I Am a Strange Loop

It is curious, how one often mistrusts one’s own opinions if they are stated by someone else.

“Then feeling one is alive is merely an illusion propagated by a reflex that urges one to utter, without understanding, such a sentence, and a truly living creature is reduced to a collection of complex reflexes.”

Like the score to a Chopin etude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.

I don’t want to go on a crusade here, but I do need to talk a little bit about my vegetarian leanings, because they have everything to do with souls.

In my mind, I kept on flipping back and forth between being an upside-down oinking pig on a hook and being Lexington, spilling into the cauldron...

We English speakers do not eat pig or cow; we eat pork and beef. We do eat chicken — but we don’t eat chickens.

Who was that animal? I wasn’t wondering about its name, because I knew that farm animals didn’t have names; I was grasping at something more philosophical — how it had felt to be that animal as opposed to some other one.

“Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should not attempt it.”

What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)?

I suspect that thanks to this unmistakable image of absolute interchangeability, virtually no viewer feels the slightest twinge of sadness when a bomb falls on the charging platoon and all of its members — these factory-made “creatures” — are instantly blown to smithereens.

“souledness” is by no means an off-on, black-and-white, discrete variable having just two possible states like a bit, a pixel, or a light bulb, but rather is a shaded, blurry numerical variable that ranges continuously across different species and varieties of object.

Writing this chapter thus gave rise to a totally unexpected boomerang effect on its author — and as we shall see in later chapters, such an unpredictable bouncing-back of choices one has just made, followed by the incorporation of their repercussions into one’s self-model, serves as an excellent example of the meaning of the motto “I am a strange loop.”

My point is simple: abstractions are central, whether in the study of literature or in the study of the brain.

The big picture will become clear only when we focus on the brain’s large-scale architecture, rather than doing ever more fine-grained analyses of its building blocks.

How could a metallic beer can possibly experience thirst? And how would its popping up constitute thirst?

To put it very simply, it comes down to the issue of who pushes whom around in the population of causal forces that occupy the cranium. It is a matter, in other words, of straightening out the peck-order hierarchy among intracranial control agents.

Who shoves whom around in the tangled mega­ganglion that is your brain, and who shoves whom around in “this teetering bulb of dread and dream” that is mine?

I also realized that this kind of shift in levels of description yielded something very precious to living beings: comprehensibility.

We necessarily simplify, and indeed, vastly so. But that sacrifice is also our glory.

The second answer bypasses all the physics of gravity and domino chains and makes reference only to concepts that belong to a completely different domain of discourse.

If you’re totally fog-bound like that, or if you’re incredibly myopic, then you might think to yourself, “It’s all my neighbor’s fault!”, and there’s at least a small chance that you’re right.

“Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.”

Those air molecules could have done exactly the same kid-music job in an astronomical number of different but humanly indistinguishable fashions.

Every day of our lives, we all depend in a million tacit ways on innumerable rock-solid predictabilities about how things happen in the visible, tangible world (the solidity of rocks being yet another of those countless rock-solid predictabilities).

These simms bash into each other and also bounce off the walls, careening about rather wildly in their perfectly flat world — and since it is frictionless, they just keep on careening and careening, never stopping.

The key idea is that whereas no simm on its own encodes anything or plays a symbolic role, the simmballs, on their far more macroscopic level, do encode and are symbolic.

There is no comprehensibility left, since everything is shattered into a trillion trillion trillion invisible pieces that are scattered hither and yon. Reductionism is merciless.

In our new way of seeing things, their frenetic careening-about on the table forms nothing but a stationary gray background.

Likewise, any old simm-bashings will do — the “thoughtmill” will churn no matter what, thanks to the symbolic nature of its simmballs.

However, despite appearances, there is no hidden person guiding it — just some simple feedback mechanisms in some circuitry monitoring the objects in the enclosure and controlling the light beam. But the red spot seems for all the world to have a personality, an impish desire to tease people, even a sense of humor!

The question is whether such systems, despite their lack of brains, are nonetheless imbued with goals and desires. Do they have hopes and aspirations?

The little system contains the seeds of its own destruction!

Feedback — making a system turn back or twist back on itself, thus forming some kind of mystically taboo loop — seems to be dangerous, seems to be tempting fate, perhaps even to be intrinsically wrong, whatever that might mean.

What seemed to me most magical, as I read through Nagel and Newman’s compelling booklet, was the way in which mathematics seemed to be doubling back on itself, engulfing itself, twisting itself up inside itself.

The point is that among my earliest memories is a relishing of loopy structures, of self-applied operations, of circularity, of paradoxical acts, of implied infinities. This, for me, was the cat’s meow and the bee’s knees rolled into one.

Categorically banishing all loops of reference struck me as such a paranoid maneuver that I was disappointed for a lifetime with the once-bitten twice-shy mind of Bertrand Russell.

