Interiority of Objects

The Arts
1

I have come to believe that every object has its own personal experience of reality, just like every human does. I like to call it the “interiority” of that object. The more complex an object or entity is, the richer its interior world will be. A stone would have a very bland experience of reality, whereas a human has a highly complex experience due to the extensive amount of neural synapses in its head.

I think that this interior dimension is what makes art seem beautiful to us. A certain arrangement of vibrations in the air, or colors on the canvas, or ingredients on a plate, will create a lush interior space, and this is what gives good art its aesthetic appeal.

You can apply this to humans as well, and realize that whatever is the shape, color, and size of this hidden dimension corresponds neatly with the personality of a given person. Social interaction produces a certain kind of excitation, or a rubbing, or a spiking effect.

The goal of the universe, the goal of Earth, and the goal of humanity is to create the most complex objects possible, and to turn themselves into the most complex entities possible, in order to harvest this interiority which is natural to reality.

In my opinion, animism (Shinto in Japan) is the worship of these interior spaces. I think that when people talk about an object or place having a “spirit,” what they are actually percieving is this occasionally exposed interior side of things.

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Hi there, welcome to Briar Fray.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot since Ryan Faulk has been talking about it. But I don’t think that panpsychism is rational.

As Bill Gaede pointed out, consciousness is a verb. It’s a type of motion found in brains, but not rocks or trees.

And I would add that it means the process of being self-aware. Every time you go “I am thinking right now,” “I am experiencing this,” etc you are being conscious. You lose consciousness of your vehicle when you drive long enough – you go into a state of automatic pilot.

The problem with saying that experience is a feature of all things is that it’s kind of like saying that “jump” is a feature of all things. Yes, experience relies on physical matter, and how this matter moves around. But you don’t have “write” until you get the man, his desk, his paper, and pen.

As far as animism goes, I’ve actually been thinking a lot about that too. I think it’s sort of like an imaginary friend where it makes the object more interesting. But I think it also saves effort in a Zipfian sense by allowing you to explain phenomena very simply. Instead of wondering where a storm comes from, you invent a character who created it magically. This reduces effort and is economical.

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While I have a pretty generous allowance for ‘selfhood’, or what ever you want to call it, I’m not sure I could apply it so generously as to include rocks. When I was younger I read Gödel Escher Bach and although that book is something of a meme and is probably way out of date as far as The Science is concerned, I think it (and its followup book I am a Strange Loop) provide a decent working definition for consciousness which relies on a system having some sort of feedback mechanism and a way to act on it. You could place a thermostat system on one end of a spectrum and a human brain on another.

Animism as a lie to ward of boredom is a questionable (but very modern) postulate. Thankfully the very next sentence saves the day. In the way that a poem can tell more truth than a hundred scientific papers, it is thus far more economical. When we ascribe our sufferings to gods (of storms or disease etc) we aren’t merely hand-waving out of ignorance but painting a picture existence and the world that is intelligible and accurate. To the Greeks, for example, the gods were tempestuous but also generous, prone to madness but also beautiful. And this is a perfectly acceptable rendering of what the world and life in it will be. That they anointed all these things good and ill as divine is a great act of gratitude.

You can understand how a people see their world by how they describe their gods.

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I would really hate to start a discussion about certain new-agey panpsychist concepts such as the nature of consciousness/awareness and things like that. But I can’t deny being somewhat influenced by that type of concept, the idea that the vibrant way that we experience phenomena can’t be explained merely by physical processes and that there must be an inherent “phenomenological” quality to all matter. To me this is basically the opposite concept of solipsism–rather than oneself being the only thing in the world experiencing anything, the entire world at all levels is experiencing things in one way or another. As I mentioned, I think it is clear that highly complex objects, or objects arranged in a certain way, clearly have a much higher level of this than simpler objects. That’s why awareness seems undetectable except in humans and animals. It is present, but only in minute quantities.

The smaller the amount of awareness, the fewer modes of perception available to an entity, and the fewer self-referential loops available to the entity, the less useful the awareness will be–but it also is confined to itself, and its world of experience is segregated from the rest of reality. This means that whatever the experience of reality is for simple, small objects, it will have to be surreal and alien, since it is almost entirely cut off from the rest of the physical world. Perhaps the only “sense” available would be a type of extremely basic interoception. If this were the case, then the conscious experience of these inanimate objects would be confined to perceptions of itself. These perceptions would have to be highly abstract, as there would be no external sensory input linking them to the rest of the world.

