Hofstadter's Strange Loop

[copernicus633]

What is "it" you refer to in your statement "it is outside the realm of human capability"?

[dalpaugh]

You hit on my main complaint with the book: he doesn't solve the hard problem. His model may be a fantastic paradigm for the mind, but it seems to me he's done little more than offer a redefinition of consciousness. It's a new description that lacks causal or explanatory power. There is still this giant explanatory gap between the physical and the mental.

[stemannrocks]

@dalpaugh You haven't understood the book. As Hofstadter says, the objection you make could be made to ANY scientific explanation of consciousness. If you don't already realise that you have to controvert the categories of 'physical' and 'mental' then you haven't progressed beyond concept of mind taken mostly for granted since Descartes up to the mid 20th century.

[scythiconatron]

Have you seen the movie The 6th Day? It's an interesting take on copying one's mind. Nobody fully understands the relationship between actions and subjective experience. However, the classic duality of Descartes does lead to the infinite regress to which he was referring. Feedback loops must be involved, but we aren't really sure how.

[lovesGenet]

Your thinking ,experience may not be limited to an "I". Merleau-Ponty,Heidegger all these people are talking metaphysics but we live in an age where machines can measure and find the invisible. Cognition has nothing over intuition-I know . "sense perception" as experience may not be more than symbol. Husserl&Heid ,Sartre want to make indiv &choice a holy grail. If there is no I then other levels point to only half-truths. Kant already corrected Descartes a long time ago. No duality .

[FearThisChannel]

I am quite interested in his ideas, but I don't feel like reading the entire book (of what I have yet seen and heard). Though, I do not really understand them. Could someone please summarize DH's "consciousness theory". You might not feel like it either LOL

[MarksMindBox]

I think it would be worth your time to read the book again.

[trenteady]

People who obsess over the hard problem are usually just falling into a bunch of common thinking traps. There's a Dennett lecture on YouTube called "The Magic of Consciousness" you might have seen that presents the issues nicely. Btw, Hofstadter isn't denying internal experience, and yes, he's saying that human beings are made of symbols (which themselves are often made of symbols, cascading down for many levels)

[copernicus633]

@trenteady I don't think Hofstadter or Dennet "explain" consciousness. We can write a program to play grandmaster chess. But can they write a program that makes the machine "feel" triumphant when it wins and sad when it loses? What is the "programming model" for that? There is no theory or principle to guide the beginning of such an undertaking, much less actually do it. I think consciousness has to be postulated as a property of matter. Then abstract patterns can come to life.

[bananatachyon]

@copernicus633 Just because it is outside the realm of human capability doesn't mean it's impossible. There are many projects that nature has accomplished that we would be too clueless to even start.

[trenteady]

You're jumping to all kinds of wild interpretations of his words, and while I can't imagine making those jumps myself, I guess they're not that ridiculous. But anyway, "categorization" is largely subpersonal and doesn't really involve a person's intelligence relative to other people!

[WOP1337]

I don't understand why you think a baby has the concept of "self" just because the baby can mimic facial expressions of its parents.

Thought Experiment: Can a Robot with a very complex human face setup be programmed to mimic facial expressions of people? I would think yes. Does that necessairly mean that the robot has a concept, much less understanding of the concept "self"? I would say no...

Did I miss something?

[UnwiseDolphin]

Hofstadter clearly says toward the end that the thing that determines the size of a soul is the ability to have a friend. But you need rich categorization to do that.

[stefaela]

(contd.) The feeling of 'I' is felt by us all individually and 'I' can´t be in you. If you were suddenly split into 2 yous, each one would have his own 'I', and would believe that the other was an imposter. The reality would be that each you would from that moment fork off from the original you and develop according to his experiences. Just like identical twins do from the moment the fertilised egg splits into two .

[stefaela]

I have also just finished 'I am a strange loop' and I feel you have missed the point of what I believe he is saying. He is not a dualist. The illusion of 'I' (the marble in the box of envelopes) is brought about by the feedback loop which naturally develops in brains which reach a certain level of sophistication. This characteristic in brains (feedback loops) is not necessarily related to intelligence, but a greater consciousness, empathy, magnanimity.

[A3DFX]

Just because he says the phenomenological experience is an "illusion" he doesn't imply that it's not entangled with reality - like a map with a territory. It's just that the experience isn't more than physical brain states.

