As it happens, we do not live in a didymous world like Twinwirld, nor do we live in a world where the existence of relatively clear boundaries between souls seems imminently threatened by the advent of extremely high-bandwidth interbrain communication — a world in which signals are swapped so fast and furiously between brains that separate bodies would cease to determine separate individuals. That is not the case at present, nor do I envision it becoming the case in the foreseeable future (though I am not a futurologist, and I could be quite wrong).
My point, though, is that the myth of watertight boundaries between souls is something whose falsity we all have slight tastes of all the time, but since it is so convenient and so conventional to associate one body with precisely one soul, since it is so deeply tempting and so deeply ingrained to see a body and a soul as being in perfect alignment, we choose to downplay or totally ignore the implications of the everyday manifestations of the interpenetration of souls.
Consider how profoundly wrapped up you can become in a close friend’s successes and failures, in their very personal ecstasies and agonies. If my vicarious enjoyment of my sister’s falafel seemed vivid to me, just think how much more vivid and intense is your vicarious thrill when a forever-lonely friend of yours finally bumps into someone wonderful and a promising romance starts up, or when a long-frustrated actor friend is finally given a lucky break and receives terrific reviews in the press. Or turning things around, think how powerful is your sense of injustice when a close friend of yours is hit, out of the blue, by some terrible misfortune. What are you doing but living their life inside your own head?
And yet we describe phenomena of this extremely familiar sort in easier, less challenging terms, such as “He identifies with her”, or “She is such an empathetic woman”, or “I know what you’re going through”, or “I feel for you”, or “It pains me to see what she’s up against”, or “Don’t tell me any more — I can’t stand it!” Standard expressions like these, although they indeed reflect someone’s partially being inside someone else, are seldom if ever taken as literal suggestions that our souls really do interpenetrate and blur together. That is just too messy and possibly even too scary an idea for us to deal with, and so we insist instead that there is no genuine overlap, that we are like distant galaxies to each other. Our lifelong ingrained habit is to accept without question the caged-bird metaphor for souls, and it’s very hard to break out of such a profoundly rooted habit.
Am I No One Else or Am I Everyone Else?
The image of the caged bird essentially implies that different people are like separate dots on the same line, dots having a diameter of exactly zero, and thus having no overlap whatsoever. Indeed, if we take the so-called “real line” of elementary algebra as a metaphor, then the caged-bird metaphor would assign to each person a “serial number” — an infinite decimal that uniquely determines “what it is like” to be that person. In that view, you and I, no matter how similar we think we are, no matter how much experience we have shared in life, even if we are identical or Siamese twins, were simply assigned different serial numbers at birth, and hence we inhabit different zero-width dots on the line, and that is that. You are you, I am I, and there is not one whit of overlap, no matter how near we are. I cannot possibly know what it’s like to be you, nor the reverse.
The opposite thesis would claim that every person is distributed uniformly over the entire real line, and that all individuals are therefore one and the same person! There is only one person. This extreme view, although less commonly advocated, has its modern proponents, such as philosopher Daniel Kolak in his recent book I Am You. This view makes as little sense to me as does panpsychism, which asserts that every entity — every stone, every picnic table, every picnic, every electron, every rainbow, every drop of water, waterfall, skyscraper, oil refinery, billboard, speedlimit sign, traffic ticket, county jail, jailbreak, track meet, election rigging, airport gate, spring sale, soap opera cancellation, photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and so on ad nauseam — is conscious.
The viewpoint of this book lies somewhere between these two extremes, picturing individuals not as pointlike infinite-decimal serial numbers but as fairly localized, blurry zones scattered here and there along the line. While some of these zones overlap considerably, most of them overlap little or none at all. After all, two smudges of width one inch apiece located a hundred miles apart will obviously have zero overlap. But two smudges of width one inch whose centers are only a half inch apart will have a great deal of overlap. There will not be an unbridgeable existential gap between two such people. Each of them is instead spread out into the other one, and each of them lives partially in the other.
Interpenetration of National Souls
Earlier in this chapter, I briefly offered the image of a self as analogous to a country with embassies in many other countries. Now I wish to pursue a similar notion, but I’ll start out with a very simplistic notion of what a country is, and will build up from there. So let’s consider the slogan “One country, one people”. Such a slogan would suggest that each people (a spiritual, cultural notion involving history, traditions, language, mythology, literature, music, art, religion, and so forth) is always crisply and perfectly aligned with some country (a physical, geographical notion involving oceans, lakes, rivers, mountains, valleys, prairies, mineral deposits, cities, highways, precise legal borders, and so forth).