Together in my kids’ old “playroom”, Bill and I spent many delightful hours sailing the same old seas but in a somewhat newer craft, and we wound up with several hundred color snapshots that archived our voyage superbly.

Nevertheless, peering down what looked like a magically endless corridor was much more enticing and provocative than merely peering down a mundanely truncated corridor.

The image itself was moving. Now that may strike you as a fatuous, trivial, or smart-alecky answer, but since the image was of itself (albeit at a slight delay), it is in fact quite to the point.

For instance, when I dangled a chain of beads in front of the screen, what emerged (the choice of verb is not accidental) was a random-looking swirl of pockmarked bluish-white globs that reminded me a bit of some kind of exotic cheese.

It will not go away because it is forever refreshing itself, feeding on itself, giving rebirth to itself.

After all, in the case of a being struggling to survive, the one thing that is always in its environment is... itself. So why, of all things, should the being be perceptually immune to the most salient item in its world?

Its selective neglect would be pathological, and would threaten its survival.

Each of these examples of symbol-triggering constitutes an act of perception, as opposed to the mere reception of a gigantic number of microscopic signals arriving from some source, like a million raindrops landing on a roof.

Who cares if I’m biting a dog, a cat, a mouse, or a human — and who cares if it’s an arm, an ear, a tail, or a leg — as long as I’m drawing blood?

I would be quite happy to compare a mosquito’s inner life to that of a flush toilet or a thermostat, but that’s about as far as I personally would go.

I think you have to judge people’s opinions not by their words, but by their deeds.

If an automaton can drive itself a distance of two hundred miles across a tremendously forbidding desert terrain, how can this feat be called merely a “simulation”? It is certainly as genuine an act of survival in a hostile environment as that of a mosquito flying about a room and avoiding being swatted.

Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right.

The list starts to seem endless, and yet we are merely talking about the internal richness of one extremely ordinary human concept.

That deep and tangled self-model is what “I”-ness is all about.

The things and patterns it perceives are what define its reality — but not all perceived things and patterns are equally real to it.

This hated, rigid “abstraction ceiling” against which I had metaphorically banged my head without any advance warning was a searingly painful, life-changing trauma. And so... how concrete, how genuine, how real a thing was this abstract “abstraction ceiling”?

Surely there should be nothing that is partly real — that wouldn’t make sense! And yet, though we try very hard to force the world to match this ideal black-and-white dichotomy, things unfortunately get terribly blurry.

We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself. The realest things of all are my knee, my nose, my anger, my hunger, my toothache, my sideache, my sadness, my joy, my love for math, my abstraction ceiling, and so forth.

Oddly enough, there was a marble sitting (or floating?) right in the middle of that flimsy little cardboard box!

There was no marble anywhere in there — there was just a statistical epiphenomenon.

“Why do I always tell myself that I like running? I hate it!”

And in all of this, where are the particles? Nowhere to be seen.

What kind of thing, then, is this “I” that the careenium posits as driving its choices and its actions, and that human beings likewise posit as driving theirs? No one will be surprised at this point to hear me assert that it is a peculiar type of abstract, locked-in loop located inside the careenium or the cranium — in fact, a strange loop.

Even so, when I played the “A” role in this lap loop, I felt as if I was sitting, albeit indirectly, on my own lap! This was a most strange sensation.

Strange loops are shy creatures, and they tend to avoid the light of day.

But wait a moment! How many syllables does my italicized phrase contain? Count them

The weakness that I focus in on is the fact that English is a hopelessly imprecise medium for expressing mathematical statements; its words and phrases are far too vague.

It’s already meaningless enough to talk about counting all the “items” in a garbage can, let alone all the languages of all time!

The lad quickly chewed it into the shape of a pistol, then lifted it up, pointed it at her, and shouted, “Bang bang! You’re dead, Mommy!”

What drove all this — my core inner passion — was a burning desire to see unveiled the secrets of human mentation, to come to understand how it could be that trillions of silent, synchronized scintillations taking place every second inside a human skull enable a person to think, to perceive, to remember, to imagine, to create, and to feel.

So please fasten your seat belt, dear reader. We’re going to be experiencing a bit of weather for the next two chapters.

It is mathematicians’ relentless search for why that in the end defines the nature of their discipline.

What often happens is that some kind of unexpected yet intimate connection turns up — some kind of crazy hidden regularity that feels magical, the discovery or the revelation of which may even send mystical frissons up and down one’s spine.

What does a pattern-seeker do at this point — give up? Of course not!

Given this very clear trend, if the primes were to run out all of a sudden, it would almost feel like falling off the edge of the Earth without any warning. It would be a huge shock.

There cannot be a “Great Last Prime in the Sky”; there cannot be a “Finite, Closed Club of All Primes”. These are fictions.

This is a glimpse of pure magic — the kind of magic that mathematicians live for.

Mathematical truth was all coming together so elegantly. And as this Holy Grail was emerging into clear view, a young boy was growing up in the town of Briinn, Austro-Hungary.

