I Am a Strange Loop

CHAPTER 16

Grappling with the Deepest Mystery

A Random Event Changes Everything

IN THE month of December, 1993, when we were just a quarter of the way into my sabbatical year in Trento, Italy, my wife Carol died very suddenly, essentially without warning, of a brain tumor. She was not yet 43, and our children, Danny and Monica, were but five and two. I was shattered in a way I could never have possibly imagined before our marriage. There had been a bright shining soul behind those eyes, and that soul had been suddenly eclipsed. The light had gone out.

What hit me by far the hardest was not my own personal loss (“Oh, what shall I do now? Who will I turn to in moments of need? Who will I cuddle up beside at night?”) — it was Carol’s personal loss. Of course I missed her, I missed her enormously — but what troubled me much more was that I could not get over what she had lost: the chance to watch her children grow up, see their personalities develop, savor their talents, comfort them in their sad times, read them bedtime stories, sing them songs, smile at their childish jokes, paint their rooms, pencil in their heights on their closet walls, teach them to ride a bike, travel with them to other lands, expose them to other languages, get them a pet dog, meet their friends, take them skiing and skating, watch old videos together in our playroom, and on and on. All this future, once so easily taken for granted, Carol had lost in a flash, and I couldn’t deal with it.

There was a time, many months later, back in the United States, when I tried out therapy sessions for recently bereaved spouses — “Healing Hearts”, I think they were called — and I saw that most of the people whose mates had died were focused on their own pain, on their own loss, on what they themselves were going to do now. That, of course, was the meaning of the sessions’ name — you were supposed to heal, to get better. But how was Carol going to heal?

I truly felt as if the other people in these sessions and I were talking past each other. We didn’t have similar concerns at all! I was the only one whose mate had died when the children were tiny, and this fact seemed to make all the difference. Everything had been ripped away from Carol, and I could not stand thinking about — but I could not stop thinking about — what she’d been cheated out of. This bitter injustice to Carol was the overwhelming feeling I felt, and my friends kept on saying to me (oddly enough, in a well-meaning attempt to comfort me), “You can’t feel sorry for her! She’s dead! There’s no one to feel sorry for any more!” How utterly, totally wrong this felt to me.

One day, as I gazed at a photograph of Carol taken a couple of months before her death, I looked at her face and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes, and all at once, I found myself saying, as tears flowed, “That’s me! That’s me!” And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us together into a unit, the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized then that although Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but that it lived on very determinedly in my brain.

Desperate Lark

In the surreal months following the tragedy of Carol’s sudden death, I found myself ceaselessly haunted by the mystery of the vanishing of her consciousness, which made no sense at all to me, and by the undeniable fact that I kept on thinking of her in the present, which also confused me. Trying to put these extremely murky things down on paper but quite unsure of myself, I initiated in late March of 1994 an email exchange with my close friend and colleague Daniel Dennett across the ocean in Massachusetts, for Dan’s ideas on minds and the concept of “I” had always seemed to me to be very nearly on the same wavelength as my own (which perhaps explains why we got along so well together when, in 1981, we coedited a book entitled The Mind’s I). Dan also had spent most of his professional life thinking about and writing about these kinds of problems, so he wasn’t exactly a randomly selected partner!

Once I had started up this exchange, we sent messages back and forth across the Atlantic sporadically for a few months, the last one coming from me in late August of that year, just before the kids and I returned to the U.S. It was a fairly lopsided exchange, with me doing roughly 90 percent of the “talking”, doing my best to articulate these elusive, sometimes nearly inexpressible, ideas, and Dan mostly making just brief comments on whether he agreed or not, and hinting at why.

While I was working on the last few chapters of I Am a Strange Loop, I reread our entire exchange, which was roughly 35 pages long when printed out, and although it was not great prose, it struck me that portions of it were worth including in the new book, in some form or other. My musings were extremely personal, of course. They were grapplings by a husband in profound shock after his wife simply went up in smoke for no reason at all. I decided to include excerpts from them here not because I wish to make some kind of grand after-the-fact public declaration of love for my wife, although there is no doubt that I loved and love her deeply. I decided to include some of my musings for the simple reason that they are heartfelt probings that struggle with the issues that form the very core of this book. Nothing else that I have written on the topic of the human soul and human consciousness ever came so much from the heart as did those messages to Dan, and even though I would like to think that I now understand the issues somewhat more clearly than I did then, I doubt that anything I write today can have nearly as much urgency as what I wrote then, in those days of extreme anguish and turmoil.

