I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter

eggshell — there are just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones.

Ultimately, the “I” is a hallucination, and yet, paradoxically, it is the most precious thing we own. As Dan Dennett points out in Consciousness Explained, an “I” is a little like a bill of paper money — it feels as if it is worth a great deal, but ultimately, it is just a social convention, a kind of illusion that we all tacitly agree on without ever having been asked, and which, despite being illusory, supports our entire economy. And yet the bill is just a piece of paper with no intrinsic worth at all.

Perhaps Jim will forget his own name, where he grew up, what he likes to eat, and much more. He is heading into the same terrible, thick, all enveloping fog that former President Reagan lived in during the closing few low-huneker years of his life. And yet, something of Jim is surviving strongly — surviving in other brains, thanks to human love. His easy-going sense of humor, his boundless joy at driving the wide open spaces of the prairies, his ideals, his generosity, his simplicity, his hopes and dreams — and (for what it’s worth) his understanding of credit cards. All of these things survive at different levels in many people who, thanks to having interacted with him intimately over many years or decades, constitute his “soular corona” — his wife, his three children, and his many, many friends.

Consciousness is not an add-on option when one has a 100-huneker brain; it is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Gödel’s strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you’ve got self, you’ve got consciousness.

Why do I see such unequal treatments by society as tacit distinctions between the values of souls? Because I think that wittingly or unwittingly, we all equate the size of a living being’s soul with the “objective” value of that being’s life, which is to say, the degree of respect that we outsiders pay to that being’s interiority.

I ask myself, if soul-size distinctions between species are such a commonplace and non-threatening notion, why should we not also be willing to consider some kind of explicit (not just tacit) spectrum of soul-sizes within a single species, and in particular within our own?

You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception

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.

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.