Souls, Conciousness, and Love
I've been reading I am a Strange Loop by Doug Hofstadter for the past few weeks. It's a book that explores the notion of "I", "self-awareness", "consciousness", the "soul", etc. Hofstadter draws analogies between feedback systems and specifically to an interesting feedback loop discovered by Kurt Gödel that pops out of a rigorous mathematical theory called Principia Mathematica. I'm already getting a tad off track because my desire is not to discuss the book right now as I am not done with it, but rather explore some thoughts that a particular section spawned. I haven't even finished this section but I wanted to get these thoughts down before I did so that they were not biased by what may be to come. Hofstadter is describing the notion of intertwined souls, in the sense that when two people share the same hopes and desires and a large number of experiences from similar perspectives then the content that makes up their selfness overlaps and is intertwined. A Manifestation of this phenomenon might be couples finishing each other's sentences, but there are others more difficult to describe that I won't repeat here. It is also a way to explain how a consciousness might live on in the brain of another individual. If hopes, dreams and desires are shared than if one person dies their essence can still be carried on by the other in their actions to influence the world in a similar way that the deceased would have. This idea resonated with me and it isn't the first time I had thought of it or even seen references to this idea in literature (but the other instances the literature was sci-fi, e.g. the Ender's Game series). It dawned on me that this entwinement of souls could be an emergent property of biological and social evolution that has been taking place for tens of thousands of years. I believe it is fairly undisputed that biological (i.e. sexual) attraction came about as a means to propagate genes and increase the chances of survival of the species. I think it is also safe to say that that mechanism has certainly worked wonders as we now populate nearly every piece of land on this planet and have done a great deal to shape the planet (for better or for worse) in a way to cater to our specific needs and desires. Crucial for this level of control over our environment are the roles of culture and society. At some point long the way the importance of sexual attraction and desire for offspring was downplayed by the emergent desire to form personal bonds to one another, bonds that have since evolved themselves and that we now loosely call "love". Indeed, our species would not be in the place it is today if we simply reproduced and moved on. Necessary for our advancement was some kind of social stability. This entwinement of souls provided that. By sharing our individual hopes and dreams with our families and friends we create a kind of personal safety net that not only protects against unforeseen circumstances (the untimely death of a spouse or close friend) but in the inevitable end of every individual life. It has this effect because of the desire of remaining souls to carry on the memories and believes of the ones lost. A lost friend or spouse may result in those remaining to influence the world in a way that the deceased would have wanted to. Hofstadter speculates that the continuation of these memories and actions may even be used to say that a little piece of the consciousness of the deceased continues to live on.
Perhaps what we call "love" is this mixing of souls and our desire for it comes about from the evolution of our evolutionary process shifting from purely biological pressures to social pressures. To put it in terms of biological evolution people who form lasting, loving relationships and pass that notion on to their offspring tend to reproduce more than those who do not form lasting relationships and pass their values and hopes on to their children.
I'm still not sure that I wrote what I intended to write or am accurately conveying what I'm thinking, but it's already later than I planned to stay up so I'm just going to post this and perhaps add a follow-up and clarification tomorrow.
Perhaps what we call "love" is this mixing of souls and our desire for it comes about from the evolution of our evolutionary process shifting from purely biological pressures to social pressures. To put it in terms of biological evolution people who form lasting, loving relationships and pass that notion on to their offspring tend to reproduce more than those who do not form lasting relationships and pass their values and hopes on to their children.
I'm still not sure that I wrote what I intended to write or am accurately conveying what I'm thinking, but it's already later than I planned to stay up so I'm just going to post this and perhaps add a follow-up and clarification tomorrow.