Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Beyond Rejection 252body. What I had, of course, came free under the Kellog-Murphy Bill.After a while she left. I stared at the wall numbly. A nurse brought a tray withscrambled eggs and toast. I ignored both nurse and tray. The thin-lipped mouth salivated.Let it suffer.ReflectionsFascinating as the idea of mind tapes is, the supposition that such person preservationmight someday be possible is almost certainly wrong. Leiber sees the fundamentalobstacle-brains are not like computers fresh from the factory and all alike. Even at birthhuman brains are no doubt uniquely configured-like fingerprints-and a lifetime oflearning and experience can only enhance their idiosyncracies. There are scant groundsthen for hoping that anything with the hardware-independence c( a program can be "readout" of a brain (at a periodic "mind taping" session). There is even less hope that such amind tape, even if it could be constructed, would be compatible with another brain'shardware. Computers are designed to be readily redesignable (at another level) by theinsertion, in one big lump or rush, of a new program; brains presumably are not.Leiber is wonderfully imaginative about the ways technicians might try to solvethis incompatibility problem (and his book contains many more surprises on this score),but in order to tell a good tale he has had; to understate the problems by orders ofmagnitude in our opinion. The problems of transferring massive amounts of informationbetween structurally different brains-such as yours and ours-are not insurmountable. Thetechnology that already exists for accomplishing that task may however, turn out in theend to be the most efficient possible. One of the most recent and advanced examples ofthat technology is in your handsD.C.D.