Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain 448what's going on in the world about you, not even with respect to your page-turner.Your thoughts proceed calmly and coolly, unaffected by the cares of the outsideworld, blithely unaware that they may soon come to a forced end, since the pageturnermay break. An idyllic existence! Up until the very end, not a worry!ACHILLES: But when it breaks, I would be dead and gone. TORTOISE: You would?ACHILLES: I'd be a lifeless, motionless heap of number-covered sheets. TORTOISE: Apity, I'm sure. But maybe old A-kill-ease would somehow find his way back to hisfamiliar haunts, and take up where the broken machine left off.ACHILLES: Oh! So I'd be resuscitated. I was dead for a while, and then returned to life!TORTOISE: If you insist on making these strange distinctions. What makes you any"deader" when the machine breaks than you are when A-kill-ease leaves youunattended for a few minutes or a few years, to play a game of backgammon, totake a trip around the world, or to go get his brain copied into a book?ACHILLES: I'm obviously deader when the machine breaks, because there is noexpectation that I will ever resume functioning. . whereas when A-kill-ease takesoff on his sprees, he will eventually return to his duty.TORTOISE: You mean, if you have been abandoned, you are still alive, just because A-kill-ease has the intention of returning? But when the machine breaks, you aredead?ACHILLES: That would be a very silly way of defining "aliveness" and "deadness."Certainly such concepts should have nothing to do with the mere intentions ofother beings. It would be as silly as saying that a light bulb is "dead" if its ownerhas no intention of turning it on again. Intrinsically, the light bulb is the same asever-and that's what counts. In my case, what counts is that that book should bekept intact.TORTOISE: You mean, that it should all be there, all at once? Its mere presence there iswhat guarantees your aliveness? Just as the existence of a playing-record istantamount to the existence of its music?ACHILLES: A funny image comes into my head. The earth is destroyed, but one recordof Bach's music somehow escapes and goes sailing out into the void of space.Does the music still exist? It would be silly