[lit-ideas] Re: Feeling Loopy
- From: John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 07:41:22 -0600
It's even loopier than this!
The term "soul" doesn't sound right to me here. "consciousness" captures
more of what he's getting at.
A "loop" is closed. Consciousness is not the terminus, just a stop on
the neverending loop.
That means our consciousness does affect the whole rest of the process;
what we think about ourselves affects who we are, just as much as what
our neurons do affects who we are. The feedback mechanisms are not
simple but they are loopily loopy--We are much more than we can know
about ourselves because we are the knower and the known, so anything we
know about ourselves changes the object of that knowledge.
The whole "loop" itself, neurons, consciousness, etc., is me. My
consciousness doesn't decide to go to work now; my body doesn't decide
to go to work--I, the whole loop, decides.
I'm off!
(To which Pogo might say, "Not so's you'd notice..., although in this
loopy case it might not be true.)
John McCreery wrote:
It's that kind of day. Arts & Letters daily points me to a piece in
Scientific American, a review of Douglas Hofstadter's _I am a strange
loop_.
. . . .
And that is what leads to the grand illusion. "In the soft, ethereal,
neurology-free world of these players," the author writes, "the
typical human brain perceives its very own 'I' as a pusher and a
mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player
might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad infinitesimal
entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among
them."
-----------
For the second half see
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=C7265AEC-E7F2-99DF-3B3A60DE6200D457
--
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"Never attribute to malice that which can be
explained by incompetence and ignorance."
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John Wager john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx
Lisle, IL, USA
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