Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

The Riddle on the Universe and its Solution 283Nally preserves a history of its worldline, but moreover, that stored worldline inturn serves to determine the object's future worldline. This largeline harmony amongpast, present, and future allows you to perceive scale your self, despite its ever-changingand multifaceted nature, as a unity with some internal logic to it. If the self is likened to ariver meandering through spacetime, then it is important to point out that not just thefeatures of the landscape but also the desires of the river act as forces determining thebends in the river.Not only does our conscious mind's activity create permanent side effects at theneural level; the inverse holds too: Our conscious thoughts seem to come bubbling upfrom subterranean caverns of our mind, images flood into our mind's eye without ourhaving any idea where they came from! Yet when we publish them, we expect that wenotour subconscious structures-will get credit for our thoughts. This dichotomy of thecreative self into a conscious part and an unconscious part is one of the most disturbingaspects of trying to understand the mind. If-as was just asserted-our best ideas comeburbling up as if from mysterious underground springs, then who really are we? Wheredoes the creative spirit really reside? Is it by an act of will that we create, or are we justautomata made out of biological hardware, from birth until death fooling ourselvesthrough idle chatter into thinking that we have "free will"? If we are fooling ourselvesabout all these matters, then whom -or what-are we fooling?There is a loop lurking here, one that bears a lot of investigation. Cherniak's storyis light and entertaining, but it nonetheless hits the nail on the head by pointing toGödel’s work not as an argument against mechanism, but as an illustration of the primalloop that seems somehow deeply implicated in the plot of consciousness.D.R.H.