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

One shouldn’t ignore the critics of AI. In addition to Weizenbaum, who devotes several chapters of Computer Power and Human Reason to an attack on AI, there is the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, whose What Computers Can’t Do (New York: Harper & Row, 2nd ed., 1979) is the most sustained and detailed criticism of the methods and presuppositions of the field. An entertaining and informative history of the birth of the field is Pamela McCorduck’s Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into History and Prospects of Articial Intelligence (San Francisco: Freeman, 1979).

Dawkins’s provocative views on genesas the units of selection have received considerable attention from biologists and philosophers of biology. Two good and relatively accessible discussions are William Wisatt’s “Reductionistic Research Strategies and Their Biases in the Units of Selection Controversy,” in Thomas Nickles, ed., Scientific Discovery, vol. 2, Case Studies (Hingham, Mass.: Reidel, 1980, pp. 213–59), and Elliot Sober’s “Holism, Individualism, and the Units of Selection,” in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association (vol. 2, 1980).

There have been many attempts to establish different levels of description of the brainand to describe the relations between them. Some pioneering attempts by neuroscientists are Karl Pribram’s The Languages of the Brain (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), Michael Arbib’s The Metaphorical Brain (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1972), and R.W. Sperry’s “A Modified Concept of Consciousness” in Psychological Review, (vol. 76, (6), 1969, pp. 532–536). Consciousness and Brain: A Scientific an Philosophical Inquiry (New York: Plenum, 1976), edited by G. Globus, G. Maxwell, and I. Savodnick, includes several discussions of the problems faced by anyone who tries to relate brain-talk to mind-talk. An earlier work, yet still full of fresh insight, is Dean Wooldridge’s Mechanical Man: The Physical Basis of Intelligent Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).

The general problem of levels of explanationin discussing mind and brain is one of the central themes of Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. It is also the topic of the books The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2nd ed., 1981) and Hierarchy Theory, edited by Howard H. Pattee (New York: George Braziller, 1973).

Reduction and holism in biological systems such as ant colonies have been under debate for many decades. Back in 1911, William Morton Wheeler wrote an influential article entitled “The Ant-Colony as an Organism” in the Journal of Morphology (vol. 22, no. 2, 1911, pp. 307–325). More recently, Edward O. Wilson has written a remarkably thorough treatise on social insects, called The Insect Societies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1971). We are not aware of any literature exploring the intelligence of societies; for example, can an ant colony learn new tricks?

The explicitly antireductionistic sentimenthas been put forward vehemently by an international group whose most outspoken member is the novelist and philosopher Arthur Koestler. Together with J.R. Smythies, he has edited a volume called Beyond Reductionism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) and has stated his own position eloquently in Janus: A Summing Up (New York: Vintage, 1979), particularly the chapter entitled “Free Will in a Hierarchic Context.”

The quotations in the Reflections on “Prelude, Ant Fugue” are from Richard D. Mattuck, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), and Inside the Brain (New York: Mentor, 1980), by William H. Calvin and George A. Ojemann. Aaron Sloman, who was probably the first person trained as a philosopher to he field of artificial intelligence, is the author of The Computer Revolution in Philosophy (Brighton, England: Harvester, 1979). Like many revolutionary manifestos, Sloman’s book vacillates between declaring victory, declaring that victory is inevitable, and exhorting the reader to a difficult and uncertain campaign. Sloman’s vision of the accomplishments and prospects of the movement is rose-tinted, but insightful. Other landmark work on systems of knowledge representationcan be found in Lee W. Gregg, ed., Knowledge and Cognition (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Daniel G. Bobrow and Allan Collins, eds., Representation and Understanding (New York: Academic Press, 1975); Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1977); Nicholas V. Findler, ed., Foundations of Semantic Networks (New York: Academic Press); Donald A. Norman and David Rumelhart, eds. Explorations in Cognition (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1975); Patrick Henry Winston, The Psychology of Computer Vision (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975); and the other books and articles on artificial intelligence mentioned in this chapter.

The strategy of speaking figuratively of homunculi, little people in the brain whose joint activity composes the activity of a single mind, is explored in detail in Daniel C. Dennett’s Brainstorms (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, 1978). An early article in this vein was F. Attneave’s “In Defense of Homunculi,” in W. Rosenblith, ed., Sensory Communication, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960, pp. 777–782). William Lycan advances the cause of homunculi in “Form, Function, and Feel,” in the Journal of Philosophy (vol. 78, (1), 1981, pp. 24–50). See also Ronald de Sousa’s “Rational Homunculi” in Rorty’s The Identities of Persons.

Disembodied brainshave long been a favorite philosophical fantasy. In his Meditations (1641), Descartes presents the famous thought experiment of the evil demon or evil genius. “How do I know,” he asks himself in effect, “that I am not being tricked by an infinitely powerful evil demon who wants to deceive me into believing in the existence of the external world (and my own body)?” Perhaps, Descartes supposes, the only thing that exists aside from the demon is his own immaterial mind—the minimal victim of the demon’s deceit. In these more materialistic times the same question is often updated: How do I know that evil scientists haven’t removed my brain from my head while I slept and put it in a life-support vat, where they are tricking it—me—with phony stimulation? Literally hundreds of articles and books have been written about Descartes’s thought experiment with the evil demon. Two good recent books are Anthony Kenny’s Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy (Random House, 1968), and Harry Frankfurt’s Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’ Meditations (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). A fine anthology is Willis Doney, ed., Descartes: a Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1968). A particularly memorable and amusing discussion is O. K. Bouwsma’s “Descartes’ Evil Genius,” in the Philosophical Review (vol. 58, 1949, pp. 141–151).

The “brain in the vat” literature, of which Zubotff’s strange tale is a previously unpublished instance, has recently been rejuvenated with some new critical slants. See Lawrence Davis’s “Disembodied Brains,” in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (vol. 52, 1974, pp. 121–132), and Sydney Shoemaker’s “Embodiment and Behavior,” in Rorty’s The Identities of Persons. Hilary Putnam discusses the case at length in his new book, Reason, Truth and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and argues that the supposition is not just technically outrageous but deeply, conceptually incoherent.