Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Borges and I 21that he is the person whose pocket is being picked! Thisdramatic shift is a discovery; Pete comes to know something hedidn’t know a moment before, and of course it is important.Without the capacity to entertain the sorts of thoughts that nowgalvanize him into defensive action, he would hardly be capableof action at all. But before the shift, he wasn’t entirelyignorant, of course; he was thinking about “the person in theovercoat” and seeing that the person was being robbed, and sincethe person in the overcoat is himself, he was thinking abouthimself. But he wasn’t thinking about himself as himself; hewasn’t thinking about himself “in the right way.”For another example, imagine someone reading a book inwhich a descriptive noun phrase of, say, three dozen words inthe first sentence of a paragraph portrays an unnamed person ofinitially indeterminate sex who is performing an everydayactivity. The reader of that book, on reading the given phrase,obediently manufactures in his or her mind’s eye a simple,rather vague mental image of a person involved in some mundaneactivity. In the next few sentences, as more detail is added tothe description, the reader’s mental image of the whole scenariocomes into a little sharper focus. Ten at a certain moment,after the description has gotten quite specific, somethingsuddenly “clicks,” and the reader gets an eerie sense that he orshe is the very person being described! “How stupid of me not torecognize earlier that I was reading about myself!” the readermuses, feeling a little sheepish, but also quite tickled. Youcan probably imagine such a thing happening, but to help youimagine it more clearly, just suppose that the book involvedwas The Mind’s I. There now – doesn’t your mental image of thewhole scenario come into a little sharper focus? Doesn’t it allsuddenly “click”? What page did you imagine the reader asreading? What paragraph? What thoughts might have crossed thereader’s mind? If the reader were a real person, what might heor she be doing right now?It is not easy to describe something of such special selfrepresentation.Suppose a computer is programmed to control thelocomotion and behavious of a robot to which it is attached byradio links. (The famous “Shakey” at SRI International inCalifornia was so controlled.) The computer contains arepresentation of the robot and its environment, and as therobot moves around, the representation changes accordingly. Thispermits the computer program to control the robot’s activitieswith the aid of up-to-date information about the robot’s “body”and the environment it finds itself in. Now suppose the computerrepresents the robot as located in the middle of an empty room,and suppose you are