“I’m afraid he’ll catch cold with lying on the damp grass,” said Alice, who was a very thoughtful little girl.
“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”
Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”
“Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly.
“And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
“I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?”
“Ditto,” said Tweedledum.
“Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.
He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying “Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.”
“Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.”
“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.
“You won’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.”
“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seem so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry.”
“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
René Descartes asked himself whether he could tell for certain he wasn’t dreaming. “When I consider these matters carefully, I realize so clearly that there are no conclusive indications by which waking can be distinguished from sleep that I am quite astonished, and bewilderment is such that it is almost able to convince me that I am sleeping.”
It did not occur to Descartes to wonder if he might be a character in someone else’s dream, or, if it did, he dismissed the idea out of hand. Why? Couldn’t you dream a dream with a character in it who was not you but whose experiences were a part of your dream? It is not easy to know how to answer a question like that. What would be the difference between dreaming a dream in which you were quite unlike your waking self—much older or younger, or of the opposite sex—and dreaming a dream in which the main character (a girl named Renee, let’s say), the character from whose “point of view” the dream was “narrated,” was simply not you but merely a fictional dream character, no more real than the dream-dragon chasing her? If that dream character were to ask Descartes’s question, and wonder if she were dreaming or awake, it seems the answer would be that she was not dreaming, nor was she really awake; she was just dreamt. When the dreamer, the real dreamer, wakes up, she will be annihilated. But to whom would we address this answer, since she does not really exist at all, but is just a dream character?
Is this philosophical play with the ideas of dreaming and reality just idle? Isn’t there a no-nonsense “scientific” stance from which we objectively distinguish between the things that are really there and mere fictions? Perhaps there is, but then on which side of the divide we put ourselves? Not our physical bodies, but our selves?
Consider the sort of novel that is written from the point of view a fictional narrator-actor. Moby Dick begins with the words “Call Ishmael,” and then we are told Ishmael’s story by Ishmael. Call whom Ishmael? Ishmael does not exist. He is just a character in Melville’s novel. Melville is, or was, a perfectly real self, and he created a fictional self who calls himself Ishmael—but who is not to be numbered among the real things, the things that really are. But now imagine, if you can, a novel writing machine, a mere machine, without a shred of consciousness selfhood. Call it the JOHNNIAC. (The next selection will help you imagine such a machine, if you cannot yet convince yourself you can do it.) Suppose the novel that clattered out of the JOHNNIAC on its high-speed printer started: “Call me Gilbert,” and proceeded to tell Gilbert’s story from Gilbert’s point of view. Call whom Gilbert? Gilbert is just a fictional character, a nonentity with no real existence, though we can go along with the fiction and talk about, learn about, worry about “his” adventures, problems, hopes, fears, pains. In the case of Ishmael, we may have supposed his queer, fictional, quasi-existence depended on the real existence of Melville’s self. No dream without a dreamer to dream it seems to be Descartes’ discovery. But in this case we do seem to have a dream—a fiction, in any case—with no real dreamer or author, no real self with whom we might or might not identify Gilbert. So in such an extraordinary case as the novel-writing machine there might be created a merely fictional self with no real self behind the act of creation. (We can even suppose the JOHNNIAC’s designers had no idea what novels it would eventually write.)
Now suppose our imagined novel-writing machine is not just a sedentary, boxy computer, but a robot. And suppose—why not?—that the text of the novel is not typed but “spoken” from a mechanical mouth. Call this robot the SPEECHIAC. And suppose, finally, the tale we learn from the SPEECHIAC about the adventures of Gilbert is a more or less true story of the “adventures” of the SPEECHIAC. When it is locked in a closet, it says: “I am locked in the closet! Help me!” Help whom? Help Gilbert. But Gilbert does not exist; he is just a fictional character in the SPEECHIAC’s peculiar narration. Why, though, should we call this account fiction, since there is a quite obvious candidate in sight to be Gilbert: the person whose body is the SPEECHIAC? In “Where Am I?” Dennett called his body Hamlet. Is this a case of Gilbert having a body called the SPEECHIAC, or of the SPEECHIAC calling itself Gilbert?
Perhaps we are being tricked by the name. Naming the robot “Gilbert” may be just like naming a sailboat “Caroline” or a bell “Big Ben” or a program “ELIZA.” We may feel like insisting that there is no person named Gilbert here. What, though, aside from bio-chauvinism, grounds our resistance to the conclusion that Gilbert is a person, a person created, in effect, by the SPEECHIAC’s activity and self-presentation in the world?
“Is the suggestion then that I am my body’s dream? Am I just a fictional character in a sort of novel composed by my body in action?” That would be one way of getting at it, but why call yourself fictional? Your brain, like the unconscious novel-writing machine, cranks along, doing its physical tasks, sorting the inputs and the outputs without a glimmer of what it is up to. Like the ants that compose Aunt Hillary in “Prelude, Ant Fugue,” it doesn’t “know” it is creating you in the process, but there you emerging from its frantic activity almost magically.
This process of creating a self at one level out of the relatively mindless and uncomprehending activities amalgamated at another level is vividly illustrated in the next selection by John Searle, though he firmly resists that vision of what he is showing.
D.C.D.