I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [127]
My allegory was written in order to illustrate a downwards level-shift that is seen as very improbable. The Klüdgerot see only high-level meanings like “I am edible” in certain enormous PM strings, and they supposedly cannot imagine any lower-level meaning also residing in those strings. To us who know the original intent of the strings of symbols in Principia Mathematica, this sounds like an inexplicably rigid prejudice, yet when it comes to understanding our own nature, the tables are quite turned, for a very similar rigid prejudice in favor of high-level (and only high-level) perception turns out to pervade and even to define “the human condition”.
Trapped at the High Level
For us conscious, self-aware, “I”-driven humans, it is almost impossible to imagine moving down, down, down to the neuronal level of our brains, and slowing down, down, down, so that we can see (or at least can imagine) each and every chemical squirting in each and every synaptic cleft — a gigantic shift in perspective that would seem to instantly drain brain activity of all symbolic quality. No meanings would remain down there, no sticky semantic juice — just astronomical numbers of meaningless, inanimate molecules, squirting meaninglessly away, all the livelong, lifeless day.
Your typical human brain, being blissfully ignorant of its minute physical components and their arcanely mathematizable mode of microscopic functioning, and thriving instead at the infinitely remote level of soap operas, spring sales, super skivaganzas, SUV’s, SAT’s, SOB’s, Santa Claus, splashtacular scuba specials, snorkels, snowballs, sex scandals (and let’s not forget sleazeballs), makes up as plausible a story as it can about its own nature, in which the starring role, rather than being played by the cerebral cortex, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cerebellum, or any other weirdly named and gooey physical structure, is played instead by an anatomically invisible, murky thing called “I”, aided and abetted by other shadowy players known as “ideas”, “thoughts”, “memories”, “beliefs”, “hopes”, “fears” “intentions”, “desires”, “love”, “hate”, “rivalry”, “jealousy”, “empathy”, “honesty”, and on and on — and in the soft, ethereal, neurology-free world of these players, your typical human brain perceives its very own “I” as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad of infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them, by the billions — nay, the millions of billions — every single second.
The human condition is thus profoundly analogous to the Klüdgerotic condition: neither species can see or even imagine the lower levels of a reality that is nonetheless central to its existence.
First Key Ingredient of Strangeness
Why does an “I” symbol never develop in a video feedback system, no matter how swirly or intricate or deeply nested are the shapes that appear on its screen? The answer is simple: a video system, no matter how many pixels or colors it has, develops no symbols at all, because a video system does not perceive anything. Nowhere along the cyclic pathway of a video loop are there any symbols to be triggered — no concepts, no categories, no meanings — not a tad more than in the shrill screech of an audio feedback loop. A video feedback system does not attribute to the strange emergent galactic shapes on its screen any kind of causal power to make anything happen. Indeed, it doesn’t attribute anything to anything, because, lacking all symbols, a video system can’t and doesn’t ever think about anything!
What makes a strange loop appear in a brain and not in a video feedback system, then, is an ability — the ability to think — which is, in effect, a one-syllable word standing for the possession of a sufficiently