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.