I Am a Strange Loop

by Douglas R. Hofstadter

  To our everyday, downhome, SL #642–style minds, it’s very stark and very simple: one of the Parfits is a fake. We cannot imagine being in two places at once, so we think (identifying ourselves with the intrepid voyager), “Either I’ve got to be the Venus one, or the Mars one, or neither one.” And yet none of these answers is in the least satisfying to our classical intuitions.

  Parfit’s own answer is actually closer to the thought that I brusquely dismissed in the previous paragraph: that we are in two places at once! I say it’s closer to that answer rather than saying that it is that answer, because Parfit’s view, like mine in this book, is that these things that seem so black-and white to us actually come in shades of gray — it’s just that in ordinary circumstances, things are always so close to being pure black or white that any hints of grayness remain hidden from view, not only thanks to the obvious external fact that we all have separate physical brains housed in separate skulls, but also thanks to an extensive web of linguistic and cultural conventions that collectively and subliminally insist that we each are exactly one person (this is the “caged-bird metaphor” of Chapter 18, and it’s also the Cartesian Ego notion), and which implicitly discourage us from imagining any kind of blending, overlapping, or sharing of souls.

  There is also, I cannot deny it, an absolute certainty, deep down in each one of us, that I cannot be in two places at once. In earlier chapters, I went to great lengths to give counterexamples of many sorts to this idea, and Parfit, too, takes great pains to give other kinds of evidence about the possibility of spread-out identity. In fact, he eschews the term “personal identity”, preferring to replace it by a different term, one less likely to conjure up images of indivisible “soul quanta” (analogous to unique factory-issued serial numbers or government-issued identity cards). The term Parfit prefers is “psychological continuity”, by which he means what I would tend to call “psychological similarity”. In other words, although he doesn’t propose anything that would smack of mathematics, Parfit essentially proposes an abstract “distance function” (what mathematicians would call a “metric”) between personalities in “personality space” (or between brains, although at what structural level brains would have to be described in order for this “distance calculation” to take place is never specified, and it is hard to imagine what that level might be).

  Using such a mind-to-mind metric, I would be very “close” to the person I was yesterday, slightly less close to the person I was two days ago, and so forth. In other words, although there is a great degree of overlap between the individuals Douglas Hofstadter today and Douglas Hofstadter yesterday, they are not identical. We nonetheless standardly (and reflexively) choose to consider them identical because it is so convenient, so natural, and so easy. It makes life much simpler. This convention allows us to give things (both animate and inanimate) fixed names and to talk about them from one day to the next without constantly having to update our lexicon. Moreover, this convention is ingrained in us when we are infants — at about the same Piagetian developmental stage as that in which we learn that when a ball rolls behind a box, it still exists even though it’s not visible, and may even reappear on the other side of the box in a second or two!

  The Radical Nature of Parfit’s Views

  To dismantle unconscious beliefs that are so deeply rooted and that have such a degree of primacy in our worldview is an extremely daunting and bold undertaking, comparable in subtlety and difficulty to what Einstein accomplished in creating special relativity (undermining, through sheer logic, our deepest and most unquestioned intuitions about the nature of time), and what a whole generation of brilliant physicists, with Einstein at their core, collectively accomplished in creating quantum mechanics (undermining our deepest and most unquestioned intuitions about the nature of causality and continuity). The new view that Parfit proposes is a radical reperception of what it is to be, and in certain ways it is extremely disturbing. In other ways, it is extremely liberating! Parfit even devotes a page or two to explaining how this radical new view of human existence has freed him up and profoundly changed his attitudes towards his life, his death, his loved ones, and other people in general.

