I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [129]
In summary, the combination of these two ingredients — one an ability and the other an inability — gives rise to the strange loop of selfhood, a trap into which we humans all fall, every last one of us, willy-nilly. Although it begins as innocently as a humble toilet’s float-ball mechanism or an audio or video feedback loop, where no counterintuitive type of causality is posited anywhere, human self-perception inevitably ends up positing an emergent entity that exerts an upside-down causality on the world, leading to the intense reinforcement of and the final, invincible, immutable locking-in of this belief. The end result is often the vehement denial of the possibility of any alternative point of view at all.
Sperry Redux
I just said that we all fall into this “trap”, but I don’t really see things so negatively. Such a “trap” is not harmful if taken with a grain of salt; rather, it is something to rejoice in and cherish, for it is what makes us human. Permit me once more to quote the eloquent words of Roger Sperry:
In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell.
When you come down to it, all that Sperry has done here is to go out on a limb and dare to assert, in a serious scientific publication, the ho-hum, run-of-the-mill, commonsensical belief held by the random person on the street that there is a genuine reality (i.e., causal potency) of the thing we call “I”. In the scientific world, such an assertion runs a great risk of being looked upon with skepticism, because it sounds superficially as if it reeks of Cartesian dualism (wonderfully mystical-sounding terms such as élan vital, “life force”, “spirit of the hive”, “entelechy”, and “holons” occasionally spring into my mind when I read this passage).
However, Roger Sperry knew very well that he wasn’t embracing dualism or mysticism of any sort, and he therefore had the courage to take the plunge and make the assertion. His position is a subtle balancing act whose insightfulness will, I am convinced, one day be recognized and celebrated, and it will be seen to be analogous to the subtle balancing act of Kurt Gödel, who demonstrated how high-level, emergent, self-referential meanings in a formal mathematical system can have a causal potency just as real as that of the system’s rigid, frozen, low-level rules of inference.
CHAPTER 15
Entwinement
Multiple Strange Loops in One Brain
TWO chapters back, I declared that there was one strange loop in each human cranium, and that this loop constituted our “I”, but I also mentioned that that was just a crude first stab. Indeed, it is a drastic oversimplification. Since we all perceive and represent hundreds of other human beings at vastly differing levels of detail and fidelity inside our cranium, and since the most important facet of all of those human beings is their own sense of self, we inevitably mirror, and thus house, a large number of other strange loops inside our head. But what exactly does it mean to say that each human head is the locus of a multiplicity of “I” ’s?
Well, I don’t know precisely what