Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

By focusing on the medium rather than the message, the pottery rather than the pattern, the typeface rather than the tale, philosophers who claim that something ineffable about carbon’s chemistry is indispensable for consciousness miss the boat. As Daniel Dennett once wittily remarked in a rejoinder to John Searle’s tiresome “right-stuff” refrain, “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion.” (This was a somewhat subtle hat-tip to the title of a somewhat unsubtle, clearly erotic song written in 1951 by Lois Mann and Henry Glover, made famous many years later by singer Maria Muldaur.) And for my money, the magic that happens in the meat of brains makes sense only if you know how to look at the motions that inhabit them.

The Stately Dance of the Symbols

Brains take on a radically different cast if, instead of focusing on their squirting chemicals, you make a level-shift upwards, leaving that low level far behind. To allow us to speak easily of such upward jumps was the reason I dreamt up the allegory of the careenium, and so let me once again remind you of its key imagery. By zooming out from the level of crazily careening simms and by looking instead at the system on a speeded-up time scale whereby the simms’ locally chaotic churning becomes merely a foggy blur, one starts to see other entities coming into focus, entities that formerly were utterly invisible. And at that level, mirabile dictu, meaning emerges.

Simmballs filled with meaning are now seen to be doing a stately dance in a blurry soup that they don’t suspect for a split second consists of small interacting magnetic marbles called “simms”. And the reason I say the simmballs are “filled with meaning” is not, of course, that they are oozing some mystical kind of sticky semantic juice called “meaning” (even though certain meat-infatuated philosophers might go for that idea), but because their stately dance is deeply in synch with events in the world around them.

Simmballs are in synch with the outer world in the same way as in La Femme du boulanger, the straying cat Pomponnette’s return was in synch with the return of the straying wife Aurélie: there was a many-faceted alignment of Situation “P” with Situation “A”. However, this alignment of situations at the film’s climax was just a joke concocted by the screenwriter; no viewer of La Femme du boulanger supposes for a moment that the cat’s escapades will continue to parallel the wife’s escapades (or vice versa) for months on end. We know it was just a coincidence, which is why we find it so humorous.

By contrast, a careenium’s dancing simmballs will continue tracking the world, will stay in phase with it, will remain aligned with it. That (by fiat of the author!) is the very nature of a careenium. Simmballs are systematically in phase with things going on in the world just as, in Gödel’s construction, prim numbers are systematically in phase with PM’ s provable formulas. That is the only reason simmballs can be said to have meaning. Meaning, no matter what its substrate might be — Tinkertoys, toilet paper, beer cans, simms, whole numbers, or neurons — is an automatic, unpreventable outcome of reliable, stable alignment; this was the lesson of Chapter 11.

Our own brains are no different from careenia, except, of course, that whereas careenia are just my little fantasy, human brains are not. The symbols in our brains truly do do that voodoo that they do so well, and they do it in the electrochemical soup of neural events. The strange thing, though, is that over the eons that it took for our brains to evolve from the earliest proto-brains, meanings just sneaked ever so quietly into the story, almost unobserved. It’s not as if somebody had devised a grand plan, millions of years in advance, that high-level meaningful structures — physical patterns representing abstract categories — would one day come to inhabit big fancy brains; rather, such patterns (the “symbols” of this book) simply came along as an unplanned by-product of the tremendously effective way that having bigger and bigger brains helped beings to survive better and better in a terribly cutthroat world.

Just as Bertrand Russell was blindsided by the unexpected appearance of high-level Gödelian meanings in the heart of his ultraprotected bastion, Principia Mathematica, so someone who had never conceived of looking at a brain at any level other than that of Hans Moravec’s squirting chemicals would be mightily surprised at the emergence of symbols. Much as Gödel saw the great potential of shifting attention to a wholly different level of PM strings, so I am suggesting (though I’m certainly far from the first) that we have to shift our attention to a far higher level of brain activity in order to find symbols, concepts, meanings, desires, and, ultimately, our selves.

The funny thing is that we humans all are focused on that level without ever having had any choice in the matter. We automatically see our brains’ activity as entirely symbolic. I find something wonderfully strange and upside-down about this, and I’ll now try to show why through an allegory.

In which the Alfbert Visits Austranius

Imagine, if you will, the small, lonely planet of Austranius, whose sole inhabitants are a tribe called the “Klüdgerot”. From time immemorial, the Klüdgerot have lived out their curious lives in a dense jungle of extremely long PM strings, some of which they can safely ingest (strings being their sole source of nutrition) and others of which they must not ingest, lest they be mortally poisoned. Luckily, the resourceful Klüdgerot have found a way to tell apart these opposite sorts of PM strings, for certain strings, when inspected visually, form a message that says, in the lilting Klüdgerotic tongue, “I am edible”, while others form a message in Klüdgerotic that says “I am inedible”. And, quite marvelously, by the Benevolent Grace of Göd, every PM string proclaiming its edibility has turned out to be edible, while every PM string proclaiming its inedibility has turned out to be inedible. Thus have the Klüdgerot thrived for untold öörs on their bountiful planet.

On a fateful döö in the Austranian möönth of Spöö, a strange-looking orange spacecraft swoops down from the distant planet of Ukia and lands exactly at the North Pöö of Austranius. Out steps a hulking whiteheaded alien that announces itself with the words, “I am the Alfbert. Behold.” No sooner has the alien uttered these few words than it trundles off into the Austranian jungle, where it spends not only the rest of Spöö but also all of Blöö, after which it trundles back, slightly bedraggled but otherwise no worse for the wear, to its spacecraft. Bright and early the next döö, the Alfbert solemnly convenes a meeting of all the Klüdgerot on Austranius. As soon as they all have assembled, the Alfbert begins to speak.

“Good döö, virtuous Klüdgerot,” intones the Alfbert. “It is my privilege to report to you that I have made an Austranius-shaking scientific discovery.” The Klüdgerot all sit in respectful if skeptical silence. “Each PM string that grows on this planet,” continues the Alfbert, “turns out to be not merely a long and pretty vine but also, astonishingly enough, a message that can be read and understood. Do not doubt me!” On hearing this non-novelty, many Klüdgerot yawn in unison, and a voice shouts out, “Tell us about it, white head!”, at which scattered chuckles erupt. Encouraged, the Alfbert does just so. “I have made the fantastic discovery that every PM string makes a claim, in my beautiful native tongue of Alfbertic, about certain wondrous entities known as the ‘whole numbers’. Many of you are undoubtedly champing at the bit to have me explain to you, in very simple terms that you can understand, what these so-called ‘whole numbers’ are.”