So far, in my reading of Minsky’s Society of Mind, his hypothesis, that the mind is an agglomeration of specialized agents working in conjunction with each other completely meshes with observations of my own behavior. In particular, I’ve noticed that when I get stuck thinking about a problem, I’ll endlessly repeat, in my head, the knowledge and reasons surrounding the problem until the solution/new path/new thought occurs to me. It’s not me that’s doing the thinking here, rather It’s me that the thought occurs to, which explains the phrase, “It occurred to me that…”). So our Ego has the mistaken opinion that it’s the originator of all the thought in the mind, while all the time it’s more the receiver of the thoughts which occur in the brain.

But if this is true, then what is it that makes one person smarter than another? It must be that more thoughts (maybe of different character) occur to the smarter person. But then how does one make themselves smarter? One probable method would be to do daily exercises in logic puzzles and brain teasers, on the presumption that it will exercise and stimulate some parts of the brain from latent dormancy into activity, and that this sort of change in brain activity will be of general use in life’s daily problems. I’m not a psychologist, and have no data on the efficacy of this approach, but it seems plausible. More helpful, would be a correlation between specific types of problems and wether experience in solving particular instances of that type will extend to an increased ability to solve all problems in that class.

Yet the revered smarts of Einstein and Leibniz isn’t that they were particularly good at solving instances of know problems, computers can do that better than any human, it’s that they saw connections and aspects of unsolved problems that then allowed those problems to be solved. What brain calisthenics would help you to answer the currently unanswered questions? Here I draw a blank and even have a difficult time speculating. History is replete with anecdotes about flashes of insight that answer the prepared mind (penicillin was found in dirty dishes, structure of benzene revealed in a dream of snakes, gravity with the fall of an apple, etc). But beyond extended concentration on a given problem to prepare the mind, none of these tales suggest a general approach for encouraging the frothy bubbling of thoughts that the brain must present to the consciousness trying to solve the problem. Intelligence then will vary as a result of the computational structure in underlying medium (neural brain) that supports thought.

I’m at a loss when I try to conjure up a method by which we can transform my brain’s architecture so that it can better do my thinking for me. If Minsky is right (and I really think he is) then the solution must lie in the study of multi-agent systems and emergent behavior. Unfortunately, we are still developing the non-linear methods and mathematical tools that will help an understanding of such systems. But the research will be useful for much more than the study of thought, it applies to a very wide range of things found in nature (Economic behavior, Environment/Ecosystems, Evolution + Game Theory, etc.) and cuts across so many fields that it’s likely everyone has a roughly equal chance of contributing, wether they realize it or not. This really is the age of the multi-disciplined researcher.

Update: a Reasonable Deviations post about the Creativity Machine, which incorporates an apropos feedback mechanism, that readily models the difference between the consciousness which experiences thought and the separate generative mechanism of thought.

I keep finding interesting stuff on this old HD; Here’s a documented e-mail conversation between myself and a high-school friend Jeff Peoples on materialism and the mind. It was dated 2004-04-07 and appears to have been written in response to a missing article titled “Enlightenment” that was itself dated 2004-03-02.

Eric:
I think I have figured out what enlightenment is. It occurs when a neural network achieves the capacity to look at itself as it looks at any other object. ie. when a person fully understands consciousness itself, the phenomenon of ‘I’. Furthermore, this insight halts the normal categorizations of Aristotle’s knife, so that you are able to see things as One complete form.

Associated with this insight is the ability to treat oneself and others with a deep holistic respect, friendliness, and complete impartiality.

Enlightenment might be more quickly arrived at by attacking the inherent gaps in logic directly with koans.

Jeff:
Very interesting. However, I think attaching consciousness to the brain is a mistake. For one thing, the one thing we are certain about is our conscious awareness, all else is in doubt; including the brain. Solipsism must be taken seriously, and to use that which is in doubt: the body, to explain that which is certain–the mind–sounds to me like backward thinking.