I decided that since my email grapplings have a different style from the rest of this book, and since they come from a different period of time, I would devote a separate chapter to them — and this is that chapter. In order to prepare it, I went through those 35 pages of email, which were often jumbled, redundant, and vague, and which included sporadic snippets on peripheral if not irrelevant topics, and I edited them down to about a quarter of their original length. I also reordered pieces of my messages and allowed myself to make occasional slight modifications in the passages I was keeping, so as to make the flow more logical. Consequently, what you see here is by no means a raw transcript of my end of our conversation, for that would be truly rough going, but it is a faithful boiling-down of the most important topics.

Although it was a dialogue, I have left Dan’s voice out of this chapter because, as I said above, he served mostly as a cool, calm sounding board for my white-hot, emotional explorations. He was not trying to come up with any new theories; he was just listening, being my friend. There was, however, one point in April of 1994 where Dan waxed poetic about what I was going through in those days, and I think his words make an excellent prelude to this chapter, so I’ll quote them below. All else that follows will be in my voice, quoted (in a slightly retouched form) from my email musings between March and August, 1994.

There is an old racing sailboat in Maine, near where I sail, and I love to see it on the starting line with me, for it is perhaps the most beautiful sailboat I have ever seen; its name is “Desperate Lark”, which I also think is beautiful. You are now embarked on a desperate lark, which is just what you should be doing right now. And your reflections are the reflections of a person who has encountered, and taken a measure of, the power of life on our sweet Earth. You’ll return, restored to balance, refreshed, but it takes time to heal. We’ll all be here on the shore when you come back, waiting for you.

The name “Carol” denotes, for me, far more than just a body, which is now gone, but rather a very vast pattern, a style, a set of things including memories, hopes, dreams, beliefs, loves, reactions to music, sense of humor, self-doubt, generosity, compassion, and so on. Those things are to some extent sharable, objective, and multiply instantiatable, a bit like software on a diskette. And my obsessive writing-down of memories, and the many videotapes she is on, and all our collective brain-stored memories of Carol make those pattern-aspects of her still exist, albeit in spread-out form — spread out among different videotapes, among different friends’ and relatives’ brains, among different yellow-sheeted notebooks, and so on. In any case, there is a spread-out pattern of Carolness very clearly discernable in this physical world. And in that sense, Carolness survives.

By “Carolness surviving”, what I mean is that even people who never met her can see how it was to be near her, around her, with her — they can experience her wit, see her smile, hear her voice and her laugh, hear about her youthful adventures, learn how she and I met, watch her play with her small children, and so forth…

I keep trying, though, to figure out the extent to which I believe that because of my memories of her (in my brain or on paper), and those of other people, some of Carol’s consciousness, her interiority, remains on this planet. Being a strong believer in the noncentralizedness of consciousness, in its distributedness, I tend to think that although any individual’s consciousness is primarily resident in one particular brain, it is also somewhat present in other brains as well, and so, when the central brain is destroyed, tiny fragments of the living individual remain — remain alive, that is.

Also being a believer in the thesis that external memory is a very real part of our personal memories, I think that an infinitesimal sliver of Carol’s consciousness resides even in the slips of paper on which I captured some of her cleverer bon mots, and a somewhat larger (though still tiny) shard of her resides in the yellow lined notebooks in which I have, in the past few months of grieving, recorded so many of our joint experiences. To be sure, those experiences were already encoded in my own brain, but the externalization of them will one day allow them to be shared by other people who knew her, and thus will somehow “resuscitate” her, in a small way. Thus even a static representation on paper can contain elements of a “living” Carol, of Carol’s consciousness.

All of this brings to mind a conversation I had with my mother a few weeks after my Dad died. She said that once in a while she would look at a photo of him that she loved, in which he was smiling, and she would find herself smiling back at “him”, or at “it”. Her comment on this reaction of hers was, “Smiling at that photo is so wrong, because it’s not him — it’s just a flat, meaningless piece of paper.” And then she got very upset with herself, and felt even more distraught over her loss of him. I pondered her anguished remark for a while, and though I could see what she meant, it seemed to me that the situation was much more complicated than what she had said.

