I Am a Strange Loop (79 page)

Excerpt from Carson McCullers,
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Copyright © 1940, renewed 1967, by Carson McCullers. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Derek Parfit,
Reasons and Persons
© 1984 Oxford University Press. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Excerpts from Albert Schweitzer,
Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit.
© C. H. Beck, Munich, 1924. Personal translation for use in this book only, by Douglas Hofstadter. Reprinted with permission.

INDEX

A

abbreviations piled on abbreviations

aboutness, double, of Gödel’s formula

absorbing someone else’s essence

“abstraction ceiling” in author’s mind

abstractions: as causes; centrality of: formidable tower of, in human minds

abstractly swirling patterns

accidents in mathematics: absence of; possibility of

accretion: of self-model; of soul

Ackermann’s function

active symbols,
see
symbols

affinity of souls,
see
chemistry (interpersonal)

afterglow of a soul

Aimable, the village baker

“alacrity, celerity, assiduity”, etc.

Alfbert, the; dream of

Alf and Bertie’s Posh Shop

algorithmic information theory

Ali, Muhammad

Alienware machine, emulated by Macintosh

Alighieri, Dante

alignment: of
PM
theorems and code numbers; of truths and
PM
theorems; of two souls in married couple dedicated to common goals

allegoric license

“Alle Menschen Müssen Sterben” (Bach)

Alzheimer’s disease

ambiguity of operations inside computers

américain,
pronunciation of the word in movie

amino acids

amplification of input in audio feedback; saturation of

analogies: central role of, in this book; as fabric of human thought; having force proportional to precision and visibility; index entries for; jumping out automatically; made by bees; as mediating reference; research on; retrieved automatically by new events; rivalry between two similar ones; seen as simmball patterns in the careenium; self-referential; as source of meaning; tossed off effortlessly; trivial-seeming examples; by W. V. O. Quine

analogies, serious examples of: between Alfbert and Whitehead/Russell; between audio and video feedback; between Aurélie and Pomponnette; between the author’s mind and others’ minds; between the author’s view of “I” and quantum mechanics; between beer cans and neurons; between brain and oil refinery; between brains and countries; between brains and
PM
as substrates for strange loops; between brain structures and genes or atoms; between butterfly swarms and souls; between careenium and brain; between careenium and pinball machine; between cars and dogs; between Chantal looking at movie and Russell looking at Gödel’s formula; between children with muddy boots; between cookies on same plate; between couples; between crystal and orchard; between death and eclipse; between decision-making and political elections; between dedicated machines and music boxes; between dog looking at pixels and Russell looking at Gödel’s formula; between domino chainium and traffic jam; between donning piece of clothing and identifying with someone else; between Doug and Carol; between edibility and provability; between electron clouds and human souls; between entwined video loops and entwined souls; between epiphenomena in brain and in mineral; between formula containing own Gödel number and elephant in matchbox; between gems in Caspian Sea and powers in Fibonacci sequence; between genes and novels; between Gödel’s construction and black-belt judo maneuver; between Gödel number
k
and Morton Salt can; between Gödel’s strange loop and video feedback; between grapplings with death and beautiful sailboat; between growing soul and accreting planetoid; between Guru and Göru; between heart and brain; between heart-shaped bread and heart on collar; between human soul and train; between “I” and dollar bill; between “I” and either “i” or “Twe”; between “I” and “Epi”; between “I” and video-feedback galaxy; between Imp and KG; between K. Gödel’s article on
Principia Mathematica
and G. Külot’s review of
Prince Hyppia: Math Dramatica
; between Klüdgerot and Kurt Gödel; between Leafpilishness and Consciousness; between learning to be someone else and learning a foreign language; between leg-tingles and ants (and ginger ale); between life and hedge maze; between listener not relating to Bartók and magnetic field not penetrating superconductor; between mosquito and flush toilet; between mosquito and heat-seeking missile; between mosquito and red spot; between naïve careenium and young Doug; between Newtonian physics and naïve view of self; between oneself and others; between pairsons and persons; between Parfit and Einstein; between picket lines in play and outside theater; between pieces of cake; between pixel patterns and events; between
PM
and sinking boat; between prim numbers and prime numbers; between
Principia Mathematica
and invaded fortress; between quoted phrases and Gödel numbers; between recursion and plant growth; between recursive sequences of numbers and
PM
theorems; between robot vehicle and an ant; between Rosalyn Wadhead and Russell and Whitehead; between salt box and picture of salt box; between salt-box picture and Gödel’s self-referential trick; between saucy numbers and unpennable lines in plays; between self-reference and self-replication; between self-symbol and video feedback; between Sluggo dreaming of himself and self-quoting sentence; between “soap digest rack” spelled out in Sanskrit and Gödel’s formula spelled out in
PM
notation; between souledness and tallness; between Sperry’s and Gödel’s balancing acts; between strange loops and selves; between symbols in brain and books in library; between uninteresting number and Berry’s number; between universal machines and chameleonic integers; between universal machines and people; between unpennable lines and unprovable strings; between unscalability of KJ and unprovability of KG; between video feedback and iteration in complex plane; between windmill and thoughtmill; between Xerxes’ breath and Yolanda’s breath; between Y. Ted Enrustle and Whitehead and Russell

