LIT-413: The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul

Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett (composers and arrangers), The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, New York: Basic Books, c1981 (hardback, ISBN 0-465-04624-X; Library of Congress 81066099, call number B29 .H58, Dewey 126; vii, 501 pp., illustrated, 24 cm; bibliography pp. [465]–482; index). The same year Harvester Press issued it in Brighton (ISBN 0-7108-0352-4, vii, 501 pp.). Bantam (Toronto and New York, 1982) and Penguin (Harmondsworth, 1982, vii, 504 pp.) paperbacks followed. Basic Books sells a trade paperback now (ISBN 978-0-465-03091-0, 512 pp.; on sale 17 January 2001 per the publisher). The catalogue record gives only the year 1981, so published: carries the year, as the first of January.

The brief’s citation (Basic Books, 1981) is correct. The title page, as the catalogue transcribes it, says “composed and arranged by” the two, not “edited by”.

Key takeaways

Registered from the catalogue record, the publisher’s page and a library contents note, not a reading. What follows is what those sources say.

• What it is. The Library of Congress note: “Includes selected writings of Jorge Luis Borges and others with reflections by the authors.” The subject headings are Self (Philosophy); Intellect; Consciousness; Soul, each also as “Literary collections”.
• The publisher’s description (Basic Books, for the current paperback), verbatim in part: “With contributions from Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Dawkins, John Searle, and Robert Nozick, The Mind’s I explores the meaning of self and consciousness through the perspectives of literature, artificial intelligence, psychology, and other disciplines. In selections that range from fiction to scientific speculations about thinking machines, artificial intelligence, and the nature of the brain, Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett present a variety of conflicting visions of the self and the soul”.
• Contents. The 27 selections, in the order of the contents note (MARC 505) in the catalogue record of the 1982 Bantam printing, which carries the Basic Books LCCN 81066099. Spellings are corrected where the note misspells (“Whellis”, “Statislaw”, “espistemological”):
  1. “Borges and I”, Jorge Luis Borges
  2. “On Having No Head”, D. E. Harding
  3. “Rediscovering the Mind”, Harold J. Morowitz
  4. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, A. M. Turing
  5. “The Turing Test: A Coffeehouse Conversation”, Douglas R. Hofstadter
  6. “The Princess Ineffabelle”, Stanisław Lem
  7. “The Soul of Martha, a Beast”, Terrel Miedaner
  8. “The Soul of the Mark III Beast”, Terrel Miedaner
  9. “Spirit”, Allen Wheelis
  10. “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes”, Richard Dawkins
  11. “Prelude … Ant Fugue”, Douglas R. Hofstadter
  12. “The Story of a Brain”, Arnold Zuboff
  13. “Where Am I?”, Daniel C. Dennett
  14. “Where Was I?”, David Hawley Sanford
  15. “Beyond Rejection”, Justin Leiber
  16. “Software”, Rudy Rucker
  17. “The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution”, Christopher Cherniak
  18. “The Seventh Sally, or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good”, Stanisław Lem
  19. “Non Serviam”, Stanisław Lem
  20. “Is God a Taoist?”, Raymond M. Smullyan
  21. “The Circular Ruins”, Jorge Luis Borges
  22. “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, John R. Searle
  23. “An Unfortunate Dualist”, Raymond M. Smullyan
  24. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, Thomas Nagel
  25. “An Epistemological Nightmare”, Raymond M. Smullyan
  26. “A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain”, Douglas R. Hofstadter
  27. “Fiction”, Robert Nozick
• Not seen. No source I could reach gives the book’s six part titles with their boundaries, the credit line for each selection’s original publication, or which editor signed each “Reflections”. A secondary account (Wikipedia) names six parts, “A Sense of Self”, “Soul Searching”, “From Hardware to Software”, “Mind as Program”, “Created Selves and Free Will” and “The Inner Eye”. I did not use it to assign selections to parts.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request for Daniel Dennett in this record. The book is where the record’s threads were first put side by side for a general reader: machine minds and the Turing test, consciousness and what it is like, the self and where it is, and minds built from mindless parts. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice. The Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it: a grep of its literature.d for the title, Hofstadter and Dennett found nothing.

