Andrew Carlquist
26 February 2008
Dennett: Where He Is Not.
The idea of self is a difficult matter to address. For as long as there have been people capable of it, these people have speculated on what constitutes self, why we have it, what and where it is. Daniel Dennett is no different, and creates a hypothetical situation involving the physical removal of his brain while maintaining bodily function in order to address “Where Am I?” He states his position as being a physicalist, meaning he believes every piece of the self is located within the brain.
Before we can really look at some of the questions by Dennett in “Where Am I?” we need to address certain things brought up by his scenario: the first being his assumption that it is indeed possible to separate the brain from the body without effect on the psyche, and the second is the set of his theories about the experience of being disembodied. I intend to examine the validity of Dennett’s ideas and conclusions; in doing so, a probable answer to the question of “where is the self” will be provided. But first, a discussion of terms.
The psyche is the amalgamated structure of what we consider, in parts, as the exercise of psychology and philosophy; in other words, it is what the brain creates through its functioning. Psyche is made up of our cognitions, personalities, emotions, identities, egos; the entire human experience. Everything in the experiment that Dennett proposes relies on the assumption that removing the brain from the body has no effect on psyche. So, given the definition of psyche, if it is said that Dennett is convinced of the independent nature of the psyche and assumes that the disconnection of the brain from the body has no effect on the psyche, then it is meant that none of the listed aspects of psyche are at all affected by removal of the brain from the body.
It is important now to make known crucial information about the self and mind. The self is inherently dualistic, having two distinct features: the empirical, known concept or schema of self, typically called the “me-self” or self-concept, and the thinking, analyzing processor, called the “I-self,” mind, or self-awareness. When we think about ourselves, the I-self is what does the thinking and the me-self is what is thought about. This idea will be extremely important later, but for sake of ease, the I-self will be referred to as “the mind” while the me-self will be referred to simply as “the self”.
So, is the brain really physically separable from the body? Dennett clearly believes yes. However, there are many aspects of the brain-body connection that Dennett does not address whatsoever, the most important of which is the role of hormones. Though they often work in tandem, the endocrine system is essentially autonomous from the nervous system. So, even though the neuronal connections remain functionally intact when his brain, dubbed “Yorick,” is removed from his body, “Hamlet,” the entire endocrine system is completely severed. This would, without a doubt, be a complete loss.
How drastic would the effects of this loss be? Considerably. Many of the systems and behaviors we take for granted rely not only on neuronal processes, but hormonal balances, such as hunger, blood pressure, growth, and the circadian rhythm. Granted, we can not ignore the sensory aspects, but for many behaviors the importance of these is significantly less than that of hormones. Let us look at one example: hunger. Satiation occurs essentially by two mechanisms: distention of the stomach and a balance of the hormones leptin and ghrelin, which are created in adipose tissue and the stomach lining, respectively. It has been shown that, while distention abates hunger in the very short term, the effect of hormones is more important to the appetite. So, if we apply this to Dennett, we would most likely see the effect of some sort of serious appetite disorder, since none of the hormones are able to reach the hypothalamus, which is the site of their effects. Without the communication of hormones, Hamlet might become over-watered and suffer electrolyte imbalance or have blood pressure high enough to burst his heart, so it would be foolish to ignore the importance of Yorick being able to communicate with other endocrine glands, particularly the thyroid and testes, which are located within Hamlet and rely almost entirely on hormones for communication. It is obvious that, given that the procedure was “a mere stretching of the nerves,” (Dennett, 1981, pg. 311) this central method of physical communication is completely non-functional, and realistically both Yorick and Hamlet would suffer from the disconnect.
Fortunately for Dennett, this problem can be easily waved away by saying “Science has it all figured out” and emphasizing the hypothetical nature of his story. So ultimately, the entire line of reasoning appears to be moot. It is probable that Dennett could come up with a way to address any physical problems facing his experiment, especially if we also consider that he does indeed do this: he admits to having knowledge of the effects of plastic surgery or sex change on personality and to thinking that “the person” still remains in these cases (Dennett, 1981, pg. 319).
Unlike the previous subject, the flaws of Dennett’s theories of disembodiment and what it means for the self are unavoidable. The important discrepancy appears on page 312: Dennett hits the output switch, cutting off all connection between Yorick and Hamlet, and “immediately slumped, groggy and nauseated” (Dennett, 1981); in effect, Dennett completely severs the connection between his brain and body. This is a problem for three reasons: it is a baseless guess, it is inconsistent with the rest of the story, and his descriptions of disembodiment are neither accurate nor sufficient.
