I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [115]
It is crucial to our young lives that we hone our developing self-symbol as precisely as possible. We want (and need) to find out where we belong in all sorts of social hierarchies and classes, and sometimes, even if we don’t want to know these things, we find out anyway. For instance, we are all told, early on, that we are “cute”; in some of us, however, this message is reinforced far more strongly than in others. In this manner, each of us comes to realize that we are “good-looking” or “gullible” or “cheeky” or “shy” or “spoiled” or “funny” or “lazy” or “original”, or whatever. Dozens of such labels and concepts accrete to our growing self-symbols.
As we go through thousands of experiences large and small, our representations of these experiences likewise accrete to our self-symbols. Of course a memory of a visit to the Grand Canyon, say, is attached not only to our self-symbol but to many other symbols in our brains, but our self-symbol is enriched and rendered more complex by this attachment.
Making Tosses, Internalizing Bounces
Constantly, relentlessly, day by day, moment by moment, my self-symbol is being shaped and refined — and in turn, it triggers external actions galore, day after day after day. (Or so the causality appears to it, since it is on this level, not on the micro-level, that it perceives the world.) 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.
To be more concrete: I throw a basketball toward a hoop, and thanks to hordes of microscopic events in my arms, my fingers, the ball’s spin, the air, the rim, and so forth, all of which I am unaware of, I either miss or make my hook shot. This tiny probing of the world, repeated hundreds or thousands of times, informs me ever more accurately about my level of skill as a basketball player (and also helps me decide if I like the sport or not). My sense of my skill level is, of course, but a very coarse-grained summary of billions of fine-grained facts about my body and brain.
Similarly, my social actions induce reactions on the part of other sentient beings. Those reactions bounce back to me and I perceive them in terms of my repertoire of symbols, and in this way I indirectly perceive myself through my effect on others. I am building up my sense of who I am in others’ eyes. My self-symbol is coalescing out of an initial void.
Smiling Like Hopalong Cassidy
One morning when I was about six years old, I mustered all my courage, stood up in my first-grade class’s show-and-tell session, and proudly declared, “I can smile just like Hopalong Cassidy!” (I don’t remember how I had convinced myself that I had this grand ability, but I was as sure of it as I was of anything in the world.) I then proceeded to flash this lovingly practiced smile in front of everybody. In my episodic memory lo these many decades later there is a vivid trace of this act of derring-do, but unfortunately I have only the dimmest recollection of how my teacher, Miss McMahon, a very sweet woman whom I adored, and my little classmates reacted, and yet their collective reaction, whatever it was, was surely a formative influence on my early life, and thus on my gradually growing, slowly stabilizing “I”.
What we do — what our “I” tells us to do — has consequences, sometimes positive and sometimes negative, and as the days and years go