(or nuclei). No tree is privileged. In this image, then (which is close to Daniel Kolak’s view in I Am You), each human soul floats among all human brains, and its identity is determined not by its location but by the undulating global pattern it forms.
These are extremes, but nothing keeps us from imagining a halfway situation, with many localized swarms of butterflies, each swarm floating near a single tree but not limited to it. Thus a red swarm might be centered on tree A but blur out to the nearest dozen trees, and a blue swarm might be blurrily centered on tree B, a yellow swarm around tree C, etc. Each tree would be the center of just one swarm, and each swarm would have just one principal tree, but the swarms would interpenetrate so intimately that it would be hard to tell which swarm “belonged” to which tree, or vice versa.
This peculiar and surreal tale, launched in solid-state physics but winding up with imagery of interpenetrating swarms of colored butterflies fluttering in an orchard, gives as clear a picture as I can paint of how a human soul is spread among brains.
Page 264 Many of these ideas were explored …in his philosophical fantasy “Where Am I?”… This classic piece can be found in [Dennett 1978] and in [Hofstadter and Dennett].
Page 267 internal conflict between several “rival selves”… Chapter 13 of [Dennett 1991] gives a careful discussion of multiple personality disorder. See also [Thigpen and Cleckley], from which a famous movie was made. See also [Minsky 1986] and Chapter 33 of [Hofstadter 1985] for views of a normal self as containing many competing subselves.
Page 267 in such cases Newtonian physics goes awry… See [Hoffmann] for a discussion of the subtle relationship between relativistic and Newtonian physics.
Page 271 every entity…is conscious… See [Rucker] for a positive view of panpsychism.
Page 276 because now they want the symbols themselves to be perceived… See the careful debunking in [Dennett 1991] of what its author terms the “Cartesian Theater”.
Page 277 to trigger just one familiar pre-existing symbol… This sentence is especially applicable to the nightmare of preparing an index. Only if one has slaved away for weeks on a careful index can one have an understanding of how grueling (and absurd) the task is.
Page 278 when its crust is discarded and its core is distilled… See [Sander], [Kahneman and Miller], [Kanerva], [Schank], [Boden], and [Gentner et al.] for discussions of the analogy-based mechanisms of memory retrieval, which underlie all human cognition.
Page 279 to simplify while not letting essence slip away… See [Hofstadter 2001], [Sander], and [Hofstadter and FARG]. To figure out how to give a computer the rudiments of this ability has been the Holy Grail of my research group for three decades now.
Page 279 There is not some special “consciousness locus”… See [Dennett 1991].
Page 282 but we are getting ever closer… See [Monod], [Cordeschi], and [Dupuy 2000] for clear discussions of the emergence of goal-orientedness (i.e., teleology) from feedback.
Page 283 a physical vortex, like a hurricane or a whirlpool… See Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter 1985] for a discussion of the abstract essence of hurricanes.
Page 283 every integer is the sum of at most four squares… See [Hardy and Wright] and [Niven and Zuckerman] for this classic theorem, the simplest case of Waring’s theorem.
Page 285 to see that brilliant purple color of the flower… See [Chalmers] for a spirited defense of the notion of qualia, and see [Dennett 1991], [Dennett 1998], [Dennett 2005], and [Hofstadter and Dennett], which do their best to throw a wet blanket on the idea.
Page 287 There is no meaning to the letter “b”… See the dialogue “Prelude… Ant Fugue”
(found in both [Hofstadter 1979] and [Hofstadter and Dennett]) for a discussion of how meanings at a high level can emerge from meaningless symbols at a low level.
Page 293 the notion that consciousness is a novel kind of quantum phenomenon… See [Penrose], which views consciousness as an intrinsically quantum-mechanical phenomenon, and [Rucker], which views consciousness as uniformly pervading everything in the universe.
Page 295 Taoism and Zen long ago sensed this paradoxical state… Far and away the best book I have read on these spiritual approaches to life is [Smullyan 1977], but [Smullyan 1978] and [Smullyan 1983] also contain excellent pieces on the topic. These ideas are also discussed in Chapter 9 of [Hofstadter 1979], but from a skeptical point of view.
Page 296 the story of an “I” is a tale about a central essence… See [Dennett 1992] and [Kent].
Page 298 The…self-pointing loop that the pronoun “I” involves … See [Brinck] and [Kent].
Page 299 This is what John von Neumann unwittingly revealed… See [von Neumann] for a very difficult and [Poundstone] for a very lucid discussion of self-replicating automata.
See Chapters 2 and 3 of [Hofstadter 1985] for a simpler discussion of the same ideas. Chapter 16 of [Hofstadter 1979] carefully spells out the mapping between Godel’s self-referential construction and the self- replicating mechanisms at the core of life.
Page 300 too marbelous for words… Borrowing a few words from a love song by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting, sung in an unsurpassable fashion by Frank Sinatra.
Page 300 with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality… My father’s friend Bob Herman (a top-notch physicist who famously co-predicted the cosmic background radiation fifteen years before it was observed) loved to recite this riddle, putting on a strong Yiddish accent: “A tramp in the woods happened upon a hornets’ nest. When they stung him with alacrity, celerity, assiduity, vim, vigor, vitality, savoir-faire, and undue velocity, ‘Oh!’, he mused, counting his bumps, ‘If I had as many bumps on the left side of my right adenoid as six and three-quarters times seven-eighths of those between the heel of Achilles and the circumference of Adam’s apple, how long would it take a boy rolling a hoop up a moving stairway going down to count the splinters on a boardwalk if a horse had six legs?’ ” And so I thought I’d give a little posthumous hat-tip to Bob.
Page 305 Dan calls such carefully crafted fables ‘intuition pumps’… Dennett introduced his term “intuition pump”, I believe, in the Reflections that he wrote on John Searle’s “Chinese room” thought experiment in Chapter 22 of [Hofstadter and Dennett].
Page 308 The term Parfit prefers is “psychological continuity”… See [Nozick] for a lengthy treatment of the closely related concept of “closest continuer”.
Page 309 what Einstein accomplished in creating special relativity… See [Hoffmann].
Page 309 what a whole generation of brilliant physicists, with Einstein at their core… See [Pais 1986], [Pais 1991], and [Pullman].
Page 315 just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones… See the Prologue for my first inklings of this viewpoint. See also my Achilles–Tortoise dialogue entitled “A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain”, which is Chapter 26 in [Hofstadter and Dennett], for more evolved ideas on it.
Page 320 Dave Chalmers explores these issues… See [Chalmers]. I always find it ironic that Dave’s highly articulate and subtle ideas on consciousness, so wildly opposed to my own, took shape right under my nose some fifteen or so years ago, in my very own Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, at Indiana University (although the old oaken table in Room 641 is a bit of a tall tale…). Dave added enormous verve to our research group, and he was a good friend to both Carol and me. Despite our disagreements on qualia, zombies, and consciousness, we remain good friends.
Page 321 with a nine-planet solar system… I’m not about to enter into the raging debate over poor Pluto’s possible planethood (is Disney’s Pluto a dog?), although I think the question is a fascinating one from the point of view of cognitive science, since it opens up deep questions about the nature of categories and analogies in the human mind.
Page 322 Z-people… laugh exactly the same as …Q-people… See “Planet without Laughter” in [Smullyan 1980], a wonderful tale about vacuously laughing zombies.
