Zen Physics

I'm a dualist -- can't help it, always have been -- no matter how eloquently Hofstadter tells me that I am a strange loop. And I just don't buy the bit about reincarnation. I've studied reincarnation from every angle, and it has simply never made sense to me.

Until now, that is.

I recently opened David Darling's 1996 book titled Zen Physics: The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation prepared to defeat any and all of his arguments in support of reincarnation, but then he goes and blindsides me with this:

We are the products of our life stories. [...] So, inevitably, a lot of what we remember is not what actually happened--whatever this may mean--but rather a kind of myth or confabulation that helps us sustain the impression that we know what is going on. [...] We maintain a sense of continuity and so provide a basis for our feeling of personal identity at the cost of never knowing what is true. We are as much a myth as the stories we tell ourselves. (35-36)

This makes perfect sense from a Campbellian perspective, and from there Darling continues to chip away at every wall of incredulity. He goes on to show how the brain is a memory device, nothing more, and certainly not the source of consciousness as Hofstadter would contend. It is, in fact, a filter that limits our awareness of the singular consciousness that is the universe at large. Moreover, the brain seems to have a built-in storyteller that puts everything (i.e., the insignificant amount of data actually processed and stored by the brain) into a "single coherent narrative." With a nod to Hua-Yen Buddhism and Indra's Net of Gems, Darling advances into a discussion of Zen and quantum mechanics to show how upon death we will each undergo secular reincarnation into a new and previously unknown example of fragmented consciousness, each with a new story to tell.

If all the world's a stage, then the universe must be a multiplex theatre.

Maybe God's just a film buff.

The Myth Known as Elizabeth Edwards Prepares for Life after Life

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Life after Life

In previous posts, we have noted that consciousness is a matter of recursive symbol processing in the brain. One of the most important symbols will be the one named I; moreover, as Hofstadter puts it, "your brain is inhabited to varying extents by other I's, other souls" (Hofstadter, 2007, p 248). The more faithfully your own consciousness represents and resonates with that of another soul, another I, the more affinity you are likey to share with that other soul.

And an affinity of souls means that the people concerned can rapidly come to know each other's essences, have great potential to live inside each other. (250)

So, what becomes of a soul after the physical body has died? For myself, that remains to be seen, but at minimum, the soul lives on within the consciousness of every other soul it has inhabited, or as Hofstadter puts it:

When the sun is eclipsed, there remains a corona surrounding it, a circumferential glow. When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them. (258)

Their myth--the story that gives so much meaning to the souls that they inhabit--lives on.

A Fractal Theory of Literature

Assumption: poetry consists of sound and sense.

The sound is that of a beating heart.

The sense is one of yearning to return.

I Am a Myth

As I reviewed Hofstadter last week, I enjoyed rereading another of his Platonic dialogues, "A Courteous Crossing of Words," this one between SL #641--a believer in the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop--and SL #642--a doubter of the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop:

SL #641: Earlier, I described your "I" as a self-reinforcing structure and a self-reinforcing story, but now I'll risk annoying you by calling it a self-reinforcing myth [emphasis is Hofstadter's].

SL #642: A myth?! I'm certainly not a myth, and I'm here to tell you so. (291)

SL #641 then explains itself this way:

The "I" -- yours, mine, everyone's -- is a tremendously effective illusion, and falling for it has fantastic survival value. Our "I"'s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life. (291)

Such dramatic language would seem to invite literary support, but first we find support from another take on the physics of thought -- Zen Physics:

We are the products of our life stories. [...] So, inevitably, a lot of what we remember is not what actually happened--whatever this may mean--but rather a kind of myth or confabulation that helps us sustain the impression that we know what is going on. [...] We maintain a sense of continuity and so provide a basis for our feeling of personal identity at the cost of never knowing what is true. We are as much a myth as the stories we tell ourselves. (Darling, 1996, 35-36)

Darling goes on to assert that "[t]he brain, in effect, appears to have a resident storyteller that works ceaselessly to link everything that comes to its attention into a single coherent narrative" (87).

A single coherent narrative. A myth. A monomyth. That's what Joyce called it in Finnegans Wake, and it would become the basis of Joseph Campbell's concept of the hero's journey:

The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation--initiation--return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. (Campbell, 1949, 30)

Separation--initiation--return. We do it over and over; furthermore, we remember each iteration and use it to inform the next iteration of the set of strange loops we call life. And the lifestory that we construct becomes a myth with a single protagonist: I.

So what is myth?

For Marshall McLuhan, myth "is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects" (McLuhan, 1962, 266). This "complex group of causes and effects" is simply another way to express strange loops of separation--initiation--return; therefore, McLuhan's definition of myth would certainly support both Darling and Hofstadter. But James P. Carse gives us, perhaps, the most concrete definition of myth:

Myths [...] are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings" (Carse, 1986).

Without myth, life would have no meaning. That is why I am a myth.

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.

Genesis Revisited

This blog takes its name from the driving force behind Frank Herbert's early novel, Destination: Void (see "Chapter 1", below), but for me, personally, the real motivator in pursuing this blog is to reproduce the group project that I require of my students while reading Herbert's novel in my online Science Fiction class. The assignment is to collaboratively describe consiousness using Herbert's novel as the primary source, but giving free rein to source discovery beyond that. Here is one of the best examples of that effort: Earthling 8. By the time I wrote last week's entry on "Learning to Fly," I had completely forgotten that Earthling 8 had leaned so heavily on Pink Floyd for their inspiration, but I'm sure it was still bouncing around in my brain somewhere. Thank you, crew!

In addition to requiring Herbert as the primary source, I always kick off the project with a quote from Doug Hofstadter in which he introduces his concept of consciousness as a strange loop:

My belief is that the explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our brains--for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will--are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the top level. [...] The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself. (Godel, Escher, Bach, 709).

This resonating recursion is fundamental to much of W.B. Yeats' gyrical poetry and philosophy, but I think it is nowhere more clearly shown than in Ted Kooser's brilliant "Skater".

Project Consciousness is just like that.