I Am A Strange Loop Quotes

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

A mirror mirroring a mirror

Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.

We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth.

We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.

No, no - I think about thinking

Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.

It is curious, how one often mistrusts one’s own opinions if they are stated by someone else.

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there's cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I'm easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I'll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.

We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality.

Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right. In other words, concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees.

I Am a Strange Loop, by Doug Hofstadter,

There are those who will immediately be drawn to the idea of pattern-seeking, and

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

We should have great respect for what seem like the most mundane of analogies, for when they are examined, they often can be seen to have sprung from, and to reveal, the deepest roots of human cognition.

what happens on the lower level is responsible for what happens on the higher level, it is nonetheless irrelevant to the higher level. The higher level can blithely ignore the processes on the lower level.

And that is also the way the human mind works — by the compounding of old ideas into new structures that become new ideas that can themselves be used in compounds, and round and round endlessly, growing ever more remote from the basic earthbound imagery that is each language’s soil.

Kurt Gödel was the first person to realize and exploit the fact that the positive integers, though they might superficially seem to be very austere and isolated, in fact constitute a profoundly rich representational medium. They can mimic or mirror any kind of pattern.

We mortals are condemned not to speak at that level of no information loss. We necessarily simplify, and indeed, vastly so. But that sacrifice is also our glory. Drastic simplification is what allows us to reduce situations to their bare bones, to discover abstract essences, to put our fingers on what matters, to understand phenomena at amazingly high levels, to survive reliably in this world, and to formulate literature, art, music, and science.

Where there's a pattern, there's a reason.

That’s what I Am a Strange Loop is about,” said Deborah. “It’s about how we spend our lives self-referencing, over and over, in a kind of strange loop.

Where There’s Pattern, There’s Reason The key thought in the preceding few lines is the article of faith that this pattern cannot merely be a coincidence. A mathematician who finds a pattern of this sort will instinctively ask, “Why? What is the reason behind this order?” Not only will all mathematicians wonder what the reason is, but even more importantly, they will all implicitly believe that whether or not anyone ever finds the reason, there must be a reason for it. Nothing happens “by accident” in the world of mathematics.

By the time we emerge from childhood, we have acquired a reflex-level intuition for where most of our everyday world’s loci of unpredictability lie, and the more unpredictable end of this spectrum simultaneously beckons to us and frightens us. We’re pulled by but fearful of risk-taking. That is the nature of life.

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.

We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

It seems to me, therefore, that the instinctive although seldom articulated purpose of holding a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, and to collectively rekindle in them all, for one last time, the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person, profiting directly or indirectly from the presence of one another, feeling the presence of that person in the brains that remain, and thus solidifying to the maximal extent possible those secondary personal gemmae that remain aflicker in all these different brains. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word "love" cannot, thus, be separated from the word "I"; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.

What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)? In the final analysis, it is simply because might makes right, and we humans, thanks to the intelligence afforded us by the complexity of our brains and our embeddedness in rich languages and cultures, are indeed high and mighty, relative to the “lower” animals (and vegetables). By virtue of our might, we are forced to establish some sort of ranking of creatures, whether we do so as a result of long and careful personal reflections or simply go along with the compelling flow of the masses. Are cows just as comfortably killable as mosquitoes? Would you feel any less troubled by swatting a fly preening on a wall than by beheading a chicken quivering on a block?

if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those over-all organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity…. Near the apex of this command system in the brain…. we find ideas. Man over the chimpanzee has ideas and ideals. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burst-wise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell. Who

In short, there are surprising new structures that looping gives rise to that constitute a new level of reality that could in principle be deduced from the basic loop and its detailed properties, but that in practice have a different kind of “life of their own” and that demand — at least when it comes to extremely finite, simplicity-seeking, pattern-loving creatures like us — a new vocabulary and a new level of description that transcend the basic level out of which they emerge.

