I Am a Strange Loop (4 page)

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 a human self and the mystery of consciousness to Gödel’s stunning discovery of a majestic wraparound self-referential structure (a “strange loop”, as I later came to call it) in the very midst of a formidable bastion from which self-reference had been strictly banished by its audacious architects. I found the parallel between Gödel’s miraculous manufacture of self-reference out of a substrate of meaningless symbols and the miraculous appearance of selves and souls in substrates consisting of inanimate matter so compelling that I was convinced that here lay the secret of our sense of “I”, and thus my book
Gödel, Escher, Bach
came about (and acquired a catchier title).

That book, which appeared in 1979, couldn’t have enjoyed a greater success, and indeed yours truly owes much of the pathway of his life since then to its success. And yet, despite the book’s popularity, it always troubled me that the fundamental message of
GEB
(as I always call it, and as it is generally called) seemed to go largely unnoticed. People liked the book for all sorts of reasons, but seldom if ever for its most central
raison d’être
! Years went by, and I came out with other books that alluded to and added to that core message, but still there didn’t seem to be much understanding out there of what I had really been trying to say in
GEB.

In 1999,
GEB
celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and the folks at Basic Books suggested that I write a preface for a special new edition. I liked the idea, so I took them up on it. In my preface, I told all sorts of tales about the book and its vicissitudes, and among other things I described my frustration with its reception, ending with the following plaint: “It sometimes feels as if I had shouted a deeply cherished message out into an empty chasm and nobody heard me.”

Well, one day in the spring of 2003, I received a very kind email message from two young philosophers named Ken Williford and Uriah Kriegel, inviting me to contribute a chapter to an anthology they were putting together on what they called “the self-referentialist theory (or theories)” of consciousness. They urged me to participate, and they even quoted back to me that very lamentation of mine from my preface, and they suggested that this opportunity would afford me a real chance to change things. I was genuinely gratified by their sincere interest in my core message and moved by their personal warmth, and I saw that indeed, contributing to their volume would be a grand occasion for me to try once again to articulate my ideas about self and consciousness for exactly the right audience of specialists — philosophers of mind. And so it wasn’t too hard for me to decide to accept their invitation.

From the Majestic Dolomites to Gentle Bloomington

I started writing my chapter in a quiet and simple hotel room in the beautiful Alpine village of Anterselva di Mezzo, located in the Italian Dolomites, only a few stone’s throws from the Austrian border. Inspired by the loveliness of the setting, I quickly dashed off ten or fifteen pages, thinking I might already have reached the halfway point. Then I returned home to Bloomington, Indiana, where I kept on plugging away.

It took me a good deal longer than I had expected to finish it (some of my readers will recognize this as a quintessential example of Hofstadter’s Law, which states, “It always takes longer than you think it will take, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law”), and worse, the chapter wound up being four times longer than the specified limit — a disaster! But when they finally received it, Ken and Uriah were very pleased with what I had written and were most tolerant of my indiscretions; indeed, so keen were they to have a contribution from me in their book that they said they could accept an extra-long chapter, and Ken in particular helped me cut it down to half its length, which was a real labor of love on his part.

In the meantime, I was starting to realize that what I had on my hands could be more than a book chapter — it could become a book unto itself. And so what had begun as a single project fissioned into two. I gave my chapter the title “What is it like to be a strange loop?”, alluding to a famous article on the mystery of consciousness called “What is it like to be a bat?” by the philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel, while the book-to-be was given the shorter, sweeter title “I Am a Strange Loop”.

In Ken Williford and Uriah Kriegel’s anthology,
Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness,
which appeared in the spring of 2006, my essay was placed at the very end, in a two-chapter section entitled “Beyond Philosophy” (why it qualified as lying “beyond philosophy” is beyond me, but I rather like the idea nonetheless). I don’t know if, in that distinguished but rather specialized setting, this set of ideas will have much impact on anyone, but I certainly hope that in this book, its more fully worked-out and more visible incarnation, it will be able to reach all sorts of people, both inside and outside of philosophy, both young and old, both specialists and novices, and will give them new imagery about selves and souls (not to mention loops!). In any case, I owe a great deal to Ken and Uriah for having provided the initial spark that gave rise to this book, as well as for giving me much encouragement along the way.

