I Am a Strange Loop (76 page)
Page 248
concepts are active symbols in a brain…
See Chapter 11 of [Hofstadter 1979].
Page 252
a marvelous pen-and-ink “parquet deformation” drawn in 1964…
For a dozen-plus examples of this subtle Escher-inspired art form, see Chapter 10 of [Hofstadter 1985].
Page 260
It is not easy to find a strong, vivid metaphor to put up against the caged-bird metaphor…
The idea of a soul distributed over many brains brought to my mind an image from solid-state physics, the field in which I did my doctoral work. A solid is a crystal, meaning a periodic lattice of atoms in space, like the trees in an orchard but in three dimensions instead of two. In some solids (those that do not conduct electricity), the electrons “hovering” around each atomic nucleus are so tightly bound that they never stray far from that nucleus. They are like butterflies that hover around just one tree in the orchard, never daring to venture as far as the next tree. In metals, by contrast, which are excellent conductors, the electrons are not timid stay-at-homes stuck to one tree, but boldly float around the entire lattice. This is why metals conduct so well.
Actually, the proper image of an electron in a metal is not that of a butterfly fickly fluttering from one tree to another, never caring where it winds up, but of an intensity pattern distributed over the entire crystal at once — in some places more intense, in other places less so, and changing over time. One electron might better be likened to an entire swarm of orange butterflies, another electron to a swarm of red butterflies, another to a swarm of blue butterflies, and so on, with each swarm spread about the whole orchard, intermingling with all the others. Electrons in metals, in short, are anything but tightly bound dots; they are floating patterns without any home at all.
But let’s not lose track of the purpose of all this imagery, which is to suggest helpful ways of imagining what a human soul’s essence is. If we map each tree (or nucleus) in the crystal lattice onto a particular human brain, then in the tight-binding model (which corresponds to the caged-bird metaphor), each brain would possess a unique soul, represented by the cloud of timid butterflies that hover around it and it alone. By contrast, if we think of a metal, then the cloud is spread out across the whole lattice — which is to say, shared equally among all the trees (or nuclei). No tree is privileged. In this image, then (which is close to Daniel Kolak’s view in
I Am You
), each human soul floats among all human brains, and its identity is determined not by its location but by the undulating global pattern it forms.
These are extremes, but nothing keeps us from imagining a halfway situation, with many localized swarms of butterflies, each swarm floating near a single tree but not limited to it. Thus a red swarm might be centered on tree A but blur out to the nearest dozen trees, and a blue swarm might be blurrily centered on tree B, a yellow swarm around tree C, etc. Each tree would be the center of just one swarm, and each swarm would have just one principal tree, but the swarms would interpenetrate so intimately that it would be hard to tell which swarm “belonged” to which tree, or vice versa.
This peculiar and surreal tale, launched in solid-state physics but winding up with imagery of interpenetrating swarms of colored butterflies fluttering in an orchard, gives as clear a picture as I can paint of how a human soul is spread among brains.
Page 264
Many of these ideas were explored …in his philosophical fantasy “Where Am I?”…
This classic piece can be found in [Dennett 1978] and in [Hofstadter and Dennett].
Page 267
internal conflict between several “rival selves”…
Chapter 13 of [Dennett 1991] gives a careful discussion of multiple personality disorder. See also [Thigpen and Cleckley], from which a famous movie was made. See also [Minsky 1986] and Chapter 33 of [Hofstadter 1985] for views of a normal self as containing many competing subselves.
Page 267
in such cases Newtonian physics goes awry…
See [Hoffmann] for a discussion of the subtle relationship between relativistic and Newtonian physics.
Page 271
every entity…is conscious…
See [Rucker] for a positive view of panpsychism.
Page 276
because now they want the symbols themselves to be perceived…
See the careful debunking in [Dennett 1991] of what its author terms the “Cartesian Theater”.
Page 277
to trigger just one familiar pre-existing symbol…
This sentence is especially applicable to the nightmare of preparing an index. Only if one has slaved away for weeks on a careful index can one have an understanding of how grueling (and absurd) the task is.
