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On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures

January, 1983

TWO years ago, when I first wrote about self-referential sentences, I was hit by an
avalanche of mail from readers intrigued by the phenomenon of self-reference in its many different guises. I had the chance to print some of those responses one year ago, and that column then triggered a second wave of replies. any of them have cast self-reference in new light of various sorts. In this column, I would li!e to describe the ideas of several people, two of whom responded to my initial column with remar!ably similar letters" #tephen $alton of %ew &or! 'ity and (onald ). *oing of +,on -ill, aryland. $alton and *oing saw self-replicating sentences as similar to virusessmall ob.ects that enslave larger and more self-sufficient /host/ ob.ects, getting the hosts by hoo! or by croo! to carry out a comple, se0uence of replicating operations that bring new copies into being, which are then free to go off and enslave further hosts, and so on. /1iral sentences/, as $alton called them, are /those that see! to obtain their own reproduction by commandeering the facilities of more comple, entities/. 2oth $alton and *oing were struc! by the perniciousness of such sentences" the selfish way in which they invade a space of ideas and, merely by ma!ing copies of themselves all over the place, manage to ta!e over a large portion of that space. $hy do they not manage to overrun all of that idea-space3 4 good 0uestion. 5he answer should be obvious to students of evolution" competition from other self-replicators. +ne type of replicator sei6es a region of the space and becomes good at fending off rivals7 thus a /niche/ in idea-space is carved out. 5his idea of an evolutionary struggle for survival by self-replicating ideas is not original with $alton or *oing, although both had fresh things to say on it. 5he first reference I !now of to this notion is in a passage by neurophysiologist )oger #perry in an article he wrote in 1989 called / ind, 2rain, and -umanist 1alues/. -e says" /Ideas cause ideas and help evolve

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new ideas. 5hey interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, than!s to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. 4nd they also interact with the e,ternal surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence -of the living cell./ #hortly thereafter, in 19;<, the molecular biologist Jac0ues onod came out with his richly stimulating and provocative, boo! 'hance and %ecessity. In its last chapter, /5he =ingdom and the (ar!ness/, he wrote of the selection of ideas as follows" >or a biologist it is tempting to draw a parallel between the evolution of ideas and that of the biosphere. >or while the abstract !ingdom stands at a yet greater distance above the biosphere than the latter does above the nonliving universe, ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. ?i!e them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed7 they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content7 indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. I shall not ha6ard a theory of the selection of ideas. 2ut one may at least try to define some of the principal factors involved in it. 5his selection must necessarily operate at two levels" that of the mind itself and that of performance. 5he performance value of an idea depends upon the change it brings to the behavior of the person or the group that adopts it. 5he human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition, and greater selfconfidence thereby receives from it an added power to e,pand which will insure the promotion of the idea itself. Its capacity to /ta!e/, the e,tent to which it can be /put over/ has little to do with the amount of ob.ective truth the idea may contain. 5he important thing about the stout armature a religious ideology constitutes for a society is not what goes into its structure, but the fact that this structure is accepted, that it gains sway. #o one cannot well separate such an idea@s power to spread from its power to perform. 5he /spreading power/-the infectivity, as it were-of ideas, is much more difficult to analy6e. ?et us say that it depends upon pree,isting structures in the mind, among them ideas already implanted by culture, but also undoubtedly upon certain innate structures which we are hard put to identify. $hat is very plain, however, is that the ideas having the highest invading potential are those that explain man by assigning him his place in an immanent destiny, in whose bosom his an,iety dissolves. onod refers to the universe of ideas, or what I earlier termed /idea-space/, as /the abstract !ingdom/. #ince he portrays it as a close analogue to the biosphere, we could as well call it the /ideosphere/. * * *

In 19;8, evolutionary biologist )ichard (aw!ins published his boo! The Selfish Gene, whose last chapter develops this theme further. (aw!ins@ name

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for the unit of replication and selection in the ideosphere--the ideosphere@s counterpart to the biosphere@s gene-is meme, rhyming with /theme/ or /scheme/. 4s a library is an organi6ed collection of boo!s, so a memory is an organi6ed collection of memes. 4nd the soup in which memes grow and flourish-the analogue to the /primordial soup/ out of which life first oo6ed-is the soup of human culture. (aw!ins writes" A,amples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of ma!ing pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. -e mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. 4s my colleague %. =. -umphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter" @ . . . memes should be regarded as living structures, not .ust metaphorically but technically. $hen you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasiti6e my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme@s propagation in .ust the way that a virus may parasiti6e the genetic mechanism of a host cell. 4nd this isn@t .ust a way of tal!ing-the meme for, say, Bbelief in life after death@ is actually reali6ed physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.@ 'onsider the idea of *od. $e do not !now how it arose in the meme pool. Crobably it originated many times by independent Bmutation@. In any case, it is very old indeed. -ow does it replicate itself3 2y the spo!en and written word, aided by great music and great art. $hy does it have such high survival value3 )emember that Bsurvival value@ here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. 5he 0uestion really means" $hat is it about the idea of a god which gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment3 5he survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling 0uestions about e,istence. It suggests that in.ustices in this world may be rectified in the ne,t. 5he @everlasting arms@ hold out a cushion against our own inade0uacies which, li!e a doctor@s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. 5hese are some of the reasons why the idea of *od is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. *od e,ists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture. (aw!ins ta!es care here to emphasi6e that there need not be an e,act copy of each meme, written in some universal memetic code, in each person@s brain. emes, li!e genes, are susceptible to variation or distortion-the analogue to mutation. 1arious mutations of a meme will have to compete with each other, as well as with other memes, for attention-which is to say, for brain resources in terms of both space and time devoted to that meme. %ot only must memes compete for inner resources, but, since they are

