God is a Strange Loop

What are strange loops, and how might an ability to understand them enhance ones relationship with God?

What follows here is an outline of what may someday be a book.  It is dense.  It is a condensation of a larger argument about the nature of being and our relationship with it.  Read slowly.

Initial Conditions

• Are you someone who believes it is possible for you to have a richer fuller life? 

• Do you have a potential that you have not yet fully realized?

• Do you believe that your choices matter? 

• Are there problems that you face that are of such importance to you that you want to get better at making the best possible choice? 

If you are not someone with a fire in your belly to "be the best you can be," wrapping your head around strange loops may just be more trouble than it is worth.

Perhaps the most often quoted passage from Victor Frankl's book, Man's Search of Meaning comes at the point where he is talking about our ability to make meaningful choices.  He states that…

"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."

In the moment of choosing our response we are assessing what is happening, determining what it means, and deciding on a strategy that will move us toward what we need.

If you want to be the most evolved, effective, and fully expressed person you can be; and you want to be able to fully assess whatever is arising in any given moment, and to be able to confidently make the choices that are best for you, for those around you, and for the well-being of the whole planet; then you will find benefit from understanding and using the heuristic of strange loops.

A strange loop is a heuristic for addressing complexity. 

A heuristic technique is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision. [Wikipedia article]

Even if the biggest problem you encounter is finding the lost remote, you use a heuristic to solve the problem.  You will have a routine for finding it that includes looking first in the places that you think have the greatest probability of revealing the remote.  You will look under the sofa cushions before you look in the freezer.

We each have a whole toolkit full of ways to solve problems, each designed for a particular kind of problem.  Selecting and properly applying the right heuristic is key to solving problems.  I did well in my statistics class because I was good at knowing which equation to use in which situation.  I had no idea why it was the right one or what the answer revealed, but it got me a good grade on the test.

Some heuristics allow us to solve simple problems.  I can look at a door and easily know how to open it [assuming it is unlocked].  Baking a cake can be more complicated.  It takes a series of steps, each of which must be done well, and all must be done in the right order.  To bake a cake we use a heuristic called a recipe.

A strange loop is a heuristic.  It is both a model for describing the fundamental nature of being, and a kind of cognitive map used for solving problems.  It is particularly valuable for thinking about and thus relating to complex situations.

Complex and chaotic are different from simple and complicated. 

We want to have cognitive maps that are as simple as possible.  If they are good enough to solve the problem, then they are both efficient and effective.  Some problems require complicated solutions; that is, they yield to a series of simple steps.  If all are done well enough, and in the right order, then the desired outcome can be assured.

But some problems arise in the context of systems that are made dynamic by the presence of multiple interdependent variables.  That is to say, when one thing changes, it changes other things in ways that cannot be reliably predicted.  Complex systems have conditions that move through multiple possible states that may be more or less probable, but not certain.  Consider the weather forecast that says there is a 48% chance of rain.  Predicting the weather is not complicated.  It is complex because it is trying to anticipate a chaotic system.

Strange loops are heuristics that help us deal with the chaos that is our lives.

What is a strange loop?

The first use of the term strange loop was by Douglas Hofstadter in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach [1980].  He returned to the notion in a second book, I am a Strange Loop [2007].  I urge you to consult these to see the origins of the term, but I am going to take the concept a bit further than what I think Hofstadter was referencing.  For one thing, he was talking about what I have come to see as a special case of strange loops.  In the normal use of the word strange, strange loops are not at all strange.  Indeed, they are ubiquitous.  They are everywhere all the time.

We know a loop when we tie our shoes, but another form of a loop is a process that repeats itself, though with minor variations.  In this sense a conversation is a loop.  We take turns speaking and we each imagine that we are responding to what the other has said.  A conversation is an example of a dynamic loop.

Some loops appear to us as static.  A table top is a static loop.  We know that at the atomic and subatomic level what we get are probability clouds for where a packet of energy may be at any given moment, but, in the aggregate, some things appear solid.  Indeed, they are loops made of loops which are made of loops.  Reality is actually a complex and dynamic set of interrelated loops.

