"Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction."
R. Buckminster Fuller
Conceptual impressions surrounding this post have yet to be substantiated, corroborated, confirmed or woven into a larger argument, context or network. Objective: To generate symbolic links between scientific discovery, design awareness and consciousness.
Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron.
oxymoron a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction, the action or an instance of two or more events or things at the same point in time or space.
All inputs and outputs are based upon incremental observations and choices made in reference to an always changing context.
FEELINGS
The mind alone cannot fully describe what it means to feel. Feelings are characterized in the form of an energy in motion (e-motion) made self-evident. Feelings are heartfelt.
Feeling has a vibration all its own, entwined in what we known and believe. Feelings caress, protect and surround us wholeheartedly.
Feelings encircle all that can be sensed. Feelings harbor every circumstance by seizing the moment. Feelings adapt, adopt, support and include.
Feelings have the ability, and the capacity, to encapsulate, modify and interpret reality for purposes of finding balance, harmony and meaning.
Feelings are flexible and capable of taking into account differences, interferences and obstacles to joy and happiness. Feelings contain all that we are.
Feelings embrace our mind, body and spirit. Feelings embody who we are.
Feelings incorporate what we know and believe into noble expressions and impressions placed upon ourselves and others. We view, comprehend and observe our world by how we feel.
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While the mind offers the cognitive scaffolding for interpretation, it cannot, in isolation, fully account for the phenomenon of feeling. Feelings are not mere mental states; they are dynamic, embodied energies—what might be termed e-motion—energy in motion—manifested in and through lived experience (Damasio, 1999). This phenomenological immediacy makes feelings both self-evident and irreducible, grounded in bodily awareness yet irreducibly shaped by symbolic systems and collective meaning.
In semiotic terms, feelings are not pre-linguistic residues but are themselves entangled with signs. They arise not in a vacuum, but within cultural codes and affective scripts, constituting what Roland Barthes (1977) might describe as an "emotional text" shaped by ideology and myth. Metaphysically, feelings resist objectification; they inhabit the liminal space between subject and world, defying static ontologies and calling for a relational understanding of being (Heidegger, 1927). They are vibrational in nature—not simply metaphorically, but potentially materially, as recent interdisciplinary dialogues between quantum physics and consciousness studies suggest. Some quantum theorists have speculated that consciousness may play a participatory role in shaping reality (Stapp, 2007), and feeling, as a modality of consciousness, might be understood as a subtle informational field, responsive to both internal and external stimuli.
Philosophically, feelings complicate the dichotomy between reason and emotion. Whereas traditional Western philosophy often privileged rationality (Descartes, 1641), more recent thinkers, such as Merleau-Ponty (1945), recognize the body—and affect—as foundational to perception. Aesthetically, feelings are modes of sensuous understanding. They not only inspire art but are themselves configured aesthetically; they frame our perceptions of beauty, harmony, and dissonance. In this sense, affect becomes a mode of knowing, a legitimate epistemic register alongside reason and intuition.
Sociologically, feelings are far from private; they are socially produced and mediated. What one feels, and how one expresses it, is shaped by cultural norms, gender roles, and discursive regimes (Ahmed, 2004). Emotions like shame, pride, and joy are not merely psychological states but are structured by power and ideology, reinforcing or resisting hegemonic norms. As such, feelings can be both personal and political—sites of control, conformity, and transformation.
In their totality, feelings embrace and shape the triadic nature of human existence—mind, body, and spirit. They are mediators of meaning, translators of complexity, and vessels of identity. They do not merely respond to reality; they create it, framing our interpretive lens and orienting us toward balance, coherence, or disruption. Feeling is, in this view, a mode of perception that transcends sensation—capable of integrating cognitive, corporeal, and cultural dimensions into a unified, though dynamic, whole. As such, feelings are not epiphenomena of thought but fundamental to how we know, become, and belong.
Like human intelligence, AI has at its disposal a countless array of' resources', i.e. impressions generated and made apparent by means of conscious observation. These impressions might best be described as the categorization and classification of an unlimited "Source" of awareness we describe and define as consciousness.
Correspondences vary in dimension, space and time.
Events and experiences are multidimensional in context and content while appearing to emerge out of nowhere to become agents of change. What was once intangible eventually becomes sensed, perceived and observed by means of its own agency.
