Today, more than two thousand years after Heraclitus wrote those
words, science has shrunk the boundaries of the soul considerably. A
soul that can transcend space and time, survive death, and even possess
others, is considered intellectually passé. In its place we
have the brain – “a teetering bulb of dread and dream” as the poet
Russell Edson described the grey matter which makes us who we are –
which is the indispensible substrate of our personal identity and
consciousness. As the brain goes, so goes the mind, they say.Not
so fast, protests Pulitzer Prize-winning cognitive scientist Douglas
Hofstadter in I Am a Strange Loop – the thoughtful companion to
Gödel, Escher, Bach, his seminal contribution to consciousness
studies and the field of Artificial Intelligence. Strange Loop
says that each of us is a point of view, and one’s perspective – indeed
our most intimate subjectivity – can exist in other substrates, outside
of the brain. No, Hofstadter hasn’t gone mystical, religious, or
superstitious; but he has pushed the boundaries of science by thinking
poetically. This leads him to some very fruitful ways of looking at
consciousness.Does the score of a Bach fugue contain a trace of
the composer’s soul or essence? Certainly there is a world of difference
between the Old Master himself and a folio of his sheet music lying
waiting to be played. Nevertheless, that objective musical notation does
represent a pattern of symbolic activity that once danced through
Bach’s brain. And when we listen to a particularly sublime passage,
Hofstadter speculates, are we not in some sense sharing in Bach’s
subjectivity – that is, in his experience?Poetically speaking,
Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Plato, Socrates and our loved ones can live
on through us insofar as we can see the world through their eyes.
Immortality by proxy may not be what most of us have in mind when we
think about life after death, but it seems to me Hofstadter is on to
something very profound.
