I Am a Strange Loop

So caught up was I in trying to understand what being alive, being human, and being conscious are all about that I felt driven to try to capture my elusive thoughts on paper lest they flit away forever, and so I sat down and wrote a dialogue between two hypothetical contemporary philosophers whom I flippantly named “Plato” and “Socrates” (I knew almost nothing about the real Plato and Socrates). This may have been the first serious piece of writing I ever did; in any case, I was proud of it, and never threw it away. Although I now see my dialogue between these two pseudo-Greek philosophers as pretty immature and awkward, not to mention extremely sketchy, I decided nonetheless to include it herein as my Prologue, because it hints at many of the ideas to come, and I think it sets a pleasing and provocative tone for the rest of the book.

A Shout into a Chasm

When, some ten years or so later, I started working on my first book, whose title I imagined would be “Gödel’s Theorem and the Human Brain”, my overarching goal was to relate the concept of a human self and the mystery of consciousness to Gödel’s stunning discovery of a majestic wraparound self-referential structure (a “strange loop”, as I later came to call it) in the very midst of a formidable bastion from which self-reference had been strictly banished by its audacious architects. I found the parallel between Gödel’s miraculous manufacture of self-reference out of a substrate of meaningless symbols and the miraculous appearance of selves and souls in substrates consisting of inanimate matter so compelling that I was convinced that here lay the secret of our sense of “I”, and thus my book Gödel, Escher, Bach came about (and acquired a catchier title).

That book, which appeared in 1979, couldn’t have enjoyed a greater success, and indeed yours truly owes much of the pathway of his life since then to its success. And yet, despite the book’s popularity, it always troubled me that the fundamental message of GEB (as I always call it, and as it is generally called) seemed to go largely unnoticed. People liked the book for all sorts of reasons, but seldom if ever for its most central raison d’être! Years went by, and I came out with other books that alluded to and added to that core message, but still there didn’t seem to be much understanding out there of what I had really been trying to say in GEB.

In 1999, GEB celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and the folks at Basic Books suggested that I write a preface for a special new edition. I liked the idea, so I took them up on it. In my preface, I told all sorts of tales about the book and its vicissitudes, and among other things I described my frustration with its reception, ending with the following plaint: “It sometimes feels as if I had shouted a deeply cherished message out into an empty chasm and nobody heard me.”

Well, one day in the spring of 2003, I received a very kind email message from two young philosophers named Ken Williford and Uriah Kriegel, inviting me to contribute a chapter to an anthology they were putting together on what they called “the self-referentialist theory (or theories)” of consciousness. They urged me to participate, and they even quoted back to me that very lamentation of mine from my preface, and they suggested that this opportunity would afford me a real chance to change things. I was genuinely gratified by their sincere interest in my core message and moved by their personal warmth, and I saw that indeed, contributing to their volume would be a grand occasion for me to try once again to articulate my ideas about self and consciousness for exactly the right audience of specialists — philosophers of mind. And so it wasn’t too hard for me to decide to accept their invitation.

From the Majestic Dolomites to Gentle Bloomington

I started writing my chapter in a quiet and simple hotel room in the beautiful Alpine village of Anterselva di Mezzo, located in the Italian Dolomites, only a few stone’s throws from the Austrian border. Inspired by the loveliness of the setting, I quickly dashed off ten or fifteen pages, thinking I might already have reached the halfway point. Then I returned home to Bloomington, Indiana, where I kept on plugging away.