Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

In Chapter 12 of Reasons and Persons, boldly entitled “Why Our Identity Is Not What Matters”, there is a series of penetrating musings, all of which have wonderfully provocative titles. Since I so much admire this book and its style, I will simply quote those section titles for you here, hoping thereby to whet your appetite to read it. Here they are: “Divided Minds”; “What Explains the Unity of Consciousness?”; “What Happens When I Divide?”; “What Matters When I Divide?”; “Why There is No Criterion of Identity that Can Meet Two Plausible Requirements”; “Wittgenstein and Buddha”; “Am I Essentially My Brain?”; and finally, “Is the True View Believable?”

Even though all eight of these sections are rife with insight, it is the last section that I admire the most, because in the end, Parfit asks himself if he really believes in the edifice he has just built. It is as if Albert Einstein had just realized that his own ideas would bring Newtonian mechanics crashing down in rubble, and then paused to ask himself, “Do I really have such deep faith in my own mind’s pathways that I can believe in the bizarre, intuition-defying conclusions I have reached? Am I not being enormously arrogant in rejecting a whole self-consistent web of interlocked ideas that were carefully worked out by two or three centuries’ worth of extraordinary physicists who came before me?”

And although Einstein was exceedingly modest throughout his lifetime, his answer to himself (though to my knowledge he never wrote any such introspective essay) was, in effect, “Yes, I do have this strange faith in my own mind’s correctness. Nature has to be this way, no matter what other people have said before me. I have somehow been given the opportunity to glimpse the inner logic of nature more deeply and more accurately than anyone else before me has. I am unaccountably lucky in this fact, and though I take no personal credit for it, I do wish to publish it so that I may share this valuable vision with others.”

Self-confidence, Humility, and Self-doubt

Parfit is far more prudent than this. His conclusions, to my mind, are just as radical as those of Einstein (although I find it a bit of a stretch to imagine radical ideas about the ineffability of personal identity leading to any marvelous technological consequences, whereas Einstein’s ideas of course did), but he is not quite as convinced of them as Einstein must have been. He feels confident, but not absolutely confident, of his edifice of thought. He doesn’t think it will start to shake and soon tumble down if he stands on it, but then again he admits that it just might do so. Let us hear him express himself on this topic in his own words:

[The philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel] once claimed that, even if the Reductionist View is true, it is psychologically impossible for us to believe this. I shall therefore briefly review my arguments given above. I shall then ask whether I can honestly claim to believe my conclusions. If I can, I shall assume that I am not unique. There would be at least some other people who can believe the truth.

[A few pages later] .…I have now reviewed the main arguments for the Reductionist View. Do I find it impossible to believe this View?

What I find is this. I can believe this view at the intellectual or reflective level. I am convinced by the arguments in favour of this view. But I think it likely that, at some other level, I shall always have doubts.…

I suspect that reviewing my arguments would never wholly remove my doubts. At the reflective or intellectual level, I would remain convinced that the Reductionist View is true. But at some lower level I would still be inclined to believe that there must always be a real difference between some future person’s being me, and his being someone else. Something similar is true when I look through a window at the top of a sky-scraper. I know that I am in no danger. But, looking down from this dizzying height, I am afraid. I would have a similar irrational fear if I was about to press the green button.

….It is hard to be serenely confident in my Reductionist conclusions. It is hard to believe that personal identity is not what matters. If tomorrow someone will be in agony, it is hard to believe that it could be an empty question whether this agony will be felt by me. And it is hard to believe that, if I am about to lose consciousness, there may be no answer to the question “Am I about to die?”

I must say, I find Parfit’s willingness to face and to share his self-doubts with his readers to be extremely rare and wonderfully refreshing.

Morphing Parfit into Bonaparte

In the last paragraph quoted above, Parfit alludes to a thought experiment invented partly by philosopher Bernard Williams and partly by himself (in other words, invented by a Williams–Parfit hybrid who might be called “Bernek Willfits”), in which he is about to undergo a special type of neurosurgery whose exact nature is determined by a numerical parameter — namely, how many switches will be thrown. What do the individual switches do? Each one of them converts one of Parfit’s personality traits into a different personality trait belonging to none other than Napoleon Bonaparte (and I literally mean “none other than”, as I will shortly explain). For example, one switch makes Parfit far more irascible, another switch removes his repugnance at the idea of seeing people killed, and so forth. Note that in the previous sentence I used the proper noun “Parfit” and the pronoun “his”, which presumably is an unambiguous reference to Parfit. However, the whole question here is whether or not such usages are legitimate. If switch after switch were thrown, converting Parfit more and more into Napoleon, at what stage would he — or rather, at what stage would this slowly morphing person — simply be Napoleon?

As I have already made clear, asking exactly where along the line the switchover would take place makes no sense from Parfit’s point of view, for what matters is psychological continuity ( i.e., proximity in that quasimathematical space of personalities or brains that I suggested a little while ago), and that is a feature that comes in all shades of gray. It is not a 0/1 matter, not all-or-nothing. A person can be partly Derek Parfit and partly Napoleon Bonaparte, and drifting from the one to the other as the switches are thrown. And this doesn’t merely mean that this person is becoming more and more like Napoleon Bonaparte — it means that this person really is slowly becoming Bonaparte himself.

In Parfit’s view, the Cartesian Ego of Napoleon is not indivisible, nor is that of Derek Parfit. Rather, it is as if there were a slider on a wire, and the two individuals (who are not really “individuals” in the etymological sense, since the word means “undividable”) can be merged or morphed arbitrarily by sliding that slider to any desired position on the wire. The result is a hybrid person, a tenth or a third or halfway or three-quarters of the way between the two ends — whatever proportions one wishes, ranging from Derek Parfit to Deren Parfite to Dereon Parpite to Deleon Parapite to Doleon Paraparte to Daoleon Panaparte to Dapoleon Ponaparte to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Most people, unlike Parfit, want there to be and are convinced that there must be, at each point along the spectrum of cases, a sharp yes–no answer to the question, “Is this person Derek Parfit?” This is the classical view, of course — the view that takes for granted the notion of Parfit’s own Cartesian Ego. And so most people are put into the awkward position of having to say that there would be a particular spot along the wire at which all of a sudden, without warning, at the instant when the slider passes it, the Cartesian Ego of Parfit would poof out of existence, to be replaced by that of Napoleon Bonaparte. Where only a moment ago we had been dealing with a somewhat personality-modified Derek Parfit, but still and all a Derek Parfit who genuinely felt Derek Parfit’s feelings, now we suddenly have a modified Napoleon Bonaparte, and he feels Napoleon’s feelings, and not Parfit’s whatsoever!