I Am a Strange Loop (66 page)

When I say these two universes are indistinguishable, one of the myriad consequences is that Universe Z, just like Universe Q , has a Milky Way galaxy, a star therein called “Sol” with a nine-planet solar system whose third planet is called “Earth”, and on Universe Z’s Earth there is a Pakistania University with a Center for Research into Consciousness and Cognetics, and in it, good old Room 641. There is even “the same” old oaken table, and there, lo and behold, is “the same machine” sitting on it. Surely you see it, do you not? But since this machine is in Universe Z, we will call it “Machine Z”, just so that we have different names for these indistinguishable machines located in indistinguishable surroundings.

Now of course we can’t launch Machines Q and Z at “the same instant”, because they belong to different universes with independent timelines, but luckily these two universes have exactly the same laws of physics, so synchronization isn’t necessary. We just start them up and let them do their things. As before, they do
exactly the same thing,
since they are both following the same laws of physics, and physics suffices to determine all behavior down to the finest detail. And yet, what do you suppose turns out to be the case? Oddly enough, although both machines do exactly the same thing down to the quark level and far beyond, Machine Q enjoys
feelings
about what it is doing while Machine Z does not. Machine Q is in fact ecstatic, whereas Machine Z feels nothing. That is, Zilch. Zero.

“How is that possible?”, you might ask. I too, no less bewildered, ask the same question. But Dave most cheerfully explains: “Oh, it’s because the universe in which Machine Q exists has something extra, on top of the laws of physics, that allows
feelings
to accompany certain types of physical processes. Even though these feelings don’t have and
can’t
have any effect on anything physical, they are nonetheless real, and they are really there.”

In other words, although physics is identical in Universes Q and Z, there are no feelings anywhere in Universe Z — just empty motions. Thus Machine Z mouths all the same words as Machine Q does. It
claims
to be ecstatic about its proof (exactly as does Machine Q), and it goes on and on about the beauty it sees in it (exactly as does Machine Q) — but in fact it is feeling nothing. Its words are all hollow.

Two Daves

What is this extra ingredient that makes Universes Q and Z so vitally different? Dave doesn’t say, but he tells us that it is the very stuff of consciousness — I’ll dub it
élan mental
— and if you’re born in a universe
with
it, then lucky you, whereas if you’re born in a universe without it, well, tough luck, because there’s no you-ness, no I-ness, no who-ness, no me-ness (or he-ness or she-ness) in you — there’s just
it
-ness. Despite this enormous difference, all the objective phenomena in both universes are identical. Thus there are Marx Brothers movies in both of these universes, and when Z-people in Universe Z look at
A Night at the Opera,
they laugh exactly the same as when Q-people in Universe Q look at
A Night at the Opera
.

Most deliciously ironically of all, just as there is a Dave Chalmers in Universe Q (the one in which
we
live), there is also a Dave Chalmers in Universe Z, and it goes around the world giving lectures on why there
is
feeling in the universe in which it was born but
no
feeling in the isomorphic universe into which its unfortunate “zombie twin” was born. The irony, of course, is that Universe Z’s Dave Chalmers is lying through its teeth, yet without having the foggiest idea it’s lying. Although it
believes
it is conscious, in truth it is not. Sadly, this Dave is an innocent victim of the
illusion
of consciousness, which is nothing but a trivial by-product of having a deeply entrenched strange loop in its brain, whereas its isomorphic counterpart in Universe Q, using the same words and intonations, is telling the truth, for
he
truly
is
conscious! Why? Because he not only has a strange loop in his brain but also — lucky fellow! — lives in a universe with
élan mental.

Now please don’t think I am poking fun at my friend Dave Chalmers, for Dave truly
does
go around the world visiting philosophy departments, giving colloquia in which he most gleefully describes his “zombie twin” and chortles merrily over that twin’s helpless deludedness, since the zombie twin gives word for word and chortle for chortle the very same lecture, believing every word of it but not feeling a thing. Dave is a very insightful thinker, and he is every bit as aware as I am of the
seeming
craziness of his distinction between Universes Q and Z, between Machines Q and Z, and between himself and his alleged zombie twin, but whereas I find all of this unacceptably silly, Dave is convinced that, outrageous though such a distinction seems at first to be, Universe Q’s mysterious, nonphysical, and causality-lacking extra ingredient
élan mental
— a close kin to the notion of “feelium” discussed by Strange Loops #641 and #642 — is the missing key to the otherwise inexplicable nature of consciousness.

The Nagging Worry that One Might Be a Zombie

Of late, not a few philosophers of mind have, like Dave, been caught in a tidal wave of fascination with this notion called “zombies”. (Actually, it’s more like “the notion we love to hate”.) It seems to have originated in voodoo rites in the Caribbean and to have spread from there to horror films and then to the world of literature. A Web search will quickly give you all the information you want, and most of it is pretty funny.

Basically, a zombie is an unconscious humanoid who acts — oops, I mean “that acts” — as if it were conscious. There’s no one home inside a zombie, though from the outside one might think so. I have to admit, once in a blue moon I’ve run into someone whose glazed eyes give me the eerie sense that there’s no one home behind them. Of course, I don’t take such impressions seriously. Yet for many philosophers, the hollow, glazed-eyes image has turned into a paradigmatic fear, and today there is no paucity of philosophers of mind who find the notion of a zombie not just painfully abhorrent but in fact perplexingly coherent. These philosophers are so troubled by the specter of zombies that they have taken as their sacred mission to show that our world is not the cold and empty Universe Z, but the warm and fuzzy Universe Q.

