I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter

  It’s hard for me to figure this out since I think he says both things often enough that one could argue it either way. But where do I come down on this issue? I think I come down on the “two me’s” side. At first, this almost sounds as if I am embracing the Cartesian Ego theory, just imagining that the egg is cloned and two identical Cartesian Egos come to exist, one on Venus and one on Mars. But then SL #642 would start screaming, “Which one is me?” It sounds as if I haven’t answered the question at all, or as if I want to have my egg on Mars and eat it too, on Venus.

  In order to regain some semblance of consistency, I have to return to SL #641’s theme in the dialogue, which is that the “I” notion is, fundamentally and in the end, a hallucination. Let’s let Episode III, my teleportation scenario with fresh copies on Venus and Mars and no copy left on Earth, apply to me instead of to Parfit. In that case, each of the new brains — the one on Mars and the one on Venus — is convinced that it is me. It feels just like it always felt to be me. The same old urge to say, “I am here and not there” zooms up in both brains as automatically as when someone taps my knee and my leg jerks upwards. But knee-jerk reflex or not, the truth of the matter is that there is no thing called “I” — no hard marble, no precious yolk protected by a Cartesian eggshell — there are just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones. In the end, we have to believe both Douglas Hofstadters as they say, “This one here is me,” at least to the extent that we believe the Douglas Hofstadter who is right now sitting in his study typing these words and saying to you in print, “This one here is me.” Saying this and insisting on its truth is just a tendency, an inclination, a habit — in fact, a knee-jerk reflex — and it is no more than that, even though it seems to be a great deal more than that.

  Ultimately, the “I” is a hallucination, and yet, paradoxically, it is the most precious thing we own. As Dan Dennett points out in Consciousness Explained, an “I” is a little like a bill of paper money — it feels as if it is worth a great deal, but ultimately, it is just a social convention, a kind of illusion that we all tacitly agree on without ever having been asked, and which, despite being illusory, supports our entire economy. And yet the bill is just a piece of paper with no intrinsic worth at all.

  Trains Who Roll

  In Chapters 15 through 18, I argued that each of us is spread out and that, despite our usual intuitions, each of us is housed at least partially in different brains that may be scattered far and wide across this planet. This viewpoint amounts to the idea that one can be in two places at once, despite our initial knee-jerk rejection of such a crazy-sounding thought. If being in two or more places at once seems to make no sense, think about reversing the roles of space and time. That is, consider that you have no trouble imagining that you will exist tomorrow and also the next day. Which one of those future people will really be you? How can two different you’s exist, both claiming your name? “Ah,” you reply, “but I will shortly be getting there, like a train pulling through different stations.” But that just begs the question. Why is it the same train, if in the meantime it has dropped some passengers off and picked others up, perhaps changed a car or two, maybe even its locomotive? It is simply called “Train 641”, and that’s why it is “the same train”. It’s a linguistic convention, and a very good one, too. It is a very natural convention in the classical world in which we exist.

  If Train 641, heading east from Milano, always were to split up in Verona into two pieces, one that headed north to Bolzano and one that continued eastwards to Venice, then we would probably not call either half “Train 641” any longer, but would give them separate numbers. But we could also call them “Train 641a” and “Train 641b”, or even just leave them both as “Train 641”. It might happen, after all, that upon reaching Bolzano, the northern half always veers suddenly eastwards, and likewise that upon reaching Venice, the eastern half always veers suddenly northwards, and the two halves always rejoin and fuse together in Belluno, on their way — or rather, on its way — to Udine!

  You may object that trains have no inner perspective on the matter — that “641” is just a third-person label rather than a first-person point of view. All I can say is, this is a very tempting viewpoint, but it is to be resisted. Trains who roll and trains that roll are the same thing, at least if they have sufficiently rich representational systems that allow them to wrap around and self-represent. Most trains today don’t (in fact none of them do), so we don’t usually give them the benefit of the “who” pronoun. But maybe someday they will, and then we will. However, the transition from one pronoun to the other won’t be sharp and sudden; it will be gradual, like the fading of the belief in Cartesian Egos as people grow in sophistication.

  The Glow of the Soular Corona

  It may strike you that this whole chapter has been predicated upon such weird science-fiction scenarios that it has no bearing at all upon how we think about the real world of real human beings, and their real lives and deaths. But I believe that that is mistaken.

  I have a close friend whose aging father Jim has Alzheimer’s Disease. For some years my friend has been sadly watching his father lose contact, bit by bit, with one aspect after another of the reality that only a few years ago constituted the absolute bedrock, the completely reliable terra firma, of his inner life. He no longer knows his address, he has lost his former understanding of such mundane things as credit cards, and he isn’t quite sure who his children are, though they look vaguely familiar. And it is all getting dimmer, never brighter.

  Perhaps Jim will forget his own name, where he grew up, what he likes to eat, and much more. He is heading into the same terrible, thick, allenveloping fog that former President Reagan lived in during the closing few low-huneker years of his life. And yet, something of Jim is surviving strongly — surviving in other brains, thanks to human love. His easy-going sense of humor, his boundless joy at driving the wide open spaces of the prairies, his ideals, his generosity, his simplicity, his hopes and dreams — and (for what it’s worth) his understanding of credit cards. All of these things survive at different levels in many people who, thanks to having interacted with him intimately over many years or decades, constitute his “soular corona” — his wife, his three children, and his many, many friends.

