I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [138]
The communication between the two halves of a dividual in Twinwirld (whether it’s the Siamese variant or the original one) is, of course, less efficient than that between the two cerebral hemispheres inside a human head, because our hemispheres are hard-wired together. On the other hand, the communication between halves in Twinwirld is more efficient than that between nearly any two individuals in our “normal” world. And so the degree of fusing-together of two Twinwirld halves, though not as deep as that between two cerebral hemispheres, is deeper than that between two very close siblings in our world, deeper than that between identical twins, deeper than that between wife and husband.
Post Scriptum re Twinwirld
After I had written a first draft of this chapter and had moved on to the following one, which is based on emails exchanged between Dan Dennett and myself in 1994, I noticed that in one of his messages to me he referred to an unusual pair of twins in England that he had mentioned in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained (which I had read in manuscript form). I had forgotten this email from Dan, so I decided to go look the reference up in his book, and I found the following passage:
We can imagine.… two or more bodies sharing a single self. There may actually be such a case, in York, England: the Chaplin twins, Greta and Freda (Time, April 6, 1981). These identical twins, now in their forties and living together in a hostel, seem to act as one; they collaborate on the speaking of single speech acts, for instance, finishing each other’s sentences with ease or speaking in unison, with one just a split-second behind. For years they have been inseparable, as inseparable as two twins who are not Siamese twins could arrange. Some who have dealt with them suggest that the natural and effective tactic that suggested itself was to consider them more of a her.…
I’m not for a moment suggesting that these twins were linked by telepathy or ESP or any other sort of occult bonds. I am suggesting that there are plenty of subtle, everyday ways of communicating and coordinating (techniques often highly developed by identical twins, in fact). Since these twins have seen, heard, touched, smelled, and thought about very much the same events throughout their lives, and started, no doubt, with brains quite similarly disposed to react to these stimuli, it might not take enormous channels of communication to keep them homing in on some sort of loose harmony. (And besides, how unified is the most self-possessed among us?)….
But in any case, wouldn’t there also be two clearly defined individual selves, one for each twin, and responsible for maintaining this curious charade? Perhaps, but what if each of these women had become so selfless (as we do say) in her devotion to the joint cause that she more or less lost herself (as we also say) in the project?
I don’t have any clear memory of when I first came up with the germ that has here blossomed out as my fairly elaborate Twinwirld fantasy, although I’d like to think it was before I read about the Chaplin twins in Dan’s book. But whether I got the idea from Dan or made it up myself isn’t crucial; I was delighted to discover not only that Dan resonated with the idea, but also that observers of real human behavior claimed to have seen something much like what I was merely blue-skying about. Twinwirld thus comes one step closer to plausibility than I might have suspected.
There is one other curiosity that by a great stroke of luck dovetails astonishingly with this chapter. A couple of days after finishing Twinwirld, I chanced to see a scrap of paper on my bedside table, and on it, in pencil, in my own hand, were written four German words — O du