I Am a Strange Loop (37 page)

Stuck, for Better or Worse, with “I”

It would be a rare thinker indeed that would discount its everyday, familiar symbols and its ever-present sense of “I”, and would make the bold speculation that somewhere physically inside its cranium (or its careenium), there might be an esoteric, hidden,
lower
level, populated by some kind of invisible churnings that have nothing to do with its symbols (or simmballs), but which somehow must involve myriads of microscopic units that, most mysteriously, lack all symbolic quality.

When you think about human life this way, it seems rather curious that we become aware of our brains in high-level, non-physical terms (like hopes and beliefs) long before becoming aware of them on low-level neural terms. (In fact, most people never come into contact at all with their brains at that level.) Had things happened in an analogous fashion in the case of
Principia Mathematica,
then recognition of the high-level Gödelian meaning of certain formulas of
PM
would have long preceded recognition of their far more basic Russellian meanings, which is an inconceivable scenario. In any case, we humans evolved to perceive and describe ourselves in high-level mentalistic terms (“I hope to read
Eugene Onegin
next summer”) and not in low-level physicalistic terms (imagine an unimaginably long list of the states of all the neurons responsible for your hoping to read
Eugene Onegin
next summer), although humanity is collectively making small bits of headway toward the latter.

Proceeding Slowly Towards the Bottom Level

Such mentalistic notions as “belief”, “hope”, “guilt”, “envy”, and so on arose many eons before any human dreamt of trying to ground them as recurrent, recognizable patterns in some physical substrate (the living brain, seen at some fine-grained level). This tendency to proceed slowly from intuitive understanding at a high level to scientific understanding at a low level is reminiscent of the fact that the abstract notion of a
gene
as the basic unit by which heredity is passed from parent to offspring was boldly postulated and then carefully studied in laboratories for many decades before any “hard” physical grounding was found for it. When microscopic structures were finally found that allowed a physical “picture” to be attached to the abstract notion, they turned out to be wildly unexpected entities: a gene was revealed to be a medium-length stretch of a very long helically twisting cord made of just four kinds of molecules (nucleotides) linked one to the next to form a chain millions of units long.

And then, miraculously, it turned out that the chemistry of these four molecules was in a certain sense incidental — what mattered most of all when one thought about heredity was their newly revealed
informational
properties, as opposed to their traditional physico-chemical properties. That is, the proper description of how heredity and reproduction worked could in large part be abstracted away from the chemistry, leaving just a high-level picture of information-manipulating processes alone.

At the heart of these information-manipulating processes lay a high abstraction called the “genetic code”, which mapped every possible three-nucleotide “word” (or “codon”), of which there are sixty-four, to one of twenty different molecules belonging to a totally unrelated chemical family (the amino acids). In other words, a profound understanding of genes and heredity was possible only if one was intimately familiar with a high-level meaning-mediating mapping. This should sound familiar.

Of Hogs, Dogs, and Bogs

If you wish to understand what goes on in a biological cell, you have to learn to think on this new informational level. Physics alone, although theoretically sufficient, just won’t cut it in terms of feasibility. Obviously the elementary particles take care of themselves, not caring at all about the informational levels of biomolecules (let alone about human perceptual categories or abstract beliefs or “I”-ness or patriotism or the burning desire, on the part of a particular large agglomeration of biomolecules, to compose a set of twenty-four preludes and fugues). Out of all these elementary particles doing their microscopic things, there emerge the macroscopic events that befall a bio-creature.

However, as I pointed out before, if you choose to focus on the particle level, then you cannot draw neat boundary lines separating an entity such as a cell or a hog from the rest of the world in which it resides. Notions like “cell” or “hog” aren’t relevant at that far lower level. The laws of particle physics don’t respect such notions as “hog”, “cell”, “gene”, or “genetic code”, or even the notion of “amino acid”. The laws of particle physics involve only particles, and larger macroscopic boundaries drawn for the convenience of thinking beings are no more relevant to them than votingprecinct boundaries are to butterflies. Electrons, photons, neutrinos, and so forth zip across such artificial boundaries without the least compunction.

If you go the particles route, then you are committed to doing so whole hog, which unfortunately means going way beyond the hog. It entails taking into account all the particles in all the members of the hog’s family, all the particles in the barn it lives in, in the mud it wallows in, in the farmer who feeds it, in the atmosphere it breathes, in the raindrops that fall on it, in the cumulo-nimbus clouds from which those drops fall, in the thunderclaps that make the hog’s eardrums reverberate, in the whole of the earth, in the whole of the sun, in the cosmic background radiation pervading the entire universe and stretching back in time to the Big Bang, and on and on. This is far too large a task for finite folks like us, and so we have to settle for a compromise, which is to look at things at a less inclusive, less detailed level, but (fortunately for us) a more insight-providing level, namely the informational level.

At that level, biologists talk about and think about what genes
stand for,
rather than focusing on their traditional physico-chemical properties. And they implicitly accept the fact that this new, “leaner and meaner” way of talking suggests that genes, thanks to their informational qualities, have their own causal properties — or in other words, that certain extremely abstract large-scale events or states of affairs (for example, the high-level regularity that golden retrievers tend to be very gentle and friendly) can validly be attributed to
meanings of molecules.

