I love the accessibility of presenting this very complex philosophical thought experiment in the form of fiction. He walks you through some of the analysis you need to be making in the beginning,
with the narrator-philosopher basically teaching you, but as the story goes on, you are increasingly left to your own devices to unpack the consequences of the increasingly bizarre scenario. By the end, it's completely stopped being a lecture and is just an entertaining story, but still no less instructive because of the way it captures your imagination and makes you want to work through the ideas.
I remember when first reading the story thinking, that I can resolve the question "Where am I" easily because of my experience with video games.<p>When I play a first-person video game, and someone behind me looks at my screen and asks me, "Where are you?", I don't say "In a chair playing a game". I say "I'm in such-and-such room on a space station" or whatever.<p>This made me think that "Where am I" depends on the spatial coordinates your inputs (eyes, ears) are picking up. In an every day case it's wherever my eyeballs are, in a video game case it's the setting of the video game, and Daniel Dennet's case it's wherever his eyeballs are.<p>This works for videogames but not TV. So the brain must be able to control the inputs.<p>This also works for the "Tom and Dick switch brains" thought experiment in the story. After the switch, Tom is wherever the eyeballs that are communicating with his brains are, which is to say wherever Dick's body is.
Loved this story. Surprised to find how simple and straightforward his writing is here, when in discussions on free will he was much more obfuscatory. Is it due to the difference in difficulty between posing interesting questions and giving good answers?
Here is the part I completely lost the thread - Right at the beginning..<p>> “Yorick,” I said aloud to my brain, “you are my brain. The rest of my body, seated in this chair, I dub ‘Hamlet.’” So here we all are: Yorick’s my brain, Hamlet’s my body, and I am Dennett.<p>Why is the brain or the body different from "I"? There seems to be an unstated assumption that your ego is different from your physical manifestation and I did not see anything to substantiate that. This is a religious argument and I could not make sense of the arguments following it.<p>Maybe there is already an assumption that I missed.
Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all.<p>Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?