Let’s assume, as would seem natural, that camera A is closer to screen A than it is to screen B (and vice versa). Then loop A will take up more space on screen A than does loop B, meaning more pixels, and so loop A will be reproduced with higher fidelity on screen A. Loop A will be large and fine-grained, loop B will be small and coarse-grained. But that’s only on screen A. On screen B, everything is reversed: loop B will be larger and finer-grained, while loop A will be smaller and of coarser grain. The last thing I want to remind you of before we go on to a new paragraph is that now loop A, although it’s still called just “A”, nonetheless involves loop B as well (and vice versa); each of these two loops now plays a role in defining the other one, though loop A plays a larger role in its own definition than does loop B (and vice versa).
We now have a metaphor for two individuals, A and B, each of whom has their own personal identity (i.e., their own private strange loop) — and yet part of that private identity is made out of, and is thus dependent upon, the private identity of the other individual. Furthermore, the more faithful the image of each screen on the other one, the more the “private” identities of the two loops are intertwined, and the more they start to be fused, blurred, and even, to coin a word, undisentanglable from each other.
At this point, even though we are being guided solely by a very curious technological metaphor, I believe we are drawing slowly closer to an understanding of what genuine human identity is all about. In fact, how could anyone imagine that it would be possible to gain deep insight into the mystery of human identity without eventually running up against some sort of unfamiliar abstract structures? Sigmund Freud posited egos, ids, and superegos, and there may well exist some such abstractions inside the architecture of a human soul (perhaps not exactly those three, but patterns of that ilk). We humans are so different from other natural phenomena, even from most other types of living beings, that we should expect that in order to get a glimpse into what we truly are, we would have to look in very unexpected places. Although my strange loops are obviously very different from Freud’s notions, there is a certain similarity of spirit. Both views of what a self is involve abstract patterns that are extremely remote from the biological substrate they inhabit — so remote, in fact, that the specifics of the substrate would seem mostly irrelevant.
One Privileged Loop inside our Skull
Suppose some future television technology managed to eliminate the graininess of cameras and screens, so that all images were flawless at all scales. Such a fanciful scenario would then invalidate the argument, given above, that A’s representation of B’s loop, since it uses fewer pixels, is less faithful than that of its own loop. Now A has a perfect representation of B’s loop on its screen, and vice versa. So what makes A different from B? Perhaps they are now indistinguishable?
Well, no. There is still a fundamental difference between A and B, even though each represents the other perfectly. The difference is that camera A is feeding its image directly to screen A (and not screen B), while camera B is directly feeding screen B (and not screen A). Thus, if camera A tilts or zooms in, then the entire image on screen A follows suit and also tilts or grows larger, whereas the image on screen B stays put. (To be sure, the nested image of screen A on screen B will tilt or grow, all the way down the line of ever-more-nested images — but the orientation and size of the top-level screen in system B will remain unchanged, while those of the top-level screen in system A will be directly affected by what camera A does.)
The point of this variation was to make clear that distinct identities still exist even in a situation with profoundly intertwined loops, because the perceptual hardware of a given system directly feeds only that system. It may have indirect effects on all sorts of other systems, and those effects may even be very important, but any perceptual hardware is associated first and foremost with the system into which it feeds directly (or with which it is “hard-wired”, in today’s blur of computational and neurological jargon).
Put less metaphorically, my sense organs feed my brain directly. They also feed the brains of my children and my friends and other people (my readers, for instance), but they do so indirectly — usually through the intermediary channel of language (though sometimes by photography, art, or music). I tell my kids some droll story of what happened at the grocery store checkout stand, and by George, they instantly see it all oh-so-clearly in their mind’s eyes! The customer with the black-and-white tabloid Weekly World News in his cart, the odd look of the cashier as she picks it up and reads the headline about the baby found, perfectly healthy, floating in a life raft from the Titanic, the embarrassed chuckle of the customer, the quip by the next person in line, and so on. The imagery thus created in the brains of my kids, my friends, and others may seem at times to have a vividness rivaling that of images coming directly through their own sense organs.
Our ability to experience life vicariously in this manner is a truly wonderful aspect of human communication, but of course most of anyone’s perceptual input comes from their own perceptual hardware, and only a smaller part comes filtered this way through other beings. That, to put it bluntly, is why I remain primarily myself, and why you remain primarily yourself. If, however, my perceptions came flooding as fast and furiously into your brain as they do into mine, then we’d be talking a truly different ballgame. But at least for the time being, there’s no danger of such high communication rates between, say, my eyes and your brain.
Shared Perception, Shared Control
At first I had proposed that a human “I” results from the existence of a very special strange loop in a human brain, but now we see that since we mirror many people inside our crania, there will be many loops of different sizes and degrees of complexity, so we have to refine our understanding. Part of the refinement hinges, as I just stated, on the fact that one of these loops in a given brain is privileged — mediated by a perceptual system that feeds directly into that brain. There is another part of the story, though, which has to do with what a brain controls rather than what it perceives.
