I Am a Strange Loop

For starters, a brain would seem, a priori, just about as unlikely a substrate for self-reference and its rich and counterintuitive consequences as was the extremely austere treatise Principia Mathematica, from which self-reference had been strictly banished. A human brain is just a big spongy bulb of inanimate molecules tightly wedged inside a rock-hard cranium, and there it simply sits, as inert as a lump on a log. Why should self-reference and a self be lurking in such a peculiar medium any more than they lurk in a lump of granite? Where’s the “I”-ness in a brain?

Just as something very strange had to be happening inside the stony fortress of Principia Mathematica to allow the outlawed “I” of Gödelian sentences like “I am not provable” to creep in, something very strange must also take place inside a bony cranium stuffed with inanimate molecules if it is to bring about a soul, a “light on”, a unique human identity, an “I”. And keep in mind that an “I” does not magically pop up in all brains inside all crania, courtesy of “the right stuff” (that is, certain “special” kinds of molecules); it happens only if the proper patterns come to be in that medium. Without such patterns, the system is just as it superficially appears to be: a mere lump of spongy matter, soulless, “I”-less, devoid of any inner light.

Squirting Chemicals

When the first brains came into existence, they were trivial feedback devices, less sophisticated than a toilet’s float-ball mechanism or the thermostat on your wall, and like those devices, they selectively made primitive organisms move towards certain things (food) and away from others (dangers). Evolutionary pressures, however, gradually made brains’ triage of their environments grow more complex and multi-layered, and eventually (here we’re talking millions or billions of years), the repertoire of categories that were being responded to grew so rich that the system, like a TV camera on a sufficiently long leash, was capable of “pointing back”, to some extent, at itself. That first tiny glimmer of self was the germ of consciousness and “I”-ness, but there is still a great mystery.

No matter how complicated and sophisticated brains became, they always remained, at bottom, nothing but a set of cells that “squirted chemicals” back and forth among each other (to borrow a phrase from the pioneering roboticist and provocative writer Hans Moravec), a bit like a huge oil refinery in which liquids are endlessly pumped around from one tank to another. How could a system of pumping liquids ever house a locus of upside-down causality, where meanings seem to matter infinitely more than physical objects and their motions? How could joy, sadness, a love for impressionist painting, and an impish sense of humor inhabit such a cold, inanimate system? One might as well look for an “I” inside a stone fortress, a toilet’s tank, a roll of toilet paper, a television, a thermostat, a heat-seeking missile, a heap of beer cans, or an oil refinery.

Some philosophers see our inner lights, our “I” ’s, our humanity, our souls, as emanating from the nature of the substrate itself — that is, from the organic chemistry of carbon. I find that a most peculiar tree on which to hang the bauble of consciousness. Basically, this is a mystical refrain that explains nothing. Why should the chemistry of carbon have some magical property entirely unlike than that of any other substance? And what is that magical property? And how does it make us into conscious beings? Why is it that only brains are conscious, and not kneecaps or kidneys, if all it takes is organic chemistry? Why aren’t our carbon-based cousins the mosquitoes just as conscious as we are? Why aren’t cows just as conscious as we are? Doesn’t organization or pattern play any role here? Surely it does. And if it does, why couldn’t it play the whole role?

By focusing on the medium rather than the message, the pottery rather than the pattern, the typeface rather than the tale, philosophers who claim that something ineffable about carbon’s chemistry is indispensable for consciousness miss the boat. As Daniel Dennett once wittily remarked in a rejoinder to John Searle’s tiresome “right-stuff” refrain, “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion.” (This was a somewhat subtle hat-tip to the title of a somewhat unsubtle, clearly erotic song written in 1951 by Lois Mann and Henry Glover, made famous many years later by singer Maria Muldaur.) And for my money, the magic that happens in the meat of brains makes sense only if you know how to look at the motions that inhabit them.

The Stately Dance of the Symbols