Going Out on a Limb (Human Conscious Experience II)

In Human Conscious Experience I I talked about two ideas concerning what human consciousness is. The first came from Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop. Hofstadter shows that human self-awareness is a "strange loop," a property of any sufficiently complex system of information processing which allows the system to turn right around and process itself.

The other idea about consciousness came from David Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind, which holds that consciousness "supervenes" on physical brain processes. Consciousness as such is powerless to affect events in the physical world, just as the occupant of the sidecar of a motorcycle cannot steer the motorcycle.

For Hofstadter, consciousness qua consciousness is an illusion. All we really have is self-awareness, in the form of a self-referential strange loop. For Chalmers, consciousness is real, but (at least to a first approximation) it is "epiphenomenal." We wouldn't possess it were it not for the "extra work" that God (figuratively speaking; Chalmers is an agnostic) must have done to institute certain non-physical laws of nature, above and beyond the physical laws, that cause consciousness to supervene on physical brain states.

If you believe Hofstadter, we have no soul.

If you believe Chalmers, there is a wisp of a soul — but it can't do anything except enjoy its own inner conscious experience.

In my previous post, I tried to sketch out an alternative view of the conscious soul. It holds that the conscious mind or soul is an emergent property of the brain. As such, it is more than a limp epiphenomenon; it exerts "downward causation," also known as "top-down causality" or "whole-part influence."


That means it is like emergent properties of all sorts of complex systems. In theories of emergence, the whole world can be seen as one big complex system containing many complex subsystems that themselves each contain many complex subsystems, and so on and so on until a minimum level of complexity is reached. Each level of complexity emerges from the lower level. Each is the result of bottom-up causality in which the parts assemble themselves (or are assembled by some external force) into a whole that is greater than their sum, thereby causing something "extra" to exist above and beyond their own existence as parts.

An arch possesses such "extra" being, above and beyond the stones it is made of.

These emergent wholes, in turn, exert whole-part influence or downward causality on the parts at the next lower level. If the conscious mind is an emergent whole that springs forth from physical brain activities, it in turn causes events to happen at the physical level of the brain, and via the brain the body, and via the body the whole wide world.


One upshot is to believe that the conscious mind, contrary to Chalmers, is the natural result of human biological evolution. It did not arise because God did "extra work" in instituting non-physical laws of nature. It arose because evolution has just naturally produced ever-increasing embodiments of complexity at higher and higher levels of emergence.

I do not suggest that my view is an atheistic one, though. I think it is very theistic — as long as you are willing to entertain the notion that evolution is part of God's plan.

I'd like now to go out on a limb and try to show why believers in God might put aside any initial distaste for evolution and see these ideas as friendly to their point of view.

My argument is to the effect that the core of human consciousness is our ability to have personal inner experience. That is, we experience what we are conscious of in ways that differ from one individual to the next, but in all cases involve personal inner experience. If we were androids like Lt. Cmdr. Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, that wouldn't be true. Our experiences, plural, would register upon the screen of our mental awareness, but they would not generate inner experience, singular.


Experience as I am using the word is hard to define. Philosophers of mind have spoken of it as knowing "what it is like to be/do/know X," where X is just about anything that an entity is able to be, or do, or know. If a bat were conscious, it would know "what it is like to be a bat."

When we see a red tricycle, we feel we somehow know "what it it like to be, or at least to see, red." "Consciousness," "experience," and "feeling" are synonyms. In such philosophies, these terms imply more than awareness, more even than self-awareness. Chalmers gives this very sort of description to conscious experience or feeling; it is just that he does not ascribe causal efficacy to it, as I do.

For Hofstadter, there is nothing higher or loftier than strange-loop self-awareness. To him, such notions as "consciousness," "experience," and "feeling" are illusions of the strange loop inside the workings of the brain.


I hinge my argument that both Chalmers and Hofstadter miss the boat on the ideas of the great Jewish theologian Martin Buber about (in the title of his most famous book) I and Thou.

