I Am a Strange Loop

SL #641: Hold your horses for a moment. Think of the illusion of the solid marble in the box of envelopes. Were I to insist that that box of envelopes had a genuine marble in it, you’d say I had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a tactile illusion, wouldn’t you?

SL #642: I would indeed, although the feeling that something solid is in there is not an illusion.

SL #641: Agreed. So my claim is that your brain (like mine and like everyone else’s) has, out of absolute necessity, invented something it calls an “I”, but that that thing is as real (or rather, as unreal) as is that “marble” in that box of envelopes. In that sense, your brain has tricked itself. The “I” — yours, mine, everyone’s — is a tremendously effective illusion, and falling for it has fantastic survival value. Our “I” ’s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life.

SL #642: You’re telling me there is not really any “I”. Yet my brain tells me just as assuredly that there is an “I”. Then you tell me that this is just my brain pulling a trick on me. But excuse me — pulling a trick on whom? You’ve just told me that this me doesn’t exist, so who is my brain pulling a trick on? And — pardon me once again — how can I even call it “my brain” if there is no me for it to belong to?

SL #641: The problem is that in a sense, an “I” is something created out of nothing. And since making something out of nothing is never possible, the alleged something turns out to be an illusion, in the end, but a very powerful one, like the marble among the envelopes. However, the “I” is an illusion far more entrenched and recalcitrant than the marble illusion, because in the case of “I”, there is no simple revelatory act corresponding to turning the box upside down and shaking it, then peering in between the envelopes and finding nothing solid and spherical in there. We don’t have access to the inner workings of our brains. And so the only perspective we have on our “I”-ness marble comes from the counterpart to squeezing all the envelopes at once, and that perspective says it’s real!

SL #642: If that’s the only possible perspective, then what would ever give us even the slightest sense that we might be lending credence to a myth?

SL #641: One thing that gives many people a sneaking suspicion that something about this “I” notion might be mythical is precisely what you’ve been troubled about all through our discussion — namely, there seems to be something incompatible between the hard laws of physics and the existence of vague, shadowy things called “I” ’s. How could experiencers come to exist in a world where there are just inanimate things moving around? It seems as if perception, sensation, and experience are something extra, above and beyond physics.

SL #642: Unless, of course, there’s feelium, but that’s not by any means clear. In any case, I agree that conflicts with physics give a hint that this “I” notion is very elusive and cries out for an explanation.

SL #641: A second hint that something needs revision has to do with what we perceive as causing what. In our everyday life, we take it for granted that an “I” can cause things, can push things around. If I decide to drive to the grocery store, my one-ton automobile winds up taking me there and bringing me back. Now that seems pretty peculiar in the world of physics, where everything comes about solely as a result of how particles interact. How does the particle story leave room for a shadowy, ethereal “I” to cause a heavy car to move somewhere? This, too, casts a bit of doubt on the reality of the notion of “I”.

SL #642: Perhaps — but if so, it’s very very slight.

SL #641: No matter. That extremely slight doubt flies in the face of what we all take for granted ever since our earliest childhood, which is that “I” ’s do exist — and in most people, the latter belief simply wins out, hands down. The battle is never even engaged, in most people’s minds. On the other hand, for a few people the battle starts to rage: physics versus “I”. And various escape hatches have been proposed, including the notion that consciousness is a novel kind of quantum phenomenon, or the idea that consciousness resides uniformly in all matter, and so on. My proposal for a truce to end this battle is to see the “I” as a hallucination perceived by a hallucination, which sounds pretty strange, or perhaps even stranger: the “I” as a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

SL #642: That sounds way beyond strange. That sounds crazy.