I Am a Strange Loop

CHAPTER 17

How We Live in Each Other

Universal Machines

WHEN I was around twelve, there were kits you could buy that allowed you to put together electronic circuitry that would carry out various interesting functions. You could build a radio, a circuit that would add two binary numbers, a device that could encode or decode a message using a substitution cipher, a “brain” that would play tic-tac-toe against you, and a few other devices like this. Each of these machines was dedicated: it could do just one kind of trick. This is the usual meaning of “machine” that we grow up with. We are accustomed to the idea of a refrigerator as a dedicated machine for keeping things cold, an alarm clock as a dedicated machine for waking us up, and so on. But more recently, we have started to get used to machines that transcend their original purposes.

Take cellular telephones, for instance. Nowadays, in order to be competitive, cell phones are marketed not so much (maybe even very little) on the basis of their original purpose as communication devices, but instead for the number of tunes they can hold, the number of games you can play on them, the quality of the photos they can take, and who knows what else! Cell phones once were, but no longer are, dedicated machines. And why is that? It is because their inner circuitry has surpassed a certain threshold of complexity, and that fact allows them to have a chameleon-like nature. You can use the hardware inside a cell phone to house a word processor, a Web browser, a gaggle of video games, and on and on. This, in essence, is what the computer revolution is all about: when a certain well-defined threshold — I’ll call it the “Gödel–Turing threshold” — is surpassed, then a computer can emulate any kind of machine.

This is the meaning of the term “universal machine”, introduced in 1936 by the English mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing, and today we are intimately familiar with the basic idea, although most people don’t know the technical term or concept. We routinely download virtual machines from the Web that can convert our universal laptops into temporarily specialized devices for watching movies, listening to music, playing games, making cheap international phone calls, who knows what. Machines of all sorts come to us through wires or even through the air, via software, via patterns, and they swarm into and inhabit our computational hardware. One single universal machine morphs into new functionalities at the drop of a hat, or, more precisely, at the double-click of a mouse. I bounce back and forth between my email program, my word processor, my Web browser, my photo displayer, and a dozen other “applications” that all live inside my computer. At any specific moment, most of these independent, dedicated machines are dormant, sleeping, waiting patiently (actually, unconsciously) to be awakened by my royal double-click and to jump obediently to life and do my bidding.

Inspired by Gödel’s mapping of PM into itself, Alan Turing realized that the critical threshold for this kind of computational universality comes at exactly that point where a machine is flexible enough to read and correctly interpret a set of data that describe its own structure. At this crucial juncture, a machine can, in principle, explicitly watch how it does any particular task, step by step. Turing realized that a machine that has this critical level of flexibility can imitate any another machine, no matter how complex the latter is. In other words, there is nothing more flexible than a universal machine. Universality is as far as you can go!

This is why my Macintosh can, if I happen to have fed it the proper software, act indistinguishably from my son’s more expensive and faster “Alienware” computer (running any specific program), and vice versa. The only difference is one of speed, because my Mac will always remain, deep in its guts, a Mac. It will therefore have to imitate the fast, alien hardware by constantly consulting tables of data that explicitly describe the hardware of the Alien, and doing all those lookups is very slow. This is like me trying to get you to sign my signature by writing out a long set of instructions telling you how to draw every tiny curve. In principle it’s possible, but it would be hugely slower than just signing with my own handware!

The Unexpectedness of Universality

There is a tight analogy linking universal machines of this sort with the universality I earlier spoke of (though I didn’t use that word) when I described the power of Principia Mathematica. What Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead did not suspect, but what Kurt Gödel realized, is that, simply by virtue of representing certain fundamental features of the positive integers (such basic facts as commutativity, distributivity, the law of mathematical induction), they had unwittingly made their formal system PM surpass a key threshold that made it “universal”, which is to say, capable of defining number-theoretical functions that imitate arbitrarily complex other patterns (or indeed, even capable of turning around and imitating itself — giving rise to Gödel’s black-belt maneuver).

Russell and Whitehead did not realize what they had wrought because it didn’t occur to them to use PM to “simulate” anything else. That idea was not on their radar screen (for that matter, radar itself wasn’t on anybody’s radar screen back then). Prime numbers, squares, sums of two squares, sums of two primes, Fibonacci numbers, and so forth were seen merely as beautiful mathematical patterns — and patterns consisting of numbers, though fabulously intricate and endlessly fascinating, were not thought of as being isomorphic to anything else, let alone as being stand-ins for, and thus standing for, anything else. After Gödel and Turing, though, such naïveté went down the drain in a flash.

