Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain 447ACHILLES: "All at once," bah! What's the fun of life if we're not being processed?TORTOISE: Was it any better at an ever-slowing snail's pace?ACHILLES: At any pace, it's better. Even a Tortoise's. But say-what's If point of callingthe book-tender "A-kill-ease"?TORTOISE: I just thought I'd let you think about how it would feel if yol brain were notonly encoded in a book, but also you were minding th very brain-book (no punintended, to be sure!).ACHILLES: I suppose I would have to ask my own book. Or no-wait minute. My bookwould have to ask me! Oh, I'm so befuddled 1 these confounded and compoundedlevel-confusions you always 1 me with out of the blue! Ah! I have a grand idea.Suppose there w a machine that came along with the books, a machine that does tpage turning, the little calculations, and the clerical work. This m we would avoidthe problem of human unreliability, as well as your strange twisty loop.TORTOISE: Suppose so-an ingenious plan. And suppose the machine broke.ACHILLES: Oh, you have a morbid imagination! What recherché tortures you would putme through!TORTOISE: Not at all. Unless somebody told you of it, you wouldn't e' be aware of themachine's existence, much less that the machine had broken.ACHILLES: I don't like this isolation from the outer world. I'd rather h some way ofsensing what's going on around me than be depend' upon people telling me thingsof their own choice. Why not 1 advantage of the neurons which, in life, processedvisual input?, like the auditory conversion tables, we could have opticalconversion tables. These will be used to create changes in the book accord to thesignals from a television camera. Then I could watch the w about me, and react toits events. In particular, I'd soon become aware of the page-turning machine, thebook full of so many pages and numbers, and so on....TORTOISE: Oh, you are determined to suffer. So now you'll perceive fate that is tobefall you: You'll "see," by means of input fed into via the television camera andthe conversion tables, that the mechanical page-turner that has served you so wellhas a loose part the just about to slip. That'll scare you, all right. And what good is~ If you had no optical scanning device, you'd have no way of knowing