And so, after just about forty-five years (good grief!), I’ve come full circle, writing once again about souls, selves, and consciousness, banging up against the same mysteriousness and eerieness that I first experienced when I was a teen-ager horrified and yet riveted by the awful and awesome physicality of that which makes us be what we are.

An Author and His Audience

Despite its title, this book is not about me, but about the concept of “I”. It’s thus about you, reader, every bit as much as it is about me. I could just as well have called it “You Are a Strange Loop”. But the truth of the matter is that, in order to suggest the book’s topic and goal more clearly, I should probably have called it “‘I’ Is a Strange Loop” — but can you imagine a clunkier title? Might as well call it “I Am a Lead Balloon”.

In any case, this book is about the venerable topic of what an “I” is. And what is its audience? Well, as always, I write in order to reach a general educated public. I almost never write for specialists, and in a way that’s because I’m not really a specialist myself. Oh, I take it back; that’s unfair. After all, at this point in my life, I have spent nearly thirty years working with my graduate students on computational models of analogy-making and creativity, observing and cataloguing cognitive errors of all sorts, collecting examples of categorization and analogy, studying the centrality of analogies in physics and math, musing on the mechanisms of humor, pondering how concepts are created and memories are retrieved, exploring all sorts of aspects of words, idioms, languages, and translation, and so on — and over these three decades I have taught seminars on many aspects of thinking and how we perceive the world.

So yes, in the end, I am a kind of specialist — I specialize in thinking about thinking. Indeed, as I stated earlier, this topic has fueled my fire ever since I was a teen-ager. And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experiences.

The Horsies-and-Doggies Religion

Over the years, I have fallen into a style of self-expression that I call the “horsies-and-doggies” style, a phrase inspired by a charming episode in the famous cartoon “Peanuts”, which I’ve reproduced on the following page.

I often feel just the way that Charlie Brown feels in that last frame — like someone whose ideas are anything but “in the clouds”, someone who is so down-to-earth as to be embarrassed by it. I realize that some of my readers have gotten an impression of me as someone with a mind that enormously savors and indefatigably pursues the highest of abstractions, but that is a very mistaken image. I’m just the opposite, and I hope that reading this book will make that evident.

I don’t have the foggiest idea why I wrongly remembered the poignant phrase that Charlie Brown utters here, but in any case the slight variant “horsies and doggies” long ago became a fixture in my own speech, and so, for better or for worse, that’s the standard phrase I always use to describe my teaching style, my speaking style, and my writing style.

In part because of the success of
Gödel, Escher, Bach,
I have had the good fortune of being given a great deal of freedom by the two universities on whose faculties I have served — Indiana University (for roughly twenty-five years) and the University of Michigan (for four years, in the 1980’s). Their wonderful generosity has given me the luxury of being able to explore my variegated interests without being under the infamous publish-or-perish pressures, or perhaps even worse, the relentless pressures of grant-chasing.

I have not followed the standard academic route, which involves publishing paper after paper in professional journals. To be sure, I have published some “real” papers, but mostly I have concentrated on expressing myself through books, and these books have always been written with an eye to maximal clarity.

Clarity, simplicity, and concreteness have coalesced into a kind of religion for me — a set of never-forgotten guiding principles. Fortunately, a large number of thoughtful people appreciate analogies, metaphors, and examples, as well as a relative lack of jargon, and last but not least, accounts from a first-person stance. In any case, it is for people who appreciate that way of writing that this book, like all my others, has been written. I believe that this group includes not only outsiders and amateurs, but also many professional philosophers of mind.

If I tell many first-person stories in this book, it is not because I am obsessed with my own life or delude myself about its importance, but simply because it is the life I know best, and it provides all sorts of examples that I suspect are typical of most people’s lives. I believe most people understand abstract ideas most clearly if they hear them through stories, and so I try to convey difficult and abstract ideas through the medium of my own life. I wish that more thinkers wrote in a first-person fashion.