We can't get our heads around such dynamic concepts.  Instead, our brains take the data from our senses and form representations called mental objects which we then believe to be real.  After all, we think, seeing is believing.  But consider a movie on a monitor.  It is a set of pixels of various colors that fire to create an image in our minds.  The higher the refresh rate on the monitor, the clearer the image my brain can construct.

One of the benefits of the heuristic of a strange loop is that it reminds us that reality is not the objects we think we are relating to.  It reminds us that while the conversation I have with the checker at the grocery store may be very narrow around whether I have any coupons, that person has as full and rich a life as I do.  I may only be able to relate to them in the moment as an object, but they are in fact a rich and dynamic set of loops.

This is very important.  While I experience the world as a set of objects, reality is actually a set of interconnected dynamic loops whose complexity I can only just begin to grasp.

Every object we relate to is actually a loop. Brains use a heuristic to make the chaos of our lives simple enough for us to conceptually grasp and then respond to.

Natural hierarchies: Each loop is part of a larger loop. 

Each larger loop is able to carry more information and to arise with greater dynamism and complexity.  Some molecules can combine to make proteins, and some proteins can act as a catalyst to form other proteins, and can link with lipids to make cells that can reproduce themselves and cooperate with other cells to make organisms and on and on.  We are ourselves made up of billions of cells, most of which are not genetically identical to us but rather are bacteria with which we have a symbiotic relationship.  Think gut biome here.

A mark on a page can be a letter, which is part of a word, which helps to form a sentence, which fits into a paragraph in a section of a chapter of a book.  And the book was created out of the mind of the author.  So this raises a fundamental question.  Do the letters create the book or does the mind of the author create the book?  And of course the correct answer is, yes.

Strange, yes?

The quality of strangeness is the aspect of the loop that appreciates not only that the loop is constructed of many nested levels, but that the higher and the lower levels appear to co-construct each other.  The process by which the lower levels create the higher levels is a process complexity theory refers to as emergence.  And the process by which the higher levels invite the lower levels into being is referred to as the quality of mind.

"Are you going to the party?" 

"I don't know, I haven't made up my mind."

Strangeness is the property of a loop by which we are able to see that those levels that appear to be in a hierarchy with each other are in fact creating each other.  In the Hofstadter book, Gödel, Escher, Bach he highlights the M.C. Escher drawing of two hands each drawing the other.

When we understand that the mental objects we create are really strange loops, we can contemplate the loop to experience and enjoy its strangeness.  We can discover the multiple levels that interact to construct the loop and thus come to see it with greater depth.

Why does this matter?

We go back to the question of how we can be the best we can be.  How do we make the choices that will most effectively move us toward what we need?  We need to know

• what is happening now,

• how what is happening is impacting us,

• what that tells us about what we need, and

• what we can do to move toward or create more of what we need.

Robert Kegan is a Harvard professor of adult learning.  He wrote a book in 1994 entitled In Over Our Heads in which he argues that, as our society transforms, we humans have to become able to similarly have a transformed consciousness so that we can keep pace with modern life. 

He begins his exploration of our cognitive development with the observation that we try to get our adolescent children to change their behavior, to do better.  He argues that what we really need is for them to change how they think.  When they think better, they will naturally do better. They are more mature physically than they are mentally mature, and we just want to keep them from killing themselves so they have time to grow up.

Kegan places himself in the lineage of Jean Piaget.  Piaget is the father of developmental psychology.  As a French-speaking Swiss-born child psychologist, he noticed that children not only gain more knowledge as they grow, they actually change how they think about what they know.  He also noted that one of the ways they learn better ways of thinking was by watching their peers.  He may have been the first to document that peers are more powerful than parents when it comes to shaping how a person approaches life.

Objectification and Differentiation

At birth, the human infant is able to survive outside its mother's womb, but it is helpless to create what it needs.  If we are not cared for, we die.  We have to remain in the care of others until we have had a chance to grow up.

