Inference 5: Metabolizing organisms are the extrinsic appearance of alters of TWE.
The reasoning here is simple: since we only have intrinsic access to ourselves, we are the only structures known to have dissociated streams of inner experiences. We also have good empirical reasons to conclude that normal metabolism is essential for the maintenance of this dissociation, for when it slows down or stops the dissociation
seems to reduce or end (Kastrup 2017a5). These observations alone suggest strongly that metabolizing life is the structure corresponding to alters of TWE.
A
As a matter of fact, these empirically-motivated speculations can be couched in recent theoretical results. Donald Homan’s interface theory of perception (2009, Homan & Singh 2012), for instance, shows that evolution emphasizes perceptual qualities conducive to tness, not to truth. In other words, we have evolved to perceive not the qualities that are really ‘out there’—that is, outside our alter— but just a representation thereof that helps us to survive and reproduce. Homan uses the analogy of a computer desktop: although a computer le is represented in it as e.g. a blue rectangle, this does not mean that the le itself has the qualities of being blue and rectangular. As a matter of fact, the actual le does not have those qualities at all: it is a pattern of open and closed microscopic switches in a silicon chip. In an analogous way, my hypothesis is that the qualities of our perceptions—colors, shapes, sounds, avors, textures, etc.—are not the qualities of the experiences of TWE that surround our alter, but their ‘desktop representation’ instead. Our perceptions do not feel like the thoughts of TWE (see Figure 5.2 again) because a qualitative transition between these two experiential
categories has helped our ancestors survive and reproduce.
A
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