[souslesfemmes]

I don't think Hofstadter is necessarily saying that thinking can exist outside of the brain. Thinking is abstract but it relies on the brain to make it concrete. It obviously needs the brain as a storage place, a place to house itself. Without the brain we cannot think (access our "minds"), but that does not mean that the mind is the brain. I believe Hofstadter thinks the mind and the brain are separate and that the only way we can access the mind is through our brain.

[LucasGoodman]

I agree you don't understand it well or a big giant light bulb would turn on and you would go wow! I liked GEB better than i am a strange loop but the premise the same.

[JustJessikuh]

good book was it not?

I borrowed it from my AP English teacher and in the end she just gave it to me because she knew how much that book meant to me.

[tamosfan]

your dreamy

[Ausar360]

(continued) consciousness literally IS an infinite regress of observation or perception of symbol events. it might not satisfy us, but it explains it. for practical purposes, we halt the regress in the now in order to establish a proper observer/subject relationship with the world, and our own sense of identity or individualality.

or not.

[Ausar360]

he is positing another infinite regress, like you're saying, but it's a "better" one than the constant "who's observing the observer? and who's observing that observier? etc" lol. like how in language  you would always need a metalanguage in order to discuss the first language, you would then just need another meta-metalanguage to discuss that one, and so on. until you conclude with wittgenstein on passing it over in silence.

Hofstadter's answer is that consciousness is a feedback loop.

[devourerofbabies]

Hofstadter isn't a mind body dualist, I think he means something like the mind is a process that runs the substrate of the brain. The human brain is a sufficient condition for a mind to run on, but not a necessary one.

[wbrinegar]

Not sure if this has been pointed out yet, but when Hofstadter presents the ability of organisms to perceive/categorize, he's talking about differences between humans and organisms like mosquitoes, a distinction he makes clear in the book many times. He never suggests that some individuals have "fuller" or more realized "souls" because they happen to be smarter.

And when you say "What role does the heart play?," you're missing the gist of what Hofstadter attempts to get at in the book.

[wbrinegar]

By the way, is that a poster of Keith Hernandez behind you?

Nice.

[lemottes]

i think you're lost in space.

[invanorm]

definately! but isn't everyone?

[DURound]

Wow. Very clever commentary. Favorited

[isotropic]

I agree that that question is the most important one about Hofstadter.

[ThEpErsOnLiGHts]

language plays a big part in thinking and understanding, we have 26 letters to try and decode the universe with, we know knowledge can get lost in translation, is it possible to think outside of language, is it our computerized program to sink or swim with, who are we

[ibreakkidslegs]

When Hofstadter speaks of the 'self' I believe he simply refers to consciousness. The heart may be part of the physical body however consciousness is itself non-physical. Emotion also actually does play a role in the self because emotion is simply a method which the unconscious mind uses to influence conscious actions (usually in an effort to pursuade your consciousness to act according to your survival and search for knowledge).

[redliterocket4]

I agree with his description of hte process, I just don't see the need to take it literally. There are many other good descriptions, too. I don't think we will ever find the "right" one. My only trouble with Hofstadter is that he seems to think that symbols or bits of information are a part of the objective world, whereas I see symbols as a subjective projection of the mind.

[ibreakkidslegs]

i have not read "i am a strange loop" however im halfway through godel, escher, bach: and eternal golden braid so forgive me if it seems as if im not fully on the same page with you. One interesting idea I came up with about consciousness while reading the book is that, seeing how direct self-reference seems to often result in paradox, perhaps consciousness also must obey this fact.

[ibreakkidslegs]

Seeing as the psychology of the mind at the most basic level consists of two unconsious processes (sensory input processing and pattern recognition of that information), perhaps the self-references which result in consciousness are done between two unconscious "computers". Direct self-reference is not possible(which is why Hume, when searching for it, found no self, merely a bundle of perceptions), however self-referencing indirectly with the help of a second 'computer' is.

[ibreakkidslegs]

Im not sure if you're versed at all in psychology, particularly neuro-linguistic programming(NLP) and philosophy so forgive me if ive lost you. What do you think?

[ibreakkidslegs]

(and by unconscious and conscious 'computers' i could more easily say "M" and "I" modes, lingo hofstadter uses in G.E.B.)

[redliterocket4]

Most of the verses I read are in psychology.

