I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter

  You can call my feeling an “illusion” if you wish, but before you do so, consider how primitive this now-ancient implementation of telepresence was. Today, one can easily imagine turning up all the technological knobs by orders of magnitude. There could be a mobile robot out in California whose movements were under my instantaneous and precise control (the joystick idea again), and whose multimedia “sensory organs” instantly transmitted whatever they picked up to me in Indiana. As a result, I could be fully immersed in a virtual experience thousands of miles from where my brain was located, and this could go on for any length of time. What would be most confusing would still be the moments of change, when I removed the helmet that made me feel I was in California, thereby finding myself transported two thousand miles eastwards in a fraction of a second — or the reverse, when I would don my helmet and in a flash would sail all the way out to the west coast.

  What, in the end, would suggest to me that my presence in Indiana was “realer” than my presence in California? One clue, I suppose, would be the telltale fact that in order to “be” in California, I would always have to don some sort of helmet, whereas in order to “be” in Bloomington, I would need no such device. Another tip-off might be that if I picked up food while meandering about in California, I couldn’t get it into my Indianabased stomach! That little problem, however, could easily be taken care of: just attach an intravenous feeding device to me in Indiana and arrange for it to pump nutrients into my bloodstream whenever I — my robot body, that is — manage to track down some “food” in California (and it need not be actual food, as long as the act of laying my remote robotic hands on it out there activates the intravenous feeding device back home in Indiana).

  What one starts to realize, as one explores these disorienting but technologically feasible ideas of virtual presence “elsewhere”, is that as the telepresence technology improves, the “primary” location becomes less and less primary. Indeed, one can imagine a proverbial “brain in the vat” in Bloomington controlling a strolling robot out in California, and totally believing itself to be a physical creature way out west and not believing one word about being a brain in a vat. (Many of these ideas were explored, incidentally, by Dan Dennett in his philosophical fantasy “Where Am I?”)

  Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?

  I am hesitant to adduce too many science-fiction-like scenarios in order to explain and justify my ideas about soul and consciousness, because doing so might give the impression that my viewpoint is essentially tied to the indiscriminate mentality of an inveterate science-fiction junkie, which I am anything but. Nonetheless, I think such examples are often helpful in getting one to break free of ancient, deeply rooted prejudices. But one hardly needs to talk about head-mounted television cameras, remote-controlled robots, and intravenous feeding devices in order to remind people of how we routinely transport ourselves into virtual worlds. The mere act of reading a novel while relaxing in an armchair by the window in one’s living room is an example par excellence of this phenomenon.

  When we read a Jane Austen novel, what we look at is just a myriad of black smudges arranged neatly in lines on a set of white rectangles, and yet what we feel we are “seeing” (and should I use the quotation marks or not?) is a mansion in the English countryside, a team of horses pulling a carriage down a country lane, an elegantly clad lady and gentleman sitting side by side in the carriage exchanging pleasantries when they espy a poor old woman emerging from her humble cottage along the roadside… We are so taken in by what we “see” that in some important and serious sense we don’t notice the room we are sitting in, the trees visible through its window, nor even the black smudges speckled all over the white rectangles in our hands (even though, paradoxically, we are depending on those smudges to bring us the visual images I just described). If you don’t believe me, consider what you have just been doing in the last thirty seconds: processing black smudges speckled on white rectangles and yet “seeing” someone reading a Jane Austen novel in an armchair in a living room, and in addition, seeing the mansion, the country road, the carriage, the elegant couple, and the old woman… Black curlicues on a white background, when suitably arranged, transport us in milliseconds to arbitrarily distant, long-gone, or even never-existent venues and epochs.

  The point of all of this is to insist on the idea that we can be in several places at one time, simultaneously entertaining several points of view at one time. You just did it! You are sitting somewhere reading this book, yet a moment ago you were also in a living-room armchair reading a Jane Austen novel, and you were also simultaneously in a carriage going down a country lane. At least three points of view coexisted simultaneously inside your cranium. Which one of those viewers was “real”? Which one was “really you”? Need these questions be answered? Can they be answered?

  Where Am I?

  As I was driving a few days ago, I pulled up alongside a jogger waiting at a red light. She was trotting in place, and then the light changed and she crossed the street and disappeared. For a brief moment, I was “in her shoes”. I had never seen her before and probably will never see her again, but I have been there many a time. I had lived that experience in my own way, and even though I know virtually nothing about her, I have shared that experience of hers. To be sure, I was not seeing it through her eyes. But let’s briefly jump once again into the realm of slightly silly technological extravagance.

  Suppose everyone wore a tiny TV camera on the bridge of their nose, and that everyone had glasses that could be tuned to receive the signals from any selected TV camera on earth. If there were a way of specifying a person by their GPS coordinates (and that certainly doesn’t seem far-fetched), then all I would have to do is set my glasses to receive the signals from that jogger’s nose-mounted TV camera, and presto! — I would suddenly be seeing the world from her perspective. When I was sitting in my car and the traffic light changed and she took off and disappeared, I could have ridden along and seen just where she was going, could have heard the birds chirping as she jogged through a woodsy lane, and so forth. And at any point I could switch channels and go see the world through the nose-camera of my daughter Monica or my son Danny, or anyone else I wished. So where am I? “Still just where you are!” chirps common sense. But that’s too simplistic, too ambiguous.

