult to implement in computational architectures. Further, Turing machines can only envy the storage free comparison mechanisms in our new model, necessary mechanisms are lost in any symbolic abstraction.

§572 The one requirement in our logic that steps beyond earlier work is the necessity of a simple and inert extension to prevailing physical models. In our logic this provides the basis of logic as differentiation.

§573 This extension is the inclusion of the basis of experience and the identification of the role, discussed above, that this primitive plays in shaping the substantive basis of the world. The mechanical explanation that we attempt here, describing the engineering of sentience, is then an advance on the earlier explanations by providing an existential basis for the characterization of sense.

§574 We are forced to recognize that the method of constructive integration utilized in current computational systems and proofs is inadequate.

§575 That we are able to imbue the simple mechanical actions of machinery with the benefit of a formalized logic that captures the effective methods of thinking is a remarkable and surprising fact.

§576 It is not, however, adequate to infer the presence of experience and it certainly offers no explanation of sense. The approach has proven to be a useful tool in computer systems and it has enabled us to place some part of our intelligence in mechanical devices. This is wholly unexpected.

§577 As a result we must review the foundations of logic and here we will seek to achieve several things. Either we create a logical syntax with semantic rules that do not reduce to a point aggregate of truth values but one that reflects the constraint of the physical and logical structure in which it is bound or we must find a way to reconcile an aggregate truth statement with it's natural implementation.

§578 In any case, how logical computations halt has to be reconsidered in light of the above model.

§579 As challenging as this may sound initially, our first approach, as we outline above, is an attempt to unify logic and geometry. Such unification has been considered before by David Hilbert^[52] and Hans Reichenbach^[53] in particular.

The Limits of Computational Mechanics

We identify limits in computational mechanics.

§580 Our explanation of nature identifies the limits of Turing computation and classical mechanics. We do this essentially by observing that symbolic systems, and the mathematical logic upon which they are based, do not reflect the substantive engineering of sentience in nature.

§581 Widely held expectations that our computational machines will awaken are unreasonable.

§582 This is a negative result for computer science, identifying fundamental limits.

§583 Computer systems, as currently conceived, can never meet the expectations of twentieth century visionaries for reasons that are fundamental to the nature of the world.

§584 For these same reasons the “Principle of Computational Equivalence” that relies upon the notion of computational complexity, proposed by Stephen Wolfram in his book “A New Kind of Science,” is false.

§585 Despite the often slower operation of biological operations, the broad economy of logical differentiation is more efficient than the labor of logical integration required by Turing machines and computational complexity is insufficient to explain the nonlocality in sense.

§586 For these same reasons computers can never be intelligent as we are intelligent. The kind of intelligence that you possess arises only as a product of the engineering of sentience in motile sentient organism. This is a fundamentally different kind of mechanics than that found in computers.

§587 This is not to say that intelligent machines cannot be built; by our mechanics, ultimately, they can be. However, simple functional equivalence or bio-mimicry using existing models of physical mechanics, the cornerstone of modern expectations, are insufficient.

§588 The operators of computational logic do not differentiate against a manifold of any kind, inputs are atomic and require storage and laborious integration, in parallel computation results require distribution and gathering.

§589 The truth value of a Turing computation is an abstract point aggregation of the logical parts. This is not how logic works in our biophysical model and we will claim that the results from work in biophysics over the past fifteen years or more confirm this.

§590 The results of the two logic systems will differ for reasons of efficiency and nonlocal effects in result constraints by physical structure producing a manifold of sense. Biology is a highly concurrent storage free system of distributed logical differentiations with nonlocal effect naturally constrained by physical structure.

§591 Turing machines simply cannot compete and if allowed to run free will produce contradictions because they do not know when to integrate or stop a concurrent computation.

§592 No symbolic system implemented in software and silicon can emulate the logical function of our species or any other in any function that involves a sensory or motile mode. Systems of parallel computation do not help us since the fabric of parallel computation implements no nonlocal storage free coordinated computation of the kind seen in biology. Contemporary computational logic reflects only a fragment of cognitive capacity.

§593 Simply put, computers are not engineered as sentience is engineered in nature and it is remarkable that we can endow such machines with heuristics and imbue them with some aspects of our intelligence.

New Technologies

We propose to build motile machines-that-experience.

§594 We will explore the new things that our theories may enable us to do. But why take this radical approach?

§595 Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and we simply cannot imagine a more extraordinary way to prove the case than to carefully consider how successful theories may be applied.

