CHAPTER 14
Strangeness in the “I” of the Beholder
The Inert Sponges inside our Heads
WHY, you might be wondering, do I call the lifelong loop of a human being’s self-representation, as described in the preceding chapter, a strange loop? You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback, incorporate it into your self, then the updated “you” makes more decisions, and so forth, round and round. It’s a loop, no doubt — but where’s the paradoxical quality that I’ve been saying is a sine qua non for strange loopiness? Why is this not just an ordinary feedback loop? What does such a loop have in common with the quintessential strange loop that Kurt Gödel discovered unexpectedly lurking inside Principia Mathematica?
For starters, a brain would seem, a priori, just about as unlikely a substrate for self-reference and its rich and counterintuitive consequences as was the extremely austere treatise Principia Mathematica, from which self-reference had been strictly banished. A human brain is just a big spongy bulb of inanimate molecules tightly wedged inside a rock-hard cranium, and there it simply sits, as inert as a lump on a log. Why should self-reference and a self be lurking in such a peculiar medium any more than they lurk in a lump of granite? Where’s the “I”-ness in a brain?
Just as something very strange had to be happening inside the stony fortress of Principia Mathematica to allow the outlawed “I” of Gödelian sentences like “I am not provable” to creep in, something very strange must also take place inside a bony cranium stuffed with inanimate molecules if it is to bring about a soul, a “light on”, a unique human identity, an “I”. And keep in mind that an “I” does not magically pop up in all brains inside all crania, courtesy of “the right stuff” (that is, certain “special” kinds of molecules); it happens only if the proper patterns come to be in that medium. Without such patterns, the system is just as it superficially appears to be: a mere lump of spongy matter, soulless, “I”-less, devoid of any inner light.
Squirting Chemicals
When the first brains came into existence, they were trivial feedback devices, less sophisticated than a toilet’s float-ball mechanism or the thermostat on your wall, and like those devices, they selectively made primitive organisms move towards certain things (food) and away from others (dangers). Evolutionary pressures, however, gradually made brains’ triage of their environments grow more complex and multi-layered, and eventually (here we’re talking millions or billions of years), the repertoire of categories that were being responded to grew so rich that the system, like a TV camera on a sufficiently long leash, was capable of “pointing back”, to some extent, at itself. That first tiny glimmer of self was the germ of consciousness and “I”-ness, but there is still a great mystery.
No matter how complicated and sophisticated brains became, they always remained, at bottom, nothing but a set of cells that “squirted chemicals” back and forth among each other (to borrow a phrase from the pioneering roboticist and provocative writer Hans Moravec), a bit like a huge oil refinery in which liquids are endlessly pumped around from one tank to another. How could a system of pumping liquids ever house a locus of upside-down causality, where meanings seem to matter infinitely more than physical objects and their motions? How could joy, sadness, a love for impressionist painting, and an impish sense of humor inhabit such a cold, inanimate system? One might as well look for an “I” inside a stone fortress, a toilet’s tank, a roll of toilet paper, a television, a thermostat, a heat-seeking missile, a heap of beer cans, or an oil refinery.
Some philosophers see our inner lights, our “I” ’s, our humanity, our souls, as emanating from the nature of the substrate itself — that is, from the organic chemistry of carbon. I find that a most peculiar tree on which to hang the bauble of consciousness. Basically, this is a mystical refrain that explains nothing. Why should the chemistry of carbon have some magical property entirely unlike than that of any other substance? And what is that magical property? And how does it make us into conscious beings? Why is it that only brains are conscious, and not kneecaps or kidneys, if all it takes is organic chemistry? Why aren’t our carbon-based cousins the mosquitoes just as conscious as we are? Why aren’t cows just as conscious as we are? Doesn’t organization or pattern play any role here? Surely it does. And if it does, why couldn’t it play the whole role?
By focusing on the medium rather than the message, the pottery rather than the pattern, the typeface rather than the tale, philosophers who claim that something ineffable about carbon’s chemistry is indispensable for consciousness miss the boat. As Daniel Dennett once wittily remarked in a rejoinder to John Searle’s tiresome “right-stuff” refrain, “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion.” (This was a somewhat subtle hat-tip to the title of a somewhat unsubtle, clearly erotic song written in 1951 by Lois Mann and Henry Glover, made famous many years later by singer Maria Muldaur.) And for my money, the magic that happens in the meat of brains makes sense only if you know how to look at the motions that inhabit them.
