I Am a Strange Loop

CHAPTER 18

The Blurry Glow of Human Identity

I Host and Am Hosted by Others

AMONG the beliefs most universally shared by humanity is the idea “One body, one person”, or equivalently, “One brain, one soul”. I will call this idea the “caged-bird metaphor”, the cage being, of course, the cranium, and the bird being the soul. Such an image is so self-evident and so tacitly built into the way we all think about ourselves that to utter it explicitly would sound as pointless as saying, “One circle, one center” or “One finger, one fingernail”; to question it would be to risk giving the impression that you had more than one bat in your belfry. And yet doing precisely the latter has been the purpose of the past few chapters.

In contrast to the caged-bird metaphor, the idea I am proposing here is that since a normal adult human brain is a representationally universal “machine”, and since humans are social beings, an adult brain is the locus not only of one strange loop constituting the identity of the primary person associated with that brain, but of many strange-loop patterns that are coarse-grained copies of the primary strange loops housed in other brains. Thus, brain 1 contains strange loops 1, 2, 3, and so forth, each with its own level of detail. But since this notion is true of any brain, not just of brain 1, it entails the following flip side: Every normal adult human soul is housed in many brains at varying degrees of fidelity, and therefore every human consciousness or “I” lives at once in a collection of different brains, to different extents.

There is, of course, a “principal domicile” or “main brain” for each particular “I”, which means that there remains a good deal of truth to simple, commonsensical statements like “My soul is housed in my brain”, and yet, close to true though it is, that statement misses something crucial, which is the idea, perhaps strange-sounding at first, that “My soul lives to lesser extents in brains that are not mine.”

At this point, we should think at least briefly about the meaning of innocent-sounding phrases like “my brain” and “brains that are not mine”. If I have five sisters, then saying “my sister” is, if not meaningless, then at least highly ambiguous. Likewise, if I have three nationalities, then saying “my nationality” is ambiguous. And analogously, if my self-symbol exists in, say, fifteen different brains (at fifteen different degrees of fidelity, to be sure), then not only is the phrase “my brain” ambiguous, but so is the word “my”! Who is the talker? I am reminded of a now-defunct bar in the Bay Area whose sign amused me no end every time I drove by it: “My Brother’s Place”. Yes, but whose brother’s place? Just who was doing the talking here? I never could figure this out (nor, I guess, could anyone else), and I relished the sign’s intentional silliness.

Fortunately, the existence of a “main brain” means that “my brain” has an unambiguous primary meaning, even if the soul uttering the phrase lives, to smaller extents, in fourteen other brains at the same time. And usually the soul uttering the phrase will be using its main brain (and thus its main body and main mouth), and so most listeners (including the speaker) will effortlessly understand what is meant.

It is not easy to find a strong, vivid metaphor to put up against the caged-bird metaphor. I have entertained quite a few possibilities, involving such diverse entities as bees, tornados, flowers, stars, and embassies. The image of a swarm of bees or of a nebula clearly conveys the idea of diffuseness, but there is no clear counterpart to the cage (or rather, to the head or brain or cranium). (A hive is not what I mean, because a flying swarm is not at all inside its hive.) The image of a tornado cell is appealing because it involves swirling entities reminiscent of the video feedback loops we’ve so often talked about, and because it involves a number of such swirls spread out in space, but once again there is no counterpart to the “home location”, nor is it clear that there is one primary tornado in a cell. Then there is the image of a plant sending out underground shoots and popping up in several places at once, where there is a primary branch and secondary offshoots, which is an important component of the idea, and similarly, the image of a country with embassies in many other countries captures an important aspect of what I seek. But I am not fully satisfied with any of these metaphors, and so, rather than settling on a single one, I’ll simply throw them all out at once, hoping that they stir up some appropriate imagery in your mind.

Feeling that One is Elsewhere

All this talk of one person inhabiting several bodies at the same time may seem wildly at odds with “common sense”, which unambiguously tells us that we are always in just one place, not two or more. But let’s examine this commonsense axiom a bit.

If you go to an I-Max movie theater and are riding a wild roller-coaster, where are you? The temptation is to say, “I’m sitting in a movie theater”, but if that’s the case, then why are you so scared? What’s to scare you about a couple of dozen rows of stationary seats, the odor of popcorn, and a thin screen hanging forty or fifty feet away? The answer is obvious: when you watch the movie, the audiovisual input to your brain seems to be coming not from inside the theater but from somewhere else, a place that is far away from the theater and that has nothing to do with it. And it is that input that you can’t help interpreting as telling you where you are. You feel you have been transported to a place where your body is actually not located, and where your brain is not located either, for that matter.