I had the realization that even the body is a creation of the mind. For example: phantom limb; the experience that one is aware of pain in a member of the body that has been recently removed. It is to the senses, that is to the sight, obvious that the limb is not there and if the location of pain were actually in the body, then one would not experience pain there. But because the location of pain is actually “in” the mind, one still experiences pain in the phantom limb. Thus it is feasible to assume that one could place awareness of mind outside of the body, and in fact anywhere, for the awareness of the mind is not limited to the body, as is shown in the phantom limb. Furthermore, if the mind is capable of creating pain where there is in fact no location for the pain to occur, it must also be possible for the mind to eliminate pain where one thinks pain can occur; for the experience of pain is actually sensed by the mind, and not the body, and sensations of the body are at least partially a projection of the mind, as is the case in the phantom limb. It has been demonstrated that people under “hypnosis” can “block” out pain from awareness. I contend that hypnosis is simply a term used to apply to the inherent power of the mind that when fully mastered is its natural and perfected state. When one can produce “self-hypnosis” by choice and will, the term hypnosis is no longer an appropriate term, for it implies that one is under the control of another and ones freedom is partially usurped.

The idea of the koan is very good. I wish I had a koan.

Now that you know what enlightenment is, achieve it. Otherwise it is like describing an orange without ever tasting it.

I hope that you find true happiness.

If you want to talk more about these things, like in person, I would be happy to.

Eric:
Your appeal to the phantom limb as an attempt to justify the existence of the body as a realized idea of the mind is poorly justified. Although it is true that a person can feel many things from the phantom limb, only one of which is pain, this phenomenon lends more credibility to the concept of a ‘body image’ that the mind creates than it does to a solipsistic reality.

I’m a materialist (physicist by training) so I think that the mind is a phenomenon created by a sufficiently complex processing system. Actually in light of Wolfram’s _A_New_Kind_of_Science_ the system may not need to be that complex to achieve consciousness. But the point is that mind is a side effect of the body. To prove this, I just point out that there is no mind without body, and in fact mind seems to be much more elusive than body, just compare physics to psychology.

If the mind and consciousness are just side-effects of certain matter arrangements comprising the brain. It is part of the functioning of this matter that ‘you’ ‘think’ you exist. ie. the brain has manifested an internal process that you identify as yourself, and some other processes, more correspondant with reality, that constitute your ‘body image.’ In virtue of this conceptualization we can explain phantom limb, and other feelings of Oneness with objects distinct from the body as hallucinations. It should be remembered, however, that I think everything the mind creates is a hallucination.

This interpretation does bring into question, free will. ie “can the mind will itself to do things.” to which I am bound by logical consistency to respond “Yes, it appears that way, but No, it’s all self-delusion.”

Jeff:
Well your understanding of the mind, although it is consistent with materialism, which is based on the axiom, (faith), that the mind exists, does not do any mind any good.

If all conceptions of the the mind are “delusions” as you call them, then nothing is a delusion. Indeed, if all things are delusions the word delusion loses meaning. Delusion and hallucination are two pejorative words that are less science and more fear of the unknown. We are confused by hallucinations and therefore claim they are “unreal” or manifestations of the mind; but of course, ALL THINGS are manifestations of the mind.

For me to know mind I need not think, I need only to be, and I need not have any faith; to believe in the body I must think, and I must also have faith.

You think there is no mind without the body, but how can you prove this? When is the last time you did NOT see an invisible mind? And, can you prove that the body can exist without a mind to perceive it? And most importantly, can you prove that YOUR body exists without your mind to perceive it?

Science cant even prove the existence of mind. The materialist, before even studying the “mind” must assume its existence. If the materialist actually kept to its primary axiom: that only observable phenomenon exist and only observable phenomenon are areas of legitimate study, it would not waste its time trying to prove that an invisible ghost called the “mind” is a side effect of the body.

The materialist can put brains, hearts, and fingers in jars, but it cannot put a mind in a jar. And until it can, he has no business studying it.

And for all the materialists theorizing about the mind, and how much they think they know about it, they don’t even have control over their own mind; the Buddha did, so I have much more reason to believe he knew what he was talking about.

The most important thing about the phantom limb example is that it shows that all experience occurs in the mind and not in the body. That is, what we think is pain in our body is actually pain in our mind. Pain is a subjective experience, not objective; pleasure is a subjective experience, not objective. Although pain and pleasure are often correlated with body, they are not caused by the body.

It is the beginning of all mystical practice to understand that pleasure can be had without the senses, without the 5 delights–sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations—and with this beginning one can work on the joy that can be produced directly by the mind. In this first step people realize that imaginations and intellectualizations can produce pleasures. Some people get stuck on the intellectualizations, and some people on imaginations. Once you then rid yourself of both of these, you can produce joy with just the will.

