I Am a Strange Loop (49 page)

Along with Carol’s desires, hopes, and so on, her own personal sense of “I” is represented in my brain, because I was so close to her, because I empathized so deeply with her, co-felt so many things with her, was so able to see things from inside her point of view when we spoke, whether it was her physical sufferings (writhing in pain an hour after a sigmoidoscopy, her insides churning with residual air bubbles) or her greatest joys (a devilishly clever bon mot by David Moser, a scrumptious Indian meal in Cambridge) or her fondest hopes or her reactions to movies or whatever.

For brief periods of time in conversations, or even in nonverbal moments of intense feeling,
I was Carol,
just as, at times,
she was Doug.
So her “personal gemma” (to borrow Stanislaw Lem’s term in his story “Non Serviam”) had brought into existence a somewhat blurry, coarse-grained copy of itself inside my brain, had created a secondary Gödelian swirl inside my brain (the primary one of course being my own self-swirl), a Gödelian swirl that allowed me to be her, or, said otherwise, a Gödelian swirl that allowed her self, her personal gemma, to ride (in simplified form) on my hardware.

But is this secondary swirl that now lives in my brain, this simulated personal gemma, anything like the
real
swirl, the
primary
swirl, that once lived in her brain and is now gone? Is there Carol-consciousness still somewhere in this world? That is, is it possible for me to look at Monica “for Carol” and, even in the tiniest degree, to
become Carol
seeing Monica? Or has that personal gemma been finally and totally and irrevocably obliterated?

A person is a
point of view
— not only a
physical
point of view (looking out of certain eyes in a certain physical place in the universe), but more importantly a
psyche’s
point of view: a set of hair-trigger associations rooted in a huge bank of memories. The latter can be absorbed, more and more over time, by someone else. Thus it’s like acquiring a foreign language step by step.

For a while, one’s speaking is largely “fake” — that is, one is thinking in one’s native language but substituting words quickly enough to give the impression that the thinking is going on in the second language; however, as one’s experience with the second language grows, new grammatical habits form and turn slowly into reflexes, as do thousands of lexical items, and the second language becomes more and more rooted, more and more genuine. One gradually becomes a fluent thinker in and speaker of the other language, and it is no longer “fake”, even if one has an accent in it. So it is with coming to see the world through another person’s soul.

My parents, for instance, internalized each other’s psychic points of view very deeply over the nearly fifty years of their marriage, and each of them thus gradually became a “fluent be-er” of the other. Perhaps when my mother “was” my father, she was so with an “accent”, and vice versa, but for each of them, the act of
being
the other one was certainly genuine, was not fakery.

As with my parents, so there was some degree of genuine
being of Carol
by me when she was alive, and vice versa. Although it took me several years to learn to “be” Carol, and although I certainly never reached the “native speaker” level, I think it’s fair to say that, at our times of greatest closeness, I was a “fluent be-er” of my wife. I shared so many of her memories, both from our joint times and from times before we ever met, I knew so many of the people who had formed her, I loved so many of the same pieces of music, movies, books, friends, jokes, I shared so many of her most intimate desires and hopes. So her point of view, her interiority, her
self,
which had originally been instantiated in just one brain, came to have a second instantiation, although that one was far less complete and intricate than the original one. (Actually, long before she met me, her point of view had already engendered other instantiations, because it had of course been internalized to varying degrees and levels of fidelity by her siblings and her parents.) Needless to say, Carol’s point of view was always by far
most
strongly instantiated in
her
brain.

This talk of someone “being” someone else reminds me of a Linguistics Department Christmas party back in the late 1970’s, when Carol’s and my old friend Tom Ernst did a marvelous imitation of his professor John Goldsmith (also a friend), with so many
echt
mannerisms of John’s. It was uncanny to me to watch Tom “put on” and “take off” John’s style — and in so doing, putting John on and making a fine take-off of him.

There are shallower aspects of a person and there are deeper aspects, and the deeper aspects are what imbue the shallower ones with genuine meaning. I guess that sounds cryptic. What I mean is that if I believe statement X (for example, “Chopin is a great composer”) and someone else also believes X, then, despite this ostensible agreement between us, our internal feelings when we think X may be unutterably different even though, on the superficial verbal level, our belief is “the same”. On the other hand, if our souls have a deep resemblance, then our two beliefs in X will in fact be very similar, and we will intuitively resonate with each other. Communication (at least on that topic) will be nearly effortless.

