I Am a Strange Loop

I suspect that these skeptics would argue that the symbols’ dance on its own is merely motion of material stuff, unfelt by anyone, so that despite my claim, this dance cannot constitute consciousness. The skeptics would like me to name or point to some special locus of subjective awareness that we all have of our thoughts and perceptions. I feel, though, that such a hope is confused, because it uses what I consider to be just another synonym for “conscious” — namely, “aware” — in posing the same question once more, but at a different level. In other words, people seeking the “reader” for configurations of activated symbols may accept the idea of symbols galore being triggered in the brain, but they refuse to call that kind of internal churning “consciousness” because now they want the symbols themselves to be perceived. These people would probably be particularly unhappy if I were to bring up the careenium metaphor at this point and to suggest that the dance of simmballs in the careenium constitutes consciousness. They would argue that it’s just the mutual bashing of scads of tiny little marbles on a glorified pool table, and that that’s obviously empty and devoid of consciousness. They want much more than that.

Such skeptics are in essence kicking the problem upstairs — instead of settling for the idea that symbol-level brain activity (or simmball-level careenium activity) that mirrors external events is consciousness, they now insist that the internal events of brain activity must in turn be perceived if consciousness is to arise. This runs the risk of setting up an infinite regress and thus moving further and further away from an answer to the riddle of consciousness rather than homing in on an answer to it.

I will give such people one thing, however — I will agree that symbolic activity is itself an important, indispensable focus of a human brain’s attention (but I would quickly add that this does not hold for chickens or frogs or butterflies, and pretty darn little for dogs). Mature human brains are constantly trying to reduce the complexity of what they perceive, and this means that they are constantly trying to get unfamiliar, complex patterns made of many symbols that have been freshly activated in concert to trigger just one familiar pre-existing symbol (or a very small set of them). In fact, that’s the main business of human brains — to take a complex situation and to put one’s finger on what matters in it, to distill from an initial welter of sensations and ideas what a situation really is all about. To spot the gist. To Spot, the gist, however, doesn’t much matter, and the gist certainly doesn’t matter one whit to the flea on Spot’s wagging tail.

I suspect that all of this may sound a bit abstruse and vague, so I’ll illustrate it with a typical example.

Symbols Trigger More Symbols

A potential new doctoral student named Nicole comes to town for a day to explore the possibility of doing a Ph.D. in my research group. After my graduate students and I have interacted with her for several hours, first at our Center and then over a Chinese dinner, we agree that we all find her mind delightfully lively and her thoughts just on our wavelength, and it’s clear that our enthusiasm is reciprocated. Needless to say, then, we are all hopeful that she’ll join us next fall. After she returns home, Nicole sends me an email saying that she is still very excited by our ideas and that they are continuing to reverberate vividly in her mind. I reply with a note of encouragement, and then there ensues an e-silence for a couple of weeks. When I finally send her a second email telling her how eager we all are for her to come next year, a couple of days pass and then a terse and somewhat starchy reply arrives, saying that she’s sorry but she’s decided to go to another university for graduate school. “But I hope we’ll have a chance to interact in the future,” she adds politely at the end.

Well, this little episode is all fresh to me. Nicole is a unique individual, our lively conversations with her were all sui generis, and the complex configuration of symbols activated in my brain by the whole event is, by definition, unprecedented. And yet on another level that’s not true at all.