I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas HofstadterI Am a Strange Loop is a more focused follow up to Gödel, Escher, Bach. The themes are the same: how consciousness arises from inanimate matter. Hofstadter’s argument is that consciousness arises when, with our arbitratily extensible system of meaningful symbols, we observe others reacting to our actions and generate a special symbol “I” that is the cause of these reactions.
Levels of understanding
An understanding of consciousness must come at the level at which consciousness occurs: at the macro level. Going deeper, e.g. to the synapses or the molecules, provides irrelevant detail to the functioning of consciousness. The lowest level of abstraction (e.g. the molecules themselves) are responsible for the outcomes but irrelevant for understanding them (and predicting the outcomes).
Consciousness is an epiphenomenon resulting from the underlying activity in our brains which is inaccessible to us.
No engineer tries to figure out the exact trajectories of 10^23 molecules banging into each other! The locations and velocities of individual molecules are simply irrelevant. All that matters is that they can be counted on to collectively push the piston out.
Seen at its highest, most collective level, a brain is quintessentially animate and conscious. But as one gradually descends, structure by structure, from cerebrum to cortex ro column to cell to cytoplasm to protein to peptide to particle, one loses the sense of animacy more and more until, at the lowest levels, it has surely vanished entirely.
The “I” we create for each of us is a quintessential example of such a perceived or invented reality, and it does such a good job of explaining our behaviour that it becomes the hub around which the rest of the world seems to rotate. But this “I” notion is just a shorthand for the vast mass of seething and churning of which we are necessarily unaware.
Symbols and meaning
Clever rules imbue inert symbols with meaning. Mapping can cause meaning to appear on abstract, meaningless symbols. Categorising perceptions ultimately leads to consciousness: the ability to internalise aspects of the interiority of other creatures. We store other people in our head as simplified consciousnesses.
There is a threshold of consciousness crossed when a system’s symbols become universally extensible, i.e. anything can be represented using a finite set of symbols.
Because it encapsulates so neatly and so efficiently for us what we perceived to be truly important aspects of causality in the world, we cannot help attributing reality to our “I” and to those of other people – indeed, the highest possible level of reality.
What seems to be the epitome of selfhood – a sense of “I” – is in reality brought into being if only if along with that self there is a sense of other selves with whom one has bonds or affection.
An epiphenomenon, as you probably recall from earlier chapters, is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unsuspected, events. In other words, an epiphenomenon could said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.
The “I” Symbol
The “I” symbol is a feedback loop based on perceiving your interactions with the universe. Consequences of actions get processed to refine the picture of “I”, which then informs new actions. The key to the “I” symbol is meaning, i.e. categories based on perception. The actions / desires of the self are just our best descriptions of the outcomes of the unthinking feedback loop whose target is ultimately copying its genes.
What makes a strange loop appear in the brain and not in a video feedback system, then, is an ability – the ability to think – which is, in effect, a one-syllable word standing for the possession of a sufficiently large repertoire of triggerable symbols.
We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting to other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck.
At the beginning, when the brain that would later house your soul was taking form, there was no you. But that brain slowly grew, and its experiences slowly accumulated. Somewhere along the way, as more and more things happened to it, were registered by it, and became internalized in it, it started immittating the cultural and linguistic conventions in which it was immersed, and thus it tentatively said “I” about itself (even though the referent of that word was still very blurry).
It sees its chosen actions (kicks, tosses, screams, laughs, jokes, jabs, trips, books, pleas, threats, etc.) making all sorts of entities in its environment react in large or small ways, and it internalizes those effects in terms of its coarse-grained categories (as to their graininess, it has no choice). Through endless random explorations like this, my self-symbol slowly acquires concise and valuable insight into its nature as a chooser and launcher of actions, embedded in a vast and multifarious, partially predictable world.