gozzterLeave a Comment on The Ouroboros

The Ouroboros

I don’t know about you, but lately I have found myself thinking about thinking -wondering, for example, about infinite regress. Now that I’m retired, memories of disparate things that bothered me back in my university philosophy classes, pop up like seals surfacing in the harbour. Things like trying to prove the existence of God with the old Cosmological Argument: everything has a cause, so what was the cause of the first cause? It’s  circular reasoning, of course -the premises of the argument are in need of as much proof as the conclusions at which they claim to arrive: Circulus in Probando was the strangely evocative description of the process I was told.

And yet, even thinking about such things, whether they involve circular reasoning, or logical traps, are really just thinking about thinking, aren’t they? Metacognition.

A more delightfully mysterious name which usually comes to mind for me, though is Ouroboros -a snake eating its own tail -an entity much like the legendary Phoenix that keeps renewing itself.

I heard the name first from my father, long before my Philosophy seminars. He’d apparently found the word in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and decided to use it whenever he saw me nibbling my fingernails as I was trying to figure something out. “Don’t get eaten by the Ouroboros,” he’d say with a twinkle in his eyes and a mischievous grin on his face. “Step back for a moment and try to see it through different eyes, G.”

I suspect it was the Oory-Boory sound that intrigued me more than its gentle condemnation of my self-cannibalism though; giggling at the word was enough to separate me from the problem. Anyway, the distraction reframed the question and helped me to see it from a different angle. I had no inkling that he really had no idea what an Ouroboros was, but he used it as a way of telling me I was over-thinking the problem: swallowing it over and over again without ever digesting it.

But, who -or what– is it that should be able to see things differently? How can whatever constitutes a me escape from the confines of its constituent neurons to analyse itself when, supposedly, it is a byproduct of that same neural activity? And even if I could ever manage to escape from the motherboard, would it still be a me that escaped? An I? Or is there, unbeknownst to either of us, some sort of homunculus at the central keyboard overseeing the process, a meta-program director that I am not programmed to be able to detect? I mean, should I worry about ceding control? Can a person actually ‘meta’ himself…? I’ve lived alone too long, I think…

But worries accumulate; they pile up at the strangest times. And, if you think too long and hard about them, they occasionally incarnate. I found myself apologizing to an elderly lady standing ahead of me in the grocery lineup when my shopping cart bumped into her.

She seemed very accommodating and smiled when I picked up a bunch of bananas I’d knocked out of her hands. “Those carts are dangerous animals, aren’t they?” she said as I bumped into her again and stooped to grab a stray banana that had escaped from its friends. “Yours seems to have a mind of its own.”

I smiled at the notion. “I suppose the cart is an extension of me while I’m using it, isn’t it? Like writing with a pencil is just an external manifestation of my thoughts.” I didn’t really mean to wax philosophical, or anything -it just popped out of my mouth.

Bewildered, the lady stared at me for a moment and then her face softened; I suspect she hadn’t expected that kind of conversation in a supermarket lineup. “That’s an interesting way of thinking of it, you know…” A sudden smile surfaced in her eyes. “It’s the kind of thing my grandson comes up with nowadays. He’s in second year at university and thinking of majoring in Philosophy like his mother.” She sighed at the thought, and looked at her bananas for a moment. “She’s a professor there, so I suppose there’s no hope he’ll change his mind.”

“Do you want him to change his mind?” I’d had the same temptation I remembered, so I just had to ask.

She shrugged, and shuffled ahead as the line slowly progressed towards the cashier. “My daughter was always questioning things, always trying to look at things from a different perspective than me -almost as if she were standing outside and looking through a window watching the conversation. I thought it was just a phase she was going through but she made a career out of it, so…”

“And is your grandson like that as well?”

She smiled at the thought. “No, he’s more respectful. But he thinks about thinking a lot…”

“Metacognition?” I volunteered the idea quite accidently.

She chuckled at the word. “I think that’s what he called it, and for some reason, it bothered him…”

I was instantly alert. “Why’s that?”

She shrugged. “I’m not quite sure I understand why. He once told me that thinking about thinking often involved circular reasoning and it gave him a headache…”

“You mean where the thing you are trying to prove is actually the proof?”

She nodded. “Something like that, I guess; he was never very specific…” The line shuffled forward, and she had almost made it to the cash register. She turned back to me just as the cashier was about to deal with her bananas. “He seemed particularly fascinated by the ‘Liar’s Paradox’. Have you ever heard of that?”

I riffled through my university memories. “It was something like ‘All Cretan’s are liars’, I think…”

“Yes, that’s it! But I can’t see why that’s a paradox…”

The cashier smiled at her as he scanned the label on the bananas; he was wearing the sweatshirt of a local university. “It’s because Epimenides, the person who first said it, was himself a Cretan…”

The lady looked at the cashier, obviously surprised.

 “So,” he continued, “if all Cretans are liars, then he can’t be telling the truth, and if they aren’t, then what he said was a lie.” He giggled. “Ya gotta love it, eh?”

We both stared at the cashier, a young man who must have still been in his teens. “I just work here on weekends,” he explained. “University students don’t really have enough time to work, though…” He rolled his eyes comically. “Or have I just plugged into a Circulus in Probando?”

I knew what he was talking about, and smiled; the elderly lady just sighed, paid for her bananas, and left. I guess Philosophy is wasted on some people…

, , ,

Leave a comment

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close