The thermostat in my house does not regulate the temperature in your house. Analogously, the decisions made in my brain do not control the body that’s hard-wired to your brain. When you and I play tennis, it’s only my arms that my brain controls! Or so it would seem at first. On second thought, that’s clearly an oversimplification, and this is where things start to get blurry once again. I have partial and indirect control over your arms — after all, wherever I send the ball, that’s where you run, and my shot has a great deal to do with how you will swing your arms. So in some indirect fashion, my brain can control your muscles in a game of tennis, but it is not a very reliable fashion. Likewise, if I hit my brakes while driving down the road, then the person behind me will also hit their brakes. What happens in my brain exerts a little bit of control over that driver’s actions, but it is an unreliable and imprecise control.
The type of external control just described does not create a profound blurring of two people’s identities. Tennis and driving do not give rise to deep interpenetrations of souls. But things get more complicated when language enters the show. It is through language most of all that our brains can exert a fair measure of indirect control over other humans’ bodies — a phenomenon very familiar not only to parents and drill sergeants, but also to advertisers, political “spin doctors”, and whiny, wheedling teen-agers. Through language, other people’s bodies can become flexible extensions of our own bodies. In that sense, then, my brain is attached to your body in somewhat the same way as it is to my body — it’s just that, once again, the connection is not hard-wired. My brain is attached to your body via channels of communication that are much slower and more indirect than those linking it to my body, so the control is much less efficient.
For example, I am infinitely better at writing my signature with my own hand than if I were to try to get you to do so by describing all the tiny details of the many curves that I execute so smoothly and unconsciousl
y whenever I “sign out” at the grocery store checkout stand. But the initial notion that there is a fundamental and absolute distinction between how my brain is linked to my own body and how it’s linked to someone else’s body is seen to be exaggerated. There is a difference in degree, that’s clear, but it’s not clear that it’s a difference in kind.
Where have we gotten so far in discussing intertwined souls? We’ve seen that I can perceive your perceptions indirectly, and that I can also control your body indirectly. Likewise, you can perceive my perceptions indirectly (that’s what you’re doing right now!), and you can control my body indirectly, at least a bit. We’ve also seen that the communication channels are slow enough that there are two pretty clearly separate systems, and so we can unproblematically give them different names. The fact that we humans have cleanly separated bodies (except for mother–fetus unions and Siamese twins) makes it absolutely natural to assign a different name to each body, and on a surface level, the act of assignment of distinct names to distinct bodies seems to settle the question once and for all. “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Our naming convention not only supports but enormously helps to lock in the comfortable notion that we — our selves — are cleanly separated entities. “Me Tarzan, you Jane” — end of story.
Language plays a further role, though, in this matter of establishing a body as the locus of an identity. Not only does it give us one name per body (“Tarzan”, “Jane”) but it also gives us personal pronouns (“me”, “you”) that do just as much as names do to reinforce the notion of a crystal-clear, sharp distinction between souls, associating one watertight soul to each body. Let’s take a closer look.
A Twirlwind Trip to Twinwirld
Once, some years ago, I concocted a curious philosophical fantasy-world, to which now, with your permission, I’ll escort you for the next few sections. Although back then I didn’t give the place a name, I think I’ll call it “Twinwirld” here. The special feature of Twinwirld is that 99 percent of all births result in identical twins, and only 1 percent give rise to singletons, which are not called that, but “halflings”. In Twinwirld, twins (who, as in our world, are not exactly identical but have the same genome) grow up together and go everywhere together, wearing identical clothes, attending the same schools, taking the same courses, cooperating on homework assignments, making the same friends, learning to play the same musical instrument, eventually taking a single job together as a team, and so forth. A pair of identical twins in Twinwirld is called, rather inevitably, a “pairson” or a “dividual” (or even just a “dual”).
Each dividual in Twinwirld is given a name at birth — thus a male pairson might be named “Greg” and a female pairson “Karen”. In case you were wondering, there is a way to refer to each of the two “halves” of a pairson, although, as it happens, the need to do so crops up very seldom. However, for completeness’s sake, I will describe how this is done. One simply appends an apostrophe and a one-letter suffix — either an “l” or an “r” — to the dividual’s name. (Twinwirld etymologists have determined that these consonants “l” and “r” are not arbitrary, but are in fact residues of the words “left” and “right”, although no two seems to be sure exactly why this should be the case.) Thus Greg consists of a “left half”, Greg’l, and a “right half”, Greg’r. Karen likewise consists of Karen’l and Karen’r — but as I said, most of the time, nobodies feel the need to address the “left” or “right” half of a pairson, so those suffixes are almost never used.
