Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Where was I? 238movements, directly affect what they see. Many of their movements a positions arecontinually perceived although with only intermittent co scious attention. The robots inthe Hawley family preserved almost all-t4 normal functions and relations between thesense organs and limbs of ° person and the environment the robots found themselves in.And so th spatial unity of a functioning Hawley robot was more than enough t provideSanford with a sense of having a unified location where the robot was. At the time, theprospect of Hawley's disassembly was more unsettling than the prospect of David'sdismemberment.It was technically possible, I realized, that the inputs and outputs; from David, orthe computer duplicate, or whatever, could be divide between Little Hawley, Metal BigHawley, and Plastic Big Hawley. Or a. single robot could be disassembled although itsvarious parts continue independently to move and to relay perceptual information. I didn'tknow what would happen to my sense of unity in such a circumstance Would I be able topreserve any sense of myself as a single agent? Under such bizarre circumstances I mightbe inclined to parody Descartes and say that I was not only in control of these differentparts as an admiral commanding a fleet, but that I was very closely united to them, and soto speak so intermingled with them that I seemed to compose with them one whole. Or Imight not be up to that task of self-integration. Would' my range of motor and perceptualactivity, rather than being more widely distributed in space, be reduced to recollection,meditation, and fantasy as the deliverances from spatially separated and independentsources impressed me only as a booming, buzzing, distracting confusion? I am glad that Iwas never given a chance to find out.If we regard light, pressure waves, and so forth as carrying information about thephysical world, the point of view is the spatial point where this information is received bya perceiver. Sometimes, as Dennett remarks, one can shift one's point of view back andforth. The laboratory worker remotely manipulating dangerous materials can shift it backand forth from mechanical hands to hands of flesh and blood. The Cinerama viewer canshift it back and forth from a car hurtling down a roller-coaster from which one sees theground approach with sickening rapidity to a seat inside a theater from which one seesrapidly changing images on a screen. Dennett had been unable to accomplish such a shiftbetween Yorick and Hamlet, and I had been unable to accomplish such a shift betweenDavid and Hawley. Try as I might, I could not regard myself as seeing an imageprojected by eyevideo rather than seeing the scene before the camera that wastransmitting to the eyevideo. In my present state of embodiment, analogously, I cannotshift my point of view a couple of inches farther in so that I can focus my attention on apair of retinal images rather than