I Am a Strange Loop

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

A note from the Publisher

WORDS OF THANKS

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1 - On Souls and Their Sizes

Soul-Shards

What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?

Guinea Pig

Pig

Revulsion, Revelation, Revolution

Reversion, Re-evolution

The Mystery of Inanimate Flesh

Give Me Some Men Who Are Stouter-souled Men

Small-souled and Large-souled Humans

Hattie the Chocolate Labrador

Ollie the Golden Retriever

Where to Draw that Fateful, Fatal Line?

Interiority — What Has it, and to What Degree?

The Gradual Growth of a Soul

Lights On?

Post Scriptum

CHAPTER 2 - This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream

What Is a “Brain Structure”?

A Simple Analogy between Heart and Brain

Can Toilet Paper Think?

The Terribly Thirsty Beer Can

Levels and Forces in the Brain

Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Cranium?

Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics

Thinkodynamics and Statistical Mentalics

CHAPTER 3 - The Causal Potency of Patterns

The Prime Mover

The Causal Potency of Collective Phenomena

Neurons and Dominos

Patterns as Causes

The Strange Irrelevance of Lower Levels

A Hat-tip to the Spectrum of Unpredictability

The Careenium

Simmballism

Taking the Reductionistic View of the Careenium

Taking a Higher-level View of the Careenium

Who Shoves Whom Around inside the Careenium?

The Dance of the Simmballs

CHAPTER 4 - Loops, Goals, and Loopholes

The First Flushes of Desire

A Soccer Ball Named Desire

The Slippery Slope of Teleology

Feedback Loops and Exponential Growth

Fallacy the First

Fallacy the Second

Feedback and Its Bad Rap

God, Gödel, Umlauts, and Mystery

Savoring Circularity and Self-application

The Timid Theory of Types

Intellectuals Who Dread Feedback Loops

CHAPTER 5 - On Video Feedback

Two Video Voyages, Three Decades Apart

Diary of a Video Trip

Enigmatic, Emergent Reverberation

Feeding “Content” to the Loop

A Mathematical Analogue

The Phenomenon of “Locking-in”

Emergent New Realities of Video Feedback

CHAPTER 6 - Of Selves and Symbols

Perceptual Looping as the Germ of “I”-ness

Varieties of Looping

Reception versus Perception

Mosquito Symbols

Mosquito Selves

An Interlude on Robot Vehicles

Pondering Dogthink

The Radically Different Conceptual Repertoire of Human Beings

Episodic Memory

CHAPTER 7 - The Epi Phenomenon

As Real as it Gets

Concrete Walls and Abstract Ceilings

The Many-faceted Intellectual Grounding of Reality

No Luck, No Soap, No Dice

An Out-of-the-Blue Ode to My Old Friend Epi

No Sphere, No Radius, No Mass

Where the Buck Seems to Stop

The Prime Mover, Redux

God’s Eye versus the Careenium’s Eye

I Am Not God

CHAPTER 8 - Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari

Flap Loop, Lap Loop

Seeking Strange Loopiness in Escher

Seeking Strange Loops in Feedback

Seeking Strange Loops in the Russellian Gloom

Mr Berry of the Bodleian

I Can’t Tell You How Indescribably Nondescript It Was!

Blurriness Buries Berry

A Peanut-butter and Barberry Sandwich

An Autobiographical Snippet

Idealistic Dreams about Metamathematics

Post Scriptum

CHAPTER 9 - Pattern and Provability

Principia Mathematica and its Theorems

Mixing Two Unlikely Ideas: Primes and Squares

Pattern-hunting

People who Pursue Patterns with Perseverance

Where There’s Pattern, There’s Reason

Sailing the Ocean of Primes and Falling off the Edge

The Mathematician’s Credo

No Such Thing as an Infinite Coincidence

The Long Search for Proofs, and for their Nature

CHAPTER 10 - Gödel’s Quintessential Strange Loop

Gödel Encounters Fibonacci

The Caspian Gemstones: An Allegory

A Tiny Spark in Gödel’s Brain

Clever Rules Imbue Inert Symbols with Meaning

Mechanizing the Mathematician’s Credo

Miraculous Lockstep Synchrony

Flipping between Formulas and Very Big Integers

Very Big Integers Moving in Lock-step with Formulas

Glimmerings of How PM Can Twist Around and See Itself

Prim Numbers

The Uncanny Power of Prim Numbers

Gödelian Strangeness

How to Stick a Formula’s Gödel Number inside the Formula

Gödel’s Elephant-in-Matchbox Trick via Quine’s Analogy

The Trickiest Step

An Elephant in a Matchbox is Neither Fish Nor Fowl

Sluggo and the Morton Salt Girl

CHAPTER 11 - How Analogy Makes Meaning

The Double Aboutness of Formulas in PM

Extra Meanings Come for Free, Thanks to You, Analogy!

Exploiting the Analogies in Everyday Situations

The Latent Ambiguity of the Village Baker’s Remarks

Chantal and the Piggybacked Levels of Meaning

Pickets at the Posh Shop

Prince Hyppia: Math Dramatica

Analogy, Once Again, Does its Cagey Thing

How Can an “Unpennable” Line be Penned?