One would naturally wonder if more gems might be hidden down there, but how could one ever know?

This is just one more triumph of the Mathematician’s Credo — one more reason to buy a lot of stock in the idea that in mathematics, where there’s a pattern, there's a reason.

The infinite body of theorems of PM is fully determined by the initial seeds and by the typographical “growth rules” that allow one to make new theorems out of old ones.

An inner voice told him that this connection was not just a vague resemblance but could in all likelihood be turned into an absolutely precise correspondence.

But no matter — numbers are just numbers, no matter how big they are. (Luckily for Godel, there are infinitely many primes, since if there had been merely, say, one billion of them, then his method would only have let him encode formulas made of a billion symbols or fewer. Now that would be a crying shame!)

These were simply two different views of what was going on — views that were 100 percent equivalent and interchangeable.

Numerical computation was effectively thumbing its nose at typographical manipulation, sassily saying, “Anything you can do, I can do better!”

If you believed Goru to be reliable and you also believed in the Mathematician’s Credo (Principia Mathematica version), then you could conclude that your little Goru, working all by itself, could answer any number-theoretical question that you were interested in, just like a genie

The prim numbers alone would therefore seem to contain, in a cloaked fashion, all of mathematical knowledge wrapped up inside them!

When you think about it at first, it seems like trying to squeeze an elephant into a matchbox — and in a way, that’s exactly right.

An elephant will not fit inside a matchbox! On the other hand, an elephant’s DNA will easily fit inside a matchbox...

Quine’s Quip turns out to be talking about a phrase that is identical to the Quip itself! It is claiming that something is a full sentence, and when you go about constructing that thing, it turns out to be Quine’s Quip itself.

And yet we still have a self-referential picture, because customers in the grocery store understand that the little box shown on the label is the same as the big box they are holding.

This upstart Austrian sorcerer had surely cast some sort of evil spell, but by what means had he wrought his wretched deed?

Yet we take such throwaway analogies so much for granted that we tend to think that the word “analogy” must denote something far more exalted.

Hinting by analogy allows us to get our message across politely but effectively.

Such boomeranging-back is almost inevitable because romances, even very good ones, are filled with uncertainty and yearning.

A dog gazing vacantly at a television screen, unable to make out any imagery, unaware even that any imagery is intended, is thus not unlike Lord Russell staring blankly at a formula of his beloved system PM and seeing only its “easy” (arithmetical) meaning.

In a certain sad sense, the good Lord never learned to read his own holy books.

“Wherefore the number £ is saucy and not prim!” (It’s a rare audience that fails to gasp in unison when they hear Hyppia’s most math-dramatical outburst.)

And yet, protest though he might, there was nothing at all that Y. Ted Enrustle could do about how audiences were now interpreting his beloved play’s lines, because the two notions — the sauciness of certain integers and the unpennability of certain lines of theatrical dialogue — were now seen by enlightened playgoers as precisely isomorphic phenomena.

Therefore, an unpennable line could indeed be penned —just not by someone who rigorously respected those rules.

Dancing the same dance is the key.

The bottom line, then, is that the unanticipated self-referential twist that Godel found lurking inside Principia Mathematica was a natural and inevitable outcome of the deep representational power of whole numbers.

In a nutshell, we have established two facts: (1) KG is unprovable in PM; and (2) KG is true.

To add insult to injury, Godel’s conclusion sprang not from a weakness in PM but from a strength. What a fantastic irony!

It seems that holes are popping up inside the struggling boat of PM as plentifully as daisies and violets pop up in the springtime.

By contrast, our team of explorers has concluded from some novel property of KJ, without once thinking about (let alone actually trying out) a single one of the infinitely many conceivable routes leading up to its summit, that by its very nature it is unscalable.

Indeed it is. But Kurt Godel’s bombshell, though just as fantastic, was not a fantasy.

It’s a great scenario for solving all problems with just one little gadget, but unfortunately we can now see that it is fatally flawed. Godel revealed to us that there is a profound gulf between truth and provability in PM (indeed, in any formal axiomatic system like PM).

There is thus a curious upside-downness to our normal human way of perceiving the world: we are built to perceive “big stuff” rather than “small stuff”, even though the domain of the tiny seems to be where the actual motors driving reality reside.

And then, miraculously, it turned out that the chemistry of these four molecules was in a certain sense incidental — what mattered most of all when one thought about heredity was their newly revealed informational properties, as opposed to their traditional physico-chemical properties.

If you go the particles route, then you are committed to doing so whole hog, which unfortunately means going way beyond the hog.

And yet, for all its supposed reality, my list is pervaded by vague, blurry, unbelievably elusive abstractions.

We are powerfully driven to create a term that summarizes the presumed unity, internal coherence, and temporal stability of all the hopes and beliefs and desires that are found inside our own cranium — and that term, as we all learn very early on, is “I”. And pretty soon this high abstraction behind the scenes comes to feel like the maximally real entity in the universe.

