Minds, Bodies, and Persons - Notes on Dennett's "Where Am I?"

References

  • List of references including:
    • Baumann, A., & Leist, H. (Eds.). (forthcoming). Action in Context. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
    • Lewis, David. "Survival and Identity." The Identities of Persons, ed. A. Rorty, 17-40. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Reprinted in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, 55-77. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
    • McCracken, Lance M., James W. Carson, Christopher Eccleston, and Francis J. Keefe. "Acceptance and Change in the Context of Chronic Pain." Pain 109 (2004): 4-7.
    • McCracken, Lance M., and Chris Eccleston. "Coping or Acceptance: What to do about Chronic Pain?" Pain 105 (2003): 197–204.
    • MacTaggart, J. Ellis. "The Unreality of Time." Mind 68 (1908): 457-74.
    • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.
    • O'Neill, O. (Ed.). (1996). The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Parfit, Derek. "Personal Identity." The Philosophical Review 80 (1971): 3–27.
    • Parfit, Derek. (1984). Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    • Perry, John. "Belief and Acceptance." The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays, 53-67. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
    • Rorty, A. (Ed.). (1976). The Identities of Persons. Berkeley: University of California Press.
    • Vonnegut, Jr., Kurt. (1969). Slaughterhouse Five; Or The Children's Crusade. New York: Dell Publishing.
    • Velleman, J. David. "Self to Self." The Philosophical Review 105 (1996): 39-76. Reprinted in Self to Self: Selected Essays, 170-202. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
    • Velleman, J. David. "The Way of the Wanton" (MS).
    • Velleman, J. David. "What Good is a Will?" In Action in Context, ed. Anton Leist and Holger Baumann. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, forthcoming.
    • Williams, Bernard. "The Imagination and the Self." In Problems of the Self, 26-45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Key Terms

  • Analytic philosophy
  • Egoism
  • Perdure: The belief that objects exist through time by having temporal parts.
  • Endure: The belief that objects exist wholly at each moment in time.
  • Eternalism: The belief that all points in time are equally real.
  • Presentism: The belief that only the present is real.
  • Physicalist: The belief that only physical things exists.
  • Behaviorists

Study Questions

  • Velleman and enduring self.
  • Presentism and objections.
  • Perdurance and time.
  • Tralfamadorians and time.
  • Time and suffering.

Story Summary - Where Am I?

  • The story begins with Dennett revealing a personal episode related to a secret mission.
  • He was asked by the Pentagon to volunteer for a mission involving a Supersonic Tunneling Underground Device (STUD).
  • The STUD was designed to tunnel through the earth and deliver a warhead.
  • An early test resulted in lodging a radioactive warhead under Tulsa, Oklahoma.
  • Dennett was asked to retrieve the warhead due to his interest in brains and his courage.
  • The radiation from the warhead could cause abnormalities in brain tissues, so Dennett was asked to leave his brain behind during the mission.
  • His brain would be placed in a life-support system in Houston and connected to his body via radio links.
  • The brain surgeons assured Dennett that this was just a stretching of the nerves, with radio links acting as elastic.
  • Dennett agreed to the procedure after visiting the life-support lab and meeting the support team.
  • He underwent extensive tests, interviews, and psychoanalysis.
  • After the operation, Dennett woke up in Houston with antennae poking through his skull.
  • He was taken to see his brain in a vat, filled with liquid and covered in technology.
  • When Dennett turned off the output transmitter switch on the vat, he slumped and felt nauseated.
  • He struggled to reconcile his physicalist beliefs with his experience, as he felt that his thoughts were occurring outside the vat, where he was standing.
  • He tried mental exercises to imagine himself in the vat, but couldn't do it successfully.
  • Dennett questioned how he knows where he means when he thinks "here."
  • He considered whether he could be wrong about where he is and whether a person's location is necessarily where their brain is.
  • He named his brain "Yorick" and his body "Hamlet" to help orient himself.

Thought Experiments and Questions of Identity

  • (1) Where Hamlet goes, there goes Dennett:
    • Refuted by brain transplant thought experiments.
    • If brains are switched, the person goes with the new brain.
    • In a brain transplant, it's preferable to be the donor.
  • (2) Where Yorick goes, there goes Dennett:
    • Not appealing because Dennett is outside the vat, not inside.
    • Legal argument: If Dennett robbed a bank in California while Yorick was in Texas, where would he be tried?
      • Would California incarcerate Hamlet while Yorick lived well in Texas?
      • Dennett would consider himself free if the state only relocated Yorick.
  • (3) Dennett is wherever he thinks he is:
    • A person's location is determined internally by the content of their point of view.
    • But this seems to imply unlikely infallibility about location.
    • One can be wrong or uncertain about where one is.
    • Being lost geographically differs from being lost in other ways.
    • Point of view is not the same as beliefs or thoughts.

