A Conversation With Einstein's Brain

In “A conversation with Einstein’s Brain,” written by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, the authors write about a conversation occurring between tortoise and Achilles in which they discuss about a book containing all of the neurons and pathways symbolized by abbreviations and words. These fully functional neurons written as abbreviations represent Einstein’s brain, and thus, the book is Einstein’s brain. During the conversation, Achilles struggles to understand the concept. Thus, Tortoise uses an analogy of a record player to describe the book of Einstein’s brain. When the record or book is not being used, it just sits there, but the music or information is still contained inside and able to be played back whenever someone choses …show more content…
The mechanism that allows the book to equate a mind is the theory of functionalism. As described by the theory, a functionally specified entity can preserve its functional status across various changes. In this essay, the book and Einstein’s brain are made up of different systems, but they still have the same functional purpose of replicating and giving off equal outputs in response to various inputs. Thus, the book mentioned in the essay has a mind as it is an elaborate system that exhibits human-like functioning. The idea that although the brain and the book are different systems, but still generate a mind due to equal functioning can be seen through the mouse trap example. In this example discussed in lecture, there was a simple spring-loaded, wooden mousetrap that was compared to a very extensive and elaborate mousetrap that had a bunch of special and complex chain of reactions that extended over a vast amount of area. While these two mouse traps contain very different mechanisms of operation, they both achieve the same function of trapping a mouse regardless of the mechanisms used to achieve this end goal. This same concept can be applied to the brain and book where they both function as minds by receiving equivalent inputs and responding with equivalent outputs although they contain different operating