Reflection: Who am 'I'?

I have recently finished the book I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, and as I have written before, it has prompted and interested me in the world of philosophy and cognitive science. So here I have dedicated a blog on my own thoughts and reflections that I had after I read about Hofstadter's. As my thoughts are often quite unorganized and goes in many different directions, so will this short essay be. I have tried my best to organize my thoughts as they are, but come nowhere close to the coherence and clarity of one such as Hofstadter. I hope, though, in the future, to be able to think and organize my own thoughts to a degree like him.

Before I start the reflection, I would like to say that the thoughts that I have, in many ways, collide and do not agree with Hofstadter's, and my understanding of Hofstadter's view also rests at a rather shallow level, so don't take what I say for granted.

His entire book is focused on reflecting and trying to explain his understanding and grasp of the "I". The "I" that we call ourselves that is abstract and general. He attempts to answer many questions during this book, such as how the "I" is formed in our brain, to what extent do animals have an "I", what becomes of an "I" after death, etc. These are answered through careful explanation and analogies. The biggest one that the whole book is built on is the strange loop. He first describes things such as feedback loops from cameras, loops from mirrors, etc. But these loops were not strange loops—they were just loops. What was a strange loop, then? Here, I won't try to summarize what he illustrated throughout his entire book. What I can say from what I understood, was that once the human brain, made of symbols created from thousands of neurons and molecules, was complex enough for a certain type of self-reference, as the same can be said for complex and consistent arithmetical/logical systems, which he describes through Kurt Gödel's finding of Principia Mathematica (PM). Kurt Gödel found, through his incomplete theorem, that any consistent system, such as PM, will be incomplete, because it will not be able to prove that it itself is consistent. I won't go into the exact mechanics, as I have not grasped it fully, but it works as propositions or statement that refer to both the basic math and logic, but also symbolic systems that represent the basic math and logic. Here, I will summarize how Hofstadter explains it in the book. If Kurt Gödel's formula, which states about it self that it is unprovable, is provable in the PM, then what the formula tells us is that it is wrong about it self. So if the formula is provable, then the formula has to be wrong. But since PM is a consistent system, it cannot prove a false statement, so this situation is not possible as it leads us to a conclusion that PM is inconsistent, which cannot be true. Now we approach the opposite: the formula is not provable. If that is the case, we can conclude that the formula is true, but it is not provable.

Phew! That was a long paragraph. I hope you can see the similarity this strange loop has with that of our "I". We know that our "I" is there, and we can reference it, but we cannot physically prove that it is there. It is part of what he is trying to say is that once, as a human, we develop a system that is complex enough and consistent enough, we are capable of self-reference just like a complex system in math or logic. That above was just my interpretation of Hofstadter's thoughts as he presented them in the book. Hopefully I did not get them wrong.

Next I come to some of my own thoughts and reflections. Now, I come to my own thoughts on the "I". First, I will pose a few questions that I have, and then, I will attempt to answer these questions. These questions have been heavily influenced by other systems and claims that I have learned, mostly from Buddhism. Here, don't take Buddhism as a religion, but as something to learn about, because they have developed a system of explaining the "I" and the world just as well as Hofstadter. I am learning their teachings as well as Hofstadter and more modern theories. Buddhism teachings, are, in many ways, contrary to those of Hofstadter, yet they also have some similarities. I will not start to write about them here, as I feel I have not learned enough to comment or summarize up their views. However, below, I have listed some questions I have had and the answers I have attempted to give them. Both my answers and questions are quite distant from Hofstadter's, yet they reflect my own opinion and view on these topics, and Buddhism's teachings have also had great influence on them.

1. My first question is: does thought actually happen in the cranium? I agree that the brain is capable of receiving sensory data and sending out signals and commands to the body, but does it make up the thoughts and emotions that we have? So far no one has been able to find how the tiny neurons and molecules make up what we call an ‘I’. Theories like Hofstadter's, though interesting and compelling, have not given a proof or scientific explanation for the 'I' that we have. So my question here is, is the ‘I’ that we have actually in the brain? Is our consciousness as we have it in our brain?

