Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop - Session 4 [Cosmos Café 2022-03-31]

Commons Cosmos Café
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I would support meeting up this coming Thursday, the 31st, and wrapping of Hofstadter the following week (first Thursday (4/7), but I do agree it would be good to supplement the text with some other influences, as there may be some nutritional deficiencies in the brain-centric approach—but I like that in the current chapters Hofstadter is grappling with the intersubjective dimensions of the topic. He talks about “resonance” and “chemistry,” and how taste in music might be the best predictor of compatibility between “souls,” which I think has some truth in it.

And I also hope Ewere and everyone else can make it, since I think our differing understandings of the text could provide some window or mirror on the strange loops we have been talking about, in real time, in real life, and create even better conditions for learning. Is there a way of understanding the brain, and it’s profound role in our experience, without reducing or basing everything somehow on the individual brain?

For those who are not familiar with Wilber’s 4 quadrants, here is how he maps the equiprimordial pronoun-perspective dimensions of every actual occasion:

Quadrants3

The idea is that all four dimensions “tetra-arise” irreducibly. The “I” of the subjective self is not primary, nor is the “it” of the objective brain, but they co-arise with cultures and systems too. This is the most basic aspect of Wilber’s theory, but once one gets it it’s hard to go back to the mind/body dualism and whether or not consciousness is real debates, which are outcontextualized by the more generous integrality of the quadrants.

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I am not able to attend this Thursday 03/31/22,meeting with my two
sisters,we have Birthdays from mine on 03/22/22,03/28/22 & 04/03/22 ,
meeting to Break Bread & Re-Member our Sharing of Parents DNA,which also Includes Just How Different we have Grown Into.

I will check Out the Cafe’ on 03/31/22 & Plan to attend 04/07/22!

Dancing on a Great Redwood 1876

Dancing on the Stump of a Great Redwood Tree in California,1876…

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I am glad to go ahead with the weeks’ session on 31st March and resolve the final week’s session on the 4th April.

We would need to complete the remaining reading of chapter 21 to the epilogue (smaller chapter sizes) in under a week.

Please advise if this would work for the group.

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If there are no objections from the others, let’s do that, Ewere. However, wouldn’t the second (and last) session on Hofstadter fall on the 7th of April (next Thursday)? In either case, I plan to be there this Thursday, there in the liminal zone where subjective strange loops overlap, resonate and interfere with, sometimes cancel out, but can also amplify each other, when the vibes are conducive…

Here is someone who argues (along cyborg lines, which I imagine Hofstadter would support) that we should regard our technological and digital media-extensions (including the data we produce or emanate, as identifiable patterns) as aspects of our essential selves, not just because this would be cool (which it isn’t as much, anymore) but because this brings them under the principles of universal human rights, liberties, and dignities:

https://ar.al/notes/the-nature-of-the-self-in-the-digital-age/

Where do the cyborg and the subtle aspects of the self meet up? What do these aspect enhance, retrieve, obsolesce, and reverse into when saturated? While I don’t personally identify as a cyborg, I do think there is something essential about how we relate to our technological extensions, similar to but different than how we relate to our own bodies (gross, subtle, and causal layers)—our Original Media—that must go into the concept of an intersubjective/interobjective self.

The article, to me, argues that an impoverished and fragmentary concept of self enables social exploitation, colonization by nefarious forces, and economic disempowerment. In the past, we’ve also read Donna Haraway, who brings a more-than-human, ecological sensibility into the conversation about the cyborg self: Cosmos Café [9/3/19] - Introducing Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble

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I read this, was reminded of Ursula K Le Guin;

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words. Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound—a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.)

From The Left Hand of Darkness…

Z

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That was my mistake with the dates, with the correct dates being 31st March & 7th April.

The article by Aral Balkan is an excellent descriptor for my thoughts on the “I” as an unaware producer of data within Surveillance Capitalism.

I am still undecided if this would be Hofstadter’s position; the most recently read chapters adds to my belief that he does not force the “I” into a neuron or cell (at the biological level) in the brain but allows the “I” to be a manifestation of the mind. One we can not avoid and has to be (linguistically speaking) for us to reflect on our pursuit of the day.