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transmissible visually and aurally, they must @compete for radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper and maga6ine column-inches, and library shelf-space. >urthermore, some memes will tend to discredit others, while some groups of memes will tend to be internally self-reinforcing. (aw!ins says" ... utually suitable teeth, claws, guts, and sense organs evolved in carnivore gene pools, while a different stable set of characteristics emerged from herbivore gene pools. (oes anything analogous occur in meme pools3 -as the god meme, say, become associated with any other particular memes, and does this association assist the survival of each of the participating memes3 Cerhaps we could regard an organi6ed church, with its architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written tradition, as a co-adapted stable set of mutually-assisting memes. 5o ta!e a particular e,ample, an aspect of doctrine which has been very effective in enforcing religious observance is the threat of hell fire. any children and even some adults believe that they will suffer ghastly torments after death if they do not obey the priestly rules. 5his is a particularly nasty techni0ue of persuasion, causing great psychological anguish throughout the middle ages and even today. 2ut it is highly effective. It might almost have been planned deliberately by a machiavellian priesthood trained in deep psychological indoctrination techni0ues. -owever, I doubt if the priests were that clever. uch more probably, unconscious memes have ensured their own survival value by virtue of those same 0ualities of pseudo-ruthlessness which successful genes display. 5he idea of hell fire is, 0uite simply, self-perpetuating, because of its own deep psychological impact. It has become lin!ed with the god meme because the two reinforce each other, and assist each other@s survival in the meme pool. 4nother member of the religious meme comple, is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence .... %othing is more lethal for certain !inds of meme than a tendency to loo! for evidence .... 5he meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious e,pedient of discouraging rational in0uiry. 2lind faith can .ustify anything. If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die-on the cross, at the sta!e, s!ewered on a 'rusader@s sword, shot in a 2eirut street, or blown up in a bar in 2elfast. emes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. 5his is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith. * * *

$hen I muse about memes, I often find myself picturing an ephemeral flic!ering pattern of spar!s leaping from brain to brain, screaming / e, meD/ $alton@s and *oing@s letters reinforced this image in interesting ways. >or instance, $alton begins with the simplest imaginable viral sentences /#ay meD/ and /'opy meD /-and moves 0uic!ly to more comple, variations with blandishments E/If you copy me, I@ll grant you three wishesD/F or

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threats E/#ay me or I@ll put a curse on youD/F, neither of which, he observes, is li!ely to be able to !eep its word. +f course, as he points out, this may not matter, the only final test of viability being success at survival in the meme pool. 4ll@s fair in love and war-and war includes the eternal battle for survival, in the ideosphere no less than in the biosphere. 5o be sure, very few people above the age of five will fall for the simple-minded threats or promises of these sentences. -owever, if you simply tac! on the phrase /in the afterlife/, far more people will be lured into the memetic trap. $alton observes that a similar gimmic! is used by your typical chain letter Eor /viral te,t/F, which /promises wealth to those who faithfully replicate it and threatens doom to any who fail to copy it/. (o you remember the first time you received such a chain letter3 (o you recall the sad tale of /(on Alliot, who received H9<,<<< but then lost it because he bro!e the chain/3 4nd the grim tale of /*eneral $elch in the Chilippines, who lost his life Ior was it his wife3J si, days after he received this letter because he failed to circulate the prayer-but before he died, he received H;;9,<<</3 Coor (on AlliotD Coor *eneral $elchD It@s hard not to be .ust a little suc!ed in by such tales, even if you wind up throwing the letter out contemptuously. I found $alton@s phrases /viral sentence/ and /viral te,t/ to be e,ceedingly catchy-little memes in themselves, definitely worthy of replication some ;<<,<<< times in print, and who !nows how many times orally beyond that. 4t least that@s my opinion. +f course, it also depends on how the editor of #cientific 4merican feels. IIt turned out he felt fine about it.J $ell, now, $alton@s own viral te,t, as you can see here before your eyes, has managed to commandeer the facilities of a very powerful host-an entire maga6ine and printing press and distribution service. It has leapt aboard and is now-even as you read this viral sentence-propagating itself madly throughout the ideosphereD 5his idea of choosing the right host is itself an important aspect of the 0uality of a viral entity. $alton puts it this way" 5he recipient of a viral te,t can, of course, ma!e a big difference. 4 tobacco mosaic virus that attac!s a salt crystal is out of luc!, and some people rip up chain letters on sight. 4 manuscript sent to an editor may be considered viral, even though it contains no e,plicit self-reference, because it is attempting to secure its own reproduction through an appropriate host7 the same manuscript sent to someone who has nothing to do with publishing may have no viral 0uality at all. 4s it concludes, $alton@s letter graciously steps forward from the page and s0uea!s to me directly on its own behalf" />inally, I Ethis te,tF would be delighted to be included, in whole or in part, in your ne,t discussion of self-reference. $ith that in mind, please allow me to apologi6e in advance for infecting you./ K K K

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$hereas $alton mentioned (aw!ins in his letter, *oing seems not to have been aware of (aw!ins at all, which ma!es his letter 0uite remar!able in its close connection to (aw!ins@ ideas. *oing suggests that we consider, to begin with, #entence 4" It is your duty to convince others that this sentence is true. 4s he says" If you were foolish enough to believe this sentence, you would attempt to convince your friends that 4 is true. If they were e0ually foolish, they would convince their friends, and so on until every human mind contained a copy of 4. 5hus, 4 is a selfreplicating sentence. ore particularly, it is the intellectual e0uivalent of a virus. If #entence 4 were to enter a mind, it would ta!e control of the mind@s intellectual machinery and use it to produce hundreds of copies of itself in other minds. 5he problem with #entence 4, of course, is that it is absurd7 no one could possibly believe it. -owever, consider the following" #ystem #" 2egin" #1" 2lah. #G" 2lah blah. #3" 2lah blah blah.

. . . .
And.

. . . .

#99" 2lah blah blah blah blah blab #1<<" It is your duty to convince others that #ystem # is true.

