Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

The human condition is thus profoundly analogous to the Klüdgerotic condition: neither species can see or even imagine the lower levels of a reality that is nonetheless central to its existence.

First Key Ingredient of Strangeness

Why does an “I” symbol never develop in a video feedback system, no matter how swirly or intricate or deeply nested are the shapes that appear on its screen? The answer is simple: a video system, no matter how many pixels or colors it has, develops no symbols at all, because a video system does not perceive anything. Nowhere along the cyclic pathway of a video loop are there any symbols to be triggered — no concepts, no categories, no meanings — not a tad more than in the shrill screech of an audio feedback loop. A video feedback system does not attribute to the strange emergent galactic shapes on its screen any kind of causal power to make anything happen. Indeed, it doesn’t attribute anything to anything, because, lacking all symbols, a video system can’t and doesn’t ever think about anything!

What makes a strange loop appear in a brain and not in a video feedback system, then, is an ability — the ability to think — which is, in effect, a one-syllable word standing for the possession of a sufficiently large repertoire of triggerable symbols. Just as the richness of whole numbers gave PM the power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and engulf itself via Gödel’s construction, so our extensible repertoires of symbols give our brains the power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.

Second Key Ingredient of Strangeness

But there is a flip side to all this, a second key ingredient that makes the loop in a human brain qualify as “strange”, makes an “I” come seemingly out of nowhere. This flip side is, ironically, an inability — namely, our Klüdgerotic inability to peer below the level of our symbols. It is our inability to see, feel, or sense in any way the constant, frenetic churning and roiling of micro-stuff, all the unfelt bubbling and boiling that underlies our thinking. This, our innate blindness to the world of the tiny, forces us to hallucinate a profound schism between the goal-lacking material world of balls and sticks and sounds and lights, on the one hand, and a goalpervaded abstract world of hopes and beliefs and joys and fears, on the other, in which radically different sorts of causality seem to reign.

When we symbol-possessing humans watch a video feedback system, we naturally pay attention to the eye-catching shapes on the screen and are seduced into giving them fanciful labels like “helical corridor” or “galaxy”, but still we know that ultimately they consist of nothing but pixels, and that whatever patterns appear before our eyes do so thanks solely to the local logic of pixels. This simple and clear realization strips those fancy fractalic gestalts of any apparent life or autonomy of their own. We are not tempted to attribute desires or hopes, let alone consciousness, to the screen’s swirly shapes — no more than we are tempted to perceive fluffy cotton-balls in the sky as renditions of an artist’s profile or the stoning of a martyr.

And yet when it comes to perceiving ourselves, we tell a different story. Things are far murkier when we speak of ourselves than when we speak of video feedback, because we have no direct access to any analogue, inside our brains, to pixels and their local logic. Intellectually knowing that our brains are dense networks of neurons doesn’t make us familiar with our brains at that level, no more than knowing that French poems are made of letters of the roman alphabet makes us experts on French poetry. We are creatures that congenitally cannot focus on the micromachinery that makes our minds tick — and unfortunately, we cannot just saunter down to the corner drugstore and pick up a cheap pair of glasses to remedy the defect.

One might suspect neuroscientists, as opposed to lay people, to be so familiar with the low-level hardware of the brain that they have come to understand just how to think about such mysteries as consciousness and free will. And yet often it turns out to be quite the opposite: many neuroscientists’ great familiarity with the low-level aspects of the brain makes them skeptical that consciousness and free will could ever be explained in physical terms at all. So baffled are they by what strikes them as an unbridgeable chasm between mind and matter that they abandon all efforts to see how consciousness and selves could come out of physical processes, and instead they throw in the towel and become dualists. It’s a shame to see scientists punt in this fashion, but it happens all too often. The moral of the story is that being a professional neuroscientist is not by any means synonymous with understanding the brain deeply — no more than being a professional physicist is synonymous with understanding hurricanes deeply. Indeed, sometimes being mired down in gobs of detailed knowledge is the exact thing that blocks deep understanding.

Our innate human inability to peer below a certain level inside our cranium makes our inner analogue to the swirling galaxy on a TV screen — the vast swirling galaxy of “I”-ness — strike us as an undeniable locus of causality, rather than a mere passive epiphenomenon coming out of lower levels (such as a video-feedback galaxy). So taken in are we by the perceived hard sphericity of that “marble” in our minds that we attribute to it a reality as great as that of anything we know. And because of the locking-in of the “I”-symbol that inevitably takes place over years and years in the feedback loop of human self-perception, causality gets turned around and “I” seems to be in the driver’s seat.

In summary, the combination of these two ingredients — one an ability and the other an inability — gives rise to the strange loop of selfhood, a trap into which we humans all fall, every last one of us, willy-nilly. Although it begins as innocently as a humble toilet’s float-ball mechanism or an audio or video feedback loop, where no counterintuitive type of causality is posited anywhere, human self-perception inevitably ends up positing an emergent entity that exerts an upside-down causality on the world, leading to the intense reinforcement of and the final, invincible, immutable locking-in of this belief. The end result is often the vehement denial of the possibility of any alternative point of view at all.

Sperry Redux

I just said that we all fall into this “trap”, but I don’t really see things so negatively. Such a “trap” is not harmful if taken with a grain of salt; rather, it is something to rejoice in and cherish, for it is what makes us human. Permit me once more to quote the eloquent words of Roger Sperry:

In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell.

When you come down to it, all that Sperry has done here is to go out on a limb and dare to assert, in a serious scientific publication, the ho-hum, run-of-the-mill, commonsensical belief held by the random person on the street that there is a genuine reality ( i.e., causal potency) of the thing we call “I”. In the scientific world, such an assertion runs a great risk of being looked upon with skepticism, because it sounds superficially as if it reeks of Cartesian dualism (wonderfully mystical-sounding terms such as élan vital, “life force”, “spirit of the hive”, “entelechy”, and “holons” occasionally spring into my mind when I read this passage).