Buber's ideas in I and Thou are if anything even more abstruse than the ideas about consciousness I just talked about. I'll give my interpretation here.

When I encounter another person, I can treat that person as Thou or as It. The I-It relationship is deadening, and it doesn't matter whether I say I-He or I-She instead of I-It. Only an I-Thou relationship is a true, life-affirming dialogue.

In fact, the "I" of I-It is a different "I" than the "I" of I-Thou.

I interpret this as meaning that when I experience another person as Thou, what emerges into consciousness from the strange loop of my own self-awareness is a different existent than that which emerges when I experience the other person as It.

There are accordingly two "I" experiences: "I" of I-Thou and "I" of I-It. Ergo, the strange-loop "I" of Douglas Hofstadter's soulless philosophy is not the end of the story.

Moreover, unless these two seemingly very different inner "I" experiences make no difference to what actually happens in the physical world, Chalmers is equally off base. It seems to me, contrariwise, that a rich I-Thou dialogue will have different worldly consequences than a sterile I-It relationship. For example, the former is far more conducive to a healthy marriage and plenteous children.


It seems decidedly contrived, then, to claim that the inner, experiential distinction between "I" of I-Thou and "I" of I-It isn't somehow responsible for altering the stream of physical events in the world.

To go along with Chalmers is to imagine that the physical world is hermetically sealed off from mental phenomena — if mental phenomena exist at all. Hofstadter takes the position that there are no mental phenomena; what seem to be mental phenomena are but illusions of the strange loop. Chalmers says nearly the same thing, except that there are epiphenomenal manifestations of consciousness which exert no downward force on events.

Hofstadter accuses Chalmers of being a dualist, but I'd say Chalmers is nearly as much of an anti-dualist or materialist as Hofstadter is. Materialism is non-dualistic; it holds that the only reality is made of material, physical stuff. When the only exception to that rule is Chalmers' notion of "superveneient" consciousness which makes no difference at the level of physical events, in my book that's materialism with an asterisk.

In my book, consciousness as an emergent mental phenomenon possesses downward force and exerts whole-part influence. That is dualism par excellence.

The anti-dualism of Hofstadter can give no account of how the I-Thou experience and the I-It experience can have different "I's."

The anti-dualism of Chalmers (with an asterisk) cannot show how the I-Thou experience produces a different world than the I-It experience does.

Could this "different world" of the I-Thou experience be, by the way, what Jesus meant when he said the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand (Matthew 10:7)?

Human Conscious Experience I

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop has been a hot topic of this blog recently and in the past. The book tries (and, I think, succeeds) in explaining the ability of the human mind to conceive of itself in the first-person, as an "I." It does this by recourse to ideas broached in early-20th century mathematics and symbolic logic to the effect that all symbol-manipulating systems above a certain low threshold of complexity, of which the human brain is one, are intrinsically "incomplete."

There are, inescapably, truths concerning these symbol-manipulation systems themselves that have to be true, Hofstadter shows, but nonetheless cannot be derived as theorems from within the system. Hofstadter calls the ability of a system to contain countless truths beyond its own ability to prove them a "strange loop." A strange loop arises from the ability of a system to refer to itself. Hofstadter shows, convincingly, that the "I" in the human mind is nothing more than just this sort of strange loop.

Once that much has been established, he extends it in quite a lovely way to show that we humans build up in our minds over the course of time (albeit imperfect) copies of the "I-loops" of other persons whom we love ... and they harbor copies of our "I-loops." When one of us dies, an "I-loop" copy lives on in the brains of their mourners.


After saying that much, I think Hofstadter misses an opportunity. He tries to show that what philosophers of the mind call "consciousness" (or "feeling," or "experience") is nothing more than the working of the strange "I-loop" in the brain. To the extent that consciousness and "soul" have been conflated historically in our thinking about thinking, the soul, too, is just the strange "I-loop," nothing more.