The strange loop making up an “I” is no more a pinpointable, extractable physical object than an audio feedback loop is a tangible object possessing a mass and a diameter.

My vast episodic memory of my past, together with its counterpart pointing blurrily towards what is yet to come ... gives rise to the endless hall of mirrors that constitutes my “I”.

Constantly, relentlessly, day by day, moment by moment, my self-symbol is being shaped and refined — and in turn, it triggers external actions galore, day after day after day.

The idealized image might be called a fictitious or illusory self, but that would be only a half truth and hence misleading.

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.

By the time this brain had lived in this body for a couple of years or so, the “I” notion was locked into it beyond any conceivable hope of reversal.

Indeed, any oddballs who denied the existence of marbles inside their cardboard boxes would be accused of having lost their marbles. And thus it is with this notion of “I”.

At the present, though, its ability to cross a desert without self-destructing strikes me as comparable to an ant’s following a dense pheromone trail across a vacant lot without perishing.

A human brain is just a big spongy bulb of inanimate molecules tightly wedged inside a rock-hard cranium, and there it simply sits, as inert as a lump on a log. Why should self-reference and a self be lurking in such a peculiar medium any more than they lurk in a lump of granite?

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”.

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.

“Away with the alien! Off with its white head!” screams the infuriated mob, and a moment later, a phalanx of Kliidgerot grabs hold of the declaiming alien.

“Your harvest of PM strings is treacherous! A foolish superstition has tricked you into thinking they are nutritious, but the truth is otherwise.”

Likewise, Godel’s string KG, which we conventionally express in supercondensed form through phrases such as “I am not provable in PM”, would, if written out in pure PM notation, be monstrously long — and yet despite its formidable size, we understand precisely what it says.

The only hope for either the Alfbert or the Kliidgerot is to notice that certain patterns are used over and over again in the sea of symbols, and to give these patterns names, thus compressing the string into something more manageable, and then carrying this process of pattern-finding and compression out at the new, shorter level, and each time compressing further and further and further until finally the whole string collapses down into just one simple idea: “I am not edible” (or, translating out of the allegory, “I am not provable”).

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

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.

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.

When no signal enters a feedback loop, the loop has no perceptible effect; it might as well not even exist.

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.

The more faithful the image of each screen on the other one, the more “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.

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.

Through language, other people’s bodies can become flexible extensions of our own bodies.

Things have parts, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have integrity as wholes!

“Every dividual is indivisible”, runs an ancient Twinwirld saying.

How extremely strange it would be to grow up side by side with sometwo almost identical to twoself!

And if you’re anything like me, neither of your half-brains goes around calling itself “i” and brazenly proclaiming itself an autonomous soul! Rather, the two of them together make just one capital “I”.

Since these twins have seen, heard, touched, smelled, and thought about very much the same events throughout their lives, and started, no doubt, with brains quite similarly disposed to react to these stimuli, it might not take enormous channels of communication to keep them homing in on some sort of loose harmony.

“In this closing aria, ‘I’ would denote the couple itself, not either of its members, and the aria would be thought of as being for the couple’s one new voice rather than for two independent voices.”

Something, some thing, was coming into being that was made out of both of us.

There had been a bright shining soul behind those eyes, and that soul had been suddenly eclipsed. The light had gone out.

One day, as I gazed at a photograph of Carol taken a couple of months before her death, I looked at her face and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes, and all at once, I found myself saying, as tears flowed, “That’s me! That’s me!”

You are now embarked on a desperate lark, which is just what you should be doing right now. And your reflections are the reflections of a person who has encountered, and taken a measure of, the power of life on our sweet Earth.

Thus even a static representation on paper can contain elements of a “living” Carol, of Carol’s consciousness.

For brief periods of time in conversations, or even in nonverbal moments of intense feeling, I was Carol' just as, at times, she was Doug.

So it is with coming to see the world through another person’s soul.

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”?

If this is true, then Carol survives because her point of view survives — or rather, she survives to the extent that her point of view survives — in my brain and those of others.

But as I watch the videos, knowing she is gone, the fraudulency will at once be being revealed and yet be deeply confusing me, because I will be seeming to see her, seeming to have revived her, seeming to have brought her back, just as I do in my dreams.

I did not merely tumble for some kind of path-of-least-resistance belief system that winked at me, but instead I stayed true to my long-term principles, worked out with great care many years earlier.

One single universal machine morphs into new functionalities at the drop of a hat, or, more precisely, at the double-click of a mouse.

All at once, these machines were like music boxes that could read arbitrary paper scrolls with holes in them, and thus could play any tune.

That term tips you off, if you bother to think about it, to the fact that underneath all the colorful pictures, seductive games, and lightning-fast Web searches, there is nothing going on but integer arithmetic. What a hilarious joke!

Once beyond the magic threshold, universal beings seem inevitably to become ravenously thirsty for tastes of the interiority of other universal beings.