By and large, the engineers who designed the earliest electronic computers were as unaware as Russell and Whitehead had been of the richness that they were unwittingly bringing into being. They thought they were building machines of very limited, and purely military, scopes — for instance, machines to calculate the trajectories of ballistic missiles, taking wind and air resistance into account, or machines to break very specific types of enemy codes. They envisioned their computers as being specialized, single-purpose machines — a little like wind-up music boxes that could play just one tune each.

But at some point, when Alan Turing’s abstract theory of computation, based in large part on Gödel’s 1931 paper, collided with the concrete engineering realities, some of the more perceptive people (Turing himself and John von Neumann especially) put two and two together and realized that their machines, incorporating the richness of integer arithmetic that Gödel had shown was so potent, were thereby universal. All at once, these machines were like music boxes that could read arbitrary paper scrolls with holes in them, and thus could play any tune. From then on, it was simply a matter of time until cell phones started being able to don many personas other than just the plain old cell-phone persona. All they had to do was surpass that threshold of complexity and memory size that limited them to a single “tune”, and then they could become anything.

The early computer engineers thought of their computers as number-crunching devices and did not see numbers as a universal medium. Today we (and by “we” I mean our culture as a whole, rather than specialists) do not see numbers that way either, but our lack of understanding is for an entirely different reason — in fact, for exactly the opposite reason. Today it is because all those numbers are so neatly hidden behind the screens of our laptops and desktops that we utterly forget they are there. We watch virtual football games unfolding on our screen between “dream teams” that exist only inside the central processing unit (which is carrying out arithmetical instructions, just as it was designed to do). Children build virtual towns inhabited by little people who virtually ride by on virtual bicycles, with leaves that virtually fall from trees and smoke that virtually dissipates into the virtual air. Cosmologists create virtual galaxies, let them loose, and watch what happens as they virtually collide. Biologists create virtual proteins and watch them fold up according to the complex virtual chemistry of their constituent virtual submolecules.

I could list hundreds of things that take place on computer screens, but few people ever think about the fact that all of this is happening courtesy of addition and multiplication of integers way down at the hardware level. But that is exactly what’s happening. We don’t call computers computers for nothing, after all! They are, in fact, computing sums and products of integers expressed in binary notation. And in that sense, Gödel’s world-dazzling, Russell-crushing, Hilbert-toppling vision of 1931 has become such a commonplace in our downloading, upgrading, gigabyte culture that although we are all swimming in it all the time, hardly anyone is in the least aware of it. Just about the only trace of the original insight that remains visible, or rather, “audible”, around us is the very word “computer”. That term tips you off, if you bother to think about it, to the fact that underneath all the colorful pictures, seductive games, and lightning-fast Web searches, there is nothing going on but integer arithmetic. What a hilarious joke!

Actually, it’s more ambiguous than that, and for all the same reasons as I elaborated in Chapter 11. Wherever there is a pattern, it can be seen either as itself or as standing for anything to which it is isomorphic. Words that apply to Pomponnette’s straying also apply, as it happens, to Aurélie’s straying, and neither interpretation is truer than the other, even if one of them was the originally intended one. Likewise, an operation on an integer that is written out in binary notation (for instance, the conversion of “0000000011001111” into “1100111100000000”) that one person might describe as multiplication by 256 might be described by another observer as a left-shift by eight bits, and by another observer as the transfer of a color from one pixel to its neighbor, and by someone else as the deletion of an alphanumeric character in a file. As long as each one is a correct description of what’s happening, none of them is privileged. The reason we call computers “computers”, then, is historic. They originated as integer-calculation machines, and they are still of course validly describable as such — but we now realize, as Kurt Gödel first did back in 1931, that such devices can be equally validly perceived and talked about in terms that are fantastically different from what their originators intended.

Universal Beings

We human beings, too, are universal machines of a different sort: our neural hardware can copy arbitrary patterns, even if evolution never had any grand plan for this kind of “representational universality” to come about. Through our senses and then our symbols, we can internalize external phenomena of many sorts. For example, as we watch ripples spreading on a pond, our symbols echo their circular shapes, abstract them, and can replay the essence of those shapes much later. I say “the essence” because some — in fact most — detail is lost; as you know very well, we retain not all levels of what we encounter but only those that our hardware, through the pressures of natural selection, came to consider the most important. I also have to make clear (although I hope no reader would fall into such a trap) that when I say that our symbols “internalize” or “copy” external patterns, I don’t mean that when we watch ripples on a pond, or when we “replay” a memory of such a scene (or of many such scenes blurred together), there literally are circular patterns spreading out on some horizontal surface inside our brains. I mean that a host of structures are jointly activated that are connected with the concepts of water, wetness, ponds, horizontal surfaces, circularity, expansion, things bobbing up and down, and so forth. I am not talking about a movie screen inside the head!

