I am a Strange Loop

Prologue. An Affable Locking of Horns

Plato: Some Thoughts I think about consciously before uttering

Socrates: In what sense do you think consciously about them?

P: I don’t know. I suppose that I try to find the correct words to describe them.

S: What guides you to the correct words?

P: Why, I search logically for synonyms, similar words, and so on, with which I am familiar.

S: In other words, habit guides your thought.

P: Yes, my thought is guided by the habit of connecting words with one another systematically

S: Then once again, these conscious thoughts are produced by reflex action.

P: I do not see how I can know I am conscious, how I can feel alive if this is true, yet I have followed your argument.

S: But this argument itself shows that your reaction is merely habit, or reflex action, and that no conscious thought is leading you to say you know you are alive. If you stop to consider it, do you really understand what you mean by saying such a sentence? Or does it just come into your mind without your thinking consciously of it?

…

P: Then feeling one is alive is merely an illusion propagated by a reflex that urges one to utter, without understanding, such a sentence, and a truly living creature is reduced to a collection of complex reflexes. Then you have told me, Socrates, what you think life is.

1. On Souls and Their Sizes

• Soul shards
• Souls of different sizes:
  • Lots of consciousness:
    • normal adult humans
    • mentally retarded, brain-damanged, and senile humans
    • dogs, bunnies, chickens
  • Less (but some) consciousness:
    • goldfish, bees, mosquitoes, mites
  • Little or no consciousness:
    • microbes, viruses, atoms

Lights on?

• possessing intentionality
• having semantics

2. This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream

I think about thinking. I think about:

• how concepts and words are related,
• what ‘thinking in French’ is,
• what underlies slips of the tongue and other types of errors
• how one event effortlessly reminds us of another
• how we recognize written letters and words
• how we understand sloppily spoken, slurred, slangy speech
• how we toss of untold numbers of utterly bland-seeming yet never-before-made analogies and occasionally come up with sparklingly original ones
• how each of our concepts grows in subtlety and fluidity over our lifetime

I think about the brain, since the human brain is precisely the machinery that carries out human thinking, via a series of abstractions:

• The concept « dog »
• The associative link between the concepts « dog » and « bark »
• Object files (Anne Treisman)
• Frames (Marvin Minsky)
• Memory organization packets (Roger Schank)
• Long-term memory and short-term memory
• Episodic memory and melodic memory
• Analogical bridges
• Mental spaces (Gilles Fauconnier)
• Memes (Richard Dawkins)
• The ego, id, and superego (Sigmund Freud)
• The grammar of one’s native language
• Sense of humor
• « I »

A heart is a pump. Analogously, a brain is a thinking machine:

• There exists within the cranium a whole world of diverse causal forces
• If one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain…
• Near the apex of this command system in the brain… we find ideas
• Ways of describing complex patterns engendered by basic physical forces
• This kind of shift in levels of description yielded something very precious to living beings: comprehensibility
• Thinkodynamics is analogous to themodynamics - it involves large-scale structures and patterns in the brain and makes no reference to microscopic events such as neural firings. It is what psychologists study - how people make choices, commit errors, perceive patterns, experience novel remindings
• Mentalics is about small-scale phenomena that neurologists study
• The pressures of daily life force us to talk about events at the level on which we directly perceive them. We necessarily simplify and vastly so. But that sacrifice is our glory. Drastic simplification is what allows us to reduce situations to their bare bones, to discover abstract essences, to put our fingers on what matters, to understand phenomena at amazingly high levels, to survive reliably in this world, and to formulate literature, art, music, and science.

3. The Causal Potency of Patterns

• Entities that think
• A network of precisely times domino chains
• The abstract forces that can act on freeways and traffic
• Voters in a national election
• In a brain there can be vastly different explanations belonging to vastly different domains of discourse at vastly different levels of abstraction.
• The locations and velocities of individual molecules are simply irrelevant.
• That high-level statistical outcome is robust and invariant against the details of the substrate. The high-level outcome is insulated and sealed off from the microscopic level.
• There’s plenty of unpredictability up here in the macroworld:
  • When we toss a basketball towards a basket, we don’t have any idea whether it will go through or not.
  • When we begin to utter a thought, we have no idea what words we will wind up using nor which grammatical pathways we will wind up following, nor can we predict the speech errors or the facts about our unconscious mind that our little slips will reveal.
  • When we ski down a slope, we don’t know if we’re going to fall on our next turn or not.
• The macroscopic world as experienced by humans is, in short, an intimate mixture ranging from the most predictable events all the way to wildly unpredictable ones.
• By the time we emerge from childhood, we have acquired a reflex-level intuition for where most of our everyday world’s loci of unpredictability lie, and the more unpredictable end of this spectrum simultaneously beckons to us and frightens us. We’re pulled by but fearful of risk-taking. That is the nature of life.