You have allowed yourself to be invaded by an “alien universal being”, and to some extent the alien takes charge inside your skull, starts pushing things around in its own fashion, making words, ideas, memories, and associations bubble up inside your brain that ordinarily would not do so.

Listening to it, I feel like a magnetic field bashing headlong into a superconductor — cannot penetrate even one micron!

Everything I do is some kind of modified borrowing from others who have been close to me either actually or virtually, and the virtual influences are among the most profound.

We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck.

Watching the tapes would heighten the anguish of her death, by seeming to bring her back physically but doing nothing of the sort in reality.

To that extent, and only to that extent, Carol would be thinking with my brain, feeling with my heart, living in my soul.

The pattern of organization is what matters, not the substance. It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion!

When the sun is eclipsed, there remains a corona surrounding it, a circumferential glow. When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them.

My soul lives to lesser extents in brains that are not mine.

You feel you have been transported to a place where your body is actually not located, and where your brain is not located either, for that matter.

It was as if my eyes, though in Bloomington, were looking at an Imlac screen in California, thanks to Scott’s eyes and the clarity of his words on the phone.

What one starts to realize, as one explores these disorienting but technologically feasible ideas of virtual presence “elsewhere”, is that as the telepresence technology improves, the “primary” location becomes less and less primary.

Black curlicues on a white background, when suitably arranged, transport us in milliseconds to arbitrarily distant, long-gone, or even never-existent venues and epochs.

To varying degrees, we human beings live inside other human beings already, even in a totally nontechnological world.

But in this chapter I have tried to show that you can indeed be in two places at the same time, and you don’t even notice anything funny going on.

And so, at a distance, at a delay, and to a diminished degree, I am in her skin and she is in mine.

What are you doing but living their life inside your own head?

Each of them is instead spread out into the other one, and each of them lives partially in the other.

It is a “halo” of Chineseness that extends far beyond the physical borders of the land.

Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means.

This dance of symbols in the brain is what consciousness is. (It is also what thinking is.)

These old sagas, long ago wrapped up in nice neat mental packages, had been idly sitting around on the shelves of my brain, waiting to be triggered if and when “the same thing” should ever happen, in new guise.

There is not some special “consciousness locus” where something magic happens, something other than just more of the same, some locus where the dancing symbols make contact with... well, with what?

An “inner light” starts to turn on as we rise in this hierarchy. The light is still incredibly dim even at the list’s end, but if we extend the list further and sweep upwards through the brains of bees, goldfish, bunnies, dogs, and toddlers, it grows far brighter.

To make an “I” you need meanings, and to make meanings you need perception and categories — in fact, a repertoire of categories that keeps on building on itself, growing and growing and growing.

The knotty issue that simply will not go away is: What would make one of those strange loops me? Which one?

A dangling rope doesn’t feel anything when a breeze impinges on it. There’s no feeling in there, there’s no here there.

A piece of music can have great emotional meaning despite being made of tiny atoms of sound that have no emotional meaning. What matters, therefore, is the pattern of organization, not the nature of the constituents.

My inner fire is here, not anywhere else. I want to know what singles out this particular fire from all the others.

But unlike those physical systems, it could perceive and evolve in sophistication, and so, as weeks, months, and years passed, there gradually came to be someone in there.

The “I” — yours, mine, everyone’s — is a tremendously effective illusion, and falling for it has fantastic survival value.

My proposal for a truce to end this batde is to see the “I” as a hallucination perceived by a hallucination, which sounds pretty strange, or perhaps even stranger: the “I” as a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

Sometimes the strict scientific viewpoint is hopelessly useless, even if it’s correct. That’s a dilemma.

We’re stuck at the level of radical simplification, for better or for worse.

It is just one thing described in two phenomenally different ways, and that's just the same as Godel’s sentence.

The sole root of all these strange phenomena is perception, bringing symbols and meanings into physical systems. To perceive is to make a fantastic jump from William James’ “blooming, buzzing confusion” to an abstract, symbolic level.

“Wait a minute,” I reply, “If I’m here I can’t also be on Mars.”

Oh, but what mindless pushovers we are! Whereas we bought right into the “teleportation equals travel” theme of Episode I, falling for it hook, line, and sinker, we seem in Episode II to have unthinkingly taken the path of least resistance.

My jaw fairly dropped. It was exactly the same fantasy, only with planets reversed and sexes reversed, and told in a more American style.

In my strange distorted imagery, that yolk is the secret of human identity — and alas, Parfit’s central mission in his book is to mercilessly crush the whole egg, and with it, the sacred yolk!

To our everyday, downhome, SL #642~style minds, it’s very stark and very simple: one of the Parfits is a fake.

The new view that Parfit proposes is a radical reperception of what it is to be, and in certain ways it is extremely disturbing. In other ways, it is extremely liberating!

At the reflective or intellectual level, I would remain convinced that the Reductionist View is true. But at some lower level I would still be inclined to believe that there must always be a real difference between some future person’s being me, and his being someone else.

