Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book (was Re-evaluating Lysenko)

[c b]

On 4/1/10, CeJ  wrote:
> CB: >>I happened to have had a personal intellectual history of studying
> paradoxes, going back to when I heard of Russell's paradox as a
> college freshman. This was before I studied dialectics , wherein
> paradoxical contradiction is central. So, I was interested in the
> focus on strange loops. By and large, I don't read for the writing
> style of the writer. I'm not much of a reacreational reader of books.<<
>
> I hate to be too narrow-minded, but although these have big
> implications for axiomatics in mathematics (starting with 'infinite
> sets', right?), what do they say about reality outside human
> formulations of mathematics?  I'm not a mathematician or logician or a
> philosopher of such, and the one thing I know is it is very hard to
> say anything in ordinary language that satisfies them.
>
> I don't mean pardoxical contradictions like we have been discussing, I
> mean the nifty paradoxes that made Frege depressed.
>
> But at any rate, when Hofstadter comes out with a new book that
> incorporates a bunch of stuff he put into co-authored papers, you can
> be sure he is going after a recreational reader--that's where the
> money is. I don't like recreational reading because it hurts my eyes.
>
> CJ
>
^
CB: Yeah, your definitely correct that this book is
recreational.(smile)  I mean he gets way into the Turtle and Achilles
and a rabbit,no doubt. It is  sort of modern Alice in Wonderlandish.
Oh and he is a computer scientist and this was early eighties before
computers were as ubiquitous as they are now. There was some promise
of learning the math of computers.

Those Escher drawings were on a lot of dorm and other college apartment walls...

...I know what it is. I guess I would call the book college dorm
bullsession like.  Much of my knowledge comes from talking with other
students, studying with other students.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book (was Re-evaluating Lysenko)

[CeJ]

CB: >>I happened to have had a personal intellectual history of studying
paradoxes, going back to when I heard of Russell's paradox as a
college freshman. This was before I studied dialectics , wherein
paradoxical contradiction is central. So, I was interested in the
focus on strange loops. By and large, I don't read for the writing
style of the writer. I'm not much of a reacreational reader of books.<<

I hate to be too narrow-minded, but although these have big
implications for axiomatics in mathematics (starting with 'infinite
sets', right?), what do they say about reality outside human
formulations of mathematics?  I'm not a mathematician or logician or a
philosopher of such, and the one thing I know is it is very hard to
say anything in ordinary language that satisfies them.

I don't mean pardoxical contradictions like we have been discussing, I
mean the nifty paradoxes that made Frege depressed.

But at any rate, when Hofstadter comes out with a new book that
incorporates a bunch of stuff he put into co-authored papers, you can
be sure he is going after a recreational reader--that's where the
money is. I don't like recreational reading because it hurts my eyes.

CJ

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book (was Re-evaluating Lysenko)

[c b]

 CeJ  wrote:

> The pure concentrated thesis that he never got around to stating very
> clearly in GEB is: we are conscious because we are strange loops.


CB: OK Yeah. Self-reference seems to be the culprit in generating
insoluable paradoxes in mathematics. The set of all sets that don't
contain _themselves_ (Russell). The liar's paradox entails referring
to one_self_ as a liar (Goedel) The self _is_ riddles Or any reference
to self leads to riddles,or strange loops. Although I'm not sure how
there is self-reference in Bach's strange loops or Escher's.  That
would be interesting to look for that. I think I will.

>
> As an aside here, maybe my take on human consciousness has no value
> whatsoever, but my perspective is one that most people can not get:
> I'm an identical twin. And I always used to think that, even if I'm an
> exact genetic copy, we are not physically identical, not really. But
> what separated me from my brother is simply that I can not experience
> his being, his body, his life (unless ESP were possible, and nothing I
> ever thought or did made me think it was). That doesn't mean I thought
> that he and I have different souls. Rather, I always thought that even
> the simplest physical differences in the two copies helped bring this
> about. But later I thought --and still do--that even if the genes were
> the same and even if we were completely the same physically, we still
> couldn't experience each other's lives. Even if we were side by side,
> we weren't occupying the same space.

^^^
CB: This sounds like a Merleau-Ponty type of observation.

