But is this secondary swirl that now lives in my brain, this simulated personal gemma, anything like the real swirl, the primary swirl, that once lived in her brain and is now gone? Is there Carol-consciousness still somewhere in this world? That is, is it possible for me to look at Monica “for Carol” and, even in the tiniest degree, to become Carol seeing Monica? Or has that personal gemma been finally and totally and irrevocably obliterated?
A person is a point of view — not only a physical point of view (looking out of certain eyes in a certain physical place in the universe), but more importantly a psyche’s point of view: a set of hair-trigger associations rooted in a huge bank of memories. The latter can be absorbed, more and more over time, by someone else. Thus it’s like acquiring a foreign language step by step.
For a while, one’s speaking is largely “fake” — that is, one is thinking in one’s native language but substituting words quickly enough to give the impression that the thinking is going on in the second language; however, as one’s experience with the second language grows, new grammatical habits form and turn slowly into reflexes, as do thousands of lexical items, and the second language becomes more and more rooted, more and more genuine. One gradually becomes a fluent thinker in and speaker of the other language, and it is no longer “fake”, even if one has an accent in it. So it is with coming to see the world through another person’s soul.
My parents, for instance, internalized each other’s psychic points of view very deeply over the nearly fifty years of their marriage, and each of them thus gradually became a “fluent be-er” of the other. Perhaps when my mother “was” my father, she was so with an “accent”, and vice versa, but for each of them, the act of being the other one was certainly genuine, was not fakery.
As with my parents, so there was some degree of genuine being of Carol by me when she was alive, and vice versa. Although it took me several years to learn to “be” Carol, and although I certainly never reached the “native speaker” level, I think it’s fair to say that, at our times of greatest closeness, I was a “fluent be-er” of my wife. I shared so many of her memories, both from our joint times and from times before we ever met, I knew so many of the people who had formed her, I loved so many of the same pieces of music, movies, books, friends, jokes, I shared so many of her most intimate desires and hopes. So her point of view, her interiority, her self, which had originally been instantiated in just one brain, came to have a second instantiation, although that one was far less complete and intricate than the original one. (Actually, long before she met me, her point of view had already engendered other instantiations, because it had of course been internalized to varying degrees and levels of fidelity by her siblings and her parents.) Needless to say, Carol’s point of view was always by far most strongly instantiated in her brain.
This talk of someone “being” someone else reminds me of a Linguistics Department Christmas party back in the late 1970’s, when Carol’s and my old friend Tom Ernst did a marvelous imitation of his professor John Goldsmith (also a friend), with so many echt mannerisms of John’s. It was uncanny to me to watch Tom “put on” and “take off” John’s style — and in so doing, putting John on and making a fine take-off of him.
There are shallower aspects of a person and there are deeper aspects, and the deeper aspects are what imbue the shallower ones with genuine meaning. I guess that sounds cryptic. What I mean is that if I believe statement X (for example, “Chopin is a great composer”) and someone else also believes X, then, despite this ostensible agreement between us, our internal feelings when we think X may be unutterably different even though, on the superficial verbal level, our belief is “the same”. On the other hand, if our souls have a deep resemblance, then our two beliefs in X will in fact be very similar, and we will intuitively resonate with each other. Communication (at least on that topic) will be nearly effortless.
What really matters for mutual understanding of two people are such things as having similar responses to music (not just shared likes but also shared dislikes), having similar responses to people (again, I mean both likes and dislikes), having similar degrees of empathy, honesty, patience, sentimentality, audacity, ambition, competitiveness, and so on. These central building blocks of personality, character, and temperament are decisive in mutual understanding.
Consider, for instance, the shattering experience of constantly feeling inferior to other people. Some people know this intimately, and some don’t know it at all. A person with huge reserves of self-confidence will simply never be able to feel how it is to be paralyzed by the lack of confidence — they “just don’t get it”. It is these sorts of aspects, these innermost aspects of a soul (as opposed to such relatively objective and transferable items as countries visited, novels read, cuisines mastered, historical facts known, and so forth) that make for soul-uniqueness.
I’m concerned with whether the deeper aspects of a person, the ones that give rise to a self, to an “I”, are transportable to another person, or absorbable by another person (i.e., by the second person’s brain). The second person doesn’t have to change their own personality or opinions in order to absorb the first person; it can be more like an alter ego that, like an article of clothing or a persona or a stage role, they can occasionally don or slip into (my image is that of Tom Ernst putting on and taking off that John Goldsmith persona, although of course on a much more profound level), a sort of a “second vantage point” from which to see the world.
But the key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you ever have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth, because they (or at least a significant fraction of them) are still instantiated in your brain, because they still live on in a “second neural home”?
