I Am a Strange Loop (61 page)

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 nonsymbolic neural activity, so you can shift viewpoint and get rid of the language of symbols entirely, in which case the “I” disintegrates. It just poofs out of existence, so there’s no room left for downward causality.

SL #642: What does that mean, more specifically?

SL #641: It means that in the new picture there are no desires, beliefs, character traits, senses of humor, ideas, memories, or anything mentalistic; just itty-bitty physical events (particle collisions, in essence) are left. One can do likewise in the careenium, where you can shift points of view, either looking at things at the level of simmballs or looking at things at the level of simms. At the former level, the simms are totally unseen, and at the latter level, the simmballs are totally unseen. These rival viewpoints really are extreme opposites, like the heliocentric and geocentric views.

SL #642: All of this I see, but why do you keep implying that one of these views is an illusion, and the other one is the truth? You always give primacy to the
particle
viewpoint, the lower-level microscopic viewpoint. Why are you so prejudiced? Why don’t you simply see two equally good rival views that we can oscillate between as we find appropriate, in somewhat the way that physicists can oscillate between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics when they deal with gases?

SL #641: Because, most unfortunately, the non-particle view involves several types of magical thinking. It entails making a division of the world into two radically different kinds of entities (experiencers and non-experiencers), it involves two radically different kinds of causality (downward and upward), it involves immaterial souls that pop into being out of nowhere and at some point are suddenly extinguished, and on and on.

SL #642: You are so bloody inconsistent! You
liked
the explanation of the falling domino that invoked the primeness of 641! You
preferred
it! You kept on saying it was the
real
reason the domino didn’t fall, and that the other explanation was myopic and hopelessly useless.

SL #641: Touché! I admit that my stance has a definite ironic tinge to it. Sometimes the strict scientific viewpoint
is
hopelessly useless, even if it’s correct. That’s a dilemma. As I said, the human condition is, by its very nature, one of believing in a myth. And we’re permanently trapped in that condition, which makes life rather interesting.

SL #642: Taoism and Zen long ago sensed this paradoxical state of affairs and made it a point to try to dismantle or deconstruct or simply get rid of the “I”.

SL #641: That sounds like a noble goal, but it’s doomed to failure. Just as we need our eyes in order to
see,
we need our “I” ’s in order to
be
! We humans are beings whose fate it is to be able to perceive abstractions, and to be driven to do so. We are beings that spend their lives sorting the world into an ever-growing hierarchy of patterns, all represented by symbols in our brains. We constantly come up with new symbols by putting together previous symbols in new kinds of structures, nearly
ad infinitum.
Moreover, being macroscopic, we can’t see way down to the level where physical causality happens, so in compensation, we find all sorts of marvelously efficient shorthand ways of describing what goes on, because the world, though it’s pretty crazy and chaotic, is nonetheless filled with regularities that can be counted on most of the time.

SL #642: What kinds of regularities are you talking about?

SL #641: Oh, for example, swings on a playground will swing in a very predictable way when you push them, even though the detailed motions of their chains and seats are way beyond our ability to predict. But we don’t care in the least about that level of detail. We feel we know extremely well how swings move. Similarly, shopping carts go pretty much where you want them to when you push them, even if their wobbly wheels, rather predictably, lend them an amusing trace of unpredictability. And someone ambling down the sidewalk in your direction may make some slightly unpredictable motions, but you can count on them not turning into a giant and gobbling you up. These sorts of regularity are what we all know intimately and take for granted, and they are amazingly remote from the level of particle collisions. The most efficient and irresistible shorthand of all is that of imputing abstract desires and beliefs to certain “privileged” entities (those with minds — animals and people), and of wrapping all of those things together in one single, supposedly indivisible unity that represents the “central essence” of such an entity.

SL #642: You mean that entity’s “soul”?

