I Am a Strange Loop

And yet when it comes to perceiving ourselves, we tell a different story. Things are far murkier when we speak of ourselves than when we speak of video feedback, because we have no direct access to any analogue, inside our brains, to pixels and their local logic. Intellectually knowing that our brains are dense networks of neurons doesn’t make us familiar with our brains at that level, no more than knowing that French poems are made of letters of the roman alphabet makes us experts on French poetry. We are creatures that congenitally cannot focus on the micromachinery that makes our minds tick — and unfortunately, we cannot just saunter down to the corner drugstore and pick up a cheap pair of glasses to remedy the defect.

One might suspect neuroscientists, as opposed to lay people, to be so familiar with the low-level hardware of the brain that they have come to understand just how to think about such mysteries as consciousness and free will. And yet often it turns out to be quite the opposite: many neuroscientists’ great familiarity with the low-level aspects of the brain makes them skeptical that consciousness and free will could ever be explained in physical terms at all. So baffled are they by what strikes them as an unbridgeable chasm between mind and matter that they abandon all efforts to see how consciousness and selves could come out of physical processes, and instead they throw in the towel and become dualists. It’s a shame to see scientists punt in this fashion, but it happens all too often. The moral of the story is that being a professional neuroscientist is not by any means synonymous with understanding the brain deeply — no more than being a professional physicist is synonymous with understanding hurricanes deeply. Indeed, sometimes being mired down in gobs of detailed knowledge is the exact thing that blocks deep understanding.

Our innate human inability to peer below a certain level inside our cranium makes our inner analogue to the swirling galaxy on a TV screen — the vast swirling galaxy of “I”-ness — strike us as an undeniable locus of causality, rather than a mere passive epiphenomenon coming out of lower levels (such as a video-feedback galaxy). So taken in are we by the perceived hard sphericity of that “marble” in our minds that we attribute to it a reality as great as that of anything we know. And because of the locking-in of the “I”-symbol that inevitably takes place over years and years in the feedback loop of human self-perception, causality gets turned around and “I” seems to be in the driver’s seat.

In summary, the combination of these two ingredients — one an ability and the other an inability — gives rise to the strange loop of selfhood, a trap into which we humans all fall, every last one of us, willy-nilly. Although it begins as innocently as a humble toilet’s float-ball mechanism or an audio or video feedback loop, where no counterintuitive type of causality is posited anywhere, human self-perception inevitably ends up positing an emergent entity that exerts an upside-down causality on the world, leading to the intense reinforcement of and the final, invincible, immutable locking-in of this belief. The end result is often the vehement denial of the possibility of any alternative point of view at all.

Sperry Redux

I just said that we all fall into this “trap”, but I don’t really see things so negatively. Such a “trap” is not harmful if taken with a grain of salt; rather, it is something to rejoice in and cherish, for it is what makes us human. Permit me once more to quote the eloquent words of Roger Sperry:

In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell.

When you come down to it, all that Sperry has done here is to go out on a limb and dare to assert, in a serious scientific publication, the ho-hum, run-of-the-mill, commonsensical belief held by the random person on the street that there is a genuine reality (i.e., causal potency) of the thing we call “I”. In the scientific world, such an assertion runs a great risk of being looked upon with skepticism, because it sounds superficially as if it reeks of Cartesian dualism (wonderfully mystical-sounding terms such as élan vital, “life force”, “spirit of the hive”, “entelechy”, and “holons” occasionally spring into my mind when I read this passage).