I Am a Strange Loop

CHAPTER 19

Consciousness = Thinking

So Where’s Consciousness in my Loopy Tale?

FROM the very start in this book, I have used a few key terms pretty much interchangeably: “self”, “soul”, “I”, “a light on inside”, and “consciousness”. To me, these are all names for the same phenomenon. To other people, they may not seem to denote one single thing, but that’s how they seem to me. It’s like prime numbers of the form 4n + 1 and prime numbers that are the sums of two squares — on the surface these would seem to be descriptions of completely different entities, but on closer analysis they turn out to denote exactly the same entities.

In my way of looking at things, all of these phenomena come in shades of gray, and whatever shade one of them has in a particular being (natural or artificial), all the others have that same shade. Thus I feel that in talking about “I”-ness, I have also been talking about consciousness throughout. Yet I know that some people will protest that although I may have been addressing issues of personal identity, and perhaps the concepts of “I” and “self”, I haven’t even touched the far deeper and more mysterious riddle of consciousness. They will skeptically ask me, “What, then, is experience in terms of your strange loops? How do strange loops in the brain tell us anything about what it feels like to be alive, to smell honeysuckle, to see a sunset, or to listen to raindrops patter on a tin roof? That is what consciousness is all about! How does that have anything to do with your strange, loopy idea?”

I doubt that I can answer such questions to the satisfaction of these hard-core skeptics, for they will surely find what I say both too simple and too evasive. Nonetheless, here is my answer, stripped down to its essence: Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to make it even more pithy, consciousness is thinking. As Descartes said, Cogito ergo sum.

Unfortunately, I suspect that this answer is far too compressed for even my most sympathetic readers, so I will try to spell it out a little more explicitly. Most of the time, any given symbol in our brain is 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 is. (It is also what thinking is.) Note that I say “symbols” and not “neurons”. The dance has to be perceived at that level for it to constitute consciousness. So there you have a slightly more spelled-out version.

Enter the Skeptics

“But who reads these symbols and their configurations?”, some skeptics will ask. “Who feels these symbols ‘come alive’? Where is the counterpart to the reader of the retrieved book?”

I suspect that these skeptics would argue that the symbols’ dance on its own is merely motion of material stuff, unfelt by anyone, so that despite my claim, this dance cannot constitute consciousness. The skeptics would like me to name or point to some special locus of subjective awareness that we all have of our thoughts and perceptions. I feel, though, that such a hope is confused, because it uses what I consider to be just another synonym for “conscious” — namely, “aware” — in posing the same question once more, but at a different level. In other words, people seeking the “reader” for configurations of activated symbols may accept the idea of symbols galore being triggered in the brain, but they refuse to call that kind of internal churning “consciousness” because now they want the symbols themselves to be perceived. These people would probably be particularly unhappy if I were to bring up the careenium metaphor at this point and to suggest that the dance of simmballs in the careenium constitutes consciousness. They would argue that it’s just the mutual bashing of scads of tiny little marbles on a glorified pool table, and that that’s obviously empty and devoid of consciousness. They want much more than that.

Such skeptics are in essence kicking the problem upstairs — instead of settling for the idea that symbol-level brain activity (or simmball-level careenium activity) that mirrors external events is consciousness, they now insist that the internal events of brain activity must in turn be perceived if consciousness is to arise. This runs the risk of setting up an infinite regress and thus moving further and further away from an answer to the riddle of consciousness rather than homing in on an answer to it.

I will give such people one thing, however — I will agree that symbolic activity is itself an important, indispensable focus of a human brain’s attention (but I would quickly add that this does not hold for chickens or frogs or butterflies, and pretty darn little for dogs). 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 all about. To spot the gist. To Spot, the gist, however, doesn’t much matter, and the gist certainly doesn’t matter one whit to the flea on Spot’s wagging tail.

I suspect that all of this may sound a bit abstruse and vague, so I’ll illustrate it with a typical example.

Symbols Trigger More Symbols

A potential new doctoral student named Nicole comes to town for a day to explore the possibility of doing a Ph.D. in my research group. After my graduate students and I have interacted with her for several hours, first at our Center and then over a Chinese dinner, we agree that we all find her mind delightfully lively and her thoughts just on our wavelength, and it’s clear that our enthusiasm is reciprocated. Needless to say, then, we are all hopeful that she’ll join us next fall. After she returns home, Nicole sends me an email saying that she is still very excited by our ideas and that they are continuing to reverberate vividly in her mind. I reply with a note of encouragement, and then there ensues an e-silence for a couple of weeks. When I finally send her a second email telling her how eager we all are for her to come next year, a couple of days pass and then a terse and somewhat starchy reply arrives, saying that she’s sorry but she’s decided to go to another university for graduate school. “But I hope we’ll have a chance to interact in the future,” she adds politely at the end.

