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.