Simmballs in the Careenium:

• While no simm on its own encodes anything or plays a symbolic role, the simmballs, on their far more macroscopic level, do encode and are symbolic
• We cannot see the simms any more.
• From our higher-level macroscopic vantage point as we hover above the table, we can see ideas giving rise to other ideas, we can see one symbolic event reminding the system of another symbolic event, we can see elaborate patterns of simmballs coming together and forming even larger patterns that constitute analogies - in short, we can visually eavesdrop on the logic of a thinking mind taking place in the patterned dance of the simmballs. And in this latter view, it is the simmballs that shove each other about, at their own isolated symbolic level.

4. Loops, Goals, and Loopholes

• Mechanical systems with feedback such as James Watt’s steam-engine governor.
• The presence of a feedback loop is a strong pressure to shift levels of description from the goalless level of mechanics (in which forces make things move) to the goal-oriented level of cybernetics (in which desires make things move).
• The suspicion of loops just runs in our human grain.
• From Russel’s theory of types and elsewhere, we see that people can be irrationally allergic to the idea of self-reference.

5. On Video Feedback

• truncated corridor, endless corridor, helical corridor.
• An emergent phenomenon somehow emerges quite naturally and automatically from rigid rules operating at a lower, more basic level, but exactly how that emergence happens is not at all clear to the observer.
• The amazing visual universe discovered around 1980 by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.
• It is the circularity - the loopiness - of the system that brings these patterns into existence and makes them persist.
• Feedback gives rise to a new kind of abstract phenomenon that can be called « locking-in ».
• It will not go away because it is forever refreshing itself, feeding on itself, giving rebirth to itself. It is a self-stabilizing structure whose origins, despite the simplicity of the feedback loop itself, are nearly impenetrable because the loop is cycled through so many times.

6. Of Selves and Symbols

• In the case of a being struggling to survive, the one thing that is always in its environment is… itself.
• The camera, rather than being bolted onto its TV set is attached to it by a short leash, giving rise to a truncated corridor, like pet animals or even young children are slightly self-aware
• When the leash is sufficiently long and flexible that the video camera can point straight at the center of the screen, we can have an endless corridor, which is far richer than a truncated one.
• Symbols in a brain are the neurological entities that correspond to concepts. Each symbol is dormant most of the time, but is potentially triggerable at any time.
• The passage leading from vast numbers of received signals to a handful of triggered symbols is a kind of funneling process, in which initial input signals are manipulated or massaged, the results of which selectively trigger further (ie more internal) signals and so forth.
• In fact there is a great deal of two-way flow. Signals don’t propagate solely from the outside inwards, towards symbols; expectations from past experiences simultaneously give rise to signals propagating outwards from certain symbols.
• Mosquito behavior seems perfectly comprehensible without recourse to anything that deserves the name « symbol ».
• No one could doubt that pet dogs develop a respectable repertoire of categories. A dog has some kind of rudimentary self-model, some kind of sense of itself.
• The emergence of this kind of reflexive symbolic structure, at whatever level of sentience it first enters the picture, constitutes the central germ, the initial spark, of I-ness, the tiny core to which more complex senses of

I-ness will then accrete over a lifetime, like the snowflake that grows around a tiny initial speck of dust.

• There is some level of complexity at which a creature starts applying some of its categories to itself.

The radically different conceptual repertoir of human beings:

• A spectacular evolutionary gulf opened up at some point as human being were gradually separating from other primates: their category systems became arbitrarily extensible. Into our mental lives there entered a dramatic quality of open-endedness, an essentially unlimited extensibility, as compared with a very palpable limitedness in other species.
• Concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees, like the huge difference, in video feedback, between an infinite corridor and a truncated one.

Episodic memory:

• Episodes are concepts of a sort, but they take place over time and each one is presumably one-of-a-kind, a bit like a proper noun but lacking a name, and linked to a particular moment in time. Although each one is unique, episodes also fall into their own categories.
• Nearly all memories of specific episodes are dormant almost all the time (otherwise we would bo stark-raving mad)
• The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a hyman being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what I-ness is about.

7. The Epi Phenomenon

• Thanks to the funneling-down processes of perception, which will lead eventually - in a matter of milliseconds - to the activation of certain discrete symbols in its brain, an animal can relate intimately and reliably to its physical environment.
• Because an animal’s internal mirroring of the world must be highly reliable, its mirroring of the world via its private cache of symbols becomes an unquestioned pillar of stability. The things and patterns it perceives are what define its reality - but not all perceived things and patterns are equally real to it.
• It takes a child a few years to sort out the reality of real and imaginary objects, and some people take a full lifetime to do so.
• For any concept, there are plenty of people who believe fervently in it, others who believe in it just a little, others not a all (whether out of ignorance, cynicism, poor education, or excellent education):
  • Some of these concepts, we are repeatedly told by authorities, are not real, and yet we hear about them over and over again in television shows, books, newspapers, and so we are left with a curious blurry sense as to whether they do exist, or could exist, or might exist.
  • Others, we are told by authorities, are absolutely real, but somehow we never see them.
  • Others we are told were real but are real no longer, and that places them in a kind of limbo as far as reality is concerned.
  • Yet others, we are told are real but are utterly beyond our capacity to imagine.
  • Others are said to be real, but only metaphorically or only approximately so - and so on. Sorting all this out is not in the least easy.
• Although nobody planned it that way, most of us wind up emerging from adolescence with a deeply nuanced sense of what is real, with shades of gray all over the place.

