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although what happens on the lower level is responsible for what happens on the higher level, it is nonetheless irrelevant to the higher level.
the living being’s ability to sense certain aspects of its environment flips around and endows the being with the ability to sense certain aspects of itself.
as human beings were gradually separating from other primates: their category systems became arbitrarily extensible.
If you wish to understand what goes on in a biological cell, you have to learn to think on this new informational level. Physics alone, although theoretically sufficient, just won’t cut it in terms of feasibility.
the most efficient way to think about brains that have symbols — and for most purposes, the truest way — is to think that the microstuff inside them is pushed around by ideas and desires, rather than the reverse.
The overall gestalt “shape” of one’s self — the “stable whorl”, so to speak, of the strange loop constituting one’s “I” — is not picked up by a disinterested, neutral camera, but is perceived in a highly subjective manner through the active processes of categorizing, mental replaying, reflecting, comparing, counterfactualizing, and judging.
being a professional neuroscientist is not by any means synonymous with understanding the brain deeply — no more than being a professional physicist is synonymous with understanding hurricanes deeply. Indeed, sometimes being mired down in gobs of detailed knowledge is the exact thing that blocks deep understanding.
a “bare” strange loop of selfhood does not give rise to a distinct self — it is just a generic, vanilla shell that requires contact with something else in the world in order to start acquiring a distinctive identity, a distinctive “I”.
that is what a brain is made for — to be a stage for the dance of active symbols.
We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting
each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls,
The pattern of organization is what matters, not the substance. It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion!
