An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter
tal.forum2.org
tal.forum2.org
But he takes distasteful shots at AI researchers who disagree with him, here.
He embraces protecting animals and other semi-conscious beings, but doesn't extend that sympathy to AIs, or other potentially conscious beings. That's a bioelitist stance; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-progressivism#Contrastin...
He even celebrates slow developments in computing, as a good thing.
He needs to find a buddhist teacher and an LSD dealer to get over his fear of death. He's going to die, his body is going to rot and his greying, decayed, stinking flesh is going to be churned into worm poop, his memory and personality will dissolve, as the thing that observes all that (an is the same behind my eyes as yours, that you can see by considering your self image for a long time, and then asking "if I'm looking at me, what is doing the looking?") discards the used up vehicle and suits up for the next adventure as a different one of these trippy humans, which will have a different set of ultimately illusory relationships with this fact through waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep, all before the sun supernovas and destroys every single hint of anything he did with his life, all of which is not only going to happen, but already happening because time is an illusory construct perceived by an illusory ego. The sooner he spends 2 or 3 weeks in a psych word processing that after eating a quarter sheet of acid and screaming about it for twelve hours while burning his retinas out staring at the sun and directly perceiving it, the better off and closer to the truth his community will be.
This critique of AI was a highlight for me. People who think they can mimic consciousness on computers have more in common with magical thinking then with science because they have absolutely no deep understanding of consciousness.
I remember way back in the day being on psychedelic mushrooms once, walking through the woods, and talking to Buddha, who had appeared in a rock wall in a tunnel I walked past. Then I was like "I just saw Buddha, I should say hi and talk to him." I turned back said "hi" and he was like "Dont be a Buddhist, figure it out for yourself." So I know exactly what you mean.
You had me until that line.
But, on the other hand, many technology/science/Math visionaries have been driven by mythic kind of visions. Newton, Swedenberg, Cantor and Bohm come to mind. That in itself isn't hurtful. But when the nature of the belief causes them to not deal with a major facet of human existence, it starts to be bad.
Really, I am waiting eagerly.
As for Kurzweil, being afraid of death seems very rational to me. His escape plan might seem overly optimistic, but at least it is conceivable. More than you can say for your average religion.
The deeper you go into your awareness the more universal the experience is. You can verify this experientially. Our bodies, thought patterns, emotions and memories all die but the awareness they all rise in (which, being aware of space, time, and identity, is outside of time, space, and identity) is immortal.
Except that it seems likely that our brains simply follow the laws of physics, like everything else.
"You can verify this experientially."
How?
"the awareness they all rise in (which, being aware of space, time, and identity, is outside of time, space, and identity) is immortal."
I didn't understand that sentence.
2.) Here are three ways, the best first. 5 to 10 years of meditation lead by the right teacher. A near anesthetic dose of ketamine or experiences with sensory deprivation. Stuart Davis says something like "If you doubt the fact of a spiritual dimension, get a gun, shoot yourself in the head. Freed from that dingy filter you call a mind, confirm through direct experience the ontological status of subtle and causal reality. Upon rebirth, try not to forget it this time."
I personally think the fastest way is to take a week camping, spend three days to read a bunch of Alan Watts, listen to "Love Has No Opposite" by Stuart Davis and everything by Bill Hicks a couple times, catch up on sleep, relax, and hike, then on day four, find a beautiful area to sit and watch water and take a medium low dose of mushrooms, and listen to some gamelan music on speakers while you let the patters of nature and the flowing water merge synaesthetically with the study and relaxation you did and the intricate gamelan music. After six hours, you will understand. Then, spend three days relaxing, reflecting, and get back to work.
You can't do astronomy without a telescope. You can't do medicine without dissecting cadavers. You can't do consciousness without technology to poke at the way the brain perceives itself. The same type of power structure that wanted to keep people from looking in the sky, where they had located the God they were distorting to gain power or the body, where they located the soul, now want to keep us from looking at consciousness, where many of them now locate the soul. In these cases, letting scientists look beyond the curtain threatened the worldview they depended on to keep power. Drugs aren't the only or best tool (long term meditation is best) but for seeing a certain kind of thing in the short term, they can work. Personally, my drug days are behind me. But I learned a lot of good stuff from it.
3.) I know you don't. You have fused with your ego and are unable to take a backwards step from it. (I'm not calling you egotistical or being derogatory). Awareness and ego come apart. Spend a while with your eyes closed, considering the way your sense of space and time, and attention and memory relate to form your identity. Breathe. After 15 or 20 minutes, you might realize that you are observing your identity as a constellation of your space-time concept, attention, memory, and breath. When this happens, your concept of self switches from being the subject through which you interact with objects to being itself an object of awareness. When this happens, what is the new subject? Spend another 20 minutes considering this. The new subject becomes an object as well, and the frontal structure of your personality becomes more and more distant as you climb the subject-object ladder by observing the new subjects an objects of an increasingly broad awareness.