To people who deal directly in dogs and not in molecular biology, this kind of thing is taken for granted. Dog folks talk all the time about the temperamental and mental propensities of this or that breed, as if all this were somehow completely detached from the physics and chemistry of DNA (not to mention physical levels finer than that of DNA), and as if it resided purely at the abstract level of “character traits of dog breeds”. And the marvelous thing is that dog folks, no less than molecular biologists, can get along perfectly well thinking and talking this way. It actually works! Indeed, if they (or molecular biologists) tried to do it the pure-physics way or the pure-molecular-biology way, they would instantly get bogged down in the infinite detail of unimaginable numbers of interacting micro-entities constituting dogs and their genes (not to mention the rest of the universe).

The upshot of all this is that the most
real
way of talking about dogs or hogs involves, as Roger Sperry said, high-level entities pushing low-level entities around with impunity. Recall that the intangible, abstract quality of the primality of the integer 641 is what most truly topples hard, solid dominos located in the “prime stretch” of the chainium. This is nothing if not downward causality, and it leads us straight to the conclusion that the most efficient way to think about brains that have symbols — and for most purposes, the
truest
way — is to think that the microstuff inside them is pushed around by ideas and desires, rather than the reverse.

CHAPTER 13

The Elusive Apple of My “I”

The Patterns that Constitute Experience

B
Y OUR deepest nature, we humans float in a world of familiar and comfortable but quite impossible-to-define abstract patterns, such as: “fast food” and “clamato juice”, “tackiness” and “wackiness”, “Christmas bonuses” and “customer service departments”, “wild goose chases” and “loose cannons”, “crackpots” and “feet of clay”, “slam dunks” and “bottom lines”, “lip service” and “elbow grease”, “dirty tricks” and “doggie bags”, “solo recitals” and “sleazeballs”, “sour grapes” and “soap operas”, “feedback” and “fair play”, “goals” and “lies”, “dreads” and “dreams”, “she” and “he” — and last but not least, “you” and “I”.

Although I’ve put each of the above items in quotation marks, I am not talking about the written words, nor am I talking about the observable phenomena in the world that these expressions “point to”. I am talking about the
concepts
in my mind and your mind that these terms designate — or, to revert to an earlier term, about the corresponding
symbols
in our respective brains.

With my hopefully amusing little list (which I pared down from a much longer one), I am trying to get across the flavor of most adults’ daily mental reality — the bread-and-butter sorts of symbols that are likely to be awakened from dormancy in one’s brain as one goes about one’s routines, talking with friends and colleagues, sitting at a traffic light, listening to radio programs, flipping through magazines in a dentist’s waiting room, and so on. My list is a random walk through an everyday kind of mental space, drawn up in order to give a feel for the phenomena in which we place the most stock and in which we most profoundly believe (sour grapes and wild goose chases being quite real to most of us), as opposed to the forbidding and inaccessible level of quarks and gluons, or the only slightly more accessible level of genes and ribosomes and transfer RNA — levels of “reality” to which we may pay lip service but which very few of us ever think about or talk about.

And yet, for all its supposed reality, my list is pervaded by vague, blurry, unbelievably elusive abstractions. Can you imagine trying to define any of its items
precisely
? What on earth is the quality known as “tackiness”? Can you teach it to your kids? And please give me a pattern-recognition algorithm that will infallibly detect sleazeballs!

Reflected Communist Bachelors with Spin 1/2 are All Wet

As a simple illustration of how profoundly wedded our thinking is to the blurry, hazy categories of the macroworld, consider the curious fact that logicians — people who by profession try to write down ironclad, razor-sharp rules of logical inference that apply with impeccable precision to linguistic expressions — seldom if ever resort to the level of particles and fields for their canonical examples of fundamental, eternal truths. Instead, their most frequent examples of “truth” are typically sentences that use totally out-of-focus categories — sentences such as “Snow is white”, “Water is wet”, “Bachelors are unmarried males”, and “Communism either is or is not in for deep trouble in the next few years in China.”

If you think these sentences
do
express sharp truths, just ponder for a moment… What does “snow” really mean? Is it as sharp a category as “checkmate” or “prime number”? And what does “wet” really mean,
exactly
? No blur at all there? What about “unmarried” — not to mention “the next few years” and “in for deep trouble”? Ambiguities galore here! And yet such classic philosophers’ sentences, since they reside at the level where we naturally float, seem to most people far realer and (therefore far more reliably true) than sentences such as “Electrons have spin 1/2” or “The laws of electromagnetism are invariant under a mirror reflection.”

Because of our relatively huge size, most of us never see or deal directly with electrons or the laws of electromagnetism. Our perceptions and actions focus on far larger, vaguer things, and our deepest beliefs, far from being in electrons, are in the many macroscopic items that we are continually assigning to our high-frequency and low-frequency mental categories (such as “fast food” and “doggie bags” on the one hand, and “feet of clay” and “customer service departments” on the other), and also in the perceived causality, however blurry and unreliable it may be, that seems to hold among these large and vague items.