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

Selections from On Having No Head, by D. E. Harding, Perennial Library, Harper & Row. Published by arrangement with the Buddhist Society, 1972 Reprinted by permission.

“Rediscovered the Mind,” by Harold J. Morowitz. From Psychology Today, August 1980. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Excerpt from “Computing Machines and Intelligence.” Mind, Vol. LIX. No. 236 (1950). Reprinted by permission.

Possibly this view is heretical. St Thomas Aquinas ( Summa Theologica, quoted by Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945], p. 458) states that God cannot make man to have no soul. But this may not be a real restriction on His powers, but only a result of the fact that men’s souls are immortal and therefore indestructible.

This selection appeared previously as “Metamagical Themas: A Coffeehouse conversation on the Turing test to determine if a machine can think.” In Scientific American, May 1981, pp. 15–36.

(See selection 22, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” p. 375)

Excerpt from “The Tale of the Three Story-Telling Machines,” from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel. Copyright © 1974 by The Seabury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of The Continuum Publishing Corporation.

Excerpt from The Soul of Anna Klane by Terrel Miedaner. Copyright © 1977 by Church of Physical Theology, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc.

Excerpt from The Soul of Anna Klane by Terrel Miedaner. Copyright © 1977 by the Church of Physical Theology, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc.

Excerpt from On Not Knowing How to Live by Allen Wheelis. Copyright © 1975 by Allen Wheelis. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

Excerpt from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1976. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

Not to he confused with the Andromeda galaxy, which is two million light years away.

—Eds.

Excerpt from Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Copyright © 1979 by Basic Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, Inc., Publishers.

See selection 25, “An Epistemological Nightmare,” for a story featuring a machine that can outdo a person at “brain reading.”

Excerpt from Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology by Daniel C. Dennett Copyright © 1978 by Bradford Books, Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

As in Hilary Putnam’s famous “Twin Earth” thought experiment. See “Further Reading.”

This essay was first presented to a seminar on the philosophy of mind conducted by Douglas C. Long and Stanley Munsat at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In Brainstorms.

Excerpt from Beyond Rejection by Justin Leiber. Copyright © 1980 by Justin Leiber. Reprinted by permission of Ballantine Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.

Excerpt from Software by Rudy Rucker. Copyright © 1981 by Rudy Rucker. The complete novel Software will be published by Ace Books, New York, 1981.

Copyright © 1978 by Christopher Cherniak.

“The seventh Sally” from the The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel. Copyright © 1974 by The Seabury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of The Continuum Publishing Corporation.

Excerpt from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins, pp. 191–192. Copyright © 1976 by Tom Robbins. Reprinted by permission of Bantam Books. All rights reserved.

“Non Serviam” from A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books by Stanislaw Lem. Copyright © 1971 by Stanislaw Lem; English translation copyright © 1979, 1978 by Stanislaw Lem. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Credo quia absurdum est (Prof. Dobb’s note in the text).

Jerry Fodor, “Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology” (see “Further Reading”).

“Is God a Taoist?” from The Tao is Silent by Raymond M. Smullyan. Copyright © 1977 by Raymond M. Smullyan. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.

“The Circular Ruins,” translated by James E. Irby, from Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Others Writings, edited by Donald E. Yates and James E. Irby. Copyright © 1962 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions, New York.

“Minds, Brains, and Programs,” by John R. Searle, from The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 3. Copyright © 1980 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

Also, “understanding” implies both the possession of mental (intentional) states and truth (validity, success) of these states. For the purposes of this discussion we are concerned only with the possession of the states.

Intentionality is by definition that feature of certain mental states by which they are directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world. Thus, beliefs, desires, and intentions are intentional states; undirected forms of anxiety and depression are not.

I am indebted to a rather large number of people for discussion of these matters and for their patient attempts to overcome my ignorance of artificial intelligence. I would especially like to thank Ned Block, Hubert Dreyfus, John Haugeland, Roger Schank, Robert Wilensky, and Terry Winograd.

“An Unfortunate Dualist” from This Book Needs No Title by Raymond M. Smullyan. Copyright © 1980 by Raymond M. Smullyan. Published by Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.

“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel appeared in The Philosophical Review, October 1974. It is reprinted by permission of the author.

See “Further Reading” for Nagel’s references.

Perhaps there could not actually be such robots. Perhaps anything complex enough to behave like a person would have experiences. But that, if true, is a fact which cannot be discovered merely by analyzing the concept of experience.

It is not equivalent to that about which we are incorrigible, both because we are not incorrigible about experience and because experience is present in animals lacking language and thought, who have no beliefs at all about their experiences.

By “our own case” I do not mean just “my own case,” but rather the mentalistic ideas that we apply unproblematically to ourselves and other human beings.