Andrew Y. Lee on the Geometry of Consciousness

www.andrewyuan...
philosophy.uto...
more YT videos with Andrew:
• Modeling Mental Qualit...
• QSJC#6: Modeling Menta...
• [2022 Neural basis of ...
• Part2/3 [2022 Neural b...
• Part3/3 [2022 Neural b...
• Degrees of consciousne...
• Consciousness Live! S3...
• Video
mentioned BOOKS
"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter:
en.wikipedia.o...
"The Conscious Mind" by David Chalmers:
en.wikipedia.o...
referenced PAPERS:
"Objective Phenomenology" by Andrew Lee:
philarchive.or...
"Modeling Mental Qualities" by Andrew Lee:
philarchive.or...
G. Jordan et al.'s case study of a woman exhibiting tetrachromacy:
jov.arvojourna...
"Degrees of Consciousness" by Andrew Lee:
philpapers.org...
PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS that we talk about:
the Hard Problem:
en.wikipedia.o...
Philosophical Zombies:
en.wikipedia.o...
Mary's Room:
en.wikipedia.o...
What is it like to be a bat?
en.wikipedia.o...
Psychophysics:
en.wikipedia.o...
COLLEAGUES mentioned (in chronological order):
David Chalmers
en.wikipedia.o...
Ned Block
en.wikipedia.o...
Thomas Nagel
en.wikipedia.o...
Max Tegmark
en.wikipedia.o...
Johannes Kleiner:
jkleiner.de/
Poppy Mankovitz:
poppymankowitz...
Nao Tsuchiya:
sites.google.c...
Nao Tsuchiya's TH-cam channel:
/ @neuralbasisofconsciou...

[@Kimani_White]

In recent years, I've been deeply investigating a variant of Jungian Typology called Socionics, and have come to the conclusion that it has great potential as a preliminary framework for a science of consciousness.
The theory takes the 4 initial dichotomies identified by Jung _(i.e. Sensing/iNtuition, Logic/Feeling, Introversion/Extraversion & Perceiving/Judging)_ to mathematically extrapolate the existence of 11 additional dichotimies. Fleshing out the semantics of this structure is an ongoing project and, despite its logical rigor, Socionics is still a ways away from being a fully developed scientific discipline. However, I think the gist of it all points to these dichotomous qualities as foundational aspects of conscious being itself, and not just features specific to human psychology.

[@astonishinghypothesis]

Rigor is the way to go. But the problem with Jung is that his starting point is dubious. One might ask, for example, what is the evidence that logic and feeling are opposed to each other? There is no logical (a priori) reason to assume that to be the case, and there is little empirical (a posteriori) evidence other than our intuition perhaps.
Launching off intuition is not problematic per se (IIT does that, too). But it requires frequent reexamination whether it does not clash with further data as it comes in, and that is where Jung runs into trouble. That is, if you take human psychological data and you run some kind of dimensionality reduction analysis (e.g., PCA) on it, you do not end up with the Jungian dimensions to explain the maximal variance.
That situation is not unlike Myers-Briggs. It is intuitively appealing to assume that "feeling" and "thinking" are on separate axes, or opposite poles, of the multidimensional space that best explains the variance between human personality traits. But when we statistically examine the actual data (e.g., using PCA), we do not find that to be the case.
It might be interesting to "save" the Jungian approach by replacing his intuited dichotomies with more empirically sound ones, and to take it from there.

[@Kimani_White]

