I Am a Strange Loop

CHAPTER 7

The Epi Phenomenon

As Real as it Gets

THANKS to the funneling-down processes of perception, which lead eventually — that is, in a matter of milliseconds — to the activation of certain discrete symbols in its brain, an animal (and let’s not forget robot vehicles!) can relate intimately and reliably to its physical environment. A mature human animal not only does a fine job of not slipping on banana peels and not banging into thorn-bristling rosebushes, it also reacts in a flash to strong odors, strange accents, cute babies, loud crashes, titillating headlines, terrific skiers, garish clothes, and on and on. It even occasionally hits curve balls coming at it at 80 miles an hour. Because an animal’s internal mirroring of the world must be highly reliable (the symbol elephant should not get triggered by the whine of a mosquito, nor should the symbol mosquito get triggered if an elephant ambles into view), 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.

Of course, in nonverbal animals, a question such as “Which things that I perceive are the most real of all to me?” is never raised, explicitly or implicitly. But in human lives, questions about what is and what is not real inevitably bubble up sooner or later, sometimes getting uttered consciously and carefully, other times remaining unexpressed and inchoate, just quietly simmering in the background. As children and teen-agers, we see directly, or we see on television, or we read about, or we are told about many things that supposedly exist, things that vie intensely with each other for our attention and for acceptance by our reality evaluators — for instance, God, Godzilla, Godiva, Godot, Gödel, gods, goddesses, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, gremlins, golems, golliwogs, griffins, gryphons, gluons, and grinches. It takes a child a few years to sort out the reality of some of these; indeed, it takes many people a full lifetime to do so (and occasionally a bit longer).

By “sorting out the reality of X”, I mean coming to a stable conclusion about how much you believe in X and whether you would feel comfortable relying on the notion of X in explaining things to yourself and others. If you are willing to use griffins in your explanations and don’t flinch at other people’s doing so in theirs, then it would seem that griffins are a seriously real concept to you. If you had already pretty much sorted out for yourself the reality of griffins and then heard there was going to be a TV special on griffins, you wouldn’t feel a need to catch the show in order to help you decide whether or not griffins exist. Perhaps you believe strongly in griffins, perhaps you think of them as a childish fantasy or a joke — but your mind is made up one way or the other. Or perhaps you haven’t yet sorted out the reality of griffins; if it were to come up in a dinner-party conversation, you would feel unsure, confused, ignorant, skeptical, or on the fence.

Another way of thinking about “how real X is to you” is how much you would trust a newspaper article that took for granted the existence of X (for example, a living dinosaur, a sighting of Hitler, insects discovered on Mars, a perpetual-motion machine, UFO abductions, God’s omniscience, out-ofbody experiences, alternate universes, superstrings, quarks, Bigfoot, Big Brother, the Big Bang, Atlantis, the gold in Fort Knox, the South Pole, cold fusion, Einstein’s tongue, Holden Caulfield’s brain, Bill Gates’ checkbook, or the proverbial twenty-mile “wall” for marathon runners). If you stop reading an article the moment you see X’s existence being taken for granted, then it would seem that you consider X’s “reality” highly dubious.

Pick any of the concepts mentioned above. Almost surely, there are plenty of people who believe fervently in it, others who believe in it just a little, others not at 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, and 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.

Concrete Walls and Abstract Ceilings

To be more concrete about all this, how real is the marathoners’ twenty-mile wall, mentioned above? If you’re a marathoner, you almost surely have a well-worked-out set of thoughts about it. Perhaps you have experienced it personally, or know people who have. Or perhaps you think the notion is greatly exaggerated. I’ve never hit the wall myself, but then my longest run ever was only fifteen miles. What I know is that “they say” that most runners, if they haven’t trained properly, will bang up against a brutal wall at around twenty miles, in which their body, having used up all of its glycogen, starts burning fat instead (I’ve heard it described as “your body eating its own muscles”). It comes out of the blue and is extremely painful (“like an elephant falling out of a tree onto my shoulders”, said marathoner Dick Beardsley), and many runners simply cannot go any further at that point, and drop out. But is this a universal phenomenon? Is it the same for all people? Do some marathoners never experience it at all? And even if it is scientifically explicable, is it as real and as palpable a phenomenon as a concrete wall into which one bangs?

