The Hindu Business Line : We humans are `unpredictable self-writing poems'

A one-letter word that fills our brains all the time is I. It is `the realest thing in the world' for each human being, and `the most complex symbol in the brain,' says Douglas Hofstadter in `I am a Strange Loop' (www.landmarkonthe net.com).

The book is `a gigantic salad bowl full of metaphors and analogies,' he writes in the intro. The author, a specialist in `thinking about thinking', is a teacher who has spent nearly three decades with graduate students `exploring all sorts of aspects of words, idioms, languages and translation'.

Aiming his work at the general educated public, he asks simple questions. Such as these in a chapter `on souls and their sizes': "Does a baby lamb have a soul that matters, or is the taste of lamb chops just too delicious to worry one's head over that?" He wonders, "Do grasshoppers and mosquitoes and even bacteria have a tiny little `light on' inside, no matter how dim, or is it all dark `in there'?" What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words, he demands?

To find answers, Hofstadter explores the brain's large-scale architecture rather than doing a fine-grained analysis of its building blocks. No different from car buyers, who "don't think about the physics of protons and neutrons or the chemistry of alloys, but concentrate instead on high abstractions such as comfort, safety, fuel efficiency, manoeuvrability, sexiness, and so forth."

Hofstadter discovers explanation for the strangely looping back `I', in Kurt Gödel's `Principia Mathematica'. Indexical such as I is "a simple, natural consequence of an unexpected isomorphism." Gödel, for starters, was the first to realise that the positive integers "though they might superficially seem to be very austere and isolated, in fact constitute a profoundly rich representational medium. They can mimic or mirror any kind of pattern."

If that eludes comprehension, move to a chapter titled `the elusive apple of my I' and take a random walk "through and everyday kind of mental space" to notice that "our keenest insights into causality in the often terribly confusing world of living beings invariably result from well-honed acts of categorisation at a macroscopic level." We swim in the world of everyday concepts, and it is they, not micro-events, that define our reality, says the author.

I, thus, "encapsulates so neatly and so efficiently for us what we perceive to be truly important aspects of causality in the world." We cannot therefore help attributing reality to our "I", the highest possible level of reality. But there is a flip side - "our inability to see, feel, or sense in any way the constant, frenetic churning and roiling of micro-stuff, all the unfelt bubbling and boiling that underlies our thinking."

We are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages, and little miracles of self-reference, Hofstadter declares. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding the very nature; we humans are more like rainbows than boulders. "Unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful... "

For a contemplative read.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in