Belief in things unseen... Haptics as primary

I wrote a post recently in the jsc-online (Yahoo Group) which started out on the spiritual thin ice but that, after a fashion, did circle around to uncover some interesting possibilities. The overall gist is that the general consensus seems to be that vision is a dominant sense and it seems to be electromagnetically active and ..therefore most everyone's conclusion is.. consciousness ought to be electromagnetic leading to the various electromagnetic/quantum_whatever theories and models about consciousness.


Considering the various senses, though -- touch, taste, smell, hearing -- these all look, feel, and are quite haptic and/or involving structural, molecular steric hindrance sorts of influences. While we may be  familiar with various "holographic models" which invoke strong "visual" associations, consider the more intriguing and agreeable situation where "visual" does turn out to be, like the other senses, working on a subtle haptic -- molecular torquing. Yes we can attempt a more complex electromagnetic/dynamic description, but look what happens when we don't, when we settle in with just the haptics.


This sort of thinking gets us to the one common (haptic/tactile) category and it also opens a doorway to getting to a direct, common "subjective feel" as to why we have the "subjective feels" that we do. Granted, of course, doing this re-arrangement is fairly easy and strongly in line with my standard "structured duality" party line and with ...imagining consciousness ...as a single internal analog language made of ordered water forged during respiration in concert with experience...Various "pressures and torques" ebb and flow. It's hard not to notice the associated subjective feels...

Perhaps you see or feel the point. If people walk around saying and thinking "La-la-la, I am a visual thinker..." (akin to saying, "the sun is rising") and then go about trying to figure out a visually-centered (~electromagnetic/quantum-based) model of consciousness when all of consciousness is really subtly or more grossly haptic, one could probably guess that the visually-centered models actually would not make much sense or converge on a clear, rational "solution".

Getting to such a common, correct functional categorization, if it continues to test out and propagate well, seems to have interesting traction with the so-called "binding problem. It is as though we would be waking up from the mis-understanding that creates the "hard problem" (accounting for subjectivity) and the "binding problem" (paraphrased here as how to integrate mixed haptic/electromagnetic impressions: solution -> don't try, since there is only the haptic level of torquing).

If you really start to think rationally ;-) noticing that we do respire and in the process generate a flow of about 1.55x10^20 water molecules per second (body-wide) which, through structured duality provide a natural internal 6^n representational/associative lingo. Given this perhaps new fact, what begins to make sense is our haptic *feelings* ARE our primary and truly dominant language which places our oh-so-elegant-and-much-loved intellectual/wordy/rational-visual impressions and expressions in a widly secondary position. Intuitively, this gives a beginning to a different sort of solution to the binding problem -- or provides a necessary and much-needed ~unbinding or better, a slight correction in the overall, big picture conceptual modeling regarding human consciousness...
Does the sun actually rise, or does the Earth rotate? Which theory is more accurate?

Such a question or insight leads, I think, to a wonderful level of intense ambiguity which is also, obviously present in the (haptic) internal ordered water analog language (andphysically exemplified in magnetic tetrahedra). Attractions and repulsions are in nested structural arrangement. Yes, we have developed various words, names and labels for all the various stuff (other levels of structured duality), but when we look close (feel* carefully), our secondary word signals arise from the common vibrating haptics. We can cling to the hope of their rational *feel* providing a saving grace, or we can turn and stand and face directly into the wind and notice that saving grace actually does come from another, non-natural source.

Climbing back on the hummock of having a mixed haptic/"visual" system, or dozing off in that sort of dream might be attractive to some participants. Fundamentally, though, once we formulate even a sloppily configured, approximate, somewhat accurate SINGLE internal language we find oursleves on delightfully shaky and uncertain grounds. Our rational words merely create a sense of greater security.

It's an interesting state of affairs, what a single internal analog language buys us. Translating things into the more complicated "quantun mechanics" or cascading "quantum gravitational" models of consciousness, doesn't really improve things much if at all, particularly if that uncertain layer has to hook up with protein folding and replication levels of organization at some point in the discussion. Better to make the model only as complex as it needs to be.

Think about it.