Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Further Reading 468Hugh Everett's original paper is found, together with discussions b other physicists, inThe Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Princeton, N .J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1973), edited by B. S. Dewitt and N. Graham. A recent and much easierbook on these puzzling,Splitting worlds is Paul Davies' Other Worlds (New York: Simon& Schuster, 1981).The strange problem of personal identity under such conditions o branching has beenexplored, indirectly, in a high-powered but lively debate among philosophers over theclaims made by the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke in his classic monograph"Naming and Necessity," which first appeared in 1972 in D. Davidson and G. Harman,eds., The Semantics of Natural Language (Hingham, Mass.: Reidel, 1972), and has justbeen reprinted, with additional material, as a book by Kripke, Naming and Necessity(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). In the Reflections, an issue is raisedthat must have occurred to you before: If my parents hadn't met, I'd never have existed-orcould I have been the child of some other parents? Kripke argues (with surprisingpersuasiveness) that although someone exactly like you might have been born at adifferent time to different parents-or even to your own parents-that person could not havebeen you. Where, when, and to whom you were born is part of your essence. DouglasHofstadter, Gray Clossman, and Marsha Meredith explore this strange terrain in"Shakespeare's Plays Weren't Written by Him, but by Someone Else of the Same Name"(Indiana University Computer Science Dept. Technical Report 96) and Daniel Dennettcasts some doubt on the enterprise in "Beyond Belief," forthcoming in AndrewWoodfield, ed., Thought and Object (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).Meaning, Reference and Necessity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975),edited by Simon Blackburn, is, a good anthology of work on the issue, and the topiccontinues to be analyzed in current and forthcoming articles in major philosophyjournals.Morowitz cites recent speculation about the sudden emergence of a special sort of selfconsciousnessin evolution-a discontinuity in the development of our remote ancestors.Certainly the boldest and most ingeniously argued case for such a development is JulianJaynes's The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1976), in which he argues that consciousness of the familiar, typicallyhuman sort is a very recent phenomenon, whose onset is datable in historical times, notbiological eons. The human beings told of in Homer's Iliad, Jaynes insists, were notconscious! That is not to say they were asleep, or unperceiving, of course, but that theyhad nothing like what we think of as our inner lives. Even if Jaynes has overstated his