The Pope and Islam

One of the things that concern me as a Catholic today is what Pope Benedict XVI has said and done with respect to Islam. This is the topic of a recent article by Jane Kramer in The New Yorker. Even more recently, the Catholic writer George Weigel published this article, also available here, taking Ms. Kramer and the magazine editors to task for factual inaccuracies and "tendentious mis-readings of documents."

The Pope was criticized by many last September for, in a speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, citing "a question posed by a fourteenth century Byzantine emperor to a Persian guest at his winter barracks near Ankara. 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new,' the emperor asked the Persian, 'and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached'.” What he meant by dredging this quote up was hard to discover, but it apparently had to do with the Pope's feeling that Islam is not part of “the Western rational tradition.”

(The prepared text of the Pope's Regensburg lecture can be read here, or in PDF format here. The Wikipedia article on it and the controversy it ignited is here.)


I read the Kramer piece, which was generally hostile to Benedict XVI, with much puzzlement. It stemmed, I realized, from my own lack of understanding of the basic issue. The latter, if my shaky comprehension is to be believed, seems to revolve around a claim which the Pope supposedly is making to the effect that interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims will fail. Why? Because reason and rationalism are at the base of Christian understanding, historically, and are not equally fundamental to the Muslim worldview.

“In Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories — even that of rationality," the Pope apparently said at Regensburg.

I find my own personal knowledge base about the place of reason in Islam to be wholly inadequate to judging the Pope's claim, which is accordingly difficult for me to fathom the intent of. I admit to all that right up front.


Mr. Weigel's response to the Kramer article is of some help here, but not a lot. My fault, not his — it's essentially an op-ed piece, not a doctoral dissertation. And it's more about the hasty, error-prone judgmentalism of the secular press toward the Pope than about the basic issues at hand.

Still, I gain some insight when Mr. Weigel writes in rebuttal of

... Ms. Kramer’s bugbear about reason-and-faith. Classical ideas of reason have a privileged place in Christian theology, not because of xenophobia (“Ratzinger is Eurocentric. To him, Europe means Christianity.”) but because the conviction that human beings can know that some things are true is essential in a Church whose Lord taught that the truth is liberating. Doctrine is not excess baggage on the journey of faith. It’s the vehicle that makes the journey possible.

This comes in the wake of Mr. Weigel's umbrage at Ms. Kramer's

... brusque dismissal, without serious examination, of Benedict XVI's suggestion that the first inculturation of Christianity in the world of classical rationality was providential, because it gave early Christians the intellectual tools to turn their evangelical confession of faith (“Jesus is Lord”) into doctrine and creeds ...

"As for the issues put on the global table at Regensburg," Mr. Weigel adds, "does Ms. Kramer really think it a bad thing to challenge irrational forms of faith that command the murder of innocents in the name of God? Is it wrong to suggest that there is danger in the obverse of irrational faith: that trouble is afoot in the West’s loss of faith in reason, which erodes our capacity to defend the universality of human rights and the superiority of the rule of law over the rule of coercion?"

That's admittedly a bit hard for me to parse. I think Mr. Weigel is suggesting that we in the West today court an error which is the polar opposite of Islam's supposed tone-deafness to rational thought, namely, the decay of our capacity to discover and uphold truth when it conflicts with our other, less moderate inclinations.


Why does the Pope find Islam anti-rational? According to Ms. Kramer, "it was at Regensburg's theology department that he [as Joseph Ratzinger] honed his belief that the discourse of Christianity is a fundamentally rational discourse — as the West, grounded in Greek philosophical inquiry, understands reason — and as such not ultimately comprehensible, even for argument’s sake, outside the Judeo-Christian tradition." Benedict XVI apparently deems Islam at base unintelligible because it does not seek to know God's will preeminently through rational inquiry.

Again, I simply have no basis on which to evaluate such a claim of Islam's fundamental irrationality, if that is indeed what the Pope is claiming.

