Tag: experience

How MEOW Turns a Metaphysical Mountain Into a Linguistic Molehill

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In the last post, I argued that the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness‘ was never a problem with consciousness. It was a problem with language – specifically, the English language’s unfortunate habit of carving the world into neat little substances and then demanding to know why its own divisions won’t glue back together.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic, on resolving the hard problem of consciousness.

The response was predictable.

  • ‘But what about subjective feel?’
  • ‘What about emergence?’
  • ‘What about ontology?’
  • ‘What about Chalmers?’
  • ‘What about that ineffable thing you can’t quite point at?’

All fair questions. All built atop the very framing that manufactures the illusion of a metaphysical gap.

So here’s the promised demonstration: not yet a full essay (though it may evolve into one), but a clear application of MEOW – the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – to the hard problem itself. Consider this a field test of the framework. A tidy autopsy, not the funeral oration.

The Set-Up: Chalmers’ Famous Trick

Chalmers asks:

How do physical processes give rise to experience?

The question feels profound only because the terms ‘physical’ and ‘experience’ smuggle in the very metaphysics they pretend to interrogate. They look like opposites because the grammar makes them opposites. English loves a comforting binary.

But MEOW doesn’t bother with the front door. It doesn’t assume two substances – ‘mind’ over here, ‘world’ over there – and then panic when they refuse to shake hands. It treats experience as the way an encounter manifests under a layered architecture of mediation. There’s no bridge. Only layers.

T₀ – Biological Mediation

The body is not a barrier. It is the encounter’s first architecture.

At T₀, the world is already transformed: transduction, gating, synchrony, inhibition, adaptation. Organisms don’t receive ‘raw’ physical inputs. They metabolise them. The form of contact is biological before it is anything else.

The hard problem begins by assuming there’s a realm of dumb physical mechanisms that somehow need to ‘produce’ experience. But organisms do not encounter dumb mechanism. They encounter structured contact –biological mediation – from the first millisecond.

If you insist on thinking in substances, T₀ looks like a problem.
If you think in mediations, it looks like the beginning of sense-making.

T₁ – Cognitive Mediation

Where the Enlightenment saw a window, cognition installs a newsroom.

Prediction, priors, memory, inference, attention – all shaping what appears and what never makes it into view. Experience at T₁ is not something ‘added’. It is the organisational structure of the encounter itself.

The hard problem treats ‘experience’ as a mysterious extra–something floating atop neural activity like metaphysical cream. But at T₁, what appears as experience is simply the organisation of biological contact through cognitive patterns.

There is no ‘what emerges from the physical’. There is the way the encounter is organised.

And all of this unfolds under resistance – the world’s persistent refusal to line up neatly with expectation. Prediction errors, perceptual limits, feedback misfires: this constraint structure prevents the entire thing from collapsing into relativist soup.

T₂ – Linguistic–Conceptual Mediation

Here is where the hard problem is manufactured.

This is the layer that takes an ordinary phenomenon and turns it into a metaphysical puzzle. Words like ‘experience’, ‘physical’, ‘mental’, ‘subjective’, and ‘objective’ pretend to be carved in stone. They aren’t. They slide, drift, and mutate depending on context, grammar, and conceptual lineage.

The hard problem is almost entirely a T₂ artefact – a puzzle produced by a grammar that forces us to treat ‘experience’ and ‘physical process’ as two different substances rather than two different summaries of different mediational layers.

If you inherit a conceptual architecture that splits the world into mind and matter, of course you will look for a bridge. Language hands you the illusion and then refuses to refund the cost of admission.

T₃ – Cultural–Normative Mediation

The Western problem is not the world’s problem.

The very idea that consciousness is metaphysically puzzling is the product of a specific cultural lineage: Enlightenment substance dualism (even in its ‘materialist’ drag), Cartesian leftovers, empiricist habits, and Victorian metaphysics disguised as objectivity.