The Stately Dance of the Symbols
Brains take on a radically different cast if, instead of focusing on their squirting chemicals, you make a level-shift upwards, leaving that low level far behind. To allow us to speak easily of such upward jumps was the reason I dreamt up the allegory of the careenium, and so let me once again remind you of its key imagery. By zooming out from the level of crazily careening simms and by looking instead at the system on a speeded-up time scale whereby the simms’ locally chaotic churning becomes merely a foggy blur, one starts to see other entities coming into focus, entities that formerly were utterly invisible. And at that level, mirabile dictu, meaning emerges.
Simmballs filled with meaning are now seen to be doing a stately dance in a blurry soup that they don’t suspect for a split second consists of small interacting magnetic marbles called “simms”. And the reason I say the simmballs are “filled with meaning” is not, of course, that they are oozing some mystical kind of sticky semantic juice called “meaning” (even though certain meat-infatuated philosophers might go for that idea), but because their stately dance is deeply in synch with events in the world around them.
Simmballs are in synch with the outer world in the same way as in La Femme du boulanger, the straying cat Pomponnette’s return was in synch with the return of the straying wife Aurélie: there was a many-faceted alignment of Situation “P” with Situation “A”. However, this alignment of situations at the film’s climax was just a joke concocted by the screenwriter; no viewer of La Femme du boulanger supposes for a moment that the cat’s escapades will continue to parallel the wife’s escapades (or vice versa) for months on end. We know it was just a coincidence, which is why we find it so humorous.
By contrast, a careenium’s dancing simmballs will continue tracking the world, will stay in phase with it, will remain aligned with it. That (by fiat of the author!) is the very nature of a careenium. Simmballs are systematically in phase with things going on in the world just as, in Gödel’s construction, prim numbers are systematically in phase with PM’s provable formulas. That is the only reason simmballs can be said to have meaning. Meaning, no matter what its substrate might be — Tinkertoys, toilet paper, beer cans, simms, whole numbers, or neurons — is an automatic, unpreventable outcome of reliable, stable alignment; this was the lesson of Chapter 11.
Our own brains are no different from careenia, except, of course, that whereas careenia are just my little fantasy, human brains are not. The symbols in our brains truly do do that voodoo that they do so well, and they do it in the electrochemical soup of neural events. The strange thing, though, is that over the eons that it took for our brains to evolve from the earliest proto-brains, meanings just sneaked ever so quietly into the story, almost unobserved. It’s not as if somebody had devised a grand plan, millions of years in advance, that high-level meaningful structures — physical patterns representing abstract categories — would one day come to inhabit big fancy brains; rather, such patterns (the “symbols” of this book) simply came along as an unplanned by-product of the tremendously effective way that having bigger and bigger brains helped beings to survive better and better in a terribly cutthroat world.
Just as Bertrand Russell was blindsided by the unexpected appearance of high-level Gödelian meanings in the heart of his ultraprotected bastion, Principia Mathematica, so someone who had never conceived of looking at a brain at any level other than that of Hans Moravec’s squirting chemicals would be mightily surprised at the emergence of symbols. Much as Gödel saw the great potential of shifting attention to a wholly different level of PM strings, so I am suggesting (though I’m certainly far from the first) that we have to shift our attention to a far higher level of brain activity in order to find symbols, concepts, meanings, desires, and, ultimately, our selves.
The funny thing is that we humans all are focused on that level without ever having had any choice in the matter. We automatically see our brains’ activity as entirely symbolic. I find something wonderfully strange and upside-down about this, and I’ll now try to show why through an allegory.
In which the Alfbert Visits Austranius
Imagine, if you will, the small, lonely planet of Austranius, whose sole inhabitants are a tribe called the “Klüdgerot”. From time immemorial, the Klüdgerot have lived out their curious lives in a dense jungle of extremely long PM strings, some of which they can safely ingest (strings being their sole source of nutrition) and others of which they must not ingest, lest they be mortally poisoned. Luckily, the resourceful Klüdgerot have found a way to tell apart these opposite sorts of PM strings, for certain strings, when inspected visually, form a message that says, in the lilting Klüdgerotic tongue, “I am edible”, while others form a message in Klüdgerotic that says “I am inedible”. And, quite marvelously, by the Benevolent Grace of Göd, every PM string proclaiming its edibility has turned out to be edible, while every PM string proclaiming its inedibility has turned out to be inedible. Thus have the Klüdgerot thrived for untold öörs on their bountiful planet.
