I Am a Strange Loop

communication between your team’s two members is so strong and rapid, however, that the fused entity — the team itself — seems like just one thing, one absolutely unbreakable self. You know just what this feels like because it’s how you are constructed! And if you’re anything like me, neither of your half-brains goes around calling itself “i” and brazenly proclaiming itself an autonomous soul! Rather, the two of them together make just one capital “I”. In short, our own human condition in this, the real world, is quite analogous to that of pairsons in Siamese Twinwirld.

The communication between the two halves of a dividual in Twinwirld (whether it’s the Siamese variant or the original one) is, of course, less efficient than that between the two cerebral hemispheres inside a human head, because our hemispheres are hard-wired together. On the other hand, the communication between halves in Twinwirld is more efficient than that between nearly any two individuals in our “normal” world. And so the degree of fusing-together of two Twinwirld halves, though not as deep as that between two cerebral hemispheres, is deeper than that between two very close siblings in our world, deeper than that between identical twins, deeper than that between wife and husband.

Post Scriptum re Twinwirld

After I had written a first draft of this chapter and had moved on to the following one, which is based on emails exchanged between Dan Dennett and myself in 1994, I noticed that in one of his messages to me he referred to an unusual pair of twins in England that he had mentioned in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained (which I had read in manuscript form). I had forgotten this email from Dan, so I decided to go look the reference up in his book, and I found the following passage:

We can imagine.… two or more bodies sharing a single self. There may actually be such a case, in York, England: the Chaplin twins, Greta and Freda (Time, April 6, 1981). These identical twins, now in their forties and living together in a hostel, seem to act as one; they collaborate on the speaking of single speech acts, for instance, finishing each other’s sentences with ease or speaking in unison, with one just a split-second behind. For years they have been inseparable, as inseparable as two twins who are not Siamese twins could arrange. Some who have dealt with them suggest that the natural and effective tactic that suggested itself was to consider them more of a her.…

I’m not for a moment suggesting that these twins were linked by telepathy or ESP or any other sort of occult bonds. I am suggesting that there are plenty of subtle, everyday ways of communicating and coordinating (techniques often highly developed by identical twins, in fact). Since these twins have seen, heard, touched, smelled, and thought about very much the same events throughout their lives, and started, no doubt, with brains quite similarly disposed to react to these stimuli, it might not take enormous channels of communication to keep them homing in on some sort of loose harmony. (And besides, how unified is the most self-possessed among us?) ….

But in any case, wouldn’t there also be two clearly defined individual selves, one for each twin, and responsible for maintaining this curious charade? Perhaps, but what if each of these women had become so selfless (as we do say) in her devotion to the joint cause that she more or less lost herself (as we also say) in the project?

I don’t have any clear memory of when I first came up with the germ that has here blossomed out as my fairly elaborate Twinwirld fantasy, although I’d like to think it was before I read about the Chaplin twins in Dan’s book. But whether I got the idea from Dan or made it up myself isn’t crucial; I was delighted to discover not only that Dan resonated with the idea, but also that observers of real human behavior claimed to have seen something much like what I was merely blue-skying about. Twinwirld thus comes one step closer to plausibility than I might have suspected.

There is one other curiosity that by a great stroke of luck dovetails astonishingly with this chapter. A couple of days after finishing Twinwirld, I chanced to see a scrap of paper on my bedside table, and on it, in pencil, in my own hand, were written four German words — O du angenehmes Paar (“O thou pleasant couple”). That short phrase didn’t ring a bell, but from its antiquated and exalted tone, I guessed that it was probably the opening line of an aria from some Bach cantata that I had once heard on the radio, found beautiful, and jotted down. From the Web I quickly found out my guess was right — these are the words that open a bass aria from Cantata 197, Gott ist unsre Zuversicht (“God, Our One True Source of Faith”). It turns out that this is a “wedding cantata” — one intended to accompany a marriage ceremony.

Here are the words that the bass sings to the couple, given first in the original German and then in my own translation, respecting both the meter and the rhyme scheme of the original:

O du angenehmes Paar,

Dir wird eitel Heil begegnen,

Gott wird dich aus Zion segnen

Und dich leiten immerdar,

O du angenehmes Paar!

O thou charming bridal pair,

Providence shall e’er caress thee

And from Zion God shall bless thee

And shall guide thee, e’er and e’er,

O thou charming bridal pair!

Are you struck, dear reader, by something rather peculiar about these words? What struck me forcefully is that although they are being sung to a couple, they feature singular pronouns — du, dir, and dich in German and, in my English rendition, the obsolete pronouns “thou” and “thee”. On one level, these second-person singular pronouns sound strange and wrong, and yet, by addressing the couple in the singular, they convey a profound feeling of the imminent joining- together of two souls in a sacred union. To me, these poems suggest that the wedding ceremony in which they occur constitutes a “soul merger”, giving rise to a single unit having just one “higher-level soul”, like two drops of water coming together, touching, and then seamlessly fusing, showing that sometimes one plus one equals one.

I found translations of this aria’s words into French and Italian, and they, too, used tu to address the twosome, and this, just like the German, sounded far weirder to me than the English, since tu (in either language) is completely standard usage today (unlike “thou”) but it is always addressed to just one person, never ever to a couple or small group of any kind.

To experience the same kind of semantic jolt in modern English, you’d have to move from second person to first person, and imagine the opposite of the editorial “we” — namely, a pair of people who refer to the union they compose as “I”. Thus I shall now counterfactually extend Cantata 197 by imagining one last joyous aria to be sung by the united twosome at the very end of their wedding ceremony. Its first line would run, Jetzt bin ich ein strahlendes Paar — “I now am a radiant couple” — and the new wife and husband would sing it precisely in unison from start to finish, instead of singing two melodies in typical Bachian counterpoint, for doing that would inappropriately draw attention to their distinct identities. In this closing aria, “I” would denote the couple itself, not either of its members, and the aria would be thought of as being for the couple’s one new voice rather than for two independent voices.