Book Thoughts: I am a Strange Loop

I've wanted to read a bit of philosophy-of-the-mind for some time now, but never really got around to it. After a discussion on consciousness with a friend a bit back, I was recommended the works by Douglas Hofstadter. His big-dick book "G.E.B" was a little intimidating, but the title of his more recent work "I Am a Strange Loop" resonated with me (my own online identity being tied to my loop-like spiral logo), and I've just finished the audio version!

Firstly, a bit of praise: I'm a philosophy noob, and the author's heavy use of allegory and analogy made digesting the book's core ideas approachable and entertaining. I've managed to grind my attention span into dust and was concerned the general dryness of philosophy texts would have me reaching for other things to read -- but while it wasn't a particularly gripping read, it absolutely held my attention the whole way through.

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Hofstadter's core focus here is exploring the "I" or "Self", and working to convince the reader of the author's idea that the self is a hallucination. He puts it rather elegantly in the final chapter that the "Self" or "Consciousness" (let us use the two interchangeably here) is like a rainbow: A side effect of natural physical processes. This side-steps the dualist-vs-materialist arguments by making consciousness an "epiphenomenon"; a beautiful mirage.

Central to this idea is the titular "Strange Loop", which he slowly pulls out of Gödel's self-referential incompleteness theorem. Admittedly the math bits went a bit long and over my head at times, but the author's love of the topic shone through the medium and kept me listening through the weeds.

The Strange Loop of consciousness essentially comes down to: Self is the outcome of a feedback loop where a brain sufficiently capable of categorising and comprehending abstract symbols turns back to catagorise and comprehend itself. The result is a constantly changing self-aware loop which our brains perceive as "I".

Hofstadter does a much better job wording that than I have (there's a whole book) and does a damn good job at being convincing. Many of the philosophical ideas presented in the book were new to me (again, bit of a noob) and resonated. His exploration of the various building blocks of his theory via allegory made for many profound "holy shit" moments during my listen that I want to briefly unpack here.

Ascribing Loops to Others

In a segment where the author discusses the death of his wife, he goes into the rather romantic idea that we hold within ourselves not just our loop, but also courser-grained loops of other people. That is, to some degree, others' "souls" or loops also exist within us -- this is a secondary feedback loop, as the ways humans perceive and interact with one another based on those perceptions will grow and alter those perceptions. The ones we love live on by embedding themselves within us, imprinting their loops into memories and mediums (books, journals).

This concept greatly resonated with something I've had rattling around in my head for a long time: Does the act of loving thing or person make that thing more?

Let's say you have a pet rat that you love very dearly and spend a lot of time with. You'll obviously recognise their little personality and begin to build a representation of them in your head. Assuming you're not heartless, you'll also begin to personify and empathise with your pet, building in your head a "strange loop" representation of you furry friend -- likely a representation that is considerably more detailed than the rat can hold within its own crafty tiny mind!

If one's soul is measured both in their own ability to hold loops, and the loops of others in their consciousness as well as the representational loops they leave in the consciousness of others, I'd say that the loops we forge for our pets and treasured objects make those things "more". That is, we can grant souls (or simply increase the 'size' of souls) to entities. This lets these things live on well past death or destruction -- in stories and memories. The pet rat who lived two years, but lives on in generations of human memory.

This idea also made me start wondering about the loopy representation of myself that lives in the heads of others. How much of these alternative, lower-resolution "me"s accurately mirrors my own internal concept of self? How much is the me I purposely project in different social scenarios? How much is perception I have no control over?

If our own "self" is merely a mirage, aren't the versions of us that live in the heads of others equally valid, even if not accurate representations by our own standard? If representations survive beyond the death of the original, do they become more real?

I'm really enjoying chewing on these questions, and grateful to the author for creating so many branching ideas in my head!

Higher Order Perspectives

Several passages in the book deal with the idea of "looking at things at a higher order".

An early example of this was a thought experiment about flipping a coin a whole bunch until you get the statistical 50/50 outcome -- then asking "did the atoms of the coin matter?"

Besides being arranged in a roughly coin-ish shape, they don't! They could be iron or copper or organised into a hexagonal coin and it wouldn't matter -- the interesting information here is happening at the statistical level.

The author later brings up DNA (which I know very little about) and discusses how DNA was theorised, then oater discovered -- only to find that the actual chemical properties of DNA weren't particularly important to understanding genes; rather specific patterns of DNA held the key to decoding genes. We had to zoom out.

Hofstadter uses this concept to suggest that we shouldn't be looking at the individual firing neurons in a brain to seek consciousness -- the interesting bits are happening at a higher level. This was really an intuitive idea that's made me question how I look at lots of other things.

Numbers Representing Anything

I'm late to the party on this one. During Hofstadter's discussions of Gödel's attack on Principia Mathematica he brings up Gödel numbers and casually mentions how any symbols can be mapped to numbers or some such thing. It went over my head (much of the Gödel chapters may have).

He comes back to this point much later, however, mentioning the same concept with computers -- which I very much understand!

