du boulanger supposes for a moment that the cat’s escapades will continue to parallel the wife’s escapades (or vice versa) for months on end. We know it was just a coincidence, which is why we find it so humorous.
By contrast, a careenium’s dancing simmballs will continue tracking the world, will stay in phase with it, will remain aligned with it. That (by fiat of the author!) is the very nature of a careenium. Simmballs are systematically in phase with things going on in the world just as, in Godel’s construction, prim numbers are systematically in phase with PM’s provable formulas. That is the only reason simmballs can be said to have meaning. 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.
Our own brains are no different from careenia, except, of course, that whereas careenia are just my little fantasy, human brains are not. The symbols in our brains truly do do that voodoo that they do so well, and they do it in the electrochemical soup of neural events. The strange thing, though, is that over the eons that it took for our brains to evolve from the earliest proto-brains, meanings just sneaked ever so quietly into the story, almost unobserved. It’s not as if somebody had devised a grand plan, millions of years in advance, that high-level meaningful structures — physical patterns representing abstract categories — would one day come to inhabit big fancy brains; rather, such patterns (the “symbols” of this book) simply came along as an unplanned by-product of the tremendously effective way that having bigger and bigger brains helped beings to survive better and better in a terribly cutthroat world.
Just as Bertrand Russell was blindsided by the unexpected appearance of high-level Godelian meanings in the heart of his ultraprotected bastion, Principia Mathematica, so someone who had never conceived of looking at a brain at any level other than that of Hans Moravec’s squirting chemicals would be mightily surprised at the emergence of symbols. Much as Godel saw the great potential of shifting attention to a wholly different level of PM strings, so I am suggesting (though I’m certainly far from the first) that we have to shift our attention to a far higher level of brain activity in order to find symbols, concepts, meanings, desires, and, ultimately, our selves.
The funny thing is that we humans all are focused on that level without ever having had any choice in the matter. We automatically see our brains’ activity as entirely symbolic. I find something wonderfully strange and upside-down about this, and I’ll now try to show why through an allegory.
In which the Alfbert Visits Austranius
Imagine, if you will, the small, lonely planet of Austranius, whose sole inhabitants are a tribe called the “Kludgerot”. From time immemorial, the Kludgerot have lived out their curious lives in a dense jungle of extremely long PM strings, some of which they can safely ingest (strings being their sole source of nutrition) and others of which they must not ingest, lest they be mortally poisoned. Luckily, the resourceful Kludgerot have found a way to tell apart these opposite sorts of PM strings, for certain strings, when inspected visually, form a message that says, in the lilting Kludgerotic tongue, “I am edible”, while others form a message in Kludgerotic that says “I am inedible”. And, quite marvelously, by the Benevolent Grace of God, every PM string proclaiming its edibility has turned out to be edible, while every PM string proclaiming its inedibility has turned out to be inedible. Thus have the Kludgerot thrived for untold oors on their bountiful planet.
On a fateful doo in the Austranian moonth of Spoo, a strange-looking orange spacecraft swoops down from the distant planet of Ukia and lands exactly at the North Poo of Austranius. Out steps a hulking whiteheaded alien that announces itself with the words, “I am the Alfbert. Behold.” No sooner has the alien uttered these few words than it trundles off into the Austranian jungle, where it spends not only the rest of Spoo but also all of Bloo, after which it trundles back, slightly bedraggled but otherwise no worse for the wear, to its spacecraft. Bright and early the next doo, the Alfbert solemnly convenes a meeting of all the Kludgerot on Austranius. As soon as they all have assembled, the Alfbert begins to speak.
