I don’t think valence itself is necessarily a complex phenomenon, and just because the methodology of affective neuroscience isn’t generating crisp insights doesn’t mean there are no crisp insights to be had.
Michael Edward Johnson, Principia Qualia
I. Wisdom and Independence From External Validation
In numerous conversations, I’ve often encountered the concept of an “old soul”. This dual-aspect distinction which separates biological from phenomenal age, or the material experience dependent on physical time from the conscious experience dependent on phenomenal time, can help us understand different reactions to the perceived phenomena occuring in our environment, i.e. qualia. In this blog post, we’ll explore what factors might contribute to the development of true wisdom, a trait often associated with being an “old soul.”
If we take Qualia Formalism as an ontological truth (as we at Qualia Research Institute do) and every qualia, every aspect of our phenomenal experience is isomophic to a certain mathematical object, then, I argue, there will be objective individual differences in complexity, diversity and symmetry/harmony parameters of subjective experience.
To conceptualize measurement, IIT won’t be enough. We need to conceptualize perception without a nervous system. Let’s have a look at one simple example.
II. A Sea Sponge and a Cat
Let’s take a sea sponge and a cat.
A sea sponge is a sessile animal that doesn’t have a brain. Actually, sea sponges are among the few multicellular organisms that do not have a nervous system at all! However, they can respond to their environment and self-organize by slow, cellular-level reactions. They don’t move on their own volition – spending all their energy on creating the screen of consciousness (a hologram) would be a useless feature; rather it would be impossible without the visual cortex. But sea sponges have metabolism. They do not produce their own food (as plants do through photosynthesis) but instead filter feed by straining suspended matter and food particles from water. This is what they do to survive.
The shapes of the sea sponges’ bodies are adapted for maximal efficiency of water flow through the central cavity which is pretty much something we tend to achieve by seeking pleasure and symmetrifying/harmonizing the content of our inner subjective experience through practices such as meditation, psychedelics, sports, sex, dancing etc.
Spending energy to feel pleasure is of course not only observed in humans but also experimentally shown in other non-human animals showing how rodents and primates will work for drugs.
Stimulants like cocaine and amphetamine or opioids were the most often used in experiments. This is significant because animals are willing to compromise their life and take risks for a little bit of pleasure. When animals (including humans) experience this drug-induced pleasure, their brain’s reward system reinforces the behavior that led to it, encouraging them to repeat the action. The amazing thing is that by utilizing the evolutionary purpose of consciousness technology we are capable of activating our reward systems without being the victims of the Tyranny of the Intentional Object.
On the other hand, cats, like all mammals, have a highly developed central nervous system, a brain with distinct regions with specialized functions, and a spinal cord. Unlike sea sponge, a cat is highly mobile. What moves requires orientation in space which requires conceptualization of locations which provide pleasure. Cats do need the screen of consciousness (hologram). For moving, cats need a representational memory system. Indeed, a cat’s brain includes areas for processing sensory information, coordinating movement, and higher-order functions like memory and emotion. If a cat is more intelligent, like a human, it will significantly enrich the memory system by the virtue of imagination. In fact, memory and imagination seem to become almost identical functions. Slowly, humans understood that the screen of consciousness is an orientation-system dreamt up by the brain.
Essentially, both sea sponges and cats perceive environment, but there is a crucial difference. Sea sponges don’t form concepts. Many animals demonstrate the ability to categorize objects, individuals, and events, which is a fundamental aspect of conceptual thinking, but the ability to form basic concepts likely predates the evolution of language. Maybe in the pre-language era non-verbal art was all there was. After all, art is an affective protolanguage.
III. Metabolism: Insufficient for Conceptualization, Sufficient for Pleasure?
The earliest photoreceptor cells in the evolutionary history of eyes were likely rudimentary and primarily geared towards distinguishing light from dark, rather than perceiving color or detailed images. These early photoreceptors were probably more similar to modern rod cells, which are highly sensitive to light and excel in low-light conditions but do not provide color vision or fine detail for which we possess cone cells.
In order to exist, concepts somehow need to be created, conceptualized by a perceiver. But just because a sea sponge doesn’t have a brain doesn’t mean it doesn’t perceive signals from its environment. Only the evolution of cone cells allowed for the exploitation of different ecological niches and the development of more complex behaviors and interactions with the environment.
Geometry existed before creation.
Plato (4th Century BC)
Since we are not just shapes but shapes in time, here is also a text on Why Music Theory of Consciousness.
Because successful self-organization models such as Free Energy Principle require an existence of an external world as described by Markov blankets, I believe we can safely say that there is an external source, a signal we’re all receiving through biophysical and biochemical processes, but due to our unique perceptual aparatus we experience it differently. Not everyone perceives color, and not everyone has complex spatio-temporal depth.
How much is the screen of consciousness important for consciousness? And how much is metabolism important to experience core affect?
IV. IIT+: We Use Our Intelligence to Pursue Pleasure but Pleasure also Facilitates Problem Solving
What are the necessary properties of those conceptualized gestalts, the building blocks of our shared holographic screen? Which qualities might be important for determining, let’s say, an aspect of the question ‘what is it like to be’ a certain organism? Just as we’re not just shapes but shapes in time, we also need to put mathematical objects in time and harmonize the concepts in order for them to reach meaningful level of integration.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness, developed by Giulio Tononi and others, is a theoretical framework that seeks to explain the nature, quality, and quantity of conscious experiences. While IIT primarily focuses on the integration and differentiation of information in a system to explain consciousness, concepts like symmetry or harmony are not central to the framework in a direct sense. However, they can be related in a broader, more metaphorical context.
