Is God a Strange Loop?
Strange loops often lead to infinite regresses, like this image of notebooks within notebooks that I drew in a notebook.
CAMBRIDGE, MA, SEPTEMBER 13, 2024. I recently hobnobbed with a writer, I’ll call him Bob, as obsessed with the mind-body problem as I am. The problem concerns, in a narrow sense, how matter makes mind, but it also encompasses the puzzles of consciousness, intelligence, free will, the self, meaning, morality…
The mind-body problem, in short, is the mystery of what we are. And should be. The key puzzle is consciousness, without which nothing else matters. I don’t feel like defending this proposition, I’m just asserting it as an axiom.
Bob’s been pondering recent advances in artificial intelligence, and whether they favor this or that model of cognition. I told Bob I’m not a fan of any leading mind-models. I had in mind integrated information theory, the global workspace widget and the Penrose-Hameroff contraption.
The only model that strikes me as true, I told Bob, or at least on the right track, is Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loop, which rarely gets mentioned in mind-body debates. Below I’ll describe Hofstadter’s loopy idea. Or try.
Hofstadter is a… Well, what is he, exactly? He’s hard to define. I’d call him a philosopher, but Hofstadter loathes most philosophers (his pal Daniel Dennett, who just died, being an exception). You could call Hofstadter a polymath, because his ideas draw from mathematics, physics, biology, cognitive science, computer science, art, music, Zen, you name it.
He is best known for his still-astonishing 1979 opus Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. The 777-page book is about many things. But its primary focus—which can be hard to discern amidst Hofstadter’s exuberant digressions--is the mind-body problem.
Hofstadter’s solution is the strange loop, which is something that does something to itself. It refers to, reflects, defines, restricts, contradicts, chases, plays with, creates itself. Like Gödel’s theorem about the limits of theorems. Escher’s drawing of hands drawing each other. Bach’s fugues, which curl back upon themselves like Mobius strips.
Hofstadter explains, in painstaking detail, how purely physical processes generate minds and meaning. Loops at the level of electrons and quarks give rise to loops at the level of genes and neurons all the way up to the level of symbols, concepts, meaning.
Language, which consists of words defined by words, is a gargantuan snarl of strange loops. So are mathematics, science, music, art and all human culture. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a strange loop too. It has a fugue-like structure, with recurrent themes and motifs, and it constantly talks about itself.
Human minds are the strangest, loopiest loops of all. Our minds are symbol-processing strange loops that are generated by and exert influence over matter. Weave all the loops at different levels together and you get the “eternal golden braid” of existence.
Strange loops serve, for Hofstadter, as the essential mechanism of minds, whatever form they take. Truly intelligent machines, if we build them, and aliens, if we encounter them, must have loopy minds, as we do.
The mind-body problem is itself a strange loop, which coils like an ouroboros at the heart of philosophy, science, mathematics, art, everything. Some experts, notably Hofstadter’s buddy Dennett, strain to explain away the mind-body problem. But to my mind Hofstadter—and this comment might make him wince--makes the problem more mysterious, even mystical.
Why would he wince? Because a paradox lurks within Hofstadter’s career. His work strikes me as one long argument against the reduction of minds to physical processes. And yet, ironically, Hofstadter is a militant reductionist and materialist who downplays the importance of consciousness and free will.
“We should remember,” he writes in Gödel, Escher, Bach, “that physical law is what makes it all happen, way, way down in neural nooks and crannies which are too remote for us to reach with our high-level introspective probes.”
Hofstadter agrees with Dennett that consciousness is “not as deep a mystery as it seems” because it is an “illusion.” By this, Hofstadter apparently means that our conscious thoughts and perceptions are often misleading, and they are trivial compared to all the computations whizzing and whirring below the level of our awareness.
Our sense of free will is an illusion, too, according to Hofstadter. He told me that he doesn’t feel as though he has truly made any decisions in his life. “I feel like decisions are made for me by the forces inside my brain.”
I disagree with Hofstadter that consciousness and free will are illusions. But I wholeheartedly agree with his most original, profound claim: at the bottom of everything, something is doing something to itself.
In I Am a Strange Loop, his more accessible 2007 follow-up to Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter calls the strange loop a “closed cycle.” He writes that “despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origins, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out.” A paradigmatic example is Escher’s staircase, which goes up and up and up but never gets anywhere.
The Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges offers an even more arresting example of loopiness in his creepy fable “Borges and I.” He describes how he, the real Borges, is oppressed by his authorial persona, Borges. Whatever he does, whatever he creates, the other Borges coopts it. “Thus is my life a flight, and I lose everything, and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him,” “Borges” writes. “I don’t know which of the two of us is writing this page.”
This is the nightmarish converse of Escher’s drawing of two hands chummily bringing each other into existence. If Borges could draw, he might show two hands frantically erasing each other.
In 1981 I emerged from a psychedelic trance convinced that I had stumbled onto the secret of existence: God is undergoing a perpetual, cosmic identity crisis. Think of the responsibility! Being God! Like the Borges of “Borges and I,” God flees from Her/His/Their/Its self. This whole crazy, cosmic human adventure, this eternal (we hope) golden braid in which we find ourselves, stems from God’s loopy self-pursuit.
That’s it, the secret of existence.
Eventually I persuaded myself that the anxious cosmic self I had encountered, or become, during my trip was just a projection of my anxious little self. But I get flashbacks of that sublime, hellish vision whenever I contemplate strange loops. Like right now.
When I told Bob that I liked Hofstadter’s strange-loop model because I once became the strange loop that creates everything, he gave me a dry little smile. Yeah, Bob should be skeptical, I would be too, if I hadn’t had that trip in 1981.
But that experience, plus Hofstadter’s fantastical writings, convince me that if there is a God, She/He/They/It must be a strange loop. Yup, it’s strange loops all the way down.
Further Reading:
Check out my profile of Hofstadter in my free, online book Mind-Body Problems, parts of which I borrowed to write this column. My Quantum Experiment and Pay Attention also get pretty loopy.
Consciousness and the Dennett Paradox