Transcription
Let's start with the most famous example of self-reference goes something like this. This sentence is not true.
Any object that we can think of as referring to something or that has the ability to refer to something is potentially self-referential. Self- reference is an elegant mind if you happen to read about it casually, but it can also be a key to the forever question. What is self?
The orubberus, that serpent or dragon curling into a circle to devour its own tale, captures the logic of self- reference in an image older than writing systems. It is both eater and eaten, subject and object, the loop that contains itself as content.
In philosophy, this image recurs as the paradox of thought reflecting on thought. Language describing language systems feeding their own outputs back as inputs. Mathematics encapsulates it in Godell's incompleteness theorems where statements turn back upon themselves to expose the edges of formal logic. Mysticism expresses this concept in the upanishadic mahavakas where the knower and the known collapse into the same gesture.
In biological realm DNA produces proteins that fold into enzymes that regulate DNA living loop of code that writes and reads itself. But the fact that life persists at all is testimony to the productivity of self-reference. The system does not collapse from feeding on itself. It evolves into increasing complexity because each loop introduces variation.
Cosmic law gives rise to thought. Thought gives rise to technology. Technology reshapes the earth and the reshaped earth becomes the new context in which cosmology will be imagined. The answer to the question, what is self is intimately tied to the tools available to study it and thus knowledge gleaned about the self often represents the zeitgeist associated with different eras of psychological research.
However, one particular methodological approach to studying the self through the self-reference effect has stood the test of time. A wellorganized research demonstrated across over 100 studies that information leaves a much deeper and more robust memory trace when it is encoded with reference to the self. So when something we hear is somehow connected to us.
By adulthood, our self-concept is highly detailed and elaborate. By associating the item with our self-concept, we achieve a depth of processing that is perhaps unparalleled by any other concept we hold. Think of your reaction when you overhear your own name mentioned in conversation. It instantly becomes a priority topic over all other auditory stimuli. This cognitive activity is likely to create a strong memory trace, allowing us to store useful information about ourselves and further elaborate our self-concept.
From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to prioritize our attention and memory to the events that are most relevant for us is very profitable. We are primed to react to events that are likely to concern us and store information to inform our decisions in the future.
As we said earlier, the self only gets to be the self because of this key cutting off point. In our interest, we're not interested in what life might look like outside of our own habitual perception of it. We're not interested in what reality might be in itself. We're only interested in how it appears in relation to us. Or as we could also say, we're not interested in the question of what life would be like when it's not constantly confirming our existence, either through agreeing with our prejudices or disagreeing with them. There is nothing less interesting to us than this.
As we have said, the cutff point in our attention doesn't just create the self. It is the self. This arbitrary cutff point in our interest, the existence of which is itself of zero interest to us, is what the self is. And so, just as long as we very strongly identify with this self and take its well-being to be the same thing as our well-being, we are never going to be not trapped in our own reality.
This message is so subtle many people are unable to see through its meaning. We are always going to be imprisoned by what Carlos Casteda calls the chains of our self-reflection. This is the most perfect trap there ever was. It's a trap that we can't see to be a trap because we think it's the whole world. And yet, of course, it isn't the world. It's far from being the world. It isn't actually anything.
We are all perfectly trapped in our own realities. We're trapped every inch of the way with no sign that we will ever be not trapped with no sign that we will ever have the slightest awareness of what's actually going on. We carry on quite happily or unhappily as the case may be. Whether we're having a good time or a bad time makes not the slightest bit of difference. Either way, we're still just as trapped. One way we're trapped in feeling good, the other way we're trapped in feeling bad. These are two room in the same prison.
The reason we're trapped in our own personal version of reality is because we're always reading into it. Just as I might read into what people are saying to me if I were to be suffering from acute paranoia. We're not seeing what's actually there. We're seeing what seems to be there as far as we're concerned. We're seeing our own fears and hopes reflected back at us. When it comes right down to it, we're only interested in stuff which relates to our own personal angle on things, stuff which relates to our particular perceptual cognitive bias.
It's as if I am measuring everything with a sacred yard stick. And if there is something that can't be measured with this standard, this yard stick, then as far as I'm concerned, it just doesn't exist.
When a novel steps outside its own story to mention its own title, or when a character in a film casually complains about the script they are in, the medium folds back up on itself, drawing us into a loop. This act is more than a clever gimmick. It reveals the architecture of storytelling, the fact that all narratives are artifacts, constructed frames of meaning. By pointing to itself, the story pulls the thin veil into view. Nabokov, with a sly grin, inserts puzzles and games into his texts that force the reader to realize the book knows it as a book. Each of these examples turns fiction into a hall of mirrors, where the act of reading becomes part of the narrative itself.
The effect on the reader or viewer is peculiar and rich. Self- reference produces both intimacy and estrangement. We feel included because the work acknowledges our presence but also unsettled because the work exposes its own mechanics. Character complaining about the plot reminds us that the plot is an invention.
