I Am a Strange Loop (38 page)

Our keenest insights into causality in the often terribly confusing world of living beings invariably result from well-honed acts of categorization at a macroscopic level. For example, the reasons for a mysterious war taking place in some remote land might suddenly leap into sharp focus for us when an insightful commentator links the war’s origin to an ancient conflict between certain religious dogmas. On the other hand, no enlightenment whatsoever would come if a physicist tried to explain the war by saying it came about thanks to trillions upon trillions of momentum-conserving collisions taking place among ephemeral quantum-mechanical specks.

I could go on and say similar things about how we always perceive love affairs and other grand themes of human life in terms of intangible everyday patterns belonging to the large-scale world, and never in terms of the interactions of elementary particles. In contrast to declaring that quantum electrodynamics is “what makes the world go round”, I could instead cite such eternally elusive mysteries as beauty, generosity, sexuality, insecurity, fidelity, jealousy, loneliness, and on and on, making sure not to leave out that wonderful tingling of two souls that we curiously call “chemistry”, and that the French, even more curiously, describe as
avoir des atomes crochus,
which means having atoms that are hooked together.

Making such a list, though fun, would be a simple exercise and would tell you nothing new. The key point, though, is that we perceive essentially
everything
in life at this level, and essentially
nothing
at the level of the invisible components that, intellectually, we know we are made out of. There are, I concede, a few exceptions, such as our modern keen awareness of the microscopic causes of disease, and also our interest in the tiny sperm–egg events that give rise to a new life, and the common knowledge of the role of microscopic factors in the determination of the sex of a child — but these are highly exceptional. The general rule is that we swim in the world of everyday concepts, and it is they, not micro-events, that define our reality.

Am I a Strange Marble?

The foregoing means that we can best understand our
own
actions just as we best understand other creatures’ actions — in terms of stable but intangible internal patterns called “hopes” and “beliefs” and so on. But the need for self-understanding goes much further than that. We are powerfully driven to create a term that summarizes the presumed unity, internal coherence, and temporal stability of all the hopes and beliefs and desires that are found inside our own cranium — and that term, as we all learn very early on, is “I”. And pretty soon this high abstraction behind the scenes comes to feel like the maximally real entity in the universe.

Just as we are convinced that ideas and emotions, rather than particles, cause wars and love affairs, so we are convinced that our “I” causes our own actions. The Grand Pusher in and of our bodies is our “I”, that marvelous marble whose roundness, solidity, and size we so unmistakably feel inside the murky box of our manifold hopes and desires.

Of course I am alluding here to “Epi” — the nonexistent marble in the box of envelopes. But the “I” illusion is far subtler and more recalcitrant than the illusion of a marble created by many aligned layers of paper and glue. Where does the tenaciousness of this illusion come from? Why does it refuse to go away no matter how much “hard science” is thrown at it? To try to answer questions of this sort, I shall now focus on the strange loop that makes an “I” — where it is found, and how it arises and stabilizes.

A Pearl Necklace I Am Not

To begin with, for each of us, the strange loop of our unique “I”-ness resides inside our own brain. There is thus one such loop lurking inside the cranium of each normal human being. Actually, I take that back, since, in Chapter 15, I will raise this number rather drastically. Nonetheless, saying that there is just one is a good approximation to start with.

When I refer to “a strange loop inside a brain”, do I have in mind a physical structure — some kind of palpable closed curve, perhaps a circuit made out of many neurons strung end-to-end? Could this neural loop be neatly excised in a brain operation and laid out on a table, like a delicate pearl necklace, for all to see? And would the person whose brain had thus been “delooped” thereby become an unconscious zombie?

Needless to say, that’s hardly what I have in mind. The strange loop making up an “I” is no more a pinpointable, extractable physical object than an audio feedback loop is a tangible object possessing a mass and a diameter. Such a loop may exist “inside” an auditorium, but the fact that it is physically localized doesn’t mean that one can pick it up and heft it, let alone measure such things as its temperature and thickness! An “I” loop, like an audio feedback loop, is an abstraction — but an abstraction that seems immensely real, almost physically palpable, to beings like us, beings that have high readings on the hunekometer.