Of course since watching a movie is a very familiar activity, we are not confused by this phenomenon of virtual displacement, and we accept the idea that there is simply a temporary suspension of disbelief, so that we can enter into another world virtually, vicariously, and volatilely. No serious philosophical conundrums seem to be raised by such an experience, and yet to me, this first little crack allows the door of multiple simultaneous locations of the self to open up much more widely.

Now let’s recall the experience of being transported from the ski resort in California’s Sierra Nevada range to the Bloomington kennel via the “doggie cam” and the World Wide Web. Watching the dogs play in their little area, my children and I didn’t in the least feel that we were “in Ollie’s skin”, but let’s tweak the parameters of the situation a little bit. Suppose, for example, that the bandwidth of the visual image were greatly increased. Suppose moreover that the webcam was mounted not in a fixed spot above the fenced-in play area but on Ollie’s head, and that it included a microphone. And lastly, suppose that you had a pair of dedicated goggles (spectacles with earphones) that, whenever you put them on, transmitted this scene to you in very high audiovisual fidelity. As long as you can put them on and then take them off, these teleportation goggles would seem like just a game, but what if they were affixed for several hours to your head and served as your only way of peering out at the world? Don’t you think you would start to feel a little bit as if you were Ollie? What would it matter to you that you were in a faraway California ski resort, if your own eyes and ears were unable to give you any Californian input?

You might object that it’s impossible to feel that you are Ollie if his movements are out of your control. In that case, we can add a joystick that will tend to make Ollie turn left or right, at your discretion (how it does so is not germane here). So now your hand controls Ollie’s movements and you receive audiovisual input solely from the camera attached to Ollie’s head, for several hours nonstop. This scenario is rather bizarre, but I think you can easily see that you will soon start to feel as if you are more in the Indiana kennel, where you are free to move about, than in some Californian ski resort, where you are basically stuck to your seat (because you have your goggles on, hence you can’t see where you’re going, hence you don’t dare venture anywhere). We’ll refer to this sensation of feeling that you are somewhere far from both your body and your brain, thanks to the ultrarapid transmission of data, as “telepresence” (a term invented by Pat Gunkel and popularized by Marvin Minsky around 1980).

Telepresence versus “Real” Presence

Perhaps my most vivid experience of telepresence occurred when I was typesetting my book Gödel, Escher, Bach. This was back in the late 1970’s, when for an author to do any such thing was unheard of, but I had the good fortune of having access to one of the only two computer typesetting systems in the world at that time, both of which, by coincidence, were located at Stanford. The catch was that I was an assistant professor at Indiana University in far-off Bloomington, and I had courses to teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays. To make things doubly hard, there was no Internet, so I couldn’t possibly do the typesetting work from Indiana. To typeset my book, I had to be on site at Stanford, but my teaching schedule allowed me to get there only on weekends, and not on all weekends at that. And so each time I flew out to Stanford for a weekend, I would instantly zoom to Ventura Hall, plunk myself down at a terminal in the so-called “Imlac room”, and plunge furiously into the work, which was extremely intense. I once worked forty hours straight before collapsing.

Now what does this all have to do with telepresence? Well, each long, grueling work session at Stanford was quite hypnotic, and when I left, I would still half-feel as if I were there. One time when I had returned to Bloomington, I realized I had made a serious typesetting mistake in one chapter, and so, in panic, I called up my friend Scott Kim, who also had been spending endless hours in the Imlac room, and I was hugely relieved to find him there. Scott was more than happy to sit down at an Imlac terminal and to pull up the right program and the proper file to work on. So we set to work on it, with me talking Scott through the whole long and detailed process, and Scott reading to me what he saw on the screen. Since I had just spent numberless hours right there, I was easily able to see in my mind’s eye everything that Scott relayed to me, and I remember how disoriented I would feel when, every so often, I remembered that my body was still in Bloomington, for I felt for all the world as if I were in Stanford, working directly at the Imlac terminal. And mind you, this powerful visual sense of telepresence was taking place solely through the sonic modality of a telephone. It was as if my eyes, though in Bloomington, were looking at an Imlac screen in California, thanks to Scott’s eyes and the clarity of his words on the phone.

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

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

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

Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?

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

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

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

Where Am I?

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

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

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

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

Varying Degrees of Being Another

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

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

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

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

The Naïve Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough

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

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

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

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

Where Does a Hammerhead Shark Think it is?