§596 The applications we consider will not be constructed by computational techniques using classical mechanics, nor be built by electrical engineering in silicon and programmed using first order binary logic. They will not merely simulate the behavior of biology. They will be engineered using the same fundamental principles of biophysics. They will enable new technologies that are only possible because our premises hold.

§597 Should these premises hold true, we will enable a new kind of device, machines that experience, engineered for sentience and motile action, and capable of performing recognition and response as we do.

§598 We anticipate that these devices will initially be hybrids of biology and silicon. They will provide interfaces between today's silicon systems and biological systems. The fabrication technologies required to assemble such devices exist today in the semiconductor and biotechnology industries where molecular engineering is fast becoming a fine art.

§599 General purpose computers have been very useful. It is not yet clear that the engineering of sentience will allow a general purpose architecture but there is cause for optimism, at least to the degree that we oursleves are general purpose machines.

§600 We have achieved so much in computer science but computer science has become a stagnant domain; it has been driven more by the economic pragmatics and hyperbole of commercial interest than research interests or truth.

§601 Perhaps it will be possible to directly program machines-that-experience using logical methods and techniques of translation not dissimilar from those we use today in computing systems. If so these methods will build upon modifications to the foundations of mathematical logic; at least as it pertains to the basis of relatives, differentiation, and the operation of symbolic systems.

§602 A more exciting prospect is the potential to build special purpose autonomous sentient machines; intelligent machines that are motile, autopoietic, and with experience.

§603 Such machines could reach into the environments that are hostile to us and finally we will have served nature's goal to extend the evolution of life beyond the confines of this fragile planet into environments in which it would otherwise not appear.

♦

End Notes

¹ In the course of this work we rely upon the physical mechanics and the epistemology described as the basis of logic and apprehension to enable our logical construction of the world.

² We use the term “against” in the same manner as one might say a shelter is built against a cliff or that stars and planets are the construction of mass against the gravitational field.

³ In fact, despite the “lumpiness” of mass/energy we also view it as a universal primitive aspect of the world in just the same way. We exclude mention of it here to avoid distracting justification. We discuss the question later in the text.

⁴ Here we specifically refer to the notion of orthogonality in geometry and algebra that we claim is based upon false physical intuitions.

⁵ John Locke used the term “semeiotic” first to distinguish “the doctrine of signs.” He originally expressed the term in its Greek form and it was subsequently Anglicized by publishers that reprinted the work.

Charles Sanders Peirce took up the term in this context and used various transliterations of the term. I give priority to Locke because, by whatever written form, he appears to have first uttered the term with this intended definition. The term was not used extensively by logicians of the early twentieth century where the interest was more narrowly focused upon systems of formal logic inspired by the work of Russell and Whitehead.

The term also has a long history of use extending back to ancient times in medicine where it refers to the study of symptoms and the diseases they indicate. I take this to be a quite separate development. The term also appears as “semiotic” and is often associated in this form with the linguistic teaching of Ferdinand Saussure.

⁶ Distinguishing between the two types of mark, one created by another sentient individual (such as this text) and one created by nature (such as the morning star), has often presented our species with a challenge and apparently continues to do so.

⁷ For a detailed account of Feigl's identity theory and conception of physicalism see an valuable and interesting exchange between Carnap and Feigl in Paul Arthur Schilpp's “The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap” (referenced and quoted later). It reveals a subtle and interesting diversity in the positivist conceptions of physicalism and discloses a clear distinction between the strict identity physicalism of Feigl and the liberal physicalism of Carnap. In brief, Feigl's physicalism adheres to the materialist assumption the we know all the essential things of the world while Carnap's view allows for new discoveries in the essential things of the world “as we discover more about perception.”

⁸ It's tempting here to immediately think of nonlocal features in Quantum Mechanics, but we caution the reader not to do so. That there is an observed nonlocal effect in Quantum Mechanics is indeed interesting but there is nothing here to suggest that these are one and the same phenomena. Further, we present a different view of quantum physics in which Quantum Mechanics is simply a matter of record.

We will discuss this at length later and it is a difficult argument that relates to the nature of “memory” in general but, briefly, we propose that the particles of Quantum Mechanics have no existential status beyond their apprehension. They are the record of mass/energy interactions in continuous energy fields. Our view then is not an atomic one, particles are differentiations of these fields. For us “the now” has primacy. Consideration of the past and future, that is entirely the subject of Quantum Mechanics, is vacuous.

However, the Quantum Mechanical behavior of Entanglement may be a critical physical feature to allow the individuation referred to here.

