I Am a Strange Loop

If one understands the careenium well, it would seem that both points of view are valid, although the latter one, leaving out no details, might seem to be the more fundamental one (we could call it the “God’s eye” point of view), while the former, being a highly compressed simplification in which vast amounts of information are thrown away, might seem to be the more useful one for us mortals, as it is so much more efficient (even though some things then seem to happen “for no reason” — that’s the tradeoff ).

I Am Not God

But not all observers of the careenium enjoy the luxury of being able to flip back and forth between these two wildly discrepant viewpoints. Not all thinking creatures understand the careenium nearly as clearly or as fully as I described it in Chapter 3. The God’s-eye point of view is simply not available to all observers; indeed, the very fact that such a point of view might exist is utterly unsuspected by some careenium observers. I am in particular thinking of one very special and privileged careenium observer, and that is the careenium itself.

When the careenium grapples with its own nature, particularly when it is “growing up”, just beginning to know itself, long before it has become a scientist that studies mathematics and physics (and perhaps, eventually, the noble discipline of careeniology), all it is aware of is its simmballic activity, not its simm-level churnings. After all, as you and I both know (but it does not know), the careenium’s perceptions of all things are fantastically coarse-grained simplifications (small sets of simmballs that have been collectively triggered by a vast storm of impinging signals) — and its self-perceptions are no exception.

The innocent young careenium has no inkling that behind the scenes, way down on some hidden micro-scale, churning, seething, simm-level activities are taking place inside it. Not once has it ever suspected the existence, even in principle, of any alternative viewpoint concerning its nature and its behavior. Indeed, this young careenium reminds me of myself as an adolescent, just before I read the books on the human brain by Pfeiffer and by Penfield and Roberts, books that so troubled me and yet that so fired my imagination. This idealistic young careenium is much like the naïve teen-aged Doug, just at the cusp, just before he began to glimpse the extraordinary eerieness of what goes on in total darkness, day and night, inside each and every human cranium.

And so, built as irrefutably as a granite marble into the careenium’s pre-scientific understanding of itself is the sense of being a creature driven entirely by thoughts and ideas; its self-image is infinitely far from that of being a vast mechanistic entity whose destiny is entirely determined by billions of invisibly careening, mutually bashing micro-objects. Instead, the naïve careenium serenely asserts of itself, “I am driven solely by myself, not by any mere physical objects anywhere.”

What kind of thing, then, is this “I” that the careenium posits as driving its choices and its actions, and that human beings likewise posit as driving theirs? No one will be surprised at this point to hear me assert that it is a peculiar type of abstract, locked-in loop located inside the careenium or the cranium — in fact, a strange loop. And thus, in order to lay out clearly my claim about what constitutes “I”-ness, I need to spell out what I mean by “strange loop”. And since we’re just finishing Chapter 7 of I Am a Strange Loop, it’s about time!

CHAPTER 8

Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari

Flap Loop, Lap Loop

I’VE already described, in Chapter 4, how enchanted I was as a child by the brazen act of closing a cardboard box by folding down its four flaps in a cyclic order. It always gave me a frisson of delight (and even today it still does a little bit) to perform that final verboten fold, and thus to feel I was flirting dangerously with paradoxicality. Needless to say, however, actual paradox was never achieved.

A close cousin to this “flap loop” is the “lap loop”, shown on the facing page. There I am with a big grin (I’ll call myself “A”), front and center in Anterselva di Mezzo, sitting on the lap of a young woman (“B”), also grinning, with B sitting on C’s lap, C on D’s lap, and so forth, until one complete lap has been made, with person K sitting on my lap. One lap with lots of laps but no collapse. If you’ve never played this game, I suggest you try it. One feels rather baffled about what on earth is holding the loop up.