< Ji Yibi > Mathematically proves that "the self is an illusion"
1979
A 34-year-old American cognitive scientist wrote a curious book
This book tells the story of three people simultaneously
One was the logician who proved that mathematics can never hold its own
One was the printmaker who made the impossible staircase.
One is that you can take a melody and fold it six times over, and you still feel like you're in one piece.
The composer
They were called Gödel, Escher and Bach.
And the name of this book is "Gödel, Escher, Bach"
The Dacheng of Gathering Different Bi >
The writer is Douglas Hofstadter.
It won a Pulitzer Prize when it came out.
It is still considered the most important intellectual work of the twentieth century to this day
one
But most people will tell you when they finish reading it
He wasn't quite sure what the book was really about
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
I'm going to do something today
With the key to Buddhism
Open this supposedly most difficult book to understand
You will find
Hofstadter spent over 700 pages
The central conclusion that has been repeatedly demonstrated through mathematics, logic and art
The Buddha said it in two words 2,500 years ago.
That is.
selflessness
But don't feel that Buddhism has won
It's not that simple
The path taken by Hofstadter and the path taken by Buddha
Although the endpoints are very similar
But the paths are completely different.
Understand the difference
More important than understanding the conclusion itself
Let's start with Hofstadter's core weapon
Gödel's incompleteness theorem
1931
The Austrian logician Kurt Gödel published a paper
It blew up the whole mathematics community.
Before Gödel
Mathematicians had a big dream.
They hoped to base all mathematics on a complete and self-consistent system of axioms
All true propositions can be proven within the system
There are no conflicts within the system.
The leader of this dream is a man called David Hilbert.
He famously posed 23 mathematical problems in 1900.
The second of these is
Prove that the system of arithmetic axioms is self-consistent
Gödel did something brilliant.
He constructed a proposition in the language of mathematics
The translation of this proposition into human language is
This sentence cannot be proven in this system
You taste this sentence
If this statement is true
Then it cannot be proven
Indicates that the system is incomplete
There are true propositions that cannot be proved
If this sentence is false
That means it can be proven
But it says I can't be proven.
A false proposition has been proven
The system is conflicting
self-consistent collapse
No matter what
You all lose
This is the heart of Gödel's incompleteness theorem
Any sufficiently powerful formal system
If it is self-consistent
It's necessarily incomplete.
In other words
The system cannot fully understand itself
Hou Shida is in < Jiyibi >
Li distilled this discovery into a deeper concept
It's called a circle.
What is a vicious circle?
When a system attempts to describe itself
It will inevitably get involved in a cycle
In this cycle
The hierarchy is broken.
The descriptor and the described are entangled
You can't tell who's up there and who's down there.
Gödel used logic and mathematics.
Escher uses vision
You must have seen his famous print
Drawing a staircase
The monks on the stairs keep going up
After walking around, I returned to the starting point
But it does seem that every step is going up
Your eyes tell you that he is climbing
But reason tells you it's impossible.
Bach used music.
His fugue
The same melody at different speeds in different parts
Simultaneous expansion of different tonalities
echo each other
Chasing each other
You're hearing a complete melody.
But take it apart
Each part is operating its own logic independently
A sense of unity emerges
It's not preset.
Hofstadter's core argument is
These three circles are not three different phenomena
But three expressions of the same phenomenon
And this phenomenon
It's the nature of consciousness.
His chain of argument goes like this
The human brain is a physical system
Consists of tens of billions of nerve cells
Each nerve cell is meaningless on its own
It's an electrochemical switch.
Either discharge or not discharge
It's essentially the same as the ones and zeros in a computer.
But when these meaningless switches form networks through mass connections
When the complexity of the network reaches a certain critical point
A strange thing happened
The system starts pointing at itself.
It's a system of meaningless symbols.
Through sufficiently complex recursion and self-referencing
Emerging is the ability to see yourself.
This ability
What you call me
But Hofstadter then said something that made everyone uncomfortable
This me
It's an illusion.
It's not a soul
It's not some permanent thing.
It's a feeling that the symbolic system produces in a cycle of self-reference.
It's an illusion.
It's like Escher's staircase.
You feel like it's going up all the time.
It's really just a closed loop.
It's like Gödel's thesis.
You think it speaks a profound truth.
In fact, it's just pointing at itself and saying
I'm pointing at myself.
I am not a thing
I am a process
A system sees itself as a mirage
So much for that.
I'm going to ask you to just stop for a second.
If you are a regular viewer of our channel
You must have heard an extremely familiar voice
Hofstadter used mathematics and logic for more than 700 pages to reach this conclusion
It's almost exactly the same thing as the idealism.
