I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter

  SL #642: Words, words, words! The point is that experience involves more than mere words — it involves feelings. Any experiencer worthy of the term has to see that brilliant purple color of the flower and feel it as such, not merely drone the sound “purple” like an automated voice in a telephone menu tree. Seeing a vivid purple takes place below the level of words or ideas or symbols — it is more primordial. It’s an experience directly felt by an experiencer. That’s the difference between true consciousness and mere “artificial signaling” as in a mechanical-sounding telephone menu tree.

  SL #641: Would you say nonverbal animals enjoy such “primordial” experiences? Do cows savor the deep purple of a flower just as intensely as you do? And do mosquitoes? If you say “yes”, doesn’t that come dangerously close to suggesting that cows and mosquitoes have just as much consciousness as you do?

  SL #642: Mosquito brains are far less complex than mine, so they can’t have the same kinds of rich experiences as I do.

  SL #641: Now wait a minute. You can’t have it both ways. A moment ago, you were insisting that brain complexity doesn’t make any difference — that if a brain lacks that special je ne sais quoi that separates things that feel from things that don’t feel, then it’s not a locus of consciousness. But now you’re saying that the complexity of the brain in question does make a difference.

  SL #642: Well, I guess it has to, to some extent. A mosquito doesn’t have the equipment to appreciate a purple flower in the way I do. But maybe a cow does, or at least it comes closer. But complexity alone does not account for the presence of feeling and experience in brains.

  SL #641: Let’s consider a bit more deeply this notion of experiencing and feeling the world outside. If you were to stare at a big broad sheet of pure, uniform purple, your favorite shade ever, entirely filling your visual field, would you experience the same rush as when you see that color in the petals of a flower blooming in a garden?

  SL #642: I doubt it. Part of what makes my experience of a purple flower so intense is all the subtle shades I see on each petal, the delicate way each petal is curved, and the way the petals all swirl together around a glowing center made of dozens of tiny dots…

  SL #641: Not to mention the way the flower is poised on a branch, and the branch is part of a bush, and the bush is just one of many in a brightly colored garden…

  SL #642: Are you intimating that I don’t enjoy the purple for its own sake, but only because of the way it’s embedded in a vast scene? This goes too far. The surroundings may enhance my experience, but I love that rich velvety purple purely for itself, independently of anything else.

  SL #641: Why then do you describe it with the word “velvety”? Do flies or dogs experience purple flowers as “velvety”? Isn’t that word a reference to velvet? Doesn’t it mean that your visual experience calls up deeply buried memories, perhaps tactile memories from childhood, of running your fingers along a purple cushion made of velvet? Or maybe you’re unconsciously reminded of a dark-colored wine you once drank whose label described it as “velvety”. How can you claim your experience of purple is “independent of anything else in the world”?

  SL #642: All I’m trying to say is that there are basic, primordial experiences out of which larger experiences are built, and that even the primordial ones are radically, qualitatively different from what goes on in simple physical systems like ropes dangling in breezes and floats bobbing in toilets. A dangling rope doesn’t feel anything when a breeze impinges on it. There’s no feeling in there, there’s no here there. But when I see purple or taste chocolate, that’s a sensual experience I’m having, and it’s from millions of such sensual experiences that my mental life is built up. There’s a big mystery here, in this breach.

  SL #641: It sounds attractive, but unfortunately I think you’ve got it all backwards. Those little sensual experiences are to the grand pattern of your mental life as the letters in a novel are to the novel’s plot and characters — irrelevant, arbitrary tokens, rather than carriers of meaning. There is no meaning to the letter “b”, and yet out of it and the other letters of the alphabet, put together in complex sequences, comes all the richness and humanity in a novel or a story.

  SL #642: That’s the wrong level to talk about a story. Writers choose words, not letters, and words are of course imbued with meaning. Put together a lot of those tiny meanings and you get one big meaning-rich thing. Similarly, life is made out of many tiny sensual experiences, chained together to make one huge sensuo-emotional experience.

  SL #641: Hold on a minute. No isolated word has depth and power. When embedded in a complex context, a word may have great power, but in isolation it does not. It’s an illusion to attribute power to the word itself, and it’s a greater illusion to attribute power to the letters constituting the word.

  SL #642: I agree that letters have no power or meaning. But words, yes! They are the atoms of meaning out of which larger structures of meaning are built. You can’t get big meanings from atoms that are meaningless!

  SL #641: Oh, really? I thought you just conceded that exactly this happens in the case of words and letters. But all right — let’s move on from that example. Would you say that music has meaning?

  SL #642: Music is among the most meaningful things I know.

  SL #641: And yet, are individual notes meaningful to you? For instance, do you feel attraction or repulsion, beauty or ugliness, when you hear middle C?

  SL #642: I hope not! No more than when I see the isolated letter “C”.

  SL #641: Is there any isolated note that on its own attracts or repels you?

  SL #642: No. An isolated note doesn’t carry musical meaning. Anyone who claimed to be moved by a single note would be putting on airs.

  SL #641: Yet when you hear a piece of music you like or hate, you certainly are attracted or repelled. Where does that feeling come from, given that no note in it has any intrinsic attraction or repulsion for you?

