I Am a Strange Loop

Sometimes, when my leg goes to sleep (as we put it in English) and I feel a thousand pins and needles tingling inside it, I say to myself, “Aha! So this is what being alive really is! I’m getting a rare glimpse of how complex I truly am!” (In French, one says that one has “ants in one’s leg”, and the cartoon character Dennis the Menace once remarked that he had “ginger ale in his leg” — two unforgettable metaphors for this odd yet universal sensation.) Of course we can never come close to experiencing the full tingling complexity of what we truly are, since we have, to take just one typical example, six billion trillion (that is, six thousand million million million) copies of the hemoglobin molecule rushing about helter-skelter through our veins at all moments, and in each second of our lives, 400 trillion of them are destroyed while another 400 trillion are created. Numbers like these are way beyond human comprehension.

But our own unfathomability is a lucky thing for us! Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how minuscule we are in comparison to the vast universe we live in, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

I Am a Strange Loop

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems — vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like “I” is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be. As Kurt Gödel with his unexpected strange loops gave us a deeper and subtler vision of what mathematics is all about, so the strange-loop characterization of our essences gives us a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human. And to my mind, the loss is worth the gain.

NOTES

Page xi gave me the impetus to read a couple of lay-level books about the human brain… These were [Pfeiffer] and [Penfield and Roberts]. Another early key influence was [Wooldridge].

Page xi the physical basis…of being…an “I”, which… Placing commas and periods outside quotation marks when they are not part of what is being quoted exhibits greater logic than does American usage, which puts them inside regardless of circumstance. In this book, the logical convention (also the standard in British English) is adopted.

Page xiv Hofstadter’s Law… This comes from Chapter V of [Hofstadter 1979].

Page xiv “What is it like to be a bat?”… See Chapter 24 in [Hofstadter and Dennett].

Page xv I have spent nearly thirty years… See, for instance, [Hofstadter and Moser], [Hofstadter and FARG], [Hofstadter 1997], and [Hofstadter 2001].

Page xviii virtually every thought in this book…is an analogy… See [Hofstadter 2001].

Page xviii not indulging in Pushkinian digressions… See James Falen’s sparkling anglicization of Pushkin’s classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin [Pushkin 1995], or see my own translation [Pushkin 1999]. There is no sublimer marriage of form to content than Eugene Onegin.