Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

I: Snags and Snarls

1. On Self-Referential Sentences

• Many systems have the capability to represent or refer to themselves somehow, to designate themselves (or elements of themselves) within the system of their own symbolism. Whenever this happens, it is an instance of self-reference.
• Self-reference is often associated with paradox, but this is not necessarily the case.
• The classic paradox is 'Epimenides the Cretan said "All Cretans are liars."'
• It seems that all paradoxes involve, in one way or another, self-reference, whether it is achieved directly or indirectly.
• The philosophical problem of the connections among Platonic ideas, mental activity, physiological brain activity, and the external symbols that trigger them is vividly raised by these disturbing sentences:
  • I am the meaning of this sentence.
  • I am the thought you are now thinking.
  • I am thinking about myself right now.
  • I am the set of neural firings taking place in your brain as you read the set of letters in this sentence and think about me.
  • This inert sentence is my body, but my soul is alive, dancing in the sparks of your brain.
• Content is just fancy form. Content is just a shorthand way of saying "form perceived by a very fancy apparatus capable of making complex and subtle distinctions and abstractions and connections to prior concepts.
• When self-reference (or reference in general, for that matter) is indirect, mediated by form, then fluidity is required. The understanding of such sentences involves a mixture of deriving the content and yet retaining the form in mind, letting qualities of the form in mind, letting qualities of the form conjure up flavors and enhance the meaning with a halo of not-quite-conscious pseudo-meanings, connotations, flavors, that flicker in the mind, not quite out of reach.

2. Self-Referential Sentences: A Follow-Up

• David Moser's: "This is the Title of this Story, Which is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself":
  • This is the first sentence of this story. This is the second sentence.
  • This sentence is questioning the intrinsic value of the first two sentences. This sentence is to inform you, in case you haven't already realized it, that this is a self-referential story, that is, a story containing sentences that refer to their own structure and function.
  • I mean, there is such a thing as free will, there has to be, and this sentence is proof of it!
  • This is the last sentence of the story. This is the last sentence of the story. This is the last sentence of the story. This is.
  • Sorry