Now you might say that this whole book buys into the cold, glazed-eyes, zombie vision of human beings, since it posits that the “I” is, when all is said and done, an illusion, a sleight of mind, a trick that a brain plays on itself, a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination. That would mean that we all
are
unconscious but we all
believe
we are conscious and we all
act
conscious. All right, fine. I agree that that’s a fair characterization of my views. But the swarm of zombie-fearing philosophers all want our inner existence to be richer than that. They claim that they can easily conceive of a cold, icy universe populated solely by nightmarishly hollow zombies, yet not distinguishable in any objective way from our own universe; at the same time, they insist that such is not the universe we live in. According to them, we humans don’t just
act
conscious or
claim
to be conscious; we truly
are
conscious, and that’s another matter entirely. Therefore Hofstadter and Parfit are wrong, and David Chalmers is right.

Well, I think Dan Dennett’s criticism of such philosophers hits the nail on the head. Dan asserts that these thinkers, despite their solemn promises, are
not
conceiving of a world identical to ours but populated by zombies. They don’t even seem to try very hard to do so. They are like SL #642, who, when imagining what a strange loop would say on looking at a brilliant purple flower, chose the dehumanizing verb “drone” to describe how it would talk, and likened its voice to a mechanical-sounding recorded voice in a hated phone menu tree. SL #642 has a stereotype of a strange loop as soul-less, and that prejudice rides roughshod over the image of perfectly natural, normal human behavior. Likewise, philosophers who fear zombies fear them because they fear the mechanical drone, the glazed eyes, and the frigid inhumanity that would surely pervade a world of mere zombies — even if, only a moment before, they signed off on the idea that such a world would be
indistinguishable
from our world.

Consciousness Is Not a Power Moonroof

In debates about consciousness, one of the most frequently asked questions goes something like this: “What is it about consciousness that helps us
survive
? Why couldn’t we have had all this cognitive apparatus but simply been machines that don’t feel anything or have any experience?” As I hear it, this question is basically asking, “Why did consciousness get
added on
to brains that reached a certain level of complexity? Why was consciousness thrown into the bargain as a kind of
bonus
? What
extra
evolutionary good does the possession of consciousness contribute, if any?”

To ask this question is to make the tacit assumption that there could be brains of any desired level of complexity that are
not
conscious. It is to buy into the distinction between Machines Q and Z sitting side by side on the old oaken table in Room 641, carrying out identical operations but one of them doing so
with
feeling and the other doing so
without
feeling. It assumes that consciousness is some kind of orderable “extra feature” that some models, even the fanciest ones, might or might not have, much as a fancy car can be ordered with or without a DVD player or a power moonroof.

But consciousness is not a power moonroof (you can quote me on that). Consciousness is not an optional feature that one can order independently of how the brain is built. You cannot order a car with a two-cylinder motor and then tell the dealer, “Also, please throw in
Racecar Power
^®
for me.” (To be sure, nothing will keep you from placing such an order, but don’t hold your breath for it to arrive.) Nor does it make sense to order a car with a hot sixteen-cylinder motor and then to ask, “Excuse me, but how much more would I have to throw in if I also want to get
Racecar Power
^®
?”

Like my fatuous notion of optional “
Racecar Power
^®
”, which in reality is nothing but the upper end of a continuous spectrum of horsepower levels that engines automatically possess as a result of their design, consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design. Fancy 100-hunekerand-higher racecar brains like yours and mine have a lot of self-perception and hence a lot of consciousness, while very primitive wind-up rubber-band brains like those of mosquitoes have essentially none of it, and lastly, middle-level brains, with just a handful of hunekers (like that of a two-year-old, or a pet cat or dog) come with a modicum of it.

Consciousness is not an add-on option when one has a 100-huneker brain; it is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Gödel’s strange loop, which arises
automatically
in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you’ve got self, you’ve got consciousness.
Élan mental
is not needed.

Liphosophy

Philosophers who believe that consciousness comes from something over and above physical law are dualists. They believe we inhabit a world like that of magical realism, in which there are two types of entities: magical entities, which possess
élan mental,
and ordinary entities, which lack it. More specifically, a magical entity has a nonphysical soul, which is to say, it is imbued with exactly one “dollop of consciousness” (a dollop being the standard unit of
élan mental
), while ordinary entities have no such dollop. (Dave Chalmers believes in two types of universe rather than two types of entity in a single universe, but to me it’s a similar dichotomy, since we can consider various universes to be entities inside a greater “meta-verse”.) Now I should like to be very sure, dear reader, that you and I are on the same page about this dichotomy between magical and ordinary entities, so to make it maximally clear, I shall now parody it, albeit ever so gently.

Imagine a philosophical school called “liphosophy” whose disciples, known as “liphosophers”, believe in an elusive — in fact, undetectable — and yet terribly important nonphysical quality called
Leafpilishness
(always with a capital “L”) and who also believe that there are certain special entities in our universe that are imbued with this happy quality. Now, not too surprisingly, the entities thus blessed are what you and I would tend to call “leaf piles” (with all the blurriness that any such phrase entails). If you or I caught a glimpse of such a thing and were in the right mood, we might exclaim, “Well, what do you know — a leaf pile!” Such an enthusiastic outburst would more than suffice for you and me, I suspect. We would not be likely to dwell much further on the situation.

But for a liphosopher, it would lead to the further thought, “Aha! So there’s another one of those rare entities imbued with one dollop of Leafpilishness, that mystical, nonphysical, other-worldly, but very real aura that doesn’t ever attach itself to haystacks, reams of paper, or portions of French fries, but only to piles of leaves! If it weren’t for Leafpilishness, a leaf pile would be nothing but a motley heap of tree debris, but thanks to Leafpilishness, all such motley heaps become Leafpilish! And since each dollop of Leafpilishness is different from every other one, that means that each leaf pile on Earth is imbued with a totally unique identity! What an amazing and profound phenomenon is Leafpilishness!”