An aspect I have noticed is how much Hofstadter values his wifes’ “I” which he describes as their union into “We”, there is an action in pursuit of understanding the other’s “I” devoid of projection. In complete acceptance and manifesting a sense of their “I” within oneself, it changes our belief of what we are, what we want for the other’s “I”, our response to their presence.

At this point, to me, your “I” is who you are, your body and all it can do is your expressive response to the reality you find yourself in.

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I tend to read him this way as well, but I think he is way too breezy about conflating the “I” with “mind,” “self,” “soul,” “consciousness,” “a light bulb on inside” (ch. 19), etc., as if these words are all just pointing to and talking about the same phenomenon (which is really a noumenon), without any regard for qualitative distinctions. There is a reason philosophers (not to mention poets!) go to great lengths to define (or refine) their terms, and use their words carefully. His thinking just strikes me as a bit lazy, but he distracts us with cute anecdotes and far-fetched metaphors, so we might fail to notice (or notice that we notice) the emptiness inside.

For example, rather than being conflated as all just the same mental/symbolic stuff, consciousness can be experienced as a field of awareness, whereas the “I” arises (dynamically coalesces) as an embodied interface within the field “we” are; and we might understand “mind” as a kind of distributed, all-encompassing self-orchestrating, autopoetic intelligence inherent in all manifestations (in infinite degrees); and there is such a rich literature on the ontology of the “self” in Indian philosophy and Buddhist thought, not to mention modern Western philosophy (I am thinking of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, which does so much intellectual labor to situate and embed the self in historical context). It is painstaking work, and I find that the cognitive science and mathematics (which is a lot of symbolic manipulation, when you get down to it), ends up turning into a kind of runaround or “mental bypassing” of more substantial issues.

Maybe the “hard problem” of consciousness should be hard! Maybe we should break our heads on it. I am afraid that Hofstadter ends up offering only a kind of virtual self, which doesn’t really square with the drama of lived history, our struggles with actual time, and the felt-reality and intensity of personal existence when it hits you (or when you smash your head on it), without which consciousness would be a rather dull carnival. I do find it compelling and honorable that he loved his wife so much, and how he could feel so fused with her. Being married myself, and knowing a bit what that is like, it is hard be believe that such a state of perfect fusion would be totally free from projection. But then, we don’t have Carol to ask for her perspective (or position, or opinion) on anything anymore. The living can say anything they want. The dead can only speak through us. Thus we enter into an even stranger hermeneutic circle to account for the loops within which we find ourselves.

Well, that’s what I’m thinking this morning, and I suppose we’ll hash it out on Thursday. Hard problem? No problem for the Caféistas. Let’s make history this Thursday: solve for n(Consciousness)wtf = X, once and for all!

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The Great Within seems to have no Out-side only Manifestations
of Different “Within-ness”…

image
image1024×1024 74.3 KB

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I’ll save it for our Cafe discussion later… please bring your head and something hard to break against it.

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Imaginal Body

Craig Lee Davis (1956-2020)

And the World War 3 started over a month ago

And Frances McDormand, playing Lady Macbeth , bursts forth,

I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out,

And in the last act,
After the murder,
As she walks in her sleep
Lady M makes a gesture
nursing a baby
Her face contorts
She howls.

Her hurried howl and unsexed body
echoes thus in my mind-

Before bed I replay
that scene and drift
during my dream yoga
I feel the baby at my breast
I see my dead brother
in my mind’s eye
He holds an innocent babe
And feeling love for her and for him
I have a wave of remorse
I roll over on my right side
he was a good father
even though his father
and mine was as demonic
as Macbeth
I did my brother wrong
I fall asleep.

A fluttering light
In my bed I feel a being
wrap around my
dreambody

A man asks, Do you know me?
I remember," You are Craig ."
A wave of perfect love enfold us.
He was a freckled red haired wild boy
He has become a spectral figure
I am deep he says but you-
you are deeper.

I ask about past and future lives.
As he walks beside me on a country road
He morphs into different shapes and sizes.
We drift apart…

I wake up and put left hand on my heart
And right hand cups the back of my skull

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Wonderful, thank you, edoubleoo!

“true integration at every level and in every aspect of life”
becoming “a microcosm of the Evolving Cosmos”

I appreciate your contributions/expansions.

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