On a fateful döö in the Austranian möönth of Spöö, a strange-looking orange spacecraft swoops down from the distant planet of Ukia and lands exactly at the North Pöö of Austranius. Out steps a hulking whiteheaded alien that announces itself with the words, “I am the Alfbert. Behold.” No sooner has the alien uttered these few words than it trundles off into the Austranian jungle, where it spends not only the rest of Spöö but also all of Blöö, after which it trundles back, slightly bedraggled but otherwise no worse for the wear, to its spacecraft. Bright and early the next döö, the Alfbert solemnly convenes a meeting of all the Klüdgerot on Austranius. As soon as they all have assembled, the Alfbert begins to speak.
“Good döö, virtuous Klüdgerot,” intones the Alfbert. “It is my privilege to report to you that I have made an Austranius-shaking scientific discovery.” The Klüdgerot all sit in respectful if skeptical silence. “Each PM string that grows on this planet,” continues the Alfbert, “turns out to be not merely a long and pretty vine but also, astonishingly enough, a message that can be read and understood. Do not doubt me!” On hearing this non-novelty, many Klüdgerot yawn in unison, and a voice shouts out, “Tell us about it, white head!”, at which scattered chuckles erupt. Encouraged, the Alfbert does just so. “I have made the fantastic discovery that every PM string makes a claim, in my beautiful native tongue of Alfbertic, about certain wondrous entities known as the ‘whole numbers’. Many of you are undoubtedly champing at the bit to have me explain to you, in very simple terms that you can understand, what these so-called ‘whole numbers’ are.”
At the sound of this term, a loud rustling noise is heard among the assembled crowd. Unbeknownst to the Alfbert, the Klüdgerot have for countless generations held the entities called “whole numbers” to be incomprehensibly abstract; indeed, the whole numbers were long ago unanimously declared so loathsome that they were forever banned from the planet, along with all their names. Clearly, the Alfbert’s message is not welcome here. It is of course wrong (that goes without saying), but it is not merely wrong; it is also totally absurd, and it is repugnant, to boot.
But the whiteheaded Alfbert, blithely unaware of the resentment it has churned up, continues to speak as the mob rustles ever more agitatedly. “Yes, denizens of Austranius, fabulously unlikely though it may sound, in each PM string there resides meaning. All it takes is to know how to look at the string in the proper way. By using a suitable mapping, one can…”
All at once pandemonium erupts: has the Alfbert not just uttered the despised word “one”, the long-banished name of the most dreaded of all the whole numbers? “Away with the alien! Off with its white head!” screams the infuriated mob, and a moment later, a phalanx of Klüdgerot grabs hold of the declaiming alien. Yet even as it is being dragged away, the pontificating Alfbert patiently insists to the Klüdgerot that it is merely trying to edify them, that it can perceive momentous facts hidden to them by reading the strings in a language of which they are ignorant, and that… But the angered throng drowns out the Alfbert’s grandiose words.
As the brazen alien is being prepared to meet a dire fate, a commotion suddenly breaks out among the Klüdgerot; they have plumb forgotten the age-old and venerated Klüdgerot tradition of holding a Pre-dishing-out-ofdire-fate Banquet! A team is dispatched to pick the sweetest of all PM strings from the Principial Planetary Park of Wööw, a sacred sanctuary into which no Klüdgerot has ever ventured before; when it returns with a fine harvest of succulent strings from Wööw, each of which clearly reads “I am edible”, it is greeted by a hail of thunderous applause. After the Klüdgerot have expressed their gratitude to Göd, the traditional Pre-dishing-out-ofdire-fate Banquet begins, and at last it begins to dawn on the Alfbert that it will indeed meet a dire fate in short order. As this ominous fact takes hold, it feels its white head start to spin, then to swim, and then…
Idealistically attempting to save the unsuspecting Klüdgerot, the ever-magnanimous Alfbert cries out, “Listen, I pray, O friends! Your harvest of PM strings is treacherous! A foolish superstition has tricked you into thinking they are nutritious, but the truth is otherwise. When decoded as messages, these strings all make such grievously false statements about whole numbers that no one — I repeat, no one! — could swallow them.” But the words of warning come too late, for the PM strings from Wööw are already being swallowed whole by the stubbornly superstitious Klüdgerot.