I do understand and sympathize, though, with one of Mr. Weigel's constant themes, "the conviction that human beings can know that some things are true," as he puts it in this article. The knowability of truth, the firmness of it, the impregnability of truth to relativistic thought, the fact that truth and love are synonyms of God — Mr. Weigel talks about these ideas often. "Truth and Love are, if you will, two 'names' for God as Christianity understands God," he says in this interview.


What I'm skeptical about is the ability of reason to know all truth.

The way I see it, reason is a system by which we develop confidence in the truth of propositions derivedfrom a set of original, taken-on-faith suppositions by the application of rules of logic. All the derivable propositions are supposed to form an intelligible, coherent whole. But as I discuss in The Incompleteness of Provability and the other posts in my "Strange Loops" series about Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, there seem inescapably to be truths that we cannot know without standing outside such formal systems of proof.

The mathematician Kurt Gödel was able in 1931 to find a way to prove the incompleteness of provability, using full mathematical rigor, Hofstadter shows. I wonder if the Pope's commitment to rationalism as the high road to truth might not stumble badly over Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.


A homely example of what I mean concerns a TV set I once owned. Back around 1990 I bought an expensive TV that contained what was at the time a novelty: digital picture-enhancement circuitry. After a year of use it started doing odd things. Instead of giving me a normal picture, after it had warmed up fully it would suddenly start showing what looked like a negative color photographic image, except that the result was weirder and more psychedelic even than that.

I knew enough about digital circuitry to know that the fault could well be due to a single signal line "flipping" from 1 to 0, or vice versa — or, possibly, simply "floating" without any definite value whatever. That changed the internal "logic" of the circuitry. Where the picture was originally meant to be one thing, it was now another.

But, given the altered "presupposition" which the faulty signal line now embodied, the TV system was still acting as "rationally" as it had always done. It still produced an intelligible, coherent picture — even if you had to be on LSD to appreciate it. The only way to know something was wrong was to stand outside the system and judge it from afar.


If you accidentally "flip" or nullify any of the (perhaps hidden) presuppositions of a rational system, you can end up, without quite realizing what has happened or how, with a convincing, if false, phantasmagoria.

I think that is the explanation for such less-than-wonderful aspects of the history of Christianity as the Spanish Inquisition and burnings at the stake. The Church was eventually able to stand outside itself and see how wrong such "logical" applications of its own theology were. Thank God.

So the questions I have are these: why does the Pope think the suicide bombings and other evil manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism are categorically different from those Christian sins? Why does he imagine (if indeed he does) that radical Islamism is anything other than a flipped or nullified presupposition in the logical fabric of an otherwise rational belief system? Why does he not believe that patient dialogue with Islam can help it recover its balance, to all our benefit?

Brains and Thoughts

Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach

It has been a while since my last "Strange Loops" post, Souls: What Are They, Anyway?. In it I talked some more about the human mind — namely, ideas concerning the mind that appear in Douglas R. Hofstadter's one-of-a-kind 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. To Hofstadter, the mind somehow arises out of the mechanical, deterministic operations of the brain. Yet it has non-deterministic attributes that cannot be fully explained at the level of neurons and their vast interconnections.

That said, Hofstadter's Chapter XI, "Brains and Thoughts," seeks a way to establish a high-level brain organization made of "symbols" that somehow emerges from "signals" exchanged by neurons, or from whole groups of neurons called "modules" by Hofstadter. An object of thought is presumably a matter of which modular symbols get activated, among the countless symbols a brain can house.

Perhaps there are large numbers of related symbols activated to represent a concept such as "car" or "road." Who can say?

I have to say at the outset of my discussion of this particular chapter that I am less than convinced that Hofstadter's speculations are on the money. I have the uneasy feeling that the author is trying to force human brain organization into patterns that are — to use one of his favorite words — "isomorphic" with the way computer programs model intelligence artificially. For example, computer programs have access to data — Hofstadter calls it "declarative knowledge," likening it to "facts" (see p. 363) — and are themselves made up of procedures that manipulate data in some way.