  In Chapter 12 of Reasons and Persons, boldly entitled “Why Our Identity Is Not What Matters”, there is a series of penetrating musings, all of which have wonderfully provocative titles. Since I so much admire this book and its style, I will simply quote those section titles for you here, hoping thereby to whet your appetite to read it. Here they are: “Divided Minds”; “What Explains the Unity of Consciousness?”; “What Happens When I Divide?”; “What Matters When I Divide?”; “Why There is No Criterion of Identity that Can Meet Two Plausible Requirements”; “Wittgenstein and Buddha”; “Am I Essentially My Brain?”; and finally, “Is the True View Believable?”

  Even though all eight of these sections are rife with insight, it is the last section that I admire the most, because in the end, Parfit asks himself if he really believes in the edifice he has just built. It is as if Albert Einstein had just realized that his own ideas would bring Newtonian mechanics crashing down in rubble, and then paused to ask himself, “Do I really have such deep faith in my own mind’s pathways that I can believe in the bizarre, intuition-defying conclusions I have reached? Am I not being enormously arrogant in rejecting a whole self-consistent web of interlocked ideas that were carefully worked out by two or three centuries’ worth of extraordinary physicists who came before me?”

  And although Einstein was exceedingly modest throughout his lifetime, his answer to himself (though to my knowledge he never wrote any such introspective essay) was, in effect, “Yes, I do have this strange faith in my own mind’s correctness. Nature has to be this way, no matter what other people have said before me. I have somehow been given the opportunity to glimpse the inner logic of nature more deeply and more accurately than anyone else before me has. I am unaccountably lucky in this fact, and though I take no personal credit for it, I do wish to publish it so that I may share this valuable vision with others.”

  Self-confidence, Humility, and Self-doubt

  Parfit is far more prudent than this. His conclusions, to my mind, are just as radical as those of Einstein (although I find it a bit of a stretch to imagine radical ideas about the ineffability of personal identity leading to any marvelous technological consequences, whereas Einstein’s ideas of course did), but he is not quite as convinced of them as Einstein must have been. He feels confident, but not absolutely confident, of his edifice of thought. He doesn’t think it will start to shake and soon tumble down if he stands on it, but then again he admits that it just might do so. Let us hear him express himself on this topic in his own words:

  [The philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel] once claimed that, even if the Reductionist View is true, it is psychologically impossible for us to believe this. I shall therefore briefly review my arguments given above. I shall then ask whether I can honestly claim to believe my conclusions. If I can, I shall assume that I am not unique. There would be at least some other people who can believe the truth.

  [A few pages later] .…I have now reviewed the main arguments for the Reductionist View. Do I find it impossible to believe this View?

  What I find is this. I can believe this view at the intellectual or reflective level. I am convinced by the arguments in favour of this view. But I think it likely that, at some other level, I shall always have doubts.…

  I suspect that reviewing my arguments would never wholly remove my doubts. At the reflective or intellectual level, I would remain convinced that the Reductionist View is true. But at some lower level I would still be inclined to believe that there must always be a real difference between some future person’s being me, and his being someone else. Something similar is true when I look through a window at the top of a sky-scraper. I know that I am in no danger. But, looking down from this dizzying height, I am afraid. I would have a similar irrational fear if I was about to press the green button.

  ….I
t is hard to be serenely confident in my Reductionist conclusions. It is hard to believe that personal identity is not what matters. If tomorrow someone will be in agony, it is hard to believe that it could be an empty question whether this agony will be felt by me. And it is hard to believe that, if I am about to lose consciousness, there may be no answer to the question “Am I about to die?”

  I must say, I find Parfit’s willingness to face and to share his self-doubts with his readers to be extremely rare and wonderfully refreshing.

