I think we are almost speaking about the same thing
now Katherine.
> 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?
Secondly, I don't think that Cherniak was being
misleading when he wrote: "it was unlikely the coma
could be the correlate of a state of meditative
> enlightenment,..."
Since we believe there clould be another realm of
conciousness at play here, perhaps the mind is busy
uncovering truths about the newfound area at an
incredible pace. Therefore it is not Meditating or
Zenlike, it's racing ahead searching for answers.
/David McKay XXXX76573
--- Katherine Loo <in_limbo@yorku.ca> wrote:
> 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=
>
___________________________________________________________________
> This message was sent to the math3500 discussion
> list by Katherine Loo <in_limbo@yorku.ca> .
>
______________________________________________________________________
Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
___________________________________________________________________
This message was sent to the math3500 discussion list by David McKay <ntkernl@yahoo.ca> .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Dec 07 2004 - 00:01:17 EST