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
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
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
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
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.”
CHAPTER 2
What Is a “Brain Structure”?
I HAVE often been asked, when people hear that my research amounts to a quest after the hidden machinery of human thought, “Oh, so that means that you study the brain?”
One part of me wants to reply, “No, no — I think about