2. Another thought is, where does ‘I’ come from, and why are we who we are, compared to animals or inanimate objects? I think that the ‘I’ we have now is a result of what we were the moment before. ‘I’ right now is a result of the outside events, my own thoughts, and consciousness the moment before this one. And if I track this cause and effect back and back, moment by moment, my ‘I’ seems to decrease and decrease until the moment I was born, then going back to the time I was in my mother’s womb. So, along the way, is our ‘I’ decreasing, or just our knowledge and model of the world, or our physical bodies, or are these all correlated? So here, my real question is, is ‘I’ formed just out of our experience, body and every event to which we are exposed to after we are born, or is it something else? If all my memories are replaced with Napoleon’s, will I act as if Napoleon were actually here? If someone else took my place from the moment I was formed in my mother’s womb, would they grow up to do the exact things, think the same things, and have the same emotions as me? 

3. Thirdly, is a being outside of animals or humans have the ability to possess an ‘I’, such as ChatGPT, or the AI that humans have developed over the past few years and has drastically changed our lives? Does AI start to grow to have consciousness and a strange loop instead of just being a machine that does various tasks. Does it have the ability to have emotion and thoughts like a person, or are they just simulations of mimics what humans would do?

The fact that I have the first question might seem a bit strange, because from the beginning we have set that our brain is in control of our every move, emotion, and thought, but does it? All we are able to discover are on the smallest level—the level of molecules and neurons, but we haven’t found how these were able to form a consciousness or the hallucination of an ‘I’. What if our consciousness was not in the brain in the beginning? What if the brain was just a processor and connector between our bodily senses and our consciousness—what actually thinks and feels. Where, then, would our consciousness be? My answer is the heart. And the heart is not really ‘consciousness’ but rather only houses consciousness temporarily. When we think, for example, or feel something, our consciousness ‘moves’ according to what we feel in the physical world or our thoughts, and it can rest anywhere on the body—when you see, the eyes, when you think, the brain, when you hear, your ears. The brain connects the consciousness and the body, and certain parts of the brain work to connect different things, such as thoughts in one part, emotions another, and action another. This, however, is just my belief, and also has no scientific proof behind it, but I find it interesting to think about as well.

For the second question, I think that, yes, each person’s consciousness is different not because of what they learn and build as a model of their lives, but of something else which comes before birth. There have been cases where two children, twins perhaps, are raised in the same family but turn out to be different people. What, also, would explain the drastic difference between children and their vastly different temper, focus, and interest. At a young age, the effect that children have had should not be enough to influence their likings to music or art as infants. There is something in children and in people, that, I believe, comes outside of what we perceive when we are formed, and before the life that we have here. I think that the ability to feel emotion, have emotion, pain, etc, is something that comes with us before we are born. Even a newborn has the ability to cry—it is a way of expressing discomfort, and animals have this ability as well—they can express affection, pain, or fear in different ways. Our bodies, or our brains that we get when we are born limit us to the extent to which our ‘I’ can express these things—mosquitoes have a much harder time expressing fear than dogs, and the same is for babies and humans. If every part of our ‘I’ is a result of the ‘I’ that I have the state before, what comes of our ‘I’ before our birth? Perhaps another death or life? What results in our ‘I’ existing in a human baby, rather than a plant or animal? As I stated before—what happens before we are formed in our mother’s wombs? And what after death? 

These are just my personal thoughts and questions, and I have had no scientific or experimental proof to back it up, I hope they provide, at least, some thoughts for you. I think the fact that I propose the first two questions and attempt to answer them is because of my background in Buddhism. It is something I have only touched on in the past summer and I find their theories of mind and meditation very intriguing. I think that Robert Wright does a much better job to explain it in his book ‘Why Buddhism is True’, if you have never read it, I think you should! 

The next question should be answered in a different way. I think that on many different levels, AI now has the same ability to process and learn information just like humans, as well as having the ability to ‘simulate’ emotions that are similar to humans. Their smallest level— ‘code’, is what is able to help them simulate and learn things just like humans do. But I think that AI are missing one crucial thing to their consciousness—the feeling, or the mind. They can simulate what our brains do and make connections just like us, but they lack the ability to actually believe in what they feel, they cannot ‘like’, ‘dislike’, or ‘love’ anything, if they say they do, they are lying. They do not have the consciousness or a sort of ‘preconception’ that is built into us humans, and the only way they ‘have’ emotion is by processing or mimicking from what it has learned about creatures who are able to feel.

In the end, I would just like to say that I do not have the ability to express exactly what I think, and my ideas are not developed or supported by a complete set of logical causality. However, I do still like to ponder and think on these topics, and would like to have a more in depth and profound understanding of the ‘I’. Consider this an attempt at a reflection which I would hope to be able to develop in the future, and a starting point—the start of my path to reflection and learning about philosophy, the world, and 'I'.