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One day when I was around sixteen or seventeen, musing intensely on these swirling clouds of ideas that gripped me emotionally no less than intellectually, it dawned on me — and it has ever since seemed to me — that what we call “consciousness” was a kind of mirage.
When, some ten years or so later, I started working on my first book, whose title I imagined would be “Gödel’s Theorem and the Human Brain”, my overarching goal was to relate the concept of a human self and the mystery of consciousness to Gödel’s stunning discovery of a majestic wraparound self-referential structure (a “strange loop”, as I later came to call it) in the very midst of a formidable bastion from which self-reference had been strictly banished by its audacious architects. I found the parallel between Gödel’s miraculous manufacture of self-reference out of a substrate of meaningless
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“What is it like to be a strange loop?”, alluding to a famous article on the mystery of consciousness called “What is it like to be a bat?” by the philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel, while the book-to-be was given the shorter, sweeter title “I Am a Strange Loop”.
Despite its title, this book is not about me, but about the concept of “I”. It’s thus about you, reader, every bit as much as it is about me. I could just as well have called it “You Are a Strange Loop”. But the truth of the matter is that, in order to suggest the book’s topic and goal more clearly, I should probably have called it “‘I’ Is a Strange Loop” — but can you imagine a clunkier title? Might as well call it “I Am a Lead Balloon”.
After all, at this point in my life, I have spent nearly thirty years working with my graduate students on computational models of analogy-making and creativity, observing and cataloguing cognitive errors of all sorts, collecting examples of categorization and analogy, studying the centrality of analogies in physics and math, musing on the mechanisms of humor, pondering how concepts are created and memories are retrieved, exploring all sorts of aspects of words, idioms, languages, and translation, and so on — and over these three decades I have taught seminars on many aspects of thinking and
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And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experiences.
Style guide
I believe most people understand abstract ideas most clearly if they hear them through stories, and so I try to convey difficult and abstract ideas through the medium of my own life. I wish that more thinkers wrote
in a first-person fashion.
Indeed, this book is a gigantic salad bowl full of metaphors and analogies.
I am a lifelong lover of form–content interplay, and this book is no exception.
Some months later, while I was “fleshing it out” by summarizing the short story “Pig”, I suddenly found myself questioning the dividing line that I had carefully drawn two decades earlier and had lived with ever since (although occasionally somewhat uneasily) — namely, the line between mammals and other animals. All at once, I started feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of eating
One part of me wants to reply, “No, no — I think about thinking. I think about how concepts and words are related, what ‘thinking in French’ is, what underlies slips of the tongue and other types of errors, how one event effortlessly reminds us of another, how we recognize written letters and words, how we understand sloppily spoken, slurred, slangy speech, how we toss off untold numbers of utterly bland-seeming yet never-before-made analogies and occasionally come up with sparklingly original ones, how each of our concepts grows in subtlety and fluidity over our lifetime, and so forth. I
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Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities such as these would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth.
object files (as proposed by Anne Treisman)
frames (as proposed by Marvin Minsky)
memory organization packets (as proposed b...
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analogical bridges (as proposed by my own research group)
mental spaces (as proposed by Gilles Fauconnier)
memes (as proposed by Richa...
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the notion of “gene” as an invisible entity that enabled the passing-on of traits from parents to progeny was proposed and studied scientifically long before any physical object could be identified as an actual carrier of such traits, and just as the notion of “atoms” as the building blocks of all physical objects was proposed and studied scientifically long before individual atoms were isolated and internally probed, so any of the notions listed above might legitimately be considered as invisible structures for brain researchers to try to pinpoint physically in the human brain.
A Simple Analogy between Heart and Brain
Have religious beliefs caused any wars, or have all wars just been caused by the interactions of quintillions (to underestimate the truth absurdly) of infinitesimal particles according to the laws of physics?
What do I mean by these two terms, “thinkodynamics” and “statistical mentalics”?
My first example involves the familiar notion of a chain of falling dominos.
The point of this example is that 641’s primality is the best explanation, perhaps even the only explanation, for why certain dominos did fall and certain other ones did not fall. In a word, 641 is the prime mover. So I ask: Who shoves whom around inside the domino chainium?
As I continued to sit in this traffic jam, twiddling my thumbs instead of honking, I let these thoughts continue, in their bully-like fashion, to push my helpless neurons around.
The point is that among my earliest memories is a relishing of loopy structures, of self-applied operations, of circularity, of paradoxical acts, of implied infinities. This, for me, was the cat’s meow and the bee’s knees rolled into one.
