I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter

And yet I have to admit that I somewhat agree with Huneker, and I can’t help wondering if we don’t all of us implicitly believe in the validity of something vaguely like the idea of “small-souled” and “large-souled” human beings. In fact, I can’t help suggesting that this is indeed the belief of almost all of us, no matter how egalitarian we publicly profess to be.

Some of us believe in capital punishment — the intentional public squelching of a human soul, no matter how ardently that soul would plead for mercy, would tremble, would shake, would shriek, would desperately struggle to escape, on being led down the corridor to the site of their doom.

The presence of a feedback loop, even a rather simple one, constitutes for us humans a strong pressure to shift levels of description from the goalless level of mechanics (in which forces make things move) to the goal-oriented level of cybernetics (in which, to put it very bluntly, desires make things move). The latter is, as I have stressed, nothing but a more efficient rewording of the former; nonetheless, with systems that possess increasingly subtle and sophisticated types of feedback loops, that shorthand’s efficiency becomes well-nigh irresistible. And eventually, not only does teleological language become indispensable, but we cease to realize that there could be any other perspective. At that point, it is locked into our worldview.