[MD] I Am a Strange Loop

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Arlo previously]
Paradox, recursion, self-referentiality, "strange loops" reveal the 
Escherian landscape around us.

[SA]
What is the Escherian landscape? ... I'm just trying to understand 
what your saying here.

[Arlo]
What I'm saying is we are symbolically mediated beings. Our 
intellection of "the world" is thus one where paradox, recursion, 
strange loops and the like are unavoidable, when we turn intellection 
back on intellect, when we attempt to symbolically represent WITHIN a 
symbol system that very system itself.

Hofstadter refers to this as "essential incompleteness", saying "The 
fascinating thing is that any such system digs its own hole; the 
system's own richness brings about its own downfall. The downfall 
occurs essentially because the system is powerful enough to have 
self-referential sentences. ... It seems that with formal systems 
there is an analogous critical point. Below a point, a system is 
"harmless" and does not even approach defining arithmetical truth 
formally [Arlo adds, he is using "arithmetical truth" in this 
particular sentence, but its in the context of demonstrating features 
of any symbolic system, of which language itself is]; but beyond the 
critical point, the system suddenly attains the capacity for 
self-reference, and thereby dooms itself to incompleteness."

Consider "early language", the grunts, gestures and simple sounds we 
used to "communicate". In this early "system", a level of complexity 
did not exist for self-reference. Man did not "grunt about grunts". 
Over time, as our grunt-system evolved into more nuanced sounds, 
which were then strung together into the formation of lexicon and 
grammar, our symbol system hit a point where we could "talk about 
talking". At some point, this rich complexity led to a boon in 
broadening our understanding, but at the same time brought this 
"essential incompleteness" into play.

Here is a brief passage from Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach" that 
I hope you find interesting, and likely gives the backdrop for the 
new book Platt mentioned.

Strange Loops as the Crux of Consciousness (pp. 709-710)

My belief is that the explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our 
brains-for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally 
consciousness and free will-are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an 
interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down 
towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time 
being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a 
self-reinforcing "resonance" between different levels--quite like the 
Henkin sentence which, by merely asserting its own provability, 
actually becomes provable. The self comes into being at the moment it 
has the power to reflect itself.

This should not be taken as an antireductionist position. It just 
implies that a reductionistic explanation of a mind, in order to be 
comprehensible, must bring in "soft" concepts such as levels, 
mappings, and meanings. In principle, I have no doubt that a totally 
reductionistic but incomprehensible explanation of the brain exists; 
the problem is how to translate it into a language we ourselves can 
fathom. Surely we don't want a description in terms of positions and 
momenta of particles; we want a description which relates neural 
activity to "signals" (intermediate-level phenomena)-and which 
relates signals, in turn, to "symbols" and "subsystems", including 
the presumed-to-exist "self-symbol". This act of translation from 
low-level physical hardware to high-level psychological software is 
analogous to the translation of number-theoretical statements into 
meta mathematical statements. Recall that the level-crossing which 
takes place at this exact translation point is what creates Godel's 
incompleteness and the self-proving character of Henkin's sentence. I 
postulate that a similar level-crossing is what creates our nearly 
unanalyzable feelings of self.

In order to deal with the full richness of the brain/mind system, we 
will have to be able to slip between levels comfortably. Moreover, we 
will have to admit various types of "causality": ways in which an 
event at one level of description can "cause" events at other levels 
to happen. Sometimes event A will be said to "cause" event B simply 
for the reason that the one is a translation, on another level of 
description, of the other. Sometimes "cause" will have its usual 
meaning: physical causality. Both types of causality-and perhaps some 
more-will have to be admitted in any explanation of mind, for we will 
have to admit causes that propagate both upwards and downwards in the 
Tangled Hierarchy of mentality, just as in the Central Dogmap.

At the crux, then, of our understanding ourselves will come an 
understanding of the Tangled Hierarchy of levels inside our minds. My 
position is rather similar to the viewpoint put forth by the 
neuroscientist Roger Sperry in his excellent article "Mind, Brain, 
and Humanist Values", from which I quote a little here:

In my own hypothetical brain model, conscious awareness does get 
representation as a very real causal agent and rates an important 
place in the causal sequence and chain of control in brain events, in 
which it appears as an active, operational force .... To put it very 
simply, it comes down to the issue of who pushes whom around in the 
population of causal forces that occupy the cranium. It is a matter, 
in other words, of straightening out the peck-order hierarchy among 
intracranial control agents. 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 . . . . To make a long story short, 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 
burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the 
evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell.

There is a famous breach between two languages of discourse: the 
subjective language and the objective language. For instance, the 
"subjective" sensation of redness, and the "objective" wavelength of 
red light. To many people, these seem to be forever irreconcilable. I 
don't think so. No more than the two views of Escher's Drawing Hands 
are irreconcilable from "in the system", where the hands draw each 
other, and from outside, where Escher draws it all. The subjective 
feeling of redness comes from the vortex of self-perception in the 
brain; the objective wavelength is how you see things when you step 
back, outside of the system. Though no one of us will ever be able to 
step back far enough to see the "big picture", we shouldn't forget 
that it exists. We should remember that physical law is what makes it 
all happen-way, way down in neural nooks and crannies which are too 
remote for us to reach with our high-level introspective probes.