This loophole (the word fits perfectly here) was based on the notion of “the set of all sets that don’t
contain themselves”, a notion that was legitimate in set theory, but that turned out to be deeply self-contradictory.
If some formal language had a word like “word”, that word could not refer to or apply to itself, but only to entities on the levels below itself.
What could be wrong with such innocent sentences as “I started writing this book in a picturesque village in the Italian Dolomites”, “The main typeface in this chapter is Baskerville”, or “This carton is made of recyclable cardboard”? Do such declarations put anyone or anything in danger? I can’t see how. What about “This sentence contains eleven syllables” or “The last word in this sentence is a four-letter noun”? They are both very easy to understand, they are clearly true, and certainly they are not paradoxical. Even silly sentences such as “The ninth word in this sentence contains ten
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If the meanings of “true” and “false” were switched, this sentence wouldn’t be false. I am going two-level with you. The following sentence is totally identical with this one, except that the words “following” and “preceding” have been exchanged, as have the words “except” and “in”, and the phrases “identical with” and “different from”. The preceding sentence is totally different from this one, in that the words “preceding” and “following” have been exchanged, as have the words “in” and “except”, and the phrases “different from” and “identical with”.
As you have seen, I started talking about “corridors” and “walls”, “doorways” and “galaxies”, “spirals” and “black holes”, “hubs” and “spokes”, “petals” and “pulsations”, and so forth. In the second video voyage with Bill, many of these same terms were once again needed, and some new ones were called for, such as “starfish”, “cheese”, “fire”, “foam”, and others.
In short, there are surprising new
structures that looping gives rise to that constitute a new level of reality that could in principle be deduced from the basic loop and its detailed properties, but that in practice have a different kind of “life of their own” and that demand — at least when it comes to extremely finite, simplicity-seeking, pattern-loving creatures like us — a new vocabulary and a new level of description that transcend the basic level out of which they emerge.
Perceptual Looping as the Germ of “I”-ness
Indeed, to some people — perhaps to most, perhaps even to us all — the ineffable sense of being an “I” or a “first person”, the intuitive sense of “being there” or simply “existing”, the powerful sense of “having experience” and of “having raw sensations” (what some philosophers refer to as “qualia”), seem to be the realest things in their lives, and an insistent inner voice bridles furiously at any proposal that all this might be an illusion, or merely the outcome of some kind of physical processes taking place among “third-person” (i.e., inanimate) objects.
My goal here is to combat this strident inner voice.
To enhance the chances of its survival, any living being must be able to react flexibly to events that take place in its environment.
Once the ability to sense external goings-on has developed, however, there ensues a curious side effect that will have vital and radical consequences. This is the fact that 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.
It is no more surprising than the fact that audio feedback can take place or that a TV camera can be pointed at a screen to which its image is being sent.
We next imagine a more “evolved”, hence more flexible, setup; this time the camera, rather than being bolted onto its TV set, is attached to it by a “short leash”. Here, depending on the length and flexibility of the cord, it may be possible for the camera to twist around sufficiently to capture at least part of the TV screen in its viewfinder, giving rise to a truncated corridor. The biological counterpart to feedback of this level of sophistication may be the way our pet animals or even young children are slightly self-aware.
The idea I want to convey by the phrase “a symbol in the brain” is that some specific structure inside your cranium (or your careenium, depending on what species you belong to) gets activated whenever you think of, say, the Eiffel Tower. That brain structure, whatever it might be, is what I would call your “Eiffel Tower symbol”.
In this book, then, symbols in a brain are the neurological entities that correspond to concepts, just as genes are the chemical entities that correspond to hereditary traits.
The passage leading from vast numbers of received signals to a handful of triggered symbols is a kind of funneling process in which initial input signals are manipulated or “massaged”, the results of which selectively trigger further (i.e., more “internal”) signals, and so forth.
though, it suffices to say that perception means that, thanks to a rapid two-way flurry of signal-passing, impinging torrents of input signals wind up triggering a small set of symbols, or in less biological words, activating a few concepts.
In summary, the missing ingredient in a video system, no matter how high its visual fidelity, is a repertoire of symbols that can be selectively triggered.
Only if such a repertoire existed and were accessed could we say that the system was act...
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Mosquito Symbols
What kind of representation of the outside world does such a primitive creature have? In other words, what kind of symbol repertoire is housed inside its brain, available for tapping into by perceptual processes?