And before long, frightful groans are heard resounding far and near; the sensitive Alfbert shields its gaze from the dreadful event. When at last it dares to look, it beholds a sorry sight; on every side, as far as its sole eye can see, lie lifeless shells of Klüdgerot that but moments ago were carousing their silly heads off. “If only they had listened to me!”, sadly muses the kindly Alfbert, scratching its great white head in puzzlement. On these words, it trundles back to its strange-looking orange spacecraft at the North Pöö, takes one last glance at the bleak Klüdgerot-littered landscape of Austranius, and finally presses the small round “Takeoff” button on the craft’s leatherette dashboard, setting off for destinations unknown.
At this point, the Alfbert, having earlier swooned in terror as the banqueters began their ritual reveling, regains consciousness. First it hears shouts of excitement echoing all around, and then, when it dares to look, it beholds a startling sight; on every side, as far as its sole eye can see, masses of Klüdgerot are staring with unmistakable delight at something moving, somewhere above its white head. It turns to see what this could possibly be, just in time to catch the most fleeting glimpse of a thin shape making a strange, high-pitched rustling sound as it rapidly plummets towards —
Brief Debriefing
I offer my apologies to the late Ambrose Bierce for this rather feeble imitation of the plot of his masterful short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, but my intentions are good. The raison d’être of my rather flippant allegory is to turn the classic tragicomedy starring Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell (jointly alias the Alfbert) and Kurt Gödel (alias the Klüdgerot) on its head, by positing bizarre creatures who cannot imagine the idea of any number-theoretical meaning in PM strings, but who nonetheless see the strings as meaningful messages — it’s just that they see only high-level Gödelian meanings. This is the diametric opposite of what one would naïvely expect, since PM notation was invented expressly to write down statements about numbers and their properties, certainly not to write down Gödelian statements about themselves!
A few remarks are in order here to prevent confusions that this allegory might otherwise engender. In the first place, the length of any PM string that speaks of its own properties (Gödel’s string KG being the prototype, of course) is not merely “enormous”, as I wrote at the allegory’s outset; it is inconceivable. I have never tried to calculate how many symbols Gödel’s string would consist of if it were written out in pure PM notation, because I would hardly know how to begin the calculation. I suspect that its symbol-count might well exceed “Graham’s constant”, which is usually cited as “the largest number ever to appear in a mathematical proof”, but even if not, it would certainly give it a run for its money. So the idea of anyone directly reading the strings that grow on Austranius, whether on a low level, as statements about whole numbers, or on a high level, as statements about their own edibility, is utter nonsense. (Of course, so is the idea that strings of mathematical symbols could grow in jungles on a faraway planet, as well as the idea that they could be eaten, but that’s allegoric license.)
Gödel created his statement KG through a series of 46 escalating stages, in which he shows that in principle, certain notions about numbers could be written down in PM notation. A typical such notion is “the exponent of the kth prime number in the prime factorization of n”. This notion depends on prior notions defined in earlier stages, such as “exponent”, “prime number”, “kth prime number”, “prime factorization” (none of which come as “built-in notions” in PM). Gödel never explicitly writes out PM expressions for such notions, because doing so would require writing down a prohibitively long chain of PM symbols. Instead, each individual notion is given a name, a kind of abbreviation, which could theoretically be expanded out into pure PM notation if need be, and which is then used in further steps. Over and over again, Gödel exploits alreadydefined abbreviations in defining further abbreviations, thus carefully building a tower of increasing complexity and abstractness, working his way up to its apex, which is the notion of prim numbers.
Soaps in Sanskrit
This may sound a bit abstruse and remote, so let me suggest an analogy. Imagine the challenge of writing out a clear explanation of the meaning of the contemporary term “soap digest rack” in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit. The key constraint is that you are restricted to using pure Sanskrit as it was in its heyday, and are not allowed to introduce even one single new word into the language.
