I Am a Strange Loop (73 page)

Riposte: A Soft Poem

And yet to you, my faithful reader who has plowed all through this book up to its nearly final page, I would hope that things seem otherwise. Together, you and I have gone through instance after instance of increasingly sophisticated structures having loops, from the ever-darting-off Exploratorium red dot to fine-grained television cameras taking in the screens they fill, then to formulas asserting that they have no
PM
proof, and winding up with the strange loop that comes about inside the ever-growing repertoire of symbols in each human being’s brain. (
Élan mental
we have no truck with, for it leads to endless traps.)

If there were ever, in our physics-governed world, a kind of magic, it is surely in these self-reflecting, self-defining patterns. Such strange loops, inspired by Gödel’s Trojan horse that sneaked self-consciousness inside the very fortress that was built to keep it out, and recalling Roger Sperry’s tower of forces within forces within forces (found inside each teet’ring bulb of dread and dream), give the only explanation I can fancy for how animate, desire-driven beings can arise from just plain matter, and for how, among the swarm of loops that populate our planet, there is one, and only one, that you call “I” (and I call “you”).

A Billion Trillion Ants in One’s Leg

You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception — the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world. When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics and when feedback loops galore come into play, then “which” eventually turns into “who”. What would once have been brusquely labeled “mechanical” and reflexively discarded as a candidate for consciousness has to be reconsidered.

We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality. The “I” we create for each of us is a quintessential example of such a perceived or invented reality, and it does such a good job of explaining our behavior that it becomes the hub around which the rest of the world seems to rotate. But this “I” notion is just a shorthand for a vast mass of seething and churning of which we are necessarily unaware.

Sometimes, when my leg goes to sleep (as we put it in English) and I feel a thousand pins and needles tingling inside it, I say to myself, “Aha! So
this
is what being alive
really
is! I’m getting a rare glimpse of how complex I truly am!” (In French, one says that one has “ants in one’s leg”, and the cartoon character Dennis the Menace once remarked that he had “ginger ale in his leg” — two unforgettable metaphors for this odd yet universal sensation.) Of course we can never come close to experiencing the full tingling complexity of what we truly are, since we have, to take just one typical example, six billion trillion (that is, six thousand million million million) copies of the hemoglobin molecule rushing about helter-skelter through our veins at all moments, and in each second of our lives, 400 trillion of them are destroyed while another 400 trillion are created. Numbers like these are way beyond human comprehension.

But our own unfathomability is a lucky thing for us! Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how minuscule we are in comparison to the vast universe we live in, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

I Am a Strange Loop

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems — vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like “I” is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be. As Kurt Gödel with his unexpected strange loops gave us a deeper and subtler vision of what mathematics is all about, so the strange-loop characterization of our essences gives us a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human. And to my mind, the loss is worth the gain.

NOTES

Page
xi gave me the impetus to read a couple of lay-level books about the human brain…
These were [Pfeiffer] and [Penfield and Roberts]. Another early key influence was [Wooldridge].

Page
xi the physical basis…of being…an “I”, which…
Placing commas and periods outside quotation marks when they are not part of what is being quoted exhibits greater logic than does American usage, which puts them inside regardless of circumstance. In this book, the logical convention (also the standard in British English) is adopted.

Page
xiv Hofstadter’s Law…
This comes from Chapter V of [Hofstadter 1979].

Page
xiv “What is it like to be a bat?”…
See Chapter 24 in [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page
xv I have spent nearly thirty years…
See, for instance, [Hofstadter and Moser], [Hofstadter and FARG], [Hofstadter 1997], and [Hofstadter 2001].

Page
xviii virtually every thought in this book…is an analogy…
See [Hofstadter 2001].

Page
xviii not indulging in Pushkinian digressions…
See James Falen’s sparkling anglicization of Pushkin’s classic novel-in-verse
Eugene Onegin
[Pushkin 1995], or see my own translation [Pushkin 1999]. There is no sublimer marriage of form to content than
Eugene Onegin.

Page
xviii typeset it down to the finest level of detail…
In this book, one of my chief esthetic concerns has been where page breaks fall. A cardinal rule has been that no paragraph (or section) should ever break in such a way that only one line of it occurs at the top or bottom of a page. Another guiding principle has been that the interword spacing in each line should look pleasing, and, in particular, not too loose (which is a frequent and annoying eyesore in computer-set text). In order to avoid such blemishes, I have done touch-up rewriting, often quite extensive, of just about every paragraph in the book. Page
xviii
itself is a typical example of the end result. And of course the page you are right now reading (and that I am right now touching up so that it will please your eye) is another such example.

