This kind of sentiment does not go down well in today’s egalitarian America. It would not play in Peoria. Quite frankly, it rings terribly elitist, perhaps even repugnant, to our modern democratic ears. And yet I have to admit that I somewhat agree with Huneker, and I can’t help wondering if we don’t all of us implicitly believe in the validity of something vaguely like the idea of “small-souled” and “large-souled” human beings. In fact, I can’t help suggesting that this is indeed the belief of almost all of us, no matter how egalitarian we publicly profess to be.
Small-souled and Large-souled Humans
Some of us believe in capital punishment — the intentional public squelching of a human soul, no matter how ardently that soul would plead for mercy, would tremble, would shake, would shriek, would desperately struggle to escape, on being led down the corridor to the site of their doom.
Some of us, perhaps almost all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.
In earlier days, perhaps some of us would have believed (as did George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, each in their own way, at least for some period of time) that it was not immoral to own slaves and to buy and sell them, breaking up families willy-nilly, just as we do today with, for example, horses, dogs, and cats.
Some religious people believe that atheists, agnostics, and followers of other faiths — and worst of all, traitors who have abandoned “the” faith — have no souls at all, and are therefore eminently deserving of death.
Some people (including some women) believe that women have no souls — or perhaps, a little more generously, that women have “smaller souls” than men do.
Some of us (myself included) believe that the late President Reagan was essentially “all gone” many years before his body gave up the ghost, and more generally we believe that people in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease are essentially all gone. It strikes us that although there is a human brain couched inside each of those cranial shells, something has gone away from that brain — something essential, something that contains the secrets of that person’s soul. The “I” has either wholly or partly vanished, gone down the drain, never to be found again.
Some of us (again, I count myself in this group) believe that neither a just-fertilized egg nor a five-month old fetus possesses a full human soul, and that, in some sense, a potential mother’s life counts more than the life of that small creature, alive though it indisputably is.
Hattie the Chocolate Labrador
Kellie: After brunch we’re going out to see Lynne’s turkey, which we haven’t seen yet.
Doug: Which, or whom?
Kellie: Which, I’d say. A turkey’s not a whom.
Doug: I see… So is Hattie a whom, or a which?
Kellie: Oh, she’s a whom, no doubt.
Ollie the Golden Retriever
Doug: So how did Ollie enjoy the outing this afternoon at Lake Griffy?
Danny: Oh, he had a pretty good time, but he didn’t play much with the other dogs. He liked playing with the people, though.
Doug: Really? How come?
Danny: Ollie’s a people person.
Where to Draw that Fateful, Fatal Line?
All human beings — at least all sufficiently large-souled ones — have to make up their minds about such matters as the swatting of mosquitoes or flies, the setting of mousetraps, the eating of rabbits or lobsters or turkeys or pigs, perhaps even of dogs or horses, the purchase of mink stoles or ivory statues, the usage of leather suitcases or crocodile belts, even the penicillinbased attack on swarms of bacteria that have invaded their body, and on and on. The world imposes large and small moral dilemmas on us all the time — at the very least, meal after meal — and we are all forced to take a stand. Does a baby lamb have a soul that matters, or is the taste of lamb chops just too delicious to worry one’s head over that? Does a trout that went for the bait and is now helplessly thrashing about on the end of a nylon line deserve to survive, or should it just be given one sharp thwack on the head and “put out of its misery” so that we can savor the indescribable and yet strangely predictable soft, flaky texture of its white muscles? Do grasshoppers and mosquitoes and even bacteria have a tiny little “light on” inside, no matter how dim, or is it all dark “in there”? (In where?) Why do I not eat dogs? Who was the pig whose bacon I am enjoying for breakfast? Which tomato is it that I am munching on? Should we chop down that magnificent elm in our front yard? And while I’m at it, shall I yank out the wild blackberry bush? And all the weeds growing right by it?
What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)? In the final analysis, it is simply because might makes right, and we humans, thanks to the intelligence afforded us by the complexity of our brains and our embeddedness in rich languages and cultures, are indeed high and mighty, relative to the “lower” animals (and vegetables). By virtue of our might, we are forced to establish some sort of ranking of creatures, whether we do so as a result of long and careful personal reflections or simply go along with the compelling flow of the masses. Are cows just as comfortably killable as mosquitoes? Would you feel any less troubled by swatting a fly preening on a wall than by beheading a chicken quivering on a block? Obviously, such questions can be endlessly proliferated (note the ironic spelling of this verb), but I will not do so here.
Below, I have inserted my own personal “consciousness cone”. It is not meant to be exact; it is merely suggestive, but I submit that some comparable structure exists inside your head, as well as in the head of each language-endowed human being, although in most cases it is seldom if ever subjected to intense scrutiny, because it is not even explicitly formulated.
Interiority — What Has it, and to What Degree?