  What determines “where I am”? If we once again postulate the idea of obtaining nutrition by carrying out certain remote actions, and if we add back the ability to control distant motion by means of a joystick or even by certain brain events, then things really start to shimmer in uncertainty. For surely a mobile robot is not where the radio-connected computer that is controlling it happens to be sitting. A robot might be strolling about on the moon while its computerized guidance system was in some earthbound laboratory. Or a self-driving car like Stanley could be crossing the Nevada desert, and its computer control system might be on board or might be located in a lab in California, connected by radio. But would we even care where the computer was? Why should we care where it is located?

  A robot, we feel, is where its body is. And so when my brain can switch at will (using the fancy glasses described above) between inhabiting any one of a hundred different bodies — or worse yet, when it can inhabit several bodies at the same time, processing different kinds of input from all of them at once (perhaps visual input from one, sonic from another, tactile from a third) — then where I am becomes extremely ill-defined.

  Varying Degrees of Being Another

  Once again, let’s leave the science-fiction scenarios behind and just think about everyday events. I sit in a plane coming in for a landing and overhear random snippets of conversations around me — remarks about how great the Indianapolis Zoo is, how there’s a new delicatessen at Broad Ripple, and so forth. Each snippet carries me a smidgen into someone else’s world, gives me the tiniest taste of someone else’s viewpoint. I may resonate very little with that viewpoint, but even so, I am entering ever so slightly into that person’s “private�
� universe, and this incursion, though absolutely trivial for a human being, is far deeper than any canine’s incursion into another canine’s universe ever was.

  And if I have untold thousands of hours of conversation with another human being on topics of every imaginable sort, including the most private feelings and the most confidential confessions, then the interpenetration of our worlds becomes so great that our worldviews start to fuse. Just as I could jump to California when talking on the telephone with Scott Kim in the Imlac room, so I can jump inside the other person’s head whenever, through words and tones of voice, they call forth their most fervent hopes or their most agonizing fears.

  To varying degrees, we human beings live inside other human beings already, even in a totally nontechnological world. The interpenetration of souls is an inevitable consequence of the power of the representationally universal machines that our brains are. That is the true meaning of the word “empathy”.

  I am capable of being other people, even if it is merely an “economy class” version of the act of being, even if it falls quite a bit short of being those people with the full power and depth with which they are themselves. I have the good fortune — at least I usually consider it fortunate, though at times I wonder — of always having the option of falling back and returning to being “just me”, because there is only one primary self housed in my brain. If, however, there were a few high-powered selves in my brain, all competing with each other for primacy, then the meaning of the word “I” would truly be up for grabs.

  The Naïve Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough

  The image I just conjured up of several selves competing for primacy inside one brain may have struck you as extremely weird, but in fact the experience of internal conflict between several “rival selves” is one that we all know intimately. We know what it is to feel split between wanting to buy that candy bar and wanting to refrain. We know what it is to feel split between driving “just another twenty miles” and pulling off at the next rest stop for a desperately needed nap. We know what it is like to think, “I’ll just read one more paragraph and then go fix dinner” and also to think, “I’ll just finish this chapter first.” Which one of these opposing inner voices is really me? In growing up, we learn not to ask or try to answer questions like this. We unthinkingly accept such small internal conflicts as simply part of “the human condition”.

  If you simultaneously dip your left hand into a basin of hot water and your right hand into a basin of ice water, leave them both there for a minute, and then plunge them into a lukewarm sink, you will find that your two hands — usually your most reliable scouts and witnesses of the outer world — are now telling you wildly opposite things about the very same sinkful of water. In reaction to this paradox, you will most likely just shrug and smile, thinking to yourself, “What a strong tactile illusion!” You aren’t likely to think to yourself, “This cognitive split inside my brain is the thin edge of the wedge, revealing the illusoriness of the everyday conviction that there is just a single self inside my head.” And the reason nearly everyone would put up great resistance to such a conclusion is that for nearly all purposes, the simple story we tell ourselves is good enough.

  This situation is a bit reminiscent of Newtonian physics, whose laws are extraordinarily reliable unless there are objects moving near each other with a relative velocity approaching the velocity of light, and in such cases Newtonian physics goes awry and gives very wrong answers. There is no reason at all, however, to abandon Newtonian physics in most familiar situations, even including the calculations of the orbits of spacecraft traveling to the moon or other planets. The velocities of such spacecraft, although huge compared with those of jet airplanes, are still minuscule fractions of the speed of light, and abandonment of Newton is not in the least called for.

