Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

It is Parfit the space voyager. As it happens, Parfit the philosopher is just spinning a good yarn, doing his best to make it sound teddibly realistic, but we soon find out that, in fact, he doesn’t believe in several parts of his own story. The second episode in his fantasy starts out by contradicting the first one. When we find out that the New Scanner, in contrast to the old one, doesn’t destroy the “original”, we go right along with the tacit idea that Parfit the intrepid space voyager has not voyaged anywhere. We don’t question his stepping out of the cubicle on Earth, because he’s still here.

Oh, but what mindless pushovers we are! Whereas we bought right into the “teleportation equals travel” theme of Episode I, falling for it hook, line, and sinker, we seem in Episode II to have unthinkingly taken the path of least resistance, which runs something like this: “If there are two different things that look like, think like, and quack like Derek Parfit, and if one of those things is located where we last saw Parfit and the other one of them is farther away, then, by God, the close one is obviously the real one, and the far one is just a copy — a clone, a counterfeit, an impostor, a fake.”

This already is plenty of food for thought. If the copy on Mars is a fake in Episode II, why wasn’t it a fake in Episode I? Why were we such suckers when we read Episode I? We naïvely bought into his wife’s reassuring smile at breakfast, and then, when he stepped out of the Martian cubicle, that telltale nick on his face convinced us beyond all doubt. We took his word for it that it was indeed he who was stepping out of the cubicle. But what else could we have expected? Was the newborn body going to step out of the cubicle and proclaim, “Oh, horrors, I’m not me! I’m someone else who merely looks like me, and who has all of my memories stretching all the way back to childhood, and even my memory of breakfast only a few moments ago with my wife! I’m just a sham, but oh, such a good one!”

Of course the newly built Martian is not going to utter something incoherent like that, because he would have no way of knowing that he is a fake. He would believe for all the world that he is the original Derek Parfit, only moments ago disintegrated in the scanner on Earth. After all, that’s what his brain would tell him, since it’s identical to Derek Parfit’s brain! This shows that we have to treat claims of personal identity, even ones coming straight from the first person’s mouth, with extreme caution.

Well then, given our new no-nonsense attitude, what should we think about Episode II? We have been told that Parfit the would-be space voyager instead stepped out of the cubicle on Earth, and with heart damage. But how do we know that that one is Parfit? Why didn’t Parfit the storyteller tell us the story from the vantage point of the new Martian who also calls himself “Derek Parfit”? Suppose the story had been told this way: “The moment I stepped out of the Martian cubicle, I was told the terrible news that the other Parfit — that poor fellow way down on Earth — had suffered cardiac damage in beaming me up here. I was devastated to hear it. Soon he and I were talking on the phone, and I found myself in the odd position of trying to console him just as I had recently consoled a dying friend…”

If it had been recounted sufficiently smoothly, we might not have been able to resist the thought that this body, the Mars-borne one, is really Derek Parfit. Indeed, Derek Parfit the skilled philosopher–storyteller might even have gotten us to imagine that the earthbound body with the damaged heart was merely a pretender to the Unique Soul linked by birth and by divine decree to the name “Derek Parfit”.

Teleportation of a Thought Experiment across the Atlantic

It seems that the way in which a science-fiction scenario is related is crucial in determining our intuitions about its credibility. This is a point that my old colleague and friend Dan Dennett has made many times in his discussions of philosophers’ crafty thought experiments. Indeed, Dan calls such carefully crafted fables intuition pumps, and he knows very well whereof he speaks, since he has dreamt up some of the most insight-providing intuition pumps in the field of philosophy of mind.

And I have to say that as I was typing Parfit’s story from his 1984 book into this chapter, a little voice murmured softly to me, “Say, doesn’t this remind you of Dan’s foreword to The Mind’s I , his ingenious teleportation fantasy that drew so many readers to our book when it came out in 1981?” And so after the Parfit story had been all typed in, I pulled a copy of The Mind’s I off my shelf and reread its first few pages. I have to say that my jaw fairly dropped. It was exactly the same fantasy, only with planets reversed and sexes reversed, and told in a more American style. There was exactly the same bipartite structure, the first part featuring a “Teleclone Mark IV” that destroyed the original, and the second part featuring a newand-improved version (“Mark V”) that preserved the original.

What can I say? I love both of these stories, one from each side of the Atlantic, whether one is a “clone” of the other or their pedigrees are independent (though that seems unlikely, since The Mind’s I is in Parfit’s bibliography). In any case, now that I’ve got this little matter off my chest, I’ll continue with my commentary on Parfit’s provocative tale (and also, of course, on Dan’s, thanks to the referential power of analogy).

The Murky Whereabouts of Cartesian Egos

The key question raised by Parfit’s tale is this: “Where is space voyager Derek Parfit really, after the teletransportation has taken place in Episode II?” Put otherwise, which of the two claimants to being Parfit really is Parfit? In Episode I, Parfit the storyteller plants a most plausible-seeming answer, but then in Episode II he just as plausibly undermines that answer. At this point, you can probably almost hear Strange Loop #642 intensely identifying with the space traveler and screaming out, “Which of the two would I be?”

To my mind, one cannot claim to have said anything significant about the riddle of consciousness if one cannot propose (and defend) some sort of answer to this extremely natural-seeming and burning question. I think that by now you know my answer to the question, but maybe not. In any case, I’ll let you ponder the issue for a moment, and meanwhile, I’ll go on to tell you more or less how Parfit sees the matter.

This issue lies at the very core of Parfit’s book, and the explanation of his position occupies about a hundred pages. The key notion to which he is opposed is what he dubs “Cartesian Pure Ego”, or “Cartesian Ego”, for short. To put it in my words, a Cartesian Ego constitutes one exact quantum of pure soul (also known as “personal identity”), and it is 100 percent indivisible and undilutable. In short, it is what makes you be you and me be me. My Cartesian Ego is mine and no one else’s, has been from birth and will be to death, and that’s that. It’s my very own, completely private, unshared and unsharable, first-person world. It’s the subject of my experiences. It’s my totally unique inner light. You know what I mean!

I have to admit, parenthetically, that every time I see the phrase “Cartesian Ego”, although my eyes perceive only one “g” there, some part of me invariably hallucinates another “g”, and the image of an egg bubbles up in my brain — a “Cartesian Eggo”, if you’ll permit — a beautifully formed egg with a pristine white shell protecting a perfectly spherical and infinitely precious yolk at its core. In my strange distorted imagery, that yolk is the secret of human identity — and alas, Parfit’s central mission in his book is to mercilessly crush the whole egg, and with it, the sacred yolk!