Page 278
when its crust is discarded and its core is distilled…
See [Sander], [Kahneman and Miller], [Kanerva], [Schank], [Boden], and [Gentner
et al.
] for discussions of the analogy-based mechanisms of memory retrieval, which underlie all human cognition.
Page 279
to simplify while not letting essence slip away…
See [Hofstadter 2001], [Sander], and [Hofstadter and FARG]. To figure out how to give a computer the rudiments of this ability has been the Holy Grail of my research group for three decades now.
Page 279
There is not some special “consciousness locus”…
See [Dennett 1991].
Page 282
but we are getting ever closer…
See [Monod], [Cordeschi], and [Dupuy 2000] for clear discussions of the emergence of goal-orientedness (
i.e.,
teleology) from feedback.
Page 283
a physical vortex, like a hurricane or a whirlpool…
See Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter 1985] for a discussion of the abstract essence of hurricanes.
Page 283
every integer is the sum of at most four squares…
See [Hardy and Wright] and [Niven and Zuckerman] for this classic theorem, the simplest case of Waring’s theorem.
Page 285
to see that brilliant purple color of the flower…
See [Chalmers] for a spirited defense of the notion of qualia, and see [Dennett 1991], [Dennett 1998], [Dennett 2005], and [Hofstadter and Dennett], which do their best to throw a wet blanket on the idea.
Page 287
There is no meaning to the letter “b”…
See the dialogue “Prelude… Ant Fugue”
(found in both [Hofstadter 1979] and [Hofstadter and Dennett]) for a discussion of how meanings at a high level can emerge from meaningless symbols at a low level.
Page 293
the notion that consciousness is a novel kind of quantum phenomenon…
See [Penrose], which views consciousness as an intrinsically quantum-mechanical phenomenon, and [Rucker], which views consciousness as uniformly pervading everything in the universe.
Page 295
Taoism and Zen long ago sensed this paradoxical state…
Far and away the best book I have read on these spiritual approaches to life is [Smullyan 1977], but [Smullyan 1978] and [Smullyan 1983] also contain excellent pieces on the topic. These ideas are also discussed in Chapter 9 of [Hofstadter 1979], but from a skeptical point of view.
Page 296
the story of an “I” is a tale about a central essence…
See [Dennett 1992] and [Kent].
Page 298
The…self-pointing loop that the pronoun “I” involves …
See [Brinck] and [Kent].
Page 299
This is what John von Neumann unwittingly revealed…
See [von Neumann] for a very difficult and [Poundstone] for a very lucid discussion of self-replicating automata.
See Chapters 2 and 3 of [Hofstadter 1985] for a simpler discussion of the same ideas. Chapter 16 of [Hofstadter 1979] carefully spells out the mapping between Gödel’s self-referential construction and the self-replicating mechanisms at the core of life.
Page 300
too marbelous for words…
Borrowing a few words from a love song by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting, sung in an unsurpassable fashion by Frank Sinatra.
Page 300
with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality…
My father’s friend Bob Herman (a top-notch physicist who famously co-predicted the cosmic background radiation fifteen years before it was observed) loved to recite this riddle, putting on a strong Yiddish accent: “A tramp in the woods happened upon a hornets’ nest. When they stung him with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality, savoir-faire, and undue velocity, ‘Oh!’, he mused, counting his bumps, ‘If I had as many bumps on the left side of my right adenoid as six and three-quarters times seven-eighths of those between the heel of Achilles and the circumference of Adam’s apple, how long would it take a boy rolling a hoop up a moving stairway going down to count the splinters on a boardwalk if a horse had six legs?’ ” And so I thought I’d give a little posthumous hat-tip to Bob.
Page 305
Dan calls such carefully crafted fables ‘intuition pumps’…
Dennett introduced his term “intuition pump”, I believe, in the Reflections that he wrote on John Searle’s “Chinese room” thought experiment in Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].
Page 308
The term Parfit prefers is “psychological continuity”…
See [Nozick] for a lengthy treatment of the closely related concept of “closest continuer”.
Page 309
what Einstein accomplished in creating special relativity…
See [Hoffmann].