Representational universality also means that we can import ideas and happenings without having to be direct witnesses to them. For example, as I mentioned in Chapter 11, humans (but not most other animals) can easily process the two-dimensional arrays of pixels on a television screen and can see those ever-changing arrays as coding for distant or fictitious three-dimensional situations evolving over time.

On a skiing vacation in the Sierra Nevada, far away from home, my children and I took advantage of the “doggie cam” at the Bloomington kennel where we had boarded our golden retriever Ollie, and thanks to the World Wide Web, we were treated to a jerky sequence of stills of a couple of dozen dogs meandering haphazardly in a fenced-in play area outdoors, looking a bit like particles undergoing random Brownian motion, and although each pooch was rendered by a pretty small array of pixels, we could often recognize our Ollie by subtle features such as the angle of his tail. For some reason, the kids and I found this act of visual eavesdropping on Ollie quite hilarious, and although we could easily describe this droll scene to our human friends, and although I would bet a considerable sum that these few lines of text have vividly evoked in your mind both the canine scene at the kennel and the human scene at the ski resort, we all realized that there was not a hope in hell that we could ever explain to Ollie himself that we had been “spying” on him from thousands of miles away. Ollie would never know, and could never know.

Why not? Because Ollie is a dog, and dogs’ brains are not universal. They cannot absorb ideas like “jerky still photo”, “24-hour webcam”, “spying on dogs playing in the kennel”, or even, for that matter, “2,000 miles away”. This is a huge and fundamental breach between humans and dogs — indeed, between humans and all other species. It is this that sets us apart, makes us unique, and, in the end, gives us what we call “souls”.

In the world of living things, the magic threshold of representational universality is crossed whenever a system’s repertoire of symbols becomes extensible without any obvious limit. This threshold was crossed on the species level somewhere along the way from earlier primates to ourselves. Systems above this counterpart to the Gödel–Turing threshold — let’s call them “beings”, for short — have the capacity to model inside themselves other beings that they run into — to slap together quick-and-dirty models of beings that they encounter only briefly, to refine such coarse models over time, even to invent imaginary beings from whole cloth. (Beings with a propensity to invent other beings are often informally called “novelists”.)

Once beyond the magic threshold, universal beings seem inevitably to become ravenously thirsty for tastes of the interiority of other universal beings. This is why we have movies, soap operas, television news, blogs, webcams, gossip columnists, People magazine, and The Weekly World News, among others. People yearn to get inside other people’s heads, to “see out” from inside other crania, to gobble up other people’s experiences.

Although I have been depicting it somewhat cynically, representational universality and the nearly insatiable hunger that it creates for vicarious experiences is but a stone’s throw away from empathy, which I see as the most admirable quality of humanity. To “be” someone else in a profound way is not merely to see the world intellectually as they see it and to feel rooted in the places and times that molded them as they grew up; it goes much further than that. It is to adopt their values, to take on their desires, to live their hopes, to feel their yearnings, to share their dreams, to shudder at their dreads, to participate in their life, to merge with their soul.

Being Visited

One morning not long ago I woke up with the memory of my father richly pulsating inside my cranium. For a shining moment my dreaming mind seemed to have brought him back to life in the most vivid fashion, even though “he” had had to float in the rarefied medium of my brain’s stage. It felt, nonetheless, like he was really back again for a short while, and then, sadly, all at once he just went poof. How is this bittersweet kind of experience, so familiar to every adult human being, to be understood? What degree of reality do these software beings that inhabit us have? Why did I put “he” in quotation marks, a few lines up? Why the caution, why the hedging?

