??!?!!???, Therefore I Am
I just moved Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop into the “finished” column of my reading list – this was our Dad’s birthday gift to me this year, and a good one – so I’d better jot something down about it before it melts away from my mind entirely.
I haven’t read any other Hofstadter. (Can anyone out there lend me Gödel, Escher, Bach at Narragansett next month?) I like his style: quirky is good. There was a surprising lot here I didn’t agree with.
My attempted nickel version of Hofstadter’s main idea: what we perceive as our consciousness, “I,” is a “strange loop,” which is maddeningly hard to paraphrase. Essentially it has to do with a self-containing, self-referential pattern. Consciousness develops and grows in a human being as this strange loop feeds back into itself and establishes a stable pattern. This is a high-level phenomenon, found on an abstract pattern level rather than a biological or physical one.
What throws me off is that Hofstadter doesn’t deal with the present-tense nature of consciousness. It seems to me that an “I” isn’t just defined by a sustained pattern, but rather the constant, immediate act of generating that pattern. In fact, it seems to me that calling the “I” a sustained pattern is completely the wrong approach – nothing is sustained over time; you’ve got the Here and Now, plus an extensive mental representation of your past perception of that “I,” but only that Here and Now is the part that counts as consciousness.
And then the feedback isn’t so much from “I” into itself, but rather from this separate mental representation of the “past I” into the “I.” Just as mental representations of the visual field, soundscape, sense of location, and so on feed into the “I.” There must be some degree of “I” (that is, perception of consciousness) feeding into itself, but it’s not clear to me why this would be any more prominent in the “I” than the perception that one is receiving other kinds of information (that is, “I am engaged in seeing or hearing,” as opposed to “I see or hear X”).
One of Hofstadter’s thought exercises involves a science-fiction scenario where someone is teleported simultaneously to two other locations (cloned in the process); where does the “I” reside, then? In both? This only seems tricky if you assume there’s a continuity here; there’s not, I don’t think, and what you would get is two separate, independent Here and Now “I”’s that happen to have identical past mental representations of themselves. (Hofstadter hashes out a position that the “I” is doubled, more or less, though he doesn't stake an emphatic claim.)
Skipping over the biological/physiological level seems like a jump too far, too. In another example, Hofstadter imagines a world made entirely of inseparable twin pairs (not conjoined, just inseparable): if they constantly coexist, collaborating on the same thoughts and actions, do they have two “I”’s or one shared “I”? But there’s a biological reason this doesn’t happen, right? – what a brain has evolved to do certainly includes distinguishing itself from the outside world, and if Twin A’s brain is going to register early on that Twin B’s body has no connection to it. And where that divide is drawn, so is the “I” delimited.
A shade of this idea is one of Hofstadter’s most unusual arguments: that a soul does not in fact exist in only one body, but can spread (at least faintly) into the bodies of those close to it. Hofstadter’s main example, touchingly, is he himself and his wife, who died very suddenly in her 40s; in a tangible sense, he argues, his wife’s soul continues on in the mind-patterns he shared with her (hopes, beliefs, love of pieces of music). I think there’s something meaningful there, but when you get down to it, the Carol Hofstadter patterns inside Douglas Hofstadter have been generated by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s important, but it’s not anyone else’s soul.
I also have a feeling that you can’t treat a brain as a neutral medium for establishing patterns, and then look only at the patterns, as Hofstadter does: we’re defined by what our neurons do, however confusing the scheme is, and they’re set up for some kinds of pattern-making and not for others.
Anyway, it’s a good read (it took over more of the weekend than I intended to give it), and I recommend it. It’s going to make me enjoy Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto more, since Hofstadter devotes some time to describing how touching he finds it, and his wife found it. Also, one of his examples of self-referential sentences still has me laughing out loud every time I think of it:
“If wishes were horses, the antecedent clause in this conditional sentence would be true.”
Yep. Nerd indicator light: lit. Still laughing.
I haven’t read any other Hofstadter. (Can anyone out there lend me Gödel, Escher, Bach at Narragansett next month?) I like his style: quirky is good. There was a surprising lot here I didn’t agree with.
My attempted nickel version of Hofstadter’s main idea: what we perceive as our consciousness, “I,” is a “strange loop,” which is maddeningly hard to paraphrase. Essentially it has to do with a self-containing, self-referential pattern. Consciousness develops and grows in a human being as this strange loop feeds back into itself and establishes a stable pattern. This is a high-level phenomenon, found on an abstract pattern level rather than a biological or physical one.
What throws me off is that Hofstadter doesn’t deal with the present-tense nature of consciousness. It seems to me that an “I” isn’t just defined by a sustained pattern, but rather the constant, immediate act of generating that pattern. In fact, it seems to me that calling the “I” a sustained pattern is completely the wrong approach – nothing is sustained over time; you’ve got the Here and Now, plus an extensive mental representation of your past perception of that “I,” but only that Here and Now is the part that counts as consciousness.
And then the feedback isn’t so much from “I” into itself, but rather from this separate mental representation of the “past I” into the “I.” Just as mental representations of the visual field, soundscape, sense of location, and so on feed into the “I.” There must be some degree of “I” (that is, perception of consciousness) feeding into itself, but it’s not clear to me why this would be any more prominent in the “I” than the perception that one is receiving other kinds of information (that is, “I am engaged in seeing or hearing,” as opposed to “I see or hear X”).
One of Hofstadter’s thought exercises involves a science-fiction scenario where someone is teleported simultaneously to two other locations (cloned in the process); where does the “I” reside, then? In both? This only seems tricky if you assume there’s a continuity here; there’s not, I don’t think, and what you would get is two separate, independent Here and Now “I”’s that happen to have identical past mental representations of themselves. (Hofstadter hashes out a position that the “I” is doubled, more or less, though he doesn't stake an emphatic claim.)
Skipping over the biological/physiological level seems like a jump too far, too. In another example, Hofstadter imagines a world made entirely of inseparable twin pairs (not conjoined, just inseparable): if they constantly coexist, collaborating on the same thoughts and actions, do they have two “I”’s or one shared “I”? But there’s a biological reason this doesn’t happen, right? – what a brain has evolved to do certainly includes distinguishing itself from the outside world, and if Twin A’s brain is going to register early on that Twin B’s body has no connection to it. And where that divide is drawn, so is the “I” delimited.
A shade of this idea is one of Hofstadter’s most unusual arguments: that a soul does not in fact exist in only one body, but can spread (at least faintly) into the bodies of those close to it. Hofstadter’s main example, touchingly, is he himself and his wife, who died very suddenly in her 40s; in a tangible sense, he argues, his wife’s soul continues on in the mind-patterns he shared with her (hopes, beliefs, love of pieces of music). I think there’s something meaningful there, but when you get down to it, the Carol Hofstadter patterns inside Douglas Hofstadter have been generated by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s important, but it’s not anyone else’s soul.
I also have a feeling that you can’t treat a brain as a neutral medium for establishing patterns, and then look only at the patterns, as Hofstadter does: we’re defined by what our neurons do, however confusing the scheme is, and they’re set up for some kinds of pattern-making and not for others.
Anyway, it’s a good read (it took over more of the weekend than I intended to give it), and I recommend it. It’s going to make me enjoy Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto more, since Hofstadter devotes some time to describing how touching he finds it, and his wife found it. Also, one of his examples of self-referential sentences still has me laughing out loud every time I think of it:
“If wishes were horses, the antecedent clause in this conditional sentence would be true.”
Yep. Nerd indicator light: lit. Still laughing.
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