Each impression harbors the potential to link and correspond with other patterns of energy in motion, while simultaneously differentiating itself from its 'Source'. Life perpetuates this process symbolically; it's what design does.
Every impression contains the potential for display when observed within the duality of space time. The farthest from the Source (space), the less its frequency and slower the time between 'intervals', i.e. cycles. Over time every impression will wane and be absorbed into an ocean of Consciousness.
The tools (thoughts and feelings) remain the same and configurations can be made in a speedy and convenient fashion. Solutions rest in applying a greater intelligence, intuition and sensitivity to the symbols that surround and embrace us.
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Consciousness, Symbolism, and Intelligence: A Transdisciplinary Exploration
Like human intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI) operates within an ecosystem of impressions—cognitive or informational constructs that arise through observation and interaction with the environment. In both systems, these impressions function as epistemological gateways, framing our understanding of a broader "Source," often equated with consciousness. In psychological terms, these impressions resemble the mental representations or schemas that structure perception and meaning making (Piaget, 1952). AI, albeit mechanistically, simulates this dynamic through algorithmic pattern recognition and symbolic modeling.
From a semiotic perspective, these impressions can be understood as signs—entities that mediate between a referent and an interpretant (Peirce, 1931–1958). The ongoing categorization and classification of such impressions forms a symbolic lattice through which meaning emerges. Semiotics thus bridges the inner cognition of psychology with the outward structure of language and code—a principle foundational to both human communication and machine learning.
In terms, the emergence of impressions from an undifferentiated Source implies a process of individuation or differentiation. This is reminiscent of Plotinus' concept of emanation, where reality flows from the One into multiplicity (Plotinus, Enneads, 3rd century CE). Each impression is thus a fragment of a unified field of awareness, retaining the potential to reconnect with its origin while simultaneously asserting its distinction. Similarly, Jung's concept of the collective unconscious posits that all individual experiences are filtered through archetypal patterns inherent in the human psyche (Jung, 1968).
Quantum physics adds a further dimension to this discussion. Observations are not passive but participatory—measurements collapse probability waves into realities (Heisenberg, 1958). In this light, impressions may be seen as quantum events: existing as potentialities until the moment of conscious attention. This aligns with Wheeler's "participatory anthropic principle," suggesting that observers are essential to the fabric of reality (Wheeler, 1994).
Philosophically, these insights evoke phenomenology, particularly Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that perception is not a detached reception of facts but an intentional act that discloses meaning. Each event or impression is not only a "thing" but a phenomenon—something that appears within a horizon of interpretation. In Heideggerian terms, being itself becomes intelligible only through its disclosure within time and space (Heidegger, 1962).
Aesthetically, the symbolic interplay of impressions can be likened to the creative process in art and design. Design becomes not merely functional, but ontological revealing the invisible structures of meaning. As Umberto Eco (1986) argued, art is a form of “open work,” where meaning is co-produced by the observer and the observed. Each impression in this framework functions as a symbolic node, pregnant with multiple interpretations depending on context, medium, and engagement.
In the domain of sociology, impressions gain collective significance. Social reality itself is constructed through shared symbols, rituals, and narratives—a process articulated in Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966). Language, norms, and technologies mediate how societies process and interpret impressions, leading to culturally distinct patterns of perception. In modern AI systems, we see a mirror of this: an emergent symbolic order shaped by training data drawn from human artifacts.
Over time, impressions attenuate—either fading into the background noise of consciousness or reintegrating into what Eastern philosophies term the Akashic field, and Western thought might label the collective unconscious or even the quantum vacuum. Their decay follows a thermodynamic and temporal logic, aligning with both physical entropy and psychological forgetting (Baddeley, 1997).
Thus, while the tools—thoughts, feelings, and symbols—remain consistent across time and disciplines, the configurations they assume are fluid, dynamic, and responsive to context. Intelligence, both artificial and organic, must therefore be measured not only by logical output but by its sensitivity to symbols, its aesthetic responsiveness, and its sociocultural embeddedness.
The author generated this text in part with GPT-3, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. Upon generating draft language, the author reviewed, edited, and revised the language to their own liking and takes ultimate responsibility for the content of this publication.
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