On Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 9:09 AM 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> I invite you to discover my paper "How Self-Reference Builds the World" > which is the theory of everything that people searched for millennia. It > can be found on my philpeople profile: > https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan > Hi Cosmin, Very nice, and very original work. A few comments and questions, written as they occurred to me: The idea of self reference being larger and smaller than itself made me think of how the universe can be thought of as much larger than us, but all our thoughts and ideas about the universe are contained within our skulls. I am not sure if this is an example of the kind of paradox of self reference that you describe but I thought I would ask. Your bootstrapping of nothing into something via self reference made me think of the following example. Start with the sentence: "Every rule has an exception" This is a self referential sentence, which can be either true or false. If it is false, then there are rules without exceptions (i.e. laws). If it is true, then "every rule has an exception" would also be a rule, and if it has an exception, then again we reach the conclusion that there are some rules without exceptions (i.e. laws), so this self refuting sentence implies a universal truth, the existence of laws. Another comment: Fractals are objects defined through their self reference, is any special attention owed to them? What about numbers such as e? Or steps in a recursive computational relation (steps of the evolving game of life universe might be conceived of as a recursive function, for example). What would you consider the simplest possible program that had consciousness to be? That is, what is the shortest bit of code that would manifest consciousness of something (even a single bit)? I agree to that the difficulty of explaining or communicating qualia stems from what me might call self-reference islands. Each of us is trapped within an isolated context, from which we have qualia of various kinds but no common framework established between other minds that enable communication beyond this island. Think of the analogous situation of people in two different universes or AIs in two different computer simulations, trying to define what they mean by a metered or a kilogram. These terms are meaningless and incommunicable outside the particular universe, since they are terms wholly defined by relationships that exist only within a particular universe or simulation. There not only can be no agreement on what is meant by those terms, but they aren't even definable (outside the contextual island that exists only within that universe). For we consciousness beings, we each have such a universe of qualia in our own heads, and these are similarly undefinable beyond the context of our inner view. As for the ontology that results, your work reminded me of these works that contain related ideas (of self-reference, observer-centric, nothing-based means of bootstrapping reality): Bruno Marchal's "The computationalist reformulation of the mind-body problem" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236138701_The_computationalist_reformulation_of_the_mind-body_problem Mark F. Sharlow's "Can Machines Have First-Person Properties?" https://archive.is/rDP33 Markus Muller's "Law without law: from observer states to physics via algorithmic information theory" https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01826 David Pearce's "The Zero Ontology" https://www.hedweb.com/witherall/zero.htm Stephen Wolfram's "The Concept of the Ruliad" https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-concept-of-the-ruliad/ And Russell Standish's "Theory of Nothing" https://www.hpcoders.com.au/nothing.html I have written an article which reaches similar conclusions: https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/ Note that while I focus more on the mathematics than self-reference, I do see self-reference (in consciousness) as being a key step in the process of realizing an apparent reality, providing a first person localized perspective out of objective mathematical truths and number relations. Here are some quotes and references you may appreciate from others who have seen a key role of self-reference in the definition of consciousness: Douglas Hofstadter's notion of "Strange Loop" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop “In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference.” — Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, p. 363 WHO SHOVES WHOM AROUND INSIDE THE CAREENIUM? OF WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE WORD "I"? - DOUGLAS R. HOFSTADTER - 1982 - https://jsomers.net/careenium.pdf - “The real point is, there's only ONE MECHANISM underlying "I-ness": namely, the circling-back of a complex representation of the system together with its representations of all the rest of the world. Which “I” you are is determined by the WAY you carry out that cycling, and the way you represent the world.” “In a sense, Gödel’s Theorem is a mathematical analogue of the fact that I cannot understand what it is like not to like chocolate, or to be a bat, except by an infinite sequence of ever-more-accurate simulation processes that converge toward, but never reach, emulation. I am trapped inside myself and therefore can’t see how other systems are. Gödel’s Theorem follows from a consequence of the general fact: I am trapped inside myself and therefore can’t see how other systems see me. Thus the objectivity-subjectivity dilemmas that Nagel has sharply posed are somehow related to epistemological problems in both mathematical logic, and as we saw earlier, the foundations of physics.” (Hofstader in Mind’s I) -- Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett in "The Mind’s I" (1981) “There was a man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, what I would like to see, is the eye that knows me, when I know that I know that I know.” - “This is the human problem, we know that we know.” -- Alan Watts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Q2xNqKvnE “Even for the universal machine