I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [183]
SL #642: Perhaps — but if so, it’s very very slight.
SL #641: No matter. That extremely slight doubt flies in the face of what we all take for granted ever since our earliest childhood, which is that “I” ’s do exist — and in most people, the latter belief simply wins out, hands down. The battle is never even engaged, in most people’s minds. On the other hand, for a few people the battle starts to rage: physics versus “I”. And various escape hatches have been proposed, including the notion that consciousness is a novel kind of quantum phenomenon, or the idea that consciousness resides uniformly in all matter, and so on. My proposal for a truce to end this battle is to see the “I” as a hallucination perceived by a hallucination, which sounds pretty strange, or perhaps even stranger: the “I” as a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.
SL #642: That sounds way beyond strange. That sounds crazy.
SL #641: Perhaps, but like many strange fruits of modern science, it can sound crazy yet be right. At one time it sounded crazy to say that the earth moved and the sun was still, since it was patently obvious that it was the other way around. Today we can see it either way, depending on circumstances. When we’re in an everyday frame of mind, we say, “The sun is setting”, and when we’re in a scientific frame of mind we remember that the earth is merely turning. We are flexible creatures, able to shift point of view according to circumstance.
SL #642: And so, in your view, should we also be able to shift points of view concerning the existence of an “I”?
SL #641: Definitely. My claim that an “I” is a hallucination perceived by a hallucination is somewhat like the heliocentric viewpoint — it can yield new insights but it’s very counterintuitive, and it’s hardly conducive to easy communication with other human beings, who all believe in their “I” ’s with indomitable fervor. We explain our own behavior, and that of others, through the positing of our own “I” and its analogues in other people. This naïve viewpoint allows us to talk about the world of people in terms that make perfect sense to people.
SL #642: Naïve?! I notice that you haven’t stopped saying “I”! You’ve probably said it a hundred times in the last five minutes!
SL #641: To be sure. You’re absolutely right. This “I” is a necessary, indispensable concept to all of us, even if it’s an illusion, like thinking that the sun is circling the earth because it rises, moves across the sky, and sets. It’s only when our naïve viewpoint about “I” bangs up against the world of physics that it runs into all sorts of difficulties. It’s at that point that those of us who are scientifically inclined realize that there has to be some other story to be told about it. But believing in the easy story about “I” is a million times more important to most of us than figuring out a scientific explanation for “I”, so the upshot is that there’s no contest. The “I” myth wins hands down, without a debate ever taking place — even in the minds of the majority of scientifically inclined people!
SL #642: How can that be?
SL #641: I surmise it’s for two reasons. One is that the “I” myth is infinitely more central to our belief systems than is the “sun circling the earth” myth, and the other is that any scientific alternative to it is far subtler and more disorienting than the shift to heliocentrism was. And so the “I” myth is much harder to dislodge from our minds than the “sun circling the earth” myth. Deconstructing the “I” holds about as much appeal for a typical adult as deconstructing Santa Claus would hold for a typical toddler. Actually, giving up Santa Claus is trivial compared to giving up “I”. Ceasing to believe