I Am a Strange Loop

This kind of knee-jerk reaction against even the possibility that someone might meaningfully utter a self-referential sentence was new to me, and caught me off guard. I reflected long and hard on the education professor’s lament, and for the next issue of the magazine I wrote a lengthy reply to it, citing case after case of flagrant and often useful, even indispensable, self-reference in ordinary human communication as well as in humor, art, literature, psychotherapy, mathematics, computer science, and so forth. I have no idea how he or other objectors to self-reference took it. What remained with me, however, was the realization that some highly educated and otherwise sensible people are irrationally allergic to the idea of self-reference, or of structures or systems that fold back upon themselves.

I suspect that such people’s allergy stems, in the final analysis, from a deep-seated fear of paradox or of the universe exploding (metaphorically), something like the panic that the television sales clerk evinced when I threatened to point the video camera at the TV screen. The contrast between my lifelong savoring of such loops and the allergic recoiling from them on the part of such people as Bertrand Russell, B. F. Skinner, this education professor, and the TV salesperson taught me a lifelong lesson in the “theory of types” — namely, that there are indeed “two types” of people in this world.

CHAPTER 5

On Video Feedback

Two Video Voyages, Three Decades Apart

THE loop of video feedback is rich, as I found out in my first explorations with our family’s new video camera in the mid-1970s. A few months later, my appreciation of the phenomenon deepened considerably when I decided to explore it in detail as a visual study for my book Gödel, Escher, Bach. I made an appointment at the Stanford University television studios, and upon arriving I found that the very friendly fellow there had already set up a TV and a camera on a tripod for me to play around with. It was a piece of cake to point the camera at the screen, zoom in and out, tilt the camera, change angles, regulate brightness and contrast, and so on. He told me I was free to use the system as long as I wanted, and so I spent several hours that afternoon navigating around in the ocean of “taboo” possibilities opened up by this video loop. Like any curious tourist, I snapped dozens of photos (just black-and-white stills) during my exotic trip, and later I selected twelve of my favorites to use in one of GEB’s dialogues.

Since that first adventure in video feedback, three decades have passed and technology has advanced a bit, so for my new book I decided to give it another shot. This time I was aided and abetted by Bill Frucht, who, because of (or in spite of) being my editor at Basic Books for a dozen years or so, has become a good friend, and who flew in from New York just for this purpose. Together in my kids’ old “playroom”, Bill and I spent many delightful hours sailing the same old seas but in a somewhat newer craft, and we wound up with several hundred color snapshots that archived our voyage superbly. Aside from the cover illustration, sixteen of my favorites, covering a wide range, can be found in the color insert.

Although both video voyages were vivid and variegated, I decided for this chapter to write up a “diary” of the earlier one, undertaken long ago at Stanford, since that’s when I first explored the phenomenon and learned about it step by step. So the story below involves a different television, a different TV camera, and in general an older technology than was used in making this book’s color insert. Nonetheless, as you will see, much of the old diary still pertains to the newer voyage, though there are a few small discrepancies that I’ll mention when I come to them.

Diary of a Video Trip

There happened to be a shiny metallic strip running down the right side of the TV set I was given, and the presence of this random object had the fortuitous effect of making the various layers of screens-within-screens easily distinguishable. The first thing I discovered, then, was that there was a critical angle that determined whether the regress of nested screens was finite or infinite. If I pointed the camera at the metal strip instead of the center of the screen, this gave me what looked like a snapshot of the right wall of a long corridor, showing a few evenly spaced “doorways” (which actually were images of that metal strip), moving away from where I was “standing”. But I was not able to peer all the way down to the end of this “corridor”. I’ll therefore call what was visible on the screen in such a case a truncated corridor.