I Am a Strange Loop

CHAPTER 1

On Souls and Their Sizes

Soul-Shards

ONE gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents’ house, and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, “What meaning does that photograph have? None at all. It’s just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It’s useless.” The bleakness of my mother’s grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be considered.

After a few minutes of emotional pondering — soul-searching, quite literally — I hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was along the following lines.

“In the living room we have a book of the Chopin études for piano. All of its pages are just pieces of paper with dark marks on them, just as two-dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad — and yet, think of the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in Frédéric Chopin’s heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin’s interiority — to the experience of living in the head, or rather the soul, of Frédéric Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper are no less than soul-shards — scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Frédéric Chopin. Each of those strange geometries of notes has a unique power to bring back to life, inside our brains, some tiny fragment of the internal experiences of another human being — his sufferings, his joys, his deepest passions and tensions — and we thereby know, at least in part, what it was like to be that human being, and many people feel intense love for him. In just as potent a fashion, looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to us who knew him intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness, activates inside our living brains some of the most central representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like the score to a Chopin étude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.”

Although the above is a bit more flowery than what I said to my mother, it gives the essence of my message. I don’t know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture, but that photo is still there, on a counter in her kitchen, and every time I look at it, I remember that exchange.

What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?

I slice up and devour tomatoes without the slightest sense of guilt. I do not go to bed uneasily after having consumed a fresh tomato. It does not occur to me to ask myself which tomato I ate, or whether by eating it I have snuffed an inner light, nor do I believe it is meaningful to try to imagine how the tomato felt as it was sitting on my plate being sliced apart. To me, a tomato is a desireless, soulless, nonconscious entity, and I have no qualms about doing with its “body” as I like. Indeed, a tomato is nothing but its body. There is no “mind–body problem” for tomatoes. (I hope, dear reader, that we agree on this much!)

I also swat mosquitoes without a qualm, though I try to avoid stepping on ants, and when there is an insect other than a mosquito in the house, I usually try to capture it and carry it outside, where I let it go unharmed. I eat chicken and fish sometimes [Note: This is no longer the case — see the Post Scriptum to this chapter], but many years ago I stopped eating the flesh of mammals. No beef, no ham, no bacon, no spam, no pork, no lamb — no thank you, ma’am! Mind you, I would still enjoy the taste of a BLT or well-done burger, but for moral reasons, I simply don’t partake of them. I don’t want to go on a crusade here, but I do need to talk a little bit about my vegetarian leanings, because they have everything to do with souls.

Guinea Pig

When I was fifteen, I had a summer job punching buttons on a Friden mechanical calculator in a physiology lab at Stanford University. (This was back in those days when there was but one computer on the whole Stanford campus and few scientists even knew of its existence, let alone thought about using it for their calculations.) It was pretty grueling work to do such “number-punching” for hours on end, and one day, Nancy, the graduate student for whose research project I was doing all this, asked me if, for relief, I’d like to try my hand at other kinds of tasks around the lab. I said “Sure!”, and so that afternoon she escorted me up to the fourth floor of the physiology building and showed me the cages where they kept the animals — literally guinea pigs — that they used in their experiments. I still remember the pungent smell and the scurrying-about of all those little orange-furred rodents.

The next afternoon, Nancy asked me if I would please go up to the top floor and bring down two animals for her next round of experiments. I didn’t have a chance to reply, however, for no sooner had I started to imagine myself reaching into one of those cages and selecting two small soft furry beings to be snuffed than my head began spinning, and in a flash I fainted right away, banging my head on the concrete floor. The next thing I knew, I was looking up into the face of the lab’s director, George Feigen, a dear old family friend, who was deeply concerned that I might have injured myself in the fall. Luckily I was fine, and I slowly stood up and then rode my bike home for the rest of the day. Nobody ever asked me again to pick animals to be sacrificed for the sake of science.

