I Am a Strange Loop

Late one autumn afternoon, the red, orange, and yellow leaves are so alluring, and the fall weather so mild, compared to the just-finished muggy summer, that I decide to take a good long run. I go into my bedroom, search around for my running shorts and shoes and T-shirt, change my clothes in eagerness, and soon enough, my body finds itself out on the pavement, with my feet pounding the ground and my heart beginning to thump away. Before I know it, I’ve taken a hundred steps, and moments later it’s been three hundred. Then it’s been a thousand, then three thousand, and I’m still charging on, breathing hard, sweating, and thinking to myself, “Why do I always tell myself that I like running? I hate it!” And yet my body doesn’t stop for a split second, and no matter how tired my muscles are, my self just says to them, like a sadistic drill sergeant sneering at a bunch of new recruits, “Don’t be quitters!” — and lo and behold, my poor, huffing, heaving, protesting body unquestioningly obeys my self, even charging up steep hills against its will. In shorts, my rebelling physical body is being quite mercilessly pushed around by my intangible I’s equally intangible determination to take this autumn run.

So who is pushing whom around here? Where are the particles of physics in this picture of what makes us do things? They are invisible, and even if you remember that they exist, they seem to be just secondary players. It is this “I”, a coherent collection of desires and beliefs, that sets everything in motion. It is this “I” that is the prime mover, the mysterious entity that lies behind, and that launches, all the creature’s behaviors. If I want something to happen, I just will it to happen, and unless it is out of my control, it generally does happen. The body’s molecules, whether in the fingers, the arm, the legs, the throat, the tongue, or wherever, obediently follow the supreme bidding of the Grand “I” on high.

Thus it is that I push various pedals down and sure enough, my one-ton automobile obediently goes right where I want it to go. The ethereal “I” has pushed this huge physical object around. I twiddle my chopsticks and sure enough, the string beans obediently jump on board and I receive the sensory joy that I covet and the nourishment I need. I push certain keys on my Macintosh’s keyboard and sure enough, sentences obediently emerge on its screen, and they pretty much express the thoughts that the ethereal “I” hoped to express. And in all of this, where are the particles? Nowhere to be seen. All there seems to be is this “I” making it all happen.

Well then, if this “I” thing is causing everything that a creature does, if this “I” thing is responsible for the creature’s decisions and plans and actions and movements, then surely this “I” thing must at least exist. How could it be so all-powerful and yet not exist?

God’s Eye versus the Careenium’s Eye

I’d like to return, at this point, to the image of the careenium. At the heart of my discussion of the tiny zipping simms and the far larger, more sluggish simmballs in the careenium was the fact that this system can be seen on two very distant levels, yielding widely discrepant interpretations.

From the higher-level “thinkodynamics” viewpoint, there is symbolic activity in which simmballs interact with each other, taking advantage of the “heat energy” provided by the churning soup of invisible simms. From this viewpoint, what causes any simmballic event we see is a set of other simmballic events, even if the details of the causation are often tricky or too blurry to pin down precisely. (We are very familiar with this type of blurriness of causality in daily life — for instance, if I just barely miss a free throw in basketball, we know that it was my fault and that I did something a bit wrong, but we don’t know exactly what it was. If I throw a die and it comes up ‘6’, we aren’t in the least surprised, but we still don’t know why it came up ‘6’ — nor do we give the question the least thought.)

Contrariwise, from the lower-level “statistical mentalics” viewpoint, there are just simms and simms alone, interacting through the fundamental dynamics of careening, bashing simms — and from this viewpoint, there is never the least vagueness or doubt about causality, because everything is governed by sharp, precise, hard-edged mathematical laws. (If we could zoom in arbitrarily closely on my arms and hands and fingers and also on the basketball and the backboard and the rim, or on the die and the table, and watch everything in slow motion of any desired slowness, we could discover exactly what gave rise to the missed free throw or the ‘6’. This might require a descent all the way down to the level of atoms, but that’s all right — eventually, the reason would emerge into the clear.)