Awareness of experience is of a second or higher order from that would seems to allow it to function at all.
It is systemic, which means it can be objectively broken in Parts that allow it to function – in every part it could be broken – and yet as long as it continues to run _as a whole_ (as one unit), it can all seem perfectly normal.
And it is normal – for that system. So long as it remains a system and functions as a system, if the mechanisms that allow awareness of experience continue to work together, regardless of how optimum their functioning is to an external metric, it can have *some* measure of many experiences in common in *some* fashion.
But what is that measure?
Sensory modalities are highly interchangeable because they are all translated into a similar language : and this would be true if the nervous system was made up of sticks and rubber bands.
If you ask a blind person what something looks like, they can tell you what it looks like to them. Language is a higher order feature that is Loosely coupled to that which allows it to happen, as is one’s internal language of whatever nature that is – The inner languages of dogs and cats and such
is awareness of experience constructed of this inner language? what are the minimum features of this inner communication that allow for some fundamental awareness experience?
it’s very possible the key pieces of what I wrote are incorrect. maybe the substrate *is* it; perhaps awareness of experience is only possible in a bioelectrochemical system that evolved as it did. but I believe it’s all of the many robust redundancies in the system itself that allows for awareness of experience to function in such a large variety of configurations
perhaps it is the freely spinning parts of the system – the noisiness – that is the true substrate upon which the inner language of awareness of experience is constructed in a higher order than the noise it is made from.
it is possible that this (the freely spinning parts) is what allows us to make computers and systems of logic and mathematics and other seemingly decoupled from us – or loosely coupled to us – patterned information systems (that is, more tightly coupled to itself, like a reduced broth) that have a life of their own in a sense.
they are constructed of thought.
we create imitation thinking systems
even before we created electromechanical systems like computers, these imitation thinking systems are things like logic and philosophy and mathematics and many other cohesive sense-making fields.
sense making
resolvers
constructors
pattern makers.
patterns which are of a higher order than noise which allows other patterns to be build on top of it.
this is as true with physical systems as it is within our systems created of thought.
they are not simply patterns because we think they are patterns
physical systems form into common shapes and configurations, and behaviors that repeat that are built upon these common shapes and configurations occur regularly.
there’s a frustrated push and pull between order and disorder
order decoupled from disorder is dead
order loosely coupled with disorder is functional and intelligent
order tightly coupled with disorder creates … creates.. what does it create? novel affordances? packets of prior ordered systems that can be used by more loosely disordered systems (ordered but highly flexible) to create new ordered systems that can leverage packets from prior ordered systems that were partially torn asunder by being too tightly coupled to disorder

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