Where Am I Daniel Dennett Analysis

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Daniel Dennett is an American philosopher that wrote a science-fiction narrative in which his brain is removed from his body, but he is still alive. I will go into detail about how the actions in the story affected Dennett and provide insight on the questions it posed. Daniel Dennett’s “Where Am I?” is a famous philosophical science-fiction story where Dennett gets his brain removed. He then asks himself why is he conscious in his body and not in his brain. This causes multiple explanations and possible answers to arise. Daniel Dennett persists through the operation because he is still himself. The only thing that changed was that his brain was replaced with wires and transmitters. These pieces of technology were linked to Dennett’s physical brain using radio signals. So Dennett was ultimately still himself, but he was just undergoing “stretching of the nerves”. Daniel Dennett thinks that, even through the mental and physical changes, he is still the same person. Both Dennett and the technicians in the story decided that both the original brain, Yorick, and the computer “brain”, Hubert, are the same. They both have the same thoughts and react in synchrony. Philosopher John Locke would …show more content…

In the story when Daniel Dennett flipped the switch between Yorick and Hubert, there was no faltering of his train of thought whatsoever. In “Where Am I?”, Dennett wrote “I could switch in mid-utterance, and the sentence I had begun speaking under the control of Yorick was finished without a pause or hitch of any kind under the control of Hubert.” The scientists ran tests on the computer brain to see how it pared up to the original brain and the results showed that Hubert’s responses and outputs were identical and occured within the same time. This means that his stream of consciousness never changed courses with the different types of

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