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By Root 1706 0

more abstract terms. The vast amounts of stuff that we call “I” collectively give rise, at some particular moment, to some external action, much as a stone tossed into a pond gives rise to expanding rings of ripples. Soon, our action’s myriad consequences start bouncing back at us, like the first ripples returning after bouncing off the pond’s banks. What we receive back affords us the chance to perceive what our gradually metamorphosing “I” has wrought. Millions of tiny reflected signals impinge on us from outside, whether visually, sonically, tactilely, or whatever, and when they land, they trigger internal waves of secondary and tertiary signals inside our brain. Finally this flurry of signals is funneled down into just a handful of activated symbols — a tiny set of extremely well-chosen categories constituting a coarse-grained understanding of what we’ve just done (for example, “Shoot — missed my hook shot by a hair!”, or perhaps, “Wow, my new hair-do hooked him!”).

And thus the current “I” — the most up-to-date set of recollections and aspirations and passions and confusions — by tampering with the vast, unpredictable world of objects and other people, has sparked some rapid feedback, which, once absorbed in the form of symbol activations, gives rise to an infinitesimally modified “I”; thus round and round it goes, moment after moment, day after day, year after year. In this fashion, via the loop of symbols sparking actions and repercussions triggering symbols, the abstract structure serving us as our innermost essence evolves slowly but surely, and in so doing it locks itself ever more rigidly into our mind. Indeed, as the years pass, the “I” converges and stabilizes itself just as inevitably as the screech of an audio feedback loop inevitably zeroes in and stabilizes itself at the system’s natural resonance frequency.

I Am Not a Video Feedback Loop

It’s analogy time again! I’d like once more to invoke the world of video feedback loops, for much of this has its counterpart in that far simpler domain. An event takes place in front of the camera and thus is sent onto the screen, but in simplified form, since continuous shapes (shapes with very fine grain) have been rendered on a grid made of discrete pixels (a coarse-grained medium). The new screen is then taken in by the camera and fed back in, and around and around it goes. The upshot of all this is that a single easily perceivable gestalt shape — some kind of stable but one-of-a-kind, never-seen-before whorl — appears on the screen.

Thus it is with the strange loop making up a human “I”, but there is a key difference. In the TV setup, as we earlier observed, no perception takes place at any stage inside the loop — just the transmission and reception of bare pixels. The TV loop is not a strange loop — it is just a feedback loop.

In any strange loop that gives rise to human selfhood, by contrast, the level-shifting acts of perception, abstraction, and categorization are central, indispensable elements. It is the upward leap from raw stimuli to symbols that imbues the loop with “strangeness”. The overall gestalt “shape” of one’s self — the “stable whorl”, so to speak, of the strange loop constituting one’s “I” — is not picked up by a disinterested, neutral camera, but is perceived in a highly subjective manner through the active processes of categorizing, mental replaying, reflecting, comparing, counterfactualizing, and judging.

I Am Ineradicably Entrenched…

While you were reading my first-grade show-and-tell period Hopalong Cassidy–style smile-attempt bravado anecdote, the question “How come Hofstadter is once again leaving elementary particles out of the picture?” may have flitted through your mind; then again, perhaps it did not. I hope the latter is the case! Indeed, why would such an odd thought occur to any sane human being reading that passage (including the most hard-bitten of particle physicists)? Even the vaguest, most fleeting allusion to particle physics in that context would seem to constitute an absurd non sequitur, for what on earth