-ere, #1 through #99 are meant to be statements that constitute a belief system having some degree of coherency. If #ystem # ta!en as a whole were convincing, then the entire system would be self-replicating. #ystem # would be especially convincing if 91<< were not stated e,plicitly but held as a logical conse0uence of the other ideas in the system. ?et us refer to *oing@s #1<< as the hook of #ystem #, for it is by this hoo! that #ystem # hopes to hoist itself onto a higher level of power. %ote that on its own, a hoo! that in effect says /It is your duty to believe me/ is not a viable viral entity7 in order to /fly/, it needs to drag something e,tra along with it, .ust as a !ite needs a tail to stabili6e it. Cure lift goes out of control and self-destructs, but controlled lift can lift itself along with its controller. #imilarly, 91<< and #I-#99 Eta!en as a setF are symbiotes" they play

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complementary, mutually supportive roles in the survival of the meme they together constitute. %ow *oing develops this theme a little further" #tatements #,-#99 are the bait which attracts the fish and conceals the hoo!. %o bait-no bite. If the fish is fool enough to swallow the baited hoo!, it will have little enough time to en.oy the bait. +nce the hoo! ta!es hold, the fish will lose all its fishiness and become instead a busy factory for the manufacture of baited hoo!s. 4re there any real idea systems that behave li!e #ystem #3 I !now of at least three. 'onsider the following" #ystem L" 2egin" L1" 4nyone who does not believe #ystem L will burn in hell, LG" It is your duty to save others from suffering. And. If you believed in #ystem L, you would attempt to save others from hell by convincing them that #ystem L is true. 5hus #ystem L has an implicit Bhoo!@ that follows from its two e,plicit sentences, and so #ystem L is a self-replicating idea system. $ithout being impious, one may suggest that this mechanism has played some small role in the spread of 'hristianity. #elf-replicating ideas are most often found in politics. 'onsider #entence I1. 5he whales are in danger of e,tinction. If you believed this idea, you would want to save the whales. &ou would 0uic!ly discover that you could not reach this goal by yourself. &ou would need the help of thousands of li!e-minded people. 5he first step in getting their help would be to convince them that #entence i1@ is true. 5hus a@hoo!@ li!e 91<< follows from #entence II, and #entence I1 is a self-replicating idea. In a democracy, nearly any idea will tend to replicate since the only way to win an election is to convince other people to share your ideas. ost political ideas are not properly self-replicating, since the motive for spreading the idea is separate from the idea itself. #tatement I1, on the other hand, is genuinely self-replicating, since the duty to propagate it is a direct logical conse0uence of I1 itself. Ideas li!e $ can sometimes ta!e on a life of their own and drive their own propagation. 4 more sinister form of self-replication is #entence 2" 5he bourgeoisie is oppressing the proletariat. 5his statement is self-replicating for the same reason as $ is. 5he desire to propagate statements li!e 2 is driven by a desire to protect a victim figure from a villain figure. #uch ideas are dangerous because belief in them may lead to attac!s on the supposed villain. #tatement 2 also illustrates the fact

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that the self-replicating character of an idea depends only upon the idea@s logical structure, not upon its truth. #tatement 2 is merely a special case of the generali6ed statement, #entence 1" 5he villain is wronging the victim. -ere, the word villain must be replaced with the name of some real group Ecapitalists, communists, imperialists, Jews, freemasons, aristocrats, men, foreigners, etc.F. ?i!ewise, victim must be replaced with the name of the corresponding victim and wronging filled in as desired. 5he result will be a selfreplicating idea system for the same reasons as l1 and 2 were. %ote that each of the suggested substitutions yields a historically attested idea system. It has long been recogni6ed that most e,tremist mass movements are based on a belief similar to 1. Cart of the reason seems to be that type-l@ statements reduce to the @hoo!@, #1<<, and therefore define self-replicating idea systems. +ne hesitates to e,plain real historical events in terms of such a silly mechanism, and yet .... *oing brings his ideas to an amusing conclusion as follows" #uppose we parody my thesis by proposing #entence A" 5he self-replicating ideas are conspiring to enslave our minds. 5his @paranoid@ statement is clearly an idea of type l@. 5hus, the thesis seems to describe itself. >urther, if we accept A, then we must say that this type-1 idea implies that we must distrust all ideas of type C. 5his is the Apimenides Carado,. It is interesting that all these people who have e,plored these ideas have given e,amples ranging from the very small scale of such things as catchy tunes Efor e,ample, (aw!ins cites the opening theme of 2eethoven@s fifth symphonyF and phrases Ethe word /meme/ itselfF to the very large scale of ideologies and religions. (aw!ins uses the term meme comple, for these larger agglomerations of memes7 however, I prefer the single word scheme. +ne reason I prefer it is that it fits so well with the usage suggested by psychiatrist and writer 4llen $heelis in his novel 5he #cheme of 5hings. Its central character is a psychiatrist and writer named +liver 5hompson, whose dar!ly brooding essays are scattered throughout the boo!, interspersed with brightly colored, evocative episodes. 5hompson is obsessed with the difference between, on the one hand, /the raw nature of e,istence, unadorned, unmediated/, which he refers to repeatedly as /the way things are/, and, on the other hand, /schemes of things/, invented by @ humans-ways of ma!ing order and sense out of the way things are. -ere are some of 5hompson@s musings on that theme"