Pig

Oddly enough, despite that extremely troubling head-on encounter with the concept of taking the life of a living creature, I kept on eating hamburgers and other kinds of meat for several years. I don’t think I thought about it very much, since none of my friends did, and certainly no one talked about it. Meat-eating was just a background fact in the life of everyone I knew. Moreover, I admit with shame that in my mind, back in those days, the word “vegetarian” conjured up an image of weird, sternly moralistic nutcases (the movie The Seven Year Itch has a terrific scene in a vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan that conveys this stereotype to a tee). But one day when I was twenty-one, I read a short story called “Pig” by the Norwegian–English writer Roald Dahl, and this story had a profound effect on my life — and through me, on the lives of other creatures as well.

“Pig” starts off lightly and amusingly — a naïve young man named Lexington, raised as a strict vegetarian by his Aunt Glosspan (“Pangloss” reversed), discovers after her death that he loves the taste of meat (though he doesn’t know what it is that he’s eating). Soon, as in all Dahl stories, things take weird twists.

Driven by curiosity about this tasty substance called “pork”, Lexington, on the recommendation of a new friend, decides to take a tour of a slaughterhouse. We join him as he sits in the waiting room with other tourists. He idly watches as various waiting parties are called, one by one, to take their tours. Eventually, Lexington’s turn comes, and he is escorted from the waiting room into the shackling area where he watches pigs being hoisted by their back legs onto hooks on a moving chain, getting their throats slit, and, with blood gushing out, proceeding head downwards down the “disassembly line” to fall into a cauldron of boiling water where their body hair is removed, after which their heads and limbs are chopped off and they are prepared for being gutted and sent off, in neat little cellophane-wrapped packages, to supermarkets all over the country, where they will sit in glass cases, along with other rose-colored rivals, waiting for purchasers to admire them and hopefully to select them to take home.

As he is observing all this with detached fascination, Lexington himself is suddenly yanked by the leg and flipped upside down, and he realizes that he too is now dangling from the moving chain, just like the pigs he’s been watching. His placidity all gone, he yells out, “There has been a frightful mistake!”, but the workers ignore his cries. Soon the chain pulls him alongside a friendly-looking chap who Lexington hopes will grasp the situation’s absurdity, but instead, the gentle “sticker” grasps Lexington’s ear, pulls the dangling lad a bit closer, and then, smiling at him with lovingkindness, deftly slits the boy’s jugular vein wide open with a razor-sharp knifeblade. As young Lexington continues his unanticipated inverted journey, his powerful heart pumps his blood out of his throat and onto the concrete floor, and even though he is upside down and losing awareness rapidly, he dimly perceives the pigs ahead of him dropping, one by one, into the steaming cauldron. One of them, oddly enough, seems to have white gloves on its two front trotters, and he is reminded of the glove-clad young woman who had just preceded him from the waiting room into the tour area. And with that curious final thought, Lexington woozily slips out of this, “the best of all possible worlds”, into the next.

The closing scene of “Pig” reverberated in my head for a long time. In my mind, I kept on flipping back and forth between being an upside-down oinking pig on a hook and being Lexington, spilling into the cauldron…

Revulsion, Revelation, Revolution

A month or two after reading this haunting story, I accompanied my parents and my sister Laura to the city of Cagliari, at the southern end of the rugged island of Sardinia, where my father was participating in a physics conference. To wind up the meeting in grand local style, the organizers had planned a sumptuous banquet in a park on the outskirts of Cagliari, in which a suckling piglet was to be roasted and then sliced apart in front of all the diners. As honored guests of the conference, we were all expected to take part in this venerated Sardinian tradition. I, however, was deeply under the influence of the Dahl story I had recently read, and I simply could not envision participating in such a ritual. In my new frame of mind, I couldn’t even imagine how anybody could wish to be there, let alone partake of the piglet’s body. It turned out that my sister Laura was also horrified by the prospect, and so the two of us stayed behind in our hotel and were very happy to eat some pasta and vegetables.

The one–two punch of the Norwegian “Pig” and the Sardinian piglet resulted in my following my sister’s lead in completely giving up meat-eating. I also refused to buy leather shoes or belts. Soon I became a fervent proselytizer for my new credo, and I remember how gratified I was that I managed to sway a couple of my friends for a few months, although to my disappointment, they gradually gave up on it.