^^^
>
> But maybe this is attempting to contemplate an impossiblity. In the
> real world, we will always be different realizations, and different
> lived experiences, and different memories of those lived experiences
> adding to those lived experiences so long as life goes on. Oh, and
> even if DH is a significant thinker about such matters, I never did
> find his writing very interesting to read. Perhaps GEB really needed
> an editor that understood the author more? Or perhaps I ought to delve
> into his later stuff, now that he no longer sells hundreds of
> thousands of unread copies and he has stuck with 'cognitive science'.

CB: I happened to have had a personal intellectual history of studying
paradoxes, going back to when I heard of Russell's paradox as a
college freshman. This was before I studied dialectics , wherein
paradoxical contradiction is central. So, I was interested in the
focus on strange loops. By and large, I don't read for the writing
style of the writer. I'm not much of a reacreational reader of books.

>
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter
>
> Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in GEB but
> also present in several of his later books, is that it is an emergent
> consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain. In GEB  he
> draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants
> and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. In particular,
> Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes
> from the abstract pattern he terms a "strange loop", which is an
> abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video
> feedback, and which Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing
> feedback loop". The prototypical example of this abstract notion is
> the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness
> theorems. Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop carries his
> vision of consciousness considerably further, including the idea that
> each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being
> limited to precisely one brain.[20]
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
>
> I Am a Strange Loop
> From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> Jump to: navigation, search
> I Am A Strange Loop
> Strageloop.jpg
> Author  Douglas Hofstadter
> Country USA
> LanguageEnglish
> Subject(s)  Consciousness, strange loops, intelligence
> Publisher   Basic Books
> Publication dateMarch 26th, 2007
> Media type  Hardback
> Pages   412 pages
> ISBN978-0465030781
> OCLC Number 64554976
> LC Classification   BD438.5 .H64 2007
> Preceded by Gödel, Escher, Bach
>
> I Am a Strange Loop is a 2007 book by Douglas Hofstadter, examining in
> depth the concept of a strange loop originally developed in his 1979
> book Gödel, Escher, Bach.
> “   In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages
> are little miracles of self-reference.  ”
>
> — Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop p.363
>
> Hofstadter had previously expressed disappointment with how Gödel,
> Escher, Bach, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for general
> nonfiction, was received. In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary
> edition, Hofstadter laments that his book has been misperceived as a
> hodge-podge of neat things with no central theme. He states: "GEB is a
> very persona

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book (was Re-evaluating Lysenko)

[CeJ]

For what it is worth, Merleau Ponty appeals to some in cognitive
science and in 'ecophenomenogy' (which I didn't know existed until
today) :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty#Anticognitivist_cognitive_science

Anticognitivist cognitive science

Despite Merleau-Ponty's own critical position with respect to science
- he describes scientific points of view as "always both naive and at
the same time dishonest" in his Preface to the Phenomenology - his
work has become a touchstone for the "anti-cognitivist" strands of
cognitive science, largely through the influence of Hubert Dreyfus.

Dreyfus's seminal critique of cognitivism (or the computational
account of the mind), What Computers Can't Do, consciously replays
Merleau-Ponty's critique of intellectualist psychology to argue for
the irreducibility of corporeal know-how to discrete, syntactic
processes. Through the influence of Dreyfus's critique, and
neurophysiological alternative, Merleau-Ponty became associated with
neurophysiological, connectionist accounts of cognition.

With the publication in 1991 of The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela,
Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, this association was extended, if
only partially, to another strand of "anti-cognitivist" or
post-representationalist cognitive science: embodied or enactive
cognitive science, and later in the decade, to neurophenomenology.

It was through this relationship with Merleau-Ponty's work that
cognitive science's affair with phenomenology was born, which is
represented by a growing number of works, including Andy Clark's Being
There (1997), the collection Naturalizing Phenomenology edited by
Petitot et al. (1999), Alva Noë's Action in Perception (2004), Shaun
Gallagher's How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005), and the journal
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.



Ecophenomenology

Ecophenomenology can be described as the pursuit of the
relationalities of worldly engagement, both human and those of other
creatures (Brown & Toadvine 2003).