⁹ A functional dependence is an identified cause .

¹⁰ Indeed, as we shall see later, a certain non-locality is essential to account for the mechanics of sensory differentiations; i.e. reduction from the whole. Quantum entanglement does not violate the law of existential distinction in our model and may, of course, relate to the physical manifestation of this non-locality, though we hesitate to draw such conclusions here.

¹¹ As we shall see, the presence of uniform properties that we call fluid or solid indicate the inevitable outcome of natural processes despite existential distinction; despite the fact that there are no actual relationships between the parts of the world.

¹² Our model is not nominal. It accepts the existence of universals as the product of uniformity in natural law and in apprehension. There is, however, no sense in our model in which universals exist beyond the uniformity of natural law and the apprehension of the effects of this great uniformity.

¹³ Peirce, incidentally, also designed the first electronic implementation of logical machines around this time.

¹⁴ In this work I take “positivism” to refer to a rejection of supernatural solutions and the pursuit of a constructive unified science. Whereas, I take “empiricism” to be a focus upon what is observed. While positivism requires empiricism, empiricism has not required positivism. I further take this to be a strength of positivist inquiry and a weakness of empiricism in isolation.

¹⁵ Stephen Wolfram, in his book A New Kind of Science has proposed the “Principle of Computational Equivalence” that really does propose that Turing's model literally explains everything.

¹⁶ Several scholars, including Stanford University's Michael Friedman, point out that the German title “Der logische Aufbau der Welt” may be better translated into English as “The Logical Construction of the World.”

¹⁷ It is, of course, tempting to infer some quantum mechanical source of this non-locality and there may be a relationship but I steer clear of such conclusions for now. As it stands the nonlocality of quantum entanglement is an observer based phenomenon not easy to reconcile with our model here.

It is conceivable that the manifest nonlocality in sense is the stimulated effect by classical dispersion of molecules across the membrane structures. Nitric Oxide, for example, is a molecule that passes easily across membrane structures producing effects across the entire structure.

¹⁸ The recognition mechanism in this model is very simple (if surprising) and relates directly to the structural configuration.

¹⁹ Later we note that with our new knowledge of biophysics we now have the potential to become the creators of new forms of life, we may yet sow the seeds of new life in the world in places where it would not otherwise arise. In this case our creations will, in fact, be able to appeal to a notion of intelligent design.

This note simply acknowledges a logical problem that will no doubt lead to great debate since it is indeed conceivable that should our advances continue, and we may contribute to them here, we are able to be the progenitors of subsequent intelligent life. Therefore the notion of deliberate creation must be acknowledged.

²⁰ Though as we shall see emergent transcendental ( intelligence, compassion) behaviors remain. They are transcendent but remain functionally dependent; they have clear cause.

²¹ This affect is greater than learning simple syntactic convention because programming languages, indeed all languages, embody problem solving models and these models represent distinct ways of seeing the world; so it is that the language you utilize directly affects your structure and behavior. This includes more general social behavior; the language you know and the problem solving models that it embodies does, in fact, modify your behavior. The uniform and disparate styles of behavior we witness in social communities are almost entirely the product of a common vocabulary or lack thereof.

²² In contrast to String Theory we argue that primitive nature is not so readily apprehended mathematically; to appreciate its properties requires a more subtle characterization of its primitive form than the humble string. We view the notion of general covariance as first utilized by Einstein as a requirement for us to begin to comprehend the primitive nature of the world and its aspects.

²³ August Comte believed he had discovered “a great fundamental law, to which the mind is subjected by an invariable necessity” that the principal ideas of human intelligence passes through three theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state.

Concepts

apprehension: Apprehension is the act of individuating sense; the taking away of the world from sensory transduction to sensory conception.

apprehension: The differentiation of marks through impressions in the organism.

behavior of organisms: In our mechanics organisms act inevitably according to dispositions that arise from natural structure propagated by genetics. We refer to this as “Genetic Disposition,” This effect upon behavior is mitigated (amplified or diminished) by conventions, the signs that the organism embodies.

complexity: We will limit the use of the term “complexity” to the range of behaviors that are the product of our mechanics despite the common use of the term “computational complexity” to refer to the seeming complexity that arises in the uniform application of computational mechanics.

