More about Strange Loops

It's been nearly a year since I last mentioned Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, in Back to Dualism. I've picked up the book again after stalling out on it about halfway through.

Hofstadter's quarry is an understanding of the soul — the self, the "I," the unique person referred to by that pronoun. What is it about the human mind that makes the conscious "I" possible?

Is the "I" equivalent to the brain itself? Is it part of the neural wetware of the human cerebrum in particular? Or is the fissured and involute organ inside the cranium something of a sideshow, with the "I" or conscious soul being instead a pattern of signals among the cells that make up that organ? Isn't the self or soul but a super-rich symbol system, a mega-concept housed in a brain but ultimately independent of the brain?

Hofstadter likens the conscious "I" to a mathematical system, Principia Mathematica, devised in the early 20th century as an attempt to subsume all of mathematics into a single symbol system independent of everyday language's inescapable ambiguities. It was hoped by the authors of PM, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, to develop a system by means of which every true mathematical proposition could be derived and proven, while all false propositions could be exposed as such.

But then the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel showed two things about PM:

1. Self-referentiality: PM contains a back door by which it can be used to construct symbol strings representing propositions about itself.
2. Incompleteness: At least one such self-referential proposition (and in fact an infinite number of them) exists which can be demonstrated outside PM to be true — since denying the truth thereof creates a manifest paradox — but which PM itself cannot internally prove ... thus making PM inescapably "incomplete" as a truth-proving engine.

To Hofstadter, the neural structure of the human brain is, like PM, capable of

• manufacturing and using symbols
• making and testing the validity of propositions couched in the form of combinations of these symbols
• doing so with or without being expressly aware that that is what is going on — the symbol processing per se can either be unconscious or raised to the level of consciousness
  
• doing so in tandem with, but ultimately independently of, the use of natural language
• generating and testing self-referential symbol strings/propositions that underpin the emergence of the conscious "I" super-symbol
  

The brain is therefore like PM, an artificial product of two brains, those of Whitehead and Russell. Messrs. Whitehead and Russell wanted to use PM to bypass the brain's difficulty with doing formal mathematical logic to perfection. Instead, Gödel showed that PM, and by extension every symbol-manipulating engine powerful enough to generate self-referential propositions, shares the same inability to decide all truth without getting tangled up in paradox instead.

Hofstadter's own lifelong intellectual journey seems to have picked up first on Gödelian incompleteness as of primary interest to his mathematician's mentality, then to have realized that Gödelian self-referentiality trumps even that — because it gives us a basis for explaining the conscious "I" we call the soul.

He shows that Gödelian self-referentiality, the potential for "I"-hood, is first cousin to universality, the principle established by British mathematician Alan Turing at the dawn of the computer age by which it can be determined whether a computer is capable of being programmed to do anything any other computer does. The critical condition for universality to hold is that the computer be able to manipulate symbolical representations of its own capabilities: self-referentiality.

Virtually every computer in common use today can do that — which is why, among other things, the Mac I am writing this on is capable of pretending to be a Windows machine.

So universal computers running appropriate software can in effect emulate themselves, a capacity which at least potentially means they could generate arbitrarily complex symbol sets, up to and including the granddaddy of them all, the conscious "I."

(Why is it that I'm wondering at this moment whether my Mac may be laughing at me?)

The human brain has enough neural connections to be Turing-universal, and to generate an "I," but animal brains probably don't. The capacity for having what we call a human soul probably appeared somewhere along the evolutionary path from the last common ancestor we share with the other primates, such as chimpanzees, to our species, Homo sapiens. The first possessor of a human soul was very likely a Homo, but not a Homo sapiens.

All this, I note, chimes with A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, which I discussed most recently in Faiths of Our Fathers. It argues that Catholics such as I should be open to a pro-choice position concerning abortion because the church, prior to the seventeenth century, held that the fetus in a human womb lacked a human soul until late in pregnancy.

St. Augustine and, later, St. Thomas Aquinas believed that the soul of a fetus prior to some indeterminate point of blossoming into a full-fledged human one went through merely vegetative and animal stages first.

Abortions were immoral no because they destroyed ensouled human beings. They were wrong because they frustrated the only defensible use of the sex drive: procreation.

At the dawn of the scientific age, the Augustinian theory of late ensoulment (aka delayed hominization) was supplanted by a belief in the instant arrival of the human soul from the very moment of an egg's fertilization by a sperm. This was a logical consequence of a mistaken scientific theory of the day. The sperm was thought to be a very miniaturized but fully-formed human being, the "homunculus," complete with human soul.

Later, the microscope debunked the homunculus theory — but by that time, the church had hinged its objection to abortion on the idea of immediate hominization that went along with it. To abort an early-stage fetus was as immoral as aborting a late-term fetus, and for the same reason: it was the murder of a being, however tiny, with a human soul.

But if Douglas Hofstadter is correct, the human soul is the conscious "I" that can only develop when the brain of the human fetus is fully "wired up," such that it can (immediately or eventually) turn to constructing symbols of itself. Specifically, suffering as we know it is not possible until there can be an "I" to do the suffering.

And thus it can be seen that thinking like Hofstadter's is not really compatible with traditional religious thought about the soul — although it is compatible with the thought of the early Church Fathers, long since abandoned but ripe for recovery.