I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [184]
.SL #642: Why do you keep on saying the “I” is just a myth or a hallucination or an illusion, just like that blasted non-marble? I’m tired of your trotting out your tired old marble metaphor. I want to know what’s hallucinated.
SL #641: All right, let’s put the marble metaphor to bed for a while. The basic idea is that the dance of symbols in a brain is itself perceived by symbols, and that step extends the dance, and so round and round it goes. That, in a nutshell, is what consciousness is. But if you recall, symbols are simply large phenomena made out of nonsymbolic neural activity, so you can shift viewpoint and get rid of the language of symbols entirely, in which case the “I” disintegrates. It just poofs out of existence, so there’s no room left for downward causality.
SL #642: What does that mean, more specifically?
SL #641: It means that in the new picture there are no desires, beliefs, character traits, senses of humor, ideas, memories, or anything mentalistic; just itty-bitty physical events (particle collisions, in essence) are left. One can do likewise in the careenium, where you can shift points of view, either looking at things at the level of simmballs or looking at things at the level of simms. At the former level, the simms are totally unseen, and at the latter level, the simmballs are totally unseen. These rival viewpoints really are extreme opposites, like the heliocentric and geocentric views.
SL #642: All of this I see, but why do you keep implying that one of these views is an illusion, and the other one is the truth? You always give primacy to the particle viewpoint, the lower-level microscopic viewpoint. Why are you so prejudiced? Why don’t you simply see two equally good rival views that we can oscillate between as we find appropriate, in somewhat the way that physicists can oscillate between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics when they deal with gases?
SL #641: Because, most unfortunately, the non-particle view involves several types of magical thinking. It entails making a division of the world into two radically different kinds of entities (experiencers and non-experiencers), it involves two radically different kinds of causality (downward and upward), it involves immaterial souls that pop into being out of nowhere and at some point are suddenly extinguished, and on and on.
SL #642: You are so bloody inconsistent! You liked the explanation of the falling domino that invoked the primeness of 641! You preferred it! You kept on saying it was the real reason the domino didn’t fall, and that the other explanation was myopic and hopelessly useless.
SL #641: Touché! I admit that my stance has a definite ironic tinge to it. Sometimes the strict scientific viewpoint is hopelessly useless, even if it’s correct. That’s a dilemma. As I said, the human condition is, by its very nature, one of believing in a myth. And we’re permanently trapped in that condition, which makes life rather interesting.
SL #642: Taoism and Zen long ago sensed this paradoxical state of affairs and made it a point to try to dismantle or deconstruct or simply get rid of the “I”.
SL #641: That sounds like a noble goal, but it’s doomed to failure. Just as we need our eyes in order to see, we need our “I” ’s in order to be! We humans are beings whose fate it is to be able to perceive abstractions, and to be driven to do so. We are beings that spend their lives sorting the world into an ever-growing hierarchy of patterns, all represented by symbols in our brains. We constantly come up with new symbols by putting together previous symbols in new kinds of structures, nearly ad infinitum. Moreover, being macroscopic, we can’t see way down to the level where physical causality happens, so in compensation, we find all sorts of marvelously efficient shorthand ways of describing what goes on, because the world, though it’s pretty crazy and chaotic, is nonetheless filled with regularities