Page 309
what a whole generation of brilliant physicists, with Einstein at their core…
See [Pais 1986], [Pais 1991], and [Pullman].
Page 315
just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones…
See the Prologue for my first inklings of this viewpoint. See also my Achilles–Tortoise dialogue entitled “A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain”, which is Chapter 26 in [Hofstadter and Dennett], for more evolved ideas on it.
Page 320
Dave Chalmers explores these issues…
See [Chalmers]. I always find it ironic that Dave’s highly articulate and subtle ideas on consciousness, so wildly opposed to my own, took shape right under my nose some fifteen or so years ago, in my very own Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, at Indiana University (although the old oaken table in Room 641 is a bit of a tall tale…). Dave added enormous verve to our research group, and he was a good friend to both Carol and me. Despite our disagreements on qualia, zombies, and consciousness, we remain good friends.
Page 321
with a nine-planet solar system…
I’m not about to enter into the raging debate over poor Pluto’s possible planethood (is Disney’s Pluto a dog?), although I think the question is a fascinating one from the point of view of cognitive science, since it opens up deep questions about the nature of categories and analogies in the human mind.
Page 322
Z-people… laugh exactly the same as …Q-people…
See “Planet without Laughter” in [Smullyan 1980], a wonderful tale about vacuously laughing zombies.
Page 324
Dan Dennett’s criticism of such philosophers hits the nail on the head…
See especially “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies” in [Dennett 1998] and “The Zombic Hunch” in [Dennett 2005] for marvelous Dennettian arguments.
Page 325
you can quote me on that…
Actually, the image is Bill Frucht’s, so you can quote Bill on that. I had originally written something about a Flash Gordon–style hood ornament, and Bill, probably correctly seeing this 1950’s image as too passé, perhaps even camp, pulled me single-handedly into the twenty-first century.
Page 326
What is this nutty Capitalized Essence all about?
I concocted the phrase “Capitalized Essences” when I wrote the dialogue “Three-Part Invention” in [Hofstadter 1979].
Page 333
for all you know, what I am experiencing as redness…
The most penetrating discussion of the inverted-spectrum riddle that I have read is that in [Dennett 1991].
Page 333
Bleu Blanc Rouge…
The colors of the French flag are red, white, and blue, but the French always recite them in the order “blue, white, red”. This makes for a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that their color experiences are “just like ours, but flipped”.
Page 339
the so-called problem of “free will”…
There had to be some arena in which Dan Dennett and I do not quite see eye to eye, and at this late point in my book we have finally hit it. It is the question of free will. I agree with most of Dan’s arguments in [Dennett 1984], and yet I can’t go along with him that we have free will, of any sort. One day, Dan and I will thrash this out between ourselves.
Page 340
the analogy to our electoral process is such a blatant elephant…
This idea of “votes” in the brain is discussed in Chapter 33 of [Hofstadter 1985], as well as in the Careenium dialogue, which is Chapter 25 of the same book.
Page 345
gentle people such as…César Chávez…
In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, deeply depressed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, I worked intensely for the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (later known as the “United Farm Workers of America”) for a couple of years, first as a frequent volunteer and then for several months as a boycott organizer (first for grapes, then for lettuce). In this capacity I had the chance to meet with César Chávez a few times, although to my great regret I never truly got to know him as a person.
Page 346
As far as I can peer back…
The translation is my own.
Page 347
This was an abhorrent proposal…
The translation is my own.
Page 347
a book entitled ‘Le Cerveau et la conscience’…
This was [Chauchard].
Page 351
Many performers have been performing…
The translation is my own.
Page 361
Riposte: A Soft Poem…
There is a method to my madness in this section. In particular, both paragraphs were written to an ancient kind of meter called “paeonic”. What this means is that three syllables go by without a stress, but on the fourth a stress is placed, without its seeming (so I hope) to have been forced: “And yet to
you,
my faithful
read
er who has
plowed
all through this
book
up to its
near
ly final
page…
” One last constraint upon both paragraphs is simply on their length in terms of “feet” (which means stressed syllables). The number of these “paeons” must be forty, and the reason is, I’m mimicking two paragraphs of forty paeons each on page 5a of
Le Ton beau.