In order to get across the meaning of “soap digest rack” in detail, you would have to explain, for starters, the notions of electricity and electromagnetic waves, of TV cameras and transmitters and TV sets, of TV shows and advertising, the notion of washing machines and rivalries between detergent companies, the idea of daily episodes of predictable hackneyed melodramas broadcast into the homes of millions of people, the image of viewers addicted to endlessly circling plots, the concept of a grocery store, of a checkout stand, of magazines, of display racks, and on and on… Each of the words “soap”, “digest”, and “rack” would wind up being expanded into a chain of ancient Sanskrit words thousands of times longer than itself. Your final text would fill up hundreds of pages in order to get across the meaning of this three-word phrase for a modern banality.
Likewise, Gödel’s string KG, which we conventionally express in supercondensed form through phrases such as “I am not provable in PM”, would, if written out in pure PM notation, be monstrously long — and yet despite its formidable size, we understand precisely what it says. How is that possible? It is a result of its condensability. KG is not a random sequence of PM symbols, but a formula possessing a great deal of structure. Just as the billions of cells comprising a heart are so extremely organized that they can be summarized in the single word “pump”, so the myriad symbols in KG can be summarized in a few well-chosen English words.
To return to the Sanskrit challenge, imagine that I changed the rules, allowing you to define new Sanskrit words and to employ them in the definitions of yet further new Sanskrit words. Thus “electricity” could be defined and used in the description of TV cameras and televisions and washing machines, and “TV program” could be used in the definition of “soap opera”, and so forth. If abbreviations could thus be piled on abbreviations in an unlimited fashion, then it is likely that instead of producing a book-length Sanskrit explanation of “soap digest rack”, you would need only a few pages, perhaps even less. Of course, in all this, you would have radically changed the Sanskrit language, carrying it forwards in time a few thousand years, but that is how languages always progress. And that is also the way the human mind works — by the compounding of old ideas into new structures that become new ideas that can themselves be used in compounds, and round and round endlessly, growing ever more remote from the basic earthbound imagery that is each language’s soil.
Winding Up the Debriefing
In my allegory, both the Klüdgerot and the Alfbert supposedly have the ability to read pure PM strings — strings that contain no abbreviations whatsoever. Since at one level (the level perceived by the Klüdgerot) these strings talk about themselves, they are like Gödel’s KG, and this means that such strings are, for want of a better term, infinitely huge (for all practical purposes, anyway). This means that any attempt to read them as statements about numbers will never yield anything comprehensible at all, and so the Alfbert’s ability, as described, is a total impossibility. But so is the Klüdgerot’s, since they too are overwhelmed by an endless sea of symbols. The only hope for either the Alfbert or the Klüdgerot is to notice that certain patterns are used over and over again in the sea of symbols, and to give these patterns names, thus compressing the string into something more manageable, and then carrying this process of patternfinding and compression out at the new, shorter level, and each time compressing further and further and further until finally the whole string collapses down into just one simple idea: “I am not edible” (or, translating out of the allegory, “I am not provable”).
Bertrand Russell never imagined this kind of a level-shift when he thought about the strings of PM. He was trapped by the understandable preconception that statements about whole numbers, no matter how long or complicated they might get, would always retain the familiar flavor of standard number-theoretical statements such as “There are infinitely many primes” or “There are only three pure powers in the Fibonacci sequence.” It never occurred to him that some statements could have such intricate hierarchical structures that the number-theoretical ideas they would express would no longer feel like ideas about numbers. As I observed in Chapter 11, a dog does not imagine or understand that certain large arrays of colored dots can be so structured that they are no longer just huge sets of colored dots but become pictures of people, houses, dogs, and many other things. The higher level takes perceptual precedence over the lower level, and in the process becomes the “more real” of the two. The lower level gets forgotten, lost in the shuffle.
Such an upwards level-shift is a profound perceptual change, and when it takes place in an unfamiliar, abstract setting, such as the world of strings of Principia Mathematica, it can sound very improbable, even though when it takes place in a familiar setting (such as a TV screen), it is trivially obvious.