Andromeda galaxy

animacy, found in inanimate substrate

animals: killing of; self-awareness of

another soul, living inside oneself

ant: crossing property lines; rescued; Schweitzer’s personal

Antarctica, reality of

Anterselva di Mezzo

anthropomorphic language, temptation of

ants’ disrespect for property lines

“ants in my leg”

“Anything you can docan do meta”

arbitrarily extensible repertoires of categories
see also
concepts, symbols

arbitrarily subtle properties of whole numbers;
see also
universality

arbitrary mapping between stimuli and sensations

Archimedes

arithmetization of
PM
formulas

Arnheim, Rudi and Mary

Around the World in Eighty Days

arrangement as cause

artificial “I”, still far off

artificial intelligence;
see also
robots

“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”

atomes crochus, avoir des
(“having hooked atoms”), as French for interpersonal chemistry

atoms as abstract entities

audio feedback; pitch of; vanilla loop in

Aurélie, straying wife

Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit
(Schweitzer)

Austen, Jane

Austranius

authority, arguments by

Avogadro’s number

awareness: of dance of symbols; levels of, compared;
see also
consciousness, perception

axioms: analogous to seeds in recursion; as top lines of
PM
proofs

B

b
(Berry’s number)

Babbage, Charles

baby: impoverished perceptual system of; lack of self at birth or conception

Bach, Johann Sebastian; cantata by; organ music by; tricentennial birthday party for

“bachelor”, elusiveness of concept

bad-breath analogy

bandwidth of communication as determinant of degree of interpenetration

banishment of toy guns from household

barber paradox

barberry jelly

“bare” strange loop of selfhood

barking, reverberant

Bartók, Béla; violin concerto # 2

baseball and football sensations swapped

Baskerville, John

basketball: skill in, as part of self-symbol; unpredictability of, when tossed

Beardsley, Dick

beauty, as bedrock cause for humans

“because” coinciding with “although”

Bechet, Sidney

beer cans and ping-pong balls as substrate for thinking

bees, swarm of, opposing caged-bird metaphor

Beethoven, Ludwig van

behaviors, attempted and evaluated

being: in two places at the same time; at two times in the same place

being someone else: economy-class version; with a “foreign accent”

beings: defined as systems having representational universality; modeling other beings

belief: as experienced by a zombie; shared by two people

believability of The True View

Berkeley, University of California at

Bernstein, Jeremy

Berry, G. G.

Berry’s paradox: as breeding ground for Gödel’s theorem; as formalized by Chaitin; as strange-loop candidate

Bierce, Ambrose

“Bigger they are, harder they fall”

bile, single-edged or double-edged

biologists paying attention to informational rather than physical level of genes

birds saved by young Schweitzer

black-and-white smudges: as early teleportation technology; as soul-shards

black-belt maneuver by Gödel

“black holes” in video feedback

bleu blanc rouge
(colors of the French flag)

blocked infinite regress

blood, nonexperienced quale of

“blooming, buzzing confusion” (Wm. James)

Bloomington, Indiana

blue humpback

blueprint used in self-replicating machine

blurriness of everyday concepts

boat with endless succession of leaks

bodies
vs.
souls

body parts initiate self-representation

Bohr atom, as stepping stone en route to quantum mechanics

Bohr, Niels

boiling water, reliability of

Bonaparte,
see
Napoleon

bon mots: by Carol Hofstadter; by David Moser

“Book of nature written in mathematics” (Galileo)

Boole, George

boot-removal analogy

boundaries between souls, blurriness of

boundaries, macroscopic, as irrelevant to particles

box with flaps making loop

Brabner, George

brain activity: hiddenness of substrate of; modeled computationally; need for high-level view of; obviousness of high-level view of

brain-in-vat scenario

brain research, nature of

brain-scanning gadgets

brain structures

brains: compared to hearts; complexity of, as relevant to consciousness; controlling bodies directly
vs.
indirectly; eerieness of; evolution of; as fusion of two half-brains; as inanimate; inhabited by more than one “I”; interacting via ideas; main; as multi-level systems; not responsible for color qualia; perceiving multiple environments simultaneously; receiving sensory input directly or indirectly; resembling inert sponges; unlikely substrate for interiority

Braitenberg, Valentino

bread becoming a gun

Brown, Charlie

Brownian motion

Brünn, Austria (birthplace of Kurt Gödel)

buck stopping at “I”

Bugeaud, Yann

bunnies as edible beings

“burstwise advance in evolution” (Sperry)

Bushmiller, Ernie

butterflies: not respecting precinct boundaries; in orchard, as metaphor for human soul

Buzzaround Betty

C

caged-bird metaphor; as analogous to Newtonian physics; hints at wrongness of; as ingrained habit; at level of countries and cultures; metaphors opposed to; normally close to correct; as reinforced by language; temptingness of

Cagey’s doubly-hearable line

cake whose pieces all taste bad, as inferrred by analogy

candles

cantata aria

Cantor, Georg

capital punishment

Capitalized Essences; canceled

careenium; growing up; self-image of; two views of; unsatisfactory to skeptics

Carnap, Rudolf

Carol-and-Doug: as higher-level entity; joint mind of; shared dreads and dreams of

Carolness, survival of

Carol-symbol in Doug’s brain: being
vs.
representing a person; triggerability of

cars: as high-level objects; pushed around by desires