Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

But for a liphosopher, it would lead to the further thought, “Aha! So there’s another one of those rare entities imbued with one dollop of Leafpilishness, that mystical, nonphysical, other-worldly, but very real aura that doesn’t ever attach itself to haystacks, reams of paper, or portions of French fries, but only to piles of leaves! If it weren’t for Leafpilishness, a leaf pile would be nothing but a motley heap of tree debris, but thanks to Leafpilishness, all such motley heaps become Leafpilish! And since each dollop of Leafpilishness is different from every other one, that means that each leaf pile on Earth is imbued with a totally unique identity! What an amazing and profound phenomenon is Leafpilishness!”

No matter what your opinion is on consciousness, reader, I suspect you would scratch your head at the tenets of liphosophy. It would be unnatural if you didn’t wonder, “What is this nutty Capitalized Essence all about? What follows from having this invisible, undetectable aura?” You would also be likely to wonder, “Who or what agent in nature decides which entities in the physical world will receive dollops of Leafpilishness?”

Such musings might lead you to posing other hard questions, such as: What exactly constitutes a leaf pile? How many leaves, and of what size, does it take to make a leaf pile? Which leaves belong to it, and which ones do not? Is “belonging” to a given leaf pile always a black-and-white matter? What about the air between the leaves? What about the dirt on a leaf? What if the leaves are dry, and a few (or half, or most) of them have been crushed into tiny pieces? What if there are two neighboring leaf piles that share a few leaves between them? Is it 100 percent clear at all times where the borders of a leaf pile are? In short, how does Mother Nature figure out in a perfectly black-and-white fashion what things are worthy recipients of dollops of Leafpilishness?

If you were in a yet more philosophical mood, you might ask yourself questions such as: What would happen if, through some freak accident or bizarre mistake, a dollop of Leafpilishness got attached to, say, a leaf pile with an ant crawling in it (that is, to the compound entity consisting of leaf pile plus ant)? Or to just the upper two-thirds of a leaf pile? Or to a pile of seaweed? Or to a child’s crumbly sand castle on the beach? Or to the San Francisco Zoo? Or to Andromeda galaxy? Or to my dentist appointment next week? What would happen if two dollops of Leafpilishness accidentally got attached to just one leaf pile? (Or zero dollops, yielding a “zombie” leaf pile?) What dreadful or marvelous consequences would ensue?

I suspect, reader, that you would not take seriously a liphosopher who argued that Leafpilishness was a central and mystical aspect of the cosmos, that it transcended physical law, that items possessing Leafpilishness were inherently different from all other items in the universe, and that each and every leaf pile had a unique identity — thanks not to its unique internal composition but rather to the particular dollop of Leafpilishness that had been doled out to it from who knows where. I hope you would join me in saying, “Liphosophy is a motley belief pile!” and in paying it no heed.

Consciousness: A Capitalized Essence

So much for liphosophers. Now let’s turn to philosophers who see consciousness as an elusive — in fact, undetectable — and yet terribly important nonphysical aspect of the universe. In order to distinguish this notion of consciousness from the one I’ve been talking about all through this book, I’m going to capitalize it: “Consciousness”. Whenever you see this word capitalized, just think of the nonphysical essence called élan mental, or else make an analogy to Racecar Power ®or Leafpilishness; either way, you won’t be far off.

At this point, I have to admit that I have a rather feeble imagination for Capitalized Essences. In trying to picture in my mind a physical object imbued with a nonphysical essence (such as Leafpilishness or élan mental ), I inadvertently fall back on imagery derived from the purely physical world. Thus for me, the attempt to imagine a “dollop of Consciousness” or a “nonphysical soul” inevitably brings to mind a translucent, glowing swirl of haze floating within and perhaps a little bit around the physical object that it inhabits. Mind you, I know all too well that this is most wrong, since the phenomenon is, by definition, not a physical one. But as I said, my imagination is feeble, and I need this kind of physical crutch to help it out.

In any case, the idea of a sharp dichotomy between objects imbued with dollops of Consciousness and those deprived of such leads to all sorts of puzzling riddles, such as the following:

Which physical entities possess Consciousness, and which ones do not? Does a whole human body possess Consciousness? Or is it just the human’s brain that is Conscious? Or could it be that only a certain part of the brain is Conscious? What are the exact boundaries of a Conscious physical entity? What organizational or chemical property of a physical structure is it that graces it with the right to be invaded by a dollop of Consciousness?

What mechanism in nature makes the elusive elixir of Consciousness glom onto some physical entities and spurn others? What wondrous pattern-recognition algorithm does Consciousness possess so as to infallibly recognize just the proper kinds of physical objects that deserve it, so it can then bestow itself onto them?

How does Consciousness know to do this? Does it somehow go around the physical world in search of candidate objects to glom onto? Or does it shine a metaphorical flashlight metaphorically down at the world and examine it piece by piece, occasionally saying to itself, “Aha! So there’s an entity that deserves one standard-size dollop of me!”

How does Consciousness get attached to some specific physical structure and not accidentally onto nearby pieces of matter? What kind of “glue” is used to make this attachment? Can the “glue” possibly wear out and the Consciousness accidentally fall off or transfer onto something else?

How is your Consciousness different from my Consciousness? Did our respective dollops come with different serial numbers or “flavors”, thus establishing the watertight breach between us? If your dollop of Consciousness had been attached to my brain and vice versa, would you be writing this and I reading it?

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?

A Sliding Scale of Élan Mental

Now some readers might say that I am not giving élan mental (a.k.a. Consciousness) enough respect. They might say that there are gradations in the dispensation of this essence, so that some entities receive a good deal of it while others get rather little or none of it. It’s not just all-or-nothing; rather, the amount of Consciousness attached to any given physical structure is not precisely one dollop but can be any number of dollops (including fractional amounts). That’s progress!

And yet, for such readers, I would still have numerous questions, such as the following:

How is it determined exactly how many dollops (or fractional dollops) of Consciousness get attached to a given physical entity? Where are these dollops stored in the meantime? In other words, where is the Central Consciousness Bank?

Once a certain portion of Consciousness has been dished out to a recipient entity (Ronald Reagan, a chess-playing computer, a cockroach, a sperm, a sunflower, a thermostat, a leaf pile, a stone, the city of Cairo), is it a permanent allotment, or is the size of the allotment variable, depending on what physical events take place involving the recipient? If the recipient is in some way altered, does its allotment (or part of it) revert to the Central Consciousness Bank, or does it just float around forevermore, no longer attached to a physical anchor? And if it floats around unattached, does it retain traces of the recipient to which it was once attached?