Strange Loops and Magical Thinking

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, as I said in Strange Loops and Souls, has it that to believe in the soul as anything more than a paradoxically self-aware symbolic structure within the brain is to commit the error of "magical thinking."

In the guise of "consciousness," Hofstadter's symbolic "I" purportedly accounts for what certain other philosophers treat as something "extra" in the mind, above and beyond the mind's ordinary functions. This extraordinary something — consciousness — is said to be the human capacity to intuit what is the essence of being (for example) a red tricycle, whenever we are perceiving a red tricycle. Specifically, the perception of (say) red triggers a certain one of the many experiential "qualia" built into the human mind. These inbuilt qualia, sniffs Hofstadter, are made of magic stuff he refers to as élan mental.

Hofstadter's overarching belief is that there is no such thing as élan mental, no such thing as magic stuff, no such entity (beyond the "I") as consciousness or the soul.

Magical thinking is accordingly what we commit when we affirm the existence of an indissoluble soul, one each per person. As either the soul of western religious tradition or the Cartesian ego described by the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, this understanding of the individual self is a figment, Hofstadter says. He compares it to an illusory marble his fingertips are sure they feel when he clutches a perfectly aligned stack of envelopes.

I don't think Hofstadter's logic is impeccable in this. Just because the mind is capable of placing imaginary marbles where no marbles exist does not prove there is, in a human being, neither consciousness nor a soul.

Just because Hofstadter's successfully likens the human "I" to any self-extensible symbol set capable of computational universality, à la Principia Mathematica after Kurt Gödel gave it unsuspected wings of formal incompleteness, does not prove that this explanation, which accounts well for our mysterious capacity of self-awareness, necessarily covers consciousness or the soul.

Just because non-magical thinking — a.k.a. science — works so well in any number of physical venues does not prove there is nothing at all magical, supernatural, or transcendental about reality.

Just because our "classical" categories of thought about who and what we are insist on there being a unique, indelible conscious soul inside us, somehow, does not mean we now need to set such categories aside in the way that Einstein's special theory of relativity displaced "classical" Newtonian mechanics. Hofstadter commits a fallacy to assume that all "classical," intuition-friendly understandings ought to be marked with a skeptical asterisk, just because one of them has successfully been superseded.

What seems to be going on here is that Hofstadter starts from a deep-seated commitment to a thoroughly materialist, physics-only, non-dualist view of the world. He is also fond of mathematical paradoxes in all of their loopy manifestations, so he sets his cap for coming up with an explanation of the self-aware "I" in terms of these "strange loops."

In this quest he succeeds marvelously. He shows how the brain is, at a level above its elementary particles and neurons, but a network of symbols. Beyond some minimal threshold of complexity, any network of interlocking symbols becomes implicitly self-referential. When implicit self-reference becomes explicit, you have the makings of a self.

Then it is as if Hofstadter says, "My model works so well with respect to explaining self-awareness, I wonder if it also accounts for those other two perennial mysteries of the human mind, consciousness and the soul."

Here, unfortunately, he takes a shortcut. He simply declares the latter pair to be illusory ways in which the "I" tries to account for itself to itself. Along these lines there is a lot of hand-waving, a lot of noticing how magical thinking always generates more unanswerable questions and further mysteries.

This is, to Hofstadter, an unacceptable result, since one of the corollaries to his postulate that all things are physical is that they can all be explained naturally — that somewhere there has to be an end to unanswerable questions and further mysteries.

Hence, his argument that the Gödelian nature of self-awareness also explains consciousness/the soul holds water only as long as you assume with him from the get-go that all things are physical and all scientific explanations are possible.

Because of this circularity, it would be wrong to imagine that the success of his Gödelian model of the self proves the truth of his materialist prejudice in general.