In those days, I often wondered how some of my personal idols — Albert Einstein, for instance — could have been meat-eaters. I found no explanation, although recently, to my great pleasure, a Web search yielded hints that Einstein’s sympathies were, in fact, toward vegetarianism, and not for health reasons but out of compassion towards living beings. But I didn’t know that fact back then, and in any case many other heroes of mine were certainly carnivores who knew exactly what they were doing. Such facts saddened and confused me.

Reversion, Re-evolution

The very strange thing is that only a few years later, I, too, found the pressures of daily life in American society so strong that I gave up on my once-passionate vegetarianism, and for a while all my intense ruminations went totally underground. I think that the me of the mid-sixties would have found this reversal totally unfathomable, and yet the two versions of me had both lived in the very same skull. Was I really the same person?

Several years passed this way, almost as if I had never had any epiphany, but then one day, when I was a beginning assistant professor at Indiana University, I met a highly thoughtful woman who had adopted the same vegetarian philosophy as I once had, and had done so for similar reasons, but she had stuck to it for a longer time than I had. Sue and I became good friends, and I admired the purity of her stance. Our friendship caused me to think it all through once more, and in short order I had swung back to my post-“Pig” stance of no killing at all.

Over the next several years there came a few more oscillations, but by my late thirties I had finally settled into a stable state — a compromise representing my evolving intuition that there are souls of different sizes. Though it was anything but crystal-clear to me, I was willing to accept the vague idea that some souls, provided they were “small enough”, could legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the desires of “larger” souls, such as mine and those of other human beings. Although drawing the dividing line at mammals was clearly somewhat arbitrary (as any such dividing line must be), that became my new credo and I stuck with it for two more decades.

The Mystery of Inanimate Flesh

We English speakers do not eat pig or cow; we eat pork and beef. We do eat chicken — but we don’t eat chickens. One time the very young daughter of a friend of mine exclaimed with great mirth to her father that the word for a certain farm bird that clucks and lays eggs was also the word for a substance that she often found on her plate at dinnertime. She found this a most humorous coincidence, similar to the humorous coincidence that “calf ” means both a young cow and a part of one’s leg. She was upset, needless to say, when she was told that the tasty foodstuff and the clucky egg-layer were one and the same thing.

Presumably we all go through much the same confusion when, as children, we discover we are eating animals that our culture tells us are cute — lambs, bunnies, calves, chicks, and so forth. I remember, albeit dimly, my own genuine childhood confusion at this mystery, but since meat-eating was such a bland commonplace, I usually swept it under the rug and didn’t give it much thought.

Nonetheless, grocery stores had an annoying way of bringing the issue up very vividly. There were big display cases with all sorts of slimy-looking blobs of various strange colors, labeled “liver”, “tripe”, “heart”, and “kidney”, and sometimes even “tongue” and “brain”. Not only did these sound like animal parts, they looked like them as well. Fortunately, what was called “ground beef ” didn’t look terribly much like an animal part, and I say “fortunately” because it tasted so good. Wouldn’t want to be talked out of that! Bacon tasted great too, and strips of the stuff were so thin and, once cooked, so crunchy, that they hardly conjured up thoughts of an animal at all. How fortunate!

It was the unloading docks at the rear of grocery stores that made the mystery come back with a vengeance. Sometimes a big truck would pull up and when its rear doors swung open, I would see huge hunks of flesh and bones dangling lifelessly on scary-looking metal hooks. I would watch with morbid curiosity as these carcasses were carried into the back of the store and attached to hooks that slid along overhead rails, so that they could be moved around easily. All this made the preadolescent me very uneasy, and as I gazed at a carcass, I could not help musing, “Who was that animal?” I wasn’t wondering about its name, because I knew that farm animals didn’t have names; I was grasping at something more philosophical — how it had felt to be that animal as opposed to some other one. What was the unique inner light that had suddenly gone off when this animal had been slaughtered?