When I entered math graduate school at Berkeley in 1966, I had the self-image of being quite a math whiz. After all, as an undergraduate math major at Stanford, not only had I coasted through most of my courses without too much work, but I had done lots of original research, and on graduating I was awarded the citation “with Distinction” by the Math Department. I was expecting to become a mathematician and to do great things. Well, at Berkeley two courses were required of all first-year students — abstract algebra and topology — and so I took them. To my shock, both were very hard for me — like nothing I’d ever encountered before. I got good grades in them but only by memorizing and then regurgitating ideas on the finals. For the entire year, my head kept on hurting from a severe lack of imagery such as I had never before experienced. It was like climbing a very high peak and getting piercing headaches as the air grows ever thinner. Abstraction piled on abstraction and the further I plowed, the slower my pace, and the less I grasped. Finally, after a year and a half, I recognized the situation’s hopelessness, and with a flood of bitter tears and a crushing loss of self-confidence, I jettisoned my dream of myself as a mathematician and bailed out of the field forever. This hated, rigid “abstraction ceiling” against which I had metaphorically banged my head without any advance warning was a searingly painful, life-changing trauma. And so… how concrete, how genuine, how real a thing was this abstract “abstraction ceiling”? As real as a marathoner’s wall? As real as a wooden joist against which my skull could audibly crash? What is really real?

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. (However, I have known, and probably you have too, reader, a few adults for whom every issue that strikes me as subtle seems to them to be totally black-and-white — no messy shades of gray at all to deal with. That must make life easy!) Actually, to suggest that for most of us life is filled with “shades of gray” is far too simple, because that phrase conjures up the image of a straightforward one-dimensional continuum with many degrees of grayness running between white and black, while in fact the story is much more multidimensional than that.

All of this is disturbing, because the word “real”, like so many words, seems to imply a sharp, clear-cut dichotomy. Surely it ought to be the case that some things simply are real while other things simply are not real. Surely there should be nothing that is partly real — that wouldn’t make sense! And yet, though we try very hard to force the world to match this ideal black-and-white dichotomy, things unfortunately get terribly blurry.

The Many-faceted Intellectual Grounding of Reality

That marble over there in that little cardboard box on my desk is certainly real because I see the cardboard box sitting there and because I can go over and open it and can squeeze the marble, hefting it and feeling its solidity. I hope that makes sense to you.

The upper edge of that 75-foot-tall Shell sign near the freeway exit is real, I am convinced, because every road sign is a solid object and every solid object has a top; also because I can see the sign’s bottom edge and its sides and so, by analogy, I can imagine seeing its top; also because, even though I’ll certainly never touch it, I could at least theoretically climb up to it or be lowered down onto it from a helicopter. Then again, the sign could topple in an earthquake and I could rush over to it and touch what had once been its upper edge, and so forth.

Antarctica, too, is real because, although I’ve never been there and almost surely will never go there, I’ve seen hundreds of photos of it, I’ve seen photos of the whole earth from space including all of Antarctica, and also I once met someone who told me he went there, and on and on.

Why do I believe what certain people tell me more than I believe what others tell me? Why do I believe in (some) photos as evidence of reality? Why do I trust certain photos in certain books? Why do I trust certain newspapers, and why only up to a certain point? Why do I not trust all newspapers equally? Why do I not trust all book publishers equally? Why do I not trust all authors equally?

Through many types of abstraction 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.

Just as we believe in other peoples’ kidneys and brains (thanks almost entirely to arguments from analogy and authority), so we come to believe in our own kidneys and brains. Just as we believe in everyone else’s mortality (again, thanks primarily to arguments from analogy and authority), so we come, eventually, to believe in our own mortality, as well as in the reality of the obituary notices about us that will appear in local papers even though we know we will never be able to flip those pages and read those notices.

