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Was Hofstadter ever arguing that intelligence requires self-referentiality? I haven't read his stuff in a long time, but from what I recall he was saying more

Was Hofstadter ever arguing that intelligence requires self-referentiality? I haven't read his stuff in a long time, but from what I recall he was saying more that something about consciousness and the sense of self is based on self-referentiality. Not that intelligence requires self-referentiality. I also remember having the sense that Hofstadter didn't really understand the "hard problem of consciousness". His discussions seemed to somehow confuse the sense of self with having subjective experience. But like I said, it's been a while since I read it.

iainmerrick 1mo ago
Yes -- I can't remember the exact words, but there's a striking bit in GEB where he directly addresses the question of "will a machine ever create art?" His answer is yes, but only after it has really lived life, experienced heartbreak, and so on. The machine would have to have a self, which he argued arose from self-referentiality and "strange loops". Oh, I guess there's a question of whether you can separate intelligence from consciousness. His writing was mostly done in the long period where things that are very easy for humans were still intractably difficult for machines -- identifying objects in pictures, following simple written instructions, etc. So I think it's clear that he saw "intelligence" as being able to solve those simple-yet-intractable common-sense problems; the kind of thing LLMs now excel at.
- gwd 1mo ago
  > His answer is yes, but only after it has really lived life, experienced heartbreak, and so on. The thing about this is that we're always encouraging people to read, because it gives them access to experiences and exposure to ideas far beyond what they could just speaking to the people around them. But there's no human alive who has read as widely or esoterically as the current crop of frontier models.
m-hodges 1mo ago
A few quotes towards the end of GEB: > I see no barrier imposed by Gödel’s Theorem to the implementation on computers (or their successors) of types of symbol manipulation that achieve roughly the same results as brains do. And a distinction between intelligence and consciousness: > It is entirely another question to try and duplicate in a program some particular human’s mind—but to produce an intelligent program at all is a more limited goal. And then: > Gödel’s Theorem doesn’t ban our reproducing our own level of intelligence via programs That is pretty hard to square with "GEB argued that AI couldn’t achieve intelligence without first mastering Gödelian self-reference." A bit more introspective: > I think that the process of coming to understand Gödel’s proof, with its construction involving arbitrary codes, complex isomorphisms, high and low levels of interpretation, and the capacity for self-mirroring, may inject some rich undercurrents and flavors into one’s set of images about symbols and symbol processing, which may deepen one’s intuition for the relationship between mental structures on different levels.

iainmerrick 1mo ago

Yes -- I can't remember the exact words, but there's a striking bit in GEB where he directly addresses the question of "will a machine ever create art?" His answer is yes, but only after it has really lived life, experienced heartbreak, and so on. The machine would have to have a self, which he argued arose from self-referentiality and "strange loops". Oh, I guess there's a question of whether you can separate intelligence from consciousness. His writing was mostly done in the long period where things that are very easy for humans were still intractably difficult for machines -- identifying objects in pictures, following simple written instructions, etc. So I think it's clear that he saw "intelligence" as being able to solve those simple-yet-intractable common-sense problems; the kind of thing LLMs now excel at.

gwd 1mo ago
> His answer is yes, but only after it has really lived life, experienced heartbreak, and so on. The thing about this is that we're always encouraging people to read, because it gives them access to experiences and exposure to ideas far beyond what they could just speaking to the people around them. But there's no human alive who has read as widely or esoterically as the current crop of frontier models.

m-hodges 1mo ago

A few quotes towards the end of GEB: > I see no barrier imposed by Gödel’s Theorem to the implementation on computers (or their successors) of types of symbol manipulation that achieve roughly the same results as brains do. And a distinction between intelligence and consciousness: > It is entirely another question to try and duplicate in a program some particular human’s mind—but to produce an intelligent program at all is a more limited goal. And then: > Gödel’s Theorem doesn’t ban our reproducing our own level of intelligence via programs That is pretty hard to square with "GEB argued that AI couldn’t achieve intelligence without first mastering Gödelian self-reference." A bit more introspective: > I think that the process of coming to understand Gödel’s proof, with its construction involving arbitrary codes, complex isomorphisms, high and low levels of interpretation, and the capacity for self-mirroring, may inject some rich undercurrents and flavors into one’s set of images about symbols and symbol processing, which may deepen one’s intuition for the relationship between mental structures on different levels.