All behaviors are the product of the uniformity of natural law, including the fluid and solid behaviors that are explained by classical mechanics. This uniformity continues in the laws that involve our newly proposed primitive. However, without our primitive classical mechanics will not produce the behavior we call “life.”

computational complexity: “Computational complexity” refers to the apparent complexity that arises from the uniform application of simple local rules in classical mechanics.

consciousness: The variety of properties associated with sense and cognition.

constructive explanation: An explanation that is built from clearly identified premises constructed according to well-defined rules of logical construction.

determinant: That which determines the way things are, either a law or a principle.

A law is an a priori determinant. A principle is a posterior determinant. Laws determine the intrinsic behavior of mass/energy. Principles determine the forms and behaviors of evolving structure. Example laws include the conservation and equilibrium laws of thermodynamics, the laws of motion and gravitation, and the new laws that we will propose here to characterize sense. Examples of a principle include the Darwinian principle of natural selection that plays a role in the determination of evolved forms and their behaviour, and the principles of epistemology that constrain predictive behavior.

dimensionality: The notion of dimensionality in mathematics and physics relies on the notion of “orthogonality,” that in a systematic system of element identification a given coverage specification is orthogonal to the specifications upon which it depends, that one dimension is “orthogonal” to another.

emergence theory: Emergence theory is the theory that novel properties arise in the world that are independent of their functional dependence.

existential status: Existence is that which derives constructively from primitive nature.

An existential status is an existential characterization. In our model it is either a “necessary distinction” or a “way of speaking.”

Let us assume for the moment that the entire world is derived from primitive nature. The world is said to “exist” and derive its existential status by virtue of it's descent from primitive nature. When we speak of that world, is that of which we speak consistent with this status or is it merely a way of speaking about the world?

These questions do not define a dualism. They are, rather, the necessary distinction between the world and ways of speaking about the world.

existential status: We award existential status to all things and behaviors that possess a functional dependence on the primitive aspects of the world. Thus sense, intelligence, the mind, possess existential status according to our model. What then does not possess existential status? We will see later that “relations(”the products of sentience) allow us to perceive things that do not exist (such as irrational numbers and television).

existential distinction: existential distinction is the aspect of our theory that argues that all constructions are existentially distinct, the product of uniform laws. In our model existential distinction is necessary for the isolation of our conception of relations. By arguing that existent entities and behaviors are existentially distinct we enable a coherent model of relations as principal elements of sentience alone. Thus, for example, mathematical notions are the products of the mechanics of apprehension alone.

experience: Here we refer to experience as the basis of consciousness. It is that which is most familiar. It is the property that is common to all senses. It is the first thing and the last thing for each of us. Though strictly, according to the model we will present, the first and the last thing for each of us is a sense, the primitive we will propose characterized by physiology.

first principles: The principles of determination that come before all others.

forms of intelligence: The sensory characterization of the primitive we propose constructs forms of “intelligence” that modify our inevitable behavior according to genetic disposition. This intelligence includes intellectual, intuitive, and emotional capacity.

information: That which contributes to knowledge and identifies cause, in-formation.

integrative logic: Integrative logic is the logic implemented by computer systems. It is a point aggregation. Compare this to the logic of differentiation that we propose in which results are the product of a nonlocal manifold of sense.

intension: Intension is the sense in an act of apprehension.

knowledge: The term “knowledge” in our model is generalized to refer to that which determines subsequent action. The phrase “anthropogenic knowledge” refers to that action in our species.

law: An a priori determinant.

laws: Laws are a priori determinants. They characterize the covariance of the primitive aspects of the world. By this definition, examples include, the laws of thermodynamics and gravity. “Laws of complexity (or life),” is also a meaningful statement by this definition.

liberal physicalism: When we use the unqualified term “physicalism” here we are referring to the unrestricted physicalism of Rudolf Carnap that we qualify with the term “liberal.” Liberal Physicalism then makes the same requirements of all physicalism, that all aspects of nature reduce to a common primitive but allows for new discovery.

liberal physicalism: The physicalist view that allows for new discovery in the foundations of the world.

magic: We use the term 'magic' and 'magical' here to refer to claims that are supernatural; i.e., outside a logical construction of the world.

marks: Formally a mark is simply the subject of a sign. We distinguish two types of mark: one type is the product of semeiosis and the other is not. A thing designed, like a text or a television, we call an “intentional mark.” We will refer to a mark that is not of this type as a “natural mark.” The morning star or a sunrise, for example, is a natural mark.

We inductively differentiate between these two types of mark. We prefer to assume that all marks not readily differentiated are natural marks until the contrary is established.

materialism: Materialism is the view that our physical models are essentially complete. Hence any explanation of experience in nature based upon this premise is logically constrained to identity and emergence.