What we most notice in the development of children is their growth in gross motor ability.  We are excited when the baby takes her first steps.  Less visible are the ways her brain is changing and her mind is forming. 

One of our early developmental tasks is to become able to experience the world around us as a set of discrete objects.  We become able to know that a certain set of sounds, sights and sensations mean that there is the promise of mother's milk.  The infant becomes able to form an internal representation of "Mom" which elicits a set of behaviors which facilitate getting fed.  This set of stimuli means the presence of an object.  Our minds form a mental object. The capacity to "objectify" our experience allows us to relate quickly and easily to a whole range of circumstances. 

We thus learn to treat reality as a set of objects to be manipulated for our own immediate gratification.  While this is normal and necessary, there are some problems that arise as a result.  For one, when complex adaptive systems like other humans become for us only objects, we may decide that they may be treated as objects for our sexual gratification or to be enslaved to our economic purposes.  We treat the earth and the minerals within it as objects which we own simply because we did the work of extracting them.  So while forming mental objects is necessary, it is not sufficient for healthy living.  We have to appreciate depth and dynamism.

A second and related task is that of making distinctions between objects.  Mom is not the same as Dad.  My thumb is not the same as my teething ring.  This seedling is or is not a weed.  Our capacity to make subtle distinctions is a primary way that we measure intelligence.

One of the ways we make this simpler for us is to construct dualities.  These are ways of thinking that say that two things are opposites.  Up is the opposite of down. In is the opposite of out.  We do this even when the two things are simply at different points on a gradient.  Hot is not the opposite of cold.  Love is not the opposite of hate.  Just because someone is not in my tribe doesn't mean they are my enemy.

We hope that we and others develop beyond the heuristics of objectification and dualistic thinking.  Reality is itself chaotic, but we can't get our heads around chaos.  We need simple cognitive maps to think efficiently, but some maps are too simple to solve the problems of daily living.  We need maps which appreciate and explain complexity, but some people are unable to mature into more complex ways of thinking.  They are intellectually stuck.  Their development is stunted because of the unresolved traumas in their lives.

The result of widespread objectification and dualistic thinking is social dislocation and alienation and ecological despoliation and climate catastrophe.  When we relate only to the superficial aspects of being, we miss the deeper reality and clamor for what we want, instead of collaboratively creating what we all need.

Multiple Truth Claims

It is essential that we become more and more able to relate to that which is really real, but we live in a time when there are deep divides around which truth claims are most authentic.  In the early years of human history the deeper dimensions of reality were all collected under the common umbrella of cosmology, but beginning about four centuries ago there arose a rift between the emerging discipline of science and the old institutions of theology. 

While there are a great many very wise and articulate people writing and speaking today in an effort to reconcile these truth claims, the bulk of humanity remains at odds about whether science or religion best reveals to us the nature of what is.  Scientific materialism condemns religion [Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion] while the bulk of Evangelical Christianity makes it a test of faith to reject the reality of evolution.

As I am an ordained minister whose bachelor degree is in physical science, I reside somewhat on the intersection of these disciplines.  But I have had family and friends tell me that, when I talk about this concern, I have to avoid the word religion and not speak of spirituality.  Such words turn people off.  Religion is stultifying and spirituality is just woo-woo,  We deny that it is real.  Indeed, we deny the existence of any reality that we have never knowingly experienced.

Nevertheless, there are certain concepts and objects of consideration that are not material objects but which we accept as real because we all experience them.  Is language real?  Is education real?  How about democracy or autocracy?  These words have meaning because there is a consensus about what they refer to.  As many people experience the same thing, it becomes real.  [Or when a single thing is experienced deeply as the skin horse in The Velveteen Rabbit.]

We See What We Look For: We Look For What We See

We develop cognitive maps to help us make sense of the world we encounter.  Sometimes we are mapping the territory we are walking, and sometimes we chart the course using the maps and then walk it.  The process is both inductive and deductive.  We describe what we see and we look for what others have seen which they have then told us about.  Knowledge moves from the specific to the general and from the general to the specific.

