Page 29 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

26 Daniel C. Dennett

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 inter-state, 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, leav-
ing Hamlet free to take the next boat to Rio? This 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 unpleas-
antness of the opprobrium, I, for one, would not mind at all and would con-
sider myself a free man under those circumstances. If the state has an interest
in forcibly relocating persons in institutions, it would fail to relocate me 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-I-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 un-
certain? 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 at-
tempt 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.
Perhapsinthiscaseone wouldnot have drawnone’s attentiontomuchtobe
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 over-
comes 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 under-
go a shift in point of view that is crisper and more pronounced than any-
thing Cinerama can provoke. They can feel the heft and slipperiness of 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 Neckar cube or an Escher drawing change orientation