Soul shards
Douglas Hofstadter. Image © Massimiliano Sticca.
What is a person?
They are flesh and blood, of course. Atoms arranged in cells arranged in that marvel called a ‘body’. Yet a person is far more than just their body. A person is a personality: a unique set of thought patterns informed by their past experience and their temperament which gives rise to a unique set of behaviours.
Nobody but Chopin could have written his études just as he did. Nobody but my granny can make brown bread just as she did. Nobody but me could write this blog post exactly like I'm writing it now.
Our thoughts and behaviours originate in our brain, for sure, but they spread far beyond our borders and touch all those with whom we interact. You have models of those who are closest to you living inside your head. I can predict fairly accurately how my wife will react in any given situation – in a very real sense she lives in me.
These models persist after their subject dies. I still carry echoes of my granny in my brain. When I remember her, she lives again in me. We also carry softer echoes than explicit memories – I’m sure my granny’s kindness has shaped me in ways I will never know.
I find this thought immensely consoling when thinking about death. People live on in the minds of others – as memories and as influences. The ripples of a person’s life spread outwards through the minds of intimates and on, outwards, forever. We also survive as physical echoes – for years, my granddad’s shed was just as he left it, full of old bits of twine and half-assembled gadgets. Even now, plants he planted bloom in a Dublin garden.
Douglas Hofstadter put it wonderfully, in the opening to I am a Strange Loop. His father had recently died, and his mother was looking at a photograph of him.
‘What meaning does that photograph have?’ Hoftadter’s mother said, ‘None at all. It’s just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It’s useless.’
Hofstadter’s reply is one of the kindest, most uplifting consolations of grief I have ever read.
‘In the living room we have a book of Chopin études for piano. All of its pages are just blank pieces of paper with dark marks on them, just as two-dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad – and yet, think of the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in Frédéric Chopin’s heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin’s interiority – to the experience of living in the head, or rather the soul, of Frédéric Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper are no less than soul-shards – scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Frédéric Chopin.
‘…In just as potent a fashion, looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to those of us who knew him intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness, activates inside our living brains some of the most central representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like the score to a Chopin étude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live.’
It is only the ego, the ‘self-identifying self’, the part which is inextricable from the body, which is destroyed by death. So much of us lives on in the minds of those we have touched and the artefacts we leave behind. Death may be the end of the song of life, but its echoes reverberate to eternity.
For more on minds as patterns, I highly recommend The Cosmist Manifesto by the wonderful Ben Goertzel.
I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter is a brilliant book by a singular mind.