The global problems that threaten our very existence require us to use cognitive maps that open for us the complexity of the problems themselves.  This is an important part of what I think the heuristic of strange loops can provide for humanity.  Mapping complexity invites us into an awareness of aspects of being that are not commonly experienced, even aspects of being that we may wish to avoid.

We have noted the phenomenon of the development of human cognition, but transformation along lines of development happen in all dimensions of reality.  This development has been mapped in every culture.  In the appendix of Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology he offers twenty pages of charts which correlate hundreds of developmental lines. 

Whether we are talking about Jean Piaget with cognition, Lawrence Kohlberg with ethics, Abraham Maslow with human needs, Susanne Cook-Greuter with ego development, or Clare Graves with styles of governance, and on and on, all of them share similar characteristics as each new level transcends but also includes the levels below them.  For our purposes here, I just want to suggest a very simple hierarchy that is general enough to incorporate all of these developmental lines.

The most consensual of realities is the material realm.  Scientism claims that it is the only realm.  Nothing is real if you can't touch it and measure it.  But in the late 60's as social planners were trying to make their discipline as rigorous as physics, they discovered that their problems were not solvable through the techniques of the hard sciences.  These became known as "wicked problems."

These are problems which arise in the relational realm.  Here the choices of many actors cause disruptions that may be experienced as chaotic.  It is at this relational or interpersonal level of being that most of us first discover our need to understand the nature of complex systems.  Families are complex.

But as we engage with complex interpersonal systems, we discover that among the variables are the inconsistencies arising from the inner experience of the various actors.  In addition to the Interpersonal - Relational realm there is an Intrapersonal or Inner realm.  There are loops within the loops.  Everything has an interior.

And as we observe these complex and even chaotic actions in these dynamic systems we begin to see that there are various patterns or archetypes which express themselves over and over.  There is a realm of being that connects everything.  This can be referred to as the Transpersonal or [dare I say it] the Spiritual Realm.  In this realm everything is connected to everything, everywhere, all the time.

So we have four distinguishable but interconnected realms of being that arise always and everywhere for everything.  And these four realms inform and thus create each other.  And when we can access an awareness of all of this depth of reality, it can inform our choices such that we act in a manner that respects and even enhances the whole of being.

We can come to see that physical science is a heuristic that primarily addresses phenomena in the material realm.  Such disciplines as linguistics, social psychology, and jurisprudence address issues in the relational realm. The various depth psychologies explore the inner realm.  Theology is a heuristic for addressing issues of the spiritual realm.  They are not antagonistic to each other as long as they stay in their own lane.  Each is a discipline developed for their own area of expertise.

Further, if we are diligent in our search for truth, we are going to find analogues between the various realms.  For example, doing the work of knowing our own interior takes us to a place of compassion and understanding, not only of ourselves, but also of others.  The result is more harmonious relationships [relational] and lowered blood pressure [material].

Building Healthy Relationships

One of the more surprising revelations from quantum physics is that, when we look for a particular quality in the quantum state, we not only find it, but we durably create it.  If we look for a wave, we find a wave.  If we look for a particle, we find a particle.  And once we have observed a particular packet of energy, it remains what we observed it to be.

At another level of being, when a teacher looks for a student to be capable, the student becomes more capable.  The expectation calls forth a particular way of being.  It is not just that we see what we look for.  We actually create what we look for.

We can readily notice that we show up differently in different relationships.  What we less readily notice is that the more we show up in a particular way in a given set of relationships, the more that way of being becomes a durable part of our identity.

As parents, we worry that our children may be hanging out with the wrong crowd because they are learning bad habits.  Criminal justice reform advocates have long noted that prisons are training grounds for criminal behavior.  What we less often notice is how our own values and thus behaviors are a product of the communities in which we place ourselves.

