I Am a Strange Loop

“walls”, “doorways” and “galaxies”, “spirals” and “black holes”, “hubs” and “spokes”, “petals” and “pulsations”, and so forth. In the second video voyage with Bill, many of these same terms were once again needed, and some new ones were called for, such as “starfish”, “cheese”, “fire”, “foam”, and others.

Such words are hardly the kind of language I had thought I would be dealing with when I first broached the idea of video feedback. Although the system to which I was applying these terms was mechanical and deterministic, the patterns that emerged as a consequence of the loop were unpredictable, and therefore it turned out that words were needed that no one could have predicted in advance.

Simple but evocative metaphors like “corridor”, “galaxy”, and others turned out to be indispensable in describing the abstract shapes and events I witnessed on the screen. The initial terms I had tacitly assumed I would use wound up getting mostly ignored, because they yielded little insight. Of course, in principle, everything could be explained in terms of them, in a rigorous and incomprehensibly verbose fashion (like explaining a gas’s temperature and pressure by writing out Avogadro’s number of equations) — but such a boringly reductionistic, nearly pixel-by-pixel explanation would entirely leave out the wonderful higher- level visual phenomena to which a human eye and mind intuitively resonate.

In short, there are surprising new structures that looping gives rise to that constitute a new level of reality that could in principle be deduced from the basic loop and its detailed properties, but that in practice have a different kind of “life of their own” and that demand — at least when it comes to extremely finite, simplicity-seeking, pattern-loving creatures like us — a new vocabulary and a new level of description that transcend the basic level out of which they emerge.

CHAPTER 6

Of Selves and Symbols

Perceptual Looping as the Germ of “I”-ness

I FIND it curious that, other than proper nouns and adjectives, the only word in the English tongue that is always capitalized is the first-person pronoun (nominative case) with which this sentence most f lamboyantly sets sail. The convention is striking and strange, hinting that the word must designate something very important. Indeed, to some people — perhaps to most, perhaps even to us all — the ineffable sense of being an “I” or a “first person”, the intuitive sense of “being there” or simply “existing”, the powerful sense of “having experience” and of “having raw sensations” (what some philosophers refer to as “qualia”), seem to be the realest things in their lives, and an insistent inner voice bridles furiously at any proposal that all this might be an illusion, or merely the outcome of some kind of physical processes taking place among “third-person” (i.e., inanimate) objects. My goal here is to combat this strident inner voice.

I begin with the simple fact that living beings, having been shaped by evolution, have survival as their most fundamental, automatic, and built-in goal. To enhance the chances of its survival, any living being must be able to react flexibly to events that take place in its environment. This means it must develop the ability to sense and to categorize, however rudimentarily, the goings-on in its immediate environment (most earthbound beings can pretty safely ignore comets crashing on Jupiter). Once the ability to sense external goings-on has developed, however, there ensues a curious side effect that will have vital and radical consequences. This is the fact that the living being’s ability to sense certain aspects of its environment flips around and endows the being with the ability to sense certain aspects of itself.

That this flipping-around takes place is not in the least amazing or miraculous; rather, it is a quite unremarkable, indeed trivial, consequence of the being’s ability to perceive. It is no more surprising than the fact that audio feedback can take place or that a TV camera can be pointed at a screen to which its image is being sent. Some people may find the notion of such self-perception peculiar, pointless, or even perverse, but such a prejudice does not make self-perception a complex or subtle idea, let alone paradoxical. 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? Now that would seem perverse!

Such a lacuna would be reminiscent of a language whose vocabulary kept growing and growing yet without ever developing words for such common concepts as are named by the English words “say”, “speak”, “word”, “language”, “understand”, “ask”, “question”, “answer”, “talk”, “converse”, “claim”, “deny”, “argue”, “tell”, “sentence”, “story”, “book”, “read”, “insist”, “describe”, “translate”, “paraphrase”, “repeat”, “lie”, “hedge”, “noun”, “verb”, “tense”, “letter”, “syllable”, “plural”, “meaning”, “grammar”, “emphasize”, “refer”, “pronounce”, “exaggerate”, “bluster”, and so forth. If such a peculiarly self-ignorant language existed, then as it grew in flexibility and sophistication, its speakers would engage ever more in talking, arguing, blustering, and so forth, but without ever referring to these activities, and such entities as questions, answers, and lies would become (even while remaining unnamed) ever more salient and numerous. Like the hobbled formalisms that came out of Bertrand Russell’s timid theory of types, this language would have a gaping hole at its core — the lack of any mechanism for a word or utterance or book (etc.) to refer to itself. Analogously, for a living creature to have evolved rich capabilities of perception and categorization but to be constitutionally incapable of focusing any of that apparatus onto itself would be highly anomalous. Its selective neglect would be pathological, and would threaten its survival.

Varieties of Looping

To be sure, the most primitive living creatures have little or no self-perception. By analogy, we can think of a TV camera rigidly bolted on top of a TV set and facing away from the screen, like a flashlight tightly attached to a miner’s helmet, always pointing away from the miner’s eyes, never into them. In such a TV setup, obviously, a self- turned loop is out of the question. No matter how you turn it, the camera and the TV set turn in synchrony, preventing the closing of a loop.

We next imagine a more “evolved”, hence more flexible, setup; this time the camera, rather than being bolted onto its TV set, is attached to it by a “short leash”. Here, depending on the length and flexibility of the cord, it may be possible for the camera to twist around sufficiently to capture at least part of the TV screen in its viewfinder, giving rise to a truncated corridor. The biological counterpart to feedback of this level of sophistication may be the way our pet animals or even young children are slightly self-aware.

The next stage, obviously, is where the “leash” is sufficiently long and flexible that the video camera can point straight at the center of the screen. This will allow an endless corridor, which is far richer than a truncated one. Even so, the possibility of closing the self-watching loop does not pin down the system’s richness, because there still are many options open. Can the camera tilt or not, and if so, by how much? Can it zoom in or out? Is its image in color, or just in black and white? Can brightness and contrast be tweaked? What degree of resolution does the image have? What percentage of time is spent in self-observation as opposed to observation of the environment? Is there some way for the video camera itself to appear on the screen? And on and on. There are still many parameters to play with, so the potential loop has many open dimensions of sophistication.

Reception versus Perception

Despite the richness afforded by all these options, a self-watching television system will always lack one crucial aspect: the capacity of perception, as opposed to mere reception, or image-receiving. Perception takes as its starting point some kind of input