I Am a Strange Loop (59 page)

SL #641: I really do understand that this matter would nag at you; it should nag at any thinking person. My reply is this: In the vast universe of diverse physical events that you just evoked so vividly, there are certain rare spots of localized activity in which a special kind of abstractly swirling pattern can be found. Those special loci — at least the ones that we have run into so far — are human brains, and “I” ’s are restricted to those loci. Such loci are hard to find in the vast universe; they are few and far between. Wherever this special, rare kind of physical phenomenon arises, there’s an
I
and a
here.

SL #642: Your phrase “abstractly swirling pattern” makes me think of a physical vortex, like a hurricane or a whirlpool or a spiral galaxy — but I suppose those aren’t abstract enough for you.

SL #642: No, they really aren’t. Whirlpools and hurricanes are merely spinning vortices — fluid cousins to tops and gyroscopes. To make an “I” you need
meanings,
and to make meanings you need perception and categories — in fact, a repertoire of categories that keeps on building on itself, growing and growing and growing. Such things are nowhere to be found in the physical vortices you mentioned. That’s why a far better metaphor for an “I” is the structure of the self-referring formulas that Gödel found in the barren-seeming universe of
PM.
His formulas, like human “I” ’s, are extremely intricately and delicately structured, and are hardly a dime a dozen. “Ordinary” formulas of
PM,
like “0+0=0”, say, or a formula that states that every integer is the sum of at most four squares, are the analogues to inert, “I”-less physical objects, like grains of sand or bowling balls. Those simple kinds of formulas don’t have wraparound high-level meanings in the way that Gödel’s special strings do. It takes a great deal of number-theoretical machinery to build up from ordinary assertions about numbers to the complexity of Gödelian strange loops, and likewise it takes a great deal of evolution to build up from very simple feedback loops to the complexity of strange loops in brains.

SL #642: Suppose I granted you that there are lots of abstract “strange loops” floating around the universe, which somehow coalesced over the course of billions of years of evolution — strange loops residing in crania, a bit like audio feedback loops residing in auditoriums. They can be as complex as you like; the complexity of their physical activity doesn’t matter one whit to me. The knotty issue that simply will not go away is: What would make one of those strange loops
me
? Which one? You can’t answer that.

SL #641: I can, although you won’t like my answer. What makes one of them
you
is that it is resident in a particular brain that went through all the experiences that made you you.

SL #642: That’s just a tautology!

SL #641: Not really. It’s a subtle idea whose crux is that what you call “I” is an
outcome,
not a starting point. You coalesced in an unplanned fashion, coming only slowly into existence, not in a flash. At the beginning, when the brain that would later house your soul was taking form, there was no you. But that brain slowly grew, and its experiences slowly accumulated. Somewhere along the way, as more and more things happened to it, were registered by it, and became internalized in it, it started imitating the cultural and linguistic conventions in which it was immersed, and thus it tentatively said “I” about itself (even though the referent of that word was still very blurry). That’s roughly when it noticed it was somewhere — and not surprisingly, it was where a certain brain was! At that point, though, it didn’t know anything about its brain. What it knew instead was its brain’s
container,
which was a certain body. But even though it didn’t know anything about its brain, that nascent “I” faithfully followed its brain around just as a shadow always tags along after a moving object.

SL #642: You’re not dealing with my question, which is about how to pick
me
out in a world of indistinguishable physical structures.

SL #641: All right, let me turn straight to that. To you, all the brains housing strange loops seem no different from thousands of sewing machines scattered hither and yon, all clicking away. You would ask, “Which sewing machine is
me
?” Well, of course, none of them is you — and that’s because none of them
perceives
anything. You see brains that house strange loops as being just as inert and identity-lacking as sewing machines, pinwheels, or merry-go-rounds. But the funny thing is that the beings whose brains house those strange loops don’t agree with you that they have no identity. One of them insists, “I’m the one right
here,
looking at this purple flower, not the one over
there,
drinking a milkshake!” Another one insists, “I’m the one drinking this chocolate shake, not the one looking at that flower!” Each one of them is convinced of being somewhere and of seeing things and hearing things and having experiences. What makes you reject their claims?

SL #642: I don’t reject their claims. Those claims are perfectly valid — it’s just that their validity has nothing to do with brains housing strange loops. You’re focusing on the wrong thing. Any claims of “being here” and “being conscious” are valid because there is something extra, something over and above strange loops, that makes a brain be the locus of a soul. I can’t tell you just what it is, but I know this is true, because
I
am not just physical stuff happening somewhere in the universe. I
experience
things, such as that purple flower in the garden and that loud motorcycle a couple of blocks away. And my experience is the primary data on which everything else that I say is based, so you cannot deny my claim.

SL #641: How is that any different from what I’ve described? A sufficiently complex brain not only can perceive and categorize but it can verbalize what it has categorized. Like you, it can talk about flowers and gardens and motorcycle roars, and it can talk about itself, saying where it is and where it is not, it can describe its present and past experiences and its goals and beliefs and confusions… What more could you want? Why is that not what you call “experience”?

SL #642: Words, words, words! The point is that experience involves
more
than mere words — it involves
feelings.
Any experiencer worthy of the term has to see that brilliant purple color of the flower and
feel
it as such, not merely drone the sound “purple” like an automated voice in a telephone menu tree. Seeing a vivid purple takes place below the level of words or ideas or symbols — it is more primordial. It’s an experience directly felt by an experiencer. That’s the difference between true consciousness and mere “artificial signaling” as in a mechanical-sounding telephone menu tree.

SL #641: Would you say nonverbal animals enjoy such “primordial” experiences? Do cows savor the deep purple of a flower just as intensely as you do? And do mosquitoes? If you say “yes”, doesn’t that come dangerously close to suggesting that cows and mosquitoes have just as much consciousness as you do?

