Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

After all, a phrase like “physical system” or “physical substrate” brings to mind for most people, including a substantial proportion of the world’s philosophers and neurologists, an intricate structure consisting of vast numbers of interlocked wheels, gears, rods, tubes, balls, pendula, and so forth, even if they are tiny, invisible, perfectly silent, and possibly even probabilistic. Such an array of interacting inanimate stuff seems to most people as unconscious and devoid of inner light as a flush toilet, an automobile transmission, a fancy Swiss watch (mechanical or electronic), a cog railway, an ocean liner, or an oil refinery. Such a system is not just probably unconscious, it is necessarily so, as they see it. This is the kind of single-level intuition so skillfully exploited by John Searle in his attempts to convince people that computers could never be conscious, no matter what abstract patterns might reside in them, and could never mean anything at all by whatever long chains of lexical items they might string together.

Riposte: A Soft Poem

And yet to you, my faithful reader who has plowed all through this book up to its nearly final page, I would hope that things seem otherwise. Together, you and I have gone through instance after instance of increasingly sophisticated structures having loops, from the ever-darting-off Exploratorium red dot to fine-grained television cameras taking in the screens they fill, then to formulas asserting that they have no PM proof, and winding up with the strange loop that comes about inside the ever-growing repertoire of symbols in each human being’s brain. ( Élan mental we have no truck with, for it leads to endless traps.)

If there were ever, in our physics-governed world, a kind of magic, it is surely in these self-reflecting, self-defining patterns. Such strange loops, inspired by Gödel’s Trojan horse that sneaked self-consciousness inside the very fortress that was built to keep it out, and recalling Roger Sperry’s tower of forces within forces within forces (found inside each teet’ring bulb of dread and dream), give the only explanation I can fancy for how animate, desire-driven beings can arise from just plain matter, and for how, among the swarm of loops that populate our planet, there is one, and only one, that you call “I” (and I call “you”).

A Billion Trillion Ants in One’s Leg

You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception — the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world. When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics and when feedback loops galore come into play, then “which” eventually turns into “who”. What would once have been brusquely labeled “mechanical” and reflexively discarded as a candidate for consciousness has to be reconsidered.

We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality. The “I” we create for each of us is a quintessential example of such a perceived or invented reality, and it does such a good job of explaining our behavior that it becomes the hub around which the rest of the world seems to rotate. But this “I” notion is just a shorthand for a vast mass of seething and churning of which we are necessarily unaware.

Sometimes, when my leg goes to sleep (as we put it in English) and I feel a thousand pins and needles tingling inside it, I say to myself, “Aha! So this is what being alive really is! I’m getting a rare glimpse of how complex I truly am!” (In French, one says that one has “ants in one’s leg”, and the cartoon character Dennis the Menace once remarked that he had “ginger ale in his leg” — two unforgettable metaphors for this odd yet universal sensation.) Of course we can never come close to experiencing the full tingling complexity of what we truly are, since we have, to take just one typical example, six billion trillion (that is, six thousand million million million) copies of the hemoglobin molecule rushing about helter-skelter through our veins at all moments, and in each second of our lives, 400 trillion of them are destroyed while another 400 trillion are created. Numbers like these are way beyond human comprehension.

But our own unfathomability is a lucky thing for us! Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how minuscule we are in comparison to the vast universe we live in, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. 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.

I Am a Strange Loop

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.

To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like “I” is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be. As Kurt Gödel with his unexpected strange loops gave us a deeper and subtler vision of what mathematics is all about, so the strange-loop characterization of our essences gives us a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human. And to my mind, the loss is worth the gain.

NOTES

Page xi gave me the impetus to read a couple of lay-level books about the human brain… These were [Pfeiffer] and [Penfield and Roberts]. Another early key influence was [Wooldridge].

Page xi the physical basis…of being…an “I”, which… Placing commas and periods outside quotation marks when they are not part of what is being quoted exhibits greater logic than does American usage, which puts them inside regardless of circumstance. In this book, the logical convention (also the standard in British English) is adopted.

Page xiv Hofstadter’s Law… This comes from Chapter V of [Hofstadter 1979].

Page xiv “What is it like to be a bat?”… See Chapter 24 in [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page xv I have spent nearly thirty years… See, for instance, [Hofstadter and Moser], [Hofstadter and FARG], [Hofstadter 1997], and [Hofstadter 2001].

Page xviii virtually every thought in this book…is an analogy… See [Hofstadter 2001].