I Am a Strange Loop

What makes for our sense of utter sureness about such abstract things? It comes firstly from the reliability of our internal symbols to directly mirror the concrete environment (e.g., we purchase a cup of coffee and instantly, somewhere inside our cranium, God only knows where, there springs into existence a physical record reflecting this coffee, tracking where it is on the table or in our hand, constantly updating its color, bitterness level, warmth, and how much there is left of it). It comes secondly from the reliability of our thinking mechanisms to tell us about more abstract entities that we cannot directly perceive (e.g., the role of Napoleon in French history, the impact of Wagner on late-romantic French composers, or the unsolvability by radicals, such as Évariste Galois, of the quintic equation). All of this more abstract stuff is rooted in the constant reinforcement, moment by moment, of the symbols that are haphazardly triggered out of dormancy by events in the world that we perceive first-hand. These immediate mental events constitute the bedrock underlying our broader sense of reality.

Inevitably, what seems realest to us is what gets activated most often. Our hangnails are incredibly real to us (by coincidence, I found myself idly picking at a hangnail while I was reworking this paragraph), whereas to most of us, the English village of Nether Wallop and the high Himalayan country of Bhutan, not to mention the slowly swirling spiral galaxy in Andromeda, are considerably less real, even though our intellectual selves might wish to insist that since the latter are much bigger and longer-lasting than our hangnails, they ought therefore to be far realer to us than our hangnails are. We can say this to ourselves till we’re blue in the face, but few of us act as if we really believed it. A slight slippage of subterranean stone that obliterates 20,000 people in some far-off land, the ceaseless plundering of virgin jungles in the Amazon basin, a swarm of helpless stars being swallowed up one after another by a ravenous black hole, even an ongoing collision between two huge galaxies each of which contains a hundred billion stars — such colossal events are so abstract to someone like me that they can’t even touch the sense of urgency and importance, and thus the reality, of some measly little hangnail on my left hand’s pinky.

We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself. The realest things of all are my knee, my nose, my anger, my hunger, my toothache, my sideache, my sadness, my joy, my love for math, my abstraction ceiling, and so forth. What all these things have in common, what binds them together, is the concept of “my”, which comes out of the concept of “I” or “me”, and therefore, although it is less concrete than a nose or even a toothache, this “I” thing is what ultimately seems to each of us to constitute the most solid rock of undeniability of all. Could it possibly be an illusion? Or if not a total illusion, could it possibly be less real and less solid than we think it is? Could an “I” be more like an elusive, receding, shimmering rainbow than like a tangible, heftable, transportable pot of gold?

No Luck, No Soap, No Dice

One day, many years ago, I wanted to pull out all the envelopes from a small cardboard box lying on the floor of my study and stick them as a group into one of my desk drawers. Accordingly, I picked up the box, reached into it, clasped my right hand around the pack of envelopes inside it (about a hundred in number), and squeezed tightly down on them in order to pull them all out of the box as a unit. Nothing at all surprising in any of this. But all of a sudden I felt, between my thumb and fingers, something very surprising. Oddly enough, there was a marble sitting (or floating?) right in the middle of that flimsy little cardboard box!

Like most Americans of my generation, I had held marbles hundreds of times, and I knew without any doubt what I was feeling. Like you, dear reader, I was an “old marble hand”. But how had a marble somehow found its way into this box that I usually kept on my desk? At the time I didn’t have any kids, so that couldn’t be the explanation. And anyway, how could it be hovering in the very middle of the box, rather than sitting at the bottom? Why wasn’t gravity working?

I peered in between the envelopes, looking for a small, smooth, colored glass sphere. No luck. Then I fumbled about with my fingers between the envelopes, feeling for it. Again no soap. But then, as soon as I grasped the whole set of envelopes as before, there it was again, as solid as ever! Where was this little devil of a marble hiding?