Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Where was I? 236there turned out to be more than one robot. In Houston there were two full-size robots,one whose main parts were mostly plastic and one whose main parts were mostly metal.They looked just the same from the outside, and, if you know what I mean, they felt justthe same from the inside. Neither robot was flown to Tulsa. A third robot, built on athree-fifths scale so it could maneuver more easily in cramped quarters, was therealready. That's the one that retrieved the warhead.Once I was onto the fact that there was more than one robot, the technicians didnot always wait for David to fall asleep before switching channels. When Little Hawleyreturned in triumph from Tulsa, the three of us, or the three of I, would play three-cornercatch with the cooperation of three human helpers who would keep the temporarilyinactive and unsentient robots from toppling over. I persisted in locating myself in theposition of the active, sentient robot and thus had the experience, or at least seemed tohave the experience, of spatiotemporally discontinuous travel from one location toanother without occupying any of the positions in between.The principle Where David goes, there goes Sanford was no more appealing forme than Dennett's analogous 11 'here Yorick goes, there goes Dennett. My reasons forrejection were more epistemological than legalistic. I had not seen David since LittleHawley's return from Tulsa and I could not be sure that David still existed. For somereason I never fully understood, quite soon after David began perceiving the externalworld via skintact, eyevideos, and earphones I was prevented from having theexperiences associated with breathing, chewing, swallowing, digesting, and excreting.When Plastic Big Hawley produced articulate speech, I was unsure that the movements ofDavid's diaphragm, larynx, tongue, and lips were still causally involved in its production.The scientists had the technology to tap directly into the appropriate nerves and rectifythe neural output, which was itself produced partly in response to artificially rectifiedinput, to transmit the same signals to the receiver connected to the loudspeaker mountedin the head of Plastic Big Hawley. The scientists, indeed, had the technology to bypassany of their fancy electronic devices of causal mediation and substitute even fancierdevices that hook up directly with the brain. Suppose, I thought, something went wrongwith David; its kidneys broke down or it developed an embolism in a coronary artery.Everything of David except the brain might be dead. For that matter, the brain might bedead too. Since a computer duplicate of Yorick, Dennett's brain, had been manufactured,then so might a computer duplicate of David's brain. I could have become a robot, or acomputer, or a robot-computer combination, with no organic parts whatsoever. I wouldthen resemble the Frank Baum character Nick Chopper, better known as the