I Am My Brain’s Most Complex Symbol
Like a careenium (and also like PM), a brain can be seen on at (at least) two levels — a low level involving very small physical processes (perhaps involving particles, perhaps involving neurons — take your pick), and a high level involving large structures selectively triggerable by perception, which in this book I have called symbols, and which are the structures in our brain that constitute our categories.
Among the untold thousands of symbols in the repertoire of a normal human being, there are some that are far more frequent and dominant than others, and one of them is given, somewhat arbitrarily, the name “I” (at least in English). When we talk about other people, we talk about them in terms of such things as their ambitions and habits and likes and dislikes, and we accordingly need to formulate for each of them the analogue of an “I”, residing, naturally, inside their cranium, not our own. This counterpart of our own “I” of course receives various labels, depending on the context, such as “Danny” or “Monica” or “you” or “he” or “she”.
The process of perceiving one’s self interacting with the rest of the universe (comprised mostly, of course, of one’s family and friends and favorite pieces of music and favorite books and movies and so on) goes on for a lifetime. Accordingly, the “I” symbol, like all symbols in our brain, starts out pretty small and simple, but it grows and grows and grows, eventually becoming the most important abstract structure residing in our brains. But where is it in our brains? It is not in some small localized spot; it is spread out all over, because it has to include so much about so much.
Internalizing Our Weres, Our Wills, and Our Woulds
My self-symbol, unlike that of my dog, reaches back fairly accurately, though quite spottily, into the deep (and seemingly endless) past of my existence. It is our unlimitedly extensible human category system that underwrites this fantastic jump in sophistication from other animals to us, in that it allows each of us to build up our episodic memory — the gigantic warehouse of our recollections of events, minor and major, simple and complex, that have happened to us (and to our friends and family members and people in books and films and newspaper articles and so forth, ad infinitum) over a span of decades.
Similarly, driven by its dreads and dreams, my self-symbol peers with great intensity, though with little confidence, out into the murky fog of my future existence. My vast episodic memory of my past, together with its counterpart pointing blurrily towards what is yet to come (my episodic projectory, I think I’ll call it), and further embellished by a fantastic folio of alternative versions or “subjunctive replays” of countless episodes (“if only X had happened…”; “how lucky that Y never took place…”, “wouldn’t it be great if Z were to occur…” — and why not call this my episodic subjunctory?), gives rise to the endless hall of mirrors that constitutes my “I”.
I Cannot Live without My Self
Since we perceive not particles interacting but macroscopic patterns in which certain things push other things around with a blurry causality, and since the Grand Pusher in and of our bodies is our “I”, and since our bodies push the rest of the world around, we are left with no choice but to conclude that the “I” is where the causality buck stops. The “I” seems to each of us to be the root of all our actions, all our decisions.
This is only one side of the truth, of course, since it utterly snubs the viewpoint whereby an impersonal physics of micro-entities is what makes the world go round, but it is a surprisingly reliable and totally indispensable distortion. These two properties of the naïve, non-physics viewpoint — its reliability and its indispensability — lock it ever more tightly into our belief systems as we pass from babyhood through childhood to adulthood.
I might add that the “I” of a particle physicist is no less entrenched than is the “I” of a novelist or a shoestore clerk. A profound mastery of all of physics will not in the least undo the decades of brainwashing by culture and language, not to mention the millions of years of human evolution preparing the way. The notion of “I”, since it is an incomparably efficient shorthand, is an indispensable explanatory device, rather than just an optional crutch that can be cheerily jettisoned when one grows sufficiently scientifically sophisticated.