Deferred because it was not read. This record files a book from its publisher’s description and contents when no lawful text can be read, and does not rebuild a book from what others say about it. The selections are a different matter, since many are reprints with lives of their own, and the record holds or now files the ones that bear on its threads:

• Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (selection 4), is filed as LIT-394, read in full from the off-print in the Turing Digital Archive.
• Searle, “Minds, brains, and programs” (selection 22), is filed as LIT-400, read in full from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences preprint. The book reprints the target article. The BBS issue also carried open peer commentary, and its reference list marks entries cited by Dennett and by Hofstadter as commentators, so the editors had answered Searle in print before they reprinted him.
• Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (selection 24), is LIT-096, read in NOTE-089.
• Dennett, “Where Am I?” (selection 13), is being filed separately in this batch, with Dennett’s other work. Sanford’s “Where Was I?” (selection 14) continues its story and was not filed (no lawful copy found).
• Hofstadter, “Prelude … Ant Fugue” (selection 11), is reprinted from GEB, LIT-437. It is the meeting point THEORY-043 names, a colony whose ants are mindless and whose organisation is a mind. No separate lawful copy exists, so it is not filed apart from GEB.
• Zuboff, “The Story of a Brain” (selection 12), probably bears on the same bridge. Search summaries describe a brain whose neural patterns are induced artificially, as in a vat; I have not read it. PhilPapers records it as first published in this book (pp. 202–212) and lists a PDF in PhilArchive, uploaded in 2015 by an archiver it does not name. The PDF refused me (HTTP 403, a browser challenge) and I could not confirm the upload is the author’s, so it is not filed. It is the next selection worth filing.

The literary selections (Borges, Lem, Miedaner, Wheelis, Leiber, Rucker, Smullyan, Nozick) are listed above and none is filed. None has a lawful copy I could find. Whether any bears on a thread more than as illustration is a question for a reading of the book.

The Reflections are unread. They are the editors’ contribution, and they are what would make the book more than an anthology in this record. Two traces of them reached me. Dennett’s Tufts archive holds “The Myth of the Computer: An Exchange” (1982, hdl.handle.net/10427/56703), catalogued under this book with Hofstadter and Searle as names; it is the printed argument over how the book treats Searle and is being considered with Dennett’s other work. And the BBS commentaries above. Neither is the text of a Reflection.

Where it bears on the record’s accounts, through the selections filed: THEORY-023 holds that behavioural evidence cannot settle AI consciousness. Turing’s paper is the proposal that it should settle machine thinking, and Searle’s the argument that no behaviour could. THEORY-043 holds that a mind of mindless parts and a mind of minded parts are one functionalist move; the Ant Fugue, Zuboff, and Searle’s systems reply each work that seam. Hofstadter’s later account of the self, LIT-423, is the strange-loop line the book’s Hofstadter selections begin.

Access when seeded:

• Library of Congress catalogue record, through the public MARC XML copy Internet Archive keeps with its scan of the 1981 Basic Books printing (mindsifantasiesr00hofs, field 040 DLC/DLC): LCCN, ISBN, title page, imprint, extent, notes, call numbers and subjects. loc.gov itself returned a Cloudflare challenge and then HTTP 429, and lccn.loc.gov/81066099/marcxml returned 404.
• The contents note: MARC 505 in the catalogue records of the Bantam 1982 scans (mindsi00doug and mindsifantasiesr1982hofs), both carrying LCCN 81066099. The Basic Books records have no contents note.
• Hachette Book Group’s page for the Basic Books paperback (ISBN 9780465030910): description, on-sale date, page count.
• Open Library work OL716849W: edition list (no edition carries a table of contents) and the scan identifiers.
• Internet Archive scans of the Basic Books (two), Harvester, Bantam (three) and Penguin printings: all lending-only, their text and page files private. Search-inside refused (“Item not available”). I did not open them.
• HathiTrust’s catalogue API returned no record for the LCCN. Google Books’ API refused for an exhausted daily quota. Stanford SearchWorks rejected the request.
• Tufts Digital Library, searched for the title and for Dennett’s 1981 items: no copy of the book or of any Reflection.

Selections filed separately. “Where Am I?” is LIT-405, read in full from a course copy. Turing (LIT-394) and Searle (LIT-400) are filed and read, and Nagel is LIT-096.