I am a Strange Loop

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Prologue. An Affable Locking of Horns

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.

P: Yes, my thought is guided by the habit of connecting words with one another systematically

S: Then once again, these conscious thoughts are produced by reflex action.

P: I do not see how I can know I am conscious, how I can feel alive if this is true, yet I have followed your argument.

S: But this argument itself shows that your reaction is merely habit, or reflex action, and that no conscious thought is leading you to say you know you are alive. If you stop to consider it, do you really understand what you mean by saying such a sentence? Or does it just come into your mind without your thinking consciously of it?

…

P: Then feeling one is alive is merely an illusion propagated by a reflex that urges one to utter, without understanding, such a sentence, and a truly living creature is reduced to a collection of complex reflexes. Then you have told me, Socrates, what you think life is.

1. On Souls and Their Sizes

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

2. This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream

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 original ones
how each of our concepts grows in subtlety and fluidity over our lifetime

I think about the brain, since the human brain is precisely the machinery that carries out human thinking, via a series of abstractions:

The concept « dog »
The associative link between the concepts « dog » and « bark »
Object files (Anne Treisman)
Frames (Marvin Minsky)
Memory organization packets (Roger Schank)
Long-term memory and short-term memory
Episodic memory and melodic memory
Analogical bridges
Mental spaces (Gilles Fauconnier)
Memes (Richard Dawkins)
The ego, id, and superego (Sigmund Freud)
The grammar of one’s native language
Sense of humor
« I »

A heart is a pump. Analogously, a brain is a thinking machine:

There exists within the cranium a whole world of diverse causal forces
If one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain…
Near the apex of this command system in the brain… we find ideas
Ways of describing complex patterns engendered by basic physical forces
This kind of shift in levels of description yielded something very precious to living beings: comprehensibility
Thinkodynamics is analogous to themodynamics - it involves large-scale structures and patterns in the brain and makes no reference to microscopic events such as neural firings. It is what psychologists study - how people make choices, commit errors, perceive patterns, experience novel remindings
Mentalics is about small-scale phenomena that neurologists study
The pressures of daily life force us to talk about events at the level on which we directly perceive them. We necessarily simplify and vastly so. But that sacrifice is our glory. Drastic simplification is what allows us to reduce situations to their bare bones, to discover abstract essences, to put our fingers on what matters, to understand phenomena at amazingly high levels, to survive reliably in this world, and to formulate literature, art, music, and science.

3. The Causal Potency of Patterns

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 details of the substrate. The high-level outcome is insulated and sealed off from the microscopic level.
There’s plenty of unpredictability up here in the macroworld:
- When we toss a basketball towards a basket, we don’t have any idea whether it will go through or not.
- When we begin to utter a thought, we have no idea what words we will wind up using nor which grammatical pathways we will wind up following, nor can we predict the speech errors or the facts about our unconscious mind that our little slips will reveal.
- When we ski down a slope, we don’t know if we’re going to fall on our next turn or not.
The macroscopic world as experienced by humans is, in short, an intimate mixture ranging from the most predictable events all the way to wildly unpredictable ones.
By the time we emerge from childhood, we have acquired a reflex-level intuition for where most of our everyday world’s loci of unpredictability lie, and the more unpredictable end of this spectrum simultaneously beckons to us and frightens us. We’re pulled by but fearful of risk-taking. That is the nature of life.

Simmballs in the Careenium:

While no simm on its own encodes anything or plays a symbolic role, the simmballs, on their far more macroscopic level, do encode and are symbolic
We cannot see the simms any more.
From our higher-level macroscopic vantage point as we hover above the table, we can see ideas giving rise to other ideas, we can see one symbolic event reminding the system of another symbolic event, we can see elaborate patterns of simmballs coming together and forming even larger patterns that constitute analogies - in short, we can visually eavesdrop on the logic of a thinking mind taking place in the patterned dance of the simmballs. And in this latter view, it is the simmballs that shove each other about, at their own isolated symbolic level.

4. Loops, Goals, and Loopholes

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 allergic to the idea of self-reference.

5. On Video Feedback

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 them persist.
Feedback gives rise to a new kind of abstract phenomenon that can be called « locking-in ».
It will not go away because it is forever refreshing itself, feeding on itself, giving rebirth to itself. It is a self-stabilizing structure whose origins, despite the simplicity of the feedback loop itself, are nearly impenetrable because the loop is cycled through so many times.

6. Of Selves and Symbols

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 far richer than a truncated one.
Symbols in a brain are the neurological entities that correspond to concepts. Each symbol is dormant most of the time, but is potentially triggerable at any time.
The passage leading from vast numbers of received signals to a handful of triggered symbols is a kind of funneling process, in which initial input signals are manipulated or massaged, the results of which selectively trigger further (ie more internal) signals and so forth.
In fact there is a great deal of two-way flow. Signals don’t propagate solely from the outside inwards, towards symbols; expectations from past experiences simultaneously give rise to signals propagating outwards from certain symbols.
Mosquito behavior seems perfectly comprehensible without recourse to anything that deserves the name « symbol ».
No one could doubt that pet dogs develop a respectable repertoire of categories. A dog has some kind of rudimentary self-model, some kind of sense of itself.
The emergence of this kind of reflexive symbolic structure, at whatever level of sentience it first enters the picture, constitutes the central germ, the initial spark, of I-ness, the tiny core to which more complex senses of

I-ness will then accrete over a lifetime, like the snowflake that grows around a tiny initial speck of dust.

There is some level of complexity at which a creature starts applying some of its categories to itself.

The radically different conceptual repertoir of human beings:

A spectacular evolutionary gulf opened up at some point as human being were gradually separating from other primates: their category systems became arbitrarily extensible. Into our mental lives there entered a dramatic quality of open-endedness, an essentially unlimited extensibility, as compared with a very palpable limitedness in other species.
Concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees, like the huge difference, in video feedback, between an infinite corridor and a truncated one.

Episodic memory:

Episodes are concepts of a sort, but they take place over time and each one is presumably one-of-a-kind, a bit like a proper noun but lacking a name, and linked to a particular moment in time. Although each one is unique, episodes also fall into their own categories.
Nearly all memories of specific episodes are dormant almost all the time (otherwise we would bo stark-raving mad)
The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a hyman being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what I-ness is about.