11–20 of 179 posts
I'm surprised that in all this hype Gödel Escher Bach hasn't seen a proportional comeback. Hofstadter outlines with some formality a very plausible kind of structure of consciousness, namely the "strange loop": a system of symbols or rule-patterns that contains a distinct but isomorphic (or approaching) description of itself.
I'm surprised that in all this hype Gödel Escher Bach hasn't seen a proportional comeback. Hofstadter outlines with some formality a very plausible kind of structure of consciousness, namely the "strange loop": a system of symbols or rule-patterns that contains a distinct but isomorphic (or approaching) description of itself.
https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/
Read to the ending where it closes the recursive loop.
Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"
So... is this another one of those "Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity by AD Sokal" - type efforts?
Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"
Anil Seth's Being You is a recent one that does a good job of summarizing the most popular theories in consciousness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you
The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness (https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Consciousness-Hand...) is far more comprehensive and while being more academicky is still an excellent read.
Unfortunately both miss what I think is easily the best and most computationally robust and fleshed out consciousness theory, but that's because it's so tragically unknown. I co-authored a book that covers this (while staying accessible) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-...
So much of the stuff in the mathematical-this and physics-that of conscious experience is just crap because there is very little understanding of biological consciousness and what it is and where we can find it, and where we cannot. These start with assumptions of what consciousness is and then go on to mathematize these non-validated assumptions. (Integrated Information Theory) IIT is the most popular among these. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 -- this article captures well why IIT, and many like it, are bad models of consciousness.
>In defining what it means for a mathematical structure to be of conscious experience, our proposal does not answer the question of what this mathematical structure is. Nothing is answered in this article. We simply don't know. This article is up here because nobody is sure whether or not chatGPT is in any way representative of an aspect of our conscious experience. Is chatGPT a mathematical model of consciousness? W…
It is unclear what necessitates any closed-form mathematical description of 'consciousness'.
Such a concept seems tantamount to a faith claim.
Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We know it doesn't represent the whole experience because... it has huge flaws To be clear, we can't yet conclude that these huge flaws are due to its structure rather than the extra sensory data that we have and it doesn't. Doesn't really change your overall point, just wanted to clarify what we can and cannot conclude from the evidence, because people are far too quick to jump to conclusions after seeing the flaw…
Completely agreed. There are flaws. But there are times where the output appears that it cannot anything else other then complete understanding of what was given to it as input.