SL #642: Mosquito brains are far less complex than mine, so they can’t have the same kinds of rich experiences as I do.

SL #641: Now wait a minute. You can’t have it both ways. A moment ago, you were insisting that brain complexity doesn’t make any difference — that if a brain lacks that special
je ne sais quoi
that separates things that feel from things that don’t feel, then it’s not a locus of consciousness. But now you’re saying that the complexity of the brain in question
does
make a difference.

SL #642: Well, I guess it has to, to some extent. A mosquito doesn’t have the equipment to appreciate a purple flower in the way I do. But maybe a cow does, or at least it comes closer. But complexity alone does not account for the presence of feeling and experience in brains.

SL #641: Let’s consider a bit more deeply this notion of experiencing and feeling the world outside. If you were to stare at a big broad sheet of pure, uniform purple, your favorite shade ever, entirely filling your visual field, would you experience the same rush as when you see that color in the petals of a flower blooming in a garden?

SL #642: I doubt it. Part of what makes my experience of a purple flower so intense is all the subtle shades I see on each petal, the delicate way each petal is curved, and the way the petals all swirl together around a glowing center made of dozens of tiny dots…

SL #641: Not to mention the way the flower is poised on a branch, and the branch is part of a bush, and the bush is just one of many in a brightly colored garden…

SL #642: Are you intimating that I don’t enjoy the purple for its own sake, but only because of the way it’s embedded in a vast scene? This goes too far. The surroundings may
enhance
my experience, but I love that rich velvety purple purely for itself, independently of anything else.

SL #641: Why then do you describe it with the word “velvety”? Do flies or dogs experience purple flowers as “velvety”? Isn’t that word a reference to velvet? Doesn’t it mean that your visual experience calls up deeply buried memories, perhaps tactile memories from childhood, of running your fingers along a purple cushion made of velvet? Or maybe you’re unconsciously reminded of a dark-colored wine you once drank whose label described it as “velvety”. How can you claim your experience of purple is “independent of anything else in the world”?

SL #642: All I’m trying to say is that there are basic, primordial experiences out of which larger experiences are built, and that even the primordial ones are radically, qualitatively different from what goes on in simple physical systems like ropes dangling in breezes and floats bobbing in toilets. A dangling rope doesn’t feel anything when a breeze impinges on it. There’s no feeling in there, there’s no
here
there. But when I see purple or taste chocolate, that’s a sensual experience I’m having, and it’s from millions of such sensual experiences that my mental life is built up. There’s a big mystery here, in this breach.

SL #641: It sounds attractive, but unfortunately I think you’ve got it all backwards. Those little sensual experiences are to the grand pattern of your mental life as the letters in a novel are to the novel’s plot and characters — irrelevant, arbitrary tokens, rather than carriers of meaning. There is no meaning to the letter “b”, and yet out of it and the other letters of the alphabet, put together in complex sequences, comes all the richness and humanity in a novel or a story.

SL #642: That’s the wrong level to talk about a story. Writers choose
words,
not letters, and words are of course imbued with meaning. Put together a lot of those tiny meanings and you get one big meaning-rich thing. Similarly, life is made out of many tiny sensual experiences, chained together to make one huge sensuo-emotional experience.

SL #641: Hold on a minute. No isolated word has depth and power. When embedded in a complex context, a word may have great power, but in isolation it does not. It’s an illusion to attribute power to the word itself, and it’s a greater illusion to attribute power to the letters constituting the word.

SL #642: I agree that letters have no power or meaning. But words, yes! They are the atoms of meaning out of which larger structures of meaning are built. You can’t get big meanings from atoms that are meaningless!

SL #641: Oh, really? I thought you just conceded that exactly this happens in the case of words and letters. But all right — let’s move on from that example. Would you say that music has meaning?

SL #642: Music is among the most meaningful things I know.

SL #641: And yet, are individual notes meaningful to you? For instance, do you feel attraction or repulsion, beauty or ugliness, when you hear middle C?

SL #642: I hope not! No more than when I see the isolated letter “C”.

SL #641: Is there
any
isolated note that on its own attracts or repels you?

SL #642: No. An isolated note doesn’t carry musical meaning. Anyone who claimed to be moved by a single note would be putting on airs.

SL #641: Yet when you hear a piece of music you like or hate, you certainly are attracted or repelled. Where does that feeling come from, given that no
note
in it has any intrinsic attraction or repulsion for you?

SL #642: It depends on how they are arranged in larger structures. A melody is attractive because of some kind of “logic” it possesses. Some other melody could be repulsive because it lacks logic, or because its logic is too simplistic or childish.

SL #641: That certainly sounds like a response to
pattern,
not like raw sensation. A piece of music can have great emotional meaning despite being made of tiny atoms of sound that have no emotional meaning. What matters, therefore, is the pattern of organization, not the nature of the constituents. This brings us back to your puzzlement about the difference between experiencers such as you and me, and non-experiencers such as dangling ropes and plastic floats. To you, this crucial difference must originate in some special ingredient, some tangible
thing
or
substance,
which experiencers have in their makeup, and which non-experiencers lack. Is that right?

SL #642: Something like that has to be the case.

SL #641: Then let’s call this special ingredient that allows experiencers to come into existence “feelium”. Unfortunately, no one has ever found a single atom or molecule of feelium, and I suspect that even if we did find a mysterious substance present in all higher animals but not in lower ones, let alone in mere machines, you would start wondering how it could be that any mere
substance,
inanimate and insensate on its own, could give rise to sensation.

SL #642: Feelium, if it existed, would probably be more like electricity than like atoms or molecules. Or maybe it would be like fire or radioactivity — in any case, something that seems living, something that by its very nature dances in crazy ways — not just inert
stuff.