I Am a Strange Loop

If instead one believes that consciousness (now with a small “c”) is an outcome of physical law, then no room remains for anything extra “on top”. This is appealing to a scientific mind because it is far simpler than dualism. It gets rid of a puzzling dichotomy between ordinary physical entities and extraordinary nonphysical essences, and it cancels the long list of questions about the nature of the nonphysical Capitalized Essence.

On the other hand, throwing dualism out the window is troubling as well, because, at least on first glance, doing so seems to leave us with no distinction between animate and inanimate entities, and no explanation for our unique experience of our own interiority or inner light, no explanation for the gulf between our self and other selves. A more careful look at this viewpoint, however, shows that there is room in it for such distinctions.

In the Introduction, I wrote of “the miraculous appearance of selves and souls in substrates consisting of inanimate matter”, a phrase I suspect made more than one reader bristle. “How can the author refer to a human brain — the most animate of all entities in the universe — as ‘inanimate matter’?” Well, one of the leitmotifs of this book has been that the presence or absence of animacy depends on the level at which one views a structure. Seen at its highest, most collective level, a brain is quintessentially animate and conscious. But as one gradually descends, structure by structure, from cerebrum to cortex to column to cell to cytoplasm to protein to peptide to particle, one loses the sense of animacy more and more until, at the lowest levels, it has surely vanished entirely. In one’s mind, one can move back and forth between the highest and lowest levels, and in this fashion oscillate at will between seeing the brain as animate and as inanimate.

A nondualistic view of the world can thus include animate entities perfectly easily, as long as different levels of description are recognized as valid. Animate entities are those that, at some level of description, manifest a certain type of loopy pattern, which inevitably starts to take form if a system with the inherent capacity of perceptually filtering the world into discrete categories vigorously expands its repertoire of categories ever more towards the abstract. This pattern reaches full bloom when there comes to be a deeply entrenched self-representation — a story told by the entity to itself — in which the entity’s “I” plays the starring role, as a unitary causal agent driven by a set of desires. More precisely, an entity is animate to the degree that such a loopy “I” pattern comes into existence, since this pattern’s presence is by no means an all-or-nothing affair. Thus to the extent that there is an “I” pattern in a given substrate, there is animacy, and where there is no such pattern, the entity is inanimate.

Rainbows or Rocks?

There still remains a sticky question: What would make a loopy abstract pattern, however fancy it might be, constitute a locus of interiority, an inner light, a site of first-person experience? Otherwise put, where does me-ness come from? The notion that such a pattern grows enormously in size and complexity over time, perceives itself, and entrenches itself so deeply as to become all but undislodgeable will constitute a satisfactory answer for some seekers of truth (such as Strange Loop #641). For others, however (such as Strange Loop #642), it will not do at all.

For the latter sort of thinker, there will always remain the kind of riddle posed in Chapter 21 about the two freshly minted atom-for-atom copies of a destroyed body, one on Mars and one on Venus: “Where will I wake up? Which, if either, of the two bodies will house my inner light?” Thinkers of this kind cling fiercely to the instinctive notion of a unique Cartesian Ego that constitutes the identity, the “I”-ness, the inner light, the interiority of any sentient being. To such thinkers, it will be totally unacceptable to suggest that their precious notion of me-ness is more like a shimmering, elusive rainbow than it is like a solid, mass-possessing rock, and that there is thus no right answer to the perplexing “Which one will I be?” riddle. They will insist that there has to be a genuine marble of “I”-ness in one of the two bodies and not in the other one, as opposed to an elusive rainbow-like entity that first recedes and then disintegrates entirely as one draws ever closer. But to believe in such an indivisible, indissoluble “I” is to believe in nonphysical dualism.

Thrust: The Hard Problem