Surely there should be nothing that is partly real!

• That marble over there is surely real
• The upper edge of that 75-foot tall Shell sign near the freeway exit is real, I am convinced
• Antarctica is real because, though I’ve never been there, I’ve seen hundreds of photographs.
• Through many types of abstractions and analogy-making and inductive reasoning, and through many long and tortuous chains of citations of all sorts of authorities (which constitute an indispensable pillar supporting every adult’s belief system, despite the insistence of high-school teachers who year after year teach that « arguments by authority » are spurious and are convinced that they ought to be believed because they are, after all, authority figures), we build up an intricate, interlocked set of beliefs as to what exists « out there » - and then, once again, that set of beliefs folds back, inevitably and seamlessly, to apply to our own selves.
• What makes for our sense of utter sureness about abstract things like other peoples’s kidneys and brains and mortality?
• Immediate mental events constitute the bedrock underlying our broader sense of reality.
• Inevitably, what seems realest to us is what gets activated most often.
• We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself - the concept of « my ».
• An epiphenomenon is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unsuspected events. Ie, it could be said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.
• There is a special type of abstract structure or pattern that gives rise to what feels like a self.
• Each living being, no matter how simple, has a set of innate goals embedded in it, thanks to the feedback loops that evolved over time and that characterize its species. These feedback loops are the familiar, almost cliched activities of life, such as seeking certain types of food, seeking a certain temperature range, seeking a mate, and so forth. Some creatures additionally develop their own individual goals, such as playing certain pieces of music, etc. Whatever a creature’s goals are, we are used to saying that it pursues those goals and, at least if it is sufficiently complicated or sophisticated, we often add that it does so because it wants certain things.
• It is this I, a coherent collection of desires and beliefs, that sets everything in motion.
• A highly-compressed simplification, in which vast amounts of information are thrown away, is the more useful one for us mortals, as it is so much more efficient (even though some things then seem to happen « for no reason » - that’s the tradeoff).
• When the careenium grapples with its own nature, all it is aware of is its simmballic activity, not its simm-level churnings. The careenium’s perceptions of all things are fantastically coarse-grained simplifications, and its self-perceptions are no exception
• The extraordinary eeriness of what goes on in total darkness, day and night, inside each and every human cranium;
• Built as irrefutably as a granite marble is the sense of being a creature driven entirely by thought and ideas - I am driven solely by myself, not be any mere physical objects anywhere!

8. Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari

• A strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.

9. Pattern and Provability

- No Notes! -

10. Godel’s Quintessential Strange Loop

• Mathematicians see their pristine, abstract world as the antithesis to the random, accident-filled physical world we all inhabit.
• In mathematics, where there’s a pattern, there’s a reason.
• What a recursive definition does, albeit implicitly, is to divide the entire set of integers into members and non-members of the club.
• Godel’s formula is making a claim about itself.

11. How Analogy Makes Meaning

• We effortlessly generalize outwards.
• It is out of a dense fabric of a myriad of invisible, throwaway analogies that the vast majority of our rich mental life is built.
• What seem like the most mundane analogies can, when they are examined, be seen to have sprung from, and to reveal, the deepest roots of human cognition.
• An isomorphism is just a formalized and strict analogy.
• What we might be tempted to call « direct » reference is mediated by a code too - the code between words and things given to us by our native language. The seemingly sharp distinction between « direct » and « indirect » reference is only a matter of degree.
• Analogies and mappings give rise to secondary meanings that ride on the back of primary meanings. Even primary meanings depend on unspoken mappings. All meaning is mapping-mediated, which is to say, all meaning comes from analogies
• An unpennable line in drama is not one that could never ever be written by anyone, but merely a line that violated one or more of the dramaturgical conventions that most playwrights took for granted. An unpennable line could indeed be penned - just not by someone who rigorously respected those rules.
• A loop’s strangeness comes purely from the way in which a system can seem to « engulf itself » through an unexpected twisting around, rudely violating what we had taken to be an inviolable hierarchical order.
• The strange loopiness resides not in the flip due to the word « not », but in the unexpected, hierarchy-violating twisting-back involving the word « this ».
• The strange twisting-back is a simple, natural consequence of an unexpected isomorphism between two different situations (that which is being talked about and that which is doing the talking)
• No one before Godel had realized that one of the domains that mathematics can model is the doing of mathematics itself.