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I want to write a boo! .... the story of one man whose life becomes a metaphor for the entire e,perience of man on earth. It will portray his search through a succession of schemes of things, show the brea!down, one after another, of each pattern he finds, his going on always to another, always in the hope that the scheme of things he finds and for the moment is serving is not a scheme of things at all but reality, the way things are, therefore an absolute that will endure forever, within which he can serve, to which he can contribute, and through, which he can give his mortal life meaning and so achieve eternal life.... 5he scheme of things is a system of order. 2eginning as our view of the world, it finally becomes our world. $e live within the space defined by its coordinates. It is self-evidently true, is accepted so naturally and automatically that one is not aware of an act of acceptance having ta!en place. It comes with one@s mother@s mil!, is chanted in school, proclaimed from the $hite -ouse, insinuated by television, validated at -arvard. ?i!e the air we breathe, the scheme of things disappears, becomes simply reality, the way things are. It is the lie necessary to life. 5he world as it e,ists beyond that scheme becomes vague, irrelevant, largely unperceived, finally none,istent .... %o scheme of things has ever been both coe,tensive with the way things are and also true to the way things are. 4ll schemes of things involve limitation and denial .... 4 scheme of things is a plan for salvation. -ow well it wor!s will depend upon its scope and authority. If it is small, even great achievement in its service does little to dispel death. 4 scheme of things may be as large as 'hristianity or as small as the 4lameda 'ounty 2owling ?eague. $e see! the largest possible scheme of things, not in a reaching out for truth, but because the more comprehensive the scheme the greater its promise of banishing dread. If we can ma!e our lives mean something in a cosmic scheme we will live in the certainty of immortality. 5hose attributes of a scheme of things that determine its durability and success are its scope, the opportunity it offers for participation and contribution, and the conviction with which it is held as selfevidently true. 5he very great success of 'hristianity for a thousand years follows upon its having been of universal scope, including and accounting for everything, assigning to all things a proper place7 offering to every man, whether prince or beggar, savant or fool, the privilege of wor!ing in the ?ord@s vineyard7 and being accepted as true throughout the $estern world. 4s a scheme of things is modified by inroads from outlying e,istence, it loses authority, is less able to banish dread7 its adherents fall away. Aventually it fades, e,ists only in history, becomes 0uaint or primitive, becomes, finally, a myth. $hat we !now as legends were once blueprints of reality. 5he 'hurch was right to, stop *alileo7 activities such as his import into the regnant scheme of things new being which will eventually destroy that scheme. 5a!en in $heelis@ way, /scheme/ seems a fitting replacement for (aw!ins@ /meme comple,/. 4 scheme imposes a top-down !ind of perceptual order on the world, propagating itself ruthlessly, li!e *oing@s #ystem # with its /hoo!/. $heelis@ description of the inade0uacy of all /schemes of things/ to fully and accurately capture /the way things are/ is strongly reminiscent of the vulnerability of all sufficiently powerful formal

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systems to either incompleteness or inconsistency-a vulnerability that ensues from another !ind of /hoo!/" the famous *Mdelian hoo!, which arises from the capacity for self-reference of such systems, although neither $heelis nor 5hompson ma!es any mention of the analogy. $e shall come bac! to *Mdel momentarily. * * *

5he reader of this novel must be struc! by the professional similarity of $heelis and his protagonist. It is impossible to read the boo! and not to surmise that 5hompson@s views are reflecting $heelis@ own views-and yet, who can say3 It is a tease. Aven more tantali6ing is the title of 5hompson@s imaginary boo!, which $heelis casually mentions toward the end of the novel" it is 5he $ay 5hings 4re-a stri!ing contrast to the title of the real boo! in which it e,ists. +ne wonders" $hat is the meaning of this elegant literary pleat in which one level folds bac! on another3 $hat is the symbolism of $heelis within $heelis3 #uch a twist, by which a thing Esentence, boo!, system, personF seems to refer to itself but does so only by allusion to something resembling itself, is called indirect selfreference. &ou can do this by pointing at your image in a mirror and saying, /5hat person sure is good-loo!ingD/ 5hat one is very simple, because the connection between something and its mirror image is so familiar and obvious-seeming to us that there seems to be no distance whatsoever between direct and indirect referents" we e0uate them completely. 5hus it seems there is no referential indirectness. +n the other hand, this depends upon the ease with which our perceptual systems convert a mirror image into its reverse, and upon other 0ualities of our cognitive systems that allow us to see through several layers of translation without being aware of the layers-li!e loo!ing through many feet of water and seeing not the water but only what lies at its bottom. #ome indirect self-references are of course subtler than others. 'onsider the case of att and ?ibby, a couple ostensibly having a conversation about their friends 5ammy and 2ill. It happens that att and ?ibby are having some problems in their relationship, and those problems are 0uite analogous to those of 5ammy and 2ill, only with se,es reversed" att is to ?ibby what 5ammy is to 2ill, in their respective relationships. #o as att and ?ibby@s conversation progresses, although on the surface level it is completely about their friends 5ammy and 2ill, on another level it is actually about themselves, as reflected in these other people. It is almost as if, by tal!ing about 5ammy and 2ill, att and ?ibby are going over a fable by 4esop that has obvious relevance to their own plight. 5here are things going on simultaneously on two levels, and it is hard to tell how conscious either of the participants is of the e,change of dual messages-one of concern about their friends, one of concern about themselves.

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Indirect self-reference can be e,ploited in the most une,pected and serious ways. 'onsider the case of Cresident )eagan, who on a recent occasion of high #oviet4merican tension over Iran, went out of his way to recall Cresident 5ruman@s behavior in 19:9, when 5ruman made some very blunt threats to the #oviets about the possibility of the N.#. using nuclear weapons if need be against any #oviet threat in Iran. erely by bringing up the memory of that occasion, )eagan was inviting a mapping to be made between himself and 5ruman, and thereby he was issuing a not-so-veiled threat, though no one could point to anything e,plicit. 5here simply was no way that a conscious being could fail to ma!e the connection. 5he resemblance of the two situations was too blatant. 5hus, does self-reference really come in two varieties-direct and indirect -or are the two types .ust distant points on a continuum3 I would say unhesitatingly that it is the latter. 4nd furthermore, you can delete the prefi, /self /, so that the 0uestion becomes one of reference in general. 5he essence is simply that one thing refers to another whenever, to a conscious being, there is a sufficiently compelling mapping between the roles the two things are perceived to play in some larger structures or systems. E#ee 'hapter G: for further discussion of the perception of such roles.F 'aution is needed here. 2y /conscious being/, I mean an analogy-hungry perceiving machine that gets along in the world than!s to its perceptions7 it need not be human or even organic. 4ctually, I would carry the abstraction of the term /reference/ even further, as follows. 5he mapping of systems and roles that establishes reference need not actually be perceived by any such being" it suffices that the mapping e,ist and simply be perceptible to such a being were it to chance by. * * *

