By Michael Messina
I recently read Douglass Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop. You may recall that Hofstadter translated and co-wrote Christer Sturmark’s To Light the Flame of Reason (a book that everyone living in these early decades of the 21st century should read). While the Hofstadter’s book in some places is difficult to to read, especially when esoteric concepts of higher — and I mean sky high — math is being considered, it is thought provoking and fascinating. At the end, everything came together and I was very happy I had struggled through it. This book seems to zig and zag between unrelated topics, but in the end, things come together in a way that makes a heretofore difficult or unknown subject understandable. If you want to watch an amusing, but extremely informative lecture, go to https://youtu.be/n8m7lFQ3njk
I am a Strange Loop is about how the brain works to produce consciousness — what is commonly referred to as the “I” or “soul” — not to be confused with the religious meaning of soul. Are Humans the only animals who have a sense of “I”? What about our cousins chimpanzees, gorillas, etc? What about whales and dolphins? What about horses and cows and pigs? Okay, those animals may have a sense of “I” to a greater or lessor degree. What about a mosquito or house fly? Back to humans — does a human have a soul when sperm and egg to develop? Does a new born have a soul? Is the soul of a 10-year-old the same as someone like Chopin or Einstein, or for that matter the child’s parents or grandparents? Keep in mind that in this context soul means an awareness of oneself. There is obviously a sliding scale. Early in his childhood, by chance while learning to play Chopin, Hofstadter read essays, printed inside his music books, by an early 20th century author — James Huneker — and based on, or inspired by those essays, Hofstadter came up with a numerical scale of “degrees of souledness” running from 0 to 100 which he called, “just for the fun of it,” hunekers.
Hofstadter’s parents were professors at Stanford, so little Doug was able to hang around the laboratory, playing with TV cameras and monitors. He became fascinated by pointing the camera at the monitor and studying the feedback loops. By the way, if you want to see, or actually not see, an interesting feedback loop, look at a box of Morten Salt, the box has a picture of a little girl carrying a box of salt which presumably has a picture of a little girl carrying a box of salt ad infinitum. Well, not exactly ad infinitum: “The girl’s arm is covering up the critical spot where the regress would occur. If you were to ask the girl to (please) hand you her salt box so that you could actually see the infinite regress on its label, you would wind up disappointed, for the label on that box would show her holding a yet smaller box with her arm once again blocking the regress.”
Speaking of how little Doug spent his childhood, I was taken by this story: When he was 14-years-old, he read a book by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman — Gödel’s Proof. As it happened, Ernest Nagel and Doug’s father were friends and, by and by, Doug and Nagel’s two sons became close friends. “Sandy was just my age, and we were both exploring mathematics with a kind of wild intoxication that only teenagers know.” I can only wish I had become wildly intoxicated with mathematics when I was 14.
In any event that story starts a several-chapters-long discussion of Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica and how Kurt Gödel discovered something unexpected in the work. I won’t attempt to relate the substance of these chapters — I feel proud that I was able to read them and understand a snippet here and there. Sometimes, however, I read something that just made my head spin:
“Gödel envisioned a set of whole numbers that would organically grow out of each other …
For instance, if you made theorem Z out of theorems X and Y by using typographical rule R5, and if you made the number z out of numbers x and y using computational rule r5, then everything would match up. That is to say, if x were the number corresponding to theorem X and y were the number corresponding to theorem Υ, then z would “miraculously” turn out to be the number corresponding to theorem Z. *** The main thing to remember is that Gödel devised a very clever number-description trick — a recipe for making a very huge number g out of a less huge number k — in order to get a formula of PM to make a claim about its own Gödel number’s non-primness (which means that the formula is actually making a claim of its own non-theoremhood).”