Well, this little episode is all fresh to me. Nicole is a unique individual, our lively conversations with her were all sui generis, and the complex configuration of symbols activated in my brain by the whole event is, by definition, unprecedented. And yet on another level that’s not true at all.

In my many decades’ worth of episodic memory, there are precedents galore for this episode, if I just “hold it loosely in the mind”. In fact, without making the slightest effort, I find quite a few old memories bubbling up for the first time in many years, such as that time nearly thirty years ago when a very promising young candidate for our faculty seemed so interested but then, to our great surprise, he turned down our exceedingly generous offer. And that time a few years later when an extremely bright grad student of mine got all excited about accompanying me out to California for my sabbatical year but then changed his mind and soon dropped entirely out of sight, never to be heard from again. And then there’s that sad time I was terribly infatuated with that young woman from a far-off land, whose signals to me at first seemed so tinglingly filled with promise, but who then inexplicably drew back a bit, and a week or so later wound up telling me she was involved with someone else (actually, that event happened far more than just once, to my chagrin…).

And so, one by one, 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”, and one after another of them gets pulled out and placed in the limelight of activation. These old sagas, long ago wrapped up in nice neat mental packages, had been idly sitting around on the shelves of my brain, waiting to be triggered if and when “the same thing” should ever happen, in new guise. And, sad to say, it did!

When all this activity has flowed around for a while, with memories triggering memories triggering memories, something slowly settles out — some kind of “precipitate”, to borrow a term from chemistry. In this case, it finally boils down to just one word: “jilted”. Yes, I feel jilted. My research group has been jilted.

What a phenomenal reduction in complexity! We began with an encounter that lasted for hours in two different venues and that involved many people and many thousands of words exchanged and uncountable visual impressions and then some follow-up emails, but in the end the whole thing funneled down to (or should I rather say “fizzled out in”?) just one single very disappointing six-letter word. To be sure, that’s not the only idea I retain from the saga, but “jilt” becomes one of the dominant mental categories with which Nicole’s visit will forever be associated. And of course, the Nicole saga itself gets neatly bound and stored on the shelves of my episodic memory for potential retrieval by this “I” of mine, somewhere further down the line, who knows when or where.

The Central Loop of Cognition

The machinery that underwrites this wonderfully fluid sort of abstract perception and memory retrieval is at least a little bit like what the skeptics above were clamoring for — it is a kind of perception of internal symbolpatterns, rather than the perception of outside events. Someone seems to be looking at configurations of activated symbols and perceiving their essence, thereby triggering the retrieval of other dormant symbols (which, as we have just seen, can be very large structures — memory packages that store entire romantic sagas, for instance), and round and round it all goes, giving rise to a lively cycle of symbolic activity — a smooth but completely improvised symbolic dance.

The stages constituting this cycle of symbol-triggerings may at first strike you as being wildly different from the act of recognizing, say, a magnolia tree in a flood of visual input, since that involves an outside scene being processed, whereas here, by contrast, I’m looking at my own activated symbols dancing and trying to pinpoint the dance’s essence, rather than pinpointing the essence of some external scene. But I would submit that the gap is far smaller than one might at first suppose.

My brain (and yours, too, dear reader) 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 or the tympani or the skin, it enters the realm of the internal, and from that point on, perception is solely an internal affair.

In short, and this should please the skeptics, there is a kind of perceiver of the symbols’ activity — but what will not please them is that this “perceiver” is itself just further symbolic activity. There is not some special “consciousness locus” where something magic happens, something other than just more of the same, some locus where the dancing symbols make contact with… well, with what? What would please the skeptics? If the “consciousness locus” turned out to be just a physical part of the brain, how would that satisfy them? They would still protest that if that’s all I claim consciousness is, then it’s just insensate physical activity, no different from and no better than the mindless careening of simms in the inanimate arena of the careenium, and has nothing to do with consciousness!

I think it may be helpful at this point to allow my various inner skeptical voices to merge into a single paper persona (hopefully not a paper tiger!), and for that persona to lock horns in an extended dialogue with another persona who essentially represents the ideas of this book. I’ll call the voice of this book “Strange Loop #641” and the voice of the skeptics “Strange Loop #642”.

It may strike some readers that I am unfairly prejudicing the case by labeling not only myself (or rather, my proxy) a “strange loop”, but also my worthy opponent, for that might be seen as suggesting that the game is over before it’s begun. But these are nothing more than labels. What counts in the dialogue is what the characters say, not what I call them. And so, if you prefer to give Strange Loops #641 and #642 the alternative names “Inner Light #7” and “Inner Light #8”, or perhaps even “Socrates” and “Plato”, that’s fine by me.

And now, without further ado, we tune in as our two strange loops (or inner lights) begin their amiable debate. Oops! I guess I’ve been rambling on a bit too long here, and we seem unfortunately to have missed a bit of the two friends’ opening repartee. Oh, well, that’s life. I expect you and I can jump in at this point without feeling too lost. Let’s give it a try…