I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [34]
Of course this image is far-fetched, but remember that the careenium is merely intended as a useful metaphor for understanding our brains, and the fact is that our brains, too, are rather far-fetched, in the sense that they too contain tiny events (neuron firings) and larger events (patterns of neuron firings), and the latter presumably somehow have representational qualities, allowing us to register and also to remember things that happen outside of our crania. Such internalization of the outer world in symbolic patterns in a brain is a pretty far-fetched idea, when you think about it, and yet we know it somehow came to exist, thanks to the pressures of evolution. If you wish, then, feel free to imagine that careenia, too, evolved. You can think of them as emerging as the end result of billions of more primitive systems fighting for survival in the world. But the evolutionary origins of our careenium need not concern us here. The key idea is that whereas no simm on its own encodes anything or plays a symbolic role, the simmballs, on their far more macroscopic level, do encode and are symbolic.
Taking the Reductionistic View of the Careenium
The first inclination of a modern physicist who heard this story might be reductionistic, in the sense of pooh-poohing the large simmballs as mere epiphenomena, meaning that although they are undeniably there, they are not essential to an understanding of the system, since they are composed of simms. Everything that happens in the careenium is explainable in terms of simms alone. And there’s no doubt that this is true. A volcano, too, is undeniably there, but who needs to talk about mountains and subterranean pressures and eruptions and lava and such things? We can dispense with such epiphenomenal concepts altogether by shifting to the deeper level of atoms or elementary particles. The bottom line, at least for our physicist, is that epiphenomena are just convenient shorthands that summarize a large number of deeper, lower-level phenomena; they are never essential to any explanation. Reductionism ho!
The only problem is the enormous escalation in complexity when we drop all macroscopic terms and ways of looking at things. If we refuse to use any language that involves epiphenomena, then we are condemned to seeing only untold myriads of particles, and that is certainly not a very welcoming thought. Moreover, when one perceives only myriads of particles, there are no natural sharp borders in the world. One cannot draw a line around the volcano and declare, “Only particles in this zone are involved”, because particles won’t respect any such macroscopic line — no more than ants respect the property lines carefully surveyed and precisely drawn by human beings. No fixed portion of the universe can be tightly fenced off from interacting with the rest — not even approximately. To a reductionist, the idea of carving the universe up into zones with inviolable macroscopic spatiotemporal boundary lines makes no sense.
Here is a striking example of the senselessness of local spatiotemporal boundaries. In November of 1993, I read several newspaper articles about a comet that was “slowly” making its way towards Jupiter. It was still some eight months from t-zero but astrophysicists had already predicted to the minute, if not to the second, when it would strike Jupiter, and where. This fact about some invisible comet that was billions of miles away from earth had already had enormous impacts on the surface of our planet, where teams of scientists were already calculating its Jovian arrival time, where newspapers and magazines were already printing front-page stories about it, and where millions of