These data-manipulating procedures constitute the equivalent, he says, of human "procedural knowledge." An example that springs to mind is the person who says to a stranger asking directions, "I can't tell you how to get there, but I can drive you there myself."

Hofstadter's assumption, then, is that declarative knowledge may not be encoded at the brain's higher organizational levels in the same way procedural knowledge is. Somehow the symbol activation that goes on for human declarative knowledge to manifest itself is different from the type of activation that underlies procedural knowledge ... maybe.

Yet he quickly adds that "in between the declarative and procedural extremes, there are all possible shades." For example, how is a recalled melody stored in the brain? As a succession of remembered notes? As a group of relationships based on tone-to-tone musical intervals? As both of those and more: for instance, with emotional qualities that the notes evoke stored along with the notes?

Or, is melodic memory entirely procedural rather than declarative, as the previous speculations would seem to imply? Perhaps, though, it is a mix of the declarative and the procedural.

In short, Hofstadter offers just one basic high-level construct of brain organization: the potentially activated symbol. True, lurking in the background is a nebulous idea that symbols can trigger one another in mutual activation, and/or be activated in different ways for different purposes and with different results. Yet there is no real suggestion as to how, say, melodic memory can possibly combine two ways or patterns of symbol activation in one.


Another ambiguity arises in Hofstadter's discussion of "classes" versus "instances." Intuitively it seems as if there ought to be a firm distinction between broad conceptual categories — classes — and specific individual instances of those classes. "Golfer" would seem to represent a class of mental objects; "Tiger Woods," an instance. Yet both would, to Hofstadter, necessarily be represented by symbols.

Still, a "golfer" is an "athlete," possibly a "professional." And not all "golfers" are "championship golfers," the way Tiger Woods is. There can be many levels of specificity between a broad class and a specific manifestation or instance. Furthermore, it is likely that some, if not all, classes start off as instances: think of the child who encounters his or her very first golfer.

Once a class of sufficient generality has been constructed, then, each time it is activated by, say, a golfer seen on TV, something like a "rubbing off" must take place. In it, as when making a rubbing from a brass in a church, a copy of the original comes to be. The copy of the original symbol must be able to include sufficient idiosyncrasies to keep it distinct from all other copies. We can't afford to confuse Tiger Woods with Ernie Els, after all.


Another difficulty is that the roster of symbols in human brains can be extended, as we learn and gain experience, while experiments suggest that whatever symbols may be active in the brain of, say, a wasp, are hard-wired and cannot be augmented/altered. It is not clear exactly how symbols as high-level constructs that map to the lower-level patterns of neural signals in the human brain can explain the difference. Nor is it clear how our symbols undergird the capacity of the brain to deal with hypotheticals and what-if worlds.

To Hofstadter's credit, he alludes to all these conundrums. He also admits that he has no real evidence to support his hunch that symbols are very likely localizable to specific groups neurons, no matter how intricately they may be interwoven. Nor does he take much cognizance of the idea that, as I quoted a brain expert in Authority and Metaphor as theorizing, "The brain is a metaphor-making machine. It routinely expresses the concrete in terms of the figurative."


This theory of the human brain as a metaphor machine, which I have to admit gives my brain a buzz of recognition that is lacking when I trudge through Hofstadter's discussion, depends on the fact that the vast majority of each brain is composed of something called "association cortices" or "association regions." In this theory of the human mind as propounded by Baltimore neurosurgeon Michael Salcman, relational "associations" rather than encapsulated entities or "symbols" take center stage. An analogy would be the idea that music is actually a set of tonal relationships, not a set of notes.

I have to believe the capacity to make associations — metaphors, analogies, and the like — is more crucial to human intelligence than the (putative) existence of symbols that might or might not map to individual neural clusters or modules. It is in the realm of associations that leaps of insight can arise. In is in associations that Hofstadter's "strange loops" — patterns that reassert themselves at various levels of consideration — are most at home.