Meaning: The behavioral product of apprehension.

necessary distinction: A conceptual distinction that is forced upon our apprehension by the world.

nominalism: We take nominalism to be the rejection of universals.

orthogonality: Orthogonality is the logical relation of one concept to another that states that the concepts do not intersect anywhere in their development, though they have a common conceptual “starting” point. The example analogy is the notion of intersecting lines.

physicalism: Physicalism argues that everything, including our experience of the world, is derived from natural laws and principles. We distinguish two forms of physicalism one is the “materialist” view that takes the position that physics currently includes all the essential things of the world (and that these derive from mass/energy and the gravitational field), the other view allows for new discovery in the foundations of the world and argues that necessary expansion of physics is required to encompass an explanation of experience in nature as we discover more about perception This last view is a view that allows for new discovery.

pragmaticism: Pragmaticism, a precursor of logical positivism, originates with the American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce. It's maxim simply states that the meaning of a sign is no more than it logically implies. Where meaning according to the model we develop here is precisely the behavior produced by the apprehension of a mark. It shares with logical positivism a rejection of the supernatural and a concern with matters of apprehension.

primitive nature: All the world derives from a single, currently inaccessible, primitive. We are able to apprehend three aspects of this primitive as necessary distinctions in order to provide an explanation of the world: mass/energy, gravitation, and a primitive of experience.

Contrast this view with, for example, String Theory; in which a geometric element alone is the primitive basis of the world.

principles: Principles are posterior determinants. Principles arise in the composition of Laws. By this definition natural selection is a principle of the world and not a law. In our model principles include those determinants that deal with the mitigation of genetic disposition through the engineering and operation of sentience.

relations: In our model “relations” possess existential status only in their physical instantiation according to our model. Our model of existence is one of strict independence, things exist in and of themselves and possess no a priori relationship to anything else. They are detached and merely coincident; quantum phenomena not withstanding. Quantum entanglement, in this model, is viewed as suggestive of the nonlocality we propose; though it does not itself provide a sufficient explanation. Thus, relations do not exist in the world beyond their apprehension. However, they uniquely possess “epistemological status”, they are the sole source of epistemology. Hence relations allow us to apprehend what does not in fact exist in the world - such as irrational numbers and televisions.

religion: A religion is a philosophy, a framework of ideas, such that one cannot look upon the world without consideration of them

semantics: Here we adopt Rudolf Carnap's definition of semantics with a modification. Semantics is then “a system of rules in a metalanguage and referring to an object language, of such kind that the rules determine a truth-condition for every sentence of the object language, i.e. a sufficient and necessary condition for its truth.”

The type of truth referred to here is “logical truth,” to be distinguished from “factual truth,” in our terms “the way things are.”

In our own explication, to avoid widely held confusion on the matter, we will eliminate the notion of logical-truth in favor of a similar notion of “validity” and for our purposes it is enough to say that semantics is the set of rules that define valid sentences and their transformation.

Logical-truth and validity are dissimilar only in so far as validity says nothing at all about the truth of the statement. “Truth” in our model refers only to the degree to which statements refer to the way things are. Valid statements are true then not because they derive from true premises but because they and statements derived from them are necessary distinctions.

semeiotic theory: The study of signs, the development of general theories of signs.

sensory and motile structures: Sensory and motile structures are the physical structures of organisms producing autonomous spontaneous behavior. Sense and motility, in the model we propose, are two sides of the same coin.

signs: In our semeiotic model a sign is simply an individuated experience.

the eternal moment: The eternal moment is the universe without time, in which all transformations are the product of energy in the structures of mass that exist. The notion is essential to the explanation of the continuity of experience in our model. All sentient structures are formed by transformation against our primitive that characterizes sense. There is not flow of time in our model and nor are there discrete particles. Particles are seen solely as the product of record.

type physicalism: We prefer to use the term “identity theory” when referring to the physicalism of Herbert Feigl often referred to as “Type Physicalism.” Type physicalism is essentially materialist in that it holds that all essential properties of the world are discovered. Indeed, identity theory is the inevitable logical consequence of such an assumption.

variety of sense: The broad range of senses, including those familiar to us.

In addition to the variety of sense familiar to us other sensory modalities are known. The Platypus, for example, is known to sense electrical phenomenon (electroception).

Recent evidence has shown that pain is a distinct sense.

ways of speaking: A way of speaking is notion forced upon the world.

