Re: Strange loops

On Apr 6, 5:31 pm, "Lance" <LanceG...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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-3...

Self Assembly
Margaret A. Boden

I Am a Strange Loop. Douglas R. Hofstader. xxiii + 384 pp. Basic
Books, 2007. $26.95.

Douglas Hofstadter suffers from the grave disadvantage of having
written a masterpiece as a young man: the utterly unique Gödel,
Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. This exhilarating intellectual
and rhetorical extravaganza, published in 1979, was focused on the new
ways of studying life and minds that were being offered by cognitive
science. The book spanned mathematical logic, artificial intelligence,
artificial life, psychology, neuroscience and the philosophy of mind.
Along the way, it provided deep insights into mathematics, music and
creativity-plus countless deliciously outrageous puns. Despite the
puns, it was translated many times and became a cult book worldwide.
click for full image and caption



One might almost say it was incomparable. But, inevitably, all his
later work was compared with Gödel, Escher, Bach. And, also
inevitably, his readers' expectations have been largely disappointed.
Even his fascinating 1997 book, Le Ton Beau de Marot-a discussion of
language and of the challenges, and the very possibility, of
translation-couldn't measure up. It was a masterwork in itself,
sparkling with subtle insights and stimulating asides. Yet it, too,
suffered in comparison with its predecessor.

Hofstadter's new book, deeply thought-provoking though it is, is less
engaging than either Gödel, Escher, Bach or Le Ton Beau de Marot. Yet
I Am a Strange Loop carries the high hopes of its author, not just
those of its readers. Hofstadter feels that his first book, despite
its massive popularity, has been widely misunderstood. Its fundamental
message seems not to have been noticed: "It sometimes feels as if I
had shouted a deeply cherished message out into an empty chasm and
nobody heard me." This new volume is his attempt to set the record
straight.

The core intellectual claim, then, is much the same as that of Gödel,
Escher, Bach: namely, that a proper understanding of Gödel's proof
helps us to see that life, mind and self are all constituted not by
biochemistry but by the higher-level patterns that biochemistry makes
possible. In particular, human selves are abstract self-referential
(reflexively looping) patterns that arise spontaneously out of the
meaningless base of neural activity.

These patterns are real, albeit abstract. And they have real causal
power, even though they are epiphenomena generated by the brain. They
affect other patterns within the mind-complex, and they loop back into
the brain itself. Unlike the complex patterns generated when a video
camera is focused on a television screen showing its own output (an
analogy repeatedly used to demystify the notion of strange loops), the
human-self patterns can determine changes within the system's
hardware. But this mind-brain causation is nothing "spooky" or
supernatural. It's an emergent consequence of the physical complexity
of human brains.

Electrical signals and neurochemicals, or the porridge-like matter
inside the skull, seem distinctly unpromising as origins of mind or
meaning. Indeed, Hofstadter scorns John Searle's suggestion that
neuroprotein constitutes "the right stuff" for intentionality and
consciousness, whereas silicon or old beer cans obviously do not.
What's important is not the stuff in itself, but the looping patterns
of activity that emerge from it-whatever its chemistry happens to be.
So whereas many philosophers despair of there being any scientific,
naturalistic explanation of meaning, Hofstadter does not. But he
doesn't accept the currently popular neuroscientific reductionism
either. In his view, neuroscience can never capture the essence of
mind. Indeed, the neuroscientific details are in an important sense
irrelevant-even though they are, at base, what makes mind possible.

If a brain were all that one needed, then a newborn baby would greet
the world with a mind ready-formed, albeit nearly empty. Indeed, many
people assume that each human individual is equipped with a special
inner essence at birth, perhaps even from the moment of conception. On
the contrary, says Hofstadter, the mind-pattern develops gradually.
Newborn babies are human beings only genetically, biologically or
potentially. They don't yet have human minds, still less reflective
human selves. Such patterns take many years to emerge.

The self, in short, is a lifelong construction. Up to a point, it's
amenable to deliberate (reflexive) self-molding. It's a unifying
pattern that enables its subpatterns-our desires, beliefs, plans and
actions-to cohere and to advance toward freely (that is, personally)
chosen ends. Hofstadter stresses the reality, and even the necessity,
of the self. Far from being an arbitrary pattern, it emerges naturally
from our neural activity, much as the video image on the screen
emerges from the physics of the self-looping video camera. And it's a
pattern without which the person concerned simply couldn't exist,
because for that self to exist at all just is for that pattern to be
instantiated-a point to which I'll return.

