Self as Symbol
The loopy nature of consciousness trips up scientists studying themselves
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/337947/title/Self_as_Symbol
I used to subscribe to Science News and had been receiving it for decades (my parents started getting it for me when I was a teenager). I find it a very good source of information on science in general and most of the time provides me with exactly the sort of digest I desire (and always provide links to the relevant peer reviewed data it is based on if I want to do additional reading). However, because the magazine was on paper by the time I got it I had pretty much already read all the information in it due to my regular haunting of the on-line new sources and I was finding the magazines were piling up un-read. My wife also noticed that and thus when renewal came around a year or two ago, she allowed it to lapse and I found I really didn’t miss anything. However, some years ago I had a reason to log onto their web site and formed an account and got signed up for weekly digests and have found these last few months that they are a few days ahead of most of the other sciency sites I visit, so expect the beginning of every other week to be tilted toward science as a consequence.
So with that as likely unnecessary preamble, to the article…
What is consciousness? I really like this quote:
“You and I are mirages that perceive themselves”
It is an interesting article and I look forward to the follow-on pieces promised in the intro.
I am not really sure how to address this in a blog post, either it is too brief or it turns into a novel. I am very interested in these sorts of concepts that sort of tread down the line betwixt philosophy, religion and science.
Personally I believe consciousness and self-awareness are ‘software’ based, rather than ‘hardware’, so while clearly there has to be enough complexity in the hardware (meaning brain or CPU) to support the software needed to have the self-referential looping constructs the article mentions, I think we could do this with silicon with appropriate effort and hardware expense. Whether that turns into Skynet and releases terminators on us or the somewhat more benign result of “The Two Faces of Tomorrow” is of course something we will have to just wait and see.
Well, after consideration, I have decided to just leave this post as-is, hence too brief. I have diverted myself reading some Wiki pages and how have even more ideas to think about and I suspect even if I were able to organize my thoughts this would wind up being such a long post no one would read it.