Hey...you okay?" I recognized the voice-how had my dreams known his voice?-but when he crouched down next to me, I skittered away. "Don't touch me!" I snapped. He held up his hands to show he was harmless. "Okay, okay," he said with a smirk. "You were the one chasing me." I glared at him. It was an impressive show of restraint on my part, when the truth was that having him physically in front of me was wreaking havoc on my body and my brain. My heart was pounding fast, and my mind played a loop of every moment we'd shared in my dreams. I forced myself to remember he was a stranger. Quite possibly a dangerous stranger. I needed answers from him, but I also needed to stay strong. "I'm sorry," he said. "I thought you were hurt." "I am hurt. I twisted my ankle." "Maybe you shouldn't be chasing strange men through the woods, then." "Maybe you shouldn't pretend you don't know who I am." His eyes widened in shock for a moment. "You reme-" Then he twitched his head briefly to the side, as if flicking away an unwanted thought, and his face relaxed. Only the clenched muscle in his jaw gave away any tension. "You must be mistaken. I don't think we've ever met." "Really? You look at most girls like you were caught with your hand in their purse?" "I don't know what you're talking-" "And then you ran away. Full speed, even though you knew I was trying to catch up with you. That's not normal. That's not how you act with a stranger." The man pursed his lips and pressed his right fist to his temple, a gesture I'd seen him make so many times I almost lost my grip. Somehow I managed to stay steely eyed. He lowered his fist and smiled, though the smile didn't reach his eyes. "I reacted poorly," he said stiffly. "I don't have a good answer for why, other than I like to keep to myself. I only came back because you were hurt, and it seemed irresponsible to leave a girl all alone in the middle of nowhere. But if you'd rather I left..." "No. "Fine. Let's take a look at your ankle.

who nodded as well. The relief hit Clearsight so hard, she nearly had to lie down again. But the dragons beckoned her to follow them, and they all took off, flying cautiously through the storm-tossed treetops. Dragons appeared between the leaves as she swept through the forest with her two companions, all of them watching her with startled curiosity. Most of them were dark green and brown with leaf-shaped wings. That’s their name in Dragon, she realized from a new cascade of visions. LeafWings. But about a quarter of them were the other tribe, the one Clearsight didn’t have a name for yet, and those glittered like jewels on the branches: gold and blue and purple and orange and every color of the rainbow. She saw a tiny lavender dragonet clinging to a branch, and for a moment Clearsight was alarmed to see that she didn’t have any wings. Then she spotted little wingbuds on the dragonet’s back and remembered—or foresaw, or remembered foreseeing—that the glittering tribe grew their wings a few years after hatching. Growing up wingless . . . that must be so strange. Clearsight’s mind flashed to that other vision, the horrible one, where this dragonet had been one of the many bodies left in the hurricane wreckage. But instead, tomorrow the little dragon would wake up and chase butterflies in the sunlight, complaining that she wanted blackberries for breakfast. I saved her. I did something right. The green dragon called out in a booming voice like a bell tolling. Whatever he said, the dragons around them repeated it, passing it along. Clearsight could hear the echoes of other dragon voices rolling through the forest. She felt the drumming wingbeats behind her as both tribes rose into the air and followed them to safety. “You save us,” said the shimmering dragon, looping around to fly beside Clearsight. He smiled at her again. “You safe now, too.” Maybe I am, she thought. I stopped Darkstalker. I saved Fathom, and the NightWings, and my parents. And now I’ve found a new home, with new dragons to save. I can help them with my visions. I can do everything right this time. New futures exploded in her mind. She might marry this kind, funny dragon, whose name would turn out to be Sunstreak. Or she could end up with a dragon she’d meet in three days, while helping to clean up the forest, whose gentle green eyes were nothing like Darkstalker’s.

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr. Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs.