If we actually believed a strict geographical analogue to the caged-bird metaphor for human selves, then we would have the curious belief that all individuals found inside a certain geographical region always had the same cultural identity. The phrase “an American in Paris” would make no sense to us, for the French nationality would coincide exactly with the boundaries of the physical place called “France”. There could never be Americans in France, nor French people in America! And of course analogous notions would hold for all countries and peoples. This is clearly absurd. Migration and tourism are universal phenomena, and they intermix countries and peoples continuously.
This does not mean that there is no such thing as a people or a country, of course. Both notions remain useful, despite enormous blurs concerning each one. Think for a moment of Italy, for instance. The northwestern region called “Valle d’Aosta” is largely French-speaking, while the northeastern region called “Alto Adige” (also “Südtirol”) is largely German-speaking. Moreover, north of Milano but across the border, the Swiss canton of Ticino is Italian-speaking. So what is the relationship between the country of Italy and the Italian people? It is not precise and sharp, to say the least — and yet we still find it useful to talk about Italy and Italians. It’s just that we know there is a blur around both concepts. And what goes for Italy goes for every country. We know that each nationality is a blurry, spread-out phenomenon centered on but not limited to a single geographical region, and we are completely accustomed to this notion. It does not feel paradoxical or confusing in the least.
So let us exploit our comfort with the relationship between a place and a people to try to get a more sophisticated handle on the relationship between a body and a soul. Consider China, which over the past couple of centuries has lost millions of people to emigration. Does China simply forget about those people, thinking of them as deserters and expunging them from its collective memory? Not at all. There is a strong residual feeling inside China for the “Overseas Chinese”. These cherished though distant people are urged to “come home” at least temporarily, and when they do, they are warmly welcomed like long-lost relatives (which of course is exactly what they are). This overseas branch of China is thus considered, within China, very much a part of China. It is a “halo” of Chineseness that extends far beyond the physical borders of the land.
Not just China, of course, but every country has such a halo, and this halo shimmers, sometimes brightly, sometimes dimly, in every other country on earth. If there were a counterpart at the country level to human death, then a people whose “body” was annihilated (by s
ome kind of cataclysm such as a huge meteor crashing into their land) could survive, at least partially, thanks to the glowing halo that exists beyond their land’s physical borders.
Though horrific, such an image does not strike us as in the least counterintuitive, because we understand that the physical land, no matter how beloved in song and story, is not indispensable for the survival of a nationality. The geographical place is merely the traditional breeding grounds for an ancient set of genes and memes — complexions, body types, hair colors, traditions, words, proverbs, dances, myths, costumes, recipes, and so forth — and as long as a critical mass of carriers of these genes and memes, located abroad, survives the cataclysm, all of this richness can continue to exist and flourish elsewhere, and the now-gone physical place can continue to be celebrated in song and story.
Although no entire country has ever been physically annihilated, events somewhat like this have happened in the past. I am reminded of the gulping-up of all of Polish soil by Poland’s neighbors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the so-called “partitions of Poland”. The Polish people, although rendered physically homeless, continued to endure. Here was a nation — naród polski — vibrant and alive, yet entirely deprived of a land. Indeed, the words that open the Polish national anthem celebrate this survival: “Poland is not lost, as long as we live!” In parallel fashion, the original Jews, scattered in biblical times from the cradle of their culture, continued to survive, keeping alive their traditions, their language, and their beliefs, in the Diaspora.
Halos, Afterglows, Coronas
In the wake of a human being’s death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of all those who were dearest to them. And when those people in turn pass on, the afterglow becomes extremely faint. And when that outer layer in turn passes into oblivion, then the afterglow is feebler still, and after a while there is nothing left.
This slow process of extinction I’ve just described, though gloomy, is a little less gloomy than the standard view. Because bodily death is so clear, so sharp, and so dramatic, and because we tend to cling to the caged-bird view, death strikes us as instantaneous and absolute, as sharp as a guillotine blade. Our instinct is to believe that the light has all at once gone out altogether. I suggest that this is not the case for human souls, because the essence of a human being — truly unlike the essence of a mosquito or a snake or a bird or a pig — is distributed over many a brain. It takes a couple of generations for a soul to subside, for the flickering to cease, for all the embers to burn out. Although “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” may in the end be true, the transition it describes is not so sharp as we tend to think.
It seems to me, therefore, that the instinctive although seldom articulated purpose of holding a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, and to collectively rekindle in them all, for one last time, the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person, profiting directly or indirectly from the presence of one another, feeling the shared presence of that person in the brains that remain, and thus solidifying to the maximal extent possible those secondary personal gemmae that remain aflicker in all these different brains. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word “love” cannot, thus, be separated from the word “I”; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.
