I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [170]
The opposite thesis would claim that every person is distributed uniformly over the entire real line, and that all individuals are therefore one and the same person! There is only one person. This extreme view, although less commonly advocated, has its modern proponents, such as philosopher Daniel Kolak in his recent book I Am You. This view makes as little sense to me as does panpsychism, which asserts that every entity — every stone, every picnic table, every picnic, every electron, every rainbow, every drop of water, waterfall, skyscraper, oil refinery, billboard, speedlimit sign, traffic ticket, county jail, jailbreak, track meet, election rigging, airport gate, spring sale, soap opera cancellation, photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and so on ad nauseam — is conscious.
The viewpoint of this book lies somewhere between these two extremes, picturing individuals not as pointlike infinite-decimal serial numbers but as fairly localized, blurry zones scattered here and there along the line. While some of these zones overlap considerably, most of them overlap little or none at all. After all, two smudges of width one inch apiece located a hundred miles apart will obviously have zero overlap. But two smudges of width one inch whose centers are only a half inch apart will have a great deal of overlap. There will not be an unbridgeable existential gap between two such people. Each of them is instead spread out into the other one, and each of them lives partially in the other.
Interpenetration of National Souls
Earlier in this chapter, I briefly offered the image of a self as analogous to a country with embassies in many other countries. Now I wish to pursue a similar notion, but I’ll start out with a very simplistic notion of what a country is, and will build up from there. So let’s consider the slogan “One country, one people”. Such a slogan would suggest that each people (a spiritual, cultural notion involving history, traditions, language, mythology, literature, music, art, religion, and so forth) is always crisply and perfectly aligned with some country (a physical, geographical notion involving oceans, lakes, rivers, mountains, valleys, prairies, mineral deposits, cities, highways, precise legal borders, and so forth).
If we actually believed a strict geographical analogue to the caged-bird metaphor for human selves, then we would have the curious belief that all individuals found inside a certain geographical region always had the same cultural identity. The phrase “an American in Paris” would make no sense to us, for the French nationality would coincide exactly with the boundaries of the physical place called “France”. There could never be Americans in France, nor French people in America! And of course analogous notions would hold for all countries and peoples. This is clearly absurd. Migration and tourism are universal phenomena, and they intermix countries and peoples continuously.
This does not mean that there is no such thing as a people or a country, of course. Both notions remain useful, despite enormous blurs concerning each one. Think for a moment of Italy, for instance. The northwestern region called “Valle d’Aosta” is largely French-speaking, while the northeastern region called “Alto Adige” (also “Südtirol”) is largely German-speaking. Moreover, north of Milano but across the border, the Swiss canton of Ticino is Italian-speaking. So what is the relationship between the country of Italy and the Italian people? It is not precise and sharp, to say the least — and yet we still find it useful to talk about Italy and Italians. It’s just that we know there is a blur