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07:21, 17 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs created page From Bacteria to Bach and Back (Created page with "== Part I: Turning Our World Upside Down == === 1. Introduction === === 2. Before Bacteria and Bach === === 3. On the Origin of Reasons === === 4. The Strange Inversions of Meaning === === 5. The Evolution of Understanding === == Part II: From Evolution to Intelligent Design == === 6. What is Information? === === 7. Darwinian Space: An Interlude === === 8. Brains Made of Brains === === 9. The Role of Words in Cultural Evolution === === 10. The Meme's-Eye Point of View ==...")
07:12, 17 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs moved page Gödel, Escher Bach to Gödel, Escher, Bach
16:01, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Strange Loops, Or Tangled Hierarchies (content was: "* Reasoning involves an infinite regress. * Machines may someday have wills despite the fact that no magic program spontaneously appears in memory from out of nowhere. Instead it will be by reason of organization and structure on many levels of hardware and software; * When humans think, we certainly do change our own mental rules, and we change the rules that change the rules, and on and...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Artificial Intelligence: Prospects (content was: "* I believe that "almost" situations and unconsciously manufactured subjunctives represent some of the richest potential sources of insight into how human beings organize and categorize their perceptions of the world. * The "slippability" of a feature of some event or circumstance depends on a set of nested contexts in which the event or circumstance is perceived to occur. We build up ou...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Artificial Intelligence: Retrospects (content was: "* Tesler's theorem - "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." * Translation involves having a mental model of the world being discussed, and manipulating symbols in that model. A program which makes no use of a model of the world as it reads the passage will soon get hopelessly bogged down in ambiguities and multiple meanings. * Skillful game players choose their moves according to mental p...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Church, Turing, Tarski, and Others (content was: "* Every aspect of thinking can be viewed as a high-level description of a system which, on a low level, is governed by simple, even formal, rules. * The only way to understand such a comple system as a brain is by chunking it on higher and higher levels, and therby losing some precision at each step. What emerges at the top level is the « informal system » which obeys so many rules of...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Self-Ref and Self-Rep (content was: "* The word sequences are the tips of the icebergs and the processing which must be done to understand them is the hidden part. * Self-reproducing object = self-rep - we want to have the feeling that, to the max extend possible, it explicitly contains the directions for copying itself. There is an intuitive borderline on one side of which we perceive true self-directed self-rep, and on the...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Jumping out of the System (content was: "* Gw was not clever enough to foresee its own embeddability inside number theory. * Any system, no matter how complex or tricky it is, can be Gödel-numbered, and then the notion of its proof-pairs can be defined - and this is the petard by which it is hoise. Once a system is well-defined, or "boxed", it becomes vulnerable. * TNT is "essentially incomplete". The downfall occurs essentiall...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
16:00, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page On Formally Undecideable Propositions of TNT and Related Systems (content was: "* The arithmetical version of quining - arithmoquining - will allow us to make a TNT-sentence which is "about itself". ** a' is the Gödel number of the formula gotten by arithmoquining the formula with Gödel number a'' ** a' is the arithmoquinification of a'' * It's not enough to quine - you must quine a quine-mentioning sentence * We have gradually pulled a high-level interpretation -...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page BlooP and FlooP and GlooP (content was: "* Primitive recursivity and general recursivity * An orderly system of sufficient complexity that it can mirror itself cannot be totally orderly - it must contain some strange, chaotic features * Recursive function theory * Primitive recursive truths involve only predictably terminating calculations. These core truths serve for N as Euclid's first four postulates served for geometry; they...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Minds and Thoughts (content was: "* There can be no isomorphism between two brains on the neural or macroscopic suborgan level. * But on the symbol level, there could be functional isomorphisms between symbols and triggering patterns. * These would not be exact (even identical twins have different memories and thought symbols), but clearly some humans think more alike than others do. * What is a partial isomorphism or con...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Brains and Thoughts (content was: "* Thought must depend on representing reality in the hardware of the brain. * We must have active symbols, rather than passive typographic symbols. * Not all descriptions of a person need be attached to some central symbol for that person, which stores the person’s name. Descriptions can be manufactured and manipulated in themselves. We can invent nonexistent people by making descriptio...