Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Further Reading 479Further Reading 479Harvard University Press, 1980, 1981), along with many other articles and chapters onthe topics encountered in The Mind's I. For some fascinating thought experiments abouthow a different understanding of science might change what it is like to be us, see PaulChurchland's Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1979).A careful discussion of the mirror problem is Ned Block's "SrwoU\qU JoI4 bru1391\tdBiA 9z-i9v9A zoo-niM oU ydW" in the Journal of Philosophy (1974, pp. 259-277).The perception of color, which Smullyan exploits in "An Epistemological Nightmare,"has often been discussed by philosophers in the guise of the inverted spectrum thoughtexperiment, which is at least as old as John Locke's Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding (1690, book 2, chap. 32, par. 15). How do I know that I see what you see(in the way of color) when we both look at a clear "blue" sky? We both learned the word"blue" by being shown things like clear skies, so our color-term use will be the same,even if what we see is different! For recent work on this ancient conundrum, see Block'santhology, and Paul and Patricia Churchland's "Functionalism, Qualia, andIntentionality," in Philosophical Topics(vol. 12, no.1, spring 1981). Stranger than FictionThe fantasies and thought experiments in this book are designed to make one think aboutthe hard-to-reach corners of our concepts, but sometimes perfectly real phenomena arestrange enough to shock us into a new perspective on ourselves. The facts about some ofthese strange cases are still hotly disputed, so one should read these apparentlystraightforward factual accounts with a healthy helping of skepticism.Cases of multiple personalities-two or more persons "inhabiting" one body for alternatingperiods of time-have been made famous in two popular books, The Three Faces of Eve(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), by Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, andSybil (Warner paperbacks, 1973), by Flora Rheta Schreiber. Both books have been madeinto motion pictures. It should be apparent that nothing in the theories sketched orimplied by the fantasies and reflections in this book would rule out multiple personalityas impossible. Still, it may be that the recorded cases, however scrupulously described inthe literature, have been too much the products of their observers' theoreticalexpectations, ratherPart VI. The Inner Eye