Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

To put it bluntly, since its future symbolic machinery is 99 percent missing, a human neonate, devastatingly cute though it might be, simply has no “I” — or, to be more generous, if it does possess some minimal dollop of “I”-ness, perhaps it is one huneker’s worth or thereabouts — and that’s not much to write home about. So we see that a human head can contain less than one strange loop. What about more than one?

Entwined Feedback Loops

To explore in a concrete fashion the idea of two strange loops coexisting in one head, let’s start with a mild variation on our old TV metaphor. Suppose two video cameras and two televisions are set up so that camera A feeds screen A and, far away from it, camera B feeds screen B. Suppose moreover that at all times, camera A picks up all of what is on screen A (plus some nearby stuff, to give the A-loop “content”) and cycles it back onto A, and analogously, camera B picks up all of what is on screen B (plus some external content) and cycles it back onto B. Now since systems A and B are, by stipulation, far apart from each other, it is intuitively clear that A and B constitute separate, disjoint feedback loops. If the local scenes picked up by cameras A and B are different, then screens A and B will have clearly distinguishable patterns on them, so the two systems’ “identities” will be easily told apart. So far, what this metaphor gives us is old hat (in fact, it’s two old hats) — two different heads, each having one loop inside it.

What will happen, however, when systems A and B are gradually brought close enough together to begin interacting with each other? Camera A will then see not only screen A but also screen B, and so loop B will enter into the content of loop A (and vice versa).

Let’s assume, as would seem natural, that camera A is closer to screen A than it is to screen B (and vice versa). Then loop A will take up more space on screen A than does loop B, meaning more pixels, and so loop A will be reproduced with higher fidelity on screen A. Loop A will be large and fine-grained, loop B will be small and coarse-grained. But that’s only on screen A. On screen B, everything is reversed: loop B will be larger and finer-grained, while loop A will be smaller and of coarser grain. The last thing I want to remind you of before we go on to a new paragraph is that now loop A, although it’s still called just “A”, nonetheless involves loop B as well (and vice versa); each of these two loops now plays a role in defining the other one, though loop A plays a larger role in its own definition than does loop B (and vice versa).

We now have a metaphor for two individuals, A and B, each of whom has their own personal identity ( i.e., their own private strange loop) — and yet part of that private identity is made out of, and is thus dependent upon, the private identity of the other individual. Furthermore, the more faithful the image of each screen on the other one, the more the “private” identities of the two loops are intertwined, and the more they start to be fused, blurred, and even, to coin a word, undisentanglable from each other.

At this point, even though we are being guided solely by a very curious technological metaphor, I believe we are drawing slowly closer to an understanding of what genuine human identity is all about. In fact, how could anyone imagine that it would be possible to gain deep insight into the mystery of human identity without eventually running up against some sort of unfamiliar abstract structures? Sigmund Freud posited egos, ids, and superegos, and there may well exist some such abstractions inside the architecture of a human soul (perhaps not exactly those three, but patterns of that ilk). We humans are so different from other natural phenomena, even from most other types of living beings, that we should expect that in order to get a glimpse into what we truly are, we would have to look in very unexpected places. Although my strange loops are obviously very different from Freud’s notions, there is a certain similarity of spirit. Both views of what a self is involve abstract patterns that are extremely remote from the biological substrate they inhabit — so remote, in fact, that the specifics of the substrate would seem mostly irrelevant.

One Privileged Loop inside our Skull

Suppose some future television technology managed to eliminate the graininess of cameras and screens, so that all images were flawless at all scales. Such a fanciful scenario would then invalidate the argument, given above, that A’s representation of B’s loop, since it uses fewer pixels, is less faithful than that of its own loop. Now A has a perfect representation of B’s loop on its screen, and vice versa. So what makes A different from B? Perhaps they are now indistinguishable?

Well, no. There is still a fundamental difference between A and B, even though each represents the other perfectly. The difference is that camera A is feeding its image directly to screen A (and not screen B), while camera B is directly feeding screen B (and not screen A). Thus, if camera A tilts or zooms in, then the entire image on screen A follows suit and also tilts or grows larger, whereas the image on screen B stays put. (To be sure, the nested image of screen A on screen B will tilt or grow, all the way down the line of ever-more-nested images — but the orientation and size of the top-level screen in system B will remain unchanged, while those of the top-level screen in system A will be directly affected by what camera A does.)

The point of this variation was to make clear that distinct identities still exist even in a situation with profoundly intertwined loops, because the perceptual hardware of a given system directly feeds only that system. It may have indirect effects on all sorts of other systems, and those effects may even be very important, but any perceptual hardware is associated first and foremost with the system into which it feeds directly (or with which it is “hard-wired”, in today’s blur of computational and neurological jargon).

Put less metaphorically, my sense organs feed my brain directly. They also feed the brains of my children and my friends and other people (my readers, for instance), but they do so indirectly — usually through the intermediary channel of language (though sometimes by photography, art, or music). I tell my kids some droll story of what happened at the grocery store checkout stand, and by George, they instantly see it all oh-so-clearly in their mind’s eyes! The customer with the black-and-white tabloid Weekly World News in his cart, the odd look of the cashier as she picks it up and reads the headline about the baby found, perfectly healthy, floating in a life raft from the Titanic, the embarrassed chuckle of the customer, the quip by the next person in line, and so on. The imagery thus created in the brains of my kids, my friends, and others may seem at times to have a vividness rivaling that of images coming directly through their own sense organs.

Our ability to experience life vicariously in this manner is a truly wonderful aspect of human communication, but of course most of anyone’s perceptual input comes from their own perceptual hardware, and only a smaller part comes filtered this way through other beings. That, to put it bluntly, is why I remain primarily myself, and why you remain primarily yourself. If, however, my perceptions came flooding as fast and furiously into your brain as they do into mine, then we’d be talking a truly different ballgame. But at least for the time being, there’s no danger of such high communication rates between, say, my eyes and your brain.

Shared Perception, Shared Control