I Am a Strange Loop

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.