My allegory was written in order to illustrate a downwards level-shift that is seen as very improbable. The Klüdgerot see only high-level meanings like “I am edible” in certain enormous PM strings, and they supposedly cannot imagine any lower-level meaning also residing in those strings. To us who know the original intent of the strings of symbols in Principia Mathematica, this sounds like an inexplicably rigid prejudice, yet when it comes to understanding our own nature, the tables are quite turned, for a very similar rigid prejudice in favor of high-level (and only high-level) perception turns out to pervade and even to define “the human condition”.
Trapped at the High Level
For us conscious, self-aware, “I”-driven humans, it is almost impossible to imagine moving down, down, down to the neuronal level of our brains, and slowing down, down, down, so that we can see (or at least can imagine) each and every chemical squirting in each and every synaptic cleft — a gigantic shift in perspective that would seem to instantly drain brain activity of all symbolic quality. No meanings would remain down there, no sticky semantic juice — just astronomical numbers of meaningless, inanimate molecules, squirting meaninglessly away, all the livelong, lifeless day.
Your typical human brain, being blissfully ignorant of its minute physical components and their arcanely mathematizable mode of microscopic functioning, and thriving instead at the infinitely remote level of soap operas, spring sales, super skivaganzas, SUV’s, SAT’s, SOB’s, Santa Claus, splashtacular scuba specials, snorkels, snowballs, sex scandals (and let’s not forget sleazeballs), makes up as plausible a story as it can about its own nature, in which the starring role, rather than being played by the cerebral cortex, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cerebellum, or any other weirdly named and gooey physical structure, is played instead by an anatomically invisible, murky thing called “I”, aided and abetted by other shadowy players known as “ideas”, “thoughts”, “memories”, “beliefs”, “hopes”, “fears” “intentions”, “desires”, “love”, “hate”, “rivalry”, “jealousy”, “empathy”, “honesty”, and on and on — and in the soft, ethereal, neurology-free world of these players, your typical human brain perceives its very own “I” as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad of infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them, by the billions — nay, the millions of billions — every single second.
The human condition is thus profoundly analogous to the Klüdgerotic condition: neither species can see or even imagine the lower levels of a reality that is nonetheless central to its existence.
First Key Ingredient of Strangeness
Why does an “I” symbol never develop in a video feedback system, no matter how swirly or intricate or deeply nested are the shapes that appear on its screen? The answer is simple: a video system, no matter how many pixels or colors it has, develops no symbols at all, because a video system does not perceive anything. Nowhere along the cyclic pathway of a video loop are there any symbols to be triggered — no concepts, no categories, no meanings — not a tad more than in the shrill screech of an audio feedback loop. A video feedback system does not attribute to the strange emergent galactic shapes on its screen any kind of causal power to make anything happen. Indeed, it doesn’t attribute anything to anything, because, lacking all symbols, a video system can’t and doesn’t ever think about anything!
What makes a strange loop appear in a brain and not in a video feedback system, then, is an ability — the ability to think — which is, in effect, a one-syllable word standing for the possession of a sufficiently large repertoire of triggerable symbols. Just as the richness of whole numbers gave PM the power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and engulf itself via Gödel’s construction, so our extensible repertoires of symbols give our brains the power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.
Second Key Ingredient of Strangeness
But there is a flip side to all this, a second key ingredient that makes the loop in a human brain qualify as “strange”, makes an “I” come seemingly out of nowhere. This flip side is, ironically, an inability — namely, our Klüdgerotic inability to peer below the level of our symbols. It is our inability to see, feel, or sense in any way the constant, frenetic churning and roiling of micro-stuff, all the unfelt bubbling and boiling that underlies our thinking. This, our innate blindness to the world of the tiny, forces us to hallucinate a profound schism between the goal-lacking material world of balls and sticks and sounds and lights, on the one hand, and a goalpervaded abstract world of hopes and beliefs and joys and fears, on the other, in which radically different sorts of causality seem to reign.
When we symbol-possessing humans watch a video feedback system, we naturally pay attention to the eye-catching shapes on the screen and are seduced into giving them fanciful labels like “helical corridor” or “galaxy”, but still we know that ultimately they consist of nothing but pixels, and that whatever patterns appear before our eyes do so thanks solely to the local logic of pixels. This simple and clear realization strips those fancy fractalic gestalts of any apparent life or autonomy of their own. We are not tempted to attribute desires or hopes, let alone consciousness, to the screen’s swirly shapes — no more than we are tempted to perceive fluffy cotton-balls in the sky as renditions of an artist’s profile or the stoning of a martyr.