What is really going on when you dream or think more than fleetingly about someone you love (whether that person died many years ago or is right now on the other end of a phone conversation with you)? In the terminology of this book, there is no ambiguity about what is going on. The symbol for that person has been activated inside your skull, lurched out of dormancy, as surely as if it had an icon that someone had double-clicked. And the moment this happens, much as with a game that has opened up on your screen, your mind starts acting differently from how it acts in a “normal” context. You have allowed yourself to be invaded by an “alien universal being”, and to some extent the alien takes charge inside your skull, starts pushing things around in its own fashion, making words, ideas, memories, and associations bubble up inside your brain that ordinarily would not do so. The activation of the symbol for the loved person swivels into action whole sets of coordinated tendencies that represent that person’s cherished style, their idiosyncratic way of being embedded in the world and looking out at it. As a consequence, during this visitation of your cranium, you will surprise yourself by coming out with different jokes from those you would normally make, seeing things in a different emotional light, making different value judgments, and so forth.

But the crux of the matter for us right now is the following question: Is your symbol for another person actually an “I”? Can that symbol have inner experiences? Or is it as unalive as is your symbol for a stick or a stone or a playground swing? I chose the example of a playground swing for a reason. The moment I suggest it to you, no matter what playground you have located it in, no matter what you imagine its seat to be made of, no matter how high you imagine the bar it is dangling from, you can see it swinging back and forth, wiggling slightly in that funny way that swings wiggle, losing energy unless pushed, and you can also hear its softly clinking chains. Though no one would call the swing itself alive, there is no doubt that its mental proxy is dancing in the seething substrate of your brain. After all, that is what a brain is made for — to be a stage for the dance of active symbols.

If you seriously believe, as I do and have been asserting for most of this book, that concepts are active symbols in a brain, and if furthermore you seriously believe that people, no less than objects, are represented by symbols in the brain (in other words, that each person that one knows is internally mirrored by a concept, albeit a very complicated one, in one’s brain), and if lastly you seriously believe that a self is also a concept, just an even more complicated one (namely, an “I”, a “personal gemma”, a rock-solid “marble”), then it is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of this set of beliefs that your brain is inhabited to varying extents by other I’s, other souls, the extent of each one depending on the degree to which you faithfully represent, and resonate with, the individual in question. I include the proviso “and resonate with” because one can’t just slip into any old soul, no more than one can slip into any old piece of clothing; some souls and some suits simply “fit” better than others do.

Chemistry and Its Lack

For me, the best illustration of the idea of better and worse fits or “resonances” between souls is musical taste. I will never forget what happened, thirty-some years ago, when a pianist friend praised Béla Bartók’s second violin concerto to the skies and insisted that I get to know it. This was an act of reciprocation for my having introduced to her, a few years earlier, one of the most stirring pieces of music I knew — Prokofiev’s third piano concerto. At that time, she had resonated to the last movement of the Prokofiev in an incredibly powerful way, a fact that seemed to signal that we were on much the same musical wavelength; therefore, I took her passionate endorsement of Bartók’s second violin concerto with great seriousness. To egg me on, she said that Bartók not only used her favorite chord from the Prokofiev over and over, but he used it better. Say no more! I instantly went out and bought a record of it. That evening, with high anticipation, I put it on and listened carefully. To my disappointment, I was utterly unaffected. This was very puzzling. I listened again. And then again. And again. And again. Over a couple of weeks, I must have listened to that highly-touted piece a dozen times if not two dozen, and yet nothing at all ever happened inside me, except that a fifteen-second section somewhere in the middle mildly engaged me. You could call this a blind spot — or a deaf spot — inside me, or else, as I would prefer, you could just say that the “fit” between my soul and Bartók’s is extremely poor. And this has been corroborated many times over with other Bartók pieces, so that now I am quite confident about what will (or rather, won’t) happen inside me when I hear Bartók. Although I like a few small pieces (based on folk songs) that he wrote, the bulk of his output doesn’t speak to me at all. And so my sense that this friend and I had a lot in common musically was greatly reduced, and in fact our friendship subsided thereafter.

After writing that paragraph, I grew curious as to whether a thirtyyear-old memory might be revealed invalid, or whether in the meantime my soul might perhaps have opened up to new musical horizons, so I went straight to my record player (yes, vinyl), put the Bartók violin concerto on once again, and listened to it carefully from beginning to end. My reaction was totally identical. To me, the piece just seems to wander and wander, never getting anywhere. Listening to it, I feel like a magnetic field bashing headlong into a superconductor — cannot penetrate even one micron! In case that’s too esoteric a metaphor, let’s just say that I’m stopped dead, right at the surface. It makes no sense at all to me; it is music written in an impenetrable idiom. It’s like looking at a book written in an alien script. You can tell there is intelligence behind it — maybe a great deal! — but you have no idea what it is saying.

