I Am a Strange Loop (60 page)

SL #641: When you painted a picture of the earth before life evolved, it had volcanoes, thunder and lightning, electricity, fire, light, and sound — even the sun, that great big ball of nuclear fusion. And yet you weren’t willing to imagine that the presence of such phenomena, in any combination or permutation, could ever give rise to an experiencer. Yet just now, in talking about the mysterious soul-creating essence I called “feelium”, you used the word “dance”, as in the phrase “dancing symbols”. Are you perhaps unwittingly changing your tune?

SL #642: Well, I can imagine a sparkling, firelike “dance” as being what distinguishes experiencers from non-experiencers. It’s even somehow appealing to me to think that the dancing of feelium, if it turned out to exist, might be able to explain the difference between experiencers and non-experiencers. But even if we came to understand the physics of how feelium produces experience, something crucial would
still
be missing. Suppose that the world were populated by experiencers defined by some kind of pattern involving feelium. Let’s even suppose that the pattern at the core of each experiencer were a strange loop, as you postulate. So now, because of this elusive but wonderful physical pattern executed at least partially in feelium, there are lots of “lights on” scattered around in special spots here and there in the universe. The sticking point remains: Which one of them is
me
? What makes
one
of them different from all of the others? What is the source of “I”-ness?

SL #641: Why do you say you would be different from the others? Each one would cry out that
it
was different. You’d all be mouthing just the same thoughts. In that sense, you would all be indistinguishable!

SL #642: I think you’re teasing me. You know perfectly well that I’m
not
the same as anyone else. My inner fire is
here,
not anywhere else. I want to know what singles out this particular fire from all the others.

SL #641: It’s as I said before: you’re a satellite to your brain. Like a fireplace, a particular brain is in a particular spot. And wherever it happens to be, its resident strange loop calls that place “here”. What’s so mysterious about that?

SL #642: You’re not answering my question. I don’t think you’re even
hearing
my question.

SL #641: Oh, sure — I hear you. I here, you there!

SL #642: Ouch. Now just listen for a moment. My question is very straightforward. Anybody can understand it (except maybe you). Why am I in
this
brain? Why didn’t I wind up in some
other
brain? Why didn’t I wind up in
your
brain, for instance?

SL #641: Because your “I” was not an
a priori
well-defined thing that was predestined to jump, full-fledged and sharp, into some just-created empty physical vessel at some particular instant. Nor did your “I” suddenly spring into existence, wholly unanticipated but in full bloom. Rather, your “I” was the slowly emerging outcome of a million unpredictable events that befell a particular body and the brain housed in it. Your “I” is the self-reinforcing structure that gradually came to exist not only
in
that brain, but
thanks to
that brain. It couldn’t have come to exist in
this
brain, because
this
brain went through different experiences that led to a different human being.

SL #642: But why couldn’t
I
have had those experiences as easily as you?

SL #641: Careful now! Each “I” is defined as a
result
of its experiences, and not vice versa! To think the reverse is a very tempting, seductive trap to fall into. You keep on revealing your tacit assumption that any “I”, despite having grown up inside one particular brain, isn’t deeply rooted in that brain — that the same “I” could just as easily have grown up in and been attached to any other brain; that there is no deeper a connection between a given “I” and a given brain than the connection between a given canary and a given cage. You can just swap them arbitrarily.

SL #642: You’re still missing my point. Instead of asking why I
ended up
in this brain, I’m asking why I
started out
in that random brain, and not in some other one. There’s no reason that it had to be
that
one.

SL #641: No,
you’re
the one who’s missing the point. The key point, uncomfortable for you though it will be, is that
no one
started out in that brain — no one at all. It was just as uninhabited as a swinging rope or a whirlpool. But unlike those physical systems, it could perceive and evolve in sophistication, and so, as weeks, months, and years passed, there gradually came to be
someone
in there. But that personal identity didn’t suddenly appear full-blown; rather, it slowly coalesced and came into focus, like a cloud in the sky or condensation on a windowpane.

SL #642: But who was that person destined to be? Why couldn’t it have been someone else?

SL #641: I’m coming to that. What slowly came to pervade that brain was a complicated set of mental tendencies and verbal habits that are now insistently repeating this question, “Why am I
here
and not
there
?” As you may notice, this brain
here
(mine, that is) doesn’t make its mouth ask that question over and over again.
My
brain is very different from
your
brain.

SL #642: Are you telling me that it doesn’t make sense to ask the question, “Why am I here and not there?”

SL #641: Yes, I’m saying that, among other things. What makes all of this so counterintuitive — verging on the incomprehensible, at times — is that your brain (like mine, like everyone’s) has told itself a million times a self-reinforcing story whose central player is called “I”, and one of the most crucial aspects of this “I”, an aspect that is truly a
sine qua non
for “I”-ness, is that it fluently flits into other brains, at least partially. Out of intimacy, out of empathy, out of friendship, and out of relatedness (as well as for other reasons),
your
brain’s “I” continually makes darting little forays into
other
brains, seeing things to some extent from their point of view, and thus convincing itself that it could easily be housed in them. And then, quite naturally, it starts wondering why it
isn’t
housed in 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 naïve viewpoint allows us to talk about the world of people in terms that make perfect sense to people.

SL #642:
Naïve
?! 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 naïve 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!