The Slow Buildup of a Self
What would make a human brain a candidate for housing a loop of self-representation? Why would a fly brain or a mosquito brain not be just as valid a candidate? Why, for that matter, not a bacterium, an ovum, a sperm, a virus, a tomato plant, a tomato, or a pencil? The answer should be clear: a human brain is a representational system that knows no bounds in terms of the extensibility or flexibility of its categories. A mosquito brain, by contrast, is a tiny representational system that contains practically no categories at all, never mind being flexible and extensible. Very small representational systems, such as those of bacteria, ova, sperms, plants, thermostats, and so forth, do not enjoy the luxury of self-representation. And a tomato and a pencil are not representational systems at all, so for them, the story ends right there (sorry, little tomato! sorry, little pencil!).
So a human brain is a strong candidate for having the potential of rich perceptual feedback, and thus rich self-representation. But what kinds of perceptual cycles do we get involved in? We begin life with the most elementary sorts of feedback about ourselves, which stimulate us to formulate categories for our most obvious body parts, and building on this basic pedestal, we soon develop a sense for our bodies as flexible physical objects. In the meantime, as we receive rewards for various actions and punishments for others, we begin to develop a more abstract sense of “good” and “bad”, as well as notions of guilt and pride, and our sense of ourselves as abstract entities that have the power to decide to make things happen (such as continuing to run up a steep hill even though our legs are begging us to just walk) begins to take root.
It is crucial to our young lives that we hone our developing self-symbol as precisely as possible. We want (and need) to find out where we belong in all sorts of social hierarchies and classes, and sometimes, even if we don’t want to know these things, we find out anyway. For instance, we are all told, early on, that we are “cute”; in some of us, however, this message is reinforced far more strongly than in others. In this manner, each of us comes to realize that we are “good-looking” or “gullible” or “cheeky” or “shy” or “spoiled” or “funny” or “lazy” or “original”, or whatever. Dozens of such labels and concepts accrete to our growing self-symbols.
As we go through thousands of experiences large and small, our representations of these experiences likewise accrete to our self-symbols. Of course a memory of a visit to the Grand Canyon, say, is attached not only to our self-symbol but to many other symbols in our brains, but our self-symbol is enriched and rendered more complex by this attachment.
Making Tosses, Internalizing Bounces
Constantly, relentlessly, day by day, moment by moment, my self-symbol is being shaped and refined — and in turn, it triggers external actions galore, day after day after day. (Or so the causality appears to it, since it is on this level, not on the micro-level, that it perceives the world.) It sees its chosen actions (kicks, tosses, screams, laughs, jokes, jabs, trips, books, pleas, threats, etc.) making all sorts of entities in its environment react in large or small ways, and it internalizes those effects in terms of its coarse-grained categories (as to their graininess, it has no choice). Through endless random explorations like this, my self-symbol slowly acquires concise and valuable insight into its nature as a chooser and launcher of actions, embedded in a vast and multifarious, partially predictable world.
To be more concrete: I throw a basketball toward a hoop, and thanks to hordes of microscopic events in my arms, my fingers, the ball’s spin, the air, the rim, and so forth, all of which I am unaware of, I either miss or make my hook shot. This tiny probing of the world, repeated hundreds or thousands of times, informs me ever more accurately about my level of sk
ill as a basketball player (and also helps me decide if I like the sport or not). My sense of my skill level is, of course, but a very coarse-grained summary of billions of fine-grained facts about my body and brain.
Similarly, my social actions induce reactions on the part of other sentient beings. Those reactions bounce back to me and I perceive them in terms of my repertoire of symbols, and in this way I indirectly perceive myself through my effect on others. I am building up my sense of who I am in others’ eyes. My self-symbol is coalescing out of an initial void.
Smiling Like Hopalong Cassidy
One morning when I was about six years old, I mustered all my courage, stood up in my first-grade class’s show-and-tell session, and proudly declared, “I can smile just like Hopalong Cassidy!” (I don’t remember how I had convinced myself that I had this grand ability, but I was as sure of it as I was of anything in the world.) I then proceeded to flash this lovingly practiced smile in front of everybody. In my episodic memory lo these many decades later there is a vivid trace of this act of derring-do, but unfortunately I have only the dimmest recollection of how my teacher, Miss McMahon, a very sweet woman whom I adored, and my little classmates reacted, and yet their collective reaction, whatever it was, was surely a formative influence on my early life, and thus on my gradually growing, slowly stabilizing “I”.