What makes for our sense of utter sureness about such abstract things? It comes firstly from the reliability of our internal symbols to directly mirror the concrete environment (e.g., we purchase a cup of coffee and instantly, somewhere inside our cranium, God only knows where, there springs into existence a physical record reflecting this coffee, tracking where it is on the table or in our hand, constantly updating its color, bitterness level, warmth, and how much there is left of it). It comes secondly from the reliability of our thinking mechanisms to tell us about more abstract entities that we cannot directly perceive (e.g., the role of Napoleon in French history, the impact of Wagner on late-romantic French composers, or the unsolvability by radicals, such as Évariste Galois, of the quintic equation). All of this more abstract stuff is rooted in the constant reinforcement, moment by moment, of the symbols that are haphazardly triggered out of dormancy by events in the world that we perceive first-hand. These immediate mental events constitute the bedrock underlying our broader sense of reality.

Inevitably, what seems realest to us is what gets activated most often. Our hangnails are incredibly real to us (by coincidence, I found myself idly picking at a hangnail while I was reworking this paragraph), whereas to most of us, the English village of Nether Wallop and the high Himalayan country of Bhutan, not to mention the slowly swirling spiral galaxy in Andromeda, are considerably less real, even though our intellectual selves might wish to insist that since the latter are much bigger and longer-lasting than our hangnails, they ought therefore to be far realer to us than our hangnails are. We can say this to ourselves till we’re blue in the face, but few of us act as if we really believed it. A slight slippage of subterranean stone that obliterates 20,000 people in some far-off land, the ceaseless plundering of virgin jungles in the Amazon basin, a swarm of helpless stars being swallowed up one after another by a ravenous black hole, even an ongoing collision between two huge galaxies each of which contains a hundred billion stars — such colossal events are so abstract to someone like me that they can’t even touch the sense of urgency and importance, and thus the reality, of some measly little hangnail on my left hand’s pinky.

We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself. The realest things of all are my knee, my nose, my anger, my hunger, my toothache, my sideache, my sadness, my joy, my love for math, my abstraction ceiling, and so forth. What all these things have in common, what binds them together, is the concept of “my”, which comes out of the concept of “I” or “me”, and therefore, although it is less concrete than a nose or even a toothache, this “I” thing is what ultimately seems to each of us to constitute the most solid rock of undeniability of all. Could it possibly be an illusion? Or if not a total illusion, could it possibly be less real and less solid than we think it is? Could an “I” be more like an elusive, receding, shimmering rainbow than like a tangible, heftable, transportable pot of gold?

No Luck, No Soap, No Dice

One day, many years ago, I wanted to pull out all the envelopes from a small cardboard box lying on the floor of my study and stick them as a group into one of my desk drawers. Accordingly, I picked up the box, reached into it, clasped my right hand around the pack of envelopes inside it (about a hundred in number), and squeezed tightly down on them in order to pull them all out of the box as a unit. Nothing at all surprising in any of this. But all of a sudden I felt, between my thumb and fingers, something very surprising. Oddly enough, there was a marble sitting (or floating?) right in the middle of that flimsy little cardboard box!

Like most Americans of my generation, I had held marbles hundreds of times, and I knew without any doubt what I was feeling. Like you, dear reader, I was an “old marble hand”. But how had a marble somehow found its way into this box that I usually kept on my desk? At the time I didn’t have any kids, so that couldn’t be the explanation. And anyway, how could it be hovering in the very middle of the box, rather than sitting at the bottom? Why wasn’t gravity working?

I peered in between the envelopes, looking for a small, smooth, colored glass sphere. No luck. Then I fumbled about with my fingers between the envelopes, feeling for it. Again no soap. But then, as soon as I grasped the whole set of envelopes as before, there it was again, as solid as ever! Where was this little devil of a marble hiding?

I looked more carefully, and of course took the envelopes out and tried to shake it out from between them, but still no dice. And finally, on checking, I found that each envelope on its own was empty. So what in tarnation was going on?