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

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

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

Sympathetic Vibrations

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

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

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

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

As it happens, we do not live in a didymous world like Twinwirld, nor do we live in a world where the existence of relatively clear boundaries between souls seems imminently threatened by the advent of extremely high-bandwidth interbrain communication — a world in which signals are swapped so fast and furiously between brains that separate bodies would cease to determine separate individuals. That is not the case at present, nor do I envision it becoming the case in the foreseeable future (though I am not a futurologist, and I could be quite wrong).

My point, though, is that the myth of watertight boundaries between souls is something whose falsity we all have slight tastes of all the time, but since it is so convenient and so conventional to associate one body with precisely one soul, since it is so deeply tempting and so deeply ingrained to see a body and a soul as being in perfect alignment, we choose to downplay or totally ignore the implications of the everyday manifestations of the interpenetration of souls.

Consider how profoundly wrapped up you can become in a close friend’s successes and failures, in their very personal ecstasies and agonies. If my vicarious enjoyment of my sister’s falafel seemed vivid to me, just think how much more vivid and intense is your vicarious thrill when a forever-lonely friend of yours finally bumps into someone wonderful and a promising romance starts up, or when a long-frustrated actor friend is finally given a lucky break and receives terrific reviews in the press. Or turning things around, think how powerful is your sense of injustice when a close friend of yours is hit, out of the blue, by some terrible misfortune. What are you doing but living their life inside your own head?

And yet we describe phenomena of this extremely familiar sort in easier, less challenging terms, such as “He identifies with her”, or “She is such an empathetic woman”, or “I know what you’re going through”, or “I feel for you”, or “It pains me to see what she’s up against”, or “Don’t tell me any more — I can’t stand it!” Standard expressions like these, although they indeed reflect someone’s partially being inside someone else, are seldom if ever taken as literal suggestions that our souls really do interpenetrate and blur together. That is just too messy and possibly even too scary an idea for us to deal with, and so we insist instead that there is no genuine overlap, that we are like distant galaxies to each other. Our lifelong ingrained habit is to accept without question the caged-bird metaphor for souls, and it’s very hard to break out of such a profoundly rooted habit.

Am I No One Else or Am I Everyone Else?

The image of the caged bird essentially implies that different people are like separate dots on the same line, dots having a diameter of exactly zero, and thus having no overlap whatsoever. Indeed, if we take the so-called “real line” of elementary algebra as a metaphor, then the caged-bird metaphor would assign to each person a “serial number” — an infinite decimal that uniquely determines “what it is like” to be that person. In that view, you and I, no matter how similar we think we are, no matter how much experience we have shared in life, even if we are identical or Siamese twins, were simply assigned different serial numbers at birth, and hence we inhabit different zero-width dots on the line, and that is that. You are you, I am I, and there is not one whit of overlap, no matter how near we are. I cannot possibly know what it’s like to be you, nor the reverse.

The opposite thesis would claim that every person is distributed uniformly over the entire real line, and that all individuals are therefore one and the same person! There is only one person. This extreme view, although less commonly advocated, has its modern proponents, such as philosopher Daniel Kolak in his recent book I Am You. This view makes as little sense to me as does panpsychism, which asserts that every entity — every stone, every picnic table, every picnic, every electron, every rainbow, every drop of water, waterfall, skyscraper, oil refinery, billboard, speedlimit sign, traffic ticket, county jail, jailbreak, track meet, election rigging, airport gate, spring sale, soap opera cancellation, photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and so on ad nauseam — is conscious.

The viewpoint of this book lies somewhere between these two extremes, picturing individuals not as pointlike infinite-decimal serial numbers but as fairly localized, blurry zones scattered here and there along the line. While some of these zones overlap considerably, most of them overlap little or none at all. After all, two smudges of width one inch apiece located a hundred miles apart will obviously have zero overlap. But two smudges of width one inch whose centers are only a half inch apart will have a great deal of overlap. There will not be an unbridgeable existential gap between two such people. Each of them is instead spread out into the other one, and each of them lives partially in the other.

Interpenetration of National Souls

Earlier in this chapter, I briefly offered the image of a self as analogous to a country with embassies in many other countries. Now I wish to pursue a similar notion, but I’ll start out with a very simplistic notion of what a country is, and will build up from there. So let’s consider the slogan “One country, one people”. Such a slogan would suggest that each people (a spiritual, cultural notion involving history, traditions, language, mythology, literature, music, art, religion, and so forth) is always crisply and perfectly aligned with some country (a physical, geographical notion involving oceans, lakes, rivers, mountains, valleys, prairies, mineral deposits, cities, highways, precise legal borders, and so forth).