SL #641: Pretty much. Or if you don’t want to use that word, then it’s the way that you presume that that thing feels inside — its inner viewpoint, let’s say. And then, to cap it all off, since each perceiver is always swimming in its own activities and their countless consequences, it can’t keep itself from fabricating a particularly intricate tale about its
own
soul, its
own
central essence. That tale is no different in kind from the tales it makes up for the other mind-owning entities that it sees — it’s just far more detailed. Moreover, the story of an “I” is a tale about a central essence that never disappears from view (in contrast to “you” ’s and “she” ’s and “he” ’s, which tend to come into view for a scene or two and then go off stage).

SL #642: So it’s the fact that the system can watch itself that dooms it to this illusion.

SL #641: Not just that it
can
watch itself, but that it
does
watch itself, and does so all the time. That, plus the crucial fact that it has no choice but to radically simplify everything. Our categories are vast simplifications of patterns in the world, but the well-chosen categories are enormously efficient in allowing us to fathom and anticipate the behavior of the world around us.

SL #642: And why can’t we get rid of our hallucinations? Why can’t we attain that pure and selfless “I”-less state that the Zen people would aim for?

SL #641: We can try all we want, and it is an interesting exercise for a short while, but we can’t turn off our perception machinery and still survive in the world. We can’t make ourselves
not
perceive things like trees, flowers, dogs, and other people. We can play the game, can tell ourselves we’ve succeeded, can claim that we have “unperceived” them, but that’s just plain self-fooling. The fact is, we are macroscopic creatures, and so our perception and our categories are enormously coarse-grained relative to the fabric at which the true causality of the universe resides. We’re stuck at the level of radical simplification, for better or for worse.

SL #642: Is that a tragedy? You make it sound like a sad fate.

SL #641: Not at all — it’s our glory! It’s only those who take Zen and the Tao very seriously who consider this to be a condition to be fought against tooth and nail. They resent words, they resent breaking the world up into discrete chunks and giving them names. And so they give you recipes — such as their droll koans — to try to combat this universal built-in drive to use words. I myself have no desire to fight against the use of words in understanding the world’s mysteries — quite the reverse! But I admit that using words has one very major drawback.

SL #642: What is that?

SL #641: It is that we have to live with paradox, and live with it in the most intimate fashion. And the word “I” epitomizes all of that.

SL #642: I don’t see anything in the least paradoxical about the word “I”. In fact, I see no analogy at all between the commonplace, straightforward, down-to-earth notion of “I” and the esoteric, almost ungraspably elusive notion of a Gödelian strange loop.

SL #641: Well, consider this. On the one hand, “I” is an expression denoting a set of very high abstractions: a life story, a set of tastes, a bundle of hopes and fears, some talents and lacunas, a certain degree of wittiness, some other degree of absent-mindedness, and on and on. And yet on the other hand, “I” is an expression denoting a physical object made of trillions of cells, each of which is doing its own thing without the slightest regard for the supposed “whole” of which it is but an infinitesimal part. Put another way, “I” refers at one and the same time to a highly tangible and palpable biological substrate and also to a highly intangible and abstract psychological pattern. When you say “I am hungry”, which one of these levels are you referring to? And to which one are you referring when you declare, “I am happy”? And when you confess, “I can’t remember our old phone number”? And when you exult, “I love skiing”? And when you yawn, “I am sleepy”?

SL #642: Yes, now that you mention it, I do agree that what “I” stands for is a little hard to pin down. Sometimes its referent is concrete and physical, sometimes it’s abstract and mental. And yet when you come down to it, “I” is always both concrete and abstract at the same time.

SL #641: It is just one thing described in two phenomenally different ways, and that’s just the same as Gödel’s sentence. That’s why it is valid to say that it is both about numbers and about itself. Likewise, “I” is both about a myriad of separate physical objects and also about one abstract pattern — the very pattern causing the 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 Gödel’s construction. Quite the contrary. It’s just that Gödel 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 Gödelian as is “I”.

SL #642: Ah, yes, to be sure — little microgödelinos! 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 Gödel’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 Gödel’s self-referential trick did.

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

SL #641: Yes! It’s a subtle but beautiful analogy. The analogue of the Gödel 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 Gödelian 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
voilà
! — 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 Gödelian 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!