Hofstadter contrasts this view with that of David Chalmers, whose book The Conscious Mind I have dealt with in earlier posts. Chalmers' take on human consciousness is that it "supervenes" on the physical workings of the brain in a way that makes it a very real but nonphysical phenomenon.

Hofstadter won't embrace the views of Chalmers (who is a personal friend and former student of his) because they are dualistic: they require that not all things having being in this world be part of the physical order of things. Specifically the mind, to the extent that it is possesses consciousness, is nonphysical.

Here, in the Chalmers view as opposed to Hofstadter's, we have a way for the "soul" to be real but nonphysical and immaterial — though not necessarily God-given in any supernatural way. Hofstadter admits to puzzlement and even outright revulsion at such dualistic philosophies of mind.

Hofstadter even comes right out and lampoons Chalmers' views, accusing him of positing that there has to be an immaterial substance out of which consciousness is made: "feelium." Feelium really exists, Chalmers implies, but it is incapable of exerting causal influence over the physical stuff of the universe, including the matter in the brain. Or, as Hofstadter puts it pithily, feelium cannot "push anything around."

There has never been in the life of the entire universe any object, molecule, atom, or quark whose trajectory has been altered by the exertions of feelium. Rather, feelium is naught but the putative stuff of human inner experience — "stuff" which Hofstadter feels is a grand illusion. Philosophers have in the past not so frequently in the present) held that consciousness is bound up with categories of experience called qualia (sing. quale, a two-syllable word pronounced KWAH-lay). Whenever we see a red tricycle, the quale for redness is invoked in our minds, thus providing us with our inner experience of the redness of the tricycle. In this view, all of our inner experience is qualia-based. If there were no qualia, there would be no conscious experience.

So the qualia exist as the "atoms and quarks" of our conscious inner experience, as it were, but they never push "real" atoms and quarks around.


This Chalmers view is one which takes as a given the idea that the universe is "causally closed." In other words, all physical effects have causes, and all the causes that account for all the effects in the whole physical universe are contained within the physical universe itself. There is no room for the laws of nature to be guided from above, as it were.

It is the insistence on a causally closed universe which — paradoxically, since neither Chalmers nor Hofstadter believes in a supernatural God — winds up providing Hofstadter with his greatest occasion for heaping scorn upon Chalmers. Chalmers builds up an elaborate theory that there could be, at least in concept, an alternate universe in which humanoid beings who are outwardly our exact twins wholly lack conscious inner experience.

These "zombie twins" of ours have evolved in the same Darwinian way that Homo sapiens did in our universe, Chalmers asserts, but since in their universe our "extra" laws of nature — those above and beyond our merely physical laws, that gave us conscious inner experience that supervenes on our brain function — don't hold. In the absence of these "extra" laws, our zombie twins have evolved without what Hofstadter sneers at by calling it an inner store of feelium.

Yet, since the physical laws of nature are identical in both worlds, and since the zombie world, like ours, is causally closed, every physical event that happens in Z-world precisely mirrors its twin event in our world. So when one of us utters the words, "I am having conscious inner experience of a red tricycle," our zombie twin mouths the exact same words ... and, as we do, fully believes them! His brain's "belief" circuitry functions just as ours does — a necessary consequence of the assumption that the feelium in our heads (but absent in those of our zombie twins) cannot push anything around, not even the particles whose interactions result in the activity of the neural circuits of our brain.

In short, if a universe is causally closed, and if, accordingly, any purported conscious experience that exists within that universe is wholly unable to influence its physical events, there is absolutely no way for that universe's denizens (much less any outside observers) to know for sure whether purported conscious experience is real or not. The denizens could be total zombies, and not even know it themselves! (And so could we!)


Hofstadter pokes great fun at Chalmers for this necessary upshot of his, Chalmers', theory of consciousness as supervening in a wholly acausal way upon the physical workings of the brain, and therefore of the material universe. But it seems to me all this silliness about zombie twins dissipates once you eliminate the assumption that the physical universe — ours, that is — is closed to nonphysical (i.e., mental) causes.

