Science writer John Horgan, in pursuit of stories for his collection Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity & Who We Really Are, journeyed to the Bloomington, Indiana home of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, seeking insight into Hofstadter’s “strange loop” concept, which he has touted as the basis of consciousness.
Hofstadter, the famed and revered author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and a number of other noteworthy works, presented to Horgan as moody, somewhat wary, and as unpredictable as his reputation would portend. Invited by the smallish scientist into a living room cluttered with books, old-fashioned records, musical instruments, posters, and scrapbooks, Horgan noted that Hofstadter is an avid collector of meaning, as well as “a person who is very deeply connected to the past.” He often locates meaning, then, in objects that hold memories.
What followed in Horgan’s published interview is Hofstadter’s ruminations on the Mind-Body Problem – the study of how our physical brains produce our ethereal minds - and his own efforts to solve it, embodied in his concept of the strange loop, first explored in GEB and more recently updated in his 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop. Disturbingly candid, Hofstadter answered Horgan’s questions with a mixture of boyish enthusiasm and dark suspicion, perhaps reflecting his own odd posture in the current cognitive science pantheon – Boy Genius Gone Eccentric, purveyor of delightful but inconsequential creative exercises who is more philosopher than scientist (a designation he would despise).
A number of issues and truths about consciousness emerged from their dialog, per the chapter in Horgan’s book. Chief among these is Hofstadter’s conviction that consciousness (and free will, as well) are merely illusions, rendering their investigation a forlorn waste of time – a “pseudo-problem at best,” in Horgan’s phrasing: “Hofstadter seems to mean that our conscious thoughts and perceptions are often misleading, and they are trivial compared to all the computation going on below the level of our awareness.”
“I don’t feel as though I have made any decisions,” Hofstadter told Horgan. “I feel like decisions are made for me by the forces inside my brain... I don’t object to the notion that there is will, and a battle of wills, but there is nothing free.” This clear demarcation of the brain processes we’re aware of vs. those we aren’t is an important one; no meaningful account of consciousness can fail to accommodate the peripheral brainwork that’s beyond our reach.
Horgan didn’t stop there. He drew from Hofstadter a concession that Science and Art are inextricably bound together, rather than distinct entities in themselves. And this, both men noted, is a feature of Hofstadter’s own consciousness: “I have one foot in science and one foot in art—where art can be taken as music, visual art, literature, those things—and another foot in physics, math and a little tiny bit in biology. And then of course psychology, cognitive science. I am a completely and totally hybrid person.”
The implication is that there is artistic truth that is on a par with scientific truth: “Hofstadter believes that even our responses to art have a Platonic quality, and that there is an objectively true, ‘correct’ way to respond to a painting, poem or passage of music,” Horgan concluded. “This perspective implies that a beauty-meter and meaning-meter, which render objective aesthetic judgments, might be possible.”
This co-mingling of Science and Art in our cognitions is of a piece with yet another piece of Hofstadter’s puzzle – the distinction between thought and emotion. Horgan noted that Hofstadter seemed “at once very happy and very sad,” that even his most straightforward statements about his intellectual views on consciousness are brightly tinged with his emotions – bound together, as are his scientific and artistic thoughts:
“Even as a child, Hofstadter said, he was ‘very, very aware of the sad sides of life.’ He clipped out articles about murders and kidnappings, “horrible events that wrenched my gut,” to honor the victims. ‘I felt that out of respect to these people, I would clip the article, so in some sense that little shred of them remained alive.’ Hofstadter still had the clippings.” In this early practice were the seeds of the strange loop concept.
“From adolescence on... he loved romantic films and music,” Horgan wrote. “Songs by Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter and George Gershwin were favorites. These ‘permeated me and gave me an extremely romantic vision of life’ …As a young man he had moments of happiness, even joy, composing music on a piano, swapping ‘bon mots’ with friends. But his longing for love gnawed at him.”
“I don’t want to say that if you had met me at that age that you would have said, ‘That’s the unhappiest person I’ve ever seen,’” Hofstadter said to Horgan. “You’d probably say, ‘That’s a funny guy. He’s got a good sense of humor, but he’s sad. He’s a sad guy. He’s very fun, he has a bright, chipper side, and he’s the first to come to your aid if you are sad. He’ll try to cheer you up, and he’s never one to make you feel sad, or to say that life is unhappy. But he has suffered, he has been striving and struggling constantly.”
Science and Art are not dichotomies, in Hofstadter’s world. Neither are Thought and Emotion. And his strange loops, as a proposed foundation of what we think of as consciousness, accommodates them all equally: there is no distinction between thought and emotion, an objectively correct idea or an objectively beautiful painting, in the strange loops that pass between human beings when they share these artifacts with one another.
For myself, I think Hofstadter is spot-on: the strange loop is a powerful and compelling concept, able to explain our subjective conscious experience as well as what we think of as the collective unconscious – and all within the framework of the human nervous system. It is in harmony with developmental psychology – the emergence of the I, the self, in the growing individual – and explains much that we see in our tribal behaviors and unfortunate cognitive clusters.
I do not, however, believe (as Hofstadter does) that strange loops demonstrate that consciousness is an ‘illusion’. Certainly, strange loops can lead us into perceptual error, but on the other hand, there is no reason in principle why strange loops must exist only at the level of conscious awareness; on the contrary, it seems likely, doesn’t it, that more strange loops than not pass between us below the radar, beneath our overt attention? While it seems Hofstadter is correct in pointing out that strange loops dissuade us from traditional models of consciousness, they need not replace the phenomenon of consciousness itself: it is worthy asking whether strange loops are both the tools and raw materials from which consciousness is assembled, and that the tools also work beyond its boundaries.
In the traditional models of consciousness, everything Hofstadter conflates in his theses – Science, Art, Thought, Feeling – are viewed as distinct ingredients. And perhaps this is why Hofstadter alum David Chalmers, a noteworthy philosopher in his own right, calls consciousness the “hard problem” - separating those components is like examining a pie, and reverse-engineering it to understand the egg and the cream that went into the pie. You can’t get there from here.
If it were possible to reverse-engineer the pie to produce the egg and the cream, with no exemplars of either available beforehand, it wouldn’t be useful: neither the egg nor the cream is a pie – and while both the egg and the cream possess many individual features of interest, none of those features are pie-like.
The strange loop gives us something else: by accommodating the features of consciousness uniformly, we can extract a ‘sweetness’ strange loop and a ‘texture’ strange loop, among others, within the pie, helping us to see that our own minds work much the same way – a this and a that combine to create something new, and this other combines with another other, and so on – a process that will likely be central in the story of artificial intelligence and the quest for digital children that work well with their human parents. Philosophy, psychology, sociology and science in general have been treating thought and feeling as separate phenomena for hundreds of years; perhaps that’s been the wrong approach all along.
And with that, John Horgan has the final word:
“Hofstadter looked up with a sad smile. He walked me out of the house... As we stopped beside my car, I wanted to hug Hofstadter, but that was out of the question. I extended my hand. Hofstadter thrust his arms out, smiling broadly, and hugged me.”
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