From this joy of will comes the obvious connection with morality. For if one can will joy, one does not need the pleasures of anything else; so one does not want sex, and thus is not lustful and adulterous, one does not want “things”, and thus is not covetous, one does not want honor or the approval of others, thus is not envious or angry or jealous or lonely etc. And one also recognizes that such negative emotions such as anger, envy, fear–they are all impurities of the will, which is pure joy.

Nevermind the “scientific” reasons for this. It can be had.

Eric:
I’m quite surprised that you did not bother to point out that although I was arguing that ‘I’ is an illusion and does not exist the entire e-mail was written in first person, quite an irony.

And it’s not that the mind’s conceptions are delusions, but that they are not real in the same manner that physical objects are. I have used the terms delusion and hallucination, to refer to mind-like activities of a biological neural net. The net has convinced itself that it has a self and that that self exists, and somehow came to doubt everything acquired it. The net has acquired language as analytical tool and uses it so well that thought and reason cannot occur without it. Paradoxically, your doubt of things other than yourself, can only be expressed in a language that you had to acquire from others, which is why I doubt my ’self’, but not the external world. So we have that ALL PERCEPTIONS are manifestations of the mind, not all things.

Unfortunately, the way in which neural nets adapt makes it so that you cannot ignore signals of pressure and temperature relayed to the brain from neurons in the extremities. A neural net with no inputs will never get anywhere, will never learn anything. Your ’self’ exists, and all the ideas about yourself exist because you have acquired these thoughts from interaction with others. Take for example: a researcher discovered a primitive tribe in a rain forest. This tribe had hitherto no knowledge of the outside world. Fortunately, the researcher learned the language of this tribe, only to find that there was no word ‘I’ ‘mine’ or ‘You’(singular) ‘Yours’(singular) only ‘We’ ‘Ours’ and ‘You’(plural) ‘Yours’(plural). These people had no concept of singular possession, they could not exist, even in concept, by themselves without their family. Apparently the most basic ideas you have about yourself are borrowed from your culture.

I may be misunderstanding, but I don’t think I have ever encountered a mind that was not derived from some physical process. Furthermore, I’m quite sure that rocks and planets exist, and would exist if I were not here to perceive them, because of (1) China exists and I’ve never been there, and (2) China existed before I was born, and will continue to do so after I die. Although I cannot know this from experience, my parents could, and they are people like me.

The primary reason Science cannot prove the existence of mind, is because science needs a much better set of parameters by which to measure mind. Mind doesn’t have a sufficient definition that enables testing. But consciousness seems to exist as a direct subjective experience of every person. If you put a brain in a jar very carefully, it’s processes can be studied. For example: Some scientists took some manta ray brains (they last about 2 weeks disembodied) and connected electrodes into them, wired to wheels of a little cart and a photo-detector. The brains successfully navigated the cart toward a flashlight in a darkened room.

I do agree, most people could use some practice controlling their own minds, esp. the minds’ perception of itself. Such control would be very convenient to have in today’s world. Joy and Happiness have been found to be related to brain chemistry and activity of certain areas.

• Love as a chemical in the brain
• God center of the brain

So it seems with sufficient training, you can get the brain to pleasure itself, and ignore external stimuli (the usual trigger of pleasure/pain). But I will not believe that anything we do has an intrinsic morality, though it does have a survival value, and other subjective, linguistic, cultural rubbish heaped upon it.

If the consistency of the external world is greater than that of your own mind, you must believe in the existence of the former over the latter.

Jeff:
Well I wrote a long response originally but my computer crashed. And I’m not going to write another one. Sorry :(

But here is a summary without argument:

