Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

The Riddle on the Universe and its Solution 279The "Short Circuit" serves to illustrate the short circuit of logical paradox. The negative invitesthe positive, and the inert circle is complete. (From Vicious Circles and Infinity.)But let us go back to Cherniak's story. As we have seen, the selfreferential linguisticparadoxes are deliciously tantalizing, but hardly dangerous for a human mind. Cherniak'sRiddle, by contrast, must be far more sinister. Like a Venus's-flytrap, it lures you, thensnaps down, trapping you in a whirlpool of thought, sucking you ever deeper down into avortex, a "black hole of the mind," from which there is no escape back to reality. Yet whoon the outside knows what charmed alternate reality the trapped mind has entered?The suggestion that the mind-breaking Riddle thought would be based on selfreferenceprovides a good excuse to discuss the role of looplike self-reference orinterlevel feedback in creating a self-a soulout of inanimate matter. The most vividexample of such a loop is that of a television on whose screen is being projected a pictureof the television itself. This causes a whole cascade of ever-smaller screens to appear onewithin another. This is easy to set up if you have a television camera.The results [see figure] are quite fascinating and often astonishing. The simplestshows the nested-boxes effect, in which one has the illusion of looking down a corridor.To achieve a heightened effect, if you rotate the camera clockwise around the axis of itslens, the first inner screen will