iguring out how our brain works has been the pursuit of many scientists throughout history, but most of it still remains a mystery. One possible explanation for why we have not been able to make as much progress comes from cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, as he poses his “641 argument.”
The 641 argument sets up the following scenario: imagine a chain of dominoes. If 641 is identified as prime, then a particular stretch of dominoes in the “results” section of the chain will remain standing. Now imagine someone who is not aware of the computations and tries to explain why some dominoes are still standing. One explanation could be: “because the previous domino didn’t hit it.” True, but it doesn’t tell the whole story, which is “because 641 is prime.”
Hofstadter notes it is perhaps even the only satisfactory answer on the level that truly explains the phenomenon. This distinction is the heart of Hofstadter’s lesson. Some explanations only exist at a higher level of abstraction and can never be uncovered by staring harder at the low-level mechanics. You could track every vibration of every domino, every molecule of wood and air, and still never discover the concept of “prime.”
For Hofstadter, this is a clue to why the mind itself is so hard to pin down. Brains are made of neurons firing, ions flowing, and chemicals binding, but describing that activity alone doesn’t explain why you feel joy, remember a childhood song, or suddenly realize a joke is funny. Just as primality is invisible in the physics of dominoes, consciousness may be invisible in the biochemistry of neurons.
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