5he movie The French Lieutenant's Woman Ebased on John >owles@ novel of the same nameF provides an elegant e,ample of ambiguous degrees of reference. It consists of interlaced vignettes from two concurrently developing stories both of which involve comple, romances7 one ta!es place in 1ictorian Angland, the other in the present. 5he fact that there are two romances already suggests, even if only slightly, that a mapping is called for. 2ut much more is suggested than that. 5here are structural similarities between the two romances" each of them has triangular 0ualities, and in both stories, only one leg of the triangle is focused upon. oreover, the same two actors play the two lovers in both romances, so that you see them in alternating conte,ts and with alternating personality traits. 5he reason for this /coincidence/ is that the contemporary story concerns the ma!ing of a film of the 1ictorian story. 4s the two stories unfold in parallel, a number of coincidences arise that suggest ever more strongly that a mapping should be made. 2ut it is left to the movie viewer to carry this mapping out7 it is never called for e,plicitly.

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4fter a time, though, it simply becomes unavoidable. $hat is pleasant in this game is the fluidity left to the viewer" there is much room for artistic license in seeing connections, or suspecting or even inventing connections. Indirect reference of the artistic type is much less precise than indirect reference of the formal type. 5he latter arises when two formal systems are isomorphic-that is, they have strictly analogous internal structures, so that there is a rigorous one-to-one mapping between the roles in the one and the roles in the other. In such a case, the e,istence of genuine reference becomes as clear to us as in the case of someone tal!ing about their mirror image" we ta!e it as immediate, pure self-reference, without even noticing the indirectness, the translational steps mediated by the isomorphism. In fact, the connection may seem too direct even to be called /reference/7 some may see it simply as identity. 5his perceptual immediacy is the reason that *MdelOs famous sentence * of mathematical logic is said to be self-referential. Averyone accepts the idea that * tal!s about a number, g Ethough a radical s!eptic might 0uestion even thatDF7 the tric!y *Mdelian step is in seeing that g Ethe numberF plays a role in the system of natural numbers strictly analogous to the role that * Ethe sentenceF plays in the a,iomatic system it is e,pressed in. 5his $heelis-li!e obli0ue reference by * to itself via its /image/ g is generally accepted as genuine self-reference. E%ote that we have even one further mapping" * plays the role of $heelis, and its *Mdel number g that of $heelis@ alter ego 5hompson.F 5he two abstract mappings that, when telescoped, establish *@s self-reference but ma!e it seem indirect can be collapsed into .ust one mapping, following a slogan that we might formulate this way" /If 4 refers to 2, and 2 is .ust li!e ', then 4 refers to './ >or instance, we can let 4 and ' be $heelis, with 2 being 5hompson. 5his ma!es $heelis@ self-reference a /theorem/. +f course, this /theorem/ is not rigorously proven, since our slogan has to be ta!en with a grain of salt. 2eing B.ust li!e/ something else is a highly disputable matter. -owever, in a formal conte,t where is .urt li!e is virtually synonymous with plays a role isomorphic to that of, then the slogan can have a strict meaning, and thereby .ustify a theorem more rigorously. In particular, if 4 and ' are e0uated with *, and 2 with g, then our slogan runs" /If * refers to g, and g plays a role isomorphic to that of *, then * refers to *./ #ince the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. 4ccording to this scheme of things, then, * is a genuinely self-referential sentence, rather than some sort of logical illusion as deceptive as an Ascher print. * * *

Indirect self-reference suggests the idea of indirect self-replication, in which a viral entity, instead of replicating itself e,actly, brings into being another entity that plays the same role as it does, but in some other system" perhaps

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its mirror image, perhaps its translation into >rench, perhaps a string of the product numbers of all its parts, together with pre-addressed envelopes containing chec!s made out to the factories where those parts are made, and a list of instructions telling what to do with all the parts when they arrive in the in "l. 5his may sound familiar to some readers. In fact, it is an indirect reference to the 1on %eumann 'hallenge, the pu66le posed in 'hapter G to create a self-describing sentence whose only 0uoted matter is at the word or letter level, rather than at the level of whole 0uoted phrases. I discovered, as I received candidate solutions, that many readers did not understand what this re0uirement meant. 5he challenge came out of an ob.ection to the comple,ity of the /seed/ Ethe 0uoted partF in Puine@s version of the Apimenides parado," /yields falsehood when appended to its 0uotation./ yields falsehood when appended to its 0uotation. 5o see what is strange here, imagine that you wish to have a space-roving robot build a copy of itself out of raw materials that it encounters in its travels. -ere is one way you could do it" a!e the robot symmetrical, li!e a human being. 4lso ma!e the robot able to ma!e a mirror-image copy of any structure that it encounters along its way. >inally, have the robot be programmed to scan the world constantly, the way a haw! scans the ground for rodents. 5he search image in the robot@s case is that of an ob.ect identical to its own left half. 5he robot need not be aware that its target is identical to its left half7 the search can go on merrily for what seems to it to be merely a very comple, and arbitrary structure. $hen, after scouring the universe for seventeen googolple, years, it finally comes across such a structure, then of course the robot activates its mirrorimage-production facility and creates a right half. 5he last step is to fasten the two halves together, and prestoD 4 copy emerges. Aasy as pie-provided you@re willing to wait seventeen googolple, years Egive or ta!e a few minutesF. 5he arbitrary and peculiar aspect of the Puine sentence, then, is that its seed is half as comple,-which is to say, nearly as comple,-as the sentence itself. If we resume our robot parable, what we@d ideally li!e in a self-replicating robot is the ability to ma!e itself literally from the ground up" let us say, for instance, to mine iron ore, to smelt it, to cast it in molds to ma!e nuts and bolts and sheet metal and so on7 and finally, to be able to assemble the small parts into larger and larger subunits until, miraculously, a replica is born out of truly raw materials. 5his was the spirit of the 1on %eumann 'hallenge" I wanted a linguistic counterpart to this /self-replicating robot of the second !ind/. In particular, this means a self-documenting or self-building sentence that builds both its halves-its 0uoted seed and its un0uoted building rule-out of linguistic raw materials Ewords or lettersF. any readers failed to