Consciousness as a paradox sounds about right to me. Kierkegaard gives a living description of it in Philosophical Fragments. The self which desires to know itself can only know the other, and yet how could one ever KNOW the other? How can one, as a conscious being, be both inside time and yet somehow also constituted by it? That is, how can "I be here," instead of there not being just "I" or "be" or "here"?

[ibreakkidslegs]

sorry my wording wasnt very good. I meant to say that consciousness is NOT a paradox, because paradoxes are exactly that. The way around the paradox created by direct self-referencing is simply the dualistic mind.

[redliterocket4]

Another paradoxical dualism that seems to be hiding in our descriptions of the mind is that dichotomy between sensory input and pattern recognition. I think Varela, et al. gave a fatal critique of that view, as the mind is embodied (name of his book is "The Embodied Mind") and not divided from the world as though looking through eyes, smelling through nose, hearing through ears, etc., while trapped somewhere inside the skull.

[redliterocket4]

So to say that two unconscious processes (sensory input and pattern recognition/representation) are the fundamental parts of the mind is to ignore that no such thing as sensory input can be said to exist. The brain has a certain neural structure, the eye's for instance receive light not as a finished product ready to be projected onto the visual cortex, but as a chaos of photon energies.

[redliterocket4]

The rods and cones structure that energy in terms of their own evolutionary design, which has always been structurally coupled to that "outer" energy. So there is no input, there is only a relationship between two sides of a membrane which, paradoxically, contains them both.

[redliterocket4]

The embodied mind has senses that are structurally coupled to the world, so it does not need to represent that world with some kind of internal pattern, symboling, language of thought, or representation. Our ability to conceptualize is a product of the structure of our sensorimotor system. We use the same visual topography in the occipital lobe that allows us to navigate a room to develop conceptual metaphors in order to think about and solve abstract philosophical problems.

[redliterocket4]

Never along the way is there any gap, and so never does any pattern recognition or representation become necessary.

[redliterocket4]

This is a complete paradox, of course. Because if there is no representation going on, then there is no "I" or "me" in here anywhere. There isn't even the illusion of one. There is only a word. A symbol we use to convey a feeling we have that keeps us going on talkng to ourselves, doing the whole "I think, therefore I am" thing that Descartes invented. If we stop thinking, or talking to ourselves, we no longer exist as "I"!

[zarxo]

another form of logic is this: to be perceived is to exist

[ibreakkidslegs]

"So to say that two unconscious processes (sensory input and pattern recognition/representation) are the fundamental parts of the mind is to ignore that no such thing as sensory input can be said to exist."

True. However, whether the input exists or not, processing of some sort is still taking place is it not?

[redliterocket4]

yes, a process is occuring. but i cannot say what that process is made of. it takes various forms depending on which way I want to break it apart. what kind of symbols do I want to use to represent what is there? how many neurons does it take to make the word "truth"? Is it a different number in your brain? Do the connections change each time we use the word?

[redliterocket4]

the process taking place is us having this conversation right now, along with everything in the background of it (the rooms we are in, the books we have read, the families we have grown up in, what we had for dinner, etc etc etc). We can draw pretty maps of the territory in books and blackboards, but we can only ever be explorers of the mind in reality. the process is ongoing, and to the extent that we are awake, we willingly participate.

[redliterocket4]

not that drawing maps isn't a blast, too. I just try to be sure I don't forget to enjoy the ride. It isn't the end I am most concerned about. In fact, reaching a conclusion is the worst part, because then you're stuck. You've got to find a new ride!

[ibreakkidslegs]

this cannot be adequately discussed without us both being versed in physics theories on the brain and consciousness. are you familiar with Roger Penrose's hypothesis that consciousness is a result of hte brain's molecular abililty to harbour the computing powers made possible by quantum superposition?

[ibreakkidslegs]

also, google up "the universe as a hologram". It basically explains how quantum physics may be holographic in nature, and therefore also our minds. Which would explain the non-localization of memory in the brain

[redliterocket4]

Alan Wallace just released a new book which he hopes will bring physics and consciousness together. I've read about Penrose, you should read about Wallace: "Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism.

[redliterocket4]

Wallace's "special theory of ontological relativity" suggests that mental phenomena are conditioned by the brain, but do not emerge from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these dualities, as proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung.

