I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [137]
There was once even an author in Twinwirld who concocted a curious philosophical fantasy-world called “Twinnwirrld”, whose defining feature was that 99 percent of all births resulted in so-called “identical twinns” — but that’s a whole nother story.
“Twe”-tweaking by Twinwirld-twiddling
Several intertwined issues are inevitably raised by our short and hopefully provocative little jaunt. The most vivid, of course, is that in Twinwirld, a solo human body — a half — builds up a sense of itself as an “i” (lowercase!), while at the same time a pair of human bodies — a pairson — builds up a sense of itself as a “Twe”. This latter process happens partly thanks to genetics (just one genome, found in the zwygote, determines a pairson) and partly thanks to acculturation, enhanced by a slew of linguistic conventions, some of which were mentioned.
Suppose we wanted to apply the loaded word “soul” to beings in Twinwirld. What or who in Twinwirld has a soul? Even the noun “being” is a loaded word. What constitutes a being in Twinwirld? To my mind, both of these questions have the same answer as the following question: “What kind of entity in Twinwirld builds up an unshakable conviction of itself as an ‘I’? Is it a half, a pairson, or both?” What we’re really asking here is how strong each of two salient and rival analogies is — namely, how strong is the analogy between an “i” and an “I”, and how strong is the analogy between a “Twe” and an “I”?
I suspect that any human reader of this chapter can easily identify with a Twinwirld half (such as Karen’l or Greg’r), which would suggest that the “i”/“I” analogy seems convincing to most readers. I hope, however, that my human readers will also see a convincing analogy between Twe-ness and I-ness, even if, for some, it is less strong than that between “i” and “I”. In any case, since Twinwirld is just a fantasy, one can adjust its parameters as one wishes. You and I are both free, reader, to twiddle knobs of various sorts on Twinwirld to make “i” weaker and “Twe” stronger, or the reverse.
For the twirlwind trip just undertaken, I set the knobs determining Twinwirld at a middle-range level in order to make both analogies roughly equally plausible, hence to make the competition between “i” and “Twe” quite tight. But now I want to tweak Twinwirld so as to make “Twe” a bit stronger. In this new fantasy world, which I’ll dub “Siamese Twinwirld”, instead of positing that 99 percent of births yield standard identical twins, I’ll posit that 99 percent of births yield Siamese twins joined, say, at the hip. Moreover, I’ll stipulate that the Twinwirld pronoun “i” doesn’t exist in Siamese Twinwirld. Now the only analogy that remains is that between our concept of “I” and their concept of “Twe”. This may seem extremely far-fetched, but the curious thing is, our standard earthly world has much in common with Siamese Twinwirld. Here’s why.
We all possess two cerebral hemispheres (left and right halves), each of which can function pretty well as a brain on its own, in case one side of our brain is damaged. I’ll presume that both of your hemispheres are in good shape, dear reader, in which case what you mean when you say “I” involves a very tight team consisting of your left and right half-brains, each of which is fed directly by just one of your eyes and just one of your ears. The communication between your team’s two members is so strong and rapid, however, that the fused entity — the team itself — seems like just one thing, one absolutely unbreakable self. You know just what this feels like because it’s how