After the chapters on mathematics, a seemingly different concept was introduced. Imagine a teleporter such as the one on Star Trek. Suppose you volunteered to be teleported to another planet. The only catch was that — yes you would arrive on the other planet but you would also remain intact here on planet earth. Which “you” would be “you.” If only one, than which one, and if both, than how would you know who was who? Would the two “yous” be the same person, or would you be the the same and different at the same time. The reason a 10-year-old has less of a “I” than the 50-year-old is because the older individual has more experiences which have developed into the 50-year-old. So I’m not quite the same person I was yesterday and even more different than I was two days ago, etc. I can’t remember who said that you can never step into the same river twice — or even once. Hofstadter quotes “Reasons and Persons by the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit.” In Parfit’s story, the individual who remains on earth is called into the director’s and told there is a problem. The teleporter worked fine except it damaged the cardiac system of the scanned individual who could expect to die within a day or two of cardiac failure. The two individuals talk, and the one on earth is told not to worry, the scanned person loves their wife and children, he’ll finish the book being written, etc., etc.
Can we really be transported to other worlds and other times? Hofstadter thinks yes, and to show how easy it is, he offers the following:
“The mere act of reading a novel while relaxing in an armchair by the window in one’s living room is an example par excellence of this phenomenon.
When we read a Jane Austen novel, what we look at is just a myriad of black smudges arranged neatly in lines on a set of white rectangles, and yet what we feel we are “seeing” … is a mansion in the English countryside, a team of horses pulling a carriage down a country lane, an elegantly clad lady and gentleman sitting side by side in the carriage exchanging pleasantries when they espy a poor old woman emerging from her humble cottage along the roadside… We are so taken in by what we “see” that in some important and serious sense we don’t notice the room we are sitting in, the trees visible through its window, nor even the black smudges speckled all over the white rectangles in our hands (even though, paradoxically, we are depending on those smudges to bring us the visual images I just described). If you don’t believe me, consider what you have just been doing in the last thirty seconds: processing black smudges speckled on white rectangles and yet “seeing” someone reading a Jane Austen novel in an armchair in a living room, and in addition, seeing the mansion, the country road, the carriage, the elegant couple, and the old woman… Black curlicues on a white background, when suitably arranged, transport us in milliseconds to arbitrarily distant, long-gone, or even never-existent venues and epochs.”
The point of all of this is to insist on the idea that we can be in several places at one time, simultaneously entertaining several points of view at one time. You just did it! You are sitting somewhere reading this book, yet a moment ago you were also in a living-room armchair reading a Jane Austen novel, and you were also simultaneously in a carriage going down a country lane. At least three points of view coexisted simultaneously inside your cranium. Which one of those viewers was “real”? Which one was “really you”? Need these questions be answered? Can they be answered?”
Hofstadter argues that a little bit of each of us lives, to a greater or lessor extent in many people. He distinguishes his thesis from other views such as panpsychism.
“The viewpoint of this book lies somewhere between these two extremes, picturing individuals not as point like infinite-decimal serial numbers but as fairly localized, blurry zones scattered here and there along the line. While some of these zones overlap considerably, most of them overlap little or none at all. After all, two smudges of width one inch apiece located a hundred miles apart will obviously have zero overlap. But two smudges of width one inch whose centers are only a half inch apart will have a great deal of overlap. There will not be an unbridgeable existential gap between two such people. Each of them is instead spread out into the other one, and each of them lives partially in the other.
***
In the wake of a human being’s death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of all those who were dearest to them. And when those people in turn pass on, the afterglow becomes extremely faint. And when that outer layer in turn passes into oblivion, then the afterglow is feebler still, and after a while there is nothing left.
***
Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word “love” cannot, thus, be separated from the word “I”; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.”
At the end of the book, it all comes together. Hofstadter’s closing thoughts are:
“In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems — vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.
To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like “I” is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be. As Kurt Gödel with his unexpected strange loops gave us a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human. And to my mind, the loss is worth the gain.”
At several points in the book I was reminded of Nick Chater’s The Mind is Flat. Although I Am A Strange Loop is long and sometimes difficult, it is well worth the effort. I highly recommend it.