I Am a Strange Loop

We next imagine a more “evolved”, hence more flexible, setup; this time the camera, rather than being bolted onto its TV set, is attached to it by a “short leash”. Here, depending on the length and flexibility of the cord, it may be possible for the camera to twist around sufficiently to capture at least part of the TV screen in its viewfinder, giving rise to a truncated corridor. The biological counterpart to feedback of this level of sophistication may be the way our pet animals or even young children are slightly self-aware.

The next stage, obviously, is where the “leash” is sufficiently long and flexible that the video camera can point straight at the center of the screen. This will allow an endless corridor, which is far richer than a truncated one. Even so, the possibility of closing the self-watching loop does not pin down the system’s richness, because there still are many options open. Can the camera tilt or not, and if so, by how much? Can it zoom in or out? Is its image in color, or just in black and white? Can brightness and contrast be tweaked? What degree of resolution does the image have? What percentage of time is spent in self-observation as opposed to observation of the environment? Is there some way for the video camera itself to appear on the screen? And on and on. There are still many parameters to play with, so the potential loop has many open dimensions of sophistication.

Reception versus Perception

Despite the richness afforded by all these options, a self-watching television system will always lack one crucial aspect: the capacity of perception, as opposed to mere reception, or image-receiving. Perception takes as its starting point some kind of input (possibly but not necessarily a two-dimensional image) composed of a vast number of tiny signals, but then it goes much further, eventually winding up in the selective triggering of a small subset of a large repertoire of dormant symbols — discrete structures that have representational quality. That is to say, a symbol inside a cranium, just like a simmball in the hypothetical careenium, should be thought of as a triggerable physical structure that constitutes the brain’s way of implementing a particular category or concept.

I should offer a quick caveat concerning the word “symbol” in this new sense, since the word comes laden with many prior associations, some of which I definitely want to avoid. We often refer to written tokens (letters of the alphabet, numerals, musical notes on paper, Chinese characters, and so forth) as “symbols”. That’s not the meaning I have in mind here. We also sometimes talk of objects in a myth, dream, or allegory (for example, a key, a flame, a ring, a sword, an eagle, a cigar, a tunnel) as being “symbols” standing for something else. This is not the meaning I have in mind, either. The idea I want to convey by the phrase “a symbol in the brain” is that some specific structure inside your cranium (or your careenium, depending on what species you belong to) gets activated whenever you think of, say, the Eiffel Tower. That brain structure, whatever it might be, is what I would call your “Eiffel Tower symbol”.

You also have an “Albert Einstein” symbol, an “Antarctica” symbol, and a “penguin” symbol, the latter being some kind of structure inside your brain that gets triggered when you perceive one or more penguins, or even when you are just thinking about penguins without perceiving any. There are also, in your brain, symbols for action concepts like “kick”, “kiss”, and “kill”, for relational concepts like “before”, “behind”, and “between”, and so on. In this book, then, symbols in a brain are the neurological entities that correspond to concepts, just as genes are the chemical entities that correspond to hereditary traits. Each symbol is dormant most of the time (after all, most of us seldom think about cotton candy, egg-drop soup, St. Thomas Aquinas, Fermat’s last theorem, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, or dental-floss dispensers), but on the other hand, every symbol in our brain’s repertoire is potentially triggerable at any time.

The passage leading from vast numbers of received signals to a handful of triggered symbols is a kind of funneling process in which initial input signals are manipulated or “massaged”, the results of which selectively trigger further (i.e., more “internal”) signals, and so forth. This batonpassing by squads of signals traces out an ever-narrowing pathway in the brain, which winds up triggering a small set of symbols whose identities are of course a subtle function of the original input signals.