I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [166]
What determines “where I am”? If we once again postulate the idea of obtaining nutrition by carrying out certain remote actions, and if we add back the ability to control distant motion by means of a joystick or even by certain brain events, then things really start to shimmer in uncertainty. For surely a mobile robot is not where the radio-connected computer that is controlling it happens to be sitting. A robot might be strolling about on the moon while its computerized guidance system was in some earthbound laboratory. Or a self-driving car like Stanley could be crossing the Nevada desert, and its computer control system might be on board or might be located in a lab in California, connected by radio. But would we even care where the computer was? Why should we care where it is located?
A robot, we feel, is where its body is. And so when my brain can switch at will (using the fancy glasses described above) between inhabiting any one of a hundred different bodies — or worse yet, when it can inhabit several bodies at the same time, processing different kinds of input from all of them at once (perhaps visual input from one, sonic from another, tactile from a third) — then where I am becomes extremely ill-defined.
Varying Degrees of Being Another
Once again, let’s leave the science-fiction scenarios behind and just think about everyday events. I sit in a plane coming in for a landing and overhear random snippets of conversations around me — remarks about how great the Indianapolis Zoo is, how there’s a new delicatessen at Broad Ripple, and so forth. Each snippet carries me a smidgen into someone else’s world, gives me the tiniest taste of someone else’s viewpoint. I may resonate very little with that viewpoint, but even so, I am entering ever so slightly into that person’s “private” universe, and this incursion, though absolutely trivial for a human being, is far deeper than any canine’s incursion into another canine’s universe ever was.
And if I have untold thousands of hours of conversation with another human being on topics of every imaginable sort, including the most private feelings and the most confidential confessions, then the interpenetration of our worlds becomes so great that our worldviews start to fuse. Just as I could jump to California when talking on the telephone with Scott Kim in the Imlac room, so I can jump inside the other person’s head whenever, through words and tones of voice, they call forth their most fervent hopes or their most agonizing fears.
To varying degrees, we human beings live inside other human beings already, even in a totally nontechnological world. The interpenetration of souls is an inevitable consequence of the power of the representationally universal machines that our brains are. That is the true meaning of the word “empathy”.
I am capable of being other people, even if it is merely an “economy class” version of the act of being, even if it falls quite a bit short of being those people with the full power and depth with which they are themselves. I have the good fortune — at least I usually consider it fortunate, though at times I wonder — of always having the option of falling back and returning to being “just me”, because there is only one primary self housed in my brain. If, however, there were a few high-powered selves in my brain, all competing with each other for primacy, then the meaning of the word “I” would truly be up for grabs.
The Naïve Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough
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