Prolegomena to any kind of knowledge

2.1.19. There is no such thing as a third-person view because no one owns it. It is a fiction created by realists in an attempt to represent a gaze independent of the subject. There are only two views: the first-person view, which is me, and the second-person view, which is the person with whom I am discussing it.

2.1.20. When we try to find the basis of any property or object, we fall into a void. For example, an apple is made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which are made up of elementary particles, which are made up of quarks, whose nature we do not know. This is not a property of “reality,” but rather a property of our explanation of it and our ability to constructively divide everything into discrete parts.

2.1.21. Complex numbers cannot be seen anywhere; they are purely a mental construct that helps us build reasoning and create new ideal models. These models justify themselves not as reflections of reality, but as ways of thinking and building models of reality. We invented uses for them, yet some have claimed that the things to which we applied them are the source of the representation of complex numbers. This ignores the obvious fact that we invented them before we could apply them to describe physical phenomena.

2.1.22. Does the concept of the “average” exist in the world as a phenomenon? We may find an object or phenomenon in the data whose value corresponds to an average relative to all perceived ones. But this is not the average as some special entity, but as an instance of a set with such a particular value. By analogy, we can conclude that concepts such as probability, randomness, infinity, and the past have no direct correspondence in reality. They are merely convenient constructs of the mind that allow us to create schemas for operating the entities of the same mind and instruments in experiments. The average and probability help to deal with the complexity of values in a series by replacing them with a single number that is easier to work with.

2.1.23. Physicists reason about time as follows: we perceive events in time, so time is a characteristic of events (rather than how we perceive them). And even if they agree that these are all representations of sequence as a construct of the mind, they say “but what is behind these representations must also have some kind of sequence”. This is an example of the hypostatizing error – physicists tend to attribute phenomena to the world they investigate than to themselves. Hence, the paradoxes of time arise. Below it will be convincingly shown that time is an artifact resulted from emergence of individual consciousness, while sequence is just one of the abstract schemas of representation.

2.1.24. Physicists are still making discoveries about motion back and forth in time, which suggests that the paradigm of realism, expressed by hypostatizing time as an entity in the world, is not obsolete. Despite more than 300 years of subjective idealism pointing out the illusory nature of our representations, the human psyche still tends to view the world as external. This prevents us from recognizing that our entire imagined world exists only within us.

2.1.25. We use our representations to interact with an assumed world that exists outside our representations, evaluating the results of these actions also based on representations of possible consequences, which forms an endless circle. We are beings, with mentality which goes round in a circle. All that is available to us is the verification of our representations through experience, provided there is a choice of the representation option at the perceptual level which is independent of our will.

2.1.26. Objectivism generates both explanations and contradictions. The wave function describes well the passage of an electron through slits, but it also creates contradictions for our own thinking with the notions of singularity of particles. However, there are no contradictions in the real world (reality). Here is another example. Quantum entanglement contradicts causality as the foundation of our thinking, because causality exists only for us and is necessary just for us, but not for nature, for the capability of prediction. Any theory corresponds only to our experience.

2.1.27. Concepts do not exist beyond us, they are our own constructs. Nothing in the world will change because we invented a new concept. The assertion that concepts exist objectively is as naïve as the claim that fairy tale characters exist in reality. Only children believe in that.

2.2.1. Dualism arises because of the hypostatization of different human representations of the self, such as feelings and physiological processes, as different substances existing in the external world, although both are only internal representations of the same phenomenon, but in different forms. This is the reason for the difficulty of solving the mind – body problem and the existence of an explanatory gap. In constructivism there are different, often incompatible representations of the same thing (and below it will be shown why they are incompatible), but all of them are human representations, constructs of the mind, between which there can be no causal relations as between physical objects, because they mean the same thing, just in a different representation. It is illogical to regard ultrasound of brain and its MRT as discrete entities and to attempt to establish causal relationships between the structures revealed by these methods.

2.2.2 The explanatory gap in the mind – body problem, as the impossibility to deduce from one representation the other, follows from the fact that the two different explanations are based on different basic concepts. Pain and nerve cells, heat and joules, light and photons are not qualitatively deduced from each other either; they are only compared to each other in experience. Pain is defined as a feeling, while the nerve cells that cause it are regarded as microorganisms, light is defined as a sensation, while photons – as physical objects. The explanatory gap occurs wherever different ontologies exist.

