I Am a Strange Loop

word to be said!

SL #642: It seems that this little pronoun is the nexus of all that makes our human existence mysterious and mystical. It’s so different from anything else around. The intrinsically self-pointing loop that the pronoun “I” involves — its indexicality, as philosophers would call it — is quintessentially different from all other structures in the universe.

SL #641: I don’t quite agree with that. Or rather, I don’t agree with it at all. The pronoun “I” doesn’t involve a stronger or deeper or more mysterious self-reference than the self-reference at the core of Godel’s construction. Quite the contrary. It’s just that Godel spelled out what “I” really means. He revealed that behind the scenes of so-called “indexicals”, there are merely codes and correspondences depending on stable, reliable systems of analogies. The thing we call “I” comes from that referential stability, and that’s all. There’s nothing more mystical about “I” than about any other word that refers. If anything, it is language that is so different from other structures in the universe.

SL #642: So for you, “I” is not mystical? Being is not mysterious?

SL #641: I didn’t say that. Being feels very mysterious to me, because, like everyone else, I’m finite and don’t have the ability to see deeply enough into my substrate to make my “I” poof out of existence. If I did, I guess life would be very uninteresting.

SL #642: I should think so!

SL #641: When we do look down at our fine-grained substrates through scientific experiments, we find small miracles just as Godelian as is “I”.

SL #642: Ah, yes, to be sure — little microgodelinos! But… such as?

SL #641: I mean the self-reproduction of the double helix of DNA. The mechanism behind it all involves just the same abstract ideas as are implicated in Godel’s type of self-reference. This is what John von Neumann unwittingly revealed when he designed a self-reproducing machine in the early 1950’s, and it had exactly the same abstract structure as Godel’s self-referential trick did.

SL #642: Are you saying microgodelinos are self-replicating machines?

SL #641: Yes! It’s a subtle but beautiful analogy. The analogue of the Godel number k is a particular blueprint. The “parent” machine examines this blueprint and follows its instructions exactly — that is, it builds what the blueprint depicts. To do that, it has to know what icons stand for what objects — a Godelian kind of code, or mapping. The newly-built object is a machine that lacks one crucial part. To fill this lacuna, the parent machine then copies the blueprint and sticks the copy (which is the key missing part) into the new machine, and voila! — the new composite object is a “child” machine, identical to its parent.

SL #642: This reminds me of the Morton Salt logo. Would the “child machine” lacking the crucial part be like the “umbrella girl” standing there empty-handed? And the blueprint would be a little blue salt box?

SL #641: Right! Hand her the little blue box, and she’s off to the races! Infinity, ho! And amazingly, only a few years later molecular biologists found that von Neumann’s Godelian mechanism was the same trick Nature had discovered for making self-reproducing physical entities. DNA is the blueprint, of course. It all hinges on the existence of stable mappings (in this case, the mapping called the “genetic code”) and the meanings that come from them. And look where that led — to all of life, as far as it has come, and wherever it’s still heading! Infinity, ho!

SL #642: So you claim that the sense of being a unique living thing, reflected in the magical indexicality of the elusive word “I”, is not a profound phenomenon, but just a mundane consequence of mappings?

SL #641: I don’t think I said that! The sense of being alive and being a unique link in the infinite chain certainly is profound. It’s just that it doesn’t transcend physical law. To the contrary, it is a profound exploitation of physical law — hardly mundane! On the other hand, the all-too-common desire to mystify the pronoun “I”, as if it concealed a deeper mystery than other words do, truly muddies up the picture. The sole root of all these strange phenomena is perception, bringing symbols and meanings into physical systems. To perceive is to make a fantastic jump from William James’ “blooming, buzzing confusion” to an abstract, symbolic level. And then, when perception twists back and focuses on itself, as it inevitably will, you get rich, magical-seeming consequences. Magical-seeming, mind you, but not truly magical. You get a level-crossing feedback loop whose apparent solidity dominates the reality of everything else in the world. This “I”, this unreal but unutterably stubborn marble in the mind, this “Epi” phenomenon, simply takes over, anointing itself as Reality Number One, and from there on out it won’t go away, no matter what words are spoken.

SL #642: So the “I” is all too marbelous — too marbelous for words?

SL #641: What?! I thought you thought my “I” idea was for the birds.

SL #642: It’s true, I did, but I think I’m catching your drift. Perhaps I’m coming around a little bit. Your strange-loop view of an “I” is close to paradoxical, and yet not quite. It’s like Escher’s Drawing Hands — paradoxical when you’re sucked into the drawing by its wondrous realism, yet the paradox dissolves when you step back and see it from outside. Then it’s just another drawing! Most intriguing. It’s all too much, and just too very Berry… to ever be in Russell’s Dictionary.

SL #641: Ah, music to my ears! I’m so delighted you find a bit of merit in my ideas. As you know, they are only metaphors, but they help me to make some sense of the great puzzle of being alive and, as you kept on stressing, the great puzzle of being here. I thank you for the splendid opportunity of exchanging views on such subtle matters.

SL #642: The pleasure, I assure you, was all mine. And I shall await our next meeting with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality, savoir-faire, and undue velocity. Adieu till then, and cheerio!

[Exeunt.]

CHAPTER 21

A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos

Well-told Stories Pluck Powerful Chords

IN THE preceding dialogue, the query most insistently posed by Strange Loop #642 was, “What makes me housed in this particular brain, rather than in any other one?” However, even though Strange Loop #641 tried to provide an answer to this enigma in several different fashions, Strange Loop #642 always had the nagging feeling that Strange Loop #641 hadn’t really gotten the question, and hadn’t understood how profoundly central it is to human existence. Could it be that there is a fundamental breach of communication here, and that some people simply never will get the question because it is too subtle and elusive?

Well, if one is not averse to using a science-fiction scenario, this same question can be posed so vividly and starkly that hopefully no one could fail to understand and feel deeply troubled by the enigma. One way of doing this appears in the path-breaking book Reasons and Persons by the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit. Here is how Parfit poses the riddle:

I enter the Teletransporter. I have been to Mars before, but only by the old method, a space-ship journey taking several weeks. This machine will send me at the speed of light. I merely have to press the green button. Like others, I am nervous. Will it work? I remind myself what I have been told to expect. When I press the button, I shall lose consciousness, and then wake up at what seems a moment later. In fact I shall have been unconscious for about an hour. The Scanner here on Earth will destroy my brain and body, while recording the exact states of all my cells. It will then transmit this information by radio. Travelling at the speed of light, the message will take three minutes to reach the Replicator on Mars. This will then create, out of new matter, a brain and body exactly like