Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

If this is true, then Carol survives because her point of view survives — or rather, she survives to the extent that her point of view survives — in my brain and those of others. This is why it is so good to keep records, to write down memories, to have photos and videotapes, and to do so with maximal clarity — because thanks to having such records, you can “possess”, or “be possessed by”, other people’s brains. That’s why Frédéric Chopin, the actual person, survives so much in our world, even today.

When, someday, I first watch our videotapes with Carol on them, my heart is going to break because I’ll be seeing her again, living her again, being with her again — and though I’ll be filled with love, I’ll also be pervaded by the feeling that this is fake, that I’m being tricked, and all of this will make me wonder just what is going on inside my brain.

There is no doubt that the patterns that will be sparked in my brain by watching those videos — the symbols in my brain that will be triggered, reactivated, resuscitated, brought back to life for the first time since she died, and that will be dancing inside me — will be just as strong as when they were sparked in my brain when she herself was there, in person, actually doing those things that are now merely images on tape. The dance of the symbols inside my brain sparked by the videos will be the same dance, and danced by the same symbols, as when she was right there before me.

So there’s this set of structures inside my brain that videos and photos and other extremely intense records can access in such a profound way — the structures in me that, when she was alive, were correlated with Carol, were deeply in resonance with her, the structures that represented Carol, the structures that seemed, for all the world, to be Carol. But as I watch the videos, knowing she is gone, the fraudulency will at once be being revealed and yet be deeply confusing me, because I will be seeming to see her, seeming to have revived her, seeming to have brought her back, just as I do in my dreams. And so I wonder, what is the nature of those structures collectively forming the “Carol symbol” in my brain? How big is the Carol symbol? And most importantly of all: How close does the Carol symbol inside Doug come to being a person, as opposed to merely representing or symbolizing a person?

The following should be a much easier question (although I think it is not actually easier). What was the nature of the “Holden Caulfield symbol” in J. D. Salinger’s brain during the period when he was writing Catcher in the Rye ? That structure was all there ever was to Holden Caulfield — but it was so, so rich. Perhaps that symbol wasn’t as rich as a full human soul, but Holden Caulfield seems like so much of a person, with a true core, a true soul, a true personal gemma, even if only a “miniature” one. You couldn’t ask for a richer representation, a richer mirroring, of one person inside another person, than whatever constituted the Holden Caulfield symbol inside Salinger’s brain.

I hope the overall set of ideas here sounds coherent to you, Dan, even though what I have said is certainly made up of lots of incoherent little threads. It is terribly hard to articulate these things, and it is made far harder by the interference of one’s deep emotions, which wish things to be certain ways, and which push to a certain extent for the answers to come out on that side. Of course it is also precisely the strength of those desires that makes these questions so intense and so important in ways that wouldn’t have happened if tragedy hadn’t struck.

I must admit that I feel a little bit like someone trying to grapple with quantum-mechanical reality while quantum mechanics was developing but before it had been fully and rigorously established — someone around 1918, someone like Sommerfeld, who had a deep understanding of all the so-called “semiclassical” models that were then available (the wonderful Bohr atom and its many improved versions), but quite a while before Heisenberg and Schrödinger came along, cutting to the very core of the question, and getting rid of all the confusion. Around 1918, a lot of the truth was nearly within reach, but even people who were at the cutting edge could easily fall back into a purely classical mode of thinking and get hopelessly confused.

That’s how I feel about self, soul, consciousness these days. I feel as if I know very intimately, yet can’t quite always remember, the distributedness of consciousness and the illusion of the soul. It’s frustrating to feel myself constantly sliding back into conventional intuitive (“classical”) views of these questions when I know that deep down, my view is radically counterintuitive (“quantum-mechanical”).

Post Scriptum

Long after this chapter (minus this P.S.) had been put together in final form, it occurred to me that it might be tempting for some readers to conclude that in the wake of Carol’s death, her deeply depressed husband had buckled under the terrible pressures of loss, and had sought to build some kind of elaborate intellectual superstructure through which he could deny to himself what was self-evident to all outsiders: that his wife had died and was completely gone, and that was all there was to it.

Such skepticism or even cynicism is quite natural, and I will admit that even I, looking back at these grapplings, couldn’t help wondering if denial of death’s reality or finality wasn’t a good part of the motivation for all the anguished musings about souls and survival that I engaged in, not only during the year of 1994 but for many years thereafter. Since I know myself quite well, I didn’t really think this was the case (although sometimes I was a little bit unsure just what was the case), but what definitely troubled me was the thought that readers who don’t know me could easily draw such a conclusion and could thus dismiss my grapplings as the passionate ravings of a suffering individual who had expediently modified his belief system in order to give balm to his grief.

It was therefore a relief when, very recently, I went through a number of old files in my filing cabinets — files with names like “Identity”, “Strange Loops”, “Consciousness”, and so forth — and ran across writings galore in which all these same ideas are set forth in crystal-clear terms long before there was any shadow on the horizon. I found endless musings, all written out by hand, in which I talked about the blurred identities of human souls, and in particular I found several episodes where I talked explicitly about the fusing of Carol’s and my soul into a single tight unit, or about the “soul merger” of Carol and Danny.

In these improvised passages, I often dreamed up quite amusing but very serious thought experiments in which I tampered with the rate of potential information flow between two brains (one time involving a linkup connecting my brain and a zombie’s brain — a delightful thought, at least to me!). What became obvious was that these ideas about who we are and what makes a person unique had been brewing and stirring around in my mind for decades, and that it had all come to an intense boil when I got married and especially when I had the experience of having children and raising them with someone whose love for them was so terribly similar to, and so terribly entangled with, my own love for them.

My book is now done, and those old paper files are rich preludes to it. Perhaps someday some of what I wrote back then will see the light of day, perhaps never, but at least I myself have the comfort of knowing that when I was in my time of greatest need, I did not merely tumble for some kind of path-of-least-resistance belief system that winked at me, but instead I stayed true to my long-term principles, worked out with great care many years earlier. That knowledge about myself gives me a small kind of solace.