When I went to Europe as a teenager, the issue was raised more starkly. There, lifeless animal bodies (usually skinned, headless and tailless, but sometimes not) were on display in front of all customers. My most vivid recollection is of one grocery store that, around the Christmas season, featured the severed head of a pig on a table in the middle of an aisle. If you chanced to approach it from the rear, you would see a flat cross-section showing all the inner structures of that pig’s neck, exactly as if it had been guillotined. There were all the dense communication lines that had once connected all the far-flung parts of this individual’s body to the central “headquarters” in its head. Seen from the other side, this pig had what looked like a smile frozen on its face, and that gave me the creeps.

Once again, I couldn’t help wondering, “Who once had been in that head? Who had lived there? Who had looked out through those eyes, heard through those ears? Who had this hunk of flesh really been? Was it a male or a female?” No answers came, of course, and no other customers seemed to pay any attention to this display. It seemed to me that nobody else was facing the intense questions of life, death, and “porcinal identity” that this silent, still head provoked so powerfully and agitatedly inside mine.

I sometimes asked myself the analogous question if I squished an ant or clothes moth or mosquito — but not so often. My instincts told me that there was less meaning to the question “Who is ‘in there’?” in such cases. Nonetheless, the sight of a partly squished insect writhing around on the floor would always give rise to some soul-searching.

And indeed, the reason I have raised all these grim images is not in order to crusade for a cause to which probably most of my readers have already given considerable thought; it is, rather, to raise the burning issue of what a “soul” is, and who or what possesses one. It is an issue that concerns everyone throughout their life — implicitly at the very least, and for many people quite explicitly — and it is the core issue of this book.

Give Me Some Men Who Are Stouter-souled Men

I alluded earlier to my deep love for the music of Chopin. In my teens and twenties, I played a lot of Chopin on the piano, often out of the bright yellow editions published by G. Schirmer in New York City. Each of those volumes opened with an essay penned in the early 1900’s by the American critic James Huneker. Today, many people would find Huneker’s prose overblown, but I did not; its unrestrained emotionality resonated with my perception of Chopin’s music, and I still love his style of writing and his rich metaphors. In his preface to the volume of Chopin’s études, Huneker asserts of the eleventh étude in Opus 25, in A minor (a titanic outburst often called the “Winter Wind”, though that was certainly neither Chopin’s title nor his image for it), the following striking thought: “Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should not attempt it.”

I personally can attest to the terrifying technical difficulty of this incredible surging piece of music, having valiantly attempted to learn it when I was around sixteen and having sadly been forced to give it up in mid-stream, since playing just the first page up to speed (which I finally managed to do after several weeks of unbelievably arduous practice) made my right hand throb with pain. But the technical difficulty is, of course, not what Huneker was referring to. Quite rightly, he is saying that the piece is majestic and noble, but more controversially, he is drawing a dividing line between different levels or “sizes” of human souls, suggesting that some people are simply not up to playing this piece, not because of any physical limitations of their bodies, but because their souls are not “large enough”. (I won’t bother to criticize the sexism of Huneker’s words; that was par for the course in those days.)

This kind of sentiment does not go down well in today’s egalitarian America. It would not play in Peoria. Quite frankly, it rings terribly elitist, perhaps even repugnant, to our modern democratic ears. And yet I have to admit that I somewhat agree with Huneker, and I can’t help wondering if we don’t all of us implicitly believe in the validity of something vaguely like the idea of “small-souled” and “large-souled” human beings. In fact, I can’t help suggesting that this is indeed the belief of almost all of us, no matter how egalitarian we publicly profess to be.

Small-souled and Large-souled Humans

Some of us believe in capital punishment — the intentional public squelching of a human soul, no matter how ardently that soul would plead for mercy, would tremble, would shake, would shriek, would desperately struggle to escape, on being led down the corridor to the site of their doom.

Some of us, perhaps almost all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.

In earlier days, perhaps some of us would have believed (as did George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, each in their own way, at least for some period of time) that it was not immoral to own slaves and to buy and sell them, breaking up families willy-nilly, just as we do today with, for example, horses, dogs, and cats.

Some religious people believe that atheists, agnostics, and followers of other faiths — and worst of all, traitors who have abandoned “the” faith — have no souls at all, and are therefore eminently deserving of death.

