I Am a Strange Loop

them.

SL #642: Well, of course it would ask itself that. What more natural thing to wonder about?

SL #641: And one piece of the answer is that to a small extent, your “I” is housed in other brains. Yes, your “I” is housed a little bit in my frustratingly dense and pigheaded brain, and vice versa. But despite that blurry spillover that turns the strict city-limits version of You into Greater Metropolitan You, your “I” is still very localized. Your “I” is certainly not uniformly spread out among all the brains on the surface of the earth — no more so than the great metropolitan sprawl of Mexico City possesses suburbs in Madagascar! But there is another piece of the answer to your question “Why am I here and not there?”, and it is going to trouble you. It is that your “I” isn’t housed anywhere. SL #642: Come again? This doesn’t sound like your usual line.

SL #641: Well, it’s just another way of looking at these things. Earlier, I described your “I” as a self- reinforcing structure and a self-reinforcing story, but now I’ll risk annoying you by calling it a self-reinforcing myth.

SL #642: A myth?! I’m certainly not a myth, and I’m here to tell you so.

SL #641: Hold your horses for a moment. Think of the illusion of the solid marble in the box of envelopes. Were I to insist that that box of envelopes had a genuine marble in it, you’d say I had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a tactile illusion, wouldn’t you?

SL #642: I would indeed, although the feeling that something solid is in there is not an illusion.

SL #641: Agreed. So my claim is that your brain (like mine and like everyone else’s) has, out of absolute necessity, invented something it calls an “I”, but that that thing is as real (or rather, as unreal) as is that “marble” in that box of envelopes. In that sense, your brain has tricked itself. The “I” — yours, mine, everyone’s — is a tremendously effective illusion, and falling for it has fantastic survival value. Our “I” ’s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol- possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life.

SL #642: You’re telling me there is not really any “I”. Yet my brain tells me just as assuredly that there is an “I”. Then you tell me that this is just my brain pulling a trick on me. But excuse me — pulling a trick on whom? You’ve just told me that this me doesn’t exist, so who is my brain pulling a trick on? And — pardon me once again — how can I even call it “my brain” if there is no me for it to belong to?

SL #641: The problem is that in a sense, an “I” is something created out of nothing. And since making something out of nothing is never possible, the alleged something turns out to be an illusion, in the end, but a very powerful one, like the marble among the envelopes. However, the “I” is an illusion far more entrenched and recalcitrant than the marble illusion, because in the case of “I”, there is no simple revelatory act corresponding to turning the box upside down and shaking it, then peering in between the envelopes and finding nothing solid and spherical in there. We don’t have access to the inner workings of our brains. And so the only perspective we have on our “I”-ness marble comes from the counterpart to squeezing all the envelopes at once, and that perspective says it’s real!

SL #642: If that’s the only possible perspective, then what would ever give us even the slightest sense that we might be lending credence to a myth?

SL #641: One thing that gives many people a sneaking suspicion that something about this “I” notion might be mythical is precisely what you’ve been troubled about all through our discussion — namely, there seems to be something incompatible between the hard laws of physics and the existence of vague, shadowy things called “I” ’s. How could experiencers come to exist in a world where there are just inanimate things moving around? It seems as if perception, sensation, and experience are something extra, above and beyond physics.

SL #642: Unless, of course, there’s feelium, but that’s not by any means clear. In any case, I agree that conflicts with physics give a hint that this “I” notion is very elusive and cries out for an explanation.

SL #641: A second hint that something needs revision has to do with what we perceive as causing what. In our everyday life, we take it for granted that an “I” can cause things, can push things around. If I decide to drive to the grocery store, my one-ton automobile winds up taking me there and bringing me back. Now that seems pretty peculiar in the world of physics, where everything comes about solely as a result of how particles interact. How does the particle story leave room for a shadowy, ethereal “I” to cause a heavy car to move somewhere? This, too, casts a bit of doubt on the reality of the notion of “I”.

SL #642: Perhaps — but if so, it’s very very slight.

SL #641: No matter. That extremely slight doubt flies in the face of what we all take for granted ever since our earliest childhood, which is that “I” ’s do exist — and in most people, the latter belief simply wins out, hands down. The battle is never even engaged, in most people’s minds. On the other hand, for a few people the battle starts to rage: physics versus “I”. And various escape hatches have been proposed, including the notion that consciousness is a novel kind of quantum phenomenon, or the idea that consciousness resides uniformly in all matter, and so on. My proposal for a truce to end this battle is to see the “I” as a hallucination perceived by a hallucination, which sounds pretty strange, or perhaps even stranger: the “I” as a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

SL #642: That sounds way beyond strange. That sounds crazy.

SL #641: Perhaps, but like many strange fruits of modern science, it can sound crazy yet be right. At one time it sounded crazy to say that the earth moved and the sun was still, since it was patently obvious that it was the other way around. Today we can see it either way, depending on circumstances. When we’re in an everyday frame of mind, we say, “The sun is setting”, and when we’re in a scientific frame of mind we remember that the earth is merely turning. We are flexible creatures, able to shift point of view according to circumstance.

SL #642: And so, in your view, should we also be able to shift points of view concerning the existence of an “I”?

SL #641: Definitely. My claim that an “I” is a hallucination perceived by a hallucination is somewhat like the heliocentric viewpoint — it can yield new insights but it’s very counterintuitive, and it’s hardly conducive to easy communication with other human beings, who all believe in their “I” ’s with indomitable fervor. We explain our own behavior, and that of others, through the positing of our own “I” and its analogues in other people. This naive viewpoint allows us to talk about the world of people in terms that make perfect sense to people.

SL #642: Naive?! I notice that you haven’t stopped saying “I”! You’ve probably said it a hundred times in the last five minutes!

SL #641: To be sure. You’re absolutely right. This “I” is a necessary, indispensable concept to all of us, even if it’s an illusion, like thinking that the sun is circling the earth because it rises, moves across the sky, and sets. It’s only when our naive viewpoint about “I” bangs up against the world of physics that it runs into all sorts of difficulties. It’s at that point that those of us who are scientifically inclined realize that there has to be some other story to be told about it. But believing in the easy story about “I” is a million times more important to most of us than figuring out a scientific explanation for “I”, so the upshot is that there’s no contest. The “I” myth wins hands down, without a debate ever taking place — even in the minds of the majority of scientifically inclined people!

SL #642: How can that be?

SL #641: I surmise it’s for two reasons. One is that the “I” myth is infinitely more central to our belief systems than is the “sun circling the earth” myth, and the other is that any scientific alternative to it is far subtler and more disorienting than the shift to heliocentrism was. And so the “I” myth is much harder to dislodge from our minds than the “sun circling the earth” myth. Deconstructing the “I” holds about as much appeal for a typical adult as deconstructing Santa Claus would hold for a typical toddler. Actually, giving up Santa Claus is trivial compared to giving up “I”. Ceasing to believe altogether in the “I” is in fact impossible, because it is indispensable for survival. Like it or not, we humans are stuck for good with this myth.

.SL #642: Why do you keep on saying the “I” is just a myth or a hallucination or an illusion, just like that blasted non-marble? I’m tired of your trotting out your tired old marble metaphor. I want to know what’s hallucinated.

SL #641: All right, let’s put the marble metaphor to bed for a while. The basic idea is that the dance of symbols in a brain is itself perceived by symbols, and that step extends the dance, and so round and round it goes. That, in a nutshell, is what consciousness is. But if you recall, symbols are simply large phenomena made out of