From reading all the emails about Topic 3, the hypothesis that seems the most
plausible to me is the one of the mind, upon encountering and understanding
the Riddle, goes into an infinite loop, suffers and information overload and
therefore falls into a coma. This interpretation follows nicely with
Hoftadter's reflection on Cherniak's story.
Hoftadter refers to the Riddle as a self-referential sentence. An interesting
excerpt from this reading is this one: "The mind flips back and forth a few
times...yet before long it tires of the confusion and jumps out of the loop
into contemplation, possible on the purpose or interest of the idea, possible
on the cause or resolution of the paradox, possible simply to another topic
entirely."
I think that in the case of the coma-sufferers, upon entering the loop, they
went into contemplation of the nature and meaning of the self-referential
Riddle. Yet, I am hesitant about adopting this theory since Cherniak writes
that "it was unlikely the coma could be the correlate of a state of meditative
enlightenment, because it seemed too deep to be consistent with consciousness."
Could what had happened be that the coma-sufferers, in order to understand the
Riddle, had to jump out of the system, that is, jump out of their own realm of
consciousness?
=Katherine Loo=
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This message was sent to the math3500 discussion list by Katherine Loo <in_limbo@yorku.ca> .
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