Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

At first I had proposed that a human “I” results from the existence of a very special strange loop in a human brain, but now we see that since we mirror many people inside our crania, there will be many loops of different sizes and degrees of complexity, so we have to refine our understanding. Part of the refinement hinges, as I just stated, on the fact that one of these loops in a given brain is privileged — mediated by a perceptual system that feeds directly into that brain. There is another part of the story, though, which has to do with what a brain controls rather than what it perceives.

The thermostat in my house does not regulate the temperature in your house. Analogously, the decisions made in my brain do not control the body that’s hard-wired to your brain. When you and I play tennis, it’s only my arms that my brain controls! Or so it would seem at first. On second thought, that’s clearly an oversimplification, and this is where things start to get blurry once again. I have partial and indirect control over your arms — after all, wherever I send the ball, that’s where you run, and my shot has a great deal to do with how you will swing your arms. So in some indirect fashion, my brain can control your muscles in a game of tennis, but it is not a very reliable fashion. Likewise, if I hit my brakes while driving down the road, then the person behind me will also hit their brakes. What happens in my brain exerts a little bit of control over that driver’s actions, but it is an unreliable and imprecise control.

The type of external control just described does not create a profound blurring of two people’s identities. Tennis and driving do not give rise to deep interpenetrations of souls. But things get more complicated when language enters the show. It is through language most of all that our brains can exert a fair measure of indirect control over other humans’ bodies — a phenomenon very familiar not only to parents and drill sergeants, but also to advertisers, political “spin doctors”, and whiny, wheedling teen-agers. Through language, other people’s bodies can become flexible extensions of our own bodies. In that sense, then, my brain is attached to your body in somewhat the same way as it is to my body — it’s just that, once again, the connection is not hard-wired. My brain is attached to your body via channels of communication that are much slower and more indirect than those linking it to my body, so the control is much less efficient.

For example, I am infinitely better at writing my signature with my own hand than if I were to try to get you to do so by describing all the tiny details of the many curves that I execute so smoothly and unconsciously whenever I “sign out” at the grocery store checkout stand. But the initial notion that there is a fundamental and absolute distinction between how my brain is linked to my own body and how it’s linked to someone else’s body is seen to be exaggerated. There is a difference in degree, that’s clear, but it’s not clear that it’s a difference in kind.

Where have we gotten so far in discussing intertwined souls? We’ve seen that I can perceive your perceptions indirectly, and that I can also control your body indirectly. Likewise, you can perceive my perceptions indirectly (that’s what you’re doing right now!), and you can control my body indirectly, at least a bit. We’ve also seen that the communication channels are slow enough that there are two pretty clearly separate systems, and so we can unproblematically give them different names. The fact that we humans have cleanly separated bodies (except for mother–fetus unions and Siamese twins) makes it absolutely natural to assign a different name to each body, and on a surface level, the act of assignment of distinct names to distinct bodies seems to settle the question once and for all. “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Our naming convention not only supports but enormously helps to lock in the comfortable notion that we — our selves — are cleanly separated entities. “Me Tarzan, you Jane” — end of story.

Language plays a further role, though, in this matter of establishing a body as the locus of an identity. Not only does it give us one name per body (“Tarzan”, “Jane”) but it also gives us personal pronouns (“me”, “you”) that do just as much as names do to reinforce the notion of a crystal-clear, sharp distinction between souls, associating one watertight soul to each body. Let’s take a closer look.

A Twirlwind Trip to Twinwirld

Once, some years ago, I concocted a curious philosophical fantasy-world, to which now, with your permission, I’ll escort you for the next few sections. Although back then I didn’t give the place a name, I think I’ll call it “Twinwirld” here. The special feature of Twinwirld is that 99 percent of all births result in identical twins, and only 1 percent give rise to singletons, which are not called that, but “halflings”. In Twinwirld, twins (who, as in our world, are not exactly identical but have the same genome) grow up together and go everywhere together, wearing identical clothes, attending the same schools, taking the same courses, cooperating on homework assignments, making the same friends, learning to play the same musical instrument, eventually taking a single job together as a team, and so forth. A pair of identical twins in Twinwirld is called, rather inevitably, a “pairson” or a “dividual” (or even just a “dual”).

Each dividual in Twinwirld is given a name at birth — thus a male pairson might be named “Greg” and a female pairson “Karen”. In case you were wondering, there is a way to refer to each of the two “halves” of a pairson, although, as it happens, the need to do so crops up very seldom. However, for completeness’s sake, I will describe how this is done. One simply appends an apostrophe and a one-letter suffix — either an “l” or an “r” — to the dividual’s name. (Twinwirld etymologists have determined that these consonants “l” and “r” are not arbitrary, but are in fact residues of the words “left” and “right”, although no two seems to be sure exactly why this should be the case.) Thus Greg consists of a “left half”, Greg’l, and a “right half”, Greg’r. Karen likewise consists of Karen’l and Karen’r — but as I said, most of the time, nobodies feel the need to address the “left” or “right” half of a pairson, so those suffixes are almost never used.

Now what constitutes a “friend” in Twinwirld? Well, another pairson, natch — sometwo that like a lot. And what about love and marriage? Well, if you’ve already guessed that a pairson falls in love with and marries another pairson, then you are spot on! As a matter of fact, by a crazy coincidence, this very same Karen and Greg that I just mentioned are a typical Twinwirld couple; moreover, they are the proud pairents of two twildren — a girlz named “Natalie” and a boyz named “Lucas”. (To satisfy busybodies, I have to explain that I have no idea which of Karen’l and Karen’r gave birth to either twild, nor which of Greg’r and Greg’l was, so to speak, the instigating agent in either case. No two in Twinwirld ever thinks about such intimate things — no more than we in our world wonder whether the sperm leading to a child’s birth came from the father’s right or left testicle, or whether the egg came from the mother’s left or right ovary. It’s neither here nor there — the zwygote was formed and the twild was born, that’s all that matters. Anyway, please don’t ask too many questions on this complex topic. That’s far from the point of my fantasy!)

In Twinwirld, there is an unspoken and obvious understanding that the basic units are pairsons, not left or right halves, and that even though each dividual consists of two physically separate and distinguishable halves, the bond between those halves is so tight that that the physical separateness doesn’t much matter. That everytwo is made of a left and right half is just a familiar fact about being alive, taken for granted like the fact that every half has two hands, and every hand has five fingers. Things have parts, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have integrity as wholes!