Some people (including some women) believe that women have no souls — or perhaps, a little more generously, that women have “smaller souls” than men do.

Some of us (myself included) believe that the late President Reagan was essentially “all gone” many years before his body gave up the ghost, and more generally we believe that people in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease are essentially all gone. It strikes us that although there is a human brain couched inside each of those cranial shells, something has gone away from that brain — something essential, something that contains the secrets of that person’s soul. The “I” has either wholly or partly vanished, gone down the drain, never to be found again.

Some of us (again, I count myself in this group) believe that neither a just-fertilized egg nor a five-month old fetus possesses a full human soul, and that, in some sense, a potential mother’s life counts more than the life of that small creature, alive though it indisputably is.

Hattie the Chocolate Labrador

Kellie: After brunch we’re going out to see Lynne’s turkey, which we haven’t seen yet.

Doug: Which, or whom?

Kellie: Which, I’d say. A turkey’s not a whom.

Doug: I see… So is Hattie a whom, or a which?

Kellie: Oh, she’s a whom, no doubt.

Ollie the Golden Retriever

Doug: So how did Ollie enjoy the outing this afternoon at Lake Griffy?

Danny: Oh, he had a pretty good time, but he didn’t play much with the other dogs. He liked playing with the people, though.

Doug: Really? How come?

Danny: Ollie’s a people person.

Where to Draw that Fateful, Fatal Line?

All human beings — at least all sufficiently large-souled ones — have to make up their minds about such matters as the swatting of mosquitoes or flies, the setting of mousetraps, the eating of rabbits or lobsters or turkeys or pigs, perhaps even of dogs or horses, the purchase of mink stoles or ivory statues, the usage of leather suitcases or crocodile belts, even the penicillinbased attack on swarms of bacteria that have invaded their body, and on and on. The world imposes large and small moral dilemmas on us all the time — at the very least, meal after meal — and we are all forced to take a stand. Does a baby lamb have a soul that matters, or is the taste of lamb chops just too delicious to worry one’s head over that? Does a trout that went for the bait and is now helplessly thrashing about on the end of a nylon line deserve to survive, or should it just be given one sharp thwack on the head and “put out of its misery” so that we can savor the indescribable and yet strangely predictable soft, flaky texture of its white muscles? Do grasshoppers and mosquitoes and even bacteria have a tiny little “light on” inside, no matter how dim, or is it all dark “in there”? (In where?) Why do I not eat dogs? Who was the pig whose bacon I am enjoying for breakfast? Which tomato is it that I am munching on? Should we chop down that magnificent elm in our front yard? And while I’m at it, shall I yank out the wild blackberry bush? And all the weeds growing right by it?

What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)? In the final analysis, it is simply because might makes right, and we humans, thanks to the intelligence afforded us by the complexity of our brains and our embeddedness in rich languages and cultures, are indeed high and mighty, relative to the “lower” animals (and vegetables). By virtue of our might, we are forced to establish some sort of ranking of creatures, whether we do so as a result of long and careful personal reflections or simply go along with the compelling flow of the masses. Are cows just as comfortably killable as mosquitoes? Would you feel any less troubled by swatting a fly preening on a wall than by beheading a chicken quivering on a block? Obviously, such questions can be endlessly proliferated (note the ironic spelling of this verb), but I will not do so here.

Below, I have inserted my own personal “consciousness cone”. It is not meant to be exact; it is merely suggestive, but I submit that some comparable structure exists inside your head, as well as in the head of each language-endowed human being, although in most cases it is seldom if ever subjected to intense scrutiny, because it is not even explicitly formulated.

Interiority — What Has it, and to What Degree?

