Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Beyond Rejection 248Everything would seem normal because your system would have retune itself."What do you think will happen if you then take the goggles off?"Candy Darling giggled. Ms. Pedersen said, "Oh, I see. Your mind would haveadjusted to turning the, ah, messages from your eyes upside down, so when you took thegoggles off-"Precisely," said Germaine, "everything would look upside down to you until youreadjusted to having the goggles off and it happens the same way. You stumble aroundfor a day or so and then everything snaps right side up again. And the stumbling-aroundpart is important. If you are confined to a chair with your head fixed in position, yourmind and body can't tune themselves."Now I want you to imagine what happens when we implant a mind into ablanked brain. Almost everything will be out of tune. The messages from your eyes won'tsimply be inverted, they'll be scrambled in countless ways. Same thing with your ears,nose, tongue-and with the whole nerve net covering your body. And that's just incomingmessages. Your mind will have even more problems when it tries to tell the body to dosomething. Your mind will try to get your lips to say `water,' and Sol knows what soundwill come out."And what's worse is that whatever sound does come out, your new ears won't beable to give your mind an accurate version of it."Germaine smiled at them and glanced at her watch. Terry stood up."Terry will be wanting to take you on. Let me wrap this up by saying that it is avery simple thing to play someone's mind tape into a prepared brain. The great problem isin getting the rearranged brain, the cerebral cortex, speaking strictly, to be tuned into therest of the system. As Austin Worms may have told you, we start an implant operationtomorrow. The initial tape-in will take less than an hour. But th tuning will take days anddays. Even months, if you count all the therapy. Questions?"`Just one," said Ms. Pedersen. "I can understand how difficult it is for a mind tosurvive implantation. And, of course, I know it is illegal to implant a mind that is overeighty-five. But couldn't a person-if you call a mind a person-live forever by passingthrough body after body?""Okay, that's a tough one to explain even if we had a lot of time and you knew alot of mathematics. Until this century it was believed that senility was a by-product of thephysical breakdown of the bbdy. Today we know that a human mind can have roughlyone hundred years of experiences before it reaches essential senility, however young thebody it occupies. As you know, a few successful leapers have survived implanta