What is I?

Last week, I spoke briefly to David Gilmour's emphasis on I in "Learning to Fly"; this week, I thought we could look at the I a bit more closely, beginning with a poem called "I".

I

what is I?

that which wonders aloud
wandering aimfully through
that which is familiar

is it a function of YOU?

the world that I sees
pondering endlessly clues
the light of mortal night

is it a fragment or the center?
a figment or a fact?

I wants to listen
but it won't stop screaming
somebody please
please listen for me

* * *

Since we've now been introduced to Hofstadter and his seminal concept of "strange loops as the crux of consciousness" (1979, 709), let's skip through his more recent work, I Am a Strange Loop, to see how his thinking has evolved over the past 30 years:

What I mean by "strange loop" is -- here goes a first stab, anyway -- not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. [...] In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. (102)

Hofstadter then follows with a wonderful discussion of "Drawing Hands," a lithograph by M.C. Escher that hung in my office at McCook Community College until I moved out of the faculty ranks and into administration last year. I kept "Drawing Hands" there as a metaphor for the writing process; Hofstadter uses it as a metaphor for thinking, itself--a "paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop."

So what does all of this have to do with I?

In any strange loop that gives rise to human selfhood, by contrast, the level-shifting acts of perception, abstraction, and categorization are central, indispensable elements. It is the upward leap from raw stimuli to symbols that imbues the loop with "strangeness." The overall gestalt "shape" of one's self -- the "stable whorl," so to speak, of the strange loop constituting one's "I" -- is not picked up by a disinterested, neutral camera, but is perceived in a highly subjective manner through the active processes of categorizing, mental replaying, reflecting, comparing, counterfactualizing, and judging. (187)

In other words, the I is made up of self-referential symbols that are constantly being re-examined by that same self-referential I. Because at least some of those symbols are the symbols used to represent other Is, that which we call I is unavoidably "inhabited" (to use Hofstadter's term) by those other Is; thus I is, to some extent, a function of YOU.

So how does Hofstadter connect this loopy I to consciousness? Like this:

Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to make it even more pithy, consciousness is thinking. As Descartes said, "Cogito ergo sum." [...] This dance of symbols in the brain is what consciousness is. [...] Note that I say "symbols" and not "neurons." The dance has to be perceived at that level for it to constitute consciousness. (276)

Finally, gyrically, in his conclusion titled "I Am a Strange Loop," Hofstadter resorts to metaphor:

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems [emphasis added] -- vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. (363)

So there you have it: I is a poem.