I Am a Strange Loop

"It is, and I want to stress the most important word in it—’am.’ Not ‘I have a strange loop.’ Not ‘there’s a strange loop in me.’ But ‘I am a strange loop.’ What makes the loop strange is that the ‘I’ is included in the loop. Most theories of consciousness leave the ‘I’ out of it. They talk about access consciousness, but then they don’t say who the ‘I’ is that has the access. You have to. If you haven’t included the ‘I,’ the self (in Millikan’s terms, the consumer of the representations, the interpreter), if you don’t have a model of the interpreter; you don’t have a theory of consciousness: you have a theory of television! There’s no Cartesian theater where the homunculus is. When you get rid of that idea, you take on the responsibility for showing how all that work and play gets done by the ‘I,’ the inner witness. You must have that in your theory of consciousness. Until you tackle that problem, you don’t have a theory of consciousness at all. He is unique. He’s a computer scientist, physicist, philosopher, psychologist, artist, and translator. One of the luckiest days of my life was when I let him talk me into editing The Mind’s I with him. I met Doug in 1979, just after Gödel, Escher, Bach had been published. He had reviewed my book Brainstorms in the New York Review of Books . It was a very lovely review. I was out at the center in Palo Alto, and his father, a Nobel laureate in physics, taught at Stanford. Doug had particularly liked my “Where Am I?” essay, and he went out of his way to visit me up at the center, and to twist my arm about joining him in creating The Mind’s I. I had lots of fish to fry. I had projects that I was into. I thought this wasn’t going to be a worthwhile venture, but it changed my life. He’s taught me so much about many topics. Here’s one way of viewing I Am a Strange Loop. Lots of people read his first amazing book, G öde l, Escher Bach —a cult classic, and I don’t think he would mind my calling it that—and they didn’t get it. They were bedazzled by the wordplay, logic games, the puzzles, the anagrams, the ambigrams, and they didn’t get what his big message was. Much the way Hume wrote A Treatise of Human Nature and it “fell dead-born from the press,” as Hume said, so he wrote An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding . I view I Am a Strange Loop as Doug’s Enquiry . It’s the clearer version. It’s all about strange loops and patterns and putting an account of how there can be an ‘I’ as a strange loop. It is a kind, but it’s a very strange kind. He says it’s an abstraction. I pulled a sentence out of it that captures the heart of the book: “It is the upward leap from raw stimuli to symbols that imbues the loop with strangeness.” Only human minds—language-using minds—have the task of articulating and expressing who they are, what they are, and what their thoughts are, and of formulating their beliefs about what it’s like to be them. It’s that leap—that task of taking states of the brain that are about things and putting them crudely, at first, into symbols and expressing them, maybe just to yourself—that creates a feedback loop, too. You talk to yourself, you reason to yourself, you imagine to yourself, you feel to yourself, you reflect and reflect. It’s the reflectivity that we’re capable of, and it’s not clear that any other mammal is capable of that kind of reflection because language is the crutch to get us up into it. It teaches us how to become reflective. Language is the ladder we climb. We can throw it away to gain our perspectives on our own minds. It enables us to enrich them and to stock us up with thinking tools of which words are the most important."