Jean Piaget noted, and Robert Kegan has reinforced, that we are more highly influenced by peers than by authorities.  I am less likely to do what I am told than I am to do what is the norm for my community.  This makes it critical, if I am to become the best me I can be, that I find and engage communities with the highest possible standards of behavior.  We must create ways to be around those we look up to.

But the very communities that once were the drivers of healthy transformation have fallen into stagnation and disarray.  We see this both in religious and political organizations.  In political parties and in social reform organizations the goal has become to "make the other lose."  Whether the goal is to tell others what to do, or to shape who gets to decide, the framework is objectifying and dualistic.

We don't really expect politics to be ethical.  We have a very narrow definition of corruption.  As long as one has not done something which will result in a criminal conviction, one has "not done anything wrong."

More troubling for me is the failure of faith communities to be the "beloved community" envisioned by Moses and Lao Tsu and Jesus and Muhammad and Gandhi and King. The most rapidly growing religious sect in America is the one pollsters classify as the "nones," meaning they have no religious affiliation. 

Christianity in particular is seen, rightly it seems to me, as antiquated and anti-science.  Rejection of evolution, denial of women's rights to their own bodies, and the assertion that marriage can only be between a man and a woman are at odds with the beliefs of most Americans.  Even the most progressive of American churches struggle with latent privilege and the protection of dominance hierarchies.

Central to the way beliefs are formed and articulated is the notion the community shares about the nature of God.  Beliefs about the nature of God form a heuristic by which a great many problems may be addressed.  If God, "knit me in my mother's womb," then surely abortion is murder.  If God "created us male and female," then there are only two genders and transgender or non-binary persons are abominations.

Many decide that they have no use for God in their lives and thus "don't believe in him."  But if we do that, we abandon any cognitive map with the title "God," and with it all of the guidance and insight that can come from such heuristics.

Nancy Ellen Abrams is the co-author of several prominent writings in the field of cosmology and thus is herself a consummate scientist.  When she recognized that her ability to draw from the wisdom of 12-step recovery depended on having a "higher power," she went in search of A God that Could be Real, the title of the book she then wrote.  What she came up with is fascinating and deeply useful.  What is also valuable to us is the awareness that we have permission to construct for ourselves the relationship with God that will best enable us to create what we need.

We create and are created by all of the relationships we have, especially those we give attention to.  If we want to have a rich and dynamic relationship with all that is real and relevant, we need communities in which God is a collaborative creation born from the needs and experiences of all. 

Relating to the All

The totality of being is just too big, too complex, even too chaotic, for us to relate to.  It is the loop that contains all loops.  The strange loop which contains all strange loops is not a heuristic for our daily lives.  It is just too complex. 

We have to simplify the concept of the object we create by selecting certain aspects of the totality of being which are most relevant to us.  We condense this sense of the all into a sense of what matters.  We have to reduce it to something that we can hold as a mental object, and with which we can construct a relationship.  We form a relationship which we can then use to inform the choices of our daily living. 

If the scope of our concern is the totality of the processes which make up the biosphere, we may reify it as Gaia or even Mother Nature.  But if we want to be inclusive of all of the dynamics of being, the title most commonly used is God.

For most people that word, that title, does not mean what we are talking about here.  It may be that we will have to find a different name.  Source and Ground of Being are used.  But It is hard to have a sense that the Ground loves me.  Personally, I want to try to reclaim God. 

We already have to define what we mean when we use that term.   So I am inclined to use God, and religion, and spiritual and do the work of defining my perspective.  Right out of the gate this means several things about the nature of God and my relationship to Them.

Yes, Them.  God is gender non-binary.  God is not a person, but an entity with which I desire to create a personal relationship because I find such a relationship enriches my life and results in my making choices that are observably better, not just for myself, but also for others.  While I am a loop that resides within the loop that is God, I am not God.  I am in God.  And while I have a mind of my own, to the degree to which I can align my mind with that of God, I am able to act in a manner that values and enriches all of creation.

For early Mesopotamians, God was a king.  For Jesus, God was a father.  For me,  God is a Strange Loop.