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What Hump?

June 15, 2005 11:27 AM

In Mel Brooks terrific movie Young Frankenstein, Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) tells Igore (Marty Feldman), "I am a brilliant surgeon. When this is done, I can fix the hump on your back." To which Igore replies with a hard look and almost threatening tone, "What hump?"

Is Igore guilty of self-deception or is Frankenstein guilty of putting Igore in a category of those to be pitied or helped? Is either perception the right one? Why can't Igore see that he has a hump when Gene Wilder has his hand on it?

This is one of those self-referential nightmares of the sort loved by logicians and famously studied by Godel and Turing. (Both these guys committed suicide, so fair warning if you read any further.)

If Igore acknowledges his condition, then he must recognize he is pitied by others. Then he might deserve our pity since the pity and help are worse than his condition, which he doesn't acknowledge he has. He is better off not seeing his condition.

So, this can hardly be called self-deception; it seems rational to me. He lives with his body and we with ours and there is no point whatever in comparing himself with others. He is asserting his rightful self-image and rationally choosing not to adopt an image others may have of him. Neither the Hunchback of Notre Dame nor the Elephant Man could bring themselves to do that. But, that is just Hollywood; any rational person would take Igore's position.

The problem is that the brain has a special structure, the mirror neurons, that help us to imagine how others might act by running a simulation of a model of that person in our brain. This lets us forecast their possible actions, maybe even their strategies or thoughts. This structure is supposed to let us run the simulation in the other way too; that is to imagine what we would do in their situation.

Does this structure let me run a simulation of myself in my own brain? Perhaps to assess what kind of a person I am? Probably, because I think we often think that others ought to admire us because we admire ourselves and we can run our simulation of others to the same effect.

But if I can simulate myself and others in this structure, who am I? Am I my simulation or am I something else? Are the perceptions of others as valid as mine or more? Or is everyone completely wrong about me?

So you can see how complicated this self-referential simulation of self and others gets to be. It can go very wrong.

The problem is that it is not possible to design a mind that is capable of assessing itself. The self-assessment must always be either inconsistent or incomplete. There must be times when we don't know who we are and other times when we are wildly inconsistent. That is inherent in the neural substrate and its algorithms that we call the mind.

The brain doesn't have enough "stuff" to step outside itself, so it can never have anything but incomplete and inconsistent knowledge of the mind. This makes the Biblical injunction "Know thyself" the hardest thing to do. It is impossible.

Intuition is just a word for knowledge that we have that cannot be expressed and this must always be true. Godel's theorem says this. We have knowledge beyond what our language and formal systems can express. Turing did it a different, but equivalent way. It must have been hard for both of them; self-referential introspection, running simulations of ourselves and our thought is hard; a Doesteveskian task. I wonder if it killed them.

That is why it is OK to be inconsistent or to be ignorant in some situations. It must be. There is no way around it. This the Godel/Turing theorem applied to the human mind. The theorem applies most strongly when we must imagine and analyze ourselves.

I frankly do not believe a lot of the research on self-deception. It is tangled with these self-referential vs. other paradoxes. Though I do think we do deceive ourselves. It must have had great adaptive value in the evolutionary context. How otherwise would Homo Erectus have left Africa and populated all of Europe? Its not a nice place, after all, as Mel Brooks might say.

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