I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [5]
For years, our parents explored every avenue imaginable, including the possibility of some kind of brain surgery, and as their quest for a cure or at least some kind of explanation grew ever more desperate, my own anguished thinking about Molly’s plight and the frightening idea of people opening up my tiny sister’s head and peering in at the mysterious stuff that filled it (an avenue never explored, in the end) gave me the impetus to read a couple of lay-level books about the human brain. Doing so had a huge impact on my life, since it forced me to consider, for the first time, the physical basis of consciousness and of being — or of having — an “I”, which I found disorienting, dizzying, and profoundly eerie.
Right around that time, toward the end of my high-school years, I encountered the mysterious metamathematical revelations of the great Austrian logician Kurt Gödel and I also learned how to program, using Stanford University’s only computer, a Burroughs 220, which was located in the deliciously obscure basement of decrepit old Encina Hall. I rapidly became addicted to this “Giant Electronic Brain”, whose orange lights flickered in strange magical patterns revealing its “thoughts”, and which, at my behest, discovered beautiful abstract mathematical structures and composed whimsical nonsensical passages in various foreign languages that I was studying. I simultaneously grew obsessed with symbolic logic, whose arcane symbols danced in strange magical patterns reflecting truths, falsities, hypotheticals, possibilities, and counterfactualities, and which, I was sure, afforded profound glimpses into the hidden wellsprings of human thought. As a result of these relentlessly churning thoughts about symbols and meanings, patterns and ideas, machines and mentality, neural impulses and mortal souls, all hell broke loose in my adolescent mind/brain.
The Mirage
One day when I was around sixteen or seventeen, musing intensely on these swirling clouds of ideas that gripped me emotionally no less than intellectually, it dawned on me — and it has ever since seemed to me — that what we call “consciousness” was a kind of mirage. It had to be a very peculiar kind of mirage, to be sure, since it was a mirage that perceived itself, and of course it didn’t believe that it was perceiving a mirage, but no matter — it still was a mirage. It was almost as if this slippery phenomenon called “consciousness” lifted itself up by its own bootstraps, almost as if it made itself out of nothing, and then disintegrated back into nothing whenever one looked at it more closely.
So caught up was I in trying to understand what being alive, being human, and being conscious are all about that I felt driven to try to capture my elusive thoughts on paper lest they flit away forever, and so I sat down and wrote a dialogue between two hypothetical contemporary philosophers whom I flippantly named “Plato” and “Socrates” (I knew almost nothing about the real Plato and Socrates). This may have been the first serious piece of writing I ever did; in any case, I was proud of it, and never threw it away. Although I now see my dialogue between these two pseudo-Greek philosophers as pretty immature and awkward, not to mention extremely sketchy, I decided nonetheless to include it herein as my Prologue, because it hints at many of the ideas to come, and I think it sets a pleasing and provocative tone for the rest of the book.
A Shout into a Chasm
When, some ten years or so later, I started working on my first book, whose title I imagined would be “Gödel’s Theorem and the Human Brain”, my overarching goal was to relate the concept of