Hofstadter, Douglas R.; Daniel Clement Dennett;
The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul
Basic Books, 1981/ Bantam 2001, 512 pages
ISBN 0553345842
topics: | philosophy | brain | ai | psychology
A set of fascinating readings on the mind, identity, brain transfer, consciousness, empathy for machines, etc, drawn from science fiction, philosophy, literature, and indefinable genres in between. Every piece has a small discussion called "Reflections" following it, where DRH and DCD raise some thought-provoking ways of looking at the piece. Includes several selections from Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach.
In the first selection (genre undefinable) Borges unfolds a delightful identity
crisis - he is split between the public Borges, the writer, and the man who
is thinking these lines... (Here is an excerpt, from a slightly different
translation.)
It is to this other man, to Borges, that things happen. I walk along
the streets of Buenos Aires, stopping now and then - perhaps out of
habit - to look at the arch of an old entranceway or a grillwork
gate; of Borges I get news through the mail and glimpse his name
among a committee of professors or in a dictionary of biography. I
have a taste for hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography,
the roots of words, the smell of coffee, and Stevenson's prose; the
other man shares these likes, but in a showy way that turns them into
stagy mannerisms. It would be an exaggeration to say that we are on
bad terms; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can weave his
tales and poems, and those tales and poems are my justification. It
is not hard to admit that he has managed to write a few worthwhile
pages, but these pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good
no longer belongs to anyone - not even to the other man - but rather
to speech or tradition. In any case, I am fated to become lost once
and for all, and only some moment of myself will survive in the other
man. Little by little, I have been surrendering everything to him,
even though I have evidence of his stubborn habit of falsifiying and
exaggarating. Spinoza held that all things try to keep on being
themselves; a stone wants to be stone and the tiger, a tiger. I
shall remain Borges, not in myself (if it is so that I am someone),
but I recognise myself less in his books than in those of others or
than in the laborious tuning of a guitar. Years ago, I tried ridding
myself of him and I went from myths of the outlying slums of the city
to games with time and infinity, but those games are now a part of
Borges and I will have to turn to other things. And so, my life is a
running away, and I lose everything and everything is left to
oblivion or to the other man.
Which of us is writing this page I do not know.
- tr. Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author
DCD+DRH comment on it:
Pete is waiting in line in the supermarket, and sees the queue in the
crowd monitor. Suddenly he realizes that a man in a overcoat carrying
the large paper bag is having his pocket picked... he raises his hand
to his mouth in astonishment, and notices that the victim's hand is
moving to his mouth too. Pete suddenly realizes that _he is the person
whose pocket is being picked! This dramatic shift is a discovery:
before, he was thinking about "the person in the overcoat", so he was
thinking about himself, but he wasn't thinking about himself as
himself_; he wasn't thinking about himself "in the right way".
Would this ability apply also to a robot describing itself? 21 ]
[I was reminded of this passage from Proust - see if you feel it deserves
being mentioned here. Proust also sees himself as another, but it's an
illusion that passes:
I opened the Figaro. What a bore! The main article had the same title
as the article which I had sent to the paper and which had not
appeared. But not merely the same title. . . why, here were several
words that were absolutely identical. This was really too bad. I must
write and complain. But it wasn't merely a few words, it was the whole
thing, and there was my signature at the bottom. It was my article that
had appeared at last! But my brain which, even at that period, had
begin to show signs of age and to tire easily, continued for a moment
longer to reason as though it had not understood that this was my
article, like an old man who is obliged to complete a movement that he
has begun even if it has become unnecessary, even if an unforeseen
obstacle, in the face of which he ought at once to draw back, makes it
dangerous. - Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, Penguin, p. 579) ]
Reductionism at the psychological level is exemplified by the viewpoint in Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden. He writes: My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings -- what we sometimes call 'mind' -- are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology and nothing more. As a further demonstration of this train of thought, we note that Sagan's glossary does not contain the words _mind, consciousness, perception, awareness, or thought, but rather deals with entries such as synapse, lobotomy, proteins, and electrodes_.
from _The Cyberiad, tr Michael Kandel Seabury Press 1974 [DRH praises the witty translation] [King Zipperpus falls in love with the Princess Ineffable in a dream, and wants to meet her. A wizard shows him Princess ineffable in a digital simulation. He is about to enter this simulated world, leaving his world for good, when he gets out of the dream, much to the disappointment of the scheming Lord High Thaumaturge.]
Can we have empathy for a machine? This sci-fi story explores the
possibility.
A couple visits a scientist; he produces a little mechanical marvel. When
switched on it purrs around trying to find electric sockets; finding one, it
inserts two antennae. The scientist gives her a hammer and asks her to
"kill" it. She agrees to try to "break" it. But as soon as she wields the
hammer, it runs away every time.
Eventually the scientist tells her that it can sense the metal - but she can
easily pick it up, and she does:
Through the comfortable warmth of its metal skin she
could feel the smooth purr of its motors.
Now it is turned turtle on a workbench and she is again given the hammer to
kill it. As soon as it's hit, one wheel is damaged and it lands on the
ground, and
the beast began spinning in a fitful circle. A snapping sound came
from the underbelly; the machine stopped, lights glowing dolefully".
When she is about to wield the coup de grace, "there came from within the
beast a dound, a soft crying wail that rose and fell like a baby whimpering",
and seeing it lying in a "blood-red pool of lubricating fluid", she desists.
In this fantastic thought-experiment (first appeared in his Brainstorms,
1978), Dennett is working for the Pentagon on a very radiocative retrieval
mission. To protect himself, his brain is removed and connected to his body
via (a very large number) of tiny transmitters. He wakes up from the
operation, all hale and hearty, and sees his brain in a vat.
"Yorick," I said aloud to my brain, "you are my brain. The rest of my
body, seated in this chair, I dub `Hamlet.' " So here we all are:
Yorick's my brain, Hamlet's my body, and I am Dennett.
[Yorick is the dead jester in Hamlet whose skull is dug up by a
gravedigger.]
Now, where am I?
Argument I: Must be in the brain. For instance, if Yorick is
re-connected to some other body, then that person would have all Dennett's
memories, desires and concepts. So that person would become Dennett - hence
Dennett must be in the brain.
Argument II: But if in the brain, then who would be punished if Hamlet
commits a crime?
Argument III: Dennett is wherever his mind thinks he is - based on the mental
"point of view".
{well, this is exactly the kind of stuff that kept me from doing philosophy!]
Finally, Hamlet is sent on the mission that Dennett has volunteerd for.
As he reaches the area:
When I found the warhead, I was certainly glad I had left my brain
behind, for the pointer on the specially built Geiger counter I had
brought with me was off the dial.
...
all of a sudden a terrible thing happened. I went stone deaf. At
first I thought it was only my radio earphones that had broken, but
when I tapped on my helmet, I heard nothing. Apparently the auditory
transceivers had gone on the fritz. I could no longer hear Houston or
my own voice, but I could speak, so I started telling them what had
happened.
In the end, all contact is lost with the brain in Houston:
I was faced with a new and even more shocking problem: whereas an
instant before I had been buried alive in Oklahoma, now I was
disembodied in Houston. My recognition of my new status was not
immediate. It took me several very anxious minutes before it dawned
on me that my poor body lay several hundred miles away, with heart
pulsing and lungs respirating, but otherwise as dead as the body of
any heart-transplant donor, its skull packed with useless, broken
electronic gear.
So Dennett continues to have conscious thoughts - or is it Yorick -
indeed he "wracks his brain" about the "immateriality of the soul based on
physicalist principles":
as the last radio signal between Tulsa and' Houston died away, had I
not changed location from Tulsa to Houston at the speed of light?
Someone plays Brahms for him - there he was MAINLINING Brahms without a
ear! Sometime later though, he drifts off to sleep, and eventually, he finds
himself conscious again, but with a new face - bearded and a bit heavier -
it's actually a new body, Hamlet still lies at the bottom of the chute. He
soon adjusts to this new body, which he calls Fortinbras [another character
from Hamlet].
Later he visits Yorick in the vat, and finds that they have developed a
computer, Hubert, which is an exact clone of Yorick. Switching on and off
between Hubert and Yorick is completely imperciptible to "him". Eventually,
they also make a second body, which would then become a second Dennett... ]
A fascinating fable, one that I have told several others.
John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), wondered about "the soul of a prince" entering "the body of a cobbler" so that the prince's memories are intact. Two anthologies on this theme exist, Personal Identity (1975), ed. John Perry, and The Identities of Persons (1976), ed. Amelie O. Rorty. Also, Bernard Williams's Problems of the Self (1973).
"I have my mind taped every six months, just to be safe." - Austin
Worms.
ghouls : doctors who work with the body after an accident,
vampires: who work with the mind, reprogramming it from recorded
"brain tapes"
In the Reflections, DCD comments that such programs may never be possible -
since brains are programmed in hardware, and not software alone.
I am a fictional character. However, you would be in error to smile smugly, feeling ontologically superior. For you are a fictional character too. All my readers are except one who is, properly, not reader but author. This is actually a tract about religion, but it takes a while to get there... Think of our world as a novel in which you yourself are a character. Is there any way to tell what our author is like? Perhaps. If this is a work in which the author expresses himself, we can draw inferences about his facets, while noting that each such inference we draw will be written by him. And if he writes that we find a particular inference plausible or vali who are we to argue? One sacred scripture in the novel we inhabit says that the author of our universe created things merely by speaking, by saying "Let there ..." The only thing mere speaking can create, we know, is a story, a play, an epic poem, a fiction. Where we live is created by and in words: uni-verse. Goes on to consider the problem of evil: why would a good "author" permit evil to exist? Especially, when an author includes monstrous pain and suffering, does this cast doubt on his goodness? Hamlet or Lear - their suffering is only in the book - so it is not real, is it? But, you say, if author is writing us, for us the suffering is completely real. There are anomalies in the world that we discover. The author of course, knows of them. Perhaps he now is preparing to correct them. Do we live, in galley proofs in the process of being corrected? Are we living in a first draft? Or is it that the author is also discovering about his characters even as he is writing about them? Maybe he is surprised by what we are doing! When we feel we freely think or act on our own, is this merely a description he has written in for us, or does he find it to be true of us, his characters, and therefore write it? Does our leeway and privacy reside in this, that there are some implications of his work that he hasn't yet worked out, some things he has not thought of which nevertheless are true in the world he has created, so that there are actions and thoughts of ours that elude his ken? (Must we therefore speak in code?) Or is he only ignorant of what we would do or say in some other circumstances, so that our independence lies only in the subjunctive realm? Does this way madness lie? Or enlightenment?
(from kinokuniya bookweb)
Preface ix
Introduction 3 (16)
I. A Sense of Self
1 Borges and I 19 (4)
Jorge Luis Borges
Reflections 20 (3)
2 On Having No Head 23 (11)
D. E. Harding
Reflections 30 (4)
3 Rediscovering the Mind 34 (19)
Harold J. Morowitz
Reflections 42 (11)
II. Soul Searching
4 Computing Machinery and Intelligence 53 (16)
A. M. Turing
Reflections 67 (2)
5 The Turing Test: A Coffeehouse Conversation 69 (27)
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Reflections 92 (4)
6 The Princess Ineffabelle 96 (4)
Stanislaw Lem
Reflections 99 (1)
7 The Soul of Martha, a Beast 100(9)
Terrel Miedaner
Reflections 106(3)
8 The Soul of the Mark III Beast 109(10)
Terrel Miedaner
Reflections 113(6)
III. From Hardware to Software
9 Spirit 119(5)
Allen Wheelis
Reflections 122(2)
10 Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes 124(25)
Richard Dawkins
Reflections 144(5)
11 Prelude. . . Ant Fugue 149(53)
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Reflections 191(11)
12 The Story of a Brain 202(15)
Arnold Zuboff
Reflections 212(5)
IV. Mind as Program
13 Where Am I? 217(15)
Daniel C. Dennett
Reflections 230(2)
14 Where Was I? 232(10)
David Hawley Sanford
Reflections 240(2)
15 Beyond Rejection 242(11)
Justin Leiber
Reflections 252(1)
16 Software 253(16)
Rudy Rucker
Reflections 265(4)
17 The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution 269(18)
Christopher Cherniak
Reflections 276(11)
V. Created Selves and Free Will
18 The Seventh Sally or How Trurl's Own 287(9)
Perfection Led to No Good
Stanislaw Lem
Reflections 294(2)
19 Non Serviam 296(25)
Stanislaw Lem
Reflections 317(4)
20 Is God a Taoist? 321(23)
Raymond M. Smullyan
Reflections 341(3)
21 The Circular Ruins 344(9)
Jorge Luis Borges
Reflections 348(5)
22 Minds, Brains, and Programs 353(30)
John R. Searle
Reflections 373(10)
23 An Unfortunate Dualist 383(8)
Raymond M. Smullyan
Reflections 384(7)
VI. The Inner Eye
24 What Is It Like to Be a Bat? 391(24)
Thomas Nagel
Reflections 403(12)
25 An Epistemological Nightmare 415(15)
Raymond M. Smullyan
Reflections 427(3)
26 A Conversation with Einstein's Brain 430(31)
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Reflections 457(4)
27 Fiction 461(4)
Robert Nozick
Further Reading 465(18)
Acknowledgments 483(1)
Index 484
* wikipedia