my grandma embroidered little flowers on her clothes like i do and she taught me how to cook asparagus so it actually tasted good and she wrote about grief so simply that i could make sense of it when i was a child that had just lost a grandfather and sometimes i wonder how much of me is made of her and how much of me is my uncle and how much is my best friend and how much is my little sister. i wonder how much of them is me.
A few years back, I got really interested in this topic. I read a book by a man named Douglas Hofstadter, who’s the director for the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. One of the foremost American researchers of the science of cognition, Hofstadter has written a lot of books, but the one I’m most familiar with is called I Am a Strange Loop.Strange Loop’s focus is on determining how, exactly, does consciousness—individuality, thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, desires, a sense of personhood—arise from inert and unthinking molecules? After all, atoms don’t have personalities. But yet people, who are only atoms all told, somehow do.
The crux of his argument is that humans are self-referential feedback loops. We take in information from the world and incorporate it into how we react the next time we receive information. A whole section of Strange Loop is dedicated to Hofstadter’s concern with the memory of his late wife, Carol. She died suddenly and he was left wondering what parts of her, if any, can “survive” in his memory. And he eventually concluded that every human is a combination and response to all the other humans they’ve ever interacted with:
As long as you remember someone—a dead friend, a relative, a beloved pet—your experiences with them, the way their personalities influenced you, in turn affect the way YOU act and interact with others. Personhood is a self-replicating concept. Your actions ripple out in ways that can never be fully seen or understood. In a vast, cosmic sort of way, no one ever really dies–they live on in their friends :-)
“We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (though that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with).”