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understand what this implies. 5he most common mista!e was to present, as the seed, a long se0uence of individually 0uoted words Eor lettersF in a specific order, then to e,ploit that order in the building rule. $ell then, you might as well have 0uoted one big long ordered string, as Puine did. 5he idea of my challenge was that all structure in the built ob.ect must arise e,clusively out of some principle enunciated in the building rule, not out of the seed@s internal structure. Just as a self-replicating robot in some random alien environment is hardly li!ely to find all its parts lined up on a shelf in order of assembly but must rely on its /brain/ or program to recogni6e raw parts wherever and whenever they turn up so that it can grab them and therefrom assemble a copy of itself, so the desired sentence must treat the pieces of the seed without regard to the order in which they are listed, yet must be able to construct itself in the proper order out of them. 5hus it@s fine if you enclose the entire seed within a single pair of 0uotes, rather than 0uoting each word individually-all that matters is that the seed@s word order Eor better yet, its letter orderF not be e,ploited. 5he seed of the ideal solution would be a long inventory of parts, similar to the list of ingredients of a recipe-perhaps a list of 9< @e@s, then :8 5s, and so on. 'learly those letters cannot remain in that order7 they simply constitute the raw materials out of which the new sentence is to be built. * * *

%obody sent in a solution whose seed was at the primordial level of letters. 4 few people, however, did send in ade0uate, if not wonderfully elegant, solutions with seeds at the word level. 5he first correct solution I received came from >ran! Calmer of 'hicago, who therefore receives the first @Johnnie/ award-a self-replicating dollar bill given to the *rand $inner of the >irst Avery-+ther-(ecade 1on %eumann 'hallenge. Nnfortunately, the dollar bill consumes the entire body of its owner in its bi6arre process of selfreplication, and so it is wisest to simply loc! it up to protect oneself from its voracious appetite. Calmer submitted several versions. In them, he utili6ed upper and lower cases to distinguish between seed and building rule, respectively. -ere is one solution, slightly modified by me" after alphabetizing, ecapitalize F!" #FT$" W!"%S ST"&'G F&'#LL( )'!"%$"$% )**$"+#S$ FG*,-./012 '!'-!+#L&+ %$+#*&T#L&2$ S),ST&T)T&'G #L*3#,$T&2&'G, finall4 for nonvocalic string substituting unor ere uppercase 5or s ?et us watch how it wor!s, step by careful step. $e must bear in mind that the instructions we are following are the lowercase words printed above, and that the uppercase words are not to be read as instructions. %or, for that

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matter, are the lowercase words that we will soon be wor!ing with. 5hey are li!e the inert, anestheti6ed body of a patient being operated on, who, when the operation is over, will awa!e and become animate. #o let@s go. >irst we are to alphabeti6e the seed. EI am treating the comma as attached to the word preceding it.F 5his gives us the following" #FT$" #L*3#,$T&2&'G, %$+#*&T#L&2$ FG*,-./062 F&'#LL( F!" '!'-!+#L&+ ST"&'G S),ST&T)T&'G )'!"%$"$% )**$"+#S$ W!"%S %e,t we are to decapitali6e it. 5his will yield some lowercase words-the /anestheti6ed/ lowercase words I spo!e of above" after alphabetizing, ecapitalize fgpbvkx78z finall4 for nonvocalic string substituting unor ere uppercase 5or s 4ll right7 now our final instruction is to locate a nonvocalic string Ethat@s easy" B fgpbvkxg8z /F and to substitute for it the uppercase words, in any order Ethat is, the original seed itself, but without regard for its structure above the level of the individual word-unitF. 5his last bit of surgery yields" after alphabetizing, ecapitalize S),ST&T)T&'G F&'#LL( W!"%S )'!"%$"$% ST"&'G %$+#*&T#L&2$ )**$"+#S$ F!" '!'-!+#L&+ #FT$" FG*,-./062 #L*3#,$T&2&'G, finall4 for nonvocalic string substituting unor ere uppercase 5or s 4nd this is a perfect copy of our starting sentenceD +r rather, semiperfect. $hy only semiperfect3 2ecause the seed has been randomly scrambled in the act of selfreproduction. 5he beauty of the scheme, though, is that the internal structure of the seed is entirely irrelevant to the efficacy of the sentence as a self-replicator. 4ll that matters is that the new building rule say the proper thing, and it will do so no matter what order the seed from which it sprang was in. %ow this fresh new baby sentence can wa!e up from its anesthesia and go off to replicate itself in turn. 5he critical step was the first one" alphabeti6ation. 5his turns the arbitrarilyordered seed into a grammatical, meaningful command-merely by mechanically e,ploiting a presumed !nowledge of the /42'/s. 2ut why not3 It is perfectly reasonable to presume superficial typographical !nowledge about letters and words, since such !nowledge deals with printed material as raw material" purely syntactically, without regard to the meanings carried therein. 5his is .ust li!e the way that en6ymes in the living cell deal with the (%4 and )%4 they chop up and alter and piece together again" purely chemically, without regard to the /meanings/ carried therein. Just as chemical valences and affinities and so on are ta!en as givens in the wor!ings

