ACHILLES: I am beginning to feel through this discussion that I “know” myself a little better. I wonder if it would be possible for me to learn all about my neural structure—so much so that I would be able to predict the path of my neural flash before it even covered its path! Surely, this would be total, exquisite self-knowledge.
TORTOISE: Oh, Achilles, you have innocently thrown yourself into the wildest of paradox, without the benefit of even the slightest coaching on my part! Maybe one day you will learn to do this regularly; then you will be able to dispense with me entirely!
ACHILLES: Enough of your mockery! Let’s hear about this paradox I’ve inadvertently fallen into.
TORTOISE: How could you learn all about yourself? You might try reading the Achilles book.
ACHILLES: That would certainly be a phenomenal project. A hundred billion pages! I’m afraid I’d fall asleep listening to myself read. Or—horrors—I might even die before I had completed the task! But suppose I were a very fast reader and managed to learn the contents of the whole book within the time allotted to me on the surface of our green sphere.
TORTOISE: So now you’d know all about Achilles—before he read the Achilles book! But you are quite ignorant about the Achilles who exists now!
ACHILLES: Oh, what a quandary! The fact that I read the book makes the book obsolete. The very attempt to learn about myself changes me from what I was. If only I could have a bigger brain, capable of digesting all of the complexity of myself. Yet I can see that even that would be of no avail, for possession of a bigger brain would make me all the more complex yet! My mind simply can’t understand all of itself. All I can know is the outline, the basic idea. Beyond a certain point, I cannot go. Although my brain structure is right there in my head, exactly where “I” am, still its nature is not accessible to this “I.” The very entity that constitutes “I”—and I am of necessity ignorant of it. My brain and “I” are not the same!
TORTOISE: A droll dilemma—the stuff of life’s many hilarities. And now, perhaps, Achilles, we can pause to ponder one of the original questions that prompted this discussion: “Do thoughts occur in the mind, or in the brain?”
ACHILLES: By now, I hardly know what is meant by “mind”—except, of course, as a sort of poetic expression for the brain, or its activities. The term reminds me of “beauty.” It is not something that one can locate in space—yet it is not hovering in an ethereal otherworld, either. It is more like a structural feature of a complex entity.
TORTOISE: Where lies the beauty, if I may rhetorically ask, of an étude by Scriabin? In the sounds? Among the printed notes? In the ear, mind, or brain of the beholder?
ACHILLES: It seems to me that “beauty” is just a sound that we utter whenever our neural flash passes through a certain region of our brains—a certain “labeled room.” It is tempting to think that to this sound there corresponds an “entity,” some kind of “existing thing.” In other words, because it is a noun, we think of beauty as a “Thing”; but maybe “beauty” denotes no Thing at all; the word is just a useful sound which certain events and perceptions make us want to pronounce.
TORTOISE: I would go further, Achilles: I would surmise that this is a property of many words—especially words like “beauty,” “truth,” “mind,” and “self.” Each word is but a sound which we are caused to utter, at various times, by our swooping, careening neural flash. And to each sound, we can hardly help but believe that there corresponds an Entity—a “Real Thing.” Well, I will say that the benefit that one derives from using a sound imbues it with a proportionate amount of what we call “meaning.” But as to whether that sound denotes any Thing… how would we ever know that?
ACHILLES: How solipsistically you view the universe, Mr. T. I thought such views were highly unfashionable in this day and age! One is supposed to consider that Things have an Existence of their own.
TORTOISE: Ah, me, yes, perhaps they do—I never denied it. I suppose it’s a pragmatic view of the meaning of “meaning,” useful in the bustle of everyday life, to make the assumption that some sounds do stand for Existing Entities. And the pragmatic value of this assumption may be its best justification. But let’s get back to the elusive site of the “real you,” Achilles!
ACHILLES: Well, I’m at a loss to say if it’s anywhere at all, even though another part of me is practically jumping to shout, “The ‘real me’ is here now.” Maybe the whole point is that whatever mechanism makes me make everyday statements like “Spades are trump” is quite like the mechanism which makes me—or the Achilles book—say sentences such as “The ‘real me’ is here now.” For certainly if I, Achilles, could say it, so could the book version of me—in fact, it would undoubtedly do so. Though my own first reflex is to affirm, “I know I exist; I feel it,” maybe all these “feelings” are just an illusion; maybe the “real I” is all an illusion; maybe, just like “beauty,” the sound “I” denotes no Thing at all, but is just a useful sound that we on occasion feel compelled to pronounce because our neural structures are set up that way. Probably that is what is happening when I say “I know I’m alive” or similar things. This would also explain why I got so puzzled when you brought up the version in which several copies of the Achilles book would be distributed to various people, and “I” would have conversations with all of them at once. I demanded to know where the “real I” was, and how “I” could take care of several conversations at once; I see now that each copy of the book has that structure built into it, that makes it automatically make pronouncements such as “I am the real me; I am feeling my own emotions and anybody else who claims to be Achilles is a fraud.” But I can see that the mere fact that it utters such things doesn’t mean that it has “real feelings”; and perhaps even more to the point, the mere fact that I, Achilles, utter such things, doesn’t really mean I am feeling anything (whatever that would mean!). In the light of all this, I am beginning to doubt if such phrases have any meaning at all.
TORTOISE: Well, of course, utterances about “feeling” one way or another are very useful, in practical terms.
ACHILLES: Oh, without doubt —I shan’t shun them just because this conversation has taken place; nor shall I shun the term “I,” as you can see for yourself. But I won’t imbue it with such “soulful” meaning as I have heretofore tended to do, rather instinctively, and, I have to say, dogmatically.