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.