In fact, it seems pretty clear that Hofstadter's own brain made a metaphorical or analogical leap between computerized artificial intelligence efforts of the 1970s, when his book was being written, and human thought. I think he would agree with me, however, that not all leaps are created equal. I believe more in Dr. Salcman's leap concerning the centrality of associations than I do in Hofstadter's concerning symbols in the brain.

The Power of Grace

The theologian, teacher, and author Fr. Ron Rolheiser recently penned a column, The Resurrection - The Power of Positive Thinking or the Power of God?, that I think gets at something fundamental about the religious worldview, namely, what is so crucial about the experience of resurrection to Christian belief.

Fr. Rolheiser's Eastertime offering asked whether "the resurrection" Christians advert to is a metaphor for the good effects positive thinking has in our lives. Or, is that sense of resurrection "augmented by something beyond us ... the transcendent power of God breaking into nature and into our lives and doing for us what we can't do simply through will power and positive thinking"?

Perhaps surprisingly, Fr. Rolheiser's answers to those two seemingly opposed questions are yes and yes.

Yes, "faith, hope and positive thinking make good things happen and resurrect life from its many deaths." But also, yes, "a power and grace beyond us" come into play as well. "The resurrection is about power entering our world and our lives from beyond."


Power from beyond is the gift of grace. Grace, theologically speaking, is a freely made gift that we and the world receive from God without our having earned or merited it. It is the "happy ending" that didn't seem possible at the time.

Grace comes to us from beyond by "a power that can re-arrange the very atoms inside of our physical bodies, our aching emotions, and our divided world and raise up new life from the ashes."


To what Fr. Rolheiser says I would add the following suggestion: the difference between the secular or quasi-religious understanding of "resurrection" and the truly religious one boils down to how we experience it.

When he says the secular or New Age version of resurrection "is not just wishful thinking; proper attitude lets the right physical, emotional, and spiritual energy flow into the world and into the body," he hints at what I mean by "experience." Our mind is the seat of the attitudes we take, "proper" or "wishful." The human mind is, notably, conscious ... which means it is mysteriously able to have subjective experience of its own interior states, above and beyond the workings of the brain which produce those states.

It is at this level of consciousness that we experience everything, including, perhaps, "resurrection."

If we experience our life as being raised up from the ashes by a power beyond our ken, then so be it.

If we experience our life as being revived by positive thinking alone, so be it as well.

Who is to say that the one is not just a metaphor for the other, anyway, but actually the same thing, experienced differently?

Authority and Metaphor

Anyone who reads this blog is presumably able to tell that its author is neither an atheist nor a religious fundamentalist, but falls somewhere in between. For example, though I believe in God, I also believe in Darwin's theory of evolution.

One of the questions that perplexes me is, why (at least among those with active intellects) do there seem to be three kinds of people: those who believe in God but not Darwin, those who believe in Darwin but not God, and those who, like me, believe in both?

It occurs to me that it has to do with authority figures.

By an "authority figure" I mean a person in command. Religious fundamentalists believe that God is, first and foremost, such a person. Scientific atheists own to no such personal figure of authority. For them, authority comes impersonally from the scientific method and the discovery process it underwrites.

As for me, although I call myself religious I have trouble envisioning God as mainly an authority figure. Whatever my relationship with God is, it is not one of submitting to Him as an absolute master.


I find it interesting that the word "authority" is so closely related to "authorship." Fundamentalists think of the Bible as the authorial work of the One Lord of All. God wrote it, so it must be absolutely, literally true.

An assumption fundamentalists make is that God does not speak to us in metaphors, so slippery and fuzzy in their interpretation. To the mind of a fundamentalist, metaphors and other such soft forms of utterance do not go with the assertion of absolute sovereignty.

The scientific atheist uses metaphors without ceding them much authority. To a Darwinist, "survival of the fittest" is a convenient metaphor for the much more nuanced theory of natural selection that forms the core belief of Darwinism. Natural selection as it is understood toady actually talks about statistical probabilities, not stern absolutes of survival and death. Such a metaphor as "survival of the fittest" is not actually seen as binding on the theory per se.

