Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Further Reading 467Part I. A Sense of SelfBorges draws our attention to different ways of thinking aboutoneself. A good entry to the recent work in philosophy mentioned in theReflections is "Who, Me?" by Steven Boer and William Lycan, in ThePhilosophical Review (vol. 89, 1980, pp. 427-466). It has an extensivebibliography that includes the pioneering work of Hector-Neri Castanedaand Peter Geach, and the fine recent work by John Perry and David Lewis.Harding's strange ruminations on having no head find an echo in the psychologicaltheories of the late James J. Gibson, whose last book, The Ecological Approach to VisualPerception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), contains many striking observations-andresults of experiments -about the information one gets about oneself (one's location, theorientation of one's head, even the important role of that blurry bit of nose one can seeout of the corner of one's eye) from visual perception. See especially chapter 7, "TheOptical Information for Self-Perception." For a recent criticism of Gibson's ideas, seeShimon Ullman, "Against Direct Perception," in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences(September, 1980, pp. 373-415). An excellent introduction to the Taoistic and Zen theoryof mind and existence is Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent (New York: Harper &Row, 1975). See also Paul Reps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (New York: Doubleday Anchor).The physical background for the quantum-mechanical ideas presented in Morowitz'sarticle and the accompanying Reflection is available at several levels of difficulty. Astimulating elementary presentation is that by Adolph Baker in Modern Physics and Antiphysics(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1970). And there is Richard Feynman's TheCharacter of Physical Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967). At an intermediatelevel, using a bit of mathematics, are J. Jauch's elegant dialogues Are Quanta Real?(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973) and The Feynman Lectures in Physics,vol. III, by Richard Feynman, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands (Reading, Mass.:Addison-Wesley, 1963). An advanced treatise is the monograph The ConceptualDevelopment of Quantum Mechanics by Max Jammer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).There is also a furtherout book, edited by Ted Bastin, called Quantum Theory andBeyond: Essays and Discussions Arising from a Colloquium (Cambridge, Eng.: -CambridgeUniv. Press, 1971) containing many speculative selections. Eugene Wigner, one of themajor figures in physics this century, has devoted an entire selection, in his book ofessays entitled Symmetries and Reflections (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press, 1970), to thesubject of "Epistemology and Quantum Mechanics."