I Am a Strange Loop

CHAPTER 15

Entwinement

Multiple Strange Loops in One Brain

TWO chapters back, I declared that there was one strange loop in each human cranium, and that this loop constituted our “I”, but I also mentioned that that was just a crude first stab. Indeed, it is a drastic oversimplification. Since we all perceive and represent hundreds of other human beings at vastly differing levels of detail and fidelity inside our cranium, and since the most important facet of all of those human beings is their own sense of self, we inevitably mirror, and thus house, a large number of other strange loops inside our head. But what exactly does it mean to say that each human head is the locus of a multiplicity of “I” ’s?

Well, I don’t know precisely what it means. I wish I did! And I reckon that if I did, I would be the world’s greatest philosopher and psychologist rolled into one. As best I can guess, from far below such a Parnassus, it means we manufacture an enormously stripped-down version of our own strange loop of selfhood and install it at the core of our symbols for other people, letting that initially crude loopy structure change and grow over time. In the case of the people we know best — our spouse, our parents and siblings, our children, our dearest friends — each of these loops grows over the years to be a very rich structure adorned with many thousands of idiosyncratic ingredients, and each one achieves a great deal of autonomy from the stripped-down “vanilla” strange loop that served as its seed.

Content-free Feedback Loops

More light can be cast on this idea of a “vanilla” strange loop through our old metaphor of the audio feedback loop. Suppose a microphone and a loudspeaker have been connected together so that even a very soft noise will cycle around rapidly, growing louder and louder each pass through the loop, until it becomes a huge ear-piercing shriek. But suppose the room is dead silent at the start. In that case, what happens? What happens is that it remains dead silent. The loop is working just fine, but it is receiving zero noise and outputting zero noise, because zero times anything is still zero. When no signal enters a feedback loop, the loop has no perceptible effect; it might as well not even exist. An audio loop on its own does not a screech make. It takes some non-null input to get things off the ground.

Let’s now translate this scenario to the world of video feedback. If one points a TV camera at the middle of a blank screen, and if the camera sees only the screen and none of its frame, then despite its loopiness, all that this setup will produce, whether the camera stands still, tilts, turns, or zooms in and out (always without reaching the screen’s edge), is a fixed white image. As before, the fact that the image results from a closed feedback loop makes no difference, because nothing external is serving as the contents of that loop. I’ll refer to such a content-free feedback loop as a “vanilla” loop, and it’s obvious that two vanilla video loops will be indistinguishable — they are just empty shells with no recognizable traits and no “personal identity”.

If, however, the camera turns far enough left or right, or zooms out far enough to take in something external to the blank screen (even just the tiniest patch of color), a bit of the screen will turn non-blank, and then, instantly, that non-blank patch will get sucked into the video loop and cycled around and around, like a tree limb picked up by a tornado. Soon the screen will be populated with many bits of color forming a complex and self-stabilizing pattern. What gives this non-vanilla loop its recognizable identity is not merely the fact that the image contains itself, but just as crucially, the fact that external items in a particular arrangement are part of the image.

If we bring this metaphor back to the context of human identity, we could say that a “bare” strange loop of selfhood does not give rise to a distinct self — it is just a generic, vanilla shell that requires contact with something else in the world in order to start acquiring a distinctive identity, a distinctive “I”. (For those who enjoy the taboo thrills of non-wellfounded sets — sets that, contra Russell, may contain themselves as members — I might raise the puzzle of two singleton sets, x and y, each of which contains itself, and only itself, as a member. Are x and y identical entities or different entities? Trying to answer the riddle by defining two sets to be identical if and only if they have the same members leads one instantly into an infinite regress, and thus no answer is yielded. I prefer to brazenly cut the Gordian knot by declaring the two sets indistinguishable and hence identical.)

Baby Feedback Loops and Baby “I” ’s

Although I just conjured up the notion of a “vanilla” strange loop in a human brain, I certainly did not mean to suggest that a human baby is already at birth endowed with such a “bare” strange loop of selfhood — that is, a fully-realized, though vanilla, shell of pure, distilled “I”-ness — thanks to the mere fact of having human genes. And far less did I mean to suggest that an unborn human embryo acquires a bare loop of selfhood while still in the womb (let alone at the moment of fertilization!). The realization of human selfhood is not nearly so automatic and genetically predetermined as that would suggest.