My guess is that:

(a) "feelium" exists in our universe

(b) it is an emergent property of the physical brain's functioning

(c) it can exert downward causal influence on physical events

(d) its downward causal influence is always mediated through physical intermediaries

To say (a) is true is to say that there really is "mind stuff," in addition to physical matter in the universe. Consciousness, feeling, experience: these are all real.

To say (b) is true is to say that this "mind stuff" or "feelium" emerges from our brain states and neural activities, but is distinct from those merely physical phenomena and events. An analogy: an arch is an emergent property: in this case, of an arrangement of stones. When by means of a scaffolding we stack stones in just the right way and then drop a keystone in place among them, we can remove the scaffolding and the arch stands. It possesses an integrity of its own and merits being called an arch rather than just a stack of stones. The arch qua arch is real. It exists.

Likewise, the mind that emerges from brain states and functions has an integrity of its own, merits being called something more than a brain, is real, exists.

To say (c) is true is to say this real, existent entity we call the mind can actually, in Hofstadter's words, "push stuff around" in the physical world. It is not merely the limp "epiphenomenon," or some such thing, that Chalmers believes it to be. In Chalmers' view, the notion that the conscious mind "supervenes" on the physical brain is what renders it unable to "push stuff around," and is what opens the door to the possibility of a zombie world (and to the possibility that ours is the zombie world!).

(d) is the most important of the four points: To say (d) is true is to say that the mind, though real, can't cause physical things to happen all by itself. Mental causation requires mediation through the brain and the body.

In other words, mentalists like Uri Geller who claim to be able to bend spoons with their minds alone are a sham.

I don't know what good a bent spoon is anyway. Still, there are times when we intend to bend things for practical purposes, such as when (a long time ago) I used to straighten a paper clip in order to insert its end in a little hole in front of my computer's floppy disk drive (remember those?) to get it to eject a stuck disk. That seems such a practical task, but I can remember my relief at getting the disk out ... and that it was my anticipation of such relief which impelled me to do the paper clip trick in the first place.

I contend that relief, as a type of feeling, qualifies accordingly as a type of conscious experience. And it is an emergent property of a situation or activity organized/witnessed/anticipated/remembered by the brain. It was anticipated relief which impelled me to (a) remember how to do the paper clip trick and (b) actually use it. But the paper clip would not straighten itself, would not poke itself into the little hole, and would not press firmly on the mechanism inside. My mind had to tell my brain to tell my body to accomplish those things. My mind exerted a "downward causation" on parts of the physical world — specifically, on my computer. There was a causal sequence. That causal sequence, though it arose in my (nonphysical) mind, was mediated by certain parts of the physical world: my brain and body.


What I'm really trying to get at with all this abstruse talk about consciousness is the idea that our conscious experience counts for something. It is real, and it changes everything. It "pushes stuff around" in the physical world in ways that wouldn't otherwise happen. And it is the core of who we are.

Hofstadter disagrees, saying it's all an illusion. Chalmers, too, disagrees, saying it's real but can't push anything around physically.

I say it's real, and it pushes stuff around.

Taking the position I take has some real advantages. For one thing, systems that have "emergent properties" (as opposed to limp "epiphenomena") are generally "complex" systems. The sciences of complexity apply to the complex system of the brain and mind, once you assume that the conscious mind is an emergent property of the brain.

Emergent properties are quite real; the quality that makes two stacks of stones into a standing arch (once a keystone is in place) is an emergent property, and an arch-qua-arch is real.

Systems that have emergent properties put a different spin on the notion of causation. They embody bottom-up causation and top-down causation. Top-down causation is sometimes called whole-part influence. The whole is not only more than the sum of the parts, it influences the parts' very behavior: it causes things to happen.

If the mind is an emergent property of the brain, then mental states cause, or change, physical events. Those physical events occur initially in the brain, but they spread to the body and then, via the body, to the world around us.

