Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? 407own terms! Tell me what it is like-to Indira Gandhi-for Indira Gandhi to be IndiraGandhi!" In that case, of course, she might as well speak in Hindi and leave it to you tolearn the language. And yet even then you would just be in the position of millions ofnative Hindi speakers who have no idea what it would be like to be Indira Gandhi-muchless what it is like for Indira Gandhi to be Indira Gandhi....Something seems very wrong here. Nagel is insistent that he wants his verb "be"to be subjectless, in effect. Not "What would it be like for me to be X"? but "What is itlike, objectively, to be X?" There is a "be-ee" here, with no ; `be-er"-a living beastwithout a head, as it were. Perhaps we ought to go back to the conditional version: "Whatwould it be like to be Indira Gandhi?" Well, for me, or for her? Poor Indira-where doesshe go while I'm being her? Or if we turn it around (identity being a symmetricrelationship), we get "What would it be like for Indira Gandhi to be me?" Once again,where would I be if she were me? Would we have traded places? Or would we havetemporarily collapsed two separate "souls" into one?Note that we tend to say "If she were me" rather than "If she were I." ManyEuropean languages are somewhat skittish about equations of this type. It sounds funnyto use the nominative case in both the subject and complement positions. People prefer touse "be" with the accusative case, as if it were somehow a transitive verb! "Be" is not atransitive verb, but a symmetric one-yet language tilts us away from that symmetricvision.We can see this in German, where one has interesting alternatives for constructingsuch identity-asserting sentences. Two examples follow, adapted from the Germantranslation of a Stanislaw Lem dialogue in which an exact molecule-for-molecule replicaof a doomed person is about to be constructed. In that spirit, we provide (nearly) exactword-for-word replicas in English of the German originals:1. Ob die Kopie wirklich du bist, dafur mul3 der Beweis noch erbracht werden.(As-to-whether the copy really you are, thereof must the proof still provided be.)2. Die Kopie wird behaupten, dab sie du ist. (The copy will claim that it you is.)Observe that in both identity-asserting clauses, "the copy" (or "it") appears first, then"you," then the verb. But notice-in the first clause, "are" is the verb, which retroactivelyimplies that "you" was the subject and "the copy" was the complement, whereas in thesecond clause, the verb is "is," retroactively implying that the subject was "it" and the