http://www.cs.umu.se/kurser/TDBC12/HT99/Dennett.html
DANIEL C. DENNET
Where Am I?
Excerpt from Brainstorms:
Philosophical Essays on
Mind and Psychology by Daniel C.
Dennett. Copyright (I) 1978 by Bradford Books. Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of
the publisher.
Now that I've won my suit under the Freedom of Information Act, I am at liberty to reveal for
the first time a curious episode in my life that may be of interest not only to those engaged in
research in the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience but also to the
general public.
Several years ago I was approached by Pentagon officials who asked me to volunteer for a
highly dangerous and secret mission. In collaboration with NASA and Howard Hughes, the
Department of Defense was spending billions to develop a Supersonic Tunneling Underground
Device, or STUD. It was supposed to tunnel through the earth's core at great speed and
deliver a specially designed atomic warhead "right up the Red's missile silos," as one of the
Pentagon brass put it.
The problem was that in an early test they had succeeded in lodging a warhead about a mile
deep under Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they wanted me to retrieve it for them. "Why me?" I asked.
Well, the mission involved some pioneering applications of current brain research, and they
had heard of my interest in brains and of course my Faustian curiosity and great courage and
so forth.... Well, how could I refuse? The difficulty that brought the Pentagon to my door was
that the device I'd been asked to recover was fiercely radioactive, in a new way. According to
monitoring instruments, something about the nature of the device and its complex interactions
with pockets of material deep in the earth had produced radiation that could cause severe
abnormalities in certain tissues of the brain. No way had been found to shield the brain from
these deadly rays, which were apparently harmless to other tissues and organs of the body.
So it had been decided that the person sent to recover the device should
leave his brain behind . It would
be kept in a sale place as there it could execute its normal control functions by elaborate radio
links. Would I submit to a surgical procedure that would completely remove my brain, which
would then be placed in a life-support system at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston?
Each input and output pathway, as it was severed, would be restored by a pair of
microminiaturized radio transceivers, one attached precisely to the brain, the other to the
nerve stumps in the empty cranium. No information would be lost, all the connectivity would
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be preserved. At first I was a bit reluctant. Would it really work? The Houston brain surgeons
encouraged me. "Think of it," they said, "as a mere stretching of the nerves. If your brain
were just moved over an inch in your skull, that would not alter or impair your mind. We're
simply going to make the nerves indefinitely elastic by splicing radio links into them."
I was shown around the life-support lab in Houston and saw the sparkling new vat in which
my brain would be placed, were I to agree. I met the large and brilliant support team of
neurologists, hematologists, biophysicists, and electrical engineers, and after several days of
discussions and demonstrations I agreed to give it a try. I was subjected to an enormous array
of blood tests, brain scans, experiments, interviews, and the like. They took down my
autobiography at great length, recorded tedious lists of my beliefs, hopes, fears, and tastes.
They even listed my favorite stereo recordings and gave me a crash session of psychoanalysis.
