Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop

The opposite thesis would claim that every person is distributed uniformly over the entire real line, and that all individuals are therefore one and the same person! There is only one person. This extreme view, although less commonly advocated, has its modern proponents, such as philosopher Daniel Kolak in his recent book I Am You. This view makes as little sense to me as does panpsychism, which asserts that every entity — every stone, every picnic table, every picnic, every electron, every rainbow, every drop of water, waterfall, skyscraper, oil refinery, billboard, speedlimit sign, traffic ticket, county jail, jailbreak, track meet, election rigging, airport gate, spring sale, soap opera cancellation, photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and so on ad nauseam — is conscious.

The viewpoint of this book lies somewhere between these two extremes, picturing individuals not as pointlike infinite-decimal serial numbers but as fairly localized, blurry zones scattered here and there along the line. While some of these zones overlap considerably, most of them overlap little or none at all. After all, two smudges of width one inch apiece located a hundred miles apart will obviously have zero overlap. But two smudges of width one inch whose centers are only a half inch apart will have a great deal of overlap. There will not be an unbridgeable existential gap between two such people. Each of them is instead spread out into the other one, and each of them lives partially in the other.

Interpenetration of National Souls

Earlier in this chapter, I briefly offered the image of a self as analogous to a country with embassies in many other countries. Now I wish to pursue a similar notion, but I’ll start out with a very simplistic notion of what a country is, and will build up from there. So let’s consider the slogan “One country, one people”. Such a slogan would suggest that each people (a spiritual, cultural notion involving history, traditions, language, mythology, literature, music, art, religion, and so forth) is always crisply and perfectly aligned with some country (a physical, geographical notion involving oceans, lakes, rivers, mountains, valleys, prairies, mineral deposits, cities, highways, precise legal borders, and so forth).

If we actually believed a strict geographical analogue to the caged-bird metaphor for human selves, then we would have the curious belief that all individuals found inside a certain geographical region always had the same cultural identity. The phrase “an American in Paris” would make no sense to us, for the French nationality would coincide exactly with the boundaries of the physical place called “France”. There could never be Americans in France, nor French people in America! And of course analogous notions would hold for all countries and peoples. This is clearly absurd. Migration and tourism are universal phenomena, and they intermix countries and peoples continuously.

This does not mean that there is no such thing as a people or a country, of course. Both notions remain useful, despite enormous blurs concerning each one. Think for a moment of Italy, for instance. The northwestern region called “Valle d’Aosta” is largely French-speaking, while the northeastern region called “Alto Adige” (also “Südtirol”) is largely German-speaking. Moreover, north of Milano but across the border, the Swiss canton of Ticino is Italian-speaking. So what is the relationship between the country of Italy and the Italian people? It is not precise and sharp, to say the least — and yet we still find it useful to talk about Italy and Italians. It’s just that we know there is a blur around both concepts. And what goes for Italy goes for every country. We know that each nationality is a blurry, spread-out phenomenon centered on but not limited to a single geographical region, and we are completely accustomed to this notion. It does not feel paradoxical or confusing in the least.

So let us exploit our comfort with the relationship between a place and a people to try to get a more sophisticated handle on the relationship between a body and a soul. Consider China, which over the past couple of centuries has lost millions of people to emigration. Does China simply forget about those people, thinking of them as deserters and expunging them from its collective memory? Not at all. There is a strong residual feeling inside China for the “Overseas Chinese”. These cherished though distant people are urged to “come home” at least temporarily, and when they do, they are warmly welcomed like long-lost relatives (which of course is exactly what they are). This overseas branch of China is thus considered, within China, very much a part of China. It is a “halo” of Chineseness that extends far beyond the physical borders of the land.

Not just China, of course, but every country has such a halo, and this halo shimmers, sometimes brightly, sometimes dimly, in every other country on earth. If there were a counterpart at the country level to human death, then a people whose “body” was annihilated (by some kind of cataclysm such as a huge meteor crashing into their land) could survive, at least partially, thanks to the glowing halo that exists beyond their land’s physical borders.

Though horrific, such an image does not strike us as in the least counterintuitive, because we understand that the physical land, no matter how beloved in song and story, is not indispensable for the survival of a nationality. The geographical place is merely the traditional breeding grounds for an ancient set of genes and memes — complexions, body types, hair colors, traditions, words, proverbs, dances, myths, costumes, recipes, and so forth — and as long as a critical mass of carriers of these genes and memes, located abroad, survives the cataclysm, all of this richness can continue to exist and flourish elsewhere, and the now-gone physical place can continue to be celebrated in song and story.

Although no entire country has ever been physically annihilated, events somewhat like this have happened in the past. I am reminded of the gulping-up of all of Polish soil by Poland’s neighbors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the so-called “partitions of Poland”. The Polish people, although rendered physically homeless, continued to endure. Here was a nation — naród polski — vibrant and alive, yet entirely deprived of a land. Indeed, the words that open the Polish national anthem celebrate this survival: “Poland is not lost, as long as we live!” In parallel fashion, the original Jews, scattered in biblical times from the cradle of their culture, continued to survive, keeping alive their traditions, their language, and their beliefs, in the Diaspora.

Halos, Afterglows, Coronas

In the wake of a human being’s death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of all those who were dearest to them. And when those people in turn pass on, the afterglow becomes extremely faint. And when that outer layer in turn passes into oblivion, then the afterglow is feebler still, and after a while there is nothing left.

This slow process of extinction I’ve just described, though gloomy, is a little less gloomy than the standard view. Because bodily death is so clear, so sharp, and so dramatic, and because we tend to cling to the caged-bird view, death strikes us as instantaneous and absolute, as sharp as a guillotine blade. Our instinct is to believe that the light has all at once gone out altogether. I suggest that this is not the case for human souls, because the essence of a human being — truly unlike the essence of a mosquito or a snake or a bird or a pig — is distributed over many a brain. It takes a couple of generations for a soul to subside, for the flickering to cease, for all the embers to burn out. Although “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” may in the end be true, the transition it describes is not so sharp as we tend to think.