The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 174 of 254
Hofstadter's marble in the envelopes
example of this given by Douglas Hofstadter, another writer who is keen to talk of illusions, describing the self as ‘a mirage that perceived itself, and of course it didn’t believe that it was perceiving a mirage’.6 He recounts an anecdote in which he pushed down on a pile of envelopes to pick them up and found, to his surprise, ‘there was a marble sitting (or floating?) right in the middle of that flimsy cardboard box!’7 Of course, it wasn’t a marble at all. As he explains, ‘for each envelope, at the vertex of the “V” made by its flap, there is a triple layer of paper as well as a thin layer of glue. An unintended consequence of this innocent design decision is that when you squeeze down on a hundred such envelopes all precisely aligned with each other, you can’t compress that little zone as much as the other zones.’ And that is a metaphor for the self: the feeling of a solid core which is created by nothing of the kind.