Another advantage of assuming the conscious mind to be an emergent property of the brain is that it leverages complexity science's ability to explain the quantity of diversity of the natural world. Complexity science helps explain why Darwinian biological evolution sometimes produces new species by the droves, and later watches as small, medium, and large extinction events take place, wiping out most or all of the species.

For example, the sizes of species extinction events are not random, it turns out. Plotting the event's sizes (the numbers of species eliminated in any given event) against the frequencies of events of each size yields a curious result: when so-called "log log" axes are used, the plot turns out to be a straight line!

In nature, evolution originates and destroys biological species over time in a way that Darwin's theory alone couldn't have predicted: it is as if the earth's biosphere were a "complex adaptive system," and one that is not as "random" as once assumed. Because of (albeit difficult to explain) top-down causation/whole-part influence, the pageant of speciation and extinction is more orderly than even Darwin assumed.


The same "dynamics of diversity" apply to human conscious experience, I would speculate. That's why our experiences are the most real things we know: experience is a very real, downward-causative property of the mind that emerges from, and then influences, the workings of the physical brain.

I am put in mind of that extra-special event Christians sometimes call their "conversion experience." It is also sometimes called their experience of being "born again."

It can be argued that there is no experience more central to the Christian belief than being born again, accepting Christ as one's personal savior, or other verbal descriptions of the same inner phenomenon.

The Christian New Testament is an account of historical events in the style called, by those who know such words, kerygma. "Preaching the gospel of Christ in the manner of the early church"; "the Apostolic proclamation of religious truths, especially as taught in the Gospels"; "the element of proclamation in Christian apologetic, as contrasted with didache, or its instructional aspects": these are all formal definitions of kerygma. Less formally, I would put it this way: kerygma is preaching designed to produce in the listener a born-again conversion experience.

The born-again experience is one of the vast number of "species" of experience that the conscious human mind is capable of. Especially to the evangelical Christian, no experience could be more important than the born-again, conversion experience.

Shared Souls

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop tells us that the soul in each one of us is shared with others. The soul is the "I" we all talk about incessantly: I did this; I want that; I love you. The "I" is in the brain, but it's not built in. Rather, it's built up. We start out life with no soul, no "I." As children we build up out of our perceptions and experiences a set of categories represented as mental symbols. The all-embracing master symbol that ultimately arises is "I," the soul.

An "I" can happen in us because our brain is complex enough to manipulate symbol sets in a sufficiently rich way. The brain is, in fact, a universal machine: it can map any conceivable set of mental operations, including its own internal ones. As the brain learns to map itself, it becomes self-aware and develops a soul.

When our brain learns to map the mental operations of another brain, we have the basis for empathy. We develop empathy with those whom we love and who love us. Whenever empathy happens, we build a copy of the soul of another person in our own brain. Alongside our own "I," we create a "Thou"! Hofstadter calls this mutual interpenetration of souls "entwinement."


Put more simply, souls are shared.

Religion tells us something similar. My religion happens to be Christianity, which believes that we are all members of the "body of Christ." We are "saved" corporately, not just individually. We constitute the "bride"; Christ will return to us as the "bridegroom"; and when he does, his nuptials will equal our resurrection.

Entwinement, the sharing of souls, is implicit in this imagery. The Bible could have told us about how Jesus will usher us separately and individually into heaven at the end of time, but that's not what it says. It says, rather, that we are resurrected as one body, the bride to his groom.

"Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to me," he said. More shared-soul imagery. Translation: we cannot treat anyone as beneath contempt, because they are us in Christ.


We are certainly not aware of any sort of soul interpenetration between ourselves and just anybody on the street. Be that as it may, it is not hard to construct an argument that there is a chain of entwinement that connects us to "just anyone," and the chain is rather short: six degrees of separation, we often hear said.

What we are aware of is the entwinement between ourselves and those we are close to. Personal closeness in this sense may be what Jesus meant by "neighbor" when he said, "Love thy neighbor." Not necessarily the folks next door physically, but the folks next door spiritually. They will have their own spiritual next-door neighbors, who will have their own, and so on and so on and so on. Pretty soon, everyone is included.