The first half of the book adds little to what Hofstadter wrote 30
years ago, apart from some interesting personal memories about the
writing and reception of Gödel, Escher, Bach. So, for instance, there
are several chapters on Gödel's proof. Hofstadter argues that this
proof shows how meaningful self-reference ("strange loops") can emerge
out of so apparently unpromising a base as the dry-and semantically
empty-logic of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Why should
we care about that? Because, he says, the particular way in which
Gödel's proof went beyond Russellian logic is essentially the same as
the way in which psychology goes beyond neuroscience, or mind beyond
brain.

These "logical" chapters do, as Hofstadter hoped, clarify the central
argument of Gödel, Escher, Bach. They provide some new explanatory
metaphors, while avoiding the potentially distracting references to
other areas that made the first book so richly exciting. But readers
who are logic-phobic, or already persuaded (perhaps by Gödel, Escher,
Bach itself) of this metamathematical point, may not be interested.
They may decide to skip, or anyway to skim, them. What they shouldn't
do, however, is to skip the rest of the book.

The second half of I Am a Strange Loop starts with an intensely
personal account of the author's savage grief following the sudden
death of his wife, the mother of their two infant children, in
December 1993. To supplement his memories of that wretched time, and
of the years of mourning-and the permanent sense of loss-that
followed, Hofstadter includes lengthy extracts from an extended e-mail
correspondence that he had in 1994 with his friend and colleague the
philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Why is this account, emotionally gripping though it is, relevant here?
What can a description of such suffering add to a volume inspired by
Gödel's proof? Well, remember the antireductionist claim cited above:
that the self is-repeat, is-an abstract pattern, which emerges from a
feedback system of sufficient complexity-namely, the adult human
brain. If the self, the mind or the soul-Hofstadter uses these three
terms more or less interchangeably-is not the brain, it's not obvious
that it must cease to exist when the (dead) person's brain-stuff is
dispersed by flames or by decay. Certainly the self can no longer be
instantiated by that very brain-stuff, because the relevant
complexity, or organization, has disappeared. But perhaps it can be
instantiated elsewhere-in the minds or selves of the survivors?

Hofstadter argues that it can. This is not merely a question of the
survivors still having memories of the dead person, although that is
indeed essential. Rather, it's a question of that person's self, her
idiosyncratic "point of view," having entered into the selves of the
survivors over past years. And this, in turn, is not a question of
mere psychological influence, as when one spouse "catches" a love of
opera from the other. Rather, each spouse interpenetrates the other's
mental life and personal ideals over the years. In short, each spouse
lives in the other, albeit at a much less fine-grained level (the same
overall pattern, but represented by fewer personal pixels). And a
spouse who dies continues to live after death in the bereaved partner
and, to a lesser extent, children and close friends.

That phrase lives in is to be interpreted literally here. The self,
even the consciousness, of the dead person still survives within the
mind-patterns of the survivors. I spoke, above, of Hofstadter's
"permanent loss." What's lost is not the whole person, however, but
the rich details (the missing pixels, which had existed within that
person's own self-pattern during her bodily life)-plus, of course, the
instantiation in her body/brain of what would have been her future
story. But that future story (again, in a less detailed way) can still
be told, even experienced, thanks to the survivors. In a real sense,
according to Hofstadter, his wife did live to see her children grow
up.

That may sound weird, not to say crazy-even to readers who believe in
an immortal soul. Had anyone else said it, one might write it off as
mere wishful thinking or as unthinking sentimentality. But those
charges alone can't dismiss Hofstadter's remarks. For he had long
believed that the self is an abstract pattern-as a careful reading of
Gödel, Escher, Bach makes clear. One reason that he had such a lengthy
e-mail exchange with Dennett at that time was that their philosophies
of mind were very similar. If anyone could understand, and resonate
with, what Hofstadter was saying, Dennett could. (So could the
artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, whose ideas about mind
had deeply influenced Dennett and with whom Hofstadter exchanged
similar e-mails.)

To be sure, the sincerity and longevity of a belief, and even the
prior generation of arguments intended to buttress it, can't guarantee
its truth. Perhaps Hofstadter's conclusions about mind and self, newly
expressed here without the distracting richness of Gödel, Escher,
Bach, are unsound? Readers will judge that for themselves. But they
must allow that this is not a trivial volume. Hofstadter's grief-
ridden memoir tests his philosophy in the most personally challenging
way. It's a deep book and merits our attention.
Reviewer Information

Margaret A. Boden is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the
University of Sussex, and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Her latest books are
The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd ed., expanded (Routledge,
2004) and Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, 2 vols.
(Oxford University Press, 2006).

http://www.americanscientist.org/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/55116

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