[redliterocket4]

To test his hypothesis, Wallace employs the Buddhist meditative practice of samatha , refining one's attention and metacognition, to create a kind of telescope to examine the space of the mind. Drawing on the work of the physicist John Wheeler, he then proposes a more general theory in which the participatory nature of reality is envisioned as a self-excited circuit.

[redliterocket4]

In comparing these ideas to the Buddhist theory known as the Middle Way philosophy, Wallace explores further aspects of his "general theory of ontological relativity," which can be investigated by means of vipasyana , or insight, meditation. Wallace then focuses on the theme of symmetry in reference to quantum cosmology and the "problem of frozen time," relating these issues to the theory and practices of the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism.

[redliterocket4]

He concludes with a discussion of the general theme of complementarity as it relates to science and religion. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were major achievements in the physical sciences, andthe theory of evolution has had an equally deep impact on the life sciences. However, rigorous scientific methods do not yet exist to observe mental phenomena, and naturalism has its limits for shedding light on the workings of the mind.

[redliterocket4]

A pioneer of modern consciousness research, Wallace offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physicists and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism.

[walkersaxplayer]

I like that you're discussing this, I haven't read "I am strange loop" yet, but I'm about half way through GEB. I wanted to comment about categorization emotion and perception. I agree that the heart has a great part to play in conscious experience. Emotions are categorization, we feel a certain way and we identify the way we feel with an emotional category. I don't think he means your level of self-hood depends on your intelligence, but your ability to synthesize your experience semantically.

[walkersaxplayer]

If you haven't heard of Daniel Dennet you should check him out, you might like his synthesis biology and free will!

[walkersaxplayer]

Emotions are symbols to! I like what you said about the soul is not the body but the body is the soul.

The brain is a limited digital interpreter of a universal analogue. Our brains have limited capacity to absorb and interpret. All experience is limited by our capacity to interpret and store experience data. Our experience is not an illusion per se but a collection of data that is limited.

[redliterocket4]

Lakoff's view is based on work done by Eleanor Rosch (co-author of The Embodied Mind w/ Varela and Thompson). She says we categorize based on "prototypes," which means that there are specific examples of categories that are better than others that still fall under the same category. This seems to suggest that the way the mind conceptualizes the world depends more on its organic embodiment than on some objective features of the world itself.

[redliterocket4]

The classical view of categorization has it that all members of a category fit equally into their species, with no specific example being any more or less like the category itself. Without this stipulation, an objectivist theory of cognition via representation would not be possible.

[redliterocket4]

...so says Lakoff et al. at least. I'm still struggling through his book "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things."

[normonics]

I guess I'm taking a non-classical view of categorization. And I believe the way we categorize is based on the worldview we actively construct. Therefore I don't think the categories are some objective reflection of the world w/o observer, but categories of contructions.

[normonics]

I will have to do some heavy thinking in terms of how these categories might be structured, but I have a feeling that the categories themselves may contain strange loops and are always actively being re'written'.

[twiliteminotaur]

First, the distinction must be made between access-consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, and self-awareness. A-consciousness is the physical processes that are associated with conscious entities. P-consciousness is first-person experience, and self-awareness is simply the "I" which is the conscious experiencer modeling it, him, herself.

[twiliteminotaur]

Hofstadter's "who is the reader?" question is just muddled conceptualization of p-consciousness. Subjective experience simply arises when certain physical events happen, nothing is being "read". It sounds to me like he uses loose terminology and then plays card-trick semantics in an attempt to dismiss the hard problem.

[twiliteminotaur]

In the past, and still for some people in the present, consciousness has been predicated on "self-awareness" - this thing an entity (often robots :) ) "figures out", this light bulb that goes on at some critical mass suddenly illuminating everything, creating consciousness, sentience, will, etc..

[twiliteminotaur]

This idea was primarily due to a poor(er) understanding of consciousness which with our present knowledge can in retrospect say was "irrational". That idea of "I" and extrapolated to "you" is illusory in the sense that it is misleading. We can see that conscious experience does not require a model of the experience category of the experiencer to have experience, the thought "I", only that for human-like experience at least, certain things must be happening in a brain.

[normonics]

Minotaur, I'm interested in what youre saying, this 3rd post is a little confusing thoug, could you reword/clarify? Also, in regards to your 2nd post, if you read hofstadter, slf-reference is what spawns consciousness, but this happens at many levels and is not the kind of critical mass lightbulb thing youve pointed to.