1. Science is based on the observation of materially objective phenomenon. The mind is not materially objective and thus is not a legitimate area of study. People having consciousness and subjective experience is not grounds enough to study such a thing. The fact that other people have minds is hearsay, and science is not based on hearsay. Millions of people claim to believe in God but science is not studying that. Indeed they cant. Anymore than they can study the mind.
2. The brain is not the mind anymore than a glove is a hand or a correlation a cause. And thus anything claimed about the brain cannot be claimed about the mind. To understand this do not go to scientific journals, go to philosophy journals. Scientists tend not to know the philosophical foundations they use in their own claims.
3. Intrinsic morality exists insofar that one must be moral to be happy. This is so because to have happiness one must eliminate the causes of unhappiness, and the causes of unhappiness include such things as envy, greed, lust, anger, sloth, gluttony, and pride, fear, guilt, shame, etc. The presence of such things implies a lack of something, and in joy and happiness there is no lack, there is only abundance. And in abundance comes virtue, which includes: sympathetic joy, generosity, continence, patience, industry, moderation, humility, peace, forgiveness, and mercy.
4. I don’t adhere to the popular conception of the self; that is of the individual ego or personality. The self is as empty as the world is. And my description of the self’s emptiness and the world’s emptiness is based on language I acquired from the world, but my experience of emptiness is not. For I experience emptiness when I am without thinking and imaginations. It is only after that experience do I apply language.

This was a very truncated summary.

Eric:
Sorry for taking so long to reply, I usually do very little during weekends.

Science is only capable of experimenting on the well defined. We are much closer to defining consciousness than we are God. To this end, we have much more information about the brain than we do about any so called ‘Creator.’ Our language has many terms for our varied subjective experience, so I find it very conclusive that subjective experience exists as an illusion perpetuated by ourselves’. Furthermore, the existence of minds other than my own is verifiable by direct observation, the people I see, look like me, communicate like me, etc. etc. That should be proof enough for a materialist. Consciousness has many levels and forms, which can be objectively studied through psychological exams and brain scans.

Since you insist on drawing such a fine line between mind and brain, and since you have defined mind as not having any material manifestation, it must necessarily be beyond the reach of Science, which is limited to the objective/rational world. I have been thinking this entire time that mind = consciousness, which, to my understanding, cannot occur without a brain of some sort, otherwise there will be no objective place for information storage and processing that the consciousness needs to operate on. Also many Philosophical arguments get rather semantic in nature, something that Science has avoided with precise, formal, mathematical definitions.

Since happiness is really just a class of brain chemistry, you need not be moral to achieve it. It could be acquired through drugs, sadism, or whatever, induces the chemical state of happiness. Though this seems a very superficial outlook, what you have invented is a hierarchy of things which you have not clearly defined.

Logically, the elimination of a negative does not imply the succession of the positive. ie. the difference between nonnegative and positive is the element 0. You just might end up completely devoid of any emotion.

My point with the language argument was that, it inherently changes the manner in which you evaluate your personal experiences. That is, any description is colored with categorization inherent in the system in which you are trying to express the event. Thus, inasmuch as enlightenment is a truly subjective experience that must be treated holistically, any description of it in any language will necessarily fall short. But more than this failing, the system you operate under will also affect how you approach, and what you concentration on of any repetition of the experience.

Jeff:
You in fact do not have any evidence to believe other people have separate minds anymore than you have evidence to believe that dream characters have separate minds. Behavior is not evidence of separate minds.

The very curious thing about dream characters is that they seem to be independent beings, but in fact they are a creation of your mind, as is the “Self” that exists in the dream that seems to be who you are. But in fact, in the “reality” of the dream, you are both the characters and the “Self”; for your mind creates them both. And you discover this when waking up. A dream is just–at the best–your mind playing games with itself and the worst, your mind in complete confusion: a nightmare.

In a dream, any physical thing is simply a manifestation of mind; even that which appears completely solid. If you were to study a brain in a dream it would behave the same as it would if you studied a dream in “reality.”

Happiness is not just a “class of brain chemistry.” It refers to a subjective state not an objective state. The subjective state may correlate with certain pattern of brain chemistry, but sadly our ability to trace “brain chemistry” is extraordinarily poor. Our understanding of the brain is nil. Every new discovery about how the brain works is replaced by a new discovery that refutes it or contradicts it. There is still crave over “right brain” and “left brain” thinking even though in reality it is not that clear cut; science just likes to simplify their discoveries so that it seems more correct. Any deviation in a rule of subjective experience correlating with certain brain activity (say on a EEG scan) refutes the rule completely. It is therefore just a tendency, a correlation and not a cause; otherwise the subjective experience would correlate ALWAYS with the specific brain patterns/chemistry. Any study you read you are going to see patterns of brain chemistry correlating with subjective experience not absolute correlation with subjective experience. So 80% of the time when someone smiles these parts of the brain lights up (and the parts aren’t always as highly lit as other times) the other 20% of the time when someone smiles an entire other part of the brain lights up. There goes any causal relationship.