A person can be partly Derek Parfit and partly Napoleon Bonaparte, and drifting from the one to the other as the switches are thrown.

These are shades of gray that create a halo of “possible Dougs” around the Doug that I happen to have become, thanks to a million accidental events that have befallen me over the decades.

But knee-jerk reflex or not, the truth of the matter is that there is no thing called “I” — no hard marble, no precious yolk protected by a Cartesian eggshell — there are just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones.

Ultimately, the “I” is a hallucination, and yet, paradoxically, it is the most precious thing we own.

It is very sad, but it is also beautiful. In any case, it is our only consolation.

Machine Q (it stands for “qualia”) is actually feeling something, whereas Machine Z (it rhymes with “dead”) is feeling nothing.

Although physics is identical in Universes Q and Z, there are no feelings anywhere in Universe Z — just empty motions.

The “I” is, when all is said and done, an illusion, a sleight of mind, a trick that a brain plays on itself, a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

But consciousness is not a power moonroof (you can quote me on that).

What is this nutty Capitalized Essence all about? What follows from having this invisible, undetectable aura?

What mechanism in nature makes the elusive elixir of Consciousness glom onto some physical entities and spurn others?

Belief in dualism leads to a hopelessly vast and murky pit of mysteries.

What’s the difference between being alive and living? And more importantly, what merits being sobbed over?

It all comes from the idea that you are supposedly so different from me that there is no way to cross the gap between our interiorities — no way for you to know what I am like inside, or vice versa.

In general, low notes, as they sink ever lower, glide imperceptibly into bodily shakings as opposed to being pitches in a spectrum, whereas high notes, as they grow higher, do not do so.

Maybe experiences that I feel are pleasurable are unpleasurable for you, and vice versa.

I hope that these sound ridiculously incoherent to you, and that you can move step by step backwards from these variations on the inverted-spectrum theme to the original inverted-spectrum riddle without losing the sense of ridiculousness.

And so we move willy-nilly, but not freewilly-nilly, inside the maze. A combination of pressures, some internal and some external, collectively dictates our pathway in this crazy hedge maze called “life”.

Our will, quite the opposite of being free, is steady and stable, like an inner gyroscope, and it is the stability and constancy of our non-free will that makes me me and you you, and that also keeps me me and you you. Free Willie is just another blue humpback.

To put it bluntly, these are people who are not as conscious as normal adults are, which is to say, they have smaller souls.

“Dear God, protect and bless everything that breathes, keep it from all evil, and let it softly sleep.”

For me, though, they were a voice from Heaven. I threw my slingshot down, startling the birds so that they flew off to a spot safe from my companion’s slingshot, and I fled home.

Until her dying day, Little Tyke was a vegetarian lion. Will miracles never cease?

Schweitzer’s playing was humble and simple, and it charmed me that he made mistakes now and then but simply went on unperturbedly.

We act as if we wanted to praise Bach, but in truth we only praise ourselves.

Something felt just right about this fortuitous conjunction.

In short, only when generosity is born is an ego born.

In a nutshell, our quandary is this. Either we believe that our consciousness is something other than an outcome of physical law, or we believe it is an outcome of physical law — but making either choice leads us to disturbing, perhaps even unacceptable, consequences.

I can fall for the alluring imagery, even if I reject the ideas.

They will insist that there has to be a genuine marble of “F’-ness in one of the two bodies and not in the other one, as opposed to an elusive rainbow-like entity that first recedes and then disintegrates entirely as one draws ever closer.

You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception — the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world. When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics and when feedback loops galore come into play, then “which” eventually turns into “who”.

We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

The foregoing esthetic constraints (along with a number of others that I won’t describe here) amount to random darts being thrown at every page in the book, with each dart saying to me, in effect, “Here — don’t you think you could rewrite this sentence so that it not only looks better but also makes its point even more clearly and elegantly?”

So let us imagine our thirst-simulating program running on a computer made entirely of old beer cans, millions (or billions) of old beer cans that are rigged up to levers and powered by windmills.

Principia Mathematica thus points at itself through the proud phrase “the present work” — exactly the kind of self-pointer that, in more formal contexts, its authors were at such pains to forbid categorically.

This is a kind of caricature of my ideas about people “living inside each other”, proposed in Chapters 15 through 18.

And yet, as observed from above by chance voyeurs in the plane, it was a totally silent, surrealistic vision of robots who had gotten one another all excited, and who certainly weren’t about to calm down, as dogs will.

‘“Anything you can do I can do meta’ is one of Doug’s mottoes, and of course he applies it, recursively, to everything he does.”

In fact, I had never said any such thing nor thought any such thought, and Dan was just “going me one meta”, in his own inimitable way.

what appears to be a kind of upside-down causality

“Why, you Indian-dinner givers, you!”

