Page 33 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

30 Daniel C. Dennett

of a new body leaves one’s person intact. And after a period of adjustment to a
new voice, new muscular strengths and weaknesses, and so forth, one’s per-
sonality is by and large also preserved. More dramatic changes in personality
have been routinely observed in people who have undergone extensive plastic
surgery, to say nothing of sex change operations, and I think no one contests
the survival of the person in such cases. In any event I soon accommodated to
my new body, to the point of being unable to recover any of its novelties to my
consciousness or even memory. The view in the mirror soon became utterly
familiar.Thatview, by theway,still revealed antennae,and so Iwas notsur-
prised to learn that my brain had not been moved from its haven in the life-
support lab.
I decided that good old Yorick deserved a visit. I and my new body, whom
we might as well call Fortinbras, strode into the familiar lab to another round
of applause from the technicians, who were of course congratulating them-
selves, not me. Once more I stood before the vat and contemplated poor Yorick,
and on a whim I once again cavalierly flicked off the output transmitter switch.
Imagine my surprise when nothing unusual happened. No fainting spell, no
nausea, no noticeable change. A technician hurried to restore the switch to on,
but still I felt nothing. I demanded an explanation, which the project director
hastened to provide. It seems that before they had even operated on the first
occasion, they had constructed a computer duplicate of my brain, reproducing
both the complete information processing structure and the computational
speed of my brain in a giant computer program. After the operation, but before
they had dared to send me off on my mission to Oklahoma, they had run this
computer system and Yorick side by side. The incoming signals from Hamlet
were sent simultaneously to Yorick’s transceivers and to the computer’s array
of inputs. And the outputs from Yorick were not only beamed back to Hamlet,
my body; they were recorded and checked against the simultaneous output of
the computer program, which was called ‘‘Hubert’’ for reasons obscure to me.
Over days and even weeks, the outputs were identical and synchronous, which
of course did not prove that they had succeeded in copying the brain’s func-
tional structure, but the empirical support was greatly encouraging.
Hubert’s input, and hence activity, had been kept parallel with Yorick’s dur-
ing my disembodied days. And now, to demonstrate this, they had actually
thrown the master switch that put Hubert for the first time in on-line control of
my body—not Hamlet, of course, but Fortinbras. (Hamlet, I learned, had never
been recovered from its underground tomb and could be assumed by this time
to have largely returned to the dust. At the head of my grave still lay the mag-
nificent bulk of the abandoned device, with the word STUD emblazoned on its
side in large letters—a circumstance which may provide archeologists of the
next century with a curious insight into the burial rites of their ancestors.)
The laboratory technicians now showed me the master switch, which had
two positions, labeled B, for Brain (they didn’t know my brain’s name was
Yorick) and H,for Hubert.The switch didindeed point to H, and they ex-
plained to me that if I wished, I could switch it back to B. With my heart in my
mouth (and my brain in its vat), I did this. Nothing happened. A click, that was
all. To test their claim, and with the master switch now set at B,I hit Yorick’s
output transmitter switch on the vat and sure enough, I began to faint. Once