Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

14DAVID HAWLEY SANFORDWhere was I?Daniel Dennett, or perhaps one of the representatives from the corpora tion thatcollectively comprises him, delivered "Where Am l?" to a Chapel Hill Colloquium andreceived an unprecedented standing ovation. I wasn't there clapping with the rest of thelocal philosophers; I was on sabbatical leave. Although my colleagues still believe I wasliving in New York and pursuing a line of philosophic research, actually I was., workingsecretly for the Department of Defense on a matter closely, related to the Dennettcorporation.Dennett became so preoccupied with questions about his nature unity, and identity that heseemed to forget that the primary purpose of his mission was not to make previouslyintractable problems in the philosophy of mind even more difficult but to retrieve afiercely radioactive atomic warhead stuck a mile beneath Tulsa. Dennett tells us thatHamlet, his decerebrate and remotely controlled body, had barely started work o thewarhead when communications between it and Yorick, his disembodied brain, brokedown. He speculates that Hamlet soon turned to dust and appears neither to know nor tocare what became of the warhead. I, as it happens, played an essential role in its ultimateretrieval. Although my role was similar to Dennett's, there were some importantdifferences.Dennett, or Yorick, during a wakeful interval during the long time when Dennett, orYorick, slumbered on without any thoroughgoing communication, direct or remote, witha living human body, mainlined a little Brahms. The rectified output from the stereostylus was fed directly into the auditory nerves. A certain sort of scientist or philosopherwould ask,This essay was first presented to a seminar on the philosophy of mind conducted by Douglas C.Long and Stanley Munsat at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.