What really matters for mutual understanding of two people are such things as having similar responses to music (not just shared likes but also shared dislikes), having similar responses to people (again, I mean both likes and dislikes), having similar degrees of empathy, honesty, patience, sentimentality, audacity, ambition, competitiveness, and so on. These central building blocks of personality, character, and temperament are decisive in mutual understanding.

Consider, for instance, the shattering experience of constantly feeling inferior to other people. Some people know this intimately, and some don’t know it at all. A person with huge reserves of self-confidence will simply
never
be able to feel how it is to be paralyzed by the lack of confidence — they “just don’t get it”. It is
these
sorts of aspects, these innermost aspects of a soul (as opposed to such relatively objective and transferable items as countries visited, novels read, cuisines mastered, historical facts known, and so forth) that make for soul-uniqueness.

I’m concerned with whether the deeper aspects of a person, the ones that give rise to a self, to an “I”, are transportable to another person, or absorbable by another person (
i.e.,
by the second person’s brain). The second person doesn’t have to change their own personality or opinions in order to absorb the first person; it can be more like an alter ego that, like an article of clothing or a persona or a stage role, they can occasionally don or slip into (my image is that of Tom Ernst putting on and taking off that John Goldsmith persona, although of course on a much more profound level), a sort of a “second vantage point” from which to see the world.

But the key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you ever have absorbed
so much of them
that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that
person
did not totally perish from the earth, because they (or at least a significant fraction of them) are still instantiated in your brain, because they still live on in a “second neural home”?

In my opinion, to deal with this question head-on, one really has to focus on this thing I call the “Gödelian swirl of self”. The key question becomes this: When the
pointers
to “self” — the structures that, through a lifetime of locking-in and self-stabilizing, have given rise to an “I” — are copied in some imperfect, low-resolution fashion in a secondary brain, where exactly do they wind up pointing?

My internal model of Carol is certainly “thin” or sparse in comparison to the original self-model (the one that was located inside her own brain), but that sparseness is not the key issue. The crux is this: even if my internal model of Carol were unbelievably rich (
e.g.,
like my Mom’s model of my Dad, say, or even ten times stronger than that), would it nonetheless be
the wrong kind of structure
to give rise to an “I”? Would it be something other than a strange loop? Would it be a structure pointing
not at itself
but at
something else,
and therefore be lacking that essentially swirly, vorticial, self-referential quality that makes an “I”?

My guess is that if the model were extremely rich, extremely faithful, then effectively the destinations of all the pointers in it would be
fluid
— in other words, the pointers inside my model of Carol would be able to slip, to point just as validly to the symbol for her in
my
brain as to her
own
self-symbol. If so, then the original swirliness, the original “I”-ness of the structure, would have been successfully transported to a second medium and reconstructed faithfully (though far more coarse-grainedly) in it.

The “outer” layers of the self consist in lots of pointers that point mostly at standard universal aspects of the world (
e.g.,
rain, ice cream, the swooping of swallows, etc., etc.); the “middle” layers of the self consist in pointers to things more tied in with one’s own life (
e.g.,
one’s parents’ faces and voices, the music one loves, the street one grew up on, one’s beloved pets from childhood, one’s favorite books and movies, and many other deep things); then the inner sanctum has tons of tangly pointers to very deeply “indexical” things, such as one’s insecurities, one’s sexual feelings, one’s most intense fears, one’s deepest loves, and lots of other things that I cannot put my finger on). All this is very vague, and only meant to suggest a kind of imagery wherein the outermost layers have mostly outwards-pointing arrows, the middle layers have a mixture of inwards and outwards arrows, and then the innermost core has tons of arrows that point right back in towards itself. Strange-Loop City — that’s an “I” for you!

It’s that deeply twisted-back-on-itself quality of the innermost core that, I surmise, makes it so hard to transport elsewhere, that makes the soul so deeply, almost irrevocably, attached to one single body, one single brain. The outer layers are relatively easy to transport, of course, with their relative paucity of inwards-pointing pointers, and the middle layers are medium easy to transport. Someone as close to Carol as I was can get lots of the outer layers and something of the middle layers and little bits of the inner core, but can one ever internalize enough of that core to say that, even in a very diluted sense, “she’s still here among us”?