The Mind’s I
Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett
The Introduction, by Daniel Dennett, looks at an astronaut trapped on Mars, who has equipment made for this very contingency. She is able to return via her Teleclone teleporter:she steps into it, it disassembles her very atoms and reassembles them home on earth. She feels just the same, all her memory intact, and her happy family sees her as the same person who left three years earlier. However, she spends a lot of time wondering about it. Is she really her daughter’s mother? Did that woman really die on Mars? And what about the astronaut who has to use the later model – one that just scans the astronaut and reproduces an identical copy on earth, so there are two of them?
In recent years,for analytical and other purposes, we’ve used concepts of various parts of ourselves. Thanks to Freud, we had the subconscious and other parts of our minds to talk of as though they could interactas distinct entities. Since then, neuroscience has flooded our parched understanding. Today, a whole academic discipline has developed around the study of consciousness.
A book we read recently,The Synaptic Self by Joseph Le Doux,took as a fundamental characteristic of our selvesthat we did not have a distinctConsciousness, or conscious self, plus related selves in their particular domains. (He did not deny the existence of subjective experience.)
The Princess Ineffabelle, excerpted from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, translated by the incomparable Michael Kandel. The king dreams about a magical Cabinet That Dreamed, in which he finds himself by a fire reading an ancient volume telling of the beauteous Princess Ineffable who lived centuries earlier. He is overwhelmed with his desire to meet her, searching his dream everywhere. A wise old man says that he could create a version of the king all heuristic, abstract, digital and wonderful, and put him in a dream with her right there in his magic cabinet. He gives a momentary but a very impressivesample of that experience to the king, but the king asks how he can know it’s reallyhim, because he seems to have two existences while that’s going on. I’ll take care of that, the old man says, pulling out a hammer. The king decides she isn’t really that pretty after all.
Where Am I? is early Dan Dennett, regarded today as a major presence in American philosophy. This piece is also in the format of a science fiction fantasy. A story that begins, “Now that I’ve won my suit under the Freedom of Information Act, I am at liberty to reveal . . .” has got to be entertaining. It is.
Dennett is asked to participate in a secret Defense Department project which requires him go deep underground in a place with a kind of radiation that destroys only brain tissue, so they carefully remove his brain, put it in a vat in what looks to him like ginger ale, and his brain connects to different parts of his body by some kind of radio transmitters and receivers. Where his he? He looks at the brain, which he nicknames Yorick, but can’t get a sense of place or point of view outside of his body. Life becomes even more complicated when his body is killed in an accident while on this project. They give him another body, and since he, Dennett, is in the brain, it seems to work, but other complicationsare created by the Defense Department’s having made a duplicate brain on standby, and kept the two brains in perfect synchronization . . . so far. Everyone seems to have its own point of view, except the Ginger Ale. Since I don’t think Dennett has ventured further into fiction,there’s a character just waiting for its amanuensis, or literary agent.
Minds, Brains and Programs by John Searle, from The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol 3, CambridgeUniversity Press.. A look at this dispute in its early days, with Searle, Hofstadter and Dennett taking the same general positions they do today. The Chinese room with a person, (or not a person), inside. Maybe it’s a computer, or a demon, or various levels including both programs and direct human actions. Searle says if it could pass the Turing test (i.e., could trick a human participant, through conversation skills in any particular language, intobelieving it was also a human being) it would still not be the functional equivalent of a human brain because it’s just manipulating symbols it doesn’t even recognize assymbolsof anything, following built-in rules. Dennett and Hofstadter, believe our brains are far easier to understand than they seem to be, relying on future technology. (Recommended reading -- Dennett’s 1991Consciousness, Explainedand Searle’s three part lengthy riposte in the New York Review of Books.
“The Seventh Sally,” excerpted from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. Trurl feels sorry for a king who has been exiled to an asteroid by his people, and builds him a miniature kingdom in a box with all the accoutrements, physical, social and political, that one would expect in a kingdom. His friend reacts in horror, because the people would suffer, just like any real people. Trurl says it’s all a play kingdom, the people are nothing but electron clouds – just like us, his friend says, only smaller. They rocket back to the asteroid and see . . .