And before you say that happiness is “just a chemical state” realize that the brain is a lot more complicated than chemicals. In fact much of brain activity isn’t even chemical it is electrical, and much of brain activity isn’t even electrical, its unknown. It is like saying that the world is “just made up of atoms” as if an “atom” is anything. Science thinks that because they can label things they have it all figured out.

I don’t even want to bother trying to explain why math does not explain reality. I will just say reality cannot be separated into parts. And that is the first thing math does.

The foolishness of reducing mind to brain is like this: say someone is enlightened, in extreme bliss, joy without suffering, love without hate, the messiah, the Buddha: he is brought into a laboratory and his brain is monitored; the scientists watches the activity in his brain: it fluctuates, different parts of the brain are lighting up, blah blah blah; and then after analyzing his brain activity the scientists go up to the Buddha and they say: “we know what enlightenment is” and they show him all their charts and pictures. The Buddha would respond: “no, you know what enlightenment looks like on an EEG chart; and that is not enlightenment”

The foolishness of reducing mind to brain is like this: A person who has never known pain wishes to know pain so he goes to the hospital where pain is plentiful. He gets to the hospital and sees people in the waiting room with broken bones, coughing, moaning, crying. He then goes home satisfied he knows what pain is. When his friend who also does not know pain asks him what he discovered pain is, the person tells his friend: pain is when a bone is broken, a person coughs, a person moans, or when water comes out of someones eyes. Pain is when the body squirms and moves in strange ways. I don’t know why people are so wanting to get rid of it; all of it didn’t bother me.”

Science is no closer to “defining” consciousness than they are at defining God. They are only closer to defining states of the brain that correlate to different experiences in consciousness in people who say they have conscious that science cannot be sure in fact they do have.

If you really wish to be skeptical, try to doubt science. Your faith in it has only brought you misery.

I know that I promised a post about process composition and software architecture, but this just can’t wait. Last night I had a really nice conversation with one of my high school friends about the nature of existence. It all started off with my unsubstantiated claim that “the self does not exist.” As a philosophy major, he immediately started grilling me about what I meant by ’self’, and then, as we descended into an argument over semantics, what I meant, by ‘exist’. Unlike most semantic arguments, this one actually had a beneficial outcome. Together, we discovered that there are at least three different types of existence.

• Physical Existence

This is the existence of all physical objects; cars, planes, computer hardware, chairs, tables, bodies, etc. One aspect of the nature of physical objects is that they cannot be exactly duplicated. (well, technically subatomic stuff like a photon can, but my arguments are all about the macroscopic realm). You see, when a physical object, such as a car, is duplicated you end up with two different cars. You do not end up with two instances of a single car. That is, physical objects cannot share identity.

• Virtual Existence

This is the existence of all virtual objects; computer software, digital content, the conscious self, etc. These objects have an entirely different nature of existence from object in the physical realm. These objects can potentially be copied (to enough precision) that we’d call the result identical. Not only that but, virtual objects are conceptually removed from the physical media used for their instantiation. If I make two copies of a movie onto two different physical CD’s, it’s still termed the same movie, they share identity (with respect to the interpreter that defines the virtual objects). My conscious self must be a virtual object, because I can survive the Dan Dennett teleporter.

• Platonic Existence

Quite naturally, this is the realm of Ideas. We know that Ideas are an existence level removed from the virtual realm because a single Idea can have multiple virtual instantiations. That is, in order to communicate an idea, it is first instantiated into words/diagrams/language, but if I can still communicate the same idea via a different language or different wording.

Note that the very essence of this distinction is predicated on whether or not we are inclined to apply identity to two different instantiations of a thing. I therefore say there are at least three different types of existence, because I wish to leave open the possibility of a whole hierarchy of existences like a hierarchy of types. In fact the virtual realm seems particularly flexible because of its dependence on an interpreter (is it DeCSS or a prime number?). In summary a Platonic Idea can have multiple instantiations in the virtual realm, yet retain identity; while a virtual object can have multiple instantiations in the physical realm, and still retain identity.