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Levels of Description, and Computer Systems (content was: "* We go to the doctor, who looks at us on lower levels than we think of ourselves. e read about DNA and « genetic engineering » and sip our coffee. * Flickering dots and the moview we’re watching - we have these two wildly different representations of what is on the screen, but that does not confuse us. We can just shut one out, and pay attention to the other - which is what all of...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Mumon and Gödel (content was: "* One of the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over. But Zen koans are a central part of Zen study, verbal though they are. Koans are supposed to be triggers which thought they do not contain enough information in themselves to impart enlightenment, may possible be...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:59, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Typographical Number Theory (content was: "* Three examples of indirect self-reference are included in the preceding dialog. To see them, you have to look at the form, as well as the content. * Open formulas with free variables, which express a property and quantified variables which express a truth or falsity. * A formula with at least on free variable, an open formula is called a predicate. * Assertion of existence and universa...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Propositional Calculus (content was: "* Propositional reasoning depends on the correct usage of the words "and", "if... then", "or", and "not". * The "fantasy rule" lets you write down any well-formed string and ask what if this were an axiom or a theorem * You can "push" into a fantasy, see its premise, a series of theorems and its outcome, and then "pop" back up to the previous level * You can carry over theorems from the l...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Location of Meaning (content was: "When is one thing not always the same? The idea of an objective meaning of a message will turn out to be related to the simplicity with which intelligence can be described: * There are cases where by investing sufficient effort, you can pull very recondite pieces of information out of certain structures. In fact, the pulling-out may involve such complicated operations that it makes you f...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Recursive Structures and Processes (content was: "What is recursion? It is nesting and variations on nesting. The concept is very general (stories inside stories, moveies inside movies, paintings inside paintings, Russian dolls inside Russian dolls: * A recursive definition never defines something in terms of itself, but always in terms of simpler versions of itself. * To "push" means to suspend operations on the task you're currently wo...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Consistency, Completeness, and Geometry (content was: "* The more complex the isomorphism, in general, the more « equipment » - both hardware and software - is required to extract the meaning from the symbols. * The key element is answering the question « What is consciousness? » will be the unraveling of the nature of the « isomorphism » which underlies meaning. * The story of the contracrostipunctus itself is an example of the b...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Figure and Ground (content was: " * The requirement of formality is the essential things which keeps you from mixing up the I-mode and the M-mode - it keeps you from mixing up arithmetical facts with typographical theorems * Checking whether Cx is not a theorem is not an explicitly typographical operation… You have to go outside the system. This is a rule which violates the whole idea of formal systems, in that it asks...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:58, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Meaning and Form in Mathematics (content was: "* Axiom schema * Well-formed string - those strings which, when interpreted symbol for symbol, yield grammatical sentences * Bottom-up - working its way up from the basics * Top-Down - working its way down to the basics * Meaningless interpretation - with no isomorphic connection between theorems of the system and reality * Meaningful interpretation - any old word can be used as an interp...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:57, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The MU Puzzle (content was: "* "formal system" - you must not do anything which is outside the rules (the Requirement of Formality) * "theorem" - instead of being proven, they are produced * "axiom" - a "free" theorem. A formal system may have zero, one, several, or even infinitely many axioms * "rules of production/ rules of inference" - to "shunt" strings around * "derivation" - an explicit, line-by-line demonstra...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:57, 16 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Introduction: A Musico-Logical Offering (content was: "* Notice that every type of "copy" preserves all the information in the original theme, in the sense that the theme is fully recoverable from any of the copies. Such an information-preserving transformation is often called an isomorphism * The strange loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ours...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:45, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream (content before blanking was: "I think about thinking. I think about: * how concepts and words are related, * what ‘thinking in French’ is, * what underlies slips of the tongue and other types of errors * how one event effortlessly reminds us of another * how we recognize written letters and words * how we understand sloppily spoken, slurred, slangy speech * how we toss of untold numbers of utterly bland-seeming yet never-before-made analogies and occasionally come up with sparklingly ori...")
