I Am a Strange Loop

As a simple illustration of how profoundly wedded our thinking is to the blurry, hazy categories of the macroworld, consider the curious fact that logicians — people who by profession try to write down ironclad, razor-sharp rules of logical inference that apply with impeccable precision to linguistic expressions — seldom if ever resort to the level of particles and fields for their canonical examples of fundamental, eternal truths. Instead, their most frequent examples of “truth” are typically sentences that use totally out-of-focus categories — sentences such as “Snow is white”, “Water is wet”, “Bachelors are unmarried males”, and “Communism either is or is not in for deep trouble in the next few years in China.”

If you think these sentences do express sharp truths, just ponder for a moment… What does “snow” really mean? Is it as sharp a category as “checkmate” or “prime number”? And what does “wet” really mean, exactly? No blur at all there? What about “unmarried” — not to mention “the next few years” and “in for deep trouble”? Ambiguities galore here! And yet such classic philosophers’ sentences, since they reside at the level where we naturally float, seem to most people far realer and (therefore far more reliably true) than sentences such as “Electrons have spin 1/2” or “The laws of electromagnetism are invariant under a mirror reflection.”

Because of our relatively huge size, most of us never see or deal directly with electrons or the laws of electromagnetism. Our perceptions and actions focus on far larger, vaguer things, and our deepest beliefs, far from being in electrons, are in the many macroscopic items that we are continually assigning to our high-frequency and low-frequency mental categories (such as “fast food” and “doggie bags” on the one hand, and “feet of clay” and “customer service departments” on the other), and also in the perceived causality, however blurry and unreliable it may be, that seems to hold among these large and vague items.

Our keenest insights into causality in the often terribly confusing world of living beings invariably result from well-honed acts of categorization at a macroscopic level. For example, the reasons for a mysterious war taking place in some remote land might suddenly leap into sharp focus for us when an insightful commentator links the war’s origin to an ancient conflict between certain religious dogmas. On the other hand, no enlightenment whatsoever would come if a physicist tried to explain the war by saying it came about thanks to trillions upon trillions of momentum-conserving collisions taking place among ephemeral quantum-mechanical specks.

I could go on and say similar things about how we always perceive love affairs and other grand themes of human life in terms of intangible everyday patterns belonging to the large-scale world, and never in terms of the interactions of elementary particles. In contrast to declaring that quantum electrodynamics is “what makes the world go round”, I could instead cite such eternally elusive mysteries as beauty, generosity, sexuality, insecurity, fidelity, jealousy, loneliness, and on and on, making sure not to leave out that wonderful tingling of two souls that we curiously call “chemistry”, and that the French, even more curiously, describe as avoir des atomes crochus, which means having atoms that are hooked together.

Making such a list, though fun, would be a simple exercise and would tell you nothing new. The key point, though, is that we perceive essentially everything in life at this level, and essentially nothing at the level of the invisible components that, intellectually, we know we are made out of. There are, I concede, a few exceptions, such as our modern keen awareness of the microscopic causes of disease, and also our interest in the tiny sperm–egg events that give rise to a new life, and the common knowledge of the role of microscopic factors in the determination of the sex of a child — but these are highly exceptional. The general rule is that we swim in the world of everyday concepts, and it is they, not micro-events, that define our reality.

Am I a Strange Marble?

The foregoing means that we can best understand our own actions just as we best understand other creatures’ actions — in terms of stable but intangible internal patterns called “hopes” and “beliefs” and so on. But the need for self-understanding goes much further than that. We are powerfully driven to create a term that summarizes the presumed unity, internal coherence, and temporal stability of all the hopes and beliefs and desires that are found inside our own cranium — and that term, as we all learn very early on, is “I”. And pretty soon this high abstraction behind the scenes comes to feel like the maximally real entity in the universe.