Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

Inevitably, what seems realest to us is what gets activated most often. Our hangnails are incredibly real to us (by coincidence, I found myself idly picking at a hangnail while I was reworking this paragraph), whereas to most of us, the English village of Nether Wallop and the high Himalayan country of Bhutan, not to mention the slowly swirling spiral galaxy in Andromeda, are considerably less real, even though our intellectual selves might wish to insist that since the latter are much bigger and longer-lasting than our hangnails, they ought therefore to be far realer to us than our hangnails are. We can say this to ourselves till we’re blue in the face, but few of us act as if we really believed it. A slight slippage of subterranean stone that obliterates 20,000 people in some far-off land, the ceaseless plundering of virgin jungles in the Amazon basin, a swarm of helpless stars being swallowed up one after another by a ravenous black hole, even an ongoing collision between two huge galaxies each of which contains a hundred billion stars — such colossal events are so abstract to someone like me that they can’t even touch the sense of urgency and importance, and thus the reality, of some measly little hangnail on my left hand’s pinky.

We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself. The realest things of all are my knee, my nose, my anger, my hunger, my toothache, my sideache, my sadness, my joy, my love for math, my abstraction ceiling, and so forth. What all these things have in common, what binds them together, is the concept of “my”, which comes out of the concept of “I” or “me”, and therefore, although it is less concrete than a nose or even a toothache, this “I” thing is what ultimately seems to each of us to constitute the most solid rock of undeniability of all. Could it possibly be an illusion? Or if not a total illusion, could it possibly be less real and less solid than we think it is? Could an “I” be more like an elusive, receding, shimmering rainbow than like a tangible, heftable, transportable pot of gold?

No Luck, No Soap, No Dice

One day, many years ago, I wanted to pull out all the envelopes from a small cardboard box lying on the floor of my study and stick them as a group into one of my desk drawers. Accordingly, I picked up the box, reached into it, clasped my right hand around the pack of envelopes inside it (about a hundred in number), and squeezed tightly down on them in order to pull them all out of the box as a unit. Nothing at all surprising in any of this. But all of a sudden I felt, between my thumb and fingers, something very surprising. Oddly enough, there was a marble sitting (or floating?) right in the middle of that flimsy little cardboard box!

Like most Americans of my generation, I had held marbles hundreds of times, and I knew without any doubt what I was feeling. Like you, dear reader, I was an “old marble hand”. But how had a marble somehow found its way into this box that I usually kept on my desk? At the time I didn’t have any kids, so that couldn’t be the explanation. And anyway, how could it be hovering in the very middle of the box, rather than sitting at the bottom? Why wasn’t gravity working?

I peered in between the envelopes, looking for a small, smooth, colored glass sphere. No luck. Then I fumbled about with my fingers between the envelopes, feeling for it. Again no soap. But then, as soon as I grasped the whole set of envelopes as before, there it was again, as solid as ever! Where was this little devil of a marble hiding?

I looked more carefully, and of course took the envelopes out and tried to shake it out from between them, but still no dice. And finally, on checking, I found that each envelope on its own was empty. So what in tarnation was going on?

An Out-of-the-Blue Ode to My Old Friend Epi

To you, my astute reader (and surely an old envelope hand, to boot), it is probably already obvious, but believe me, I was baffled for a minute or two. Eventually it dawned on me that there wasn’t any marble in there at all, but that there was something that felt for all the world exactly like a marble to this old marble hand. It was an epiphenomenon caused by the fact that, for each envelope, at the vertex of the “V” made by its flap, there is a triple layer of paper as well as a thin layer of glue. An unintended consequence of this innocent design decision is that when you squeeze down on a hundred such envelopes all precisely aligned with each other, you can’t compress that little zone as much as the other zones — it resists compression. The hardness that you feel at your fingertips has an uncanny resemblance to a more familiar (dare I say “a more real”?) hardness.

An epiphenomenon, as you probably recall from earlier chapters, is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unsuspected, events. In other words, an epiphenomenon could be said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.

Well, I was so charmed and captivated by this epiphenomenal illusion of the marble in the box that I nicknamed the box of envelopes “Epi”, and I have kept it ever since — three decades or more, now. (Unfortunately, the box is falling apart after such a long time.) And sometimes, when I take a trip somewhere to give a lecture on the concepts of self and “I”, I’ll carry Epi along with me and I’ll let members of the audience reach in and feel it for themselves, so that the concept of an epiphenomenon — in this case, the Epi phenomenon — becomes very real and vivid for them.

Recently I headed off to give such a lecture in Tucson, Arizona, and I took Epi along with me. One of the audience members, Jeannel King, was so taken with my Epi saga that she wrote a poem about it, translating it with poetic license into her own life, and a few days later she sent it to me. I in turn was so taken with her poem that I asked her for permission to reprint it here, and she generously said she’d be pleased if I did so. So without further ado, here is Jeannel King’s delightful poem inspired by Epi.

Ode to a Box of Envelopes

(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.

No Sphere, No Radius, No Mass

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of my epiphenomenal marble was how sure I was that this “object” in the box was spherical and how confidently I would have provided an estimate of its diameter (about half an inch, like most marbles), as well as described how hard it was (as compared with, say, an egg yolk or a ball of clay). Many aspects of this nonexistent object were clear and familiar tactile phenomena. In a word, I had been sucked in by a tactile illusion. There was no marble anywhere in there — there was just a statistical epiphenomenon.