15:45, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Quandary (content was: "* We humans are doomed, as spiritual creatures in a universe of mere stuff, to eternal puzzlement about our nature. * The presence or absence of animacy depends on the level at which one views a structure. Animate entities are those that, at some level of description, manifest a certain type of loopy pattern. * When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:45, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Epi Phenomenon (content before blanking was: "* Thanks to the funneling-down processes of perception, which will lead eventually - in a matter of milliseconds - to the activation of certain discrete symbols in its brain, an animal can relate intimately and reliably to its physical environment. * Because an animal’s internal mirroring of the world must be highly reliable, its mirroring of the world via its private cache of symbols becomes an unquestioned pillar of stability. The things and patterns it perc...")
15:45, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Causal Potency of Patterns (content before blanking was: "* Entities that. think * A network of precisely times domino chains * The abstract forces that can act on freeways and traffic * Voters in a national election * In a brain there can be vastly different explanations belonging to vastly different domains of discourse at vastly different levels of abstraction. * The locations and velocities of individual molecules are simply irrelevant. * That high-level statistical outcome is robust and invariant against the detai...")
15:45, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Blurry Glow of Human Identity (content was: "* The "caged-bird metaphor" - one soul in one brain. * In fact, every normal adult human soul is housed in many brains at varying degrees of fidelity, and therefore every human consciousness or "I" lives at once in a collection of different brains, to different extents. * Common sense tells us, unnambiguously that we are always in just one place, not two or more. * But when watching a mov...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:44, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Pattern and Provability (content was: "- No Notes! - (Chapter 10 of "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter)", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:44, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page On Video Feedback (content before blanking was: "* truncated corridor, endless corridor, helical corridor. * An emergent phenomenon somehow emerges quite naturally and automatically from rigid rules operating at a lower, more basic level, but exactly how that emergence happens is not at all clear to the observer. * The amazing visual universe discovered around 1980 by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. * It is the circularity - the loopiness - of the system that brings these patterns into existence and makes the...")
15:44, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page On Souls and Their Sizes (content before blanking was: "* Soul shards * Souls of different sizes: ** Lots of consciousness: *** normal adult humans *** mentally retarded, brain-damanged, and senile humans *** dogs, bunnies, chickens ** Less (but some) consciousness: *** goldfish, bees, mosquitoes, mites ** Little or no consciousness: *** microbes, viruses, atoms Lights on? * possessing intentionality * having semantics (Chapter 2 of "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter)")
15:44, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page On Magnanimity and Friendship (content was: "* I would point to individuals whose behavior is essentially the opposite of that of violent psychopaths: Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Raoul Wallenberg, Jean Moulin, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and César Chavez - extraordinary individuals whose deep empathy for those who suffer leads them to devote a large part of their lives to helping others, and to doing so in nonviolent...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:43, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page On Downward Causality (content was: "* The peak’s inaccessibility turns out to have nothing to do with how anyone might try to get up to it; it has to do with an inherent instability belonging to the summit itself * upside-down reasoning from a would-be theorem downwards, rather than from axioms upwards, and in particular, reasoning from a hidden meaning of the would-be theorem, rather than from its surface-level claim about numbers. * There are many true statements that are not provable. * A creature that think...")
15:43, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Of Selves and Symbols (content before blanking was: "* In the case of a being struggling to survive, the one thing that is always in its environment is… itself. * The camera, rather than being bolted onto its TV set is attached to it by a short leash, giving rise to a truncated corridor, like pet animals or even young children are slightly self-aware * When the leash is sufficiently long and flexible that the video camera can point straight at the center of the screen, we can have an endless corridor, which is f...")
15:43, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Loops, Goals, and Loopholes (content before blanking was: "* Mechanical systems with feedback such as James Watt’s steam-engine governor. * The presence of a feedback loop is a strong pressure to shift levels of description from the goalless level of mechanics (in which forces make things move) to the goal-oriented level of cybernetics (in which desires make things move). * The suspicion of loops just runs in our human grain. * From Russel’s theory of types and elsewhere, we see that people can be irrationally aller...")