12. On Downward Causality

• The peak’s inaccessibility turns out to have nothing to do with how anyone might try to get up to it; it has to do with an inherent instability belonging to the summit itself
• upside-down reasoning from a would-be theorem downwards, rather than from axioms upwards, and in particular, reasoning from a hidden meaning of the would-be theorem, rather than from its surface-level claim about numbers.
• There are many true statements that are not provable.
• A creature that thinks knows next to nothing of the substrate allowing its thinking to happen, but nonetheless it knows all about its symbolic interpretation of the world and knows very intimately something it calls I.
• We humans evolved to perceive and describe ourselves in high-level metalistic terms and not in low-level physicalistic terms.
• With genes, the proper description of how heredity and reproduction worked could in large part be abstracted away from the chemistry, leaving just a high-level picture of information-manipulating processes alone.

13. The Elusive Apple of My I

• We are powerfully driven to create a term that summarizes all the hopes and beliefs and desires that are found inside our own cranium - and that term, as we all learn early on, is « I ». And pretty soon this high abstraction behind the scenes comes to feel like the maximally real entity in the universe.
• Among the untold thousands of symbols in the repertoire of a normal human being, there are some that are far more frequent and dominant than others, and one of them is given, somewhat arbitrarily, the name « I ».
• The « I » symbol, like all symbols in our brain, starts out pretty small and simple, but it grows and grows and grows, eventually becoming the most important abstract structure residing in our brains. But where is it in our brains? It is not in some small localized spot; it is spread out all over, because it has to include so much about so much.
• It is our unlimitedly extensible human category system that underwrites this fantastic jump in sophistication from other animals to us, in that it allows each of us to build up our episodic memory - the gigantic warehouse of our recollections of events, minor and major, simple and complex, that have happened to us (and to our friends and family members and people in books and films and newspaper articles and so forth, ad infinitum) over a span of decades.
• My vast episodic memory (past), episodic projectory (future), and episodic subjunctory (what if), gives rise to the endless hall or mirrors that constitutes my « I ».
• Since we perceive not particles interacting but macroscopic patterns in which certain things push other things around with a blurry causality, and since the Grand Pusher in and of our bodies is our « I », and since our bodies push the rest of the world around, we are left with no choice but to conclude that the « I » is where the causality buck stops. The « I » seems to each of us to be the root of all our actions, all our decisions.
• This naive, non-physics viewpoint brings such reliability and indispensability, that it locks ever more tightly into our belief systems as we pass from babyhood through childhood to adulthood.
• Even a profound mastery of all of physics will not in the least undo the decades of brainwashing by culture and language, not to mention the millions of years of human evolution preparing the way. The notion of « I », since it is an incomparably efficient shorthand, is an indispensable explanatory devise, rather than just an optional crutch that can be cheerily jettisoned when one grows sufficiently scientifically sophisticated.
• A human brain is a representational system that knows no bounds in terms of the extensibility or flexibility of its categories.
• It is crucial to our young lives that we hone our developing self-symbol as precisely as possible. We want (and need) to find our where we belong in all osrts of social hierarchies and classes, and sometimes, even if we don’t want to know these things, we find our anyway. We are told that we are cute or funny or gullible or cheeky or shy or spoiled or lazy, etc. Dozens of labels and concepts accrete to our growing self-symbols.
• Constantly, relentlessly, day by day, moment by moment, my self-symbol is being shaped and refined. It slowly acquires concise and valuable insight into its nature as a chooser and launcher of actions. Similarly, my social actions induce reactions on the part of other sentient beings, and I am building up my sense of who I am in others’ eyes. My self-symbol is coalescing out of an initial void.
• What we do - what our « I » tells us to do - has consequences sometimes positive and sometimes negative, and as the days and years go by, we try to sculpt and mold our « I » in such a way as to stop leading us to negative consequences and to lead us to positive ones.
• The current « I » - the most up-to-date set of recollections and aspirations and passions and confusions, has sparked some rapid feedback, which gives rise to an infinitesimally modified « I ». Via the loop of symbols sparking actions and repercussions triggering symbols, the abstract structure serving us as our innermost essence evolves slowly but surely, and in so doing it locks itself ever more rigidly into our mind.
• In any strange loop that gives risen to human selfhood, the level-shifting acts of perception, abstraction, and categorization are central, indispensable elements. It is the upward leap from raw stimuli to symbols that imbues the loop with « strangeness ». The overall gestalt shape of one’s self - the « stable whorl » of the strange loop consituting ones « I » - is not picked up by a disinterested, neutral camera, but is perceived in a highly subjective manner through the active processed of categorizing, mental replaying, reflecting, comparing, counterfactualizing, and judging.
• As an « I » grows in complexity and grows ever realer to itself (ie ever more indispensable to the child’s efforts to categorize and understand the never-repeating events in its life), the chance that any alternative « I »-less way of understanding the world could emerge and compete with it is being rendered essentially nil.