Yes, on the surface it seems that this photo is an inert, lifeless, soulless piece of paper, but somehow it reaches her, it touches her. And this brought to my mind the set of lifeless, soulless pieces of paper comprising the complete works for piano of Frédéric Chopin. Though just pieces of paper, they have incredible effects on people all over the world. So might it be with that photograph of my Dad. It certainly causes deep rumblings in my brain when I look at it, in my sister Laura’s brain, and in many others. For us, that photo is not just a physical object with mass, size, color, and so forth; it is a pattern imbued with fantastic triggering-power.

And of course, in addition to a photo of someone and the set of someone’s complete works, there are so many other cases of elaborate patterns that contain fragments of souls — imagine, for example, having many hours of videotapes of Bach playing the organ and talking about his music, or of James Clerk Maxwell talking about physics and describing the moment when he discovered that light must be an electromagnetic wave, or of Pushkin reciting his own poetry, or of Galileo telling about how he discovered the moons of Jupiter, or of Jane Austen explaining how she imagined her characters and their complex intrigues…

Just where comes the point of “critical mass”, when having a pattern, perhaps a large set of videotapes, perhaps an extensive diary (like Anne Frank’s), amounts to having a significant percentage of the person — a significant percentage of their self, their soul, their “I”, their consciousness, their interiority? If you concede that a significant percentage of the person would exist at some point along this spectrum, provided that one had a sufficiently large pattern, then it seems to me that you would have to concede that even having a much smaller pattern, such as a photo or my cherished collection of Carol’s “bonner mots”, already gives you a non-zero (even if microscopic) fraction of the actual person — of “the view from inside” — not just of how it was to be with them.

It was Monica’s third birthday — a joyous but very sad occasion, for obvious reasons. The kids and I, along with some friends, were at an outdoor pizzeria in Cognola, our hillside village just above Trento, and we had a beautiful view of the high mountains all around us. Little Monica, in her booster chair, was sitting directly across the table from me. Because it was such an emotional occasion, one that Carol would so much have wanted to be part of, I tried to look at Monica “for Carol”, and then of course wondered what on earth I was doing, what on earth I meant by thinking such a thought.

This idea of “seeing Monica for Carol” led me to a vivid memory of Old-Doug and Old-Carol (or if you prefer, “young Doug and young Carol”) sitting on the terrace of the Wok, a favorite Chinese restaurant in Bloomington, way back in the summer of 1983, gazing at an adorable little dark-haired girl of two or three who was walking around in a navy-blue corduroy dress. We weren’t married yet, we hadn’t even broached the topic of getting married, but we had often talked very emotionally about children, and both of us were yearning to be co-parents of just such a little girl ourselves. This was a shared longing, for sure, even if only implicit.

And so now, eleven years later, now that our daughter Monica in fact exists, can I finally experience for Old-Doug that joy that he was dreaming of, longing for, back in 1983? Can I now look at his daughter Monica “for Old-Doug”? (Or do I mean “look at my daughter for him”? Or both?) And if I can validly claim to be able to do so for Old-Doug, then why not just as validly for Old-Carol? After all, our yearning for a shared daughter that long-ago summer evening was a deeply shared yearning, was the exact same yearning, burning simultaneously in both of our brains. Thus the question is, can I now experience that joy for Old-Carol, can I now look at Monica for Old-Carol?

What seems crucial here is the depth of interpenetration of souls — the sense of shared goals, which leads to shared identity. Thus, for instance, Carol always had a deep, deep desire that Monica and Danny would be each other’s best friends as they grew up, and would always remain so when they were adults. This desire also exists or persists in a very strong form inside me (in fact, we always had that joint hope, and I used to do my best to foster its realization even before she died), and it is now exerting an even greater influence on my actions than it used to, precisely because she died and so now, given that I am her best representative in this world, I feel deeply responsible to her.

Along with Carol’s desires, hopes, and so on, her own personal sense of “I” is represented in my brain, because I was so close to her, because I empathized so deeply with her, co-felt so many things with her, was so able to see things from inside her point of view when we spoke, whether it was her physical sufferings (writhing in pain an hour after a sigmoidoscopy, her insides churning with residual air bubbles) or her greatest joys (a devilishly clever bon mot by David Moser, a scrumptious Indian meal in Cambridge) or her fondest hopes or her reactions to movies or whatever.

