#12 - “The Pattern
Dear Reader,
when my son was born, his eyes did not look at anything. They were open, they moved, they registered light well enough that he would turn his head toward the window, but if you leaned over him and searched for contact, the gaze slid through you and past you, the way a camera pans across a room without settling on any of it. A newborn sees maybe thirty centimeters of blurred world, and the machinery for fixing something in place, for electing one piece of the visual field and holding it, takes months to come online.
Then at some point, and I could not tell you the week, the gaze materialized. There was suddenly someone behind it. He caught my eyes and held them, and something in the quality of the holding made it unmistakable that this was no longer light and shadow passing over a retina, that he was looking at me, and that there was now a place in him from which the looking was done.
What had arrived kept building itself in front of us. His hands, which had spent weeks drifting past his face like objects belonging to the room, became his hands, instruments he could send somewhere on purpose. He discovered pointing. And much later he said “I” for the first time, and meant himself, and meant by it something that had not existed a year earlier.
I write a monthly letter about consciousness, so I will admit that I did not always manage to watch this purely as a father, but sometimes also as a researcher. I watched a self assemble itself in my house, gradually and then suddenly, out of parts that were all present from the beginning. Something shut like a circuit in those months. This letter is about what that something is made of. I have three answers on my desk, and they contradict each other, and one of them I am not reading about but practicing, a hundred days at a time.
I started with Hofstadter.
🜏
Douglas Hofstadter became famous for a book whose central argument, he later complained, many readers missed. Gödel, Escher, Bach won him a Pulitzer in 1980 and a reputation as a playful genius of puzzles and fugues. So in 2007 he tried again with I Am a Strange Loop, a more direct account of the idea he had been working on all along, and the book I have been reading this month.
The idea begins with a piece of mathematics. In the early twentieth century, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead built a logical system called the Principia Mathematica, designed to place arithmetic on foundations strict enough to exclude paradox. Self-reference was a particular problem: sentences that talk about themselves had been causing trouble for logicians for centuries, and the system was designed to keep them out. In 1931 Kurt Gödel showed that a system powerful enough to express basic arithmetic could also encode statements about itself. The capacity for self-reference was already there in the arithmetic.
Hofstadter takes this idea from logic to the brain. An individual neuron carries no more meaning than a number does, but together they form a system that spends every waking hour building internal symbols for things: faces, words, dangers, the smell of a specific stairwell in childhood. In his account, a system this rich in symbols eventually forms one for the thing doing the symbolizing. Among the concepts a growing brain lays down, one develops for the system itself, and everything that happens gets filed in relation to it. Perceptions happen to me, decisions are made by me, and over years the brain organizes more and more of its activity around this self-model. The brain produces a symbol that in turn helps steer the brain maintaining it. Hofstadter calls this arrangement a strange loop, and identifies it with the self.
The pattern holds together because activity keeps flowing through it and returning to it. Meditating according to the the Golden Flower practice in the mornings, I have started to wonder about the resemblance to its instruction to turn the light around. I keep coming back to this circle, although I am still unsure how far the comparison goes.
Hofstadter describes reaching into a box holding a hundred envelopes and feeling a marble in the middle of the stack, round and hard and unmistakably there. Each envelope is flat paper, but their stacked glue seams produce something his fingers recognize as a marble. The self, he says, works like that. Search the brain layer by layer and you find no resident, which reminded me of the Buddhist analyses in my sixth letter. Hofstadter tries to account for why we feel someone there anyway, and why that feeling has real consequences. A stock market crash is real in much the same way, even though you cannot locate it in a single transaction.
Two parts of the book resonated with me the most. The first is the idea that selfhood comes in degrees, depending on the richness of the self-model. Hofstadter's scale runs from the mosquito through the dog to the adult human, with no clear boundary where a self suddenly appears. He follows this through to the uncomfortable claim that a newborn human has less self than a grown dog. Having spent the past three years watching my son and also being a dog keeper, I read that differently than I would have before. I recognize the gradual development he describes, and the moment his eyes first held mine was when something that had been developing for weeks became visible to me.
