I Am a Strange Loop

she happens to drive by our favorite falafel place in San Jose and stops to eat a falafel, I’m not going to taste that falafel as I sit here slaving away in my study in Bloomington, Indiana. And therefore I am not there, but here! And therefore my consciousness is local, not global, not spread out! And therefore that’s the end of the story!

But things are not quite that simple. I might receive news of Laura’s falafel an hour later, by a telephone call. When she describes it vividly (or not even vividly, since I know it so well), my mouth starts watering as I recall the exact texture of the little crunchy balls and the delicious red hot sauce. I know those falafels like the back of my teeth. Although my tongue is not caressing those little chunky deep-fried bits, something in my brain is taking a sensual delight in what I could call (in imitation of the phrase “sympathetic pain”) “sympathetic pleasure”. Albeit in a feeble way and an hour after the fact, I am sharing Laura’s pleasure. But so what if it’s a feeble imitation and is not exactly simultaneous? Even if my pleasure is a low-resolution copy of hers and is displaced in time, it is nonetheless pleasure, and it is pleasure that is “about” Laura, not about myself. Her delight has been powerfully transmitted to me. And so, at a distance, at a delay, and to a diminished degree, I am in her skin and she is in mine.

That’s all I’m claiming — that there is blur. That some of what happens in other brains gets copied, albeit coarse-grainedly, inside the brain of “Number One”, and that the closer two brains are to each other emotionally, the more stuff gets copied back and forth from one to the other, and the more faithful the copies are. There’s no claim that the act of copying is simultaneous or perfect or total — just that each person lives partially in the brain of the other, and that if the bandwidth were turned up more and more and more and still more, they would come to live more and more inside each other — until, in the limit, the sense of a clear boundary between them would slowly be dissolved, as it is for the two halves of a Twinwirld pairson (and even more so for a Siamese Twinwirld pairson).

As it happens, we do not live in a didymous world like Twinwirld, nor do we live in a world where the existence of relatively clear boundaries between souls seems imminently threatened by the advent of extremely high-bandwidth interbrain communication — a world in which signals are swapped so fast and furiously between brains that separate bodies would cease to determine separate individuals. That is not the case at present, nor do I envision it becoming the case in the foreseeable future (though I am not a futurologist, and I could be quite wrong).

My point, though, is that the myth of watertight boundaries between souls is something whose falsity we all have slight tastes of all the time, but since it is so convenient and so conventional to associate one body with precisely one soul, since it is so deeply tempting and so deeply ingrained to see a body and a soul as being in perfect alignment, we choose to downplay or totally ignore the implications of the everyday manifestations of the interpenetration of souls.

Consider how profoundly wrapped up you can become in a close friend’s successes and failures, in their very personal ecstasies and agonies. If my vicarious enjoyment of my sister’s falafel seemed vivid to me, just think how much more vivid and intense is your vicarious thrill when a forever-lonely friend of yours finally bumps into someone wonderful and a promising romance starts up, or when a long-frustrated actor friend is finally given a lucky break and receives terrific reviews in the press. Or turning things around, think how powerful is your sense of injustice when a close friend of yours is hit, out of the blue, by some terrible misfortune. What are you doing but living their life inside your own head?

And yet we describe phenomena of this extremely familiar sort in easier, less challenging terms, such as “He identifies with her”, or “She is such an empathetic woman”, or “I know what you’re going through”, or “I feel for you”, or “It pains me to see what she’s up against”, or “Don’t tell me any more — I can’t stand it!” Standard expressions like these, although they indeed reflect someone’s partially being inside someone else, are seldom if ever taken as literal suggestions that our souls really do interpenetrate and blur together. That is just too messy and possibly even too scary an idea for us to deal with, and so we insist instead that there is no genuine overlap, that we are like distant galaxies to each other. Our lifelong ingrained habit is to accept without question the caged-bird metaphor for souls, and it’s very hard to break out of such a profoundly rooted habit.

Am I No One Else or Am I Everyone Else?

The image of the caged bird essentially implies that different people are like separate dots on the same line, dots having a diameter of exactly zero, and thus having no overlap whatsoever. Indeed, if we take the so-called “real line” of elementary algebra as a metaphor, then the caged-bird metaphor would assign to each person a “serial number” — an infinite decimal that uniquely determines “what it is like” to be that person. In that view, you and I, no matter how similar we think we are, no matter how much experience we have shared in life, even if we are identical or Siamese twins, were simply assigned different serial numbers at birth, and hence we inhabit different zero-width dots on the line, and that is that. You are you, I am I, and there is not one whit of overlap, no matter how near we are. I cannot possibly know what it’s like to be you, nor the reverse.

The opposite thesis would claim that every person is distributed uniformly over the entire real line, and that all individuals are therefore one and the same person! There is only one person. This extreme view, although less commonly advocated, has its modern proponents, such as philosopher Daniel Kolak in his recent book I Am You. This view makes as little sense to me as does panpsychism, which asserts that every entity — every stone, every picnic table, every picnic, every electron, every rainbow, every drop of water, waterfall, skyscraper, oil refinery, billboard, speedlimit sign, traffic ticket, county jail, jailbreak, track meet, election rigging, airport gate, spring sale, soap opera cancellation, photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and so on ad nauseam — is conscious.

The viewpoint of this book lies somewhere between these two extremes, picturing individuals not as pointlike infinite-decimal serial numbers but as fairly localized, blurry zones scattered here and there along the line. While some of these zones overlap considerably, most of them overlap little or none at all. After all, two smudges of width one inch apiece located a hundred miles apart will obviously have zero overlap. But two smudges of width one inch whose centers are only a half inch apart will have a great deal of overlap. There will not be an unbridgeable existential gap between two such people. Each of them is instead spread out into the other one, and each of them lives partially in the other.

Interpenetration of National Souls

Earlier in this chapter, I briefly offered the image of a self as analogous to a country with embassies in many other countries. Now I wish to pursue a similar notion, but I’ll start out with a very simplistic notion of what a country is, and will build up from there. So let’s consider the slogan “One country, one people”. Such a slogan would suggest that each people (a spiritual, cultural notion involving history, traditions, language, mythology, literature, music, art, religion, and so forth) is always crisply and perfectly aligned with some country (a physical, geographical notion involving oceans, lakes, rivers, mountains, valleys, prairies, mineral deposits, cities, highways, precise legal borders, and so forth).

If we actually believed a strict geographical analogue to the caged-bird metaphor for human selves, then we would have the curious belief that all individuals found inside a certain geographical region always had the same cultural identity. The phrase “an American in Paris” would make no sense to us, for the French nationality would coincide exactly with the boundaries of the physical place called “France”. There could never be Americans in France, nor French people in America! And of course analogous notions would hold for all countries and peoples. This is clearly absurd. Migration and tourism are universal phenomena, and they intermix countries and peoples continuously.

This does not mean that there is no such thing as a people or a country, of course. Both notions remain useful, despite enormous blurs concerning each one. Think for a moment of Italy, for instance. The northwestern region called “Valle d’Aosta” is largely French-speaking, while the northeastern region called “Alto Adige” (also “Sudtirol”) is largely German-speaking. Moreover, north of Milano but across the border, the Swiss canton of Ticino is Italian-speaking. So what is the relationship between the country of Italy and the Italian people? It is not precise and sharp, to say the least — and yet we still find it useful to talk about Italy and Italians. It’s just that we know there is a blur around both concepts. And what goes for Italy goes for every country. We know that each nationality is a blurry, spread-out phenomenon centered on but not limited to a single geographical region, and we are completely accustomed to this notion. It does not feel paradoxical or confusing in the least.