I Am a Strange Loop

SL #642: Suppose I granted you that there are lots of abstract “strange loops” floating around the universe, which somehow coalesced over the course of billions of years of evolution — strange loops residing in crania, a bit like audio feedback loops residing in auditoriums. They can be as complex as you like; the complexity of their physical activity doesn’t matter one whit to me. The knotty issue that simply will not go away is: What would make one of those strange loops me? Which one? You can’t answer that.

SL #641: I can, although you won’t like my answer. What makes one of them you is that it is resident in a particular brain that went through all the experiences that made you you.

SL #642: That’s just a tautology!

SL #641: Not really. It’s a subtle idea whose crux is that what you call “I” is an outcome, not a starting point. You coalesced in an unplanned fashion, coming only slowly into existence, not in a flash. At the beginning, when the brain that would later house your soul was taking form, there was no you. But that brain slowly grew, and its experiences slowly accumulated. Somewhere along the way, as more and more things happened to it, were registered by it, and became internalized in it, it started imitating the cultural and linguistic conventions in which it was immersed, and thus it tentatively said “I” about itself (even though the referent of that word was still very blurry). That’s roughly when it noticed it was somewhere — and not surprisingly, it was where a certain brain was! At that point, though, it didn’t know anything about its brain. What it knew instead was its brain’s container, which was a certain body. But even though it didn’t know anything about its brain, that nascent “I” faithfully followed its brain around just as a shadow always tags along after a moving object.

SL #642: You’re not dealing with my question, which is about how to pick me out in a world of indistinguishable physical structures.

SL #641: All right, let me turn straight to that. To you, all the brains housing strange loops seem no different from thousands of sewing machines scattered hither and yon, all clicking away. You would ask, “Which sewing machine is me?” Well, of course, none of them is you — and that’s because none of them perceives anything. You see brains that house strange loops as being just as inert and identity-lacking as sewing machines, pinwheels, or merry-go-rounds. But the funny thing is that the beings whose brains house those strange loops don’t agree with you that they have no identity. One of them insists, “I’m the one right here, looking at this purple flower, not the one over there, drinking a milkshake!” Another one insists, “I’m the one drinking this chocolate shake, not the one looking at that flower!” Each one of them is convinced of being somewhere and of seeing things and hearing things and having experiences. What makes you reject their claims?

SL #642: I don’t reject their claims. Those claims are perfectly valid — it’s just that their validity has nothing to do with brains housing strange loops. You’re focusing on the wrong thing. Any claims of “being here” and “being conscious” are valid because there is something extra, something over and above strange loops, that makes a brain be the locus of a soul. I can’t tell you just what it is, but I know this is true, because I am not just physical stuff happening somewhere in the universe. I experience things, such as that purple flower in the garden and that loud motorcycle a couple of blocks away. And my experience is the primary data on which everything else that I say is based, so you cannot deny my claim.

SL #641: How is that any different from what I’ve described? A sufficiently complex brain not only can perceive and categorize but it can verbalize what it has categorized. Like you, it can talk about flowers and gardens and motorcycle roars, and it can talk about itself, saying where it is and where it is not, it can describe its present and past experiences and its goals and beliefs and confusions… What more could you want? Why is that not what you call “experience”?

SL #642: Words, words, words! The point is that experience involves more than mere words — it involves feelings. Any experiencer worthy of the term has to see that brilliant purple color of the flower and feel it as such, not merely drone the sound “purple” like an automated voice in a telephone menu tree. Seeing a vivid purple takes place below the level of words or ideas or symbols — it is more primordial. It’s an experience directly felt by an experiencer. That’s the difference between true consciousness and mere “artificial signaling” as in a mechanical-sounding telephone menu tree.