I Am a Strange Loop

Put less metaphorically, my sense organs feed my brain directly. They also feed the brains of my children and my friends and other people (my readers, for instance), but they do so indirectly — usually through the intermediary channel of language (though sometimes by photography, art, or music). I tell my kids some droll story of what happened at the grocery store checkout stand, and by George, they instantly see it all oh-so-clearly in their mind’s eyes! The customer with the black-and-white tabloid Weekly World News in his cart, the odd look of the cashier as she picks it up and reads the headline about the baby found, perfectly healthy, floating in a life raft from the Titanic, the embarrassed chuckle of the customer, the quip by the next person in line, and so on. The imagery thus created in the brains of my kids, my friends, and others may seem at times to have a vividness rivaling that of images coming directly through their own sense organs.

Our ability to experience life vicariously in this manner is a truly wonderful aspect of human communication, but of course most of anyone’s perceptual input comes from their own perceptual hardware, and only a smaller part comes filtered this way through other beings. That, to put it bluntly, is why I remain primarily myself, and why you remain primarily yourself. If, however, my perceptions came flooding as fast and furiously into your brain as they do into mine, then we’d be talking a truly different ballgame. But at least for the time being, there’s no danger of such high communication rates between, say, my eyes and your brain.

Shared Perception, Shared Control

At first I had proposed that a human “I” results from the existence of a very special strange loop in a human brain, but now we see that since we mirror many people inside our crania, there will be many loops of different sizes and degrees of complexity, so we have to refine our understanding. Part of the refinement hinges, as I just stated, on the fact that one of these loops in a given brain is privileged — mediated by a perceptual system that feeds directly into that brain. There is another part of the story, though, which has to do with what a brain controls rather than what it perceives.

The thermostat in my house does not regulate the temperature in your house. Analogously, the decisions made in my brain do not control the body that’s hard-wired to your brain. When you and I play tennis, it’s only my arms that my brain controls! Or so it would seem at first. On second thought, that’s clearly an oversimplification, and this is where things start to get blurry once again. I have partial and indirect control over your arms — after all, wherever I send the ball, that’s where you run, and my shot has a great deal to do with how you will swing your arms. So in some indirect fashion, my brain can control your muscles in a game of tennis, but it is not a very reliable fashion. Likewise, if I hit my brakes while driving down the road, then the person behind me will also hit their brakes. What happens in my brain exerts a little bit of control over that driver’s actions, but it is an unreliable and imprecise control.

The type of external control just described does not create a profound blurring of two people’s identities. Tennis and driving do not give rise to deep interpenetrations of souls. But things get more complicated when language enters the show. It is through language most of all that our brains can exert a fair measure of indirect control over other humans’ bodies — a phenomenon very familiar not only to parents and drill sergeants, but also to advertisers, political “spin doctors”, and whiny, wheedling teen-agers. Through language, other people’s bodies can become flexible extensions of our own bodies. In that sense, then, my brain is attached to your body in somewhat the same way as it is to my body — it’s just that, once again, the connection is not hard-wired. My brain is attached to your body via channels of communication that are much slower and more indirect than those linking it to my body, so the control is much less efficient.

For example, I am infinitely better at writing my signature with my own hand than if I were to try to get you to do so by describing all the tiny details of the many curves that I execute so smoothly and unconsciously whenever I “sign out” at the grocery store checkout stand. But the initial notion that there is a fundamental and absolute distinction between how my brain is linked to my own body and how it’s linked to someone else’s body is seen to be exaggerated. There is a difference in degree, that’s clear, but it’s not clear that it’s a difference in kind.