Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

This talk of someone “being” someone else reminds me of a Linguistics Department Christmas party back in the late 1970’s, when Carol’s and my old friend Tom Ernst did a marvelous imitation of his professor John Goldsmith (also a friend), with so many echt mannerisms of John’s. It was uncanny to me to watch Tom “put on” and “take off” John’s style — and in so doing, putting John on and making a fine take-off of him.

There are shallower aspects of a person and there are deeper aspects, and the deeper aspects are what imbue the shallower ones with genuine meaning. I guess that sounds cryptic. What I mean is that if I believe statement X (for example, “Chopin is a great composer”) and someone else also believes X, then, despite this ostensible agreement between us, our internal feelings when we think X may be unutterably different even though, on the superficial verbal level, our belief is “the same”. On the other hand, if our souls have a deep resemblance, then our two beliefs in X will in fact be very similar, and we will intuitively resonate with each other. Communication (at least on that topic) will be nearly effortless.

What really matters for mutual understanding of two people are such things as having similar responses to music (not just shared likes but also shared dislikes), having similar responses to people (again, I mean both likes and dislikes), having similar degrees of empathy, honesty, patience, sentimentality, audacity, ambition, competitiveness, and so on. These central building blocks of personality, character, and temperament are decisive in mutual understanding.

Consider, for instance, the shattering experience of constantly feeling inferior to other people. Some people know this intimately, and some don’t know it at all. A person with huge reserves of self-confidence will simply never be able to feel how it is to be paralyzed by the lack of confidence — they “just don’t get it”. It is these sorts of aspects, these innermost aspects of a soul (as opposed to such relatively objective and transferable items as countries visited, novels read, cuisines mastered, historical facts known, and so forth) that make for soul-uniqueness.

I’m concerned with whether the deeper aspects of a person, the ones that give rise to a self, to an “I”, are transportable to another person, or absorbable by another person ( i.e., by the second person’s brain). The second person doesn’t have to change their own personality or opinions in order to absorb the first person; it can be more like an alter ego that, like an article of clothing or a persona or a stage role, they can occasionally don or slip into (my image is that of Tom Ernst putting on and taking off that John Goldsmith persona, although of course on a much more profound level), a sort of a “second vantage point” from which to see the world.

But the key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you ever have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth, because they (or at least a significant fraction of them) are still instantiated in your brain, because they still live on in a “second neural home”?

In my opinion, to deal with this question head-on, one really has to focus on this thing I call the “Gödelian swirl of self”. The key question becomes this: When the pointers to “self” — the structures that, through a lifetime of locking-in and self-stabilizing, have given rise to an “I” — are copied in some imperfect, low-resolution fashion in a secondary brain, where exactly do they wind up pointing?

My internal model of Carol is certainly “thin” or sparse in comparison to the original self-model (the one that was located inside her own brain), but that sparseness is not the key issue. The crux is this: even if my internal model of Carol were unbelievably rich ( e.g., like my Mom’s model of my Dad, say, or even ten times stronger than that), would it nonetheless be the wrong kind of structure to give rise to an “I”? Would it be something other than a strange loop? Would it be a structure pointing not at itself but at something else, and therefore be lacking that essentially swirly, vorticial, self-referential quality that makes an “I”?

My guess is that if the model were extremely rich, extremely faithful, then effectively the destinations of all the pointers in it would be fluid — in other words, the pointers inside my model of Carol would be able to slip, to point just as validly to the symbol for her in my brain as to her own self-symbol. If so, then the original swirliness, the original “I”-ness of the structure, would have been successfully transported to a second medium and reconstructed faithfully (though far more coarse-grainedly) in it.

The “outer” layers of the self consist in lots of pointers that point mostly at standard universal aspects of the world ( e.g., rain, ice cream, the swooping of swallows, etc., etc.); the “middle” layers of the self consist in pointers to things more tied in with one’s own life ( e.g., one’s parents’ faces and voices, the music one loves, the street one grew up on, one’s beloved pets from childhood, one’s favorite books and movies, and many other deep things); then the inner sanctum has tons of tangly pointers to very deeply “indexical” things, such as one’s insecurities, one’s sexual feelings, one’s most intense fears, one’s deepest loves, and lots of other things that I cannot put my finger on). All this is very vague, and only meant to suggest a kind of imagery wherein the outermost layers have mostly outwards-pointing arrows, the middle layers have a mixture of inwards and outwards arrows, and then the innermost core has tons of arrows that point right back in towards itself. Strange-Loop City — that’s an “I” for you!

It’s that deeply twisted-back-on-itself quality of the innermost core that, I surmise, makes it so hard to transport elsewhere, that makes the soul so deeply, almost irrevocably, attached to one single body, one single brain. The outer layers are relatively easy to transport, of course, with their relative paucity of inwards-pointing pointers, and the middle layers are medium easy to transport. Someone as close to Carol as I was can get lots of the outer layers and something of the middle layers and little bits of the inner core, but can one ever internalize enough of that core to say that, even in a very diluted sense, “she’s still here among us”?

Perhaps I’m exaggerating the difficulty of transport. In some sense, all Gödelian loops-of-self ( i.e., strange loops that give rise to an “I”) are isomorphic at the most coarse-grained level, and therefore in lowest approximation they may not be hard to transport at all; what makes them different from each other is only their “flavorings”, consisting of memories, and, of course, genetic preferences and talents, and so forth. So, to the extent that we can be chameleons and can import the “spices” of other people’s life histories (the spices that imbue their self-loops with unique individuality), we are capable of seeing the world through their eyes. Their psychic point of view is transportable and modular — not trapped inside just one perishable piece of hardware.