One post tagged with "Holonomy"

The position in one line: everything has an inside, almost nothing has a mind, and the border between the two is a number you can compute.

For two and a half thousand years philosophers have argued about consciousness, and the argument has produced several dozen mutually exclusive positions, not one of which risks a prediction. That is the part worth refusing. A claim that cannot come out false is not a position — it is a preference with footnotes.

So this one is built to be capable of coming out false. It is derived from a mathematical structure rather than assembled from intuitions and dressed in Latin. If the structure fails, the position falls with it; and if the structure holds, its consequences have to be swallowed whole, including the ones that taste bad. An electron has an "interior" and no consciousness whatsoever [Т]+[П]. A system with no coherence along the axis of feeling — E-coherence, in the notation introduced below — cannot stay alive [Т], though reading that as "zombies are impossible" is an interpretation and not a theorem [И]. Ethics turns out to have formal support in the evolution equation [И]. And death stops being a moment and becomes a process with a measurable threshold [Т].

The name — Coherent Categorical Holonomic Paninteriorism — sounds as though generated by an algorithm trained on continental philosophy dissertations. Alas, each word is necessary, and to remove any one is to lie. The shortened version — Holonomic Paninteriorism — is only marginally kinder but honest.

Below is an attempt to explain what all this means, without condescension to the reader and without mercy toward one's own intuitions.