  SL #642: It depends on how they are arranged in larger structures. A melody is attractive because of some kind of “logic” it possesses. Some other melody could be repulsive because it lacks logic, or because its logic is too simplistic or childish.

  SL #641: That certainly sounds like a response to pattern, not like raw sensation. A piece of music can have great emotional meaning despite being made of tiny atoms of sound that have no emotional meaning. What matters, therefore, is the pattern of organization, not the nature of the constituents. This brings us back to your puzzlement about the difference between experiencers such as you and me, and non-experiencers such as dangling ropes and plastic floats. To you, this crucial difference must originate in some special ingredient, some tangible thing or substance, which experiencers have in their makeup, and which non-experiencers lack. Is that right?

  SL #642: Something like that has to be the case.

  SL #641: Then let’s call this special ingredient that allows experiencers to come into existence “feelium”. Unfortunately, no one has ever found a single atom or molecule of feelium, and I suspect that even if we did find a mysterious substance present in all higher animals but not in lower ones, let alone in mere machines, you would start wondering how it could be that any mere substance, inanimate and insensate on its own, could give rise to sensation.

  SL #642: Feelium, if it existed, would probably be more like electricity than like atoms or molecules. Or maybe it would be like fire or radioactivity — in any case, something that seems living, something that by its very nature dances in crazy ways — not just inert stuff.

  SL #641: When you painted a picture of the earth before life evolved, it had volcanoes, thunder and lightning, electricity, fire, light, and sound — even the sun, that great big ball of nuclear fusion. And yet you weren’t willing to imagine that the presence of such phenomena, in any combination or permutation, could ever give rise to an experiencer. Yet just now, in talking about the mysterious soul-creating essence I called “feelium”, you used the word “dance”, as i
n the phrase “dancing symbols”. Are you perhaps unwittingly changing your tune?

  SL #642: Well, I can imagine a sparkling, firelike “dance” as being what distinguishes experiencers from non-experiencers. It’s even somehow appealing to me to think that the dancing of feelium, if it turned out to exist, might be able to explain the difference between experiencers and non-experiencers. But even if we came to understand the physics of how feelium produces experience, something crucial would still be missing. Suppose that the world were populated by experiencers defined by some kind of pattern involving feelium. Let’s even suppose that the pattern at the core of each experiencer were a strange loop, as you postulate. So now, because of this elusive but wonderful physical pattern executed at least partially in feelium, there are lots of “lights on” scattered around in special spots here and there in the universe. The sticking point remains: Which one of them is me? What makes one of them different from all of the others? What is the source of “I”-ness?

  SL #641: Why do you say you would be different from the others? Each one would cry out that it was different. You’d all be mouthing just the same thoughts. In that sense, you would all be indistinguishable!

  SL #642: I think you’re teasing me. You know perfectly well that I’m not the same as anyone else. My inner fire is here, not anywhere else. I want to know what singles out this particular fire from all the others.

  SL #641: It’s as I said before: you’re a satellite to your brain. Like a fireplace, a particular brain is in a particular spot. And wherever it happens to be, its resident strange loop calls that place “here”. What’s so mysterious about that?

  SL #642: You’re not answering my question. I don’t think you’re even hearing my question.

  SL #641: Oh, sure — I hear you. I here, you there!

  SL #642: Ouch. Now just listen for a moment. My question is very straightforward. Anybody can understand it (except maybe you). Why am I in this brain? Why didn’t I wind up in some other brain? Why didn’t I wind up in your brain, for instance?

  SL #641: Because your “I” was not an a priori well-defined thing that was predestined to jump, full-fledged and sharp, into some just-created empty physical vessel at some particular instant. Nor did your “I” suddenly spring into existence, wholly unanticipated but in full bloom. Rather, your “I” was the slowly emerging outcome of a million unpredictable events that befell a particular body and the brain housed in it. Your “I” is the self-reinforcing structure that gradually came to exist not only in that brain, but thanks to that brain. It couldn’t have come to exist in this brain, because this brain went through different experiences that led to a different human being.

  SL #642: But why couldn’t I have had those experiences as easily as you?

  SL #641: Careful now! Each “I” is defined as a result of its experiences, and not vice versa! To think the reverse is a very tempting, seductive trap to fall into. You keep on revealing your tacit assumption that any “I”, despite having grown up inside one particular brain, isn’t deeply rooted in that brain — that the same “I” could just as easily have grown up in and been attached to any other brain; that there is no deeper a connection between a given “I” and a given brain than the connection between a given canary and a given cage. You can just swap them arbitrarily.

  SL #642: You’re still missing my point. Instead of asking why I ended up in this brain, I’m asking why I started out in that random brain, and not in some other one. There’s no reason that it had to be that one.

  SL #641: No, you’re the one who’s missing the point. The key point, uncomfortable for you though it will be, is that no one started out in that brain — no one at all. It was just as uninhabited as a swinging rope or a whirlpool. But unlike those physical systems, it could perceive and evolve in sophistication, and so, as weeks, months, and years passed, there gradually came to be someone in there. But that personal identity didn’t suddenly appear full-blown; rather, it slowly coalesced and came into focus, like a cloud in the sky or condensation on a windowpane.

