Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Rediscovering the Mind 47Back and penetrate deeply. The ultimate question is this: “Whyis this me in this branch, then? What makes me – I mean this me– feel itself – I mean myself – unsplit?”The sun is setting one evening over the ocean. You and agroup of friends are standing at various points along the wetsand. As the water laps at your feet, you silently watch the redglobe drop nearer and nearer to the horizon. As you watch,somewhat mesmerized, you notice how the sun’s reflection on thewave crests forms a straight line composed of thousands ofmomentary orange-red glints – a straight line pointing right atyou” “How lucky that I am the one who happens to be lined upexactly with that line”” you think to yourself. “Too bad not allof us can stand here and experience this perfect unity with thesun.” And at the same moment, each of your friends is havingprecisely the same thought . . or is it the same?Such musings are at the heart of the “soul-searchingquestion.” Why is this soul in this body? (Or on this branch ofthe universal wave function?” Why, when there are so manypossibilities, did this mind get attached to this body? Whycan’t my “I-ness” belong to some other body? It is obviouslycircular and unsatisfying to say something like “You are in thatbody because that was the one made by your parents.” But whywere they my parents, and not someone else? Who would have beenmy parents if I had been born in Hungary? What would I have beenlike if I had been someone else? Or if someone else had been me?Or – am I someone else? Am I everyone else? Is there only oneuniversal consciousness? Is it an illusion to feel oneself asseparate, as an individual? It is rather eerie to find thesebizarre themes reproduced at the core of what is supposedly ourstablest and least erratic science.And yet in a way it is not so surprising. There is a clearconnection between the imaginary worlds in our minds and thealternate worlds evolving in parallel with the one weexperience. The proverbial young man picking apart the daisy andmuttering, “She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, sheloves me not is clearly maintaining in his mind (at least) twodifferent worlds based on two different models for his beloved.Or would it be more accurate to say that there is one mentalmodel of his beloved that is in a mental analogue of a quantummechanicalsuperposition of states?And when a novelist simultaneously entertains a number ofpossible ways of extending a story, are the characters not, soto speak metaphorically, in a mental superposition of states? Ifthe novel never gets set to paper, perhaps the split characterscan continue to evolve their multiple stories in their author’sbrain. Furthermore, it would even seem strange to ask