I Am a Strange Loop

In Chapter 22, I discussed dualism — the idea that over and above physical entities governed by physical law, there is a Capitalized Essence called “Consciousness”, which is an invisible, unmeasurable, undetectable aspect of the universe possessed by certain entities and not others. This notion, very close to the traditional western religious notion of “soul”, is appealing because it conforms with our everyday experience that the world is divided up into two kinds of things — animate and inanimate — and it also gives some kind of explanation for the fact that we experience our own interiority or inner light, something of which we are so intimately aware that to deny its existence would seem absurd if not impossible.

Dualism also holds out the hope of explaining the mysterious division of the animate world into two types of entity: myself and others. Otherwise put, this is the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the subjective, first-person view of the world and an impersonal, third-person view of the world. If what we call “I” is a squirt of some unanalyzable Capitalized Essence magically doled out to each human being at the moment in which it is conceived, with each portion imbued with a unique savor permanently defining the recipient’s identity, then we need look no further for an explanation of what we are (even if it depends on something inexplicable).

Furthermore, the idea that each of us is intrinsically defined by a unique incorporeal essence suggests that we have immortal souls; belief in dualism may thus remove some of the sting of death. It is not very hard for someone who grows up drenched in the pictorial and verbal imagery of western religion to imagine a wispy, ethereal aura being released from the body of someone who has just died, and sailing up, up, up into some kind of invisible celestial realm, where it will survive eternally. Whether we are believers or skeptics, such imagery is part and parcel of our western heritage, and for that reason it is hard to shuck it entirely, no matter how solidly one’s belief system is anchored in science.

Not long after my wife Carol died, I organized a memorial service for her, interleaving reminiscences by a few dear friends and relatives with musical selections that had meant a great deal to her. To close this sad ceremony, I chose the final two-and-a-half minutes of the opening movement of Sergei Prokofiev’s first violin concerto, an astonishing work of musical poetry under whose spell Carol had fallen as deeply as I had. The beautiful and moving passage that I selected from this concerto (as well as its twin, at the end of the piece as a whole) might as well have been written to evoke the image of an ascending soul, so tenuous, tremulous, and delicate is it throughout, but most of all in its final upward-drifting tones. Though neither Carol nor I was religious in the least, there was something that to me rang so true in this naive image of her purest essence leaving her mortal remains and soaring up, up, forever up, even if, in the end, it was not into the sky that her soul was flying, but merely into this guy…

As this story reveals, this guy, for all his years of scientific training and hardheaded thinking about mind and spirit as rooted in physics, is at times susceptible to the traditional dualistic imagery with which most of us are brought up — if not by our families, then by our wider culture. I can fall for the alluring imagery, even if I reject the ideas. But in my more rational moments, such imagery makes no sense to me, for I know only too well how dualism leads to a long list of unanswerable questions, some of which I wrote out in Chapter 22, showing it to be fraught with such arbitrariness and illogicality that it would seem to collapse under its own weight.

The Lure and Lacunas of Nondualism

If instead one believes that consciousness (now with a small “c”) is an outcome of physical law, then no room remains for anything extra “on top”. This is appealing to a scientific mind because it is far simpler than dualism. It gets rid of a puzzling dichotomy between ordinary physical entities and extraordinary nonphysical essences, and it cancels the long list of questions about the nature of the nonphysical Capitalized Essence.

On the other hand, throwing dualism out the window is troubling as well, because, at least on first glance, doing so seems to leave us with no distinction between animate and inanimate entities, and no explanation for our unique experience of our own interiority or inner light, no explanation for the gulf between our self and other selves. A more careful look at this viewpoint, however, shows that there is room in it for such distinctions.

In the Introduction, I wrote of “the miraculous appearance of selves and souls in substrates consisting of inanimate matter”, a phrase I suspect made more than one reader bristle. “How can the author refer to a human brain — the most animate of all entities in the universe — as ‘inanimate matter’?” Well, one of the leitmotifs of this book has been that the presence or absence of animacy depends on the level at which one views a structure. Seen at its highest, most collective level, a brain is quintessentially animate and conscious. But as one gradually descends, structure by structure, from cerebrum to cortex to column to cell to cytoplasm to protein to peptide to particle, one loses the sense of animacy more and more until, at the lowest levels, it has surely vanished entirely. In one’s mind, one can move back and forth between the highest and lowest levels, and in this fashion oscillate at will between seeing the brain as animate and as inanimate.

A nondualistic view of the world can thus include animate entities perfectly easily, as long as different levels of description are recognized as valid. Animate entities are those that, at some level of description, manifest a certain type of loopy pattern, which inevitably starts to take form if a system with the inherent capacity of perceptually filtering the world into discrete categories vigorously expands its repertoire of categories ever more towards the abstract. This pattern reaches full bloom when there comes to be a deeply entrenched self- representation — a story told by the entity to itself — in which the entity’s “I” plays the starring role, as a unitary causal agent driven by a set of desires. More precisely, an entity is animate to the degree that such a loopy “I” pattern comes into existence, since this pattern’s presence is by no means an all-or-nothing affair. Thus to the extent that there is an “I” pattern in a given substrate, there is animacy, and where there is no such pattern, the entity is inanimate.

Rainbows or Rocks?

There still remains a sticky question: What would make a loopy abstract pattern, however fancy it might be, constitute a locus of interiority, an inner light, a site of first-person experience? Otherwise put, where does me-ness come from? The notion that such a pattern grows enormously in size and complexity over time, perceives itself, and entrenches itself so deeply as to become all but undislodgeable will constitute a satisfactory answer for some seekers of truth (such as Strange Loop #641). For others, however (such as Strange Loop #642), it will not do at all.

For the latter sort of thinker, there will always remain the kind of riddle posed in Chapter 21 about the two freshly minted atom-for-atom copies of a destroyed body, one on Mars and one on Venus: “Where will I wake up? Which, if either, of the two bodies will house my inner light?” Thinkers of this kind cling fiercely to the instinctive notion of a unique Cartesian Ego that constitutes the identity, the “I”-ness, the inner light, the interiority of any sentient being. To such thinkers, it will be totally unacceptable to suggest that their precious notion of me-ness is more like a shimmering, elusive rainbow than it is like a solid, mass-possessing rock, and that there is thus no right answer to the perplexing “Which one will I be?” riddle. They will insist that there has to be a genuine marble of “I”-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. But to believe in such an indivisible, indissoluble “I” is to believe in nonphysical dualism.

Thrust: The Hard Problem

And this is our central quandary. Either we believe in a nonmaterial soul that lives outside the laws of physics, which amounts to a nonscientific belief in magic, or we reject that idea, in which case the eternally beckoning question “What could ever make a mere physical pattern be me?” — the question that philosopher David Chalmers has seductively and successfully nicknamed “The Hard Problem” — seems just as far from having an answer today (or, for that matter, at any time in the future) as it was many centuries ago.

After all, a phrase like “physical system” or “physical substrate” brings to mind for most people, including a substantial proportion of the world’s philosophers and neurologists, an intricate structure consisting of vast numbers of interlocked wheels, gears, rods, tubes, balls, pendula, and so forth, even if they are tiny, invisible, perfectly silent,