I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [177]
SL #642: Your phrase “abstractly swirling pattern” makes me think of a physical vortex, like a hurricane or a whirlpool or a spiral galaxy — but I suppose those aren’t abstract enough for you.
SL #642: No, they really aren’t. Whirlpools and hurricanes are merely spinning vortices — fluid cousins to tops and gyroscopes. To make an “I” you need meanings, and to make meanings you need perception and categories — in fact, a repertoire of categories that keeps on building on itself, growing and growing and growing. Such things are nowhere to be found in the physical vortices you mentioned. That’s why a far better metaphor for an “I” is the structure of the self-referring formulas that Gödel found in the barren-seeming universe of PM. His formulas, like human “I” ’s, are extremely intricately and delicately structured, and are hardly a dime a dozen. “Ordinary” formulas of PM, like “0+0=0”, say, or a formula that states that every integer is the sum of at most four squares, are the analogues to inert, “I”-less physical objects, like grains of sand or bowling balls. Those simple kinds of formulas don’t have wraparound high-level meanings in the way that Gödel’s special strings do. It takes a great deal of number-theoretical machinery to build up from ordinary assertions about numbers to the complexity of Gödelian strange loops, and likewise it takes a great deal of evolution to build up from very simple feedback loops to the complexity of strange loops in brains.
SL #642: Suppose I granted you that there are lots of abstract “strange loops” floating around the universe, which somehow coalesced over the course of billions of years of evolution — strange loops residing in crania, a bit like audio feedback loops residing in auditoriums. They can be as complex as you like; the complexity of their physical activity doesn’t matter one whit to me. The knotty issue that simply will not go away is: What would make one of those strange loops me? Which one? You can’t answer that.
SL #641: I can, although you won’t like my answer. What makes one of them you is that it is resident in a particular brain that went through all the experiences that made you you.
SL #642: That’s just a tautology!
SL #641: Not really. It’s a subtle idea whose crux is that what you call “I” is an outcome, not a starting point. You coalesced in an unplanned fashion, coming only slowly into existence, not in a flash. At the beginning, when the brain that would later house your soul was taking form, there was no you. But that brain slowly grew, and its experiences slowly accumulated. Somewhere along the way, as more and more things happened to it, were registered by it, and became internalized in it, it started imitating the cultural and linguistic conventions in which it was immersed, and thus it tentatively said “I” about itself (even though the referent of that word was still very blurry). That’s roughly when it noticed it was somewhere — and not surprisingly, it was where a certain brain was! At that point, though, it didn’t know anything about its brain. What it knew instead was its brain’s container, which was a certain body. But even though it didn’t know anything about its brain, that nascent “I” faithfully followed its brain around just as a shadow always tags along after a moving object.
SL #642: You’re not dealing with my question, which is about how to pick me out in a world of indistinguishable physical structures.
SL #641: All right, let me turn straight to that. To you, all the brains housing strange loops seem no different from thousands of sewing machines scattered hither and yon, all clicking away. You would ask,