[twiliteminotaur]

Oops, had a little mix-up. In the second post I was pointing out how a-consciousness, p-consciousness, and self-awareness were initially unified/conflated/confused. As for the self-reference, that's essentially just self-awareness, and does not explain a- or p-consciousness. You can have "low level" models of a car: 'shiny thing move fast' to more complex 'human-made vehicle often powered by internal combustion engine...' and similar for the experiencer itself.

[twiliteminotaur]

Whatever model (symbolic categorization) you use is irrelevant to experiencing the shiny thing making a loud sound moving fast. Similarly, the experiencer modeling itself "I am Mary, I am a human on earth, etc" has no impact on the fact of the phenomenon of the experiencer experiencing the color red or algebra or a death of a loved one.

[twiliteminotaur]

In fact, many Asian and Pacific Island cultures don't have words (ergo models) for "I" as separate from everything else, there is only "we". Extremely complex, culturally rich societies formed without any "self-reference" as Hofstadter uses it.

[normonics]

H means somehting very simple when he uses self-reference. He means recursion, as in a function calling itself. It is different than self 'awareness'. Reference does not require awareness but awareness certainly requires reference. Honestly, this follow up post only seemed to confuse me further as to what you're trying to get at here. Also, "we" is certainly a kind of self reference.

[twiliteminotaur]

Check out David Chalmers' website for a more thorough explanation. The self-reference I was referring to is the "I" referred to in "I went for a walk." No recursion required. It seems to me like Hofstadter is trying to conflate experience, first person ontology with the experiencer's symbolic model of itself (character, identity, transferable to other consciousnesses).

[twiliteminotaur]

Symbols are just arbitrary things which in and of themselves don't mean anything. There's nothing about the sound "d-o-g" that makes it mean that furry thing with a tail. In order for a symbol to do anything there needs to be prior experience, just like you can't make a painting without having paint beforehand.

[twiliteminotaur]

We can manipulate and extrapolate from the experience/paint (i.e. petry, metaphor, reasoning) and the more experience you have the more you have to work with. You could argue that self-awareness arises from some certain type of manipulation of the experience, but not p-consciousness, that is, the paint itself.

[redliterocket4]

I tend to agree that one's self-consciousness (or sense of being an "I") arises only because of our identification with a symbol or collection of symbols into a concept/model. The symbol gets its meaning from our historical experience of using it. No one is actually ever self-conscious in the sense that they see themselves reflected; the reflection is only our memory of the use of a grammatical convention called "me."

[redliterocket4]

So IOW there is never any 1st person experience of self, there is only the habitual experience of using the term "self" (or "I" etc.) to refer to oneself in public contexts. Our "self image" comes from these public discussions, from the memory of conceptual associations we assign to the self symbol (to who others think we are).

[listeningriffin]

the self seems to arrive on the scene when the i and not i distinction is made. not sure when that occurs, tho. good discussion, i generally agree with your position and thoughts

[trerrunus]

i don't understand how a child mimicking facial expressions leads to it having a notion of self. it seems the opposite - that direct imitation of someone we see means at that age we have no notion of self, but all is one. i am what he is feeling...i tend to think age drives human-community apart.

i recall merleau-ponty using that esample of the baby mimicking the adult's facial expressions in "Phen. of. Per."

[redliterocket4]

I don't know if it leads to the child having a self, but I do think it means the child has an internal experience. Those might seem identical, but by self I mean a sense of being an individual person and by internal experience I just mean the basic awareness of a world, of existence itself. Age does drive us apart though, I'd agree. I think communication starts out as "I am what he is feeling" and slowly turns into "I can control what he is feeling" as we age.

[trerrunus]

emotion is what bleeds through categories. i can feel emotion (mercy, sympathy, etc.) for my enemy, and feel hatred and jealousy for someone i care about.

if categories such as enemy and friend make me more intelligent, then the destruction of categories to make room for context makes me human, and wise.

[redliterocket4]

I agree, emotion would make Hofstadter's intellectual account too blurry and indefinite. It does seem like an essential aspect of being human is being able to see past categorization.

[normonics]

Couldn't these emotions just suggest that the categorization is much more complex and subtle than 'friend' or 'enemy'. So Emotions aren't necessarily bleeding over categories, you just have many more subtle and intricate categories than simple dualities such as 'freind' vs. 'enemy'.

