• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1737 0

several selves competing for primacy inside one brain may have struck you as extremely weird, but in fact the experience of internal conflict between several “rival selves” is one that we all know intimately. We know what it is to feel split between wanting to buy that candy bar and wanting to refrain. We know what it is to feel split between driving “just another twenty miles” and pulling off at the next rest stop for a desperately needed nap. We know what it is like to think, “I’ll just read one more paragraph and then go fix dinner” and also to think, “I’ll just finish this chapter first.” Which one of these opposing inner voices is really me? In growing up, we learn not to ask or try to answer questions like this. We unthinkingly accept such small internal conflicts as simply part of “the human condition”.

If you simultaneously dip your left hand into a basin of hot water and your right hand into a basin of ice water, leave them both there for a minute, and then plunge them into a lukewarm sink, you will find that your two hands — usually your most reliable scouts and witnesses of the outer world — are now telling you wildly opposite things about the very same sinkful of water. In reaction to this paradox, you will most likely just shrug and smile, thinking to yourself, “What a strong tactile illusion!” You aren’t likely to think to yourself, “This cognitive split inside my brain is the thin edge of the wedge, revealing the illusoriness of the everyday conviction that there is just a single self inside my head.” And the reason nearly everyone would put up great resistance to such a conclusion is that for nearly all purposes, the simple story we tell ourselves is good enough.

This situation is a bit reminiscent of Newtonian physics, whose laws are extraordinarily reliable unless there are objects moving near each other with a relative velocity approaching the velocity of light, and in such cases Newtonian physics goes awry and gives very wrong answers. There is no reason at all, however, to abandon Newtonian physics in most familiar situations, even including the calculations of the orbits of spacecraft traveling to the moon or other planets. The velocities of such spacecraft, although huge compared with those of jet airplanes, are still minuscule fractions of the speed of light, and abandonment of Newton is not in the least called for.

Likewise, why should we abandon our commonsense attitudes about how many souls inhabit our brains when we know very well that the answer is just one? The only answer I can give is that, yes, the answer is very close to one, but when push comes to shove, we can see small deviations from that accurate first approximation. Moreover, we even experience such deviations all the time in everyday life — it’s just that we tend to interpret them as frivolous illusions, or else we simply ignore them. Such a strategy works quite well because we never approach the “speed of light” where the naïve, caged-bird picture fails badly. Less metaphorically, the lower-resolution, coarse-grained souls who fight and squabble for the chance to inhabit our brains never really pose any serious competition to “Number One” for the overall command, and so the naïve old caged-bird dogma “One brain, one soul” stands unchallenged nearly all of the time.

Where Does a Hammerhead Shark Think it is?

Perhaps the most forceful-seeming challenge to the thesis that a single soul — your own, say — is parceled out among a number of distinct brains is simply the question, “Okay, let’s suppose that I’m somehow distributed over many brains. Then which one do I actually experience? I can’t be simultaneously both here and there!” But in this chapter I have tried to show that you can indeed be in two places at the same time, and you don’t even notice anything funny going on. You can be in Bloomington and in Stanford at the same time. You can be in a Donner Pass ski lodge and a Midwest town’s kennel play area at the same time. You can be in your living room’s plush armchair and in an uncomfortable carriage bouncing along a