hofstadter, dennett - the mind's i

[...]... exercises designed to help In Part I the exploration begins with some swift forays into the territory, noting a few striking landmarks but mounting no campaigns In Part II our target, the mind’s I, is surveyed fro the outside What is it that reveals the presence of other minds, other souls to the searcher? Part III examines the physical foundation – in biology of the mind, and then from this foundation moves... universe to a view that sees the mind as playing an integral role in all physical events It is as if the two disciplines were on two fast-moving trains, going in opposite directions and not noticing what is happening across the tracks This role reversal by biologists and physicists has left the contemporary psychologist in an ambivalent position From the perspective of biology, the psychologist studies phenomena... duality of subject and object – has vanished: it is no longer read into a situation which has no room for it Such were the thoughts which followed the vision To try to set down the first-hand, immediate experience in these or any other terms, however, is to misrepresent it by complicating what is quite simple: indeed the longer the postmortem examination drags on the further it gets from the living original... accept without the slightest twinge of incomprehension a host of claims to the effect that sophisticated hypothesis testing, memory searching, inference – in short, information processing – occurs within us though it is entirely inaccessible to introspection It is not repressed unconscious activity of the sort Freud uncovered, activity driven out of the sight of consciousness, but just mental activity... was picked up by Thomas Huxley and his colleagues in their defense of Darwinism and, even today, echoes in the theories of modern reduction- Rediscovering the Mind 37 ists who would move from the mind to the first principles of atomic physics It is most clearly seen at present in the writings of the sociobiologists, whose arguments animate the contemporary intellectual scene In any case, Du Bois-Reymond’s... argument, or of philosophical acumen , or of working oneself up into a state, but of simple sight – LOOK=WHO’S-HERE instead of THINK-WHO’S-HERE If I fail to see what I am (and especially what I am not) it is because I am too busily imaginative, too “spiritual,” too adult and knowing, to accept the situation exactly as I find it at the moment A kind of alert idiocy is what I need It takes an innocent eye... accidents of that outer” or phenomenal world which though altogether one with the central essence, fails to affect it in the slightest degree So unprivileged, indeed, is my head in the mirror, that I don’t necessarily recognize myself in the glass, and neither do I see the man over there, the too-familiar fellow who lives in that other room behind the looking-glass and seemingly spends all his time...Outside facts will settle the question of whether or not some creature is conscious For instance, consider neurophysiologist E.R.John’s* recent attempt to define consciousness in objective terms a process in which information about multiple individual modalities of sensation and perception is combined into a unified multidimensional representation of the state of the system and its environment, and integrated... say that it is accessible to some subsystem of the brain is not yet to distinguish it from the unconscious activities and events, which are also accessible to various subsystems of the brain If some particular special subsystem is so constituted that that its traffic with the rest of the system somehow makes it the case that there is one more self in the world, one more “”thing it is like something to... Bois-Reymond’s views are consistent with modern radical reductionists, except that quantum mechanics has how replaced Newtonian mechanics as the underlying discipline During the period in which psychologists and biologists were steadily moving toward reducing their disciplines to the physical sciences, they were largely unaware of perspectives emerging from physics that cast an entirely new light on their understanding . claimed that his theories and clinical observations gave him the authority to overrule the sincere denials of his patients about what was going on in their minds. Similarly the cognitive psychologist. solipsism, we must be able to do something apparently impossible: confirm the coincidence of inner and outer in others. Their telling us of the coincidence in their own cases will not do, officially,. Thanks to the miracles of noninvasive CAT-scanning techniques, it obtains its blueprint without destroying the original. Sarah’s mother stil might decide to push the button and step into the chamber