Necessary Distinctions

construction: Systematic assembly.

distinction: A distinction is a differentiation, it is a concept that carries a unique difference.

explanation: Identification of causes.

first: Before all others.

intension: Intension is the sense in the apprehension of a mark.

intention: Intention is a reference to the experience of the creator of a mark in the process of that creation.

intentional mark: Marks are the subjects of signs. An intentional mark is the product of semeiosis. It is something created by a sentient individual. For example, this text is an intentional mark.

law: An a priori determinant.

motility: Motion that is spontaneous and self governing; the covariant product of a characterization of sense.

natural mark: Marks are the subjects of signs. A natural mark is not created by a sentient individual. For example, the morning star is a natural mark.

necessary distinction: A necessary distinction is a concept distinguished by its force upon our apprehension of the world.

necessity: We use the term “necessity” in its logical sense first put forward by Hume. Necessity is the inevitable consequence of natural law.

principle: A posterior determinant.

principle: A posterior determinant.

semeiosis: Semeiosis is the biophysical processing of signs.

sense: A physical characterization of the primitive we propose.

way of speaking: A way of speaking is a concept distinguished by its force upon the world.

Ways of Speaking

"consciousness" speaks about: cognition: The act of apprehending a sign.

"existential status" speaks about: existence: Existence is that which derives constructively from primitive nature.

"consciousness" speaks about: sense: The variety of biophysical sensory architectures.

People

Alan Turing: (1912-1954) Alan Turing's contribution and influence upon computer science cannot be understated. He articulated the model that defines computational science today.

Alfred Tarski: (1901-1983) Alfred Tarski defined the notion of truth used by generations of logicians and mathematicians until today .

Charles Sanders Peirce: (1939-1914) Charles Sanders Peirce is perhaps the first semeiotician. He made foundational contributions to logic and computer science and gave detailed consideration to matters of apprehension in the context of mathematical logic.

Claude Shannon: (1916-2001) Claude Shannon founded information science by specifying a formal view of information in telecommunication.

Douglas Hofstadter: (1945-) Douglas Hofstadter is Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University. He also directs the Fluid Analogies Research Group at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition.

Francisco Valera: (1946-2001) Chilean cognitive theorist. Student and colleague of Humberto Maturana, with whom he articulated the theory of emergent autopoiesis.

George Boole: (1815-1864) Nineteenth century logician, author of the Laws of Thought.

Gottlob Frege: (-) German mathematician, logician, and philosopher who worked at the University of Jena. Frege constructed a formal system of symbolic logic, the first predicate calculus, a calculus of prediction.

Gregory Chaitin: (1947-) Gregory Chatin is affiliated with IBM's Wolfram Research Center and has contributed important results to the theory of computation. He is a lifetime visiting Professor of Computer Science at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Hans Reichenbach: (1891-1953) German/American philosopher and educator, a leading participant of the Vienna Circle and founder of the Berlin school of Logical Empiricism. Reichenbach was a close friend of Rudolf Carnap .

Henri Poincaré: (1854-1912) The great French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and philosopher of science. Poincaré wrote extensively on questions of apprehension.

Herbert Feigl: (1902-1988) A member of the Vienna Circle, a colleague of Carnap's and an articulate advocate of identity theory.

Humberto Maturana: (1928-) Chilean biologist and cognitive theorist. His work describes an emergence theory of cognition in biology called “autopoiesis”; the process of self-creation.

John Locke: (1632-1704) English enlightenment philosopher. Locke gave first consideration to many of the issues that we look at here. He used the term “semeiotic” first to distinguish “the doctrine of signs” though he expressed the term in its original Greek form. Charles Sanders Peirce took up the term and used various transliterations of the term.

Ray Kurzweil: (-) Popular author of “The Singularity is Near” in which he predicts a technological explosion that will rapidly out pace our capacity to manage it. In particular, he projects the arising of an artificial intelligence and poses the question: will it be friendly toward us?

Rudolf Carnap: (1891-1970) Perhaps the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. A principal member of the Vienna Circle and cofounder of Logical Positivism.

Stephen Wolfram: (1959-) Stephen Wolfram is the leader of Wolfram Research the produces of the Mathematica software package. He is author of the book “A New Kind of Science and” a past member of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Stuart Kauffman: (1939-) Stuart A. Kauffman is a member of the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Science. He is a professor to the departments of Biological Sciences and Physics and Astronomy. He is also the founder of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics (IBI) there.

Originally a medical doctor, Kauffman is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and a seminal member of the Santa Fe Institute.

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