Prompts for Presence and Actuality

Reading Michał and locating the disagreement

What do you make of notes/private/within-one-mind.txt ? Might also be of use notes/private/MRW-six-volumes-aquinas.txt and notes/private/MRW-coarse-grainings.txt

In /Users/lukstafi/.codex/worktrees/fca2/lukstafi.github.io/notes/experience-selfhood-and-the-organization-of-a-mind.md , there’s our upcoming unreleased first-sketch essay, the next philosophical one after the ones Michal has read. Will it help Michal get more clarity about my tentative position?

Is there anyone else arguing for the possibility of states that are phenomenal but not mental? I guess panpsychists argue that?

But what Michał wants is phenomenal states without content because content is necessarily cognitive.

Yes, this is our claim. We accommodate Michal’s hesitation, not to say position, quite far, because we already argue against phenomenal properties in favor of experience as a mode rather than experience itself being content. Is what we’re facing here a position in the spirit of IIT that ontological distinction itself is experience?

IIT, experience, and mentality

“Subject” is a loaded word. We did a breakdown of it. “But individuation alone is not sufficient on IIT.” I don’t see how I can agree with this. Is there a brute fact about the level of integration which constitutes experience below which there’s individuation without experience?

My point is that IIT is panpsychist in that it does not put a lower bound on experience. So a piece of brain tissue will have one or more loci of experience, same as a rock, except that there will be much more loci in a rock.

Don’t IIT and panpsychism, in this sense, reduce to illusionism, since there is nothing special about experience on their account?

But the substantive nature they point out is actuality, existing in the first place.

“IIT makes additional claims about which wholes exist intrinsically” Yes, and my view invites that contribution from IIT, only without exclusivity.

I’m introducing the distinct modes of mentality and of phenomenal experience. This is not novel, but it’s not established within philosophy well enough for us to appeal to pre-existing definitions, I think.

Isn’t Michał eager to accept mentality as unproblematic? Isn’t it also at odds with pre-Cartesian philosophy, of which Thomas would be very familiar?

Actuality, constructibility, and suffering

Coming back to ontology, I think Michał has not accepted our counterargument for his argument from suffering.

The indexical account of actuality is more deflationary than my accounts of mentality and phenomenal experience. If I was articulating it again, I would only offer an indexical account of actuality as a step to take while we don’t have an account of the reality measure. I think my other lines of defense are more substantial.

I think I’ll write another article, or we will write another article, distancing ourselves from the indexical actuality point (giving up on it). We could frame it as a concession to Michał. Our new account of actuality would be more or less finitude or constructibility. (Reality in total is infinite, but any actuality within it is finite. )

This is a substantial shift between my positions in 2025 and 2026, but it was already latent in all of our writings in 2026. The indexical actuality essay was already the modified position, plus an add-on. The position is determined by Wolfram’s Ruliad, so the precise meaning will need to be worked out from there rather than postulated.

My feeling is that Michał wants to insist we are Tegmark-style Platonists, while we want to insist we are anti-Platonists.

My fundamental ontology escapes mathematical Platonism by requiring constructibility and escapes related forms of “plentitude oriented” Platonism in general by not accepting arbitrary abstractions as real.

“Being able to describe, extract, or map an apparent organization onto that reality does not establish that the organization is itself real.” A proof that a constructible model of that organization is possible would establish that that organization is real, but a postulate is not a proof.

With all of this, there is also the fact that, as an atheist, I don’t owe a Theodicy. Cluster headaches exist, and the universe is vast, spatially and quantum mechanically, even without solving for the ruliad.

Presence, content, and the proposed equivocation

Maybe one intuition to argue for the connection of phenomenal experience and content. Also, mind you, content is not necessary on our account because experience is not equated with content. The regulatory mechanism might be straining in some situations, like in dreams or psychedelic disorientation. The intuition is that phenomenal experience means there is a presentation. Does anyone claim that there can be phenomenal experience without a presentation? I think even IIT would say there is a presentation of the difference.

Yes, I mean presence.

Can we say that presence is a presence without content when it fails to present content?

Yes, I know that’s how we would frame it from our position, but can we use it argumentatively to bolster our position?

But can we use it as an argument that people who entirely detach phenomenal experience from content are not playing the game properly?

It seems to me these people make a similar but opposite mistake to the one we argued in “Redness is an Experience.” They take “presence” and they shift the meaning of it to “existence”. It’s a delicate point I’m making here, it’s not entirely coherent.

