I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [154]
Once beyond the magic threshold, universal beings seem inevitably to become ravenously thirsty for tastes of the interiority of other universal beings. This is why we have movies, soap operas, television news, blogs, webcams, gossip columnists, People magazine, and The Weekly World News, among others. People yearn to get inside other people’s heads, to “see out” from inside other crania, to gobble up other people’s experiences.
Although I have been depicting it somewhat cynically, representational universality and the nearly insatiable hunger that it creates for vicarious experiences is but a stone’s throw away from empathy, which I see as the most admirable quality of humanity. To “be” someone else in a profound way is not merely to see the world intellectually as they see it and to feel rooted in the places and times that molded them as they grew up; it goes much further than that. It is to adopt their values, to take on their desires, to live their hopes, to feel their yearnings, to share their dreams, to shudder at their dreads, to participate in their life, to merge with their soul.
Being Visited
One morning not long ago I woke up with the memory of my father richly pulsating inside my cranium. For a shining moment my dreaming mind seemed to have brought him back to life in the most vivid fashion, even though “he” had had to float in the rarefied medium of my brain’s stage. It felt, nonetheless, like he was really back again for a short while, and then, sadly, all at once he just went poof. How is this bittersweet kind of experience, so familiar to every adult human being, to be understood? What degree of reality do these software beings that inhabit us have? Why did I put “he” in quotation marks, a few lines up? Why the caution, why the hedging?
What is really going on when you dream or think more than fleetingly about someone you love (whether that person died many years ago or is right now on the other end of a phone conversation with you)? In the terminology of this book, there is no ambiguity about what is going on. The symbol for that person has been activated inside your skull, lurched out of dormancy, as surely as if it had an icon that someone had double-clicked. And the moment this happens, much as with a game that has opened up on your screen, your mind starts acting differently from how it acts in a “normal” context. You have allowed yourself to be invaded by an “alien universal being”, and to some extent the alien takes charge inside your skull, starts pushing things around in its own fashion, making words, ideas, memories, and associations bubble up inside your brain that ordinarily would not do so. The activation of the symbol for the loved person swivels into action whole sets of coordinated tendencies that represent that person’s cherished style, their idiosyncratic way of being embedded in the world and looking out at it. As a consequence, during this visitation of your cranium, you will surprise yourself by coming out with different jokes from those you would normally make, seeing things in a different emotional light, making different value judgments, and so forth.
But the crux of the matter for us right now is the following question: Is your symbol for another person actually an “I”? Can that symbol have inner experiences? Or is it as unalive as is your symbol for a stick or a stone or a playground swing? I chose the example of a playground swing for a reason. The moment I suggest it to you, no matter what playground you have located it in, no matter what you imagine its seat to be made of, no matter how high you imagine the bar it is dangling from, you can see it swinging back and forth, wiggling slightly in that funny way that swings wiggle, losing energy unless pushed, and you can also hear its