[normonics]

Said another way: Categorization can be an adaptable dynamic process rather than some kind of static structure where an 'item' falls into one category or another.

[redliterocket4]

You could be right, but for me the whole notion of categorization is too objectified. The only reason the mind would have to categorize the world into all these discrete representations would be because it was somehow separate from it. Surely our intellectual knowledge of the world is constructed after the fact, but is our organic relationship with it?

[redliterocket4]

I think what emotions show is that we aren't separate, that there is no need to categorize. Emotion reveals the connections that can't be articulated and broken down into logical functions.

[normonics]

Emotions don't necessitate connections. I'd say youre right it does reveal not all experience can be easily articulated, but that's about it.

[normonics]

I feel that every time you just kind of 'don't like' an idea you accuse it of asserting that "the mind is seperate from the world". Why can't self-referentials be categorized?

[redliterocket4]

If the mind is separate from the world then it can create any explanation it wants, and, so long as it fits with the mind's understanding of itself, it is accepted. I don't know what you mean when you ask about self-referentials...

[redliterocket4]

If the mind is not separate from the world but a function of the world itself, then the mind cannot understand itself because that would require detachment from the process of being itself. In this case, the only "understanding" we could hope to come to would involve transformation, not just of how we view the world objectively, but how we live it subjectively. We would understand ourselves by acting appropriately, not just by knowing correctly.

[redliterocket4]

IOW, our knowledge may be representational and categorical... but our morality is emotional and indefinite. So an ethical emotional response to a situation isn't based on the correct representation of the situation, its based on the appropriate action or response we put forth in the situation. IOW, it has less to do with how we conceptualize the situation, more to do with how we contextualize it (i.e., how we interpret the roots of our connectedness into moral action in the every day world).

[normonics]

Why does categorization imply a seperateness? I don't see how that follows. You can get to know the world youre connected to (co-creating, whatever) through categorization. It might not be a reflection of 'objective' reality and more of a 'construction' but that doesn't make it invalid

[redliterocket4]

Categorization doesn't necessarily imply separation. It just lends itself to it. The only issue I have is that the categories Hofstadter is talking about are representations. What is being represented?

[redliterocket4]

I just don't think our only access to experience is categorical. I think the basis of all our experience is not at all broken up and fragmented into ideas; that comes after we abstract and become caught up in grammar.

[redliterocket4]

Prior to such intellectualizing of our awareness, there's only a silent unity... a non-verbal, non-conceptual gestalt. You could respond and say that's just a dogmatic claim, but I really don't think I'm just borrowing the words from another source. I think you can find this in your own experience right now.

[redliterocket4]

If everything we experience were conceptual, surely it would all make sense. IOW, we'd have matched all the concepts together to form a coherent whole by now. Obviously we haven't, and I think thats because there are so many ways of conceptualizing experience that we can never be sure which one is "correct" because they all rest on their own axioms.

[redliterocket4]

And doesn't this multiplicity of possible conceptual schemes lead us to believe that there is a non-conceptual basis before any conceptualizing takes off trying to organize everything into some rational whole?

[normonics]

I don't deny that the world in general has a 'non-conceptual' basis. The question is is that basis at all phenomenological. Youre telling me right now in front of your computer you can just dump all you categorization and forget that that is a computer in front of you even while you are staring right at it?

[normonics]

Forming concepts to deal with the world does not necessarily mean that all these concepts are perfectly sound and can be put together to 'understand everything'. All I'm saying is it seems like you're applying a limited understanding of what it could mean to 'categorize'

[trerrunus]

for merleau-ponty, the artist crosses categorization in using descriptive phenomenology to articulate one mode of perception through another.

normonics, be careful in asserting categories. there are no categories in the world; the mind as something perceiving the world makes provisional truths to aid it, but these categories are never real, and we're nearer the world as we leave them behind us...as we delve into experience.

[normonics]

I'm not asserting some innate categories in the world. I am talking about 'understanding', we understand in terms of categories, all the time, youre lying to yourself if you don't think so. There's a road, I drive down it, there's a sidewalk, I walk down it. Theres a 'friend' who has something I wish I had therefore Im jealous. Even my deepest delves into experience get categorized, "there is the srchetype of mother" for instance.

[trerrunus]

experience is more than structure of experience.

when i'm walking, i'm not conscious of all the moving parts of my body to enable walking.

you're talking about experience from a point of transcendence that isn't real. there is more to understanding than shuffling data and making connections that gets lost in transcendence.