The whole thing clicked then - we do this kind of arbitrary symbol-to-bindary mapping all the time! 01000010 can represent the UTF-8 letter B, or the integer 66, or a color, or all kinds of other things depending on how we choose to do the mapping!

There was a vast array of other little ideas that Hofstadter either takes apart or props up, and I really enjoyed the majority of them.

I went into the book hoping for some new ideas about what human consciousness is, and I found them. I really like the perspectives Hofstadter offered and the way he offered them.

All that said, there was a something within the book that made me a little uncomfortable. Several times throughout the book the author recalls personal life experiences that seemed almost braggadocious -- along the lines of "As a small child I was pondering prime numbers while listening to Chopin's etudes in the summer house of my father's colleague from Stanford..."

This cropped up a couple times and didn't elicit much more than eye-rolling initially. Clearly the author was a very privileged individual, but then most philosophers are -- who else would attempt to establish a career thinking about thinking?

I didn't feel it was much to worry about -- the author is an esteemed philosopher and is likely extremely cognizant of their lot. A later passage, however, really rubbed me the wrong way.

In the passage Hofstadter discusses a thought experiment where switches would be flipped to replace his personality traits. The first replaces his love for Chopin with one for Beethovin, Elvis, and Eminem. The next switch replaced his habit of making ambigrams and writing philosophy novels on the weekends with watching professional football and "ogling busty babes". The next swaps out his vegetarianism for a penchant for hunting deer and elephants.

While the passage is clearly an attempt at more humorous analogies to make a point, the specific wording was a bit of a red flag:

After all, everything I suggested in the paragraphs above is the diametric opposite of what I consider core me-ness. Letting go of even one of these traits is enough to make me think, "That person wouldn't be me any more. That couldn’t be me. That is incompatible with the deepest fiber of my being."

Note the "diametric opposite". It felt to me that our esteemed author not only didn't "vibe" with alt-Doug, but may have thought less of these alt-Dougs.

On it's own I wouldn't have thought too much of this passage, but it instantly flagged a bunch of other passages in the book that had hit as almost-off.

Consider the passage from fairly early on in the book, where Hofstadter plays with the idea of having a a measurable "size" of one's soul, with the average adult having "100 hunekers":

If that’s how things are, then I retract my reflexive claim that you and I, dear reader, share 100 hunekers of souledness. Instead, I’d like to suggest that we both have considerably higher readings than that on the hunekometer! (I hope you agree.) However, this is starting to feel like dangerous moral territory, verging on the suggestion that some people are worth more than others — a thought that is anathema in our society (and which troubles me, as well), so I won’t spend much time here trying to figure out how to calculate a person’s souledness value in hunekers.

What is the basis that both the author and reader are scoring higher than average?

The "dear reader" bit is used frequently throughout the book, and is intended as a tongue-in-cheek bit of fun writing. Re-reading the dear-reader passages, however, reveals some assumptions made about his presumed reader when discussing the nature of mathematicians:

The passionate quest after order in an apparent disorder is what lights their fires and fires their souls. I hope you are among this class of people, dear reader, but even if you are not, please do bear with me for a moment.

Several pages later:

Well, dear reader, I suspect it wouldn’t take you long to recognize this scenario. You would quickly realize that Imp, just like KG, asserts of itself via your new Gödel code, “Imp has no proof in PM.”

(Spoiler: I did not make this realization at the time)

Near the end of the book, we return to a souldness scale with a similar concept to the earlier "hunekometer"

Having painted myself into a corner in the preceding section, I’ll go out on a limb and make a very crude stab at such a distinction. To do so I will merely cite two ends of a wide spectrum, with yourself and myself, dear reader, presumably falling somewhere in the mid-range (but hopefully closer to the “high” end than to the “low” one).

Collecting our evidence here:

  • Our author assumes the reader is a well-read mathy academic type, like themselves

  • Our author ascribes both the reader and himself mid-to-high souledness

  • Those who hunt, eat meat, like eminem, are conservative, or watch football instead of writing books are diametrically opposite to the author

  • Presumably, this puts such people on the other side of the souledness spectrum?

Now, despite being a meat-consumer myself I'll concede to the author that people who choose to hunt for sport and eat meat when other options are available might have slightly smaller souls than those who can't stand the thought of either (assuming we agree with his ideas that empathy for life is a factor in soul-size). The other bits are simply classist. The book's narrator suddenly stank a tiny bit of upper-class academic elitist rather than "funny smart guy teaching me stuff."

I'm probably overthinking this, but that was a bit of gristle in an otherwise lovely meal. It coloured my reading and made me question whether the whole book was inherently biased. Were all these good ideas good in vacuo, or was my own fairly privileged pseudo-academic experience resonating with the author?

At the end of the day, it was still a great read that gave me tonnes of new ideas to think about. Very speculative, approachable, quite personal at times, and generally good spirited throughout.

I honestly don't think I'm contemplative or smart enough to get through G.E.B, so I might skip Hofstadter's more influential work. Maybe I'll spend that time watching some football and listening to Eminem instead, since I'm a small-souled unwashed ape just like you, dear reader.