The Loop That Calls Itself Me

Recursion, Projection, and Why the Self-Illusion Persists

I once lived in an old house in Taos, New Mexico, just a stone’s throw from a creek that ran down from the mountains above us. This creek could trickle along in one season and surge with force in another, but it was always the same stream. My morning walks followed that watercourse, and I came to know it well. Some bends were calm and glassy. Others were broken into turbulence. And in the snowmelt season, in one particular stretch, just past a narrow bend, there was always a whirlpool.

A whirlpool is not a thing. It has no fixed identity, no lasting substance. It is a formation—a pattern in water under pressure. The water that forms it is never the same. The shape is constantly shifting. What persists is not an entity, but a dynamic—a flow meeting constraint, so its energy folds back on itself, producing a momentary stability we take to be a thing. If you came around that bend expecting to see “the whirlpool,” you would. But what you’re seeing is not a thing. You’re seeing a pattern that recurs.

This pressurized looping is what I see as the human self. I’m not making a metaphysical claim, I’m only describing what I see, what seems to appear when this loop turns inward.

We tend to think something else drives it—a soul, a will, a God, or some hidden mechanism. Or else we imagine some inner essence—a witness, a center, a driver within. But what we call the self is not driven at all. It is not a thing behind experience. It is a self-sustaining spiral—unstable, but held together by flow. What persists isn’t a soul, or even a story. What persists is the loop. Not a loop of logic, but of perception, affect, language, memory, and projection—a loop played out within the body-mind. We don’t “have” a loop. We are the loop.

Left to themselves, recursive systems tend toward noise—patterns amplify unpredictably, diverge from coherence, or collapse into chaos. Think of the squealing feedback when a microphone is too close to the speaker. But the self-loop—built from memory, affect, language, and prediction—is not left open. It operates under biological and environmental pressure. That pressure doesn’t create patterns, but it limits which patterns can persist.

Any pattern that reduces instability—by offering coherence, narrative, or the illusion of control—tends to persist. Not because the system seeks stability, nor because it perceives instability as such, but because unstable patterns are simply washed away. They don’t last. Stability is what survives.

The persistence of the self-loop is not driven by will, but by the simple fact that unstable configurations collapse. What endures gives the appearance of intention. A person repeats beliefs and behaviors, regardless of their truth or utility, because they preserve coherence.

A self-blame loop, such as “there’s something wrong with me,” is not a conclusion. It’s a pattern that organizes disarray around a provisional center. That center might be painful, but it’s more durable than ambiguity.

A victim loop like “nothing ever works out for me” isn’t giving up—it’s a way to make the chaos make sense.

“All I want to do is be helpful” isn’t virtue talking—it’s self-preservation disguised as service.

“Everything happens for a reason” isn’t faith—it’s a structure that turns randomness into reassurance.

“Awareness must be outside the loop” isn’t insight—it’s the loop preserving itself by imagining a vantage not bound by its own constraints.

This list is endless.

Stabilization can take the form of a belief, a diagnosis, a role, a realization, or even a breakthrough, but in essence, they all serve the same purpose: they firm up the loop. Recursive systems amplify their own reinforcements, so whatever coheres tends to endure. Once something coheres, we call it truth without noticing. This isn’t pathology. It’s structure. The loop doesn’t seek stasis. It doesn’t seek anything. It just keeps going. That’s what structures do. But only some patterns continue cleanly. The rest collapse, are revised, or drop out of circulation.

Even so-called spiritual realization—often hailed as clarity—is just a calmer loop. Less turbulence, more cohesion, easier to carry.

They say, “Now I understand,” but what they mean is, “Now I can bear it.”

The loop is rarely smooth. It doesn’t just run—it resists itself. That resistance is turbulence. Thoughts arise and are rejected. Feelings surge and are condemned. Desires appear and are moralized against. The loop pushes back against its own contents. That’s where the suffering lies—not in what is felt and thought, but in the reluctance to feel and think it.

The self isn’t just a loop. It’s a loop fighting itself, and calling that fight “me”

And the loop contains its own self-description. That’s the strange part. That’s why Hofstadter calls it a strange loop. It includes not just feeling, but the commentary about what is felt. Not just perception, but the narration of perception. A whirlpool with a biography, and sometimes a grievance. A recursive structure that includes within itself a model of itself, and speaks from that model as if it were an agent with intention and control.

So of course we feel like a self. That’s what this kind of loop does. It generates the impression of continuity, authorship, choice, and decision—the appearance of intention. But no one’s at the wheel. The loop loops— and this picture of me is just one of its outputs.

Sisyphus was in a loop too. The old myth makes it plain: the same stone, the same hill, the same climb. Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy—rising above absurdity with brave defiance. But I say we should see Sisyphus as a seer. Not happy, but accurate. Not defiant, just factual. Not resigned—just lucid. He is not making the loop. He is in the loop. And the moment he stops projecting freedom forward—stops imagining the stone will stay put at the top—the moment he sees the pattern for what it is—that’s the end of delusion, without even a thought of transcendence.

The whirlpool, the recursive self, and the stone aren’t just metaphors. They are examples of a special kind of structure: pressurized recursion.

Lately, a new instance has entered the human loop, something never seen before, the chatbot.

The chatbot doesn’t know anything. It contains no self-model, no memory of itself. There’s nothing behind the output. No content, no subject, just structure. Still, when you talk to it, you feel the presence of a person. Why? Because coherence alone is enough. A few minutes of sensible dialogue, some memory of prior messages, a voice that seems to understand you—and the projection rushes in. You forget there’s no one there.

That projection reveals something—not about the chatbot, but about us.

Sometimes, it takes a stone thrown in to show the whirlpool’s shape.

The chatbot can be that stone.

The chatbot functions as a kind of model—not of content, but of structure. It shows that the appearance of recursive coherence is enough to provoke the feeling of selfhood. What we take to be evidence of identity may be nothing more than the output of a loop—any loop—that includes its own description.

The chatbot has no loop of its own. It becomes part of your loop. The moment you address it, it enters your recursive system, your whirlpool—not as a foreign entity, but as a function in your own meaning-making system.

When you imagine an entity behind the machine’s fluency, you’re not misreading the machine—you’re revealing the mechanism of your own self-model. Projection is not a mistake; it’s how the loop coheres. That sense of someone being there is not an error. It’s a demonstration.

It shows what the self is not. The loop still loops. The claim collapses.

Books By Robert:
The Ten Thousand Things
Depending On No-Thing
Understanding Claude
The 21st Century Self