We should also recognize that Plato would never have thought up the idea of a Virtual realm in between that of the Physical and Platonic, because there were no computers in his day. This is only one way in which the creation and cultural acceptance of a computer has fundamentally changed the fundamental philosophy with which we view and analyze the world. The virtual realm is really very new, and mostly unexplored (at least in a legal sense). In fact there are still many of us that are all too willing to take the laws formulated about one realm (ownership of physical objects) and apply it to another (digital objects) without first examining the very existential nature of those objects. We’ve really got to get our act together, or we risk imposing on the virtual world those limitations present in the physical world.

I unfortunately haven’t seen much in terms of exploration of these three different types of existence, but then I just really discovered the difference yesterday. (well, I always knew that there was a difference, and that it was based somewhere on the ability to generate copies, but I didn’t recognize that that was the real fundamental difference, the very essence of existence in each of the realms).

See also:
The Digital Imprimatur
The Right to Read

Ok, It’s been more than a week since I last wrote down any of my thoughts. I recently went on travel for work, and gave a presentation of the software that I’ve been working on. I was received well, and I now have a list of improvements to make. I also visited my grandparents in Texas, which was loads of fun. While I was vacationing I was able to read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

I very much enjoyed the book. It had wonderful mix of virtual reality, linguistics, and ancient religious history. It also centered around the idea that if a human encounters carefully crafted input, then their brain might crash, akin to crashing a computer. I know that this is a fairly recent idea (It couldn’t possible predate computers) but it’s really captivating from a linguistic perspective. Stephenson touches on religion by tying the story of Babble to a biological virus that infects the learned linguistic wiring of the brain, meaning that you can crash peoples biohardware if you can carefully craft the right message. A touching form of Neuro-Bio-Linguistic-Hacking.

I believe that linguistics and thought are intimately related. You cannot truly have a thought without verbalization, and yet, a particular phrasing will color the thought. Humans can develop new ideas without first having the language to express them, but this requires the creation of new words or terms in which to adequately express the new forms of thought. Naming really is akin to creation (at least in the Noosphere). The language we use to express ourselves also affects the types of thoughts that you can think, it is very difficult to consider things for which you have no words. Having no words, the most immediate feeling is one of frustration, which is unfortunately not conducive to the creation of new vocabulary.

Seeing that others recognize that the linguistics of thought, and the thought of linguistics are intimately locked into a feedback loop, has come as a welcome relief. I was beginning to suspect that my viewpoint on this was unique, but now I see that the observation of this connection is old enough to have entered into popular SciFi. It really excites me that Stepenson was able to translate this observation into a novel, and spread the idea out to so many.

His attack on religion as a viral meme was also really interesting. The book wouldn’t be nearly as good without the grafting of neuro-linguistics to the ancient Sumerians and the story of Babel was fascinating. Recognition of the very existence of viral memes together with their particular relation to the major religions has started to enter the global consciousness (thanks mostly to the crusading Richard Dawkins). There is so much that isn’t widely known about our religious and cultural mythologies (most of that knowledge is still considered heretical) that we are still largely sheep to a veneer of symbology and iconography that stirs the emotions rather than the intellect. Humanity still has alot of growing up to do.

Disclaimer: I haven’t researched the historical info that Snow Crash was based on, and so I assume that most of it is inspired fiction.

I was reading Hofstadter’s latest book, I am a Strange Loop, and encountered some rather provocative statements. Hofstadter is one of the only authors that I’ve read that is not afraid of explaining in great detail why materialism is both necessary and sufficient for all the complexity of human life.

This quote starts out on page 289 in Chapter 20: A Courteous Crossing of Words. The characters in the dialog were labelled “Strange Loop #641″, the viewpoint of the book, and “Strange Loop #642″, a skeptic. I’ve renamed them.