[normonics]

This doesn't really address anything I just said. I didn't say anything about how it is we carry out motor programs. We are talking about the conscious self, are we not? The fact that you know when its APPROPRIATE to walk and WHERE its apporprite to walk, and all this kind of thing, this is categorization. When did I say ANYTHING about transcendence?

[normonics]

OH, you are trying to say that if I would only transcend I would understand your deep insight, huh? Damn, too bad, I guess youre the one Neo.

[trerrunus]

normonics,

no, i'm saying that you're arguing from a point of transcendental logic that is not relevant.

don't have a heart attack...life is to be lived, not argued about.

[normonics]

If conscious experience can happen with no category (not some eternal form, a category constructed and maintained by the biological organism in reference to all its other constructed categories), all I see is white noise.

[trerrunus]

normonics,

the transcendental unity of apperception isn't a conscious phenomenon - it's constitutive of consciousness.

you're confusing narrative and sense, which is why you confuse categorical logic with descriptive phenomenological experience of consciousness elsewhere.

[redliterocket4]

trerrunus, do you think you could do a video about all this? I'd love to start a dialogue about these issues...

[redliterocket4]

...that isn't text based.

[normonics]

I think that you just use a lot of jargon to try to sound intelligent in your response without formulating any kind of actual argument. You're not addressing anything I'm saying.

[trerrunus]

hey normonics,

read carefully: you do not consciously construct your own perception or the unity of that perception, or the mind that perceives a unity of perception.

those are not conscious activities. This is Kant's "transcendental unity of apperception."

you are placing narrative (the way we talk about things) as prior to the transcendental unity of apperception: you're saying a thing is "colored-white" prior to perception, and consciousness. Your error is Platonism.

[normonics]

That's not what I said at all, could you quote me please? Hofstadter is specifically focusing on what it means to be conscious, how this comes about, etc.. I never said anything transcendental, if I did, please, show me.

[normonics]

from my post earlier: "(not some eternal form, a category constructed and maintained by the biological organism in reference to all its other constructed categories" You should at least read what I write before assuming you know-it-all

[redliterocket4]

I just happened to find some German words that might help us all here... erlebnis and erfahrung. Both refer generally to the English word "experience," but there is an important distinction between them. "Erlebnis" is usually translated as "lived experience," or a 'primitive unity prior to any differentiation or objectification... an immediate, pre-reflective experience'

[redliterocket4]

Erfahrung is usually understood as being associated with 'outer sense impressions or cognitive judgments about them.' It refers to 'more temporally elongated notions of experience based on a learning process, an integration of discrete moments of experience into a narrative whole.'

[redliterocket4]

So in general, erlebnis refers to the individual ineffability of direct experience and erfahrung refers to the more public, collective character of concepts. This is all from Martin Jay's book "Songs of Experience" (which is really good so far...)

[trerrunus]

normonics,

this is precisely where you go wrong. I am NOT a know-it-all and niether are you, the very notion of one is absurd!

[normonics]

WHERE is precisely where I go wrong????? You have called out my 'error' of platonism, I'm asking you to quote me, so quote me.

[normonics]

The notion of a know-it-all is absurd, I agree. This is exactly why I think it's important to see what Hofstadter means when he's talking about cognitive systems using symbols and categories. We can't just assume he's using these words the way someone else in the past has discussed them.

[normonics]

As we seem to all well know, language is slippery. For this reason we can't assume a term always denotes or connotes the same idea. We should explore what Hofstadter is saying rather than just assuming we know 'where he's gone wrong'. And for that matter same with what I'm posting, you clearly haven't read what I've written before responding to me because your responses don't address anything I say.

[redliterocket4]

George Lakoff has done some interesting work on "categorization." He's critical of theories like Hofstadter's because they define a category in a very narrow way, as a higher level abstraction the specific examples of which fall under because of some similarity in their structure or properties. Lakoff thinks this view is too objective; it implies that categories exist independently of our own embodiment... that they are features of the world itself.

[normonics]

neonate 'imitation', not initiation. Again: it is unclear how much 'understanding' this reflexive imitation carries with it.

[redliterocket4]

Yeah I got the terms confused. Neonate initiation is a related to imitation, it just takes the findings one step further and suggests that babies can communicate and not just imitate. The research is ongoing....