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| Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach |
I have now read the book's first six chapters and am given to understand the next swatch of material ratchets up the technical heat several notches. The book decidedly stretches the intellect.
One of the questions that is always with me as I peruse Gödel, Etc. is how religious is it? Hofstadter himself admits (if that is the right word) in his introductory "Words of Thanks" that
In a way, this book is a statement of my religion. I hope that this will come through to my readers, and that my enthusiasm and reverence for certain ideas will infiltrate the hearts and minds of a few people. That is the best that I could ask for (p. xxi).
On its face, the book may seem to be about anything that what most people would call religion. There is little explicit mention of God. Nothing that I have read so far involves taking anything on faith. Moreover, the tone and style of Hofstadter's writing is much like that of certain leading scientists well known as skeptics and atheists. The agnostic Carl Sagan (God rest his soul) probably ate this stuff up — particularly the discussion in Chapter VI about communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence.
On the other hand, I personally feel very much like sharing Hofstadter's "religion." I feel quite drawn to it, in fact. For one thing, there seems to be something so right about a religion which examines the music of Bach as a profound clue to the nature of reality.
For another thing, the ground rules of Hofstadter's religion seem to be such that there could never be a war between it and science-reason-mathematics-logic. There is only one truth, and one kind of intelligence by which to encounter it.
It is the above-mentioned Chapter VI, "The Location of Meaning," which provides me with my own clue to the nature of Hofstadter's religion. The chapter is an inquiry into the art of deciphering messages. All messages actually have three layers, though in practice the layers can be hard to tease apart. There is the "frame message," within which is the "outer message," within which is the "inner message."
The frame message is that about the message which clues us in that it is indeed a message, full of meaning, and not just some happenstance detritus floating past: it has a meaning, if we can only decipher what it is.
The outer message is that about the message by which we recognize the manner in which it must be decoded. If the sealed bottle that has washed up on our shore contains a piece of paper, and there are marks on the paper, and those marks are in Japanese, then we know that reading Japanese will be the key to deciphering the message.
The inner message is simply the meaning which the bottle-preparer intended to convey to whoever finds the bottle, opens it, and deciphers the message.
One way of understanding the relationship between the outer message and the inner meaning is by a phenotype-and-genotype analogy.
Two DNA strands, wrapped around one another in a double-helix ladder, form a genotype within each living cell. The genotype contains a "meaning" that the ongoing processes of life serve to unfold and reveal as, ultimately, a bodily phenotype: you, or me, or that canary over there. The genotype contains all the requisite information about how the canary embryo turns eventually into a canary and not a tiger. The phenotype — a yellow bird that sings — is to be considered the "outer message" to the genotype's "inner message."
By analogy, the genotype of the endless Fibonacci sequence, in which every number is the sum of the previous two numbers,
[0,] 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ...
could be taken as the list of the first few numbers in the sequence, up to and including (say) 34. That is, the infinity of Fibonacci numbers beyond 34 are implicit in the finite list of numbers up to and including 34. That finite list can be thought of as the genotype of the entire sequence.
Or, just the bare seed [0, 1] could be considered the genotype, once you twig to the rule for generating each next number in the series — i.e., 0 plus 1 is 1, 1 plus 1 is 2, 1 plus 2 is 3, and so on.
The entire infinity of numbers, including the genotype or seed, is like unto a phenotype. In this example of a Fibonacci sequence, it is pretty easy to see how the phenotype relates to the genotype. In biology, the relationship is more exotic. How could it be that a very long string of DNA "base pairs" codes for a canary? What meaningful role, if any, in "canary-ness" is played by the vast number of molecular transactions that serve to express the genes as the embryo evolves, one day to take flight?
I extrapolate from the above this idea about Hofstadter's God: such a God is, as it were, the genotype to reality's phenotype. Using our intelligence, we can decipher the message here: there is an implicit, inherent "meaning" to all we are witness to. God is a name, as good as any, for that implicit meaning, that inner message, that seed-genotype of reality's phenotype.
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