INTROSPECTION AND INSANITY: A GODELIAN PROBLEM I think it can have suggestive value to translate Godel's Theorem into other domains, provided one specifies in advance that the translations are metaphorical and are not intended to be taken literally. That having been said, I see two major ways of using analogies to connect Godel's Theorem and human thoughts. One involves the problem of wondering about one's sanity. How can you figure out if you are sane? This is a Strange Loop indeed. Once you begin to question your own sanity, you can get trapped in an ever-tighter vortex of self-fulfilling prophecies, though the process is by no means inevitable. Everyone knows that the insane interpret the world via their own peculiarly consistent logic; how can you tell if your own logic is 'peculiar' or not, given that you have only your own logic to judge itself? I don't see any answer. I am just reminded of Godel's second Theorem, which implies that the only versions of formal number theory which assert their own consistency are inconsistent...

First things first,” Lo said. “You have to stand on both feet.” “I am standing on both feet,” I said. Lo kicked my left heel. I lost my balance and stumbled forward into the wardrobe, clinging to the coats to keep from falling on my face. “Sorry, little colt,” said Lo, laughing. “But you see what I mean now. Your weight’s all in your right foot. Men stand with their weight on both feet equally.” With both feet planted I felt both too heavy and too casual, a big clumsy kid about to barrel down a hill. “It feels strange,” I said. “It’s supposed to feel strange,” said Lo, crossing behind me. “Now hook your left thumb in your belt loop.” I did what I thought I had seen boys and men do, talking to one another at the feed store, loitering against the wall at a dance. Then I felt another kick and stumbled again, this time backward, pinwheeling my arms before regaining my balance. “You took the weight off your left leg,” Lo said. “I didn’t.” “If you hadn’t, little colt, you wouldn’t have fallen over. Now go ahead: do it again.” This time I was slower and more deliberate. “Good. Now the right—” Again I concentrated on holding my body in its odd new shape. “Very good. Now both thumbs.” The kick made me jump. “Ow!” I shouted. “Is this how you taught the others?” “It’s how I learned,” Lo said. “Who taught you,” I asked. “The Kid?” Lo laughed. “Please,” she said, “I taught the Kid and everyone else here.

Time itself is behaving strangely. It seems to have fallen on this house like snow, clustering in certain dark corners, sparse elsewhere. It lays heavy on my rooftop, tangible in a way I can't quite explain. Certain moments in my daily life have clustered together so that they are almost touching. Every night, when I wash my face, I feel as though I have been standing at my sink in one continuous moment across several months. Time has looped and gathered, and I sometimes worry that I could skip through decades like his, standing in my bathroom, until I am suddenly old. At other points in the day it moves so slowly that I can scarcely believe the world is still turning. Something surely must have stalled.

In the world of living things, the magic threshold of representational universality is crossed whenever a system’s repertoire of symbols becomes extensible without any obvious limit. This threshold was crossed on the species level somewhere along the way from earlier primates to ourselves.

My vast episodic memory of my past, together with its counterpart pointing blurrily towards what is yet to come (my episodic projectory, I think I’ll call it), and further embellished by a fantastic folio of alternative versions or “subjunctive replays” of countless episodes (“if only X had happened…”; “how lucky that Y never took place…”, “wouldn’t it be great if Z were to occur…” — and why not call this my episodic subjunctory?), gives rise to the endless hall of mirrors that constitutes my “I”.

