I Am a Strange Loop

In short, and this should please the skeptics, there is a kind of perceiver of the symbols’ activity — but what will not please them is that this “perceiver” is itself just further symbolic activity. There is not some special “consciousness locus” where something magic happens, something other than just more of the same, some locus where the dancing symbols make contact with… well, with what? What would please the skeptics? If the “consciousness locus” turned out to be just a physical part of the brain, how would that satisfy them? They would still protest that if that’s all I claim consciousness is, then it’s just insensate physical activity, no different from and no better than the mindless careening of simms in the inanimate arena of the careenium, and has nothing to do with consciousness!

I think it may be helpful at this point to allow my various inner skeptical voices to merge into a single paper persona (hopefully not a paper tiger!), and for that persona to lock horns in an extended dialogue with another persona who essentially represents the ideas of this book. I’ll call the voice of this book “Strange Loop #641” and the voice of the skeptics “Strange Loop #642”.

It may strike some readers that I am unfairly prejudicing the case by labeling not only myself (or rather, my proxy) a “strange loop”, but also my worthy opponent, for that might be seen as suggesting that the game is over before it’s begun. But these are nothing more than labels. What counts in the dialogue is what the characters say, not what I call them. And so, if you prefer to give Strange Loops #641 and #642 the alternative names “Inner Light #7” and “Inner Light #8”, or perhaps even “Socrates” and “Plato”, that’s fine by me.

And now, without further ado, we tune in as our two strange loops (or inner lights) begin their amiable debate. Oops! I guess I’ve been rambling on a bit too long here, and we seem unfortunately to have missed a bit of the two friends’ opening repartee. Oh, well, that’s life. I expect you and I can jump in at this point without feeling too lost. Let’s give it a try…

CHAPTER 20

A Courteous Crossing of Words

Dramatis personæ:

Strange Loop #641: a believer in the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop

Strange Loop #642: a doubter of the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop

SL #642: Dreary, oh so dreary. In fact, your picture of the soul is not just dreary; it’s completely empty. Vacuous. There’s nothing spiritual there at all. It’s just physical activity and nothing more.

SL #641: What else did you expect? What else could you expect? Unless you’re a dualist, that is, and you think souls are ghostly, nonphysical things that don’t belong to the physical universe, and yet that can push pieces of it around.

SL #642: No, I don’t go for that. It’s just that there has to be something extremely special that accounts for the existence of spiritual, mental, feeling, perceiving beings in this physical world — something that explains our inner light, our awareness, our consciousness.

SL #641: I couldn’t agree with you more. An explanation of such elusive phenomena surely calls for something special. Building a soul out of physical nuts and bolts is a tall order. But bear in mind that in my view, consciousness is a very unusual sort of intricately organized material pattern, not just any old physical activity. It’s not the swinging of a chain, the plopping of a stone in a pond, the splashing of a waterfall, the swirling of a hurricane, the refilling of a flush toilet, the self-regulation of the temperature in a house, the flow of electrons in a program that plays chess, the wiggling of an ovum-seeking sperm, the neural firings in a hungry mosquito’s brain… but we are getting ever closer as this list progresses. An “inner light” starts to turn on as we rise in this hierarchy. The light is still incredibly dim even at the list’s end, but if we extend the list further and sweep upwards through the brains of bees, goldfish, bunnies, dogs, and toddlers, it grows far brighter. It gets very bright when we arrive at human adolescents and adults, and it stays bright for decades. What we know as our own consciousness is, yes, nothing but the physical activity inside a human brain that has lived in the world for a number of years.