Hofstadter's viewpoint is frankly secular, not religious — yet it isn't hard to see how it could be religious, taken to it's logical conclusion.

Salt of the Earth

In A Strange-Loops Religion? I cast Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop as the founding text of a secular religion. The book argues that a soul arises in each of us only after — and due to — a long skein of mental perceptions of outward and inner reality, an ongoing process of registration that characterizes our early childhood development.

During that process, the soul gradually emerges as a "strange loop" within the brain, a functional, non-physical structure which, as it emerges, becomes able to develop an ever-more elaborate awareness of the brain's own activity. As it, the brain, processes the set of symbols which its, the brain's, perceptions build up over time, this "I"-loop — this soul, this emergent internal observer of our inner dance of symbols — becomes the most complex symbol of all, as it is aware of itself. It is, in fact, what we speak of when we use the word consciousness.

Our individual "I"-loops, inasmuch as they are symbols in the brain, are transmitted as "lower-resolution copies" to the brains of those we love, who in return bestow on us copies of their own "I"-loops. When one person dies, the "I"-loop copies in the brains of the deceased's beloveds who are left behind live on. In that way, no soul is an island: no one who loves and is loved ever truly dies.


All this talk of souls, love, and an afterlife is reminiscent, of course, of religion. But in all this religion-like talk of Hofstadter's there is no hint of anything mystical or supernatural. Hofstadter, in particular, rejects dualism, the philosophical position which holds that there are spiritual or metaphysical realities, not just physical ones.

Consciousness, the hallmark of the human condition which has been equated by religious believers to the supernatural soul, accordingly possesses an entirely physical basis, to Hofstadter. Although symbols in the brain are not themselves physical entities, they arise from physical matter in wholly non-mystical ways. Hofstadter's main brief in this book is to show how that can happen.

Yet, for all that, there is a spiritual dimension to Hofstadter's worldview:

It seems to me ... that the instinctive although seldom articulated purpose of holding a funeral or memorial service is to reunite the people most intimate with the deceased, or to collectively rekindle in them all, for one last time, the special living flame that represents the essence of that beloved person, profiting directly or indirectly from the presence of one another, feeling the shared presence of that person in the brains that remain, and thus solidifying to the maximal extent possible those secondary personal gemmae that remain aflicker in all these different brains. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word "love" cannot be separated from the word "I"; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind. (p. 274)

Still, if that's all that is going on, the soul of the departed that the funereal rekindling keeps aflicker eventually dies out as those doing the rekindling die out. Not exactly a recipe for immortality.


To get to immortality, you have to take it a step further.

Consider what it takes for someone to be remembered as a "wonderful" person — not just in the formulaic pieties you always hear at funerals, but in the sense that the mourners actually felt (and still feel) that way about the one who is being mourned. This was the case at my most recently attended funeral: for Bruce, a man taken from his family and friends far too young by cancer. Everyone at the funeral, everyone who delivered encomiums and eulogies there, could have summed up his rich life in four words: "salt of the earth."

That Bruce embodied that biblical adjuration could not have happened were it not for the fact that Bruce's "I"-loop and that of so many other people had become mutually entwined in exactly the way Hofstadter speaks of in his book. Because Bruce was so constituted mentally and psychologically as to admit of the possibility of love, he was a good man.

Think of the many unfortunates in this world who are closed off from such soul-entwinement and live destructive lives as a result. They die alone, perhaps in a drive-by shooting. One feels they did not receive the right kind of love as children, lost the ability to share souls with other humans as adults, turned to crime and dissolution, and died having lived in vain.

They are anything but salt of the earth — a phrase that Jesus used to indicate that those who enter his "kingdom" do so for having done what salt does for meat: preserve it, keep it from rot.

The soul-sharing that Hofstadter's "soul as strange loop" concept enables also enables the good works of a lifetime that forever keep the world-as-God's-kingdom from rotting. The shared "I"-loop as flickering "gemma" may die out after one or two generations, but the good works and the personal decency of ones like Bruce who are called "salt of the earth" live on in the form of a tolerable world that would otherwise cease to exist.