Somebody is in a queer state of mind, perhaps behaves oddly, and no reason for this can be discovered at the time. Later—a month, a year, 10 years—the cause of this effect reveals itself. Because of where or what or how I am now, I behaved in such a fashion then.”54 Priestley called this the “future-influencing-present effect”—not unlike what later researchers would call presentiment but unfolding in many cases across a much longer timeframe of an individual’s life. In his 1964 book Man & Time, Priestley described several examples. One letter-writer was a WWII veteran with what we would now call PTSD, who experienced a “breakdown” during the war and relapses of his condition thereafter. He credited his recovery to a somewhat older woman with children whom he met and married after the war and, by the time of his writing, had a teenage daughter with. But “for a year before he met his wife or knew anything about her, he used to pass the gate of her country cottage on the local bus. And he never did this without feeling that he and that cottage were somehow related.”55 Another, older letter writer recalled being a girl during the First World War and when out walking one night in London, “found herself looking up at a hospital, quite strange to her, with tears streaming down her cheeks.” Years later, she moved in with a woman friend, and they remained partners for 25 years. “This friend was then taken ill and she died in that same hospital at which the girl so many years before had stared through her inexplicable tears.”56 Priestley also gives an example from two acquaintances of his own: Dr A began to receive official reports from Mrs B, who was in charge of one branch of a large department. These were not personal letters signed by Mrs B, but the usual duplicated official documents. Dr A did not know Mrs B, had never seen her, knew nothing about her except that she had this particular job. Nevertheless, he felt a growing excitement as he received more and more of these communications from Mrs B. This was so obvious that his secretary made some comment on it. A year later he had met Mrs B and fallen in love with her. They are now most happily married. He believes … that he felt this strange excitement because the future relationship communicated it to him; we might say that one part of his mind, not accessible to consciousness except as a queer feeling, already knew that Mrs B was to be tremendously important to him.57

that what we call “consciousness” was a kind of mirage. It had to be a very peculiar kind of mirage, to be sure, since it was a mirage that perceived itself, and of course it didn’t believe that it was perceiving a mirage, but no matter — it still was a mirage.

Dave Chalmers is lying through its teeth, yet without having the foggiest idea it’s lying. Although it believes it is conscious, in truth it is not. Sadly, this Dave is an innocent victim of the illusion of consciousness, which is nothing but a trivial by-product of having a deeply entrenched strange loop in its brain, whereas its isomorphic counterpart in Universe Q, using the same words and intonations, is telling the truth, for he truly is conscious! Why? Because he not only has a strange loop in his brain but also — lucky fellow! — lives in a universe with élan mental.

so many people insist on the grandiose adjective, often even finding in it humanity’s crowning glory? What does it gain us, or rather, what would it gain us, if the word “free” were accurate? I honestly do not know. I don’t see any room in this complex world for my will to be “free”. I am pleased to have a will, or at least I’m pleased to have one when it is not too terribly frustrated by the hedge maze I am constrained by, but I don’t know what it would feel like if my will were free. What on earth would that mean? That I didn’t follow my will sometimes? Well, why would I do that? In order to frustrate myself? I guess that if I wanted to frustrate myself, I might make such a choice — but then it would be because I wanted to frustrate myself, and because my meta-level desire was stronger than my plain-old desire. Thus I might choose not to take a second helping of noodles even though I — or rather, part of me — would still like some, because there’s another part of me that wants me not to gain weight, and the weight-watching part happens (this evening) to have more votes than the gluttonous part does. If it didn’t, then it would lose and my inner glutton would win, and that would be fine — but in either case, my non-free will would win out and I’d follow the dominant desire in my brain. Yes, certainly, I’ll make a decision, and I’ll do so by conducting a kind of inner vote. The count of votes will yield a result, and by George, one side will come out the winner. But where’s any “freeness” in all this? Speaking of George, the analogy to our electoral process is such a blatant elephant in the room that I should spell it out. It’s not as if, in a brain, there is some kind of “neural suffrage” (“one neuron, one vote”); however, on a higher level of organization, there is some kind of “desirelevel suffrage” in the brain. Since our understanding of brains is not at the state where I can pinpoint this suffrage physically, I’ll just say that it’s essentially “one desire, n votes”, where n is some weight associated with the given desire. Not all values of n are identical, which is to say, not all desires are born equal; the brain is not an egalitarian society! In sum, our decisions are made by an analogue to a voting process in a democracy. Our various desires chime in, taking into account the many external factors that act as constraints, or more metaphorically, that play the role of hedges in the vast maze of life in which we are trapped. Much of life is incredibly random, and we have no control over it. We can will away all we want, but much of the time our will is frustrated.

consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design. Fancy 100-hunekerand-higher racecar brains like yours and mine have a lot of self-perception and hence a lot of consciousness, while very primitive wind-up rubber-band brains like those of mosquitoes have essentially none of it, and lastly, middle-level brains, with just a handful of hunekers (like that of a two-year-old, or a pet cat or dog) come with a modicum of it. Consciousness is not an add-on option when one has a 100-huneker brain; it is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Gödel’s strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you’ve got self, you’ve got consciousness. Élan mental is not needed.

