[Arlo previously] Paradox, recursion, self-referentiality, "strange loops" reveal the Escherian landscape around us.
[SA] What is the Escherian landscape? ... I'm just trying to understand what your saying here. [Arlo] What I'm saying is we are symbolically mediated beings. Our intellection of "the world" is thus one where paradox, recursion, strange loops and the like are unavoidable, when we turn intellection back on intellect, when we attempt to symbolically represent WITHIN a symbol system that very system itself. Hofstadter refers to this as "essential incompleteness", saying "The fascinating thing is that any such system digs its own hole; the system's own richness brings about its own downfall. The downfall occurs essentially because the system is powerful enough to have self-referential sentences. ... It seems that with formal systems there is an analogous critical point. Below a point, a system is "harmless" and does not even approach defining arithmetical truth formally [Arlo adds, he is using "arithmetical truth" in this particular sentence, but its in the context of demonstrating features of any symbolic system, of which language itself is]; but beyond the critical point, the system suddenly attains the capacity for self-reference, and thereby dooms itself to incompleteness." Consider "early language", the grunts, gestures and simple sounds we used to "communicate". In this early "system", a level of complexity did not exist for self-reference. Man did not "grunt about grunts". Over time, as our grunt-system evolved into more nuanced sounds, which were then strung together into the formation of lexicon and grammar, our symbol system hit a point where we could "talk about talking". At some point, this rich complexity led to a boon in broadening our understanding, but at the same time brought this "essential incompleteness" into play. Here is a brief passage from Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach" that I hope you find interesting, and likely gives the backdrop for the new book Platt mentioned. Strange Loops as the Crux of Consciousness (pp. 709-710) My belief is that the explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our brains-for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will-are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing "resonance" between different levels--quite like the Henkin sentence which, by merely asserting its own provability, actually becomes provable. The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself. This should not be taken as an antireductionist position. It just implies that a reductionistic explanation of a mind, in order to be comprehensible, must bring in "soft" concepts such as levels, mappings, and meanings. In principle, I have no doubt that a totally reductionistic but incomprehensible explanation of the brain exists; the problem is how to translate it into a language we ourselves can fathom. Surely we don't want a description in terms of positions and momenta of particles; we want a description which relates neural activity to "signals" (intermediate-level phenomena)-and which relates signals, in turn, to "symbols" and "subsystems", including the presumed-to-exist "self-symbol". This act of translation from low-level physical hardware to high-level psychological software is analogous to the translation of number-theoretical statements into meta mathematical statements. Recall that the level-crossing which takes place at this exact translation point is what creates Godel's incompleteness and the self-proving character of Henkin's sentence. I postulate that a similar level-crossing is what creates our nearly unanalyzable feelings of self. In order to deal with the full richness of the brain/mind system, we will have to be able to slip between levels comfortably. Moreover, we will have to admit various types of "causality": ways in which an event at one level of description can "cause" events at other levels to happen. Sometimes event A will be said to "cause" event B simply for the reason that the one is a translation, on another level of description, of the other. Sometimes "cause" will have its usual meaning: physical causality. Both types of causality-and perhaps some more-will have to be admitted in any explanation of mind, for we will have to admit causes that propagate both upwards and downwards in the Tangled Hierarchy of mentality, just as in the Central Dogmap. At the crux, then, of our understanding ourselves will come an understanding of the Tangled Hierarchy of levels inside our minds. My position is rather similar to the viewpoint put forth by the neuroscientist Roger Sperry in his excellent article "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values", from which I quote a little here: In my own hypothetical brain model, conscious awareness does get representation as a very real causal agent and rates an important place in the causal sequence and chain of control in brain events, in which it appears as an active, operational force .... To put it very simply, it comes down to the issue of who pushes whom around in the population of causal forces that occupy the cranium. It is a matter, in other words, of straightening out the peck-order hierarchy among intracranial control agents. There exists within the cranium a whole world of diverse causal forces; what is more, there are forces within forces within forces, as in no other cubic half-foot of universe that we know . . . . To make a long story short, if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those over-all organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity .... Near the apex of this command system in the brain ... we find ideas. Man over the chimpanzee has ideas and ideals. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell. There is a famous breach between two languages of discourse: the subjective language and the objective language. For instance, the "subjective" sensation of redness, and the "objective" wavelength of red light. To many people, these seem to be forever irreconcilable. I don't think so. No more than the two views of Escher's Drawing Hands are irreconcilable from "in the system", where the hands draw each other, and from outside, where Escher draws it all. The subjective feeling of redness comes from the vortex of self-perception in the brain; the objective wavelength is how you see things when you step back, outside of the system. Though no one of us will ever be able to step back far enough to see the "big picture", we shouldn't forget that it exists. We should remember that physical law is what makes it all happen-way, way down in neural nooks and crannies which are too remote for us to reach with our high-level introspective probes. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
