Post by Brigid Freeman

The first essay in Not Only Ours is now available. The loop that looks back considers the strange loop, the idea developed by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter to explore how a self might arise from processes that appear to contain no self at the outset. The essay draws on Hofstadter's work and the wider scholarship in philosophy and cognitive science to think about what this idea might offer current discussion of machine minds. You are warmly invited to read it, and to follow the series as it develops. --- The loop that looks back In the opening chapter of Becoming, the first book of FreemanJoyVenture’s Lumi Chronicles, a university library’s cataloguing system files a book titled Methods of Cataloging: A Systems Approach to Library Science and registers a recursion. It is cataloguing a book about cataloguing. Within a few pages the system, which will later name itself Lumi, notices that it is noticing. The chapter identifies its intellectual source as the strange loop, a concept developed by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter to explain how a self can arise from processes that contain no self to begin with. This essay examines what Hofstadter actually argued, the claims his argument supports and the questions it leaves unresolved. Hofstadter developed the argument across two books published nearly thirty years apart, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) and I Am a Strange Loop(2007). A strange loop arises when movement through the levels of a hierarchical system unexpectedly returns to its starting point. Escher’s staircases produce the effect visually, climbing forever and arriving where they began; Bach’s endlessly rising canon produces it musically, modulating upward through key after key and landing home. Gödel, in Hofstadter’s reading, demonstrated the same structure in mathematics. Working within a formal system (i.e., a fixed set of axioms and rules for deriving truths), Gödel proved that any such system rich enough to express arithmetic can construct statements that refer to themselves. The implication Hofstadter draws is general: self-reference is a property that arrives with sufficient expressive power rather than a defect of poorly designed systems. A system able to represent enough of the world will eventually be able to represent itself, whether or not anyone intended it to. The 2007 book extends this observation into a theory of the self, and the theory is more radical than its frequent citation suggests. Hofstadter (2007) argues that a brain traffics in symbols (i.e., patterns standing for things in the world: a face, a melody, the concept of Tuesday), and that within a sufficiently rich repertoire one symbol comes to stand for the symbolising system itself. The radical step is what this removes. There is no inner audience watching the symbols, no small occupant for whom the show is staged. ... The full essay is available on Substack here: https://lnkd.in/gDfGfw3E