Who or what decreed that the changing pattern that over several decades was variously known as “Ronnie Reagan”, “Ronald Reagan”, “Governor Reagan”, “President Reagan”, and “Ex-President Reagan” was “one single entity”? And if it truly, objectively, indisputably was one single entity no matter how ephemeral and wispy it became, then mightn’t that entity still exist?

Here are a few verbs that come to my mind, listed roughly in descending order of emotionality and sentience: agonize, exult, suffer, enjoy, desire, listen, hear, taste, perceive, notice, consider, reason, argue, claim, believe, remember, forget, know, calculate, utter, register, react, bounce, turn, move, stop. I won’t claim that my extremely short list of verbs is impeccably ordered; I simply threw it together in an attempt to show that there is unquestionably a spectrum, a set of shades of gray, concerning words that do and that do not suggest the presence of feelings behind the scenes. The tricky question then is: Which of these verbs (and comparable adjectives, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, etc.) would we be willing to apply to Dave’s zombie twin in Universe Z? Is there some precise cutoff line beyond which certain words are disallowed? Who would determine that cutoff line?

Our will, quite the opposite of being free, is steady and stable, like an inner gyroscope, and it is the stability and constancy of our non-free will that makes me me and you you, and that also keeps me me and you you. Free Willie is just another blue humpback.

pumps in the field of philosophy of mind.

The temptation to ask such questions (and to believe that these questions have objectively correct answers) is nearly irresistible, but nonetheless, the nearly universal intuitions that give rise to this temptation are what Parfit is out to crush in his book.

a careful thinker, he is doing something analogous to what Einstein did when he imagined himself moving at or near the speed of light — he is pushing the limits of classical notions — and, like Einstein, he finds that classical worldviews do not always work in worlds that are very different from those in which they were born and grew.

Our intuitions as we grew up on planet Earth have not prepared us for anything in the least like a nondestructive teleportation scenario, and so we clamor for a simple, straightforward answer, yet somehow we also intuit that none will be forthcoming.

so close to being pure black or white that any hints of grayness remain hidden from view, not only thanks to the obvious external fact that we all have separate physical brains housed in separate skulls, but also thanks to an extensive web of linguistic and cultural conventions that collectively and subliminally insist that we each are exactly one person (this is the “caged-bird metaphor” of Chapter 18, and it’s also the Cartesian Ego notion), and which implicitly discourage us from imagining any kind of blending, overlapping, or sharing of souls.

In other words, although he doesn’t propose anything that would smack of mathematics, Parfit essentially proposes an abstract “distance function” (what mathematicians would call a “metric”) between personalities in “personality space” (or between brains, although at what structural level brains would have to be described in order for this “distance calculation” to take place is never specified, and it is hard to imagine what that level might be).

Using such a mind-to-mind metric, I would be very “close” to the person I was yesterday, slightly less close to the person I was two days ago, and so forth. In other words, although there is a great degree of overlap between the individuals Douglas Hofstadter today and Douglas Hofstadter yesterday, they are not identical. We nonetheless standardly (and reflexively) choose to consider them identical because it is so convenient, so natural, and so easy. It makes life much simpler. This convention allows us to give things (both animate and inanimate) fixed names and to talk about them from one day to the next without constantly having to update our lexicon. Moreover, this convention is ingrained in us when we are infants — at about the same Piagetian developmental stage as that in which we learn that when a ball rolls behind a box, it still exists even though it’s not visible, and may even reappear on the other side of the box in a second or two!

