Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? 403tures of perception might be more accessible to objective description, even thoughsomething would be left out. And concepts alternative to those we learn in the first personmay enable us to arrive at a kind of understanding even of our own experience which isdenied us by the very ease of description and lack of distance that subjective conceptsafford.Apart from its own interest, a phenomenology that is in this sense objective maypermit questions about the physical* basis of experience to assume a more intelligibleform. Aspects of subjective experience that admitted this kind of objective descriptionmight be better candidates for objective explanations of a more familiar sort. But whetheror not this guess is correct, it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can becontemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective andobjective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidesteppingit.ReflectionsHe does all the things that you would never do;He loves me, too-His love is true.Why can't he be you?-Hank Cochran, ca. 1955Twinkle, twinkle, little bat,.How I wonder what you're at,Up above the world you fly,Like a tea-tray in the sky.Lewis Carroll, ca. 1865There is a famous puzzle in mathematics and physics courses. It asks, "Why does amirror reverse left and right, but not up and down?" It gives many people pause forthought, and if you don't want to be told the answer, skip the next two paragraphs.The answer hinges on what we consider a suitable way to project ourselves ontoour mirror images. Our first reaction is that by walking forward a few steps and thenspinning' around on our heels, we could step into the shoes of "that person" there in themirror-forgetting that the heart, appendix, and so forth of "that person" are on the wrongside. The*1 have not defined the term "physical." Obviously it does not apply just to what can be describedby the concepts of contemporary physics, since we expect further developments. Some may thinkthere is nothing to prevent mental phenomena from eventually being recognized as physical intheir own right. But whatever else may be said of the physical, it has to be objective. So if ouridea of the physical ever expands to include mental phenomena, it will have to assign them anobjective character-whether or not this is done by analyzing them in terms of other phenomenaalready regarded as physical. It seems to me more likely, however, that mental-physical relationswill eventually be expressed in a theory whose fundamental terms cannot be placed clearly ineither category.