This article and the Overcoming Bias post it links to ("Better Babblers") remind me of when I was in high school and was reading stuff like Gödel, Escher, Bach and Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (the two first books I ordered after mom allowed me to use Amazon) while also learning online about Wittgenstein and statistical text generation (Markov chains). All this led to a kind of crisis of identity because in their own ways all those things point to a deconstruction of the self.
That sounds hokey, but to explain briefly: GEB indicates that your self (your consciousness of being someone) is a swirling self-referential symbolic process (a "strange loop"); Dawkins indicates that your self is a kind of evolved meme whose function in nature is to further your family of genetic replicators; Wittgenstein indicates that your self is a habitual user of language where deep meaning is not as important as social function; and Markov chains indicate that your self's use of language can be modeled at least to a rough approximation by extremely simple statistics.
So I clearly remember wondering "Am I just a kind of slightly more advanced Markov chain?"
I think this is also the unsettling core question of Blade Runner: are we also artificial?
I wonder what theologians might say about this question.
That sounds hokey, but to explain briefly: GEB indicates that your self (your consciousness of being someone) is a swirling self-referential symbolic process (a "strange loop"); Dawkins indicates that your self is a kind of evolved meme whose function in nature is to further your family of genetic replicators; Wittgenstein indicates that your self is a habitual user of language where deep meaning is not as important as social function; and Markov chains indicate that your self's use of language can be modeled at least to a rough approximation by extremely simple statistics.
So I clearly remember wondering "Am I just a kind of slightly more advanced Markov chain?"
I think this is also the unsettling core question of Blade Runner: are we also artificial?
I wonder what theologians might say about this question.