I Am a Strange Loop

selves, and consciousness, banging up against the same mysteriousness and eerieness that I first experienced when I was a teen-ager horrified and yet riveted by the awful and awesome physicality of that which makes us be what we are.

An Author and His Audience

Despite its title, this book is not about me, but about the concept of “I”. It’s thus about you, reader, every bit as much as it is about me. I could just as well have called it “You Are a Strange Loop”. But the truth of the matter is that, in order to suggest the book’s topic and goal more clearly, I should probably have called it “‘I’ Is a Strange Loop” — but can you imagine a clunkier title? Might as well call it “I Am a Lead Balloon”.

In any case, this book is about the venerable topic of what an “I” is. And what is its audience? Well, as always, I write in order to reach a general educated public. I almost never write for specialists, and in a way that’s because I’m not really a specialist myself. Oh, I take it back; that’s unfair. After all, at this point in my life, I have spent nearly thirty years working with my graduate students on computational models of analogy-making and creativity, observing and cataloguing cognitive errors of all sorts, collecting examples of categorization and analogy, studying the centrality of analogies in physics and math, musing on the mechanisms of humor, pondering how concepts are created and memories are retrieved, exploring all sorts of aspects of words, idioms, languages, and translation, and so on — and over these three decades I have taught seminars on many aspects of thinking and how we perceive the world.

So yes, in the end, I am a kind of specialist — I specialize in thinking about thinking. Indeed, as I stated earlier, this topic has fueled my fire ever since I was a teen-ager. And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experiences.

The Horsies-and-Doggies Religion

Over the years, I have fallen into a style of self-expression that I call the “horsies-and-doggies” style, a phrase inspired by a charming episode in the famous cartoon “Peanuts”, which I’ve reproduced on the following page.

I often feel just the way that Charlie Brown feels in that last frame — like someone whose ideas are anything but “in the clouds”, someone who is so down-to-earth as to be embarrassed by it. I realize that some of my readers have gotten an impression of me as someone with a mind that enormously savors and indefatigably pursues the highest of abstractions, but that is a very mistaken image. I’m just the opposite, and I hope that reading this book will make that evident.

I don’t have the foggiest idea why I wrongly remembered the poignant phrase that Charlie Brown utters here, but in any case the slight variant “horsies and doggies” long ago became a fixture in my own speech, and so, for better or for worse, that’s the standard phrase I always use to describe my teaching style, my speaking style, and my writing style.

In part because of the success of Godel, Escher, Bach, I have had the good fortune of being given a great deal of freedom by the two universities on whose faculties I have served — Indiana University (for roughly twenty-five years) and the University of Michigan (for four years, in the 1980’s). Their wonderful generosity has given me the luxury of being able to explore my variegated interests without being under the infamous publish-or-perish pressures, or perhaps even worse, the relentless pressures of grant-chasing.

I have not followed the standard academic route, which involves publishing paper after paper in professional journals. To be sure, I have published some “real” papers, but mostly I have concentrated on expressing myself through books, and these books have always been written with an eye to maximal clarity.

Clarity, simplicity, and concreteness have coalesced into a kind of religion for me — a set of never-forgotten guiding principles. Fortunately, a large number of thoughtful people appreciate analogies, metaphors, and examples, as well as a relative lack of jargon, and last but not least, accounts from a first-person stance. In any case, it is for people who appreciate that way of writing that this book, like all my others, has been written. I believe that this group includes not only outsiders and amateurs, but also many professional philosophers of mind.

If I tell many first-person stories in this book, it is not because I am obsessed with my own life or delude myself about its importance, but simply because it is the life I know best, and it provides all sorts of examples that I suspect are typical of most people’s lives. I believe most people understand abstract ideas most clearly if they hear them through stories, and so I try to convey difficult and abstract ideas through the medium of my own life. I wish that more thinkers wrote in a first-person fashion.

Although I hope to reach philosophers with this book’s ideas, I don’t think that I write very much like a philosopher. It seems to me that many philosophers believe that, like mathematicians, they can actually prove the points they believe in, and to that end, they often try to use highly rigorous and technical language, and sometimes they attempt to anticipate and to counter all possible counter-arguments. I admire such self-confidence, but I am a bit less optimistic and a bit more fatalistic. I don’t think one can truly prove anything in philosophy; I think one can merely try to convince, and probably one will wind up convincing only those people who started out fairly close to the position one is advocating. As a result of this mild brand of fatalism, my strategy for conveying my points is based more on metaphor and analogy than on attempts at rigor. Indeed, this book is a gigantic salad bowl full of metaphors and analogies. Some will savor my metaphor salad, while others will find it too… well, too metaphorical. But I particularly hope that you, dear eater, will find it seasoned to your taste.

A Few Last Random Observations

I take analogies very seriously, so much so that I went to a great deal of trouble to index a large number of the analogies in my “salad”. There are thus two main headings in the index for my lists of examples. One is “analogies, serious examples of”; the other is “throwaway analogies, random examples of”. I made this droll distinction because whereas many of my analogies play key roles in conveying ideas, some are there just to add spice. There’s another point to be made, though: in the final analysis, virtually every thought in this book (or in any book) is an analogy, as it involves recognizing something as being a variety of something else. Thus every time I write “similarly” or “by contrast”, there is an implicit analogy, and every time I pick a word or phrase (e.g., “salad”, “storehouse”, “bottom line”), I am making an analogy to something in my life’s storehouse of experiences. The bottom line is, every thought herein could be listed under “analogies”. However, I refrained from making my index that detailed.

I initially thought this book was just going to be a distilled retelling of the central message of GEB, employing little or no formal notation and not indulging in Pushkinian digressions into such variegated topics as Zen Buddhism, molecular biology, recursion, artificial intelligence, and so forth. In other words, I thought I had already fully stated in GEB and my other books what I intended to (re)state here, but to my surprise, as I started to write, I saw new ideas sprouting everywhere under foot. That was a relief, and made me feel that my new book was more than just a rehash of an earlier book (or books).

Among the keys to GEB’s success was its alternation between chapters and dialogues, but I didn’t intend, thirty years later, to copycat myself with another such alternation. I was in a different frame of mind, and I wanted this book to reflect that. But as I was approaching the end, I wanted to try to compare my ideas with well-known ideas in the philosophy of mind, and so I started saying things like, “Skeptics might reply as follows…” After I had written such phrases a few times, I realized I had inadvertently fallen into writing a dialogue between myself and a hypothetical skeptical reader, so I invented a pair of oddly-named characters and let them have at each other for what turned out to be one of the longest chapters in the book. It’s not intended to be uproariously funny, although I hope my readers will occasionally smile here and there as they read it. In any case, fans of the dialogue form, take heart — there are two dialogues in this book.