I recount this rather gloomy anecdote because it stands for a thousand experiences in life, involving what, for lack of a better word, we call “chemistry” between people. There just is no chemistry between Bartók and me. I respect his intelligence, his creative drive, and his high moral standards, but I have no idea what made his heart tick. Not a clue. But I could say this of thousands of people — and then there are those for whom the reverse holds equally strongly. For instance, there is no piece of music in the world that means more to me than Prokofiev’s first violin concerto, written within just a few years of the Bartók concerto. (In fact, to my bewilderment, I have even seen the two mentioned in the same breath, as if they were cut from the same cloth. They might have some superficial textures in common here and there, but to me they are as different as Bach and Eminem.) While the Bartók rolls off of me like water off a duck’s back, the Prokofiev flows into me like an infinitely intoxicating elixir. It speaks to me, soars inside me, sets me on fire, turns up the volume of life to full blast.

I need not go on and on, because I am sure that every reader has experienced chemistries and non-chemistries of this sort — perhaps even relating to the Bartók and Prokofiev violin concertos in exactly the reverse fashion from me, but even so, the message I am trying to convey will come across loud and clear. Music seems to me to be a direct route to the heart, or between hearts — in fact, the most direct. Across-the-board alignment of musical tastes, including both loves and hates — something extremely rarely run into — is as sure a guide to affinity of souls as I have ever found. And an affinity of souls means that the people concerned can rapidly come to know each other’s essences, have great potential to live inside each other.

Copycat Planetoids Grow by Absorbing Melting Meteorites

As children, as adolescents, and even as adults, we are all copycats. We involuntarily and automatically incorporate into our repertoire all sorts of behavior-fragments of other people. I already mentioned my “Hopalong Cassidy smile” in first grade, which I suppose still vaguely informs my “real” smile, and I have dozens of explicit memories of other copycat actions from that age and later. I remember admiring and then copying one friend’s uneven, jagged handwriting, a jaunty classmate’s cool style of blustering, an older boy’s swaggering walk, the way the French ticketseller in the film Around the World in Eighty Days pronounced the word américain, a college friend’s habit of always saying the name of his interlocutor at the end of every phone call, and so forth. And when I watch a video of myself, I am always caught off guard to see so many of my sister Laura’s terribly familiar expressions (they’re so her) flicker briefly across my face. Which of us borrowed from the other, and when, and why? I’ll never know.

I have long watched my two children imitate catchy intonation-patterns and favorite phrases of their American friends, and I can also hear specific Italian friends’ sounds and phrases echo throughout their Italian. There have been times when, on listening to either of them talk, I could practically have rattled off a list of their friends’ names as the words and sounds sailed by.

The small piano pieces I used to compose with such intense emotional fervor — a fervor that felt like it was pure me — are riddled, ironically, with recognizable features coming very clearly from Chopin, Bach, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Scriabin, Ravel, Fauré, Debussy, Poulenc, Mendelssohn, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Kern, and easily another dozen or more composers whose music I listened to endlessly in those years. My writing style bears marks of countless writers who used words in amazing ways that I wished I could imitate. My ideas come from my mother, my father, my youthful friends, my teachers… Everything I do is some kind of modified borrowing from others who have been close to me either actually or virtually, and the virtual influences are among the most profound.

Much of my fabric is woven out of borrowed bits and pieces of the experiences of thousands of famous individuals whom I never met face to face, and almost surely never will, and who for me are therefore only “virtual people”. Here’s a sample: Niels Bohr, Dr. Seuss, Carole King, Martin Luther King, Billie Holiday, Mickey Mantle, Mary Martin, Maxine Sullivan, Anwar Sadat, Charles Trenet, Robert Kennedy, P. A. M. Dirac, Bill Cosby, Peter Sellers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Jesse Owens, Groucho Marx, Janet Margolin, Roald Dahl, Françoise Sagan, Sidney Bechet, Shirley MacLaine, Jacques Tati, and Charles Shultz.

The people just mentioned all had major positive impacts on my life and their lives overlapped a fair amount with mine, and thus I might (at least theoretically) have run into any of them in person. But I also contain myriad traces of thousands of individuals whom I never could have met and interacted with, such as W. C. Fields, Galileo Galilei, Harry Houdini, Paul Klee, Clément Marot, John Baskerville, Fats Waller, Anne Frank, Holden Caulfield, Captain Nemo, Claude Monet, Leonhard Euler, Dante Alighieri, Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, James Clerk Maxwell, Samuel Pickwick, Esq., Charles Babbage, Archimedes, and Charlie Brown.