The closing of the strange loop of human selfhood is deeply dependent upon the level-changing leap that is perception, which means categorization, and therefore, the richer and more powerful an organism’s categorization equipment is, the more realized and rich will be its self. Conversely, the poorer an organism’s repertoire of categories, the more impoverished will be the self, until in the limit there simply is no self at all.

As I’ve stressed many times, mosquitoes have essentially no symbols, hence essentially no selves. There is no strange loop inside a mosquito’s head. What goes for mosquitoes goes also for human babies, and all the more so for human embryos. It’s just that babies and embryos have a fantastic potential, thanks to their human genes, to become homes for huge symbol-repertoires that will grow and grow for many decades, while mosquitoes have no such potential. Mosquitoes, because of the initial impoverishment and the fixed non-extensibility of their symbol systems, are doomed to soullessness (oh, all right — maybe 0.00000001 hunekers’ worth of consciousness — just a hair above the level of a thermostat).

For better or for worse, we humans are born with only the tiniest hints of what our perceptual systems will metamorphose into as we interact with the world over the course of decades. At birth, our repertoire of categories is so minimal that I would call it nil for all practical purposes. Deprived of symbols to trigger, a baby cannot make sense of what William James evocatively called the “big, blooming, buzzing confusion” of its sensory input. The building-up of a self-symbol is still far in the future for a baby, and so in babies there exists no strange loop of selfhood, or nearly none.

To put it bluntly, since its future symbolic machinery is 99 percent missing, a human neonate, devastatingly cute though it might be, simply has no “I” — or, to be more generous, if it does possess some minimal dollop of “I”-ness, perhaps it is one huneker’s worth or thereabouts — and that’s not much to write home about. So we see that a human head can contain less than one strange loop. What about more than one?

Entwined Feedback Loops

To explore in a concrete fashion the idea of two strange loops coexisting in one head, let’s start with a mild variation on our old TV metaphor. Suppose two video cameras and two televisions are set up so that camera A feeds screen A and, far away from it, camera B feeds screen B. Suppose moreover that at all times, camera A picks up all of what is on screen A (plus some nearby stuff, to give the A-loop “content”) and cycles it back onto A, and analogously, camera B picks up all of what is on screen B (plus some external content) and cycles it back onto B. Now since systems A and B are, by stipulation, far apart from each other, it is intuitively clear that A and B constitute separate, disjoint feedback loops. If the local scenes picked up by cameras A and B are different, then screens A and B will have clearly distinguishable patterns on them, so the two systems’ “identities” will be easily told apart. So far, what this metaphor gives us is old hat (in fact, it’s two old hats) — two different heads, each having one loop inside it.

What will happen, however, when systems A and B are gradually brought close enough together to begin interacting with each other? Camera A will then see not only screen A but also screen B, and so loop B will enter into the content of loop A (and vice versa).

Let’s assume, as would seem natural, that camera A is closer to screen A than it is to screen B (and vice versa). Then loop A will take up more space on screen A than does loop B, meaning more pixels, and so loop A will be reproduced with higher fidelity on screen A. Loop A will be large and fine-grained, loop B will be small and coarse-grained. But that’s only on screen A. On screen B, everything is reversed: loop B will be larger and finer-grained, while loop A will be smaller and of coarser grain. The last thing I want to remind you of before we go on to a new paragraph is that now loop A, although it’s still called just “A”, nonetheless involves loop B as well (and vice versa); each of these two loops now plays a role in defining the other one, though loop A plays a larger role in its own definition than does loop B (and vice versa).

We now have a metaphor for two individuals, A and B, each of whom has their own personal identity (i.e., their own private strange loop) — and yet part of that private identity is made out of, and is thus dependent upon, the private identity of the other individual. Furthermore, the more faithful the image of each screen on the other one, the more the “private” identities of the two loops are intertwined, and the more they start to be fused, blurred, and even, to coin a word, undisentanglable from each other.