2.2.3 For example, sound. It can be generated by means of a circuit constructed by the interconnection of radio parts with a speaker. Sound definitely exists, and we can hear it, but this is a dynamic process that cannot be separated from the radio circuit. On the other hand, you will never find anything resembling sound in the radio circuit itself. There are transistors and capacitors there, but there is nothing that we define as sound. Even a speaker is just a coil and a cone. An explanatory gap exists wherever something is described by different models on different perceptual bases.

2.2.4. One can’t say that there is an objective, and one does not need to try to explain how the subjective is derived from objective. According to constructivism, everything is a representation. One should say that there is the subjective and should explain what we consider intersubjective in it, i.e. concerted and the same for all. For the first humans, the natural attitude meant that everything exists beyond them, and therefore, objectively, even their fantasies about dragons. It was only over time that human realized that dragons were his imagination. Now it is necessary to recognize that everything is our imagination controlled by perception, not just dragon images. And most people share common concepts, which are interpreted as intersubjective.

2.2.5. There is nothing objective, that is, nothing independent of the perceiver. Everything we know takes place in someone’s mind. Without an observer there is no representation. Without a representation, there is no knowledge. And if we agreed with someone to call something so-and-so, then when it happens, it is intersubjective (collective subjective) which is called “objective”. Even a blind man can agree with a sighted man on the color of things he has never seen. The world as implied by representations is an agreement with others about its existence. However, it must be remembered that it exists only in the representations of each. These representations are agreed through common practice. While, subjective is the representation, which is realized as belonging to me.

2.2.6. The objective is the collective subjective. It is given to us in no other way than through the belief that what I see can be seen by others. It is our accepted agreement that we are talking about the same thing. It is what others see and call the same thing. Here is a red apple in front of me. It is an objective image, on the one hand, it is seen by others, it can be eaten. But, on the other hand, there is no “red” in the world, it is a subjective representation. It follows that I see both subjective and objective at the same time. This is the paradox that creates dualism. Realism has no answer to this paradox.

2.2.7. Even in the nature of living there are different representations of the same thing. The senses cannot all be in the same modality because they cannot convey information simultaneously. These modalities complement each other – the sound of breaking branches in a forest tells us as much about danger as the sight of the large animal that caused these sound. With insufficient information we would lose a lot to prediction and confidence – when I can’t see, I can hear and predict the yet unseen. But that is why they are incompatible – one can’t convey sound with color so it doesn’t interfere with it. And signs of certain modality are related by certain pattern, such as color or tone. By means of speech we construct many more different representations and models, than nature does.

2.2.8 Objectivists agree that representations belong to us; however, their structure and meaning reflect the external world, as in the laws of physics. However, this is paradoxical thinking because the meanings of the numbers that make up the laws of physics do not exist in the world. You cannot point to them by finger.

2.2.9. The thesis that all our representations are subjective constructs can be substantiated by the following mental experiment. Imagine that my skull was opened and I was provided with a mirror to observe my own brain. The image of the brain scientists would consider objective. It’s what the doctors around me see as well. But let’s take an electrode and insert it into the area of the visual cortex which is responsible for color perception. I can see where it is stuck in my brain. And suppose the doctors hit just the red perception neuron in a certain visual field. What happens? A red spot will appear in front of my eyes, and I will be aware of the red qualia. This subjective redness will overlap the objective picture of the brain that caused it. However, doctors will not be able to discern this redness; however, they may possess their own “overlaps”. What inferences can be drawn from this phenomenon? This phenomenon signifies that the redness is primary in our perception. It is primary, which is only later related by us to what we call objective or subjective according to completely different criteria (belonging to everyone or belonging only to ourselves).

2.2.10. I see a picture in front of me, and I know how my eye is organized so that I can see it. However, the construction of the eye does not give the sensation of seeing. This is the difference between the process itself and a model of the process. One cannot get the vision in the model. From the vision one cannot see the process itself, which gives the effect of seeing. Therefore, one can feel and observe only by being part of the process, being within the process. One can study and analyze the process itself only from the outside. This is the only reason in differentiating between objective and subjective approaches. However, these are not different substances, these are different models of the same process with different data – how it is felt from the inside and how it is seen from the outside. And to know about the process from the inside allows only consciousness as a process carried out after the realized process, which will be written about further.

2.2.11. Anyone who has been fond of radio circuits knows that it is impossible to create a color music which would response in the tact of the melody we hear, because the radio circuit responses only to the frequency and amplitude of the flow of sound waves. The concept of “phrases” and “moves” in music, that is, musical patterns, is recognized by humans, rather than by radio circuitry. This is due to the human ability to recognize the correspondence of information to any of our subjective models, rather than input information.