It is most unlikely that you, a reader of this book, have missed all the Star Wars movies, with their rather unforgettable characters C-3PO and R2-D2. Absurdly unrealistic though these two robots are, especially as perceived by someone like myself who has worked for decades trying to understand just the most primordial mechanisms of human intelligence by building computational models thereof, they nonetheless serve one very useful purpose — they are mind-openers. Seeing C-3PO and R2-D2 “in flesh and blood” on the screen makes us realize that whenever we look at an entity made of metal or plastic, we are not inherently destined to jump reflexively to the dogmatic conclusion, “That thing is necessarily an inanimate object since it is made of ‘the wrong stuff ’.” Rather, we find, perhaps to our own surprise, that we are easily able to imagine a thinking, feeling entity made of cold, rigid, unfleshlike stuff.
In one of the Star Wars films, I recall seeing a huge squadron of hundreds of uniformly marching robots — and when I say “uniformly”, I mean really uniformly, with all of them strutting in perfect synchrony, and all of them featuring identical, impassive, vacuous, mechanical facial expressions. I suspect that thanks to this unmistakable image of absolute interchangeability, virtually no viewer feels the slightest twinge of sadness when a bomb falls on the charging platoon and all of its members — these factory-made “creatures” — are instantly blown to smithereens. After all, in diametric opposition to C-3PO and R2-D2, these robots are not creatures at all — they are just hunks of metal! There is no more interiority to these metallic shells than there is to a can-opener or a car or a battleship, a fact revealed to us by their perfect identicality. Or else, if perchance there is inside of them some tiny degree of interiority, it is on the same order as the interiority of an ant. These metallic marchers are mere soldier robots, members of a dronelike caste in some larger robot colony, and are merely following out, in their zombie-ish way, the inflexible mechanical drives implanted in their circuitry. If there is interiority somewhere in there, it is of a negligible level.
What is it, then, that
gives us the undeniable sense that C-3PO and R2-D2 have a “light on” inside, that there is lots of genuine interiority inside their inorganic crania, located somewhere behind their funny circular “eyes”? Where does our undeniable sense of their “I” ’s come from? And contrariwise, what was it that was lacking in former President Reagan in his last years and in that mass of identical blown-up soldier robots, and what is it that is not lacking in Hattie the chocolate labrador and in R2-D2 the robot, that makes all the difference to us?
The Gradual Growth of a Soul
I stated above that I am among those who reject the notion that a full-fledged human soul comes into being the moment that a human sperm joins a human ovum to form a human zygote. By contrast, I believe that a human soul — and, by the way, it is my aim in this book to make clear what I mean by this slippery, shifting word, often rife with religious connotations, but here not having any — comes slowly into being over the course of years of development. It may sound crass to put it this way, but I would like to suggest, at least metaphorically, a numerical scale of “degrees of souledness”. We can initially imagine it as running from 0 to 100, and the units of this scale can be called, just for the fun of it, “hunekers”. Thus you and I, dear reader, both possess 100 hunekers of souledness, or thereabouts. Shake!
Oops! I just realized that I have committed an error that comes from long years of indoctrination into the admirable egalitarian traditions of my native land — namely, I unconsciously assumed that there is a value at which souledness “maxes out”, and that all normal adults reach that ceiling and can go no higher. Why, though, should I make any such assumption? Why could souledness not be like tallness? There is an average tallness for adults, but there is also a considerable spread around that average. Why should there not likewise be an average degree of souledness for adults (100 hunekers, say), plus a wide range around that average, maybe (as for IQ) going as high as 150 or 200 hunekers in rare cases, and down to 50 or lower in others?
If that’s how things are, then I retract my reflexive claim that you and I, dear reader, share 100 hunekers of souledness. Instead, I’d like to suggest that we both have considerably higher readings than that on the hunekometer! (I hope you agree.) However, this is starting to feel like dangerous moral territory, verging on the suggestion that some people are worth more than others — a thought that is anathema in our society (and which troubles me, as well), so I won’t spend much time here trying to figure out how to calculate a person’s souledness value in hunekers.
It strikes me that when sperm joins ovum, the resulting infinitesimal bio-blob has a soul-value of essentially zero hunekers. What has happened, however, is that a dynamic, snowballing entity has come into existence that over a period of years will be capable of developing a complex set of internal structures or patterns — and the presence, to a higher and higher degree, of those intricate patterns is what would endow that entity (or rather, the enormously more complex entities into which it slowly metamorphoses, step by step) with an ever-larger value along the Huneker soul-scale, homing in on a value somewhere in the vicinity of 100.
The cone shown on the following page gives a crude but vivid sense of how I might attach huneker values to human beings of ages from zero to twenty (or alternatively, to just one human being, but at different stages).