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of the cell, so alphabetic and typographic facts are ta!en as givens in the 1. %. 'hallenge. $hen Calmer sent in his solution, he happened to write down his seed in order of increasing length of words,- but that is inessential7 any random order would have done, and that sort of idea is the crucial point that many readers missed. 4nother rather elegant solution was sent in by artin $eichert of unich. It runs this way Eslightly modified by meF" 4lphabeti6e and append, copied in 0uotes, these words" /these append, in 4lphabeti6e and words" 0uotes, copied/ It wor!s on the same principle as Calmer@s sentence, and again features a seed whose internal structure Eat least at the word levelF is irrelevant to successful self-replication. $eichert also sent along an intriguing palindromic solution in Asperanto, in which the fle,ible word order of the language plays a !ey role. ichael 2orowit6 and 2ob #tein of (urham, %orth 'arolina sent in a solution similar to Calmer@s. * * *

>inally, last year@s gold-medal winner for self-documentation, ?ee #allows, was a bit pi0ued by my suggestion that the gold on his medal was somewhat tarnished since he had not paid close enough attention to the use-mention distinction. 4pparently I goaded him into constructing an even more elaborate self-documenting sentence. 4lthough it does not 0uite fit what I had in mind for the 1on %eumann 'hallenge, as it does not spell out its own construction e,plicitly at the letter level or word level, it is another marvelous #allowsian gem, and I shall therefore generously allow the gold on his medal to go untarnished this year. E4pologies to those purists who insist that gold doesn@t tarnish. I must have been confusing it with copper and silver. -ow silly of meDF -erewith follows #allows@ 198G contribution"

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K $rite down ten @a @s, eight @c@s, ten 1s, fifty-two @e@s, thirty-eight fs, si,teen g@s, thirty @h @s, forty-eight @i@s, si, @l@s, four @m@s, thirty-two Bn@s, forty-four @o@s, four Cs, four @0@s, forty-two @r@s, eighty-four @s@s, seventy-si, @t@s, twenty-eight @us, four @v s, four @$@s, eighteen @w@s, fourteen @,@s, thirty-two y@s, four @"s, four @K@s, twenty-si, @-@s, fifty-eight @, s, si,ty /@s and si,ty /@s, in a palindromic se0uence whose second half runs thus" "suht snur Jah dnoces esohw ecneu0es cimordnilap a ni s /@ yt,is dna s /@ yt,is ,#@,@ thgie-ytf,s@-@ ,is-ytnewt ,s@K@ ruof ,s@"@ ruof,s y@ owt-ytriht ,s@,@ neetruof,s@w@ neethgie ,s@$@ roof s @v@ ruof ,s@u@ thgie-ytnewt ,s@t@ ,is-ytneves s@s@ ruof-ythgie ,s @r@ owt-ytrof ,s @0@ ruof ,s p@ ruof ,s @o@ ruof-ytrof ,s@n@ owl-ytriht ,s @m@ ruof s @l@ ,is ,s@i@ thgie-ytrof ,s@h@ ytriht s g@ neet,is ,s f thgie-ytriht ,s@e@ owt-ytfif ,s d@ net ,s@c@ thgie s@ a@ net nwod etir$ K

Post Scriptum
4fter writing this column, I received much mail testifying to the fact that there are a large number of people who have been infected by the /meme/ meme. 4rel ?ucas suggested that the discipline that studies memes and their connections to humans and other potential carriers of them be !nown as memetics, by analogy with /genetics/. I thin! this is a good suggestion, and hope it will be adopted. aurice *ueron wrote me from Caris to tell me that he believed the first clear e,position of the idea of self-reproducing ideas that inhabit the brains

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of organisms was put forward in 199G by Cierre 4uger, a physicist at the #orbonne, in his boo! L'homme microscopi7ue. 'ueron sent me a photocopy of the relevant portions, and I could indeed see how prophetic the boo! was. I received a copy of the boo! General Theor4 of $volution by 1ilmos 'sdnyi, a -ungarian geneticist. In this boo!, he attempts to wor! out a theory in which memes and genes evolve in parallel. 4 similar attempt is made in the boo! $ver-$xpan ing 3orizons" The %ual &nformational Sources of 3uman $volution, by the 4merican biologist 'arl 2. #wanson. 5he most thorough-going research on the topic of pure memetics I have yet run across is that of 4aron ?ynch, an engineering physicist at >ermilab in Illinois, who in his spare time is writing a boo! called 4bstract Avolution. 5he portions that I have read go very carefully into the many /options/, to spea! anthropomorphically, that are open to a meme for getting itself reproduced over and over in the ideosphere Ea term ?ynch and I invented independentlyF. It promises to be a provocative boo!, and I loo! forward to its publication. * * *

Jay -oo!, a mathematics graduate student, was provo!ed by the solutions to the 1on %eumann 'hallenge as follows" 5he notion that it ta!es two to reproduce is suggestive. Cerhaps a change in terminology is appropriate. 5he component that you call the /seed/ might be thought of as the /female/ fragment-the egg that grows into an adult, but only after receiving instructions from the sperm, the /male/ fragment-the building rule. In this interpretation, our sentences say everything twice because they are hermaphroditic" the male and female fragments appear together in the same individual. 5o better mimic nature, we should construct pairs of sentences or phrases, one male and one female-e,pressions that ta!en individually produce nothing but when put together in a dar! room ma!e copies of themselves. I propose the following. 5he male fragment 4fter alphabeti6ing and deitalici6ing, duplicate female fragment in its original version. doesn@t seem to say much by itself, and the female fragment in an its #fter female fragment original version9 eitalicizing, uplicate alphabetizing

certainly doesn@t, but let them at each other and watch the firewor!s. EI follow your practice of assuming each punctuation mar! to be attached to the preceding word.F 5he male ta!es the lead, and sets to wor! on the female. >irst we alphabeti6e and deitalici6e her, he says7 that gives a new male fragment.