For brief periods of time in conversations, or even in nonverbal moments of intense feeling, I was Carol, just as, at times, she was Doug. So her “personal gemma” (to borrow Stanislaw Lem’s term in his story “Non Serviam”) had brought into existence a somewhat blurry, coarse-grained copy of itself inside my brain, had created a secondary Gödelian swirl inside my brain (the primary one of course being my own self-swirl), a Gödelian swirl that allowed me to be her, or, said otherwise, a Gödelian swirl that allowed her self, her personal gemma, to ride (in simplified form) on my hardware.

But is this secondary swirl that now lives in my brain, this simulated personal gemma, anything like the real swirl, the primary swirl, that once lived in her brain and is now gone? Is there Carol-consciousness still somewhere in this world? That is, is it possible for me to look at Monica “for Carol” and, even in the tiniest degree, to become Carol seeing Monica? Or has that personal gemma been finally and totally and irrevocably obliterated?

A person is a point of view — not only a physical point of view (looking out of certain eyes in a certain physical place in the universe), but more importantly a psyche’s point of view: a set of hair-trigger associations rooted in a huge bank of memories. The latter can be absorbed, more and more over time, by someone else. Thus it’s like acquiring a foreign language step by step.

For a while, one’s speaking is largely “fake” — that is, one is thinking in one’s native language but substituting words quickly enough to give the impression that the thinking is going on in the second language; however, as one’s experience with the second language grows, new grammatical habits form and turn slowly into reflexes, as do thousands of lexical items, and the second language becomes more and more rooted, more and more genuine. One gradually becomes a fluent thinker in and speaker of the other language, and it is no longer “fake”, even if one has an accent in it. So it is with coming to see the world through another person’s soul.

My parents, for instance, internalized each other’s psychic points of view very deeply over the nearly fifty years of their marriage, and each of them thus gradually became a “fluent be-er” of the other. Perhaps when my mother “was” my father, she was so with an “accent”, and vice versa, but for each of them, the act of being the other one was certainly genuine, was not fakery.

As with my parents, so there was some degree of genuine being of Carol by me when she was alive, and vice versa. Although it took me several years to learn to “be” Carol, and although I certainly never reached the “native speaker” level, I think it’s fair to say that, at our times of greatest closeness, I was a “fluent be-er” of my wife. I shared so many of her memories, both from our joint times and from times before we ever met, I knew so many of the people who had formed her, I loved so many of the same pieces of music, movies, books, friends, jokes, I shared so many of her most intimate desires and hopes. So her point of view, her interiority, her self, which had originally been instantiated in just one brain, came to have a second instantiation, although that one was far less complete and intricate than the original one. (Actually, long before she met me, her point of view had already engendered other instantiations, because it had of course been internalized to varying degrees and levels of fidelity by her siblings and her parents.) Needless to say, Carol’s point of view was always by far most strongly instantiated in her brain.

This talk of someone “being” someone else reminds me of a Linguistics Department Christmas party back in the late 1970’s, when Carol’s and my old friend Tom Ernst did a marvelous imitation of his professor John Goldsmith (also a friend), with so many echt mannerisms of John’s. It was uncanny to me to watch Tom “put on” and “take off” John’s style — and in so doing, putting John on and making a fine take-off of him.

There are shallower aspects of a person and there are deeper aspects, and the deeper aspects are what imbue the shallower ones with genuine meaning. I guess that sounds cryptic. What I mean is that if I believe statement X (for example, “Chopin is a great composer”) and someone else also believes X, then, despite this ostensible agreement between us, our internal feelings when we think X may be unutterably different even though, on the superficial verbal level, our belief is “the same”. On the other hand, if our souls have a deep resemblance, then our two beliefs in X will in fact be very similar, and we will intuitively resonate with each other. Communication (at least on that topic) will be nearly effortless.

What really matters for mutual understanding of two people are such things as having similar responses to music (not just shared likes but also shared dislikes), having similar responses to people (again, I mean both likes and dislikes), having similar degrees of empathy, honesty, patience, sentimentality, audacity, ambition, competitiveness, and so on. These central building blocks of personality, character, and temperament are decisive in mutual understanding.

