I Am a Strange Loop (79 page)
Excerpt from Carson McCullers,
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Copyright © 1940, renewed 1967, by Carson McCullers. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from Derek Parfit,
Reasons and Persons
© 1984 Oxford University Press. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
Excerpts from Albert Schweitzer,
Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit.
© C. H. Beck, Munich, 1924. Personal translation for use in this book only, by Douglas Hofstadter. Reprinted with permission.
INDEX
A
abbreviations piled on abbreviations
aboutness, double, of Gödel’s formula
absorbing someone else’s essence
“abstraction ceiling” in author’s mind
abstractions: as causes; centrality of: formidable tower of, in human minds
abstractly swirling patterns
accidents in mathematics: absence of; possibility of
accretion: of self-model; of soul
Ackermann’s function
active symbols,
see
symbols
affinity of souls,
see
chemistry (interpersonal)
afterglow of a soul
Aimable, the village baker
“alacrity, celerity, assiduity”, etc.
Alfbert, the; dream of
Alf and Bertie’s Posh Shop
algorithmic information theory
Ali, Muhammad
Alienware machine, emulated by Macintosh
Alighieri, Dante
alignment: of
PM
theorems and code numbers; of truths and
PM
theorems; of two souls in married couple dedicated to common goals
allegoric license
“Alle Menschen Müssen Sterben” (Bach)
Alzheimer’s disease
ambiguity of operations inside computers
américain,
pronunciation of the word in movie
amino acids
amplification of input in audio feedback; saturation of
analogies: central role of, in this book; as fabric of human thought; having force proportional to precision and visibility; index entries for; jumping out automatically; made by bees; as mediating reference; research on; retrieved automatically by new events; rivalry between two similar ones; seen as simmball patterns in the careenium; self-referential; as source of meaning; tossed off effortlessly; trivial-seeming examples; by W. V. O. Quine
analogies, serious examples of: between Alfbert and Whitehead/Russell; between audio and video feedback; between Aurélie and Pomponnette; between the author’s mind and others’ minds; between the author’s view of “I” and quantum mechanics; between beer cans and neurons; between brain and oil refinery; between brains and countries; between brains and
PM
as substrates for strange loops; between brain structures and genes or atoms; between butterfly swarms and souls; between careenium and brain; between careenium and pinball machine; between cars and dogs; between Chantal looking at movie and Russell looking at Gödel’s formula; between children with muddy boots; between cookies on same plate; between couples; between crystal and orchard; between death and eclipse; between decision-making and political elections; between dedicated machines and music boxes; between dog looking at pixels and Russell looking at Gödel’s formula; between domino chainium and traffic jam; between donning piece of clothing and identifying with someone else; between Doug and Carol; between edibility and provability; between electron clouds and human souls; between entwined video loops and entwined souls; between epiphenomena in brain and in mineral; between formula containing own Gödel number and elephant in matchbox; between gems in Caspian Sea and powers in Fibonacci sequence; between genes and novels; between Gödel’s construction and black-belt judo maneuver; between Gödel number
k
and Morton Salt can; between Gödel’s strange loop and video feedback; between grapplings with death and beautiful sailboat; between growing soul and accreting planetoid; between Guru and Göru; between heart and brain; between heart-shaped bread and heart on collar; between human soul and train; between “I” and dollar bill; between “I” and either “i” or “Twe”; between “I” and “Epi”; between “I” and video-feedback galaxy; between Imp and KG; between K. Gödel’s article on
Principia Mathematica
and G. Külot’s review of
Prince Hyppia: Math Dramatica
; between Klüdgerot and Kurt Gödel; between Leafpilishness and Consciousness; between learning to be someone else and learning a foreign language; between leg-tingles and ants (and ginger ale); between life and hedge maze; between listener not relating to Bartók and magnetic field not penetrating superconductor; between mosquito and flush toilet; between mosquito and heat-seeking missile; between mosquito and red spot; between naïve careenium and young Doug; between Newtonian physics and naïve view of self; between oneself and others; between pairsons and persons; between Parfit and Einstein; between picket lines in play and outside theater; between pieces of cake; between pixel patterns and events; between
PM
and sinking boat; between prim numbers and prime numbers; between
Principia Mathematica
and invaded fortress; between quoted phrases and Gödel numbers; between recursion and plant growth; between recursive sequences of numbers and
PM
theorems; between robot vehicle and an ant; between Rosalyn Wadhead and Russell and Whitehead; between salt box and picture of salt box; between salt-box picture and Gödel’s self-referential trick; between saucy numbers and unpennable lines in plays; between self-reference and self-replication; between self-symbol and video feedback; between Sluggo dreaming of himself and self-quoting sentence; between “soap digest rack” spelled out in Sanskrit and Gödel’s formula spelled out in
PM
