Audio log: Hofstadter activation

A quote from Douglas Hofstadter about how real things feel to us.

## Location

In the same area as the previous tape, you'll find a statue of a man sitting on a throne. Check its back side to find another tape.

## Transcript

Our hangnails are incredibly real to us; whereas to most of us, the English village of Nether Wallop and the high Himalayan country of Bhutan, not to mention the slowly swirling spiral galaxy in Andromeda, are considerably less real, even though our intellectual selves might wish to insist that since the latter are much bigger and longer-lasting than our hangnails, they ought therefore to be far realer to us than our hangnails are.

We can say this to ourselves till we're blue in the face, but few of us act as if we really believed it. A slight slippage of subterranean stone that obliterates 20,000 people in some far-off land, the ceaseless plundering of virgin jungles in the Amazon basin, a swarm of helpless stars being swallowed up one after another by a ravenous black hole, even an ongoing collision between two huge galaxies each of which contains a hundred billion stars - such colossal events are so abstract to someone like me that they can't even touch the sense of urgency and importance, and thus the reality, of some measly little hangnail on my left hand's pinky.

We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself. The realest things of all are my knee, my nose, my anger, my hunger, my toothache, my sideache, my sadness, my joy, my love for math, my abstraction ceiling, and so forth.

What all these things have in common, what binds them together, is the concept of "my", which comes out of the concept of "I" or "me", and therefore, although it is less concrete than a nose or even a toothache, this "I" thing is what ultimately seems to each of us to constitute the most solid rock of undeniability of all.

Could it possibly be an illusion? Or if not a total illusion, could it possibly be less real and less solid than we think it is? Could an "I" be more like an elusive, receding, shimmering rainbow than like a tangible, heftable, transportable pot of gold?

Douglas Hofstadter, 2007

## Literal interpretation

The literal interpretation for this quote isn't completely clear. It's possible that it refers to the way these statues seem so real, but they are not, makingg us question what things are real and what things are not.
It's also possible it's a reference to the egocentrism of the king we see here and the way his entire world revolves around his own issues, while others around him might suffer.

## Literary context

This quote is from Douglas Hofstadter's book "I am a strange loop", in chapter 7, about what things feel more or less real to us and more specifically about why we would more easily believe some claims as to what is true rather than other ones.
The quote ends with the thought that while the self feels the most real to us, scientifically speaking it's one of the things we're least sure of how real it actualy is in a scientific sense.

The sentence that immediately precedes the quote is: "Inevitably, what seems realest to us is what gets activated most often." Which explains the title of the audio log within the transcript files of the game.

## Relation to the six themes of the Witness

This relates to Theme 1: Skepticism.

This quote is about the question if we are good judges of what is true or not. Our mind automatically thinks things are more true if it encounters them more often. That means that we have to be skeptical of our first impulse of truity. Our brains work in a way where neuronal paths that get activated more often get stronger and stronger.

This means that if we want to find out what is true or not, we can't just go by what we initially think is true or not. We have to be skeptical of our own beliefs or we will end up fooling ourselves into believing the wrong things.