I Am a Strange Loop

SL #641: Would you say nonverbal animals enjoy such “primordial” experiences? Do cows savor the deep purple of a flower just as intensely as you do? And do mosquitoes? If you say “yes”, doesn’t that come dangerously close to suggesting that cows and mosquitoes have just as much consciousness as you do?

SL #642: Mosquito brains are far less complex than mine, so they can’t have the same kinds of rich experiences as I do.

SL #641: Now wait a minute. You can’t have it both ways. A moment ago, you were insisting that brain complexity doesn’t make any difference — that if a brain lacks that special je ne sais quoi that separates things that feel from things that don’t feel, then it’s not a locus of consciousness. But now you’re saying that the complexity of the brain in question does make a difference.

SL #642: Well, I guess it has to, to some extent. A mosquito doesn’t have the equipment to appreciate a purple flower in the way I do. But maybe a cow does, or at least it comes closer. But complexity alone does not account for the presence of feeling and experience in brains.

SL #641: Let’s consider a bit more deeply this notion of experiencing and feeling the world outside. If you were to stare at a big broad sheet of pure, uniform purple, your favorite shade ever, entirely filling your visual field, would you experience the same rush as when you see that color in the petals of a flower blooming in a garden?

SL #642: I doubt it. Part of what makes my experience of a purple flower so intense is all the subtle shades I see on each petal, the delicate way each petal is curved, and the way the petals all swirl together around a glowing center made of dozens of tiny dots…

SL #641: Not to mention the way the flower is poised on a branch, and the branch is part of a bush, and the bush is just one of many in a brightly colored garden…

SL #642: Are you intimating that I don’t enjoy the purple for its own sake, but only because of the way it’s embedded in a vast scene? This goes too far. The surroundings may enhance my experience, but I love that rich velvety purple purely for itself, independently of anything else.

SL #641: Why then do you describe it with the word “velvety”? Do flies or dogs experience purple flowers as “velvety”? Isn’t that word a reference to velvet? Doesn’t it mean that your visual experience calls up deeply buried memories, perhaps tactile memories from childhood, of running your fingers along a purple cushion made of velvet? Or maybe you’re unconsciously reminded of a dark-colored wine you once drank whose label described it as “velvety”. How can you claim your experience of purple is “independent of anything else in the world”?

SL #642: All I’m trying to say is that there are basic, primordial experiences out of which larger experiences are built, and that even the primordial ones are radically, qualitatively different from what goes on in simple physical systems like ropes dangling in breezes and floats bobbing in toilets. A dangling rope doesn’t feel anything when a breeze impinges on it. There’s no feeling in there, there’s no here there. But when I see purple or taste chocolate, that’s a sensual experience I’m having, and it’s from millions of such sensual experiences that my mental life is built up. There’s a big mystery here, in this breach.

SL #641: It sounds attractive, but unfortunately I think you’ve got it all backwards. Those little sensual experiences are to the grand pattern of your mental life as the letters in a novel are to the novel’s plot and characters — irrelevant, arbitrary tokens, rather than carriers of meaning. There is no meaning to the letter “b”, and yet out of it and the other letters of the alphabet, put together in complex sequences, comes all the richness and humanity in a novel or a story.

SL #642: That’s the wrong level to talk about a story. Writers choose words, not letters, and words are of course imbued with meaning. Put together a lot of those tiny meanings and you get one big meaning-rich thing. Similarly, life is made out of many tiny sensual experiences, chained together to make one huge sensuo-emotional experience.

SL #641: Hold on a minute. No isolated word has depth and power. When embedded in a complex context, a word may have great power, but in isolation it does not. It’s an illusion to attribute power to the word itself, and it’s a greater illusion to attribute power to the letters constituting the word.

SL #642: I agree that letters have no power or meaning. But words, yes! They are the atoms of meaning out of which larger structures of meaning are built. You can’t get big meanings from atoms that are meaningless!

SL #641: Oh, really? I thought you just conceded that exactly this happens in the case of words and letters. But all right — let’s move on from that example. Would you say that music has meaning?

SL #642: Music is among the most meaningful things I know.