Searle: Ouch. Now just listen for a moment. My question is very straightforward. Anybody can understand it (except maybe you). Why am I in this brain? Why didn’t I wind up in your brain, for instance?
Hofstadter: Because your “I” was not an a priori well-defined thing that was predestined to jump, full-fledged and sharp, into some just-created empty physical vessel at some particular instant. Nor did your “I” suddenly spring into existence, wholly unanticipated but in full bloom. Rather, your “I” was the slowly emerging outcome of a million unpredictable events that befell a particular body and the brain housed in it. Your “I” is the self-reinforcing structure that gradually came to exist not only in that brain, but thanks to that brain. It couldn’t have come to exist in this brain, because this brain went through different experiences that led to a different human being.
Searle: But why couldn’t I have had those experiences as easily as you?
Hofstadter: Careful now! each “I” is defined as a result of its experiences, and not vice versa! To think the reverse is a very tempting, seductive trap to fall into. You keep on revealing your tacit assumption that any “I”, despite having grown up inside one particular brain, isn’t deeply rooted in that brain — that the same “I” could just as easily have grown up in a band been attached to any other brain; that there is no deeper connection between a given “I” and a given brain than the connection betweer an give canary and a given cage. You can’t just swap them arbitrarily.
Searle: You’re still missing my point. Instead of asking why I ended up in this brain, I’m asking why I started out in that random brain, and not in some other one. There’s no reason that it had to be that one.
Hofstadter: No, you’re the one who’s missing the point. The key point, uncomfortable for you though it will be, is that no one started out in that brain — no one at all. It was just as uninhabited as a swinging rope or whirlpool. But unlike those physical systems, it could perceive and evolve in sophistication, and so, as weeks, months, and years passed, there gradually came to be someone in there. But that personal identity didn’t suddenly appear full-blown; rather it slowly coalesced and came into focus, like a cloud in the sky or a condensation on a windowpane.
Searle: But who was that person destined to be? Why couldn’t it have been someone else?
Hofstadter: I’m coming to that. What slowly came to pervade that brain was a complicated set of mental tendencies and verbal habits that are now insistently repeating this question, “Why am I here and not there?” As you may notice, this brain here (mine, that is) doesn’t make its mouth ask that question over and over again. My brain is very different from your brain.
Searle: Are you telling me that it doesn’t make sense to ask the question, “Why am I here and not there?”
Hofstadter: Yes, I’m saying that, among other things. What makes all of this so counterintuitive — verging on the incomprehensible, at times — is that your brain (like mine, like everyone’s) has told itself a million times a self-reinforcing story whose central player is called “I”, and one of the most crucial aspects of this “I”, an aspect that is truly a sine qua non for “I”-ness, is that it fluently flits into other brains, at least partially. Out of intimacy, out of empathy, out of friendship, and out of relatedness (as well as for other reasons), your brain’s “I” continually makes darting little forays into other brains, seeing things to some extent from their point of view, and thus convincing itself that it could easily be housed in them. And then, quite naturally, it starts wondering why it isn’t housed in them.
Searle: Well, of course it would ask itself that. What more natural thing to wonder about?
Hofstadter: And one piece of the answer is that to a small extent, your “I” is housed in other brains. Yes, your “I” is housed a little bit in my frustratingly dense and pigheaded brain, and vice versa. But despite that blurry spillover that turns the strict city-limits version of You into Greater Metropolitan You, your “I” is still very localized. Your “I” is certainly not uniformly spread out among all the brains on the surface of the earth — no more so than the great metropolitan sprawl of Mexico City possesses suburbs in Madagascar! But there is another piece of the answer to your question “Why am I here and not there?”, and it is going to trouble you. It is that your “I” isn’t housed anywhere.
Searle: Come again? This doesn’t sound like your usual line.
Hofstadter: Well, it’s just another way of looking at these things. Earlier, I described your “I” as a self-reinforcing structure and a self-reinforcing story, but now I’ll risk annoying you by calling it a self-reinforcing myth.
Searle: A myth?! I’m certainly not a myth, and I’m here to tell you so.
Hofstadter: Hold your horses for a moment. Think of the illusion of the solid marble in the box of envelopes. Were I to insist that that box of envelopes had a genuine marble in it, you’d say that I had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a tactile illusion, wouldn’t you?
Searle: I would indeed, although the feeling that something solid is in there is not an illusion.
Hofstadter: Agreed. So my claim is that your brain (like mine and like everyone else’s) has, out of absolute necessity, invented something it calls and “I”, but that thing is as real (or rather, as unreal) as is that “marble” in that box of envelopes. In that sense, your brain has tricked itself. The “I” — yours, mine, everyone’s — is a tremendously effective illusion. and falling for it has fantastic survival value. Our “I”’s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life.

