Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

And yet, it’s undeniable that the phrase “it felt just like a marble” gets across my experience far more clearly to my readers than if I had written, “I experienced the collective effect of the precise alignment of a hundred triple layers of paper and a hundred layers of glue.” It is only because I called it a “marble” that you have a clear impression of how it felt to me. If I hadn’t used the word “marble”, would you have been able to predict that a thick pack of envelopes would give rise, in its middle, to something (some thing ?) that felt perfectly spherical, felt like it had a size, felt extremely solid — in short, that this collective effect would feel like a very simple, very familiar physical object? I strongly doubt it. And thus there is something to be gained by not rejecting the term “marble”, even if there is no real marble in the box. There is something that feels remarkably like a marble, and that fact is crucial to my portraying and to your grasping of the situation, just as the concepts of “corridor”, “galaxy”, and “black hole” were crucial in allowing me to perceive and describe the phenomena on the screen of the self-watching television — even if, strictly speaking, no corridor, no galaxy, and no black hole were there to be seen.

Where the Buck Seems to Stop

I have recounted the story of the half-real, half-unreal marble inside the box of envelopes to suggest a metaphor for the type of reality that applies to our undeniable feeling that something “solid” or “real” resides at the core of ourselves, a powerful feeling that makes the pronoun “I” indispensable and central to our existence. The thesis of this book is that in a nonembryonic, non-infantile human brain, there is a special type of abstract structure or pattern that plays the same role as does that precise alignment of layers of paper and glue — an abstract pattern that gives rise to what feels like a self. I intend to talk a great deal about the nature of that abstract pattern, but before I do so, I have to say what I mean by the term “a self ”, or perhaps more specifically, why we seem to need a notion of that sort.

Each living being, no matter how simple, has a set of innate goals embedded in it, thanks to the feedback loops that evolved over time and that characterize its species. These feedback loops are the familiar, almost clichéd activities of life, such as seeking certain types of food, seeking a certain temperature range, seeking a mate, and so forth. Some creatures additionally develop their own individual goals, such as playing certain pieces of music or visiting certain museums or owning certain types of cars. Whatever a creature’s goals are, we are used to saying that it pursues those goals, and — at least if it is sufficiently complicated or sophisticated — we often add that it does so because it wants certain things.

“Why did you ride your bike to that building?” “I wanted to practice the piano.” “And why did you want to practice the piano?” “Because I want to learn that piece by Bach.” “And why do you want to learn that piece?” “I don’t know, I just do — it’s beautiful.” “But what is it about this particular piece that is so beautiful?” “I can’t say, exactly — it just hits me in some special way.”

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”.

The Prime Mover, Redux

Late one autumn afternoon, the red, orange, and yellow leaves are so alluring, and the fall weather so mild, compared to the just-finished muggy summer, that I decide to take a good long run. I go into my bedroom, search around for my running shorts and shoes and T-shirt, change my clothes in eagerness, and soon enough, my body finds itself out on the pavement, with my feet pounding the ground and my heart beginning to thump away. Before I know it, I’ve taken a hundred steps, and moments later it’s been three hundred. Then it’s been a thousand, then three thousand, and I’m still charging on, breathing hard, sweating, and thinking to myself, “Why do I always tell myself that I like running? I hate it!” And yet my body doesn’t stop for a split second, and no matter how tired my muscles are, my self just says to them, like a sadistic drill sergeant sneering at a bunch of new recruits, “Don’t be quitters!” — and lo and behold, my poor, huffing, heaving, protesting body unquestioningly obeys my self, even charging up steep hills against its will. In shorts, my rebelling physical body is being quite mercilessly pushed around by my intangible I’s equally intangible determination to take this autumn run.

So who is pushing whom around here? Where are the particles of physics in this picture of what makes us do things? They are invisible, and even if you remember that they exist, they seem to be just secondary players. It is this “I”, a coherent collection of desires and beliefs, that sets everything in motion. It is this “I” that is the prime mover, the mysterious entity that lies behind, and that launches, all the creature’s behaviors. If I want something to happen, I just will it to happen, and unless it is out of my control, it generally does happen. The body’s molecules, whether in the fingers, the arm, the legs, the throat, the tongue, or wherever, obediently follow the supreme bidding of the Grand “I” on high.

Thus it is that I push various pedals down and sure enough, my one-ton automobile obediently goes right where I want it to go. The ethereal “I” has pushed this huge physical object around. I twiddle my chopsticks and sure enough, the string beans obediently jump on board and I receive the sensory joy that I covet and the nourishment I need. I push certain keys on my Macintosh’s keyboard and sure enough, sentences obediently emerge on its screen, and they pretty much express the thoughts that the ethereal “I” hoped to express. And in all of this, where are the particles? Nowhere to be seen. All there seems to be is this “I” making it all happen.

Well then, if this “I” thing is causing everything that a creature does, if this “I” thing is responsible for the creature’s decisions and plans and actions and movements, then surely this “I” thing must at least exist. How could it be so all-powerful and yet not exist?

God’s Eye versus the Careenium’s Eye

I’d like to return, at this point, to the image of the careenium. At the heart of my discussion of the tiny zipping simms and the far larger, more sluggish simmballs in the careenium was the fact that this system can be seen on two very distant levels, yielding widely discrepant interpretations.

From the higher-level “thinkodynamics” viewpoint, there is symbolic activity in which simmballs interact with each other, taking advantage of the “heat energy” provided by the churning soup of invisible simms. From this viewpoint, what causes any simmballic event we see is a set of other simmballic events, even if the details of the causation are often tricky or too blurry to pin down precisely. (We are very familiar with this type of blurriness of causality in daily life — for instance, if I just barely miss a free throw in basketball, we know that it was my fault and that I did something a bit wrong, but we don’t know exactly what it was. If I throw a die and it comes up ‘6’, we aren’t in the least surprised, but we still don’t know why it came up ‘6’ — nor do we give the question the least thought.)