What we do — what our “I” tells us to do — has consequences, sometimes positive and sometimes negative, and as the days and years go by, we try to sculpt and mold our “I” in such a way as to stop leading us to negative consequences and to lead us to positive ones. We see if our Hopalong Cassidy smile is a hit or a flop, and only in the former case are we likely to trot it out again. (I haven’t wheeled it out since first grade, to be honest.)
When we’re a little older, we watch as our puns fall flat or evoke admiring laughter, and according to the results we either modify our punmaking style or learn to censor ourselves more strictly, or perhaps both. We also try out various styles of dress and learn to read between the lines of other people’s reactions as to whether something looks good on us or not. When we are rebuked for telling small lies, either we decide to stop lying or else we learn to make our lies subtler, and we incorporate our new knowledge about our degree of honesty into our self-symbol. What goes for lies also goes for bragging, obviously. Most of us work on adapting our use of language to various social norms, sometimes more deliberately and sometimes less so. The levels of complexity are endless.
The Lies in our I’s
For over a century, clinical psychologists have tried to understand the nature of this strange hidden structure tightly locked in at the deepest core of each one of us, and some have written very insightfully about it. A few decades ago, I read a couple of books by psychoanalyst Karen Horney, and they left a lasting impression on me. In her book Our Inner Conflicts, for instance, Horney spoke of the “idealized image” one forms of oneself. Although her primary focus was how we suffer from our neuroses, what she said had much wider applicability.
…It [the idealized image] represents a kind of artistic creation in which opposites appear reconciled…
The idealized image might be called a fictitious or illusory self, but that would be only a half truth and hence misleading. The wishful thinking operating in its creation is certainly striking, particularly since it occurs in persons who otherwise stand on a ground of firm reality. But this does not make it wholly fictitious. It is an imaginative creation interwoven with and determined by very realistic factors. It usually contains traces of the person’s genuine ideals. While the grandiose achievements are illusory, the potentialities underlying them are often real. More relevant, it is born of very real inner necessities, it fulfills very real functions, and it has a very real influence on its creator. The processes operating in its creation are determined by such definite laws that a knowledge of its specific features permits us to make accurate inferences as to the true character structure of the particular person.
Horney is obviously not speaking of one’s awareness of one’s most superficial perceptual features such as height or hair color, or of one’s knowledge of slight abstractions such as what kind of job one has and whether one enjoys it, but rather of the (inevitably somewhat distorted) image that one forms, over a lifetime, of one’s own deepest character traits, of one’s level in all sorts of blurry social hierarchies, of one’s greatest accomplishments and failures, of one’s fulfilled and unfulfilled yearnings, and on and on. Her stress in the book is on those aspects of this image that are illusory and thus tend to be harmful, but the full structure in which such neurotic distortions reside is much larger. This structure is what I have here called the “self-symbol”, or simply the “I”.
Horney’s earlier book Self-Analysis is devoted to the complex challenge whereby one tries to change one’s own neurotic tendencies, and it inevitably centers on the rather paradoxical idea of the self reaching in and attempting deliberately to effect deep changes in itself. This is not the place to delve into such intricate issues, but I mention them briefly because doing so may help to remind readers of the immense psychological complexity that lies at the core of all human existence.
The Locking-in of the “I” Loop
Let me now summarize the foregoing in slightly more abstract terms. The vast amounts of stuff that we call “I” collectively give rise, at some particular moment, to some external action, much as a stone tossed into a pond gives rise to expanding rings of ripples. Soon, our action’s myriad consequences start bouncing back at us, like the first ripples returning after bouncing off the pond’s banks. What we receive back affords us the chance to perceive what our gradually metamorphosing “I” has wrought. Millions of tiny reflected signals impinge on us from outside, whether visually, sonically, tactilely, or whatever, and when they land, they trigger internal waves of secondary and tertiary signals inside our brain. Finally this flurry of signals is funneled down into just a handful of activated symbols — a tiny set of extremely well-chosen categories constituting a coarse-grained understanding of what we’ve just done (for example, “Shoot — missed my hook shot by a hair!”, or perhaps, “Wow, my new hair-do hooked him!”).
