Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Further Reading 476Fictional objects have recently been the focus of considerable atten tion fromphilosophers of logic straying into aesthetics. See Terence Parsons, Nonexistent Objects(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980); David Lewis, "Truth in Fiction," inAmerican Philosophical Quarterly (vol. 15, 1978, pp. 37-46); Peter van Inwagen,"Creatures of Fiction," also in American Philosophical Quarterly (vol. 14, 1977, pp. 299-308); Robert Howell, "Fictional Objects," in D. F. Gustafson and B. L. Tapscott, eds.,Body, Mind, and Method: Essays in Honor of Virgil C. Aldrich (Hingham, Mass.: Reidel,1979); Kendall Walton, "How Remote are Fictional Worlds from the Real World?" inTheJournal ofAesthetics andArt Criticism (vol. 37, 1978, pp. 11-23); and the otherarticles cited in them. Literary dualism, the view that fictions are real, has had hundredsof explorations in fiction. One of the most ingenious and elegant is Borges's "Tlon,Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964), from which theselections by Borges in The Mind's I are all drawn.All of the books on artificial intelligence mentioned earlier have detailed discussions ofsimulated worlds rather like the world described in "Non Serviam," except the worlds aremuch smaller (hard reality has a way of cramping one's style). See especially thediscussion in Raphael's book, pp. 266-269. The vicissitudes of such "toy worlds" are alsodiscussed by Jerry Fodor in "Tom Swift and his Procedural Grandmother," in his newcollection of essays, RePresentations (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford Books/MIT Press,1981), and by Daniel Dennett in "Beyond Belief." The game of Life and its ramificationsare discussed with verve by Martin Gardner in the "Mathematical Games" column of theOctober, 1970 issue of Scientific American (vol. 223, no.4, pp. 120-123).Free will has of course been debated endlessly in philosophy. An anthology of recentwork that provides a good entry into the literature is Ted Honderich, ed., Essays onFreedom of Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). Two more recent articlesthat stand out appear together in the Journal of Philosophy (March 1980): Michael Slote's"Understanding Free Will," (vol. 77, pp. 136-151) and Susan Wolf's "AsymmetricalFreedom," (vol. 77, pp. 151-166). Even philosophers are often prone to lapse into thepessimistic view that no one can ever get anywhere in debates about free will-the issuesare interminable and insoluble. This recent work makes that pessimism hard to sustain;perhaps one can