I Am a Strange Loop

It seems to me, therefore, that the instinctive although seldom articulated purpose of holding a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, and to collectively rekindle in them all, for one last time, the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person, profiting directly or indirectly from the presence of one another, feeling the shared presence of that person in the brains that remain, and thus solidifying to the maximal extent possible those secondary personal gemmae that remain aflicker in all these different brains. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word “love” cannot, thus, be separated from the word “I”; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.

CHAPTER 19

Consciousness = Thinking

So Where’s Consciousness in my Loopy Tale?

FROM the very start in this book, I have used a few key terms pretty much interchangeably: “self”, “soul”, “I”, “a light on inside”, and “consciousness”. To me, these are all names for the same phenomenon. To other people, they may not seem to denote one single thing, but that’s how they seem to me. It’s like prime numbers of the form 4n + 1 and prime numbers that are the sums of two squares — on the surface these would seem to be descriptions of completely different entities, but on closer analysis they turn out to denote exactly the same entities.

In my way of looking at things, all of these phenomena come in shades of gray, and whatever shade one of them has in a particular being (natural or artificial), all the others have that same shade. Thus I feel that in talking about “I”-ness, I have also been talking about consciousness throughout. Yet I know that some people will protest that although I may have been addressing issues of personal identity, and perhaps the concepts of “I” and “self”, I haven’t even touched the far deeper and more mysterious riddle of consciousness. They will skeptically ask me, “What, then, is experience in terms of your strange loops? How do strange loops in the brain tell us anything about what it feels like to be alive, to smell honeysuckle, to see a sunset, or to listen to raindrops patter on a tin roof? That is what consciousness is all about! How does that have anything to do with your strange, loopy idea?”

I doubt that I can answer such questions to the satisfaction of these hard-core skeptics, for they will surely find what I say both too simple and too evasive. Nonetheless, here is my answer, stripped down to its essence: Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to make it even more pithy, consciousness is thinking. As Descartes said, Cogito ergo sum.

Unfortunately, I suspect that this answer is far too compressed for even my most sympathetic readers, so I will try to spell it out a little more explicitly. Most of the time, any given symbol in our brain is dormant, like a book sitting inertly in the remote stacks of a huge library. Every so often, some event will trigger the retrieval of this book from the stacks, and it will be opened and its pages will come alive for some reader. In an analogous way, inside a human brain, perceived external events are continually triggering the highly selective retrieval of symbols from dormancy, and causing them to come alive in all sorts of unanticipated, unprecedented configurations. This dance of symbols in the brain is what consciousness is. (It is also what thinking is.) Note that I say “symbols” and not “neurons”. The dance has to be perceived at that level for it to constitute consciousness. So there you have a slightly more spelled-out version.

Enter the Skeptics

“But who reads these symbols and their configurations?”, some skeptics will ask. “Who feels these symbols ‘come alive’? Where is the counterpart to the reader of the retrieved book?”