Loops

When they meet again Pedro does not tell Mary his latest dream, for fear that it may ruin their friendship. Mary is excited to talk about her idea of memory in terms of feedback loops so she has not noticed Pedro's dreamy look.


Racetrack Playa, Where Rocks Are Moved By The Wind, by Jon Sullivan, PD Photo.org
Mary: OK, loops first. You know that on Earth everything moves. Something like a mountain may look stationary, but in time it will move to somewhere else and become something else. All things move. When they move back to where they started from, then that is a loop. In nature we can find abundant examples of loops, cycles, or circuits.

Pedro: Alright, I can imagine that everything moves. But how do you know the movements are always cyclic? Can't they be random?

M: Maybe, but let's focus on the cyclic ones first, for they account for the majority of natural events. The water cycle has been taught in science class for centuries. That's a classic example of H₂O molecules moving and transforming in a looping pathway. Actually, water pathways are complex, running in small loops within a larger loop. But they recycle nevertheless, with the help of solar energy and gravity.


Water Cycle, By William Waterway
P: Come to think of it, I have heard of rock cycle, oxygen cycle, life cycle, and whole bunch of other cycles. Can there be a thought cycle, like an idea going from one mind to another and then coming back? Wait, are you saying that memory is like a recycling of… of... sensations in the brain?


Oxygen Cycle
M: There's more to memories than just recycling of sensations or thoughts. But looping pathways have something to do with memory, our memory anyway, not the computer memory. In the brain, there are billions of neurons connected to each other. Neural impulses travel from neurons to neurons. Where do they end up? My guess is that they don't stop in some brain regions and rest forever. There are looping pathways in the neural networks for these impulses to go around and around.

P: If that were so, wouldn't the same memory be recurring forever? Nobody's memory is like that, except maybe some people with dementia who keep saying the same things over and over. Oh, I mean fanatics, not dementia patients.

M: Little children often do the same thing repeatedly. They pick up something and put it in the mouth as if they remember to do so. Adults have their routines and habits. People with dementia may ask where their socks are every 20 minutes. Of course, compulsive behaviors of obsessive people are noted for their repeating patterns. Dieters are caught in the cycles of fasting and binging. Alcoholics or smokers need their fixes like a clockwork. The serious cases are the ones who want to quit, to leave the cycles, but cannot. Anyway, memory is not as simple as that because natural loops are more than cyclic movements. It is that and transformation along the way.

P: Transformations in natural loops? Do you have some examples?

M: Well, in water cycles the water can become ice, or vapor, or fog, or snow, and back to water. Or it can combine with something else and becomes bodily fluids when it is absorbed by living creatures. It can be sap, juice, sweat, odor, blood, pee, mucus. Once transformed, the shape, size, boundary, behavior, and name of the object are all changed. In modern language we talk about these watery things as if they are unique and separate from others. But in the context of loops, they are transformations of a single circulating object.

P: Yes, I see now that in rock cycles it is the same. A rock can become rock, sand, molten lava, dust, gemstone, ore, soil, or even minerals that are taken as vitamins by people. It stays or circulates in the body for a while. When the body dies it returns to earth and continues on in the rock cycle.


Rock Cycle, By ZeWrestler
M: Although there are rock cycles, it is hard to notice transformations of rocks. They seem to be the same rocks every time we look at them. That is because they take so much longer to change. In life cycles it takes less time. Still, many of us think that the notion of self, the I, is something static and separate from others. We do not see the I change as transformations along a life cycle. That’s due partly to how we use our language, and partly to observations from our own perspectives. Take the question 'who am I' for example. If we ask someone who is 7 years old, 14 years old, 21, 28, 35, 42..., who is happy, sad, living in a big family, in a single-parent family, with or without children, parents, spouse, jobs, teacher, friends, enemy, idols, master, followers, then the different answers will show a pattern of transformation. As a person goes through different stages of life, his body and his notion of self changes. His views of the world, his interests, his sufferings, all change. In the Buddhist language this is impermanence. But I prefer the notion of transformations along the pathways of a complex loop.


Das Stufenalter der Frau by F. Leiber.
P: Yeah? What is the difference?

M: Well, with terminology like loops we can explain the expression ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. How can something be the same if it keeps changing? In loops it can. It is moving through the same loops while transforming inside the loops. If we take this a step further, we should update our language to reflect this. Change all nouns from a static name to a rolling movie. 'I' for instance. Change I to something like I-life-cycle or I-life-story or the-Watsons-life-loops or the-Shakyamuni-clans-cycles. We can spin it with Latin or Greek to lend it an air of authority. How about Mary-Cyclus or Pedro-Kyklos?

P: Okay, okay, that is a little too far fetched for me. Maybe because the Earth is spinning and revolving around the Sun day in and day out, and the Moon is orbiting around the Earth, that everything in nature goes around in loops. What about the feedback loops that you mentioned? Is there something else?