At this point, even though we are being guided solely by a very curious technological metaphor, I believe we are drawing slowly closer to an understanding of what genuine human identity is all about. In fact, how could anyone imagine that it would be possible to gain deep insight into the mystery of human identity without eventually running up against some sort of unfamiliar abstract structures? Sigmund Freud posited egos, ids, and superegos, and there may well exist some such abstractions inside the architecture of a human soul (perhaps not exactly those three, but patterns of that ilk). We humans are so different from other natural phenomena, even from most other types of living beings, that we should expect that in order to get a glimpse into what we truly are, we would have to look in very unexpected places. Although my strange loops are obviously very different from Freud’s notions, there is a certain similarity of spirit. Both views of what a self is involve abstract patterns that are extremely remote from the biological substrate they inhabit — so remote, in fact, that the specifics of the substrate would seem mostly irrelevant.

One Privileged Loop inside our Skull

Suppose some future television technology managed to eliminate the graininess of cameras and screens, so that all images were flawless at all scales. Such a fanciful scenario would then invalidate the argument, given above, that A’s representation of B’s loop, since it uses fewer pixels, is less faithful than that of its own loop. Now A has a perfect representation of B’s loop on its screen, and vice versa. So what makes A different from B? Perhaps they are now indistinguishable?

Well, no. There is still a fundamental difference between A and B, even though each represents the other perfectly. The difference is that camera A is feeding its image directly to screen A (and not screen B), while camera B is directly feeding screen B (and not screen A). Thus, if camera A tilts or zooms in, then the entire image on screen A follows suit and also tilts or grows larger, whereas the image on screen B stays put. (To be sure, the nested image of screen A on screen B will tilt or grow, all the way down the line of ever-more-nested images — but the orientation and size of the top-level screen in system B will remain unchanged, while those of the top-level screen in system A will be directly affected by what camera A does.)

The point of this variation was to make clear that distinct identities still exist even in a situation with profoundly intertwined loops, because the perceptual hardware of a given system directly feeds only that system. It may have indirect effects on all sorts of other systems, and those effects may even be very important, but any perceptual hardware is associated first and foremost with the system into which it feeds directly (or with which it is “hard-wired”, in today’s blur of computational and neurological jargon).

Put less metaphorically, my sense organs feed my brain directly. They also feed the brains of my children and my friends and other people (my readers, for instance), but they do so indirectly — usually through the intermediary channel of language (though sometimes by photography, art, or music). I tell my kids some droll story of what happened at the grocery store checkout stand, and by George, they instantly see it all oh-so-clearly in their mind’s eyes! The customer with the black-and-white tabloid Weekly World News in his cart, the odd look of the cashier as she picks it up and reads the headline about the baby found, perfectly healthy, floating in a life raft from the Titanic, the embarrassed chuckle of the customer, the quip by the next person in line, and so on. The imagery thus created in the brains of my kids, my friends, and others may seem at times to have a vividness rivaling that of images coming directly through their own sense organs.

Our ability to experience life vicariously in this manner is a truly wonderful aspect of human communication, but of course most of anyone’s perceptual input comes from their own perceptual hardware, and only a smaller part comes filtered this way through other beings. That, to put it bluntly, is why I remain primarily myself, and why you remain primarily yourself. If, however, my perceptions came flooding as fast and furiously into your brain as they do into mine, then we’d be talking a truly different ballgame. But at least for the time being, there’s no danger of such high communication rates between, say, my eyes and your brain.

Shared Perception, Shared Control

At first I had proposed that a human “I” results from the existence of a very special strange loop in a human brain, but now we see that since we mirror many people inside our crania, there will be many loops of different sizes and degrees of complexity, so we have to refine our understanding. Part of the refinement hinges, as I just stated, on the fact that one of these loops in a given brain is privileged — mediated by a perceptual system that feeds directly into that brain. There is another part of the story, though, which has to do with what a brain controls rather than what it perceives.

