I Am a Strange Loop

Thus it is with the strange loop making up a human “I”, but there is a key difference. In the TV setup, as we earlier observed, no perception takes place at any stage inside the loop — just the transmission and reception of bare pixels. The TV loop is not a strange loop — it is just a feedback loop.

In any strange loop that gives rise to human selfhood, by contrast, the level-shifting acts of perception, abstraction, and categorization are central, indispensable elements. It is the upward leap from raw stimuli to symbols that imbues the loop with “strangeness”. The overall gestalt “shape” of one’s self — the “stable whorl”, so to speak, of the strange loop constituting one’s “I” — is not picked up by a disinterested, neutral camera, but is perceived in a highly subjective manner through the active processes of categorizing, mental replaying, reflecting, comparing, counterfactualizing, and judging.

I Am Ineradicably Entrenched…

While you were reading my first-grade show-and-tell period Hopalong Cassidy–style smile-attempt bravado anecdote, the question “How come Hofstadter is once again leaving elementary particles out of the picture?” may have flitted through your mind; then again, perhaps it did not. I hope the latter is the case! Indeed, why would such an odd thought occur to any sane human being reading that passage (including the most hard-bitten of particle physicists)? Even the vaguest, most fleeting allusion to particle physics in that context would seem to constitute an absurd non sequitur, for what on earth could gluons and muons and protons and photons, of all things, have to do with a little boy imitating his idol, Hopalong Cassidy?

Although particles galore were, to be sure, constantly churning “way down there” in that little boy’s brain, they were as invisible as the myriad simms careening about inside a careenium. Roger Sperry (a later idol of mine whose writings, had I but read and understood them in first grade, might have inspired me to stand up and bravely proclaim to my classmates, “I can philosophize just like Roger Sperry!”) would additionally point out that the particles in the young boy’s brain were merely serving (i.e., being pushed around by) far higher-level symbolic events in which the boy’s “I” was participating, and in which his “I” was being formed. As that “I” grew in complexity and grew ever realer to itself (i.e., ever more indispensable to the boy’s efforts to categorize and understand the never-repeating events in his life), the chance that any alternative “I”-less way of understanding the world could emerge and compete with it was being rendered essentially nil.

At the same time as I myself was getting ever more used to the fact that this “I” thing was responsible for what I did, my parents and friends were also becoming more convinced that there was indeed something very realseeming “in there” (in other words, something very marble-like, something with its unique brands of “hardness” and “resilience” and “shape”), which merited being called “you” or “he” or “Douggie”, and that also merited being called “I” by Douggie — and so once again, the sense of reality of this “I” was being reinforced over and over again, in myriad ways. By the time this brain had lived in this body for a couple of years or so, the “I” notion was locked into it beyond any conceivable hope of reversal.

…But Am I Real?

And yet, was this “I”, for all its tremendous stability and apparent utility, a real thing, or was it just a comfortable myth? I think we need some good old-fashioned analogies here to help out. And so I ask you, dear reader, are temperature and pressure real things, or are they just façons de parler? Is a rainbow a real thing, or is it nonexistent? Perhaps more to the point, was the “marble” that I discovered inside my box of envelopes real?

What if the box had been sealed shut so I had no way of looking at the individual envelopes? What if my knowledge of the box of envelopes necessarily came from dealing with its hundred envelopes as a single whole, so that no shifting back and forth between coarse-grained and fine-grained perspectives was possible? What if I hadn’t even known there were envelopes in the box, but had simply thought that there was a somewhat squeezable, pliable mass of softish stuff that I could grab with my entire hand, and that at this soft mass’s center there was something much more rigid-feeling and undeniably spherical in shape?