If we actually believed a strict geographical analogue to the caged-bird metaphor for human selves, then we would have the curious belief that all individuals found inside a certain geographical region always had the same cultural identity. The phrase “an American in Paris” would make no sense to us, for the French nationality would coincide exactly with the boundaries of the physical place called “France”. There could never be Americans in France, nor French people in America! And of course analogous notions would hold for all countries and peoples. This is clearly absurd. Migration and tourism are universal phenomena, and they intermix countries and peoples continuously.

This does not mean that there is no such thing as a people or a country, of course. Both notions remain useful, despite enormous blurs concerning each one. Think for a moment of Italy, for instance. The northwestern region called “Valle d’Aosta” is largely French-speaking, while the northeastern region called “Alto Adige” (also “Südtirol”) is largely German-speaking. Moreover, north of Milano but across the border, the Swiss canton of Ticino is Italian-speaking. So what is the relationship between the country of Italy and the Italian people? It is not precise and sharp, to say the least — and yet we still find it useful to talk about Italy and Italians. It’s just that we know there is a blur around both concepts. And what goes for Italy goes for every country. We know that each nationality is a blurry, spread-out phenomenon centered on but not limited to a single geographical region, and we are completely accustomed to this notion. It does not feel paradoxical or confusing in the least.

So let us exploit our comfort with the relationship between a place and a people to try to get a more sophisticated handle on the relationship between a body and a soul. Consider China, which over the past couple of centuries has lost millions of people to emigration. Does China simply forget about those people, thinking of them as deserters and expunging them from its collective memory? Not at all. There is a strong residual feeling inside China for the “Overseas Chinese”. These cherished though distant people are urged to “come home” at least temporarily, and when they do, they are warmly welcomed like long-lost relatives (which of course is exactly what they are). This overseas branch of China is thus considered, within China, very much a part of China. It is a “halo” of Chineseness that extends far beyond the physical borders of the land.

Not just China, of course, but every country has such a halo, and this halo shimmers, sometimes brightly, sometimes dimly, in every other country on earth. If there were a counterpart at the country level to human death, then a people whose “body” was annihilated (by some kind of cataclysm such as a huge meteor crashing into their land) could survive, at least partially, thanks to the glowing halo that exists beyond their land’s physical borders.

Though horrific, such an image does not strike us as in the least counterintuitive, because we understand that the physical land, no matter how beloved in song and story, is not indispensable for the survival of a nationality. The geographical place is merely the traditional breeding grounds for an ancient set of genes and memes — complexions, body types, hair colors, traditions, words, proverbs, dances, myths, costumes, recipes, and so forth — and as long as a critical mass of carriers of these genes and memes, located abroad, survives the cataclysm, all of this richness can continue to exist and flourish elsewhere, and the now-gone physical place can continue to be celebrated in song and story.

Although no entire country has ever been physically annihilated, events somewhat like this have happened in the past. I am reminded of the gulping-up of all of Polish soil by Poland’s neighbors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the so-called “partitions of Poland”. The Polish people, although rendered physically homeless, continued to endure. Here was a nation — naród polski — vibrant and alive, yet entirely deprived of a land. Indeed, the words that open the Polish national anthem celebrate this survival: “Poland is not lost, as long as we live!” In parallel fashion, the original Jews, scattered in biblical times from the cradle of their culture, continued to survive, keeping alive their traditions, their language, and their beliefs, in the Diaspora.

Halos, Afterglows, Coronas

In the wake of a human being’s death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of all those who were dearest to them. And when those people in turn pass on, the afterglow becomes extremely faint. And when that outer layer in turn passes into oblivion, then the afterglow is feebler still, and after a while there is nothing left.

This slow process of extinction I’ve just described, though gloomy, is a little less gloomy than the standard view. Because bodily death is so clear, so sharp, and so dramatic, and because we tend to cling to the caged-bird view, death strikes us as instantaneous and absolute, as sharp as a guillotine blade. Our instinct is to believe that the light has all at once gone out altogether. I suggest that this is not the case for human souls, because the essence of a human being — truly unlike the essence of a mosquito or a snake or a bird or a pig — is distributed over many a brain. It takes a couple of generations for a soul to subside, for the flickering to cease, for all the embers to burn out. Although “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” may in the end be true, the transition it describes is not so sharp as we tend to think.

It seems to me, therefore, that the instinctive although seldom articulated purpose of holding a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, and to collectively rekindle in them all, for one last time, the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person, profiting directly or indirectly from the presence of one another, feeling the shared presence of that person in the brains that remain, and thus solidifying to the maximal extent possible those secondary personal gemmae that remain aflicker in all these different brains. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word “love” cannot, thus, be separated from the word “I”; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.