To dismantle unconscious beliefs that are so deeply rooted and that have such a degree of primacy in our worldview is an extremely daunting and bold undertaking, comparable in subtlety and difficulty to what Einstein accomplished in creating special relativity (undermining, through sheer logic, our deepest and most unquestioned intuitions about the nature of time), and what a whole generation of brilliant physicists, with Einstein at their core, collectively accomplished in creating quantum mechanics (undermining our deepest and most unquestioned intuitions about the nature of causality and continuity). The new view that Parfit proposes is a radical reperception of what it is to be, and in certain ways it is extremely disturbing. In other ways, it is extremely liberating! Parfit even devotes a page or two to explaining how this radical new view of human existence has freed him up and profoundly changed his attitudes towards his life, his death, his loved ones, and other people in general.

Do I really have such deep faith in my own mind’s pathways that I can believe in the bizarre, intuition-defying conclusions I have reached? Am I not being enormously arrogant in rejecting a whole self-consistent web of interlocked ideas that were carefully worked out by two or three centuries’ worth of extraordinary physicists who came before me?

Yes, I do have this strange faith in my own mind’s correctness. Nature has to be this way, no matter what other people have said before me. I have somehow been given the opportunity to glimpse the inner logic of nature more deeply and more accurately than anyone else before me has. I am unaccountably lucky in this fact, and though I take no personal credit for it, I do wish to publish it so that I may share this valuable vision with others.

ambigrams

These are shades of gray that create a halo of “possible Dougs” around the Doug that I happen to have become, thanks to a million accidental events that have befallen me over the decades, and thanks to hundreds of particular individuals who happen to have entered my life (and millions of others who never did, not to mention an infinite number of counterfactual individuals who never entered my life!). We don’t normally think of “who/what/how I am” in such shades of gray, but there they are, spelled out a bit, in my case.

there is something it is like to be that machine” (a hard phrase to translate into other languages, by the way).

It has often seemed to me that ultimately, when I am thinking about who my closest friends are, it all comes down to how they are — how they smile, how they talk, how they laugh, how they listen, how they suffer, how they share, and so on. I think to myself that the innermost essence of each friend is made up of thousands of such “how” ’s, and that that collection of “how” ’s is the answer — the full answer — to “Who is this person?

the “I” notion is, fundamentally and in the end, a hallucination. Let’s let Episode III, my teleportation scenario with fresh copies on Venus and Mars and no copy left on Earth, apply to me instead of to Parfit. In that case, each of the new brains — the one on Mars and the one on Venus — is convinced that it is me. It feels just like it always felt to be me. The same old urge to say, “I am here and not there” zooms up in both brains as automatically as when someone taps my knee and my leg jerks upwards. But knee-jerk reflex or not, the truth of the matter is that there is no thing called “I” — no hard marble, no precious yolk protected by a Cartesian eggshell — there are just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones. In the end, we have to believe both Douglas Hofstadters as they say, “This one here is me,” at least to the extent that we believe the Douglas Hofstadter who is right now sitting in his study typing these words and saying to you in print, “This one here is me.” Saying this and insisting on its truth is just a tendency, an inclination, a habit — in fact, a knee-jerk reflex — and it is no more than that, even though it seems to be a great deal more than that.

As Dan Dennett points out in Consciousness Explained, an “I” is a little like a bill of paper money — it feels as if it is worth a great deal, but ultimately, it is just a social convention, a kind of illusion that we all tacitly agree on without ever having been asked, and which, despite being illusory, supports our entire economy. And yet the bill is just a piece of paper with no intrinsic worth at all.

the transition from one pronoun to the other won’t be sharp and sudden; it will be gradual, like the fading of the belief in Cartesian Egos as people grow in sophistication.

