Reddit reviews The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Popular Science)

Definitely echo the recommendation for "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"

Would also recommend Roger Penrose, e.g. The Emperor's New Mind

and Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time."

and of course Henri Poincare's Science and Hypothesis is a classic.

I really enjoyed reading the following 4 books. Feynman is my favorite by far though.


[Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman](http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures[](http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/1439167346/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343022087&sr=1-1&keywords=how+to+win+friends+and+influence+people-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1343021477&sr=8-2&keywords=feynman)

Math and the Mona Lisa

The Emperor's New Mind

How To Win Friends and Influence People

The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics

Amazon Roger Penrose is a great place to start..

I think the scientific consensus is that the brain is no more powerful than a Turing Machine. Roger Penrose wrote a book arguing against this though.

I think the matrix representation and is similar to the letter representation just might allow for a little more incite either way your trying to formalize thought. A lot of this is talked about in the emperors new mind by roger penrsoe and I would serious take a look into it. Its really cheep and goes into a lot of cool math and AI and I think will get you closer to answering your question.

On top of that I would suggest learning about Buddhism and vipassana meditation. I know reddit has a negative disposition toward religion but just take a look at it, Buddhism doesn't have any of that Dogmatic blind faith their is in other religion. The reason I suggest this is because your going to be limited in try to understand thought through symbolic thought alone and direct observation will likely be more insiteful. Also because your talking about looking for something that's bigger then us, which comes into play with the idea of not self.

One difficult aspect of your question is that it involves incite into the nature of thoughts. Your not going to get that just by using symbolic language your also going to have to look at thoughts. Another things that I learned from Buddhism is not self. I can't fully explain it because I don't fully understand it but I think this concept would be helpful in understanding your question since a created thought implies a creator but if there is no creator of the thought then there is just the thought.

So going along these lines my guess is that thoughts are just the same as any other event in life and we only think we are creating them. For example a thought about a alarm clock is just the image of an alarm clock or word description of an alarm clock or some combination of all of them that arises when the brain is preforming a small level of Synesthesia where instead of mixing scenes your mixing the memory of a bell and clock. Many times we mix memory with a purpose but that purpose is usually driven by something other then us. So one way of looking at the creating of the though of the alarm clock is really just an event occurring similar to two liquids mixing. So in this case I would think there are an infinite number of thoughts since there are infinite number of possibilities of an event.

So with this description of thought we might even be able to say most thoughts are original because the event called thought isn't likely to occur twice in exactly the same way. The question of whether all thoughts exist before the thinker thinks it would now be released as do events exists before they occur. But then what does exist even mean?

What is the limit on 'local'? A nanometer? A millimeter? There is literally nothing different between your brain's hemispheres and two brains, besides distance and speed. Both of these are relative. I severely doubt that consciousness has some kind of minimum distance or speed to exist. Compared to an atom, the distance between two neurons is far vaster than the distance between two brains is when compared to two neurons.

Humans evolved to have SELF consciousness. This involves the brain making a mapping of itself, and is isolated to a few animals, with degrees in other animals. Self consicousness is one of the 'easy problems of consciousness' and can be solved with enough computation.

The existence of experience (also known as qualia) is known as the 'hard problem of consciousness' and is not apparently math-related imo. The universe fundamentally allows for qualia to exist and so far there is literally 0 explanation for how experience arises from computation, or why the universe allows for it at all.

Also, I think it is important to note that all studies on whatever the universe is have been gained through the actions of consciousness. There is literally nothing we know apart from consciousness. That is why arguments for living in a simulation are possible--because words like 'physical' are quite meaningless. We could be in a simulation or a coma dream. What unites these is not anything material, but the concept of experience. Which is an unexplained phenomenon.

I think your confusion is that you are defining consciousness as self-consciousness (which I would call something like suisapience) whereas the common philosophical (and increasingly, neuroscientific/physical) definition is of qualia, which is known as sentience. Animals are clearly sentient as they have similar brains to ours and similar behaviors in reaction to stimuli, and though they may not have qualia of themselves, qualia are how beings interface with reality to make behaviors.

I think it is likely that even systems like plants experience degrees of qualia, because there is nothing in a brain that would appear to generate qualia that is not also in a plant. Plants are clearly not self-conscious, but proving they do not experience qualia is pretty much impossible. And seeing how humans and animals react to qualia (with behavior,) one could easily posit that plants are doing something similar.

Some suggested reading on the nature of reality by respected neuroscientists and physicists:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

https://www.quantamagazine.org/neuroscience-readies-for-a-showdown-over-consciousness-ideas-20190306/

https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computers/dp/0192861980

I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but a professor of mine recommended reading the book The Emperor's New Mind, about this exact subject. Judging from the index, it looks like it discusses both of those proofs.

> The current computer architecture is necessarily concrete and deterministic, while the brain is almost certainly non-deterministic

It sounds like you agree with The Emporer's New Mind by Roger Penrose, which states that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus not capable of being modeled by a conventional computer.

However, the majority of experts who work in Artificial Intelligence disagree with this view. Most believe that there's nothing inherently different about what the brain does, the brain just has a staggeringly large number of neurons and we haven't been able to approach its computing power yet...but we will.

The latest advancements in the area of neural networks seems to be providing increasing evidence that computers will someday do everything the human brain can do, and more. Google's Deep Dream gives an interesting glimpse into the amazing visual abilities of these neural networks, for example.

Some good popsci-style but still somewhat theoretical CS books:

• The Emperor's New Mind
  
• The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity
  
• Gödel, Escher & Bach
  
• CODE by Charles Petzold

I recommend reading "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose.