- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
out that new invention, the video camera. He pointed it at
his father and saw his face on the screen, then he pointed
it at himself, and then he was tempted to point the camera
at the screen itself. But he was so nervous that he actually
asked the shopkeeper’s permission and was told not to do
it! ‘This suspicion of loops just runs in our human grain’, he
says (2007, p. 36). When he got home and played with the
camera, he discovered strangely complex emerging pat-
terns – but no danger.
The brain is full of loops. Some are simple like video feed-
back, but others are self-referential, like the sentence ‘I am
the meaning of this sentence’, or paradoxical like Escher’s
Drawing Hands, in which one hand is drawn as though it is drawing the cuff on
the wrist of another hand which is drawing the cuff on the wrist of the first hand
which is . . .Strangeness, claims Hofstadter (1979), arises when a system seems to twist
around and engulf itself. This happens in ‘tangled hierarchies’, where it is possible
to keep climbing from level to level only to end up where one started: ‘A strange
loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop’ (2007, pp. 101–102). Because
the brain is a tangled hierarchy, with multiple levels of symbolic representations
and no definite top or bottom, it is full of strange loops. But what does it mean to
say that I am one?It is important to be clear which level of description one is using. Looked at in
one way, the brain is full of dancing symbols perceived by other symbols, and
this, says Hofstadter, is what consciousness is: the brain’s loopy self-descriptions
amount to a conscious self, with a deeply twisted-back-on-itself quality at its core.
At this level, the self is not an illusion but is represented as a real causal agent. But
if you shift down in viewpoint, then all these symbols are just non-symbolic neu-
ral activity. Then ‘the “I” disintegrates. It just poofs out of existence’ (2007, p. 294).
In this sense, the self is an illusion or myth, but a myth we cannot live without,
because it is central to all our systems of belief about ourselves.The theory of strange loops is a bundle theory. Symbols are constantly dancing in
the brain with no truly persisting experiencer, even though similar self-referential
loops may be constructed over and over again. Hofstadter talks about souls and
how they become attached to their own bodies, but his ‘soul’ is an abstract struc-
ture within the brain, not a separate dualist entity. Its apparent continuity and
unity are properties represented in the brain. And souls can be represented, with
different degrees of fidelity, in many brains – the brains of everyone who knows
me. Does this account for consciousness? Hofstadter claims that by accounting
for the soul or the ‘I’ as a strange loop, he has also explained ‘having a light on
inside’ or ‘being conscious’. Consciousness simply is the dance of symbols. But if
so, he does not explain why the dancing is or generates a what-it’s-like.
German philosopher Thomas Metzinger also takes a representationalist view of
self. One of nature’s best inventions, he says, is an inner tool that he calls the phe-
nomenal self-model (PSM). This is ‘a distinct and coherent pattern of neural activ-
ity that allows you to integrate parts of the world into an inner image of yourself
as a whole’ (2009, p. 115). Because you have this self-model or self-representation,‘I am a strange loop’
(Hofstadter, 2007)
‘Deconstructing the “I”
holds about as much
appeal for a typical
adult as deconstructing
Santa Claus would hold
for a typical toddler’
(Hofstadter, 2007, p. 294)
FIGURE 16.8 • Who am I?