I Am a Strange Loop

The key problem is, it seems to me, that when we try to understand what we are, we humans are doomed, as spiritual creatures in a universe of mere stuff, to eternal puzzlement about our nature. I vividly remember how, as a teen-ager reading about brains, I was forced for the first time in my life to face up to the idea that a human brain, especially my own, must be a physical structure obeying physical law. Although it may seem strange to you, just as it does to me now, this realization threw me for a loop.

In a nutshell, our quandary is this. Either we believe that our consciousness is something other than an outcome of physical law, or we believe it is an outcome of physical law — but making either choice leads us to disturbing, perhaps even unacceptable, consequences. My purpose in these final pages is to face this dilemma head-on.

The Pull and Pitfalls of Dualism

In Chapter 22, I discussed dualism — the idea that over and above physical entities governed by physical law, there is a Capitalized Essence called “Consciousness”, which is an invisible, unmeasurable, undetectable aspect of the universe possessed by certain entities and not others. This notion, very close to the traditional western religious notion of “soul”, is appealing because it conforms with our everyday experience that the world is divided up into two kinds of things — animate and inanimate — and it also gives some kind of explanation for the fact that we experience our own interiority or inner light, something of which we are so intimately aware that to deny its existence would seem absurd if not impossible.

Dualism also holds out the hope of explaining the mysterious division of the animate world into two types of entity: myself and others. Otherwise put, this is the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the subjective, first-person view of the world and an impersonal, third-person view of the world. If what we call “I” is a squirt of some unanalyzable Capitalized Essence magically doled out to each human being at the moment in which it is conceived, with each portion imbued with a unique savor permanently defining the recipient’s identity, then we need look no further for an explanation of what we are (even if it depends on something inexplicable).

Furthermore, the idea that each of us is intrinsically defined by a unique incorporeal essence suggests that we have immortal souls; belief in dualism may thus remove some of the sting of death. It is not very hard for someone who grows up drenched in the pictorial and verbal imagery of western religion to imagine a wispy, ethereal aura being released from the body of someone who has just died, and sailing up, up, up into some kind of invisible celestial realm, where it will survive eternally. Whether we are believers or skeptics, such imagery is part and parcel of our western heritage, and for that reason it is hard to shuck it entirely, no matter how solidly one’s belief system is anchored in science.

Not long after my wife Carol died, I organized a memorial service for her, interleaving reminiscences by a few dear friends and relatives with musical selections that had meant a great deal to her. To close this sad ceremony, I chose the final two-and-a-half minutes of the opening movement of Sergei Prokofiev’s first violin concerto, an astonishing work of musical poetry under whose spell Carol had fallen as deeply as I had. The beautiful and moving passage that I selected from this concerto (as well as its twin, at the end of the piece as a whole) might as well have been written to evoke the image of an ascending soul, so tenuous, tremulous, and delicate is it throughout, but most of all in its final upward-drifting tones. Though neither Carol nor I was religious in the least, there was something that to me rang so true in this naïve image of her purest essence leaving her mortal remains and soaring up, up, forever up, even if, in the end, it was not into the sky that her soul was flying, but merely into this guy…

As this story reveals, this guy, for all his years of scientific training and hardheaded thinking about mind and spirit as rooted in physics, is at times susceptible to the traditional dualistic imagery with which most of us are brought up — if not by our families, then by our wider culture. I can fall for the alluring imagery, even if I reject the ideas. But in my more rational moments, such imagery makes no sense to me, for I know only too well how dualism leads to a long list of unanswerable questions, some of which I wrote out in Chapter 22, showing it to be fraught with such arbitrariness and illogicality that it would seem to collapse under its own weight.

The Lure and Lacunas of Nondualism