Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

Similarly, driven by its dreads and dreams, my self-symbol peers with great intensity, though with little confidence, out into the murky fog of my future existence. My vast episodic memory of my past, together with its counterpart pointing blurrily towards what is yet to come (my episodic projectory, I think I’ll call it), and further embellished by a fantastic folio of alternative versions or “subjunctive replays” of countless episodes (“if only X had happened…”; “how lucky that Y never took place…”, “wouldn’t it be great if Z were to occur…” — and why not call this my episodic subjunctory ?), gives rise to the endless hall of mirrors that constitutes my “I”.

I Cannot Live without My Self

Since we perceive not particles interacting but macroscopic patterns in which certain things push other things around with a blurry causality, and since the Grand Pusher in and of our bodies is our “I”, and since our bodies push the rest of the world around, we are left with no choice but to conclude that the “I” is where the causality buck stops. The “I” seems to each of us to be the root of all our actions, all our decisions.

This is only one side of the truth, of course, since it utterly snubs the viewpoint whereby an impersonal physics of micro-entities is what makes the world go round, but it is a surprisingly reliable and totally indispensable distortion. These two properties of the naïve, non-physics viewpoint — its reliability and its indispensability — lock it ever more tightly into our belief systems as we pass from babyhood through childhood to adulthood.

I might add that the “I” of a particle physicist is no less entrenched than is the “I” of a novelist or a shoestore clerk. A profound mastery of all of physics will not in the least undo the decades of brainwashing by culture and language, not to mention the millions of years of human evolution preparing the way. The notion of “I”, since it is an incomparably efficient shorthand, is an indispensable explanatory device, rather than just an optional crutch that can be cheerily jettisoned when one grows sufficiently scientifically sophisticated.

The Slow Buildup of a Self

What would make a human brain a candidate for housing a loop of self-representation? Why would a fly brain or a mosquito brain not be just as valid a candidate? Why, for that matter, not a bacterium, an ovum, a sperm, a virus, a tomato plant, a tomato, or a pencil? The answer should be clear: a human brain is a representational system that knows no bounds in terms of the extensibility or flexibility of its categories. A mosquito brain, by contrast, is a tiny representational system that contains practically no categories at all, never mind being flexible and extensible. Very small representational systems, such as those of bacteria, ova, sperms, plants, thermostats, and so forth, do not enjoy the luxury of self-representation. And a tomato and a pencil are not representational systems at all, so for them, the story ends right there (sorry, little tomato! sorry, little pencil!).

So a human brain is a strong candidate for having the potential of rich perceptual feedback, and thus rich self-representation. But what kinds of perceptual cycles do we get involved in? We begin life with the most elementary sorts of feedback about ourselves, which stimulate us to formulate categories for our most obvious body parts, and building on this basic pedestal, we soon develop a sense for our bodies as flexible physical objects. In the meantime, as we receive rewards for various actions and punishments for others, we begin to develop a more abstract sense of “good” and “bad”, as well as notions of guilt and pride, and our sense of ourselves as abstract entities that have the power to decide to make things happen (such as continuing to run up a steep hill even though our legs are begging us to just walk) begins to take root.

It is crucial to our young lives that we hone our developing self-symbol as precisely as possible. We want (and need) to find out where we belong in all sorts of social hierarchies and classes, and sometimes, even if we don’t want to know these things, we find out anyway. For instance, we are all told, early on, that we are “cute”; in some of us, however, this message is reinforced far more strongly than in others. In this manner, each of us comes to realize that we are “good-looking” or “gullible” or “cheeky” or “shy” or “spoiled” or “funny” or “lazy” or “original”, or whatever. Dozens of such labels and concepts accrete to our growing self-symbols.

As we go through thousands of experiences large and small, our representations of these experiences likewise accrete to our self-symbols. Of course a memory of a visit to the Grand Canyon, say, is attached not only to our self-symbol but to many other symbols in our brains, but our self-symbol is enriched and rendered more complex by this attachment.

Making Tosses, Internalizing Bounces

Constantly, relentlessly, day by day, moment by moment, my self-symbol is being shaped and refined — and in turn, it triggers external actions galore, day after day after day. (Or so the causality appears to it, since it is on this level, not on the micro-level, that it perceives the world.) It sees its chosen actions (kicks, tosses, screams, laughs, jokes, jabs, trips, books, pleas, threats, etc.) making all sorts of entities in its environment react in large or small ways, and it internalizes those effects in terms of its coarse-grained categories (as to their graininess, it has no choice). Through endless random explorations like this, my self-symbol slowly acquires concise and valuable insight into its nature as a chooser and launcher of actions, embedded in a vast and multifarious, partially predictable world.

To be more concrete: I throw a basketball toward a hoop, and thanks to hordes of microscopic events in my arms, my fingers, the ball’s spin, the air, the rim, and so forth, all of which I am unaware of, I either miss or make my hook shot. This tiny probing of the world, repeated hundreds or thousands of times, informs me ever more accurately about my level of skill as a basketball player (and also helps me decide if I like the sport or not). My sense of my skill level is, of course, but a very coarse-grained summary of billions of fine-grained facts about my body and brain.

Similarly, my social actions induce reactions on the part of other sentient beings. Those reactions bounce back to me and I perceive them in terms of my repertoire of symbols, and in this way I indirectly perceive myself through my effect on others. I am building up my sense of who I am in others’ eyes. My self-symbol is coalescing out of an initial void.

Smiling Like Hopalong Cassidy

One morning when I was about six years old, I mustered all my courage, stood up in my first-grade class’s show-and-tell session, and proudly declared, “I can smile just like Hopalong Cassidy!” (I don’t remember how I had convinced myself that I had this grand ability, but I was as sure of it as I was of anything in the world.) I then proceeded to flash this lovingly practiced smile in front of everybody. In my episodic memory lo these many decades later there is a vivid trace of this act of derring-do, but unfortunately I have only the dimmest recollection of how my teacher, Miss McMahon, a very sweet woman whom I adored, and my little classmates reacted, and yet their collective reaction, whatever it was, was surely a formative influence on my early life, and thus on my gradually growing, slowly stabilizing “I”.

What we do — what our “I” tells us to do — has consequences, sometimes positive and sometimes negative, and as the days and years go by, we try to sculpt and mold our “I” in such a way as to stop leading us to negative consequences and to lead us to positive ones. We see if our Hopalong Cassidy smile is a hit or a flop, and only in the former case are we likely to trot it out again. (I haven’t wheeled it out since first grade, to be honest.)