I Am a Strange Loop

Preface: An Author and His Book
	Facing the Physicality of Consciousness
	The Mirage
	A Shout into a Chasm
	From the Majestic Dolomites to Gentle Bloomington
	An Author and His Audience
	The Horsies-and-Doggies Religion
	A Few Last Random Observations
	A Useful Youthfulness

Prologue: An Affable Locking of Horns

1. On Souls and Their Sizes
	Soul-Shards
	What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?
	Guinea Pig
	Revulsion, Revelation, Revolution
	Reversion, Re-evolution
	The Mystery of Inanimate Flesh
	Give Me Some Men Who Are Stouter-souled Men
	Small-souled and Large-souled Humans
	Hattie the Chocolate Labrador
	Ollie the Golden Retriever
	Where to Draw that Fateful, Fatal Line?
	Interiority — What Has it, and to What Degree?
	The Gradual Growth of a Soul
	Lights On?
	Post Scriptum

2. This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream
	What Is a “Brain Structure”?
	A Simple Analogy between Heart and Brain
	Can Toilet Paper Think?
	The Terribly Thirsty Beer Can
	Levels and Forces in the Brain
	Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Cranium?
	Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
	Thinkodynamics and Statistical Mentalics

3. The Causal Potency of Patterns
	The Prime Mover
	The Causal Potency of Collective Phenomena
	Neurons and Dominos
	Patterns as Causes
	The Strange Irrelevance of Lower Levels
	A Hat-tip to the Spectrum of Unpredictability
	The Careenium
	Simmballism
	Taking the Reductionistic View of the Careenium
	Taking a Higher-level View of the Careenium
	Who Shoves Whom Around inside the Careenium?
	The Dance of the Simmballs

4. Loops, Goals, and Loopholes
	The First Flushes of Desire
	A Soccer Ball Named Desire
	The Slippery Slope of Teleology
	Feedback Loops and Exponential Growth
	Fallacy the First
	Fallacy the Second
	Feedback and Its Bad Rap
	God, Godel, Umlauts, and Mystery
	Savoring Circularity and Self-application
	The Timid Theory of Types
	Intellectuals Who Dread Feedback Loops

5. On Video Feedback
	Two Video Voyages, Three Decades Apart
	Diary of a Video Trip
	Enigmatic, Emergent Reverberation
	Feeding “Content” to the Loop
	A Mathematical Analogue
	The Phenomenon of “Locking-in”
	Emergent New Realities of Video Feedback

6. Of Selves and Symbols
	Perceptual Looping as the Germ of "I"-ness
	Varieties of Looping
	Reception versus Perception
	Mosquito Symbols
	Mosquito Selves
	An Interlude on Robot Vehicles
	Pondering Dogthink
	The Radically Different Conceptual Repertoire of Human Beings
	Episodic Memory

7. The Epi Phenomenon
	As Real as it Gets
	Concrete Walls and Abstract Ceilings
	The Many-faceted Intellectual Grounding of Reality
	No Luck, No Soap, No Dice
	An Out-of-the-Blue Ode to My Old Friend Epi
	No Sphere, No Radius, No Mass
	Where the Buck Seems to Stop
	The Prime Mover, Redux
	God’s Eye versus the Careenium’s Eye
	I Am Not God

8. Embarking on a Strange-Loop Safari
	Flap Loop, Lap Loop
	Seeking Strange Loopiness in Escher
	Seeking Strange Loops in Feedback
	Seeking Strange Loops in the Russellian Gloom
	Mr Berry of the Bodleian
	I Can’t Tell You How Indescribably Nondescript It Was!
	Blurriness Buries Berry
	A Peanut-butter and Barberry Sandwich
	An Autobiographical Snippet
	Idealistic Dreams about Metamathematics
	Post Scriptum

9. Pattern and Provability
	Principia Mathematica and its Theorems
	Mixing Two Unlikely Ideas: Primes and Squares
	Pattern-hunting
	People who Pursue Patterns with Perseverance
	Where There’s Pattern, There’s Reason
	Sailing the Ocean of Primes and Falling off the Edge
	The Mathematician’s Credo
	No Such Thing as an Infinite Coincidence
	The Long Search for Proofs, and for their Nature

10. Godel's Quintessential Strange Loop
	Godel Encounters Fibonacci
	The Caspian Gemstones: An Allegory
	A Tiny Spark in Godel’s Brain
	Clever Rules Imbue Inert Symbols with Meaning
	Mechanizing the Mathematician’s Credo
	Miraculous Lockstep Synchrony
	Flipping between Formulas and Very Big Integers
	Very Big Integers Moving in Lock-step with Formulas
	Glimmerings of How PM Can Twist Around and See Itself
	Prim Numbers
	The Uncanny Power of Prim Numbers
	Godelian Strangeness
	How to Stick a Formula’s Godel Number inside the Formula
	Godel’s Elephant-in-Matchbox Trick via Quine’s Analogy
	The Trickiest Step
	An Elephant in a Matchbox is Neither Fish Nor Fowl
	Sluggo and the Morton Salt Girl

11. How Analogy Makes Meaning
	The Double Aboutness of Formulas in PM
	Extra Meanings Come for Free, Thanks to You, Analogy!
	Exploiting the Analogies in Everyday Situations
	The Latent Ambiguity of the Village Baker’s Remarks
	Chantal and the Piggybacked Levels of Meaning
	Pickets at the Posh Shop
	Prince Hyppia: Math Dramatica
	Analogy, Once Again, Does its Cagey Thing
	How Can an “Unpennable” Line be Penned?
	“Not” is Not the Source of Strangeness
	Numbers as a Representational Medium

