I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter

There is no “mind–body problem” for tomatoes.

“Who once had been in that head? Who had lived there? Who had looked out through those eyes, heard through those ears? Who had this hunk of flesh really been?

Moreover, when one perceives only myriads of particles, there are no natural sharp borders in the world. One cannot draw a line around the volcano and declare, “Only particles in this zone are involved”, because particles won’t respect any such macroscopic line — no more than ants respect the property lines carefully surveyed and precisely drawn by human beings.

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).

Feedback — making a system turn back or twist back on itself, thus forming some kind of mystically taboo loop — seems to be dangerous, seems to be tempting fate, perhaps even to be intrinsically wrong, whatever that might mean.

representations of one’s own self is seen as suspicious, weird, and perhaps ultimately fatal.

the full realization of all the implications of this hint — and this new higher-level structure, this emergent pattern on the screen, this epiphenomenon, is then “locked in”, thanks to the loop. It will not go away because it is forever refreshing itself, feeding on itself, giving rebirth to itself. Otherwise put, the emergent output pattern is a self-stabilizing structure whose origins, despite the simplicity of the feedback loop itself, are nearly impenetrable because the loop is cycled through so many times.

Perceptual Looping as the Germ of “I”-ness

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.

myriads of microscopic olfactory twitchings in the nostrils of a voyager walking down an airport concourse can lead, depending on the voyager’s state of hunger and past experiences, to a joint triggering of the two symbols “sweet” and “smell”, or a triggering of the symbols “gooey” and “fattening”, or of the symbols “Cinnabon” and “nearby”, or of the symbols “wafting”, “advertising”, “subliminal”, “sly”, and “gimmick” — or perhaps a triggering of all eleven of these symbols in the brain, in some sequence or other.

Does a mosquito even know or believe that there are objects “out there”? Suppose the answer is yes, though I am skeptical about that. Does it assign the objects it registers as such to any kind of categories? Do words like “know” or “believe” apply in any sense to a mosquito?

(However, I have known, and probably you have too, reader, a few adults for whom every issue that strikes me as subtle seems to them to be totally black-and-white — no messy shades of gray at all to deal with. That must make life easy!)

This creature ascribes its behavior to things it refers to as its desires or its wants, but it can’t say exactly why it has those desires. At a certain point there is no further possibility of analysis or articulation; those desires simply are there, and to the creature, they seem to be the root causes for its decisions, actions, motions. And always, inside the sentences that express why it does what it does, there is the pronoun “I” (or its cousins “me”, “my”, etc.). It seems that the buck stops there — with the so-called “I”.

arbitrarily extensible concept repertoire

The human condition is thus profoundly analogous to the Klüdgerotic condition: neither species can see or even imagine the lower levels of a reality that is nonetheless central to its existence.

Intellectually knowing that our brains are dense networks of neurons doesn’t make us familiar with our brains at that level, no more than knowing that French poems are made of letters of the roman alphabet makes us experts on French poetry.

human self-perception inevitably ends up positing an emergent entity that exerts an upside-down causality on the world, leading to the intense reinforcement of and the final, invincible, immutable locking-in of this belief. The end result is often the vehement denial of the possibility of any alternative point of view at all.

A person is a point of view — not only a physical point of view (looking out of certain eyes in a certain physical place in the universe), but more importantly a psyche’s point of view: a set of hair-trigger associations rooted in a huge bank of memories. The latter can be absorbed, more and more over time, by someone else. Thus it’s like acquiring a foreign language step by step.

You have allowed yourself to be invaded by an “alien universal being”, and to some extent the alien takes charge inside your skull, starts pushing things around in its own fashion, making words, ideas, memories, and associations bubble up inside your brain that ordinarily would not do so. The activation of the symbol for the loved person swivels into action whole sets of coordinated tendencies that represent that person’s cherished style, their idiosyncratic way of being embedded in the world and looking out at it. As a consequence, during this visitation of your cranium, you will surprise yourself by coming out with different jokes from those you would normally make, seeing things in a different emotional light, making different value judgments, and so forth.

