Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

An Epistemological Nightmare 420is an excellent moralist-he may be able to answer this for you.FRANK: Oh come on now, I obviously didn't mean "should" in a moralistic sense. Isimply meant "Do I have any evidence that this machine is reliable?"EPISTEMOLOGISI: Well, do you?FRANK: Don't ask me! What I mean is should you trust the machine?EPISTEMOEOGt5T: Should I trust it? I have no idea, and I couldn't care less what Ishould do.FRANK: Oh, your moralistic hangup again. I mean, do you have evidence that themachine is reliable?EPISTEMOLOGIST: Well of course!FRANK: Then let's get down to brass tacks. "hat is your evidence?EPISTEMOEOCIST: You hardly can expect that I can answer this for you in an hour, aday, or a week. If you wish to study this machine with me, we can do so, but Iassure you this is a matter of several years. At the end of that time, however, youwould certainly not have the slightest doubts about the reliability of the machine.FRANK: Well, possibly I could believe that it is reliable in the sense that itsmeasurements are accurate, but then I would doubt that what it actually measuresis very significant. It seems that all it measures is one's physiological states andactivities.EPISTEMOLOGIST: But of course, what else would you expect it to measure?FRANK: I doubt that it measures my psychological states, my actual beliefs.EPISTEMOLOGIST: Are we back to that again? The machine does measure thosephysiological states and processes that you call psychological states, beliefs,sensations, and so forth.FRANK: At this point I am becoming convinced that our entire difference is purelysemantical, All right, I will gram that your machine does correctly measure beliefsin Your sense of the word "belief," but I don't believe that it has any possibility ofmeasuring beliefs in my sense of the word "believe." In other words I claim thatour entire deadlock is simply due to the fact that you and I mean different thingsby the word "belief."EPISTEMOLOCIST: Fortunately, the correctness of your claim can he decidedexperimentally. It so happens that I now have two brain-read