I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [232]
But let’s not lose track of the purpose of all this imagery, which is to suggest helpful ways of imagining what a human soul’s essence is. If we map each tree (or nucleus) in the crystal lattice onto a particular human brain, then in the tight-binding model (which corresponds to the caged-bird metaphor), each brain would possess a unique soul, represented by the cloud of timid butterflies that hover around it and it alone. By contrast, if we think of a metal, then the cloud is spread out across the whole lattice — which is to say, shared equally among all the trees (or nuclei). No tree is privileged. In this image, then (which is close to Daniel Kolak’s view in I Am You), each human soul floats among all human brains, and its identity is determined not by its location but by the undulating global pattern it forms.
These are extremes, but nothing keeps us from imagining a halfway situation, with many localized swarms of butterflies, each swarm floating near a single tree but not limited to it. Thus a red swarm might be centered on tree A but blur out to the nearest dozen trees, and a blue swarm might be blurrily centered on tree B, a yellow swarm around tree C, etc. Each tree would be the center of just one swarm, and each swarm would have just one principal tree, but the swarms would interpenetrate so intimately that it would be hard to tell which swarm “belonged” to which tree, or vice versa.
This peculiar and surreal tale, launched in solid-state physics but winding up with imagery of interpenetrating swarms of colored butterflies fluttering in an orchard, gives as clear a picture as I can paint of how a human soul is spread among brains.
Page 264 Many of these ideas were explored …in his philosophical fantasy “Where Am I?”… This classic piece can be found in [Dennett 1978] and in [Hofstadter and Dennett].
Page 267 internal conflict between several “rival selves”… Chapter 13 of [Dennett 1991] gives a careful discussion of multiple personality disorder. See also [Thigpen and Cleckley], from which a famous movie was made. See also [Minsky 1986] and Chapter 33 of [Hofstadter 1985] for views of a normal self as containing many competing subselves.
Page 267 in such cases Newtonian physics goes awry… See [Hoffmann] for a discussion of the subtle relationship between relativistic and Newtonian physics.
Page 271 every entity…is conscious… See [Rucker] for a positive view of panpsychism.
Page 276 because now they want the symbols themselves to be perceived… See the careful debunking in [Dennett 1991] of what its author terms the “Cartesian Theater”.
Page 277 to trigger just one familiar pre-existing symbol… This sentence is especially applicable to the nightmare of preparing an index. Only if one has slaved away for weeks on a careful index can one have an understanding of how grueling (and absurd) the task is.
Page 278 when its crust is discarded and its core is distilled… See [Sander], [Kahneman and Miller], [Kanerva], [Schank], [Boden], and [Gentner et al.] for discussions of the analogy-based mechanisms of memory retrieval, which underlie all human cognition.
Page 279 to simplify while not letting essence slip away… See [Hofstadter 2001], [Sander], and [Hofstadter and FARG]. To figure out how to give a computer the rudiments of this ability has been the Holy Grail of my research group for three decades now.
Page 279 There is not some special “consciousness locus”… See [Dennett 1991].
Page 282 but we are getting ever closer… See [Monod], [Cordeschi], and [Dupuy 2000] for clear discussions of the emergence of goal-orientedness