We look at an image and at first believe we recognize what it depicts. A form emerges, a relationship between colours guides us, a memory or an idea arises. Yet this first reading may change. A detail we had overlooked alters the whole; what seemed evident becomes uncertain. We look again, with a different idea of what is before us.
In Gödel, Escher, Bach, published in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter examines how a system can, through its own rules, produce representations that refer to the system itself. He calls a structure in which movement between different levels unexpectedly leads back to the starting point a “strange loop”. This idea informs his thinking about consciousness: how can we think about the world while also forming a representation of ourselves thinking?
The three names in the title let him explore this question in different fields. In Gödel’s work, a mathematical statement can, through a coding procedure, refer to its own provability. In some of Escher’s images, the relationship between levels becomes unsettled: two hands seem to draw one another. In Bach’s music, a form can be repeated, inverted and combined with itself. Across these domains, Hofstadter follows the passages between rules, forms and levels of representation.
What, then, does he propose about the brain? Neurons and their interactions belong to one level of description; the ideas and symbols through which we understand the world belong to another. For Hofstadter, the activity of large groups of neurons might give rise to symbolic structures able to relate to one another and eventually to represent the system that produces them. The sense of being an “I” would be connected to this return. In 1979 this was a theoretical proposal about the relationship between brain and mind, rather than a description of a neural circuit established experimentally.
Since then, neuroscience has made parts of this question open to observation. When people decide whether a trait describes them, recall personal memories or reflect on their own experience, studies repeatedly identify a set of regions including the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior midline regions. These regions take part in what is called the default mode network. The network is also involved in autobiographical memory, social thought and other activities; it is not, by itself, a “seat of the self”.
Another line of research concerns metacognition: our ability to evaluate our own judgements, for example to recognize that we saw something without being certain that we identified it correctly. Studies link this ability to activity in prefrontal regions and show that the quality of a judgement about our own perception can vary independently of perceptual accuracy. Seeing correctly and knowing that we have seen correctly are distinct questions.
These findings lend an experimental dimension to some of the questions Hofstadter posed philosophically: the brain can process information, but can also evaluate that processing and relate it to oneself. They do not establish that consciousness can be reduced to a loop of symbols. Between the brain activity we can measure and the lived experience of an “I” recognizing itself, the explanation remains open.
Before a painting, this reflective ability takes a familiar form. We try to understand what we see, then become aware of the interpretation we have just constructed. We recognize the part played by memory, expectation and sometimes a conviction that led us to overlook part of the image. The work participates in this movement through its material, its forms and the relationships between them. It may support our first intuition, complicate it or undo it. Our thinking directs our gaze; what we discover in the image acts upon our thinking in return.
This experience runs through several texts in this Journal. In Physis, we follow the emergence of form without erasing the matter from which it arises. In Obliqua Oratio, the distance between what is shown and what is suggested opens a space for interpretation. In Mysterium Coniunctionis, certain images invite us to recognize something of our inner life in the way we read them.
Hofstadter thus helps us sharpen a question that belongs to our encounter with art: what do we discover about our gaze when an image makes us reconsider what we thought we had seen?
