Douglas Hofstadter - The Mind’s I - Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul

Do minds or selves really exist—over and above the atoms and molecules? Such ontological questions (questions concerning the types of things that can be said to exist and the ways in which things can exist have been a major preoccupation of philosophers since Plato’s day. Probably the most influential of today’s hard-nosed, tough-minded scientific ontologists is Willard V. O. Quine, of Harvard University. His classic paper “On What There Is” first appeared in 1948 in the Review of Metaphysics. It is reprinted in his collection of essays, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). Quine’s Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960) and Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) contain later elaborations of his uncompromising ontological stand. An amusing dialogue in which a tough-minded materialist gets tied in knots is “Holes” by David and Stephanie Lewis, in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (vol. 48, 1970, pp. 206–212). If holes are things that exist, what about voices. What are they? This question is discussed in the first chapter of Daniel Dennett’s Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1969), where the claim is advanced that minds enjoy the same sort of existence as voices—not problematic (like ghosts or goblins) but not just a matter of matter, either.

The literature on consciousnesswill be introduced by subtopics later in this chapter. The discussion of consciousness in the Introduction is drawn from an entry on that topic by Dennett forthcoming in the Oxford Companion to the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press), an encyclopedia of current understanding of the mind, edited by R.L. Gregory. The quotation of E.R. John’s definition of consciousness is from R.W. Thatcher and E.R. John, Foundations of Cognitive Processes (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1977, p. 294), and the dichotic listening experiment discussed is reported in J.R. Lackner and M. Garrett, “Resolving Ambiguity: Effects of Biasing Context in the Unattended Ear,” Cognition (1973, pp. 359–372).

Borges draws our attention to different ways of thinking about oneself. A good entry to the recent work in philosophy mentioned in the Reflections is “Who, Me?” by Steven Boër and William Lycan, in The Philosophical Review (vol. 89, 1980, pp. 427–466). It has an extensive bibliography that includes the pioneering work of Hector-Neri Castañeda and Peter Geach, and the fine recent work by John Perry and David Lewis.

Harding’s strange ruminations on having no headfind an echo in the psychological theories of the late James J. Gibson, whose last book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), contains many striking observations—and results of experiments—about the information one gets about oneself (one’s location, the orientation of one’s head, even the important role of that blurry bit of nose one can see out of the corner of one’s eye) from visual perception. See especially chapter 7, “The Optical Information for Self-Perception.” For a recent criticism of Gibson’s ideas, see Shimon Ullman, “Against Direct Perception,” in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (September, 1980, pp. 373–415). An excellent introduction to the Taoistic and Zen theory of mind and existence is Raymond Smullyan’s The Tao is Silent (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). See also Paul Reps’ Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (New York: Doubleday Anchor).

The physical background for the quantum-mechanical ideaspresented in Morowitz’s article and the accompanying Reflection is available at several levels of difficulty. A stimulating elementary presentation is that by Adolph Baker in Modern Physics and Anti-physics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1970). And there is Richard Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967). At an intermediate level, using a bit of mathematics, are J. Jauch’s elegant dialogues Are Quanta Real? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973) and The Feynman Lectures in Physics, vol. III, by Richard Feynman, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1963). An advanced treatise is the monograph The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics by Max Jammer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). There is also a further-out book, edited by Ted Bastin, called Quantum Theory and Beyond: Essays and Discussions Arising from a Colloquium (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971) containing many speculative selections. Eugene Wigner, one of the major figures in physics this century, has devoted an entire selection, in his book of essays entitled Symmetries and Reflections (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press, 1970), to the subject of “Epistemology and Quantum Mechanics.”

Hugh Everett’s original paper is found, together with discussions by other physicists, in The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), edited by B.S. Dewitt and N. Graham. A recent and much easier book on these puzzling splitting worlds is Paul Davies’ Other Worlds (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981).

The strange problem of personal identityunder such conditions of branching has been explored, indirectly, in a high-powered but lively debate among philosophers over the claims made by the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke in his classic monograph “Naming and Necessity,” which first appeared in 1972 in D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds., The Semantics of Natural Language (Hingham, Mass.: Reidel, 1972), and has just been reprinted, with additional material, as a book by Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). In the Reflections, an issue is raised that must have occurred to you before: If my parents hadn’t met, I’d never have existed—or could I have been the child of some other parents? Kripke argues (with surprising persuasiveness) that although someone exactly like you might have been born at a different time to different parents—or even to your own parents—that person could not have been you. Where, when, and to whom you were born is part of your essence. Douglas Hofstadter, Gray Clossman, and Marsha Meredith explore this strange terrain in “Shakespeare’s Plays Weren’t Written by Him, but by Someone Else of the Same Name” (Indiana University Computer Science Dept. Technical Report 96) and Daniel Dennett casts some doubt on the enterprise in “Beyond Belief,” forthcoming in Andrew Woodfield, ed., Thought and Object (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Meaning, Reference and Necessity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), edited by Simon Blackburn, is a good anthology of work on the issue, and the topic continues to be analyzed in current and forthcoming articles in major philosophy journals.

Morowitz cites recent speculation about the sudden emergence of a special sort of self-consciousness in evolution—a discontinuity in the development of our remote ancestors. Certainly the boldest and most ingeniously argued case for such a development is Julian Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), in which he argues that consciousness of the familiar, typically human sort is a very recent phenomenon, whose onset is datable in historical times, not biological eons. The human beings told of in Homer’s Iliad, Jaynes insists, were not conscious! That is not to say they were asleep, or unperceiving, of course, but that they had nothing like what we think of as our inner lives. Even if Jaynes has overstated his case (as most commentators think), he has posed fascinating questions and drawn attention to important facts and problems hitherto unconsidered by thinkers on these topics. Incidently, Friedrich Nietzsche expressed a similar view of the relation of consciousness and social and linguistic practices in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), translated by Walter Kaufmann as The Gay Science (New York: Random House, 1974).