I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [196]
On “Who” and on “How”
I might add, by the way, that I think the word “who” is sometimes granted a bit too much subliminal power, in much the way as are the personal pronouns “he” and “she” (you may recall my brief interchange with Kellie about pronouns applied to animals, in Chapter 1). In the 1980’s, Pamela McCorduck wrote a history of artificial intelligence with the provocative and ingenious title “Machines Who Think”. The word “who” in the title conjures up an image radically different from our knee-jerk associations with standard machines such as can-openers, refrigerators, typewriters, and even computers; it suggests that with at least certain machines, there is someone “in there”, or as Thomas Nagel would say, “there is something it is like to be that machine” (a hard phrase to translate into other languages, by the way). It implicitly suggests, once again, a sharp, black-and-white dichotomy between a set of hypothetical “machines that think” (such machines would merely think but would have no inner life) and a different set of hypothetical “machines who think” (these machines would have an inner life, and each one would be a particular someone).
It has often seemed to me that ultimately, when I am thinking about who my closest friends are, it all comes down to how they are — how they smile, how they talk, how they laugh, how they listen, how they suffer, how they share, and so on. I think to myself that the innermost essence of each friend is made up of thousands of such “how” ’s, and that that collection of “how” ’s is the answer — the full answer — to “Who is this person?”
It may seem that this is purely a third-person, external perspective, and that it takes away, or even denies, the whole first-person perspective. It may seem to short-change or even to casually dismiss the “I”. I don’t think so, however, for I think that even to itself, that is all an “I” is. The rub is, an “I” is very good at convincing itself that it is a lot more than that — in fact, that is the entire business that the word “I” is in! “I” has a vested interest in continuing this scam (even if it is its own victim)!
Double or Nothing
At long last, we return to the Venus-versus-Mars enigma of Episode III. I have already told you that Parfit somewhat sidesteps the question by simply denying the existence of Cartesian Egos, and thus saying that the question has no meaningful answer. But in his book he also refers quite often to what he terms “double survival”, which means essentially that he is simultaneously in two places at once. More than once, he writes that double survival is hardly equivalent to death (which would be no survival), and that the number two should not be conflated with the number zero! So what is he really saying? Is he saying that there is no answer to the question, or is he saying that in fact he has been doubled, and there are now two Derek Parfits?
It’s hard for me to figure this out since I think he says both things often enough that one could argue it either way. But where do I come down on this issue? I think I come down on the “two me’s” side. At first, this almost sounds as if I am embracing the Cartesian Ego theory, just imagining that the egg is cloned and two identical Cartesian Egos come to exist, one on Venus and one on Mars. But then SL #642 would start screaming, “Which one is me?” It sounds as if I haven’t answered the question at all, or as if I want to have my egg on Mars and eat it too, on Venus.
In order to regain some semblance of consistency,