I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [111]
The upshot of all this is that the most real way of talking about dogs or hogs involves, as Roger Sperry said, high-level entities pushing low-level entities around with impunity. Recall that the intangible, abstract quality of the primality of the integer 641 is what most truly topples hard, solid dominos located in the “prime stretch” of the chainium. This is nothing if not downward causality, and it leads us straight to the conclusion that the most efficient way to think about brains that have symbols — and for most purposes, the truest way — is to think that the microstuff inside them is pushed around by ideas and desires, rather than the reverse.
CHAPTER 13
The Elusive Apple of My “I”
The Patterns that Constitute Experience
BY OUR deepest nature, we humans float in a world of familiar and comfortable but quite impossible-to-define abstract patterns, such as: “fast food” and “clamato juice”, “tackiness” and “wackiness”, “Christmas bonuses” and “customer service departments”, “wild goose chases” and “loose cannons”, “crackpots” and “feet of clay”, “slam dunks” and “bottom lines”, “lip service” and “elbow grease”, “dirty tricks” and “doggie bags”, “solo recitals” and “sleazeballs”, “sour grapes” and “soap operas”, “feedback” and “fair play”, “goals” and “lies”, “dreads” and “dreams”, “she” and “he” — and last but not least, “you” and “I”.
Although I’ve put each of the above items in quotation marks, I am not talking about the written words, nor am I talking about the observable phenomena in the world that these expressions “point to”. I am talking about the concepts in my mind and your mind that these terms designate — or, to revert to an earlier term, about the corresponding symbols in our respective brains.
With my hopefully amusing little list (which I pared down from a much longer one), I am trying to get across the flavor of most adults’ daily mental reality — the bread-and-butter sorts of symbols that are likely to be awakened from dormancy in one’s brain as one goes about one’s routines, talking with friends and colleagues, sitting at a traffic light, listening to radio programs, flipping through magazines in a dentist’s waiting room, and so on. My list is a random walk through an everyday kind of mental space, drawn up in order to give a feel for the phenomena in which we place the most stock and in which we most profoundly believe (sour grapes and wild goose chases being quite real to most of us), as opposed to the forbidding and inaccessible level of quarks and gluons, or the only slightly more accessible level of genes and ribosomes and transfer RNA — levels of “reality” to which we may pay lip service but which very few of us ever think about or talk about.
And yet, for all its supposed reality, my list is pervaded by vague, blurry, unbelievably elusive abstractions. Can you imagine trying to define any of its items precisely? What on earth is the quality known as “tackiness”? Can you teach it to your kids? And please give me a pattern-recognition algorithm that will infallibly detect sleazeballs!
Reflected Communist Bachelors with Spin 1/2 are All Wet
As a simple illustration of how profoundly wedded our thinking is to the blurry, hazy categories of the macroworld, consider the curious fact that logicians — people who by profession try to write down ironclad, razor-sharp rules of logical inference that apply with impeccable precision to linguistic expressions — seldom if ever resort to the level of particles and fields for their canonical examples of fundamental, eternal truths. Instead, their most frequent examples of “truth” are typically sentences that use totally out-of-focus categories — sentences such as “Snow is white”, “Water is wet”, “Bachelors are unmarried males”, and “Communism either is or is not in for deep trouble in the next few years in China.”
If you think these sentences do express sharp truths, just ponder for a moment… What does “snow” really mean?