Great, so the object-level argument for the new essay would be this equivocation. And the meta-level argument I’d like to make would be against postulating explanatorily inaccessible metaphysical obtainings, In the sense that Michał might want to say, “All right, there are presences, but how can you tell there are not also some other esses?”

Sources and the scope of Michał’s challenge

I just realized we can bring up Thomas Metzinger’s book on pure consciousness to give the essay what, in cinema, would be called “production value”

Yes. Which piece of literature would we bring from the IIT side?

Great find. And we need to engage with Michał separately because his move is to demand that existence (what he calls physics) confers genuineness (via what he calls legibility: “being legible to physics”). I see Michał as aligned methodologically with IIT while being more modest metaphysically.

This is something I tried to express by talking about “other esses”. It’s not language that I’ve heard Michał use, but I hear him as arguing from both “pure consciousness” and “confused consciousness” to cognition not being constitutive. I hear him, roughly speaking, as saying that experience need not be legible to itself as representational, therefore a theory of representation cannot account for it. (But I haven’t read much of his recent writings first-hand.)

“Given your qualification about his recent writings, we should present this as your reconstruction of the pressure Michał applies” – no, ideally, given my qualification we should dig into the writings as sources :-D

Thank you. So he does not require physical unity for understanding?

This is where mindedness enters and roles switch. Our account of understanding emotions, etc., as one axis, requires integration.

Writing and revising the essay

Can you write a draft essay based on these sources and considerations?

“If a minimal state retains only capacities that the theory previously required to be actively exercised, the theory needs revision.” Did you mean to say “If a minimal state does not engage capacities that the theory previously required to be actively exercised, the theory needs revision.”?

I edited to: “If a minimal state retains but does not engage capacities”

I removed “rather than where we should place an arbitrary minimum amount of experience”

“Ubiquity would not make experience illusory.” This is very out of place. My point at that phase of our conversation was that when everything is an experience, there is no place left to explain experience, so panpsychists and illusionists agree on not needing an explanation that singles out qualia. It was a bad point, I take it back.

“Our answer cannot be that understanding is unproblematic and only phenomenality requires real unity.” I would say sth like “We don’t accept that” / “Lukasz doesn’t accept that” / “Lukasz’es intuition opposes that”

“We hypothesize a connection between these modes without equating them, and without making everything mental phenomenal.” This is bad writing. I’d write “We hypothesize the latter are a subset of the former.”

Computation and the Ruliad

Replace “They do not, by themselves, prove my proposed account of actuality.” with a further elaboration to express the following. I don’t like the use of “computational” in Wolfram’s account because it relies on a meaning of “computational” that’s misleading for our purposes. When we discussed computation with Michał, we used that term to refer to characteristics of organization. (Would it be fair to call it causal coarse-graining?) The ruliad is computational only in the explanatory apparatus of the theory, not in the thing explained by it.

This doesn’t capture what I have in mind. Computation in the sense that we use in these discussions is inadequate for The Ruliad because explanatorily it doesn’t have a connection of a computer with a content. The point of the ruriat is that physics is (intrinsically?) already a coarse-graining.

What work does this do? “The Ruliad does not explain reality by supplying such a computer–content relation. Treating it as computational in that sense imports a distinction that the explanation has not yet established. Computation enters the apparatus through which we construct and describe the Ruliad; this does not make the Ruliad itself a computer computing some content.” In my own writing I would remove it, because “The further point is that physics is already a coarse-graining.” – no, this is not the further point, this is the point.

The thing you wanted to guard against is to equate the Ruliat or Wolfram’s approach with the simulation hypothesis. We don’t need to guard against mistakes we’re already pointing away from.

“rather than merely a convenient simplification of a physical world already individuated in the same terms” what do you mean? simplification = redescription? Is “the same terms” the hypergraph, or the mathematical objects of GR and QM?

Yes, and the redescription suppresses distinctions in the hypergraph, once they’re done doing their explanatory work.

I removed “The proof establishes reality; producing the proof does not bring the organization into being.” You’re right but there’s more nuance than this suggests. It depends on whether checking the proof requires executing the program with a reproduction of the interface of the program.

Levin, embodiment, and reality measure

Since the essay already goes in that direction, maybe it’s worth bringing up Michael Levin as a foil.

My intent was to bring Levin as an opponent when he resorts to the platonic space. His discussion of a sorting algorithm as having preferences that were not intended in our design of the algorithm, and extrapolating that to abstract patterns being minds that interact with the physical world.

“If it is proved possible, our ontology must accept the resulting commitment.” But the force comes when the proof is for the full embedding (embodiment). For example, if the suffering creature is evolutionarily unlikely, the proof must also show how the creature came about.