I Am My Brain’s Most Complex Symbol

Like a careenium (and also like
PM
), a brain can be seen on at (at least) two levels — a low level involving very small physical processes (perhaps involving particles, perhaps involving neurons — take your pick), and a high level involving large structures selectively triggerable by perception, which in this book I have called
symbols,
and which are the structures in our brain that constitute our categories.

Among the untold thousands of symbols in the repertoire of a normal human being, there are some that are far more frequent and dominant than others, and one of them is given, somewhat arbitrarily, the name “I” (at least in English). When we talk about other people, we talk about them in terms of such things as their ambitions and habits and likes and dislikes, and we accordingly need to formulate for each of them the analogue of an “I”, residing, naturally, inside
their
cranium, not our own. This counterpart of our own “I” of course receives various labels, depending on the context, such as “Danny” or “Monica” or “you” or “he” or “she”.

The process of perceiving one’s self interacting with the rest of the universe (comprised mostly, of course, of one’s family and friends and favorite pieces of music and favorite books and movies and so on) goes on for a lifetime. Accordingly, the “I” symbol, like all symbols in our brain, starts out pretty small and simple, but it grows and grows and grows, eventually becoming the most important abstract structure residing in our brains. But where is it in our brains? It is not in some small localized spot; it is spread out all over, because it has to include so much about so much.

Internalizing Our Weres, Our Wills, and Our Woulds

My self-symbol, unlike that of my dog, reaches back fairly accurately, though quite spottily, into the deep (and seemingly endless) past of my existence. It is our unlimitedly extensible human category system that underwrites this fantastic jump in sophistication from other animals to us, in that it allows each of us to build up our episodic memory — the gigantic warehouse of our recollections of events, minor and major, simple and complex, that have happened to us (and to our friends and family members and people in books and films and newspaper articles and so forth,
ad infinitum
) over a span of decades.

Similarly, driven by its dreads and dreams, my self-symbol peers with great intensity, though with little confidence, out into the murky fog of my future existence. My vast episodic memory of my past, together with its counterpart pointing blurrily towards what is yet to come (my
episodic projectory,
I think I’ll call it), and further embellished by a fantastic folio of alternative versions or “subjunctive replays” of countless episodes (“if only X had happened…”; “how lucky that Y never took place…”, “wouldn’t it be great if Z were to occur…” — and why not call this my
episodic subjunctory
?), gives rise to the endless hall of mirrors that constitutes my “I”.

I Cannot Live without My Self

Since we perceive not particles interacting but macroscopic patterns in which certain things push other things around with a blurry causality, and since the Grand Pusher in and of our bodies is our “I”, and since our bodies push the rest of the world around, we are left with no choice but to conclude that the “I” is where the causality buck stops. The “I” seems to each of us to be the root of all our actions, all our decisions.

This is only one side of the truth, of course, since it utterly snubs the viewpoint whereby an impersonal physics of micro-entities is what makes the world go round, but it is a surprisingly reliable and totally indispensable distortion. These two properties of the naïve, non-physics viewpoint — its reliability and its indispensability — lock it ever more tightly into our belief systems as we pass from babyhood through childhood to adulthood.

I might add that the “I” of a particle physicist is no less entrenched than is the “I” of a novelist or a shoestore clerk. A profound mastery of all of physics will not in the least undo the decades of brainwashing by culture and language, not to mention the millions of years of human evolution preparing the way. The notion of “I”, since it is an incomparably efficient shorthand, is an indispensable explanatory device, rather than just an optional crutch that can be cheerily jettisoned when one grows sufficiently scientifically sophisticated.

The Slow Buildup of a Self

What would make a human brain a candidate for housing a loop of self-representation? Why would a fly brain or a mosquito brain not be just as valid a candidate? Why, for that matter, not a bacterium, an ovum, a sperm, a virus, a tomato plant, a tomato, or a pencil? The answer should be clear: a human brain is a representational system that knows no bounds in terms of the extensibility or flexibility of its categories. A mosquito brain, by contrast, is a tiny representational system that contains practically no categories at all, never mind being flexible and extensible. Very small representational systems, such as those of bacteria, ova, sperms, plants, thermostats, and so forth, do not enjoy the luxury of self-representation. And a tomato and a pencil are not representational systems at all, so for them, the story ends right there (sorry, little tomato! sorry, little pencil!).

