I believe Andrea has raised a good point regarding the
disconnect of a small part of the brain instead of my
earlier idea of another level of consciousness in the
mind.
Andrea wrote;
> some body part that could save the body from
> entering in this infinite loop. I
> suggest that this body part would be some small part
> of their brain that they
> don't really need;
Here is my hypothesis of a physiological explanation
of how this casting off of the brain. From some of my
reading on the brain I found out that the "oldest"
part of the brain is the brain stem. This area
controls involuntary functions such as Breathing,
Heart rate, Blood pressure, Monitors attention,
arousal, consciousness, and eating and sleeping
patterns. It serves as a pathway connecting the body
to the mind. I would argue that this part of the
brain is critical to the notion of being cast-off as a
result of reading a self referential riddle.
Therefore, we could see that the human brain could be
affected by a Godelian formula to show that it can be
seen as a human Turing Machine.
Either "the riddle" affects the brain stem by a
sequence of instructions that causes it to "freeze"
OR
the cerebral hemispheres of the brain are "reasoning"
in an attempt to solve "the riddle" and at some point
instructs the brain stem to be cast off to prevent the
body from distracting the mind from finding the
answer.
(perhaps this was why Cherniak used the topologist in
his story, they piece things together and compare like
the left&right side of the brain)
That is just another of many explanations....I think
I'm ready to move on to Topic 4!!!!!
/David McKay XXXX76573
--- Andreea Ceausu <ceausu@yorku.ca> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have come to think that Cherniak wrote his
> "Riddle" story as support for
> Lucas (among others with similar thoughts) that
> machines can never equal
> minds. Cherniak wrote about this world, that is not
> ours, but where
> these "people" have minds that CAN be perfectly
> modeled by machines. So, in
> such a world, if minds can be modeled by machines,
> then each mind MUST HAVE a
> Godelian formula that it cannot prove to be true. It
> is in trying to do so,
> that the mind gets spun into this infinite loop of
> trying to process the
> Godelian formula; hence, the coma that everyone
> falls into. The only reason
> that Dizzard died was because it took a long time
> for people to discover him
> and so he died of malnutrition and dehydration -
> anybody could die of this! As
> long as the body is properly nutritioned, the mind
> will keep computing, even
> for years and years, until that body is ready to die
> of natural causes.
>
> So, these people live in fear of the Godelian
> formula sneaking up on them and
> sending them into the loop. I believe that each of
> the people in this story
> has their OWN Godelian formula that they will
> eventually come into contact
> with; that's why the Autotomy Group could not find a
> universal Godelian
> formula and isolate it and so save everyone. They
> had bigger problems: they
> were faced with everyone's Godelian formula and so
> they searched for a general
> solution. Such a solution would be, by definition of
> "autotomy," to cast off
> some body part that could save the body from
> entering in this infinite loop. I
> suggest that this body part would be some small part
> of their brain that they
> don't really need; I don't know if you need EVERY
> cell in your brain to be
> human. (Just think of people on drugs whose brains
> get fryed just a bit and
> they're fine; and I'm not talking about major drug
> addicts... .) And so, these
> people would then be saved by the Autotomy Group,
> had they worked fast enough.
> But, it seemed that with their first case, Dizzard's
> coma, they ran out of
> time.
>
> That's my opinion! Anyone else see it like this?
>
> ~Andreea Ceausu.
>
>
>
>
___________________________________________________________________
> This message was sent to the math3500 discussion
> list by Andreea Ceausu <ceausu@yorku.ca> .
>
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