Likewise, when scientists talk to us ordinary folk about quantum theory or string theory, they speak in analogies we have some chance of understanding. But when they talk among themselves, they prefer to use mathematics as a lingua franca.


Neither in the case of religious fundamentalists nor in that of scientific atheists does metaphor carry final authority. To religious liberals like myself, on the other hand, metaphor itself is apt to be seen as the central repository of authority.

No one person, divine or otherwise, is absolutely in command. Nor is absolute authority to be ceded to an impersonal process such as the scientific method. Rather, authority comes ultimately from within the individual mind. It is an emergent property of the brain.

It is, accordingly, a creative process, and like all creative processes, it springs from the metaphorical capacity of the mind.


That is a capacity that is explored in The Idea Machine, an article that appeared recently in The Baltimore Sun. According to Michael Salcman, a Baltimore neurosurgeon quoted extensively in the article, "The brain is a metaphor-making machine. It routinely expresses the concrete in terms of the figurative."

Salcman cites the poet Robert Frost to the effect that "poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another." Says Salcman, "That is what artists and scientists do all the time. The ability to compare one thing to the next is inherent to the way the brain is structured."


Scientists use metaphor to say one thing and mean another when they are thinking loosely, en route to making some concrete discovery. Yet the discovery itself, when they write it up as an article in a peer-reviewed journal, has to stand up to the decidedly non-poetic scrutiny of pursed-lipped skeptics who may not be thrilled in the least. Whether it's right or wrong, there has to ultimately be some authoritative way to express what they have discovered without using fuzzy, Frost-like language to put it across. There has to be the crisp equivalent of E = mc² at the bottom line.

When it comes to religious fundamentalists, they too insist that saying one thing and meaning another is not what God, in revealing Himself to humankind in the Holy Bible, would do.

Why is it that people on both sides of the Is-There-A-God question — and lots of other folks, too — consider it non-kosher to use figurative language to say one thing while meaning another? Especially when the thing which is meant by the utterance can hardly be encapsulated in everyday prosaic language, why is it so bad to rely on what the Sun article calls the "association regions" of the brain as a way of communicating what we think the ultimate nature of reality actually is?



The "association cortices" constitute what the article says is "the vast majority" of the human brain's neuronal constituency. Each of our brains contains about one trillion nerve cells or neurons, each with 10,000 synapses that link them across a narrow gap to other neurons. The associational cortices are no different in their organization from other areas of the brain, but instead of being dedicated to specific tasks like sensory input from a single organ or movement of a single muscle, they "respond to more than one type of sensory input" and tell us how one input pattern is like others we have experienced before.

The uniquely human capacity for unencumbered "free association" — unique because no other species possesses such a richly complex associational region in its brain — is the spark of our creative genius.

Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam"

The article hints that Michelangelo foreknew this finding of modern neuroscience concerning creativity and gave us a clue to it in his fresco "The Creation of Adam," in the Sistine Chapel. Or else, why does the Creator's swirling purple cloak form the shape of a human brain?


So religious fundamentalists today, and to a lesser extent atheistic scientists, are oddly in agreement that what the Sun article calls the "most human and complex parts" of the brain — the association cortices that give us our capacity for metaphor — are unreliable as sources of authority.

As a religious liberal who is perfectly comfortable with an authority figure that is anything but crisply concrete — the metaphorical capacity of the human mind — all I can say is, "How odd!"

Souls: What Are They, Anyway?

Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach

In my last "Strange Loops" post, Minds: What Are They, Anyway?, I talked about the mind — namely, ideas concerning the mind that appear in Douglas R. Hofstadter's one-of-a-kind 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. To Hofstadter, the mind somehow arises out of the mechanical, deterministic operations of the brain. Yet it has non-deterministic attributes that cannot be fully explained at the level of neurons and their vast interconnections, including:

• self-awareness
• consciousness
• sentience
• individual uniqueness, agency, and responsibility for imposing continuity and order on what would otherwise be frantic electrochemical chaos
• and several others

It is not easy to distinguish Hofstadter's ideas about the mind from certain longstanding philosophical ideas about the soul. In this post, I would like to go out on several limbs and investigate what impact Hofstadter's views, if taken as seriously as they deserve to be, might conceivably have on traditional notions of the soul.