We dismantled this structure in detail in the Consciousness-Only issue
What is the core function of the seventh consciousness?
constant review and consideration
It constantly examines the content of the eighth consciousness, the Alaya consciousness, twenty-four hours a day
Then apply these contents as
This is me.
What Mornai did
Precisely
It's what Hofstadter calls a vicious circle
It's a continuous self-referential operation of the conscious system on itself.
And the result of this self-referencing operation
It's how I feel.
Buddhism calls this self-determination.
Hofstadter called this the illusion of the circle
Different names
Point to the same thing
But that's where the differences begin to emerge.
And that difference is crucial.
Hofstadter comes to the point where the self is an illusion
Stopped
It's not that he doesn't want to keep going
It's that the tools he uses can't move
Logic and mathematics can help you prove that the system cannot fully understand itself
But it can't tell you
What happens when you see through this illusion?
In the second half of the book, Hofstadter exudes a very typical
The Sorrow of the Molecular Formula of Western Knowledge
He realized I was fictional.
But he couldn't imagine his life without me
Buddhism doesn't stop here
Buddhism
See that I am fictional
Not the end
Is the starting point
This sees through itself
It's liberation.
And I'll make that distinction a little bit more precise.
Hofstadter used Gödel's theorem to prove that
The system cannot fully recognize itself
It's a limitation.
A kind of ceiling
Buddhism is not about knowing oneself
It's about seeing through and knowing yourself. The need itself is an obsession
You taste the difference between the two
Hofstadter says
I will never fully understand myself
And it frustrated me.
Buddhism
You don't have to know who you are.
Because the self that wants to know you doesn't exist.
You're not solving an unsolvable problem.
What you're discovering is that the question itself is an illusion.
That's why I also see selflessness.
Hofstadter's attitude is that of an intellectual
The attitude of the Buddha was total freedom
Now let's take this contrast a step further
A core issue that Hou Shida repeatedly discussed in < Jiyibi > is
Can pure symbolic manipulation lead to true understanding?
And he does a lot of elaborate dialogue.
Let Achilles and the tortoise debate this question over and over again
And John Searle came up with this famous Chinese Room thought experiment.
They took it to an extreme.
A person who does not understand Chinese at all
If you give him a good enough rulebook
He can respond to all Chinese questions correctly
But does he really understand Chinese?
And that question is particularly acute in today's era of big language models.
A model with a trillion parameters.
Can write poetry, can reason, can talk to you about philosophy
But does it understand what it's saying?
Buddhism has a very precise response to this question
It's a four-point theory of consciousness-only.
We've talked about this before.
Every cognitive moment has four layers.
Parting is the known object
Seeing points is a function of knowing
Self-attestation is the awareness of knowing that one is knowing
The self-proof score is the verification of this awareness
The person in the Chinese room
He is divided
There are points
He's working on symbols.
Outputting the correct answer
But he lacks self-attestation.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
He doesn't have the reflexive awareness that he knows.
This is precisely the key intersection of Hofstadter's theory of vicious circles and Buddhism
Hofstadter believes
When a symbolic system is complex enough to refer to itself
That's when you can point to yourself.
It generates something like consciousness
Buddhism is more accurate.
Self-reference itself does not equal awareness
Self-reference is just an operation at the last level of consciousness
True awareness is self-proof
It's the ability to know you're talking about yourself.
What does that mean?
This means that Hofstadter found the necessary conditions for consciousness
Self-referencing and recursion
But he didn't find the conditions.
What are the sufficient conditions?
And what Buddhism says is consciousness itself.
It's the one that's there before all symbolic operations.
Can see the essence of everything
Hofstadter's circle theory explains how my hallucination came about
But it doesn't explain where the ability to see through hallucinations comes from.
If everything is just symbols recursing
Who's looking at these symbols recursively?
If consciousness is just a by-product of the system
The knowledge that consciousness is a by-product
Whose is it again?
This question
Gödel's incompleteness theorem cannot be answered
But Buddhism gives a direction.
Nagarjuna said at the beginning of < Zhonglun >
All laws do not grow by themselves
Nor born of him
No common cause
Therefore, there is no life
Translated into modern language is
Any phenomenon does not arise from itself
It doesn't come from outside.
It's not a combination of the two.
It didn't happen for nothing.
This is not nihilism.
It points to our whole framework of causality and origins.
It is all-encompassing
You ask where consciousness comes from
The premise of this question is
Consciousness is something that comes from somewhere
But if consciousness is not a thing
It was an event.
