The Mind's I

Fantasies and reflections on self and soul
Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett
Basic Books, 1981-2000

Rediscovering the Mind, by Harold J. Morowitz, p 34

[...] biologists [...] have been moving relentlessly toward the hard-core materialism that characterized nineteenth-century physics. At the same time, physicists, faced with compelling experimental evidence, have been moving away from strictly mechanical models of the universe to a view that sees the mind as playing an integral role in all physical events.

Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes, by Richard Dawkins, p 129

Jacques Monod made this point very clear in his Herbert Spencer lecture, after wryly remarking: "Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it!"

Prelude ...Ant Fugue, by Douglas Hofstadter, Reflections, p 197

Now you can see that "reductionism" is synonymous with "upward causality" and "holism" with "downward causality".
Reductionism (upward causality) + Predictionism (upstream causality) = Mechanism
Holism (downward causality) + Goalism (downstream causality) = Soulism

p 200

Mind is a pattern perceived by a mind.

19. Non Serviam, by Stanislav Lem, p 303

A solitary personoid is unable to go beyond the stage of rudimentary thinking since, solitary, it cannot exercise itself in speech, and without speech discursive thought cannot develop.
Consciousness --all consciousness, not merely the personoid-- is in its physical aspect an "informational standing wave," a certain dynamic invariant in a stream of incessant transformations, peculiar in that it represents a "compromise" and at the same time a "resultant" that, as far as we can tell, was not at all planned for by natural evolution.

20. Is God a Taoist? by Raymond Smullyan, p 325

GOD: Well, I'm always glad to learn from my mistakes.

22. Minds, Brains, and Programs, by John Searle, Reflections, p 380

[S]imulation is almost always approximate, depending on the nature of the model of the phenomenon in question, whereas emulation is in a deep sense exact.

p 382

If and when such machines come about, their causal powers will derive not from the substances they are made of, but from their design and the programs that run in them. And the way we will know they have those causal powers is by talking to them and listening carefully to what they have to say.

24. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel, p 401

People are now told at an early age that all matter is really energy. But despite the fact that they know what "is" means, most of them never form a conception of what makes this claim true, because they lack the theoretical background.

26. A Conversation with Einstein's Brain, by Douglas Hofstadter, p 444

After all, it has no vested interest in feeling its legs, which it doesn't have, aching.

[A Platonic dialog between Achilles and the Tortoise -not competing in running this time. Platonic in that the characters only pick arguments useful to the discussion, maybe without too much of psychological credibility. This used to frustrate me with Plato, since the arguments opposed by the secondary characters are often somehow dumb, or obsolete from our historical perspective. Not so as it seems with Achilles' views, unless one considers that the discussion about the life or death of the "book" is actually only a side-effect of the Kantian view of a "pre-conceptual time" - to live is thus to live in a pre-existing time]
Gödel, Escher, Bach, Climbing Mount Improbable, L'Aleph, Consciousness Explained,
Essays ToC
Marc Girod
Last modified: Tue May 11 21:37:04 EEST 2004