What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle? What is an ‘I’?
Books themselves are aperiodic crystals contained inside neat geometrical forms. These examples suggest that, where an aperiodic crystal is found “packaged” inside a very regular geometric structures, there may lurk an inner message.
Our intelligence is not disembodied, but is instantiated in physical objects: our brains. Their structure is due to the long process of evolution, and their operations are governed by the laws of physics. Since they are physical entities, our brains run without being told how to run.
What is an “I,” and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, “teetering bulbs of dread and dream”—that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?
This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
People enjoy inventing slogans which violate basic arithmetic but which illustrate “deeper” truths, such as “1 and 1 make 1” (for lovers), or “1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 1” (the Trinity). You can easily pick holes in those slogans, showing why, for instance, using the plus-sign is inappropriate in both cases. But such cases proliferate. Two raindrops running down a window-pane merge; does one plus one make one? A cloud breaks up into two clouds -more evidence of the same? It is not at all easy to draw a sharp line between cases where what is happening could be called “addition,” and where some other word is wanted.
Most of us are willing to eat animals of one sort or another, to smash flies, swat mosquitos, fight bacteria with antibiotics, and so forth. We generally concur that “men” such as a cow, a turkey, a frog, and a fish all possess some spark of consciousness, some kind of primitive “soul,” but by God, it’s a good deal smaller than ours is—and that, no more and no less, is why we “men” feel that we have the perfect right to extinguish the dim lights in the heads of these fractionally-souled beasts and to gobble down their once warm and wiggling, now chilled and stilled protoplasm with limitless gusto, and not feel a trace of guilt while doing so.
Perhaps the greatest contradiction in our lives, the hardest to handle, is the knowledge “There was a time when I was not alive, and there will come a time when I am not alive.” On one level, when you “step out of yourself” and see yourself as “just another human being,” it makes complete sense. But on another level, perhaps a deeper level, personal nonexistence makes no sense at all. All that we know is embedded inside our minds, and for all that to be absent from the universe is not comprehensible. This is a basic undeniable problem of life.
Why is some music so much deeper and more beautiful than other music? It is because form, in music, is expressive–expressive to some strange subconscious regions of our minds. The sounds of music do not refer to serfs or city-states, but they do trigger clouds of emotion in our innermost selves; in that sense musical meaning is dependent on intangible links from symbols to things in the world–those “things,” in this case, being secret software structures in our minds.
What is “music”—a sequence of vibrations in the air, or a succession of emotional responses in the brain?
I realized that to me, Gödel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to construct the central object, and came up with this book.
Consistent or inconsistent, no one is exempt from the mystery of the self. Probably we are all inconsistent. The world is just too complicated for a person to be able to afford the luxury of reconciling all of his beliefs with each other. Tension and confusion are important in a world where many decisions must be made quickly. Miguel de Unamuno once said, “If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.” I would say that we all are in the same boat as the Zen master who, after contradicting himself several times in a row, said to the confused Doko, “I cannot understand myself.”
What does it matter if two brains are isomorphic, or quasi-isomorphic, or not isomorphic at all? The answer is that we have an intuitive sense that, although other people differ from us in important ways, they are still “the same” as we are in some deep and important ways. It would be instructive to be able to pinpoint what this invariant core of human intelligence is, and then to be able to describe the kinds of “embellishments” which can be added to it, making each one of us a unique embodiment of this abstract and mysterious quality called “intelligence.”
I personally cannot imagine that consciousness will be fully understood without reference to Gödelian loops or level-crossing feedback loops.
Historically, people have been naïve about what qualities, if mechanized, would undeniably constitute intelligence. Is intelligence an ability to integrate functions symbolically? If so, then AI already exists, since symbolic integration routines outdo the best people in most cases. If intelligence involves learning, creativity, emotional responses, a sense of beauty, a sense of self, then there is a long road ahead, and it may be that these will only be realized when we have totally duplicated a living brain.
If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut: they’d just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.
It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns.
There are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision to perceive a system which governs many peoples’ lives, a system which had never before even been recognized as a system; then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there, and that it ought to be exited from!