“Good doo, virtuous Kludgerot,” intones the Alfbert. “It is my privilege to report to you that I have made an Austranius-shaking scientific discovery.” The Kludgerot all sit in respectful if skeptical silence. “Each PM string that grows on this planet,” continues the Alfbert, “turns out to be not merely a long and pretty vine but also, astonishingly enough, a message that can be read and understood. Do not doubt me!” On hearing this non-novelty, many Kludgerot yawn in unison, and a voice shouts out, “Tell us about it, white head!”, at which scattered chuckles erupt. Encouraged, the Alfbert does just so. “I have made the fantastic discovery that every PM string makes a claim, in my beautiful native tongue of Alfbertic, about certain wondrous entities known as the ‘whole numbers’. Many of you are undoubtedly champing at the bit to have me explain to you, in very simple terms that you can understand, what these so-called ‘whole numbers’ are.”
At the sound of this term, a loud rustling noise is heard among the assembled crowd. Unbeknownst to the Alfbert, the Kludgerot have for countless generations held the entities called “whole numbers” to be incomprehensibly abstract; indeed, the whole numbers were long ago unanimously declared so loathsome that they were forever banned from the planet, along with all their names. Clearly, the Alfbert’s message is not welcome here. It is of course wrong (that goes without saying), but it is not merely wrong; it is also totally absurd, and it is repugnant, to boot.
But the whiteheaded Alfbert, blithely unaware of the resentment it has churned up, continues to speak as the mob rustles ever more agitatedly. “Yes, denizens of Austranius, fabulously unlikely though it may sound, in each PM string there resides meaning. All it takes is to know how to look at the string in the proper way. By using a suitable mapping, one can…”
All at once pandemonium erupts: has the Alfbert not just uttered the despised word “one”, the long-banished name of the most dreaded of all the whole numbers? “Away with the alien! Off with its white head!” screams the infuriated mob, and a moment later, a phalanx of Kludgerot grabs hold of the declaiming alien. Yet even as it is being dragged away, the pontificating Alfbert patiently insists to the Kludgerot that it is merely trying to edify them, that it can perceive momentous facts hidden to them by reading the strings in a language of which they are ignorant, and that… But the angered throng drowns out the Alfbert’s grandiose words.
As the brazen alien is being prepared to meet a dire fate, a commotion suddenly breaks out among the Kludgerot; they have plumb forgotten the age-old and venerated Kludgerot tradition of holding a Pre-dishing-out- ofdire-fate Banquet! A team is dispatched to pick the sweetest of all PM strings from the Principial Planetary Park of Woow, a sacred sanctuary into which no Kludgerot has ever ventured before; when it returns with a fine harvest of succulent strings from Woow, each of which clearly reads “I am edible”, it is greeted by a hail of thunderous applause. After the Kludgerot have expressed their gratitude to God, the traditional Pre- dishing-out-ofdire-fate Banquet begins, and at last it begins to dawn on the Alfbert that it will indeed meet a dire fate in short order. As this ominous fact takes hold, it feels its white head start to spin, then to swim, and then…
Idealistically attempting to save the unsuspecting Kludgerot, the ever-magnanimous Alfbert cries out, “Listen, I pray, O friends! Your harvest of PM strings is treacherous! A foolish superstition has tricked you into thinking they are nutritious, but the truth is otherwise. When decoded as messages, these strings all make such grievously false statements about whole numbers that no one — I repeat, no one! — could swallow them.” But the words of warning come too late, for the PM strings from Woow are already being swallowed whole by the stubbornly superstitious Kludgerot.
And before long, frightful groans are heard resounding far and near; the sensitive Alfbert shields its gaze from the dreadful event. When at last it dares to look, it beholds a sorry sight; on every side, as far as its sole eye can see, lie lifeless shells of Kludgerot that but moments ago were carousing their silly heads off. “If only they had listened to me!”, sadly muses the kindly Alfbert, scratching its great white head in puzzlement. On these words, it trundles back to its strange-looking orange spacecraft at the North Poo, takes one last glance at the bleak Kludgerot-littered landscape of Austranius, and finally presses the small round “Takeoff” button on the craft’s leatherette dashboard, setting off for destinations unknown.
At this point, the Alfbert, having earlier swooned in terror as the banqueters began their ritual reveling,
