Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Further Reading 466"enter and inform the body of a cobbler"-taking the prince's memq ries along with it. Thetheme has had dozens of variations since then Two fine anthologies, full of imaginedcases of brain transplants, per son splitting, person fusing (two or more people merginginto one pe son with several sets of memories and tastes), and person."duplicatin arePersonal Identity (1975), edited by John Perry, and The Identities o Persons (1976),edited by Amelie O. Rorty, both in paperback from the University of California Press atBerkeley. Another good book is Ber nard Williams's Problems of the Se 4( (New York:Cambridge Universit Press, 1973).Do minds or selves really exist-over and above the atoms an molecules? Such ontologicalquestions (questions concerning the type of things that can be said to exist and the waysin which things can exist have been a major preoccupation of philosophers since Plato'sday. Prob ably the most influential of today's hard-nosed, tough-minded scientificontologists is Willard V. O. Quine, of Harvard University. His classic paper "On WhatThere Is" first appeared in 1948 in the Review of Meta physics. It is reprinted in hiscollection of essays, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1953). Quine's Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960)and Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press,1969) contain later, elaborations of his uncompromising ontological stand. An amusingdialogue in which a tough-minded materialist gets tied in knots is "Holes' by David andStephanie Lewis, in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (vol. 48, 1970, pp. 206-212).If holes are things that exist, what about voices. What are they? This question isdiscussed in the first chapter of Daniel Dennett's Content and Consciousness (London:Routledge & Kegan Paul; Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: Humanities Press, 1969), where theclaim is advanced that minds enjoy the same sort of existence as voices-not problematic(like ghosts or goblins) but not just a matter of matter, either.The literature on consciousness will be introduced by subtopics later in this chapter. Thediscussion of consciousness in the Introduction is drawn from an entry on that topic byDennett forthcoming in the Oxford Companion to the Mind (New York: OxfordUniversity Press), an encyclopedia of current understanding of the mind, edited by R. L.Gregory. The quotation of E. R. John's definition of consciousness is from R. W.Thatcher and E. R. John, Foundations of Cognitive Processes (Hillsdale, N .J.: Erlbaum,1977, p. 294), and the dichotic listening experiment discussed is reported in J.R. Lacknerand M. Garrett, "Resolving Ambiguity: Effects of Biasing Context in the UnattendedEar," Cognition (1973, pp.359-372).