In my opinion, to deal with this question head-on, one really has to focus on this thing I call the “Gödelian swirl of self”. The key question becomes this: When the pointers to “self” — the structures that, through a lifetime of locking-in and self-stabilizing, have given rise to an “I” — are copied in some imperfect, low-resolution fashion in a secondary brain, where exactly do they wind up pointing?
My internal model of Carol is certainly “thin” or sparse in comparison to the original self-model (the one that was located inside her own brain), but that sparseness is not the key issue. The crux is this: even if my internal model of Carol were unbelievably rich (e.g., like my Mom’s model of my Dad, say, or even ten times stronger than that), would it nonetheless be the wrong kind of structure to give rise to an “I”? Would it be something other than a strange loop? Would it be a structure pointing not at itself but at something else, and therefore be lacking that essentially swirly, vorticial, self-referential quality that makes an “I”?
My guess is that if the model were extremely rich, extremely faithful, then effectively the destinations of all the pointers in it would be fluid — in other words, the pointers inside my model of Carol would be able to slip, to point just as validly to the symbol for her in my brain as to her own self-symbol. If so, then the original swirliness, the original “I”-ness of the structure, would have been successfully transported to a second medium and reconstructed faithfully (though far more coarse-grainedly) in it.
The “outer” layers of the self consist in lots of pointers that point mostly at standard universal aspects of the world (e.g., rain, ice cream, the swooping of swallows, etc., etc.); the “middle” layers of the self consist in pointers to things more tied in with one’s own life (e.g., one’s parents’ faces and voices, the music one loves, the street one grew up on, one’s beloved pets from childhood, one’s favorite books and movies, and many other deep things); then the inner sanctum has tons of tangly pointers to very deeply “indexical” things, such as one’s insecurities, one’s sexual feelings, one’s most intense fears, one’s deepest loves, and lots of other things that I cannot put my finger on). All this is very va
gue, and only meant to suggest a kind of imagery wherein the outermost layers have mostly outwards-pointing arrows, the middle layers have a mixture of inwards and outwards arrows, and then the innermost core has tons of arrows that point right back in towards itself. Strange-Loop City — that’s an “I” for you!
It’s that deeply twisted-back-on-itself quality of the innermost core that, I surmise, makes it so hard to transport elsewhere, that makes the soul so deeply, almost irrevocably, attached to one single body, one single brain. The outer layers are relatively easy to transport, of course, with their relative paucity of inwards-pointing pointers, and the middle layers are medium easy to transport. Someone as close to Carol as I was can get lots of the outer layers and something of the middle layers and little bits of the inner core, but can one ever internalize enough of that core to say that, even in a very diluted sense, “she’s still here among us”?
Perhaps I’m exaggerating the difficulty of transport. In some sense, all Gödelian loops-of-self (i.e., strange loops that give rise to an “I”) are isomorphic at the most coarse-grained level, and therefore in lowest approximation they may not be hard to transport at all; what makes them different from each other is only their “flavorings”, consisting of memories, and, of course, genetic preferences and talents, and so forth. So, to the extent that we can be chameleons and can import the “spices” of other people’s life histories (the spices that imbue their self-loops with unique individuality), we are capable of seeing the world through their eyes. Their psychic point of view is transportable and modular — not trapped inside just one perishable piece of hardware.
If this is true, then Carol survives because her point of view survives — or rather, she survives to the extent that her point of view survives — in my brain and those of others. This is why it is so good to keep records, to write down memories, to have photos and videotapes, and to do so with maximal clarity — because thanks to having such records, you can “possess”, or “be possessed by”, other people’s brains. That’s why Frédéric Chopin, the actual person, survives so much in our world, even today.
When, someday, I first watch our videotapes with Carol on them, my heart is going to break because I’ll be seeing her again, living her again, being with her again — and though I’ll be filled with love, I’ll also be pervaded by the feeling that this is fake, that I’m being tricked, and all of this will make me wonder just what is going on inside my brain.
There is no doubt that the patterns that will be sparked in my brain by watching those videos — the symbols in my brain that will be triggered, reactivated, resuscitated, brought back to life for the first time since she died, and that will be dancing inside me — will be just as strong as when they were sparked in my brain when she herself was there, in person, actually doing those things that are now merely images on tape. The dance of the symbols inside my brain sparked by the videos will be the same dance, and danced by the same symbols, as when she was right there before me.
So there’s this set of structures inside my brain that videos and photos and other extremely intense records can access in such a profound way — the structures in me that, when she was alive, were correlated with Carol, were deeply in resonance with her, the structures that represented Carol, the structures that seemed, for all the world, to be Carol. But as I watch the videos, knowing she is gone, the fraudulency will at once be being revealed and yet be deeply confusing me, because I will be seeming to see her, seeming to have revived her, seeming to have brought her back, just as I do in my dreams. And so I wonder, what is the nature of those structures collectively forming the “Carol symbol” in my brain? How big is the Carol symbol? And most importantly of all: How close does the Carol symbol inside Doug come to being a person, as opposed to merely representing or symbolizing a person?