It is most unlikely that you, a reader of this book, have missed all the Star Wars movies, with their rather unforgettable characters C-3PO and R2-D2. Absurdly unrealistic though these two robots are, especially as perceived by someone like myself who has worked for decades trying to understand just the most primordial mechanisms of human intelligence by building computational models thereof, they nonetheless serve one very useful purpose — they are mind-openers. Seeing C-3PO and R2-D2 “in flesh and blood” on the screen makes us realize that whenever we look at an entity made of metal or plastic, we are not inherently destined to jump reflexively to the dogmatic conclusion, “That thing is necessarily an inanimate object since it is made of ‘the wrong stuff ’.” Rather, we find, perhaps to our own surprise, that we are easily able to imagine a thinking, feeling entity made of cold, rigid, unfleshlike stuff.

In one of the Star Wars films, I recall seeing a huge squadron of hundreds of uniformly marching robots — and when I say “uniformly”, I mean really uniformly, with all of them strutting in perfect synchrony, and all of them featuring identical, impassive, vacuous, mechanical facial expressions. I suspect that thanks to this unmistakable image of absolute interchangeability, virtually no viewer feels the slightest twinge of sadness when a bomb falls on the charging platoon and all of its members — these factory-made “creatures” — are instantly blown to smithereens. After all, in diametric opposition to C-3PO and R2-D2, these robots are not creatures at all — they are just hunks of metal! There is no more interiority to these metallic shells than there is to a can-opener or a car or a battleship, a fact revealed to us by their perfect identicality. Or else, if perchance there is inside of them some tiny degree of interiority, it is on the same order as the interiority of an ant. These metallic marchers are mere soldier robots, members of a dronelike caste in some larger robot colony, and are merely following out, in their zombie-ish way, the inflexible mechanical drives implanted in their circuitry. If there is interiority somewhere in there, it is of a negligible level.

What is it, then, that gives us the undeniable sense that C-3PO and R2-D2 have a “light on” inside, that there is lots of genuine interiority inside their inorganic crania, located somewhere behind their funny circular “eyes”? Where does our undeniable sense of their “I” ’s come from? And contrariwise, what was it that was lacking in former President Reagan in his last years and in that mass of identical blown-up soldier robots, and what is it that is not lacking in Hattie the chocolate labrador and in R2-D2 the robot, that makes all the difference to us?

The Gradual Growth of a Soul

I stated above that I am among those who reject the notion that a full-fledged human soul comes into being the moment that a human sperm joins a human ovum to form a human zygote. By contrast, I believe that a human soul — and, by the way, it is my aim in this book to make clear what I mean by this slippery, shifting word, often rife with religious connotations, but here not having any — comes slowly into being over the course of years of development. It may sound crass to put it this way, but I would like to suggest, at least metaphorically, a numerical scale of “degrees of souledness”. We can initially imagine it as running from 0 to 100, and the units of this scale can be called, just for the fun of it, “hunekers”. Thus you and I, dear reader, both possess 100 hunekers of souledness, or thereabouts. Shake!

Oops! I just realized that I have committed an error that comes from long years of indoctrination into the admirable egalitarian traditions of my native land — namely, I unconsciously assumed that there is a value at which souledness “maxes out”, and that all normal adults reach that ceiling and can go no higher. Why, though, should I make any such assumption? Why could souledness not be like tallness? There is an average tallness for adults, but there is also a considerable spread around that average. Why should there not likewise be an average degree of souledness for adults (100 hunekers, say), plus a wide range around that average, maybe (as for IQ) going as high as 150 or 200 hunekers in rare cases, and down to 50 or lower in others?

If that’s how things are, then I retract my reflexive claim that you and I, dear reader, share 100 hunekers of souledness. Instead, I’d like to suggest that we both have considerably higher readings than that on the hunekometer! (I hope you agree.) However, this is starting to feel like dangerous moral territory, verging on the suggestion that some people are worth more than others — a thought that is anathema in our society (and which troubles me, as well), so I won’t spend much time here trying to figure out how to calculate a person’s souledness value in hunekers.

It strikes me that when sperm joins ovum, the resulting infinitesimal bio-blob has a soul-value of essentially zero hunekers. What has happened, however, is that a dynamic, snowballing entity has come into existence that over a period of years will be capable of developing a complex set of internal structures or patterns — and the presence, to a higher and higher degree, of those intricate patterns is what would endow that entity (or rather, the enormously more complex entities into which it slowly metamorphoses, step by step) with an ever-larger value along the Huneker soul-scale, homing in on a value somewhere in the vicinity of 100.

