I Am a Strange Loop

I initially thought this book was just going to be a distilled retelling of the central message of GEB, employing little or no formal notation and not indulging in Pushkinian digressions into such variegated topics as Zen Buddhism, molecular biology, recursion, artificial intelligence, and so forth. In other words, I thought I had already fully stated in GEB and my other books what I intended to (re)state here, but to my surprise, as I started to write, I saw new ideas sprouting everywhere under foot. That was a relief, and made me feel that my new book was more than just a rehash of an earlier book (or books).

Among the keys to GEB’s success was its alternation between chapters and dialogues, but I didn’t intend, thirty years later, to copycat myself with another such alternation. I was in a different frame of mind, and I wanted this book to reflect that. But as I was approaching the end, I wanted to try to compare my ideas with well-known ideas in the philosophy of mind, and so I started saying things like, “Skeptics might reply as follows…” After I had written such phrases a few times, I realized I had inadvertently fallen into writing a dialogue between myself and a hypothetical skeptical reader, so I invented a pair of oddly-named characters and let them have at each other for what turned out to be one of the longest chapters in the book. It’s not intended to be uproariously funny, although I hope my readers will occasionally smile here and there as they read it. In any case, fans of the dialogue form, take heart — there are two dialogues in this book.

I am a lifelong lover of form–content interplay, and this book is no exception. As with several of my previous books, I have had the chance to typeset it down to the finest level of detail, and my quest for visual elegance on each page has had countless repercussions on how I phrase my ideas. To some this may sound like the tail wagging the dog, but I think that attention to form improves anyone’s writing. I hope that reading this book not only is stimulating intellectually but also is a pleasant visual experience.

A Useful Youthfulness

GEB was written by someone pretty young (I was twenty-seven when I started working on it and twenty-eight when I completed the first draft — all written out in pen on lined paper), and although at that tender age I had already experienced my fair or unfair share of suffering, sadness, and moral soul-searching, one doesn’t find too much allusion to those aspects of life in the book. In this book, though, written by someone who has known considerably more suffering, sadness, and soul-searching, those hard aspects of life are much more frequently touched on. I think that’s one of the things about growing older — one’s writing becomes more inward, more reflective, perhaps wiser, or perhaps just sadder.

I have long been struck by the poetic title of André Malraux’s famous novel La Condition humaine. I guess each of us has a personal sense of what this evocative phrase means, and I would characterize I Am a Strange Loop as being my own best shot at describing what “the human condition” is.

One of my favorite blurbs for GEB came from the physicist and writer Jeremy Bernstein, and in part it said, “It has a youthful vitality and a wonderful brilliance…” True music to my ears! But unfortunately this flattering phrase got garbled at some point, and as a result there are now thousands of copies of GEB floating around on whose back cover Bernstein proclaims, “It has a useful vitality…” What a letdown, compared with a “youthful” vitality! And yet perhaps this new book, in its older, more sober style, will someday be described by someone somewhere as having a “useful” vitality. I guess worse things could be said about a book.

And so now I will stop talking about my book, and will let my book talk for itself. In it I hope you will discover messages imbued with interest and novelty, and even with a useful, if no longer youthful, vitality. I hope that reading this book will make you reflect in fresh ways on what being human is all about — in fact, on what just-plain being is all about. And I hope that when you put the book down, you will perhaps be able to imagine that you, too, are a strange loop. Now that would please me no end.

— Bloomington, Indiana

December, MMVI.

PROLOGUE

An Affable Locking of Horns

[As I stated in the Preface, I wrote this dialogue when I was a teen-ager, and it was my first, youthful attempt at grappling with these difficult ideas.]

Dramatis personæ:

Plato: a seeker of truth who suspects consciousness is an illusion

Socrates: a seeker of truth who believes in consciousness’ reality

PLATO: But what then do you mean by “life”, Socrates? To my mind, a living creature is a body which, after birth, grows, eats, learns how to react to various stimuli, and which is ultimately capable of reproduction.