consciousness, yet again

I think in the opening bit where he talks about Hofstadter claiming that "some integers are conscious" he's placing a bar upon consciousness, and thus, perhaps, dismissing the discriminatory affordances (being systematic) of math symbols as having a way of dividing the things they touch or approach them and thus conduct some element of computation as a result. Now, that 'touch or approach them' quip leans heavy on analogues of movement, space, and refraction (in my mind), but if we take how we use our symbolic vocabulary seriously, that's perhaps what gives them use value to begin with—being analogues to sensory experience and the systematic nature we see in that. What this unravels isn't much other than the consistency of the interface, and Godel's argument shows that computation is bounded, and more seriously it cannot prove itself with consistency. That's where Penrose leaves space for consciousness, which is above and beyond mere integral or mathematical systems, but we are finding that much of the world around us, including the cells that make us do simple discriminatory computation and future-oriented planning all the time, something that can happen in the merest of molecules and the chemical interactions they afford And here's the rub for me, electromagnetics is the domain and coding space of consciousness. Regardless of if that emergent/transcendent entity, which emerges from so many coordinated, goal-oriented cells, is merely a space for something even bigger to find purchase is for the pantheistic argument, nevertheless, the complexity of cellular architecture, its attendant systematic set of chemistry, and the achievement of orchestrated, conformal electromagnetics is the stuff of what makes the conscious entities, which emerge in this world.

The big question racing toward the big answer is AI

The history of communication is wrangling with an interface with god. That we're racing toward a natural language wishing well super AI encompasses the value and the consequence of how we both construct that and what we do with it. The big question and the big answer are being developed simultaneously in the theoretical AI as infrastructure and interface.

Is vision a metaphor?

I was listening to NPR while making dinner tonight and heard about plant-insect signaling, which focused on a specific rainforest species of plant that has existed for countless millennia and is now being threated with extinction. Apparently, this plant heats up its fruiting body to signal to a specific beetle that uses its antenna to 'see' this heat spike against its background as the thing it is looking for: the pollen of this plant. 

I draw this conclusion because of a book I read by Donald Hoffman, who deconstructed space-time as an evolutionary adaptation, which is, itself, a fiction. From that we can draw how we reconstruct our perception of photons by our eyes as doing just this—reconstructing within the three-dimensional environment the point-source for this photon. The same can be said for this beetle's 'seeing' of the plant's heat in the infrared range. And the same thing can be said for dolphins echo-mapping their environment both at its surface and its depth, determining whether a reflected object is coral, food, or foe—a metaphor for seeing. 

Something to chew on. 

Beings of light

We are beings of light marooned upon the rocky shores of a rocky planet. Slowly we pick up the implements of our reconnection to that primordial world. At the heart of this is the spark. 

Our evolution is both an exemplar and explanation of the process. It is both the process of path optimization as it is, at the bleeding edge, of optimizing its own path. Evolution is evolving but along a specific trajectory to more and more momentum along this path. As we ramp up our speed we harness more and more energy until we have reconnected with our primordial past, as beings of light.