“Not” is Not the Source of Strangeness

Numbers as a Representational Medium

CHAPTER 12 - On Downward Causality

Bertrand Russell’s Worst Nightmare

A Strange Land where “Because” Coincides with “Although”

Incompleteness Derives from Strength

Bertrand Russell’s Second-worst Nightmare

An Endless Succession of Monsters

Consistency Condemns a Towering Peak to Unscalability

Downward Causality in Mathematics

Göru and the Futile Quest for a Truth Machine

The Upside-down Perceptions of Evolved Creatures

Stuck, for Better or Worse, with “I”

Proceeding Slowly Towards the Bottom Level

Of Hogs, Dogs, and Bogs

CHAPTER 13 - The Elusive Apple of My “I”

The Patterns that Constitute Experience

Reflected Communist Bachelors with Spin 1/2 are All Wet

Am I a Strange Marble?

A Pearl Necklace I Am Not

I Am My Brain’s Most Complex Symbol

Internalizing Our Weres, Our Wills, and Our Woulds

I Cannot Live without My Self

The Slow Buildup of a Self

Making Tosses, Internalizing Bounces

Smiling Like Hopalong Cassidy

The Lies in our I’s

The Locking-in of the “I” Loop

I Am Not a Video Feedback Loop

I Am Ineradicably Entrenched…

…But Am I Real?

The Size of the Strange Loop that Constitutes a Self

The Supposed Selves of Robot Vehicles

A Counterfactual Stanley

CHAPTER 14 - Strangeness in the “I” of the Beholder

The Inert Sponges inside our Heads

Squirting Chemicals

The Stately Dance of the Symbols

In which the Alfbert Visits Austranius

Brief Debriefing

Soaps in Sanskrit

Winding Up the Debriefing

Trapped at the High Level

First Key Ingredient of Strangeness

Second Key Ingredient of Strangeness

Sperry Redux

CHAPTER 15 - Entwinement

Multiple Strange Loops in One Brain

Content-free Feedback Loops

Baby Feedback Loops and Baby “I” ’s

Entwined Feedback Loops

One Privileged Loop inside our Skull

Shared Perception, Shared Control

A Twirlwind Trip to Twinwirld

Is One or Two Letters of the Alphabet?

Pairsonal Identity in Twinwirld

“Twe”-tweaking by Twinwirld-twiddling

Post Scriptum re Twinwirld

Soulmates and Matesouls

Children as Gluons

CHAPTER 16 - Grappling with the Deepest Mystery

A Random Event Changes Everything

Desperate Lark

Post Scriptum

CHAPTER 17 - How We Live in Each Other

Universal Machines

The Unexpectedness of Universality

Universal Beings

Being Visited

Chemistry and Its Lack

Copycat Planetoids Grow by Absorbing Melting Meteorites

How Much Can One Import of Another’s Interiority?

Double-clicking on the Icon for a Loved One’s Soul

Thinking with Another’s Brain

Mosaics of Different Grain Size

Transplantation of Patterns

CHAPTER 18 - The Blurry Glow of Human Identity

I Host and Am Hosted by Others

Feeling that One is Elsewhere

Telepresence versus “Real” Presence

Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?

Where Am I?

Varying Degrees of Being Another

The Naïve Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough

Where Does a Hammerhead Shark Think it is?

Sympathetic Vibrations

Am I No One Else or Am I Everyone Else?

Interpenetration of National Souls

Halos, Afterglows, Coronas

CHAPTER 19 - Consciousness = Thinking

So Where’s Consciousness in my Loopy Tale?

Enter the Skeptics

Symbols Trigger More Symbols

The Central Loop of Cognition

CHAPTER 20 - A Courteous Crossing of Words

CHAPTER 21 - A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos

Well-told Stories Pluck Powerful Chords

What Pushovers We Are!

Teleportation of a Thought Experiment across the Atlantic

The Murky Whereabouts of Cartesian Egos

Am I on Venus, or Am I on Mars?

The Radical Nature of Parfit’s Views

Self-confidence, Humility, and Self-doubt

Morphing Parfit into Bonaparte

The Radical Redesign of Douglas R. Hofstadter

On “Who” and on “How”

Double or Nothing

Trains Who Roll

The Glow of the Soular Corona

CHAPTER 22 - A Tango with Zombies and Dualism

Pedantic Semantics?

Two Machines

Two Daves

The Nagging Worry that One Might Be a Zombie

Consciousness Is Not a Power Moonroof

Liphosophy

Consciousness: A Capitalized Essence

A Sliding Scale of Élan Mental

Semantic Quibbling in Universe Z

Quibbling in Universe Q

CHAPTER 23 - Killing a Couple of Sacred Cows

A Cerulean Sardine

Bleu Blanc Rouge = Red, White, and Blue

Inverting the Sonic Spectrum

Glebbing and Knurking

The Inverted Political Spectrum

Violets Are Red, Roses Are Blue

A Scarlet Sardine

Yes, People Want Things

The Hedge Maze of Life

There’s No Such Thing as a Free Will

CHAPTER 24 - On Magnanimity and Friendship

Are There Small and Large Souls?

From the Depths to the Heights

The Magnanimity of Albert Schweitzer

Does Conscience Constitute Consciousness?

Albert Schweitzer and Johann Sebastian Bach

Dig that Profundity!

Alle Grashüpfer Müssen Sterben

Friends

EPILOGUE

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acknowledgements

INDEX

Copyright Page