
Do Loops Explain Consciousness? Review of 'I Am a Strange Loop' (2007) [pdf] - bootload
http://www.ams.org/notices/200707/tx070700852p.pdf
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Animats
Another useless article about "consciousness".

 _" We share a conviction that no philosopher or scientist living today has
the foggiest notion of how consciousness, and its inseparable companion free
will, emerge, as they surely do, from a material brain."_

That's reasonable enough. Nobody seems to have a clue about how
"consciousness", whatever it is, really works. If someone did, it would have
been implemented in a computer by now.

 _" We mysterians are persuaded that no computer of the sort we know how to
build—that is, one made with wires and switches—will ever cross a threshold to
become aware of what it is doing."_

Nah. Now he's just mouthing off. There's a long history of this sort of thing
from philosophers. Aristotle claimed humans were special because they could do
arithmetic. Now we know that arithmetic is simple, in the sense that it takes
a very small parts count. Hubert Dreyfus, in 1972, said computers couldn't
play even a decent amateur game of chess. Now, any laptop PC can trounce grand
masters.

What AI isn't doing well yet is predicting the consequences of actions: "what
will happen next", and "what will happen next if this decision is made".
Basically, the technology to get through the next 15 seconds of life. This is
the beginning of common sense, and really ought to be worked on more. We have
the tools now to go at that problem. Self-driving cars have to do some of
this, and answers may come out of that technology. This is an essential
technology for robots which operate in an unstructured world.

Once that problem has been solved, we might be in a position to talk about
"consciousness" from a non-clueless perspective. Higher level thinking is
mostly a strategy module for the "next 15 seconds" control system.

At least the article doesn't use the world "quantum".

~~~
dkarapetyan
Higher level thinking is model building from sensory input. I have not seen
any system out there that learns to reason about 3D space by just going around
touching/feeling things and then incorporating that feedback with other
senses. Everything starts with a model built-in and then tweaks parameters
through some kind of optimization mechanism. Which is fine but that's not
really intelligence in the sense of coming up with novel models and
incorporating it into pre-existing models.

~~~
vectorjohn
Absolutely not. You can, in your house, build a robot that uses sensory input
to construct a map of its surroundings and then navigate that map.

Check out various algorithms to do so, such as [1]. Model building from
sensory input is very simple, and in my opinion only tangentially related to
consciousness.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D*)

~~~
dkarapetyan
Oh ok. In that case ya we got all this figured out. I mean there is D*. Thanks
for clearing up all the confusion. /sarcasm

~~~
vectorjohn
Well, your whole argument is that we couldn't do it, while plainly we can. So,
answer with /sarcasm all you want, but it isn't a good argument.

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KingMob
Former neuroscientist here, whose lab studied consciousness. I'm not sure
about the book, but the review is light on details.

We know biology is connected _somehow_ to conscious awareness (sleep,
illusions, blindsight, TMS, etc.) but we still haven't jumped the gap
separating the objective from the subjective. It's called the Hard Problem for
good reason.

~~~
jquery
I tend to think subjective consciousness is just one of those fundamental
forces/components of the universe, like space-time. It's so different than
anything else we observe, I don't know how we ever bridge that gap between the
material and the subjective. It just _is_.

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467568985476
My impression of I Am a Strange Loop was that it contains a subset of the
ideas in GEB, and lacks the off the wall charm (and delicious mathematics)
that GEB contains. I sometimes recommend it to people who tried to read GEB
and gave up, but I don't think there's much to learn from I Am a Strange Loop
if you're already familiar with Hofstadter and GEB.

~~~
vectorjohn
Can you un-acronym GEB?

~~~
gerbilly
Gôdel Escher Bach Douglas Hofstadter, 1979

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach)

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amelius
First, isn't there a better word for consciousness, as used in this book?
Because I have the feeling that different people (even scientists) mean
different things by it.

Second, I think the main problem is that most people consider consciousness as
something which lies outside of the physical realm, and that there is,
supposedly, a one-way communication link from the physical world to our
consciousness. However, since we are in fact (physically) talking about the
concept of consciousness, this seems highly unlikely. It is thus more likely
that consciousness is a part of physics, and we should perhaps treat it as
such.