The foregoing esthetic constraints (along with a number of others that I won’t describe here) amount to random darts being thrown at every page in the book, with each dart saying to me, in effect, “Here — don’t you think you could rewrite this sentence so that it not only
looks
better but also makes its
point
even more clearly and elegantly?” Some authors might find this tiresome, but I freely confess that I love these random darts and the two-sided challenges that they offer me, and I have worked extremely hard to meet those challenges throughout. There is not a shadow of a doubt that form–content pressures — relentless, intense, and unpredictable — have greatly improved the quality of this book, not only visually but also intellectually.

For a more explicit spelling-out of my views on the magical power of form–content interplay, see [Hofstadter 1997], especially its Introduction and Chapter 5.

Page 5
no machine can know what words are, or mean…
This ancient idea is the rallying cry of many philosophers, such as John Searle. See Chapter 20 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 5
the laws of whose operation are arithmetical…
This is an allusion to the idea that a “Giant Electronic Brain”, whose very fiber is arithmetical, could act indistinguishably from a human or animal brain by modeling the arithmetical behavior of all of its neurons. This would give rise to a kind of artificial intelligence, but very different from models in which the basic entities are words or concepts governed by rules that reflect the abstract flow of ideas in a mind rather than the microscopic flow of currents and chemicals in biological hardware. Chapter XVII of [Hofstadter 1979], Chapter 26 of [Hofstadter and Dennett], and Chapter 26 of [Hofstadter 1985] all represent elaborations of this subtle distinction, which I was beginning to explore in my teens.

Page 10
I don’t know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture…
With some trepidation, I recently read aloud this opening section of my book to my mother, who, at almost 87, can only move around her old Stanford house in a wheelchair, but who remains sharp as a tack and intensely interested in the world around her. She listened with care and then remarked, “I must have changed a lot since then, because now, those pictures mean
everything
to me. I couldn’t live without them.” I doubt that what I said to her that gloomy day nearly sixteen years ago played much of a role in this evolution of her feelings, but I was glad in any case to hear that she had come to feel that way.

Page 10
a tomato is a desireless, soulless, nonconscious entity…
On the other hand, [Rucker] proposes that tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages, quarks, and sealing-wax are all conscious.

Page 11
a short story called “Pig”…
Found in [Dahl].

Page 16
In his preface to the volume of Chopin’s études…
All the prefaces that Huneker wrote in the Schirmer editions can be found in [Huneker].

Page 18
What gives us word-users the right to make…
See [Singer and Mason].

Page 20
it is made of ‘the wrong stuff’…
That brains but not computers are made of “the right stuff” is a slogan of John Searle. See Chapter 20 in [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 23
Philosophers of mind often use the terms…
See, for example, [Dennett 1987].

Page 25
“What do I mean…by ‘brain research’?”…
See [Churchland], [Dennett 1978], [Damasio], [Flanagan], [Hart], [Harth], [Penfield], [Pfeiffer], and [Sperry].

Page 26
these are all legitimate and important objects of neurological study…
See [Damasio], [Kuffler and Nicholls], [Wooldridge], and [Penfield and Roberts].

Page 26
abstractions are central…in the study of the brain…
See [Treisman], [Minsky 1986], [Schank], [Hofstadter and FARG], [Kanerva], [Fauconnier], [Dawkins], [Blackmore], and [Wheelis] for spellings-out of these abstract ideas.

Page 27
Just as the notion of “gene” as an invisible entity that enabled…
See [ Judson].

Page 27
and just as the notion of “atoms” as the building blocks…
See [Pais 1986], [Pais 1991], [Hoffmann], and [Pullman].

Page 28
Turing machines are…idealized computers…
See [Hennie] and [Boolos and Jeffrey].

Page 29
In his vivid writings, Searle gives…
See Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page 29
one particular can that would “pop up”…
In his smugly dismissive review [Searle] of [Hofstadter and Dennett], Searle states: “So let us imagine our thirst-simulating program running on a computer made entirely of old beer cans, millions (or billions) of old beer cans that are rigged up to levers and powered by windmills. We can imagine that the program simulates the neuron firings at the synapses by having beer cans bang into each other, thus achieving a strict correspondence between neuron firings and beer-can bangings. And at the end of the sequence a beer can pops up on which is written ‘I am thirsty.’ Now, to repeat the question, does anyone suppose that this Rube Goldberg apparatus is literally thirsty in the sense in which you and I are?”