The following should be a much easier question (although I think it is not actually easier). What was the nature of the “Holden Caulfield symbol” in J. D. Salinger’s brain during the period when he was writing Catcher in the Rye? That structure was all there ever was to Holden Caulfield — but it was so, so rich. Perhaps that symbol wasn’t as rich as a full human soul, but Holden Caulfield seems like so much of a person, with a true core, a true soul, a true personal gemma, even if only a “miniature” one. You couldn’t ask for a richer representation, a richer mirroring, of one person inside another person, than whatever constituted the Holden Caulfield symbol inside Salinger’s brain.
I hope the overall set of ideas here sounds coherent to you, Dan, even though what I have said is certainly made up of lots of incoherent little threads. It is terribly hard to articulate these things, and it is made far harder by the interference of one’s deep emotions, which wish things to be certain ways, and which push to a certain extent for the answers to come out on that side. Of course it is also precisely the strength of those desires that makes these questions so intense and so important in ways that wouldn’t have happened if tragedy hadn’t struck.
I must admit that I feel a little bit like someone trying to grapple with quantum-mechanical reality while quantum mechanics was developing but before it had been fully and rigorously established — someone around 1918, someone like Sommerfeld, who had a deep understanding of all the so-called “semiclassical” models that were then available (the wonderful Bohr atom and its many improved versions), but quite a while before Heisenberg and Schrödinger came along, cutting to the very core of the question, and getting rid of all the confusion. Around 1918, a lot of the truth was nearly within reach, but even people who were at the cutting edge could easily fall back into a purely classical mode of thinking and get hopelessly confused.
That’s how I feel about self, soul, consciousness these days. I feel as if I know very intimately, yet can’t quite always remember, the distributedness of consciousness and the illusion of the soul. It’s frustrating to feel myself constantly sliding back into conventional intuitive (“classical”) views of these questions when I know that deep down, my view is radically counterintuitive (“quantum-mechanical”).
Post Scriptum
Long after this chapter (minus this P.S.) had been put together in final form, it occurred to me that it might be tempting for some readers to conclude that in the wake of Carol’s death, her deeply depressed husband had buckled under the terrible pressures of loss, and had sought to build some kind of elaborate intellectual superstructure through which he could deny to himself what was self-evident to all outsiders: that his wife had died and was completely gone, and that was all there was to it.
Such skepticism or even cynicism is quite natural, and I will admit that even I, looking back at these grapplings, couldn’t help wondering if denial of death’s reality or finality wasn’t a good part of the motivation for all the anguished musings about souls and survival that I engaged in, not only during the year of 1994 but for many years thereafter. Since I know myself quite well, I didn’t really think this was the case (although sometimes I was a little bit unsure just what was the case), but what definitely troubled me was the thought that readers who don’t know me could easily draw such a conclusion and could thus dismiss my grapplings as the passionate ravings of a suffering individual who had expediently modified his belief system in order to give balm to his grief.
It was therefore a relief when, very recently, I went through a number of old files in my filing cabinets — files with names like “Identity”, “Strange Loops”, “Consciousness”, and so forth — and ran across writings galore in which all these same ideas are set forth in crystal-clear terms long before there was any shadow on the horizon. I found endless musings, all written out by hand, in which I talked about the blurred identities of human souls, and in particular I found several episodes where I talked explicitly about the fusing of Carol’s and my soul into a single tight unit, or about the “soul merger” of Carol and Danny.
In these improvised passages, I often dreamed up quite amusing but very serious thought experiments in which I tampered w
ith the rate of potential information flow between two brains (one time involving a linkup connecting my brain and a zombie’s brain — a delightful thought, at least to me!). What became obvious was that these ideas about who we are and what makes a person unique had been brewing and stirring around in my mind for decades, and that it had all come to an intense boil when I got married and especially when I had the experience of having children and raising them with someone whose love for them was so terribly similar to, and so terribly entangled with, my own love for them.
My book is now done, and those old paper files are rich preludes to it. Perhaps someday some of what I wrote back then will see the light of day, perhaps never, but at least I myself have the comfort of knowing that when I was in my time of greatest need, I did not merely tumble for some kind of path-of-least-resistance belief system that winked at me, but instead I stayed true to my long-term principles, worked out with great care many years earlier. That knowledge about myself gives me a small kind of solace.
CHAPTER 17
How We Live in Each Other
Universal Machines
I Am a Strange Loop Page 33
