Dan Dennett, Where Am I?
1. THE STORY, PART I
2. The characters
a. Yorick: His brain
b. Hamlet: His body
c. Fortinbras: His new body
d. Hubert: The computer program that functionally mirrors his brain
3. Asked to go fetch a radioactive atomic warhead a mile underground Tulsa, Oklahoma
4. Harmful radiation to the brain, but not rest of the body
5. Leave his brain behind in a vat in Houston, Texas
6. Hook up radio links between his brain and his body
a. “Like moving the brain over an inch in your skull and stretching the nerves”
b. “Making nerves indefinitely elastic by splicing radio links into them”
c. “Would not alter or impair the mind”
7. When he drinks he enjoys the taste, but does not get drunk no matter how much he drinks
a. Is this because inebriation is chemical and not electrical?
8. PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS PART I
9. Where am I?
a. Sitting in a chair looking at my brain in a vat next to me?
b. Suspended in fluid in a vat being stared at by my own eyes?
10. Dennett goes with the first
a. Where a person is, is not necessarily where his/her brain is
11. Physicalism seems incompatible with being separate from your brain
a. His belief that he is separate from his brain seems to conflict with physicalism’s view of mind, the idea that his thoughts were instantiated someplace in his brain
i. And presumably he is located where ever his thoughts are
12. If a person is a mental substance, distinct from a physical substance, it makes no sense to ask where am I, because mental stuff does not have location (in space)
a. Temporal properties are not a problem, but spacial ones are
13. Argument against identifying you with your body:
14. Idea that you are wherever your body is is easily shown false by brain transplant experiments
a. Imagine putting your brain in President Obama’s body and taking Obama’s brain and putting it in your body.
b. Would you be sitting in the White House or here in this class room? Where would Obama be?
c. If we asked the person in the White House what he had for breakfast and who his parents were, where he went to school, what would he say?
d. Memories seem crucial to who you are
e. You can be separated from your body
f. Much less clear you can be separated from your brain
i. Though in case of Hamlet/Yorick, seems you are
15. Argument against identifying you with your brain:
16. Idea that you are your brain, shown to be false by example of you committing a crime and they lock up your brain (Yorick) but let your body (Hamlet) go free
a. Your brain would be in prison, but you’d be on the beaches of Mexico drinking Pina Coladas
b. Seems clear they would not have successfully punished you or kept you in prison.
17. Consider: You are where ever your senses are?
a. But what if your senses are split: Hear what is happening one place and see another place?
18. Scattered individual?
a. In this case, the person is fragmented
b. I’m both inside the vat and outside it
c. Or part of me is there and part not?
d. Dennett: No, I (not part or most of me) was descending into the earth in search of the atomic warhead
19. THE STORY, PART II
20. He’s going down underneath Tulsa Oklahoma to get the warhead and he goes deaf and then blind and can’t talk can’t talk or move his body
21. The transceivers have broken
a. He’s lost all contact with that body
22. Now he’s in Houston, where his brain is
23. PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS PART II
24. Does this provide an argument for immateriality of the soul based on physical principles/premises?
a. When radio signals between Houston and Tulsa stopped, he changed locations
25. THE STORY, PART III AND PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS
26. Technical support team sedated him in to dreamless sleep
a. Awoke to music piped into his brain w/o ears and the voice of the project director giving saying they were working to re-embody him
27. Awoke with a new body
a. Leaves one’s person intact
b. One’s personality is largely preserved
i. (More so than with sex change operations)
ii. So we are not our bodies
iii. But he is no located where his new body is located
28. Went back to visit his brain (Yorik) in Houston
a. He flicked off the output transmitter
b. Nothing happened, all the senses continued to function as normal
c. How could it be?
29. From the beginning they had constructed a computer duplicate of his brain
a. Reproducing complete information processing structure and computational speed of his brain in a giant computer program
b. Run this computer system and Yorick side by side
i. Incoming signals from Hamlet (his body) sent to both Yorick and the inputs on this computer
ii. Outputs from Yorick go back to Hamlet (his body) but recorded and checked against the simultaneous outputs of the computer program (Hubert)
iii. Outputs were identical
iv. The computer program had copied brain’s functional structure
30. Flipped the master switch so Hubert (the computer) was in on-line control of his body (Fortinbras, not Hamlet--Hamlet was left underground and disintegrated)
a. The brain is just a computer program?
i. Could computers could have consciousness (if hooked up to a body?)
b. So one is not identical with the physical brain that instantiates one’s thoughts/memories/personality?
c. Functionalism: Anything that functions the same (takes given input and puts out the same outputs as the other brain) is the same thing, no matter out of what it is physically constructed
i. The matter is not important, but its function is
31. He now had a spare brain
a. Could flip back and forth between Yorick and Hubert and his consciousness would not notice
b. Could this program then insure his immortality?
32. Would there be two Dennetts if either Yorick or Hubert where hooked up to a new body?
a. Which would be the true Dennett, if either?
b. Dennett believes as long as one brain/body or compute program/body survived he’d survive
i. Doesn’t want both to survive
(1) Compete for his wife’s affection!
33. The two could lead different lives
a. One could stay at work and earn a salary
b. Other could go out and have fun
c. As soon as the experiences and memories would differ, they would be different people