I Am a Hologram

Douglas Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop tells of the author's unutterable sorrow at the death, during the time the book was being written, of his wife Carol.

The book itself is a summing up of his earlier Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. The two books together present Hofstadter's insights into how it is that the human mind can be aware of itself and can give itself a name: "I."

As the Strange Loop dust jacket puts it:

For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real — is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?

Hofstadter shows the "I" to be a virtual reality, an illusion. It doesn't really exist. It can't push electrons around in our brain. It's isn't a physical entity, a group of neurons or pathways in the brain, and the laws of physics alone can't account for it.

What actually happens is that, at a level higher than the physical, the mind is full of symbols. Symbols are not anything mystical; Hofstadter shows how they can arise in something so humdrum as the busyness of an ant colony.

Yet, as we know, symbols can be manipulated in logical ways, according to various formal systems of mathematical inference. These formal systems are, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel showed, inherently — and somewhat disappointingly — "incomplete." Surprisingly, there are, inside each of them, not just one true statement but an infinite number of true statements that the systems themselves are incapable of deriving.

As a body of theorems, every formal system is constructed from the ground up by means of applying rules of inference to a starter set of axioms. The non-derivable theorems would seem to be just as accessible to the logic and mechanics of theorem generation as are the derivable ones.

Yet they cannot be generated — though they are inescapably true. They can't be shown to be true within the system, but if you stand outside the system and think about these unprovable statements, you can see that their being false would introduce a fundamental inconsistency into a formal system that is absolutely allergic to any whiff of inconsistency. Hence, they must be true.

In short, all formal systems based on the logical manipulation of symbols to derive provable theorems based on a set of axioms are incomplete.

Hofstadter extends this basic insight to show how the set of symbols that the human mind manipulates, day in and day out, as it goes about doing its basic mental operations, is just the same. In the human mind, as in every formal system, the provable and the derivable do not exhaust the true. It is this actuality that opens the door to the possibility of a self-aware mental being, an "I" which stands outside the formal logic of our basic mental operations and independently discerns truth.

If Gödel had been wrong about the intrinsic incompleteness of formal systems, we would be living in a zombie universe in which there can be no "I," no self-awareness. Thank God Gödel was right!

Moreover, this "I"-ness of ours is, at its core, a "strange loop": the logical operations of the brain that would ordinarily constitute a straightforward hierarchy of symbol manipulation at higher and lower levels of abstraction turns, in the end, into a feedback loop. The Dutch artist M.C. Escher captured the strangeness of such loops in Drawing Hands (right).

If the above were all Hofstadter had to say, his books would be compelling. That they are also profound has to do with how he extends his basic insight into a discussion of how the unique "I"-loop of each of the people we love inhabits, in greater or lesser degree, our brain, and we, our individual "I," theirs. Again, the dust jacket gives a capsule summary:

How do we mirror other beings inside our mind? Can many strange loops of different "strengths" inhabit one brain? If so, then a hallowed tenet of our culture — that one human brain houses one human soul — is an illusion.

This notion is something the loss of Carol Hofstadter brought home to Douglas. As acute as the pain of separation was for him for a very long time, it ultimately morphed into an awareness that Carol's "I" was still alive — in Doug's brain! Also, in the brains of their children. Also, at lesser strengths, inside the brains of everyone who had ever known Carol personally!

Get it? Each of us has an "I" that is not real, in neither the physical nor the metaphysical sense, and is quintessentially strange in the way that all "strange loops" are strange. What's more, there is a spare copy of our unique "I" inside the brain of every person who knows us and loves us.

Likewise, we carry around copies of the "I"-loop of all whom, to adopt the locution of Martin Buber in I and Thou, we say "Thou" to. Depending on the depth of the mutual, personal, I-Thou relationship, the "strength" of the "I"-loop copy varies ... but it is present in every case.

Because we carry our own copies of others' "I"-loops, we learn to "see things through their eyes," as it were. We share their experiences vicariously and empathically. We "channel" these other people, in the popular parlance — as long as channeling is understood as being something neither mystical nor supernatural.

Not only can we channel those who are close to us during their lifetimes, we remain able to channel them after they're gone. My father has been dead for 20 years, my mother for 23, but scarcely a day goes by without my channeling one or the other of them, or both of them, within the confines of my own imagination.


Hofstadter uses the analogy of the strange loop to show how an "I" can exist within us and be transmitted to others. My own favorite analogy for the situation in which friends and loved ones share copies of one another's "I"-loops is the hologram. I don't claim to have a detailed understanding of holography, but my impression is that when a certain kind of light is bounced off an object onto a piece of photographic film, the light's waves form an interference pattern — criss-crossing ripples — which the film records. Then when the film is developed and the same kind of light is passed through the interference patterns on it, a virtual image of the original object appears before the eye. This image is as three-dimensional as the original object.

Interestingly, if you cut the photographic slide that records the interference pattern in half, each half can reproduce the full image of the object, all by itself. There is some minor loss of fidelity, but basically, all the information in the original slide is present in each half. If you continue to subdivide the halves, each subdivided hologram again contains the entirety of the original body of information, if in yet more attenuated fidelity, and can again reproduce the full image.

We can think of Carol Hofstadter's "I" as having been a hologram at full size and strength in her, while she was alive. Meanwhile, Doug's brain created a smaller (but nearly full-sized) copy of the "I-of-Carol" hologram during his and Carol's life together. When she passed on, his smaller copy of the hologram, which provided him with ongoing access to an only-slightly-attenuated "I-of-Carol," lived on.

Their children each possessed a like copy of the original "I-of-Carol" hologram. Innumerable friends and acquaintances of Carol and Doug also cherished "I-of-Carol" holograms at various scales and degrees of attenuation.


Moreover, the various and sundry "I-of-whoever" holograms rattling around in each of our brains modify the central "I-of-me" hologram each of us builds. I cannot tell you how many times I realize that one friend or another has imprinted something of himself or herself indelibly on my inner experience, my "I-of-me" hologram. I have one particular longtime friend, for example, whose love of our mutually shared Catholic Church dwarfs mine, I am a bit ashamed to admit. (I'll call her Mary, a pseudonym.) But I can look at the Church through Mary's eyes any time I want to, and when I do its beauty becomes instantly apparent to me.

In ways that I would not care to try to quantify, her Church-love has changed me.

That means the it has changed the copy of my "I"-hologram that is possessed by any other friend of mine, call him Joseph ... who may not know Mary at all. If my "I"-hologram changes Joseph in any way, then I have indirectly exposed Joseph to Mary's "I"-hologram as well.

Should, God forbid, Mary die tomorrow, she will live on in me, and in Joseph, whom I have touched in an I-Thou way, and in anyone Joseph touches in an I-Thou way ... and on and on and on, until the end of time.

And that is a thought that is truly marvelous to contemplate!