I Am a Strange Loop

Without going into more detail, let me simply say that it makes perfect sense to discuss living animals and self-guiding robots in the same part of this book, for today’s technological achievements are bringing us ever closer to understanding what goes on in living systems that survive in complex environments. Such successes give the lie to the tired dogma endlessly repeated by John Searle that computers are forever doomed to mere “simulation” of the processes of life. If an automaton can drive itself a distance of two hundred miles across a tremendously forbidding desert terrain, how can this feat be called merely a “simulation”? It is certainly as genuine an act of survival in a hostile environment as that of a mosquito flying about a room and avoiding being swatted.

Pondering Dogthink

Let us return to our climb up the purely biological ladder of perceptual sophistication, rising from viruses to bacteria to mosquitoes to frogs to dogs to people (I’ve skipped a few rungs in there, I know). As we move higher and higher, the repertoire of triggerable symbols of course becomes richer and richer — indeed, what else could “climbing up the ladder” mean? Simply judging from their behavior, no one could doubt that pet dogs develop a respectable repertoire of categories, including such examples as “my paw”, “my tail”, “my food”, “my water”, “my dish”, “indoors”, “outdoors”, “dog door”, “human door”, “open”, “closed”, “hot”, “cold”, “nighttime”, “daytime”, “sidewalk”, “road”, “bush”, “grass”, “leash”, “take a walk”, “the park”, “car”, “car door”, “my big owner”, “my little owner”, “the cat”, “the friendly neighbor dog”, “the mean neighbor dog”, “UPS truck”, “the vet”, “ball”, “eat”, “lick”, “drink”, “play”, “sit”, “sofa”, “climb onto”, “bad behavior”, “punishment”, and on and on. Guide dogs often learn a hundred or more words and respond to highly variegated instances of these concepts in many different contexts, thus demonstrating something of the richness of their internal category systems (i.e., their repertoires of triggerable symbols).

I used a set of English words and phrases in order to suggest the nature of a canine repertoire of categories, but of course I am not claiming that human words are involved when a dog reacts to a neighbor dog or to the UPS truck. But one word bears special mention, and that is the word “my”, as in “my tail” or “my dish”. I suspect most readers would agree that a pet dog realizes that a particular paw belongs to itself, as opposed to being merely a random physical object in the environment or a part of some other animal. Likewise, when a dog chases its tail, even though it is surely unaware of the loopy irony of the act, it must know that that tail is part of its own body. I am thus suggesting that a dog has some kind of rudimentary self-model, some kind of sense of itself. In addition to its symbols for “car”, “ball”, and “leash”, and its symbols for other animals and human beings, it has some kind of internal cerebral structure that represents itself (i.e., the dog itself, not the symbol itself!).

If you doubt dogs have this, then what about chimpanzees? What about two-year-old humans? In any case, the emergence of this kind of reflexive symbolic structure, at whatever level of sentience it first enters the picture, constitutes the central germ, the initial spark, of “I”-ness, the tiny core to which more complex senses of “I”-ness will then accrete over a lifetime, like the snowflake that grows around a tiny initial speck of dust.

Given that most grown dogs have a symbol for dog, does a dog know, in some sense or other, that it, too, belongs to the category dog? When it looks at a mirror and sees its master standing next to “some dog”, does it realize that that dog is itself? These are interesting questions, but I will not attempt to answer them. I suspect that this kind of realization lies near the fringes of canine mental ability, but for my purposes in this essay, it doesn’t really matter on which side dogs fall. After all, this book is not about dogs. The key point here is that there is some level of complexity at which a creature starts applying some of its categories to itself, starts building mental structures that represent itself, starts placing itself in some kind of “intellectual perspective” in relationship to the rest of the world. In this respect, I think dogs are hugely more advanced than mosquitoes, and I suspect you agree.