So a human brain is a strong candidate for having the potential of rich perceptual feedback, and thus rich self-representation. But what kinds of perceptual cycles do we get involved in? We begin life with the most elementary sorts of feedback about ourselves, which stimulate us to formulate categories for our most obvious body parts, and building on this basic pedestal, we soon develop a sense for our bodies as flexible physical objects. In the meantime, as we receive rewards for various actions and punishments for others, we begin to develop a more abstract sense of “good” and “bad”, as well as notions of guilt and pride, and our sense of ourselves as abstract entities that have the power to decide to make things happen (such as continuing to run up a steep hill even though our legs are begging us to just walk) begins to take root.

It is crucial to our young lives that we hone our developing self-symbol as precisely as possible. We want (and need) to find out where we belong in all sorts of social hierarchies and classes, and sometimes, even if we don’t want to know these things, we find out anyway. For instance, we are all told, early on, that we are “cute”; in some of us, however, this message is reinforced far more strongly than in others. In this manner, each of us comes to realize that we are “good-looking” or “gullible” or “cheeky” or “shy” or “spoiled” or “funny” or “lazy” or “original”, or whatever. Dozens of such labels and concepts accrete to our growing self-symbols.

As we go through thousands of experiences large and small, our representations of these experiences likewise accrete to our self-symbols. Of course a memory of a visit to the Grand Canyon, say, is attached not only to our self-symbol but to many other symbols in our brains, but our self-symbol is enriched and rendered more complex by this attachment.

Making Tosses, Internalizing Bounces

Constantly, relentlessly, day by day, moment by moment, my self-symbol is being shaped and refined — and in turn, it triggers external actions galore, day after day after day. (Or so the causality appears to it, since it is on this level, not on the micro-level, that it perceives the world.) It sees its chosen actions (kicks, tosses, screams, laughs, jokes, jabs, trips, books, pleas, threats, etc.) making all sorts of entities in its environment react in large or small ways, and it internalizes those effects in terms of its coarse-grained categories (as to their graininess, it has no choice). Through endless random explorations like this, my self-symbol slowly acquires concise and valuable insight into its nature as a chooser and launcher of actions, embedded in a vast and multifarious, partially predictable world.

To be more concrete: I throw a basketball toward a hoop, and thanks to hordes of microscopic events in my arms, my fingers, the ball’s spin, the air, the rim, and so forth, all of which I am unaware of, I either miss or make my hook shot. This tiny probing of the world, repeated hundreds or thousands of times, informs me ever more accurately about my level of skill as a basketball player (and also helps me decide if I like the sport or not). My sense of my skill level is, of course, but a very coarse-grained summary of billions of fine-grained facts about my body and brain.

Similarly, my social actions induce reactions on the part of other sentient beings. Those reactions bounce back to me and I perceive them in terms of my repertoire of symbols, and in this way I indirectly perceive myself through my effect on others. I am building up my sense of who I am in others’ eyes. My self-symbol is coalescing out of an initial void.

Smiling Like Hopalong Cassidy

One morning when I was about six years old, I mustered all my courage, stood up in my first-grade class’s show-and-tell session, and proudly declared, “I can smile just like Hopalong Cassidy!” (I don’t remember how I had convinced myself that I had this grand ability, but I was as sure of it as I was of anything in the world.) I then proceeded to flash this lovingly practiced smile in front of everybody. In my episodic memory lo these many decades later there is a vivid trace of this act of derring-do, but unfortunately I have only the dimmest recollection of how my teacher, Miss McMahon, a very sweet woman whom I adored, and my little classmates reacted, and yet their collective reaction, whatever it was, was surely a formative influence on my early life, and thus on my gradually growing, slowly stabilizing “I”.