Loops and life
Radiolab’s 2/21 podcast on loops is trippy, funny, and alarmingly educational.
It begins with a sketch that starts off normally, then veers into a horrifying fugue state of some kind:
And, they discuss set theory. I knew about Russell and Gödel, although I honestly could not make heads or tails of Gödel, Escher, Bach when it rampaged through my friends’ cognitive science classes in the early 80’s. The podcast wisely steers clear of Hofstadter, focusing instead on things that happen in real life. This, it turns out, is trippy enough.
There is an interview with a woman who experienced transitory amnesia and was, for a time, unable to form short-term memories. I’ve been there - after a bad bike crash - and friends noted the looping character of conversations. It’s a constant process of re-orientation - where am I? how did I get here? what happened? - followed by a reset every couple of minutes. Gradually, as the brain gets back to normal, you move out of the loop and back into normal functioning. But isn’t it interesting that as we malfunction we become more orderly, more algorithmic, more recursive…. And, as we heal, less predictable, more varied in our interests, more chaotic…?
There’s also some discussion of the life and death of an ecosystem - one that kicks off when a whale dies and falls to the sea floor. (They don’t mention Whalefall by the estimable Alicia Chen, but should have.)
One odd problem - what happens to all those scavengers and microbes when the whale is finally gone? No one knows - they must disperse, most to oblivion. But a few, somehow, must find new whale-worlds to colonize, and keep the loop going.