  Even before Jim’s body physically dies, his soul will have become so foggy and dim that it might as well not exist at all — the soular eclipse will be in full force — and yet despite the eclipse, his soul will still exist, in partial, low-resolution copies, scattered about the globe. Jim’s first-person perspective will flicker in and out of existence in other brains, from time to time. He will exist, albeit in an extremely diluted fashion, now here, now there. Where will Jim be? Not very much anywhere, admittedly, but to some extent he will be in many places at once, and to different degrees. Though terribly reduced, he will be wherever his soular corona is.

  It is very sad, but it is also beautiful. In any case, it is our only consolation.

  CHAPTER 22

  A Tango with Zombies and Dualism

  Pedantic Semantics?

  TO ARGUE over whether the appropriate relative pronoun to apply to some hypothetical thinking machine one day in the future will be “who” or merely “which” would doubtless strike certain people as the quintessence of pedantic semantic quibbling, yet there are other people for whom the question would raise issues of life-or-death importance. Indeed, this is a quintessentially semantic issue, in that it involves deciding what verbal label to apply to something never seen before, but since category assignments go right to the core of thinking, they are determinant of our attitude toward each thing in the world, including such matters as life and death. For that reason, I feel that this pronoun issue, even if it is “merely semantics”, is of great importance to our sense of who or what we are.

  The well-known Australian philosopher of mind David Chalmers, which not only is a cherished friend but also is my former doctoral student, has devoted many years to ar
guing for the provocative idea that there could be both “machines that think” and also “machines who think”. For me, the notion of both types of machine coexisting makes no sense, because, as I declared in Chapter 19, the word “thinking” stands for the dancing of symbols in a cranium or careenium (or some such arena), and this is also what is denoted by the word “consciousness”. Since being conscious merits the use of the pronoun “who” (and also, of course, the pronouns “I”, “me”, and so on), so does thinking — and that settles the question for me. In other words, “machine that thinks” is an incoherent phrase because of its relative pronoun, and if some day there really are machines that think, then by definition they will be machines who think.

  Two Machines

  Dave Chalmers explores these issues in an unprecedented new fashion. He paints a picture of a world that has two machines identical down to the last nail, transistor, atom, and quark, and these two machines, sitting side by side on an old oaken table in Room 641 of the Center for Research into Consciousness and Cognetics at Pakistania University, are carrying out exactly the same task. For concreteness’ sake, let’s say both machines are struggling to prove, using informal geometrical insights rather than formal algebraic manipulations, the simple but surprising “chord–angle theorem” of Euclidean geometry, which states that if a point (A in the figure below) moves along an arc of a circle, then the angle (α) subtended by a fixed chord (BC) that the point is “looking at” as it moves along will be constant.

  I chose this elementary but elegant theorem because it is one that Dave and I discussed together with great pleasure many years ago, and some of his comments on it gave me insights that literally changed my life. In fact, that fateful fork in the road way back when allows me to imagine Switch #6, the throwing of which would subtract from my brain all knowledge of this theorem and all the subsequent passion for geometry that was sparked by my thinking carefully about it…

  As I was saying, these two exactly identical machines are launched on this task in the exact same terasecond by an atomic clock, and they proceed in exact lockstep synchrony towards its solution, simulating, let us say, the exact processes that took place in Dave Chalmers’ own brain when he first found an insight-yielding visual proof. The details of the program running in both machines are of no import to us here; what does matter is that Machine Q (it stands for “qualia”) is actually feeling something, whereas Machine Z (it rhymes with “dead”) is feeling nothing. This is where Dave’s ideas grow incomprehensible to me.

  Now I have to admit that in order to make it a bit easier to envision, I have slightly altered the story that Dave tells. I placed these two machines side by side on the old oaken table in Room 641 of CRCC, while Dave never does that. In fact, he would protest, saying something such as, “It’s bloody incoherent to postulate two identical machines running identical processes on the very same oaken table with one of them feeling something and the other one not. That violates the laws of the universe!”

  I fully accept this objection and plead guilty to having distorted Dave’s tale. To atone for my sin and to turn my story back into his, I first remove one of the machines from the old oaken table in Room 641. Let’s call the machine who remains, no matter what we’d called it before, “Machine Q”. Now (following Dave), we take a rather unexpected step: we imagine a different but isomorphic (i.e., “separate but indistinguishable”) universe. We’ll call the first one “Universe Q” and the new one “Universe Z”. Both universes have exactly the same laws of physics, and in each universe the laws of physics are all one needs to know in order to predict what will happen, given any initial configuration of particles.

  When I say these two universes are indistinguishable, one of the myriad consequences is that Universe Z, just like Universe Q , has a Milky Way galaxy, a star therein called “Sol” with a nine-planet solar system whose third planet is called “Earth”, and on Universe Z’s Earth there is a Pakistania University with a Center for Research into Consciousness and Cognetics, and in it, good old Room 641. There is even “the same” old oaken table, and there, lo and behold, is “the same machine” sitting on it. Surely you see it, do you not? But since this machine is in Universe Z, we will call it “Machine Z”, just so that we have different names for these indistinguishable machines located in indistinguishable surroundings.

