Attempted first line:
For there to be causation between any two objects, there must first be causal affinty between those objects. Objects must be able to interact before they interact. This capacity for physical interaction, this causal affinity can be called interrelativity.

Objects must be able to interrelate before they have any interaction. A blind cavefish may have very little to no reason for interacting with light, and so, functionally speaking, light does not exist to it. If we took a cavefish out of its home and exposed it to the sun, it would experience a change, but it would experience that sunlight primarily as a heat source. It might be tempting to assume the cavefish would be perplexed by the sunlight, not being able to see it, but because the cavefish lacks the mechanism for perceiving light in the first place, it has no reason to see how it has a limited reference frame. It might be surprised by the new heat source, but it would not even begin to think of what it cannot perceive. The visual dimension of light does not exist to the blind cavefish, even though we who have eyes know it is there as an available form of perception. There is a reduced degree of interaction between photons and a blind cavefish, there is a lower degree of causal interrelativity between them. The cavefish lives in an environment devoid of light, and has subsequently lost the need to sense it, so as a species it gave up the physical mechanism to interact with light. It has little to no biological need to interrelate with light.

But how did vision emerge in the first place? In the time before vision, what motivated the evolution of the first eye? Of course, we can account for natural selection, in that organisms with a slightly better ability to respond to photons were slightly more successful, perhaps with a few genetic mutations thrown in, and over the generations, the visual organ emerged as an accident of improved environmental fitness. Nevertheless, this biological narrative does not explain why it was possible that vision evolved out of a blind world? What is the ground for a new form of sense-perception? I think that the narrative of evolutionary biology is true, that there are selection pressures that, under the right circumstances, prefer various sense-organs, but this narrative is often used as a metaphysical stopgap for the mystery of what defines the edge of perceivable reality. It is tempting to assume that we can perceive all that there is to the physical universe. The fact that the way the universe appears to us is based on our forms of perception should blow an evolutionary biologist’s mind. The knowledge that we have more sensory organs than microbes and can perceive an immensely larger set of data about the universe than they can should inspire us to wonder how much we ourselves have not evolved to perceive, rather than putting ourselves on a pedestal atop the universe. What limits exist on the set of all possible sensory dimensions? What defines what is real when there are different sets of functional neurobiology?

There was physical causation going on between blind Pre-Cambrian invertebrates and the light around them, but it did not have to evolve into vision. It proved successful to do so. Our ability to represent light and measure it is entirely contingent on our vision. A blind person has no way of measuring light. The fact that the basis of our scientific measurements are local to our perceptive reference frame means that if we had biological reasons to evolve new sense forms, we would re-render the universe and have new mechanisms for scientific observation. The world literally changes when you have a different neurobiology.

Much more to come.


June 9th, 2023
Gorda






be perplexed, lacking the mechanism to understand what is happening to it. It would not be able to see the light, and would instead experience light primarily as a heat source. It lacks the visual dimension of sense-perception. There is an aspect of light that does not exist to the cavefish, because it has lost its the sense organ for receiving light. The reduced degree of interaction between light and the cavefish speaks to a lower degree of causal interrelativity between them.