14. Strangeness in the I of the Beholder

• How could a system. of pumping liquids ever house a locus of upside-down causality, where meanings seem to matter infinitely more than physical objects and their motions?
• A careenium’s dancing simmballs will continue tracking the world, will stay in phase with it, will remain aligned with it. Simballs are systematically in phase with things going on in the world.
• That is the only reason simmballs can be said to have meaning. Meaning, no matter what its substrate might be, is an automatic, unpreventable outcome of reliable stable alignment.
• Over the eons that it took for our brains to evolve from the earliest proto-brains, meanings just sneaked ever so quietly into the story, almost unobserved. Such patterns (the symbols of this book) simply came along as an unplanned by-product of the tremendously effective way that having bigger and bigger brains helped beings to survive better and better in a terribly cutthroat world.
• We automatically see our brains activity as entirely symbolic.
• The way the human mind works is by compounding of old ideas into new structures that become new ideas that can themselves be used in compounds, and round and round endlessly, growing every more remote from the basic earthbound imagery that is each language’s soil.
• The higher level takes perceptual precedence over the lower level, and in the process becomes the « more real » of the two. The lower level gets forgotten, lost in the shuffle. Rigid prejudice in favor of high-level (and only high-level) perception turns out to pervade and even to define « the human condition ».
• Your typical human brain, being blissfully ignorant of its minute physical components, makes up as plausible a story as it can about its own nature, in which the starring role, rather than being played by the cerebral cortex, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cerebellum, or any other weirdly named and gooey physical structure, in played instead by an anatomically invisible, murky thing called « I », aided by other shadowy players known as thoughts, ideas, memories, beliefs, hopes, fears, intentions, desires, love, hate, rivalry, jealousy, empathy, honesty, and on and on.
• What makes a strange loop appear in a brain is an ability to think (a one-syllable word standing for the possession of a sufficiently large repertoire of triggerable symbols. This extensible repertoire gives our brains the power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.
• It is our inability to see, feel, or sense in any way the constant, frenetic churning and roiling of micro-stuff, all the unfelt bubbling and boiling that underlies our thinking. This, our innate blindness to the world of the tiny, forces us to hallucinate a profound schism between the goal-lacking material world of balls and sticks and sounds and lights, on the one hand, and a goal-pervaded abstract world of hopes and beliefs and joys, and fears, on the other, in which radically different sorts of causality seem to reign.
• Our innate human inability to peer below a certain level inside our cranium makes the vast swirling galaxy of I-ness strike us as an undeniable locus of causality, rather than a mere passive epiphenomenon coming our of lower levels. Human self-perception inevitably ends up positing an emergent entity that exerts an upside-down causality on the world.

15. Entwinement

• We all perceive and represent hundreds of other human beings at vastly differing levels of detail and fidelity inside our cranium.
• We manufacture an enormously stripped-down version of our own strange loop of selfhood and install it at the core of our symbols for other people, letting that initially crude loopy structure change and grows over time.
• In the case of people we know best - our spouse, our parents and siblings, our children, our dearest friends - each of these loops grows over the years to be a very rich structure adorned with many thousands of idiosyncratic ingredients, and each on achieves a great deal of autonomy from the stripped-down vanilla strange loop that served as its seed.
• The closing of the strange loop of human selfhood is deeply dependent upon the level-changing leap that is perception, which means categorization and therefore the richer and more powerful an organism’s categorization equipment is, the more realized and rich will be its self.
• We now have a metaphor for two individuals, A and B, each of whom has their own personal identity (ie their own private strange loop) - and yet part of that private identity is made our of, and is thus dependent upon, the private identity of the other individual.
• My sense organs feed my brain directly. They also feed the brains of my children and my friends and other people (my readers, for instance), but they do so indirectly - usually throught the intermediary channel of language (though sometimes by photography, art, or music).
• Most of anyone’s perceptual input comes from their own perceptual hardware, and only a smaller part comes filtered this way through other beings.
• The strange loop of the self is privileged - mediated by a perceptual system that feeds directly into that brain.
• It is through language most of all that our brains can exert a fair measure of indirect control over other humans’ bodies. My brain is attached to your body via channels of communication that are much slower and more indirect than those linking it to my body, so the control is much less efficient.
• I can perceive your perceptions indirectly, and I can also control your body indirectly.
• What you mean when you say « I » involves a very tight team consisting of your left and right half-brains, each of which is fed directly by just one of your eyes and just one of your ears.
• A gene is a pattern, an abstraction, and thus « the very same gene » can exist in different cells, different organisms, even organisms living millions of years apart.
• A novel is a pattern, an abstraction that can exist in different languages, different cultures.
• The same hopes and dreams can inhabit two different people’s brains, especially when those two people live together for years and have, as a couple, engendered new entities on which these hopes and dreams are all centered.

