Even Paranoids have Real Friends

Let's complete our Journey to the Edge of Reason before circling back to The Philosophy of Being -- bearing in mind that a comprehensive philosophy of being is a journey to the edge of reason and beyond. 

In other words, no philosophy that confines itself to the necessarily circular and ultimately tautologous domain of reason is going to be complete. Which is indeed Gödel's whole point. 

Now, not everyone gets the point, including -- or so we have been told by the wise-in-their-own-eyes -- many experts. One such expert is Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote a popular book called Gödel-Something-Something way back in the disco era. But unlike the Bee Gees, it hasn't aged well. 

Here is an extract from the previous post, followed by a comment that cuts my coondle to the quick:

--The mind is not a computer. Sure, a lot of experts talk about artificial intelligence, but this is only because they are genuinely stupid. Or at least ignorant of Gödel.

You do know that the leading popularizer of Gödel in recent times, Doug Hofstadter, is an AI researcher?

Yes, we are aware of the book. In fact, it's buried somewhere in our vast Closet of Unnecessary Books. To be sure, these books are not totally unnecessary, as I will eventually get around to inflicting them upon the local library for profoundly serious reasons of tax avoidance.

At any rate, Gödel was a persistent Platonist (not that there's anything wrong with it), certainly not any kind of materialist. As it pertains to the possibility of artificial intelligence, he concluded that that the theorems are "decidedly opposed to materialistic philosophy," and that our intuition is "a more magnificent thing than what any machine could duplicate" (Budiansky). And 

If the mind is not a machine, then the human spirit cannot be reduced to the mechanistic operation of the brain, with its finite collection of working parts consisting of neurons and their interconnections (ibid.) 

Conversely, according to the always-untrustworthy-so-who-really-knows? Prof. Wiki, Hofstadter argues that consciousness -- not just his, but ours too! -- is but

an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain.... he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. 

In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from the abstract pattern he terms a "strange loop", an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback he has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The prototypical example of a strange loop is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. 

Now, his ant colony is undoubtedly bigger than mine, but that doesn't make it truer than mine. Hat size correlates with intelligence, but only in the range of r = .2 to .4. 

But let's not make an ontos out of an anthill. According to Gödel, "My theory is rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological." "It is," writes Budiansky, "committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths" -- truths which are again discovered, not invented, whether by us or by any conceivable number of tenured worker ants. 

Besides, ant is to queen as is many to one. And human image to divine likeness. Sort of. The point is, there's always a telovator to the top floor. 

"There are," wrote Gödel, "worlds and rational beings, who are of the other and higher kind"; these latter are "connected to other beings by analogy, not by composition."  

Moreover, "There is a scientific (exact) philosophy (and theology)" that "deals with the concepts of the highest abstractness."

Because even paranoids have real friends.