Some of the people in the latter list, of course, are fictional while others hover between the fictional and the real, but that is of no more import than the fact that in my mind, they are all merely virtual beings. What matters is neither the fictional/nonfictional nor the virtual/nonvirtual dimension, but the duration and depth of an individual’s interaction with my interiority. In that regard, Holden Caulfield ranks at about the same level as Alexander Pushkin, and higher far than Dante Alighieri.

We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (though that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with). Although my meteorite metaphor may make it sound as if we are victims of random bombardment, I don’t mean to suggest that we willingly accrete just any old mannerism onto our sphere’s surface — we are very selective, usually borrowing traits that we admire or covet — but even our style of selectivity is itself influenced over the years by what we have turned into as a result of our repeated accretions. And what was once right on the surface gradually becomes buried like a Roman ruin, growing closer and closer to the core of us as our radius keeps increasing.

All of this suggests that each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way. But of course not all contributors are represented equally. Those whom we love and who love us are the most strongly represented inside us, and our “I” is formed by a complex collusion of all their influences echoing down the many years. A marvelous pen-and-ink “parquet deformation” drawn in 1964 by David Oleson (below) illustrates this idea not only graphically but also via a pun, for it is entitled “I at the Center”:

Here one sees a metaphorical individual at the center, whose shape (the letter “I”) is a consequence of the shapes of all its neighbors. Their shapes, likewise, are consequences of the shapes of their neighbors, and so on. As one drifts out toward the periphery of the design, the shapes gradually become more and more different from each other. What a wonderful visual metaphor for how we are all determined by the people to whom we are close, especially those to whom we are closest!

How Much Can One Import of Another’s Interiority?

When we interact for a couple of minutes with a checkout clerk in a store, we obviously do not build up an elaborate representation of that person’s interior fire. The representation is so partial and fleeting that we would probably not even recognize the person a few days later. The same goes, only more so, for each of the hundreds of people we pass as we walk down a busy sidewalk at the height of the Christmas shopping madness. Though we know well that each person has at their core a strange loop somewhat like our own, the details that imbue it with its uniqueness are so inaccessible to us that that core aspect of them goes totally unrepresented. Instead, we register only superficial aspects that have nothing to do with their inner fire, with who they really are. Such cases are typical of the “truncated corridor” images that we build up in our brain for most people that we run across; we have no sense of the strange loop at their core.

Many of the well-known individuals I listed above are central to my identity, in the sense that I cannot imagine who I would be had I not encountered their ideas or deeds, but there are thousands of other famous people who merely grazed my being in small ways, sometimes gratingly, sometimes gratifyingly. These more peripheral individuals are represented in me principally by various famous achievements (whether they affected me for good or for ill) — a sound bite uttered, an equation discovered, a photo snapped, a typeface designed, a line drive snagged, a rabble roused, a refugee rescued, a plot hatched, a poem tossed off, a peace offer tendered, a cartoon sketched, a punch line concocted, or a ballad crooned.

The central ones, by contrast, are represented inside my brain by complex symbols that go well beyond the external traces they left behind; they have instilled inside me an additional glimmer of how it was to live inside their head, how it was to look out at the world through their eyes. I feel I have entered, in some cases deeply, into the hidden territory of their interiority, and they, conversely, have infiltrated mine.

And yet, for all the wonderful effects that our most beloved composers, writers, artists, and so forth have exerted on us, we are inevitably even more intimate with those people whom we know in person, have spent years with, and love. These are people about whom we care so deeply that for them to achieve some particular personal goal becomes an important internal goal for us, and we spend a good deal of time musing over how to realize that goal (and I deliberately chose the neutral phrase “that goal” because it is blurry whether it is their goal or ours).

We live inside such people, and they live inside us. To return to the metaphor of two interacting video feedback systems, someone that close to us is represented on our screen by a second infinite corridor, in addition to our own infinite corridor. We can peer all the way down — their strange loop, their personal gemma, is incorporated inside us. And yet, to reiterate the metaphor, since our camera and our screen are grainy, we cannot have as deep or as accurate a representation of people beloved to us as either our own self-representation or their own self-representation.

