I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [195]
Most people, unlike Parfit, want there to be and are convinced that there must be, at each point along the spectrum of cases, a sharp yes–no answer to the question, “Is this person Derek Parfit?” This is the classical view, of course — the view that takes for granted the notion of Parfit’s own Cartesian Ego. And so most people are put into the awkward position of having to say that there would be a particular spot along the wire at which all of a sudden, without warning, at the instant when the slider passes it, the Cartesian Ego of Parfit would poof out of existence, to be replaced by that of Napoleon Bonaparte. Where only a moment ago we had been dealing with a somewhat personality-modified Derek Parfit, but still and all a Derek Parfit who genuinely felt Derek Parfit’s feelings, now we suddenly have a modified Napoleon Bonaparte, and he feels Napoleon’s feelings, and not Parfit’s whatsoever!
The Radical Redesign of Douglas R. Hofstadter
The intuitions being pushed here are very emotional and run very deep in our culture and our whole view of life. It gets particularly intense for me when I insert myself into this scenario and start imagining the personality-trait substitutions that a neurosurgeon might carry out by throwing one switch after another.
For example, I begin by imagining that, upon the throwing of Switch #1, my love for Chopin and Bach is replaced by a visceral loathing of their music and that instead, a sudden yet powerful veneration for Beethoven, Bartók, Elvis, and Eminem flowers in “my” brain.
Next, I imagine that Switch #2 causes me every single weekend (and every other spare moment as well) to elect, instead of designing ambigrams or working hard on my book about being a strange loop, to spend hours on end watching professional football games on a huge-screen television and delightedly ogling all the busty babes in the beer ads.
And then (Switch #3) I imagine my political leanings being turned on their head, including my decades of crusading against sexist language. Now, I come out with “you guys” every other sentence, and anyone who objects to it I chortlingly deride as “a politically correct monkey” (as you might imagine, that’s just one of the milder epithets I use).
With the next switch, I jettison my lifelong inclination towards vegetarianism and trade it in for a passion for shooting deer and other wild animals — and of course the larger they are, the better. Thus, after Switch #4 has been thrown, I just adore toppling elephants and rhinos with my trusty rifle! The most fun thing in the world! And each time one of the noble beasts bows humbly down to my triumphant bullets, I give one of those “I’m great” jerks with my arm, which one so often sees when a football player scores a touchdown.
And lastly, needless to say, after Switch #5 has been thrown, I totally agree with John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, and I think that Derek Parfit’s ideas about personal identity are a complete crock. Oh, I forgot — can’t do that, since I never think about philosophical issues at all!
You may have noticed that when I discussed Switch #1, I put quotes around the word “my” when talking about the brain in which a veneration for Ludwig, Béla, Elvis, and Eminem flowers. From there on out, though, I didn’t bother with the quote marks, but I probably should have. After all, everything I suggested in the paragraphs above is the diametric opposite of what I consider core me-ness. Letting go of even one of these traits is enough to make me think, “That person wouldn’t be me any more. That couldn’t be me. That is incompatible with the deepest fiber of my being.”
Of course we can imagine milder changes, such as an alternate life in which I somehow never ran into Prokofiev’s violin concerto #1. That would be another version of me, and surely a more impoverished one, but it would still feel like me, to this me. Or we can imagine that I still eat hamburgers on occasion but feel guilty about it, or that once in a blue moon I voluntarily