Gödel, Escher, Bach

Preface

• “GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle? What is an ‘I’, and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russel Edson once wonderfully phrased it, ‘teetering bulbs of dread and dream.’”

• To feel one’s way out of the mystery of consciousness, one must find that the key lies not in “the stuff out of which brains are made, but the patterns that can come to exist inside the stuff of a brain.”

  • Ah. Same with wisdom traditions. It is not the particularities of the traditions themselves, or the people that make them up, but the patterns that the people engage in. And those patterns are material agnostic (mmm, not material agnostic, that’s not quite right).

Part 1: GEB

• The Epimenides paradox or liar paradox: “I am lying;” or, “This statement is false.” If the statement is indeed false then I can’t trust that it’s false. If I think it’s true, well, that means it’s false. Infinite, paradoxical loop
• Isomorphism: an information preserving transformation
• Interpretations of symbols are meaningful insofar as they accurately reflect an isomorphism to the real world. There can be multiple meanings, multiple links, of one symbol to real world phenomena.
• Author notes three layers of any message: 1) the frame message: some pattern or order that indicates a message contained that can be decoded; 2) the outer message: the symbols and patterns within the frame that are to be decoded: 3) the inner message: the meaning carried by the collection of patterns that the generator of the message intends to communicate
  • Gives the metaphor of a message in a bottle: the bottle is the frame (hey! Im worth decoding!); the text is the outer message (here’s what to decode!); and the meaning of the text is the inner message (here’s what it all means)
• If the meaning of a message can be decoded in some universal sense, by many distributed and divided intelligences, there seems to be more meaning inherent in the message itself
• “Intelligence loves patterns and balks at randomness.”
• Music has three major dimensions: melody, harmony, and rhythm. Story, continuity (both in linear time flowing into each other and at various levels simultaneously), and pace.
• Zen is holism, carried to its logical extreme. If holism cares that thing can only be understood as wholes, not as sums of their parts. Zen goes one further, in maintaining that the world cannot be broken into parts at all To divide the world into parts is to be deluded, and to miss enlightenment
• A master was asked the question, “What is the Way?” by a curious monk
  • “It is right before your eyes,” said the master.
  • “Why do I not see it for myself?”
  • “Because you are thinking of yourself.”
  • “What about you: do you see it?”
  • “So long as you see double, saying ‘I don’t’, and ‘you do’, and so on, your eyes are clouded,” said the master.
  • “When there is neither ‘I’ nor ‘You’, can one see it?”
  • “When there is neither ‘I’ nor ‘You’, who is the one that wants to see it?”
• Has a dog Buddha-nature? This is the most serious question of all. If you say yes or no, You lose your own Buddha-nature.
  • Non-dualism.

Part 2

• Discussion on compilers working on machine language. Bootstrapping occurs when a minimal unit of compiler, one level above machine language, can be used to translate bigger compilers into machine language. Likens it to “the attainment by a child of a critical level of fluency in his native language, from which point on his vocabulary and fluency can grow leaps and bounds, since he can use language to acquire new language.”
• Talks of chunked models. Generally when we work at the level of a higher level, we don’t need to understand lower level components. For instance, to deliver a joke you don’t have to understand cell biology. This simplicity comes at the cost of less determinism. “A chunked model defines a ‘space’ within which behaviour is expected to fall, and specifies probabilities of its falling in different parts of that space.”
• I see your side; but I believe you see things too narrowly.
• “Ant colonies have been subjected to the rigors of evolution for billions of years. A few mechanisms were selected for, and most were selected against. The end result was a set of mechanisms which make ant colonies work as we have been describing. If you could watch the whole process in a movie—running a billion or so times faster than life, of course—the emergence of various mechanisms would be seen as natural responses to external pressures, just as bubbles in boiling water are natural responses to an external heat source.”
• “I have as much difficulty as anyone else in seeing things on such a grandiose time scale, so I find it much easier to change points of view. When I do so, forgetting about evolution and seeing things in the here and now, the vocabulary of teleology comes back: the MEANING of the caste distribution and the PURPOSEFULNESS of signals. This not only happens when I think of ant colonies, but also when I think about my own brain and other brains. However, with some effort I can always remember the other point of view if necessary, and drain all these systems of meaning, too.”
  • Brilliant. Farsighted wisdom reveals inevitable cause and effect. Nearsighted love reveals overwhelming purpose and agency.
• Speaks of signals and symbols. Letters are passive symbols, which are individually meaningless, that combine to create meaningful passive signals: words. In adaptive systems, such as ant colonies or brains, active symbols are distributors of information (individual ants or neurons) that come together to produce an active signal (purposeful action).
• Meaning of passive symbols can only be derived from an active symbol interacting with it: words (symbols) on a page are given meaning by the active symbols (brain activity) interacting with it. Meaning drips down from the active symbol and coats the passive symbol.
• To see an ant colony at its highest symbolic representation rather than the collection of ants that compose it is to identify that colony with a self (in the book’s case: Aunt Hillary). The agent/self we ascribe to the colony is the part that remains and coheres over time as the parts/signals constantly evolve.
• With consciousness, we are fully restricted to the symbolic level, we have no access to the signals (neuron behaviour) that produce consciousness.
• “There are, after all, several distinct ways to rearrange a group of parts to form a “sum”. And Aunt Hillary was just a new “sum” of the old parts. Not MORE than the sum, mind you—just that particular KIND of sum.”
  • The same parts can form a different sum. Neither is MORE than the other, they are simply of different kind or quality. Like two humans are different organizations of the same component cells yet create two different kinds of humans.
• When we create higher order representations of things, like how plants and animals or people or societies behave (i.e., biology, psychology, and sociology) we sacrifice determinism for simplicity. “Our reality ends up being able only to predict probabilities of ending up in certain parts of abstract spaces of behaviour—not to predict anything with the precision of physics.”