The thermostat in my house does not regulate the temperature in your house. Analogously, the decisions made in my brain do not control the body that’s hard-wired to your brain. When you and I play tennis, it’s only my arms that my brain controls! Or so it would seem at first. On second thought, that’s clearly an oversimplification, and this is where things start to get blurry once again. I have partial and indirect control over your arms — after all, wherever I send the ball, that’s where you run, and my shot has a great deal to do with how you will swing your arms. So in some indirect fashion, my brain can control your muscles in a game of tennis, but it is not a very reliable fashion. Likewise, if I hit my brakes while driving down the road, then the person behind me will also hit their brakes. What happens in my brain exerts a little bit of control over that driver’s actions, but it is an unreliable and imprecise control.

The type of external control just described does not create a profound blurring of two people’s identities. Tennis and driving do not give rise to deep interpenetrations of souls. But things get more complicated when language enters the show. It is through language most of all that our brains can exert a fair measure of indirect control over other humans’ bodies — a phenomenon very familiar not only to parents and drill sergeants, but also to advertisers, political “spin doctors”, and whiny, wheedling teen-agers. Through language, other people’s bodies can become flexible extensions of our own bodies. In that sense, then, my brain is attached to your body in somewhat the same way as it is to my body — it’s just that, once again, the connection is not hard-wired. My brain is attached to your body via channels of communication that are much slower and more indirect than those linking it to my body, so the control is much less efficient.

For example, I am infinitely better at writing my signature with my own hand than if I were to try to get you to do so by describing all the tiny details of the many curves that I execute so smoothly and unconsciously whenever I “sign out” at the grocery store checkout stand. But the initial notion that there is a fundamental and absolute distinction between how my brain is linked to my own body and how it’s linked to someone else’s body is seen to be exaggerated. There is a difference in degree, that’s clear, but it’s not clear that it’s a difference in kind.

Where have we gotten so far in discussing intertwined souls? We’ve seen that I can perceive your perceptions indirectly, and that I can also control your body indirectly. Likewise, you can perceive my perceptions indirectly (that’s what you’re doing right now!), and you can control my body indirectly, at least a bit. We’ve also seen that the communication channels are slow enough that there are two pretty clearly separate systems, and so we can unproblematically give them different names. The fact that we humans have cleanly separated bodies (except for mother–fetus unions and Siamese twins) makes it absolutely natural to assign a different name to each body, and on a surface level, the act of assignment of distinct names to distinct bodies seems to settle the question once and for all. “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Our naming convention not only supports but enormously helps to lock in the comfortable notion that we — our selves — are cleanly separated entities. “Me Tarzan, you Jane” — end of story.

Language plays a further role, though, in this matter of establishing a body as the locus of an identity. Not only does it give us one name per body (“Tarzan”, “Jane”) but it also gives us personal pronouns (“me”, “you”) that do just as much as names do to reinforce the notion of a crystal-clear, sharp distinction between souls, associating one watertight soul to each body. Let’s take a closer look.

A Twirlwind Trip to Twinwirld

Once, some years ago, I concocted a curious philosophical fantasy-world, to which now, with your permission, I’ll escort you for the next few sections. Although back then I didn’t give the place a name, I think I’ll call it “Twinwirld” here. The special feature of Twinwirld is that 99 percent of all births result in identical twins, and only 1 percent give rise to singletons, which are not called that, but “halflings”. In Twinwirld, twins (who, as in our world, are not exactly identical but have the same genome) grow up together and go everywhere together, wearing identical clothes, attending the same schools, taking the same courses, cooperating on homework assignments, making the same friends, learning to play the same musical instrument, eventually taking a single job together as a team, and so forth. A pair of identical twins in Twinwirld is called, rather inevitably, a “pairson” or a “dividual” (or even just a “dual”).

