I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [193]
To dismantle unconscious beliefs that are so deeply rooted and that have such a degree of primacy in our worldview is an extremely daunting and bold undertaking, comparable in subtlety and difficulty to what Einstein accomplished in creating special relativity (undermining, through sheer logic, our deepest and most unquestioned intuitions about the nature of time), and what a whole generation of brilliant physicists, with Einstein at their core, collectively accomplished in creating quantum mechanics (undermining our deepest and most unquestioned intuitions about the nature of causality and continuity). The new view that Parfit proposes is a radical reperception of what it is to be, and in certain ways it is extremely disturbing. In other ways, it is extremely liberating! Parfit even devotes a page or two to explaining how this radical new view of human existence has freed him up and profoundly changed his attitudes towards his life, his death, his loved ones, and other people in general.
In Chapter 12 of Reasons and Persons, boldly entitled “Why Our Identity Is Not What Matters”, there is a series of penetrating musings, all of which have wonderfully provocative titles. Since I so much admire this book and its style, I will simply quote those section titles for you here, hoping thereby to whet your appetite to read it. Here they are: “Divided Minds”; “What Explains the Unity of Consciousness?”; “What Happens When I Divide?”; “What Matters When I Divide?”; “Why There is No Criterion of Identity that Can Meet Two Plausible Requirements”; “Wittgenstein and Buddha”; “Am I Essentially My Brain?”; and finally, “Is the True View Believable?”
Even though all eight of these sections are rife with insight, it is the last section that I admire the most, because in the end, Parfit asks himself if he really believes in the edifice he has just built. It is as if Albert Einstein had just realized that his own ideas would bring Newtonian mechanics crashing down in rubble, and then paused to ask himself, “Do I really have such deep faith in my own mind’s pathways that I can believe in the bizarre, intuition-defying conclusions I have reached? Am I not being enormously arrogant in rejecting a whole self-consistent web of interlocked ideas that were carefully worked out by two or three centuries’ worth of extraordinary physicists who came before me?”
And although Einstein was exceedingly modest throughout his lifetime, his answer to himself (though to my knowledge he never wrote any such introspective essay) was, in effect, “Yes, I do have this strange faith in my own mind’s correctness. Nature has to be this way, no matter what other people have said before me. I have somehow been given the opportunity to glimpse the inner logic of nature more deeply and more accurately than anyone else before me has. I am unaccountably lucky in this fact, and though I take no personal credit for it, I do wish to publish it so that I may share this valuable vision with others.”
Self-confidence, Humility, and Self-doubt
Parfit is far more prudent than this. His conclusions, to my mind, are just as radical as those of Einstein (although I find it a bit of a stretch to imagine radical ideas about the ineffability of personal identity leading to any marvelous technological consequences, whereas Einstein’s ideas of course did), but he is not quite as convinced of them as Einstein must have been. He feels confident, but not absolutely confident, of his edifice of thought. He doesn’t think it will start to shake and soon tumble down if he stands on it, but then again he admits that it just might do so. Let us hear him express himself on this topic in his own words:
[The philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel] once claimed that, even if the Reductionist View is true, it is psychologically impossible for us to believe this. I shall therefore briefly review my arguments given above. I shall then ask whether I can honestly claim to believe my conclusions. If I can, I shall assume that I am not unique. There would be at least some other