Douglas Hofstadter: Going loopy over consciousness
- From: Sam Wormley <swormley1@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 02:48:46 GMT
Going loopy over consciousness
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/20/7/5
Reviews: July 2007
I Am a Strange Loop
Douglas Hofstadter
2007 Basic Books
412pp £14.99/$26.95 hb
Douglas Hofstadter's writing talent makes his love of paradox
contagious. Reading I Am a Strange Loop inclines one to see whimsical
connections, language games and self-reference everywhere. Part of
Hofstadter invades one's brain and starts thinking there in its own
right -- a phenomenon that is itself a theme of the book. Hofstadter,
therefore, is in effect co-writing this review, inclining it towards
paradox. Which may be why my method of urging you to read the book
will itself be paradoxical: I shall summarize why I find it
ultimately unconvincing.
Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University,
expresses disappointment that his 1979 masterpiece Gödel, Escher,
Bach (one of my favourite books) was not recognized as explaining the
true nature of consciousness, or "I"-ness. I have to confess that it
never occurred to me that it was intended to do so. I thought it
merely explained the problem, highlighting stark flaws in
common-sense ideas about minds. It also surveyed the infinite depth
and meaning that can exist in "mere" computer programs. One could
only emerge from the book (or so I thought) concluding that brains
must in essence be computers, and consciousness an attribute of
certain programs -- and that discovering exactly what attribute is an
urgent problem for philosophy and computer science. Hofstadter agrees
with the first two conclusions but not the third; he considers that
problem solved.
I Am a Strange Loop is supposed to restate and explain his solution:
in short, that a mind is a near-infinitely extendable,
self-referential loop of symbols that suffers -- or rather, benefits
-- from the hallucination of being an "I". Furthermore (Hofstadter
says paradoxically), that hallucination is itself an "I".
Hofstadter's "strange loop" is a bit like an ordinary feedback loop,
such as the images in a pair of parallel mirrors facing each other,
but instead of merely depicting itself physically, it symbolically
refers to itself. And unlike ordinary self-referential statements,
like this one, the symbol inside a brain that refers to itself as "I"
is not used by anyone else: it is someone.
Strangely, Hofstadter's half of this theory of consciousness (the
loopy half), is quite convincing. The unconvincing half is
essentially philosopher Daniel Dennett's theory from his book
Consciousness Explained (which critics have justly renamed
Consciousness Denied) -- namely that our opinion that we are
conscious is simply mistaken. Hofstadter calls it the "I myth". We
can, of course, be mistaken about anything, so here Dennett laid down
a valuable marker: the true explanation of consciousness will have to
refute his position.
Hofstadter is a master of analogy and metaphor, which abound in this
book. One of his metaphors is that of a soul (but devoid of religious
connotations -- these souls are unequivocally aspects of the brain)
and, daringly, the idea of differently sized souls corresponding to
degrees of consciousness. Children have smaller souls than adults, he
says; animals have tiny (but non-zero) souls; the Franco-German
philosopher and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer's soul was bigger than
yours or mine. But Hofstadter's arguments for his analogies are,
frustratingly, sometimes compelling but often absent.
The central analogy is between minds and other "strange loops":
certain self-referential statements discovered by Kurt Gödel within
formal mathematical systems. These statements assert their own
unprovability within the system but are nevertheless provably true,
akin to the paradoxical "this statement is false". And the way
Gödel's proof works is by showing that certain very large numbers
also have another meaning, as statements about numbers; and so a
proof about numbers -- which is itself just a number -- turns into a
proof about proofs, and in particular about itself.
The author flits between two somewhat conflicting strands of this
analogy. He stresses that human consciousness depends on the
universality of our thinking -- the fact that we can extend our
internal repertoire of symbols indefinitely, and eventually refer to
anything at all. But he also draws the lesson that self-awareness is
the heart of the matter. I do not see why. Most of my conscious
thought is not about me. Gödelian statements refer meaningfully to
themselves, but are not conscious. Universality implies the ability
to contemplate oneself, but the converse is not true.
Correspondingly, Hofstadter does not seem to be able to decide
whether animal minds are merely quantitatively inferior
("small-souled") or qualitatively. On the one hand he says that the
"huge and fundamental breach between humans and...all other
species...makes us unique, and...gives us what we call 'souls'". Yet,
on the other : "to argue...that the word 'soul' does not even apply
to animals...seems to me more like received dogma than like mature
reflection". I think Hofstadter was right the first time: animals are
not miniature people but are fundamentally different, and
unmysterious, things. They cannot create new meanings at all because
they lack the as-yet-unknown attribute of human brains that gives
them universality.
The more Hofstadter invokes souls, feelings and animals -- and the
less he discusses computers, mathematics and meaning -- the more, it
seems to me, emotion replaces reason. For instance, what is his
evidence for Schweitzer's oversized soul? Firstly, that Schweitzer
empathized with insects. So if a soul is measured by its empathy with
the small-souled, would an even greater soul empathize with
cucumbers? Secondly, Schweitzer loved Bach's organ music, and musical
taste is apparently a soul-size indicator. Hofstadter's argument for
that? Absent. The animal theme culminates in a veritable celebration
of sentimental anthropomorphism, describing Hofstadter's own "ability
to mirror the interiorities" of grasshoppers and ants while listening
to the music of Bach.
Hofstadter argues that emergent entities (such as people) and
abstract concepts (such as numbers, and meanings) really do have
causal effects on the microscopic constituents of events. He imagines
a computer made of toppling dominoes that is designed to factorize
integers. It is presented with the input "641" and set in motion to
perform its computation. Why is one particular domino left standing?
The most fundamental explanation does not refer to the sequence in
which the other dominoes fell; rather it is "because 641 is prime".
I see no escape from this argument: regarding microphysical
explanations as more fundamental than emergent ones is arbitrary and
fallacious. Yet, from Hofstadter's point of view, I seem to have
catastrophically missed the point, for he eventually disowns the
argument. Consciousness (in its guise as free will), he says, cannot
"push material stuff around" because "physical law alone would
suffice to determine [its] behaviour". But physical laws can't push
anything! They are just predictions and explanations -- and by no
means our only ones. Here I wondered what the point of the "641"
argument was in the first place, and indeed of the whole book.
Finally, Hofstadter embraces irrationality itself: "Our very nature
is such as to prevent us from understanding our nature".
I judge claims to understand consciousness largely by this question:
can you use that understanding to create an artificial-intelligence
program? Judged by that criterion, Hofstadter does not have the
answer. However, his claim that our nature prevents us from
understanding our nature cannot be taken at face value. Like a
Gödelian claim to be unprovable, it applies only inside the system
from which it is derived, namely Hofstadter's own philosophical
framework. But, again like Gödel's construction, this simultaneously
reveals that there is a truth to be discovered outside of that
framework.
Something new is needed to discover that truth, and Hofstadter's
loops are probably involved. "Strange loopiness" is a distinctive
form of emergence, rooted not in complexity but in universality, the
real substrate of "I"-ness. That is why, if you want to understand
what an "I" is -- what you yourself are -- you should want to read
this book. Unless your soul is too small.
.
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