Sunday, September 30, 2007

Take My Hat, Please

I re-read Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat a couple of weeks ago. (I went on a big late-summer popular nonfiction kick; this, the two Gladwell books, the Gaddis Cold War History, and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. I think I'm full for now.) I think I read this back in college. There are two or three really involving chapters, and then a lot of what's relatively filler.

One of the fascinating chapters is about a man ("Jimmie") with a profound, alcoholically induced amnesia, who can't form new memories and only has access to memories of his life up to the late 1940s, when he was in his early 20s and in the Navy. Nate was bringing up Hofstadter again the other day and it reminded me of this section of Sacks:
One tended to speak of him, instinctively, as a spiritual casualty--a 'lost soul': was it possible that he had really been 'de-souled' by a disease? 'Do you think he has a soul?' I once asked the Sisters. They were outraged by my question, but could see why I asked it. . . .
[later in the chapter]
But humanly, spiritually, he is at times a different man altogether--no longer fluttering, restless, bored, and lost, but deeply attentive to the beauty and soul of the world, rich in all the Kierkegaardian categories--and aesthetic, the moral, the religious, the dramatic. I had wondered, when I first met him, if he was not condemned to a sort of 'Humean' froth, a meaningless fluttering on the surface of life. . . . Empirical science told me there was not--but empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.
I think this is an interesting convergence with Hofstadter: both reach a viewpoint that people have souls, and that these souls are a matter of feeding your life experience into a stable, continuous, and persistent being. Jimmie doesn't have this, quite. I think it's interesting that Sacks asks "Does Jimmie have a soul" rather than "Do any of us have a soul, in this sense, given what Jimmie's brain is doing." I doubt Jimmie's that different from us: point-to-point he's rather the same, but when his brain draws on stored memories, they're not there, at least since '45. (Sacks is a bit frustrating to read for this reason: he'll find something interesting and pan out to a "big question" kind of perspective, rather than trying to find the shortest line between his observation and an explanation.)

And I think this blows up Hofstadter's conception of the soul, too--this "soul" isn't a self-generating pattern, but something made of different parts (say, a "point-to-point" observation part, and a stored-memory part) that can, rarely, get disconnected. There's no need to insert a hard-to-pin-down, continuous "other thing" there and define that as the soul. Also this is why Hofstadter's tack of eliminating the biological level from his philosophy doesn't really work out.

Hofstadter's (and, as Nate said, Michelangelo's) other idea of the soul, the soul that persists in others, is kind of the opposite condition: no point-to-point observation, but just stored memory. Here again, asking whether this represents a "soul" seems like it adds dead weight to the question.

Anyway, speaking of losing one's soul, I'm about to go try to buy a used TV set. If all goes well, I may never need to read another book again!

3 Comments:

Blogger Pete said...

I don't think describing Hofstader's vision of the soul as a "self-generating pattern" is not quite accurate - my understanding of the Hofstadterian soul is that it is an emergent property of many other processes - that is, there certainly is a set of patterns generating the pattern that is identifiable as a soul, but there isn't a single pattern generator that causes the soul to be.

9/30/2007 6:15 PM  
Blogger Pete said...

Sorry about the grammar in that first sentence. Should read to disagree with what you wrote in your post, Jack.

9/30/2007 6:15 PM  
Blogger nate said...

Sacks apparently just published another similar book on musical perception & abilities. Looks like fun.

As far as "eliminating the biological level" I think you should reread the first three or four chapters of Strange Loop when you get a chance, since Hofstadter lays out as condensed a case as you're likely to find for his thinking about consciousness as a higher-level process than neuron-level brain activity. He doesn't dismiss the biological causes of consciousness. Rather he argues that human thought happens at a sufficiently higher level than the machinery of the brain that the easiest way to comprehend it is at that higher, emergent level that abstracts out the usually consistent brain activity, just as we still practice cell biology rather than just chemistry or chemistry rather than just particle physics. I don't remember him making any very specific points about faulty memory but it's not inconsistent with his philosophy. If he's right you could implement a human soul with the computer you're reading this on just as you could with a brain, but you'd still get cognitive problems if your hard drive became corrupted.

10/01/2007 8:56 AM  

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