I Am a Strange Loop

In short, I would here argue, echoing and generalizing the provocative statement by James Huneker, that “souledness” is by no means an off–on, black-and-white, discrete variable having just two possible states like a bit, a pixel, or a light bulb, but rather is a shaded, blurry numerical variable that ranges continuously across different species and varieties of object, and that also can rise or fall over time as a result of the growth or decay, within the entity in question, of a special kind of subtle pattern (the elucidation of whose nature will keep us busy for much of this book). I would also argue that most people’s largely unconscious prejudices about whether to eat or not to eat this or that food, whether to buy or not to buy this or that article of clothing, whether to swat or not to swat this or that insect, whether to root or not to root for this or that species of robot in a sci-fi film, whether to be sad or not to be sad if a human character in a film or a novel meets with a violent end, whether to claim or not to claim that a particular senescent person “is no longer there”, and so forth, reflect precisely this kind of numerical continuum in their minds, whether they admit it or not.

You might wonder whether my having drawn a cone that impenitently depicts “degrees of souledness” during the development of a given human being implies that I would be more willing, if placed under enormous pressure (as in the film Sophie’s Choice), to extinguish the life of a two-year-old child than the life of a twenty-year-old adult. The answer is, “No, it does not.” Even though I sincerely believe there is much more of a soul in the twenty-year-old than in the two-year-old (a view that will no doubt dismay many readers), I nonetheless have enormous respect for the potential of the two-year-old to develop a much larger soul over the course of a dozen or so years. In addition, I have been built, by the mechanisms of billions of years of evolution, to perceive in the two-year-old what, for lack of a better word, I will call “cuteness”, and the perceived presence of that quality grants the two-year-old an amazingly strong shell of protectedness against attacks not just by me, but by humans of all ages, sexes, and persuasions.

Lights On?

The central aim of this book is to try to pinpoint the nature of that “special kind of subtle pattern” that I have come to believe underlies, or gives rise to, what I have here been calling a “soul” or an “I”. I could just as well have spoken of “having a light on inside”, “possessing interiority”, or that old standby, “being conscious”.

Philosophers of mind often use the terms “possessing intentionality” (which means having beliefs and desires and fears and so forth) or “having semantics” (which means the ability to genuinely think about things, as contrasted with the “mere” ability to juggle meaningless tokens in complicated patterns — a distinction that I raised in the dialogue between my versions of Socrates and Plato).

Although each of these terms puts the focus on a slightly different aspect of the elusive abstraction that concerns us, they are all, from my perspective, pretty much interchangeable. And for all of these terms, I reiterate that they have to be understood as coming in degrees along a sliding scale, rather than as on/off, black/white, yes/no switches.

Post Scriptum

The first draft of this chapter was written two years ago, and although it discussed meat-eating and vegetarianism, it had far less on the topic than this final version does. Some months later, while I was “fleshing it out” by summarizing the short story “Pig”, I suddenly found myself questioning the dividing line that I had carefully drawn two decades earlier and had lived with ever since (although occasionally somewhat uneasily) — namely, the line between mammals and other animals.

All at once, I started feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of eating chicken and fish, even though I had done so for some twenty years, and so, catching myself by surprise, I stopped “cold turkey”. And by a remarkable coincidence, my two children independently came to similar conclusions at almost exactly the same time, so that over a period of just a couple of weeks our family’s diet was transmuted into a completely vegetarian one. I’ve returned to the same spot as I was in when I was twenty-one in Sardinia, and it’s the spot I plan to stay in.

Writing this chapter thus gave rise to a totally unexpected boomerang effect on its author — and as we shall see in later chapters, such an unpredictable bouncing-back of choices one has just made, followed by the incorporation of their repercussions into one’s self-model, serves as an excellent example of the meaning of the motto “I am a strange loop.”

CHAPTER 2

This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream

What Is a “Brain Structure”?