I’ve been reading an old issue of Seed (March 2007), in which you’ll find an essay by Douglas Hofstadter adapted from his latest book, I Am a Strange Loop. The piece features (for anyone looking for one) an engaging and clear explanation of Gödel’s discovery of incompleteness theorems showing inherent and unavoidable limitations of any formal system. The theorems demonstrate that you can never have both consistency and completeness in a system adequate for arithmetic. Hofstadter wants to use this sort of discovery to illustrate the idea of feedback loops, and especially what he calls “strange loops”–feedback loops that operate on different levels of reality (i.e., exhibit “level-crossing”). A visual representation of such a strange loop would be M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands (shown below).
The “I” that each of us is is the effect of such strange loops, says Hofstadter, between the particle/neuronal level and higher-order levels of consciousness and desire (and external stimuli, as well, in turn operating on various levels of reality). Generally, I think Hofstadter is right about all this.
The problem I have with the article is in how he (and not only he) views the upshot of this way of looking at things. Allow me to jump into his exposition:
Everyone wonders, “Am I attractive? Smart? Kind? Funny? Brave? Deserving?” and so on. Over a lifetime, we try to answer such questions. Using feedback from the outside world, we gradually build up a self-model that, though coarse-grained, is fairly accurate. Among its chief features is that we know we want certain things, and our desires cause us to do certain things.
If, however, you see a human as a collection of elementary particles, there’s no room for desires–there are only laws of physics, pushing particles around. And yet desires seem to coexist smoothly with particles. Desires do cause things to happen! [...] How can mere abstractions shove solid bodies around?
It’s a sleight of hand. Desires are complex patters involving an incalculable number of particles, so that whenever we think we’re talking about desires, we’re actually talking indirectly about scads of particles. To talk about desires as if they existed is a shorthand. When you come down to it, so is talking about apples as if they existed. In a sense, apples don’t exist–all that exists is particles and their interactions.
“Sleight of hand,” “as if,” “shorthand,” “shortcut descriptions”–this kind of talk tends to forget its use “in a sense,” as Hofstadter himself puts it.
My proposal is as follows: what exists are apples (among many, many other things). Talk of particles, systems, feedback loops, etc., is longhand for apples (for instance). What there is is apples, but we can speak of them as if they were just masses of particles, etc., if we have particular pragmatic reasons to take this long-cut to apples–which are, simply, there. I like apples. I eat one every day. Keeps the physician away…but not necessarily the metaphysician and or the scientist. But my primary ontological commitment is to the apple, without which there’d be no science of apples (appleology? malusology?); and without apples and other material things like them, no physics; and without the existence of all that is, no metaphysics.
In a similar vein, I will opt to start out with persons as an element of my basic ontological commitment, reserving the right always to take any longhand view that serves my (or our) personal interests (which also hold a place in my preferred ontology).
In saying that there are apples (and persons), I am not saying that there are not atoms and other particles. There are atoms and particles just like there are apple parts and apple bits: seeds, stem, skin, slices, etc. In fact, you can chop up an apple and have loads of apple bits, chop those bits and have loads of apple-bit bits, chop those (really, really finely) to get apple chemistry, molecules, atoms, etc. And, yes, at some point it would be plausible to say that the “appleness” of the thing goes away. But none of that implies that there are “not really” apples, as Hofstadter and all my elementary school textbooks seem to want to tell me. How are we going to get to the hard cases of ontology (sets, classes, universals, literary fictions, numbers, etc.) if we go so badly off the rails from the get-go?
In fact, it would be my contention that the hard cases would not come up, or would not seem hard if they did, were there not, fundamentally, apples.