12. On Downward Causality
	Bertrand Russell’s Worst Nightmare
	A Strange Land where “Because” Coincides with “Although”
	Incompleteness Derives from Strength
	Bertrand Russell’s Second-worst Nightmare
	An Endless Succession of Monsters
	Consistency Condemns a Towering Peak to Unscalability
	Downward Causality in Mathematics
	Goru and the Futile Quest for a Truth Machine
	The Upside-down Perceptions of Evolved Creatures
	Stuck, for Better or Worse, with “I”
	Proceeding Slowly Towards the Bottom Level
	Of Hogs, Dogs, and Bogs

13. The Elusive Apple of My "I"
	The Patterns that Constitute Experience
	Reflected Communist Bachelors with Spin 1/2 are All Wet
	Am I a Strange Marble?
	A Pearl Necklace I Am Not
	I Am My Brain’s Most Complex Symbol
	Internalizing Our Weres, Our Wills, and Our Woulds
	I Cannot Live without My Self
	The Slow Buildup of a Self
	Making Tosses, Internalizing Bounces
	Smiling Like Hopalong Cassidy
	The Lies in our I’s
	The Locking-in of the “I” Loop
	I Am Not a Video Feedback Loop
	1 Am Ineradicably Entrenched...
	...But Am I Real?
	The Size of the Strange Loop that Constitutes a Self
	The Supposed Selves of Robot Vehicles
	A Counterfactual Stanley

14. Strangeness in the “I” of the Beholder
	The Inert Sponges inside our Heads
	Squirting Chemicals
	The Stately Dance of the Symbols
	In which the Alfbert Visits Austranius
	Brief Debriefing
	Soaps in Sanskrit
	Winding Up the Debriefing
	Trapped at the High Level
	First Key Ingredient of Strangeness
	Second Key Ingredient of Strangeness
	Sperry Redux

15. Entvoinement
	Multiple Strange Loops in One Brain
	Content-free Feedback Loops
	Baby Feedback Loops and Baby "I"'s
	Entwined Feedback Loops
	One Privileged Loop inside our Skull
	Shared Perception, Shared Control
	A Twirlwind Trip to Twinwirld
	Is “UU” One or Two Letters of the Alphabet?
	Pairsonal Identity in Twinwirld
	“Twe”-tweaking by Twinwirld-twiddling
	Post Scriptum re Twinwirld
	Soulmates and Matesouls
	Children as Gluons

16. Grappling with the Deepest Mystery
	A Random Event Changes Everything
	Desperate Lark
	Post Scriptum

17. How We Live in Each Other
	Universal Machines
	The Unexpectedness of Universality
	Universal Beings
	Being Visited
	Chemistry and Its Lack
	Copycat Planetoids Grow by Absorbing Melting Meteorites
	How Much Can One Import of Another’s Interiority?
	Double-clicking on the Icon for a Loved One’s Soul
	Thinking with Another’s Brain
	Mosaics of Different Grain Size
	Transplantation of Patterns

18. The Blurry Glow of Human Identity
	I Host and Am Hosted by Others
	Feeling that One is Elsewhere
	Telepresence versus “Real” Presence
	Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?
	Where Am I?
	Varying Degrees of Being Another
	The Naive Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough
	Where Does a Hammerhead Shark Think it is?
	Sympathetic Vibrations
	Am I No One Else or Am I Everyone Else?
	Interpenetration of National Souls
	Halos, Afterglows, Coronas

19. Consciousness = Thinking
	So Where’s Consciousness in my Loopy Tale?
	Enter the Skeptics
	Symbols Trigger More Symbols
	The Central Loop of Cognition

20. A Courteous Crossing of Words

21. A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos
	Well-told Stories Pluck Powerful Chords
	What Pushovers We Are!
	Teleportation of a Thought Experiment across the Atlantic
	The Murky Whereabouts of Cartesian Egos
	Am I on Venus, or Am I on Mars?
	The Radical Nature of Parfit’s Views
	Self-confidence, Humility, and Self-doubt
	Morphing Parfit into Bonaparte
	The Radical Redesign of Douglas R. Hofstadter
	On “Who” and on “How”
	Double or Nothing
	Trains Who Roll
	The Glow of the Soular Corona

22. A Tango with Zombies and Dualism
	Pedantic Semantics?
	Two Machines
	Two Daves
	The Nagging Worry that One Might Be a Zombie
	Consciousness Is Not a Power Moonroof
	Liphosophy
	Consciousness: A Capitalized Essence
	A Sliding Scale of Elan Mental
	Semantic Quibbling in Universe Z
	Quibbling in Universe Q

23. Killing a Couple of Sacred Cows
	A Cerulean Sardine
	Bleu Blanc Rouge = Red, White, and Blue
	Inverting the Sonic Spectrum
	Glebbing and Knurking
	The Inverted Political Spectrum
	Violets Are Red, Roses Are Blue
	A Scarlet Sardine
	Yes, People Want Things
	The Hedge Maze of Life
	There’s No Such Thing as a Free Will

24. On Magnanimity and Friendship
	Are There Small and Large Souls?
	From the Depths to the Heights
	The Magnanimity of Albert Schweitzer
	Does Conscience Constitute Consciousness?
	Albert Schweitzer and Johann Sebastian Bach
	Dig that Profundity!
	Alle Grashupfer Mussen Sterben
	Friends

Epilogue: The Quandary
	Not a Tall!
	The Pull and Pitfalls of Dualism
	The Lure and Lacunas of Nondualism
	Rainbows or Rocks?
	Thrust: The Hard Problem
	Riposte: A Soft Poem
	A Billion Trillion Ants in One’s Leg
	I Am a Strange Loop
Notes
Bibliography
Permissions and Acknowledgments
Index