I Am a Strange Loop

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