  Now of course we can’t launch Machines Q and Z at “the same instant”, because they belong to different universes with independent timelines, but luckily these two universes have exactly the same laws of physics, so synchronization isn’t necessary. We just start them up and let them do their things. As before, they do exactly the same thing, since they are both following the same laws of physics, and physics suffices to determine all behavior down to the finest detail. And yet, what do you suppose turns out to be the case? Oddly enough, although both machines do exactly the same thing down to the quark level and far beyond, Machine Q enjoys feelings about what it is doing while Machine Z does not. Machine Q is in fact ecstatic, whereas Machine Z feels nothing. That is, Zilch. Zero.

  “How is that possible?”, you might ask. I too, no less bewildered, ask the same question. But Dave most cheerfully explains: “Oh, it’s because the universe in which Machine Q exists has something extra, on top of the laws of physics, that allows feelings to accompany certain types of physical processes. Even though these feelings don’t have and can’t have any effect on anything physical, they are nonetheless real, and they are really there.”

  In other words, although physics is identical in Universes Q and Z, there are no feelings anywhere in Universe Z — just empty motions. Thus Machine Z mouths all the same words as Machine Q does. It claims to be ecstatic about its proof (exactly as does Machine Q), and it goes on and on about the beauty it sees in it (exactly as does Machine Q) — but in fact it is feeling nothing. Its words are all hollow.

  Two Daves

  What is this extra ingredient that makes Universes Q and Z so vitally different? Dave doesn’t say, but he tells us that it is the very stuff of consciousness — I’ll dub it élan mental — and if you’re born in a universe with it, then lucky you, whereas if you’re born in a universe without it, well, tough luck, because there’s no you-ness, no I-ness, no who-ness, no me-ness (or he-ness or she-ness) in you — there’s just it-ness. Despite this enormous difference, all the objective phenomena in both universes are identical. Thus there are Marx Brothers movies in both of these universes, and when Z-people in Universe Z look at A Night at the Opera, they laugh exactly the same as when Q-people in Universe Q look at A Night at the Opera.

  Most deliciously ironically of all, just as there is a Dave Chalmers in Universe Q (the one in which we live), there is also a Dave Chalmers in Universe Z, and it goes around the world giving lectures on why there is feeling in the universe in which it was born but no feeling in the isomorphic universe into which its unfortunate “zombie twin” was born. The irony, of course, is that Universe Z’s Dave Chalmers is lying through its teeth, yet without having the foggiest idea it’s lying. Although it believes it is conscious, in truth it is not. Sadly, this Dave is an innocent victim of the illusion of consciousness, which is nothing but a trivial by-product of having a deeply entrenched strange loop in its brain, whereas its isomorphic counterpart in Universe Q, using the same words and intonations, is telling the truth, for he truly is conscious! Why? Because he not only has a strange loop in his brain but also — lucky fellow! — lives in a universe with élan mental.

  Now please don’t think I am poking fun at my friend Dave Chalmers, for Dave truly does go around the world visiting philosophy departments, giving colloquia in which he most gleefully describes his “zombie twin” and chortles merrily over that twin’s helpless deludedness, since the zombie twin gives word for word and chortle for chortle the very same lecture, believing every word of it but not feeling a thing. Dave is a very insightful thinker, and he is every bit as aware as I am of the seeming craziness of his distinction between Universes Q
and Z, between Machines Q and Z, and between himself and his alleged zombie twin, but whereas I find all of this unacceptably silly, Dave is convinced that, outrageous though such a distinction seems at first to be, Universe Q’s mysterious, nonphysical, and causality-lacking extra ingredient élan mental — a close kin to the notion of “feelium” discussed by Strange Loops #641 and #642 — is the missing key to the otherwise inexplicable nature of consciousness.

  The Nagging Worry that One Might Be a Zombie

  Of late, not a few philosophers of mind have, like Dave, been caught in a tidal wave of fascination with this notion called “zombies”. (Actually, it’s more like “the notion we love to hate”.) It seems to have originated in voodoo rites in the Caribbean and to have spread from there to horror films and then to the world of literature. A Web search will quickly give you all the information you want, and most of it is pretty funny.

  Basically, a zombie is an unconscious humanoid who acts — oops, I mean “that acts” — as if it were conscious. There’s no one home inside a zombie, though from the outside one might think so. I have to admit, once in a blue moon I’ve run into someone whose glazed eyes give me the eerie sense that there’s no one home behind them. Of course, I don’t take such impressions seriously. Yet for many philosophers, the hollow, glazed-eyes image has turned into a paradigmatic fear, and today there is no paucity of philosophers of mind who find the notion of a zombie not just painfully abhorrent but in fact perplexingly coherent. These philosophers are so troubled by the specter of zombies that they have taken as their sacred mission to show that our world is not the cold and empty Universe Z, but the warm and fuzzy Universe Q.