Katherine, Anil,
I thought of the mind gaining another level of
consciousness as one way to see how the mind could
take the body prisoner -- give me what I want and
nobody gets hurt sort of threat! It gets extremely
selfish about solving the riddle. As Lucas pointed
out in his essay from something that Turing described
as a super-critical state that had not been seen yet.
"When we increase the complexity of our machines there
may, perhaps, be surprises in store for us. He draws a
parallel with a fission pile. Below a certain
"critical" size, nothing much happens: but above the
critical size, the sparks begin to fly. So too,
perhaps, with brains and machines."
The mind gets greedy and takes all steps necessary to
remain focused on a solution to the riddle. Hence
the name Autotomy. If it means that it is going in
infinite loops then so be it. Once it crosses this
hypothetical tipping point, it will look the same to
me as the Blue Screen of Death on a Windows machine.
It's virtually DEAD!
/David XXXX76573
--- Anil Pasricha <cell@yorku.ca> wrote:
> Katherine,
>
>
> From the reading (as far as I understood) the riddle
> was just that--
> a Godelian-type statement-- which exlpoited a flaw
> in the way the humans
> processed information. And as a result they lapsed
> into a coma.
>
> In that world, they finally found one (the riddle)
> that exploited a flaw in
> the human thought process causing them to jump into
> one infinite loop after
> another (maybe). Perhaps it was a self-referential
> statement-- which was
> refering to many other referential statements. And
> by the time the person
> was into the core of the riddle, they were too far
> lost in this endless
> looping.
>
> Just a thought.
>
>
>
> Quoting Katherine Loo <in_limbo@yorku.ca>:
>
> > I am not really convinced that the comas were
> induced because people fell
> > into
> > a neverending loop that led information or
> processing overload.
> >
> > If the cause of the coma was too much information,
> then this would imply that
> >
> > the brain has a limited capacity. Therefore,
> anyone who reads or studies too
> >
> > much would fall into comas.
> > If the coma were caused by a Godelian-type
> statement that caused the person
> > to
> > enter a loop, then why could the person not decide
> to leave the loop? In
> > Hofstadter's reading, he says that when we find
> ourselves contemplating
> > sentences like "Thiss sentence contains threee
> errors" we eventually tire of
> >
> > the confusion and jump out of the loop. What
> about the Riddle would make one
> >
> > stay in the loop forever?
> >
> > =Katherine Loo=
> >
>
___________________________________________________________________
> > This message was sent to the math3500 discussion
> list by Katherine Loo
> > <in_limbo@yorku.ca> .
> >
>
>
>
___________________________________________________________________
> This message was sent to the math3500 discussion
> list by Anil Pasricha <cell@yorku.ca> .
>
______________________________________________________________________
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This message was sent to the math3500 discussion list by David McKay <ntkernl@yahoo.ca> .
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