So we have these highly abstract internal experiences, and they are based on interoception by whatever object is perceiving them, which means they are unique to the type of object doing the perceiving. So a hidden abstract world within every object, unique to it, and conforming to its inherent properties such as shape, color, tension, fluidity, etc.

I am aware that my lines of reasoning here are not exactly rational and rely on a lot of assumptions, and so I don’t expect to convince anyone of my ideas, and hence why I put this topic in “The Arts” rather than “Philosophy”–because I don’t consider this idea rational enough to be philosophical. It’s not an idea I which I came up with rationally; in fact, it’s my attempt to describe something which I saw while dreaming where I saw this concept very vividly. I believe in non-rational modalities as a valid source of knowledge, but I would never pretend they are rational.

With animism, I think that like any religion it has an authentic mystical experience at its core, and so you could psychoanalyze it to simply be a simpler explanation of phenomena, but I believe at least part of it probably shows something true about reality. But I don’t really know.

5

You are describing a different concept than what I am talking about. I am not saying rocks or inanimate objects have a self. I am saying they have a rudimentary form of first- person experience, even though they don’t have any form of identity or processing capacity to understand anything. These two things are frequently conflated because they are described by a similar set of words and because the nature of our experience of reality is taken for granted.

Animism is something related to the subjective nature of different things–objects, animals, plants, concepts, historical figures, mythological figures–and as such isn’t disproven by a better objective understanding of them. There is just more than one modality. A rational modality is better than a subjective one? Of course, viewing things objectively is what allows us to create technology and solve practical problems. Without the subjective lens though, life would be abysmal, autistic, and mechanistic. This way of explaining it is probably an oversimplification though.

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For those making the Gaedean noun/verb distinction, we can talk about Boltzmann brains instead- it’s the same thing but in motion.

You could talk about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, the extended mind hypothesis. My post is long enough as is…

I have thought of existence as the base phenomenon you (OP) are describing that becomes consciousness when it is folded in on itself. I might have stolen this from I am a strange loop but I think he would not phrase it quite that way? (his illusory consciousness shtick… which did not convince me at all) It felt so fitting because what we care about in consciousness is that it is substantial, weighty, that is has presence. All of these are material terms adapted to mean something more “material” than material. I know there are specific terms for these details like whether you think it is a property of a substrate granted to some events or a property of the logical/causal relationship itself.

You know when people have a hard time defining something but we’re all pretty sure we know what it means? Consciousness is one of those things. When did someone actually use the word consciousness in this way and I was sure I got what they meant? I remember the first time I read the word neurotic and wondered what it meant outside of the context, but I probably first saw the word consciousness used to describe someone coming “back to consciousness” e.g. from sleep.

For people, especially those similar to us, we have a great and simple argument that they are conscious. I’m conscious, that’s practically all that defines conscious for me. My consciousness is anchored to an object called a human body. There are other human bodies around. If that wasn’t enough, my actions- which originate in me, the conscious- have their apparent mirrors in other human bodies. Not that hard to make the leap and say, “at least some of these bodies probably have something conscious like me, pulling the levers.”

You could suppose that only bodies and patterns of action similar enough to yours correspond to something conscious, but I think there is still a limit on this. If someone behaves much simpler than you do and doesn’t diverge from precedent, maybe the lights are on and nobody is home. If someone is not just harder to predict (which might be enough by itself) but they even have a more intricate dynamic to their actions than you do, the question arises: why is something presumably mechanistic outdoing something conscious? It isn’t impossible to imagine, but for those of us who are more intelligent than average it is dissonant. I guess we could add more non-conscious classes of complex action-selecting entity, whatever that would look like.

Topical link: no such argument extends to objects as of yet, and even if an object (server farm) starts doing actions you do for apparently the same reasons it only has the action half of the argument not the corporal part.

I find the prospect that conscious somethings aren’t a natural category fascinating- that we share no green or red- and even things with definite structure like vision might only be isomorphic to each other but their character distinct to each of us. Isn’t this the only alternative to open individualism?