I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [56]
The Radically Different Conceptual Repertoire of Human Beings
A spectacular evolutionary gulf opened up at some point as human beings were gradually separating from other primates: their category systems became arbitrarily extensible. Into our mental lives there entered a dramatic quality of open-endedness, an essentially unlimited extensibility, as compared with a very palpable limitedness in other species.
Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right. In other words, concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees. This reminds me — and I do not think it is a pure coincidence — of the huge difference, in video feedback, between an infinite corridor and a truncated one.
For instance, the phenomenon of having offspring gave rise to concepts such as “mother”, “father”, and “child”. These concepts gave rise to the nested concept of “parent” — nested because forming it depends upon having three prior concepts: “mother”, “father”, and the abstract idea of “either/or”. (Do dogs have the concept “either/or”? Do mosquitoes?) Once the concept of “parent” existed, that opened the door to the concepts of “grandmother” (“mother of a parent”) and “grandchild” (“child of a child”), and then of “great-grandmother” and “great-grandchild”. All of these concepts came to us courtesy of nesting. With the addition of “sister” and “brother”, then further notions having greater levels of nesting, such as “uncle”, “aunt”, and “cousin”, could come into being. And then a yet more nested notion such as “family” could arise. (“Family” is more nested because it takes for granted and builds on all these prior concepts.)
In the collective human ideosphere, the buildup of concepts through such acts of composition started to snowball, and it turns out to know no limits. Our species would soon find itself leapfrogging upwards to concepts such as “love affair”, “love triangle”, “fidelity”, “temptation”, “revenge”, “despair”, “insanity”, “nervous breakdown”, “hallucination”, “illusion”, “reality”, “fantasy”, “abstraction”, “dream”, and of course, at the grand pinnacle of it all, “soap opera” (in which are also nested the concepts of “commercial break”, “ring around the collar”, and “Brand X”).
Consider the mundane-seeming concept of “grocery store checkout stand”, which I would be willing to bet is a member in good standing of your personal conceptual repertoire. It already sounds like a nested entity, being compounded from four words; thus it tells us straightforwardly that it symbolizes a stand for checking out in a store that deals in groceries. But looking at its visible lexical structure barely scratches the surface. In truth, this concept involves dozens and dozens of other concepts, among which are the following: “grocery cart”, “line”, “customers”, “to wait”, “candy rack”, “candy bar”, “tabloid newspaper”, “movie stars”, “trashy headlines”, “sordid scandals”, “weekly TV schedule”, “soap opera”, “teenager”, “apron”, “nametag”, “cashier”, “mindless greeting”, “cash register”, “keyboard”, “prices”, “numbers”, “addition”, “scanner”, “bar code”, “beep”, “laser”, “moving belt”, “frozen food”, “tin can”, “vegetable bag”, “weight”, “scale”, “discount coupon”, “rubber separator bar”, “to slide”, “bagger”, “plastic bag”, “paper bag”, “plastic money”, “paper money”, “to load”, “to pay”, “credit card”, “debit card”, “to swipe”, “receipt”, “ballpoint pen”, “to sign”, and on and on. The list starts to seem endless, and yet we are merely talking about the internal richness of one extremely ordinary human concept.
Not all of these component concepts need be activated when we think about a grocery store checkout stand, to be sure — there is a central nucleus of concepts