Strange loops
- From: "Lance" <LanceGary@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 6 Apr 2007 08:31:55 -0700
February 18, 2007
A New Journey into Hofstadter's Mind
The eternal golden braid emerges as a strange loop
By George Johnson
I AM A STRANGE LOOP
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Basic Books, 2007
To get into a properly loopy mind-set for Douglas R. Hofstadter's new
book on consciousness, I plugged a Webcam into my desktop computer and
pointed it at the screen. In the first instant, an image of the screen
appeared on the screen and then the screen inside the screen. Cycling
round and round, the video signal rapidly gave rise to a long corridor
leading toward a patch of shimmering blue, beckoning like the light at
the end of death's tunnel.
Giving the camera a twist, I watched as the regress of rectangles took
on a spiraling shape spinning fibonaccily deeper into nowhere.
Somewhere along the way a spot of red--a glint of sunlight, I later
realized--became caught in the swirl, which slowly congealed into a
planet of red continents and blue seas. Zooming in closer, I explored
a surface that was erupting with yellow, orange and green volcanoes.
Like Homer Simpson putting a fork inside the microwave, I feared for a
moment that I had ruptured the very fabric of space and time.
In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter, a cognitive and computer scientist
at Indiana University, describes a more elaborate experiment with
video feedback that he did many years ago at Stanford University. By
that time he had become obsessed with the paradoxical nature of
Gödel's theorem, with its formulas that speak of themselves. Over the
years this and other loopiness--Escher's drawings of hands drawing
hands, Bach's involuted fugues--were added to the stew, along with the
conviction that all of this had something to do with consciousness.
What finally emerged, in 1979, was Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal
Golden Braid, one of the most captivating books I have ever read.
I still remember standing in the aisle of a bookstore in Washington,
D.C., where I had just finished graduate school, devouring the pages.
GEB, as the author calls it, is not so much a "read" as an experience,
a total immersion into Hofstadter's mind. It is a great place to be,
and for those without time for the scenic route, I Am a Strange Loop
pulls out the big themes and develops them into a more focused picture
of consciousness.
Think of your eyes as that video camera, but with a significant
upgrade: a mechanism, the brain, that not only registers images but
abstracts them, arranging and constantly rearranging the data into
mental structures--symbols, Hofstadter calls them--that stand as
proxies for the exterior world. Along with your models of things and
places are symbols for each of your friends, family members and
colleagues, some so rich that the people almost live in your head.
Among this library of simulations there is naturally one of yourself,
and that is where the strangeness begins.
"You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback
from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you'
makes more decisions, and so forth, round and round," Hofstadter
writes. What blossoms from the Gödelian vortex--this symbol system
with the power to represent itself--is the "anatomically invisible,
terribly murky thing called I." A self, or, to use the name he favors,
a soul.
It need know nothing of neurons. Sealed off from the biological
substrate, the actors in the internal drama are not things like
"serotonin" or "synapse" or even "cerebrum," "hippocampus" or
"cerebellum" but abstractions with names like "love," "jealousy,"
"hope" and "regret."
And that is what leads to the grand illusion. "In the soft, ethereal,
neurology-free world of these players," the author writes, "the
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 infinitesimal
entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among
them."
Thinking of souls this way makes me feel better about the fly I just
swatted. Whatever repertoire of symbols it may have possessed was
surely too constricted for Gödelian self-representation to arise. The
same would probably go for an amphibian or a fish or, for that matter,
a human ovum that had just been fertilized by a sperm. But somewhere
along the line--maybe with parakeets or cats--it becomes harder to
deny the glint of some kind of "who" inside.
Souls, as Hofstadter puts it, come in "different sizes." In a
whimsical moment, he even suggests that soulness might be measured--in
units called "hunekers," after an American music critic, James
Huneker, who once wrote of a certain Chopin étude that "small-souled
men" should not attempt it. The scale might start with a mosquito,
with a tiny fraction of a huneker, ascending to 100 for an average
human and upward to maybe 200 for Mahatma Gandhi.
Hofstadter's fans may find some of this familiar, but I Am a Strange
Loop is much more than the condensed version of Gödel, Escher, Bach.
In the 28 years since that book appeared, Hofstadter has lived with
these ideas, working out their implications. From being a
semivegetarian (fish and chicken were okay), he became, just recently,
a strict one. Most significantly, in this time he learned what happens
when another soul becomes entwined with your own. Her name was Carol,
and as they became absorbed one into the other, consciousness spilling
beyond its containers, he sometimes thought of them as "one individual
with two bodies," sharing "exactly the same dreads and dreams and
hopes and fears."
Then, when she was not yet 43, Carol died without warning from a brain
tumor. Even though I knew that was coming, it did not diminish the
blow. It is heart-wrenching to read how the author has tried to come
to grips with her death, agonizing over how much "Carolness" and even
"Carol-consciousness"--how much of her "interiority"--still lives in
his brain and in those of the others who knew her.
Consciousness is a pattern. The substrate is not supposed to matter.
And yet it does. I finished the book with a sense of the desperation
that must come from losing, in body if not in spirit, one half of a
400-huneker soul.
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=C7265AEC-E7F2-99DF-3B3A60DE6200D457
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