Double-clicking on the Icon for a Loved One’s Soul

There was a point in my 1994 email broodings to Dan Dennett where I worried about how it would feel when, for the first time after her death, I would watch a video of Carol. I imagined the Carol symbol in my head being powerfully activated by the images on tape — more powerfully activated than at any moment since she had died — and I was fearful of the power of the illusion it would create. I would seem to see her standing by the staircase, and yet, obviously, if I were to get up and walk through the house to the spot where she had once stood, I would find no body there. Though I would see her bright face and hear her laugh, I could not go up to her and put my arm around her shoulders. Watching the tapes would heighten the anguish of her death, by seeming to bring her back physically but doing nothing of the sort in reality. Her physical nature would not be brought back by the tapes.

But what about her inner nature? When Carol was alive, her presence routinely triggered certain symbols in my brain. Quite obviously, the videos would trigger those same symbols again, although in fewer ways. What would be the nature of the symbolic dance thus activated in my brain? When the videos inevitably double-clicked on my “Carol” icon, what would happen inside me? The strange and complex thing that would come rushing up from the dormant murk would be a real thing — or at any rate, just as real as the “I” inside me is real. The key question then is, how different is that strange thing in my brain from the “I” that had once flourished inside Carol’s brain? Is it a thing of an entirely different type, or is it of the same type, just less elaborate?

Thinking with Another’s Brain

Of all Dan Dennett’s many reactions to my grapplings in that searing spring of 1994, there was one sentence that always stood out in my mind: “It is clear from what you say that Carol will be thinking with your brain for quite some time to come.” I appreciated and resonated to this evocative phrase, which, as I later discovered, Dan was quoting with a bit of license from our mutual friend Marvin Minsky, the artificial-intelligence pioneer — copycats everywhere!

“She’ll be thinking with your brain.” What this Dennett–Minsky utterance meant to me was roughly the following. Input signals coming to me would, under certain circumstances, follow pathways in my brain that led not to my memories but to Carol’s memories (or rather, to my low-resolution, coarse-grained “copies” of them). The faces of our children, the voices of her parents and sisters and brothers, the rooms in our house — such things would at times be processed in a frame of reference that would imbue them with a Carol-style meaning, placing them in a frame that would root them in and relate them to her experiences (once again, as crudely rendered in my brain). The semantics that would accrue to the signals impingent on me would have originated in her life. To the extent, then, that I, over our years of living together, had accurately imported and transplanted the experiences that had rooted Carol on this earth, she would be able to react to the world, to live on in me. To that extent, and only to that extent, Carol would be thinking with my brain, feeling with my heart, living in my soul.

Mosaics of Different Grain Size

Since everything hung on those words “to the extent that X”, what seemed to matter most of all here was degree of fidelity to the original, an idea for which I soon found a metaphor based on portraits rendered as mosaics made out of small colored stones. The more intimately someone comes to know you, the finer-grained will be the “portrait” of you inside their head. The highest-resolution portrait of you is of course your own self-portrait — your own mosaic of yourself, your self-symbol, built up over your entire life, exquisitely fine-grained. Thus in Carol’s case, her own self-symbol was by far the finest-grained portrait of her inner essence, her inner light, her personal gemma. But surely among the next-highest in resolution was my mosaic of Carol, the coarser-grained copy of her interiority that resided inside my head.

It goes without saying that my portrait of Carol was of a coarser grain than her own; how could it not be? I didn’t grow up in her family, didn’t attend her schools, didn’t live through her childhood or adolescence. And yet, over our many years together, through thousands of hours of casual and intimate conversations, I had imported lower-resolution copies of so many of the experiences central to her identity. Carol’s memories of her youth — her parents, her brothers and sisters, her childhood collie Barney, the family’s “educational outings” to Gettysburg and to museums in Washington D.C., their summer vacations in a cabin on a lake in central Michigan, her adolescent delight in wildly colorful socks, her preadolescent loves of reading and of classical music, her feelings of differentness and isolation from so many kids her age — all these had imprinted my brain with copies of themselves, blurry copies but copies nonetheless. Some of her memories were so vivid that they had become my own, as if I had lived through those days. Some skeptics might dismiss this outright, saying, “Just pseudo-memories!” I would reply, “What’s the difference?”

A friend of mine once told me about a scenic trip he had taken, describing it in such vivid detail that a few years later I thought I had been on that trip myself. To add insult to injury, I didn’t even remember my friend as having had anything to do with “my” trip! One day this trip came up in a conversation, and of course we both insisted that we were the one who had taken it. It was quite puzzling! However, after my friend showed me his photos of the trip and recounted far more details of it than I could, I realized my mistake — but who knows how many other times this kind of confusion has occurred in my mind without being corrected, leaving pseudo-memories as integral elements of my self-image?

