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Do Loops Explain Consciousness? Review of 'I Am a Strange Loop' (2007) [pdf]
- johnsearle 11y agobook was really bad, hofstadter tryin to make an extra buck piggybacking off the success of GEB, dont waste your time
- ctdavies 11y agoHuh, are you the famous philosopher John Searle?
- colomon 11y agoWho created a HN account just to to smack talk Hofstadter? That seems likely.
- yarrel 11y agoThe book is a product of grief, not greed.
- DonHopkins 11y agoOn that note, I second your ringing endorsement of GEB, and if you haven't read it yet, you should run out and buy a copy. ;)
- amelius 11y agoFirst, isn't there a better word for consciousness, as used in this book? Because I have the feeling that different people (even scientists) mean different things by it. Second, I think the main problem is that most people consider consciousness as something which lies outside of the physical realm, and that there is, supposedly, a one-way communication link from the physical world to our consciousness. However, since we are in fact (physically) talking about the concept of consciousness, this seems highly unlikely. It is thus more likely that consciousness is a part of physics, and we should perhaps treat it as such.
- betenoire 11y agoI don't remember the book (or this review of the book) ever suggesting consciousness existed outside of the realm of physics or the natural world. In fact, the opposite: it tried to show how consciousness might have come about through natural means (feedback loops).
- orthoganol 11y agoThis is the standard reductionist position, and the standard strawmannirg of people who don't agree with it. To explain it crudely, yes, it all ultimately reduces to the neuronal substrate and no one in their right mind disagrees. The point is that only looking at this level ignores the important and large set of data that is humans' first-hand observations of consciousness, what you're able to perceive, study, and observe about conscious experience, the kind of observations that Searle makes. To just write off first hand observation data as irrelevant strikes me as anti-scientific if not ideological. I mean, why wouldn't you try to develop a system of consciousness that starts with this data, in tandem with neuronal studies (there's no inherent contradiction)?
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoThe problem is that first-hand observations aren't irrelevant, they're perverse. They're the mind viewing itself through its own intuitive folk-theory of mind, which is nowhere near an accurate psychology.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gsmsg 11y agoI have a short article that covers some similar topics. In the third paragraph I make a strong argument against materialism by examining consciousness. http://www.gmw6.com/belief_through_reason.html http://www.gmw6.com/belief_through_reason.html
- jshen 11y ago> it seems disingenuous to either believe that many separate things can have a synthesized experience. This isn't an argument, it's merely an assertion of a point of view, and one that isn't obviously true. The evidence on the other side of the argument seems much stronger than your argument about our visual field. When you look at all of the examples of brain damage causing peoples personalities to change dramatically, well you have a high hill to climb to say that who we are isn't material in nature.
- gsmsg 11y agothe quoted text foreshadows the argument about visual fields. I'm not saying that the brain isn't important, just that it cannot solely explain our conscious experience. This alone is sufficient to defeat materialism.
- vectorjohn 11y agoSo... magic.
- ryanobjc 11y agoHonestly, I didn't really follow this line: "if we take drugs we get stupid" You obviously haven't taken much drugs! Some do in fact make you smarter.
- gsmsg 11y agoMaybe I should change that to say harmful drugs.
- skissane 11y ago
- Animats 11y agoAnother useless article about "consciousness". "We share a conviction that no philosopher or scientist living today has the foggiest notion of how consciousness, and its inseparable companion free will, emerge, as they surely do, from a material brain." That's reasonable enough. Nobody seems to have a clue about how "consciousness", whatever it is, really works. If someone did, it would have been implemented in a computer by now. "We mysterians are persuaded that no computer of the sort we know how to build—that is, one made with wires and switches—will ever cross a threshold to become aware of what it is doing." Nah. Now he's just mouthing off. There's a long history of this sort of thing from philosophers. Aristotle claimed humans were special because they could do arithmetic. Now we know that arithmetic is simple, in the sense that it takes a very small parts count. Hubert Dreyfus, in 1972, said computers couldn't play even a decent amateur game of chess. Now, any laptop PC can trounce grand masters. What AI isn't doing well yet is predicting the consequences of actions: "what will happen next", and "what will happen next if this decision is made". Basically, the technology to get through the next 15 seconds of life. This is the beginning of common sense, and really ought to be worked on more. We have the tools now to go at that problem. Self-driving cars have to do some of this, and answers may come out of that technology. This is an essential technology for robots which operate in an unstructured world. Once that problem has been solved, we might be in a position to talk about "consciousness" from a non-clueless perspective. Higher level thinking is mostly a strategy module for the "next 15 seconds" control system. At least the article doesn't use the world "quantum".
- JackFr 11y agoYou didn't read it very closely: >Penrose, for example, thinks the mystery may yield to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics.
- Animats 11y agoOh, crap; I missed that.
- dkarapetyan 11y agoHigher level thinking is model building from sensory input. I have not seen any system out there that learns to reason about 3D space by just going around touching/feeling things and then incorporating that feedback with other senses. Everything starts with a model built-in and then tweaks parameters through some kind of optimization mechanism. Which is fine but that's not really intelligence in the sense of coming up with novel models and incorporating it into pre-existing models.
- KingMob 11y agoFormer neuroscientist here, whose lab studied consciousness. I'm not sure about the book, but the review is light on details. We know biology is connected somehow to conscious awareness (sleep, illusions, blindsight, TMS, etc.) but we still haven't jumped the gap separating the objective from the subjective. It's called the Hard Problem for good reason.
- jquery 11y agoI tend to think subjective consciousness is just one of those fundamental forces/components of the universe, like space-time. It's so different than anything else we observe, I don't know how we ever bridge that gap between the material and the subjective. It just is.
- SixSigma 11y agoOn the subject of loops: Common Lisp’s loop is so powerful that people invented functional programming so that they’d never have to use it. G_Morgan in reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a481l/so_to_get_back_to_the_point_go_vs_algol68_tbh_i/c0fs2nk http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a481l/so_to_get...
- lispm 11y agoLisp users thought that the standard LOOP was dumbed down from the real MIT LOOP, so they invented a new one, even more powerful: https://common-lisp.net/project/iterate/ https://common-lisp.net/project/iterate/
- 467568985476 11y agoMy impression of I Am a Strange Loop was that it contains a subset of the ideas in GEB, and lacks the off the wall charm (and delicious mathematics) that GEB contains. I sometimes recommend it to people who tried to read GEB and gave up, but I don't think there's much to learn from I Am a Strange Loop if you're already familiar with Hofstadter and GEB.
- vectorjohn 11y agoCan you un-acronym GEB?
- gerbilly 11y agoGôdel Escher Bach Douglas Hofstadter, 1979 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
- baddox 11y agoI've heard that it's a much more refined version of the strange loop idea presented in GEB, although now that I think of it, it was probably the author who claimed that.
- anonymfus 11y agothere is no way to teach calculus to a chimp, or even to make it understand the square root of 2. Legends ever say that the first man who tried to make primates to understand the square root of 2 was drowned by them.
- sireat 11y agoThe undercurrent running through "I Am a Strange Loop" was the grief of losing his wife to brain cancer. The playful discourse evident in GEB was no more.