Mathy Stuff

I Am Self-Conscious

太陽 寺田

Why do we talk about ourselves? Or more importantly, how do we talk about ourselves? Most people will find it hard to deny the existence of things, but specifically and more interestingly themselves. Is this all there is to consciousness? The ability to recognize one's own existence, or, dare the author of this paper risk antinomy and say consciousness? How can we ever know if a non-human has consciousness? If we define consciousness as the ability to recognize “physical” reality then maybe all animals and even some artificial intelligence machines have consciousness. Then it must be that there are different levels of consciousness, but the the concept of recognizing one's own existence is the one that will occupy most of this discussion, and we will refer to it as self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is a strange mystery, and some (unfortunately very few) of the inherent paradoxes that arise while thinking about it will be tackled in this paper. If one hopes to have self consciousness revealed to them in this paper they will be disappointed. While it is tempting to want to try and say definitive things about self consciousness, it currently seems to just simply not be possible. This is the real point of my discussion.

What does it really mean to say, “we experience self-consciousness”? The idea of solipsism aside, all people are self-conscious and recognize their own existence. Self-consciousness is often associated with intelligence. For instance, Hal in the Stanly Kubrick film 2001 was self-aware. Why this is so seems to be that it “feels” reasonable to believe that if artificial intelligence was created it would be able to recognize its own existence. It “feels“ that way because most (or all) intelligent beings that people meet are human, and humans seem to realize their own existence. But is this really a necessity for intelligence? That probably depends on one's definition of intelligence.

For the sake of argument let's say that intelligence means one has the ability to come up with, solve, or resolve any mathematical problem so far proposed by any human. Try to ignore the silliness of this definition for now. Humans seem to be self-conscious, but still with this definition of intelligence, we don't know if even humans qualify. In fact Gödel's theorems in some ways point towards the idea that humans are not intelligent (by this same (bad) definition). Personally, the being writing this believes humans are intelligent, so it would seem that this definition might not be too desirable.

Think about the problem of trying to have all the digits of Pi. So does that mean, not just listing them off, but actually possessing all of them? Is this problem mathematical? If one chooses to accept that we have them, because we could find an arbitrary number of digits, then the answer is yes. The answer is also yes if "having all the digits of Pi" means possessing a precise definition of the number, independent from its digits, but by necessity implies them. However, there are other ways to think about this problem.

If we want to write all of the digits down on a piece of paper, then there is not enough paper in the world, and most likely not enough in the universe either (since all known paper is made in the world) . However, if what we want is to be able to answer any question about the structure of the sequence and still be guaranteed an answer, this may be questionable. For example if someone wanted to know whether or not an arbitrary string of digits is or is not in the digits of pi, they would not always be able to know. They can decide if the string is in the expansion, because if the string is in the sequence then they would find it at some point, but if it was not in it, then they would have to search forever. At least under our current understanding of pi, no one knows if we can find a specific string of digits in Pi (people seem more interested to see if every possible finite string can be found in pi, which if true would let us know our string is in Pi, and we just have to search for it until we find it. However, a proof of this would be non-constructive, and therefore controversial to Constructivists). There are many possible solutions to this awkward problem of defining what it means to "have all the digits of Pi".

All of these definitions exhibited quite a few liberties in the interpretation of the problem, partly because the question uses imprecise language. The writer of the solution seemed as though it used its own personal knowledge of the material to give an explanation that seemed to make sense to it personally. Now what happens if the writer of that solution does not know what they are talking about. This may very well be the case. Now what about a reader of this paper. Surely they too could possibly think that their personal collection of facts that most likely differ at least slightly from the writer are some how the same as the writer and assume things that were not intended.

