Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

The Story of a Brain 212this physiology in the first place. Unless Cassander is right, to some extent, thenphysiology reduces to absurdity. It undermines itself."Such thinking killed the great project and with it the spread-brain. Men turned toother weird activities and to new conclusions about the nature of experience. But whatthese were is another story.ReflectionsThis weird tale seems at first to be a sly demolition of virtually all the ideasexploited in the rest of the book, a reductio ad absurdum of the assumptions about therelations between brain and experience that had seemed to be innocent and obvious. Howmight one resist the daffy slide to its conclusion? Some hints:Suppose someone claimed to have a microscopically exact replica (in marble,even) of Michelangelo's "David" in his home. When you go to see this marvel, you find atwenty-foot-tall roughly rectilinear hunk o pure white marble standing in his living room."I haven't gotten around to unpacking it yet," he says, "but I know it's in there."Consider how little Zuboff tells us of the wonderful "cartridges" and "impulseprogrammers" that get fastened to the various bits and pieces of brain. All they do, welearn, is provide their attached neuron, or group of neurons, with a lifetime supply of theright sort of impulses in the right order and timing. Mere beepers, we might be inclined tothink. But reflect on what must actually be produced by these cartridges, by consideringwhat would in fact be a vastly "easier" technological triumph. Crippling strikes closedown all the television stations, so there is nothing to watch on TV; fortunately, IBMcomes to the aid of all the people who are going insane without their daily dose of TV, bymailing them "impulse cartridges" to fasten to their TV sets; these cartridges areprogrammed to produce ten channels of news, weather, soap opera, sports, and so forth -all made up, of course (the news won't be accurate news, but at least it will be realistic).After all, say the IBM people, we all know that television signals are just impulsestransmitted from the stations; our cartridges simply take a shorter route to the receiver.What could be inside those wonderful cartridges, though? Videotapes of some sort? Buthow were they made? By videotaping real live actors, newscasters, and the like, or byanimation? Animators will tell you that the task of composing, from