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Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop

For the last few weeks I have been exploring in this blog Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop. The book argues that the "I" or self is a symbol that naturally arises in each human brain in the same way as self-reference ineluctably arises in logical-mathematical systems used for the derivation of theorems that are proved by applying rules of inference. The theorems such systems generate are analogous to our thoughts, and the individaul symbols which are strung together to form these formulas and theorems are analogous to the symbols, categories, and meanings that emerge from the neural interactions of our cranial gray matter.

My response to this view of the self has taken me on something of a roller-coaster ride. At first, in a series of posts that challenged Strange Loop's casual assumption that the self is the same as the conscious soul, I sketched out an alternate view of human self-awareness in which our capacity for conscious experience echoes God's own such capacity. In that alternate view, which I labeled "Genesis By Experience," or GBE, I held that mind is distinct from matter in the same way as God is distinct from the physical world.

GBE was thus a dualistic worldview in which the fact of being seen by an observant, conscious mentality — God's — is what confers existence on us and everything around us. I noted that quantum physics seems to show something similar: that possibly, just possibly, when we observe one of two equiprobable quantum events, we confer existence on the one event and consign the other to oblivion. This existence-conferring act of observation on our part applies to quantum alternatives that to our ordinary way of understanding had to be chosen in the past. Yet by observing them in the present, ex post facto, we "fix" them in existence and expunge their twins' existence from reality retrospectively.

Not being all that comfortable with the intrinsic mind-matter/God-world dualism of my ideas, I then looked for and thought I spotted a way in which it could be eliminated without sacrificing the notion that there is a God. I thought God might in fact be the "I" of the world, a symbolic category that could emerge from the mechanical physical workings of the universe in much the same way as the individual "I" emerges from each of our brains.


I was merrily constructing a "God Is a Strange Loop" (or GISL) theology along just those lines — lines suggested to my mind by Hofstadter even though he himself owns to no God — when I experienced a philosophical cave-in. I noticed that the "strange loop" in Hofstadter's crucial discussion of Principia Mathematica — the logical-mathematical system wherein self-referentiality obtrudes despite all its designers' efforts to exclude it — requires of us a commitment to the notion that such a system cannot be logically inconsistent.

The alternative possibility is that the system might very well be inconsistent, which simply means it can prove theorems that aren't true. To allow inconsistency in such a system is to turn coherence into incoherence, which accordingly turns the world which we hope to model by such a mathematical system into an unknowable farce.

There's a pattern here. An external mind is required to choose between a pair of choices. One choice is that the system is an incoherent, logically inconsistent, useless mess. The other choice is for the system to be logically consistent ... which, as Hofstadter shows by presenting to us lay readers Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, has the side effect of making it logically incomplete. Logical incompleteness means there are system-internal truths which the system itself is powerless to prove. Again, an external observer is required to "see" the veracity of those truths.


The requisite external observer is usually one that has a mind, is conscious, and has a sense of self — typically, it is one of us humans. But if we were to envision the universe-as-a-whole as basically a repository of truths — some of which are unprovable in a Gödelian sense, some not — who then would the external observer be?

Here, obviously, is where I think the God/world dualism comes into play. The cosmos-external observer is God. In so saying, I am simply claiming that the pattern of needing an external observer to choose between two mutually exclusive alternatives, incoherence and incompleteness, applies to the cosmos as a whole, whose external observer is God, but it does not apply to God himself. By virtue of the mind-matter/God-world dualism, the need to confer existence on God — via an external-observational imposition of causal coherence upon God — simply doesn't arise. God's very being is made, as it were, of causal coherence.


In short, I am back to a dualistic view of reality: God is distinct from the world which God creates and sustains, by virtue of his ongoing, conscious act of "seeing" or observing the world and all in it. The distinction between each conscious, observing human mind and the body/brain that carries it around echoes that very God/world dichotomy.

The "I" or sense of self may well arise within the human brain exactly as Hofstadter proposes — but it is not the same thing as consciousness per se, and it is not the same as the soul.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

I accordingly say consciousness arises, just as David J. Chalmers argues in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, as subjective "phenomena" within the mind: "raw sense experience" lacking all causal efficacy. We quasi-empathetically know something of "what it is like to be red," whenever we observe a red tricycle. But having (or lacking) such knowledge makes zero difference to our behavior, or to its causal impact on the external world.

Moreover, I say, the soul comes from God. Specifically, it is God's seeing us that confers an immortal soul upon each of us.

In chapter 15, "Entwinement," Hofstadter constructs an elaborate thought experiment about "Twinwirld," a world that is just like ours except that almost all babies are born as identical twins. The linguistic and cultural customs of Twinwirld are such that each pair of twins develops a single, unitary sense of self — and thus, in Hofstadter's estimation, a single consciousness, and just one soul.

Any hesitation Hofstadter's reader might have in crediting the single-souledness of Twinwirld's ubiquitous twins is supposed to vanish when Hofstadter tweaks the rules, and each dual "pairson" becomes a conjoined ("Siamese") twinset. I couldn't get through this part of the book without wondering why the conjoined Twinwirld twins couldn't be surgically separated, thus creating two persons, two minds, two consciousnesses ... and two souls.

Nor could I find an answer to the nagging question, what happens if one half of a Twinwirld twinset dies and the other survives? The question may not matter if there is no afterlife, as Hofstadter seems to believe. But if there is ... and if there is only one soul per twinset ... then what?


It seems to be quite true, as Hofstadter points out in his "Post Scriptum re Twinwirld" section, that in at least one rare case of earthly twindom — that of Greta and Freda, the Chaplin twins of York, England — two twins can indeed develop a single "self," for all practical purposes. But, I would add, this is not necessarily the same thing as having a single consciousness, which by Chalmers' reckoning cannot be either proved or disproved for Greta and Freda, or for any other pair of twins.

Nor is it the same thing, by my reckoning, as having a single soul. If, God forbid, Greta dies and Freda lives (assuming they're both still with us), I believe Greta's soul would find a heavenly abode while bereft Freda's remained, waiting patiently, here on earth.


So Hofstadter and I now seem to be at daggers drawn. Peeking ahead at chapters still to come, I can see that he intends to take up the topic of dualism, presumably to kayo it summarily. Needless to say, when I get there I will be highly skeptical.