Contribution
The essay separates three things that ordinarily coincide: where a person’s body is, where the brain is, and where the person takes himself to be. It does so with a scenario vivid enough that the separation sticks. It then adds a fourth thing that ordinarily goes unnoticed, the brain’s uniqueness, and separates that too with a functional duplicate. What it leaves behind is a set of named cases, Yorick, Hamlet, Hubert and Fortinbras, that the literature on personal identity and location still uses.
Key insight
Where a person is follows the point of view, not the hardware, and the point of view follows the causal links. Cut the links to the body and the narrator is “disembodied in Houston” at the speed of light, with no change of mass. So “where am I?” has no answer deeper than where the links and the point of view put you, and when there are two sets of links there can be two of you.
Assumptions
- Radio links preserve everything. “No information would be lost, all the connectivity would be preserved”, “a mere stretching of the nerves”. Only the speed of light intrudes, as coordination lags over distance.
- A program can duplicate a brain. Hubert reproduces “both the complete information-processing structure and the computational speed” of the brain. Matching outputs over weeks “did not prove” the copy, the narrator says, but was “greatly encouraging”.
- Physicalism. The narrator is “a philosopher of firm physicalist conviction”, and the puzzles are posed inside physicalism.
- Brain-transplant intuitions are taken as data, that one would rather be “the donor not the recipient”.
Key results
The essay offers no theorems. Its moves:
- Thinking “here” of the vat fails. “Here am I, Daniel Dennett, suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes” cannot be thought with conviction. “There”s can be aimed anywhere; “here in the vat always seemed merely an unmeant mental mouthing”. So either the narrator thinks “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 … resides”.
- Three principles tried.
- “Where Hamlet goes there goes Dennett” is refuted by brain-transplant cases.
- “Where Yorick goes there goes Dennett” is unappealing from the inside, and the bank-robbery jurisdiction case (California or Texas?) makes it seem a matter for lawyers.
- “Dennett is wherever he thinks he is”: a person’s location is the location of his point of view, “determined internally by the content of the point of view”. This threatens “unlikely infallibility” about location, and point of view is “itself an unclear notion”: the Cinerama viewer shifts it by illusion, and the teleoperator shifts it without being fooled.
- Two places at once. On reflection the narrator is “in two places, clearly”, “one of those scattered individuals”. The more obviously true that seems, “the less important the question to which it could be the true answer seemed”. A residual question, “in some sense I and not merely most of me was descending into the earth”, is left.
- Disembodiment. When the links fail, the narrator “changed location from Tulsa to Houston at the speed of light” with no gain in mass. He calls this, ironically, “an impressive demonstration of the immateriality of the soul based upon physicalist principles and premises”. The alternative, “banishing all talk of persons”, is called as unconvincing as “non sum”.
- Hubert. Brain and program run in parallel. A master switch hands the new body to either “without a pause or hitch”, mid-sentence. Which pairing would be “the true Dennett” if each drove a body turns on legal analogies (causal priority, “squatter’s rights”) that are “a bit too redolent of the arbitrariness of consanguinity and legal possession, to be convincing at the metaphysical level”. The narrator’s “strongest intuition” is that he survives while either brain–body couple does.
- Drift. “Our two brains drifted just a bit out of synch”, the difference “snowballed”, and the other brain lost control of the body without anyone knowing it existed. One body now houses two persons, one a passenger “like being possessed”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | A person is not located wherever the body is | moderate | brain-transplant intuitions, cited as standard |
| C2 | A person is not, from the inside, located wherever the brain is | intuition | the failure to think “here” of the vat; the narrator concedes it “begged the question” |
| C3 | A person is located at his point of view | tentative, offered with stated doubts | the teleoperator and Cinerama cases; “unclear notion” and “unlikely infallibility” are the essay’s own objections |
| C4 | A person can be in two places at once, and the location question then loses its interest | intuition | ”scattered individuals”; asserted with a residual doubt |
| C5 | A functional duplicate of the brain can take over a body with no difference detectable to the person | stipulated | Hubert; the essay says matched outputs did not prove the duplication |
| C6 | Which of two duplicates is the original person is not settled by any metaphysical fact | argued by elimination | the legal analogies fail “at the metaphysical level”; no positive criterion given |
| C7 | Two brains are one person only while they stay in step; drift makes two | illustrated | the closing scene; it is the punch line, not argued |
Concepts
- Yorick, Hamlet, Hubert, Fortinbras — the brain in the vat, the original body, the program duplicate of the brain, the replacement body.