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

To you, my astute reader (and surely an old envelope hand, to boot), it is probably already obvious, but believe me, I was baffled for a minute or two. Eventually it dawned on me that there wasn’t any marble in there at all, but that there was something that felt for all the world exactly like a marble to this old marble hand. It was an epiphenomenon caused by the fact that, for each envelope, at the vertex of the “V” made by its flap, there is a triple layer of paper as well as a thin layer of glue. An unintended consequence of this innocent design decision is that when you squeeze down on a hundred such envelopes all precisely aligned with each other, you can’t compress that little zone as much as the other zones — it resists compression. The hardness that you feel at your fingertips has an uncanny resemblance to a more familiar (dare I say “a more real”?) hardness.

An epiphenomenon, as you probably recall from earlier chapters, is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unsuspected, events. In other words, an epiphenomenon could be said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.

Well, I was so charmed and captivated by this epiphenomenal illusion of the marble in the box that I nicknamed the box of envelopes “Epi”, and I have kept it ever since — three decades or more, now. (Unfortunately, the box is falling apart after such a long time.) And sometimes, when I take a trip somewhere to give a lecture on the concepts of self and “I”, I’ll carry Epi along with me and I’ll let members of the audience reach in and feel it for themselves, so that the concept of an epiphenomenon — in this case, the Epi phenomenon — becomes very real and vivid for them.

Recently I headed off to give such a lecture in Tucson, Arizona, and I took Epi along with me. One of the audience members, Jeannel King, was so taken with my Epi saga that she wrote a poem about it, translating it with poetic license into her own life, and a few days later she sent it to me. I in turn was so taken with her poem that I asked her for permission to reprint it here, and she generously said she’d be pleased if I did so. So without further ado, here is Jeannel King’s delightful poem inspired by Epi.

Ode to a Box of Envelopes

(For all who have lost their marbles…)

by Jeannel King

A box of env’lopes on the floor —

I want to shift them to my drawer.

I squeeze inside — there’s something there!

I look inside — there’s naught but air.

I squeeze again and marble find.

Is this a marble of my mind?a

Determined now, and one by one,

out come the env’lopes — still no plum!

For closer views of each, I must

brave paper cuts and motes of dust.

In tips? Or env’lope forty-six?a

My marble, whole, does not exist.

Then coarse-grained Mother whispers, “Nell,

you keep this up, you’ll go to hell!”

To which Dad counters, “Mind yer mopes!

Let Nell seek God in envelopes!”

So envelopes lie all around

as I sit, vexed, upon the ground.

My marble’s lost, but in my core

could there, perhaps, be something more?a

For more than parts this whole has grown:

No single part doth stand alone.

In parts, the marble simply mocks.

Intact, I think, I’ll keep this box.

No Sphere, No Radius, No Mass

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of my epiphenomenal marble was how sure I was that this “object” in the box was spherical and how confidently I would have provided an estimate of its diameter (about half an inch, like most marbles), as well as described how hard it was (as compared with, say, an egg yolk or a ball of clay). Many aspects of this nonexistent object were clear and familiar tactile phenomena. In a word, I had been sucked in by a tactile illusion. There was no marble anywhere in there — there was just a statistical epiphenomenon.

And yet, it’s undeniable that the phrase “it felt just like a marble” gets across my experience far more clearly to my readers than if I had written, “I experienced the collective effect of the precise alignment of a hundred triple layers of paper and a hundred layers of glue.” It is only because I called it a “marble” that you have a clear impression of how it felt to me. If I hadn’t used the word “marble”, would you have been able to predict that a thick pack of envelopes would give rise, in its middle, to something (some thing?) that felt perfectly spherical, felt like it had a size, felt extremely solid — in short, that this collective effect would feel like a very simple, very familiar physical object? I strongly doubt it. And thus there is something to be gained by not rejecting the term “marble”, even if there is no real marble in the box. There is something that feels remarkably like a marble, and that fact is crucial to my portraying and to your grasping of the situation, just as the concepts of “corridor”, “galaxy”, and “black hole” were crucial in allowing me to perceive and describe the phenomena on the screen of the self-watching television — even if, strictly speaking, no corridor, no galaxy, and no black hole were there to be seen.