In the end, what is the difference between actual, personal memories and pseudo-memories? Very little. I recall certain episodes from the novel Catcher in the Rye or the movie David and Lisa as if they had happened to me — and if they didn’t, so what? They are as clear as if they had. The same can be said of many episodes from other works of art. They are parts of my emotional library, stored in dormancy, waiting for the appropriate trigger to come along and snap them to life, just as my “genuine” memories are waiting. There is no absolute and fundamental distinction between what I recall from having lived through it myself and what I recall from others’ tales. And as time passes and the sharpness of one’s memories (and pseudo-memories) fades, the distinction grows ever blurrier.

Transplantation of Patterns

Even if most readers agree with much that I am saying, perhaps the hardest thing for many of them to understand is how I could believe that the activation of a symbol inside my head, no matter how intricate that symbol might be, could capture any of someone else’s first-person experience of the world, someone else’s consciousness. What craziness could ever have led me to suspect that someone else’s self — my father’s, my wife’s — could experience feelings, given that it was all taking place courtesy of the neurological hardware inside my head, and given that every single cell in the brain of the other person had long since gone the way of all flesh?

The key question is thus very simple and very stark: Does the actual hardware matter? Did only Carol’s cells, now all recycled into the vast impersonal ecosystem of our planet, have the potential to support what I could call “Carol feelings” (as if feelings were stamped with a brand that identified them uniquely), or could other cells, even inside me, do that job?

To my mind, there is an unambiguous answer to this question. The cells inside a brain are not the bearers of its consciousness; the bearers of consciousness are patterns. The pattern of organization is what matters, not the substance. It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion! Otherwise, we would have to attribute to the molecules inside our brains special properties that, outside of our brains, they lack. For instance, if I see one last tortilla chip lying in a basket about to be thrown away, I might think, “Oh, you lucky chip! If I eat you, then your lifeless molecules, if they are fortunate enough to be carried by my bloodstream up to my brain and to settle there, will get to enjoy the experience of being me! And so I must devour you, in order not to deprive your inert molecules of the chance to enjoy the experience of being human!” I hope such a thought sounds preposterous to nearly all of my readers. But if the molecules making you up are not the “enjoyers” of your feelings, then what is? All that is left is patterns. And patterns can be copied from one medium to another, even between radically different media. Such an act is called “transplantation” or, for short, “translation”.

A novel can withstand transplanting even though readers in the “guest language” haven’t lived on the soil where the original language is spoken; the key point is, they have experienced essentially the same phenomena on their own soil. Indeed, all novels, whether translated or not, depend on this kind of transplantability, because no two human beings, even if they speak the same language, ever grow up on exactly the same soil. How else could we contemporary Americans relate to a Jane Austen novel?

Carol’s soul can withstand transplanting into the soil of my brain because, even though I didn’t grow up in her family and in their various houses, I know, to some degree, all the key elements of her earliest years. In me robustly live and survive her early inner roots, out of which her soul grew. My brain’s fertile soil is a soul-soil not identical to, but very similar to, hers. And so I can “be” Carol albeit with a slight Doug accent, just as James Falen’s lovely, lilting, and lyrical English transplantation of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin is certainly and undeniably that very novel, even if it has something of an American accent.

The sad truth is, of course, that no copy is perfect, and that my copies of Carol’s memories are hugely defective and incomplete, nowhere close to the level of detail of the originals. The sad truth is, of course, that Carol is reduced, in her inhabitation of my cranium, to only a tiny fraction of what she used to be. The sad truth is, my brain’s mosaic of Carol’s essence is far more coarse-grained than the privileged mosaic that resided in her brain was. That is the sad truth. Death’s sting cannot be denied. And yet death’s sting is not quite as absolute or as total as it might seem.

When the sun is eclipsed, there remains a corona surrounding it, a circumferential glow. When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them. Inevitably, as time passes, the afterglow fades and finally goes out, but it takes many years for that to happen. When, eventually, all of those close ones have died as well, then all the embers will have gone cool, and at that point, it’s “ashes to ashes and dust to dust”.

Several years ago, my email friend James Plath, knowing of my intense musings along these lines, sent me a paragraph from the novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, with which I conclude this chapter.

Late the next morning he sat sewing in the room upstairs. Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he is watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved — so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living?