Hofstadter's Strange Loop

Does Hofstadter explain consciousness away, or not?

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• consciousness
• hofstadter
• mind
• brain
• symbols
• cognition
• embodiment
• strange
• loop
• philosophy
• science

[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]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[walkersaxplayer]

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

[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.

[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 .