I Am a Strange Loop

like audio feedback loops residing in auditoriums. They can be as complex as you like; the complexity of their physical activity doesn’t matter one whit to me. The knotty issue that simply will not go away is: What would make one of those strange loops me? Which one? You can’t answer that.

SL #641: I can, although you won’t like my answer. What makes one of them you is that it is resident in a particular brain that went through all the experiences that made you you.

SL #642: That’s just a tautology!

SL #641: Not really. It’s a subtle idea whose crux is that what you call “I” is an outcome, not a starting point. You coalesced in an unplanned fashion, coming only slowly into existence, not in a flash. At the beginning, when the brain that would later house your soul was taking form, there was no you. But that brain slowly grew, and its experiences slowly accumulated. Somewhere along the way, as more and more things happened to it, were registered by it, and became internalized in it, it started imitating the cultural and linguistic conventions in which it was immersed, and thus it tentatively said “I” about itself (even though the referent of that word was still very blurry). That’s roughly when it noticed it was somewhere — and not surprisingly, it was where a certain brain was! At that point, though, it didn’t know anything about its brain. What it knew instead was its brain’s container, which was a certain body. But even though it didn’t know anything about its brain, that nascent “I” faithfully followed its brain around just as a shadow always tags along after a moving object.

SL #642: You’re not dealing with my question, which is about how to pick me out in a world of indistinguishable physical structures.

SL #641: All right, let me turn straight to that. To you, all the brains housing strange loops seem no different from thousands of sewing machines scattered hither and yon, all clicking away. You would ask, “Which sewing machine is me?” Well, of course, none of them is you — and that’s because none of them perceives anything. You see brains that house strange loops as being just as inert and identity-lacking as sewing machines, pinwheels, or merry-go-rounds. But the funny thing is that the beings whose brains house those strange loops don’t agree with you that they have no identity. One of them insists, “I’m the one right here, looking at this purple flower, not the one over there, drinking a milkshake!” Another one insists, “I’m the one drinking this chocolate shake, not the one looking at that flower!” Each one of them is convinced of being somewhere and of seeing things and hearing things and having experiences. What makes you reject their claims?

SL #642: I don’t reject their claims. Those claims are perfectly valid — it’s just that their validity has nothing to do with brains housing strange loops. You’re focusing on the wrong thing. Any claims of “being here” and “being conscious” are valid because there is something extra, something over and above strange loops, that makes a brain be the locus of a soul. I can’t tell you just what it is, but I know this is true, because I am not just physical stuff happening somewhere in the universe. I experience things, such as that purple flower in the garden and that loud motorcycle a couple of blocks away. And my experience is the primary data on which everything else that I say is based, so you cannot deny my claim.

SL #641: How is that any different from what I’ve described? A sufficiently complex brain not only can perceive and categorize but it can verbalize what it has categorized. Like you, it can talk about flowers and gardens and motorcycle roars, and it can talk about itself, saying where it is and where it is not, it can describe its present and past experiences and its goals and beliefs and confusions… What more could you want? Why is that not what you call “experience”?

SL #642: Words, words, words! The point is that experience involves more than mere words — it involves feelings. Any experiencer worthy of the term has to see that brilliant purple color of the flower and feel it as such, not merely drone the sound “purple” like an automated voice in a telephone menu tree. Seeing a vivid purple takes place below the level of words or ideas or symbols — it is more primordial. It’s an experience directly felt by an experiencer. That’s the difference between true consciousness and mere “artificial signaling” as in a mechanical-sounding telephone menu tree.

SL #641: Would you say nonverbal animals enjoy such “primordial” experiences? Do cows savor the deep purple of a flower just as intensely as you do? And do mosquitoes? If you say “yes”, doesn’t that come dangerously close to suggesting that cows and mosquitoes have just as much consciousness as you do?

SL #642: Mosquito brains are far less complex than mine, so they can’t have the same kinds of rich experiences as I do.

SL #641: Now wait a minute. You can’t have it both ways. A moment ago, you were insisting that brain complexity doesn’t make any difference — that if a brain lacks that special je ne sais quoi that separates things that feel from things that don’t feel, then it’s not a locus of consciousness. But now you’re saying that the complexity of the brain in question does make a difference.

SL #642: Well, I guess it has to, to some extent. A mosquito doesn’t have the equipment to appreciate a purple flower in the way I do. But maybe a cow does, or at least it comes closer. But complexity alone does not account for the presence of feeling and experience in brains.

SL #641: Let’s consider a bit more deeply this notion of experiencing and feeling the world outside. If you were to stare at a big broad sheet of pure, uniform purple, your favorite shade ever, entirely filling your visual field, would you experience the same rush as when you see that color in the petals of a flower blooming in a garden?

SL #642: I doubt it. Part of what makes my experience of a purple flower so intense is all the subtle shades I see on each petal, the delicate way each petal is curved, and the way the petals all swirl together around a glowing center made of dozens of tiny dots…

SL #641: Not to mention the way the flower is poised on a branch, and the branch is part of a bush, and the bush is just one of many in a brightly colored garden…

SL #642: Are you intimating that I don’t enjoy the purple for its own sake, but only because of the way it’s embedded in a vast scene? This goes too far. The surroundings may enhance my experience, but I love that rich velvety purple purely for itself, independently of anything else.

SL #641: Why then do you describe it with the word “velvety”? Do flies or dogs experience purple flowers as “velvety”? Isn’t that word a reference to velvet? Doesn’t it mean that your visual experience calls up deeply buried memories, perhaps tactile memories from childhood, of running your fingers along a purple cushion made of velvet? Or maybe you’re unconsciously reminded of a dark-colored wine you once drank whose label described it as “velvety”. How can you claim your experience of purple is “independent of anything else in the world”?

SL #642: All I’m trying to say is that there are basic, primordial experiences out of which larger experiences are built, and that even the primordial ones are radically, qualitatively different from what goes on in simple physical systems like ropes dangling in breezes and floats bobbing in toilets. A dangling rope doesn’t feel anything when a breeze impinges on it. There’s no feeling in there, there’s no here there. But when I see purple or taste chocolate, that’s a sensual experience I’m having, and it’s from millions of such sensual experiences that my mental life is built up. There’s a big mystery here, in this breach.

SL #641: It sounds attractive, but unfortunately I think you’ve got it all backwards. Those little sensual experiences are to the grand pattern of your mental life as the letters in a novel are to the novel’s plot and characters — irrelevant, arbitrary tokens, rather than carriers of meaning. There is no meaning to the letter “b”, and yet out of it and the other letters of the alphabet, put together in complex sequences, comes all the richness and humanity in a novel or a story.

SL #642: That’s the wrong level to talk about a story. Writers choose words, not letters, and words are of course imbued with meaning. Put together a lot of those tiny meanings and you get one big meaning-rich thing. Similarly, life is made out of many tiny sensual experiences, chained together to make one huge sensuo-emotional experience.

SL #641: Hold on a minute. No isolated word has depth and power. When embedded in a complex context, a word may have great power, but in isolation it does not. It’s an illusion to attribute power to the word itself, and it’s a greater illusion to attribute power to the letters constituting the word.

SL #642: I agree that letters have no power or meaning. But words, yes! They are the atoms of meaning out of which larger structures of meaning are built. You can’t get big meanings from atoms that are meaningless!

SL #641: Oh, really? I thought you just conceded that exactly this happens in the case of words and letters. But all right — let’s move on from that example. Would you say that music has meaning?

SL #642: Music is among the most meaningful things I know.