Each dividual in Twinwirld is given a name at birth — thus a male pairson might be named “Greg” and a female pairson “Karen”. In case you were wondering, there is a way to refer to each of the two “halves” of a pairson, although, as it happens, the need to do so crops up very seldom. However, for completeness’s sake, I will describe how this is done. One simply appends an apostrophe and a one-letter suffix — either an “l” or an “r” — to the dividual’s name. (Twinwirld etymologists have determined that these consonants “l” and “r” are not arbitrary, but are in fact residues of the words “left” and “right”, although no two seems to be sure exactly why this should be the case.) Thus Greg consists of a “left half”, Greg’l, and a “right half”, Greg’r. Karen likewise consists of Karen’l and Karen’r — but as I said, most of the time, nobodies feel the need to address the “left” or “right” half of a pairson, so those suffixes are almost never used.

Now what constitutes a “friend” in Twinwirld? Well, another pairson, natch — sometwo that like a lot. And what about love and marriage? Well, if you’ve already guessed that a pairson falls in love with and marries another pairson, then you are spot on! As a matter of fact, by a crazy coincidence, this very same Karen and Greg that I just mentioned are a typical Twinwirld couple; moreover, they are the proud pairents of two twildren — a girlz named “Natalie” and a boyz named “Lucas”. (To satisfy busybodies, I have to explain that I have no idea which of Karen’l and Karen’r gave birth to either twild, nor which of Greg’r and Greg’l was, so to speak, the instigating agent in either case. No two in Twinwirld ever thinks about such intimate things — no more than we in our world wonder whether the sperm leading to a child’s birth came from the father’s right or left testicle, or whether the egg came from the mother’s left or right ovary. It’s neither here nor there — the zwygote was formed and the twild was born, that’s all that matters. Anyway, please don’t ask too many questions on this complex topic. That’s far from the point of my fantasy!)

In Twinwirld, there is an unspoken and obvious understanding that the basic units are pairsons, not left or right halves, and that even though each dividual consists of two physically separate and distinguishable halves, the bond between those halves is so tight that that the physical separateness doesn’t much matter. That everytwo is made of a left and right half is just a familiar fact about being alive, taken for granted like the fact that every half has two hands, and every hand has five fingers. Things have parts, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have integrity as wholes!

The left and right halves of a pairson are sometimes physically apart from each other, though generally only for very brief periods. For instance, one half of twem might make a quick hop to the grocery store to get something that twey forgot to purchase, while the other half is cooking tweir dinner. Or if twey’re snowboarding down a hill, twey might split apart to go around opposite sides of a twee. But most of the time the two halves prefer to stay close to each other. And although the two halves do have conversations together, most thoughts are so easily anticipated that very few words are usually needed, even to get across rather complex ideas.

Is One or Two Letters of the Alphabet?

We now come to the tricky matter of pairsonal pronouns in Twinwirld. To start off, they have something like our familiar pronoun “I” for an isolated half, but it is written with a small “i”. This is because “i”, much like the suffixes “l” and “r”, is a very rare term used only when extreme pedantic clarity is called for. Far more common than “i” is the pronoun that either half of a pairson uses in order to refer to the whole pairson. I am not speaking of the pronoun “we”, because that word reaches out beyond the pairson who is speaking, and includes other pairsons. Thus “we” might mean, for instance, “our whole school” or “everytwo at last night’s dinner party”. Instead, there is a special variant of “we” — “Twe” (always spelled with a capital “T”) — which denotes just that pairson of which the speaker is the left or right half. And of course there is an analogous pronoun, “” (which, although it looks as though it should be pronounced “double-you”, is actually pronounced “tyou”, like the “Tue” in a British “Tuesday”), used for addressing exactly one other pairson. Thus, for example, back when they were first getting to know each other, Greg (that is, either Greg’l or Greg’r — I don’t know which half of twem) once said very timidly to Karen (on whom twey had a crush), “Tonight after dinner, Twe are going to the movies; would like to join twus, Karen?”

