When "I" think of your "I" (II)
Another thing that I think deserves mentioning, in terms of this whole soul-sharing concept. It is of course, not a brand new idea that has only come around with Hofstadter (and he himself, in La Ton Beau de Marot, proffers a weaker version of this soul-sharing thesis of Strange Loop). A particularly useful example are two books of poetry by the French mathemetician and writer Jacques Roubaud, Some Thing Black and The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis.
Roubaud develops his theory on the your-soul/mind/self-in-my-soul/mind/self under a very similar circumstance as Hofstadter. Roubaud's much beloved wife also died suddenly, and Some Thing Black, sequeled later by The Plurality of Worlds, were his first published responses (Some Thing Black appearing after, I believe, 3 years where Roubaud did not write). Roubaud spends much of his time in these poems trying to determine what exactly his remembering of his wife is doing, and he arrives at the opposite conclusion as Hofstadter, arriving, finally, in Plurality at (and again, I'm working from memory, so sorry for the inexactness):
Each time I think of you,
you cease to be.
Some Thing Black charts an amazing sorrow, which is amplified by what the reader experiences of what happens to Roubaud's wife as the poems progress one after the next. Slowly, Roubaud takes complete ownership of his wife, through his memory. Despite the all of the crippling grief and continued sorrow over his loss, his wife fades away until she is only the memories that he himself can generate. Where Hofstadter feels that the Carol Hofstadter in his brain is, in fact, Carol, and a distinct loop generated from without, Roubaud experiences the same phenomenon with the Alix Cleo loop in his brain, but finds that is generated from within, bringing him finally to the stark conclusion quoted above.
Again, the Roubaudian vision, while well more cynical, is also easier to buy into. Yeah, of course we remember our loved ones after they're gone, but it doesn't mean that we can claim that they still exist, as such. But again, still, Hofstadter's view is very useful, in that it accounts for the processes of memory better than Roubaud's - to return once more to the couplet above, his conclusion certainly does have a lot of strength, but it is at the same time contradictory - it doesn't have room for a double-existence, whereas Hofstadter, in empowering the loop for the person-representated provides a way to see how a consiousness experiences another by interpreting a self-standing model that is, in the end, inaccesible to the still-living "I."
Roubaud develops his theory on the your-soul/mind/self-in-my-soul/mind/self under a very similar circumstance as Hofstadter. Roubaud's much beloved wife also died suddenly, and Some Thing Black, sequeled later by The Plurality of Worlds, were his first published responses (Some Thing Black appearing after, I believe, 3 years where Roubaud did not write). Roubaud spends much of his time in these poems trying to determine what exactly his remembering of his wife is doing, and he arrives at the opposite conclusion as Hofstadter, arriving, finally, in Plurality at (and again, I'm working from memory, so sorry for the inexactness):
Each time I think of you,
you cease to be.
Some Thing Black charts an amazing sorrow, which is amplified by what the reader experiences of what happens to Roubaud's wife as the poems progress one after the next. Slowly, Roubaud takes complete ownership of his wife, through his memory. Despite the all of the crippling grief and continued sorrow over his loss, his wife fades away until she is only the memories that he himself can generate. Where Hofstadter feels that the Carol Hofstadter in his brain is, in fact, Carol, and a distinct loop generated from without, Roubaud experiences the same phenomenon with the Alix Cleo loop in his brain, but finds that is generated from within, bringing him finally to the stark conclusion quoted above.
Again, the Roubaudian vision, while well more cynical, is also easier to buy into. Yeah, of course we remember our loved ones after they're gone, but it doesn't mean that we can claim that they still exist, as such. But again, still, Hofstadter's view is very useful, in that it accounts for the processes of memory better than Roubaud's - to return once more to the couplet above, his conclusion certainly does have a lot of strength, but it is at the same time contradictory - it doesn't have room for a double-existence, whereas Hofstadter, in empowering the loop for the person-representated provides a way to see how a consiousness experiences another by interpreting a self-standing model that is, in the end, inaccesible to the still-living "I."
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