CHAPTER 19
Consciousness = Thinking
So Where’s Consciousness in my Loopy Tale?
FROM the very start in this book, I have used a few key terms pretty much interchangeably: “self”, “soul”, “I”, “a light on inside”, and “consciousness”. To me, these are all names for the same phenomenon. To other people, they may not seem to denote one single thing, but that’s how they seem to me. It’s like prime numbers of the form 4n + 1 and prime numbers that are the sums of two squares — on the surface these would seem to be descriptions of completely different entities, but on closer analysis they turn out to denote exactly the same entities.
In my way of looking at things, all of these phenomena come in shades of gray, and whatever shade one of them has in a particular being (natural or artificial), all the others have that same shade. Thus I feel that in talking about “I”-ness, I have also been talking about consciousness throughout. Yet I know that some people will protest that although I may have been addressing issues of personal identity, and perhaps the concepts of “I” and “self”, I haven’t even touched the far deeper and more mysterious riddle of consciousness. They will skeptically ask me, “What, then, is experience in terms of your strange loops? How do strange loops in the brain tell us anything about what it feels like to be alive, to smell honeysuckle, to see a sunset, or to listen to raindrops patter on a tin roof? That is what consciousness is all about! How does that have anything to do with your strange, loopy idea?”
I doubt that I can answer such questions to the satisfaction of these hard-core skeptics, for they will surely find what I say both too simple and too evasive. Nonetheless, here is my answer, stripped down to its essence: Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to make it even more pithy, consciousness is thinking. As Descartes said, Cogito ergo sum.
Unfortunately, I suspect that this answer is far too compressed for even my most sympathetic readers, so I will try to spell it out a little more explicitly. Most of the time, any given symbol in our brain is dormant, like a book sitting inertly in the remote stacks of a huge library. Every so often, some event will trigger the retrieval of this book from the stacks, and it will be opened and its pages will come alive for some reader. In an analogous way, inside a human brain, perceived external events are continually triggering the highly selective retrieval of symbols from dormancy, and causing them to come alive in all sorts of unanticipated, unprecedented configurations. This dance of symbols in the brain is what consciousness is. (It is also what thinking is.) Note that I say “symbols” and not “neurons”. The dance has to be perceived at that level for it to constitute consciousness. So there you have a slightly more spelled-out version.
Enter the Skeptics
“But who reads these symbols and their configurations?”, some skeptics will ask. “Who feels these symbols ‘come alive’? Where is the counterpart to the reader of the retrieved book?”
I suspect that these skeptics would argue that the symbols’ dance on its own is merely motion of material stuff, unfelt by anyone, so that despite my claim, this dance cannot constitute consciousness. The skeptics would like me to name or point to some special locus of subjective awareness that we all have of our thoughts and perceptions. I feel, though, that such a hope is confused, because it uses what I consider to be just another synonym for “conscious” — namely, “aware” — in posing the same question once more, but at a different level. In other words, people seeking the “reader” for configurations of activated symbols may accept the idea of symbols galore being triggered in the brain, but they refuse to call that kind of internal churning “consciousness” because now they want the symbols themselves to be perceived. These people would probably be particularly unhappy if I were to bring up the careenium metaphor at this point and to suggest that the dance of simmballs in the careenium constitutes consciousness. They would argue that it’s just the mutual bashing of scads of tiny little marbles on a glorified pool table, and that that’s obviously empty and devoid of consciousness. They want much more than that.
Such skeptics are in essence kicking the problem upstairs — instead of settling for the idea that symbol-level brain activity (or simmball-level careenium activity) that mirrors external events is consciousness, they now insist that the internal events of brain activity must in turn be perceived if consciousness is to arise. Th
is runs the risk of setting up an infinite regress and thus moving further and further away from an answer to the riddle of consciousness rather than homing in on an answer to it.
I will give such people one thing, however — I will agree that symbolic activity is itself an important, indispensable focus of a human brain’s attention (but I would quickly add that this does not hold for chickens or frogs or butterflies, and pretty darn little for dogs). Mature human brains are constantly trying to reduce the complexity of what they perceive, and this means that they are constantly trying to get unfamiliar, complex patterns made of many symbols that have been freshly activated in concert to trigger just one familiar pre-existing symbol (or a very small set of them). In fact, that’s the main business of human brains — to take a complex situation and to put one’s finger on what matters in it, to distill from an initial welter of sensations and ideas what a situation really is all about. To spot the gist. To Spot, the gist, however, doesn’t much matter, and the gist certainly doesn’t matter one whit to the flea on Spot’s wagging tail.
I suspect that all of this may sound a bit abstruse and vague, so I’ll illustrate it with a typical example.
I Am a Strange Loop Page 38
