I Am a Strange Loop (13 page)

The dynamics taking place on this pool table — hereinafter called the “careenium” — thus involves simms crashing into each other and also into simmballs. To be sure, the details of the physics involve transfers of momentum, angular momentum, kinetic energy, and rotational energy, just as in a standard gas, but we won’t even think about that, because this is just a
thought
experiment (in two senses of the term). All that matters for our purposes is that there are these collisions taking place all the time.

Simmballism

Why the corny pun on “symbol”? Because I now add a little more complexity to our system. The vertical walls that constitute the system’s boundaries react sensitively to outside events (
e.g.,
someone touching the outside of the table, or even a breeze) by momentarily flexing inward a bit. This flexing, whose nature retains some traces of the external causing event, of course affects the motions of the simms that bounce internally off that section of wall, and indirectly this will be registered in the slow motions of the nearest simmballs as well, thus allowing the simmballs to
internalize
the event. We can posit that one particular simmball always reacts in some standard fashion to breezes, another to sharp blows, and so forth. Without going into details, we can even posit that the configurations of simmballs
reflect the history
of the impinging outer-world events. In short, for someone who looked at the simmballs and knew how to read their configuration, the simmballs would be
symbolic,
in the sense of
encoding events.
That’s why the corny pun.

Of course this image is far-fetched, but remember that the careenium is merely intended as a useful metaphor for understanding our brains, and the fact is that our brains, too, are rather far-fetched, in the sense that they too contain tiny events (neuron firings) and larger events (patterns of neuron firings), and the latter presumably somehow have
representational
qualities, allowing us to register and also to remember things that happen outside of our crania. Such internalization of the outer world in symbolic patterns in a brain is a pretty far-fetched idea, when you think about it, and yet we know it somehow came to exist, thanks to the pressures of evolution. If you wish, then, feel free to imagine that careenia, too, evolved. You can think of them as emerging as the end result of billions of more primitive systems fighting for survival in the world. But the evolutionary origins of our careenium need not concern us here. The key idea is that whereas no simm on its own encodes anything or plays a symbolic role, the simmballs, on their far more macroscopic level,
do
encode and
are
symbolic.

Taking the Reductionistic View of the Careenium

The first inclination of a modern physicist who heard this story might be reductionistic, in the sense of pooh-poohing the large simmballs as mere
epiphenomena,
meaning that although they are undeniably
there,
they are not essential to an understanding of the system, since they are composed of simms. Everything that happens in the careenium is explainable in terms of simms alone. And there’s no doubt that this is true. A volcano, too, is undeniably
there,
but who needs to talk about mountains and subterranean pressures and eruptions and lava and such things? We can dispense with such epiphenomenal concepts altogether by shifting to the deeper level of atoms or elementary particles. The bottom line, at least for our physicist, is that epiphenomena are just convenient shorthands that summarize a large number of deeper, lower-level phenomena; they are never essential to any explanation. Reductionism ho!

The only problem is the enormous escalation in complexity when we drop all macroscopic terms and ways of looking at things. If we refuse to use any language that involves epiphenomena, then we are condemned to seeing only untold myriads of particles, and that is certainly not a very welcoming thought. Moreover, when one perceives only myriads of particles, there are no natural sharp borders in the world. One cannot draw a line around the volcano and declare, “Only particles in this zone are involved”, because particles won’t respect any such macroscopic line — no more than ants respect the property lines carefully surveyed and precisely drawn by human beings. No fixed portion of the universe can be tightly fenced off from interacting with the rest — not even approximately. To a reductionist, the idea of carving the universe up into zones with inviolable macroscopic spatiotemporal boundary lines makes no sense.

Here is a striking example of the senselessness of local spatiotemporal boundaries. In November of 1993, I read several newspaper articles about a comet that was “slowly” making its way towards Jupiter. It was still some eight months from t-zero but astrophysicists had already predicted to the minute, if not to the second, when it would strike Jupiter, and where. This fact about some invisible comet that was billions of miles away from earth had already had enormous impacts on the surface of our planet, where teams of scientists were already calculating its Jovian arrival time, where newspapers and magazines were already printing front-page stories about it, and where millions of people like me were already reading about it. Some of these people were possibly missing planes because of being engrossed in the story, or possibly striking up a new friendship with someone because of a common interest in it, or possibly arriving at a traffic light one second later than otherwise because of having reread one phrase in the article, and so on. As t-zero approached and finally the comet hit Jupiter’s far side exactly as predicted, denizens of the Earth paid enormous attention to this remote cosmic event. There is no doubt that many months before the comet hit Jupiter, certain fender-benders took place on our planet that wouldn’t have taken place if the comet hadn’t been coming, certain babies were conceived that wouldn’t have been conceived otherwise, certain flies were swatted, certain coffee cups were chipped, and so on. All of this crazy stuff happening on our tiny planet was due to a comet coasting through silent space billions of miles away and nearly half a million minutes in advance of its encounter with the huge planet.

The point is that one gets into very hot water if one goes the fully reductionistic route; not only do all the objects in “the system” become microscopic and uncountably numerous, but also the system itself grows beyond bounds in space and time and becomes, in the end, the entire universe taken over all of time. There is no comprehensibility left, since everything is shattered into a trillion trillion trillion invisible pieces that are scattered hither and yon. Reductionism is merciless.

Taking a Higher-level View of the Careenium

If, on the other hand, there is a perceptible and comprehensible “logic” to events at the level of epiphenomena, then we humans are eager to jump to that level. In fact, we have no choice. And so we
do
talk of volcanoes and eruptions and lava and so forth. Likewise, we talk of bitten fingernails and rye bread and wry smiles and Jewish senses of humor rather than of cells and proteins, let alone of atoms and photons. After all, we ourselves are pretty big epiphenomena, and as I’ve already observed many times in this book, this fact dooms us to talking about the world in terms of other epiphenomena at about our size level (
e.g.,
our mothers and fathers, our cats and cars and cakes, our sailboats and saxophones and sassafras trees).

Now let’s return to the careenium and talk about what happens in it. The way I’ve portrayed it so far focuses on the simms and their dashing and bashing. The simmballs are also present, but they serve a similar function to the walls — they are just big stationary objects off of which the simms bounce. In my mind’s eye, I often see the simms as acting like the silver marbles in a pinball machine, with the simmballs acting like the “pins” — that is, the larger stationary cylindrical objects which the marbles strike and ricochet off of as they roll down the sloped board of play.

But now I’m going to describe a different way of looking at the careenium, which is characterized by two perceptual shifts. First, we shift to time-lapse photography, meaning that imperceptibly slow motions get speeded up so as to become perceptible, while fast motions become so fast that they are not even seen as blurs — they become imperceptible, like the spinning blades of an electric fan. The second shift is that we spatially back away or zoom out, thus rendering simms too small to be seen, and so the simmballs alone necessarily become our focus of attention.

Now we see a completely different type of dynamics on the table. Instead of seeing simms bashing into what look like large stationary blobs, we realize that these blobs are not stationary at all but have a lively life of their own, moving back and forth across the table and interacting with each other, as if there were nothing else on the table but them. Of course we know that deep down, this is all happening thanks to the teeny-weeny simms’ bashing-about,
but we cannot see the simms any more.
In our new way of seeing things, their frenetic careening-about on the table forms nothing but a stationary gray background.

Think of how the water in a glass sitting on a table seems completely still to us. If our eyes could shift levels (think of the twist that zooms binoculars in or out) and allow us to peer at the water at the micro-level, we would realize that it is not peaceful at all, but a crazy tumult of bashings of water molecules. In fact, if colloidal particles are added to a glass of water, then it becomes a locus of Brownian motion, which is an incessant random jiggling of the colloidal particles, due to a myriad of imperceptible collisions with the water molecules, which are far tinier. (The colloidal particles here play the role of simmballs, and the water molecules play the role of simms.) The effect, which is visible under a microscope, was explained in great detail in 1905 by Albert Einstein using the theory of molecules, which at the time were only hypothetical entities, but Einstein’s explanation was so far-reaching (and, most crucially, consistent with experimental data) that it became one of the most important confirmations that molecules do exist.

Who Shoves Whom Around inside the Careenium?

And so we finally have come to the crux of the matter:
Which of these two views of the careenium is the truth?
Or, to echo the key question posed by Roger Sperry,
Who shoves whom around in the population of causal forces that occupy the careenium?
In one view, the meaningless tiny simms are the primary entities, zipping around like mad, and in so doing they very slowly push the heavy, passive simmballs about, hither and thither. In this view, it is the tiny simms that shove the big simmballs around, and that is all there is to it. In fact, in this view the simmballs are not even recognized as separate entities, since anything we might say about their actions is just a shorthand way of talking about what simms do. From this perspective, there are no simmballs, no symbols, no ideas, no thoughts going on — just a great deal of tumultuous, pointless careening-about of tiny, shiny, magnetic spheres.

In the other view, speeded up and zoomed out, all that is left of the shiny tiny simms is a featureless gray soup, and the interest resides solely in the simmballs, which give every appearance of richly interacting with each other. One sees groups of simmballs triggering other simmballs in a kind of “logic” that has nothing to do with the soup churning around them, except in the rather pedestrian sense that the simmballs derive their
energy
from that omnipresent soup. Indeed, the simmballs’ logic, not surprisingly, has to do with the
concepts
that the simmballs symbolize.

The Dance of the Simmballs

From our higher-level macroscopic vantage point as we hover above the table, we can see
ideas
giving rise to other
ideas,
we can see one symbolic event
reminding
the system of another symbolic event, we can see elaborate patterns of simmballs coming together and forming even larger patterns that constitute
analogies
— in short, we can visually eavesdrop on the logic of a thinking mind taking place in the patterned dance of the simmballs. And in this latter view,
it is the simmballs that shove each other about,
at their own isolated symbolic level.

The simms are still there, to be sure, but they are simply serving the simmballs’ dance, allowing it to happen, with the microdetails of their bashings being no more relevant to the ongoing process of cognition than the microdetails of the bashings of air molecules are relevant to the turning of the blades of a windmill. Any old air-molecule bashings will do — the windmill will turn no matter what, thanks to the aerodynamic nature of its blades. Likewise, any old simm-bashings will do — the “thoughtmill” will churn no matter what, thanks to the symbolic nature of its simmballs.

If any of this strikes you as too far-fetched to be plausible, just return to the human brain and consider what must be going on inside it in order to allow our thinking’s logic to take place. What else is going on inside every human cranium but some story like this?

Of course we have come back to the question that that long-agoshelved book’s title made me ask, and the question that Roger Sperry also asked: Who is shoving whom about in here? And the answer is that it all depends on what level you choose to focus on. Just as, on one level, the primality of 641 could legitimately be said to be shoving about dominos in the domino-chain network, so here there is a level on which the meanings attached to various simmballs can legitimately be said to be shoving other simmballs about. If this all seems topsy-turvy, it certainly is — but it is nonetheless completely consistent with the fundamental causality of the laws of physics.