I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter Read Free Book Online Page A

human intelligence by building computational models thereof, they nonetheless serve one very useful purpose — they are mind-openers. Seeing C-3PO and R2-D2 “in flesh and blood” on the screen makes us realize that whenever we look at an entity made of metal or plastic, we are not inherently destined to jump reflexively to the dogmatic conclusion, “That thing is necessarily an inanimate object since it is made of ‘the wrong stuff ’.” Rather, we find, perhaps to our own surprise, that we are easily able to imagine a thinking, feeling entity made of cold, rigid, unfleshlike stuff.
    In one of the Star Wars films, I recall seeing a huge squadron of hundreds of uniformly marching robots — and when I say “uniformly”, I mean really uniformly , with all of them strutting in perfect synchrony, and all of them featuring identical, impassive, vacuous, mechanical facial expressions. I suspect that thanks to this unmistakable image of absolute interchangeability, virtually no viewer feels the slightest twinge of sadness when a bomb falls on the charging platoon and all of its members — these factory-made “creatures” — are instantly blown to smithereens. After all, in diametric opposition to C-3PO and R2-D2, these robots are not creatures at all — they are just hunks of metal! There is no more interiority to these metallic shells than there is to a can-opener or a car or a battleship, a fact revealed to us by their perfect identicality. Or else, if perchance there is inside of them some tiny degree of interiority, it is on the same order as the interiority of an ant. These metallic marchers are mere soldier robots, members of a dronelike caste in some larger robot colony, and are merely following out, in their zombie-ish way, the inflexible mechanical drives implanted in their circuitry. If there is interiority somewhere in there, it is of a negligible level.
    What is it, then, that gives us the undeniable sense that C-3PO and R2-D2 have a “light on” inside, that there is lots of genuine interiority inside their inorganic crania, located somewhere behind their funny circular “eyes”? Where does our undeniable sense of their “I” ’s come from? And contrariwise, what was it that was lacking in former President Reagan in his last years and in that mass of identical blown-up soldier robots, and what is it that is not lacking in Hattie the chocolate labrador and in R2-D2 the robot, that makes all the difference to us?

    The Gradual Growth of a Soul
    I stated above that I am among those who reject the notion that a full-fledged human soul comes into being the moment that a human sperm joins a human ovum to form a human zygote. By contrast, I believe that a human soul — and, by the way, it is my aim in this book to make clear what I mean by this slippery, shifting word, often rife with religious connotations, but here not having any — comes slowly into being over the course of years of development. It may sound crass to put it this way, but I would like to suggest, at least metaphorically, a numerical scale of “degrees of souledness”. We can initially imagine it as running from 0 to 100, and the units of this scale can be called, just for the fun of it, “hunekers”. Thus you and I, dear reader, both possess 100 hunekers of souledness, or thereabouts. Shake!
    Oops! I just realized that I have committed an error that comes from long years of indoctrination into the admirable egalitarian traditions of my native land — namely, I unconsciously assumed that there is a value at which souledness “maxes out”, and that all normal adults reach that ceiling and can go no higher. Why, though, should I make any such assumption? Why could souledness not be like tallness? There is an average tallness for adults, but there is also a considerable spread around that average. Why should there not likewise be an average degree of souledness for adults (100 hunekers, say), plus a wide range around that average,