The cone shown on the following page gives a crude but vivid sense of how I might attach huneker values to human beings of ages from zero to twenty (or alternatively, to just one human being, but at different stages).

In short, I would here argue, echoing and generalizing the provocative statement by James Huneker, that “souledness” is by no means an off–on, black-and-white, discrete variable having just two possible states like a bit, a pixel, or a light bulb, but rather is a shaded, blurry numerical variable that ranges continuously across different species and varieties of object, and that also can rise or fall over time as a result of the growth or decay, within the entity in question, of a special kind of subtle pattern (the elucidation of whose nature will keep us busy for much of this book). I would also argue that most people’s largely unconscious prejudices about whether to eat or not to eat this or that food, whether to buy or not to buy this or that article of clothing, whether to swat or not to swat this or that insect, whether to root or not to root for this or that species of robot in a sci-fi film, whether to be sad or not to be sad if a human character in a film or a novel meets with a violent end, whether to claim or not to claim that a particular senescent person “is no longer there”, and so forth, reflect precisely this kind of numerical continuum in their minds, whether they admit it or not.

You might wonder whether my having drawn a cone that impenitently depicts “degrees of souledness” during the development of a given human being implies that I would be more willing, if placed under enormous pressure (as in the film Sophie’s Choice), to extinguish the life of a two-year-old child than the life of a twenty-year-old adult. The answer is, “No, it does not.” Even though I sincerely believe there is much more of a soul in the twenty-year-old than in the two-year-old (a view that will no doubt dismay many readers), I nonetheless have enormous respect for the potential of the two-year-old to develop a much larger soul over the course of a dozen or so years. In addition, I have been built, by the mechanisms of billions of years of evolution, to perceive in the two-year-old what, for lack of a better word, I will call “cuteness”, and the perceived presence of that quality grants the two-year-old an amazingly strong shell of protectedness against attacks not just by me, but by humans of all ages, sexes, and persuasions.

Lights On?

The central aim of this book is to try to pinpoint the nature of that “special kind of subtle pattern” that I have come to believe underlies, or gives rise to, what I have here been calling a “soul” or an “I”. I could just as well have spoken of “having a light on inside”, “possessing interiority”, or that old standby, “being conscious”.

Philosophers of mind often use the terms “possessing intentionality” (which means having beliefs and desires and fears and so forth) or “having semantics” (which means the ability to genuinely think about things, as contrasted with the “mere” ability to juggle meaningless tokens in complicated patterns — a distinction that I raised in the dialogue between my versions of Socrates and Plato).

Although each of these terms puts the focus on a slightly different aspect of the elusive abstraction that concerns us, they are all, from my perspective, pretty much interchangeable. And for all of these terms, I reiterate that they have to be understood as coming in degrees along a sliding scale, rather than as on/off, black/white, yes/no switches.

Post Scriptum

The first draft of this chapter was written two years ago, and although it discussed meat-eating and vegetarianism, it had far less on the topic than this final version does. Some months later, while I was “fleshing it out” by summarizing the short story “Pig”, I suddenly found myself questioning the dividing line that I had carefully drawn two decades earlier and had lived with ever since (although occasionally somewhat uneasily) — namely, the line between mammals and other animals.

All at once, I started feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of eating chicken and fish, even though I had done so for some twenty years, and so, catching myself by surprise, I stopped “cold turkey”. And by a remarkable coincidence, my two children independently came to similar conclusions at almost exactly the same time, so that over a period of just a couple of weeks our family’s diet was transmuted into a completely vegetarian one. I’ve returned to the same spot as I was in when I was twenty-one in Sardinia, and it’s the spot I plan to stay in.

Writing this chapter thus gave rise to a totally unexpected boomerang effect on its author — and as we shall see in later chapters, such an unpredictable bouncing-back of choices one has just made, followed by the incorporation of their repercussions into one’s self-model, serves as an excellent example of the meaning of the motto “I am a strange loop.”