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By Root 1697 0

of the two bodies will house my inner light?” Thinkers of this kind cling fiercely to the instinctive notion of a unique Cartesian Ego that constitutes the identity, the “I”-ness, the inner light, the interiority of any sentient being. To such thinkers, it will be totally unacceptable to suggest that their precious notion of me-ness is more like a shimmering, elusive rainbow than it is like a solid, mass-possessing rock, and that there is thus no right answer to the perplexing “Which one will I be?” riddle. They will insist that there has to be a genuine marble of “I”-ness in one of the two bodies and not in the other one, as opposed to an elusive rainbow-like entity that first recedes and then disintegrates entirely as one draws ever closer. But to believe in such an indivisible, indissoluble “I” is to believe in nonphysical dualism.

Thrust: The Hard Problem

And this is our central quandary. Either we believe in a nonmaterial soul that lives outside the laws of physics, which amounts to a nonscientific belief in magic, or we reject that idea, in which case the eternally beckoning question “What could ever make a mere physical pattern be me?” — the question that philosopher David Chalmers has seductively and successfully nicknamed “The Hard Problem” — seems just as far from having an answer today (or, for that matter, at any time in the future) as it was many centuries ago.

After all, a phrase like “physical system” or “physical substrate” brings to mind for most people, including a substantial proportion of the world’s philosophers and neurologists, an intricate structure consisting of vast numbers of interlocked wheels, gears, rods, tubes, balls, pendula, and so forth, even if they are tiny, invisible, perfectly silent, and possibly even probabilistic. Such an array of interacting inanimate stuff seems to most people as unconscious and devoid of inner light as a flush toilet, an automobile transmission, a fancy Swiss watch (mechanical or electronic), a cog railway, an ocean liner, or an oil refinery. Such a system is not just probably unconscious, it is necessarily so, as they see it. This is the kind of single-level intuition so skillfully exploited by John Searle in his attempts to convince people that computers could never be conscious, no matter what abstract patterns might reside in them, and could never mean anything at all by whatever long chains of lexical items they might string together.

Riposte: A Soft Poem

And yet to you, my faithful reader who has plowed all through this book up to its nearly final page, I would hope that things seem otherwise. Together, you and I have gone through instance after instance of increasingly sophisticated structures having loops, from the ever-darting-off Exploratorium red dot to fine-grained television cameras taking in the screens they fill, then to formulas asserting that they have no PM proof, and winding up with the strange loop that comes about inside the ever-growing repertoire of symbols in each human being’s brain. (Élan mental we have no truck with, for it leads to endless traps.)

If there were ever, in our physics-governed world, a kind of magic, it is surely in these self-reflecting, self-defining patterns. Such strange loops, inspired by Gödel’s Trojan horse that sneaked self-consciousness inside the very fortress that was built to keep it out, and recalling Roger Sperry’s tower of forces within forces within forces (found inside each teet’ring bulb of dread and dream), give the only explanation I can fancy for how animate, desire-driven beings can arise from just plain matter, and for how, among the swarm of loops that populate our planet, there is one, and only one, that you call “I” (and I call “you”).

A Billion Trillion Ants in One’s Leg

You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception — the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world. When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics