I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [160]
A friend of mine once told me about a scenic trip he had taken, describing it in such vivid detail that a few years later I thought I had been on that trip myself. To add insult to injury, I didn’t even remember my friend as having had anything to do with “my” trip! One day this trip came up in a conversation, and of course we both insisted that we were the one who had taken it. It was quite puzzling! However, after my friend showed me his photos of the trip and recounted far more details of it than I could, I realized my mistake — but who knows how many other times this kind of confusion has occurred in my mind without being corrected, leaving pseudo-memories as integral elements of my self-image?
In the end, what is the difference between actual, personal memories and pseudo-memories? Very little. I recall certain episodes from the novel Catcher in the Rye or the movie David and Lisa as if they had happened to me — and if they didn’t, so what? They are as clear as if they had. The same can be said of many episodes from other works of art. They are parts of my emotional library, stored in dormancy, waiting for the appropriate trigger to come along and snap them to life, just as my “genuine” memories are waiting. There is no absolute and fundamental distinction between what I recall from having lived through it myself and what I recall from others’ tales. And as time passes and the sharpness of one’s memories (and pseudo-memories) fades, the distinction grows ever blurrier.
Transplantation of Patterns
Even if most readers agree with much that I am saying, perhaps the hardest thing for many of them to understand is how I could believe that the activation of a symbol inside my head, no matter how intricate that symbol might be, could capture any of someone else’s first-person experience of the world, someone else’s consciousness. What craziness could ever have led me to suspect that someone else’s self — my father’s, my wife’s — could experience feelings, given that it was all taking place courtesy of the neurological hardware inside my head, and given that every single cell in the brain of the other person had long since gone the way of all flesh?
The key question is thus very simple and very stark: Does the actual hardware matter? Did only Carol’s cells, now all recycled into the vast impersonal ecosystem of our planet, have the potential to support what I could call “Carol feelings” (as if feelings were stamped with a brand that identified them uniquely), or could other cells, even inside me, do that job?
To my mind, there is an unambiguous answer to this question. The cells inside a brain are not the bearers of its consciousness; the bearers of consciousness are patterns. The pattern of organization is what matters, not the substance. It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion! Otherwise, we would have to attribute to the molecules inside our brains special properties that, outside of our brains, they lack. For instance, if I see one last tortilla chip lying in a basket about to be thrown away, I might think, “Oh, you lucky chip! If I eat you, then your lifeless molecules, if they are fortunate enough to be carried by my bloodstream up to my brain and to settle there, will get to enjoy the experience of being me! And so I must devour you, in order not to deprive your inert molecules of the chance to enjoy the experience of being human!” I hope such a thought sounds preposterous to nearly all of my readers. But if the molecules making you up are not the “enjoyers” of your feelings, then what is? All that is left is patterns. And patterns can be copied from one medium to another,