@@astonishinghypothesis
From what I've come to understand, Jung's "psychic functions" _(or "information metabolism elements" in Socionics)_ are broad psychological/physiological faculties common to us all, and type is defined by which of those faculties one's center of awareness defaults to. All other properties of a TIM _("Type of Information Metabolism")_ are a result of that faculty's functional interrelations with the rest.
For instance, "Sensing" broadly refers to physical perception _[ both somatic inputs (Si) & outputs (Se) ]_ while "iNtuition" refers to abstract perception _[ i.e. psychological inputs (Ni) & outputs (Ne) ]._ Obviously, such processes are going on concurrently within any given subject; however, directly focusing on one aspect comes at the expense of the other. And while one is free to shift their awareness between Sensoric and iNtuitive modalities, they will always gravitate towards one end or the other. So, if one is a Sensoric type, their awareness will default towards directly attending to their immediate physical experiences and actions, while shifting to maintain focus on things like fantasizing or imagining novel possibilities takes sustained effort. The converse is true of iNtuitive types, as they're naturally much more inclined to be stuck in their heads, and must make an effort to maintain direct attention on their immediate bodily experiences & activities.
And yes, everyone simultaneously uses both Logic and Feeling to assess and engage with the world. However, the Logical types more readily interface with the world in terms of objective factors, with subjective feelings generally being more in the background of their awareness, and _vis versa_ for Feeling types.
Socionics takes these elements and frames them in terms of functional interrelations. The most common iteration of this is called "Model-A", which mathematically represents types with an 8 slot grid _(one for each of the 8 elements originally identified by Jung)._
Since I was a small child, I've always been extremely introspective, and would often make note of my own cognitive processes, and even conduct internal psychological experiments on myself. Since coming up on and learning the intricacies of this theory, its language and framing has been extremely useful as a conceptual tool to aid in such introspective investigations. Over the past several years or so, I've used the insights I've subsequently gained to tweak and improve upon the theory's semantics. I've also managed to expand upon its classical type model to include 8 additional functions _(for a total of 16),_ which not only provides a greater degree of descriptive depth and accuracy for the 16 types, but more parsimoniously accounts for the extended dichotomy structure predicted by this iteration of J Type Theory.
To be clear, the ontological premises of the theory _(i.e. the IM elements/functions)_ are sound, in that they're just _synthetic a priori_ descriptions of things we already know to exist. What needs testing is how or whether these other dichotomous properties and correlations predicted by the theory manifest in practice. As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently working on fleshing out the semantics of these theorized dichotomies so that they're more amenable to empirical testing.

[@mattsigl1426]

IIT really is supreme at developing these ideas most fully. A recent paper isolated how the qualia space of space is generated by an integrated set of grids. Qualia analysis and it’s geometric construction is the extreme Wild West of science and very much the future, especially in the area of A.I.
Overall, I think it’s very important to recognize the hierarchal nature of our qualia experience. Color experience first and foremost happens in a quale capable of a sense of space, for instance. No color without space. (Lots of rules like this I reckon.) Also, if information is the key then it explains why “color” is a dimension (or dimensions) while a particular color (like pink) is not. This is because, if color is a dimension which contains the potentiality to be different states (shapes) then SOME color will be realized as long as it’s POSSIBLE that some color can be realized! And the shape that that dimension transforms to (in the context of the whole quale) specifies the color that is actually being experienced, but with the important point that when this happens all the other color experiences that COULD have happened but didn’t are attendant to (and even constitute to a degree) the color actually experienced. Blue MEANS, not red, not green etc. within the context of an existent possibility space of color geometry, which itself is a geometrically isolatable sub-modality within the context of a larger whole quale that is geometrically realized as single hyper-complex n-dimensional polytope.

[@mattsigl1426]

There are also interesting parallels between the “platonic essence” of colors and the relation to how they are grounded by the firing pattern in the neuronal systems that realize them in the physical substrate. It seems likely the neurons specifying for color cause the geometric modality of color within a quale to realize black when those neurons are silent. And we have always associated black with void, silence or absence. Black is activated by non-activation. Void is the on that’s off. I suspect white is the inverse, and is the color that, to be realized in the quale, requires maximum neuronal activation. The light turning on as it were. (Though I’m more confident of the first speculation than the latter.)

[@Starcell170]

If we start from phenomenology and structuralize it well, let’s say color experience can be embedded in (R, G, B) space and discovered con cells representing RGB, then can we say we solved the hard problem of color consciousness? I don’t think so, but I don’t know why.

[@astonishinghypothesis]

I believe you are touching on one of the most interesting questions of our times: Let's assume that science solves how brain activity "translates" into consciousness. Similar to how physics shows how energy can be "translated" to mass and vice versa. In other words, if we found equations that map between (the structure of) neuronal population spiking and phenomenal structure, would that not solve the hard problem? What else can we expect from science other than providing equations? What remains to be desired? What is missing? Why is finding mathematical laws of nature suddenly not enough?
This is exactly the kind of thought experiment that led to the postulate of a hard problem in the first place. To many, the answer seems to be no. That's because we map a 3rd person-perspective structure to another 3rd person-perspective structure. So, there is still no way to explain the existence of a 1st person-perspective in the first place.
Yet, this is all just rests on extrapolation and intuition. We do not know how we will fell once science achieves such a breakthrough. And history provides reason for caution. Vitalists made similar arguments when it comes to explaining the hard problem of "life". And they faded rapidly once we understood the genetic code.