I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Strangely Wrong

I must suggest something blasphemously arrogant: Douglas Hofstadter has it wrong. My only justification for saying such an outrageous thing is that it doesn’t matter. Folk will go on taking Hofstadter seriously in any case. Nevertheless I have a valid objection which needs to be recorded. Enough, then, of self-referentiality.

Hofstadter’s teenage intuition got him started on the idea that there are degrees of souledness in the material world. Atoms (and presumably their constituent parts) have no souls; bacteria have very primitive, that is to say, very small souls; dogs have somewhat bigger souls; and human beings have much larger souls but even among those there is enormous variation and no logical upper limit to size. This of course is not an entirely novel intuition. It was shared by Ancient Greek philosophers, pre-industrial tribal groups, perhaps some Shinto sects, and St. Thomas Aquinas among others.

This idea of souledness is of course essentially a moral one. Hofstadter’s explicit intention is to provide a criterion by which he and his fellow human beings can decide how to act - in general the more soul, the more respect should be afforded to its bearer. Incidentally he is also developing a theory of consciousness, which is a correlate of soul.

But this is simply wrong. Hofstadter, from the very beginning of his exceptionally discursive argument, presumes that what he is doing is constructing a metric of souledness through which he can estimate the size of soul or degree of consciousness possessed by an entity.

This is, of course what scientists, and engineers, and husbands who are putting up curtains usually think they are doing when they measure something, namely determining what length, breadth, volume, color, texture, or other magnitude constitutes some entity of interest. The metric employed depends on the interest one has of course.

It is this interest one has, however, and not the molecule, or bridge, or curtain material, which ‘contains’ the result of any measurement. The choice of which metric to employ determines not how much of something is contained in an object but where that object sits in relation to other objects on the metric. The object is a property of the metric; the metric is definitely not a property of the object.

This distinction is crucial in light of Hofstadter’s fundamental motivation to provide a criteria for correct behaviour. The choice of metric is THE moral choice. The thing measured has no moral content at all - not people, not events, not inanimate objects. They are considered as moral (or tall, or wide, or disgusting) when we put them on the scale we have chosen.

The consequence is that Hofstader’s Strange Loop, the ‘I’ of consciousness, is not some objective entity, a logical ego which can be studied scientifically for its salient characteristics. This Strange Loop is literally a moral construction, a consequence of the very metric of souledness that Hofstader chooses. We, not just human beings but all that exists, have no soul whatsoever until someone like Hofstader, or Plato, or Thomas Aquinas comes along and sets up a criterion for assessing it. Then, hey voila, it’s there.

But it’s really not there as well. The mirage that Hofstadter writes about is that the things we measure have the characteristics that we measure. An innocuous self-delusion, except when it’s not. The metric he started with is the Strange Loop, hiding in plain sight, a ninja ego smirking behind his index finger with a Cheshire Cat grin. It was created when Hofstadter said it and someone else heard it. The Strange Loop is not ‘I’, it is ‘We’.

And so the Strange Loop exists in that very strange state we call language, being nowhere specific but lurking invisibly everywhere. This gives the Strange Loop the character of quantum uncertainty: it can be experienced and reflected upon, but never at the same time. Just like the metric of souledness, one of its many masks.

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