The pronoun “you” also exists in Twinwirld, but it is plural only, which means that it is never used for addressing just one other dividual — it always denotes a group. “Do you know how to ski?” might be asked of an entire family, but never of just one twild or one pairent. (The way to ask that would be, of course, “Do know how to ski?”) Analogously, “they” never denotes just one dividual. “Both of them came to our wedding” is a statement about a duo of pairsons (that is to say, four halves — or four “persons”, in the quaint terminology of those hailing from our world). As for a third-pairson singular pronoun, there is one — “twey” — and it is genderless. Thus “Did twey go to the concert last night?” could be a question about either Karen or Greg (but not about both together, as that would require “they”), and “Have twey had the measles?” could be asked about either Lucas or Natalie, but of course not about both.

Pairsonal Identity in Twinwirld

A young pairson in Twinwirld grows up with a natural sense of being just one unit, even though twey consist of two disconnected parts. “Every dividual is indivisible”, runs an ancient Twinwirld saying. All sorts of conventions in Twinwirld systematically reinforce and lock in this feeling of unity and indivisibility. For instance, only one grade is earned for work that do in school. It may be that one half of is a bit weaker than the other half is in, say, math or drawing, but that doesn’t affect collective self-image; what counts is the team’s joint performance. When a twild learns to play a musical instrument, both halves have their own instrument, practice the same pieces, and do so simultaneously. A bit later in life, when ’re in college, read novels written by pairsons, go to exhibits of paintings painted by pairsons, and study theorems proven by pairsons. In a word, credit and blame, glory and shame, neglect and fame are always doled out to pairsons, never to mere halves of pairsons.

The cultural norms in Twinwirld take for granted and thus reinforce the view of a pair of halves as a natural and indissoluble unit. Whereas in our society, identical twins often yearn to break away from each other, to strike out on their own, to show the world that they are not identical people, such desires and behavior in Twinwirld would be seen as anomalous and deeply puzzling. The two halves of a pairson would scratch tweir head (or each other’s head — why not?), and say to each other, perhaps even in synchrony, “Why in the Twinwirld did twey break apart? Who would ever want to become a halfling? It would be such a semitary existence!”

I mentioned at the outset that 1 percent of births in Twinwirld result in halflings rather than pairsons. Actually, it’s not quite 1 percent — more like 0.99 percent. But in any case, in Twinwirld, a very young pairson will sometimes wonder what it could possibly be like to be born a halfling, and not to be composed of two nearly identical “left” and “right” halves that hang around together all the time, echoing each other’s words, thinking each other’s thoughts, forming a tight team. The latter state seems so absolutely normal that it is very hard to imagine a halfling’s deeply strange, semitary, and impoverished life (often jokingly called a “half-life”).

What about that tiny remaining portion of births, happening just 0.01 percent of the time? Well, there is a curious phenomenon that can occur in pregnancy: both fertilized eggs constituting the zwygote break in half at the same moment (no two knows why it always happens this way, but it does), and as a result, instead of a single twild being born, two genetically identical twildren emerge! (Oddly, the babies are called “identical twinns”, although they are never exactly identical.) The pairents of twinns of course love both of their “identical” offspring equally well, and very often give them cutely resonant pairs of names (such as “Natalie” and “Natalia”, in the case of twinn girlzes, or “Lucas” and “Luke”, for twinn boyzes).

Sometimes twinns feel the need, as they are growing up, to break away from each other, to strike out on their own, to show the wirld that they are not identical pairsons. But then again, some twinns enjoy playing the near-identicality game to the hilt. Roy and Bruce Nabel, for instance, are a typical pair of twinn boyzes (actually, now they’re grown up) who love to confuse their friends by having Bruce turn up when Roy is expected, or vice versa. Nearly everytwo in Twinwirld finds such stunts quite amusing, because the idea of twinns is so unfamiliar to ordinary pairsons in Twinwirld. Indeed, a normal (non-twinn) pairson in Twinwirld has almost no concept of what it could be like to be a twinn. How extremely strange it would be to grow up side by side with sometwo almost identical to twoself !

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.

Here are the words that the bass sings to the couple, given first in the original German and then in my own translation, respecting both the meter and the rhyme scheme of the original:

O du angenehmes Paar,

Dir wird eitel Heil begegnen,

Gott wird dich aus Zion segnen

Und dich leiten immerdar,

O du angenehmes Paar!

