I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [67]
The abstract structure in Drawing Hands would constitute a perfect example of a genuine strange loop, were it not for that one little defect — what we think we see is not genuine; it’s fake! To be sure, it’s so impeccably drawn that we seem to be perceiving a full-fledged, true-blue, card-carrying paradox — but this conviction arises in us only thanks to our having suspended our disbelief and mentally slipped into Escher’s seductive world. We fall, at least momentarily, for an illusion.
Seeking Strange Loops in Feedback
Is there, then, any genuine strange loop — a paradoxical structure that nonetheless undeniably belongs to the world we live in — or are so-called strange loops always just illusions that merely graze paradox, always just fantasies that merely flirt with paradox, always just bewitching bubbles that inevitably pop when approached too closely?
Well, what about our old friend video feedback as a candidate for strange loopiness? Unfortunately, although this modern phenomenon is very loopy and flirts with infinity, it has nothing in the least paradoxical to it — no more than does its simpler and older cousin, audio feedback. To be sure, if one points the TV camera straight at the screen (or brings the microphone right up to the loudspeaker) one gets that strange feeling of playing with fire, not only by violating a natural-seeming hierarchy but also by seeming to create a true infinite regress — but when one thinks about it, one realizes that there was no ironclad hierarchy to begin with, and the suggested infinity is never reached; then the bubble just pops. So although feedback loops of this sort are indisputably loops, and although they feel a bit strange, they are not members of the category “strange loop”.
Seeking Strange Loops in the Russellian Gloom
Fortunately, there do exist strange loops that are not illusions. I say “fortunately” because the thesis of this book is that we ourselves — not our bodies, but our selves — are strange loops, and so if all strange loops were illusions, then we would all be illusions, and that would be a great shame. So it’s fortunate that some strange loops exist in the real world.
On the other hand, it is not a piece of cake to exhibit one for all to see. Strange loops are shy creatures, and they tend to avoid the light of day. The quintessential example of this phenomenon, in fact, was only discovered in 1930 by Kurt Gödel, and he found it lurking in, of all places, the gloomy, austere, supposedly paradox-proof castle of Bertrand Russell’s theory of types.
What was a 24-year-old Austrian logician doing, snooping about in this harsh and forbidding British citadel? He was fascinated by paradoxes, and although he knew they had supposedly been driven out by Russell and Whitehead, he nonetheless intuited that there was something in the extremely rich and flexible nature of numbers that had a propensity to let paradox bloom even in the most arid-seeming of deserts or the most sterilized of granite palaces. Gödel’s suspicions had been aroused by a recent plethora of paradoxes dealing with numbers in curious new ways, and he felt convinced that there was something profound about these tricky games, even though some people claimed to have ways of defusing them.
Mr Berry of the Bodleian
One of these quirky paradoxes had been concocted by an Oxford librarian named G. G. Berry in 1904, two years before Gödel was born. Berry was intrigued by the subtle possibilities for describing numbers in words. He noticed that if you look hard enough, you can find a quite concise description of just about any integer you name. For instance, the integer 12 takes only one syllable to name, the integer 153 is pinpointable in but four syllables (“twelve squared plus nine” or “nine seventeens”), the integer 1,000,011 is nameable in just six syllables (“one million eleven”), and so forth. In how few syllables can you describe the number 1737?
In general, one would think that the larger the number, the longer any description of it would have to be, but it all depends