Other cultures don’t carve the world this way. Other ontologies don’t need to stitch mind back into world. Other languages simply don’t produce this problem.

The hard problem is not a universal insight. It’s a provincial glitch.

Reassembling the Encounter

Once you run consciousness through the mediational layers, the hard problem dissolves:

  • Consciousness is not an emergent property of neural complexity.
  • Consciousness is not a fundamental property of the universe.
  • Consciousness is the reflexive mode of certain mediated encounters, the form the encounter takes when cognition, language, and culture become part of what is appearing.

There is no gap to explain because the ‘gap’ is the product of a linguistic–conceptual framework that splits where the world does not.

As for the ever-mystical ‘what-it’s-like’: that isn’t a metaphysical jewel buried in the brain; it is the way a T₀–T₃ architecture manifests when its own structure becomes reflexively available.

A Brief Disclaimer Before the Internet Screams

Pointing out that Chalmers (and most of modern philosophy) operates within a faulty ontology is not to claim MEOW is flawless or final. It isn’t. But if Occam’s razor means anything, MEOW simply removes one unnecessary supposition — the idea that ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are independent substances in need of reconciliation. No triumphalism. Just subtraction.

Where This Leaves Chalmers

Chalmers is not wrong. He’s just asking the wrong question. The hard problem is not a metaphysical insight. It’s the moment our language tripped over its shoelaces and insisted the pavement was mysterious.

MEOW doesn’t solve the hard problem. It shows why the hard problem only exists inside a linguistic architecture that can’t model its own limitations.

This piece could easily grow into a full essay – perhaps it will. But for now, it does the job it needs to: a practical demonstration of MEOW in action.

And, arguably more important, it buys me one more day of indexing.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Perfect and Relative Pitch and Reality

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Perception of Reality™ is akin to having relative pitch. Unlike pitch, where some people have perfect pitch – the ability to name a note or chordal composition without any other reference – it is unlikely that anyone has or will have access to objective reality – analogically: perfect pitch for reality.

As I’ve mentioned, I believe that all our experiences and interactions with reality are relative, if not wholly subjective. There may exist an objective reality, but for reasons already noted – cognitive and sense perception deficits –, we can never access it.

Musically, If someone plays and identifies a reference note, say A (or do in movable do solfège), and then plays a major fifth above (or sol), a person with relative pitch can hear that fifth interval and identify it as an E. Everything is about relationships. In music, the relationships are intervalic, but we know where we are based on where we’ve been. A person with perfect pitch requires no such priming. They can identify the first A note without prompting.

Our experience with reality is also relative, but no one has the equivalence of perfect pitch. No one has access to objective reality – if there even is one.

I don’t deny that there could be an objective reality. I just believe it’s inaccessible. I am a qualified realist – so, not a physicalist –, but I don’t believe in supernatural or paranormal events. A so-called ‘supernatural’ event is merely an event that hasn’t yet been described in ‘natural’ terms.

Now that I got that off my chest, what are your thoughts on objective reality? Lemme know.

Underrepresented Class

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Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content

I’ve just finished reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, having paused The Matter with Things to put it to bed. The book is divided into two sections. The first lays down the neuroscientific base whilst the second contains expository forrays. Technically, one might argue that there are three sections as the last unnumbered chapter seems to stand alone from the second part. It’s only one chapter containing some 36 pages, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. But this will not be a book review, as highly recommended as it is.

I’ve been a vocal proponent of hiring neurodiverse people into certain roles. Having read the book and absorbed the rationale, it’s easy to see how it aligns with and supports some of my own experiences. In particular, I’ve noticed that many companies hire autism spectrum on the Aspergers end of the scale. These people tend to be hired into IT and programming roles—functions already having reputations for being staffed with socially awkward and low EQ individuals, characteristics of people on the spectrum. It makes sense because left-hemisphere-dominant managers evaluate this hyper-left-hemisphere-dominant cohort as assets. Without getting too deep into the territory of stereotypes, in general, this group are laser-focused and doggedly pursue tasks at hand without tiring. I’ve met plenty of ADHD-diagnosed people in these roles, too—not as many, but also employed in technology-oriented positions.

