Oft have we pondered the mystery of strange loops – those bits and pieces of thought, emotion, memory and experience that pass between us all, interweaving themselves into our I and building within us what we think of as consciousness.
Douglas Hofstadter, the Indiana cognitive scientist/philosopher, is the pacesetter in this arena, having coined the term and explicated it for our general use. It was with the death of his beloved wife Carol in 1993 that he began to understand the true nature of the strange loop, a mechanism of thought he had uncovered that explained the workings of both science and art, while demonstrating their intense commonalities.
Hofstadter realized that the deep intimacy he had experienced with Carol, a mind and heart and spirit equal to his own, had invoked that same mechanism – that the self-referential, recursive echoes of thought and experience that he and Carol had exchanged over the years had not only etched themselves into his memory, but into his very cognition; he thinks and feels and experiences the world differently today because of all his Carol yesterdays. Their years together had, for want of a better metaphor, rewritten his intellectual and spiritual software. We could write this off as one person “influencing” another, but it’s the other way around: Hofstadter has provided a concrete definition of “influence.” Put simply, the strange loop explains how we are built inside. He is not just the sum of the loops he created on his own and took from Carol; he is also those loops he absorbed from his children, and his colleagues, and his academic opponents.
The I that is Doug Hofstadter also contains strange loops he absorbed from Godel and Escher and Bach, loops that made their way out of those artists and into their work, which in turn crept into Hofstadter’s. And the loops he absorbed that originated in other composers and authors and painters and philosophers and great thinkers. And fictional characters, persons on the page, people of myth, who are in turn built out of the strange loops of the living.
And if Hofstadter is right, if this transfer of self-referential experience and reflection is indeed the basis of conscious cognition, then I, too, am an animate onion, the sum total of my strange loop skins: the loops of the people I’ve loved who have loved me; the minds and art and thought that have changed me; the experiences and feelings that I created and passed on, and those that were passed to me. By people. And places. And things, concrete and abstract.
And pets.
I could write a few paragraphs here to justify the assumption that some if not most of Earth’s creatures are conscious, in varying degrees, but anyone who has ever owned a dog or a cat or a parrot needs no convincing: the denizens of the Earth, in all their glorious variety, each has an I, a self – there is something that it is like to be that creature. And if Hofstadter is right... well, then they, too, have their strange loops.
I remember Yukon, my second dog, from my early teen years. A Siberian Husky, Yukon was rambunctious, willful, somewhat difficult to deal with (kind of an early teen himself). His outdoor habitat was as spacious as we could manage, and as escape-proof as possible (not very). I was all the time chasing him down in the fields and neighboring yards around our own, yanking him out of trouble.
Yukon teased and dared and challenged me always – run, jump, live a little! - playfully provoking my solitary bookwormy self to lighten up and breathe the air a little more. And I, in turn, calmed Yukon down – take a breath and soak up the sun, wild thing! - and we would trot down the road, headed back to our own space.
I have Yukon’s strange loops in me still. And in his time, he had mine.
Then there was Ranger, two decades later. A more relaxed and mature beast, Ranger was a black hybrid lab who loved to run ahead of me and chase things while I walked the lane beside our Greenville country home. He never went without me; he would wait for me to emerge from the house onto the porch, where he patiently waited each day, then to coax me out into the world.
Ranger’s patience, waiting for others, is a strange loop he gave me that persists today. And while I may not coax others out into the world, I learned to let myself be coaxed – another strange loop that lives on in me.
Do you own a pet? Can you feel your pet’s strange loops persisting in you now?
Do you realize that those strange loops endure beyond the passing of their originator? That strange loops are, from the viewpoint of science, our actual road to eternity?
And one more thought before I get my second cup of coffee: I write these words on a Sunday morning in a cabin in Red River Gorge, my personal valhalla, a place I’ve been returning to over and over for decades now. I know the Gorge as Gandalf knows Middle Earth. I will always return here.
And it occurs to me that the Gorge has its own strange loops, with its cycles and seasons and recursions and patterns in cliffs and streams and the etchings of eons and the death and rebirth of living things that are unique to this special blurp of spacetime - and that I am drawn here perennially because those strange loops now live in me. The Gorge was written itself into my consciousness, into my cognition, into my thinking. And emotions. And my spirit.
The Mother Goddess, as pagans address Her – Nature in all Her splendid, chaotic, perfectly-ordered glory – is the ultimate amalgam of strange loops, necessarily subsuming us and our groups and our pets and our ancestors and our spacetime blurps. She passes Her loops to us every day, and we absorb them as we are willing – and She responds, absorbing ours in turn: adjusting the flow of energy within Her to accommodate the family of mammals that overwandered; shifting the drift of Her waters when trees arise or grasses pull; enfolding the bones of one of Her children when their time comes in some lonely place.
No magic in these words, Gentle Reader, Uncle Scott remains the curmudgeonly empiricist he’s always been; my point is that Nature provides all the magic we could ever want or need, so no Supernature will ever be called for. My point is that the strange loop is the messaging within, the network of life that runs alongside the flow of energy between Her infinite domains, adding meaning to Her endless cycles. Meaning that defines us. And those creatures we let into our lives. And all other creatures besides.
Consciousness. Spirit. Life and love, not just person to person or person to pet or Uncle Scott to the Gorge, but planet-wide. A world alive. A conscious planet...
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