Just Read: I Am a Strange Loop

I Am a Strange Loop: Douglas Hofstadter

I read Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning blockbuster Godel, Escher, Bach back when I was in high school, and though some of the number theory and complicated computer science ideas in the book were beyond me at the time, I thought I basically understood the theme of the book as exploration of how inanimate matter can give rise to conscious self.

Apparently I was ahead of most people; in his prologue, Hofstadter laments that "despite the book's popularity, it always troubled me that the fundamental message of GEB seemed to go largely unnoticed." I Am a Strange Loop, then, is Hofstadter's attempt, some thirty years later, to more clearly restate the ideas of GEB, attempting to answer the question, "What do we mean when we say 'I'?"

The basic idea here is that consciousness, the subjective experience of feeling you and I feel but computers and mosquitoes don't, is basically a system of perceptive inputs with the potential for infinite feedback. He makes the analogy (portrayed on the cover of the book) of a video camera pointed at its own output display, resulting in an infinite cascade of diminishing images of itself. A sufficiently complex computing system will be capable not just of responding to input given to it, but of taking its own response and taking that as input and responding to that, and so on. And so our brains are not just mechanisms that direct us to reflexively toward positive stimuli and away from negative stimuli, but run programs that model ourselves as part of the natural environment, model how our output (behavior) will affect future stimuli, model how similar goal-seeking programs will model themselves and respond, model how our modeling of others' modeling will affect behavior, and so on (I know, and you know I know, and I know you know I know...).

The inevitable result of a system as incredibly complex as the human brain, with its hundreds of billions of processes, sub-processes, and meta-processes all looping around on themselves is that out of a purely physical system of particles and proteins, synaptic fires and axon uptakes, rises this strange, non-physical seeming epiphenomenon called consciousness.

This materialist interpretation of the self has two consequences that run roughly against the grain of Western concepts of being. One is that consciousness is not an on/off switch, but runs along a spectrum in accordance with the complexity of an organism's perceptive and feedback systems. Insects have basically no consciousness at all, chickens have a bit more, dogs have more than them, humans have the most. But even among humans all are not created equal; infants have virtually no self, children have more, adults have the most, and though he doesn't put it so bluntly, Hofstadter implies that more cognitively capable (smarter) people in a very real sense have "larger souls" than others. Materialism leads us to the existentialist theme of "existence before essence." "You" are not an immortal soul that came into this world attached arbitrarily to some human body. Rather, when you were born "you" still didn't really exist yet, but only grew over time as the intricate result of the input fed into your brain and the way it processed it. And some grew more than others.

Secondly, and maybe even more disturbingly, "you" don't even really exist, at least not the way you think you do. You're more like a rainbow, something visible and appearing to have substance, but really just an illusion that fades away into nothingness the closer you get to it. Humans naturally think of themselves as singular, indivisible ("individual" = "undividable") entities that exists here, somewhere right behind our eyes, at the seat of consciousness, taking in everything in our environment, thinking it over, and responding of our own volition. In reality, there is no seat of consciousness, no CPU of the soul where all inputs leads to and all output emanates from. The various programs you run to live all run independently throughout different parts of your body and brain, and the feeling of being you is not what controls it all, but is a side effect of all these patterns and processes. In principle, all the systems comprising your nervous system could be copied and rewritten, either to another biological brain, a computer drive, or something else entirely, and the resulting program would think, act, and feel just like you. It would claim to be you, and we would have no objective reason to doubt it.

Ideas like this are some of the most fascinating and terrifying there are to think about, guaranteed to start giving you feelings of vertigo. One complaint I have about this otherwise good book on the fundamental issues at the heart of cognitive science is that it doesn't spend enough time discussing the truly dizzying empirical work that's gone into this line of thought. Since this post is already running long, I'll go into some of that again later.