Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Where am I? 219circuit chips, plastic tubules, electrodes, and other paraphernalia. "Is tha mine?" I asked."Hit the output transmitter switch there on the side o the vat and see for yourself," theproject director replied. I moved th, switch to OFF, and immediately slumped, groggyand nauseated, into the arms of the technicians, one of whom kindly restored the switchto its OP position. While I recovered my equilibrium and composure, I thought ti myself:"Well, here I am sitting on a folding chair, staring through a pies of plate glass at my ownbrain.... But wait," I said to myself, "shouldn’t' I have thought, `Here I am, suspended in abubbling fluid, being stare at by my own eyes'?" I tried to think this latter thought. I triedto proje( it into the tank, offering it hopefully to my brain, but I failed to carry of theexercise with any conviction. I tried again. "Here am I, Daniel Dernett, suspended in abubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes." N( it just didn't work. Most puzzlingand confusing. Being a philosopher c firm physicalist conviction, I believedunswervingly that the tokening c my thoughts was occurring somewhere in my brain: yet,when I though "Here I am," where the thought occurred to me was here, outside the vawhere I, Dennett, was standing staring at my brain.I tried and tried to think myself into the vat, but to no avail. I trie to build up to thetask by doing mental exercises. I thought to myself "The sun is shining over there," fivetimes in rapid succession, each time mentally ostending a different place: in order, thesunlit corner of the lab the visible front lawn of the hospital, Houston, Mars, and Jupiter. Ifound I had little difficulty in getting my "there" 's to hop all over the celestial; map withtheir proper references. I could loft a "there" in an instant through the farthest reaches ofspace, and then aim the next "there" wit pinpoint accuracy at the upper left quadrant of afreckle on my arm. WI was I having such trouble with "here"? "Here in Houston" workedwe enough, and so did "here in the lab," and even "here in this part of ti lab," but "here inthe vat" always seemed merely an unmeant mental mouthing. I tried closing my eyeswhile thinking it. This seemed to hell but still I couldn't manage to pull it off, exceptperhaps for a fleeting instant. I couldn't be sure. The discovery that I couldn't be sure wasalso unsettling. How did I know where I meant by "here" when I thought "here"? Could Ithink I meant one place when in fact I meant another I didn't see how that could beadmitted without untying the few bone of intimacy between a person and his own mentallife that had survive the onslaught of the brain scientists and philosophers, thephysicalists and behaviorists. Perhaps I was incorrigible about where I meant when said"here." But in my present circumstances it seemed that either I w~ doomed by sheer forceof mental habit to thinking systematically false indexical thoughts, or where a person is(and hence where his thoughts