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| Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach |
- 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
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.
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| Victor Zuckerkandl's The Sense of Music |
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.
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| Jim Law's The Backyard Vintner |
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?
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