Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

The Circular Ruins 351Suppose the novel that clattered out of the JOHNNIAC on its high-speed printer started:"Call me Gilbert," and proceeded to tell Gilbert's story from Gilbert's point of view. Callwhom Gilbert? Gilbert is just a fictional character, a nonentity with no real existence,though we can go along with the fiction and talk about, learn about, worry about "his"adventures, problems, hopes, fears, pains. In the case of Ishmael, we may have supposedhis queer, fictional, quasi-existence depended on the real existence of Melville's self. Nodream without a dreamer to dream it seems to be Descartes' discovery. But in this casewe do seem to have a dream-a fiction, in any case-with no real dreamer or author, no realself with whom we might or might not identify Gilbert. So in such an extraordinary caseas the novel-writing machine there might be created a merely fictional self with no realself behind the act of creation. (We can even suppose the JOHNNIAC's designers had noidea what novels it would eventually write.)Now suppose our imagined novel-writing machine is not just a sedentary, boxycomputer, but a robot. And suppose-why not?-that the text of the novel is not typed but"spoken" from a mechanical mouth. Call this robot the SPEECHIAC. And suppose,finally, the tale we learn from the SPEECHIAC about the adventures of Gilbert is a moreor less true story of the "adventures" of the SPEECHIAC. When it is locked in a closet, itsays: "I am locked in the closet! Help me!" Help whom? Help Gilbert. But Gilbert doesnot exist; he is just a fictional character in the SPEECHIAC's peculiar narration. Why,though, should we call this account fiction, since there is a quite obvious candidate insight to be Gilbert: the person whose body is the SPEECHIAC? In "Where Am I?"Dennett called his body Hamlet. Is this a case of Gilbert having a body called theSPEECHIAC, or of the SPEECHIAC calling itself Gilbert?Perhaps we are being tricked by the name. Naming the robot "Gilbert" may bejust like naming a sailboat "Caroline" or a bell "Big Ben" or a program "ELIZA." Wemay feel like insisting that there is no person named Gilbert here. What, though, asidefrom bio-chauvinism, grounds our resistance to the conclusion that Gilbert is a person, aperson created, in effect, by the SPEECHIAC's activity and self-presentation in theworld?"Is the suggestion then that I am my body's dream? Am 1 just a fictional characterin a sort of novel composed by my body in action?" That would be one way of getting atit, but why call yourself fictional? Your brain, like the unconscious novel-writingmachine, cranks along, doing its physical tasks, sorting the inputs and the outputs withouta glimmer of what it is up to. Like the ants that compose Aunt Hillary in "Prelude, AntFugue,"