Various theories have described our world as less real than another, even as an illusion. The idea of our having this inferior ontological status takes some getting used to, however. It may help if we approach our situation as literary critics and ask the genre of our universe, whether tragedy, farce, or theater-of-the-absurd? What is the plot line, and which act are we in?
Still, our status may bring some compensations, as, for example, that we live on even after we die, preserved permanently in the work of fiction. Or if not permanently, at least for as long as our book lasts. May we hope to inhabit an enduring masterpiece rather than a quickly remaindered book?
Moreover, though in some sense it might be false, in another wouldn’t it be true for Hamlet to say, “I am Shakespeare”? What do Macbeth, Banquo, Desdemona, and Prospero have in common? The consciousness of the one author, Shakespeare, which underlies and infuses each of them. (So too, there is the brotherhood of man.) Playing on the intricacy both of our ontological status and of the first person reflexive pronoun, each of us too may truly say, “I am the author.”
Suppose I now tell you that the preceding was a work of fiction and the “I” didn’t refer to me, the author, but to a first person character. Or suppose I tell you that it was not a work of fiction but a playful, and so of course serious, philosophical essay by me, Robert Nozick, (Not the Robert Nozick named as author at the beginning of this work—he may be, for all we know, another literary persona—but the one who attended P.S. 165.) How would your response to this whole work differ depending on which I say, supposing you were willing, as you won’t be, simply to accept my statement?
May I decide which to say, fiction or philosophical essay, only now, as I finish writing this, and how will that decision affect the character of what already was set down previously? May I postpone the decision further, perhaps until after you have read this, fixing its status and genre only then?
Perhaps God has not decided yet whether he has created, in this world, a fictional world or a real one. Is the Day of Judgment the day he will decide? Yet what additional thing depends upon which way he decides—what would either decision add to our situation or subtract from it?
And which decision do you hope for?
Further Reading
Almost every topic that arises in The Mind’s I has been explored in greater detail in the explosively growing literature of “cognitive science”—philosophy of mind, psychology, artificial intelligence, and the neurosciences, to mention the central fields. There has also been a mountain of science fiction on these themes, of course, but we will not attempt to survey that literature in this catalogue of the best and most readable recent books and articles, ranging from clinical studies of strange cases through experimental work to theoretical and speculative explorations. The catalogue is organized by topics in the order in which they arise in the preceding selections. Each piece we list will in turn lead to additional relevant literature through its citations. Those who pursue these leads will discover a huge tree of intricately intertwined branches of discovery, speculation, and argument. That tree will not include everything that has been written on these topics, certainly, but whatever it neglects will have escaped the attention of most of the experts as well.
The idea of body-switching has fascinated philosophers for centuries. John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), asked himself what would happen if “the soul of a prince” were to “enter and inform the body of a cobbler”—taking the prince’s memories along with it. The theme has had dozens of variations since then. Two fine anthologies, full of imagined cases of brain transplants, per son splitting, person fusing (two or more people merging into one person with several sets of memories and tastes), and person duplicating are Personal Identity (1975), edited by John Perry, and The Identities of Persons (1976), edited by Amelie O. Rorty, both in paperback from the University of California Press at Berkeley. Another good book is Bernard Williams’s Problems of the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
Do minds or selves really exist—over and above the atoms and molecules? Such ontological questions (questions concerning the types of things that can be said to exist and the ways in which things can exist have been a major preoccupation of philosophers since Plato’s day. Probably the most influential of today’s hard-nosed, tough-minded scientific ontologists is Willard V. O. Quine, of Harvard University. His classic paper “On What There Is” first appeared in 1948 in the Review of Metaphysics. It is reprinted in his collection of essays, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). Quine’s Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960) and Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) contain later elaborations of his uncompromising ontological stand. An amusing dialogue in which a tough-minded materialist gets tied in knots is “Holes” by David and Stephanie Lewis, in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (vol. 48, 1970, pp. 206–212). If holes are things that exist, what about voices. What are they? This question is discussed in the first chapter of Daniel Dennett’s Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1969), where the claim is advanced that minds enjoy the same sort of existence as voices—not problematic (like ghosts or goblins) but not just a matter of matter, either.
The literature on consciousness will be introduced by subtopics later in this chapter. The discussion of consciousness in the Introduction is drawn from an entry on that topic by Dennett forthcoming in the Oxford Companion to the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press), an encyclopedia of current understanding of the mind, edited by R.L. Gregory. The quotation of E.R. John’s definition of consciousness is from R.W. Thatcher and E.R. John, Foundations of Cognitive Processes (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1977, p. 294), and the dichotic listening experiment discussed is reported in J.R. Lackner and M. Garrett, “Resolving Ambiguity: Effects of Biasing Context in the Unattended Ear,” Cognition (1973, pp. 359–372).
Borges draws our attention to different ways of thinking about oneself. A good entry to the recent work in philosophy mentioned in the Reflections is “Who, Me?” by Steven Boër and William Lycan, in The Philosophical Review (vol. 89, 1980, pp. 427–466). It has an extensive bibliography that includes the pioneering work of Hector-Neri Castañeda and Peter Geach, and the fine recent work by John Perry and David Lewis.
Harding’s strange ruminations on having no head find an echo in the psychological theories of the late James J. Gibson, whose last book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), contains many striking observations—and results of experiments—about the information one gets about oneself (one’s location, the orientation of one’s head, even the important role of that blurry bit of nose one can see out of the corner of one’s eye) from visual perception. See especially chapter 7, “The Optical Information for Self-Perception.” For a recent criticism of Gibson’s ideas, see Shimon Ullman, “Against Direct Perception,” in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (September, 1980, pp. 373–415). An excellent introduction to the Taoistic and Zen theory of mind and existence is Raymond Smullyan’s The Tao is Silent (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). See also Paul Reps’ Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (New York: Doubleday Anchor).