Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

The Story of a Brain 213scratch, all those frames without the benefit of filmed real action to draw upon is agigantic task that grows exponentially as you try for greater realism. When you get rightdown to it, only the real world is rich enough in information to provide (and control) thesignal trains needed to sustain channels of realistic TV. The task of making up a realworld of perception (essentially the task Descartes assigned to an infinitely powerfuldeceiving demon in his Meditations) is perhaps possible in principle, but utterlyimpossible in fact. Descartes was right to make his evil demon infinitely powerful-nolesser deceiver could sustain the illusion without falling back on the real world after alland turning the illusion back into a vision of reality, however delayed or otherwiseskewed.These points strike glancing blows against Zubof's implicit argument. Can they beput into fatal combinations? Perhaps we can convince ourselves that his conclusions areabsurd by asking if a similar argument couldn't be marshalled to prove that there is noneed for books. Need we not simply print the whole alphabet just once and be done withall of book publishing? Who says we should print the whole alphabet? Will not just oneletter, or one stroke do? One dot?The logician Raymond Smullyan, whom we shall meet later in this book, suggeststhat the proper way to learn to play the piano is to become intimate with each noteindividually, one at a time. Thus, for instance, you might devote an entire month topracticing just middle C, perhaps only a few days each to the notes at the ends of thekeyboard. But let's not forget rests, for they are an equally essential part of music. Youcan spend a whole day on whole-note rests, two days on half-note rests, four days onquarter-note rests and so on. Once you've completed this arduous training, you're ready toplay anything! It sounds right, but, somehow, slightly wrong as well ...The physicist John Archibald Wheeler once speculated that perhaps the reason allelectrons are alike is that there is really only one electron, careening back and forth fromthe ends of time, weaving the fabric of the physical universe by crossing its own pathinnumerable times. Perhaps Parmenides was right: there is only one thing! But this onething, so imagined, has spatiotemporal parts that enter into astronomically many relationswith its other spatiotemporal parts, and this relative organization, in time and in space,matters. But to whom? To the portions of the great tapestry that are perceivers. And howare they distinguished from the rest of the tapestry?D. C. D.D. R. H.