Consider, for example, the striking discovery by the psycholinguists James Lackner and Merril Garrett (see “Further Reading”) of what might be called an unconscious channel of sentence comprehension. In dichotic listening tests, subjects listen through earphones to two different channels and are instructed to attend to just one channel. Typically they can paraphrase or report with accuracy what they have heard through the attended channel but usually they can say little about what was going on concomitantly in the unattended channel. Thus, if the unattended channel carries a spoken sentence, the subjects typically can report they heard a voice, or even a male or female voice. Perhaps they even have a conviction about whether the voice was speaking in their native tongue, but they cannot report what was said. In Lackney and Garrett’s experiments subjects heard ambiguous sentences in the attended channel, such as “He put out the lantern to signal the attack.” Simultaneously, in the unattended channel one group of subjects received a sentence that suggested the interpretation of the sentence in the attended channel (e.g. “He extinguished the lantern), while another group had a neutral or irrelevant sentence as input. The former group could not report what was presented through the unattended channel, but they favoured the suggested reading of the ambiguous sentences significantly more than the control group did. The influence of the unattended channel on the interpretation of the attended signal is processed all the way to a semantic level—that is, the unattended signal is comprehended—but this is apparently unconscious sentence comprehension! Or should we say it is evidence of the presence in the subject of at least two different and only partially communicating consciousnesses? If we ask the subjects what it was like to comprehend the unattended channel, they will reply, sincerely, that it was not like anything to them—they were quite unaware of that sentence. But perhaps, as is often suggested about the split brain patients, there is in effect someone else to whom our question ought to be addressed—the subject who consciously comprehended the sentence and relayed a hint of its meaning to the subject who answers our questions.
Which should we say, and why? We seem to be back to our unanswerable question, which suggests we should find different ways of looking at the situation. A view of consciousness that does justice to the variety of complications will almost certainly demand a revolution in our habits of thought. Breaking bad habits is not that easy. The fantasies and thought experiments collected here are games and 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 up several levels of complexity to the level of internal representations. The mind begins to emerge as a self-designing system of representations, physically embodied in the brain. Here we encounter our first roadblock—“The Story of a Brain.” We suggest some paths around it, and in Part IV we explore the implications of the emerging views of the mind as software or program—as an abstract sort of thing whose identity is independent of any particular physical embodiment. This opens up delightful prospects, such as various technologies for the transmigration of souls, and Fountains of Youth, but it also opens a Pandora’s box of traditional metaphysical problems in untraditional costumes, which are confronted in Part V. Reality itself is challenged by various rivals: dreams, fictions, simulations, illusions. Free will, something no self-respecting mind would be caught without, is put under an unusual spotlight. In “Minds, Brains, and Programs” we encounter our second roadblock, but learn from it how to press on, in Part VI, past our third roadblock, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” into the inner sanctum, where our mind’s-eye view affords us the most intimate perspectives on our target, and allows us to relocate our selves in the metaphysical and physical world. A guide to further expeditions is provided in the last section.
D.C.D.
I
A Sense of Self
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate. I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteen-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
Reflections
Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer, has a deserved international reputation, which creates a curious effect. Borges seems to himself to be two people, the public personage and the private person. His fame magnifies the effect, but we all can share the feeling, as he knows. You read your name on a list, or see a candid photograph of yourself, or overhear others talking about someone and suddenly realize it is you. Your mind must leap from a third-person perspective—“he” or “she”—to a first-person perspective—“I.” Comedians have long known how to exaggerate this leap: the classic “double-take” in which say, Bob Hope reads in the morning newspaper that Bob Hope is wanted by the police, casually comments on this fact, and then jumps up in alarm: “That’s me!”
2
“Borges and I,” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby, from