The other part concerns his wife Carol, who died abruptly in 1993, when their children were five and two. In the later chapters he tries to understand what remains of her in him. If a self is a pattern, he argues, it need not be confined to the skull where it first developed. After years of shared life, a version of Carol's loop was running in his own brain: her way of seeing, her tastes and objections, the voice he could still hear completing his sentences. He is careful about how much survives. This is a partial, reduced version of Carol, and he knows what it cannot replace. Still, he takes seriously the possibility that some of her patterns continue to act through him, as they had already done while she was alive.
This has consequences for the machines I want to write about next month. If a self develops wherever a system becomes capable of this kind of self-representation, then it could in principle develop on other hardware. Hofstadter accepts that possibility. The process I watched in my son would belong to a much wider category than I am used to thinking about.
I find this harder to accept when I think about what happens in my art studio.
🜏
Some nights the work starts before I have any idea what to paint. There is a pressure behind the sternum, an unrest I cannot put into a sentence, which reading will not settle and conversation only irritates. I go upstairs, put something loud (currently mostly synthetic and from the eighties) on the speakers/headphones and work standing, letting my arms get on with something I have been unable to think my way through.
In the letter about my first exhibition, I wrote that the work deals with parts of my story that needed a language before I had words for them. Certain things seem to live in my body without being available to the speaking part of me, and painting is the most reliable way I have found of getting at them. Sometimes I leave the studio lighter, with a painting that holds something I still could not explain to you. It does not always work. I call the process catalyzing, for lack of a better word, because the canvas seems to make a change possible that I cannot bring about by thinking or talking.
This is where I struggle with the portability of Hofstadter's pattern. Machines generate images by the millions, some technically beyond anything my hands will ever manage, but I cannot see what would make such a system need to paint. I know what brings me into the studio: something has been accumulating, sometimes since childhood, and I need to do something with it. Readers of the ninth and tenth letters will remember Damasio's patients, who could reason but struggled to decide after losing access to their bodily feelings, and Navarro's suspects, whose feet gave away what their faces concealed. I keep thinking about those examples when I try to imagine a self running independently of a body. In my own experience, sensation, memory and thought are so entangled that I cannot tell what would survive the separation.
My next exhibition will take place in a BDSM club. I only gradually understood how closely the setting fits the work. Pain in those rooms is negotiated, bounded by rules, stopped by an agreed word and followed by care. Most of what I have painted has been an attempt to process pain I never consented to, and I wanted to show it in a place where consent matters so explicitly. The exhibition is called No Safeword Outside These Walls. Thinking about it this month, I realized how much the title assumes about a self: a body, a nervous system, the possibility of being overwhelmed. I find it difficult to imagine what any of that means to an intelligence without flesh.
I still cannot settle this. If the body is the hardware on which the loop runs, it might be replaceable. If bodily experience is part of what makes the loop, then a self without it would be a different kind of thing, however familiar its language sounded. I trust what happens in the studio, but I also know how much that trust comes from being unable to imagine myself without a body.
The third book on my desk proposes that consciousness depends on something received from outside, and that this may have happened more than once.
🜏
Daimonosophy was written under the name Sakaki 4 by the same man whose manual guides my morning practice. It is the handbook of a small esoteric order he founded, which grew out of the tradition (temple of Set) I wrote about in the eighth letter. Much of it follows Gurdjieff's Fourth Way, with its practices of self-observation and crystallization, in a darker vocabulary. Like Second Awakening, it is largely practical. Two chapters depart from that and explore ideas the author seems drawn to but presents tentatively, and those are the ones I want to discuss here.
In the first, he proposes an exercise: set aside the image of Set (as in the egyptian god) as a god with intentions and imagine an extremely fine substance that accelerates consciousness when it enters a sufficiently developed organism. He reads the name through three Latin and Greek components, Substantia, Energia, Telos. The last, purpose, is what makes the substance non-natural in his terms, since he argues that directed purpose requires a mind to receive and use it. He relates it to Gurdjieff's hanbledzoin, Reich's orgone, chi and prana, but adds that the supply is finite. There is simply not enough to go around, he writes, which is why the path he teaches will always be a minority affair. I find this difficult to reconcile with Hofstadter, for whom a sufficiently rich system can produce a self from its own activity. Here it depends on receiving something the organism cannot produce for itself.
The next chapter asks when such an intervention might have happened. The author begins with stories running from the Garden of Eden and the Yellow Emperor, child of dragons, to von Däniken's ancient astronauts and Sitchin's twelfth planet. He treats them as versions of a recurring suspicion that something intervened in our development. I am interested in why we keep telling that story, and the chapter gives me a way to think about it without having to accept any of these accounts as evidence.
