I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [165]
Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?
I am hesitant to adduce too many science-fiction-like scenarios in order to explain and justify my ideas about soul and consciousness, because doing so might give the impression that my viewpoint is essentially tied to the indiscriminate mentality of an inveterate science-fiction junkie, which I am anything but. Nonetheless, I think such examples are often helpful in getting one to break free of ancient, deeply rooted prejudices. But one hardly needs to talk about head-mounted television cameras, remote-controlled robots, and intravenous feeding devices in order to remind people of how we routinely transport ourselves into virtual worlds. The mere act of reading a novel while relaxing in an armchair by the window in one’s living room is an example par excellence of this phenomenon.
When we read a Jane Austen novel, what we look at is just a myriad of black smudges arranged neatly in lines on a set of white rectangles, and yet what we feel we are “seeing” (and should I use the quotation marks or not?) is a mansion in the English countryside, a team of horses pulling a carriage down a country lane, an elegantly clad lady and gentleman sitting side by side in the carriage exchanging pleasantries when they espy a poor old woman emerging from her humble cottage along the roadside… We are so taken in by what we “see” that in some important and serious sense we don’t notice the room we are sitting in, the trees visible through its window, nor even the black smudges speckled all over the white rectangles in our hands (even though, paradoxically, we are depending on those smudges to bring us the visual images I just described). If you don’t believe me, consider what you have just been doing in the last thirty seconds: processing black smudges speckled on white rectangles and yet “seeing” someone reading a Jane Austen novel in an armchair in a living room, and in addition, seeing the mansion, the country road, the carriage, the elegant couple, and the old woman… Black curlicues on a white background, when suitably arranged, transport us in milliseconds to arbitrarily distant, long-gone, or even never-existent venues and epochs.
The point of all of this is to insist on the idea that we can be in several places at one time, simultaneously entertaining several points of view at one time. You just did it! You are sitting somewhere reading this book, yet a moment ago you were also in a living-room armchair reading a Jane Austen novel, and you were also simultaneously in a carriage going down a country lane. At least three points of view coexisted simultaneously inside your cranium. Which one of those viewers was “real”? Which one was “really you”? Need these questions be answered? Can they be answered?
Where Am I?
As I was driving a few days ago, I pulled up alongside a jogger waiting at a red light. She was trotting in place, and then the light changed and she crossed the street and disappeared. For a brief moment, I was “in her shoes”. I had never seen her before and probably will never see her again, but I have been there many a time. I had lived that experience in my own way, and even though I know virtually nothing about her, I have shared that experience of hers. To be sure, I was not seeing it through her eyes. But let’s briefly jump once again into the realm of slightly silly technological extravagance.
Suppose everyone wore a tiny TV camera on the bridge of their nose, and that everyone had glasses that could be tuned to receive the signals from any selected TV camera on earth. If there were a way of specifying a person by their GPS coordinates (and that certainly doesn’t seem far-fetched), then all I would have to do is set my glasses to receive the signals from that jogger’s nose-mounted TV camera, and presto!