Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

On Having No Head 32Them both, we also have developed a respect for the compellingof simple logic. But the sudden conjunction of these twopremises slaps us in the face unexpectedly. It is an ugly,brutal blow that sends us reeling – probably for days, weeks,months. Actually, for years – for our whole lives! But somehowwe suppress the conflict and turn it in other directions.Do higher animals have the ability to see themselves asmembers of a class? Is a dog capable of (wordlessly) thinkingthe thought. “I bet I look like those dogs over there”? Imaginethe following gory situation. A ring is formed of, say, twentyanimals of one sort. An evil human repeatedly spins a dial andwalks over to the designated animal and knifes it to death infront of the remaining ones. Is it likely that each one willrealize its impending doom, will think, “That animal over thereis just like me, and my goose may soon be cooked just as hiswas. Oh, no!”? ((Patrick’s note.. YES, animals do know, cows atthe abattoir know they are going to be slaughtered… smack onedog and my others know they had better go hide….)This ability to snap oneself onto others seems to be theexclusive property of members of higher species. (it is thecentral topic of Thomas Nagel’s article, “What is it like to bea Bat?” reprinted in selection 24.) One begins by making partialmappings: “I have feet, you have feet; I have hands, you havehands; hmm . . “ These partial mappings then can induce a totalmapping. Pretty soon, I conclude from your having a head that Ito have one, although I can’t see mine. But this steppingoutside myself is a gigantic and, in some ways, self-denyingstep. It contradicts much direct knowledge about myself. It islike Harding’s two distinct types of verb “to see” – whenapplied to myself it is quite another thing than when it appliesto you. The power of this distinction gets overcome, however, bythe sheer weight of too many mappings all the time, establishingwithout doubt my membership in a class that I formulatedoriginally without regard to myself.So logic overrides intuition. Just as we could come tobelieve that our Earth can be round – as is the alien moon –without people falling off, so we finally come to believe thatthe solipsistic view is nutty. Only a powerful vision such asHarding’s Himalayan experience can return us to that primordialsense of self and otherness, which is at the root of theproblems of conscious ness, soul, and self.Do I have a brain? Will I actually die? We all think aboutsuch questions many times during our lives. Occasionally,probably every imaginative person thinks that all of life is ahuge joke or hoax – perhaps a psychology experiment – beingperpetrated by some inconceivable superbeing, seeing how far itcan push us into believing obvious absurdities (the idea thatsounds that I can’t understand really mean something. The ideathat someone can hear Chopin or eat chocolate ice-cream withoutloving it, the idea that light goes at the same speed in anyreference frame,