His own version splits the intervention in two. The first, more than a hundred thousand years ago, would have brought the flame of consciousness. In his reading of the anthropology, humans then spent tens of millennia as largely peaceful, social and creative beings, a period he hears remembered in Eden. The second intervention comes around four thousand BCE, when, in his account, large populations begin working within elaborate systems for the benefit of a few. He sets the modest earthen graves of pre-dynastic Egypt against the pyramids built for individual rulers, and places institutionalized warfare, sexual repression and the teaching of guilt in the same period. These arrangements seem so contrary to ordinary human desires that he imagines them being imposed from outside, with Babel as the myth that remembers it. As history, I do not find this defensible. The anthropology is selective and the change made to look far too sudden. What interests me is the attempt to account for the difference between Eden and Babel, between receiving consciousness and becoming subject to systems we would struggle to choose willingly. I can recognize that tension without believing in either intervention.
The conclusion has been sitting in my notes for weeks: if it happened once, it can happen again. In this cosmology, further interventions remain possible.
I have ended up with three accounts of how a self develops: through the growth of a sufficiently rich self-model, through something received from outside, or through sustained practice. The last is the one I can work with personally, turning the light around for a hundred days and then another hundred. They also suggest different possibilities for machines. If Hofstadter is right, increasing their capacity for self-representation might eventually be enough. In the substance model, complexity alone cannot supply the missing ingredient. And if selfhood has to be cultivated, I would want to know whether a machine could sustain that work, and what would make it want to begin. Reading these books has made me less certain which account I believe.
I also keep returning to the distinction between the two interventions, one that expands a creature's possibilities and another that subjects it to control. It is hard to read that now without thinking about AI. Next month I want to put that question, along with the others this series has gathered, directly to the machine.
There is one more quality I would want to ask it about, though I have had to work out for myself what I mean by it.
🜏
I have been avoiding the word wisdom for eleven letters, mostly because it makes me think of beards, mountaintops and framed quotations. I have also not read the empirical literature on it, so what follows is a working definition drawn from my own experience.
Wisdom, as far as I can tell, is the distillate of processed experience. I know men my age who have been through extraordinary things and seem to have learned very little from them. Going through something does not mean you have understood it, and finding out what it has done to you can take years, in therapy, on long walks or lying awake at four in the morning. Sometimes the result is a thought so familiar that you can no longer remember how long it took to arrive at it.
I co-own a small whiskey distillery with my best friend, on a farmstead we bought together, and I often think about this when I’m there. The spirit changes over years of contact with the wood. Some of it evaporates along the way, the angels' share, so that there is less in the barrel by the time it has matured. Making the alcohol is only the beginning of the process. You still have to leave it there, and I find that hard to accept in my own life too, how much time can pass before an experience becomes something I understand.
Readers of the tenth letter may remember what my other friend told me at a campfire in Canada, about the first reaction and the half-second that follows it. The first comes from habits and responses we did not choose. In the second, we sometimes have a little room to decide what to do. That is where I would look for wisdom in a person, including myself. My demons are still there, and I know how easily calm can be induced chemically. What has changed is that I can sometimes feel a reaction coming and have enough time to consider it before I act. The hours spent working through what happened to me, in therapy rooms and on cushions and in front of canvases, seem to have helped make that possible.
For a decade I had plenty of knowledge and very little of that room. The young man at the business class bar in the eleventh letter had read a lot of philosophy already, could argue a position, and knew in the abstract what excess and emptiness could do to a person. I knew all of that and carried on anyway. I have tried to imagine what I could have told him that would have made a difference, and I still do not know. That is an awkward thing to admit when I spend so much time writing these letters.
The machine I intend to question has been trained on more writing than I could read in a lifetime, including accounts of loss and the attempts people have made to understand it. It can draw on those accounts with extraordinary fluency. I want to know whether anything in it corresponds to that half-second I have been describing, whether it has ever had something at stake in an experience. A self-model, a body or a closed loop might conceivably be engineered. I am less sure what it would mean to engineer wisdom, if the understanding depends on having lived through something yourself. That is the difficulty I want to carry into the conversation.
One letter remains in this arc.
- Transmission Sent -