I Am a Strange Loop (57 page)

So let us exploit our comfort with the relationship between a place and a people to try to get a more sophisticated handle on the relationship between a body and a soul. Consider China, which over the past couple of centuries has lost millions of people to emigration. Does China simply forget about those people, thinking of them as deserters and expunging them from its collective memory? Not at all. There is a strong residual feeling inside China for the “Overseas Chinese”. These cherished though distant people are urged to “come home” at least temporarily, and when they do, they are warmly welcomed like long-lost relatives (which of course is exactly what they are). This overseas branch of China is thus considered, within China, very much a part of China. It is a “halo” of Chineseness that extends far beyond the physical borders of the land.

Not just China, of course, but every country has such a halo, and this halo shimmers, sometimes brightly, sometimes dimly, in every other country on earth. If there were a counterpart at the country level to human death, then a people whose “body” was annihilated (by some kind of cataclysm such as a huge meteor crashing into their land) could survive, at least partially, thanks to the glowing halo that exists beyond their land’s physical borders.

Though horrific, such an image does not strike us as in the least counterintuitive, because we understand that the physical land, no matter how beloved in song and story, is not indispensable for the survival of a nationality. The geographical place is merely the traditional breeding grounds for an ancient set of genes and memes — complexions, body types, hair colors, traditions, words, proverbs, dances, myths, costumes, recipes, and so forth — and as long as a critical mass of carriers of these genes and memes, located abroad, survives the cataclysm, all of this richness can continue to exist and flourish elsewhere, and the now-gone physical place can continue to be celebrated in song and story.

Although no entire country has ever been physically annihilated, events somewhat like this have happened in the past. I am reminded of the gulping-up of all of Polish soil by Poland’s neighbors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the so-called “partitions of Poland”. The Polish people, although rendered physically homeless, continued to endure. Here was a nation —
naród polski
— vibrant and alive, yet entirely deprived of a land. Indeed, the words that open the Polish national anthem celebrate this survival: “Poland is not lost, as long as we live!” In parallel fashion, the original Jews, scattered in biblical times from the cradle of their culture, continued to survive, keeping alive their traditions, their language, and their beliefs, in the Diaspora.

Halos, Afterglows, Coronas

In the wake of a human being’s death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of all those who were dearest to them. And when those people in turn pass on, the afterglow becomes extremely faint. And when that outer layer in turn passes into oblivion, then the afterglow is feebler still, and after a while there is nothing left.

This slow process of extinction I’ve just described, though gloomy, is a little less gloomy than the standard view. Because bodily death is so clear, so sharp, and so dramatic, and because we tend to cling to the caged-bird view, death strikes us as instantaneous and absolute, as sharp as a guillotine blade. Our instinct is to believe that the light has all at once gone out altogether. I suggest that this is not the case for human souls, because the essence of a human being — truly unlike the essence of a mosquito or a snake or a bird or a pig — is distributed over many a brain. It takes a couple of generations for a soul to subside, for the flickering to cease, for all the embers to burn out. Although “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” may in the end be true, the transition it describes is not so sharp as we tend to think.

It seems to me, therefore, that the instinctive although seldom articulated purpose of holding a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, and to collectively rekindle in them all, for one last time, the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person, profiting directly or indirectly from the presence of one another, feeling the shared presence of that person in the brains that remain, and thus solidifying to the maximal extent possible those secondary personal gemmae that remain aflicker in all these different brains. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word “love” cannot, thus, be separated from the word “I”; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.

CHAPTER 19

Consciousness = Thinking

So Where’s Consciousness in my Loopy Tale?

F
ROM the very start in this book, I have used a few key terms pretty much interchangeably: “self”, “soul”, “I”, “a light on inside”, and “consciousness”. To me, these are all names for the same phenomenon. To other people, they may not seem to denote one single thing, but that’s how they seem to me. It’s like prime numbers of the form 4
n
+ 1 and prime numbers that are the sums of two squares — on the surface these would seem to be descriptions of completely different entities, but on closer analysis they turn out to denote exactly the same entities.

In my way of looking at things, all of these phenomena come in shades of gray, and whatever shade one of them has in a particular being (natural or artificial), all the others have that same shade. Thus I feel that in talking about “I”-ness, I have also been talking about consciousness throughout. Yet I know that some people will protest that although I may have been addressing issues of personal identity, and perhaps the concepts of “I” and “self”, I haven’t even touched the far deeper and more mysterious riddle of consciousness. They will skeptically ask me, “What, then, is
experience
in terms of your strange loops? How do strange loops in the brain tell us anything about
what it feels like
to be alive, to smell honeysuckle, to see a sunset, or to listen to raindrops patter on a tin roof?
That
is what consciousness is all about! How does
that
have anything to do with your strange, loopy idea?”