I say "out on several limbs" because I intend to talk about a number of topics in which I am anything but well-versed. As a non-expert tailor, I will nevertheless be picking up buttons and sewing sizable vests on them.


I'll begin by alluding to John Dominic Crossan's review in The Washington Post Book World of the recent book Reading Judas, by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King. The book is a translation and explication of the recently resurrected Gospel of Judas, a Gnostic Gospel that was lost for centuries and then found again not too long ago.

Judas Iscariot, of course, is the disciple who betrayed Jesus, leading to his crucifixion. That there should be an ancient Gospel lionizing Judas comes as a shock. Even more surprising, the Gospel of Judas says Judas' betrayal was blessed by Jesus himself as the only means by which he, Jesus, could be freed from the prison of his mortal body — in what the Gospel of Judas characterizes as the only kind of martyrdom that can be deemed good.

The Gospel of Judas was written in the second century A.D. at a time when Christians were in effect consenting to be put to violent death by the pagan Romans after undergoing great humiliations and suffering. According to Judas, this sort of martyrdom was not good, because it was done in the name of (hoped for) resurrection of the body, on the other side of death. The "good" martyrdom Judas espouses is, in contrast, done in the name of (supposedly) freeing the soul forever from the shackles of a material body.

Crossan points out that the notion of the body as imprisoning the separately existing soul comes originally from Greek — specifically, Platonic — philosophy. The Gospel of Judas was heavily influenced by Platonism.


But there has historically been a competing notion of what it means to have a soul. "The other interpretation," Crossan writes, "claims that we are ensouled bodies or incarnate spirits, indissoluble unions of body and soul, flesh and spirit, able — like two sides of a coin — to be distinguished but never separated."

Richard P. McBrien writes in Catholicism, his survey book on the time-honored style of Christian faith which also happens to be my own, about the Biblical view of the human person (p. 159):

The hope of salvation ... is expressed in terms of the resurrection of the body ("Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise ... "—Isaiah 26:19; see also Daniel 12:2-3, and 2 Maccabees 7:14), and this is taken up and developed in the New Testament ("If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile"—1 Corinthians 15:16-17; see the entire fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians as well as Mark 12:18-25; John 6:39-40; and Acts of the Apostles 24:15). The idea of the immortality of the soul, on the other hand, is not developed in the writings of the later Old Testament period nor in the New Testament. The notion of immortality reflects a world view different from the Bible's anthropology. Indeed, it is more akin to Greek philosophy (i.e., the human person as embodied spirit) than to the Hebrew mentality (i.e., the human person as animated body).

That which "animates" the body is an interpretation of the soul with which I imagine Hofstadter might provisionally agree — assuming he is willing to stipulate to the existence of a soul. I picture Hofstadter and Plato on opposite sides of the (in Crossan's words) "giant fissure in Western sensibility between two interpretations of human identity."

For Hofstadter, the mind (soul?) arises from the brain in such a way as to produce a unique identity, an ongoing self that is somehow more than the gray matter from which it arises, and with which it is in "indissoluble union." It is the whole arch to the gray matter's mere stones. Hofstadter's is a holistic outlook in which the mind or self is not so much greater than the "sum of its parts" as it is inherent in the intricate, uniquely complex way in which the parts organize themselves. In short, the conscious mind emerges as an organizational function of the workings of the brain.

As a result of its manner of organization, the mind qua mind qualifies as a dynamical system whose function is to respond to and manipulate high-level constructs that Hofstadter calls "active symbols." Symbol manipulation as an activity implies an agent, a "someone" who accomplishes the manipulation, since activities are, by definition, performed by agents. Who or what is the "someone" here?