O thou charming bridal pair,

Providence shall e’er caress thee

And from Zion God shall bless thee

And shall guide thee, e’er and e’er,

O thou charming bridal pair!

Are you struck, dear reader, by something rather peculiar about these words? What struck me forcefully is that although they are being sung to a couple, they feature singular pronouns — du, dir, and dich in German and, in my English rendition, the obsolete pronouns “thou” and “thee”. On one level, these second-person singular pronouns sound strange and wrong, and yet, by addressing the couple in the singular, they convey a profound feeling of the imminent joining-together of two souls in a sacred union. To me, these poems suggest that the wedding ceremony in which they occur constitutes a “soul merger”, giving rise to a single unit having just one “higher-level soul”, like two drops of water coming together, touching, and then seamlessly fusing, showing that sometimes one plus one equals one.

I found translations of this aria’s words into French and Italian, and they, too, used tu to address the twosome, and this, just like the German, sounded far weirder to me than the English, since tu (in either language) is completely standard usage today (unlike “thou”) but it is always addressed to just one person, never ever to a couple or small group of any kind.

To experience the same kind of semantic jolt in modern English, you’d have to move from second person to first person, and imagine the opposite of the editorial “we” — namely, a pair of people who refer to the union they compose as “I”. Thus I shall now counterfactually extend Cantata 197 by imagining one last joyous aria to be sung by the united twosome at the very end of their wedding ceremony. Its first line would run, Jetzt bin ich ein strahlendes Paar — “I now am a radiant couple” — and the new wife and husband would sing it precisely in unison from start to finish, instead of singing two melodies in typical Bachian counterpoint, for doing that would inappropriately draw attention to their distinct identities. In this closing aria, “I” would denote the couple itself, not either of its members, and the aria would be thought of as being for the couple’s one new voice rather than for two independent voices.

Soulmates and Matesouls

The real point of the Twinwirld fantasy was to cast some doubt on a dogma, usually unquestioned in our world, which could be phrased as a slogan: “One body, one soul.” (If you don’t like the word “soul”, then feel free to substitute “I”, “person”, “self”, or “locus of consciousness”.) This idea, though seldom verbalized, is so taken for granted that it seems utterly tautological to most people (unless they deny the existence of souls altogether). But visiting Twinwirld (or musing about it, if a trip can’t be arranged) forces this dogma out into the open where it must at least be confronted, if not overturned. And so, if I have managed to get my readers to open their minds to the counterintuitive notion of a pair of bodies as the potential joint locus of one soul — that is, to be able to identify with a pairson such as Karen or Greg as easily as they identify with R2-D2 or with C-3PO in Star Wars — then Twinwirld will have discharged its duty well.

One of my inspirations for the Twinwirld fantasy was the notion of a married couple as a type of “higher-level individual” made of two ordinary individuals, which is why bumping into the O du angenehmes Paar scrap of paper was such a stunning coincidence. Many married people acquire this notion naturally in the course of their marriage. In fact, I had dimly sensed something like this intuitively before I was married, and I remember how, in the anticipation-filled weeks leading up to my wedding, I found this idea to be an implicit, moving theme of the book Married People: Staying Together in the Age of Divorce by Francine Klagsbrun. For instance, at the conclusion of a chapter about therapy and counseling for married couples, Klagsbrun writes, “I believe that a therapist should be neutral and impartial toward the partners, the two patients in the marriage, but that there is no breach of ethics in being biased toward the third patient, the marriage.” I was deeply struck by her idea of the marriage itself as a “patient” undergoing therapy in order to get better, and I must say that over the years, a sense of the truth in this image helped me greatly in the harder times of my marriage.

The bond created between two people who are married for a long time is often so tight and powerful that upon the death of either one of them, the other one very soon dies as well. And if the other survives, it is often with the horrible feeling that half of their soul has been ripped out. In happier days, during the marriage, the two partners of course have individual interests and styles, but at the same time a set of common interests and styles starts to build up, and over time a new entity starts to take shape.

