I Am a Strange Loop

Now let’s return to the careenium and talk about what happens in it. The way I’ve portrayed it so far focuses on the simms and their dashing and bashing. The simmballs are also present, but they serve a similar function to the walls — they are just big stationary objects off of which the simms bounce. In my mind’s eye, I often see the simms as acting like the silver marbles in a pinball machine, with the simmballs acting like the “pins” — that is, the larger stationary cylindrical objects which the marbles strike and ricochet off of as they roll down the sloped board of play.

But now I’m going to describe a different way of looking at the careenium, which is characterized by two perceptual shifts. First, we shift to time-lapse photography, meaning that imperceptibly slow motions get speeded up so as to become perceptible, while fast motions become so fast that they are not even seen as blurs — they become imperceptible, like the spinning blades of an electric fan. The second shift is that we spatially back away or zoom out, thus rendering simms too small to be seen, and so the simmballs alone necessarily become our focus of attention.

Now we see a completely different type of dynamics on the table. Instead of seeing simms bashing into what look like large stationary blobs, we realize that these blobs are not stationary at all but have a lively life of their own, moving back and forth across the table and interacting with each other, as if there were nothing else on the table but them. Of course we know that deep down, this is all happening thanks to the teeny-weeny simms’ bashing-about, but we cannot see the simms any more. In our new way of seeing things, their frenetic careening-about on the table forms nothing but a stationary gray background.

Think of how the water in a glass sitting on a table seems completely still to us. If our eyes could shift levels (think of the twist that zooms binoculars in or out) and allow us to peer at the water at the micro-level, we would realize that it is not peaceful at all, but a crazy tumult of bashings of water molecules. In fact, if colloidal particles are added to a glass of water, then it becomes a locus of Brownian motion, which is an incessant random jiggling of the colloidal particles, due to a myriad of imperceptible collisions with the water molecules, which are far tinier. (The colloidal particles here play the role of simmballs, and the water molecules play the role of simms.) The effect, which is visible under a microscope, was explained in great detail in 1905 by Albert Einstein using the theory of molecules, which at the time were only hypothetical entities, but Einstein’s explanation was so far-reaching (and, most crucially, consistent with experimental data) that it became one of the most important confirmations that molecules do exist.

Who Shoves Whom Around inside the Careenium?

And so we finally have come to the crux of the matter: Which of these two views of the careenium is the truth? Or, to echo the key question posed by Roger Sperry, Who shoves whom around in the population of causal forces that occupy the careenium? In one view, the meaningless tiny simms are the primary entities, zipping around like mad, and in so doing they very slowly push the heavy, passive simmballs about, hither and thither. In this view, it is the tiny simms that shove the big simmballs around, and that is all there is to it. In fact, in this view the simmballs are not even recognized as separate entities, since anything we might say about their actions is just a shorthand way of talking about what simms do. From this perspective, there are no simmballs, no symbols, no ideas, no thoughts going on — just a great deal of tumultuous, pointless careening-about of tiny, shiny, magnetic spheres.

In the other view, speeded up and zoomed out, all that is left of the shiny tiny simms is a featureless gray soup, and the interest resides solely in the simmballs, which give every appearance of richly interacting with each other. One sees groups of simmballs triggering other simmballs in a kind of “logic” that has nothing to do with the soup churning around them, except in the rather pedestrian sense that the simmballs derive their energy from that omnipresent soup. Indeed, the simmballs’ logic, not surprisingly, has to do with the concepts that the simmballs symbolize.

The Dance of the Simmballs