I Am a Strange Loop

Such skepticism or even cynicism is quite natural, and I will admit that even I, looking back at these grapplings, couldn’t help wondering if denial of death’s reality or finality wasn’t a good part of the motivation for all the anguished musings about souls and survival that I engaged in, not only during the year of 1994 but for many years thereafter. Since I know myself quite well, I didn’t really think this was the case (although sometimes I was a little bit unsure just what was the case), but what definitely troubled me was the thought that readers who don’t know me could easily draw such a conclusion and could thus dismiss my grapplings as the passionate ravings of a suffering individual who had expediently modified his belief system in order to give balm to his grief.

It was therefore a relief when, very recently, I went through a number of old files in my filing cabinets — files with names like “Identity”, “Strange Loops”, “Consciousness”, and so forth — and ran across writings galore in which all these same ideas are set forth in crystal-clear terms long before there was any shadow on the horizon. I found endless musings, all written out by hand, in which I talked about the blurred identities of human souls, and in particular I found several episodes where I talked explicitly about the fusing of Carol’s and my soul into a single tight unit, or about the “soul merger” of Carol and Danny.

In these improvised passages, I often dreamed up quite amusing but very serious thought experiments in which I tampered with the rate of potential information flow between two brains (one time involving a linkup connecting my brain and a zombie’s brain — a delightful thought, at least to me!). What became obvious was that these ideas about who we are and what makes a person unique had been brewing and stirring around in my mind for decades, and that it had all come to an intense boil when I got married and especially when I had the experience of having children and raising them with someone whose love for them was so terribly similar to, and so terribly entangled with, my own love for them.

My book is now done, and those old paper files are rich preludes to it. Perhaps someday some of what I wrote back then will see the light of day, perhaps never, but at least I myself have the comfort of knowing that when I was in my time of greatest need, I did not merely tumble for some kind of path-of-least-resistance belief system that winked at me, but instead I stayed true to my long-term principles, worked out with great care many years earlier. That knowledge about myself gives me a small kind of solace.

CHAPTER 17

How We Live in Each Other

Universal Machines

WHEN I was around twelve, there were kits you could buy that allowed you to put together electronic circuitry that would carry out various interesting functions. You could build a radio, a circuit that would add two binary numbers, a device that could encode or decode a message using a substitution cipher, a “brain” that would play tic-tac-toe against you, and a few other devices like this. Each of these machines was dedicated: it could do just one kind of trick. This is the usual meaning of “machine” that we grow up with. We are accustomed to the idea of a refrigerator as a dedicated machine for keeping things cold, an alarm clock as a dedicated machine for waking us up, and so on. But more recently, we have started to get used to machines that transcend their original purposes.

Take cellular telephones, for instance. Nowadays, in order to be competitive, cell phones are marketed not so much (maybe even very little) on the basis of their original purpose as communication devices, but instead for the number of tunes they can hold, the number of games you can play on them, the quality of the photos they can take, and who knows what else! Cell phones once were, but no longer are, dedicated machines. And why is that? It is because their inner circuitry has surpassed a certain threshold of complexity, and that fact allows them to have a chameleon-like nature. You can use the hardware inside a cell phone to house a word processor, a Web browser, a gaggle of video games, and on and on. This, in essence, is what the computer revolution is all about: when a certain well-defined threshold — I’ll call it the “Gödel–Turing threshold” — is surpassed, then a computer can emulate any kind of machine.