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.

Strange Loops and Souls

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, as I said in More about Strange Loops, accounts for the soul — the self, the "I," the supposedly unique and indelible person that one thinks of oneself as being — as what emerges when a human brain, capable of symbolically representing anything, so represents itself.

The brain represents all of reality in terms of symbols. Each symbol corresponds to a category into which we are capable of assigning the various things we perceive. Symbols interconnect to form larger symbols. Symbols can refer to other symbols. They can combine into symbol sets. They can symbolically represent said symbol sets ... sets that contain symbols that represent these very sets themselves. It all gets very incestuous. It's like a neurosurgeon doing brain surgery on herself ... except that it's all happening on a symbolic level, not on a physical level.

A symbol is not a physical structure in the brain. It is a pattern of neuron firings. When a symbol in the mind signifies the totality of that mind itself, then that intrinsically recursive, all-inclusive super-symbol is what we call the "I" or self.

Hofstadter advances the view that this all-inclusive self-symbol, embellished by the brain over the course of a lifetime of elaboration and refinement, is tantamount to the soul. The soul does not inhere in any "extra level of being" above and beyond our merely physical "stuff": the cells of the body and brain and the patterns of our brain's neuronal interconnections. The set of patterns constituting the "I" can grow without limit, once the underlying symbol set becomes capable of self-reference.

The "I" pattern set emerges only gradually, starting out small and simple, or barely even there, and ideally getting more elaborate, subtle, and capacious as life goes on. The upside of this growth potential of the human "I" is that the more "I" we develop, the greater the size of our soul.

The downside is that our supposedly fixed "identity" is actually changing, impermanent, illusory. It is, after all, a trick the brain plays on itself. Hence there is no fundamental reason why our identity — our supposedly unique and indelible soul — could not be transfered to a different body, provided that body were sufficiently like the original ... perhaps after teleportation of our physical "stuff" to a different planet.

The brain of an atom-for-atom, quark-for-quark transposition of the body elsewhere would necessarily contain all the same neuron-firing patterns and mapping categories of symbolic representation as were materialized in the original body, and so produce a duplicate "I." In other words, whenever our body is precisely enough replicated somewhere else, our soul gets cloned as well.


Some philosophers of mind distinguish between self-awareness, à la the "I," and a separate thing called "consciousness," which for them is the capacity to undergo the ineffable "inner experience" associated with perceiving whatever it is we happen to be perceiving and categorizing at the moment. For instance, the what-it-is-like feeling that goes along with seeing a purple flower is, on this view, separate from the underlying act of perception/cognition of the flower.

According to this wing of philosophy of the mind, consciousness arises from and accompanies physical brain states and processes, but it is not itself physical. It is an immaterial "extra."

That may or may not mean it equates to the God-given soul spoken of in religion. In past installments of my Consciousness series of posts, I discussed The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, a book by philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers. Chalmers thinks consciousness (at least to a first approximation) is epiphenomenal; it is natural and not mystical, yet it cannot directly or indirectly cause any physical events to happen in the material world.

Chalmers does not adhere to any belief in God. He has no religious ax to grind, and yet I thought it might be a good idea for me to try to show how the "extra" mind feature he calls consciousness might equate to the entity that my religion calls the soul.

Hofstadter devotes a chapter of I Am a Strange Loop to explaining why he thinks Chalmers' theory of consciousness is bunk ... even though Chalmers is a good friend of his, and a former student, to boot. To Hofstadter, there is nothing more to the soul than the "I" pattern that emerges and manifests itself in the neuronal organization of the brain.


Still, Hofstadter believes in something he calls "greatness of soul": magnanimity or empathic generosity. Different people have souls of different sizes measured, in the final analysis, by how open each person is to admitting the "I" symbols of others into their own "I" symbols.

A person that has developed only a "small soul" has, ipso facto, only an impoverished set of symbols that form the basis of his or her own personal super-symbol, the "I." Such a person, commonly spoken of as having a "large ego," actually has a tiny "I." He or she is self-centered and capable of only the most rudimentary sort of empathy with others. People whose "I" starts out minute and stays minute amount to psychopaths with no loving-kindness whatever and zero empathy for others.

But the "great of soul" — Hofstadter mentions Albert Schweitzer — are willing to vicariously incorporate into their own lives and concerns the sufferings not only of their own closest family members and loved ones, but also of humanity at large ... and even of supposedly brute animals.

Hofstadter does not mention Jesus in his short list of the great of soul, but it seems to me that empathic generosity toward "the least of these" was his stock in trade. It could be imagined that Jesus' soul was as large as a soul can get. It could even be thought that Jesus' message was, in Hofstadter's terms, quintessentially about opening up the "I" to the "I"'s of others, so as to allow our own souls to become as close as possible to his in capaciousness.