[bbor]

YES. So, so true. And Hegel in turn was just adapting Kant, despite calling him a “blockhead” in the preface (hilarious, can’t even imagine what 1800s German for “blockhead” is). It’s absolutely Hegelian. To make it more explicit for the HN audience:

Hegel wrote a very famous book called the “The Experience of Mind” (or, in obnoxious philosophy language, “The phenomenology of Spirit”). In it, he details how he thinks the mind is made up of successive levels of distinct programs, each of which builds on what came for it in a very specific way he calls “dialectic synthesis”. In this way he goes through all the perceived capabilities of the mind (the big four in order roughly being sensation, understanding, awareness, and reason) and ties them to specific steps in this synthetic chain.

I hope it’s obvious from that how this argument mimics GEB (which I understand as roughly “the human mind is a collection of looping programs with these characteristics”).

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> which I understand as roughly “the human mind is a collection of looping programs with these characteristics”

uh ... the center of Hofstadter's worldview, which he re-enunciated later in "I am a strange loop" is almost precisely the opposite of Hegel's persepective. Hofstadter came to see the idea of "heterarchical systems" as central to creativity and, in his opinion, consciousness. These systems are precisely not what Hegel describes, with "each level building on what came before it", but instead the levels are functionally and physically entangled so that "higher level" ones can intimately and profoundly impact "lower level" ones and vice versa.

[bbor]

I love hacker news - I missed this a few days ago. You’re the first human I’ve talked to about these ideas I’ve been obsessing over for months, so it feels good to get some feedback!

I’ll definitely have to look more into that. I guess my conception of Hegel has room for such “looping” — Kant explicitly says that high-level Reason produces ideas that directly impact the nature of our low-level Understanding, and I sorta assumed Hegel would agree. He’s obviously much more into the Synthesis as a means-onto-itself, not to mention much more dramatic, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the last chapters of PoS made no mention of the lower faculties.

Thanks again, if you ever scroll back through your old comments and see this :). A helpful response indeed