I Am a Strange Loop (43 page)

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.

CHAPTER 15

Entwinement

Multiple Strange Loops in One Brain

T
WO chapters back, I declared that there was one strange loop in each human cranium, and that this loop constituted our “I”, but I also mentioned that that was just a crude first stab. Indeed, it is a drastic oversimplification. Since we all perceive and represent hundreds of other human beings at vastly differing levels of detail and fidelity inside our cranium, and since the most important facet of all of those human beings is their
own
sense of self, we inevitably mirror, and thus house, a large number of other strange loops inside our head. But what exactly does it mean to say that each human head is the locus of a multiplicity of “I” ’s?

Well, I don’t know precisely what it means. I wish I did! And I reckon that if I did, I would be the world’s greatest philosopher and psychologist rolled into one. As best I can guess, from far below such a Parnassus, it means we manufacture an enormously stripped-down version of our
own
strange loop of selfhood and install it at the core of our symbols for other people, letting that initially crude loopy structure change and grow over time. In the case of the people we know best — our spouse, our parents and siblings, our children, our dearest friends — each of these loops grows over the years to be a very rich structure adorned with many thousands of idiosyncratic ingredients, and each one achieves a great deal of autonomy from the stripped-down “vanilla” strange loop that served as its seed.

Content-free Feedback Loops

More light can be cast on this idea of a “vanilla” strange loop through our old metaphor of the audio feedback loop. Suppose a microphone and a loudspeaker have been connected together so that even a very soft noise will cycle around rapidly, growing louder and louder each pass through the loop, until it becomes a huge ear-piercing shriek. But suppose the room is dead silent at the start. In that case, what happens? What happens is that it remains dead silent. The loop is working just fine, but it is receiving zero noise and outputting zero noise, because zero times anything is still zero. When no signal enters a feedback loop, the loop has no perceptible effect; it might as well not even exist. An audio loop on its own does not a screech make. It takes some non-null input to get things off the ground.

Let’s now translate this scenario to the world of video feedback. If one points a TV camera at the middle of a blank screen, and if the camera sees only the screen and none of its frame, then despite its loopiness, all that this setup will produce, whether the camera stands still, tilts, turns, or zooms in and out (always without reaching the screen’s edge), is a fixed white image. As before, the fact that the image results from a closed feedback loop makes no difference, because nothing external is serving as the
contents
of that loop. I’ll refer to such a content-free feedback loop as a “vanilla” loop, and it’s obvious that two vanilla video loops will be indistinguishable — they are just empty shells with no recognizable traits and no “personal identity”.

If, however, the camera turns far enough left or right, or zooms out far enough to take in something
external
to the blank screen (even just the tiniest patch of color), a bit of the screen will turn non-blank, and then, instantly, that non-blank patch will get sucked into the video loop and cycled around and around, like a tree limb picked up by a tornado. Soon the screen will be populated with many bits of color forming a complex and self-stabilizing pattern. What gives this non-vanilla loop its recognizable identity is not merely the fact that the image contains
itself,
but just as crucially, the fact that
external
items in a particular arrangement are part of the image.

If we bring this metaphor back to the context of human identity, we could say that a “bare” strange loop of selfhood does not give rise to a distinct self — it is just a generic, vanilla shell that requires contact with something else in the world in order to start acquiring a distinctive identity, a distinctive “I”. (For those who enjoy the taboo thrills of non-wellfounded sets — sets that,
contra
Russell, may contain themselves as members — I might raise the puzzle of two singleton sets,
x
and
y,
each of which contains itself, and
only
itself, as a member. Are
x
and
y
identical entities or different entities? Trying to answer the riddle by defining two sets to be identical if and only if they have the same members leads one instantly into an infinite regress, and thus no answer is yielded. I prefer to brazenly cut the Gordian knot by declaring the two sets indistinguishable and hence identical.)

Baby Feedback Loops and Baby “I” ’s

Although I just conjured up the notion of a “vanilla” strange loop in a human brain, I certainly did not mean to suggest that a human baby is already at birth endowed with such a “bare” strange loop of selfhood — that is, a fully-realized, though vanilla, shell of pure, distilled “I”-ness — thanks to the mere fact of having human genes. And far less did I mean to suggest that an unborn human embryo acquires a bare loop of selfhood while still in the womb (let alone at the moment of fertilization!). The realization of human selfhood is not nearly so automatic and genetically predetermined as that would suggest.

