I Am a Strange Loop

In my opinion, to deal with this question head-on, one really has to focus on this thing I call the “Gödelian swirl of self”. The key question becomes this: When the pointers to “self” — the structures that, through a lifetime of locking-in and self-stabilizing, have given rise to an “I” — are copied in some imperfect, low-resolution fashion in a secondary brain, where exactly do they wind up pointing?

My internal model of Carol is certainly “thin” or sparse in comparison to the original self-model (the one that was located inside her own brain), but that sparseness is not the key issue. The crux is this: even if my internal model of Carol were unbelievably rich (e.g., like my Mom’s model of my Dad, say, or even ten times stronger than that), would it nonetheless be the wrong kind of structure to give rise to an “I”? Would it be something other than a strange loop? Would it be a structure pointing not at itself but at something else, and therefore be lacking that essentially swirly, vorticial, self-referential quality that makes an “I”?

My guess is that if the model were extremely rich, extremely faithful, then effectively the destinations of all the pointers in it would be fluid — in other words, the pointers inside my model of Carol would be able to slip, to point just as validly to the symbol for her in my brain as to her own self-symbol. If so, then the original swirliness, the original “I”-ness of the structure, would have been successfully transported to a second medium and reconstructed faithfully (though far more coarse-grainedly) in it.

The “outer” layers of the self consist in lots of pointers that point mostly at standard universal aspects of the world (e.g., rain, ice cream, the swooping of swallows, etc., etc.); the “middle” layers of the self consist in pointers to things more tied in with one’s own life (e.g., one’s parents’ faces and voices, the music one loves, the street one grew up on, one’s beloved pets from childhood, one’s favorite books and movies, and many other deep things); then the inner sanctum has tons of tangly pointers to very deeply “indexical” things, such as one’s insecurities, one’s sexual feelings, one’s most intense fears, one’s deepest loves, and lots of other things that I cannot put my finger on). All this is very vague, and only meant to suggest a kind of imagery wherein the outermost layers have mostly outwards-pointing arrows, the middle layers have a mixture of inwards and outwards arrows, and then the innermost core has tons of arrows that point right back in towards itself. Strange-Loop City — that’s an “I” for you!

It’s that deeply twisted-back-on-itself quality of the innermost core that, I surmise, makes it so hard to transport elsewhere, that makes the soul so deeply, almost irrevocably, attached to one single body, one single brain. The outer layers are relatively easy to transport, of course, with their relative paucity of inwards-pointing pointers, and the middle layers are medium easy to transport. Someone as close to Carol as I was can get lots of the outer layers and something of the middle layers and little bits of the inner core, but can one ever internalize enough of that core to say that, even in a very diluted sense, “she’s still here among us”?

Perhaps I’m exaggerating the difficulty of transport. In some sense, all Gödelian loops-of-self (i.e., strange loops that give rise to an “I”) are isomorphic at the most coarse-grained level, and therefore in lowest approximation they may not be hard to transport at all; what makes them different from each other is only their “flavorings”, consisting of memories, and, of course, genetic preferences and talents, and so forth. So, to the extent that we can be chameleons and can import the “spices” of other people’s life histories (the spices that imbue their self-loops with unique individuality), we are capable of seeing the world through their eyes. Their psychic point of view is transportable and modular — not trapped inside just one perishable piece of hardware.

If this is true, then Carol survives because her point of view survives — or rather, she survives to the extent that her point of view survives — in my brain and those of others. This is why it is so good to keep records, to write down memories, to have photos and videotapes, and to do so with maximal clarity — because thanks to having such records, you can “possess”, or “be possessed by”, other people’s brains. That’s why Frédéric Chopin, the actual person, survives so much in our world, even today.

When, someday, I first watch our videotapes with Carol on them, my heart is going to break because I’ll be seeing her again, living her again, being with her again — and though I’ll be filled with love, I’ll also be pervaded by the feeling that this is fake, that I’m being tricked, and all of this will make me wonder just what is going on inside my brain.