2.3.1. There is an opinion that all information programs and devices are based on the processing of input information. However, this can also be interpreted as the transformation of an input signal into another signal. This transformation does not contain “information” in the sense of knowledge; rather, it is our interpretation of the transformation. For example, filtering can be seen as a form of the signal classification. If there is a classification, then the classifier must contain a model of the class, whether passive or constructive, such as a filter or resonator in a radio circuit. The input signal is merely an entity that undergoes selection in the classifier. If the signal “passes” the filter, it is interpreted as receiving “information”. This is just a signal processing as a series of transformations of the input signal. The information is actually contained within the filter or resonator as a model of what we call information. We only determine whether the input signal falls within this model or not.

2.3.2. How much information is in one megabyte? It’s a silly question because it could be one megabyte of noise. The amount of information we can obtain depends not on the source but on the models by which we perceive this megabyte as meaningful information. Reading a text requires not only the words in the book but also knowledge of their meaning.

2.3.3. Information theory is incorrect. What is information? From a constructivist standpoint, there is no flow of information from objects to subject. This notion is absurd because it assumes that knowledge depends only on the object and is outside the subject, and to see this, one has only to take a closer look. But how can one read without knowing the meaning of words? How can one learn about an object without first having a model to represent it? If we were to perceive the world directly as it is, education would not be necessary. For example, reading would not depend on knowledge of a primer. A text can be written in the sand, on a blackboard, or on a sheet of paper. This would be the same text, although the information is quite different. If all knowledge is contained in space, nature, or the book pages, why couldn’t we transform it into knowledge as early as in the times of ancient China? Still, it’s clear that in order to read a book, one must first learn letters and words, i.e., acquire a language model. The information flow carries something else, rather than information about the object itself. It carries changes that transform our internal model into one of its possible states. This process is called “information acquisition” and will be explained in the following chapters.

2.3.4. The information processing metaphor is incorrect. This metaphor originated with the transmission of a scroll containing text. We still believe that we obtain all information from objects that transmit the scroll to us in the form of photons and other physical impacts. But then people back in ancient Greece would have perceived all the knowledge about the stars and planets that we have only learned from Copernicus. In response, it is said that information from objects is processed, or encoded; that is, individual pieces of information are linked into images and concepts. Actually, we all know that to read books, the books themselves are not enough; one needs to know a primer and the meaning of words. But what is a primer? It’s not just individual letters; it’s a way of linking them into words so that we can read them. It is only because of this pattern that we can read a text. Therefore, it is logical to assume that new knowledge is not determined by the information flow from the subject, but rather by the schema itself, which determines the possible letter combinations in a text sequence.

2.3.5. The fewer letters are available, the fewer possible words there are. This does not depend on the object of perception, i.e. a book. If the words are written with letters you don’t know, you won’t be able to read them and won’t receive any information. In other words, the amount of information you can potentially obtain from an object depends solely on the schema of this object and its resolving power, which is determined by the number of possible combinations in the schema. Due to such potential combinations a schema as a model, contains all possible words in advance. This is a combinatorial set of m by n variants because the length of words is limited by our pronunciation and memory abilities.

2.3.6. When we transmit information through speech or text, we alter the state of interlocutor’s model. Each spoken word is a selection from among all possible word choices that the interlocutor can expect from us. We perceive the choice of a model variant as receiving information.

2.3.7. Traditional information theory is not a theory of value transfer; rather, it is a theory of the transfer of changes in the form of switches between model variants (their density, speed, and loss). Therefore, white noise is the most “informative” transmission because it does not fit any model and has the largest number of differences between pixels, even though it itself carries no information.

2.3.8. Is a bit a unit of information? No, a bit is merely a 0—1 trigger for anything. A bit itself does not carry information because it cannot be decoded without interpretation within a model. It could be information about an elephant or Mars.

2.3.9 The amount of information depends more on the discriminating power of the models the subject has than on the information flow from the object. We can increase the amount of information about an object simply by adjusting the resolution of the model as a device. It is the model that allows us to distinguish between different variants of an object. The name of an object is a generalization of its possible variants, some of which we have even not seen yet, as will be discussed later.