  Morphing Parfit into Bonaparte

  In the last paragraph quoted above, Parfit alludes to a thought experiment invented partly by philosopher Bernard Williams and partly by himself (in other words, invented by a Williams–Parfit hybrid who might be called “Bernek Willfits”), in which he is about to undergo a special type of neurosurgery whose exact nature is determined by a numerical parameter — namely, how many switches will be thrown. What do the individual switches do? Each one of them converts one of Parfit’s personality traits into a different personality trait belonging to none other than Napoleon Bonaparte (and I literally mean “none other than”, as I will shortly explain). For example, one switch makes Parfit far more irascible, another switch removes his repugnance at the idea of seeing people killed, and so forth. Note that in the previous sentence I used the proper noun “Parfit” and the pronoun “his”, which presumably is an unambiguous reference to Parfit. However, the whole question here is whether or not such usages are legitimate. If switch after switch were thrown, converting Parfit more and more into Napoleon, at what stage would he — or rather, at what stage would this slowly morphing person — simply be Napoleon?

  As I have already made clear, asking exactly where along the line the switchover would take place makes no sense from Parfit’s point of view, for what matters is psychological continuity (i.e., proximity in that quasimathematical space of personalities or brains that I suggested a little while ago), and that is a feature that comes in all shades of gray. It is not a 0/1 matter, not all-or-nothing. A person can be partly Derek Parfit and partly Napoleon Bonaparte, and drifting from the one to the other as the switches are thrown. And this doesn’t merely mean that this person is becoming more and more like Napoleon Bonaparte — it means that this person really is slowly becoming Bonaparte himself.

  In Parfit’s view, the Cartesian Ego of Napoleon is not indivisible, nor is that of Derek Parfit. Rather, it is as if there were a slider on a wire, and the two individuals (who are not really “individuals” in the etymological sense, since the word means “undividable”) can be merged or morphed arbitrarily by sliding that slider to any desired position on the wire. The result is a hybrid person, a tenth or a third or halfway or three-quarters of the way between the two ends — whatever proportions one wishes, ranging from Derek Parfit to Deren Parfite to Dereon Parpite to Deleon Parapite to Doleon Paraparte to Daoleon Panaparte to Dapoleon Ponaparte to Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Most people, unlike Parfit, want there to be and are convinced that there must be, at each point along the spectrum of cases, a sharp yes–no answer to the question, “Is this person Derek Parfit?” This is the classical view, of course — the view that takes for granted the notion of Parfit’s own Cartesian Ego. And so most people are put into the awkward position of having to say that there would be a particular spot along the wire at which all of a sudden, without warning, at the instant when the slider passes it, the Cartesian Ego of Parfit would poof out of existence, to be replaced by that of Napoleon Bonaparte. Where only a moment ago we had been dealing with a somewhat personality-modified Derek Parfit, but still and all a Derek Parfit who genuinely felt Derek Parfit’s feelings, now we suddenly have a modified Napoleon Bonaparte, and he feels Napoleon’s feelings, and not Parfit’s whatsoever!

  The Radical Redesign of Douglas R. Hofstadter

  The intuitions being pushed here are very emotional and run very deep in our culture and our whole view of life. It gets particularly intense for me when I insert myself into this scenario and start imagining the personality-trait substitutions that a neurosurgeon might carry out by throwing one switch after another.

  For example, I begin by imagining that, upon the throwing of Switch #1, my love for Chopin and Bach is replaced by a visceral loathing of their music and that instead, a sudden yet powerful veneration for Beethoven, Bartók, Elvis, and Eminem flowers in “my” brain.

  Next, I imagine that Switch #2 causes me every single weekend (and every other spare moment as well) to elect, instead of designing ambigrams or working hard on my book about being a strange loop, to spend hours on end watching professional football games on a huge-screen television and delightedly ogling all the busty babes in the beer ads.

  And then (Switch #3) I imagine my political leanings being turned on their head, including my decades of crusading against sexist language. Now, I come out with “you guys” every other sentence, and anyone who objects to it I chortlingly deride as “a politically correct monkey” (as you might imagine, that’s just one of the milder epithets I use).

  With the next switch, I jettison my lifelong inclination towards vegetarianism and trade it in for a passion for shooting deer and other wild animals — and of course the larger they are, the better. Thus, after Switch #4 has been thrown, I just adore toppling elephants and rhinos with my trusty rifle! The most fun thing in the world! And each time one of the noble beasts bows humbly down to my triumphant bullets, I give one of those “I’m great” jerks with my arm, which one so often sees when a football player scores a touchdown.

