I Am a Strange Loop

SL #642: No, the essence of consciousness is missing from your picture. You’ve described a complex set of brain activities involving symbols triggering each other, and I’m prepared to believe that something like that does take place inside brains. But that isn’t the whole story, because I am nowhere in this story. There is no room for an I. You’ve proposed myriads of unconscious particles bouncing around, or perhaps big clouds of activity made of particles — but if the universe were only that, then there would be no me, no you, no points of view. It would be the way the earth was before life evolved — millions of sunrises and sunsets, winds blowing hither and thither, clouds forming and scattering, thunderstorms swooping along valleys, boulders tumbling down mountains and gouging out gulleys, water flowing in riverbeds and carving deep canyons, waves breaking on sandy beaches, tides flowing in and out, volcanoes spewing out red-hot seas of lava, mountain chains bursting up out of plains, continents drifting and breaking apart, and so on. All very scenic, but there would be no inner life, no mind, no inner light, no I — no one to enjoy the great scenery.

SL #641: I sympathize with your sense of the barrenness of a universe made of physical phenomena only, but some kinds of physical systems can mirror what’s on their outside and can launch actions that depend upon their perceptions. That’s the thin edge of the wedge. When perception grows sophisticated enough, it can lead to phenomena that have no counterparts in systems that perceive only in a primitive manner. By “primitive” perceiving systems, I mean entities like, for instance, thermostats, knees, sperms, and tadpoles. These are too rudimentary to merit the term “consciousness”, but when perception takes place in a system endowed with a truly rich, fluidly extensible set of symbols, then an “I” will arise just as inevitably as strange loops arise in the barren fortress of Principia Mathematica.

SL #642: Perception?! Who’s doing the perceiving? No one! Your universe is still just a vacuous system of physical objects and their intricate, intertwined, enmeshed movements — galaxies, stars, planets, winds, rocks, water, landslides, ripples, sound waves, fire, radioactivity, and so forth. Even proteins and RNA and DNA. Even your beloved feedback loops — heat-seeking missiles, thermostats, refilling toilets, video feedback, domino chains, pool tables flooded with hordes of microscopic magnetic balls. But something crucial is missing from this bleak scene, and that’s me-ness. I am in a specific place. I’m here! What would pick out a here in a world consisting of water and float-balls in thousands of tanks, or in a world having zillions of different domino chains? There’s no here there.

SL #641: I really do understand that this matter would nag at you; it should nag at any thinking person. My reply is this: In the vast universe of diverse physical events that you just evoked so vividly, there are certain rare spots of localized activity in which a special kind of abstractly swirling pattern can be found. Those special loci — at least the ones that we have run into so far — are human brains, and “I” ’s are restricted to those loci. Such loci are hard to find in the vast universe; they are few and far between. Wherever this special, rare kind of physical phenomenon arises, there’s an I and a here.

SL #642: Your phrase “abstractly swirling pattern” makes me think of a physical vortex, like a hurricane or a whirlpool or a spiral galaxy — but I suppose those aren’t abstract enough for you.

SL #642: No, they really aren’t. Whirlpools and hurricanes are merely spinning vortices — fluid cousins to tops and gyroscopes. To make an “I” you need meanings, and to make meanings you need perception and categories — in fact, a repertoire of categories that keeps on building on itself, growing and growing and growing. Such things are nowhere to be found in the physical vortices you mentioned. That’s why a far better metaphor for an “I” is the structure of the self-referring formulas that Gödel found in the barren-seeming universe of PM. His formulas, like human “I” ’s, are extremely intricately and delicately structured, and are hardly a dime a dozen. “Ordinary” formulas of PM, like “0+0=0”, say, or a formula that states that every integer is the sum of at most four squares, are the analogues to inert, “I”-less physical objects, like grains of sand or bowling balls. Those simple kinds of formulas don’t have wraparound high-level meanings in the way that Gödel’s special strings do. It takes a great deal of number-theoretical machinery to build up from ordinary assertions about numbers to the complexity of Gödelian strange loops, and likewise it takes a great deal of evolution to build up from very simple feedback loops to the complexity of strange loops in brains.