The closing of the strange loop of human selfhood is deeply dependent upon the level-changing leap that is
perception,
which means
categorization,
and therefore, the richer and more powerful an organism’s categorization equipment is, the more realized and rich will be its self. Conversely, the poorer an organism’s repertoire of categories, the more impoverished will be the self, until in the limit there simply is no self at all.

As I’ve stressed many times, mosquitoes have essentially no symbols, hence essentially no selves. There is no strange loop inside a mosquito’s head. What goes for mosquitoes goes also for human babies, and all the more so for human embryos. It’s just that babies and embryos have a fantastic potential, thanks to their human genes, to become homes for huge symbol-repertoires that will grow and grow for many decades, while mosquitoes have no such potential. Mosquitoes, because of the initial impoverishment and the fixed non-extensibility of their symbol systems, are doomed to soullessness (oh, all right — maybe 0.00000001 hunekers’ worth of consciousness — just a hair above the level of a thermostat).

For better or for worse, we humans are born with only the tiniest hints of what our perceptual systems will metamorphose into as we interact with the world over the course of decades. At birth, our repertoire of categories is so minimal that I would call it nil for all practical purposes. Deprived of symbols to trigger, a baby cannot make sense of what William James evocatively called the “big, blooming, buzzing confusion” of its sensory input. The building-up of a self-symbol is still far in the future for a baby, and so in babies there exists no strange loop of selfhood, or nearly none.

To put it bluntly, since its future symbolic machinery is 99 percent missing, a human neonate, devastatingly cute though it might be, simply has no “I” — or, to be more generous, if it does possess some minimal dollop of “I”-ness, perhaps it is one huneker’s worth or thereabouts — and that’s not much to write home about. So we see that a human head can contain
less
than one strange loop. What about
more
than one?

Entwined Feedback Loops

To explore in a concrete fashion the idea of two strange loops coexisting in one head, let’s start with a mild variation on our old TV metaphor. Suppose two video cameras and two televisions are set up so that camera A feeds screen A and, far away from it, camera B feeds screen B. Suppose moreover that at all times, camera A picks up
all
of what is on screen A (plus some nearby stuff, to give the A-loop “content”) and cycles it back onto A, and analogously, camera B picks up all of what is on screen B (plus some external content) and cycles it back onto B. Now since systems A and B are, by stipulation, far apart from each other, it is intuitively clear that A and B constitute separate, disjoint feedback loops. If the local scenes picked up by cameras A and B are different, then screens A and B will have clearly distinguishable patterns on them, so the two systems’ “identities” will be easily told apart. So far, what this metaphor gives us is old hat (in fact, it’s two old hats) — two different heads, each having one loop inside it.

What will happen, however, when systems A and B are gradually brought close enough together to begin interacting with each other? Camera A will then see not only screen A but also screen B, and so loop B will enter into the content of loop A (and vice versa).

Let’s assume, as would seem natural, that camera A is closer to screen A than it is to screen B (and vice versa). Then loop A will take up more space on screen A than does loop B, meaning more pixels, and so loop A will be reproduced with higher fidelity on screen A. Loop A will be large and fine-grained, loop B will be small and coarse-grained. But that’s only on screen A. On screen B, everything is reversed: loop B will be larger and finer-grained, while loop A will be smaller and of coarser grain. The last thing I want to remind you of before we go on to a new paragraph is that now loop A, although it’s still
called
just “A”, nonetheless
involves
loop B as well (and vice versa); each of these two loops now plays a role in defining the other one, though loop A plays a
larger
role in its own definition than does loop B (and vice versa).

We now have a metaphor for two individuals, A and B, each of whom has their own personal identity (
i.e.,
their own private strange loop) — and yet part of that private identity is made out of, and is thus dependent upon, the private identity of the
other
individual. Furthermore, the more faithful the image of each screen on the other one, the more the “private” identities of the two loops are intertwined, and the more they start to be fused, blurred, and even, to coin a word, undisentanglable from each other.