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We live inside such people, and they live inside us. To return to the metaphor of two interacting video feedback systems, someone that close to us is represented on our screen by a second infinite corridor, in addition to our own infinite corridor. We can peer all the way down — their strange loop, their personal gemma, is incorporated inside us. And yet, to reiterate the metaphor, since our camera and our screen are grainy, we cannot have as deep or as accurate a representation of people beloved to us as either our own self-representation or their own self-representation.

Double-clicking on the Icon for a Loved One’s Soul

There was a point in my 1994 email broodings to Dan Dennett where I worried about how it would feel when, for the first time after her death, I would watch a video of Carol. I imagined the Carol symbol in my head being powerfully activated by the images on tape — more powerfully activated than at any moment since she had died — and I was fearful of the power of the illusion it would create. I would seem to see her standing by the staircase, and yet, obviously, if I were to get up and walk through the house to the spot where she had once stood, I would find no body there. Though I would see her bright face and hear her laugh, I could not go up to her and put my arm around her shoulders. Watching the tapes would heighten the anguish of her death, by seeming to bring her back physically but doing nothing of the sort in reality. Her physical nature would not be brought back by the tapes.

But what about her inner nature? When Carol was alive, her presence routinely triggered certain symbols in my brain. Quite obviously, the videos would trigger those same symbols again, although in fewer ways. What would be the nature of the symbolic dance thus activated in my brain? When the videos inevitably double-clicked on my “Carol” icon, what would happen inside me? The strange and complex thing that would come rushing up from the dormant murk would be a real thing — or at any rate, just as real as the “I” inside me is real. The key question then is, how different is that strange thing in my brain from the “I” that had once flourished inside Carol’s brain? Is it a thing of an entirely different type, or is it of the same type, just less elaborate?

Thinking with Another’s Brain

Of all Dan Dennett’s many reactions to my grapplings in that searing spring of 1994, there was one sentence that always stood out in my mind: “It is clear from what you say that Carol will be thinking with your brain for quite some time to come.” I appreciated and resonated to this evocative phrase, which, as I later discovered, Dan was quoting with a bit of license from our mutual friend Marvin Minsky, the artificial-intelligence pioneer — copycats everywhere!

“She’ll be thinking with your brain.” What this Dennett–Minsky utterance meant to me was roughly the following. Input signals coming to me would, under certain circumstances, follow pathways in my brain that led not to my memories but to Carol’s memories (or rather, to my low-resolution, coarse-grained “copies” of them). The faces of our children, the voices of her parents and sisters and brothers, the rooms in our house — such things would at times be processed in a frame of reference that would imbue them with a Carol-style meaning, placing them in a frame that would root them in and relate them to her experiences (once again, as crudely rendered in my brain). The semantics that would accrue to the signals impingent on me would have originated in her life. To the extent, then, that I, over our years of living together, had accurately imported and transplanted the experiences that had rooted Carol on this earth, she would be able to react to the world, to live on in me. To that extent, and only to that extent, Carol would be thinking with my brain, feeling with my heart, living in my soul.

Mosaics of Different Grain Size

Since everything hung on those words “to the extent that X”, what seemed to matter most of all here was degree of fidelity to the original, an idea for which I soon found a metaphor based on portraits rendered as mosaics made out of small colored stones. The more intimately someone comes to know you, the finer-grained will be the “portrait” of you inside their head. The highest-resolution portrait of you is of course your own self-portrait — your own mosaic of yourself, your self-symbol, built up over your entire life, exquisitely fine-grained. Thus in Carol’s case, her own self-symbol was by far the finest-grained portrait of her inner essence, her inner light, her personal gemma. But surely among the next-highest in resolution was my mosaic of Carol, the coarser-grained copy of her interiority that resided inside my head.