But Michał’s objection does have a point if the suffering arose in a Boltzmann brain, for example, that’s why we need to postpone this argument till an account of the reality measure.

I removed “As an atheist, I do not owe a theodicy. There is no benevolent creator whose choice of this reality I must vindicate.” Was making me slightly uncomfortable. We already discuss atheism in one of the posts. It might make sense to bring the topic of religion, but it would require its own section.

Editorial review and reconsidering actuality

What do you think of the article overall? Would you do an editorial pass? Would it make sense to add sections?

What does actuality mean? With the retraction, I’m left without meaning.

This is correct, yes. But the second line needs a delineation condition, right? In any case, if we don’t have a concept that approximates the work that Michał wants it to do, it wouldn’t help us. But your point that it’s the same concept that factors into theorizing the reality measure helps.

Wait, so for Michal esse and actuality are ascriptions of objects? There are lots of actualities, actually, at any given moment, even?

Ah right, so objects participate in esse, which leaves open that there is one esse.

I was operating with a wrong mental picture. Well, not all the time, but at least some of the time, I was equating actuality and existence. A picture where our existence is undoubtably actual, while other quantum branches’ actuality could be questioned

Yes, both my tea cup and the moon exist, but for Michal they don’t have actuality. Because it’s only my mind that individuates them as a set.

There is no such actuality. This concept is not useful.

Organizational unity is not actuality. I like organizational unity, but it doesn’t answer to that higher calling, I think. Organizational unity is organizational, not physical.

Exegesis of esse

Can we add a section where we do hermeneutics of Michal’s actuality?

(BTW I should have said exegesis, or not use a fancy word.)

He borrows esse from Thomas Aquinas. What do secondary sources on Aquinas say about esse, concisely?

But a being without esse doesn’t exist, so if Michał points to an existing pattern, he shouldn’t ask a further question about esse.

But a pattern that we identify without making a mistake exists.

Analog computation and higher-level individuality

Consider that Michał, at least in March, was taking analog computation to more likely have esse than digital computation.

I don’t think so. I think he is searching for: “I have accumulated formidable constraints on a theory of esse.” That sounds like a broader category than phenomenality?

For example, Thomas Epistemes recounts: “a satisfactory theory must survive the relation between higher-level events and underlying physics”, what is it getting at?

The Chinese nation and the organization–individual distinction

My intuition fails to supply the wedge in between 2 and 3. Of course, the understanding of individual in 3 does not extend beyond what the understanding of organization in 2 already establishes. The distinction is just about a further metaphysical fact. So it’s not like organization in two is, for example, the Chinese nation, and the individual in three is, for example, a person. Becaue in that case, one can push the person-organization in question back into step 2.

Yes, although I’m not sure if you caught that my Chinese nation example is from philosophy of mind literature.

My point being that the wedge between two and three is built on connotations of organization and individual, but the subconscious mixes the cases. One case is an organization of a nation and the individual nation, and the other case is an organization of a person and the individual person.

Can you incorporate these into the esse section and then see if we need to adapt the rest to account for what we arrived at?

Causal integration and the earlier essays

There is a further nuance. In our “Against functionalism”, we already, at the level of mindedness, were arguing that functional organization is insufficient. In organization, we include causal integration.

The account I meant is in mode_of_being_after_functionalism.md but yes both essays state it.

I changed “This requirement was already part of our account” from “was” to “is” to not imply we worked one out before the other, although actually I did have that setup from the beginning of the blog IIRC.

Separating exposition from response

“Organizational unity is not actuality. The causal integration we require for understanding concerns how memory, inference, regulation, and action constitute a mind. It does not confer existence.” Is this analogous to the ontological proof of God, or how it fails? That the organization, however hypothetically causally integrated, does not bring the hypothetical causation into existence?

An earlier ambiguity is whether we convey Michal as we understand him or our own position.

Since it’s in the exposition of Michal’s concepts and position, we don’t need to get into our reaction yet, especially since we do the objecting later on, no? Genuine question, I’ll let you decide what composition works better.

Sorry

Ah you split the section. I was worried about that, I’m getting tired and I missed that we were doing the addressing already above the paragraph I quoted.

No, go back, sorry that made sense!

Could we end Michal’s section with something like that paragraph at the end of the original joint section, but only the part that voices Michal?

Final preparation

I changed “companion draft” to “companion upcoming essay”. I’m happy with what we arrived at, even if it won’t meet Michal’s standards. Can you do a final pass to prepare for posting? (and it’s not a draft anymore) Then commit, thanks! Aha, and collect my prompts into the .prompts.md file