  Likewise, why should we abandon our commonsense attitudes about how many souls inhabit our brains when we know very well that the answer is just one? The only answer I can give is that, yes, the answer is very close to one, but when push comes to shove, we can see small deviations from that accurate first approximation. Moreover, we even experience such deviations all the time in everyday life — it’s just that we tend to interpret them as frivolous illusions, or else we simply ignore them. Such a strategy works quite well because we never approach the “speed of light” where the naïve, caged-bird picture fails badly. Less metaphorically, the lower-resolution, coarse-grained souls who fight and squabble for the chance to inhabit our brains never really pose any serious competition to “Number One” for the overall command, and so the naïve old caged-bird dogma “One brain, one soul” stands unchallenged nearly all of the time.

  Where Does a Hammerhead Shark Think it is?

  Perhaps the most forceful-seeming challenge to the thesis that a single soul — your own, say — is parceled out among a number of distinct brains is simply the question, “Okay, let’s suppose that I’m somehow distributed over many brains. Then which one do I actually experience? I can’t be simultaneously both here and there!” But in this chapter I have tried to show that you can indeed be in two places at the same time, and you don’t even notice anything funny going on. You can be in Bloomington and in Stanford at the same time. You can be in a Donner Pass ski lodge and a Midwest town’s kennel play area at the same time. You can be in your living room’s plush armchair and in an uncomfortable carriage bouncing along a nineteenth-century English country road at the same time.

  If these examples are too far-fetched or too technological for your taste, then just think of the lowly hammerhead shark. The poor thing has eyes on opposite sides of its head, which look out, quite often, on two completely unrelated scenes. So which scene is the shark really seeing? Where does it consider itself to be, really? Of course no one would ask such a question. We just accept the idea that the shark can “sort of” be in those two different worlds at the same time, mainly because we think to ourselves that no matter how different those scenes look, they nonetheless are contiguous pieces of the underwater world in the shark’s vicinity, so there is no genuine problem about whereness. But this is glib, and sidesteps the point.

  To put things in somewhat sharper focus, let’s invent a variation on the hammerhead shark. We’ll posit a creature whose eyes are taking in one situation (say in Bloomington) and whose ears are taking in another, unrelated situation (say in Stanford). The same brain is going to process these inputs at the same time. I hope you won’t claim that this is an impossible feat! If that’s your inclination, please first recall that you drive your car while reacting to other cars, scenery, billboards, and roadsigns, and also while talking with a far-off friend on your cell phone (and the topics covered in the conversation may vividly transport you to yet other places), and all during that very same period a recently-heard tune is running through your head, your strained back is bugging you, you smell cow manure wafting through the air, and your stomach is shouting to you, “I am hungry!” You manage to process all those different simultaneous worlds perfectly well — and in that same spirit, nothing is going to prevent a human brain from dealing simultaneously with the two unrelated worlds of Stanford sounds and Bloomington sights, no more than the hammerhead shark’s brain protests, “Does not compute!” So the idea “I cannot be simultaneously here and there” goes down in flames. We are simultaneously here and there all the time, even in our everyday lives.

  Sympathetic Vibrations

  But perhaps you feel that what I’ve just described doesn’t address the question originally posed about which of many brains you are really in — that being either here or there means that no matter how emotionally close you are to someone else, their feelings are always theirs, yours are always yours, and never the twain shall meet. This is once again the caged-bird imagery with which the chapter opened, and it will certainly not cease to rear its ugly head no matter how many times I try to cut it off. But let us nonetheless try tackling this medusa in yet another fashion.

  If I claim that I
am partially in my sister Laura and she is partly in me, it seems nonetheless obvious that if she happens to drive by our favorite falafel place in San Jose and stops to eat a falafel, I’m not going to taste that falafel as I sit here slaving away in my study in Bloomington, Indiana. And therefore I am not there, but here! And therefore my consciousness is local, not global, not spread out! And therefore that’s the end of the story!

  But things are not quite that simple. I might receive news of Laura’s falafel an hour later, by a telephone call. When she describes it vividly (or not even vividly, since I know it so well), my mouth starts watering as I recall the exact texture of the little crunchy balls and the delicious red hot sauce. I know those falafels like the back of my teeth. Although my tongue is not caressing those little chunky deep-fried bits, something in my brain is taking a sensual delight in what I could call (in imitation of the phrase “sympathetic pain”) “sympathetic pleasure”. Albeit in a feeble way and an hour after the fact, I am sharing Laura’s pleasure. But so what if it’s a feeble imitation and is not exactly simultaneous? Even if my pleasure is a low-resolution copy of hers and is displaced in time, it is nonetheless pleasure, and it is pleasure that is “about” Laura, not about myself. Her delight has been powerfully transmitted to me. And so, at a distance, at a delay, and to a diminished degree, I am in her skin and she is in mine.

  That’s all I’m claiming — that there is blur. That some of what happens in other brains gets copied, albeit coarse-grainedly, inside the brain of “Number One”, and that the closer two brains are to each other emotionally, the more stuff gets copied back and forth from one to the other, and the more faithful the copies are. There’s no claim that the act of copying is simultaneous or perfect or total — just that each person lives partially in the brain of the other, and that if the bandwidth were turned up more and more and more and still more, they would come to live more and more inside each other — until, in the limit, the sense of a clear boundary between them would slowly be dissolved, as it is for the two halves of a Twinwirld pairson (and even more so for a Siamese Twinwirld pairson).