We cant even verify if these fields are real though. It is an ordered mythology for making predictions that work. If I have a machine that can reproduce the footprints of an animal no one has ever seen, I have not discovered that animal. (This is personally a more powerful analogy than saying "the map is not the territory" which gets at the same point.)
Sure. Just making sure people understand that the "scientific definition of real" is based on a metaphysical assumption that real = works. It is very hard to remember this since philosophy of science is not taught in school.
I’ll never understand how GEB was using math, art, and music to explain consciousness (and Hofstadter himself still thinks no one understood it), but Nagel and Newman did a great job explaining why logic as a mechanical thing has only a tenuous relationship to concepts we understand, and that helped me crack at least a little bit of the mystery I was after when giving up on GEB.
I have not read GEB but I thought his second book, I am a Strange Loop, did a pretty good job of connecting the idea of self referential loops (like in godels proof) to consciousness and art and such.
Thanks for the suggestions. Just checked out some of Le Ton Beau de Marot, will most likely read the rest.
Actually, I was recently wondering whether poems can be interpreted as "efficient" computer programs. Words in a sentence/essay just connect different objects in space and time (syntactically and semantically) to form some concept, kind of like a program. A poem just uses higher order abstractions (imagery) to express the same concepts in fewer words.
> I’ll never understand how GEB was using math, art, and music to explain consciousness
As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "The result of the proper study of a novel should be contemplation of the mystery embodied in it, but this is a contemplation of the mystery in the whole work and not or some proposition or paraphrase. It is not the tracking down of an expressible moral or a statement about life." We don't read literature with the hopes of a book laying out a precise thesis and incontrovertibly demonstrating it.
If you come into GEB expecting a scientific explanation of consciousness (like I did, when I first read it) you walk away confused and maybe disappointed. Hofstadter observed something transcendentally beautiful about self-reference and had a spiritual or religious revelation that, for him, related it to consciousness, and he attempted to convey that beauty and spiritual revelation in - appropriately self-referentially - a book that embodied it. You're meant to appreciate it in your heart and soul, not (just) in your mind. It's literature, not science.
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