It goes without saying that my portrait of Carol was of a coarser grain than her own; how could it not be? I didn’t grow up in her family, didn’t attend her schools, didn’t live through her childhood or adolescence. And yet, over our many years together, through thousands of hours of casual and intimate conversations, I had imported lower-resolution copies of so many of the experiences central to her identity. Carol’s memories of her youth — her parents, her brothers and sisters, her childhood collie Barney, the family’s “educational outings” to Gettysburg and to museums in Washington D.C., their summer vacations in a cabin on a lake in central Michigan, her adolescent delight in wildly colorful socks, her preadolescent loves of reading and of classical music, her feelings of differentness and isolation from so many kids her age — all these had imprinted my brain with copies of themselves, blurry copies but copies nonetheless. Some of her memories were so vivid that they had become my own, as if I had lived through those days. Some skeptics might dismiss this outright, saying, “Just pseudo-memories!” I would reply, “What’s the difference?”
A friend of mine once told me about a scenic trip he had taken, describing it in such vivid detail that a few years later I thought I had been on that trip myself. To add insult to injury, I didn’t even remember my friend as having had anything to do with “my” trip! One day this trip came up in a conversation, and of course we both insisted that we were the one who had taken it. It was quite puzzling! However, after my friend showed me his photos of the trip and recounted far more details of it than I could, I realized my mistake — but who knows how many other times this kind of confusion has occurred in my mind without being corrected, leaving pseudo-memories as integral elements of my self-image?
In the end, what is the difference between actual, personal memories and pseudo-memories? Very little. I recall certain episodes from the novel Catcher in the Rye or the movie David and Lisa as if they had happened to me — and if they didn’t, so what? They are as clear as if they had. The same can be said of many episodes from other works of art. They are parts of my emotional library, stored in dormancy, waiting for the appropriate trigger to come along and snap them to life, just as my “genuine” memories are waiting. There is no absolute and fundamental distinction between what I recall from having lived through it myself and what I recall from others’ tales. And as time passes and the sharpness of one’s memories (and pseudo-memories) fades, the distinction grows ever blurrier.
Transplantation of Patterns
Even if most readers agree with much that I am saying, perhaps the hardest thing for many of them to understand is how I could believe that the activation of a symbol inside my head, no matter how intricate that symbol might be, could capture any of someone else’s first-person experience of the world, someone else’s consciousness. What craziness could ever have led me to suspect that someone else’s self — my father’s, my wife’s — could experience feelings, given that it was all taking place courtesy of the neurological hardware inside my head, and given that every single cell in the brain of the other person had long since gone the way of all flesh?
The key question is thus very simple and very stark: Does the actual hardware matter? Did only Carol’s cells, now all recycled into the vast impersonal ecosystem of our planet, have the potential to support what I could call “Carol feelings” (as if feelings were stamped with a brand that identified them uniquely), or could other cells, even inside me, do that job?
To my mind, there is an unambiguous answer to this question. The cells inside a brain are not the bearers of its consciousness; the bearers of consciousness are patterns. The pattern of organization is what matters, not the substance. It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion! Otherwise, we would have to attribute to the molecules inside our brains special properties that, outside of our brains, they lack. For instance, if I see one last tortilla chip lying in a basket about to be thrown away, I might think, “Oh, you lucky chip! If I eat you, then your lifeless molecules, if they are fortunate enough to be carried by my bloodstream up to my brain and to settle there, will get to enjoy the experience of being me! And so I must devour you, in order not to deprive your inert molecules of the chance to enjoy the experience of being human!” I hope such a thought sounds preposterous to nearly all of my readers. But if the molecules making you up are not the “enjoyers” of your feelings, then what is? All that is left is patterns. And patterns can be copied from one medium to another, even between radically different media. Such an act is called “transplantation” or, for short, “translation”.
A novel can withstand transplanting even though readers in the “guest language” haven’t lived on the soil where the original language is spoken; the key point is, they have experienced essentially the same phenomena on their own soil. Indeed, all novels, whether translated or not, depend on this kind of transplantability, because no two human beings, even if they speak the same language, ever grow up on exactly the same soil. How else could we contemporary Americans relate to a Jane Austen novel?
Carol’s soul can withstand transplanting into the soil of my brain because, even though I didn’t grow up in her family and in their various houses, I know, to some degree, all the key elements of her earliest years. In me robustly live and survive her early inner roots, out of which her soul grew. My brain’s fertile soil is a soul-soil not identical to, but very similar to, hers. And so I can “be” Carol albeit with a slight Doug accent, just as James Falen’s lovely, lilting, and lyrical English transplantation of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin is certainly and undeniably that very novel, even if it has something of an American accent.