Where the Buck Seems to Stop

I have recounted the story of the half-real, half-unreal marble inside the box of envelopes to suggest a metaphor for the type of reality that applies to our undeniable feeling that something “solid” or “real” resides at the core of ourselves, a powerful feeling that makes the pronoun “I” indispensable and central to our existence. The thesis of this book is that in a nonembryonic, non-infantile human brain, there is a special type of abstract structure or pattern that plays the same role as does that precise alignment of layers of paper and glue — an abstract pattern that gives rise to what feels like a self. I intend to talk a great deal about the nature of that abstract pattern, but before I do so, I have to say what I mean by the term “a self ”, or perhaps more specifically, why we seem to need a notion of that sort.

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 clichéd 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 or visiting certain museums or owning certain types of cars. 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.

“Why did you ride your bike to that building?” “I wanted to practice the piano.” “And why did you want to practice the piano?” “Because I want to learn that piece by Bach.” “And why do you want to learn that piece?” “I don’t know, I just do — it’s beautiful.” “But what is it about this particular piece that is so beautiful?” “I can’t say, exactly — it just hits me in some special way.”

This creature ascribes its behavior to things it refers to as its desires or its wants, but it can’t say exactly why it has those desires. At a certain point there is no further possibility of analysis or articulation; those desires simply are there, and to the creature, they seem to be the root causes for its decisions, actions, motions. And always, inside the sentences that express why it does what it does, there is the pronoun “I” (or its cousins “me”, “my”, etc.). It seems that the buck stops there — with the so-called “I”.

The Prime Mover, Redux

Late one autumn afternoon, the red, orange, and yellow leaves are so alluring, and the fall weather so mild, compared to the just-finished muggy summer, that I decide to take a good long run. I go into my bedroom, search around for my running shorts and shoes and T-shirt, change my clothes in eagerness, and soon enough, my body finds itself out on the pavement, with my feet pounding the ground and my heart beginning to thump away. Before I know it, I’ve taken a hundred steps, and moments later it’s been three hundred. Then it’s been a thousand, then three thousand, and I’m still charging on, breathing hard, sweating, and thinking to myself, “Why do I always tell myself that I like running? I hate it!” And yet my body doesn’t stop for a split second, and no matter how tired my muscles are, my self just says to them, like a sadistic drill sergeant sneering at a bunch of new recruits, “Don’t be quitters!” — and lo and behold, my poor, huffing, heaving, protesting body unquestioningly obeys my self, even charging up steep hills against its will. In shorts, my rebelling physical body is being quite mercilessly pushed around by my intangible I’s equally intangible determination to take this autumn run.

So who is pushing whom around here? Where are the particles of physics in this picture of what makes us do things? They are invisible, and even if you remember that they exist, they seem to be just secondary players. It is this “I”, a coherent collection of desires and beliefs, that sets everything in motion. It is this “I” that is the prime mover, the mysterious entity that lies behind, and that launches, all the creature’s behaviors. If I want something to happen, I just will it to happen, and unless it is out of my control, it generally does happen. The body’s molecules, whether in the fingers, the arm, the legs, the throat, the tongue, or wherever, obediently follow the supreme bidding of the Grand “I” on high.

Thus it is that I push various pedals down and sure enough, my one-ton automobile obediently goes right where I want it to go. The ethereal “I” has pushed this huge physical object around. I twiddle my chopsticks and sure enough, the string beans obediently jump on board and I receive the sensory joy that I covet and the nourishment I need. I push certain keys on my Macintosh’s keyboard and sure enough, sentences obediently emerge on its screen, and they pretty much express the thoughts that the ethereal “I” hoped to express. And in all of this, where are the particles? Nowhere to be seen. All there seems to be is this “I” making it all happen.

Well then, if this “I” thing is causing everything that a creature does, if this “I” thing is responsible for the creature’s decisions and plans and actions and movements, then surely this “I” thing must at least exist. How could it be so all-powerful and yet not exist?

God’s Eye versus the Careenium’s Eye

I’d like to return, at this point, to the image of the careenium. At the heart of my discussion of the tiny zipping simms and the far larger, more sluggish simmballs in the careenium was the fact that this system can be seen on two very distant levels, yielding widely discrepant interpretations.

