If we regard light, pressure waves, and so forth as carrying information about the physical world, the point of view is the spatial point where this information is received by a perceiver. Sometimes, as Dennett remarks, one can shift one’s point of view back and forth. The laboratory worker remotely manipulating dangerous materials can shift it back and forth from mechanical hands to hands of flesh and blood. The Cinerama viewer can shift it back and forth from a car hurtling down a roller-coaster from which one sees the ground approach with sickening rapidity to a seat inside a theater from which one sees rapidly changing images on a screen. Dennett had been unable to accomplish such a shift between Yorick and Hamlet, and I had been unable to accomplish such a shift between David and Hawley. Try as I might, I could not regard myself as seeing an image projected by eyevideo rather than seeing the scene before the camera that was transmitting to the eyevideo. In my present state of embodiment, analogously, I cannot shift my point of view a couple of inches farther in so that I can focus my attention on a pair of retinal images rather than on the messy typescript in front of my eyes. Neither can I shift my auditory point of hearing and attend to the vibrations of my eardrums rather than to the sounds outside.
My point of view had been from the location of a robot, and I had been strongly inclined to locate myself at my point of view. Although I regarded the location of a robot as being my location, I was less comfortable regarding myself as identical to a robot. Although I had no clear conception of myself as something other than the robot, I was willing to entertain the possibility that I and a robot, though distinct, occupied the same place at the same time. I was less troubled with discontinuous changes in location than with the idea that whenever the channels were switched I suddenly ceased to be identical with one robot and became identical with another.
When the time for debriefing arrived, Dr. Wechselmann, the scientist in charge, told me he had a big surprise for me and thereby filled me with fear and trepidation. Was David still alive? Was David’s brain floating in a vat? Had I been on line with a computer duplicate for days? Were there several computer duplicates, each controlling a robot or each controlling a different modified human body? I did not anticipate the actual surprise. Dr. Wechselmann said that I could witness my own disassembly—that is to say, the disassembly of the Hawley where I was. While I watched in a mirror, I saw the technicians unzip the layers and peel them back. It turned out that I, David Sanford, the living human being, was underneath. David’s health had been maintained; and forty-eight hours earlier, during sleep, the cameras had been mounted directly in front of the eyevideos, the microphones directly in front of the earphones, one layer of sensitive skintact directly over the layer next to my skin, and so forth. For a while, when I thought that my location was the location of Plastic Big Hawley, I was really walking around in a very skillfully made and lifelike or, more strictly, lifeless-like, robot costume. The sensations of breathing and eating and so forth were soon returned to me.
Taking off the eyevideo apparatus did not change things visually at all. The fact that for a while, when I thought that David’s eyes were in another room, they were actually right behind the cameras, reinforced my inclination to say that the eyevideo system does not interpose any barrier between its user and the physical world. It is like seeing things through a microscope or telescope or with the help of corrective lenses. When one sees by an eyevideo system, one sees what is in focus in front of the lens not some mediating visual object, even though the causal chain between the external object and the visual awareness is more or less altered and complicated by the intervening apparatus.
So here I am, and there is no doubt that I was inside the double-layer suit when David was inside the suit. But when David was inside a single-layer suit, and the other layer covered a robot, my locations remain something of a puzzle. If the puzzle is in any way more informative than the puzzles Dennett poses, Dennett deserves much of the credit. If he had wholly succeeded in his mission, there would have been no reason for me to embark on mine.
Reflections
Sanford’s story is much closer to being possible than its predecessor. In a recent article Marvin Minsky, founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T., discusses the prospects for this technology:
You don a comfortable jacket lined with sensors and musclelike motors. Each motion of your arm, hand, and fingers is reproduced at another place by mobile, mechanical hands. Light, dextrous, and strong, these hands have their own sensors through which you see and feel what is happening. Using this instrument, you can “work” in another room, in another city, in another country, or on another planet. Your remote presence possesses the strength of a giant or the delicacy of a surgeon. Heat or pain is translated into informative but tolerable sensation. Your dangerous job becomes safe and pleasant.
Minsky calls this technology telepresence, a term suggested to him by Pat Gunkel, and describes the advances that have already been made.
Telepresence is not science fiction. We could have a remote-controlled economy by the twenty-first century if we start planning right now. The technical scope of such a project would be no greater than that of designing a new military aircraft.
Some of the components of Sanford’s imagined MARS system already have prototypes—mechanical hands with feedback systems transmitting forces and resistance, variously amplified or moderated—and there is even a step in the direction of eyevideo:
A Philco engineer named Steve Moulton made a nice telepresence eye. He mounted a TV camera atop a building and wore a helmet so that when he moved his head, the camera on top of the building moved, and so did a viewing screen attached to the helmet.
Wearing this helmet, you have the feeling of being on top of the building and looking around Philadelphia. If you “lean over” it’s kind of creepy. But the most sensational thing Moulton did was to put a two-to-one ratio on the neck so that when you turn your head 30 degrees, the mounted eye turns 60 degrees; you feel as if you had a rubber neck, as if you could turn your “head” completely around!
Might the future hold something even stranger in store? Justin Leiber, a philosopher at the University of Houston, develops a more radical variation on these themes in the next selection, an excerpt from his science fiction novel Beyond Rejection.
D.C.D.
Worms began his spieclass="underline" “People often think that it ought to be simple enough to just manufacture an adult human body, like building a house. Or a helicopter. You’d think that, well, we know what chemicals are involved and how they go together, how they form cells according to DNA templates, and how the cells form organ systems regulated by chemical messengers, hormones, and the like. So we ought to be able to build a fully functional human body right up from scratch.”
Worms moved so that he blocked their view of the jogger. He brought his drained coffee cup down for emphasis.
21
Excerpt from