Hi Platt, Angus, others,
> > You've just struck gold! Jakobson studied a brain
> > dysfunction called "aphasia" whereby a person could
> > not communicate adequately because he/she had no
> > ability for self-reference.
Well, my mother's got aphasia, and she still knows that she is who she
is... incidentally, she's got particular problems with reading and
hearing numbers. At first, it only seemed to affect NOT her
understanding of numbers, but now (I'm getting personal just
accidentally) the brain tumor has grown and the aphasia has also grown
worse, it also affects her understanding when days or hours are
involved. It's like she first couldn't communicate the tags (names like
one and twentythree) of numbers, but still was able to think with them
as static concepts. But now the static concepts (in the realm of
numbers! I still can have nice conversations with her!) seem to
dissappear as well.
> We need self-reference for
> > consciousness.
It's funny. I always equated 'consciousness' with 'experience'. But alot
of thinkers/writers take self-reference as essential to consciousness.
The problem is that some computerprogramms are conscious too, in this
sense. And computers ain't (self)consciouss, I daresay...
> Language itself is at once
> (simultaneously) a meaningful system of meaningless elements,
> spoken words as puffs of wind. If you find that self-reference and
> self-
> contradiction (there are no absolutes) are like Zen
> koans--inexplicable
> but unmasking higher truths--then I got a million of 'em. Well, not a
> million but at least a couple of dozen I've collected over the years.
This is the part that initiated me to reply. You can interpret it in the
Gestalt-psychology frame, but I don't think you mean it that way, as I
remember our previous discussions. I think there's a different kind of
Turing Test than the famous one: Once you're able to write a
computerprogram to put a theory of consciousness or experience into
praxis, it's not about consiousness anymore (There are only static
qualities, not dynamic ones. And if there are (the latter), than they're
not related to the static qualities as in our experience). The thing is,
you can write a computer program that can recognize a triangle in three
pacmans facing each other; that's Gestalt psychology.
Anyway, I have to remember what I wanted to say! Maybe I was just struck
by your formulation of the meaning of language beyond the bits. I'm
reading Nishida's Inquiry into the Good, the book that brought me via a
searchmachine to the MoQ-site, and he says that thinking about two
representations like 'The HORSE is RUNNING' is actually thinking with
just one representation 'The RUNNING HORSE'! It's an interesting notion
that one representation can contain pulling-away-forces in it, so to
say, dynamic quality working with somewhat contradictionary static
qualities.
By the way Platt, I've seen you recommend 'The Emperor's new Mind' by
Roger Penrose somewhere. I've had a discussion recently with some
friends, and we all agreed with the notion that objective reality (very
much related to mathematics according to Penrose) is somehow secondary
to the primary experience itself, or some mystical state of being, as
one would have it. But my focus was that it is nevertheless REAL!!!! You
could say that a SOM is not absolute, but in it you can grasp absolute
things... that's just a thesis, I'm not sure if I agree with this
myself. Question: Is ANYTHING absolute in Pirsig's MoQ?
For me, Penrose with his emphasis on Goedel's theorem can trigger in me
an essential feeling of awe, of wonder, of non-intellectual
contemplation... That is, when I've read or thought (intellectually)
about things like Goedel's incompleteness theorem and just watch the
trees move outside and feel the wind in my face... or whatever. It's
like reading ZMM for the first time for an hour or two by the fire, and
then just lay the book down and put your hands behind your head and
stare at the fire for a while, letting the aha-erlebnisses coherently
spread out in the writings of this (in essence) autobiography just float
by and experience this feeling of non-thinking wonder...
Whatever. Goodnight, Patrick.
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