I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Just as many aspects of a mineral (its density, its color, its magnetism or lack thereof, its optical reflectivity, its thermal and electrical conductivity, its elasticity, its heat capacity, how fast sound spreads through it, and on and on) are properties that come from how its billions of atomic constituents interact and form high-level patterns, so mental properties of the brain reside not on the level of a single tiny constituent but on the level of vast abstract patterns involving those constituents.

An epiphenomenon, as you probably recall from earlier chapters, is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unsuspected, events. In other words, an epiphenomenon could be said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.

We have repeatedly seen how analogies and mappings give rise to secondary meanings that ride on the backs of primary meanings. We have seen that even primary meanings depend on unspoken mappings, and so in the end, we have seen that all meaning is mapping-mediated, which is to say, all meaning comes from analogies.

Unfortunately, such linguistic sloppiness serves as the opening slide down a slippery slope, soon winding up in full anthropomorphism.)

On a fateful döö in the Austranian möönth of Spöö,

This guy loves being an idiot, I am a fan

This, our innate blindness to the world of the tiny, forces us to hallucinate a profound schism between the goal-lacking material world of balls and sticks and sounds and lights, on the one hand, and a goal pervaded abstract world of hopes and beliefs and joys and fears, on the other, in which radically different sorts of causality seem to reign.

The closing of the strange loop of human selfhood is deeply dependent upon the level-changing leap that is perception, which means categorization, and therefore, the richer and more powerful an organism’s categorization equipment is, the more realized and rich will be its self. Conversely, the poorer an organism’s repertoire of categories, the more impoverished will be the self, until in the limit there simply is no self at all.

But the key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you ever have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth, because they (or at least a significant fraction of them) are still instantiated in your brain, because they still live on in a “second neural home”?

Denial. Pretty crushing.

What was the nature of the “Holden Caulfield symbol” in J. D. Salinger’s brain during the period when he was writing Catcher in the Rye? That structure was all there ever was to Holden Caulfield — but it was so, so rich. Perhaps that symbol wasn’t as rich as a full human soul, but Holden Caulfield seems like so much of a person, with a true core, a true soul, a true personal gemma, even if only a “miniature” one. You couldn’t ask for a richer representation, a richer mirroring, of one person inside another person, than whatever constituted the Holden Caulfield symbol inside Salinger’s brain.

Yay overlap between two books I'm reading at the same time!

My brain (and yours, too, dear reader) is constantly seeking to label, to categorize, to find precedents and analogues — in other words, to simplify while not letting essence slip away.

Out of intimacy, out of empathy, out of friendship, and out of relatedness (as well as for other reasons), your brain’s “I” continually makes darting little forays into other brains, seeing things to some extent from their point of view, and thus convincing itself that it could easily be housed in them. And then, quite naturally, it starts wondering why it isn’t housed in them.

The sense of being alive and being a unique link in the infinite chain certainly is profound. It’s just that it doesn’t transcend physical law. To the contrary, it is a profound exploitation of physical law — hardly mundane!

If being in two or more places at once seems to make no sense, think about reversing the roles of space and time. That is, consider that you have no trouble imagining that you will exist tomorrow and also the next day. Which one of those future people will really be you? How can two different you’s exist, both claiming your name?

may strike you that this whole chapter has been predicated upon such weird science-fiction scenarios that it has no bearing at all upon how we think about the real world of real human beings, and their real lives and deaths. But I believe that that is mistaken. I have a close friend whose aging father Jim has Alzheimer’s Disease. For some years my friend has been sadly watching his father lose contact, bit by bit, with one aspect after another of the reality that only a few years ago constituted the absolute bedrock, the completely reliable terra firma, of his inner life. He no longer knows his address, he has lost his former understanding of such mundane things as credit cards, and he isn’t quite sure who his children are, though they look vaguely familiar. And it is all getting dimmer, never brighter. 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 int...

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.

How does Consciousness coexist with physical law? That is, how does a dollop of Consciousness push material stuff around without coming into sharp conflict with the fact that physical law alone would suffice to determine the behavior of those things?

And so we move willy-nilly, but not freewilly-nilly, inside the maze.

In sum, our decisions are made by an analogue to a voting process in a democracy. Our various desires chime in, taking into account the many external factors that act as constraints, or more metaphorically, that play the role of hedges in the vast maze of life in which we are trapped. Much of life is incredibly random, and we have no control over it. We can will away all we want, but much of the time our will is frustrated.

Well, one of the leitmotifs of this book has been that the presence or absence of animacy depends on the level at which one views a structure.

to the extent that there is an “I” pattern in a given substrate, there is animacy, and where there is no such pattern, the entity is inanimate.

Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature.