I Am a Strange Loop (20 page)

In the collective human ideosphere, the buildup of concepts through such acts of composition started to snowball, and it turns out to know no limits. Our species would soon find itself leapfrogging upwards to concepts such as “love affair”, “love triangle”, “fidelity”, “temptation”, “revenge”, “despair”, “insanity”, “nervous breakdown”, “hallucination”, “illusion”, “reality”, “fantasy”, “abstraction”, “dream”, and of course, at the grand pinnacle of it all, “soap opera” (in which are also nested the concepts of “commercial break”, “ring around the collar”, and “Brand X”).

Consider the mundane-seeming concept of “grocery store checkout stand”, which I would be willing to bet is a member in good standing of your personal conceptual repertoire. It already sounds like a nested entity, being compounded from four words; thus it tells us straightforwardly that it symbolizes a stand for checking out in a store that deals in groceries. But looking at its visible lexical structure barely scratches the surface. In truth, this concept involves dozens and dozens of other concepts, among which are the following: “grocery cart”, “line”, “customers”, “to wait”, “candy rack”, “candy bar”, “tabloid newspaper”, “movie stars”, “trashy headlines”, “sordid scandals”, “weekly TV schedule”, “soap opera”, “teenager”, “apron”, “nametag”, “cashier”, “mindless greeting”, “cash register”, “keyboard”, “prices”, “numbers”, “addition”, “scanner”, “bar code”, “beep”, “laser”, “moving belt”, “frozen food”, “tin can”, “vegetable bag”, “weight”, “scale”, “discount coupon”, “rubber separator bar”, “to slide”, “bagger”, “plastic bag”, “paper bag”, “plastic money”, “paper money”, “to load”, “to pay”, “credit card”, “debit card”, “to swipe”, “receipt”, “ballpoint pen”, “to sign”, and on and on. The list starts to seem endless, and yet we are merely talking about the internal richness of one extremely ordinary human concept.

Not all of these component concepts need be activated when we think about a grocery store checkout stand, to be sure — there is a central nucleus of concepts all of which are reliably activated, while many of these more peripheral components may not be activated — but all of the foregoing, and considerably more, is what constitutes the full concept in our minds. Moreover, this concept, like every other one in our minds, is perfectly capable of being incorporated inside other concepts, such as “grocery store checkout stand romance” or “toy grocery store checkout stand”. You can invent your own variations on the theme.

Episodic Memory

When we sit around a table and shoot the breeze with friends, we are inevitably reminded of episodes that happened to us some time back, often many years ago. The time our dog got lost in the neighborhood. The time our neighbor’s kid got lost in the airport. The time we missed a plane by a hair. The time we made it onto the train but our friend missed it by a hair. The time it was sweltering hot in the train and we had to stand up in the corridor all the way for four hours. The time we got onto the wrong train and couldn’t get off for an hour and a half. The time when nobody could speak a word of English except “Ma-ree-leen Mon-roe!”, spoken with lurid grinning gestures tracing out an hourglass figure in the air. The time when we got utterly lost driving in rural Slovenia at midnight and were nearly out of gas and yet somehow managed to find our way to the Italian border using a handful of words of pidgin Slovenian. And on and on.

Episodes are concepts of a sort, but they take place over time and each one is presumably one-of-a-kind, a bit like a proper noun but lacking a name, and linked to a particular moment in time. Although each one is “unique”, episodes also fall into their own categories, as the previous paragraph, with its winking “You know what I mean!” tone, suggests. (Missing a plane by a hair is not unique, and even if it has happened to you only once in your life, you most likely know of several members of this category, and can easily imagine an unlimited number of others.)

Episodic memory is our private storehouse of episodes that have happened to us and to our friends and to characters in novels we’ve read and movies we’ve seen and newspaper stories and TV news clips, and so on, and it forms a major component of the long-term memory that makes us so human. Obviously, memories of episodes can be triggered by external events that we witness or by other episodes that have been triggered, and equally obviously, nearly all memories of specific episodes are dormant almost all the time (otherwise we would go stark-raving mad).

Do dogs or cats have episodic memories? Do they remember specific events that happened years or months ago, or just yesterday, or even ten minutes ago? When I take our dog Ollie running, does he recall how he strained at the leash the day before, trying to get to say “hi” to that cute Dalmatian across the street (who also was tugging at her leash)? Does he remember how we took a different route from the usual one three days ago? When I take Ollie to the kennel to board over Thanksgiving vacation, he seems to remember the kennel as a
place,
but does he remember anything specific that
happened
there the last time (or any time) he was there? If a dog is frightened of a particular place, does it recall a specific trauma that took place there, or is there just a generalized sense of badness associated with that place?

I do not need answers to these questions here, fascinating though they are to me. I am not writing a scholarly treatise on animal awareness. All I want is that readers think about these questions and then agree with me that some of them merit a “yes” answer, some merit a “no”, and for some we simply can’t say one way or the other. My overall point, though, is that we humans, unlike other animals, have all these kinds of memories; indeed, we have them all in spades. We recall in great detail certain episodes from vacations we took fifteen or twenty years ago. We know exactly why we are frightened of certain places and people. We can replay in detail the time we ran into so-and-so totally out of the blue in Venice or Paris or London. The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a human being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what “I”-ness is all about.

CHAPTER 7

The Epi Phenomenon

As Real as it Gets

T
HANKS to the funneling-down processes of perception, which lead eventually — that is, in a matter of milliseconds — to the activation of certain discrete symbols in its brain, an animal (and let’s not forget robot vehicles!) can relate intimately and reliably to its physical environment. A mature human animal not only does a fine job of not slipping on banana peels and not banging into thorn-bristling rosebushes, it also reacts in a flash to strong odors, strange accents, cute babies, loud crashes, titillating headlines, terrific skiers, garish clothes, and on and on. It even occasionally hits curve balls coming at it at 80 miles an hour. Because an animal’s internal mirroring of the world must be highly reliable (the symbol
elephant
should not get triggered by the whine of a mosquito, nor should the symbol
mosquito
get triggered if an elephant ambles into view), its mirroring of the world via its private cache of symbols becomes an unquestioned pillar of stability. The things and patterns it perceives are what define its reality — but not all perceived things and patterns are
equally
real to it.

Of course, in nonverbal animals, a question such as “Which things that I perceive are the most real of all to me?” is never raised, explicitly or implicitly. But in human lives, questions about what is and what is not real inevitably bubble up sooner or later, sometimes getting uttered consciously and carefully, other times remaining unexpressed and inchoate, just quietly simmering in the background. As children and teen-agers, we see directly, or we see on television, or we read about, or we are told about many things that supposedly exist, things that vie intensely with each other for our attention and for acceptance by our reality evaluators — for instance, God, Godzilla, Godiva, Godot, Gödel, gods, goddesses, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, gremlins, golems, golliwogs, griffins, gryphons, gluons, and grinches. It takes a child a few years to sort out the reality of some of these; indeed, it takes many people a full lifetime to do so (and occasionally a bit longer).

By “sorting out the reality of X”, I mean coming to a stable conclusion about how much you believe in X and whether you would feel comfortable relying on the notion of X in explaining things to yourself and others. If you are willing to use griffins in your explanations and don’t flinch at other people’s doing so in theirs, then it would seem that griffins are a seriously real concept to you. If you had already pretty much sorted out for yourself the reality of griffins and then heard there was going to be a TV special on griffins, you wouldn’t feel a need to catch the show in order to help you decide whether or not griffins exist. Perhaps you believe strongly in griffins, perhaps you think of them as a childish fantasy or a joke — but your mind is made up one way or the other. Or perhaps you haven’t yet sorted out the reality of griffins; if it were to come up in a dinner-party conversation, you would feel unsure, confused, ignorant, skeptical, or on the fence.

Another way of thinking about “how real X is to you” is how much you would trust a newspaper article that took for granted the existence of X (for example, a living dinosaur, a sighting of Hitler, insects discovered on Mars, a perpetual-motion machine, UFO abductions, God’s omniscience, out-ofbody experiences, alternate universes, superstrings, quarks, Bigfoot, Big Brother, the Big Bang, Atlantis, the gold in Fort Knox, the South Pole, cold fusion, Einstein’s tongue, Holden Caulfield’s brain, Bill Gates’ checkbook, or the proverbial twenty-mile “wall” for marathon runners). If you stop reading an article the moment you see X’s existence being taken for granted, then it would seem that you consider X’s “reality” highly dubious.

Pick any of the concepts mentioned above. Almost surely, there are plenty of people who believe fervently in it, others who believe in it just a little, others not at all (whether out of ignorance, cynicism, poor education, or excellent education). Some of these concepts, we are repeatedly told by authorities, are not real, and yet we hear about them over and over again in television shows, books, and newspapers, and so we are left with a curious blurry sense as to whether they do exist, or could exist, or might exist. Others, we are told by authorities, are absolutely real, but somehow we never see them. Others we are told
were
real but are real no longer, and that places them in a kind of limbo as far as reality is concerned. Yet others we are told are real but are utterly beyond our capacity to imagine. Others are said to be real, but only metaphorically or only approximately so — and so on. Sorting all this out is not in the least easy.

Concrete Walls and Abstract Ceilings

To be more concrete about all this, how real is the marathoners’ twenty-mile wall, mentioned above? If you’re a marathoner, you almost surely have a well-worked-out set of thoughts about it. Perhaps you have experienced it personally, or know people who have. Or perhaps you think the notion is greatly exaggerated. I’ve never hit the wall myself, but then my longest run ever was only fifteen miles. What I know is that “they say” that most runners, if they haven’t trained properly, will bang up against a brutal wall at around twenty miles, in which their body, having used up all of its glycogen, starts burning fat instead (I’ve heard it described as “your body eating its own muscles”). It comes out of the blue and is extremely painful (“like an elephant falling out of a tree onto my shoulders”, said marathoner Dick Beardsley), and many runners simply cannot go any further at that point, and drop out. But is this a universal phenomenon? Is it the same for all people? Do some marathoners never experience it at all? And even if it is scientifically explicable, is it as real and as palpable a phenomenon as a concrete wall into which one bangs?