I recently watched Prometheus for the first time. One particular scene stood out to me, where a crew member was having a conversation with David, an android played by Michael Fassbender. David asked “why do you think your people made me?” The crew member says “we made you because we could.” After a pause, David responds “can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?” This might seem unrelated but I promise it's sort of related - I also recently read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, a Pulitzer Prize winning book that talks about consciousness with an interdisciplinary lens. I may have skipped around... it’s quite long. Any attempt at a review from me would do the book injustice, so I’ll only talk about the few key points that resonated with me. Hofstadter asks, how do we get a self from a bunch of meaningless primitives like atoms and molecules? The issue with defining the self, or “I”, is that at its core, the problem is self-referential. We perceive the world around us but we also perceive ourselves. We perceive ourselves perceiving, and this somehow gives rise to the self. We are recursively confirming “I” with ourselves. It’s a paradox. There are similar self-referential paradoxes in mathematics: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. We know that mathematics can be reduced to a bunch of arbitrary symbols and operations. And mathematicians have rigorously proven how we go from those arbitrary symbols and operations to something that could refer to itself. Hofstadter’s claim is that this mathematical relationship is equivalent to the relationship between atoms and molecules and the “I”. According to Hofstadter, a “strange loop” arises when one moves up or down in a system, but inevitably find themselves back where they started. The premise of the book is that the two processes are related. What’s interesting is that the idea that small things give rise to the self is similar to David Chalmers’ easy-vs-hard problem of consciousness. Chalmers asks, how do physical processes within the brain give rise to a subjective experience? Here, physical processes correspond to problems that would be “easy” to solve, where easy means probable given continued progress in technology. Hofstadter and Chalmers both start at a similar place. They assume that consciousness could be bottom-up. This was the thought that lit up in my brain while watching Prometheus where the crew member told David “we made you because we could.” David was created not for a noble purpose, but because humans were bored. The idea that everything has a reason comes from rejecting the possibility that things in life could be bottom-up, or that they just happen. Instead, we tend to believe that life is top-down, or that there is downward causality at every level. We think that we are in charge of our actions and that God is in charge of ours. Only after a thought arises, do our actions follow. It is reasonable to think that our lives have purpose and it is reasonable to think that our lives have no purpose. The problem arises when our all or nothing mentality says that everything is bottom-up or everything is top-down. If everything is bottom-up, nothing matters. There’s no plan. Consciousness happened by accident and we exist just because. If everything is top-down, then every single atom has a purpose. Our souls inhabit temporary skin suits, and we are to fulfill what God has in store for us. My suggestion is that we should push aside this all or nothing mentality and consider that randomness and deliberate acts can exist in the same universe. Why consider bottom-up? Besides the fact that Hofstadter has a strong claim for the connection between Gödel and the self, it beautifully describes what’s going on inside of our brains. Our brains selectively process information, because to absorb everything would be overwhelming. Selective information is passed and triggers concepts in our brain that link to other concepts. To perceive a playground for the 1,000th time triggers concepts like play, friends, and swing. Over a lifetime of forming concepts, the most complex concept that is formed is the self. Hofstadter argues that consciousness can be reduced to a bunch of squirting chemicals. But since our feeble brains can’t read that level of finesse, we jump up several levels. An individual neuron has no meaning. But grouped together, it gives rise to the self. Remember when I said that mathematics can be reduced to a bunch of meaningless symbols? What if consciousness could also be reduced to smaller things? Claude Shannon showed us that we could apply logic (Boolean algebra) to the design of relay switching circuits, kickstarting the world of information. He showed us that any kind of content, whether it be text or images, could be converted into a string of binary digits, or bits. In turn, consciousness should also be able to be reduced to bits. Or anything binary. It could be yes soda-can and no soda-can. You just need enough of them arranged in the right pattern and they can do what our neurons can do. Why be wary of top-down? There’s nothing wrong with believing that we author of our own life story. The problem arises when we attribute everything to intent. Someone cuts us off in traffic and we immediately think that they did it on purpose. We look at homelessness and blame the state for lack of secure funding. We attribute our successes to God and our failures to someone else. I think this is the reason why we disagree so often. For example, two administrations have led our country in navigating the COVID pandemic. We’ve been quick to attribute successes and failures to each administration, when in reality, most of COVID was unprecedented, so everyone was making things up. I’m not saying everything is emergent, but a whole lot more is emergent than we give credit to. Consciousness has been hot goss since the days of Socrates and the Buddha, but it’s still not clear how it arises. And even if it was made clear, the debate wouldn’t end. In the face of facts, we’re governed by our feelings. As long as we believe that the “I” is in charge, we’ll believe that whatever feels real, is real. I don’t have an answer. Yeah, maybe you did just waste ten minutes of your life by reading this post. I’ll leave you with something from Hofstadter that has given me some comfort: “We human beings… are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.”