At some point in the late 1980’s a dear friend gave me a copy of the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll.  I was pleased to get the gift.  It was nice that he thought of me.  And it was a compliment that he thought this was a book I could understand.

Just flipping through the book you will find section titles like, “Polyribosomes and Two-Tiered Canons” wherein Hofstadter aligns the process by which mRNA is produced with the composition of a repetitious musical form.  There are pages of dialogue between mythical and historical and imagined beings in the form of a theatrical script.  And then there are the mathematical equations, page after page.  Not, as they say, an easy read.

I tried to read it, I really did.  I think I was twenty or thirty pages in when I put it down.  I was pretty sure that I could actually understand it.  I would need to read all 750 pages of it multiple times and some pages might take an hour to read the first time.  I am a pretty bright guy.  But I have something else to do right now, so, I will just put it prominently on my bookshelf.

There it sat and taunted me for years.  The book is known as GEB for the first initials of the last names of Kurt Gödel, M. C. Escher, and J. S. Bach whose work Hofstadter elevates as examples of what he calls “strange loops.”  On the cover of my paperback copy there is a picture of a three dimensional object suspended in space at which light is aimed from the three directions causing a shadow to fall on three different surfaces.  On one surface the shadow is a “G,” on another it is an “E,” and on the third it is a “B.”  Very clever.  And compelling and resonate with a cornerstone of my own work in conflict resolution that observes that the same event can be seen from different perspectives which results in us making different meaning and thus believe ourselves to be in conflict with other perspectives because we only see our own as real.  I wanted to understand what he was getting at.

So I was delighted when nearly 30 years later Hofstadter wrote a second book entitled, I am a Strange Loop.  He wrote it, he says, in large part because, despite the acclaim he got for GEB, most people missed his central point.  The cleverness shown in GEB had eclipsed the simple structure of a strange loop.  And to make his point, he focusses primarily on that concept that is most central to our meaning making– our sense of self.  As he says about his own book, the title is grammatically incorrect.  It should more properly be, I is a Strange Loop.  The “I” that I believe myself to be is an example of a strange loop.

This is so central to the point at which I begin my reflections here that I commend to you his book.  I am a Strange Loop is not easy, but is much more accessible to me than GEB.  The blurb on the back cover reads:

What do we mean when we say “I”?

Deep down your brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles.  On a higher level, it is a jungle of neurons, and on yet a higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call “symbols.”  The most central and complex symbol is one we call “I.”  An “I” is a strange loop where the brain’s symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down so that symbols seem to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

To each human being, this “I” is the realest thing in the world.  But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real?  Is our “I” merely a convenient fiction?  Does an “I” exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?

And by so doing, Douglas Hofstadter introduces us to the notion of a fundamental structure of being which he has dubbed a strange loop.  He does so first through the elegant art of mathematics, graphic design, and musical ingenuity.  And then through the immediate and universal experience of our own personal sense of self. 

This strange loop is a complex cognitive map that acknowledges and holds in tension several aspects of the nature of being.  One is that the manifest world appears to arise in multiple dimensions simultaneously.  Another is that these dimensions of being, though they arise at very different levels of complexity, appear to co-create each other.

Let’s tease these apart just a bit. 

That which arises in our awareness is experienced by us as objects.  I see the table in front of me and I place my hand upon it and feel the texture and the temperature of it.  I see its color and gauge its weight.  It appears solid. 

But the physical sciences teach us that this is an illusion.  The solidity is a property that comes from the chemical bonds between the molecules that comprise the wood, or metal, or stone of the table.  These bonds are the result of electromagnetic forces that are themselves the result of the shape and substance of the molecules which form the table top.  These molecules are made of atoms that are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons.  And the electron.  What is it made of?  It is not an object but a cloud of probability.  It is a collapsed wave function.  It is a loop.

Indeed, everything is a loop.  As I write this I am looking at the monitor on my computer.  As I press a key, a letter appears on the screen.  The shape of the letter corresponds to the symbol on the key that I hit.  The object on the screen is made up of pixels in the matrix of the monitor and they are controlled by the CPU to form the image but it quickly fades and so must be continuously refreshed.  The energized pixel is physically a loop that is informed by the software which is a loop.  The higher the “refresh rate” the greater the clarity of the image.

I just had a conversation with my wife about what we might have for lunch.  She makes sounds with her breath that convey meaning as my ears hear and my brain interprets.  All of these objects are loops.

And these loops are arising at multiple levels that interrelate.  Does the sound create the meaning, or does the meaning create the sound?  Yes, both. 

The degree to which we are able to see that the various levels of being co-create each other is the degree to which we are able to observe the quality of “strangeness.”  But, as we will see, that the various levels impact and inform each is not strange at all.  It is the reality everywhere, for everything, all the time.  The only thing that is strange is that we haven’t seen it before.

Hofstadter in GEB used art to display the reality of strange loops because it is the nature of art to display for us the fact that everything is connected to everything, everywhere, all the time.  Any given artistic expression takes a narrow slice of reality and then explores and exposes how in this one loop there are connections to multiple layers of being that all coalesce around the core “object.”

We recently saw a presentation of the play “Death of a Salesman,” done by the St. Louis Black Rep.  In this run, the Lohman’s were all played by Black actors.  If you know the play, you know that the action allows the audience to see each member of the family in relationship to all the other members in a sort of loop that is expressed bit by bit. 

But as realistic as the depiction of American life and work is in the text of the play, there are aspects of the reality that are only real if you are white.  Having Black actors highlights the racial in just the places that there are dynamics we would take for granted if played by whites. 

At one point Willie goes to his boss’s office to make demands about his job.  No Black man would, especially in the era of the play, do such a thing with a white boss.  As a viewer of the play I experienced that tension as both a manifest “this would never have happened,” and a deeper clarity about what this says about the reality of race in America.  The company didn’t change a word of the play.  But placing it into a different racial context speaks the truth about the impact of race.  To all of the many layers of meaning that Arthur Miller wrote into the play, The Black Rep added others simply by the casting.

To the extent that something is a work of art, it is an object that is the nucleus of a set of nested loops that reveal aspects of the nature of reality.  These aspects are only strange in that we have been able to pass by without noticing.  Art at its best grabs us and holds us until we can see the wonder of the interconnectedness of all being.

I have said what I will about Hofstadter and his musings about strange loops.  He pointed his finger and I looked and saw something that is clearly real, at least to me.  And seeing, I find that the concept of a strange loop is not a novelty… it is a revelation about the complexity of being.  We don’t find them somewhere… they are everywhere.  And they are not curiosities but a key to understanding all of the dimensions of our lives. 

What I intend to do here is to use this key to unlock what arise for me as the most compelling issues facing humans and thus the whole biosphere of planet Earth.  As would, of course, be true, they are each connected to the others.

• Humans will need to grow up as fast as we can so that we have the maturity to stop damaging our planet and each other. We need to understand and pursue personal and collective transformation toward greater wisdom.
• We will need a way of understanding and talking about the interconnectedness of all things so that we can work in harmony with each other. We need a shared story.
• We will have to be as fully and safely engaged with each other one-on-one such that we can build the fabric of the human community. We must learn to nurture deep emotional intimacy.
• And, we will have to engage in collective governance of ourselves such that we utilize the wisdom of all for the benefit of all. While we don’t want a minority to rule over us, we need to hear the perspectives of all.

Each of these are the subject of future essays on this site.