I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [118]
Although particles galore were, to be sure, constantly churning “way down there” in that little boy’s brain, they were as invisible as the myriad simms careening about inside a careenium. Roger Sperry (a later idol of mine whose writings, had I but read and understood them in first grade, might have inspired me to stand up and bravely proclaim to my classmates, “I can philosophize just like Roger Sperry!”) would additionally point out that the particles in the young boy’s brain were merely serving (i.e., being pushed around by) far higher-level symbolic events in which the boy’s “I” was participating, and in which his “I” was being formed. As that “I” grew in complexity and grew ever realer to itself (i.e., ever more indispensable to the boy’s efforts to categorize and understand the never-repeating events in his life), the chance that any alternative “I”-less way of understanding the world could emerge and compete with it was being rendered essentially nil.
At the same time as I myself was getting ever more used to the fact that this “I” thing was responsible for what I did, my parents and friends were also becoming more convinced that there was indeed something very realseeming “in there” (in other words, something very marble-like, something with its unique brands of “hardness” and “resilience” and “shape”), which merited being called “you” or “he” or “Douggie”, and that also merited being called “I” by Douggie — and so once again, the sense of reality of this “I” was being reinforced over and over again, in myriad ways. By the time this brain had lived in this body for a couple of years or so, the “I” notion was locked into it beyond any conceivable hope of reversal.
…But Am I Real?
And yet, was this “I”, for all its tremendous stability and apparent utility, a real thing, or was it just a comfortable myth? I think we need some good old-fashioned analogies here to help out. And so I ask you, dear reader, are temperature and pressure real things, or are they just façons de parler? Is a rainbow a real thing, or is it nonexistent? Perhaps more to the point, was the “marble” that I discovered inside my box of envelopes real?
What if the box had been sealed shut so I had no way of looking at the individual envelopes? What if my knowledge of the box of envelopes necessarily came from dealing with its hundred envelopes as a single whole, so that no shifting back and forth between coarse-grained and fine-grained perspectives was possible? What if I hadn’t even known there were envelopes in the box, but had simply thought that there was a somewhat squeezable, pliable mass of softish stuff that I could grab with my entire hand, and that at this soft mass’s center there was something much more rigid-feeling and undeniably spherical in shape?
If, in addition, it turned out that talking about this supposed marble had enormously useful explanatory power in my life, and if, on top of that, all my friends had similar cardboard boxes and all of them spoke ceaselessly — and wholly unskeptically — about the “marbles” inside their boxes, then it would soon become pretty irresistible to me to accept my own marble as part of the world and to allude to it frequently in my explanations of various phenomena in the world. Indeed, any oddballs who denied the existence of marbles inside their cardboard boxes would be accused of having lost their marbles.
And thus it is with this notion of “I”. Because it encapsulates so neatly and so efficiently for us what we perceive to be truly important aspects of causality in the world, we cannot help attributing reality to our “I” and to those of other people — indeed, the highest possible level of reality.
The Size of the Strange Loop that Constitutes a Self
One more time, let’s go back and talk about mosquitoes and dogs. Do they have anything like an “I” symbol? In Chapter 1, when I spoke of “small souls” and “large souls”, I said that this is not a black-and-white