I Am a Strange Loop

to do with consciousness!

I think it may be helpful at this point to allow my various inner skeptical voices to merge into a single paper persona (hopefully not a paper tiger!), and for that persona to lock horns in an extended dialogue with another persona who essentially represents the ideas of this book. I’ll call the voice of this book “Strange Loop #641” and the voice of the skeptics “Strange Loop #642”.

It may strike some readers that I am unfairly prejudicing the case by labeling not only myself (or rather, my proxy) a “strange loop”, but also my worthy opponent, for that might be seen as suggesting that the game is over before it’s begun. But these are nothing more than labels. What counts in the dialogue is what the characters say, not what I call them. And so, if you prefer to give Strange Loops #641 and #642 the alternative names “Inner Light #7” and “Inner Light #8”, or perhaps even “Socrates” and “Plato”, that’s fine by me.

And now, without further ado, we tune in as our two strange loops (or inner lights) begin their amiable debate. Oops! I guess I’ve been rambling on a bit too long here, and we seem unfortunately to have missed a bit of the two friends’ opening repartee. Oh, well, that’s life. I expect you and I can jump in at this point without feeling too lost. Let’s give it a try…

CHAPTER 20

A Courteous Crossing of Words

Dramatis person?:

Strange Loop #641: a believer in the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop

Strange Loop #642: a doubter of the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop

SL #642: Dreary, oh so dreary. In fact, your picture of the soul is not just dreary; it’s completely empty. Vacuous. There’s nothing spiritual there at all. It’s just physical activity and nothing more.

SL #641: What else did you expect? What else could you expect? Unless you’re a dualist, that is, and you think souls are ghostly, nonphysical things that don’t belong to the physical universe, and yet that can push pieces of it around.

SL #642: No, I don’t go for that. It’s just that there has to be something extremely special that accounts for the existence of spiritual, mental, feeling, perceiving beings in this physical world — something that explains our inner light, our awareness, our consciousness.

SL #641: I couldn’t agree with you more. An explanation of such elusive phenomena surely calls for something special. Building a soul out of physical nuts and bolts is a tall order. But bear in mind that in my view, consciousness is a very unusual sort of intricately organized material pattern, not just any old physical activity. It’s not the swinging of a chain, the plopping of a stone in a pond, the splashing of a waterfall, the swirling of a hurricane, the refilling of a flush toilet, the self-regulation of the temperature in a house, the flow of electrons in a program that plays chess, the wiggling of an ovum-seeking sperm, the neural firings in a hungry mosquito’s brain… but we are getting ever closer as this list progresses. An “inner light” starts to turn on as we rise in this hierarchy. The light is still incredibly dim even at the list’s end, but if we extend the list further and sweep upwards through the brains of bees, goldfish, bunnies, dogs, and toddlers, it grows far brighter. It gets very bright when we arrive at human adolescents and adults, and it stays bright for decades. What we know as our own consciousness is, yes, nothing but the physical activity inside a human brain that has lived in the world for a number of years.

SL #642: No, the essence of consciousness is missing from your picture. You’ve described a complex set of brain activities involving symbols triggering each other, and I’m prepared to believe that something like that does take place inside brains. But that isn’t the whole story, because I am nowhere in this story. There is no room for an I. You’ve proposed myriads of unconscious particles bouncing around, or perhaps big clouds of activity made of particles — but if the universe were only that, then there would be no me, no you, no points of view. It would be the way the earth was before life evolved — millions of sunrises and sunsets, winds blowing hither and thither, clouds forming and scattering, thunderstorms swooping along valleys, boulders tumbling down mountains and gouging out gulleys, water flowing in riverbeds and carving deep canyons, waves breaking on sandy beaches, tides flowing in and out, volcanoes spewing out red-hot seas of lava, mountain chains bursting up out of plains, continents drifting and breaking apart, and so on. All very scenic, but there would be no inner life, no mind, no inner light, no I — no one to enjoy the great scenery.

SL #641: I sympathize with your sense of the barrenness of a universe made of physical phenomena only, but some kinds of physical systems can mirror what’s on their outside and can launch actions that depend upon their perceptions. That’s the thin edge of the wedge. When perception grows sophisticated enough, it can lead to phenomena that have no counterparts in systems that perceive only in a primitive manner. By “primitive” perceiving systems, I mean entities like, for instance, thermostats, knees, sperms, and tadpoles. These are too rudimentary to merit the term “consciousness”, but when perception takes place in a system endowed with a truly rich, fluidly extensible set of symbols, then an “I” will arise just as inevitably as strange loops arise in the barren fortress of Principia Mathematica.

SL #642: Perception?! Who’s doing the perceiving? No one! Your universe is still just a vacuous system of physical objects and their intricate, intertwined, enmeshed movements — galaxies, stars, planets, winds, rocks, water, landslides, ripples, sound waves, fire, radioactivity, and so forth. Even proteins and RNA and DNA. Even your beloved feedback loops — heat-seeking missiles, thermostats, refilling toilets, video feedback, domino chains, pool tables flooded with hordes of microscopic magnetic balls. But something crucial is missing from this bleak scene, and that’s me-ness. I am in a specific place. I’m here! What would pick out a here in a world consisting of water and float-balls in thousands of tanks, or in a world having zillions of different domino chains? There’s no here there.

SL #641: I really do understand that this matter would nag at you; it should nag at any thinking person. My reply is this: In the vast universe of diverse physical events that you just evoked so vividly, there are certain rare spots of localized activity in which a special kind of abstractly swirling pattern can be found. Those special loci — at least the ones that we have run into so far — are human brains, and “I” ’s are restricted to those loci. Such loci are hard to find in the vast universe; they are few and far between. Wherever this special, rare kind of physical phenomenon arises, there’s an I and a here.

SL #642: Your phrase “abstractly swirling pattern” makes me think of a physical vortex, like a hurricane or a whirlpool or a spiral galaxy — but I suppose those aren’t abstract enough for you.

SL #642: No, they really aren’t. Whirlpools and hurricanes are merely spinning vortices — fluid cousins to tops and gyroscopes. To make an “I” you need meanings, and to make meanings you need perception and categories — in fact, a repertoire of categories that keeps on building on itself, growing and growing and growing. Such things are nowhere to be found in the physical vortices you mentioned. That’s why a far better metaphor for an “I” is the structure of the self-referring formulas that Godel found in the barren-seeming universe of PM. His formulas, like human “I” ’s, are extremely intricately and delicately structured, and are hardly a dime a dozen. “Ordinary” formulas of PM, like “0+0=0”, say, or a formula that states that every integer is the sum of at most four squares, are the analogues to inert, “I”-less physical objects, like grains of sand or bowling balls. Those simple kinds of formulas don’t have wraparound high-level meanings in the way that Godel’s special strings do. It takes a great deal of number-theoretical machinery to build up from ordinary assertions about numbers to the complexity of Godelian strange loops, and likewise it takes a great deal of evolution to build up from very simple feedback loops to the complexity of strange loops in brains.

SL #642: Suppose I granted you that there are lots of abstract “strange loops” floating around the universe, which somehow coalesced over the course of billions of years of evolution — strange loops residing in crania, a bit