Consciousness series pondered
Hofstadter’s “strange loop” and other
ideas presented in the article “Self as
symbol” (SN: 2/11/12, p. 28) suggest,
but never say, that the notion of “I”
exists in the dimension of time, not
space. Obviously then, consciousness is
not a tangible object — not any part of
the brain. Rather, the “I” phenomenon
is a process, a happening, always actualized with verbs like think, remember
and exist. This idea is evident when
one considers that self-awareness is
always “now,” carried along the arrow
of time. Just as movie cels projected
in sequence can create a story, brain
activity, regulated by biology, generates
an evolving self-perception, a “strange
loop” called human awareness.
James Wegryn, Dimondale, Mich.
“You and I are mirages that perceive
themselves,” a statement by Douglas
Hofstadter, is presented as a puzzle
of “loopiness” in “Self as symbol.” It
seems to the simple layman that the
answer is clear. Mirages don’t perceive.
Stephen Hawking and Leonard
Mlodinow talk about the problem in
their book The Grand Design and discuss “awake” brain surgery. Stimulating a particular area of the brain
creates the experience of the self wanting to move the foot or open the mouth
and talk. It does not cause the foot to
move; it creates the experience of “I
wanting to” and “I thinking about”
moving the foot. The self is part of the
experience created by the brain as if
the brain were the owner of the motivation and the creator of the thought, but
it isn’t. That was done with an electrical impulse.
All “self-awareness” means is that
the human brain creates an experience of self as part of the process of
responding to physical reality. It’s
just a pattern of neurons firing among
many patterns of neurons firing. There
is no actual self-referential mystery
going on, unless you can’t give up for a
moment the illusion of the free-willed
agent in your head.
Gregg Wilson, Oberlin, Ohio
www.sciencenews.org
“Consciousness emerges” (SN:
2/25/12, p. 18) describes the concept of
the “remembered present,” meaning
that what we experience consciously
is mostly a dynamic orchestration of
memory, guided by much thinner slivers of perception. Such an arrangement can also speed reaction time and
increase efficiency, since a sufficiently
predictive simulation can grasp and
respond to critical slivers of input by
framing them in terms of what is most
likely to happen next. This is in sharp
contrast to most robotic systems,
where the majority of energy and processing resources are put into interpreting massive sensory inputs, only to
find that 99 percent were meaningless.
Terry Bollinger, Ashburn, Va.
All this brouhaha regarding “the
awareness of self-awareness” that is of
immense concern to the major minds
present and past is akin to clapping
with one hand. Professor E.O. Wilson,
the father of and author of
Sociobiology, probably hit closest to the mark
in the infamous chapter where he
characterized humans as intensely
social beings who exist only in terms of
their relationships (think Facebook, et
cetera). This is probably why solitary
confinement is a punishment worse
than death (or reading another such
article).
William Thompson, Edwards, Colo.
“Enriched with information” (SN:
3/10/12, p. 22) reports that scientific
theories of consciousness as information
have caught up to C.S. Peirce’s 19th cen-
tury proposal that “rather than saying
the thought is in me, better to say that
I am in thought.” In philosophy there
has been an over 70-years-long demoli-
tion of the idea that the mind is “in the
head,” beginning with the analysis of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, through those of
Hilary Putnam, Fred Dretske and oth-
ers, to the current information theories
of Luciano Floridi. There is a treasury
of subtle and suggestive argument in
that development. I propose that the
stability and coherence of consciousness
is to be found in publicly accessible
social structures (institutions) cashed
out as networks of relations. The
“stuff” of consciousness is gone.
Ken W. Gatzke, New Haven, Conn.
The articles on consciousness in
the February 11 and 25 issues are an
extreme example of scientific reductionism. Hofstadter observed that consciousness is an example of a feedback
loop that, like Gödel’s incompleteness
theorem, can never be solved. Perhaps
another way to view the entire matter is that “the whole is bigger than the
sum of its parts.” That appears simpler
to me and doesn’t get bogged down
in such things as information theory,
brain chemistry or interpretation of
fMRI scans.
Victor Arnold, Sugar Land, Texas
Just read “Self as symbol” and loved it!
I have been a subscriber for many years
and this was one of the clearest and, yes,
most “inspiring” articles I have ever
read. My work as a psychotherapist
(with an early background in physics
and engineering) has been notably
enhanced by the point of view that you
have so elegantly contributed.
Paul Solari, Broomfield, Colo.
Tom Siegfried’s article “Self as symbol,”
while quite interesting and insightful,
assumes that consciousness and sense
of self are purely human phenomena.
Many nonhumans with complex brains
clearly possess consciousness too, of
which we as yet have little understanding. And there are good arguments for
ascribing self-awareness of some kind
to at least the great apes and probably
cetaceans. The article also treats human
consciousness as the pinnacle of evolution, but surely evolution either has no
goal or it has many. The idea of evolutionary progress is in any case a value
judgment, not a scientific one.
Michael Allen Fox, Armidale, Australia
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