Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Where was I? 233..If we can bypass the middle and inner ear and feed directly into the auditory nerve, whycan't we bypass that as well and feed directly into whatever the auditory nerve feeds?Indeed, why not bypass that as well and feed directly into the subpersonal informationprocessingsystem another step farther in? Or into the next step beyond that?" Sometheorists, but presumably not Dennett, would wonder when this process of replacingnatural with artificial information-processing devices would reach the ultimate possessorof auditory experience, the real core person, the true seat of the soul. Others would see itrather as a layer-by-layer transformation, from the outside in, of an organic subject ofconsciousness to an artificial intelligence. The scientist shooting the Brahms piano triostraight into Yorick's auditory nerves, however, actually asked himself a different kind ofquestion. He wondered why they had bothered to disconnect Dennett's ears from hisauditory nerves. There would have been advantages, he thought, if we could have usedearphones on the ears connected in the normal way to the brain in the vat and hadmicrophones instead of organic ears on the body that ventured deep below Tulsa. Thebelief that the radiation could damage only brain tissue had been utterly mistaken.Indeed, the organic ears on Hamlet had been the first to go, and the rest of Hamlet waskilled off shortly thereafter. With microphones instead of ears on Hamlet, and earphoneson the ears connected normally to Yorick, Dennett could get a more realistic stereorendition of a musical performance than could be obtained merely by mainlining theoutput from a stereo cartridge tracking a normal stereo recording. If Hamlet sat in theconcert hall during a live performance, then every turn of the head would result inslightly different outputs from the earphones back in Houston. This set up would preservethe slight differences in volume and the slight time delay between the two signals that,although not consciously discernible, are so important in fixing the location of a soundsource.A description of this marginal improvement on earphones serves as an analogy inthe explanation of some more radical advances made by the NASA technicians. Humaneyes, they discovered from the Dennett caper, could not long withstand the fierceradiation from the buried warhead. It would have been better to leave Dennett's eyesattached to his brain as well and mount little television cameras in Hamlet's empty eyesockets. By the time I had entered into the secret mission to retrieve the warhead, thetechnicians had perfected eyevideos. Eyevideos are to seeing what earphones are tohearing. They not only project an image on the retina, they monitor every movement ofthe eyeball. For every rapid eye movement, there is a corresponding rapid cameramovement; for every twist of the head, there is a corresponding shift in the cameras; andso on.