The day for surgery arrived at last and of course I was anesthetized and remember nothing of
the operation itself. When I came out of anesthesia, I opened my eyes, looked around, and
asked the inevitable, the traditional, the lamentably hackneyed postoperative question:
"Where am l?" The nurse smiled down at me. "You're in Houston," she said, and I reflected
that this still had a good chance of being the truth one way or another. She handed me a
mirror. Sure enough, there were the tiny antennae poling up through their titanium ports
cemented into my skull. "I gather tile operation was a success," I said. "I want to go see my
brain." They led me (I was a bit dizzy and unsteady) down a long corridor and into the life-
support lab. A cheer went up from the assembled support team, and I responded with what I
hoped was a jaunty salute. Still feeling lightheaded, I was helped over to tire life-support vat. I
peered through the glass. There, floating in what looked like ginger ale, was undeniably a
human brain, though it was almost covered with printed circuit chips, plastic tubules,
electrodes, and other paraphernalia. "Is that mine?" I asked. "Hit the output transmitter switch
there on the side of the vat and see for yourself," the project director replied. I moved the
switch to OFF, and immediately slumped, groggy and nauseated, into the arms of the
technicians, one of whom kindly restored the switch to its ON position. While I recovered my
equilibrium and composure, I thought to myself: "Well, here I am sitting on a folding chair,
staring through a piece of plate glass at my own brain... But wait," I said to myself, "shouldn't
I have thought, 'Here I am, suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes'?" I
tried to think this latter thought. I tried to project it into the tank, offering it hopefully to my
brain, but I failed to carry off the exercise with any conviction. I tried again. "Here am I,
Daniel Dennett, suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes." No, it just
didn't work. Most puzzling and confusing. Being a philosopher of firm physicalist conviction, I
believed unswervingly that the tokening of my thoughts was occurring somewhere in my
brain: yet, when I thought "Here I am," where the thought occurred to me was here, outside
the vat, where I, Dennett, was standing staring at my brain.
I tried and tried to think myself into the vat, but to no avail. I tried to build up to the task by
doing mental exercises. I thought to myself, "The sun is
shining over there , " five times in rapid
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succession, each time mentally ostending a different place: in order, the sunlit corner of the
lab, the visible front lawn of the hospital, Houston, Mars, and Jupiter. I found I had little
difficulty in getting my "there" 's to hop all over the celestial map with their proper references.
I could loft a "there" in an instant through the farthest reaches of space, and then aim the
next "there" with pinpoint accuracy at the upper left quadrant of a freckle on my arm. Why
was I having such trouble with "here"? "Here in Houston" worked well enough, and so did
"here in the lab," and even "here in this part of the lab," but "here in the vat" always seemed
merely an unmeant mental mouthing. I tried closing my eyes while thinking it. This seemed to
help, but still I couldn't manage to pull it off, except perhaps for a fleeting instant. I couldn't
be sure. The discovery that I couldn't be sure was also unsettling. How did I know where I
meant by "here" when I thought "here"? Could I think I meant one place when in fact I meant
another? I didn't see how that could be admitted without untying the few bonds of intimacy
between a person and his own mental life that had survived the onslaught of the brain
scientists and philosophers, the physicalists and behaviorists. Perhaps I was incorrigible about
where I meant when I said "here." But in my present circumstances it seemed that either I
was doomed by sheer force of mental habit to thinking systematically false indexical thoughts,
or where a person is (and hence where his thoughts are tokened for purposes of semantic
analysis) is not necessarily where his brain, the physical seat of his soul, resides. Nagged by
confusion, I attempted to orient myself by falling back on a favorite philosopher's ploy. I
began naming things.
"Yorick," I said aloud to my brain, "you are my brain. The rest of my body, seated in this chair,
I dub 'Hamlet.' " So here we all are: Yorick's my brain, Hamlet's my body, and I am Dennett.
Avow, where am l? And when I think "where am l?" where's that thought tokened? Is it
tokened in my brain, lounging about in the vat, or right here between my ears where it seems
to be tokened? Or nowhere? Its temporal coordinates give me no trouble; must it not have
spatial coordinates as well? I began making a list of the alternatives.
1. Where Hamlet goes there
goes Dennet . This principle was easily refuted by appeal to the
familiar brain- transplant thought experiments so enjoyed by philosophers. If Tom and Dick
switch brains, Tom is the fellow with Dick's former body--just ask him; he'll claim to be Tom
and tell you the most intimate details of Tom's autobiography. It was clear enough, then, that
my current body and I could part company, but not likely that I could be separated from my
brain. The rule of thumb that emerged so plainly from the thought experiments was that in a
brain-transplant operation, one wanted to be the donor not the recipient. Better to call such
an operation a body transplant, in fact. So perhaps the truth was,
2. Where Yorick goes there
goes Dennet t This was not at all appealing, however. How could I
be in the vat and not about to go anywhere, when I was so obviously outside the vat looking
in and beginning to make guilty plans to return to my room for a substantial lunch? This
begged the question I realized, but it still seemed to be getting at something important.