If you seriously believe, as I do and have been asserting for most of this book, that concepts are active symbols in a brain, and if furthermore you seriously believe that people, no less than objects, are represented by symbols in the brain (in other words, that each person that one knows is internally mirrored by a concept, albeit a very complicated one, in one’s brain), and if lastly you seriously believe that a self is also a concept, just an even more complicated one (namely, an “I”, a “personal gemma”, a rock-solid “marble”), then it is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of this set of beliefs that your brain is inhabited to varying extents by other I’s, other souls, the extent of each one depending on the degree to which you faithfully represent, and resonate

The interpenetration of souls is an inevitable consequence of the power of the representationally universal machines that our brains are. That is the true meaning of the word “empathy”.

Not really. It’s a subtle idea whose crux is that what you call “I” is an outcome, not a starting point. You coalesced in an unplanned fashion, coming only slowly into existence, not in a flash. At the beginning, when the brain that would later house your soul was taking form, there was no you. But that brain slowly grew, and its experiences slowly accumulated. Somewhere along the way, as more and more things happened to it, were registered by it, and became internalized in it, it started imitating the cultural and linguistic conventions in which it was immersed, and thus it tentatively said “I” about itself (even though the referent of that word was still very blurry). That’s roughly when it noticed it was somewhere — and not surprisingly, it was where a certain brain was! At that point, though, it didn’t know anything about its brain. What it knew instead was its brain’s container, which was a certain body. But even though it didn’t know anything about its brain, that nascent “I” faithfully followed its brain around just as a shadow always tags along after a moving object.

Ouch. Now just listen for a moment. My question is very straightforward. Anybody can understand it (except maybe you). Why am I in this brain? Why didn’t I wind up in some other brain? Why didn’t I wind up in your brain, for instance? SL #641: Because your “I” was not an a priori well-defined thing that was predestined to jump, full-fledged and sharp, into some just-created empty physical vessel at some particular instant. Nor did your “I” suddenly spring into existence, wholly unanticipated but in full bloom. Rather, your “I” was the slowly emerging outcome of a million unpredictable events that befell a particular body and the brain housed in it. Your “I” is the self-reinforcing structure that gradually came to exist not only in that brain, but thanks to that brain. It couldn’t have come to exist in this brain, because this brain went through different experiences that led to a different human being. SL #642: But why couldn’t I have had those experiences as easily as you?

Our “I” ’s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life.

the “I” as a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

It is hard to be serenely confident in my Reductionist conclusions. It is hard to believe that personal identity is not what matters. If tomorrow someone will be in agony, it is hard to believe that it could be an empty question whether this agony will be felt by me. And it is hard to believe that, if I am about to lose consciousness, there may be no answer to the question “Am I about to die?”

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. Élan mental is not needed.

Furthermore, the idea that each of us is intrinsically defined by a unique incorporeal essence suggests that we have immortal souls; belief in dualism may thus remove some of the sting of death. It is not very hard for someone who grows up drenched in the pictorial and verbal imagery of western religion to imagine a wispy, ethereal aura being released from the body of someone who has just died, and sailing up, up, up into some kind of invisible celestial realm, where it will survive eternally. Whether we are believers or skeptics, such imagery is part and parcel of our western heritage, and for that reason it is hard to shuck it entirely, no matter how solidly one’s belief system is anchored in science.

Animate entities are those that, at some level of description, manifest a certain type of loopy pattern, which inevitably starts to take form if a system with the inherent capacity of perceptually filtering the world into discrete categories vigorously expands its repertoire of categories ever more towards the abstract. This pattern reaches full bloom when there comes to be a deeply entrenched self-representation — a story told by the entity to itself — in which the entity’s “I” plays the starring role, as a unitary causal agent driven by a set of desires. More precisely, an entity is animate to the degree that such a loopy “I” pattern comes into existence, since this pattern’s presence is by no means an all-or-nothing affair. Thus 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.

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.