Consider, for instance, the shattering experience of constantly feeling inferior to other people. Some people know this intimately, and some don’t know it at all. A person with huge reserves of self-confidence will simply never be able to feel how it is to be paralyzed by the lack of confidence — they “just don’t get it”. It is these sorts of aspects, these innermost aspects of a soul (as opposed to such relatively objective and transferable items as countries visited, novels read, cuisines mastered, historical facts known, and so forth) that make for soul-uniqueness.

I’m concerned with whether the deeper aspects of a person, the ones that give rise to a self, to an “I”, are transportable to another person, or absorbable by another person (i.e., by the second person’s brain). The second person doesn’t have to change their own personality or opinions in order to absorb the first person; it can be more like an alter ego that, like an article of clothing or a persona or a stage role, they can occasionally don or slip into (my image is that of Tom Ernst putting on and taking off that John Goldsmith persona, although of course on a much more profound level), a sort of a “second vantage point” from which to see the world.

But the key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you ever have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth, because they (or at least a significant fraction of them) are still instantiated in your brain, because they still live on in a “second neural home”?

In my opinion, to deal with this question head-on, one really has to focus on this thing I call the “Gödelian swirl of self”. The key question becomes this: When the pointers to “self” — the structures that, through a lifetime of locking-in and self-stabilizing, have given rise to an “I” — are copied in some imperfect, low-resolution fashion in a secondary brain, where exactly do they wind up pointing?

My internal model of Carol is certainly “thin” or sparse in comparison to the original self-model (the one that was located inside her own brain), but that sparseness is not the key issue. The crux is this: even if my internal model of Carol were unbelievably rich (e.g., like my Mom’s model of my Dad, say, or even ten times stronger than that), would it nonetheless be the wrong kind of structure to give rise to an “I”? Would it be something other than a strange loop? Would it be a structure pointing not at itself but at something else, and therefore be lacking that essentially swirly, vorticial, self-referential quality that makes an “I”?

My guess is that if the model were extremely rich, extremely faithful, then effectively the destinations of all the pointers in it would be fluid — in other words, the pointers inside my model of Carol would be able to slip, to point just as validly to the symbol for her in my brain as to her own self-symbol. If so, then the original swirliness, the original “I”-ness of the structure, would have been successfully transported to a second medium and reconstructed faithfully (though far more coarse-grainedly) in it.

The “outer” layers of the self consist in lots of pointers that point mostly at standard universal aspects of the world (e.g., rain, ice cream, the swooping of swallows, etc., etc.); the “middle” layers of the self consist in pointers to things more tied in with one’s own life (e.g., one’s parents’ faces and voices, the music one loves, the street one grew up on, one’s beloved pets from childhood, one’s favorite books and movies, and many other deep things); then the inner sanctum has tons of tangly pointers to very deeply “indexical” things, such as one’s insecurities, one’s sexual feelings, one’s most intense fears, one’s deepest loves, and lots of other things that I cannot put my finger on). All this is very vague, and only meant to suggest a kind of imagery wherein the outermost layers have mostly outwards-pointing arrows, the middle layers have a mixture of inwards and outwards arrows, and then the innermost core has tons of arrows that point right back in towards itself. Strange-Loop City — that’s an “I” for you!

It’s that deeply twisted-back-on-itself quality of the innermost core that, I surmise, makes it so hard to transport elsewhere, that makes the soul so deeply, almost irrevocably, attached to one single body, one single brain. The outer layers are relatively easy to transport, of course, with their relative paucity of inwards-pointing pointers, and the middle layers are medium easy to transport. Someone as close to Carol as I was can get lots of the outer layers and something of the middle layers and little bits of the inner core, but can one ever internalize enough of that core to say that, even in a very diluted sense, “she’s still here among us”?

Perhaps I’m exaggerating the difficulty of transport. In some sense, all Gödelian loops-of-self (i.e., strange loops that give rise to an “I”) are isomorphic at the most coarse-grained level, and therefore in lowest approximation they may not be hard to transport at all; what makes them different from each other is only their “flavorings”, consisting of memories, and, of course, genetic preferences and talents, and so forth. So, to the extent that we can be chameleons and can import the “spices” of other people’s life histories (the spices that imbue their self-loops with unique individuality), we are capable of seeing the world through their eyes. Their psychic point of view is transportable and modular — not trapped inside just one perishable piece of hardware.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post Scriptum

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

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

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

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

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