Hugh Tracey, who traveled Africa extensively in the mid-Twentieth Century recording it's indigenous musicians, once recorded an obscure thumb-piano player who, upon hearing his music played back (his first exposure to such technology), exclaimed: "I can die now, it does not matter, because I am inside that (record) now". That to me is Hofstadter's idea of "soul-shards" to a tee.
It seems somewhat tragic to me that, in the West, it takes someone of Hofstadter's intellectual stature to realize and put across an idea that is as natural as the air we breathe to people in cultures that we regard as hopelessly backward.
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Hugh Tracey, who traveled Africa extensively in the mid-Twentieth Century recording it's indigenous musicians, once recorded an obscure thumb-piano player who, upon hearing his music played back (his first exposure to such technology), exclaimed: "I can die now, it does not matter, because I am inside that (record) now". That to me is Hofstadter's idea of "soul-shards" to a tee.
It seems somewhat tragic to me that, in the West, it takes someone of Hofstadter's intellectual stature to realize and put across an idea that is as natural as the air we breathe to people in cultures that we regard as hopelessly backward.