Page 36 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

Where Am I? 33

scratch our itches, but not the way I would have, and you kept me awake, with
your tossing and turning. I’ve been totally exhausted, on the verge of a nervous
breakdown, carried around helplessly by your frantic round of activities, sus-
tained only by the knowledge that some day you’d throw the switch.
‘‘Now it’s your turn, but at least you’ll have the comfort of knowing I know
you’re in there. Like an expectant mother, I’m eating—or at any rate tasting,
smelling, seeing—for two now, and I’ll try to make it easy for you. Don’t worry.
Just as soon as this colloquium is over, you and I will fly to Houston, and we’ll
see what can be done to get one of us another body. You can have a female
body—your body could be any color you like. But let’s think it over. I tell you
what—to be fair, if we both want this body, I promise I’ll let the project direc-
tor flip a coin to settle which of us gets to keep it and which then gets to choose
a new body. That should guarantee justice, shouldn’t it? In any case, I’ll take
care of you, I promise. These people are my witnesses.
‘‘Ladies and gentlemen, this talk we have just heard is not exactly the talk I
would have given, but I assure you that everything he said was perfectly true.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’d—we’d—better sit down.’’ 2

Notes
1. Cf.Jaakko Hintikka,‘‘Cogito ergosum:Inference or Performance?’’ The Philosophical Review,
LXXI, 1962, pp. 3–32.
2. Anyone familiar with the literature on this topic will recognize that my remarks owe a great deal
to the explorations of Sydney Shoemaker, John Perry, David Lewis and Derek Parfit, and in
particular to their papers in Amelie Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons, 1976.