I doubt that I can answer such questions to the satisfaction of these hard-core skeptics, for they will surely find what I say both too simple and too evasive. Nonetheless, here is my answer, stripped down to its essence: Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to make it even more pithy, consciousness is
thinking.
As Descartes said,
Cogito ergo sum.

Unfortunately, I suspect that this answer is far too compressed for even my most sympathetic readers, so I will try to spell it out a little more explicitly. Most of the time, any given symbol in our brain is dormant, like a book sitting inertly in the remote stacks of a huge library. Every so often, some event will trigger the retrieval of this book from the stacks, and it will be opened and its pages will come alive for some reader. In an analogous way, inside a human brain, perceived external events are continually triggering the highly selective retrieval of symbols from dormancy, and causing them to come alive in all sorts of unanticipated, unprecedented configurations. This dance of symbols in the brain is what consciousness is. (It is also what thinking is.) Note that I say “symbols” and not “neurons”. The dance has to be perceived
at that level
for it to constitute consciousness. So there you have a slightly more spelled-out version.

Enter the Skeptics

“But who
reads
these symbols and their configurations?”, some skeptics will ask. “Who
feels
these symbols ‘come alive’? Where is the counterpart to the reader of the retrieved book?”

I suspect that these skeptics would argue that the symbols’ dance on its own is merely motion of material stuff, unfelt by anyone, so that despite my claim, this dance cannot constitute consciousness. The skeptics would like me to name or point to some special locus of subjective
awareness
that we all have of our thoughts and perceptions. I feel, though, that such a hope is confused, because it uses what I consider to be just another synonym for “conscious” — namely, “aware” — in posing the same question once more, but at a different level. In other words, people seeking the “reader” for configurations of activated symbols may accept the idea of symbols galore being triggered in the brain, but they refuse to call that kind of internal churning “consciousness” because now they want the symbols
themselves
to be perceived. These people would probably be particularly unhappy if I were to bring up the careenium metaphor at this point and to suggest that the dance of simmballs in the careenium constitutes consciousness. They would argue that it’s just the mutual bashing of scads of tiny little marbles on a glorified pool table, and that that’s
obviously
empty and devoid of consciousness. They want much more than that.

Such skeptics are in essence kicking the problem upstairs — instead of settling for the idea that symbol-level brain activity (or simmball-level careenium activity) that mirrors external events
is
consciousness, they now insist that the internal events of brain activity must in turn be perceived if consciousness is to arise. This runs the risk of setting up an infinite regress and thus moving further and further away from an answer to the riddle of consciousness rather than homing in on an answer to it.

I will give such people one thing, however — I will agree that symbolic activity is itself an important, indispensable focus of a human brain’s attention (but I would quickly add that this does not hold for chickens or frogs or butterflies, and pretty darn little for dogs). Mature human brains are constantly trying to reduce the complexity of what they perceive, and this means that they are constantly trying to get unfamiliar, complex
patterns
made of many symbols that have been freshly activated in concert to trigger just
one
familiar pre-existing symbol (or a very small set of them). In fact, that’s the main business of human brains — to take a complex situation and to put one’s finger on
what matters
in it, to distill from an initial welter of sensations and ideas what a situation really is all about. To spot the gist. To Spot, the gist, however, doesn’t much matter, and the gist certainly doesn’t matter one whit to the flea on Spot’s wagging tail.

I suspect that all of this may sound a bit abstruse and vague, so I’ll illustrate it with a typical example.

Symbols Trigger More Symbols

A potential new doctoral student named Nicole comes to town for a day to explore the possibility of doing a Ph.D. in my research group. After my graduate students and I have interacted with her for several hours, first at our Center and then over a Chinese dinner, we agree that we all find her mind delightfully lively and her thoughts just on our wavelength, and it’s clear that our enthusiasm is reciprocated. Needless to say, then, we are all hopeful that she’ll join us next fall. After she returns home, Nicole sends me an email saying that she is still very excited by our ideas and that they are continuing to reverberate vividly in her mind. I reply with a note of encouragement, and then there ensues an e-silence for a couple of weeks. When I finally send her a second email telling her how eager we all are for her to come next year, a couple of days pass and then a terse and somewhat starchy reply arrives, saying that she’s sorry but she’s decided to go to another university for graduate school. “But I hope we’ll have a chance to interact in the future,” she adds politely at the end.

Well, this little episode is all fresh to me. Nicole is a unique individual, our lively conversations with her were all
sui generis,
and the complex configuration of symbols activated in my brain by the whole event is, by definition, unprecedented. And yet on another level that’s not true at all.