In the case of my marriage, that entity was Carol-and-Doug, once in a while jokingly called “Doca” or “Cado”. Our oneness-in-twoness started to emerge clearly in my mind on several occasions during the first year of our marriage, right after we’d had several friends over for a dinner party and everyone had finally left and Carol and I started cleaning up together. We would carry the plates into the kitchen and then stand together at the sink, washing, rinsing, and drying, going over the whole evening together to the extent that we could replay it in our joint mind, laughing with delight at the spontaneous wit and re-savoring the unexpected interactions, commenting on who seemed happy and who seemed glum — and what was most striking in these post partyum decompressions was that the two of us almost always agreed with each other down the line. Something, some thing, was coming into being that was made out of both of us.

I remember how, a few years into our marriage, the strangest remark would occasionally be made to us: “You look so much alike!” I found this astonishing because I thought of Carol as a beautiful woman and utterly unlike me in appearance. And yet, as time passed, I started to see how there was something in her gaze, something about how she looked out at the world, that reminded me of my own gaze, of my own attitude about the world. I decided that the “resemblance” our friends saw wasn’t located in the anatomy of our faces; rather, it was as if something of our souls was projected outwards and was perceptible as a highly abstract feature of our expressions. I could see it most clearly in certain photos of us together.

Children as Gluons

What made for the most profound bond between us, though, was without doubt the births of our two children. As a mere married couple without children, we were still not totally fused — in fact, like most couples, we were at times totally confused. But when new people, vulnerable tiny people, came into our lives, some kind of vectors inside us aligned totally. There are many couples who do not agree on how to rear their children, but Carol and I discovered happily that we saw eye-to-eye on virtually everything regarding ours. And if one of us was uncertain, talking with the other would always bring clarity into the picture.

That shared goal of bringing up our children safely, happily, and wisely in this huge, crazy, and often scary world became the dominant motif of our marriage, and it forged us both in the same mold. Although we were distinct individuals, that distinctness seemed to fade away, to vanish almost entirely, when it came to parenthood. First in that arena of life, and then slowly in other arenas, we were one individual with two bodies, one sole “pairson”, one “indivisible dividual”, one single “dual”. We two were Twe. We had exactly the same feelings and reactions, we had exactly the same dreads and dreams, exactly the same hopes and fears. Those hopes and dreams were not mine or Carol’s separately, copied twice — they were one set of hopes and dreams, they were our hopes and dreams.

I don’t mean to sound mystical, as if to suggest that our common hopes floated in some ethereal neverland independent of our brains. That’s not my view at all. Of course our hopes were physically instantiated two times, once in each of our separate brains — but when seen at a sufficiently abstract level, these hopes were one and the same pattern, merely realized in two distinct physical media.

No one has trouble with the idea that “the same gene” can exist in two different cells, in two different organisms. But what is a gene? A gene is not an actual physical object, because if it were, it could only be located in one cell, in one organism. No, a gene is a pattern — a particular sequence of nucleotides (usually encoded on paper by a sequence of letters from the four-letter alphabet “ACGT”). And so a gene is an abstraction, and thus “the very same gene” can exist in different cells, different organisms, even organisms living millions of years apart.

No one has trouble with the idea that “the same novel” can exist in two different languages, in two different cultures. But what is a novel? A novel is not a specific sequence of words, because if it were, it could only be written in one language, in one culture. No, a novel is a pattern — a particular collection of characters, events, moods, tones, jokes, allusions, and much more. And so a novel is an abstraction, and thus “the very same novel” can exist in different languages, different cultures, even cultures thriving hundreds of years apart.

And so no one should have trouble with the idea that “the same hopes and dreams” can inhabit two different people’s brains, especially when those two people live together for years and have, as a couple, engendered new entities on which these hopes and dreams are all centered. Perhaps this seems overly romantic, but it is how I felt at the time, and it is how I still feel. The sharing of so much, particularly concerning our two children, aligned our souls in some intangible yet visceral manner, and in some dimensions of life turned us into a single unit that acted as a whole, much as a school of fish acts as a single-minded higher-level entity.