The sad truth is, of course, that no copy is perfect, and that my copies of Carol’s memories are hugely defective and incomplete, nowhere close to the level of detail of the originals. The sad truth is, of course, that Carol is reduced, in her inhabitation of my cranium, to only a tiny fraction of what she used to be. The sad truth is, my brain’s mosaic of Carol’s essence is far more coarse-grained than the privileged mosaic that resided in her brain was. That is the sad truth. Death’s sting cannot be denied. And yet death’s sting is not quite as absolute or as total as it might seem.
When the sun is eclipsed, there remains a corona surrounding it, a circumferential glow. When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them. Inevitably, as time passes, the afterglow fades and finally goes out, but it takes many years for that to happen. When, eventually, all of those close ones have died as well, then all the embers will have gone cool, and at that point, it’s “ashes to ashes and dust to dust”.
Several years ago, my email friend James Plath, knowing of my intense musings along these lines, sent me a paragraph from the novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, with which I conclude this chapter.
Late the next morning he sat sewing in the room upstairs. Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he is watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved — so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living?
CHAPTER 18
The Blurry Glow of Human Identity
I Host and Am Hosted by Others
AMONG the beliefs most universally shared by humanity is the idea “One body, one person”, or equivalently, “One brain, one soul”. I will call this idea the “caged-bird metaphor”, the cage being, of course, the cranium, and the bird being the soul. Such an image is so self-evident and so tacitly built into the way we all think about ourselves that to utter it explicitly would sound as pointless as saying,
“One circle, one center” or “One finger, one fingernail”; to question it would be to risk giving the impression that you had more than one bat in your belfry. And yet doing precisely the latter has been the purpose of the past few chapters.
In contrast to the caged-bird metaphor, the idea I am proposing here is that since a normal adult human brain is a representationally universal “machine”, and since humans are social beings, an adult brain is the locus not only of one strange loop constituting the identity of the primary person associated with that brain, but of many strange-loop patterns that are coarse-grained copies of the primary strange loops housed in other brains. Thus, brain 1 contains strange loops 1, 2, 3, and so forth, each with its own level of detail. But since this notion is true of any brain, not just of brain 1, it entails the following flip side: Every normal adult human soul is housed in many brains at varying degrees of fidelity, and therefore every human consciousness or “I” lives at once in a collection of different brains, to different extents.
There is, of course, a “principal domicile” or “main brain” for each particular “I”, which means that there remains a good deal of truth to simple, commonsensical statements like “My soul is housed in my brain”, and yet, close to true though it is, that statement misses something crucial, which is the idea, perhaps strange-sounding at first, that “My soul lives to lesser extents in brains that are not mine.”
At this point, we should think at least briefly about the meaning of innocent-sounding phrases like “my brain” and “brains that are not mine”. If I have five sisters, then saying “my sister” is, if not meaningless, then at least highly ambiguous. Likewise, if I have three nationalities, then saying “my nationality” is ambiguous. And analogously, if my self-symbol exists in, say, fifteen different brains (at fifteen different degrees of fidelity, to be sure), then not only is the phrase “my brain” ambiguous, but so is the word “my”! Who is the talker? I am reminded of a now-defunct bar in the Bay Area whose sign amused me no end every time I drove by it: “My Brother’s Place”. Yes, but whose brother’s place? Just who was doing the talking here? I never could figure this out (nor, I guess, could anyone else), and I relished the sign’s intentional silliness.
Fortunately, the existence of a “main brain” means that “my brain” has an unambiguous primary meaning, even if the soul uttering the phrase lives, to smaller extents, in fourteen other brains at the same time. And usually the soul uttering the phrase will be using its main brain (and thus its main body and main mouth), and so most listeners (including the speaker) will effortlessly understand what is meant.
It is not easy to find a strong, vivid metaphor to put up against the caged-bird metaphor. I have entertained quite a few possibilities, involving such diverse entities as bees, tornados, flowers, stars, and embassies. The image of a swarm of bees or of a nebula clearly conveys the idea of diffuseness, but there is no clear counterpart to the cage (or rather, to the head or brain or cranium). (A hive is not what I mean, because a flying swarm is not at all inside its hive.) The image of a tornado cell is appealing because it involves swirling entities reminiscent of the video feedback loops we’ve so often talked about, and because it involves a number of such swirls spread out in space, but once again there is no counterpart to the “home location”, nor is it clear that there is one primary tornado in a cell. Then there is the image of a plant sending out underground shoots and popping up in several places at once, where there is a primary branch and secondary offshoots, which is an important component of the idea, and similarly, the image of a country with embassies in many other countries captures an important aspect of what I seek. But I am not fully satisfied with any of these metaphors, and so, rather than settling on a single one, I’ll simply throw them all out at once, hoping that they stir up some appropriate imagery in your mind.
Feeling that One is Elsewhere
All this talk of one person inhabiting several bodies at the same time may seem wildly at odds with “common sense”, which unambiguously tells us that we are always in just one place, not two or more. But let’s examine this commonsense axiom a bit.