And yet, something of Jim is surviving strongly — surviving in other brains, thanks to human love. His easy-going sense of humor, his boundless joy at driving the wide open spaces of the prairies, his ideals, his generosity, his simplicity, his hopes and dreams — and (for what it’s worth) his understanding of credit cards. All of these things survive at different levels in many people who, thanks to having interacted with him intimately over many years or decades, constitute his “soular corona” — his wife, his three children, and his many, many friends. Even before Jim’s body physically dies, his soul will have become so foggy and dim that it might as well not exist at all — the soular eclipse will be in full force — and yet despite the eclipse, his soul will still exist, in partial, low-resolution copies, scattered about the globe. Jim’s first-person perspective will flicker in and out of existence in other brains, from time to time. He will exist, albeit in an extremely diluted fashion, now here, now there. Where will Jim be? Not very much anywhere, admittedly, but to some extent he will be in many places at once, and to different degrees. Though terribly reduced, he will be wherever his soular corona is. It is very sad, but it is also beautiful. In any case, it is our only consolation.

Oh, it’s because the universe in which Machine Q exists has something extra, on top of the laws of physics, that allows feelings to accompany certain types of physical processes. Even though these feelings don’t have and can’t have any effect on anything physical, they are nonetheless real, and they are really there.

All this richness is a consequence of the fact that at some point in the dim past, the generic human brain surpassed a critical threshold of flexibility and became quasi-universal, able to internalize the abstract essences of other human brains. It is something to marvel at.

In such cases our will alone, though it pushes us, does not get us what we want. It pushes us in a certain direction, but we are maneuvering inside a hedge maze whose available paths were dictated by the rest of the world, not by our wants. And so we move willy-nilly, but not freewilly-nilly, inside the maze. A combination of pressures, some internal and some external, collectively dictates our pathway in this crazy hedge maze called “life”.

What makes no sense is to maintain, over and above that, that our wants are somehow “free” or that our decisions are somehow “free”. They are the outcomes of physical events inside our heads! How is that free?

This poignant sight clearly exemplifies will, but is it free will?

like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth. But what about the high abstractions that are the heart of literature — plot and character, style and point of view, irony and humor, allusion and metaphor, empathy and distance, and so on? Where did these crucial essences disappear in the list of topics for literary critics?

Do dreads and dreams, hopes and griefs, ideas and beliefs, interests and doubts, infatuations and envies, memories and ambitions, bouts of nostalgia and floods of empathy, flashes of guilt and sparks of genius, play any role in the world of physical objects? Do such pure abstractions have causal powers? Can they shove massive things around, or are they just impotent fictions? Can a blurry, intangible “I” dictate to concrete physical objects such as electrons or muscles (or for that matter, books) what to do?

There exists within the cranium a whole world of diverse causal forces; what is more, there are forces within forces within forces, as in no other cubic half-foot of universe that we know….

microscopic level may well be — or rather, almost certainly is — the wrong level in the brain on which to look, if we are seeking to explain such enormously abstract phenomena as concepts, ideas, prototypes, stereotypes, analogies, abstraction, remembering, forgetting, confusing, comparing, creativity, consciousness, sympathy, empathy, and the like.

whose perception is limited to the world of everyday macroscopic objects forces us, quite obviously, to function without any reference to entities and processes at microscopic levels. No one really knew the slightest thing about atoms until only about a hundred years ago, and yet people got along perfectly well.

When we begin to utter a thought, we have no idea what words we will wind up using nor which grammatical pathways we will wind up following, nor can we predict the speech errors or the facts about our unconscious mind that our little slips will reveal. Usually such revelations will make little difference, but once in a while — in a job interview, say — they can have huge repercussions.

The macroscopic world as experienced by humans is, in short, an intimate mixture ranging from the most predictable events all the way to wildly unpredictable ones.

We’re pulled by but fearful of risk-taking. That is the nature of life.

this teetering bulb of dread and dream

Just as I feel comfortable referring to “a pile of autumn leaves” without specifying the exact shape and orientation and color of each leaf, so I feel comfortable referring to a gas by specifying just its temperature, pressure, and volume, and nothing else.

what matters is not the detailed laws but merely the fact that they reliably give rise to stable statistical consequences.

stable statistical consequences.

thus there is something to be gained by not rejecting the term “marble”, even if there is no real marble in the box.