~~~
orthoganol
This is the standard reductionist position, and the standard strawmannirg of
people who don't agree with it.

To explain it crudely, yes, it all ultimately reduces to the neuronal
substrate and no one in their right mind disagrees. The point is that only
looking at this level ignores the important and large set of data that is
humans' first-hand observations of consciousness, what you're able to
perceive, study, and observe about conscious experience, the kind of
observations that Searle makes. To just write off first hand observation data
as irrelevant strikes me as anti-scientific if not ideological. I mean, why
wouldn't you try to develop a system of consciousness that starts with this
data, in tandem with neuronal studies (there's no inherent contradiction)?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
The problem is that first-hand observations aren't irrelevant, they're
_perverse_. They're the mind viewing itself through its own intuitive folk-
theory of mind, _which is nowhere near an accurate psychology_.

~~~
orthoganol
> They're the mind viewing itself through its own intuitive folk-theory of
> mind

Why do you think I'm suggesting any theory of mind at all? You're stating too
much.

I'm just suggesting look for patterns and produce models of what you can
observe about human subjectivity. Hofstadtr's "strange loop" being an example
of one such model.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>I'm just suggesting look for patterns and produce models of what you can
observe about human subjectivity.

Well yeah, but the whole problem with subjectivity is that it consists in the
mind's model of the environment feeding back into the sensory inferences as
inductive bias while the feature data extracted _from_ the sensory inferences
_also_ trains the model of the environment.

Which is _why_ people's first-hand "observations" aren't really observations
in the scientific sense: "sensings" or "appearances" are actually theory-laden
inferences.

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anonymfus
_there is no way to teach calculus to a chimp, or even to make it understand
the square root of 2._

Legends ever say that the first man who tried to make primates to understand
the square root of 2 was drowned by them.

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SixSigma
On the subject of loops:

Common Lisp’s loop is so powerful that people invented functional programming
so that they’d never have to use it.

G_Morgan in reddit

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a481l/so_to_get...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a481l/so_to_get_back_to_the_point_go_vs_algol68_tbh_i/c0fs2nk)

~~~
lispm
Lisp users thought that the standard LOOP was dumbed down from the real MIT
LOOP, so they invented a new one, even more powerful:

[https://common-lisp.net/project/iterate/](https://common-
lisp.net/project/iterate/)

------
gsmsg
I have a short article that covers some similar topics. In the third paragraph
I make a strong argument against materialism by examining consciousness.

[http://www.gmw6.com/belief_through_reason.html](http://www.gmw6.com/belief_through_reason.html)

~~~
jshen
> it seems disingenuous to either believe that many separate things can have a
> synthesized experience.

This isn't an argument, it's merely an assertion of a point of view, and one
that isn't obviously true. The evidence on the other side of the argument
seems much stronger than your argument about our visual field. When you look
at all of the examples of brain damage causing peoples personalities to change
dramatically, well you have a high hill to climb to say that who we are isn't
material in nature.

~~~
gsmsg
the quoted text foreshadows the argument about visual fields. I'm not saying
that the brain isn't important, just that it cannot solely explain our
conscious experience. This alone is sufficient to defeat materialism.

~~~
vectorjohn
So... magic.

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sireat
The undercurrent running through "I Am a Strange Loop" was the grief of losing
his wife to brain cancer.

The playful discourse evident in GEB was no more.

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johnsearle
book was really bad, hofstadter tryin to make an extra buck piggybacking off
the success of GEB, dont waste your time

~~~
ctdavies
Huh, are you the famous philosopher John Searle?

~~~
colomon
Who created a HN account just to to smack talk Hofstadter? That seems likely.

~~~
ctdavies
Gardner calls Searle "the scoundrel of Hofstadter’s book." He is now also the
scoundrel of this thread.

~~~
jakeva
What a strange loop indeed

