Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I.pdf - cognitive - widez2

Preface

What is the mind? Who am I? Can mere matter think or feel? Where is the soul? Anyone

who confronts these questions runs headlong into perplexities. We conceived this book as

an attempt to reveal these perplexities and make them vivid. Our purpose is not so much

to answer the big questions directly as to jolt everyone: people who are committed to a

hard-nosed, no-nonsense scientific world view; as well as people who have a religious or

spiritualistic vision of the human soul. We believe there are at present no easy answers to

the big questions, and it will take radical rethinking of the issues before people can be

expected to reach a consensus about the meaning of the word “I.” This book, then, is

designed to provoke, disturb and befuddle its readers, to make the obvious strange and,

perhaps, to make the strange obvious.

We would like to thank the contributors and the many people who have advised

and inspired us………………….

This book grew out of conversations in 1980 at the Center for Advanced Study in

the behavioral sciences in Palo Alto, where Dennett was a Fellow engaged in research on

Artificial Intelligence and philosophy; sponsored by NSF Grant (BNS 78-24671) and the

Alfred P Sloan Foundation. It was completed while Hofstadter was a John Simon

Guggenheim Fellow engaged in research in artificial intelligence at Stanford University.

We want to thank these foundations for supporting our research, and for providing

settings in which our discussions could lead to collaboration.

Douglas R. Hofstadter

Daniel C. Dennett

Chicago

April 1981

Introduction

You see the moon rise in the east. You see the moon rise in the west. You watch two

moons moving toward each other across the cold black sky, one soon to pass behind the

other as they continue on their way. You are on Mars, millions of miles from home,

protected from the killing frostless cold of the red Martian desert by fragile membranes of

terrestrial technology. Protected but stranded, for your spaceship has broken down

beyond repair. You will never again return to Earth, to the friends and family and places

you left behind.

But perhaps there is hope in the communication compartment of the disabled

craft you find a Teleclone Mark IV teleporter and instructions for its use. If you turn the

teleporter on, tunes its beam to the Telecone receiver on Earth, and then step into the

sending chamber, the teleporter will swiftly and painlessly dismantle your body,

producing a molecule-by-molecule blueprint to be beamed to Earth, where the receiver,

its reservoirs well stocked with the requisite atoms, will almost instantaneously produce,

from the beamed instructions – you! Whisked back to Earth at the speed of light, into the

arms of your loved ones, who will soon be listening with rapt attention to your tales of

adventures on Mars.

One last survey of the damaged spaceship convinces you that the Teleclone is

your only hope. With nothing to lose, you set the transmitter up, flip the right switches,

and step into the chamber. 5 4, 3, 2, 1, FLASH! You open the door in front of you and

step out of the Teleclone receiver chamber into the suny, familiar atmosphere of Earth.

You’ve come home, none the worse for wear after your long-distance Telecone fall

from Mars. Your narrow escape from a terrible fate on the red planet calls for a

celebration, and as your family and friends gather around, you notice how everyone as

changed since you last saw them. It has been almost three years, after all, and you’ve all

grown older. Look at Sarah, your daughter, who must now be eight and a half. You find

yourself thinking “Can this be the little girl who used to sit on my lap?” Of course it is,

you reflect, even though you must admit that you do not so much recognize her as

extrapolate from memory and deduce her identity, She is so much taller, looks so much

older, and knows so much more. In fact, most of the cells in her body were not there

when last you cast eyes on her. But in spite of growth and change, in spite of replacement

cells, she’s still the same little person you kissed goodbye three years ago.

Then it hits you: “Am I , really, the same person who kissed this little girl goodbye

three years ago? Am I this eight year old child’s mother or am I, actually a brand-new

human being, only several hours old, in spite of my memories – or apparent memories –

of days and years before that? Did this child’s mother recently die on Mars, dismantled

and destroyed in the chamber of a Teleclone Mark IV?

Did I die on Mars? No, certainly I did not die on Mars, since I am alive on Earth.

Perhaps, though, someone died on Mars – Sarah’s mother. Then I am not Sarah’s mother.

But I must be” The whole point of getting into the Teleclone was to return home to my

family! But I keep forgetting; maybe I never got into that Teleclone on Mars. Maybe that

was someone else – if it ever happened at all. Is that infernal machine a tele -porter – a

mode of transportation – or, as the brand name suggests, a sort of murdering twinmaker?

Did Sarah’s mother survive the experience with the Teleclone or not? She thought she

was going to. She entered the chamber with hope and anticipation, not suicidal

resignation. Her act was altruistic, to be sure – she was taking steps to provide sarah with

a loved one to protect her – but also selfish – she was getting herself out of a jam into

something pleasant. Or so it seemed. How do I know that’s how it seemed? Because I

was there ; I was Sarah’s mother thinking those thoughts; I am Sarah’s mother. Or so it

seems.

In the days that follow, your spirits soar and plummet, the moments of relief and

joy balanced by gnawing doubts and soul searching. Soul searching . Perhaps, you think,

it isn’t right to go along with Sarah’s joyous assumption that her mother’s come home.

You feel a little bit like an imposter and wonder what Sarah will think when some day

she figures out what really happened on Mars. Remember when she figured out about

Santa Claus and seemed so confused and hurt? How could her own mother have deceived

her all those years?

So, now it’s with more than idle intellectual curiosity that you pick up

This copy of The Mind’s I and begin to read it, for it promises to lead you on a voyage of

discovery of the self and the soul. You will learn, it says, something about what and who

you are.

You think to yourself.

Here I am reading page 5 of this book; I see my hands holding this book. I have hands.

How do I know they’re my hands? Silly question. hey’re fastened to my arms, to my

body. How do I know this is my body? I control it. Do I own it? In a sense I do. It’s mine

to do with it as I like, so long as I don’ harm others. It’s even a sort of legal possession,

for while I may not legally sell it to anyone so long as I am alive, I can legally transfer

ownership of my body, to, say a medical school once it is dead.

If I have this body, then I guess I’m something other than this body. When I say

“I own my body” I don’t mean “This body owns itself” - probably a meaningless claim.

Or does everything that no one else owns own itself? Does the moon belong to everyone,

to no one, or to itself? What can be an owner of anything? I can, and my body is just one

of the things I own. In nay case, I and my body seem both intimately connected and yet

distinct. I am the controller, it is the controlled. Most of the time.

Then The Mind’s I asks you if in that case you might exchange your body for

another, a stronger or more beautiful or more controllable body.

You think that this is impossible.

But, the book insists, it is perfectly imaginable, and hence possible in principle..

You wonder whether the book has in mind reincarnation of the transmigration of

souls, but, anticipating the wonder, the book acknowledges that while reincarnation is

one interesting idea, the details of how this might happen are always left in the dark, and

there are other more interesting ways it might happen. What if your brain were to be

transplanted into a new body, which it could then control? Wouldn’t you think of that as

switching bodies? There would be vast technical problems, of course, but, given our

purposes, we can ignore them.

It does seem hen (doesn’t it?) that if your brain were transplanted into another

body, you would go with it. But, are you a brain? Try on two sentences, and see which

one sounds more like the truth to you:

I have a brain.

I am a brain.

Sometimes we talk about smart people being brains, but we don’t mean it

literally. We mean they have good brains. You have a good brain, but who or what, then,

is the you that has the brain? Once again, if you have a brain, could you trade it in for

another? How could anyone detach

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