16. Grappling with the Deepest Mystery

• The name Carol denotes for me , far more than just a body, which is now gone, but rather a very vast pattern, a style, a set of things including memories, hopes, dreams, beliefs, loves, reactions to music, sense of humor, self-doubt, generostiry, compassion, and so on… a pattern imbued with fantastic triggering power.
• A person is a point of view - not only a physical point of view (looking out of certain eyes in a certain physical place in the universe), but more in a huge bank of memories. The latter can be absorbed, more and more over time, by someone else. Thus it’s like acquiring a foreign language step by step.
• Coming to see the world through another person’s soul.
• What really matters for mutual understanding of two people are such things as having similar responses to music (not just shared likes but also shared dislikes), having similar responses to people (again, I mean both likes and dislikes), having similar degrees of empathy, honesty, patience, sentimentality, audacity, ambition, competitiveness, and so on. These central building blocks of personality, character, and temperament are decisive in mutual understanding.
• … these innermost aspects of a soul that make for soul-uniqueness.
• The second person can be more like an alter ego.
• The Godelian swirl of self
• My internal model of Carol is certainly thin or sparse in comparison to the original self-model in her brain. Even if it were unbelievably rich, would it nonetheless be the wrong kind of structure to give rise to an I? Would it be something other than a strange loop? Would it be a structure pointing not at itself but at something else, and therefore be lacking that essentially swirly, vorticial, self-referential quality that makes an I?
• My guess is that if the model were extremely rich, extremely faithful, then effectively the destinations of all the pointers in it would be fluid - in other words, the pointers inside my model of Carol would be able to slip, to point just as validly to the symbol for her in my brain as to her own self symbol. If so, then the original swirliness, the original I-ness of the structure, would have been successfully transported to a second medium and reconstructed faithfully (though far more coarse-grainedly) in it.
• The layers of the self:
  • Outer layers - outward pointers point to standard universal aspects of the world - rain, ice cream, etc
  • Middle layers - outward and inward pointers point to one’s parents faces and voices, the music you love, the street you grew up on, pets from childhood
  • Inner sanctum - tons of tangly inward pointers to very deeply « indexical » things - your insecurities, sexual feelings, intense fears, deepest loves.
  • Innermost core - tons of arrows that point right back in towards itself. Strange Loop City. This deeply twisted back on itself quality that makes it so hard to transport elsewhere, that makes the sould so deeply, almost irrevocably , attached to one single body, one single brain.
• self loops are isomorphic at the most coarse-grained level - what makes them different from each other is only their flavorings, consisting of memories, and of course, genetic preferences and talents, etc.
• Photos, videotapes, and other records allow you to « possess » or be possessed by other people’s brains - eg Chopin
• What was the nature of the Holden Caulfield symbol in JD Salinger’s brain during the period of writing Catcher in the Rye.

17. How We Live in Each Other

• The inner circuitry of cell phones has surpassed a certain threshold of complexity and that fact allows them to have a chameleon-like nature. I'll call it the Godel-Turing threshold, and once it is surpassed, a computer can emulate any kind of machine.
• Turing realized that the critical threshold for this kind of computational universality comes at exactly that point where a machine is flexible enough to read and correctly interpret a set of data that describe its own structure. At this critical juncture, a machine can, in principle, explicitly watch how it does any particular task, step by step. Turing realized that a machine that has this critical level of flexibility can imitate any other machine, no matter how complex the latter is. In other words, there is nothinng more flexible that a universal machine. Universality is a far as you can go!
• Russell and Whitehead did not realize what they had wrought because it didn't occur to them to use PM to "simulate" anything else.
• Wherever there is a pattern, it can be seen either as itself or as standing for anything to which it is isomorphic.
• We human beings too are universal machines of a different sort: our neural hardware can copy arbitrary patterns, even if evolution never had any grand plan for this kind of "representational universality" to come about.
• Most detail is lost. We retain not all levels of what we encounter but only those that our hardware, through the pressures of nnatural selection, came to consider that most important.
• We can import ideas and happenings without having to be direct witnesses to them.
• Dogs brains are not universal.
• The magical threshold of representational universality is crossed whenever a system's repertoire of symbols becomes extensible without any obvious limit. Then a system has the capacity to model inside itself other beings that it runs into, and seems inevitably to become ravenously thirsty for tastes of the interiority of other universal beings, to adopt their values, to take on their desires, to live their hopes, to feel their yearnings, to share their dreams, to shudder at their dreads, to participate in their life, to marge with their soul.
• The symbol for a person has been activated inside your skull... your mind starts acting differently from how it acts in a "normal" context... activating whole sets of coordinated tendencies that represent that person's cherished style, their idiosyncratic way of being embedded in the world and looking out at it.
• That is what a brain is made for - to be a stage for the dance of active symbols.
• Conncepts are active symbols in a brain and people, no less than objects, are represented by symbols in the brain. A self is also a concept, just an even more complicated one and your brain is inhabited to varying extents by other Is, other souls.
• We are all copycats. We involuntarily and automatically incorporate into our repertoire all sorts of behavior fragments of other people.
• Everything I do is some kind of modified borrowing from others who have been close to me either actually or virtually, and the virtual influences are among the most profound. Much of my fabric is woven out of borrowed bits and pieces of the experiences of thousands of famous individuals.
• What matters is neither the fictional/nonfictional nor the virtual/nonvirtual dimension, but the duration and depth of an individual's interactions with my interiority.
• We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people's habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck.
• Each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people's souls, simply put together in a new way. But of course not all contributors are represented equally.
• Many well-known individuals are central to my identity, in the sense that I cannot imagine who I would be had I not encountered their ideas or deeds.
• The more intimately someone comes to know you, the finer-grained will be the portrait of you inside their head.
• What is the difference between actual, personal memories and pseudo-memories? Very little. There is no absolute and fundamental distinction between what I recall from having lived through it myself and what I recall from others' tales.
• The cells inside a brain are not the bearers of its consciousness; the bearers of consciousness are patterns. The pattern of organization is what matters, not the substance.
• And patterns can be copied from one medium to another, even between radically different media. Such an act is called transplantation or, for short, translation.
• When someone dies, they leave" a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them.