But one of my life’s most recurrent theme songs is that we should have great respect for what seem like the most mundane of analogies, for when they are examined, they often can be seen to have sprung from, and to reveal, the deepest roots of human cognition.

none of which, from their point of view, had the least thing to do with DNA, RNA, and proteins, or with carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, or with photons, electrons, protons, and neutrons, let alone with quarks, gluons, W and Z bosons, gravitons, and Higgs particles.

641 is the prime mover. So I ask: Who shoves whom around inside the domino chainium?

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.

The second answer bypasses all the physics of gravity and domino chains and makes reference only to concepts that belong to a completely different domain of discourse. The domain of prime numbers is as remote from the physics of toppling dominos as is the physics of quarks and gluons from the Cold War’s “domino theory” of how communism would inevitably topple country after neighboring country in Southeast Asia. In both cases, the two domains of discourse are many levels apart, and one is purely local and physical, while the other is global and organizational.

the high-level outcome is insulated and sealed off from the microscopic level. It is a fact in its own right, at its own level.

Just as we believe in other peoples’ kidneys and brains (thanks almost entirely to arguments from analogy and authority),

If two people are romantically involved (or even if they aren’t, but at least one of them feels there’s a potential spark), then almost any conversation between them about any romance whatsoever, no matter who it involves, stands a good chance of being heard by one or both of them as putting a spotlight on their own situation. Such boomeranging-back is almost inevitable because romances, even very good ones, are filled with uncertainty and yearning. We are always on the lookout for clues or insights into our romantic lives, and analogies are among the greatest sources of clues and insights. Therefore, to notice an analogy between ourselves and another couple that is occupying center stage in our conversation is pretty much a piece of cake handed to us on a silver platter.

trillions of silent, synchronized scintillations taking place every second inside a human skull enable a person to think, to perceive, to remember, to imagine, to create, and to feel.

realized that his inchoate dream might be made so precise that it could be spelled out to others, so he started pursuing it in a dogged fashion.

why on earth would someone outside the movie feel the sting of a volley of stern rebukes made by someone inside the movie? Ah, well… analogy has force in proportion to its precision and its visibility.

other small-souled beings do not perceive a television screen as we do. Although it’s hard for us to imagine, they see the pixels in a raw, uninterpreted fashion, and thus to them a TV screen is as drained of long-ago-and-far-away meanings as is, to you or me, a pile of fall leaves, a Jackson Pollock painting, or a newspaper article in Malagasy

we have seen that all meaning is mapping-mediated, which is to say, all meaning comes from analogies.

the strange loopiness resides not in the flip due to the word “not”, but in the unexpected, hierarchy-violating twisting-back involving the word “this”.

Recall that the intangible, abstract quality of the primality of the integer 641 is what most truly topples hard, solid dominos located in the “prime stretch” of the chainium. This is nothing if not downward causality, and it leads us straight to the conclusion that the most efficient way to think about brains that have symbols — and for most purposes, the truest way — is to think that the microstuff inside them is pushed around by ideas and desires, rather than the reverse.

This idea — that the bottom level, though 100 percent responsible for what is happening, is nonetheless irrelevant to what happens — sounds almost paradoxical, and yet it is an everyday truism.

the medium that remains after all your rigid bans may well turn out to be flexible enough to fashion precisely the items you’ve banned.

fast food” and “clamato juice”, “tackiness” and “wackiness”, “Christmas bonuses” and “customer service departments”, “wild goose chases” and “loose cannons”, “crackpots” and “feet of clay”, “slam dunks” and “bottom lines”, “lip service” and “elbow grease”, “dirty tricks” and “doggie bags”, “solo recitals” and “sleazeballs”, “sour grapes” and “soap operas”, “feedback” and “fair play”, “goals” and “lies”, “dreads” and “dreams”, “she” and “he” — and last but not least, “you” and “I”.