In short, I would here argue, echoing and generalizing the provocative statement by James Huneker, that “souledness” is by no means an off–on, black-and-white, discrete variable having just two possible states like a bit, a pixel, or a light bulb, but rather is a shaded, blurry numerical variable that ranges continuously across different species and varieties of object, and that also can rise or fall over time as a result of the growth or decay, within the entity in question, of a special kind of subtle pattern (the elucidation of whose nature will keep us busy for much of this book). I would also argue that most people’s largely unconscious prejudices about whether to eat or not to eat this or that food, whether to buy or not to buy this or that article of clothing, whether to swat or not to swat this or that insect, whether to root or not to root for this or that species of robot in a sci-fi film, whether to be sad or not to be sad if a human character in a film or a novel meets with a violent end, whether to claim or not to claim that a particular senescent person “is no longer there”, and so forth, reflect precisely this kind of numerical continuum in their minds, whether they admit it or not.
You might wonder whether my having drawn a cone that impenitently depicts “degrees of souledness” during the development of a given human being implies that I would be more willing, if placed under enormous pressure (as in the film Sophie’s Choice), to extinguish the life of a two-year-old child than the life of a twenty-year-old adult. The answer is, “No, it does not.” Even though I sincerely believe there is much more of a soul in the twenty-year-old than in the two-year-old (a view that will no doubt dismay many readers), I nonetheless have enormous respect for the potential of the two-year-old to develop a much larger soul over the course of a dozen or so years. In addition, I have been built, by the mechanisms of billions of years of evolution, to perceive in the two-year-old what, for lack of a better word, I will call “cuteness”, and the perceived presence of that quality grants the two-year-old an amazingly strong shell of protectedness against attacks not just by me, but by humans of all ages, sexes, and persuasions.
Lights On?
The central aim of this book is to try to pinpoint the nature of that “special kind of subtle pattern” that I have come to believe underlies, or gives rise to, what I have here been calling a “soul” or an “I”. I could just as well have spoken of “having a light on inside”, “possessing interiority”, or that old standby, “being conscious”.
Philosophers of mind often use the terms “possessing intentionality” (which means having beliefs and desires and fears and so forth) or “having semantics” (which means the ability to genuinely think about things, as contrasted with the “mere” ability to juggle meaningless tokens in complicated patterns — a distinction that I raised in the dialogue between my versions of Socrates and Plato).
Although each of these terms puts the focus on a slightly different aspect of the elusive abstraction that concerns us, they are all, from my perspective, pretty much interchangeable. And for all of these terms, I reiterate that they have to be understood as coming in degrees along a sliding scale, rather than as on/off, black/white, yes/no switches.
Post Scriptum
The first draft of this chapter was written two years ago, and although it discussed meat-eating and vegetarianism, it had far less on the topic than this final version does. Some months later, while I was “fleshing it out” by summarizing the short story “Pig”, I suddenly found myself questioning the dividing line that I had carefully drawn two decades earlier and had lived with ever since (although occasionally somewhat uneasily) — namely, the line between mammals and other animals.
All at once, I started feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of eating chicken and fish, even though I had done so for some twenty years, and so, catching myself by surprise, I stopped “cold turkey”. And by a remarkable coincidence, my two children independently came to similar conclusions at almost exactly the same time, so that over a period of just a couple of weeks our family’s diet was transmuted into a completely vegetarian one. I’ve returned to the same spot as I was in when I was twenty-one in Sardinia, and it’s the spot I plan to stay in.
Writing this chapter thus gave rise to a totally unexpected boomerang effect on its author — and as we shall see in later chapters, such an unpredictable bouncing-back of choices one has just made, followed by the incorporation of their repercussions into one’s self-model, serves as an excellent example of the meaning of the motto “I am a strange loop.”
CHAPTER 2
This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream
What Is a “Brain Structure”?
I HAVE often been asked, when people hear that my
research amounts to a quest after the hidden machinery of human thought, “Oh, so that means that you study the brain?”
One part of me wants to reply, “No, no — I think about thinking. I think about how concepts and words are related, what ‘thinking in French’ is, what underlies slips of the tongue and other types of errors, how one event effortlessly reminds us of another, how we recognize written letters and words, how we understand sloppily spoken, slurred, slangy speech, how we toss off untold numbers of utterly bland-seeming yet never-beforemade analogies and occasionally come up with sparklingly original ones, how each of our concepts grows in subtlety and fluidity over our lifetime, and so forth. I don’t think in the least about the brain — I leave the wet, messy, tangled web of the brain to the neurophysiologists.”
Another part of me, however, wants to reply, “Of course I think about the human brain. By definition, I think about the brain, since the human brain is precisely the machinery that carries out human thinking.”
This amusing contradiction has forced me to ask myself, “What do I mean, and what do other people mean, by ‘brain research’?”, and this leads naturally to the question, “What are the structures in the brain that someone could in principle study?” Most neuroscientists, if they were asked such a question, would make a list that would include (at least some of) the following items (listed roughly in order of physical size):
amino acids
neurotransmitters
DNA and RNA
synapses
dendrites
neurons
Hebbian neural assemblies
I Am a Strange Loop Page 5