  And lastly, needless to say, after Switch #5 has been thrown, I totally agree with John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, and I think that Derek Parfit’s ideas about personal identity are a complete crock. Oh, I forgot — can’t do that, since I never think about philosophical issues at all!

  You may have noticed that when I discussed Switch #1, I put quotes around the word “my” when talking about the brain in which a veneration for Ludwig, Béla, Elvis, and Eminem flowers. From there on out, though, I didn’t bother with the quote marks, but I probably should have. After all, everything I suggested in the paragraphs above is the diametric opposite of what I consider core me-ness. Letting go of even one of these traits is enough to make me think, “That person wouldn’t be me any more. That couldn’t be me. That is incompatible with the deepest fiber of my being.”

  Of course we can imagine milder changes, such as an alternate life in which I somehow never ran into Prokofiev’s violin concerto #1. That would be another version of me, and surely a more impoverished one, but it would still feel like me, to this me. Or we can imagine that I still eat hamburgers on occasion but feel guilty about it, or that once in a blue moon I voluntarily turn on a football game on TV. These are shades of gray that create a halo of “possible Dougs” around the Doug that I happen to have become, thanks to a million accidental events that have befallen me over the decades, and thanks to hundreds of particular individuals who happen to have entered my life (and millions of others who never did, not to mention an infinite number of counterfactual individuals who never entered my life!). We don’t normally think of “who/what/how I am” in such shades of gray, but there they are, spelled out a bit, in my case.

  On “Who” and on “How”

  I might add, by the way, that I think the word “who” is sometimes granted a bit too much subliminal power, in much the way as are the personal pronouns “he” and “she” (you may recall my brief interchange with Kellie about pronouns applied to animals, in Chapter 1). In the 1980’s, Pamela McCorduck wrote a history of artificial intelligence with the provocative and ingenious title “Machines Who Think”. The word “who” in the title conjures up an image radically different from our knee-jerk associations with standard machines such as can-openers, refrigerators, typewriters, and even computers; it suggests that with at least certain machines, there is someone “in there”, or as Thomas Nagel would say, “there is something it is like to be that machine” (a h
ard phrase to translate into other languages, by the way). It implicitly suggests, once again, a sharp, black-and-white dichotomy between a set of hypothetical “machines that think” (such machines would merely think but would have no inner life) and a different set of hypothetical “machines who think” (these machines would have an inner life, and each one would be a particular someone).

  It has often seemed to me that ultimately, when I am thinking about who my closest friends are, it all comes down to how they are — how they smile, how they talk, how they laugh, how they listen, how they suffer, how they share, and so on. I think to myself that the innermost essence of each friend is made up of thousands of such “how” ’s, and that that collection of “how” ’s is the answer — the full answer — to “Who is this person?”

  It may seem that this is purely a third-person, external perspective, and that it takes away, or even denies, the whole first-person perspective. It may seem to short-change or even to casually dismiss the “I”. I don’t think so, however, for I think that even to itself, that is all an “I” is. The rub is, an “I” is very good at convincing itself that it is a lot more than that — in fact, that is the entire business that the word “I” is in! “I” has a vested interest in continuing this scam (even if it is its own victim)!

  Double or Nothing

  At long last, we return to the Venus-versus-Mars enigma of Episode III. I have already told you that Parfit somewhat sidesteps the question by simply denying the existence of Cartesian Egos, and thus saying that the question has no meaningful answer. But in his book he also refers quite often to what he terms “double survival”, which means essentially that he is simultaneously in two places at once. More than once, he writes that double survival is hardly equivalent to death (which would be no survival), and that the number two should not be conflated with the number zero! So what is he really saying? Is he saying that there is no answer to the question, or is he saying that in fact he has been doubled, and there are now two Derek Parfits?