2.3.10. Systems built on the “information processing” paradigm which are completely dependent on input, cannot recognize noisy, distorted, or modified models, such as a syllogism. These systems have difficulty computing them from the interrelation of the seme input values. Constructivism, instead of a processing paradigm, involves finding a model or combination of models that fit a set of input features through similar semes. In fact, no information processing system can identify inputs without explicitly incorporating a model of what it is supposed to recognize into its design. This applies to everything, be it a radio receiver or a computer. Neural networks learn the models themselves, but only through large-scale simulation without the possibility of learning, that is, only by recognizing the input pattern without the possibility of creating new models during use. Therefore, such systems cannot recognize anything beyond what is embedded in them in advance. They can perform only minimal smoothing. Systems based on the constructive approach can create models and recognize a set of input features based on the principles described in this book.

2.3.11. According to information processing theory, information enters the brain and is encoded into sensations. However, this encoding poses a problem when trying to explain how objective information transforms into subjective sensation. This is an unsolvable mind – body problem in the information paradigm. A simpler explanation is that there is no recoding; rather, the brain generates sensations as prediction models, while perception serving only to confirm it.

2.3.12. Motion perception is also prediction rather than information processing. Otherwise, how could one fail to perceive an approaching car when input information is clearly present on the retina at every moment? A person cannot perceive motion in rare cases, such as when a car approaches him unexpectedly on the road. In other words, he does not expect to see the car in front of him the next moment after seeing it in the distance. A sense of motion is a time-based prediction of a new position at the next moment, verified through perception. When the prediction is incorrect, the change in position becomes unexpected.

2.3.13. Now, we know that color perception is not so much the processing of a wavelength, but the generation of a color of a point in relation to its surroundings on a color wheel. Information processing theory could not explain why despite different wavelengths illuminating and reflecting from different parts of the picture, we see colors as permanent. An explanation is possible only if we accept that color is a relationship between neighboring colors according to the schema of opponent colors. Without neighboring colors, any color strip under any illumination will appear gray to us.

2.4.1. The reference theory is incorrect. We are not comparing signs, meanings, and referents, but rather signs as pointers and nominations of subjects and meanings as the relations of these signs to other signs in the model of the subject in the same or another modality. There is nothing more here than the indicated relationship of signs in the model of the subject, because the subject is not a sign, but an interrelation of signs describing the subject in one way or another. The sign of the subject merely serves to concisely express it, but description as meaning is always implied when pronouncing the name of the subject.

2.4.2. When describing what we see or hear using words, we describe in the modality of words what we see in the modality of colors and lines. Colors are just as much “words” as regular words in the modality of speech. They make up the “text” of a picture. One can only talk about relating one description to another. Speech is universal as a way of description – it can be used to name and describe both color and sound, but not vice versa. It is this capability of speech that distinguishes people from those who do not command speech. One cannot separate a fact and its description as something objective that has happened from its explanation and description.

2.4.3. The notion of truth became obsolete. A sentence cannot always be true because its meaning lies in its interpretation, which can differ for different people, in different models, and thus cannot be unambiguous as truth is supposed to be. This is possible only in a strictly formalized system where the variables in formulas have an unambiguous interpretation. In this case, it is possible to have coherent truth within this formalism. In all other cases, it is impossible to speak of any truth as the “God’s viewpoint” seeing the only true state of affairs. All facts of the world are subjective because they constitute the content of our consciousness rather than objective reality.

2.5.1. What is constructivism in simple terms? It is the idea that we do not perceive the world as it is through our eyes and other senses, but rather, we actively construct it in our representations, which we then verify through experience. It is the concept that we cannot have direct access to the world without the mediation of our own representations of it. There is simple evidence for this: our eyes only give us a clear, colored picture in a small focal area. The rest of the picture is blurry and less colorful. Yet, we see everything in color. This is because our brain generates a full-color image so that we can see everything in color and make more informed decisions about how to proceed in a given situation.

2.5.2. Our perception of the world depends entirely on the schemas by which we construct our representation of it. This concept is well exemplified by the dual illusion. Depending on what you are willing to see, you will first notice one of the two images, even though only one image is in front of you. Furthermore, it may take you a very long time to see the second image. But it is worthwhile to give you a pointer of the schema, that is, to tell you what image is still there, and you will immediately notice what you did not see in the same image at point-blank range. The schema of representation will suddenly turn on like a light! This means that the schema completely determines what you see. This also applies to physics, which “sees” through the mathematical schemas. If you don’t have a schema for a process, you can’t build an experiment to measure a phenomenon. The schema defines only what you can observe rather than the object itself. The schema serves as the “optics” of our cognition.