This engagement is situated in a kind of middle ground of
relationality, a space that is neither purely objective, since it is
reciprocally constituted by a diversity of lived experiences
motivating the movements of countless organisms, nor purely
subjective, since it is nonetheless a field of material relationships
between bodies. It is governed exclusively neither by causality, nor
by intentionality. In this space of in-betweenness phenomenology can
overcome its inaugural opposition to naturalism.[5]

David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty's concept of "flesh" (chair) as
"the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both
the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its
spontaneous activity," and he identifies this elemental matrix with
the interdependent web of earthly life.[6] This concept unites subject
and object dialectically as determinations within a more primordial
reality, which Merleau-Ponty calls "the flesh," and which Abram refers
to variously as "the animate earth," "the breathing biosphere," or
"the more-than-human natural world." Yet this is not nature or the
biosphere conceived as a complex set of objects and objective
processes, but rather "the biosphere as it is experienced and lived
from within by the intelligent body — by the attentive human animal
who is entirely a part of the world that he, or she, experiences.
Merleau-Ponty's ecophenemonology with its emphasis on holistic dialog
within the larger than-human world also has implications for the
ontogenesis and phylogenesis of language, indeed he states that
"language is the very voice of the trees, the waves and the forest."
[7] Merleau-Ponty himself refers to "that primordial being which is
not yet the subject-being nor the object-being and which in every
respect baffles reflection. From this primordial being to us, there is
no derivation, nor any break..."[8] Among the many working notes found
on his desk at the time of his death, and published with the
half-complete manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible, several
make evident that Merleau-Ponty himself recognized a deep affinity
between his notion of a primordial "flesh" and a radically transformed
understanding of "nature." Hence in November 1960 he writes: "Do a
psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother." [9] And in the
last published working note, written in March 1961, he writes: "Nature
as the other side of humanity (as flesh, nowise as 'matter')."[10]

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book (was Re-evaluating Lysenko)

[CeJ]

I remember--it was actually about the same time Ayn Rand was making
her last tour of universities--when Hofstadter visited my provincial
podunk university, hawking his book. I recently just sold an
autographed copy of the trade paperback (it didn't go for much but
perhaps a hardback would be worth more?).

 GEB is one of those books that must have sold hundreds of thousands
of copies and got read by dozens of people, with the author then
proclaiming most people didn't understand what he was trying to say. I
don't think that happens too often because for whatever reasons most
people never get their collection of confused ideas into print form
backed by a commercial publisher. Hofstadter did.

I remember after his talk one philosophy professor getting
enthusiastic that GEB was on the verge of an explanation of human
consciousness--and of course it had to involve formal logics. He was
the same guy who was sure Chomsky was close on an explanation of human
language--and of course it had to involve formal logics. Also an
interesting conversation I recall at the time of the lecture was a
professor's wife--the dean's wife maybe--remarking that Hofstatdter
himself showed the value of a an education in the 'humanities', to
which the author replied, something like, "Oh no, not at all. My
education is in hard science." I think I made a comment to myself: yet
note how it's just we humanities types who got suckered into coming to
this lecture.

The pure concentrated thesis that he never got around to stating very
clearly in GEB is: we are conscious because we are strange loops.

As an aside here, maybe my take on human consciousness has no value
whatsoever, but my perspective is one that most people can not get:
I'm an identical twin. And I always used to think that, even if I'm an
exact genetic copy, we are not physically identical, not really. But
what separated me from my brother is simply that I can not experience
his being, his body, his life (unless ESP were possible, and nothing I
ever thought or did made me think it was). That doesn't mean I thought
that he and I have different souls. Rather, I always thought that even
the simplest physical differences in the two copies helped bring this
about. But later I thought --and still do--that even if the genes were
the same and even if we were completely the same physically, we still
couldn't experience each other's lives. Even if we were side by side,
we weren't occupying the same space.

But maybe this is attempting to contemplate an impossiblity. In the
real world, we will always be different realizations, and different
lived experiences, and different memories of those lived experiences
adding to those lived experiences so long as life goes on. Oh, and
even if DH is a significant thinker about such matters, I never did
find his writing very interesting to read. Perhaps GEB really needed
an editor that understood the author more? Or perhaps I ought to delve
into his later stuff, now that he no longer sells hundreds of
thousands of unread copies and he has stuck with 'cognitive science'.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter

Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in GEB but
also present in several of his later books, is that it is an emergent
consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain. In GEB  he
draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants
and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. In particular,
Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes
from the abstract pattern he terms a "strange loop", which is an
abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video
feedback, and which Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing
feedback loop". The prototypical example of this abstract notion is
the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness
theorems. Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop carries his
vision of consciousness considerably further, including the idea that
each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being
limited to precisely one brain.[20]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