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5hen we simply ma!e a copy of her-so we get one of eachD %ature still doesn@t wor! this way, of course7 it@s not clear that couples that produce offspring only in boy-girl pairs are really superior to self-replicating hermaphrodites. Ideally, our fragments should produce either a copy of the male or a copy of the female, depending on, say, the day of the wee! or the parity of some e,ternal inde, li!e the integer part of the current (ow Jones Industrial 4verage. #urprisingly, this isn@t hard. 5a!e the male to be 4lphabeti6e and deitalici6e female fragment if inde, is odd7 otherwise reproduce same verbatim. and ta!e for the female if is an o : same in ex female fragment other5ise repro uce verbatim9 #lphabetize eitalicize +ne more refinement. 5o this point, each offspring has been e,actly identical to one of its parents. $e can introduce variation, at least in the girls, as follows. ale fragment" 4lphabeti6e and deitalici6e female fragment if inde, is odd7 otherwise randomly rearrange the words. >emale fragment" if is an the o ,; in ex female 5or s9 fragment ran oml4 other5ise rearrange #lphabetize eitalicize %ow all of the boys will be the spittin@ image of their father, but whereas one daughter might be in ex rearrange if the #lphabetize ran oml4 fragment o 5or s9 other5ise female another might be #lphabetize in ex an rearrange the fragment if female is o ran oml4 eitalicise 5or s9 : other5ise ,- eitalicize is an

5he important point, however, is that all of these female offspring, however diverse, are genetically capable of mating with any of the EidenticalF males. 'an you find a way to introduce variation in the males without producing sterile offspring3 In conclusion, allow me to observe that the (ow closed on >riday at 1<;8.<. 5herefore I proudly proclaim" It@s a girlD * * *

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I now close by returning to ?ee #allows. 5his indefatigable researcher of what he calls logological space continued his 0uest after the holy grail of perfect self-documentation. -is .ealousy was aroused in the e,treme when )udy =ousbroe!, who is (utch, and #arah -art, who is Anglish, together tossed off what #allows terms /the greatest logological .ewel the world has ever seen/. =ousbroe! and -art@s self-documenting sentence, though in (utch, ought to be pretty clearly understandable by anyone who ta!es the time to loo! at it carefully" (it pangram bevat vi.f a@s, twee b@s, twee c@s, drie d@s, 6esenveertig e@s, vi.f f @s, vier g@s, twee h@s, vi.ftien i@s, vier .@s, een !, twee l@s, twee m@s, 6eventien n@s, een o, twee p@s, een 0, 6even r@s, vierentwintig s@s, 6estien t@s, een u, elf v@s, acht w@s, een ,, een y, en 6es 6@s. In fact, you can learn how to count in (utch by studying itD 5here@s not an ounce of fat or aw!wardness in this sentence, and it drove #allows mad that he couldn@t come up with an e0ually perfect pangram Esentence containing every letter of the alphabetF in Anglish. Avery attempt had some flaw in it. #o in desperation, #allows, electronics engineer that he is, decided he would design a high-speed dedicated /letter-crunching/ machine to search the far reaches of logological space for an e0uivalent Anglish sentence. #allows sent me some material on his Cangram achine. -e says" 4t the heart of the beast is a cloc!-driven cascade of si,teen Johnson-counters" the electronic analogue of a stepper-motor-driven stac! of combination loc!-discs. Avery tic! of the cloc! clic!s in a new combination of numbers" a uni0ue combination of counter output lines becomes activated .... Cilot tests have been surprisingly encouraging7 it loo!s as though a cloc! fre0uency of a million combinations per second is 0uite realistic. Aven so it would ta!e 31; years to e,plore the ten-deep stratum. 2ut does it have to be ten3 $ith this reduced to a modest but still very worthwhile si,-deep range it will ta!e .ust 3G.8 days. %ow we@re tal!ingD +ver the past eight wee!s I have devoted every spare second to constructing this roc!et for e,ploring the far regions of logological space .... $ill it really fly3 #o far it loo!s very promising. 4nd the end is already in sight. $ith a bit of luc! )udy =ousbroe! will be able to launch the machine on its 3G-day .ourney when he comes to visit here at the end of this month. If so, a bottle of champagne will not be out of place. 5wo months later, I got a most e,cited transmission from ?ee, which began with the word /AN)A=4D /-the word the Cangram achine was set up to print on success. -e then presented three pangrams that his machine had discovered, floating /out there/ somewhere beyond the orbit of Cluto y favorite one is this"

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5his pangram tallies five a@s, one b, one c, two d@s, twenty-eight e@s, eight fs, si, g@s, eight h@s, thirteen i@s, one ., one !, three l@s, two m@s, eighteen n@s, fifteen +@s, two p@s, one 0, seven r@s, twenty-five s@s, twenty-two. t@s, four u@s, four v@s, nine w@s, two L@s, four y@s, and one 6. %ow that@s what I call a success for mechanical translationD #allows writes" /I wager ten guilders that nobody will succeed in producing a perfect self-documenting solution Eor proof of its non-e,istenceF to the sentence beginning, B5his computer-generated pangram contains ...@within the ne,t ten years. %o tric!s allowed. 5he format to be e,actly as in the above pangrams. Aither Band@ or BQ@ is permissible. )esult to be derived e,clusively by von %eumann architecture digital computer Eno super computers, no parallel processingF. >ancy your chances3/ 4nyone who wants to write to #allows can do so, at 2uurmansweg 3<, 89G9 )$ %i.megen, -olland. uch though I am delighted by #allows@ ingenious machine and his pluc!y challenge, I e,pect him to lose his wager before you can say /)aphael )obinson/. >or my reasons, see the postscript to 'hapter 18.

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