Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

The Riddle on the Universe and its Solution 282representational system perceives its own state in terms of its repe of concepts. Forinstance, we perceive our own brain state not in t of which neurons are connected towhich others, or which ones are fi but in concepts that we articulate in words. Our viewof our brain is as a pile of neurons but as a storehouse of beliefs and feelings and id Weprovide a readout of our brain at that level, by saying such thin "I am a little nervous andconfused by her unwillingness to go to the party. Once articulated, this kind of selfobservationthen reenters the system as something to think about-but of course the reentryproc via the usual perceptual processes-namely, millions of neurons fi The loop that isclosed here is far more complex and level-muddling the television loop, beautiful andintricate though that may seem.As a digression it is important to mention that much recent progress in artificialintelligence work has centered around the attempt to give a program a set of notionsabout its own inner structures, and ways, reacting when it detects certain kinds of changeoccurring inside its At present, such self-understanding and self-monitoring abilities ofgrams are quite rudimentary, but this idea has emerged as one of the prerequisites to theattainment of the deep flexibility that is synonymous with genuine intelligence.Currently two major bottlenecks exist in the design of an arts mind: One is themodeling of perception, the other the modeling of learning. Perception we have alreadytalked about as the funneling of a m low-level responses into a jointly agreed-uponoverall interpretation the conceptual level. Thus it is a level-crossing problem. Learningis a level-crossing problem. Put bluntly, one has to ask, "How do symbols program myneurons?" How do those finger motions that you execute over and over again in learningto type get converted slowly systematic changes in synaptic structures? How does a onceconactivity become totally sublimated into complete unconscious oblivion The thoughtlevel, by force of repetition, has somehow "reached do ward" and reprogrammed some ofthe hardware underlying it. The same goes for learning a piece of music or a foreignlanguage.In fact, at every instant of our lives we are permanently changing synapticstructures: We are "filing" our current situation in our mem under certain "labels" so thatwe can retrieve it at appropriate timers the future (and our unconscious mind has to bevery clever doing since it is very hard to anticipate the kinds of future situations in w wewould benefit from recalling the present moment).The self is, in this view, a continually self-documenting "worldline (the fourdimensionalpath traced by an object as it moves through time and space). Not only is ahuman being a physical object that inter