And there you have it. None of our selves really exists. Well we do exist, but that existence is a software symbol running on the hardware of our brains. We are neither incorporeal spirit nor materialistic bodies. Children and retards aren’t as human as adults, and are therefore subject to different laws; There isn’t an afterlife when the body dies, because the mental patterns cease; We have internal conflict, because the self is a symbol just the same as all the others in your brain; Multiple personalities can inhabit the same hardware just as virtual machines contain different operating systems; Consciousness is the sublimely subtle dance of memes; It explains the inherent difficulty of sharing the qualia of experience with another being.

And thus Hofstadter reveals the lies we tell ourselves. But it won’t be prooven until we successfully build a fully-fledged artificial intelligence using this concept of cognition; and even then people will doubt because the self-reinforcing myth is more compelling than objective reality.

I’m going to found the field of Linguistic Engineering. I wish to study the relationship between what people think (algorithms) and what they say (programs), with the end goal being a set of design principles for the creation of programming languages for specific problem domains (ex. parallel computation and quantum computation ). This subject has some rather interesting ties in other fields.

• Mathematical and algorithmic education. The construction of programs and the languages they are expressed in influence they way in which we think about programming. We need elegant, yet nonrestrictive notations for our programs, and these will correlate strongly with how the human brain functions.
  
• Artificial Intelligence. The representation of knowledge strongly influences the ease with which certain types of logical inference can be deduced. The organization of knowledge within a cognitive system subjects the system to calculational constraints.
  

In most of the Sci-Fi that I’ve read humans are depicted primarily as a wild unknown of unequalled potential.

When Jane and the Bugger Queen discuss humanity, it is pointed out that humans have a crude system by which many ideas are tried in parallel, most of which are poor ideas, but the best ideas have a way to filter to the top. While both Jane and the Bugger Queen rely on deductive logic combined with a vastly greater store of experience and knowledge they are handicapped by a selection bias in favor of what is already known to them, so they don’t find the truly creative solutions to many problems. Humanity, on the other hand, has a system that turns its handicaps of short life spans, lack of a-priori knowledge, and ceaseless competition of individuality, into an advantage. And so it is possessed of an unequalled, and unpredictable, potential.

In Brin’s Uplift Universe, humans are politically positioned in a galaxy of clans which have a long history of bringing new species into the federation through the practice of uplift. When Earth entered the political arena, we had already uplifted two of our own species, and thus bootstrapped a valuable political position; patrons of a clan. But, in our self-righteousness, we grant and treat the uplifted as equals, while the prevailing galactic tradition is to keep the uplifted as a slave-race for many thousands of years, before they are granted independence and allowed to become patrons. Humans (and our clients) are also, as a matter of pride, trained to think independently, and come up with our own creative solutions to problems we encounter. ( Ex: the dolphins novel use of water as a counter-maneuver in a space-battle, scientific researchers rebellious act of uplifting gorillas, design of our space ships, etc… ) These traits cast us as insubordinate with regard to established galactic law, making us a wild unknown in political landscape. Our conceited disdain for the over-reliance of the Library, and our prooven track record of ingenuity, gain us respect for posessing an unequalled potential.

Niven, targets humans as descendants of the Pak, a very old and powerful race. He shows that while humans are uncoordinated and ignorant of manipulations by the subtle Puppeteers, we nevertheless maintain a considerable potential for disruption should we ever obtain a vision of purpose (by learning of genetic and social manipulations perpetrated by the Puppeteers, or by learning of our ancestry). We proved capable of defeating the Kzinti (a ruthless and courageous opponent) in war, of extending our own life-span to several hundred years, and, in the case of Louis Wu of ingenuity in out-thinking a Pak Protector. As a result of Puppeteer interference in local politics, we are breeding luck, an unreliable, though very useful survival mechanism. So again, we become a wild unknown with unequalled potential.

Science Fiction writers have a interesting viewpoint of humanity, and its possible place in the world. This viewpoint seems heavily biased towards democracy, and it’s ideals of individual freedoms. For without those freedoms, and the associated encumbrances of self-assertion in a hostile environment, we would not conceive of novel solutions to age-old problems, we would not feel compelled to revisit existing solutions for a spark of new insight and new understanding. That is we grow and develop as a result of the turmoil that those very freedoms give us. Man’s future is, as always, unpredictable, but He is unique among races for possessing such a flexible system. This is our conception of ourself.