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Casting about for some support for my intuition, I hit upon a legalistic sort of argument that
might have appealed to Locke.
Suppose, I argued to myself, I were now to fly to California, rob a bank, and be apprehended.
In which state would I be tried: in California, where the robbery took place, or in Texas, where
the brains of the outfit were located? Would I be a California felon with an out- of- state brain,
or a Texas felon remotely controlling an accomplice of sorts in California? It seemed possible
that I might beat such a rap just on the undecidability of that jurisdictional question, though
perhaps it would be deemed an interstate, and hence Federal, offense. In any event, suppose
I were convicted. Was it likely that California would be satisfied to throw Hamlet into the brig,
knowing that Yorick was living the good life and luxuriously taking the waters in Texas? Would
Texas incarcerate Yorick, leaving Hamlet free to take the next boat to Rio? I his alternative
appealed to me. Barring capital punishment or other cruel and unusual punishment, the state
would be obliged to maintain the life- support system for Yorick though they might move him
from Houston to Leavenworth, and aside from the unpleasantness of the opprobrium, 1, for
one, would not mind at all and would consider myself a free man under those circumstances.
If the state has an interest in forcibly relocating persons in institutions, it would fail to relocate
file in any institution by locating Yorick there. If this were true, it suggested a third alternative.
3. Dennett is wherever he thinks he is. Generalized, the claim was as follows: At any given
time a person has a point of view and the location of the point of view (which is determined
internally by the content of the point of view) is also the location of the person.
Such a proposition is not without its perplexities, but to me it seemed a step in the right
direction. The only trouble was that it seemed to place one in a heads- l- win/tails- you- lose
situation of unlikely infallibility as regards location. Hadn't I myself often been wrong about
where I was, and at least as often uncertain? Couldn't one get lost? Of course, but getting lost
geographically is not the only way one might get lost. If one were lost in the woods one could
attempt to reassure oneself with the consolation that at least one knew where one was: one
was right here in the familiar surroundings of one's own body. Perhaps in this case one would
not have drawn one's attention to much to be thankful for. Still, there were worse plights
imaginable, and I wasn't sure I wasn't in such a plight right now.
Point of view clearly had something to do with personal location, but it was itself an unclear
notion. It was obvious that the content of one's point of view was not the same as or
determined by the content of one's beliefs or thoughts. For example, what should we say
about the point of view of the Cinerama viewer who shrieks and twists in his seat as the roller-
coaster footage overcomes his psychic distancing? Has he forgotten that he is safely seated in
the theater? Here I was inclined to say that the person is experiencing an illusory shift in point
of view. In other cases, my inclination to call such shifts illusory was less strong. The workers
in laboratories and plants who handle dangerous materials by operating feedback- controlled
mechanical arms and hands undergo a shift in point of view that is crisper and more
pronounced than anything Cinerama can provoke. They can feel the heft and slipperiness of
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the containers they manipulate with their metal fingers. They know perfectly well where they
are and are not fooled into false beliefs by the experience, yet it is as if they were inside the
isolation chamber they are peering into. With mental effort, they can manage to shift their
point of view back and forth, rather like making a transparent Necker cube or an Escher
drawing change orientation before one's eves. It does seem extravagant to suppose that in
performing this bit of mental gymnastics, they are transporting themselves back and forth.
