“In my understanding, all phenomena depend ultimately on a sensory-motive, or aesthetic-participatory capacity. What I mean by that is that I think it is ultimately incorrect to assume the possibility of other properties to be equally or more fundamental. All objects and concepts are percepts, but not all percepts are objects or concepts.

Specifically, the traditional assumptions about fundamental phenomena posit the existence of concrete, tangible, formation-energetic objects and/or abstract, intangible information-processing concepts. Both of these would be diametrically opposite to aesthetic-participatory phenomena – they would lack any experiential dimension and would instead be unexperienced, anesthetic-mechanical phenomena.

It is important to understand why parsimony precludes the possibility of objects or concepts becoming conscious, and why parsimony is important in this situation. This is part of a larger discussion, but the essence is that there is nothing that a machine (abstract or concrete) does which does not absolutely oppose the possibility of symbolic association. A machine does not ‘seem’, a machine simply ‘is’ and ‘does’. There is no mechanical function for seeming like something else…no way to achieve metaphor physically or logically without assuming it from the start.

Concepts and objects cannot contact each other except through the middle-ground resource of perception. The anesthetic machine is an objectification made on behalf of an aesthetic participant. It has no frame of reference of its own – no way to collapse quantum wavefunctions or to qualify mere events as ‘signals’ or ‘interpretations’.”

— Craig Weinberg