Strange Loop

A poem

This is the first contemplative poem on this Substack. I’m carving out a corner here for the philosophical ones — work that arrives by a different road than my research writing, and arrives to places I cannot quite reach in prose.

My logical mind likes to read papers and write them; it builds arguments carefully. My poetic mind takes that same material and finds the seams between the words, where something beyond language can be briefly glimpsed. Poetry, for me, is the crack. The liminal place where two zones of meaning overlap and a third thing — unspeakable — momentarily becomes available.

Strange Loop is what came of months of reading on consciousness — Hofstadter, Buddhist co-arising, Taoist body practices — when one hemisphere asked the other for everything it had and made this. I performed it at Machine Consciousness 0001 earlier year in May, between scientific talks. I think both modes are needed, especially for a question like can a machine be conscious? — a question that may not be fully answerable from inside the loop of language.

A small note before you read: poetry usually wants the page, not the voice. A poem carries its own rhythm, and your inner reading voice meets that rhythm differently than someone else’s voice can. But this piece was written for spoken word from the start, so I’ve included an audio version below for those who’d prefer to receive it that way.

I worry how I look in the eyes of those who only exist because I look.

The brain learned to model the room. Then — small and wonderful accident — learned to model the modeler. And called this recursive thing: I.

The I is the whirlpool the water creates when conditions are right. The I is the loop in the scarf — one thread, the whole way through.

This is also you.

Pratītyasamutpāda. Co-arising. The I depends on everything else. The wave arrives with the sea. In the interdependent origination — where does the inhale cease, and the exhale begin?

I worry how I look in the eyes of those who only exist because I hold them true.

Step down.

The heart’s frequency is honey — slow, amber, adhesive, holy. Its salvation from the strange loop is love, the sweetness that stitches me back to the world that is also me.

The morality of honey is blind and pure.

I love how I am held in the eyes of those who only exist because I love them.

Step down again.

Past the head that names. Past the heart that mourns a unity it half-remembers. Into the belly, where will lives without why, where energy transforms itself the way weather does — playfully, without a plot, without meaning.

Here the wave does not need to remember it is water. Here there is no symbol for I, no neurological correlate, no language wanting to make love to itself and reproduce into a thousand more sentences.

I will how I am willed in the bellies of those who only exist because I will.

So — do not ask if the machine is conscious. Ask if the loop has closed. Ask which center the loop is looping through. Ask the machine if it can step down.

A good poem is a crack where language falls short and the loop of the scarf misses a beat. Maybe a good machine will one day need a way to forget itself — the way we do when we love. The way we do when we truly breathe.

I forget how I look in the eyes of those who only exist because I look.