Hofstadter says (p. 327) that "the full system is responsible for how its symbols trigger each other, and so it is quite reasonable to speak of the full system as the 'agent'." The mind-as-agent is, accordingly, "this partially constant, partially varying system" which, not incidentally, experiences its own "state" as one that is being "slowly transformed, or updated." This sense of self or subjective experience emerges in the mind out of its own active symbols' ceaseless operation and interaction over time.

In fact, the activities of the symbols are "not absolutely free. The activities of all symbols," Dr. Anteater says to his interlocutors, "are strictly determined by the state of the full system in which they reside."


I interpret this as representing what is called, in dynamical systems theory today, "top-down causation" or "top-down influence," another name for which is "whole-part influence." The opposite conceptual pole from top-down causation or whole-part influence is "bottom-up causation." Many dynamical systems — especially those that remain "partially constant, partially varying" over time — tend to have bottom-up and top-down influences going on within themselves constantly. These causal influences vertically interpenetrate and constrain one another all the while. It is as though the puppet constrains the puppeteer as much as the puppeteer manipulates the puppet.

The puppeteer in this particular case, i.e., the "full system" which we call the mind or the self or the soul, is not and need not be conscious of anything that is going on below the level of the brain's "active symbols." In particular, nothing at the level of what Hofstadter calls "signals" need be conscious. Signals are solely brain-related, while symbols are present to the conscious mind.

Magically, one of the symbols which the mind as "full system" is able to manipulate is that which represents its own "overall state" (see p. 328). Dr. Anteater: "In any conscious system there are symbols which represent the brain state, and they themselves are part of the very brain state which they symbolize. For consciousness requires a large degree of self-consciousness."


I realize the ideas I have just presented will seem quite baffling to anyone who has not had a great deal of exposure to the various concepts involved. Top-down influence? Bottom-up causation? Dynamical systems theory? Holistic understandings of things that science no longer hopes to explain by reducing them to the causal contributions of their tiniest parts? None of these is an easy concept to wrap the mind around.

Victor Zuckerkandl's The Sense of Music

One way to approach comprehending such holistic concepts is by analogy with music. I am currently reading a classic introduction to how music, on its face just a collection of audible tones, can possibly have meaning or sense. The book is Victor Zuckerkandl's The Sense of Music, from 1959, and it adopts a holistic attitude toward melodies built up from tones.

Zuckerkandl does not use terms like bottom-up and top-down, which have been brought into the conversation about holistic systems since he wrote his seminal book on music theory, but he does allude to some of the same ideas in different terms, and he clearly thinks that pieces of music must be understood, ultimately, as wholes.

For example, when he calls music "one of the most highly developed, most intricately organized, must subtly constructed creations of the human mind" (p. 3), he is speaking of a piece of music as a sort of complex system. The nature of complex systems, or of complexity in general, is what dynamical systems theory theorizes about.

When we experience music, the complex system which is the mind interacts with the complex system which is the music. "For music to come alive in a mind," Zuckerkandl writes (p. 4), "experience must somehow connect with experience, one musical experience with another, musical experiences with experiences of different kinds, the whole thing must develop, must grow in scope and depth." If we equate the verb "experience" with the verb "manipulate," as in Hofstadter's "the mind manipulates symbols," we see that Zuckerkandl is speaking Hofstadter's language! To experience anything at the level of consciousness is to compare that experience with all others — which is to say, to engage in the manipulation of symbols.

So the mind, as it prepares itself to understand the musical complexity of Bach and Beethoven — not just the simplicity of a folk song — is taking charge of and assuming "responsibility" for the manipulation of its own internal symbols.


The ideas of melodic tone and pitch are introduced by Zuckerkandl in such a way as to emphasize that tones are not like musical atoms. They are not the basic particles from which music is built, à la Tinker Toys or molecules. When it comes to music, the bricks (the tones) are not as important as the mortar (the pitch intervals between tones): the tonal relations that are set up as individual tones are played melodically in sequence, or are sounded harmonically in chords, note atop note.

Again, complex dynamical systems are notoriously ones in which higher-level entities — "symbols," as we can echo Hofstadter in calling them — arise from relationships among lower-level entities (pitches) that themselves have no intrinsic "meaning."

