I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [148]
It’s that deeply twisted-back-on-itself quality of the innermost core that, I surmise, makes it so hard to transport elsewhere, that makes the soul so deeply, almost irrevocably, attached to one single body, one single brain. The outer layers are relatively easy to transport, of course, with their relative paucity of inwards-pointing pointers, and the middle layers are medium easy to transport. Someone as close to Carol as I was can get lots of the outer layers and something of the middle layers and little bits of the inner core, but can one ever internalize enough of that core to say that, even in a very diluted sense, “she’s still here among us”?
Perhaps I’m exaggerating the difficulty of transport. In some sense, all Gödelian loops-of-self (i.e., strange loops that give rise to an “I”) are isomorphic at the most coarse-grained level, and therefore in lowest approximation they may not be hard to transport at all; what makes them different from each other is only their “flavorings”, consisting of memories, and, of course, genetic preferences and talents, and so forth. So, to the extent that we can be chameleons and can import the “spices” of other people’s life histories (the spices that imbue their self-loops with unique individuality), we are capable of seeing the world through their eyes. Their psychic point of view is transportable and modular — not trapped inside just one perishable piece of hardware.
If this is true, then Carol survives because her point of view survives — or rather, she survives to the extent that her point of view survives — in my brain and those of others. This is why it is so good to keep records, to write down memories, to have photos and videotapes, and to do so with maximal clarity — because thanks to having such records, you can “possess”, or “be possessed by”, other people’s brains. That’s why Frédéric Chopin, the actual person, survives so much in our world, even today.
When, someday, I first watch our videotapes with Carol on them, my heart is going to break because I’ll be seeing her again, living her again, being with her again — and though I’ll be filled with love, I’ll also be pervaded by the feeling that this is fake, that I’m being tricked, and all of this will make me wonder just what is going on inside my brain.
There is no doubt that the patterns that will be sparked in my brain by watching those videos — the symbols in my brain that will be triggered, reactivated, resuscitated, brought back to life for the first time since she died, and that will be dancing inside me — will be just as strong as when they were sparked in my brain when she herself was there, in person, actually doing those things that are now merely images on tape. The dance of the symbols inside my brain sparked by the videos will be the same dance, and danced by the same symbols, as when she was right there before me.
So there’s this set of structures inside my brain that videos and photos and other extremely intense records can access in such a profound way — the structures in me that, when she was alive, were correlated with Carol, were deeply in resonance with her, the structures that represented Carol, the structures that seemed, for all the world, to be Carol. But as I watch the videos, knowing she is gone, the fraudulency will at once be being revealed and yet be deeply confusing me, because I will be seeming to see her, seeming to have revived her, seeming to have brought her back, just as I do in my dreams. And so I wonder, what is the nature of those structures collectively forming the “Carol symbol” in my brain?