Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

When we’re a little older, we watch as our puns fall flat or evoke admiring laughter, and according to the results we either modify our punmaking style or learn to censor ourselves more strictly, or perhaps both. We also try out various styles of dress and learn to read between the lines of other people’s reactions as to whether something looks good on us or not. When we are rebuked for telling small lies, either we decide to stop lying or else we learn to make our lies subtler, and we incorporate our new knowledge about our degree of honesty into our self-symbol. What goes for lies also goes for bragging, obviously. Most of us work on adapting our use of language to various social norms, sometimes more deliberately and sometimes less so. The levels of complexity are endless.

The Lies in our I’s

For over a century, clinical psychologists have tried to understand the nature of this strange hidden structure tightly locked in at the deepest core of each one of us, and some have written very insightfully about it. A few decades ago, I read a couple of books by psychoanalyst Karen Horney, and they left a lasting impression on me. In her book Our Inner Conflicts, for instance, Horney spoke of the “idealized image” one forms of oneself. Although her primary focus was how we suffer from our neuroses, what she said had much wider applicability.

…It [the idealized image] represents a kind of artistic creation in which opposites appear reconciled…

The idealized image might be called a fictitious or illusory self, but that would be only a half truth and hence misleading. The wishful thinking operating in its creation is certainly striking, particularly since it occurs in persons who otherwise stand on a ground of firm reality. But this does not make it wholly fictitious. It is an imaginative creation interwoven with and determined by very realistic factors. It usually contains traces of the person’s genuine ideals. While the grandiose achievements are illusory, the potentialities underlying them are often real. More relevant, it is born of very real inner necessities, it fulfills very real functions, and it has a very real influence on its creator. The processes operating in its creation are determined by such definite laws that a knowledge of its specific features permits us to make accurate inferences as to the true character structure of the particular person.

Horney is obviously not speaking of one’s awareness of one’s most superficial perceptual features such as height or hair color, or of one’s knowledge of slight abstractions such as what kind of job one has and whether one enjoys it, but rather of the (inevitably somewhat distorted) image that one forms, over a lifetime, of one’s own deepest character traits, of one’s level in all sorts of blurry social hierarchies, of one’s greatest accomplishments and failures, of one’s fulfilled and unfulfilled yearnings, and on and on. Her stress in the book is on those aspects of this image that are illusory and thus tend to be harmful, but the full structure in which such neurotic distortions reside is much larger. This structure is what I have here called the “self-symbol”, or simply the “I”.

Horney’s earlier book Self-Analysis is devoted to the complex challenge whereby one tries to change one’s own neurotic tendencies, and it inevitably centers on the rather paradoxical idea of the self reaching in and attempting deliberately to effect deep changes in itself. This is not the place to delve into such intricate issues, but I mention them briefly because doing so may help to remind readers of the immense psychological complexity that lies at the core of all human existence.

The Locking-in of the “I” Loop

Let me now summarize the foregoing in slightly more abstract terms. The vast amounts of stuff that we call “I” collectively give rise, at some particular moment, to some external action, much as a stone tossed into a pond gives rise to expanding rings of ripples. Soon, our action’s myriad consequences start bouncing back at us, like the first ripples returning after bouncing off the pond’s banks. What we receive back affords us the chance to perceive what our gradually metamorphosing “I” has wrought. Millions of tiny reflected signals impinge on us from outside, whether visually, sonically, tactilely, or whatever, and when they land, they trigger internal waves of secondary and tertiary signals inside our brain. Finally this flurry of signals is funneled down into just a handful of activated symbols — a tiny set of extremely well-chosen categories constituting a coarse-grained understanding of what we’ve just done (for example, “Shoot — missed my hook shot by a hair!”, or perhaps, “Wow, my new hair-do hooked him!”).

And thus the current “I” — the most up-to-date set of recollections and aspirations and passions and confusions — by tampering with the vast, unpredictable world of objects and other people, has sparked some rapid feedback, which, once absorbed in the form of symbol activations, gives rise to an infinitesimally modified “I”; thus round and round it goes, moment after moment, day after day, year after year. In this fashion, via the loop of symbols sparking actions and repercussions triggering symbols, the abstract structure serving us as our innermost essence evolves slowly but surely, and in so doing it locks itself ever more rigidly into our mind. Indeed, as the years pass, the “I” converges and stabilizes itself just as inevitably as the screech of an audio feedback loop inevitably zeroes in and stabilizes itself at the system’s natural resonance frequency.

I Am Not a Video Feedback Loop

It’s analogy time again! I’d like once more to invoke the world of video feedback loops, for much of this has its counterpart in that far simpler domain. An event takes place in front of the camera and thus is sent onto the screen, but in simplified form, since continuous shapes (shapes with very fine grain) have been rendered on a grid made of discrete pixels (a coarse-grained medium). The new screen is then taken in by the camera and fed back in, and around and around it goes. The upshot of all this is that a single easily perceivable gestalt shape — some kind of stable but one-of-a-kind, never-seen-before whorl — appears on the screen.

Thus it is with the strange loop making up a human “I”, but there is a key difference. In the TV setup, as we earlier observed, no perception takes place at any stage inside the loop — just the transmission and reception of bare pixels. The TV loop is not a strange loop — it is just a feedback loop.

In any strange loop that gives rise to human selfhood, by contrast, the level-shifting acts of perception, abstraction, and categorization are central, indispensable elements. It is the upward leap from raw stimuli to symbols that imbues the loop with “strangeness”. The overall gestalt “shape” of one’s self — the “stable whorl”, so to speak, of the strange loop constituting one’s “I” — is not picked up by a disinterested, neutral camera, but is perceived in a highly subjective manner through the active processes of categorizing, mental replaying, reflecting, comparing, counterfactualizing, and judging.

I Am Ineradicably Entrenched…

While you were reading my first-grade show-and-tell period Hopalong Cassidy–style smile-attempt bravado anecdote, the question “How come Hofstadter is once again leaving elementary particles out of the picture?” may have flitted through your mind; then again, perhaps it did not. I hope the latter is the case! Indeed, why would such an odd thought occur to any sane human being reading that passage (including the most hard-bitten of particle physicists)? Even the vaguest, most fleeting allusion to particle physics in that context would seem to constitute an absurd non sequitur, for what on earth could gluons and muons and protons and photons, of all things, have to do with a little boy imitating his idol, Hopalong Cassidy?