I enjoyed this book. It was a bit “trippy” and “deep” at times. It definitely triggered me to think about what “I” really means.

pxv - The concept of “I”

pxv - I specialize in thinking about thinking

pxix - describing what “the human condition” is

p7 - a truly living creature is reduced to a collection of complex reflexes.

  • reflexes is the important part here.

p10 - “soul shards” … tiny fragments of the internal experiences of another human being

p13 - if two versions of me both lived in the very same skull. Was I really the same person?

p17 - “Small-souled and Large-souled humans” talks about how we value enemies less than ourselves.

p19 - “soul sizes” chart

p21 - “degrees of souledness”

p23 - where one may lack souledness, they may make up in potential e.g., babies

p31 - Trying to localize a concept or sensation or a memory (etc.) down to a single neuron makes no sense at all.

p35 - language and thought is an abstraction of feeling and trying to describe the human condition

p35 - We mortals are condemned not to speak at that level of no information loss. we necessarily simplify

p41 - different people can think about the same thing, but at different levels of abstraction (e.g., combustion engines)

p42 - “The Strange Irrelevance of Lower Levels”

p42 - This idea — that the bottom level, though 100 percent responsible for what is happening, is nonetheless irrelevant to what happens — sounds almost paradoxical, and yet it is an everyday truism.

p47 - when one perceives only myriads of particles, there are no natural sharp borders in the world. One cannot draw a line around a volcano and declare, “Only particles in this zone are involved”, because particles won’t respect any such macroscopic line

p48 - reductionism is merciless

p48 - simmballs (related to “symbol”, but I forget the difference) … serve the same function as walls.

p53 - feedback loops, for humans, strongly pressure us to shift levels from the goalless level of mechanics (or forces) to the goal-oriented level of cybernetics (or desires)

p58 - self-references, Gödel. So here was a book talking about how language can talk about itself talking about itself (etc.)

p61 - linguistic hierarchy

p73 - “Of Selves and Symbols”

p75 - even young children are slightly self-aware.

  • Who were you before you were self-aware? Is that still considered you? Even if that’s not you today?

p78 - Symbols come from a way to describe needs. Things only have symbols or language for things they need e.g., mosquitoes probably have a fewer symbols and a much simpler language than humans

p89 - “What is really real?”

p96 - “I”, a coherent collection of desires and beliefs

p103 - Are loops just illusions?

p105 - was a fun exercise in symbols; describing numbers

p106 - infinite hierarchy of different types of describability

p107 - language is imprecise

  • language is at symbol-level which is already an abstraction of truth

p110 - What happens inside mathematicians’ heads when they do their most creative work? Is it always just rule-bound symbol manipulation, deriving theorems from a fixed set of axioms? What is the nature of human thought in general? Is what goes on inside our heads just a deterministic physical process? if so, are we all, no matter how idiosyncratic and sparkly, nothing but slaves to rigid laws governing the invisible particles out of which our brains are built? Could creativity ever emerge from a set of rigid rules governing minuscule objects or patterns of numbers? Could a rule-governed machine be as creative as a human? Could a programmed machine come up with ideas not programmed into it in advance? Could a machine make its own decisions? Have its own opinions? Be confused? Know it was confused? Be unsure whether it was confused? Believe it had free will? Believe it didn’t have free will? Be conscious? Doubt it was conscious? Have a self, a soul, an “I”? Believe that its fervent belief in its “I” was only an illusion, but an unavoidable illusion?

p127 - What is “reason” / “truth” but symbols for high probabilities or guarantees?

p134 - Principia Methematica - ever provable string of Russel and Whitehead’s formal system, there was a counterpart prim number… any provable-in-PM formula could be encoded as on whopping huge integer…and you could show that that number was a prim number.

p137 - an astronomically long formula of PM that made that seemingly innocent assertion, “A certain integer g is not a prim number.” However, that “certain integer g” about which this formula spoke happened, by a most unaccidental (some might say diobolical) coicidence, to be the number associated with (i.e., coding for) this very formula

p138 - The formula that happens to havde the code number g is not provable via the rules of PM