IIT’s complexity and differentiation are important but if we want to understand the evolutionary purpose of the existence of consciousness (one that doesn’t focus on intellectual abilities given only very late by the development of brain) we have to include symmetry/harmony parameters.
Harmony is essential to the coordinated and coherent activity among different brain regions, which is essential for integrated information processing.
Complexity vs. simplicity: intelligence and information content, how richly and interdependently information is processed (zero information can have very high valence, such as in jhanas)
Differentiation vs. homogeneity: A system is considered more complex if it has a high degree of differentiation (unique states it can be in) and integration (interconnectedness and interdependence of these states). In other words, a complex system in IIT has many different possible states (high information) and a high degree of interconnectivity among its components, where information is not merely localized but distributed across the system.
Symmetry/harmony vs. antisymmetry/dissonance: hedonic tone or valence (depending not just on the structure of a mathematical object representing qualia but also on the past trajectory of the system; memory lane can also be created by imagination)
By assuming Qualia Formalism (and that you’re familiar with the qualia glossary which is all over this blog), the inner path (normally defined as an individual’s personal journey of self-discovery and self-awareness; wisdom) would then be a creative process of gaining adaptive knowledge and symmetrifying/harmonizing inner representations; a process bringing the nervous system and the connectome closer to a state of natural resonance. This is why cultivating equanimity is important for nervous system conductivity and efficiency. It’s a crucial step in wisdom and symmetrification of subjective experience -> it becomes positive valence resistant to environmental factors.
In IIT, Φ (phi) is a measure that increases as evolved complexity and problem-solving capacity increases. I/O complexity and internal complexity are usually good proxies for the Φ of a system, but not always. As Mike summarizes in Principia Qualia, a complex feed-forward neural network can be highly complex, but because it has no integration between its layers, it has zero Φ. Importantly, functionally-identical systems (in terms of I/O) can produce different qualia under IIT, depending on their internal structure, and functionally different systems may produce the same qualia. Complexity comes with a price.
To connect with previous parts, working towards achieving a state of natural resonance, whether through artistic endeavors or meditative flow, can evoke a euphoria similar to that of Lydia Lunch, rodents and primates, and it lies in their objects of addiction. The main difference between the outer and the inner path is that on the inner path there isn’t one specific external object to be addicted to (like drugs). The inner path is primarily about constructing a stable internal symmetry. Become the architect of your crystal palace which will resonate in concordance with all of its environment. Interconnected like Indra’s Net and the sea sponge, a self-organizing system with metabolism can achieve maximal efficiency of water flow in its cavity or energy in its nervous system.
Additionally, Emmy Noether’s theorem says that symmetries account for the conservation laws of linear momentum and energy within this system.
That being said, consciousness allows us to perform neural annealing and to feel pleasure without depending as much on the environment.
Without consciousness, our inner experience would have no meaning and there would be no valence acting upon the reward system and demanding one more repetition of that beautiful harmony in Cmaj7. Maybe humans and non-human animals have music because it feels good, which is one of the most puzzling phenomena and the essence of conscious experience.
V. The Number Se7en
To make the whole thing a little bit more fun, there is an allegory knows as St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle. She was a 16th-century Carmelite nun, prominent Spanish mystic and religious reformer. Overcome one day by a mystical vision of a crystal castle with seven chambers (the so-called dwelling places), each representing a different stage in spiritual development, Teresa wrote The Interior Castle. Probably her most important and widely studied work, it guides the spiritual seeker through each stage of development until the soul’s final union with the divine. I have no baked thoughts on why exactly seven chambers, but given the music theory of consciousness/vibration, it might be that the next chamber would just be an octave, which is the same frequency as the first one. Maybe this could also have something to do with our perception of fractals.
Here is a fun fact. The seventh electron shell is a practical limit in the context of the heaviest elements that have been observed or synthesized. It corresponds to the outermost electrons in the largest atoms currently known. The exploration of elements that would fill an eighth shell (n=8) remains a theoretical and experimental frontier in chemistry and physics. The existence of an eighth shell would require elements with higher atomic numbers (greater than 118), which have not been discovered or synthesized yet.
Other notable systems where number 7 appears:
- Rainbows: A rainbow typically displays seven visible colors – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. This is a consequence of the dispersion of sunlight as it passes through water droplets, though the exact number of colors seen can vary.
- Music: In Western music, there are seven natural notes in a standard diatonic scale (major or minor) – A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. This forms the basis of the Western musical scale.
- The Week: There are seven days in a week. This convention has ancient origins and is found in many cultures, often based on religious or astronomical traditions.
- Physics: There are seven base units in the International System of Units (SI): meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela. These fundamental units form the basis for scientific measurements.
- Human Body: The neck typically has seven cervical vertebrae. This is a characteristic feature of most mammals, not just humans.
In many cultures and belief systems, the number 7 also holds spiritual or symbolic significance, often representing completeness, perfection, or divine order. Common public opinion is that its significance is more cultural or coincidental than a fundamental property of nature. But is it actually?
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A few more questions before I go eat warm bagels before 5am bedtime. I’m wondering what would happen if our topological bubble of consciousness would burst apart? Why would it? By merging back with the background? Does this happen at the moment of death? What holds it together? A gravitational center? Maybe afer the burst there is no more boundary separating the observer from the observed. The I has popped. And maybe this is phenomenal ascension, a successful integration of enlightenment and final step on the spiritual path.
The cosmic utorus thanks you for reading!
Contact: @stalkerofmusik
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Related texts:
Mind Over Matter: Perception of Time Influences Wound Healing – Neuroscience News
Thoughts on Evolutions 
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