15:42, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page How We Live in Each Other (content was: "* The inner circuitry of cell phones has surpassed a certain threshold of complexity and that fact allows them to have a chameleon-like nature. I'll call it the Godel-Turing threshold, and once it is surpassed, a computer can emulate any kind of machine. * Turing realized that the critical threshold for this kind of computational universality comes at exactly that point where a machine is...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:42, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page How Analogy Makes Meaning (content was: "* We effortlessly generalize outwards. * It is out of a dense fabric of a myriad of invisible, throwaway analogies that the vast majority of our rich mental life is built. * What seem like the most mundane analogies can, when they are examined, be seen to have sprung from, and to reveal, the deepest roots of human cognition. * An isomorphism is just a formalized and strict analogy. * What we might be tempted to call « direct » reference is mediated by a code too - the code...")
15:42, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Grappling with the Deepest Mystery (content was: "* The name Carol denotes for me , far more than just a body, which is now gone, but rather a very vast pattern, a style, a set of things including memories, hopes, dreams, beliefs, loves, reactions to music, sense of humor, self-doubt, generostiry, compassion, and so on… a pattern imbued with fantastic triggering power. * A person is a point of view - not only a physical point of view (...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:42, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Godel’s Quintessential Strange Loop (content was: "* Mathematicians see their pristine, abstract world as the antithesis to the random, accident-filled physical world we all inhabit. * In mathematics, where there’s a pattern, there’s a reason. * What a recursive definition does, albeit implicitly, is to divide the entire set of integers into members and non-members of the club. * Godel’s formula is making a claim about itself. (Chapter 11 of "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter)")
15:42, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari (content before blanking was: "* A strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. (Chapter 9 of "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter)")
15:41, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Consciousness = Thinking (content was: "* Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to make it even more pithy, consciousness is thinking. * Most of the time, any given symbol in our brain in dormant, like a book sitting inertly in the remote stacks of a huge library. Every so often, some event will trigger the retrieval of this book from the stacks, and it will be opened and its pages will come alive for some reader. In an analogous way, inside a human brain, perceived external events are continu...")
15:41, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page An Affable Locking of Horns (content was: "Plato: Some Thoughts I think about consciously before uttering Socrates: In what sense do you think consciously about them? P: I don’t know. I suppose that I try to find the correct words to describe them. S: What guides you to the correct words? P: Why, I search logically for synonyms, similar words, and so on, with which I am familiar. S: In other words, habit guides your thought...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:41, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page A Tango with Zombies and Dualism (content was: "* Category assignments go right to the core of thinking. * Consciousness is not an optional feature that one can order independently of how the brain is built. Consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design. It is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficient...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:41, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page A Courteous Crossing of Words (content was: "* What we know as our consciousness is nothing but the physical activity inside a human brain that has lived in the world for a number of years. * Some kinds of physical systems can mirror what’s on their outside and can launch actions that depend upon their perceptions. * To make an I you need meanings, and to make meanings you need perception and categories - a repertoire of categorie...", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:40, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos (content was: "* Something of Jim is surviving strongly - surviving in other brains, thanks to human love. * All of these things survive at different levels in many people who, thanks to having interacted with him intimately over many years of decades, constitute his "soular corona". * His soul will still exist, in partial, low-resolution copies, scattered about the globe.", and the only contributor was "Rob" (talk))
15:40, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs undeleted page Main Page (34 revisions)
15:39, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Main Page (content was: "My main focus is on consciousness, with a particular focus on the work of Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter, along with: * project * science * philosophy of mind - a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the body and the external world. * psychology - the study of mind and behavior including the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoug...")
15:39, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Entwinement (Duplicate)
15:39, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page Strangeness in the I of the Beholder (Duplicate)
15:38, 15 February 2025 Robert.adlington talk contribs deleted page The Elusive Apple of My I (duplicate)