I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [198]
The Glow of the Soular Corona
It may strike you that this whole chapter has been predicated upon such weird science-fiction scenarios that it has no bearing at all upon how we think about the real world of real human beings, and their real lives and deaths. But I believe that that is mistaken.
I have a close friend whose aging father Jim has Alzheimer’s Disease. For some years my friend has been sadly watching his father lose contact, bit by bit, with one aspect after another of the reality that only a few years ago constituted the absolute bedrock, the completely reliable terra firma, of his inner life. He no longer knows his address, he has lost his former understanding of such mundane things as credit cards, and he isn’t quite sure who his children are, though they look vaguely familiar. And it is all getting dimmer, never brighter.
Perhaps Jim will forget his own name, where he grew up, what he likes to eat, and much more. He is heading into the same terrible, thick, allenveloping fog that former President Reagan lived in during the closing few low-huneker years of his life. And yet, something of Jim is surviving strongly — surviving in other brains, thanks to human love. His easy-going sense of humor, his boundless joy at driving the wide open spaces of the prairies, his ideals, his generosity, his simplicity, his hopes and dreams — and (for what it’s worth) his understanding of credit cards. All of these things survive at different levels in many people who, thanks to having interacted with him intimately over many years or decades, constitute his “soular corona” — his wife, his three children, and his many, many friends.
Even before Jim’s body physically dies, his soul will have become so foggy and dim that it might as well not exist at all — the soular eclipse will be in full force — and yet despite the eclipse, his soul will still exist, in partial, low-resolution copies, scattered about the globe. Jim’s first-person perspective will flicker in and out of existence in other brains, from time to time. He will exist, albeit in an extremely diluted fashion, now here, now there. Where will Jim be? Not very much anywhere, admittedly, but to some extent he will be in many places at once, and to different degrees. Though terribly reduced, he will be wherever his soular corona is.
It is very sad, but it is also beautiful. In any case, it is our only consolation.
CHAPTER 22
A Tango with Zombies and Dualism
Pedantic Semantics?
TO ARGUE over whether the appropriate relative pronoun to apply to some hypothetical thinking machine one day in the future will be “who” or merely “which” would doubtless strike certain people as the quintessence of pedantic semantic quibbling, yet there are other people for whom the question would raise issues of life-or-death importance. Indeed, this is a quintessentially semantic issue, in that it involves deciding what verbal label to apply to something never seen before, but since category assignments go right to the core of thinking, they are determinant of our attitude toward each thing in the world, including such matters as life and death. For that reason, I feel that this pronoun issue, even if it is “merely semantics”, is of great importance to our sense of who or what we are.
The well-known Australian philosopher of mind David Chalmers, which not only is a cherished friend but also is my former doctoral student, has devoted many years to arguing for the provocative idea that there could be both “machines that think” and also “machines who think”. For me, the notion of both types of machine coexisting makes no sense, because, as I declared in Chapter 19, the word “thinking” stands for the dancing of symbols in a cranium or