In this image, then (which is close to Daniel Kolak’s view in I Am You), each human soul floats among all human brains, and its identity is determined not by its location but by the undulating global pattern it forms.

To figure out how to give a computer the rudiments of this ability has been the Holy Grail of my research group for three decades now.

Despite our disagreements on qualia, zombies, and consciousness, we remain good friends.

I agree with most of Dan’s arguments in [Dennett 1984], and yet I can’t go along with him that we have free will, of any sort.

“The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity”

“Mystery, Classicism, Elegance: an Endless Chase after Magic”

Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.

“The Beauty of Fractals.”

Thanks to William Frucht for the cover photograph of video feedback and for all the photographs in the color insert in Chapter 4.

“afterglow of a soul”

animacy, found in inanimate substrate

“Anything you can do, I can do meta”

brains: inhabited by more than one “I”, 248, 354

“chemistry” (interpersonal); enabling people to live inside each other

“dance of symbols: as constituting another’s soul, 238; as constituting consciousness, 276, 289, 294, 319”

“dreads and dreams of sunflowers, 53”

“throwing consciousness in as a bonus feature”

souls, as inevitable consequence oflong-term intimate sharing

Godel’s strange loop: as inevitable as video feedback

“soul-shards, survival of, in Doug”

“looking at daughter Monica ‘for Carol’, for ‘Old-Doug’, for ‘Old-Carol’”

“I”: analogous to Godel’s strange loop, 193, 202-206, 298

“I am large, I contain multitudes” (Whitman)

knurking and glebbing, 335-336, 337; not physical processes but subjective sensations, 336; reliably evoked independently of brain’s wiring, 336

living inside someone else, 246, 247, 250, 253-254, 266, 271-272; see also survival; visitation

meaning: as always mediated by mappings/analogies, 149-161, 158

mirrors mirroring mirrors

“no symbols, no self”

strong resistance to breaking into two halflings

pointing at self is like video camera pointing at TV

its strength is its weakness

“riddles about the Capitalized Essence of Consciousness”

“self-symbol: accreting over time; ... seen as strange loop”

simplification as human glory

what is lacking for an “I” to exist in it, 190-191

“teetering bulb of dread and dream” (Edson)

two bodies but one self, 214—224

“violation of hierarchical order as essence of strange loop”

“Douglas Hofstadter is a scientist with the inspired madness of a poet.”

“Then feeling one is alive is merely an illusion propagated by a reflex that urges one to utter, without understanding, such a sentence, and a truly living creature is reduced to a collection of complex reflexes.”

What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)?

I suspect that thanks to this unmistakable image of absolute interchangeability, virtually no viewer feels the slightest twinge of sadness when a bomb falls on the charging platoon and all of its members — these factory-made “creatures” — are instantly blown to smithereens.

“souledness” is by no means an off-on, black-and-white, discrete variable having just two possible states like a bit, a pixel, or a light bulb, but rather is a shaded, blurry numerical variable that ranges continuously across different species and varieties of object.

Writing this chapter thus gave rise to a totally unexpected boomerang effect on its author — and as we shall see in later chapters, such an unpredictable bouncing-back of choices one has just made, followed by the incorporation of their repercussions into one’s self-model, serves as an excellent example of the meaning of the motto “I am a strange loop.”

My point is simple: abstractions are central, whether in the study of literature or in the study of the brain.

I also realized that this kind of shift in levels of description yielded something very precious to living beings: comprehensibility.

We necessarily simplify, and indeed, vastly so. But that sacrifice is also our glory.

Likewise, any old simm-bashings will do — the “thoughtmill” will churn no matter what, thanks to the symbolic nature of its simmballs.

What seemed to me most magical, as I read through Nagel and Newman’s compelling booklet, was the way in which mathematics seemed to be doubling back on itself, engulfing itself, twisting itself up inside itself.

Together in my kids’ old “playroom”, Bill and I spent many delightful hours sailing the same old seas but in a somewhat newer craft, and we wound up with several hundred color snapshots that archived our voyage superbly.

It will not go away because it is forever refreshing itself, feeding on itself, giving rebirth to itself.

After all, in the case of a being struggling to survive, the one thing that is always in its environment is... itself. So why, of all things, should the being be perceptually immune to the most salient item in its world?

Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right.

What kind of thing, then, is this “I” that the careenium posits as driving its choices and its actions, and that human beings likewise posit as driving theirs? No one will be surprised at this point to hear me assert that it is a peculiar type of abstract, locked-in loop located inside the careenium or the cranium — in fact, a strange loop.

Even so, when I played the “A” role in this lap loop, I felt as if I was sitting, albeit indirectly, on my own lap! This was a most strange sensation.

It is mathematicians’ relentless search for why that in the end defines the nature of their discipline.

What often happens is that some kind of unexpected yet intimate connection turns up — some kind of crazy hidden regularity that feels magical, the discovery or the revelation of which may even send mystical frissons up and down one’s spine.

What does a pattern-seeker do at this point — give up? Of course not!

