I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [44]
This pangram tallies five a’s, one b, one c, two d’s, twenty-eight e’s, eight f’s, six g’s, eight h’s, thirteen i’s, one j, one k, three l’s, two m’s, eighteen n’s, fifteen o’s, two p’s, one q, seven r’s, twenty-five s’s, twenty-two t’s, four u’s, four v’s, nine w’s, two x’s, four y’s, and one z.
Although I received from readers a good deal of positive feedback (if you’ll excuse the term), I also received some extremely negative feedback concerning what certain readers considered sheer frivolity in an otherwise respectable journal. One of the most vehement objectors was a professor of education at the University of Delaware, who quoted the famous behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner on the topic of self-referring sentences:
Perhaps there is no harm in playing with sentences in this way or in analyzing the kinds of transformations which do or do not make sentences acceptable to the ordinary reader, but it is still a waste of time, particularly when the sentences thus generated could not have been emitted as verbal behavior. A classical example is a paradox, such as “This sentence is false”, which appears to be true if false and false if true. The important thing to consider is that no one could ever have emitted the sentence as verbal behavior. A sentence must be in existence before a speaker can say, “This sentence is false”, and the response itself will not serve, since it did not exist until it was emitted.
This kind of knee-jerk reaction against even the possibility that someone might meaningfully utter a self-referential sentence was new to me, and caught me off guard. I reflected long and hard on the education professor’s lament, and for the next issue of the magazine I wrote a lengthy reply to it, citing case after case of flagrant and often useful, even indispensable, self-reference in ordinary human communication as well as in humor, art, literature, psychotherapy, mathematics, computer science, and so forth. I have no idea how he or other objectors to self-reference took it. What remained with me, however, was the realization that some highly educated and otherwise sensible people are irrationally allergic to the idea of self-reference, or of structures or systems that fold back upon themselves.
I suspect that such people’s allergy stems, in the final analysis, from a deep-seated fear of paradox or of the universe exploding (metaphorically), something like the panic that the television sales clerk evinced when I threatened to point the video camera at the TV screen. The contrast between my lifelong savoring of such loops and the allergic recoiling from them on the part of such people as Bertrand Russell, B. F. Skinner, this education professor, and the TV salesperson taught me a lifelong lesson in the “theory of types” — namely, that there are indeed “two types” of people in this world.
CHAPTER 5
On Video Feedback
Two Video Voyages, Three Decades Apart
THE loop of video feedback is rich, as I found out in my first explorations with our family’s new video camera in the mid-1970s. A few months later, my appreciation of the phenomenon deepened considerably when I decided to explore it in detail as a visual study for my book Gödel, Escher, Bach. I made an appointment at the Stanford University television studios, and upon arriving I found that the very friendly fellow there had already set up a TV and a camera on a tripod for me to play around with. It was a piece of cake to point the camera at the screen, zoom in and out, tilt the camera, change angles, regulate brightness and contrast, and so on. He told me I was free to use the system as long as I wanted, and so I spent several hours that afternoon navigating around in the ocean of “taboo” possibilities opened up by this video loop. Like any curious tourist, I snapped dozens of photos (just black-and-white stills) during my exotic trip, and later I selected twelve of my favorites to use in one of GEB’s dialogues.
Since that first adventure in video feedback, three decades have passed and technology has advanced