This digression was to emphasize that there will always be ways to improve on definitions ( i.e. Mathematical, Intelligence, etc.) when talking about mysterious subjects such as self- consciousness(or anything for that matter). This may seem confusing because the definition I am talking about is not so much a definition but a “mathematical problem” that is easily interpreted in many ways. It is of course not hard to make better definitions that will get so specific that personal interpretation is negligible or possibly even beneficial, but it is easy to see that there is no guarantee. If one wanted to understand the book GO, by Kazuki Kaneshiro, that was originally written in a language unknown to them, it would probably help to read different translations. This way they could get a broader understanding of possible crucial points that might have been translated differently in the two versions. The main story and key ideas would not be changed drastically, but the subtleties that one could argue are very important would be slightly changed. For instance, some translations for a certain part of GO use the word “sexy” and others use “beautiful” to mean essentially the same word^[1]. This may be minor, and in fact this specific reference really does not make a difference, but it may give different readers different feelings. The implicit meaning, which is just as important as the explicit, will be altered slightly. A language barrier may seem like an extreme case, but the same effect happens with readers of the same language as the original text. The word “sexy” could mean very different things to two different people. So we will just have to keep in mind that some interpretation is inevitable.

Back to our original discussion. The writer of this paper doesn't bring this up to question human intelligence, but to question whether self-consciousness and intelligence are inseparable (and even this is still a minor antecedent of the point the writer of this paper is trying to make). With the strange definition above, we said it may be possible to be self-conscious but not intelligent, but is it possible to be intelligent and not self-conscious? This question is more about “real” intelligence, so we will have to throw out the old definition. If we were trying to claim that intelligence does not rely on self-consciousness, then we would give better definitions (we won't), but the author of this work wants to encourage ideas about this issue that are unique to the reader. The writer of this discussion does however hope to get the reader questioning one idea, and that is whether or not creative thought or some other phenomena that intelligence seems to require in return requires self awareness? The pen person of this work would also like to admit that personally it feels compelled to think that intelligence and self-awareness are both in need of each other to exist, as well as emotion. However, it has no reason to know whether that's true, and it hopes that it's clear that currently no one can.

It's probably not that often one sees someone talking about themselves, unless it's to other people. Otherwise they would be talking to themselves about themselves, but someone else would be there (and then they would probably be embarrassed - sounds like the words of experience huh?[note to self: put sarcasm tag here]). In the beginning sentence of this paper the author wrote, “Why do we talk about ourselves?” So what it really thinks an interesting question is, “ how and why do we think about ourselves?” (Unfortunately, (or possibly fortunately just not for the author's purposes) “Why do we talk about ourselves?” is a more clichéd way of saying it, and thus a perfect beginning sentence for this paper.)

Is it possible that we all have souls, and that is what allows us to introspect? “Soul? What the hell is that?” is what the writer of this paper would say if he or she existed, but it doesn't so it's pointless to talk of nonexistent people. Though the author would like to say that it rather admires the viewpoint that a possible soul existent in all self-conscious beings allows for self-awareness and that this view mustn't be overlooked. Of course there are some disappointing aspects to this interpretation. Mostly it makes one often feel that it is and always will be unexplainable. The author has moments where it feels this way. Which the author feels is a common underestimation of this idea. While the writer truly hopes that all can not be known, it also feels that our knowledge of reality is so basal that who is to say whether souls are explainable in some way that is not even conceivable currently? Quantum Mechanics seems silly to most people now, not to mention if someone tried to explain it to Abraham Lincoln. Sending messages on paper seemed like magic (telepathy) to some ancient Native Americans. If this author tries to convince the reader of anything during this time that this paper is read, it hopes they recognize (assuming they don't already) that no matter how often new things are discovered, somepeople (the scribe of this parenthetical remark included) will still have the mentality that they have it all figured out. Not only that but also that the things they haven't figured out are simply mystical or beyond knowing. The parent of this paper in no way claims that this is bad, just that it's good to be open minded. Maybe neither of these options work and we can never know everything but the questions we can propose can always be answered. So when we find new answers they lead us to more questions. This is not a proposed answer to any problem about self-consciousness, just a reason to think that it might simply be impossible to be convinced of anything absolutely.

The typer of this conclusion would like to say that it has many of its own beliefs about consciousness, that as far as it knows were not expressed directly. For example, the creator of this work hates the common definition of self-conscious, but is too self-conscious to say it outside of this paragraph. It also has beliefs that it feels are unexplainable, but possibly only for the moment. The point was not to expect one to lose their opinions about self-consciousness, just that they recognize they are merely opinions. If one imagines that everyone could possibly be experiencing completely different things and maybe even think they are communicating vastly different things than what other people receive, this could mean that everything is just an opinion, even a scientifically backed theory. Or in the intuitionist's case, even the seemingly indisputable mathematical proof is simply an opinion.