Given this very clear trend, if the primes were to run out all of a sudden, it would almost feel like falling off the edge of the Earth without any warning. It would be a huge shock.

There cannot be a “Great Last Prime in the Sky”; there cannot be a “Finite, Closed Club of All Primes”. These are fictions.

This is a glimpse of pure magic — the kind of magic that mathematicians live for.

Mathematical truth was all coming together so elegantly. And as this Holy Grail was emerging into clear view, a young boy was growing up in the town of Briinn, Austro-Hungary.

An inner voice told him that this connection was not just a vague resemblance but could in all likelihood be turned into an absolutely precise correspondence.

The prim numbers alone would therefore seem to contain, in a cloaked fashion, all of mathematical knowledge wrapped up inside them!

And yet we still have a self-referential picture, because customers in the grocery store understand that the little box shown on the label is the same as the big box they are holding.

This upstart Austrian sorcerer had surely cast some sort of evil spell, but by what means had he wrought his wretched deed?

Yet we take such throwaway analogies so much for granted that we tend to think that the word “analogy” must denote something far more exalted.

The bottom line, then, is that the unanticipated self-referential twist that Godel found lurking inside Principia Mathematica was a natural and inevitable outcome of the deep representational power of whole numbers.

To add insult to injury, Godel’s conclusion sprang not from a weakness in PM but from a strength. What a fantastic irony!

A human brain is just a big spongy bulb of inanimate molecules tightly wedged inside a rock-hard cranium, and there it simply sits, as inert as a lump on a log. Why should self-reference and a self be lurking in such a peculiar medium any more than they lurk in a lump of granite?

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”.

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.

The only hope for either the Alfbert or the Kliidgerot is to notice that certain patterns are used over and over again in the sea of symbols, and to give these patterns names, thus compressing the string into something more manageable, and then carrying this process of pattern-finding and compression out at the new, shorter level, and each time compressing further and further and further until finally the whole string collapses down into just one simple idea: “I am not edible” (or, translating out of the allegory, “I am not provable”).

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

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.

And if you’re anything like me, neither of your half-brains goes around calling itself “i” and brazenly proclaiming itself an autonomous soul! Rather, the two of them together make just one capital “I”.

“In this closing aria, ‘I’ would denote the couple itself, not either of its members, and the aria would be thought of as being for the couple’s one new voice rather than for two independent voices.”

Something, some thing, was coming into being that was made out of both of us.

There had been a bright shining soul behind those eyes, and that soul had been suddenly eclipsed. The light had gone out.

One day, as I gazed at a photograph of Carol taken a couple of months before her death, I looked at her face and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes, and all at once, I found myself saying, as tears flowed, “That’s me! That’s me!”

You are now embarked on a desperate lark, which is just what you should be doing right now. And your reflections are the reflections of a person who has encountered, and taken a measure of, the power of life on our sweet Earth.

If this is true, then Carol survives because her point of view survives — or rather, she survives to the extent that her point of view survives — in my brain and those of others.

Everything I do is some kind of modified borrowing from others who have been close to me either actually or virtually, and the virtual influences are among the most profound.

We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck.

Watching the tapes would heighten the anguish of her death, by seeming to bring her back physically but doing nothing of the sort in reality.

To that extent, and only to that extent, Carol would be thinking with my brain, feeling with my heart, living in my soul.

The pattern of organization is what matters, not the substance. It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion!

When the sun is eclipsed, there remains a corona surrounding it, a circumferential glow. When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them.

There is not some special “consciousness locus” where something magic happens, something other than just more of the same, some locus where the dancing symbols make contact with... well, with what?

The new view that Parfit proposes is a radical reperception of what it is to be, and in certain ways it is extremely disturbing. In other ways, it is extremely liberating!

Machine Q (it stands for “qualia”) is actually feeling something, whereas Machine Z (it rhymes with “dead”) is feeling nothing.

But consciousness is not a power moonroof (you can quote me on that).

It all comes from the idea that you are supposedly so different from me that there is no way to cross the gap between our interiorities — no way for you to know what I am like inside, or vice versa.

And so we move willy-nilly, but not freewilly-nilly, inside the maze. A combination of pressures, some internal and some external, collectively dictates our pathway in this crazy hedge maze called “life”.

Our will, quite the opposite of being free, is steady and stable, like an inner gyroscope, and it is the stability and constancy of our non-free will that makes me me and you you, and that also keeps me me and you you. Free Willie is just another blue humpback.

In short, only when generosity is born is an ego born.

In a nutshell, our quandary is this. Either we believe that our consciousness is something other than an outcome of physical law, or we believe it is an outcome of physical law — but making either choice leads us to disturbing, perhaps even unacceptable, consequences.

You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception — the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world. When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics and when feedback loops galore come into play, then “which” eventually turns into “who”.

We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

“Douglas Hofstadter is a scientist with the inspired madness of a poet.”