When we talk about perception we should be careful not to confuse it with reception and awareness (or souledness). A thing that receives stimuli is like a video camera, merely measuring photons with a sensor. A thing that has awareness can be as simple as a toilet being “aware” of the water level. Neither perceives the world around it because neither has symbols that activate to translate that stimuli into understanding.
From I Am a Strange Loop.
Links to this note
-
Every Human Consciousness Lives at Once in a Collection of Brains
Because the human brain is a universal machine, it contains multiple strange loops that are coarse-grained copies of other strange loops housed in other brains at varying degrees of fidelity. Those you resonate most with in life (family member, a spouse, etc.) you know so well you can almost feel their feelings, recall their memories, and experience the world they would. These can not be explained by mere rote memory (perception is not reception and awareness) but something more closely resembling our own self-hood.
-
Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula Is a Visual Loop
Tupper’s formula displays its formula when plotted on a graph. This is a form of recursion but more like a mirror. Compared to Godel’s incompleteness theorem (also self-referential), Tupper’s formula is more like perception not reception—it does not create new meaning in a system unintended to do so (Principia Mathematica) and is more like a reflection of itself.
-
A Strange Loop Gives Rise to Human Selfhood
A strange loop is a combination of traits that creates the condition for selfhood. Categories of numerous symbols derive meaning from raw stimuli. Categorization leads to perception rather than reception. Abstractions create reality and high-level behavior no longer consists of lower-level behavior only. The loop reinforces the idea of the ‘self’ and the self feels the most real.