18. The Blurry Glow of Human Identity

• The "caged-bird metaphor" - one soul in one brain.
• In fact, every normal adult human soul is housed in many brains at varying degrees of fidelity, and therefore every human consciousness or "I" lives at once in a collection of different brains, to different extents.
• Common sense tells us, unnambiguously that we are always in just one place, not two or more.
• But when watching a movie, you can feel you have been transported to a place where your body is actually not located.
• "Telepresence" - feeling that you are somewhere far from both your body and your brain. And as this technology improves, the primary location becomes less and less primary.
• Reading can, similarly, transport us in milliseconds to arbitrarily distant, long-gone, or even never-existent venues and epochs. We can be in several places at one time, simultaneously entertaining several points of view at one time. You are sitting somewhere reading this, yet a moment ago you were also in a living room armchair reading a Jane Austen novel (referring to a description in the preceding paragraph), and you were also simultaneously in a carriage going down a country lane. At least three points of view coexisted simultaneously inside your cranium. Which on of those viewers was "real"? Which one was "really you"? Need these questions be answered? Can they be answered?
• I sit in a plane coming in for a landing and overhear random snippets of conversations around me. Each snippet carries me a smidgen into someone else's viewpoint
• To varying degrees, we humans live inside other humans already, even in a totally nontechnological world. The interpenetration of souls is an inevitable consequence of the power of the representationally universal machines that our brains are. That is the true meaning of the word "empathy". I am capable of being other people, even if it is merely an "economy class" version of the act of being
• The experience of internal conflict between several "rival selves" is one that we all know intimately. We feel split between wanting to buy that candy bar and wanting to refrain.
• For nearly all purposes, the simple story we tell ourselves (of a unitary "I") is good enough.
• You can drive your car while reacting to other cars, scenery, billboards, and roadsigns, while also talking with a far-off friend on your cellphone.
• We are simultaneously here and there all the time, even in our everyday lives.
• There is blur. Some of what happens in other brains gets copied, albeit coarse-grainedly, inside the brain of X, and the closer two brains are to each other emotionally, the more stuff gets copied back and forth from Y to X, and the more faithful the copies are. The copying isn't simultaneous or perfect or total, but each person lives partially in the brain of the other and if the bandwidth were turned up lore and more they would come to live more and more inside each other - until, in the lmit, the sense of a clear boundary between them would slowly be dissolved, as it is for the two halves of a "Twinwirld pairson".
• We picture individuals not as pointlike infinite-decimal serial numbers, but as fairly localized, blurry sones scattered here and there along the line.
• The more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.

19. Consciousness = Thinking

• Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to make it even more pithy, consciousness is thinking.
• Most of the time, any given symbol in our brain in dormant, like a book sitting inertly in the remote stacks of a huge library. Every so often, some event will trigger the retrieval of this book from the stacks, and it will be opened and its pages will come alive for some reader. In an analogous way, inside a human brain, perceived external events are continually triggering the highly selective retrieval of symbols from dormancy, and causing them to come alive in all sorts of unanticipated, unprecedented configurations. This dance of symbols in the brain is what consciousness it (it is also what thinking is). I say symbols and not neurons. The dance has to be perceived at that level for it to constitute consciousness.
• Mature human brains are constantly trying to reduce the complexity of what they perceive, and this means that they are constantly trying to get unfamiliar, complex patterns made of many symbols that have been freshly activated in concert to trigger just one familiar pre-existing symbol (or a very small set of them). In fact, that’s the main business of human brains - to take a complex situation and to put one’s finger on what matters in it, to distill from an initial welter of sensations and ideas what a situation really is about. To spot the gist.

A social episode happens:

• When something happens, there are precendents galore in my decades of episodic memory, if I just hold the new episode « loosely » in my mind.
• All these dusty old books are pulled off the shelves of dormancy by the current episode, because this « unprecedented » situation, when it is perceived at an abstract level, when its crust is discarded and its core is distilled, points straight at certain other past sagas stored on the shelves of my « library ».
• When all this activity has flowed around for a while, with memories triggering memories, something slowly settles out - some kind of precipitate - it boils down to just one word - jilted - I feel jilted!

The central loop of cognition:

• My brain is constantly seeking to label, to categorize, to find precedents and analogues - in other words, to simplify while not letting essence slip away. It carries on this activity relentlessly not only in response to freshly arriving sensory input but also in response to its own internal dance, and there really is not much of a difference between these two cases, for once sensory input has gotten beyond the retina of the tympani or the skin, it enters the realm of the internal, and from that point on, perception is solely an internal affair.

