Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. Since May, 2016, many of my larger book reviews have been put on a hosted Wordpress site; so now this blog emphasizes previews, interviews with authors, booklets, large periodical articles, and literary business issues. Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!
Saturday, June 01, 2013
"I Am a Strange Loop": Douglas Hofstadter explains "I-ness"
Author: Douglas Hofstadter
Title: “I Am a Strange Loop”
Publication: 2007, Basic Books, ISBN 978-0-465-03079-8, 412
pages, indexed, 24 chapters with Prologue and Epilogue
The book has a tagline on the back cover, “What do we mean
when we say ‘I’”?
Really, why am I “me”, having lived the specific life that I
have lived, with all its twists and ironies?
Why didn’t I experience myself at the time of Christ, or in the Middle
Ages, or of the Holocaust?
The author seems to take the position that the open-ended nature of mathematics makes consciousness
necessary. He spends a lot of space on
the ideas of mathematician Kurt Godel, who invented a way of mapping
mathematical propositions to “Godel numbers” and then “proved” that there had
to be statements which would be true but unprovable. That certainly brings back all those days of
graduate school in mathematics at the University of Kansas back in the 1960s.
This sets up, in nature, a logical “feedback loop” in all
things in the cosmos. The feedback tends
to contradict entropy, or the tendency for all systems to become more
disordered (according to laws of thermodynamics). The “feedback loop” sets up “patterns” which
tend to organize matter in biological systems (as least as we know them on
Earth). The “pattern” eventually
develops a sense of will or purpose which “feeds back” and mediates the
component elements. One could argue that
biological life cycles and reproduction counter entropy and help the universe
get organized – but only as it develops soul or consciousness.
Yet, “consciousness” seems to become its own beast. “I-ness”
continues even as all the cells in my body are recycled and replaced over the
years as I age.
In fact, “I-ness” roughly belongs to one body, but not
exactly. Empathy or rooting interest
ties people to others, with some sense of continuity. Consider the mediation of “personal identity”
when rooting for a professional sports team.
The idea of shared identity (or “eusociality”) has moral consequences,
because in most civilizations people have to make sacrifices for the “purposes
of others” beyond the scope of their own “axiom of choice”, Social sustainability depends on this
capacity.
Hofstadter argues that sense of identity (or “soul”) grows during childhood (is very little at
birth), is reasonably well defined by early adolescence, but not complete until
the early or mid-twenties, the time it takes for the brain to grow to full
maturity. Animals have “identity”, too;
those of more developed mammals (carnivore, cetaceans, and primates) can
certainly be compared meaningfully to ours.
After “death”, the soul gradually dissipates, but remnants
of it live in loved ones of the individual.
The soul may dissipate before death in some tragic circumstances, such
as Alzheimer’s.
It seems to me, though, that, even though physical death is
inevitable, it is implausible not to exist at all. To me, it would seem logical for the soul to
exist in some fashion, and the “moral” laws of karma would seem to demand that
it does. Perhaps it joins a “cosmic
consciousness”, as Rosicrucians have posted.
Eben Alexander, in “Proof of Heaven” (March 30) reported that, while his
cerebral cortex was completely obliterated by meningitis, the felt he was
living inside the “Core”. Perhaps once
we have lived, we must live again, but in other worlds, where instead of being
initialized (as on this planet), we are “updated”. What a science fiction scenario: to travel to
Gliese 581 G, 30 light years away, tidally locked with a narrow habitable zone,
and find that we meet a bizarre civilization of people with recycled
souls.
Another idea could be that a “virus” could move “consciousness”
from one body (after death), to a “super body” (an “angel” who could time-share
multiple souls.
Perhaps the only way to conquer space is to get a grip on the "afterlife" and communicate with it. Perhaps a succeeding generation down the pike a century or so will learn to do that. One of my first intimate partners ever (in 1976) claimed that he taught "the history of consciousness."
In the YouTube video, the author speaks at Stanford.
Update: June 2
I don't think the book author would agree with a project by Dmitry Itskov, to record the contents of the human brain on avatars, and offer digital immortality by the year 2045, NYTimes Business story here.
Here's a 2010 Wordpress blog post on the author's ideas, to which I commented. https://hearlabs.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/hofstadters-strange-loops-and-distributed-consciousness/
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1 comment:
Here's a 2010 Wordpress blog post on the author's ideas, to which I commented.
https://hearlabs.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/hofstadters-strange-loops-and-distributed-consciousness/
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