Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

the attended channel (e.g. “He extinguished the lantern), while another group had aneutral or irrelevant sentence as input. The former group could not report what waspresented through the unattended channel, but they favoured the suggested reading of theambiguous sentences significantly more than the control group did. The influence of theunattended channel on the interpretation of the attended signal is processed all the way toa semantic level – that is, the unattended signal is comprehended – but this is apparentlyunconscious sentence comprehension! Or should we say it is evidence of the presence inthe subject of at least two different and onlt partially communicating consciousnesses? Ifwe ask the subjects what it was like to comprehend the unattended cannel, they willreply, sincerely, that it was not like anything to them – they were quite unaware of thatsentence. But perhaps, as is often suggested about the split brain patients, there is ineffect someone else to whom our question ought to be addressed – the subject whoconsciously comprehended the sentence and relayed a hint of its meaning to the subjectwho answers our questions.Which should we say, and why? We seem to be back to our unanswerablequestion, which suggests we should find different ways of looking at the situation. Aview of consciousness that does justice to the variety of complications will almostcertainly demand a revolution in our habits of thought. Breaking bad habits is not thateasy. The fantasies and thought experiments collected here are games and exercisesdesigned to help.In Part I the exploration begins with some swift forays into the territory, noting afew striking landmarks but mounting no campaigns. In Part II our target, the mind’s I, issurveyed fro the outside. What is it that reveals the presence of other minds, other soulsto the searcher? Part III examines the physical foundation – in biology -- of the mind, andthen from this foundation moves up several levels of complexity to the level of internalrepresentations. The mind begins to emerge as a self-designing system of representations,physically embodied in the brain. Here we encounter our first roadblock – “The Story ofa Brain.” We suggest some paths around it, and in Part IV we explore the implications ofthe emerging views of the mind as software or program – as an abstract sort of thingwhose identity is independent of any particular physical embodiment. This opens updelightful prospects, such as various technologies for the transmigration of souls, andFountains of Youth, but it also opens a Pandora’s box of traditional metaphysicalproblems in untraditional costumes, which are confronted in Part V. Reality itself ischallenged by various rivals: dreams, fictions,