3. On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures

• Walton and Going saw self-replicating sentences as similar to viruses - small objects that enslave larger and more self-sufficient "host" objects, getting the hosts by hook or by crook to carry out a complex sequence of replicating operations that bring new copies into being, which are then free to go off and enslave further hosts, and so on. "Viral sentences, as Walton called them, are "those that seek to obtain their own reproduction by commandeering the facilities of more complex entities."
• Both W and G were struck by the perniciousness of such sentences; the selfish way in which they invade a space of ideas and, merely by making copies of themselves all over the place, manage to take over a large portion of that space. Why do they not manage to overrun all of that idea-space? A good question. The answer: competition from other self-replicators. One types of replicator seizes a region of the space and becomes good at fending off rivals; thus a "niche" in idea-space is carved out.
• Roger Sperry in 1965, "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values":
  • "Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell."
• Jacques Monod in 1970, "Chance and Necessity":
  • The performance value of an idea depends upon the change it brings to the behavior of the person or the group that adopts it. The human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition, and greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand which will insure the promotion of the idea itself. Its capacity to "take", the extent to which it can be "put over" has little to do with the amount of objective truth the idea may contain. The important this about the stout armature a religious ideology constitutes for a society is not what goes into its structure, but the fact that this structure is accepted, that it gains sway. So one cannot well separate such an idea's power to spread from its power to perform.
  • The spreading power - the infectivity - of ideas, is much more difficult to analyze. let us say that it depends upon preexisting structures in the mind, among them ideas already implanted by culture, but also undoubtedly upon certain innate structure which we are hard put to identify. What is very pain, however, is that the ideas having the highest invading potential are those that explain man by assigning him his place in an immanent destiny, in whose bosom his anxiety dissolves.
• Richard Dawkins in 1976, "The Selfish Gene":
  • As a library is an organized collection of books, so a memory is an organized collection of memes. And the soup in which memes grow and flourish is the soup of human culture.
  • Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. and this isn't just a way of talking - the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.
  • The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The "everlasting arms" hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value.
  • There need not be an exact copy of each meme, written in some universal memetic code, in each person's brain. Memes, like genes, are susceptible to variation or distortion - the analog to mutation. Various mutations of a meme will have to compete with each other, as well as other memes, for attention - for brain resources in terms of both space and time devoted to that meme. Not only must they compete for inner resources, but, since they are transmissible visually and aurally, they must compete for radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper and magazine column-inches, and library shelf-space.
  • Unconscious memes have ensured their own survival value by virtue of those same qualities of pseudo-ruthlessness which successful genes display. The idea of hell fire is, quite simply, self-perpetuating, because of its own deep psychological impact. It has become linked with the god meme because the two reinforce each other, and assist each other's survival in the meme pool.
  • Faith - Means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence... Nothing is more leghal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence... The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
• A manuscript sent to an editor may be considered viral, even though it contains no explicit self-reference, because it is attempting to secure its own reproduction through an appropriate host; the same manuscript sent to someone who has nothing to do with publishing may have no viral quality at all.
• In a democracy, nearly any idea will tend to replicate since the only way to win an election is to convince other people to share your ideas. Most political ideas are not properly self-replicating, since the motive for spreading the idea is separate from the idea itself. But ideas can sometimes take on a life of their own and drive their own propagation.
• Some statements like "The bourgeoisie is oppressing the proletariat." drive a desire to propagate them through a wish to protect a victim figure from a villain figure.
• Most extremist mass movements are based on a belief of victimhood.
• "The self-replicating ideas are conspiring to enslave our minds" - this paranoid statement is the Epimenides Paradox.
• Groups of memes are "meme complexes" for Dawkins, or "schemes" for Hofstadter.
• When a thing - a sentence, book, system, person - seems to refer to itself but does so only by allusion to something resembling itself, it is called indirect self-reference.
• This depends upon the ease with which our perceptual systems convert a mirror image into its reverse, and upon other qualities of translation without being aware of the layers - like looking through many feet of water and seeing not the water but only what lies at its bottom.
• Reagan evoked the memory of Truman to implicitly menace Iran with nuclear attack.
• Can self-reference really be direct or indirect? Or are these two points on a continuum? Is there even "self"-reference? One thing refers to another whenever, to a conscious being, there is a sufficiently compelling mapping between the roles the two things are perceived to play in some larger structures or systems. Conscious being, here, is an analogy-hungry perceiving machine that gets along in the world thanks to its perceptions; it need not be human or even organic. The mapping of systems and roles that establishes reference need not actually be perceived by any such being; it suffices that the mapping exist and simply be perceptible to such a being were it to chance by.
• In the movie of the The French Lieutenant's Woman, as two stories unfold in parallel, a number of coincidences arise that suggest ever more strongly that a mapping should be made. But it is left to the movie viewer to carry this mapping out; it is never called for explicitly. After a time though it simply becomes unavoidable.
• Indirect reference of the artistic type is much less precise than indirect reference of the formal type. The latter arises when two formal systems are isomorphic - they have strictly analogous internal structures, so that there is a rigorous one-to-one mapping between the roles in the one and the roles in the other. The existence of genuine reference becomes as clear to us as in the case of someone talking about their mirror-image: we take it as immediate, pure self-reference, without even noticing the indirectness, the translational steps mediated by the isomorphism. In fact, the connection may seem too direct even to be called "reference", some may see it simply as identity.
• This perceptual immediacy is the reason that Gôdel's famous sentence G of mathematical logic is said to be self-referential.
• Indirect self-reference suggests the idea of indirect self-replication, in which a viral entity, instead of replicating itself exactly, brings into being another entity that plays the same role as it does, but in some other system, perhaps its mirror image, perhaps its translation into French, perhaps a string of the product numbers of all its parts, together with pre-addressed envelopes containing checks made out to the factories where those parts are made, and a list of instructions telling what to do with all the parts when they arrive in the mail.
• The arbitrary and peculiar aspect of the Quine sentence is that its seed is half as complex as the sentence itself. But is there one which is made of smaller, less complex parts? Is there a self-documenting or self-building sentence that builds both its halves - its quoted seed and its unquoted building role - out of words or letters? All structure in the built object must arise exclusively out of some principle enunciated in the building rule, not out of the seed's internal structure.