If you go to an I-Max movie theater and are riding a wild roller-coaster, where are you? The temptation is to say, “I’m sitting in a movie theater”, but if that’s the case, then why are you so scared? What’s to scare you about a couple of dozen rows of stationary seats, the odor of popcorn, and a thin screen hanging forty or fifty feet away? The answer is obvious: when you watch the movie, the audiovisual input to your brain seems to be coming not from inside the theater but from somewhere else, a place that is far away from the theater and that has nothing to do with it. And it is that input that you can’t help interpreting as telling you where you are. You feel you have been transported to a place where your body is actually not located, and where your brain is not located either, for that matter.
Of course since watching a movie is a very familiar activity, we are not confused by this phenomenon of virtual displacement, and we accept the idea that there is simply a temporary suspension of disbelief, so that we can enter into another world virtually, vicariously, and volatilely. No serious philosophical conundrums seem to be raised by such an experience, and yet to me, this first little crack allows the door of multiple simultaneous locations of the self to open up much more widely.
Now let’s recall the experience of being transported from the ski resort in California’s Sierra Nevada range to the Bloomington kennel via the “doggie cam” and the World Wide Web. Watching the dogs play in their little area, my children and I didn’t in the least feel that we were “in Ollie’s skin”, but let’s tweak the parameters of the situation a little bit. Suppose, for example, that the bandwidth of the visual image were greatly increased. Suppose moreover that the webcam was mounted not in a fixed spot above the fenced-in play area but on Ollie’s head, and that it included a microphone. And lastly, suppose that you had a pair of dedicated goggles (spectacles with earphones) that, whenever you put them on, transmitted this scene to you in very high audiovisual fidelity. As long as you can put them on and then take them off, these teleportation goggles would seem like just a game, but what if they were affixed for several hours to your head and served as your only way of peering out at the world? Don’t you think you would start to feel a little bit as if you were Ollie? What would it matter to you that you were in a faraway California ski resort, if your own eyes and ears were unable to give you any Californian input?
You might object that it’s impossible to feel that you are Ollie if his movements are out of your control. In that case, we can add a joystick that will tend to make Ollie turn left or right, at your discretion (how it does so is not germane here). So now your hand controls Ollie’s movements and you receive audiovisual input solely from the camera attached to Ollie’s head, for several hours nonstop. This scenario is rather bizarre, but I think you can easily see that you will soon start to feel as if you are more in the Indiana kennel, where you are free to move about, than in some Californian ski resort, where you are basically stuck to your seat (because you have your goggles on, hence you can’t see where you’re going, hence you don’t dare venture anywhere). We’ll refer to this sensation of feeling that you are somewhere far from both your body and your brain, thanks to the ultrarapid transmission of data, as “telepresence” (a term invented by Pat Gunkel and popularized by Marvin Minsky around 1980).
Telepresence versus “Real” Presence
Perhaps my most vivid experience of telepresence occurred when I was typesetting my book Gödel, Escher, Bach. This was back in the late 1970’s, when for an author to do any such thing was unheard of, but I had the good fortune of having access to one of the only two computer typesetting systems in the world at that time, both of which, by coincidence, were located at Stanford. The catch was that I was an assistant professor at Indiana University in far-off Bloomington, and I had courses to teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays. To make things doubly hard, there was no Internet, so I cou
ldn’t possibly do the typesetting work from Indiana. To typeset my book, I had to be on site at Stanford, but my teaching schedule allowed me to get there only on weekends, and not on all weekends at that. And so each time I flew out to Stanford for a weekend, I would instantly zoom to Ventura Hall, plunk myself down at a terminal in the so-called “Imlac room”, and plunge furiously into the work, which was extremely intense. I once worked forty hours straight before collapsing.
Now what does this all have to do with telepresence? Well, each long, grueling work session at Stanford was quite hypnotic, and when I left, I would still half-feel as if I were there. One time when I had returned to Bloomington, I realized I had made a serious typesetting mistake in one chapter, and so, in panic, I called up my friend Scott Kim, who also had been spending endless hours in the Imlac room, and I was hugely relieved to find him there. Scott was more than happy to sit down at an Imlac terminal and to pull up the right program and the proper file to work on. So we set to work on it, with me talking Scott through the whole long and detailed process, and Scott reading to me what he saw on the screen. Since I had just spent numberless hours right there, I was easily able to see in my mind’s eye everything that Scott relayed to me, and I remember how disoriented I would feel when, every so often, I remembered that my body was still in Bloomington, for I felt for all the world as if I were in Stanford, working directly at the Imlac terminal. And mind you, this powerful visual sense of telepresence was taking place solely through the sonic modality of a telephone. It was as if my eyes, though in Bloomington, were looking at an Imlac screen in California, thanks to Scott’s eyes and the clarity of his words on the phone.
I Am a Strange Loop Page 36