doing nothing more than self-introspection, her consciousness (related to []p & p) is not definable, for reason related to the fact that knowledge and truth are not definable by any machine, when the range of that knowledge and truth is vast enough to encompass the machine itself.” -- Bruno Marchal “You need self-reference ability for the notion of belief, together with a notion of reality or truth, which the machine cannot define. To get immediate knowledgeability you need to add consistency ([]p & <>t), to get ([]p & <>t & p) which prevents transitivity, and gives to the machine a feeling of immediacy.” -- Bruno Marchal “It is not because some “information processing” could support consciousness that we can conclude that all information processing can support consciousness. You need at least one reflexive loop. You need two reflexive loop for having self-consciousness (Löbianity)." -- Bruno Marchal “The appearance of a universe, or even universes, must be explained by the geometry of possible computations of possible machines, seen by these machines".” -- The Amoeba’s Secret - Bruno Marchal 2014 https://www.hpcoders.com.au/docs/amoebassecret.pdf page 140 “To exist, it must have cause–effect power; to exist from its own intrinsic perspective, independent of extrinsic factors, it must have cause–effect power upon itself: its present mechanisms and state must ‘make a difference’ to the probability of some past and future state of the system (its cause–effect space)” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2014.0167 (Tononi Koch, IIT paper) “More broadly one could say that, through the human being, the universe has created a mirror to observe itself.” - David Bohm, The Undivided Universe, Routledge, 2002, pp. 389 “A many minds theory, like a many worlds theory, supposes that, associated with a sentient being at any given time, there is a multiplicity of distinct conscious points of view. But a many minds theory holds that it is these conscious points of view or ‘minds,’ rather than ‘worlds’, that are to be conceived as literally dividing or differentiating over time.” – Michael Lockwood in “‘Many Minds’. Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics” (1995) “It is sometimes suggested within physics that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe, and even that physical properties and laws may be derivative from informational properties and laws. This “it from bit” view is put forward by “Wheeler (1989, 1990) and Fredkin (1990), and is also investigated by papers in Zurek (1990) and MAtzke (1992, 1994). If this is so, we may be able to give information a more serious role in our ontology. [...] This approach stems from the observation that in physical theories, fundamental physical states are effectively individuated as information states. When we look at a feature such as mass or charge, we find simply a brute space of differences that make a difference. Physics tells us nothing about what mass is, or what charge is: it simply tells us the range of different values that these features can take on, and it tells us their effects on other features. As far as physical theories are concerned, specific states of mass or charge might as well be pure information states: all that matters is their location within an information space.” -- David Chalmers in "The Conscious Mind" (1996) "A cat. A cat is seen. Something seen, must be a seer. I see a cat. I exist. What is I?" -- Jason "Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself. Obviously the limbs and body of a survival machine must constitute an important part of its simulated world; presumably for the same kind of reason, the simulation itself could be regarded as part of the world to be simulated. Another word for this might indeed be “self-awareness,” -- Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett in "The Mind’s I" (1981) These quotes get to the heart of the difficulty of self reference, and the difference between being vs. describing: “As we discussed in the first chapters of this book, the study of consciousness as a scientific subject casts a sharp light on a special problem faced by the scientific observer. As long as his description leaves out his phenomenal experience and he can assume that such experience is present in another observer, they both can give a description of the physical world from a “God’s-eye” view. When the observer turns his attention to the description of consciousness, however, he must face some challenging issues. These issues include the fact that consciousness is embodied uniquely and privately in each individual; that no description, scientific or otherwise, is equivalent to the experience of individual embodiment; that there is no judge deciding categories in nature except for natural selection; and that the external description of information by the observers as a code in the brain leads to paradox. These issues pose a challenging set of problems: how to provide an adequate description of higher brain functions; how information arises in nature; and, finally, how we know–the central concern of epistemology.” -- Gerald Maurice Edelman and Giulio Tononi in "A Universe of Consciousness" (2000) “Our analysis has predicated on the notion that while we can construct a sensible scientific theory of consciousness that explains how matter becomes imagination, that theory cannot replace experience: Being is not describing. A scientific description can have predictive and explanatory power, but it cannot directly convey the phenomenal experience that depends on having an individual brain and body. In our theory of brain complexity, we have removed the paradoxes that arise by assuming only the God’s-eye view of the external observer and, by adhering to selectionism, we have removed the homunculus. Nevertheless, because of the nature of embodiment, we still remain, to some extent, prisoners of description, only somewhat better off than the occupants of Plato’s cave.” -- Gerald Maurice Edelman and Giulio Tononi in "A Universe of Consciousness" (2000) When do you expect part 2 will be out? Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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