I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter

It was almost as if this slippery phenomenon called “consciousness” lifted itself up by its own bootstraps, almost as if it made itself out of nothing, and then disintegrated back into nothing whenever one looked at it more closely.

perhaps almost all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance

This idea — that the bottom level, though 100 percent responsible for what is happening, is nonetheless irrelevant to what happens — sounds almost paradoxical, and yet it is an everyday truism.

(For all who have lost their marbles…) by Jeannel King A box of env’lopes on the floor — I want to shift them to my drawer. I squeeze inside — there’s something there! I look inside — there’s naught but air. I squeeze again and marble find. Is this a marble of my mind?a Determined now, and one by one, out come the env’lopes — still no plum! For closer views of each, I must brave paper cuts and motes of dust. In tips? Or env’lope forty-six?a My marble, whole, does not exist. Then coarse-grained Mother whispers, “Nell, you keep this up, you’ll go to hell!” To which Dad counters, “Mind yer mopes! Let Nell seek God in envelopes!” So envelopes lie all around as I sit, vexed, upon the ground. My marble’s lost, but in my core could there, perhaps, be something more?a For more than parts this whole has grown: No single part doth stand alone. In parts, the marble simply mocks. Intact, I think, I’ll keep this box.

the “I” is, when all is said and done, an illusion, a sleight of mind, a trick that a brain plays on itself, a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

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.

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems — vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.