Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

Because of our relatively huge size, most of us never see or deal directly with electrons or the laws of electromagnetism. Our perceptions and actions focus on far larger, vaguer things, and our deepest beliefs, far from being in electrons, are in the many macroscopic items that we are continually assigning to our high-frequency and low-frequency mental categories (such as “fast food” and “doggie bags” on the one hand, and “feet of clay” and “customer service departments” on the other), and also in the perceived causality, however blurry and unreliable it may be, that seems to hold among these large and vague items.

Our keenest insights into causality in the often terribly confusing world of living beings invariably result from well-honed acts of categorization at a macroscopic level. For example, the reasons for a mysterious war taking place in some remote land might suddenly leap into sharp focus for us when an insightful commentator links the war’s origin to an ancient conflict between certain religious dogmas. On the other hand, no enlightenment whatsoever would come if a physicist tried to explain the war by saying it came about thanks to trillions upon trillions of momentum-conserving collisions taking place among ephemeral quantum-mechanical specks.

I could go on and say similar things about how we always perceive love affairs and other grand themes of human life in terms of intangible everyday patterns belonging to the large-scale world, and never in terms of the interactions of elementary particles. In contrast to declaring that quantum electrodynamics is “what makes the world go round”, I could instead cite such eternally elusive mysteries as beauty, generosity, sexuality, insecurity, fidelity, jealousy, loneliness, and on and on, making sure not to leave out that wonderful tingling of two souls that we curiously call “chemistry”, and that the French, even more curiously, describe as avoir des atomes crochus, which means having atoms that are hooked together.

Making such a list, though fun, would be a simple exercise and would tell you nothing new. The key point, though, is that we perceive essentially everything in life at this level, and essentially nothing at the level of the invisible components that, intellectually, we know we are made out of. There are, I concede, a few exceptions, such as our modern keen awareness of the microscopic causes of disease, and also our interest in the tiny sperm–egg events that give rise to a new life, and the common knowledge of the role of microscopic factors in the determination of the sex of a child — but these are highly exceptional. The general rule is that we swim in the world of everyday concepts, and it is they, not micro-events, that define our reality.

Am I a Strange Marble?

The foregoing means that we can best understand our own actions just as we best understand other creatures’ actions — in terms of stable but intangible internal patterns called “hopes” and “beliefs” and so on. But the need for self-understanding goes much further than that. We are powerfully driven to create a term that summarizes the presumed unity, internal coherence, and temporal stability of all the hopes and beliefs and desires that are found inside our own cranium — and that term, as we all learn very early on, is “I”. And pretty soon this high abstraction behind the scenes comes to feel like the maximally real entity in the universe.

Just as we are convinced that ideas and emotions, rather than particles, cause wars and love affairs, so we are convinced that our “I” causes our own actions. The Grand Pusher in and of our bodies is our “I”, that marvelous marble whose roundness, solidity, and size we so unmistakably feel inside the murky box of our manifold hopes and desires.

Of course I am alluding here to “Epi” — the nonexistent marble in the box of envelopes. But the “I” illusion is far subtler and more recalcitrant than the illusion of a marble created by many aligned layers of paper and glue. Where does the tenaciousness of this illusion come from? Why does it refuse to go away no matter how much “hard science” is thrown at it? To try to answer questions of this sort, I shall now focus on the strange loop that makes an “I” — where it is found, and how it arises and stabilizes.

A Pearl Necklace I Am Not

To begin with, for each of us, the strange loop of our unique “I”-ness resides inside our own brain. There is thus one such loop lurking inside the cranium of each normal human being. Actually, I take that back, since, in Chapter 15, I will raise this number rather drastically. Nonetheless, saying that there is just one is a good approximation to start with.

When I refer to “a strange loop inside a brain”, do I have in mind a physical structure — some kind of palpable closed curve, perhaps a circuit made out of many neurons strung end-to-end? Could this neural loop be neatly excised in a brain operation and laid out on a table, like a delicate pearl necklace, for all to see? And would the person whose brain had thus been “delooped” thereby become an unconscious zombie?

Needless to say, that’s hardly what I have in mind. The strange loop making up an “I” is no more a pinpointable, extractable physical object than an audio feedback loop is a tangible object possessing a mass and a diameter. Such a loop may exist “inside” an auditorium, but the fact that it is physically localized doesn’t mean that one can pick it up and heft it, let alone measure such things as its temperature and thickness! An “I” loop, like an audio feedback loop, is an abstraction — but an abstraction that seems immensely real, almost physically palpable, to beings like us, beings that have high readings on the hunekometer.

I Am My Brain’s Most Complex Symbol

Like a careenium (and also like PM ), a brain can be seen on at (at least) two levels — a low level involving very small physical processes (perhaps involving particles, perhaps involving neurons — take your pick), and a high level involving large structures selectively triggerable by perception, which in this book I have called symbols, and which are the structures in our brain that constitute our categories.

Among the untold thousands of symbols in the repertoire of a normal human being, there are some that are far more frequent and dominant than others, and one of them is given, somewhat arbitrarily, the name “I” (at least in English). When we talk about other people, we talk about them in terms of such things as their ambitions and habits and likes and dislikes, and we accordingly need to formulate for each of them the analogue of an “I”, residing, naturally, inside their cranium, not our own. This counterpart of our own “I” of course receives various labels, depending on the context, such as “Danny” or “Monica” or “you” or “he” or “she”.

The process of perceiving one’s self interacting with the rest of the universe (comprised mostly, of course, of one’s family and friends and favorite pieces of music and favorite books and movies and so on) goes on for a lifetime. Accordingly, the “I” symbol, like all symbols in our brain, starts out pretty small and simple, but it grows and grows and grows, eventually becoming the most important abstract structure residing in our brains. But where is it in our brains? It is not in some small localized spot; it is spread out all over, because it has to include so much about so much.

Internalizing Our Weres, Our Wills, and Our Woulds

My self-symbol, unlike that of my dog, reaches back fairly accurately, though quite spottily, into the deep (and seemingly endless) past of my existence. It is our unlimitedly extensible human category system that underwrites this fantastic jump in sophistication from other animals to us, in that it allows each of us to build up our episodic memory — the gigantic warehouse of our recollections of events, minor and major, simple and complex, that have happened to us (and to our friends and family members and people in books and films and newspaper articles and so forth, ad infinitum ) over a span of decades.