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Comment by mxkopy | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that in all this hype Gödel Escher Bach hasn't seen a proportional comeback. Hofstadter outlines with some formality a very plausible kind of structure of consciousness, namely the "strange loop": a system of symbols or rule-patterns that contains a distinct but isomorphic (or approaching) description of itself.

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Does the strange loop explain how sensations like color and pain come from the isomorphic self-description?

The book doesn't really go that much into the hard problem of consciousness, as much of the ideas are orthogonal to that discussion. If Nagel asks, "What is like to be a bat?", Hofstadter asks "If the mind of a bat were a program, what characteristics would it have?"

IMO the hard problem is not posed to be solved. I think of it like this. The world in which we are p-zombies is categorically indistinguishable from the one in which we are not, by an objective perspective. It is not a concept that we should use for an objective definition.

In my opinion, it's unlikely that p-zombies are physically indistinguishable from conscious beings.

It's like saying "a computer that works, but where the CPU is replaced by a piece of stone is physically indistinguishable from the real thing".

We have not yet found a physical distinction. It seems likely that there is one.

The issue is, what else would we call the rock that does all the things a CPU does? If we can socket it into the motherboard and play games on it, what makes it so different?

If Hosfadter is correct, then chatGPT already fits that definition.

https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/

Read to the ending where it closes the recursive loop.

In tandem with that article there are also all those findings about GPT training smaller gradient descent models inside itself which is very interesting. That particularly seems rather... strange.

I'm sure Hofstader would dislike people saying "he was right about this!" "he defined this!", though, since that's not what he was setting out to do at all. GEB really is just an exploration, with some of the results being couched in mathematical language as an artifact of his background, not as an attempt to formalize anything.

Personally I think Hofstadter was a bit too enamored with recursion. I don't think it's some marker of consciousness. I'm not saying chatGPT isnt an aspect of consciousness (I don't know).

I've always thought consciousness is basically just feedback (like with microphones). Sensing yourself sensing yourself etc.

That's self-awareness. But it doesn't explain qualia like the sensation of the color red.

I suggest you look into Roger Scruton's interpretation of Wittgenstein's private language argument. I think it might go something like this:

You want an explanation for the sensation of the color red? Alright, I'll try, as long as you help me out: what exactly is the sensation of the color red? I need to have a good grasp on what we're talking about here.

Can you describe it? It's okay, take your time.

FIN

If you're trying to suggest qualia don't exist or don't have anything to do with consciousness, then sure you'll find some people who agree. But it's not a mainstream position.

And of course the entire point is that qualia are ineffable. That's part of the definition. It's the feature, not a bug. But if you want to deny that you have conscious sensation then go ahead. ;)

At some point I figured that "everything has qualia" and "qualia doesn't exist", when taken to their logical conclusions, are actually identical beliefs. Though I suspect I'll need quite a lot more crack cocaine to figure out how.

This argument is so empty of meaning it is itself ineffable.

I don't understand the mystery around "qualia". You sense something and it propagates through the system priming other neurons. It's just learned association.

What I'm saying is different from self awareness. Self awareness could arguably just be having a model of yourself. I'm talking about a sensory feedback loop.

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