And thus the current “I” — the most up-to-date set of recollections and aspirations and passions and confusions — by tampering with the vast, unpredictable world of objects and other people, has sparked some rapid feedback, which, once absorbed in the form of symbol activations, gives rise to an infinitesimally modified “I”; thus round and round it goes, moment after moment, day after day, year after year. In this fashion, via the loop of symbols sparking actions and repercussions triggering symbols, the abstract structure serving us as our innermost essence evolves slowly but surely, and in so doing it locks itself ever more rigidly into our mind. Indeed, as the years pass, the “I” converges and stabilizes itself just as inevitably as the screech of an audio feedback loop inevitably zeroes in and stabilizes itself at the system’s natural resonance frequency.
I Am Not a Video Feedback Loop
It’s analogy time again! I’d like once more to invoke the world of video feedback loops, for much of this has its counterpart in that far simpler domain. An event takes place in front of the camera and thus is sent onto the screen, but in simplified form, since continuous shapes (shapes with very fine grain) have been rendered on a grid made of discrete pixels (a coarse-grained medium). The new screen is then taken in by the camera and fed back in, and around and around it goes. The upshot of all this is that a single easily perceivable gestalt shape — some kind of stable but one-of-a-kind, never-seen-before whorl — appears on the screen.
Thus it is with the strange loop making up a human “I”, but there is a key difference. In the TV setup, as we earlier observed, no perception takes place at any stage inside the loop — just the transmission and reception of bare pixels. The TV loop is not a strange loop — it is just a feedback loop.
In any strange loop that gives rise to human selfhood, by
contrast, the level-shifting acts of perception, abstraction, and categorization are central, indispensable elements. It is the upward leap from raw stimuli to symbols that imbues the loop with “strangeness”. The overall gestalt “shape” of one’s self — the “stable whorl”, so to speak, of the strange loop constituting one’s “I” — is not picked up by a disinterested, neutral camera, but is perceived in a highly subjective manner through the active processes of categorizing, mental replaying, reflecting, comparing, counterfactualizing, and judging.
I Am Ineradicably Entrenched…
While you were reading my first-grade show-and-tell period Hopalong Cassidy–style smile-attempt bravado anecdote, the question “How come Hofstadter is once again leaving elementary particles out of the picture?” may have flitted through your mind; then again, perhaps it did not. I hope the latter is the case! Indeed, why would such an odd thought occur to any sane human being reading that passage (including the most hard-bitten of particle physicists)? Even the vaguest, most fleeting allusion to particle physics in that context would seem to constitute an absurd non sequitur, for what on earth could gluons and muons and protons and photons, of all things, have to do with a little boy imitating his idol, Hopalong Cassidy?
Although particles galore were, to be sure, constantly churning “way down there” in that little boy’s brain, they were as invisible as the myriad simms careening about inside a careenium. Roger Sperry (a later idol of mine whose writings, had I but read and understood them in first grade, might have inspired me to stand up and bravely proclaim to my classmates, “I can philosophize just like Roger Sperry!”) would additionally point out that the particles in the young boy’s brain were merely serving (i.e., being pushed around by) far higher-level symbolic events in which the boy’s “I” was participating, and in which his “I” was being formed. As that “I” grew in complexity and grew ever realer to itself (i.e., ever more indispensable to the boy’s efforts to categorize and understand the never-repeating events in his life), the chance that any alternative “I”-less way of understanding the world could emerge and compete with it was being rendered essentially nil.
I Am a Strange Loop Page 26