In the case of a piece of music, one of the "meanings" or "symbols" that typically arises quite early on in the piece is the tonal center that has sprung into being. The tonal center is generally thought of as the lowest tone in the scale associated with the key of the piece: the keynote. It can be established in as few as two notes, though more than two notes are often used. Once it is established, the other tones in the music are typically heard as being in dynamic relationship to — in tension with — the tonal center. They gravitate around, wishing to fall back toward, the keynote, just as the planets do the sun.

But some of the notes in music of any degree of complexity higher than some simple folk melody are not heard as individual way stations along the highway back to the "destination" note, aka the tonal center. These "extra" notes instead participate in clusters or groups which themselves serve as way stations. There are accordingly groups of notes, and groups of groups of notes, and groups of groups of groups of notes ... on up to the highest level, the musical piece as a whole. That level encompasses the musical "meaning" of the "full system."

You could call that highest-level meaning the "soul" of the piece, without doing violence to any of the concepts involved. All music is soul music.

Jim Law's The Backyard Vintner

Another way to understand holistic concepts comes from the world of wine. Jim Law's The Backyard Vintner: An Enthusiast's Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Wine at Home is an excellent introduction to how grapes express themselves as wine, even for those who have no intention of planting their own vines.

As Law makes clear, one can think of a wine as the self-expression of the grapes from which it was made, since nothing which goes into the wine doesn't come out of the grapes. But there is a yet higher level of understanding or meaning when it comes to wine. This is the level called terroir.

As Law, owner/winegrower at the small Linden Vineyards winery on the Virginia Blue Ridge, puts it (p. 10):

If you envision a vineyard replete with bottles of wine hanging from the vines, you are not far wrong. In fact, the foundation of wine is the vineyard. The true character of a good wine comes from what the French refer to as terroir — the taste of the place in which the grapes are grown. A Napa Valley Chardonnay and a French Chablis are made from the same grape variety, yet the wines have nothing in common. Why? The weather and soils in each place are completely different, resulting in wines that, though made from the same grape, do not have the same taste. Discovering the terroir from my little patch of earth is the most intellectually stimulating part of the wine growing process.

Observe that the highest level of wine character — it's "soul," if you will — is not determined by the type of grapes it was made from so much as where the vines were planted, the specific ground that the roots were in. But terroir also includes the climate of the vineyard's unique patch of earth, and the weather conditions that year, and decisions made by the vintner as to when to harvest, and ... and ... and ... . The soul of a wine is an expression of how all these factors came together in one unique holistic organization, that one time, perhaps never to be duplicated in exactly that same way again.


The difference between the soul of a human and that of a piece of music or a wine seems to be that only the human mind is self-aware. Self-awareness is the "strange loop" Hofstadter quite often refers to, in which a mind somehow incorporates the whole of itself within itself. When a holistic system possesses a manipulable symbol representing its "overall state," it qualifies as a mind that is conscious of itself. In some mysterious way, it experiences itself.

But lest we be too hasty in assigning self-awareness uniquely to the human mind, what about Hofstadter's Aunt Hillary? As an ant colony of many castes and teams and teams of teams working on multiple levels to represent information as signals and symbols, isn't Aunt Hillary tantamount to a conscious, self-aware agent, capable of self-expression through the "writing" of her ant trails?

If you answer to that question is no, how so? On the basis of what do you ascribe conscious experience to me — or to yourself — and not to Aunt Hillary?

It occurs to me that we are blind to consciousness not of our own particular kind. Extending that notion, perhaps we ought to consider the possibility that music is somehow self-aware. Or that wine is.

We know from remarks Hofstadter makes throughout his book that certain music — in particular, that of Bach — exhibits a kind of "strange loopiness." So does the visual art of M.C. Escher. What about a wine — no vin ordinaire — that preserves a distinct memory of its terroir, and seems to live and breathe as it ages in its bottle?

The overarching point here seems to be that we really have no real idea to what entities to attribute mind or soul. Does the planet have a soul? Is the Internet self-aware?