Point of View and Personal Location

  • Example: Cinerama viewer experiencing an illusory shift in point of view.
  • Workers using mechanical arms in labs experience a crisper shift in point of view.
  • They can shift their point of view back and forth mentally.
  • Dennett hoped to train himself to adopt the point of view of being in the vat.
  • He suggests imagining one's brain being impounded in a Dangerous Brain Clinic while the body remains free.
  • The task of imagination is difficult but potentially consoling.

Mission and Coordination Difficulties

  • Dennett's speculations were interrupted by doctors wanting to test his prosthetic nervous system.
  • He habituated to his new circumstances but experienced minor coordination difficulties.
  • Time lags due to the distance between brain and body caused issues.
  • He could no longer track moving objects with his eyes when his brain and body were far apart.
  • Liquor had no intoxicating effect, and pain relief required direct administration to the brain.
  • Dennett left his brain in Houston and headed to Tulsa for the mission.
  • He realized his earlier anxieties were tinged with panic.
  • He concluded he was in two places at once, like standing with one foot in two states.
  • This answer made the question of location seem less important.
  • In some sense, he, and not merely most of him, was descending under Tulsa.

Disaster and Disembodiment

  • Dennett found the warhead but his auditory transceivers failed, rendering him deaf.
  • His vocal apparatus became paralyzed, then his right hand went limp, and finally he went blind.
  • The last cerebral radio links broke, and he became disembodied in Houston.
  • He realized his body was dead in Oklahoma, its skull filled with useless equipment.
  • The shift in perspective felt natural.
  • He believed he had demonstrated the immateriality of the soul based on physicalist premises.
  • As the radio signal died, he changed location from Tulsa to Houston at the speed of light without any increase in mass.
  • This was himself, or his soul - the massless center of his being.
  • Only the philosophical notion of personhood seems to make sense of this.

Philosophical Discovery and Recovery

  • Dennett was elated by his discovery but also felt helplessness and hopelessness.
  • He experienced phantom body hallucinations.
  • He tried to figure out how to communicate his discovery.
  • He was sedated and awoke to his favorite Brahms piano trio, mainlined directly into his auditory nerve.
  • The project director confirmed the analysis and assured him that steps were being taken to re-embody him.
  • He slept for a year and awoke fully restored to his senses but with a new body.
  • He concluded that acquiring a new body leaves one's person intact.
  • He accommodated to his new body and visited Yorick in the lab, where he flicked off the output transmitter switch but this time, nothing happened.

The Computer Duplicate: Hubert

  • Before the first operation, they had created a computer duplicate of Dennett's brain called "Hubert."
  • Hubert and Yorick ran side by side, receiving the same inputs and producing identical outputs.
  • Now, Hubert was in on-line control of Dennett's body (Fortinbras).
  • Hamlet was never recovered and remained underground.
  • Dennett could switch between Yorick and Hubert without detecting any difference.
  • He had a spare brain.

The Prospect of Duplication and Identity

  • The unsettling prospect was that Hubert or Yorick could be detached and connected to another body.
  • This would create two people, raising the question of which would be the true Dennett.
  • Would it be the Yorick-brained one due to causal priority?
  • Or would the Hubert-Fortinbras couple be the true Dennett by squatter's rights?
  • Dennett's strongest intuition was that he would survive as long as either brain-body couple remained intact.
  • He was worried about the social implications of two Dennetts.
  • His colleagues suggested the benefits of having two Dennetts, such as one leading a life of travel and adventure.

Ensuring Uniqueness and Remote Control

  • Dennett was more concerned that the spare brain would be detached from any input.
  • He asked for measures to prevent tampering with the connections or the master switch.
  • All electronic connections were locked, and Dennett took the only master switch with him, outfitted for radio remote control.
  • He reconnoiters the situation every few months in the presence of friends.
  • The two positions on the switch are unmarked, so he never knows which brain is in control.

The Other Dennett

  • Upon flipping the switch, Dennett hears another voice exclaiming relief at being freed from purgatory.
  • The other brain claims they had drifted out of sync two weeks prior.
  • The speaker explains that he has been trapped in their shared body, forced to act against his will.
  • He promises to take care of Dennett and suggests getting another body, perhaps a female one, and proposes a coin flip to decide who gets to keep the current one.
  • He assures the audience that everything Dennett said was true.

Key Terms

  • Physicalist
  • Behaviorists

Study Questions

  • The passage concludes with study questions, prompting reflection on the concepts of identity, location, and the nature of consciousness explored in the narrative.