And yet when it comes to perceiving ourselves, we tell a different story. Things are far murkier when we speak of ourselves than when we speak of video feedback, because we have no direct access to any analogue, inside our brains, to pixels and their local logic. Intellectually knowing that our brains are dense networks of neurons doesn’t make us familiar with our brains at that level, no more than knowing that French poems are made of letters of the roman alphabet makes us experts on French poetry. We are creatures that congenitally cannot focus on the micromachinery that makes our minds tick — and unfortunately, we cannot just saunter down to the corner drugstore and pick up a cheap pair of glasses to remedy the defect.
One might suspect neuroscientists, as opposed to lay people, to be so familiar with the low-level hardware of the brain that they have come to understand just how to think about such mysteries as consciousness and free will. And yet often it turns out to be quite the opposite: many neuroscientists’ great familiarity with the low-level aspects of the brain makes them skeptical that consciousness and free will could ever be explained in physical terms at all. So baffled are they by what strikes them as an unbridgeable chasm between mind and matter that they abandon all efforts to see how consciousness and selves could come out of physical processes, and instead they throw in the towel and become dualists. It’s a shame to see scientists punt in this fashion, but it happens all too often. The moral of the story is that being a professional neuroscientist is not by any means synonymous with understanding the brain deeply — no more than being a professional physicist is synonymous with understanding hurricanes deeply. Indeed, sometimes being mired down in gobs of detailed knowledge is the exact thing that blocks deep understanding.
Our innate human inability to peer below a certain level inside our cranium makes our inner analogue to the swirling galaxy on a TV screen — the vast swirling galaxy of “I”-ness — strike us as an undeniable locus of causality, rather than a mere passive epiphenomenon coming out of lower levels (such as a video-feedback galaxy). So taken in are we by the perceived hard sphericity of that “marble” in our minds that we attribute to it a reality as great as that of anything we know. And because of the locking-in of the “I”-symbol that inevitably takes place over years and years in the feedback loop of human self-perception, causality gets turned around and “I” seems to be in the driver’s seat.
In summary, the combination of these two ingredients — one an ability and the other an inability — gives rise to the strange loop of selfhood, a trap into which we humans all fall, every last one of us, willy-nilly. Although it begins as innocently as a humble toilet’s float-ball mechanism or an audio or video feedback loop, where no counterintuitive type of causality is posited anywhere, human self-perception inevitably ends up positing an emergent entity that exerts an upside-down causality on the world, leading to the intense reinforcement of and the final, invincible, immutable locking-in of this belief. The end result is often the vehement denial of the possibility of any alternative point of view at all.
Sperry Redux
I just said that we all fall into this “trap”, but I don’t really see things so negatively. Such a “trap” is not harmful if taken with a grain of salt; rather, it is something to rejoice in and cherish, for it is what makes us human. Permit me once more to quote the eloquent words of Roger Sperry:
In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell.
When you come down to it, all that Sperry has done here is to go out on a limb and dare to assert, in a serious scientific publication, the ho-hum, run-of-the-mill, commonsensical belief held by the random person on the street that there is a genuine reality (i.e., causal potency) of the thing we call “I”. In the scientific world, such an assertion runs a great risk of being looked upon with skepticism, because it sounds superficially as if it reeks of Cartesian dualism (wonderfully mystical-sounding terms such as élan vital, “life force”, “spirit of the hive”, “entelechy”, and “holons” occasionally spring into my mind when I read this passage).
However, Roger Sperry knew very well that he wasn’t embracing dualism or mysticism of any sort, and he therefore had the courage to take the plunge and make the assertion. His position is a subtle balancing act whose insightfulness will, I am convinced, one day be recognized and celebrated, and it will be seen to be analogous to the subtle balancing act of Kurt Gödel, who demonstrated how high-level, emergent, self-referential meanings in a formal mathematical system can have a causal potency just as real as that of the system’s rigid, frozen, low-level rules of inference.