The general principle Where Hawley goes, there goes Sanford obviously will not do. The robot that first walked around David while David made walking motions and turned its head as David turned his head is now in a highly classified science museum, and Sanford is not.
Also, the robot could be controlled by some other flesh-and-blood body before, and after, it was controlled by David. If Sanford ever went where Hawley went, I did so only when Hawley was in communication with David or a David replica in at least some of the ways that have been described. Dennett’s first principle, Where Hamlet goes, there goes Dennett, needs analogous qualification.
My attempt to name the robot “Hawley” ran into difficulties when there turned out to be more than one robot. In Houston there were two full-size robots, one whose main parts were mostly plastic and one whose main parts were mostly metal. They looked just the same from the outside, and, if you know what I mean, they felt just the same from the inside. Neither robot was flown to Tulsa. A third robot, built on a three-fifths scale so it could maneuver more easily in cramped quarters, was there already. That’s the one that retrieved the warhead.
Once I was onto the fact that there was more than one robot, the technicians did not always wait for David to fall asleep before switching channels. When Little Hawley returned in triumph from Tulsa, the three of us, or the three of I, would play three-corner catch with the cooperation of three human helpers who would keep the temporarily inactive and unsentient robots from toppling over. I persisted in locating myself in the position of the active, sentient robot and thus had the experience, or at least seemed to have the experience, of spatiotemporally discontinuous travel from one location to another without occupying any of the positions in between.
The principle Where David goes, there goes Sanford was no more appealing for me than Dennett’s analogous Where Yorick goes, there goes Dennett. My reasons for rejection were more epistemological than legalistic. I had not seen David since Little Hawley’s return from Tulsa and I could not be sure that David still existed. For some reason I never fully understood, quite soon after David began perceiving the external world via skintact, eyevideos, and earphones I was prevented from having the experiences associated with breathing, chewing, swallowing, digesting, and excreting. When Plastic Big Hawley produced articulate speech, I was unsure that the movements of David’s diaphragm, larynx, tongue, and lips were still causally involved in its production. The scientists had the technology to tap directly into the appropriate nerves and rectify the neural output, which was itself produced partly in response to artificially rectified input, to transmit the same signals to the receiver connected to the loudspeaker mounted in the head of Plastic Big Hawley. The scientists, indeed, had the technology to bypass any of their fancy electronic devices of causal mediation and substitute even fancier devices that hook up directly with the brain. Suppose, I thought, something went wrong with David; its kidneys broke down or it developed an embolism in a coronary artery. Everything of David except the brain might be dead. For that matter, the brain might be dead too. Since a computer duplicate of Yorick, Dennett’s brain, had been manufactured, then so might a computer duplicate of David’s brain. I could have become a robot, or a computer, or a robot-computer combination, with no organic parts whatsoever. I would then resemble the Frank Baum character Nick Chopper, better known as the Tin Woodman, whose transformation from organic to inorganic constitution was a part at a time. In such a case, besides having yet another variation on puzzle cases concerning the persistence of a person through a change of bodies, we would have the materials to construct more variations on puzzle cases concerning one self dividing into several. If one computer duplicate of a brain can be produced, then so can two or three or twenty. While each could control a modified brainless human body like that described by Dennett, each could also control a robot like one of the Hawleys. In either sort of case, body transfer, or robot transfer, or brain transfer, or computer transfer, or whatever you want to call it, could be accomplished without further advances in technology.
I realized that I was tempted by an argument similar to one Arnauld attributes to Descartes.
I can doubt that the human body David, or its brain, exists.
I cannot doubt that I see and hear and feel and think.
Therefore, I who see and hear and so forth cannot be identical to David or its brain; otherwise in doubting their existence I would doubt the existence of myself.
I also realized that David could have been separated into living, functional parts. The eyes with their eyevideos could be connected with the brain down the hall. The limbs, now kept alive with artificial blood, could similarly each have their own room. Whether or not these peripheral systems were still involved in the operation of Plastic Big Hawley, the brain might also have been taken apart, and the information between various subpersonal processing systems could be transferred nearly as quickly as before even if it had to travel much farther in space. And if the brain was gone, replaced with a computer duplicate, the computer parts might be spatially spread out in one of the ways Dennett describes briefly in “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Consciousness”.[20] The spatial contiguity or chemical composition of the various internal information-processing subsystems that together were responsible for my thoughts, actions, and passions seemed irrelevant to my personal location, unity, or identity.
As Dennett first formulated his third principle of personal location, Dennett is wherever he thinks he is, it lends itself to misinterpretation. He doesn’t mean that thinking that one is in Chapel Hill would ever be sufficient for actually being in Chapel Hill. He means rather that the location of a person’s point of view is the location of the person. Of course people do more than literally just view things. They perceive by other senses; they move. Some of their movements, such as head and eye movements, directly affect what they see. Many of their movements and positions are continually perceived although with only intermittent conscious attention. The robots in the Hawley family preserved almost all the normal functions and relations between the sense organs and limbs of a person and the environment the robots found themselves in. And so the spatial unity of a functioning Hawley robot was more than enough to provide Sanford with a sense of having a unified location where the robot was. At the time, the prospect of Hawley’s disassembly was more unsettling than the prospect of David’s dismemberment.
It was technically possible, I realized, that the inputs and outputs from David, or the computer duplicate, or whatever, could be divide between Little Hawley, Metal Big Hawley, and Plastic Big Hawley. Or a single robot could be disassembled although its various parts continue independently to move and to relay perceptual information. I didn’t know what would happen to my sense of unity in such a circumstance. Would I be able to preserve any sense of myself as a single agent? Under such bizarre circumstances I might be inclined to parody Descartes and say that I was not only in control of these different parts as an admiral commanding a fleet, but that I was very closely united to them, and so to speak so intermingled with them that I seemed to compose with them one whole. Or I might not be up to that task of self-integration. Would my range of motor and perceptual activity, rather than being more widely distributed in space, be reduced to recollection, meditation, and fantasy as the deliverances from spatially separated and independent sources impressed me only as a booming, buzzing, distracting confusion? I am glad that I was never given a chance to find out.