I started reading GEB once, found the math parts relatively familiar and the consciousness parts gobbledygook, and never finished reading it. Dunno why it’s so highly regarded—it has about as much crackpot energy as the average Stephen Wolfram blog post. The thing about consciousness being due to strange loops is also obviously wrong to anyone who has ever paid attention to a nonhuman animal. They obviously possess consciousness and experience qualia, but few of them seem to possess self awareness of the strange loop variety. I think it’s most likely that consciousness is just “what computation feels like from the inside” and is ubiquitous in the universe.
I started reading GEB once, found the math parts relatively familiar and the consciousness parts gobbledygook, and never finished reading it. Dunno why it’s so highly regarded—it has about as much crackpot energy as the average Stephen Wolfram blog post. The thing about consciousness being due to strange loops is also obviously wrong to anyone who has ever paid attention to a nonhuman animal. They obviously possess consciousness and experience qualia, but few of them seem to possess self awareness of the strange loop variety. I think it’s most likely that consciousness is just “what computation feels like from the inside” and is ubiquitous in the universe.