I Am a Strange Loop

It took me a good deal longer than I had expected to finish it (some of my readers will recognize this as a quintessential example of Hofstadter’s Law, which states, “It always takes longer than you think it will take, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law”), and worse, the chapter wound up being four times longer than the specified limit — a disaster! But when they finally received it, Ken and Uriah were very pleased with what I had written and were most tolerant of my indiscretions; indeed, so keen were they to have a contribution from me in their book that they said they could accept an extra-long chapter, and Ken in particular helped me cut it down to half its length, which was a real labor of love on his part.

In the meantime, I was starting to realize that what I had on my hands could be more than a book chapter — it could become a book unto itself. And so what had begun as a single project fissioned into two. I gave my chapter the title “What is it like to be a strange loop?”, alluding to a famous article on the mystery of consciousness called “What is it like to be a bat?” by the philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel, while the book-to-be was given the shorter, sweeter title “I Am a Strange Loop”.

In Ken Williford and Uriah Kriegel’s anthology, Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness, which appeared in the spring of 2006, my essay was placed at the very end, in a two-chapter section entitled “Beyond Philosophy” (why it qualified as lying “beyond philosophy” is beyond me, but I rather like the idea nonetheless). I don’t know if, in that distinguished but rather specialized setting, this set of ideas will have much impact on anyone, but I certainly hope that in this book, its more fully worked-out and more visible incarnation, it will be able to reach all sorts of people, both inside and outside of philosophy, both young and old, both specialists and novices, and will give them new imagery about selves and souls (not to mention loops!). In any case, I owe a great deal to Ken and Uriah for having provided the initial spark that gave rise to this book, as well as for giving me much encouragement along the way.

And so, after just about forty-five years (good grief!), I’ve come full circle, writing once again about souls, selves, and consciousness, banging up against the same mysteriousness and eerieness that I first experienced when I was a teen-ager horrified and yet riveted by the awful and awesome physicality of that which makes us be what we are.

An Author and His Audience

Despite its title, this book is not about me, but about the concept of “I”. It’s thus about you, reader, every bit as much as it is about me. I could just as well have called it “You Are a Strange Loop”. But the truth of the matter is that, in order to suggest the book’s topic and goal more clearly, I should probably have called it “‘I’ Is a Strange Loop” — but can you imagine a clunkier title? Might as well call it “I Am a Lead Balloon”.

In any case, this book is about the venerable topic of what an “I” is. And what is its audience? Well, as always, I write in order to reach a general educated public. I almost never write for specialists, and in a way that’s because I’m not really a specialist myself. Oh, I take it back; that’s unfair. After all, at this point in my life, I have spent nearly thirty years working with my graduate students on computational models of analogy-making and creativity, observing and cataloguing cognitive errors of all sorts, collecting examples of categorization and analogy, studying the centrality of analogies in physics and math, musing on the mechanisms of humor, pondering how concepts are created and memories are retrieved, exploring all sorts of aspects of words, idioms, languages, and translation, and so on — and over these three decades I have taught seminars on many aspects of thinking and how we perceive the world.

So yes, in the end, I am a kind of specialist — I specialize in thinking about thinking. Indeed, as I stated earlier, this topic has fueled my fire ever since I was a teen-ager. And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experiences.

The Horsies-and-Doggies Religion

Over the years, I have fallen into a style of self-expression that I call the “horsies-and-doggies” style, a phrase inspired by a charming episode in the famous cartoon “Peanuts”, which I’ve reproduced on the following page.