  SL #642: But who was that person destined to be? Why couldn’t it have been someone else?

  SL #641: I’m coming to that. What slowly came to pervade that brain was a complicated set of mental tendencies and verbal habits that are now insistently repeating this question, “Why am I here and not there?” As you may notice, this brain here (mine, that is) doesn’t make its mouth ask that question over and over again. My brain is very different from your brain.

  SL #642: Are you telling me that it doesn’t make sense to ask the question, “Why am I here and not there?”

  SL #641: Yes, I’m saying that, among other things. What makes all of this so counterintuitive — verging on the incomprehensible, at times — is that your brain (like mine, like everyone’s) has told itself a million times a self-reinforcing story whose central player is called “I”, and one of the most crucial aspects of this “I”, an aspect that is truly a sine qua non for “I”-ness, is that it fluently flits into other brains, at least partially. Out of intimacy, out of empathy, out of friendship, and out of relatedness (as well as for other reasons), your brain’s “I” continually makes darting little forays into other brains, seeing things to some extent from their point of view, and thus convincing itself that it could easily be housed in them. And then, quite naturally, it starts wondering why it isn’t housed in them.

  SL #642: Well, of course it would ask itself that. What more natural thing to wonder about?

  SL #641: And one piece of the answer is that to a small extent, your “I” is housed in other brains. Yes, your “I” is housed a little bit in my frustratingly dense and pigheaded brain, and vice versa. But despite that blurry spillover that turns the strict city-limits version of You into Greater Metropolitan You, your “I” is still very localized. Your “I” is certainly not uniformly spread out among all the brains on the surface of the earth — no more so than the great metropolitan sprawl of Mexico City possesses suburbs in Madagascar! But there is another piece of the answer to your question “Why am I here and not there?”, and it is going to trouble you. It is that your “I” isn’t housed anywhere. SL #642: Come again? This doesn’t sound like your usual line.

  SL #641: Well, it’s just another way of looking at these things. Earlier, I described your “I” as a self-reinforcing structure and a self-reinforcing story, but now I’ll risk annoying you by calling it a self-reinforcing myth.

  SL #642: A myth?! I’m certainly not a myth, and I’m here to tell you so.

  SL #641: Hold your horses for a moment. Think of the illusion of the solid marble in the box of envelopes. Were I to insist that that box of envelopes had a genuine marble in it, you’d say I had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a tactile illusion, wouldn’t you?

  SL #642: I would indeed, although the feeling that something solid is in there is not an illusion.

  SL #641: Agreed. So my claim is that your brain (like mine and like everyone else’s) has, out of absolute necessity, invented something it calls an “I”, but that that thing is as real (or rather, as unreal) as is that “marble” in that box of envelopes. In that sense, your brain has tricked itself. The “I” — yours, mine, everyone’s — is a tremendously effective illusion, and falling for it has fantastic survival value. Our “I” ’s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life.

  SL #642: You’re telling me there is not really any “I”. Yet my brain tells me just as assuredly that there is an “I”. Then you tell me that this is just my brain pulling a trick on me. But excuse me — pulling a trick on whom? You’ve just told me that this me doesn’t exist, so who is my brain pulling a trick on? And — pardon me once again — how can I even call it “my brain” if there is no me for it to belong to?

  SL #641: The problem is that in a sense, an “I” is somethi
ng created out of nothing. And since making something out of nothing is never possible, the alleged something turns out to be an illusion, in the end, but a very powerful one, like the marble among the envelopes. However, the “I” is an illusion far more entrenched and recalcitrant than the marble illusion, because in the case of “I”, there is no simple revelatory act corresponding to turning the box upside down and shaking it, then peering in between the envelopes and finding nothing solid and spherical in there. We don’t have access to the inner workings of our brains. And so the only perspective we have on our “I”-ness marble comes from the counterpart to squeezing all the envelopes at once, and that perspective says it’s real!

  SL #642: If that’s the only possible perspective, then what would ever give us even the slightest sense that we might be lending credence to a myth?

  SL #641: One thing that gives many people a sneaking suspicion that something about this “I” notion might be mythical is precisely what you’ve been troubled about all through our discussion — namely, there seems to be something incompatible between the hard laws of physics and the existence of vague, shadowy things called “I” ’s. How could experiencers come to exist in a world where there are just inanimate things moving around? It seems as if perception, sensation, and experience are something extra, above and beyond physics.

  SL #642: Unless, of course, there’s feelium, but that’s not by any means clear. In any case, I agree that conflicts with physics give a hint that this “I” notion is very elusive and cries out for an explanation.

  SL #641: A second hint that something needs revision has to do with what we perceive as causing what. In our everyday life, we take it for granted that an “I” can cause things, can push things around. If I decide to drive to the grocery store, my one-ton automobile winds up taking me there and bringing me back. Now that seems pretty peculiar in the world of physics, where everything comes about solely as a result of how particles interact. How does the particle story leave room for a shadowy, ethereal “I” to cause a heavy car to move somewhere? This, too, casts a bit of doubt on the reality of the notion of “I”.