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.