From the higher-level “thinkodynamics” viewpoint, there is symbolic activity in which simmballs interact with each other, taking advantage of the “heat energy” provided by the churning soup of invisible simms. From this viewpoint, what causes any simmballic event we see is a set of other simmballic events, even if the details of the causation are often tricky or too blurry to pin down precisely. (We are very familiar with this type of blurriness of causality in daily life — for instance, if I just barely miss a free throw in basketball, we know that it was my fault and that I did something a bit wrong, but we don’t know exactly what it was. If I throw a die and it comes up ‘6’, we aren’t in the least surprised, but we still don’t know why it came up ‘6’ — nor do we give the question the least thought.)

Contrariwise, from the lower-level “statistical mentalics” viewpoint, there are just simms and simms alone, interacting through the fundamental dynamics of careening, bashing simms — and from this viewpoint, there is never the least vagueness or doubt about causality, because everything is governed by sharp, precise, hard-edged mathematical laws. (If we could zoom in arbitrarily closely on my arms and hands and fingers and also on the basketball and the backboard and the rim, or on the die and the table, and watch everything in slow motion of any desired slowness, we could discover exactly what gave rise to the missed free throw or the ‘6’. This might require a descent all the way down to the level of atoms, but that’s all right — eventually, the reason would emerge into the clear.)

If one understands the careenium well, it would seem that both points of view are valid, although the latter one, leaving out no details, might seem to be the more fundamental one (we could call it the “God’s eye” point of view), while the former, being a highly compressed simplification in which vast amounts of information are thrown away, might seem to be 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 ).

I Am Not God

But not all observers of the careenium enjoy the luxury of being able to flip back and forth between these two wildly discrepant viewpoints. Not all thinking creatures understand the careenium nearly as clearly or as fully as I described it in Chapter 3. The God’s-eye point of view is simply not available to all observers; indeed, the very fact that such a point of view might exist is utterly unsuspected by some careenium observers. I am in particular thinking of one very special and privileged careenium observer, and that is the careenium itself.

When the careenium grapples with its own nature, particularly when it is “growing up”, just beginning to know itself, long before it has become a scientist that studies mathematics and physics (and perhaps, eventually, the noble discipline of careeniology), all it is aware of is its simmballic activity, not its simm-level churnings. After all, as you and I both know (but it does not know), the careenium’s perceptions of all things are fantastically coarse-grained simplifications (small sets of simmballs that have been collectively triggered by a vast storm of impinging signals) — and its self-perceptions are no exception.

The innocent young careenium has no inkling that behind the scenes, way down on some hidden micro-scale, churning, seething, simm-level activities are taking place inside it. Not once has it ever suspected the existence, even in principle, of any alternative viewpoint concerning its nature and its behavior. Indeed, this young careenium reminds me of myself as an adolescent, just before I read the books on the human brain by Pfeiffer and by Penfield and Roberts, books that so troubled me and yet that so fired my imagination. This idealistic young careenium is much like the naïve teen-aged Doug, just at the cusp, just before he began to glimpse the extraordinary eerieness of what goes on in total darkness, day and night, inside each and every human cranium.

And so, built as irrefutably as a granite marble into the careenium’s pre-scientific understanding of itself is the sense of being a creature driven entirely by thoughts and ideas; its self-image is infinitely far from that of being a vast mechanistic entity whose destiny is entirely determined by billions of invisibly careening, mutually bashing micro-objects. Instead, the naïve careenium serenely asserts of itself, “I am driven solely by myself, not by any mere physical objects anywhere.”

What kind of thing, then, is this “I” that the careenium posits as driving its choices and its actions, and that human beings likewise posit as driving theirs? No one will be surprised at this point to hear me assert that it is a peculiar type of abstract, locked-in loop located inside the careenium or the cranium — in fact, a strange loop. And thus, in order to lay out clearly my claim about what constitutes “I”-ness, I need to spell out what I mean by “strange loop”. And since we’re just finishing Chapter 7 of I Am a Strange Loop, it’s about time!