The first objection, though seemingly rendered irrelevant by the obvious absurdity of the entire situation, is not such a trivial dismissal of the assumption as it appears, because the entirety of the story relies on the experience of disembodiment, and if he has it wrong, his entire position is thrown into chaos. Without anything to base this description of disembodiment upon, we might as well turn to Descartes’ substance dualism, because both are just as incredible.
Second, the statement is also inconsistent with his second experience of disembodiment. As his connections malfunction while attempting to recover the STUD, he is experiencing, while at a slower rate, the same effect as throwing the output switch. After all connections are lost, it “took [him] several very anxious minutes before it dawned on me that my poor body” was no longer connected to his brain (Dennett, 1981, pg. 317). Whereas in the first severing of the link he feels an immediate sensation, he feels nothing for several minutes after the second disembodiment. This contradiction serves to support the first objection, because without an actual idea what it actually feels like to be “disembodied,” there is no way to honestly subscribe to Dennett’s assertions without taking a leap of faith based solely on his word.
Third, looking at the closest true life cases of disembodiment serves to invalidate his descriptions of the effects of disembodiment. In Dr. Oliver Sacks’ story “The Disembodied Lady,” he describes the case of Christina who suffers a complete loss of proprioception in her body. She can still control and move it, but she has no “sixth sense” about where her body is located, or that it’s even attached to her. She feels this loss acutely and immediately, as if she’d been “pithed” (Sacks, 1985, pg. 52). Theoretically, this feeling is exactly half of what Dennett would be feeling during disembodiment; the other half being the feelings of paralyzation as a restriction of movement described in Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as like being in a diving bell, the entire body simply weighed down and immovable (Bauby, 1997, pg 5). Dennett describes neither of these genuine sensations, instead describing ones that are unprecedented, delayed, and inconsistent.
The final nail in the coffin of the saga of Yorick and Hamlet immediately follows the above line of reasoning: since Dennett’s conception of disembodiment is inaccurate, this directly influences his ideas of how the mind and self would be affected by disembodiment. One could easily remove certain key words and, instead of being completely disembodied, set him in a really big hole. Sacks would definitely disagree with disembodiment being equivalent to being in a hole. The body is “the fundamental, organic mooring of identity” and that in Christina’s (as well as other sufferers of body-image problems) “there is this general feeling—this ‘deficiency in the egoistic sentiment of individuality…” (Sacks, 1985, pg. 52). The loss of the body is personal, a chunk completely taken out of the self. The sense of where one’s self “is” is not a conscious thing, it’s innate; this is what is meant by the “fundamental mooring of identity.” The self must be anchored in order to be felt to be somewhere, and the body is that anchor. With the loss of the body, even the intellectual understanding “I am now in the tank” (which is in itself a mistake to think; I will address this later) does not allow for the anchoring of the self. Because of this, Dennett, in describing his “change of point of view” is inherently incorrect.
Concluding this rather lengthy discussion, we can now come to answer the question “Where are we?” Dennett is correct in saying that all the processes that result in psyche, including self and mind, are located within the brain; in this, there is no doubt. However, the self (read: me-self), being a concept, needing a fundamental mooring, is located in the body. Dennett’s point of view exercise does not address the depth of this issue because point of view has little to nothing to do with it. Dennett provides descriptions of cases where the “self” is transported or moved to try to show that point of view is a significant factor in the location of self, but in both these cases the body is still present, providing that necessary anchor. These attempts demonstrate his deep misunderstanding of the self: the movie-goer may be imagining he is somewhere he is not, but “he” is still in his body, and even if the plant workers were moving their “selves,” they are still anchored in a body. Dennett also tries to throw more dust into the air with the loss of Hamlet and the subsequent commandeering of Fortinbras, thinking that the loss of the original body and readjustment to a new one would negate the self being attached to the body, but this, once again, only shows his deep ignorance of the matter: the self doesn’t need the original body, it needs a body, just to serve as anchor. Though Sacks may disagree with this last matter, it is a matter of semantics.
So, to sum everything up, Dennett makes certain assumptions about the nature of disembodiment and its effects on the self that are inherently incorrect, which leads him to a mostly incorrect notion of the self and where it is located. In asking “Where Am I?” he assumes that the self is always somewhere, but the self, being a generated concept, does not fit this rule. The processes that make up self, proprioception being a pivotal one, do not allow for it. The self needs an anchor to be somewhere, and this anchor is the body.
Works Cited
Bauby, J. (1997). The diving bell and the butterfly. New York: Vintage International.
Dennett, D. (1981). Where am I? Brainstorms. MIT Press.
Sacks, O. (1985). The disembodied lady. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.
