News You Can Bruise

I'm reading clusters of related books: Consciousness Explained, I Am A Strange Loop, now Origin of Consciousness Yada Yada. I knew about this book since it was name-checked in The Big U, and afterwards I think I gathered that the same concepts had been deployed in Snow Crash, both of which books I want to re-read now.

But my interest was seriously piqued when I read Richard Dawkins referring to Origin as (non-exact quote) "one of those books that is either complete brilliance or utter rubbish". There are many such books, but most of them have been classified by now, and usually as "utter rubbish." I was intrigued by this thirty-year-old book whose ideas never became mainstream but which could still stand up to someone like Dawkins. If there are any other such books lying around I would like to hear about them.

It's a fascinating book because even if it's totally wrong, it's an excellent work of science fiction. And reading these books in rapid succession it feels to me like the bicameral mind theory is compatible with, or even a special case of, Dennett's Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness. And what do you know, Dennett has written an essay about bicameral mind theory which ties it together with his own writing in about the way I expected.

Anyway, the cluster-reading continues, as I now need to read a bunch of books about game design for the upcoming big project. I've experimented in the past with choosing a next book that has some relationship to the book I just read, but it didn't work because I was trying to make a chain chain chain, chain of books. Clusters make more sense. For instance I was just going to read Rules of Play next, but also on my bookshelf are Dungeons & Desktops and Magister Ludi, both of which I think will be important to this project, so I've put the three books in a stack. A STACK, I tell you!

I borrowed I Am a Strange Loop from Evan and read it after reading Consciousness Explained. As you might expect I agree with most of what Hofstadter says in the book, but there's one big thing I don't think he ever makes an argument for.

Nonlocalized consciousness (not the real term) makes it legitimate to think of other people as existing inside you to the extent that you've internalized their mental processes. Which is always really not very much at all, but better than nothing. One implication of this is that fictional characters can exist inside you in the same sense. That seems reasonable to me. Fictional thoughts are thoughts.

But Hofstadter says that you can (and do) actually internalize another person's consciousness on a coarse-grained level: the "strange loop" that drives that person's consciousness. And so not only do (your copies of) other people and fictional characters exist inside you, they are actually conscious inside you, because their strange loop is running on your hardware.

Stipulating the strange loop thing, I guess fictional characters could be called conscious if you simulated their thought processes in enough detail, but is that really what's happening? Do you ever know enough about someone else's thought process to internalize their consciousness, a thing so inaccessible that the person themself can't describe it? When I make up a character I have, in theory, complete control over their mental states, but I don't create a strange loop for them. I use my own, preexisting consciousness to simulate them. That's different. I'm pretending to be them, with greater or lesser success.

I'm not as old as Hofstadter, so I don't have as much practice, but I've known Sumana for about eight years and I do have an internalized Sumana that acts kind of like the real Sumana. But I wouldn't say I've internalized a copy of Sumana's consciousness, her sleep number strange loop. I'm using my own strange loop as the simulation engine.

So my intuition is that my Sumana-symbol, my symbols for dead people I used to know, and my symbols for fictional characters are the same kind of symbols as I keep for other complex entities like the World Wide Web. Not the kind that forms an "I". I can be surprised by something one of my fictional characters does, but it's the same kind of surprise as when I come up with an idea some other way. I don't see where Hofstadter argues that our representations of other people have this unusual property, but a lot of the book assumes it.

I'm explicitly not saying that mental simulations of consciousness would not be conscious. They would be. And I could believe that someone with eg. multiple personality disorder had multiple strange loops in their mind. I just don't think that's what happens when we think about a dead person we used to know.

A single proposition isn't a theory, it's a slogan; and what some philosophers do isn't theorizing, it's slogan-honing. What is this labor for? What confusion would be dissipated, what advances in outlook would be created, by success in this endeavor? Do you really need something to print on your T-shirt?

--Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained