I love the accessibility of presenting this very complex philosophical thought experiment in the form of fiction. He walks you through some of the analysis you need to be making in the beginning,
with the narrator-philosopher basically teaching you, but as the story goes on, you are increasingly left to your own devices to unpack the consequences of the increasingly bizarre scenario. By the end, it's completely stopped being a lecture and is just an entertaining story, but still no less instructive because of the way it captures your imagination and makes you want to work through the ideas.
Agreed, Dennett hit all of the high points of the who-am-I philosophy in a really entertaining story. It also reminded me of a great Greg Egan story, Learning To Be Me:
There’s a passage in there about Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat” which has fundamentally changed my worldview ever since I read a shitty OCR version on a blogspot. I ended up buying the book and enjoyed it even more.
I remember when first reading the story thinking, that I can resolve the question "Where am I" easily because of my experience with video games.
When I play a first-person video game, and someone behind me looks at my screen and asks me, "Where are you?", I don't say "In a chair playing a game". I say "I'm in such-and-such room on a space station" or whatever.
This made me think that "Where am I" depends on the spatial coordinates your inputs (eyes, ears) are picking up. In an every day case it's wherever my eyeballs are, in a video game case it's the setting of the video game, and Daniel Dennet's case it's wherever his eyeballs are.
This works for videogames but not TV. So the brain must be able to control the inputs.
This also works for the "Tom and Dick switch brains" thought experiment in the story. After the switch, Tom is wherever the eyeballs that are communicating with his brains are, which is to say wherever Dick's body is.
What if you're playing a game and someone pulls the chair from under you?
Do you remain in the game, unresponsive?
Do you prove that you were indeed on the chair all the time?
Or do you get forcefully pulled out from the game to the floor?
What if you play a game at a LAN party while chatting with others in the same room?
What if you put the loudspeaker on in the LAN room to order a pizza? What will you answer to the question of "where are you?"?
I think the answer is closer to "you're in all of those places, to differing extents, depending on who asks". Yes, it feels useless, but attempting to figure out one ultimate answer feels even more useless to me.
>What if you're playing a game and someone pulls the chair from under you?
Right, here is Daniel Dennet's answer, from the story: "For 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? And had I not accomplished this without any increase in mass? What moved from A to B at such speed was surely myself, or at any rate my soul or mind — the massless center of my being and home of my consciousness."
What you perceive is a kind of virtual reality similar to a video game. It's just constructed based on sensory input, but still has a coordinate system and a point of view, like the camera location in a game engine. Electrically stimulating certain regions of the brain can change the point of view, leading what is called an out-of-body experience. You may wonder how it is that you can move the camera location without moving the eyes. That's because the sensory input creates a kind of 3d model and just like you can imagine what if would be like to see the room from another angle, you can also "hallucinate" it.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing - but more generalised to just “sensory input”
The fact that our brains and sensory input have been tightly coupled since forever basically means we don’t have a framework for perceiving these in different spatial coordinates simultaneously.
But then I was thinking what if our sensory input was split up? My eyes in one location, seeing stuff, my ears in another location hearing stuff, my mouth in another location tasting stuff, then my notion of self switches back to wherever the brain is, but where was that transition? It’s not clear to me :/
I was more interested in the dual minds at the end of the blog post though, musing on the Ship of Theseus type problem of at what point do the two minds become distinct after desynchronisation?
That got me to thinking about how much biology alters the mind too - e.g. when he mentioned that his body was drinking alcohol would his mind get drunk (I think no, presumably because only nerve impulses are being transmitted) but then does he feel the other effects of alcohol? Rapid heartbeat, hot flushes? Can you have an adrenaline induced panic attack using such an interface?
If the sensory duplication is severed can they re-merge at any point in future even if they diverge a lot?
How does the interface resolve conflicting brain outputs? Just issue the dual signals? What of conflicting signals go to the heartbeat control nerve?
> My eyes in one location, seeing stuff, my ears in another location hearing stuff, my mouth in another location tasting stuff, then my notion of self switches back to wherever the brain is, but where was that transition?
There's a text adventure game that has exactly that as a game mechanic. I don't remember what it is called, I want to say it's "A Mind Forever Voyaging" but reading about it on Wikipedia makes no mention of this.
Loved this story. Surprised to find how simple and straightforward his writing is here, when in discussions on free will he was much more obfuscatory. Is it due to the difference in difficulty between posing interesting questions and giving good answers?
Here is the part I completely lost the thread - Right at the beginning..
> “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.
Why is the brain or the body different from "I"? There seems to be an unstated assumption that your ego is different from your physical manifestation and I did not see anything to substantiate that. This is a religious argument and I could not make sense of the arguments following it.
Maybe there is already an assumption that I missed.
I don't think there's any assumption, and later on he explores your point of view as well:
> The matter was not nearly as strange or metaphysical as I had been supposing. Where was I? In two places, clearly: both inside the vat and outside it. Just as one can stand with one foot in Connecticut and the other in Rhode Island, I was in two places at once.
But this also has problems that he gets into. If the brain and body are both "you", and one is destroyed, do you not exist anymore? Do you half exist? What if your brain gets a new body or your body gets a new brain, or both at the same time? I thought the whole point of this story was to challenge the assumption that your brain and body are both "you" by imagining different scenarios that make that difficult to believe, not to just assume it isn't true. I also didn't think it made any arguments or conclusions, it's just following an interesting thread and seeing where it leads. It's supposed to be thought-provoking, not persuasive.
The brain is part of you, but not the whole you, so it's different by definition. Same goes for the body. Now that they are split, the distinction is only more pronounced.
The narrator goes on to investigate how and whether the difference is actually supported by subjective feelings.
I find the existence of the "narrator" to be utterly debasing of the thought experiment.
Apply Dennett's deconstructions to the author and ask yourself why are you interested in this thesis of indeterminacy of the self when you've already a priori accepted and endorsed Dennett's existence though your consideration of his story on its own terms. Simply apply the same logic you used to accept the source to acceptance of yourself.
Is the dislocation of Dennett's brain from his body a genuinely marvelous feature of the scenario when the scenario is just in your own mind, already a totally displaced manifestation of Dennett's?
Maybe you are not sure that Dennett exists (apparently he actually doesn't) in which case what's going on in this thread: Is it all thoughts from no one mechanically clicking in the machine of "your" own mind?
How can there be a reasoned discussion of a topic the author himself has totally debased?
More troublingly, this response is no more meaningful, don't bother trying to respond because there's no one to respond to! Yet you're stuck with the chaotic intrusion from no one to no one.
If Dennett somehow transcends his scenario, of which there is universal agreement on this forum that he does because even in death his existence is unquestioned, this whole scene is a fright.
Ultimately, why will you allow his scenario to debase your own commonsense, unless there's a greater wisdom of the self to be learned and mastered?
Maybe there is!
So let's look at Dennett himself: he happily maintained he was Dennett his entire life and is consummately well known as such.
Readit News
https://philosophy.williams.edu/files/Egan-Learning-to-Be-Me...
This is focused on just one aspect of the philosophical dilemma, and both Dennett and Egan touch on the horror of it in delightful ways.
I just googled it and it’s still up, the formatting is terrible so it’s kind of hard to follow but i recommend it anyway: http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l...
When I play a first-person video game, and someone behind me looks at my screen and asks me, "Where are you?", I don't say "In a chair playing a game". I say "I'm in such-and-such room on a space station" or whatever.
This made me think that "Where am I" depends on the spatial coordinates your inputs (eyes, ears) are picking up. In an every day case it's wherever my eyeballs are, in a video game case it's the setting of the video game, and Daniel Dennet's case it's wherever his eyeballs are.
This works for videogames but not TV. So the brain must be able to control the inputs.
This also works for the "Tom and Dick switch brains" thought experiment in the story. After the switch, Tom is wherever the eyeballs that are communicating with his brains are, which is to say wherever Dick's body is.
Do you remain in the game, unresponsive?
Do you prove that you were indeed on the chair all the time?
Or do you get forcefully pulled out from the game to the floor?
What if you play a game at a LAN party while chatting with others in the same room?
What if you put the loudspeaker on in the LAN room to order a pizza? What will you answer to the question of "where are you?"?
I think the answer is closer to "you're in all of those places, to differing extents, depending on who asks". Yes, it feels useless, but attempting to figure out one ultimate answer feels even more useless to me.
Right, here is Daniel Dennet's answer, from the story: "For 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? And had I not accomplished this without any increase in mass? What moved from A to B at such speed was surely myself, or at any rate my soul or mind — the massless center of my being and home of my consciousness."
The fact that our brains and sensory input have been tightly coupled since forever basically means we don’t have a framework for perceiving these in different spatial coordinates simultaneously.
But then I was thinking what if our sensory input was split up? My eyes in one location, seeing stuff, my ears in another location hearing stuff, my mouth in another location tasting stuff, then my notion of self switches back to wherever the brain is, but where was that transition? It’s not clear to me :/
I was more interested in the dual minds at the end of the blog post though, musing on the Ship of Theseus type problem of at what point do the two minds become distinct after desynchronisation?
That got me to thinking about how much biology alters the mind too - e.g. when he mentioned that his body was drinking alcohol would his mind get drunk (I think no, presumably because only nerve impulses are being transmitted) but then does he feel the other effects of alcohol? Rapid heartbeat, hot flushes? Can you have an adrenaline induced panic attack using such an interface?
If the sensory duplication is severed can they re-merge at any point in future even if they diverge a lot? How does the interface resolve conflicting brain outputs? Just issue the dual signals? What of conflicting signals go to the heartbeat control nerve?
Great article! Made me think a lot!
There's a text adventure game that has exactly that as a game mechanic. I don't remember what it is called, I want to say it's "A Mind Forever Voyaging" but reading about it on Wikipedia makes no mention of this.
> “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.
Why is the brain or the body different from "I"? There seems to be an unstated assumption that your ego is different from your physical manifestation and I did not see anything to substantiate that. This is a religious argument and I could not make sense of the arguments following it.
Maybe there is already an assumption that I missed.
> The matter was not nearly as strange or metaphysical as I had been supposing. Where was I? In two places, clearly: both inside the vat and outside it. Just as one can stand with one foot in Connecticut and the other in Rhode Island, I was in two places at once.
But this also has problems that he gets into. If the brain and body are both "you", and one is destroyed, do you not exist anymore? Do you half exist? What if your brain gets a new body or your body gets a new brain, or both at the same time? I thought the whole point of this story was to challenge the assumption that your brain and body are both "you" by imagining different scenarios that make that difficult to believe, not to just assume it isn't true. I also didn't think it made any arguments or conclusions, it's just following an interesting thread and seeing where it leads. It's supposed to be thought-provoking, not persuasive.
The narrator goes on to investigate how and whether the difference is actually supported by subjective feelings.
Apply Dennett's deconstructions to the author and ask yourself why are you interested in this thesis of indeterminacy of the self when you've already a priori accepted and endorsed Dennett's existence though your consideration of his story on its own terms. Simply apply the same logic you used to accept the source to acceptance of yourself.
Is the dislocation of Dennett's brain from his body a genuinely marvelous feature of the scenario when the scenario is just in your own mind, already a totally displaced manifestation of Dennett's?
Maybe you are not sure that Dennett exists (apparently he actually doesn't) in which case what's going on in this thread: Is it all thoughts from no one mechanically clicking in the machine of "your" own mind?
How can there be a reasoned discussion of a topic the author himself has totally debased?
More troublingly, this response is no more meaningful, don't bother trying to respond because there's no one to respond to! Yet you're stuck with the chaotic intrusion from no one to no one.
If Dennett somehow transcends his scenario, of which there is universal agreement on this forum that he does because even in death his existence is unquestioned, this whole scene is a fright.
Ultimately, why will you allow his scenario to debase your own commonsense, unless there's a greater wisdom of the self to be learned and mastered?
Maybe there is!
So let's look at Dennett himself: he happily maintained he was Dennett his entire life and is consummately well known as such.
QED
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