I wanted to say that I tried learning IIT about 2 years ago after reading about most other theories of consciousness and that it was a pain in the ass and so I gave up. Thank you for this post and especially that section. I really like attention schema theory as I hadn’t thought about combining the approaches of GWT and strange loops.
I’ve also got one thing that I want to bring up about your conclusion and also one perspective that I personally find interesting that you don’t necessarily bring up in the post.
With regards to the conclusion: Why do you assume that consciousness is an illusion just because consciousness is a strange loop observing itself? Why can’t self-referential things be real? My belief here is that everything that is a possible mathematical structure is real, and even though self-referring leads to error in any axiomatic system, that just means we can’t define the things themselves. Just like how spacetime forms singularities, this can exist in a world which is as real as any other world.
Secondly, you mention panpsychism quickly, but you don’t mention the no-self perspective and panpsychism. This is quite an eastern perspective and states that you’re every experience that you have and that everything that appears is itself part of consciousness. This is essentially panpsychism, with every experience divided into it’s smallest subcomponents. The evidence for this would be meditation, I can feel that I am the sense experience in my fingers while writing. You don’t really mention this view.
Lastly, I want to mention how I bring these two views together in my head. My feeling of being my fingers doesn’t arise from the fact that I’m observing myself as a strange loop but instead that every experience is a strange loop in itself. The logical conclusion of strange loops is in my opinion that every part of reality is a strange loop viewing itself and that every system can come up with a symbol for I even if it’s not what we think of as thinking.
I wanted to say that I tried learning IIT about 2 years ago after reading about most other theories of consciousness and that it was a pain in the ass and so I gave up. Thank you for this post and especially that section. I really like attention schema theory as I hadn’t thought about combining the approaches of GWT and strange loops.
I’ve also got one thing that I want to bring up about your conclusion and also one perspective that I personally find interesting that you don’t necessarily bring up in the post.
With regards to the conclusion:
Why do you assume that consciousness is an illusion just because consciousness is a strange loop observing itself? Why can’t self-referential things be real? My belief here is that everything that is a possible mathematical structure is real, and even though self-referring leads to error in any axiomatic system, that just means we can’t define the things themselves. Just like how spacetime forms singularities, this can exist in a world which is as real as any other world.
Secondly, you mention panpsychism quickly, but you don’t mention the no-self perspective and panpsychism. This is quite an eastern perspective and states that you’re every experience that you have and that everything that appears is itself part of consciousness. This is essentially panpsychism, with every experience divided into it’s smallest subcomponents. The evidence for this would be meditation, I can feel that I am the sense experience in my fingers while writing. You don’t really mention this view.
Lastly, I want to mention how I bring these two views together in my head. My feeling of being my fingers doesn’t arise from the fact that I’m observing myself as a strange loop but instead that every experience is a strange loop in itself.
The logical conclusion of strange loops is in my opinion that every part of reality is a strange loop viewing itself and that every system can come up with a symbol for I even if it’s not what we think of as thinking.