20. A Courteous Crossing of Words

• What we know as our consciousness is nothing but the physical activity inside a human brain that has lived in the world for a number of years.
• Some kinds of physical systems can mirror what’s on their outside and can launch actions that depend upon their perceptions.
• To make an I you need meanings, and to make meanings you need perception and categories - a repertoire of categories that keeps on building on itself, growing and growing and growing.
• What you call I is an outcome, not a starting point. You coalesced in an unplanned fashion, coming only slowly into existence, not in a flash. At the beginning, when the brain that would later house your soul was taking form, there was no you. But that brain slowly grew, and its experiences slowly accumulated. Somewhere along the way, as more and more things happened to it, were registered by it, and became internalized in it, it started imitating the cultural and linguistic conventions in which it was immersed, and thus it tentatively said I about itself (even though the referent for that word was still very blurry). That’s roughly when it noticed it was somewhere - and not surprisingly, it was where a certain brain was! At that point, though, it didn’t know anything about its brain. What it knew instead was its brain’s container, which was a certain body. But even though it didn’t know anything about its brains, that nascent I faithfully followed its brain around just as a shadow always tags along after a moving object.
• A sufficiently complex brain not only can perceive and categorize but it can verbalize what it has categorized.
• Those little sensual experiences are to the grand pattern of your mental life as the letters in a novel are to the novel’s plot and characters - irrelevant, arbitrary tokens, rather than carriers of meaning.
• You’re a satellite to your brain.
• Your I was the slowly emerging outcome of a million unpredictable events that befell a particular body and the brain housed in it. Your I is the self-reinforcing structure that gradually came to exist not only in that brain, but thanks to that brain. It couldn’t have come to exist in this brain, because this brain went through different experiences that led to a different human being.
• Each I is defined as a result of its experiences, and not vice versa!
• No one started out in that brain - no one at all… as weeks, months, and years passed there gradually came to be someone in there.
• Your brain, like mine, like everyone’s, has told itself a million times a self-reinforcing story whose central player is called I.
• Your brain, like mine and like everyone’s has, out of absolute necessity, invented something it calls an I, but that thing is a real or unreal as is that marble in that box of envelopes.
• Your brain has tricked itself. The I is a tremendously effective illusion, and falling for it has fantastic survival value. Our Is are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life.
• In a sense, an I is something created out of nothing.
• The I is a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.
• The I is a necessary, indispensable concept to all of us, even if it’s an illusion, like thinking that the sun is circling the earth because it rises, moves across the sky, and sets.
• Sometimes the strict scientific viewpoint is hopelessly useless, even if it’s correct. The human condition is, but its very nature, one of believing in a myth.
• Just as we need our eyes in order to see, we need our Is in order to be.
• The most efficient and irresistible shorthand of all is that of imputing abstract desires and beliefs to certain “privileged” entities (those with minds - animals and people), and of wrapping all of those things together in one single, supposedly indivisible unity that represents the “central essence” of such an entity.
• It does watch itself, and does so all the time
• 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!
• The thing we call I comes from that referential stability, and that’s all.
• The sole root of all these strange phenomena is perception, bringing symbols and meanings into physical systems. To perceive is to make a fantastic jump from William James’ blooming buzzing confusion to an abstract, symbolic level. And then, when perception twists back and focuses on itself, as it inevitably will, you get rich, magical-seeming consequences.
• The paradox dissolves when you step back and see it from outside. Then it’s just another drawing.

21. A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos

• Something of Jim is surviving strongly - surviving in other brains, thanks to human love.
• All of these things survive at different levels in many people who, thanks to having interacted with him intimately over many years of decades, constitute his "soular corona".
• His soul will still exist, in partial, low-resolution copies, scattered about the globe.

22. A Tango with Zombies and Dualism

• Category assignments go right to the core of thinking.
• Consciousness is not an optional feature that one can order independently of how the brain is built. Consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design. It is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories... once you've got self, you've got consciousness. Elan mental is not needed.

23. Killing a Couple of Sacred Cows

- No notes -

24. On Magnanimity and Friendship

• I would point to individuals whose behavior is essentially the opposite of that of violent psychopaths: Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Raoul Wallenberg, Jean Moulin, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and César Chavez - extraordinary individuals whose deep empathy for those who suffer leads them to devote a large part of their lives to helping others, and to doing so in nonviolent fashions. Such people, I propose, are more conscious than normal adults are, which is to say, they have greater souls.
• In the romance languages, the words for conscience and consciousness are one and the same.
• The partial internalization of other creatures' interiority (conscience) is what most clearly marks off creatures who have large souls.

Epilogue. The Quandary

• We humans are doomed, as spiritual creatures in a universe of mere stuff, to eternal puzzlement about our nature.
• The presence or absence of animacy depends on the level at which one views a structure. Animate entities are those that, at some level of description, manifest a certain type of loopy pattern.
• When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics and when feedback loops galore come into play, then "which" eventually turns into "who".
• We are unpredictable self-writing poems.