notation; between souledness and tallness; between Sperry’s and Gödel’s balancing acts; between strange loops and selves; between symbols in brain and books in library; between uninteresting number and Berry’s number; between universal machines and chameleonic integers; between universal machines and people; between unpennable lines and unprovable strings; between unscalability of KJ and unprovability of KG; between video feedback and iteration in complex plane; between windmill and thoughtmill; between Xerxes’ breath and Yolanda’s breath; between Y. Ted Enrustle and Whitehead and Russell
Andromeda galaxy
animacy, found in inanimate substrate
animals: killing of; self-awareness of
another soul, living inside oneself
ant: crossing property lines; rescued; Schweitzer’s personal
Antarctica, reality of
Anterselva di Mezzo
anthropomorphic language, temptation of
ants’ disrespect for property lines
“ants in my leg”
“Anything you can docan do meta”
arbitrarily extensible repertoires of categories
see also
concepts, symbols
arbitrarily subtle properties of whole numbers;
see also
universality
arbitrary mapping between stimuli and sensations
Archimedes
arithmetization of
PM
formulas
Arnheim, Rudi and Mary
Around the World in Eighty Days
arrangement as cause
artificial “I”, still far off
artificial intelligence;
see also
robots
“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”
atomes crochus, avoir des
(“having hooked atoms”), as French for interpersonal chemistry
atoms as abstract entities
audio feedback; pitch of; vanilla loop in
Aurélie, straying wife
Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit
(Schweitzer)
Austen, Jane
Austranius
authority, arguments by
Avogadro’s number
awareness: of dance of symbols; levels of, compared;
see also
consciousness, perception
axioms: analogous to seeds in recursion; as top lines of
PM
proofs
B
b
(Berry’s number)
Babbage, Charles
baby: impoverished perceptual system of; lack of self at birth or conception
Bach, Johann Sebastian; cantata by; organ music by; tricentennial birthday party for
“bachelor”, elusiveness of concept
bad-breath analogy
bandwidth of communication as determinant of degree of interpenetration
banishment of toy guns from household
barber paradox
barberry jelly
“bare” strange loop of selfhood
barking, reverberant
Bartók, Béla; violin concerto # 2
baseball and football sensations swapped
Baskerville, John
basketball: skill in, as part of self-symbol; unpredictability of, when tossed
Beardsley, Dick
beauty, as bedrock cause for humans
“because” coinciding with “although”
Bechet, Sidney
beer cans and ping-pong balls as substrate for thinking
bees, swarm of, opposing caged-bird metaphor
Beethoven, Ludwig van
behaviors, attempted and evaluated
being: in two places at the same time; at two times in the same place
being someone else: economy-class version; with a “foreign accent”
beings: defined as systems having representational universality; modeling other beings
belief: as experienced by a zombie; shared by two people
believability of The True View
Berkeley, University of California at
Bernstein, Jeremy
Berry, G. G.
Berry’s paradox: as breeding ground for Gödel’s theorem; as formalized by Chaitin; as strange-loop candidate
Bierce, Ambrose
“Bigger they are, harder they fall”
bile, single-edged or double-edged
biologists paying attention to informational rather than physical level of genes
birds saved by young Schweitzer
black-and-white smudges: as early teleportation technology; as soul-shards
black-belt maneuver by Gödel
“black holes” in video feedback
bleu blanc rouge
(colors of the French flag)
blocked infinite regress
blood, nonexperienced quale of
“blooming, buzzing confusion” (Wm. James)
Bloomington, Indiana
blue humpback
blueprint used in self-replicating machine
blurriness of everyday concepts
boat with endless succession of leaks
bodies
vs.
souls
body parts initiate self-representation
Bohr atom, as stepping stone en route to quantum mechanics
Bohr, Niels
boiling water, reliability of
Bonaparte,
see
Napoleon
bon mots: by Carol Hofstadter; by David Moser
“Book of nature written in mathematics” (Galileo)
Boole, George
boot-removal analogy
boundaries between souls, blurriness of
boundaries, macroscopic, as irrelevant to particles
box with flaps making loop
Brabner, George
brain activity: hiddenness of substrate of; modeled computationally; need for high-level view of; obviousness of high-level view of
brain-in-vat scenario
brain research, nature of
brain-scanning gadgets
brain structures
brains: compared to hearts; complexity of, as relevant to consciousness; controlling bodies directly
vs.
indirectly; eerieness of; evolution of; as fusion of two half-brains; as inanimate; inhabited by more than one “I”; interacting via ideas; main; as multi-level systems; not responsible for color qualia; perceiving multiple environments simultaneously; receiving sensory input directly or indirectly; resembling inert sponges; unlikely substrate for interiority
Braitenberg, Valentino
bread becoming a gun
Brown, Charlie
Brownian motion
Brünn, Austria (birthplace of Kurt Gödel)
buck stopping at “I”
Bugeaud, Yann
bunnies as edible beings
“burstwise advance in evolution” (Sperry)
Bushmiller, Ernie
butterflies: not respecting precinct boundaries; in orchard, as metaphor for human soul
Buzzaround Betty
C
caged-bird metaphor; as analogous to Newtonian physics; hints at wrongness of; as ingrained habit; at level of countries and cultures; metaphors opposed to; normally close to correct; as reinforced by language; temptingness of
Cagey’s doubly-hearable line
cake whose pieces all taste bad, as inferrred by analogy
candles
cantata aria
Cantor, Georg
capital punishment
Capitalized Essences; canceled
careenium; growing up; self-image of; two views of; unsatisfactory to skeptics
Carnap, Rudolf
Carol-and-Doug: as higher-level entity; joint mind of; shared dreads and dreams of
Carolness, survival of
Carol-symbol in Doug’s brain: being
vs.
representing a person; triggerability of
cars: as high-level objects; pushed around by desires