- point of view — where the person takes himself to be, “determined internally by the content of the point of view”; explicitly not the content of his beliefs.
- scattered individual — a person whose parts are far apart, here brain and body.
Connections
- The extended mind (LIT-097, NOTE-180). Clark and Chalmers argue from coupling and parity that cognitive vehicles can lie outside the skull, and infer in one paragraph that the self extends too (their C14). This essay stretches the vehicles from the other side: the brain itself is moved out of the body and linked by radio, “a mere stretching of the nerves”. It agrees with them that where the vehicles are does not fix where the person is. It differs on what does: for Clark and Chalmers, what is reliably coupled and endorsed; for Dennett, the point of view. The two tests can come apart. Otto’s notebook is coupled but is not where Otto takes himself to be. Neither paper cites the other, as far as the two readings show. Chalmers’s later papers on extended cognition and consciousness, being filed in parallel, are where that question is taken up.
- “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity” (LIT-442, NOTE-364). That essay says what a self is: an abstractum with only grossly defined location. This essay’s three candidate locations, and its conclusion that the location question loses interest once the answer is “two places”, fit that view. The narrative essay was written later and does not cite this one.
- Functional duplicates. Hubert is the case that Chalmers’s fading-qualia and dancing-qualia arguments, being filed in parallel, turn into an argument. Dennett switches between brain and program and finds “no trace of a difference”. Chalmers argues that a switch between functionally identical systems that changed experience would have to go unnoticed by the subject, which he holds implausible. Dennett’s essay assumes the conclusion inside the story. It does not argue it.
- Dennett’s intentional-stance and consciousness papers, being filed in parallel, give the theory of point of view and of the narrator’s “here”-thoughts that this essay only dramatises. The Mind’s I, also being filed, reprints this essay with a reflection by its editors.
Bearing on the record
- THEORY-043 (the bridge): an individuation criterion by coupling. Two brains in lockstep make one person; out of step they make two. That makes coupling and synchrony, not material or place, decide how many persons there are. It is the person-scale form of Levin’s criterion, on which parts that share information form one Self and parts that stop sharing it fall back into many (LIT-439, NOTE-341, C3). The “scattered individual” is the person-scale form of Schwitzgebel’s claim that spatial contiguity is not required (LIT-159, NOTE-131, C2). The essay also bears against Clark’s high-bandwidth-synchrony requirement as a necessary condition, which Schwitzgebel answers in §6 (NOTE-131). The narrator stays one person across Houston and Tulsa, with lags so long he cannot track a moving object. These pairings are mine. The essay is about persons, not groups.
- THEORY-023 (AI consciousness): a scenario, not evidence. Hubert is a program with the brain’s “complete information-processing structure”, and the story treats it as carrying the person. That is the computational functionalism THEORY-023 says is the disputed premise. The essay presupposes it in the fiction and argues for nothing.
- No ML instruction. Nothing here belongs in the anthology.
Limitations
- It is a story. The essay stages intuitions and reports the narrator’s. Its official answer, C3, is left with the objections it raises unresolved.
- The duplication is stipulated. Hubert’s adequacy is assumed. The narrator notes that matching outputs over weeks “did not prove” it.
- The ending is a reversal, not a result. The drift scene shows that the earlier “nothing happened” was compatible with a second person suffering unnoticed. It is the essay’s sharpest point. It is not developed.
- No sources. The copy read has no notes or citations. The essay names Locke only as someone a legal argument “might have appealed to”.
Open questions
- What fixes the content of a point of view, if not the content of beliefs? The essay says it is “determined internally” and leaves the rest open.
- At what degree of drift do two synchronised systems become two persons? The essay shows the endpoints, not the threshold.