Self- reference in the literature and film enacts what consciousness itself is doing all the time. Awareness reflects on awareness. Thought contemplates thought. A story that refers to itself becomes an allegory of the mind. The pleasure we feel when a film character breaks the fourth wall is the same recognition we feel when we catch ourselves thinking I am thinking. The loop of self-reference is the structure of a reflective intelligence. And so the delight of self-reference is double. On the surface it charms us with cleverness and irony. Beneath that surface, it gestures toward the profound truth that every act of art is an act of recursion. Every narrative is aware, however dimly, that it is a narrative.
The drossy effect began as a clever piece of PR, but quickly revealed itself as something uncanny, a picture containing itself again and again, shrinking toward infinity. The 1904 cocoa tin that gave the effect its name showed a nurse carrying a tray with a cup of cocoa and the same cocoa tin she appeared on. That tin showed the same nurse and so on. A visual echo collapsing inward. What made it eerie was that the image did not end. It fell into itself like a visual whirlpool.
In preAI and Photoshop era, this ad produced mass confusion. Yanmeet was the illustrator hired by this Dutch cocoa company and he designed the draws to Coco Tin. Not being a surrealist or a philosopher, he was a commercial artist trying to create viral product that stays in memory and also elicits the feelings of trustworthiness. At the time, the figure of the nurse was a powerful symbol of care, health, and reliability. Remember, Goko was being marketed not as a rainy day stay-at-home drink, but as a restorative food, almost like medicine.
So, where did the recursive trick come from? He borrowed a device already present in European visual culture. Miz Onime in heraldry and religious art, medieval shields sometimes carried a smaller shield inside them, and alterpieces occasionally contained paintings that depicted themselves within the sacred scene. The effect carried authority. The image seemed endless, as if blessed with its own eternity, and the art loves being eternal.
What could be easier than getting trapped in a world that is made up of our own prejudices, our own biases, our own assumptions. We're never going to look beyond the world that is constructed out of our own unexamined or unconscious assumptions precisely because they are our assumptions. There is no more perfect trap than the trap of self-reference. We get trapped because of our agreement with ourselves. And when are we not going to agree with ourselves? We are agreeing with ourselves to be trapped. We're trapping ourselves, therefore, or we could also say that we are getting trapped in ourselves.
The trap of self-reference works because we only ever see the world in the way that we ourselves see it. We have some kind of an expectation about what is to happen. And so when that thing does happen, we don't look any further. Why would we look any further when we have already decided without even knowing that we have decided that there is no further? We are only interested in the world as it looks like from our own particular viewpoint on the matter. We have already decided without knowing that we have decided that this is the only way the world can appear. As far as we are concerned, the world doesn't exist apart from in this personalized format of it. As far as we are concerned, there is simply no such thing as the world as it might appear to any viewpoint other than our own.
This is just another way of saying that we never question our assumptions, of course, or that we never look further than our own ideas about things. This infinite inertia with regard to questioning our assumptions or looking further than our own ideas about things is what makes us who we are. So wherever we go and whatever we do, we are always met with this self-referential illusion of how the world appears to me.
What we see is a kind of movie that is tailor made for this me. The movie that we're talking about here is continuous. It never stops playing and it is for the most part entirely absorbing for us. We're sitting there in the cinema with a box of popcorn in one hand and a liter and a half of Coke in the other. What keeps us absorbed is like and dislike. If one doesn't do the job, then the other will. When the movie or show is interesting in an enjoyable way, then of course it's absorbing. To be enjoying something is to be absorbed by it, engrossed by it. All of our attention is taken up by it as if by a powerful magnet. But then when the movie or show is disagreeable or frightening, we're still absorbed by it, engrossed by it, swallowed up by it. Our attention is still being pulled in magnetically by the drama. Now we are fixated by our aversion. Whereas before we were fixated by our attraction.
Philosophy is reflective. The philosophizing mind never simply thinks about an object. It always while thinking about any object thinks also about its own thought about the object. Philosophy may thus be called thought of the second degree.
Douglas Hushtar's Godell Esherbach an eternal golden braid is a 700page meditation on self- reference disguised as a dialogue among mathematics, art and music. It begins as an exploration of formal systems, God's theorems, fugues, desolations. But what it's truly about is the strange moment when a system becomes self-aware. He called this the strange loop. A strange loop arises when by moving upward or downward through levels of some hierarchical system. We unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.
In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked in miragages are little miracles of self-reference, said Douglas. Neurons build representations of the world, then include within those representations a model of the one who is perceiving. The result is the eye, a structure that points to itself, and in doing so acquires the illusion of solidity.
Self- reference seems to be so much more than an intellectual curiosity, meaning maybe is just an internal echo. The mind bouncing its own signals against itself. And a self is a pattern in time, a pattern that creates and is created by the symbols it perceives.