- Making a claim about itself

- Loop!

p141 - constructing self-referential sentences

p144 - a description is different from truth

p145 - the most concise English translations of Gödel’s formula and its cousins employ the work “I”… this informal, alsmost sloppy-seeming use of the singular first-person pronoun affords us our first glimpse of the profound connection between Gödel’s austere mathematical strange loop and the very human notion of a conscious self

p148 - meaning comes from mappings

p150 - “anolgies” are “leaps

p151 - levels of meaning

p166 - numbers … mimic patterns of reasoning

p166 - PM’s expressive power is what gives rise to its incompleteness

p166 - All provable systems are necessarily incomplete; “essential incompleteness”

p169 - certainty ruins the beauty of and fun of life

p169 - the peak’s inaccessibility turns out to have nothing to do with how anyone might try to get up to it; it has to do with an inherent instability belonging to the summit itself.

- "Gödel rays"

p176 - “you” and “I” as symbols that have meaning but can’t be explained. They just are.

p177 - We live at an abstract level. Levels of “reality”

- What does "snow" really mean?

p180 - where is [the concept of “I”] in our brains?

- endless hall of mirrors that constitutes my "I". Infinitely many vectors of possibilities for my "I"

p184 - I indirectly perceive myself through my effect on others

p187 - It is the upward leap from raw stimuli to symbols that imbues the loop with “strangeness”

p198 - where does meaning come from?

p202 - meaning comes from abstractions

p213 - My brain is attached to your body via channels of communication that are much slower and more indirect than those linking it to my body, so the control is much less efficient.

p215 - language is not a great means of communication

- most thoughts are so easily anticipated that very few words are usually needed, even to get across rather complex ideas.

p230 - noncentalizedness of consciousness

- shared memories, etc.

p234 - a person is a point of view

p237 - layers of consciousness and their transferability

p244 - Wherever there is a pattern, it can be seen either as itself or as standing for anything to which it is isomorphic.

- This is where _PM_ got its power outside of what it was created for.

p246 - representational universality -> “empathy” -> shared or transferable feeling

p250 - there is something special about the penetrability of music. Penetrates the souls. It is significantly more effective as transfering feelings than language

p252 - each of us is a curious collage; a bundle of fragments of other people’s soulds, simply put together in new way.

p257 - barriers of consciousness are being able to see and recognize patterns

p265 - “Where am I?”

p271 - “Am I No One Else or Am I Everyone Else?”

p276 - This dance of symbols in the brain is what consciousness is. It is also what thinking is. Note that I say “symbols” and not “neurons”. The dance has to be perceived at that level for it to constitute consciousness.

p279 - perception is solely an internal affair

p288 - A piece of music can have great emotional meaning despite being made of tiny atoms of sound that have no emotional meaning. What matters, therefore, is the pattern of organization, not the nature of constituents.

p289 - Why didn’t I wind up in some other brain? Because your “I” was not an a priori well-defined thing that was predestined to jump, full-fledged and sharp, into some just-created empty physical vessel… Nor did your “I” suddenly spring into existence … your “I” was the slowly emerging outcome of a million unpredictable events

- "I" is defined as a _result_ of its experiences, and not vice versa.

p291 - “I” is a tremendous illusion. “I” isn’t housed anywhere.

p292 - The “I” — yours, mine, everyone’s — is a tremendously effective illusion, and falling for it has a fantastic survival value. Our “I”’s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an invevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life.

p295 - Sometimes the strict scientific viewpoint is hopelessly useless, even if it’s correct.

p300 - level-crossing feedback loop

p302 - can there be two “I”’s?

p308 - an abstract “distance function” between personalities in “personality space”.

- I would be very "close" to the person I was yesterday, slightly less close to the person I was two days ago, and so forth.

p325 - Consciousness is not an add-on option…[it] arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system.

p339 - free will