I Am a Strange Loop

If I claim that I am partially in my sister Laura and she is partly in me, it seems nonetheless obvious that if 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.