The underrepresented class are right-hemisphere-dominant people. To be fair, I’ve encountered many Creative people in Agencies, but their right-hemisphere life is separate from their left and not appreciated in the workplace. They mainly exercise their right-hemisphere life outside of office hours on personal passion projects. I’d also be willing to bet that these people are not truly right-hemisphere-dominant. Rather, they have the ability to balance and allow the left hemisphere to take over during business hours.

In some cases, these people happen to have right-hemisphere insights into a project or have some creative inspiration off hours to benefit the work of the next day. But the right hemisphere is not time-boxed. It doesn’t function on demand. In fact, it shuts down on demand, and the left introduces bootleg knock-offs. Of course, this doesn’t matter, as it is probably better than their left-hemisphere managers and clients and good enough in their eyes. I’m not convinced they’d actually recognise the right-hemisphere solution as better because the left hemisphere prefers its own tribe anyway.

If you are reading this and you are saying, “They’re running a business. They can’t wait for weeks or months for a resource to have the epiphany of a creative solution,” you’ve made my point, and you’ve presented strong evidence that you are operating from your left hemisphere as well. There’s no shame in this. The first step is to admit there’s a problem.

My point is not to antagonise left-hemisphere-dominant people or the fact that they’re at home with other like-minded people. It’s only natural. They usually find right-hemisphere types to be too eccentric for their taste anyway.

But these right- or balanced-hemisphere thinkers, not given the space for their right-hemisphere to yield benefit, are likely in a Creative function, whether in art, illustration, copywriting, or some such. They are like unicorns outside of this context.

As for me, I am at times balanced and at times left. At other times, I’m purely right, though this is admittedly short-lived and unsustainable. But in a balanced state—in a right-shifted mode—, this is where my Gestalt comes into play. One of my roles is to evaluate processes. The left hemisphere analyses in components and pieces. Taking an analytical approach, I can document that the knee bone is connected to the shin bone and the shin bone is connected to the ankle bone and so on, but this requires context, something the left hemisphere is weak at. The left hemisphere will tell us that this is the bone connexion process, as it were. But it’s more than this. It’s meaningless without musculature and connective tissue and a nervous system and a circulatory system. And we’d likely want the person to whom the bones belong to be alive. And how do these bones contribute to function and perambulation? This is a larger system thinking approach.

System thinking is a recommendation for looking at processes, but this is right-hemisphere activity. Most people asked to perform this are left-hemisphere-dominant, so they give it short-shrift.

At the end of this rant, my point is that I hear all about equity, diversity, and inclusion, but this cohort is not only underrepresented but almost nonexistent. To be fair, many of these people wouldn’t feel comfortable behind your walls anyway, aren’t likely to prefer the constraint of your walls, and they’d probably feel like outsiders. But this is the challenge with true inclusion.

Classes are a left-hemisphere operation at the start—male, female, black, white, L, B, G, T, and so on. These are left-hemisphere constructs. But since you are already stuck in this place anyway, let’s consider expanding the neurodiverse class to include right-hemisphere people.

Design and Purpose

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This viral TikTok by @viral_actor demonstrates with humour how designs and purposes don’t always coincide. The narrative of the clip is that the woman on the left designed a shape sorting toy. Metaphorically, we could assume that the design is the user interface for some software application or game.

The tester, in the right frame, ‘tests’ the interface. One way of testing is to provide the tester with a purpose and little else, as this is how much people will approach a new product. It’s quite likely that the instruction was to put the shapes into the bin. The design, on the other hand, was supposed to pair a unique avenue for each block shape (in a particular orientation) with each opening through which to insert the shape.

