Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

There was once even an author in Twinwirld who concocted a curious philosophical fantasy-world called “Twinnwirrld”, whose defining feature was that 99 percent of all births resulted in so-called “identical twinns” — but that’s a whole nother story.

“Twe”-tweaking by Twinwirld-twiddling

Several intertwined issues are inevitably raised by our short and hopefully provocative little jaunt. The most vivid, of course, is that in Twinwirld, a solo human body — a half — builds up a sense of itself as an “i” (lowercase!), while at the same time a pair of human bodies — a pairson — builds up a sense of itself as a “Twe”. This latter process happens partly thanks to genetics (just one genome, found in the zwygote, determines a pairson) and partly thanks to acculturation, enhanced by a slew of linguistic conventions, some of which were mentioned.

Suppose we wanted to apply the loaded word “soul” to beings in Twinwirld. What or who in Twinwirld has a soul? Even the noun “being” is a loaded word. What constitutes a being in Twinwirld? To my mind, both of these questions have the same answer as the following question: “What kind of entity in Twinwirld builds up an unshakable conviction of itself as an ‘I’? Is it a half, a pairson, or both?” What we’re really asking here is how strong each of two salient and rival analogies is — namely, how strong is the analogy between an “i” and an “I”, and how strong is the analogy between a “Twe” and an “I”?

I suspect that any human reader of this chapter can easily identify with a Twinwirld half (such as Karen’l or Greg’r), which would suggest that the “i”/“I” analogy seems convincing to most readers. I hope, however, that my human readers will also see a convincing analogy between Twe-ness and I-ness, even if, for some, it is less strong than that between “i” and “I”. In any case, since Twinwirld is just a fantasy, one can adjust its parameters as one wishes. You and I are both free, reader, to twiddle knobs of various sorts on Twinwirld to make “i” weaker and “Twe” stronger, or the reverse.

For the twirlwind trip just undertaken, I set the knobs determining Twinwirld at a middle-range level in order to make both analogies roughly equally plausible, hence to make the competition between “i” and “Twe” quite tight. But now I want to tweak Twinwirld so as to make “Twe” a bit stronger. In this new fantasy world, which I’ll dub “Siamese Twinwirld”, instead of positing that 99 percent of births yield standard identical twins, I’ll posit that 99 percent of births yield Siamese twins joined, say, at the hip. Moreover, I’ll stipulate that the Twinwirld pronoun “i” doesn’t exist in Siamese Twinwirld. Now the only analogy that remains is that between our concept of “I” and their concept of “Twe”. This may seem extremely far-fetched, but the curious thing is, our standard earthly world has much in common with Siamese Twinwirld. Here’s why.

We all possess two cerebral hemispheres (left and right halves), each of which can function pretty well as a brain on its own, in case one side of our brain is damaged. I’ll presume that both of your hemispheres are in good shape, dear reader, in which case what you mean when you say “I” involves a very tight team consisting of your left and right half-brains, each of which is fed directly by just one of your eyes and just one of your ears. The communication between your team’s two members is so strong and rapid, however, that the fused entity — the team itself — seems like just one thing, one absolutely unbreakable self. You know just what this feels like because it’s how you are constructed! And if you’re anything like me, neither of your half-brains goes around calling itself “i” and brazenly proclaiming itself an autonomous soul! Rather, the two of them together make just one capital “I”. In short, our own human condition in this, the real world, is quite analogous to that of pairsons in Siamese Twinwirld.

The communication between the two halves of a dividual in Twinwirld (whether it’s the Siamese variant or the original one) is, of course, less efficient than that between the two cerebral hemispheres inside a human head, because our hemispheres are hard-wired together. On the other hand, the communication between halves in Twinwirld is more efficient than that between nearly any two individuals in our “normal” world. And so the degree of fusing-together of two Twinwirld halves, though not as deep as that between two cerebral hemispheres, is deeper than that between two very close siblings in our world, deeper than that between identical twins, deeper than that between wife and husband.

Post Scriptum re Twinwirld

After I had written a first draft of this chapter and had moved on to the following one, which is based on emails exchanged between Dan Dennett and myself in 1994, I noticed that in one of his messages to me he referred to an unusual pair of twins in England that he had mentioned in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained (which I had read in manuscript form). I had forgotten this email from Dan, so I decided to go look the reference up in his book, and I found the following passage:

We can imagine.… two or more bodies sharing a single self. There may actually be such a case, in York, England: the Chaplin twins, Greta and Freda ( Time, April 6, 1981). These identical twins, now in their forties and living together in a hostel, seem to act as one ; they collaborate on the speaking of single speech acts, for instance, finishing each other’s sentences with ease or speaking in unison, with one just a split-second behind. For years they have been inseparable, as inseparable as two twins who are not Siamese twins could arrange. Some who have dealt with them suggest that the natural and effective tactic that suggested itself was to consider them more of a her.…

I’m not for a moment suggesting that these twins were linked by telepathy or ESP or any other sort of occult bonds. I am suggesting that there are plenty of subtle, everyday ways of communicating and coordinating (techniques often highly developed by identical twins, in fact). Since these twins have seen, heard, touched, smelled, and thought about very much the same events throughout their lives, and started, no doubt, with brains quite similarly disposed to react to these stimuli, it might not take enormous channels of communication to keep them homing in on some sort of loose harmony. (And besides, how unified is the most self-possessed among us?)….

But in any case, wouldn’t there also be two clearly defined individual selves, one for each twin, and responsible for maintaining this curious charade? Perhaps, but what if each of these women had become so selfless (as we do say) in her devotion to the joint cause that she more or less lost herself (as we also say) in the project?

I don’t have any clear memory of when I first came up with the germ that has here blossomed out as my fairly elaborate Twinwirld fantasy, although I’d like to think it was before I read about the Chaplin twins in Dan’s book. But whether I got the idea from Dan or made it up myself isn’t crucial; I was delighted to discover not only that Dan resonated with the idea, but also that observers of real human behavior claimed to have seen something much like what I was merely blue-skying about. Twinwirld thus comes one step closer to plausibility than I might have suspected.

There is one other curiosity that by a great stroke of luck dovetails astonishingly with this chapter. A couple of days after finishing Twinwirld, I chanced to see a scrap of paper on my bedside table, and on it, in pencil, in my own hand, were written four German words — O du angenehmes Paar (“O thou pleasant couple”). That short phrase didn’t ring a bell, but from its antiquated and exalted tone, I guessed that it was probably the opening line of an aria from some Bach cantata that I had once heard on the radio, found beautiful, and jotted down. From the Web I quickly found out my guess was right — these are the words that open a bass aria from Cantata 197, Gott ist unsre Zuversicht (“God, Our One True Source of Faith”). It turns out that this is a “wedding cantata” — one intended to accompany a marriage ceremony.