If consciousness doesn't come from somewhere
It's happening all the time.
Hofstadter is trapped in the question of origin
Because his tool was linear reasoning.
Buddhism jumps out of this framework
It says
You don't have to explain the origins of consciousness.
What you need is direct visibility into what's happening.
Just like you don't need to know how mirrors are made
To see yourself in the mirror
Now we come back to Escher and Bach.
Because they also have an exact correspondence in Buddhism
Escher's Eternal Rising Staircase
It's the visualization of ubiquity.
You are walking up the staircase of life
Every step feels like you're making progress, climbing, approaching a goal
But if you can see it from the outside
You'll find that you've been spinning in circles
This doesn't mean that the effort is pointless
Rather, the feeling itself that's going up is
Consciously constructed narratives
You're not going up. You're not going down.
You are experiencing
And ascending and descending are the labels attached to the consciousness
Bach's fugue is more interesting
What is the essence of a fugue?
It is the same theme that unfolds in different forms in multiple parts at the same time
No one is the main character.
No voice contains the full meaning
Meaning lies in the relationships between the voices.
Not in any separate part
This is the origin
Buddhism says the origin of all methods
No phenomenon exists independently.
Meaning is not in any one element.
Meaning emerges from the relationships between elements.
You take apart a fugue.
Each part is incomplete on its own
You tear apart a self
Each of the five aggregates is not me when viewed alone
I am an emergent effect of the relationship between the five aggregates
Just like the beauty of a fugue is an emergent effect of the relationships between the parts
Hofstadter intuitively touched upon this insight in "Ji Yibi"
And he even has a whole book about what it's like to have meaning inside symbols.
Or is it the relationship between the symbols?
His conclusion leans towards the latter
Meaning is in relationships.
But he doesn't push this conclusion to the logical end
If meaning only exists in relationships
Then nothing has an independent self
This is emptiness
Empty is not nothing
Emptiness is a way of being without an independent, inherent, and independent relationship
And Hofstadter saw the circle.
Saw the emergence
I see meaning in relationships.
He stood at the door of emptiness
But his logic tools stopped him at the door
Because logic itself is a formal system
And Gödel proved it.
A formal system cannot completely transcend itself
Buddhism
You don't have to override logic.
What you need is direct experience
Meditation, Vipassana, Meditation
These are not superstitious rituals
These are specific ways to get your conscious system to pause the self-referencing loop
The moment the cycle stops
You will find
I disappeared.
But the awareness is still there
That awareness is what you have been seeking
But you're looking in the wrong direction
You've been looking out.
And it has been waiting for you inward
Hofstadter wrote at the end of < Jiyibi >
When he stared at himself in the mirror
What he sees is an infinite recursion circle
A person is looking in the mirror
In the mirror, there is another person looking in the mirror
layer by layer
never ending
Buddhist society says
There's only one thing you need to do.
Put down the mirror
When you stop trying to find yourself in the mirror
You will find
You've always been the one watching
Not in the mirror
Not like in image
It's about seeing.
But here's one place I have to be honest about marking.
Hofstadter's contribution is irreplaceable
Buddhism says there is no self
But it's based on mindfulness and understanding.
If you don't have that experience
It's just a concept
A philosophical position that you can agree with or disagree with
Hofstadter uses Gödel's theorem and formal system theory
From a completely different direction
Logic and mathematics provide an independent argument for selflessness.
It's not that Buddhism needs science to endorse it.
It's about two completely separate paths pointing in the same direction.
When two unrelated paths converge at the same point
The credibility of this point is no longer a matter of belief
That's why I'm doing this series
I'm not preaching.
I'm not doing science either
I was doing something.
Let the deepest insights of different civilizations meet each other
Make them shine brighter in collisions
One last question for you.
Nearly 30 years after Hou Shida wrote < Episode Dibi >
Wrote another book called "I Am a Strange Circle"
And in that book he did something that shocked a lot of readers.
So he says.
When his beloved wife passed away
He felt that the vicious circle of his wife had not disappeared
But somehow lived in his own brain
Two vicious circles are entangled
Boundaries are blurred
This is a man who has thought scientifically and logically all his life.
The closest you can come to not having an independent self
Consciousness flows through relationships.
He was on the verge of saying no.
But he didn't.
There was no framework for it in his language.
What do you think?
If Hofstadter had read Consciousness Only
Read < Middle Theory >
I have read Nagarjuna's Eight Middle Paths
How would he rewrite his theory?
I don't give an answer to this question
Leave it to you to discuss in the comment section
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.