I Am a Strange Loop

PLATO: No… Well, perhaps I see what you mean. I grew accustomed to hearing it in certain contexts, and thus came to be able to use it myself in those contexts, in a more or less automatic fashion.

SOCRATES: Much as you use language now — without having to reflect on each word?

PLATO: Yes, exactly.

SOCRATES: Thus now, if you say, “I know I am alive”, that sentence is merely a reflex coming from your brain, and is not a product of conscious thought.

PLATO: No, no! You or I have used faulty logic. Not all thoughts I utter are simply products of reflex actions. Some thoughts I think about consciously before uttering.

SOCRATES: In what sense do you think consciously about them?

PLATO: I don’t know. I suppose that I try to find the correct words to describe them.

SOCRATES: What guides you to the correct words?

PLATO: Why, I search logically for synonyms, similar words, and so on, with which I am familiar.

SOCRATES: In other words, habit guides your thought.

PLATO: Yes, my thought is guided by the habit of connecting words with one another systematically.

SOCRATES: Then once again, these conscious thoughts are produced by reflex action.

PLATO: I do not see how I can know I am conscious, how I can feel alive, if this is true, yet I have followed your argument.

SOCRATES: But this argument itself shows that your reaction is merely habit, or reflex action, and that no conscious thought is leading you to say you know you are alive. If you stop to consider it, do you really understand what you mean by saying such a sentence? Or does it just come into your mind without your thinking consciously of it?

PLATO: Indeed, I am so confused I scarcely know.

SOCRATES: It becomes interesting to see how one’s mind fails when working in new channels. Do you see how little you understand of that sentence “I am alive”?

PLATO: Yes, it is truly a sentence which, I must admit, is not so obvious to understand.

SOCRATES: I think it is in the same way as you fashioned that sentence that many of our actions come about — we think they arise through conscious thought, yet, on careful analysis, each bit of that thought is seen to be automatic and without consciousness.

PLATO: Then feeling one is alive is merely an illusion propagated by a reflex that urges one to utter, without understanding, such a sentence, and a truly living creature is reduced to a collection of complex reflexes. Then you have told me, Socrates, what you think life is.

CHAPTER 1

On Souls and Their Sizes

Soul-Shards

ONE gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents’ house, and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, “What meaning does that photograph have? None at all. It’s just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It’s useless.” The bleakness of my mother’s grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be considered.

After a few minutes of emotional pondering — soul-searching, quite literally — I hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was along the following lines.