[lit-ideas] Feeling Loopy
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Anthro-L <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:07:29 +0900
It's that kind of day. Arts & Letters daily points me to a piece in
Scientific American, a review of Douglas Hofstadter's _I am a strange
loop_.
Starts like this,
-----------------
February 18, 2007
A New Journey into Hofstadter's Mind
The eternal golden braid emerges as a strange loop
By George Johnson
I AM A STRANGE LOOP
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Basic Books, 2007
To get into a properly loopy mind-set for Douglas R. Hofstadter's new
book on consciousness, I plugged a Webcam into my desktop computer and
pointed it at the screen. In the first instant, an image of the screen
appeared on the screen and then the screen inside the screen. Cycling
round and round, the video signal rapidly gave rise to a long corridor
leading toward a patch of shimmering blue, beckoning like the light at
the end of death's tunnel.
Giving the camera a twist, I watched as the regress of rectangles took
on a spiraling shape spinning fibonaccily deeper into nowhere.
Somewhere along the way a spot of red--a glint of sunlight, I later
realized--became caught in the swirl, which slowly congealed into a
planet of red continents and blue seas. Zooming in closer, I explored
a surface that was erupting with yellow, orange and green volcanoes.
Like Homer Simpson putting a fork inside the microwave, I feared for a
moment that I had ruptured the very fabric of space and time.
In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter, a cognitive and computer scientist
at Indiana University, describes a more elaborate experiment with
video feedback that he did many years ago at Stanford University. By
that time he had become obsessed with the paradoxical nature of
Gödel's theorem, with its formulas that speak of themselves. Over the
years this and other loopiness--Escher's drawings of hands drawing
hands, Bach's involuted fugues--were added to the stew, along with the
conviction that all of this had something to do with consciousness.
What finally emerged, in 1979, was Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal
Golden Braid, one of the most captivating books I have ever read.
I still remember standing in the aisle of a bookstore in Washington,
D.C., where I had just finished graduate school, devouring the pages.
GEB, as the author calls it, is not so much a "read" as an experience,
a total immersion into Hofstadter's mind. It is a great place to be,
and for those without time for the scenic route, I Am a Strange Loop
pulls out the big themes and develops them into a more focused picture
of consciousness.
Think of your eyes as that video camera, but with a significant
upgrade: a mechanism, the brain, that not only registers images but
abstracts them, arranging and constantly rearranging the data into
mental structures--symbols, Hofstadter calls them--that stand as
proxies for the exterior world. Along with your models of things and
places are symbols for each of your friends, family members and
colleagues, some so rich that the people almost live in your head.
Among this library of simulations there is naturally one of yourself,
and that is where the strangeness begins.
"You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback
from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you'
makes more decisions, and so forth, round and round," Hofstadter
writes. What blossoms from the Gödelian vortex--this symbol system
with the power to represent itself--is the "anatomically invisible,
terribly murky thing called I." A self, or, to use the name he favors,
a soul.
It need know nothing of neurons. Sealed off from the biological
substrate, the actors in the internal drama are not things like
"serotonin" or "synapse" or even "cerebrum," "hippocampus" or
"cerebellum" but abstractions with names like "love," "jealousy,"
"hope" and "regret."
And that is what leads to the grand illusion. "In the soft, ethereal,
neurology-free world of these players," the author writes, "the
typical human brain perceives its very own 'I' as a pusher and a
mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player
might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad infinitesimal
entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among
them."
-----------
For the second half see
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=C7265AEC-E7F2-99DF-3B3A60DE6200D457
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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