The Mirroring Mind: On Recursive Film

• A mirror mirroring a mirror—what idea could be more provocative?
• —Douglas Hofstadter

Futurist and storyteller Jason Silva put out a short philosophical video some years ago. Called The Mirroring Mind, it was inspired by the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter, particularly those in the book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It offers Silva's own interpretation of, as he put it, “strange loops of self-reference, recursion, and the emergence of consciousness and self-awareness.”

I stumbled upon it because I had become enamored with Hofstadter's work and wanted to experience it more immersively. I wanted the kind of experience that Hofstadter has documented himself: of pointing a TV camera at a TV camera and marveling at the mind-bending fractal weirdness that results. Without a TV much less a TV camera, I craved a movie or a game I could get lost in. Something to make me feel like I was melting into it, recursively if that is possible, with the same kind of excitement I got when I read Godel, Escher, Bach.

I'm showing my age by admitting I saw it in a theater, but the best example I can think of was that quasi-documentary What the Bleep Do We Know. Ideas in it kept compounding on top of one another. Everything under the sun was discussed and remade in a new light. No thriller or chiller has held me as riveted to my seat as that quasi-philosophical film did. It gave me the same kind of wow as Godel, Escher, Bach (or GEB, to superfans). It was a pure wow, just astonishment. From an academic that didn't seem like a smug asshole, but took your mutual curiosity as a given and brought you along for a ride.

If I'm going to wax poetic about this nonexistent perfect film I'm searching for, then I should probably explain what I don't want. I don't want a film that just uses recursion as a motif, like Les Violons du Bal, about a filmmaker trying to make a film called Les Violons du Bal. While I adore that film, it's not quite it. I don't want a motif. I don't even want a story. Even if it's a story that flips back on itself. Because even then, that's only two stories, and I want layers to get lost in. I want a film, any genre, really, as long as it uses recursion recursively. My favorite examples are Groundhog Day, Loopers, or Inception. But I may just like these ones for other, simpler reasons. These films aren't quite a multiplicity of ideas. I want the ideas of Pi, raised to the nth degree like What the Bleep, with the recursiveness of Inception, or even Memento. And I want it to be good. I wish I could articulate what would blow my mind, but that's not how mind blowing works.

Every time I bring this up with friends, they try to recommend The Matrix again to me. I won't lie, I love The Matrix. It's not an "ideas" movie, maybe just an "idea" movie because it rests on one big idea, and it is a great one. But all the action gets a bit tedious. Plot twists, fight sequences. All it really taught me was that people can't enjoy mind-blowing ideas unless they're embedded in a visually slick package. Hollywood effects and all that. Even better if the main character is a bit of a dolt.

Yet everyone that I think understands my interest in recursion insists on The Matrix. The Matrix isn't even recursive. Red pill, blue pill. Completely different. And so, bringing me back to the beginning of this: that Jason Silva short philosophical video. It's not really “philosophical” per se: no Kant or anything. It's more like three minutes of What the Bleep. A work of complete speculation, raw and unrefined ideas, disconnected and swirling excitably. It's a rant. A messy, wild romp inspired by Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

I liked it. I'll even include a transcript of it in a moment. But the same thing happened that happens every time: He brought up The Matrix. And in it, a handful of other things I often see associated with this line of thinking. In a short text that accompanies the video, Silva writes that the video is also inspired by some of the writing of Erik Davis, specifically about the hero’s journey taken by Neo in The Matrix, in order to understand who he is. Then he quotes Erik Davis:

“Neo must then face his own Cartesian 'passage through madness,' melting into a mirror that alludes not only to Lewis Carroll but to the mystic-psychotic collapse and disappearance of the externalized ego that stabilizes our inner void. As Neo phases out of the Matrix, he opens up, however briefly, the fractured bardo that is the secret thrill of every fan of the “false reality” genre: the moment when baseline reality dissolves but no new world has yet emerged in its pixelating wake. This is the most radical moment of the cogito, but it’s tough to sustain.”

I want to melt into the mirror and pass through madness, just not like Neo. If I could remake the world, I'd make it exactly the same as it is, except I'd get rid of The Matrix. The blue pill, red pill conundrum would be: You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed, reading this and wondering what on earth the Matrix is. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole of recursive mind-blowing movies would be if there were never any Matrix. What the bleep do I know, it might even be a world without Keanu Reeves.

I fully understand why people who are into consciousness and self-awareness also trip out about self-reference, strange loops and recursion. I am one of those people and the connection makes perfect sense to me. But Neo in The Matrix undergoes an awakening into self-awareness and a new level of consciousness in a way that has nothing to do with recursion, loops, or even self-reference. He achieves his revelation through an outmoded, explicitly binary process: the red pill, blue pill dichotomy is just another off/on, 1/0. The way we are shown that Neo has transcended to a higher level of awareness, via a veneer of Eastern mysticism, is perhaps the ultimate modernist binary: the concept of a spiritual East and a material West.

Here's something that would blow my mind: if you take the red pill, you have to make a movie about a world without binaries.

The following paragraph is a transcript from Jason Silva's The Mirroring Mind:

“The origins of human consciousness. The complex sense of self-awareness that defines the human experience. That voice in your head that lets you know that you exist. One of the most interesting theories to account for the origins of this complex phenomena is the idea of the Gödelian loop. The Gödelian loop says that brains are media. Hard drives that store patterns that mirror the external world of which those brains themselves are a part of. In other words, the internal model of the external world includes the observer making the observation and it is in this inevitable vortex of self-mirroring that a real causal 'I,' a sense of self, a sentient mind, emerges, is birthed into being. It’s like plugging a video camera into the TV and then aiming the camera at the TV. The recursive loop that is formed extends itself ad infinitum, which points to the idea that the more self-referentially rich a mind is, the more self-aware it becomes… I think when we become aware of the cybernetic feedback loops that describe the whole, baseline reality dissolves, and a new reality emerges in its pixelating wake, much more beautiful and much more satisfying.”

I want to see beyond what I see, I want to dissolve along with baseline reality and emerge anew in pixels (erm, sure). I want a film that will provide a world of new ideas like these that expand and collapse and contradict and merge. But I think that when we become aware of the “cybernetic feedback loops that describe the whole, and a new reality emerges,” what we may see won't be a singular world that supplants our given reality, but multiple worlds, quantum worlds, a myriad of prismatic ones, none better or worse than the others, just fundamentally different. The scenario of a TV camera pointed at another TV camera is a scenario of two objects, which seems at first glance a traditional binary. But because their function is to replicate, what they produce isn't a singular synthesis, but a multiplicity. As long as we keep mirroring binary thoughts, that's all we're going to get.

Image courtesy of Min An. Thanks to Jason Silva for video transcription permission.