I AM A STRANGE LOOP
By Douglas Hofstadter
Basic Books, 412 pages, $32.50
Douglas Hofstadter is renowned for his book, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), which - astonishingly - won the Pulitzer Prize despite ascending to nosebleed heights of abstraction. I am a Strange Loop is just as abstract, and its elaborate wordplay and multilayered intellectual conceits just as much fun for those of us who like such things.
Nevertheless, this is a far more engaging book than its predecessor, because through Hofstadter's abstract scientific tale he reveals a love story, which, like so many of the best love stories, ends tragically. In 1993, Hofstadter's beloved wife, Carol, "died very suddenly, essentially without warning, of a brain tumour." From the point midway in the book where this love-tragedy is revealed, Hofstadter exercises his robust intellect and fertile imagination to explain how, according to the cognitive science (a.k.a. psychology) he has been sketching through the first half of the book, Carol still lives.
So, despite his ultramodern concept of what it is to be human, Hofstadter joins the ancient legion of philosophers, poets, priests and madmen who have ruminated on the mysterious rupture of death. The result is well worth reading just to see how this particular man, a man of science, strikes the balance of denial and acceptance when his heart hits the razor-wire boundary of life.
To make Hofstadter's long story short, let's go back to René Descartes's promise in his Meditations "to give mortals the hope of an afterlife" by proving that "while the body can very easily perish, the mind is immortal by its very nature." At the time, 1641, this was not news, but a genuflection before Christian dogma. Descartes, like Galileo, was one of the new breed of scientists who had just begun to flex their muscles - and in the process had budged Earth out of its sacred place at the centre of the universe, thereby angering the church.
Descartes, again like Galileo, appeased the church and stalled the bloody Inquisition with a soothing philosophy: Science must restrict its investigations to the purely physical, but the human mind was made of finer, non-physical stuff, and so would remain within religion. Science would say how the heavens go, but religion would keep its monopoly on going to Heaven. Descartes's mind-body dualism (two-substance ontology), while claiming the whole physical domain, celestial and terrestrial, for science, nevertheless gave religion's Heaven a metaphysical foundation.
Across the English Channel some 50 years later, another scientific man, John Locke, accepted this dualism, but in pondering the joyful prospect of immortality discovered the problem of personal identity. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he writes: "He that shall with a little attention reflect on the resurrection, and consider that divine justice will bring to judgment, at the last day, the very same persons, to be happy or miserable in the other, who did well or ill in this life, will find it perhaps not easy to resolve with himself, what makes the same man, or wherein identity consists ..."
Once you have shuffled off your mortal coil and gone to Heaven (or, Heaven forbid, Hell), what will make you you? Descartes's "I think, therefore I am" proves you are your mind, and the mind transcends death. Wonderful! But since all minds have the same essence, namely consciousness, the only thing that makes your mind distinct from others is your particular stream of consciousness flowing through it. So, Locke concluded, it is not your mind, but its content, that makes you the person you are. God could replace the specific nonphysical engine that houses your consciousness with a different one, and you would not even notice, so long as your particular stream of consciousness circulated within. So it was that Locke first argued we are abstract, mere patterns in a supporting nonphysical substance.
Science jettisoned nonphysical engines ages ago, but nevertheless has returned to Locke's view that persons are abstractions. Despite Galileo's and Descartes's promises that science would leave the mind alone, the brain is physical, and in studying it, science has discovered the mind anyway. The mind is the brain, and brains are naturally occurring onboard computers which animals developed to get an edge in the evolutionary sweepstakes. Our minds are computers, and computers are information-processors. That is their essential property.
The only thing, then, that makes you the person you are is the specific information your brain processes. A neuroscientist could replace your brain with another one, and you would not even notice, so long as your particular information processes circulated within. So it is that Hofstadter argues we are abstract, mere strange loops in a supporting brain. So it is that science once again invades religion's domain, this time offering us mortals, in Descartes's words, "hope of an afterlife."
When Carol died, Hofstadter was "ceaselessly haunted by the mystery of the vanishing of her consciousness." He confided daily with his close friend Daniel Dennett, famous philosopher of mind, and in the process developed a theoretical underpinning for his intuition that "some of Carol's consciousness, her interiority, remains on this planet." Anyone who has lost a loved one to death will understand Hofstadter when he says, "I tried to look at Monica [their daughter]'for Carol,' and then of course wondered what on earth I was doing."
His answer, finally, was that since people are nothing but information structures, this permitted Carol's self "to ride (in simplified form) on my hardware." Since "a person is a point of view ... a set of hair-trigger associations rooted in a huge bank of memories ... [he or she]can be absorbed, more and more over time, by someone else." Oddly, surprisingly, through our loving relationships, we are already dispersed among the brains of those able to "see the world through" our point of view.
So, more than three centuries after Locke, Hofstadter adopts his point of view: that we share the same essential mental machinery, and what makes persons "different from each other is only their 'flavorings,' " the distinctive contents of their programs running on that machinery.
The contents of my brain as I read this included the reflection that cognitive scientists are scientists - and if science proves anything at all about what it is to be human, it is that we are animals. Thus we are born, and thus we die. And once dead, we are well and truly gone, absolutely absent from the face of reality just as before we were born.
I deeply sympathize with Hofstadter's sense of "bitter injustice" and "profound shock" when a loved one dies. It is a mystery how persons can just vanish. But then, it is a mystery how anything can either come into being or cease to be, and yet these happen all the time: Reality constantly changes. And all too often, the changes are unjust - which, though sad, is still an undeniable fact.
And yet facts such as these will be denied. One seductive logical error that abets denial is the confusion of two kinds of identity. I still have a mug my now-deceased grandmother gave me when I left for grad school some four decades ago. It is much changed since then, chipped, crazed, stained, but it is, nevertheless, the very same mug - numerically identical with the one she gave me. On the other hand, if some technological magic produced a qualitatively identical mug, chip-for-chip, stain-for-stain, it still would not be the mug my grandmother gave me. Likewise, even if some technological magic produced a complete human being qualitatively identical to me, he still would not be me, and I would not feel the sting when he is stung.
Science focuses on abstract structure, and thereby enables us to see the universal laws that underlie the booming, buzzing confusion of reality. Insofar as cognitive science enables us to understand ourselves scientifically, it will do so by focusing on our abstract structure. We may, like Locke and Hofstadter, be thereby seduced into thinking that we are abstractions - especially if this eases the sting of death. But when scientists address death, they - unlike religious thinkers - must not be influenced by fear and hope. We are not abstractions, not the stuff that dreams are made on. We are animals. Animals that breathe and eat, enjoy and suffer, love and think, live and die. Painful as this may sometimes be, it is our glory
Jeffrey Foss is a professor of philosophy at the University of Victoria, and author of Science and the Riddle of Consciousness: A Solution.