Still their example gave me hope. If I was in fact in the vat in spite of my intuitions, I might be
able to train myself to adopt that point of view even as a matter of habit. I should dwell on
images of myself comfortably floating in my vat, beaming volitions to that familiar body out
there. I reflected that the ease or difficulty of this task was presumably independent of the
truth about the location of one's brain Had I been practicing before the operation, I might now
be finding it second nature. You might now yourself try such a trompe
l'oeil. Imagine you have written an inflammatory letter which has been
published in the Times the result of which s that the government has chosen to impound your
brain for a probationary period of three years in its Dangerous Brain Clinic in Bethesda,
Maryland. Your body of course is allowed freedom to earn a salary and thus to continue its
function of laying up income to be taxed At this
moment, however, your body is seated in an auditorium listening to a peculiar account by
Daniel Dennett of his own similar experience. Try it. Think yourself to Bethesda, and then hark
back longingly to your body, far away, and yet seeming so near. It is only with long-distance
restraint (yours? the government's?) that you can control your impulse to get those hands
clapping in polite applause before navigating the old body to the rest room and a well-
deserved glass of evening sherry in the lounge. l he task of imagination is certainly difficult,
but if you achieve your goal the results might be consoling.
Anyway, there I was in Houston, lost in thought as one might say, but not for long. My
speculations were soon interrupted by the Houston doctors, who wished to test out my new
prosthetic nervous system before sending me off on my hazardous mission. As I mentioned
before, I was a bit dizzy at first, and not surprisingly, although I soon habituated myself to my
new circumstances (which were, after all, well nigh indistinguishable from my old
circumstances). My accommodation was not perfect, however, and to this day I continue to be
plagued by minor coordination difficulties. The speed of light is fast, but finite, and as my
brain and body move farther and farther apart, the delicate interaction of my feedback
systems is thrown into disarray by the time lags. Just as one is rendered close to speechless
by a delayed or echoic hearing of one's speaking voice so, for instance, I am virtually unable
to track a moving object with my eyes whenever my brain and my body are more than a few
miles apart. In most matters my impairment is scarcely detectable, though I can no longer hit
a slow curve ball with the authority of yore. There are some compensations of course. Though
liquor tastes as good as ever, and warms my gullet while corroding my liver, I can drink it in
any quantity I please, without becoming the slightest bit inebriated, a curiosity some of my
close friends may have noticed (though I occasionally have feigned inebriation, so as not to
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draw attention to my unusual circumstances). For similar reasons, I take aspirin orally for a
sprained wrist, but if the pain persists I ask Houston to administer codeine to me in vitro. In
times of illness the phone bill can be staggering.
But to return to my adventure. At length, both the doctors and I were satisfied that I was
ready to undertake my subterranean mission. And so I left my brain in Houston and headed by
helicopter for Tulsa. Well, in any case, that's the way it seemed to me. That's how I would put
it, just off the top of my head as it were. On the trip I reflected further about my earlier
anxieties and decided that my first postoperative speculations had been tinged with panic. The
matter was not nearly as strange or metaphysical as I had been supposing. Where was I? In
two places, clearly: both inside the vat and outside it. Just as one can stand with one foot in
Connecticut and the other in Rhode Island, I was in two places at once. I had become one of
those scattered individuals we used to hear so much about. The more I considered this
answer, the more obviously true it appeared. But, strange to say, the more true it appeared,
the less important the question to which it could be the true answer seemed. A sad, but not
unprecedented, fate for a philosophical question to suffer. This answer did not completely
satisfy me, of course. There lingered some question to which I should have liked an answer,
which was neither "Where are all my various and sundry parts?" nor "What is my current point
of view?" Or at least there seemed to be such a question. For it did seem undeniable that in
some sense I and not merely most oh me was descending into the earth under Tulsa in search
of an atomic warhead.
When I found the warhead, I was certainly glad I had left my brain behind, for the pointer on
the specially built Geiger counter I had brought with me was off the dial. I called Houston on
my ordinary radio and told the operation control center of my position and my progress. In
return, they gave me instructions for dismantling the vehicle, based upon my on- site
observations. I had set to work with my cutting torch when all of a sudden a terrible thing
happened. I went stone deaf. At first I thought it was only my radio earphones that had
broken, but when I tapped
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