Tuesday, June 05, 2007

When "I" think of your "I"

So I'm glad that someone else on the blog has read Strange Loop now, so I feel a bit more entitled to write a bit about it. I read the book back in March, in Portland, and the ideas it generated for me are still relatively fresh, but the fact that I've been mostly just been focusing, mentally, on German grammar for the last month may make this all come out way more mangled than it needs to be...

To spend a moment with the idea of soul-spreading:

I've read all of Hofstadter's other books, and so this idea doesn't seem so outlandish to me as it does for Jack - its definitely an extension of his thinking over consciousness as its progressed since GEB (and, by the way, Jack, I'm pretty sure that the family copy of GEB lives with our parents, so ask Dad to bring it RI). To me, regardless of how realistic a person thinks it is, or practical it is useful for at least the following reasons:

1) Built into this notion of soul-sharing is an evolutionary view for the causes that led towards the selection for apes with larger self-images in the first place. The brain is not a serial calculater - it is a network of many processes going on at once, and the "I" is an emergent property of the interactions between networked processes. So why select in favour of this emergent property? (And, again as an aside, with Strange Loop, I find myself pulled back towards a stronger version of epiphenomalism than I had been working with since reading Dennett's Freedom Evolves.) It has to do with intentionality - in social animals it becomes important to know why your peers are doing what they are doing - the development of self-consciousness arises out of a prior process of figuring out what others are doing (In Consciousness Explained, Dennett uses the example, in a thought experiment, of an animal hearing, and processing its own utterance as the core for the self-narration in the brain.) So in this social network of animals, animals that project their intentionality better are favored for survival, and with that also, simultaneously, the perception is also favored. Working backwards from Hoftstadter's idea about souls being housed in multiple minds, I find that it makes more sense to see that, in fact, brains probably first modeled other selves better than their own, and only later did this "I" come around as a feedback of these monitoring systems processing internal stimuli.

2) I tend to also read Strange Loop in the context of a couple other books published right before it, Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, and especially Dawkins' The God Delusion (previously discussed here). These are both books further extending the realm of using evolutionary thinking and methodology to investigate culture, and obviously, specifically, Religion. Many people (people, I think, that are probably like my brother Jack - too moderate for their own (and everyone else's) good) feel like the aetheism of science too be a bit stark (except for this guy) for it to be popularly functional. Dennett argues from a more agnostic stance, but of course, I reckon, in Dawkinsian terminology, he's still an atheist when it comes to most of the World's gods. The argument against religions tends to at least imply (and often explicitly states) a need for Reason to have more influence, but Reason is difficult to reconcile with the notions over Subjectivity on this Postmodern Earth.

What Hofstadter offers in Strange Loop is a worldview that finds the concepts of souls to be useful. He also redefines souls such that for the most part, their abstract, visceral qualities are maintained from their mystical existence, and grounds it in a evolutinarily-informed view of why they exist. What he offers than, for readers of "The New Atheists," is a more hopeful, utopian model of inquiry. There is of course, respect for causality (as slippery as it can be) and intentionality, but also, even more so, and more importantly an enlightened enwondernment at the "high abstractions that emerge from the gloom" (that isn't quite a direct quote but I'm working from memory here) couple with a strong desire to understand these abstractions better.

2 Comments:

Blogger Jack said...

Hofstadter doesn't talk about soul-sharing in any evolutionary context, though. (Does he discuss this in one of the other books?) In any case, I still don't think that "modeling another self" in a brain creates any kind of shared consciousness there. It's just a mental representation; it isn't tied up with perceiving anything, much less experiencing anything.

If Hofstadter's reacting to the atheism context, he doesn't let on.

Hopeful models are great, but they still have to make sense.

6/05/2007 9:05 PM  
Blogger Pete said...

No, I don't think Hofstadter was reacting to the aetheism context - its simply the context in which I read it. And the context for me, makes the Hofstadter that much more interesting for me.

In The Mind's I, there evolutionary context for consciousness is a bit more explored, but that is in all likelihood Dennett's influence. I'm not sure that Hofstadter ever gets too specific about evolution, but the influence is certainly there, I would argue.

I do think that the evolutionary implications of soul-modelling are present though, in Strange Loop, even if they aren't explicitly stated.

6/06/2007 8:34 AM  

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