Let’s be clear, the user who inserts the blocks ‘incorrectly’ relative to the design is doing nothing wrong (morally or kinetically). The problem is that the designer had an intent in mind and didn’t consider full domain of possibilities. This interface design can be improved to solve for the unique 1:1 piece-hole relationship. In fact, the testing feedback provides input for an engineering—or interface design—solution.

The tester, having been giving the task of putting blocks in a bin might be justified in entertaining the belief that the best design might have been a lidless bin—or that a single hole would have sufficed.

In this case, the video producer is employing humour, so we can ignore that an adult is not likely to be the target audience would probably be infants or to test persons for visual-spatial perception. If this is the case, the tester group should necessarily be infants. Below, we can see a similar problem, again using humour.

The parents are overjoyed to see their infant distracted by the hanging mobile. Little did they anticipate the enduring trauma it would commence.

Most people with experience in the design space have seen many of these design faux pas. Here are some design-experience chestnuts. Notice the common thread. It’s also good to remember our maths lessons: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line—as evidenced axiomatically by the hypotenuse is the square root of the sum of the squares, and so will always be shorter for any right angle (and even this slightly obtuse rendition). Thanks for that, Pythagoras.

Next, we have evidence that a designer created a barrier against bicycle traffic. To be fair, it did deter bicycle traffic from that path, but somehow I don’t think that was the sole intent. I’ll also imagine that the designed footpath route is as well travelled as the alternate path.

Design versus Experience
Please Use Sidewalk

For the image above, it seems that the path traversers (users) should put up their own sign, but for now they protest performatively.

Below, we see an intentional and mostly effective design meant to keep bicycle riders off of this footbridge.

None Shall Pass

One final note is to illustrate the difference between user interface design (UI) and user experience design. At teh top, we see two catsup (ketchup?) bottles. The traditional design on the left opens at the top and would not balance well upside down. On the right, the bottle opens down, and it sets well in this orientation. (To be fair, I’ve stored the top-right bottle upside down in my fridge, so perhaps a visual signal, say a narrower top, might obviate this habit.

At the bottom, we see the experiential result of the interface design: The age-old challenge of getting the product out of the bottle on the left versus the instance on the right. It also appears that the narrow top of the left design was intentional to slow the flow, so perhaps widening the aperture may have countered that requirement. The righthand design does have an even smaller aperture, but the egress is broader until that point, and the orientation must compensate for it.

We’ve also seen this design carry over to shampoo bottles.

So there you have it…

The Value of Experience

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I hear people say this:

Experience is more important than material wealth because you can’t take it with you.

This is silly on so many levels.

Firstly, you can’t take experiences with you any more than you can take material, so the entire logic is faulty.

Secondly, although unsaid, this is typically uttered by those who equate experience with travel to other places, and so one needs some notion of material wealth to do so.

Thirdly, just being alive and somewhat aware is an experience, but I understand the notion implies a diversity of experience.

Fourthly, you still can’t take it with you.

Personally, I love aphorisms, those near-phatic quips that no one really thinks about, yet they feel that these are somehow guiding principles.

Opposites attract.

versus

Like attracts like.

Which of these is correct?

In fact, each of these statements may be correct; it simply depends on context. The issue is that people spout these off to make a point.

Opposites attract is how we justify when two unexpected people, for example, are together. It is also the basis behind the Jungian anima-animus concept.

Like attracts like may be either to justify why person A is with person B, but it sometimes further is meant to imply a sort of guilt by association.

The other issue is one of dimension. When applied to people, they are multidimensional. So which dimension is opposite and which is like. Of course, we’ll choose the dimension that fits our purposes.

Perhaps a 172 cm brunette woman is a police officer has a life partner who is a 172 cm blonde man, who is a criminal, and who both enjoy art museums.

Without specifying what percentage the likeness needs to be to qualify,
if like truly attracted like, wouldn’t the 172 cm brunette policewoman be attracted to another 172 cm brunette policewoman? Or would just another taller policewoman be good enough?

Anyway, nothing earth-shattering here. This is simply another example of the imprecision of language. That, and I couldn’t sleep.