I Am a Strange Loop

obviously, nearly all memories of specific episodes are dormant almost all the time (otherwise we would go stark- raving mad).

Do dogs or cats have episodic memories? Do they remember specific events that happened years or months ago, or just yesterday, or even ten minutes ago? When I take our dog Ollie running, does he recall how he strained at the leash the day before, trying to get to say “hi” to that cute Dalmatian across the street (who also was tugging at her leash)? Does he remember how we took a different route from the usual one three days ago? When I take Ollie to the kennel to board over Thanksgiving vacation, he seems to remember the kennel as a place, but does he remember anything specific that happened there the last time (or any time) he was there? If a dog is frightened of a particular place, does it recall a specific trauma that took place there, or is there just a generalized sense of badness associated with that place?

I do not need answers to these questions here, fascinating though they are to me. I am not writing a scholarly treatise on animal awareness. All I want is that readers think about these questions and then agree with me that some of them merit a “yes” answer, some merit a “no”, and for some we simply can’t say one way or the other. My overall point, though, is that we humans, unlike other animals, have all these kinds of memories; indeed, we have them all in spades. We recall in great detail certain episodes from vacations we took fifteen or twenty years ago. We know exactly why we are frightened of certain places and people. We can replay in detail the time we ran into so-and-so totally out of the blue in Venice or Paris or London. The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a human being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what “I”-ness is all about.

CHAPTER 7

The Epi Phenomenon

As Real as it Gets

THANKS to the funneling-down processes of perception, which lead eventually — that is, in a matter of milliseconds — to the activation of certain discrete symbols in its brain, an animal (and let’s not forget robot vehicles!) can relate intimately and reliably to its physical environment. A mature human animal not only does a fine job of not slipping on banana peels and not banging into thorn-bristling rosebushes, it also reacts in a flash to strong odors, strange accents, cute babies, loud crashes, titillating headlines, terrific skiers, garish clothes, and on and on. It even occasionally hits curve balls coming at it at 80 miles an hour. Because an animal’s internal mirroring of the world must be highly reliable (the symbol elephant should not get triggered by the whine of a mosquito, nor should the symbol mosquito get triggered if an elephant ambles into view), its mirroring of the world via its private cache of symbols becomes an unquestioned pillar of stability. The things and patterns it perceives are what define its reality — but not all perceived things and patterns are equally real to it.

Of course, in nonverbal animals, a question such as “Which things that I perceive are the most real of all to me?” is never raised, explicitly or implicitly. But in human lives, questions about what is and what is not real inevitably bubble up sooner or later, sometimes getting uttered consciously and carefully, other times remaining unexpressed and inchoate, just quietly simmering in the background. As children and teen-agers, we see directly, or we see on television, or we read about, or we are told about many things that supposedly exist, things that vie intensely with each other for our attention and for acceptance by our reality evaluators — for instance, God, Godzilla, Godiva, Godot, Godel, gods, goddesses, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, gremlins, golems, golliwogs, griffins, gryphons, gluons, and grinches. It takes a child a few years to sort out the reality of some of these; indeed, it takes many people a full lifetime to do so (and occasionally a bit longer).

By “sorting out the reality of X”, I mean coming to a stable conclusion about how much you believe in X and whether you would feel comfortable relying on the notion of X in explaining things to yourself and others. If you are willing to use griffins in your explanations and don’t flinch at other people’s doing so in theirs, then it would seem that griffins are a seriously real concept to you. If you had already pretty much sorted out for yourself the reality of griffins and then heard there was going to be a TV special on griffins, you wouldn’t feel a need to catch the show in order to help you decide whether or not griffins exist. Perhaps you believe strongly in griffins, perhaps you think of them as a childish fantasy or a joke — but your mind is made up one way or the other. Or perhaps you haven’t yet sorted out the reality of griffins; if it were to come up in a dinner-party conversation, you would feel unsure, confused, ignorant, skeptical, or on the fence.

Another way of thinking about “how real X is to you” is how much you would trust a newspaper article that took for granted the existence of X (for example, a living dinosaur, a sighting of Hitler, insects discovered on Mars, a perpetual-motion machine, UFO abductions, God’s omniscience, out-ofbody experiences, alternate universes, superstrings, quarks, Bigfoot, Big Brother, the Big Bang, Atlantis, the gold in Fort Knox, the South Pole, cold fusion, Einstein’s tongue, Holden Caulfield’s brain, Bill Gates’ checkbook, or the proverbial twenty-mile “wall” for marathon runners). If you stop reading an article the moment you see X’s existence being taken for granted, then it would seem that you consider X’s “reality” highly dubious.

Pick any of the concepts mentioned above. Almost surely, there are plenty of people who believe fervently in it, others who believe in it just a little, others not at all (whether out of ignorance, cynicism, poor education, or excellent education). Some of these concepts, we are repeatedly told by authorities, are not real, and yet we hear about them over and over again in television shows, books, and newspapers, and so we are left with a curious blurry sense as to whether they do exist, or could exist, or might exist. Others, we are told by authorities, are absolutely real, but somehow we never see them. Others we are told were real but are real no longer, and that places them in a kind of limbo as far as reality is concerned. Yet others we are told are real but are utterly beyond our capacity to imagine. Others are said to be real, but only metaphorically or only approximately so — and so on. Sorting all this out is not in the least easy.

Concrete Walls and Abstract Ceilings

To be more concrete about all this, how real is the marathoners’ twenty-mile wall, mentioned above? If you’re a marathoner, you almost surely have a well-worked-out set of thoughts about it. Perhaps you have experienced it personally, or know people who have. Or perhaps you think the notion is greatly exaggerated. I’ve never hit the wall myself, but then my longest run ever was only fifteen miles. What I know is that “they say” that most runners, if they haven’t trained properly, will bang up against a brutal wall at around twenty miles, in which their body, having used up all of its glycogen, starts burning fat instead (I’ve heard it described as “your body eating its own muscles”). It comes out of the blue and is extremely painful (“like an elephant falling out of a tree onto my shoulders”, said marathoner Dick Beardsley), and many runners simply cannot go any further at that point, and drop out. But is this a universal phenomenon? Is it the same for all people? Do some marathoners never experience it at all? And even if it is scientifically explicable, is it as real and as palpable a phenomenon as a concrete wall into which one bangs?

When I entered math graduate school at Berkeley in 1966, I had the self-image of being quite a math whiz. After all, as an undergraduate math major at Stanford, not only had I coasted through most of my courses without too much work, but I had done lots of original research, and on graduating I was awarded the citation “with Distinction” by the Math Department. I was expecting to become a mathematician and to do great things. Well, at Berkeley two courses were required of all first-year students — abstract algebra and topology — and so I took them. To my shock, both were very hard for me — like nothing I’d ever encountered before. I got good grades in them but only by memorizing and then regurgitating ideas on the finals. For the entire year, my head kept on