Daniel Dennett is brilliant. I wish I could write half as well as he does about the mind-twisting problems of understanding ourselves and our universe. Here is an excerpt from his article “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity”:
I want to imagine something some of you may think incredible: a novel-writing machine. We can suppose it is a product of artificial intelligence research, a computer that has been designed or programmed to write novels. But it has not been designed to write any particular novel. We can suppose (if it helps) that it has been given a great stock of whatever information it might need, and some partially random and hence unpredictable ways of starting the seed of a story going, and building upon it. Now imagine that the designers are sitting back, wondering what kind of novel their creation is going to write. They turn the thing on and after a while the high speed printer begins to go clickety-clack and out comes the first sentence. “Call me Gilbert,” it says. What follows is the apparent autobiography of some fictional Gilbert. Now Gilbert is a fictional, created self but its creator is no self. Of course there were human designers who designed the machine, but they didn’t design Gilbert. Gilbert is a product of a design or invention process in which there aren’t any selves at all. That is, I am stipulating that this is not a conscious machine, not a “thinker.” It is a dumb machine, but it does have the power to write a passable novel. . . .
So we are to imagine that a passable story is emitted from the machine. Notice that we can perform the same sort of literary exegesis with regard to this novel as we can with any other. In fact if you were to pick up a novel at random out of a library, you could not tell with certainty that it wasn’t written by something like this machine. (And if you’re a New Critic you shouldn’t care.) You’ve got a text and you can interpret it, and so you can learn the story, the life and adventures of Gilbert. Your expectations and predictions, as you read, and your interpretive reconstruction of what you have already read, will congeal around the central node of the fictional character, Gilbert.
But now I want to twiddle the knobs on this thought experiment. So far we’ve imagined the novel, The Life and Times of Gilbert, clanking out of a computer that is just a box, sitting in the corner of some lab. But now I want to change the story a little bit and suppose that the computer has arms and legs—or better: wheels. (I don’t want to make it too anthropomorphic.) It has a television eye, and it moves around in the world. It also begins its tale with “Call me Gilbert,” and tells a novel, but now we notice that if we do the trick that the New Critics say you should never do, and look outside the text, we discover that there’s a truth-preserving interpretation of that text in the real world. The adventures of Gilbert, the fictional character, now bear a striking and presumably non-coincidental relationship to the adventures of this robot rolling around in the world. If you hit the robot with a baseball bat, very shortly thereafter the story of Gilbert includes his being hit with a baseball bat by somebody who looks like you. Every now and then the robot gets locked in the closed and then says “Help me!” Help whom? Well, help Gilbert, presumably. But who is Gilbert? Is Gilbert the robot, or merely the fictional self created by the robot? If we go and help the robot out of the closet, it sends us a note: “Thank you. Love, Gilbert.” At this point we will be unable to ignore the fact that the fictional career of the fictional Gilbert bears an intersting resemblance to the “career” of this mere robot moving through the world. We can still maintain that the robot’s brain, the robot’s computer, really knows nothing about the world; it’s not a self. It’s just a clanky computer. It doesn’t know what it’s doing. It doesn’t even know that it’s creating a fictional character. (The same is just as true of your brain; it doesn’t know what it’s doing either.) Nevertheless, the patterns in the behavior that is being controlled by the computer are interpretable, by us, as accreting biography–telling the narrative of a self. But we are not the only interpreters. The robot novelist is also, of course, an interpreter: a self-interpreter, providing its own account of its activities in the world.
Do read the rest of the article, which is both intriguing and edifying. And it presents another mystery primed for the contemplation I suggested in my last post, but looking inward instead of outward (or is it still outward?): Where is your self, and who is asking?
(Credit to Julia Galef, who “picked” this article in her weekly list of interesting stuff on the web.)