I Am a Strange Loop
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
I Am A Strange Loop
Strageloop.jpg
Author  Douglas Hofstadter
Country USA
LanguageEnglish
Subject(s)  Consciousness, strange loops, intelligence
Publisher   Basic Books
Publication dateMarch 26th, 2007
Media type  Hardback
Pages   412 pages
ISBN978-0465030781
OCLC Number 64554976
LC Classification   BD438.5 .H64 2007
Preceded by Gödel, Escher, Bach

I Am a Strange Loop is a 2007 book by Douglas Hofstadter, examining in
depth the concept of a strange loop originally developed in his 1979
book Gödel, Escher, Bach.
“   In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages
are little miracles of self-reference.  ”

— Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop p.363

Ho

[Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book (was Re-evaluating Lysenko)

[c b]

Below Carrol mentions _Goedel, Escher and Bach_ which I just picked up
again lately.



CB

^


[Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book
Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Mon Mar 21 09:04:45 MST 2005

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Ralph: This is a useful reference, thanks.  I'll add this to my emergence
blog tonight.

It's not clear to me what if necessary for consciousness if not brains.
Perhpas he's still leaving open the possibility of artificial intelligence?


CB: Yes, that word "emergence" rang a Thaxis bell.

Yes, the thread discussion is on artificial intelligence. Searle is a
leading figure arguing against the possibility of artificial intelligence.
Turing is a leading figure arguing for artificial intelligence as a
possibility.

I'll post some of the rest of the thread below:



Re: Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book on the brain


On Wednesday 16 March 2005 12:04 pm, Charles Brown wrote:
> is there a reason why a network of computers cannot exhibit similar
> characteristics? (and now we can link this thread to jimD's godel
> one! ;-)).
>
> --ravi
>
> ^
> CB: So far, except in a Matrix fantasy, it takes extensive human mediation
> to plug computers into culture. It's like chimps can learn some language,
> but no chimps have learned sign language on their own initiative. There is
> lots of human intervention when chimps learn language.
>
> I can't state an abstract principle as to why a Matrix couldn't be
realized
> in real life.
>

i do not see it as the equivalent of matrix, where a virtual reality is
created and maintained. but if you are a materialist, a human is no
different
from a computer. we may have been programmed by nature while computers may
need programming by us. nonetheless, if a finite mass (the human population)
can exhibit certain traits, why not some other finite mass?

--ravi



^
CB: As I said, I can't think of an abstract principle excluding the
possibility you pose.

 To me , the Matrix movie is kind of ambiguous on the issue of whether the
_computers_ have attained society and social being, reproductive,
regenerative self-perpetuative purposes. I suppose one of those characters
could be a sort of Wizard of Oz human running all the computer stuff from
behind the scenes. I really couldn't follow all that was supposed to be
happening. But I just grabbed at it for its currency in this discussion.

I guess the issue of biologicality , computers somehow duplicating
biological evolution , enters in


^^

Carrol Cox writes:

Charles, you haven't read Les Shaffer's post to the marxism list on this
topic.


 Original Message 
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Re: [PEN-L] More Godel
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 12:41:57 -0500
From: Les Schaffer 

Carrol Cox wrote:

>For critiques of Hofstadter's "computationalism," see
>
>
>
>and the other links given there. It is a discussion of the work of John
>Searle.
>
I am reading "The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence", edited by
Margaret Boden (Oxord U Press). It has Turing's orginal ideas in
non-technical form (Computing Machinery and Intelligence, A Turning,
1950) as well as Searle's rebuttal to strong AI (Minds, Brains, and
Programs). here's a snippet from the latter, reminds me _of our friend
D'Amasio:

"""
'Could a machine think?' My own view is that *only* a machine could
think, and indeed only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and
machines that had the same causal powers as brains. And that is the main
reason strong AI has had little to tell us about thinking, since it has
nothing to tell us about machines. By its own definition, it is about
programs, and programs are not machines. Whatever else intentionality
is, it is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally
dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation,
photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena. No one would suppose
that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of
the formal sequences in lactation and photosynthesis, but where the mind
is concerned many people are willing to believe in such a miracle
because of a deep and abiding dualism: the mind they suppose is a matter
of formal processes and is independent of quite specific material causes
in the way that milk and sugar are not.
"""

the compilation by Boden is good for people interested in the
philosphical background of AI, and also has some interesting history.
for example "Making a mind versus modelling the brain: artifical
intelligince back at a branch point", by Hubert and Stewart Dreyfus
traces a splitting in the research community starting in the 50's