Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Where was I? 234Seeing by means of eyevideos is in most circumstances indistinguishable fromseeing without them. When trying to read really fine print, I noticed a slight loss ofacuity; and, until the system was finely tuned, my night vision was rather better witheyevideos than without.The most amazing simulation devices were for tactile perception. But before Idescribe skintact, which is to cutaneous and subcutaneous feeling what earphones are tohearing, I should like to describe some experiments that can be performed witheyevideos. The classic experiment with inverting lenses can be repeated simply bymounting the cameras upside down. New experiments of the same general sort can beperformed by mounting the cameras in other positions that diverge from the normal. Hereare a few: the so-called rabbit mount, with the cameras facing in opposite directionsinstead of side by side; the rabbit mount with extreme wide angle lenses, so the field ofvision is 360 degrees; and the so-called bank or supermarket mount, with the twocameras mounted on opposite walls of the room that the subject occupies. This one takessome getting used to. It is possible, by the way, with this setup to see all the sides of anopaque cube at the same time.But you want to hear more about skintact. It is a light, porous material worn rightnext to the skin, and it extends one's tactile range as radio and television extend one'sauditory and visual range. When an artificial, hand equipped with skintact transmittersstrokes a damp puppy, the, nerves in the skin of a real hand enclosed in receptor skintactare, stimulated in just the way they would be if the real hand that contains them werestroking a damp puppy. When the skintact transmitter touches something warm, thecorresponding skin covered with the receptor skin tact does not actually warm up, but theappropriate sensory nerves are stimulated as they would be if warmth were actuallypresent.In order to retrieve the buried warhead, a robot was sent underground. This robotcontained no living cells. It had the same proportions as my body; it was covered withskintact transmitter; its head had microphones and cameras mounted in it that couldtransmit to earphones and eyevideos. It was jointed just as my body is jointed and couldmove in most of the ways my body moves. It did not have a mouth or jaws or anymechanism for inhaling and exhaling air or for ingesting food. In place of a mouth, it hada loudspeaker that put forth all the sounds picked up by the microphone in front of mymouth.There was another marvelous intercommunication system between me and therobot, the Motion and Resistance System, or MARS for short. The MARS membrane isworn over the skintact layer covering the human subject and under the skintact layerworn by the robot. I don't understand all the details of how MARS works, but it isn'tdifficult to say what it does.