You think you are Tichy. You are, in a way. But, also equally true, Tichy is something you are aware of. That awareness is more essential to who you are then the details of your biography. It is immortal because it is outside of time (because at a certain level of jumping the subject backwards, your time concept becomes an object of awareness). Kurzweil is concerned with preserving the ego. He should be concerned with the thing that sees the ego he is trying to preserve. Your physics doesn't touch that yet.
(It might sound like I'm talking about God. I'm not. Fuck God. But, I think many people make the mistake of confusing this awareness, often discussed in mystical poetry, with a biblical God that is actually just a surface feature of the ego we are trying to put in proper perspective. It might also sound like I'm one of those hippies who's always going on about living in the now. I'm not, fuck those hippies. It's not about one level, like the level past time that you can access with meditation or some drugs used well. It's about a healthy relationship between them all.)
Physics does explain why "we" have experiences. An experience is just an interaction of matter or information. Admittedly, I don't know what matter is, there is of course something about physics we can not understand (to me, so far, the ultimate question is, what does it mean that something exists). But that is another problem than the consciousness issue, in my opinion.
You are completely ignoring the experiential aspect of reality. Buddhism (at it's best, at it's worse it's as bad as the others) treats meditation as a science of interior experience. There are actual things you can do to change the way you perceive yourself, and you can learn things from them by a process which is analogous to science. It features hypothesis testing, experimentation, validation by a community of peers. We can learn intriguing things by looking at the places their practice, which produces measurable permanent effects on the brain, interacts with what they describe experientially. Your worldview leaves no room for this. Go do the experiments. It's easy. It's proven to make you feel better. You will directly perceive why it's wrong to think of experience as just an interaction of localized matter in time. I can't convince you of cell biology without showing you a microscope. And I can't convince you of consciousness and how it relates to these other things if you do not directly use the technology in these areas. I don't understand why people don't think it's scientific. There are confirmable results. Just look through the right door.
And when you do, you will find that rather then stepping into a room, you have a reversal of perception, and your construction of yourself becomes something you step out of. It is exactly that thought "What you call awareness is an illusion" that will flip in this way. What we call awareness is what is aware of the reality that is actually the illusion. This awareness has no properties, no features, it is what all properties and features arise and are experienced in (as you, me, and all the other experiential phenomena). You can perceive it, but when you do, the you you perceive is an object of perception. When the you that is not what you think of as you perceives you instead of perceives through you, your perception inverts and broadens. You can see this, yourself, for yourself, if you let yourself see, at which point there will be no you to be doing the seeing, you see? Do you see at least why you should do the experiments to try to see?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8832143373632003914
Particularly, where he says that there is no 'knee' of an exponential curve - well duh, where the slope hits 1. I get the impression that he's a bit lost to life since his wife died.
Bad, bad haircut though.
Is there anyone else who does that?
Hofstadter, Jack Kornfeld, VS Ramachandran, Alan Watts (at times) (not to start political debate, but Barack Obama)
And for music (what the hell) Phillip Glass, Squarepusher, Tool, Bach, almost any sort of gamelan music, or music with uneven or additive rhythmic structures.
Such a shame a great mind like Hofstadter is subjected to these awful questions. Here's an idea. If you haven't read Hofstadter's GEB and I Am a Strange Loop, don't try to interview him about it. Especially don't open with a question that reveals this in the first breath Hofstadter responds with.
I love Bill Moyers, don't get me wrong here, but this reminds me a little of Bill Moyers talking to Joseph Campbell. Campbell was so much more evolved in his understanding then Moyers, that Moyers (who is excellent) seemed like a dog trying to understand a card trick. The interviewer seems like that.
It's well worth reading anyway, because Hofstadter is so damn brilliant.
I would personally recommend reading I Am A Strange Loop, and then GEB if intrigued. This way, you will interpret GEB according to Hofstader's more explicit formulations of his deeper ideas, instead of in the more shallow way GEB can be interpreted, without following the thread about identity.
I think I Am A Strange Loop is classic and cannot say too much about how great Hofstadter is. He gets consciousness. He gets it. And he has good ways of communicating it. One of the most brilliant minds I have read.
It looks like you are from Seattle? Me too, send me an email, I work in biotech, and it looks like you might sort of also?
Otherwise I also recommend his "Metamagical Themas" - a collection of all his essays from Scientific American. Here you can skip around, pick out things that sound interesting, and not have to embark on the ~750page journey that is GEB if you don't want to.
I Am A Strange Loop is good, but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as some of his other work.
(And if it turns out you don't like Douglas R. Hofstadter, perhaps you will like Egbert B. Gebstadter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egbert_B._Gebstadter)
The upside is definitely worth a few reading struggles. It's one of those once-in-a-lifetime books (by which I mean that you don't come across books this great often; I don't mean you should read it once and throw it on the fire).
I encourage you to give it a shot.