Is consciousness a self referential paradox?

[Animavore]

[FBM]

Consciousness is an algorithm for (a) hypothetical being. Probably.

[apophenia]

"No."



I can't believe I watched the whole thing. The entire last half of the video is essentially rendered moot by what is known as the strengthened liar's paradox. Moreover, Godel proved two incompleteness theorems, not one, which he completely misrepresented by focusing only on one of them. He briefly mentions, but doesn't fully absorb that, as with Godel, statements within the system may require resolution outside that system; for systems like Tarski's convention-T, there may be an infinite regress — what philosophers term a "vicious regress" — but that isn't the only types of regresses there are. You'll find cases in the literature where an infinite regress occurs but it is ignored as not being of the vicious type. To put it in his terms, of a system with feedback, different systems, depending on the type and configuration of the feedback, will display different kinds of behavior. The example of the webcam is one where the regress converges on a stable end point (if the camera is held motionless). The regression converges on a stable value, the classic frame inside a frame inside a frame. And we can characterize that type of functional behavior at a level above that of the behavior itself. If we keep the camera steady, the image will not start jumping this way and that. Other forms of behavior are such things as bistable oscillation, where the frame jumps back and forth between two stable images. (You can notice this behavior in your own neural networks where, with the face / vases illusion, your mind toggles back and forth between two semi-stable interpretations.) Now I'm not going to go deeper into the mathematics of characterizing the higher order behaviors of functions — perhaps JimC might care to do so — other than to note that regression isn't defacto problematic. Kripke's theorem of truth, which I won't pretend to understand, is from what I gather based on just such an infinite regress, a regress that has stable, convergent properties which allow us to characterize statements within the system, even though full evaluation at that level is impossible. I understand even less about the modern set theoretic underpinnings of mathematics, but my understanding is that they are now formulated in this manner.

What that has to do with consciousness, I must confess is something of a mystery, as I see no obviously recursive system in consciousness. I think it's commonplace to think of consciousness as in some sense recursive, self-reflective or whatever, but I think that's primarily a result of a bunch of metaphysical baggage that has been attached to mental acts, most of which have no real sound foundation.

If you're interested in the liar's paradox, I can recommend a couple of good books (which I haven't read more than a chapter or two in). There is an Australian philosopher by the name of Graham Priest who specializes in dialetheism. A dialethea is a statement or proposition which is both true and false. Needless to say that if you play by queen's rules, it will play havoc with your logic — if you're going to let dialethea's into your logic, the logic has to be changed. The question is whether that can be done successfully, and, whether you would even want to do so. Priest makes the case that our logics and maths will forever be incomplete if we don't, as every time one of these paradoxes crop up, the usual response is to define it away; but it always comes back. (The cat came back...)

Anyway, In Contradiction is his first main work on the subject, and I gather, is aimed more at the philosophy community; not that it should pose inordinate difficulty so much as that reader has a different set of requirements than the lay person. The second, which I would suggest first, is Beyond The Limits Of Thought.