Now what constitutes a “friend” in Twinwirld? Well, another pairson, natch — sometwo that like a lot. And what about love and marriage? Well, if you’ve already guessed that a pairson falls in love with and marries another pairson, then you are spot on! As a matter of fact, by a crazy coincidence, this very same Karen and Greg that I just mentioned are a typical Twinwirld couple; moreover, they are the proud pairents of two twildren — a girlz named “Natalie” and a boyz named “Lucas”. (To satisfy busybodies, I have to explain that I have no idea which of Karen’l and Karen’r gave birth to either twild, nor which of Greg’r and Greg’l was, so to speak, the instigating agent in either case. No two in Twinwirld ever thinks about such intimate things — no more than we in our world wonder whether the sperm leading to a child’s birth came from the father’s right or left testicle, or whether the egg came from the mother’s left or right ovary. It’s neither here nor there — the zwygote was formed and the twild was born, that’s all that matters. Anyway, please don’t ask too many questions on this complex topic. That’s far from the point of my fantasy!)
In Twinwirld, there is an unspoken and obvious understanding that the basic units are pairsons, not left or right halves, and that even though each dividual consists of two physically separate and distinguishable halves, the bond between those halves is so tight that that the physical separateness doesn’t much matter. That everytwo is made of a left and right half is just a familiar fact about being alive, taken for granted like the fact that every half has two hands, and every hand has five fingers. Things have parts, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have integrity as wholes!
The left and right halves of a pairson are sometimes physically apart from each other, though generally only for very brief periods. For instance, one half of twem might make a quick hop to the grocery store to get something that twey forgot to purchase, while the other half is cooking tweir dinner. Or if twey’re snowboarding down a hill, twey might split apart to go around opposite sides of a twee. But most of the time the two halves prefer to stay close to each other. And although the two halves do have conversations together, most thoughts are so easily anticipated that very few words are usually needed, even to get across rather complex ideas.
Is One or Two Letters of the Alphabet?
We now come to the tricky matter of pairsonal pronouns in Twinwirld. To start off, they have something like our familiar pronoun “I” for an isolated half, but it is written with a small “i”. This is because “i”, much like the suffixes “l” and “r”, is a very rare term used only when extreme pedantic clarity is called for. Far more common than “i” is the pronoun that either half of a pairson uses in order to refer to the whole pairson. I am not speaking of the pronoun “we”, because that word reaches out beyond the pairson who is speaking, and includes other pairsons. Thus “we” might mean, for instance, “our whole school” or “everytwo at last night’s dinner party”. Instead, there is a special variant of “we” — “Twe” (always spelled with a capital “T”) — which denotes just that pairson of which the speaker is the left or right half. And of course there is an analogous pronoun, “” (which, although it looks as though it should be pronounced “double-you”, is actually pronounced “tyou”, like the “Tue” in a British “Tuesday”), used for addressing exactly one other pairson. Thus, for example, back when they were first getting to know each other, Greg (that is, either Greg’l or Greg’r — I don’t know which half of twem) once said very timidly to Karen (on whom twey had a crush), “Tonight after dinner, Twe are going to the movies; would like to join twus, Karen?”
The pronoun “you” also exists in Twinwirld, but it is plural only, which means that it is never used for addressing just one other dividual — it always denotes a group. “Do you know how to ski?” might be asked of an entire family, but never of just one twild or one pairent. (The way to ask that would be, of course, “Do know how to ski?”) Analogously, “they” never denotes just one dividual. “Both of them came to our wedding” is a statement about a duo of pairsons (that is to say, four halves — or four “persons”, in the quaint terminology of those hailing from our world). As for a third-pairson singular pronoun, there is one — “twey” — and it is genderless. Thus “Did twey go to the concert last night?” could be a question about either Karen or Greg (but not about both together, as that would require “they”), and “Have twey had the measles?” could be asked about either Lucas or Natalie, but of course not about both.
A young pairson in Twinwirld grows up with a natural sense of being just one unit, even though twey consist of two disconnected parts. “Every dividual is indivisible”, runs an ancient Twinwirld saying. All sorts of conventions in Twinwirld systematically reinforce and lock in this feeling of unity and indivisibility. For instance, only one grade is earned for work that do in school. It may be that one half of is a bit weaker than the other half is in, say, math or drawing, but that doesn’t affect collective self-image; what counts is the team’s joint performance. When a twild learns to play a musical instrument, both halves have their own instrument, practice the same pieces, and do so simultaneously. A bit later in life, when ’re in college, read novels written by pairsons, go to exhibits of paintings painted by pairsons, and study theorems proven by pairsons. In a word, credit and blame, glory and shame, neglect and fame are always doled out to pairsons, never to mere halves of pairsons.
The cultural norms in Twinwirld take for granted and thus reinforce the view of a pair of halves as a natural and indissoluble unit. Whereas in our society, identical twins often yearn to break away from each other, to strike out on their own, to show the world that they are not identical people, such desires and behavior in Twinwirld would be seen as anomalous and deeply puzzling. The two halves of a pairson would scratch tweir head (or each other’s head — why not?), and say to each other, perhaps even in synchrony, “Why in the Twinwirld did twey break apart? Who would ever want to become a halfling? It would be such a semitary existence!”
I Am a Strange Loop Page 30