In other words, there is an alchemy here: a strange-loop soul, when shared because it was sharable and love was possible, gets transmuted not into gold but into the salt of the earth. Because the kingdom does not cease to live, the soul, having attained that form, does not die.

A Strange-Loops Religion?

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop could be read as, oddly enough, the founding text of a secular religion. Along with his earlier Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (the Old Testament to Strange Loop's New Testament?) this book gives us a modern, up-to-date reason to believe we are all connected, soul to soul, in a vast tapestry in which no man or woman is an island, entire of itself.

The "I"-symbol we each construct in our brain — which is to say, our individual soul — is not hermetically sealed inside our cranium as an isolated entity. Rather, those that we love and love us carry their own copies of the "I" which we mistakenly think belongs only to us ... and we have our own copies of their souls as well (see I Am a Hologram).

Hofstadter shows that each of us human beings have brains that can build symbols that represent, abstractly, all those kindred spirits whom we know and love. Our brains are, in a strict technical sense, "universal machines," or, put in everyday terms, great "copycats." We model one another so well in our thoughts that those persons whom we resonate most deeply with — the ones we have the best "chemistry" with — give rise to permanent symbols in our brains. These symbols inhabit our brains in precisely the same way as our own "I"-symbol does.

The "I"-symbol in my head, the one that is "uniquely me," is, of course, the only one that connects directly to my own sensory-motor apparatus. The experiences of other "I"-symbols that I make copies of in my brain depend on my receiving vicarious, empathic inputs from other people who are the copies' originators. But that's exactly the point, isn't it? That's exactly what happens all the time: we see through each others' eyes so easily. That's why Hofstadter says we all have a "nearly insatiable hunger ... for vicarious experiences" (p. 246), thus accounting for our shared love of movies, novels, soap operas, comic books, jokes, etc., etc., etc., that give us a vicarious experience of other peoples' realities.


At its best, our universal vicarity becomes full-fledged empathy, says Hofstadter. He calls empathy "the most admirable quality of humanity." Heartfelt empathy, I'd add to that, is at bottom what traditional religions are there to bring out in us. The step up from vicarity (which we all have) to true charity (which is rarer) is one of degree, not of kind, and it is this step more than any other which religion prods us to take.

Heartfelt empathy, when you think about it, is the root of human loving-kindness. As a well-read Christian, I know that "Christian love" is spoken of as the Latin word for the virtue of loving-kindness which gives us our word "charity": caritas. In translations from the Latin, this word is often rendered "love," pure and simple, as in "God is love" for Deus caritas est. Another early Christian term for the same thing, this one Greek, is the three-syllable word agapē, meaning the unconditional love God has for us and the love we have for each other in emulation of God.

Every religious tradition has its own version of this. In Jewish tradition it is chesed. In Buddhism it is mettā. What if caritas, agapē, chesed, and mettā are different names for the loving-kindness that naturally happens whenever two souls are entwined?

"Entwinement" is Hofstadter's word for the idea that we have strange, feedback-type loops in our brain, not only for our own "I"-symbol, but for each of the "I"-symbols we import from others whom we have "soulful" relationships with. In I Am a Hologram, I likened all of these "I"-symbols to holograms, in that a subdivided hologram contains all the information in the original, except at lower resolution and fidelity. So when we become entwined with someone, it is as if they forward us a little piece of their inner soul-hologram. We copy that and thenceforth have a (lower-resolution) copy of their soul in our brain. The same thing happens in the other direction as well. Entwinement is two-way soul-sharing.

When we die, our original "I"-hologram disappears. But the many copies of it that have been disseminated among the various people we have soul-shared with in our lifetime could be thought of as capable of reconstructing the master copy in all its erstwhile fidelity and glory. In strange-loops religion, the afterlife is how we live on in the world that we know here and now: as copies of "I"-holograms residing in the living brains of our loved ones.