Interesting article, Douglas Hofstadter's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop takes it a step further and says that parts of our consciousness/soul lives outside of ourselves and in the minds and brains of others. Since one can generally guess how person you know would respond in a given situation, such as how a spouse might be able to know exactly what their spouse would say/do, and in that sense our "souls" are distributed. It's a bit more nuanced than that, but I think that gets the point across of how parts of ourselves live in others.

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layer8 a minute ago | parent | next [-]

This is harnessed in Greg Egan's short story "Learning To Be Me": https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1995-egan.pdf

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amelius 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Makes sense. The boundary we draw around a group of neurons that we call "self" is just arbitrary.

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kpil an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that is Hofstadter grieving his wife, and reflecting on how we embed models or predictions of others in our own neural networks, more than anything else.

We build models of the world in order to predict it.

But I guess you could say other people are objectively shaping the neurons in our brains. But so is that fiddly printer tray or whatever, to a small extent.

	▲	conartist6 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Hey that printer tray is a bit of someone's soul too. Many people's work and decisions, even a bit of the nature of our whole society is recorded in those flimsy things. It may or may not be comforting that most of what we contribute to the world will ultimately be considered mundane, even and perhaps especially if it's successful.