I Am a Strange Loop

SL #641: We can try all we want, and it is an interesting exercise for a short while, but we can’t turn off our perception machinery and still survive in the world. We can’t make ourselves not perceive things like trees, flowers, dogs, and other people. We can play the game, can tell ourselves we’ve succeeded, can claim that we have “unperceived” them, but that’s just plain self-fooling. The fact is, we are macroscopic creatures, and so our perception and our categories are enormously coarse-grained relative to the fabric at which the true causality of the universe resides. We’re stuck at the level of radical simplification, for better or for worse.

SL #642: Is that a tragedy? You make it sound like a sad fate.

SL #641: Not at all — it’s our glory! It’s only those who take Zen and the Tao very seriously who consider this to be a condition to be fought against tooth and nail. They resent words, they resent breaking the world up into discrete chunks and giving them names. And so they give you recipes — such as their droll koans — to try to combat this universal built-in drive to use words. I myself have no desire to fight against the use of words in understanding the world’s mysteries — quite the reverse! But I admit that using words has one very major drawback.

SL #642: What is that?

SL #641: It is that we have to live with paradox, and live with it in the most intimate fashion. And the word “I” epitomizes all of that.

SL #642: I don’t see anything in the least paradoxical about the word “I”. In fact, I see no analogy at all between the commonplace, straightforward, down-to-earth notion of “I” and the esoteric, almost ungraspably elusive notion of a Gödelian strange loop.

SL #641: Well, consider this. On the one hand, “I” is an expression denoting a set of very high abstractions: a life story, a set of tastes, a bundle of hopes and fears, some talents and lacunas, a certain degree of wittiness, some other degree of absent-mindedness, and on and on. And yet on the other hand, “I” is an expression denoting a physical object made of trillions of cells, each of which is doing its own thing without the slightest regard for the supposed “whole” of which it is but an infinitesimal part. Put another way, “I” refers at one and the same time to a highly tangible and palpable biological substrate and also to a highly intangible and abstract psychological pattern. When you say “I am hungry”, which one of these levels are you referring to? And to which one are you referring when you declare, “I am happy”? And when you confess, “I can’t remember our old phone number”? And when you exult, “I love skiing”? And when you yawn, “I am sleepy”?

SL #642: Yes, now that you mention it, I do agree that what “I” stands for is a little hard to pin down. Sometimes its referent is concrete and physical, sometimes it’s abstract and mental. And yet when you come down to it, “I” is always both concrete and abstract at the same time.

SL #641: It is just one thing described in two phenomenally different ways, and that’s just the same as Gödel’s sentence. That’s why it is valid to say that it is both about numbers and about itself. Likewise, “I” is both about a myriad of separate physical objects and also about one abstract pattern — the very pattern causing the word to be said!

SL #642: It seems that this little pronoun is the nexus of all that makes our human existence mysterious and mystical. It’s so different from anything else around. The intrinsically self-pointing loop that the pronoun “I” involves — its indexicality, as philosophers would call it — is quintessentially different from all other structures in the universe.

SL #641: I don’t quite agree with that. Or rather, I don’t agree with it at all. The pronoun “I” doesn’t involve a stronger or deeper or more mysterious self-reference than the self-reference at the core of Gödel’s construction. Quite the contrary. It’s just that Gödel spelled out what “I” really means. He revealed that behind the scenes of so-called “indexicals”, there are merely codes and correspondences depending on stable, reliable systems of analogies. The thing we call “I” comes from that referential stability, and that’s all. There’s nothing more mystical about “I” than about any other word that refers. If anything, it is language that is so different from other structures in the universe.

SL #642: So for you, “I” is not mystical? Being is not mysterious?

SL #641: I didn’t say that. Being feels very mysterious to me, because, like everyone else, I’m finite and don’t have the ability to see deeply enough into my substrate to make my “I” poof out of existence. If I did, I guess life would be very uninteresting.

SL #642: I should think so!

SL #641: When we do look down at our fine-grained substrates through scientific experiments, we find small miracles just as Gödelian as is “I”.

SL #642: Ah, yes, to be sure — little microgödelinos! But… such as?