Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Prelude . . . Ant Fugue 158dominant. I don't know if our other companions here have also experienced anything similar.CRAB: Most definitely. It's quite a tantalizing phenomenon, since you feel that the essence ofthe fugue is flitting about you, and you can't quite grasp all of it, because you can't quitemake yourself function both ways at once.ANTEATER: Fugues have that interesting property, that each of their voices is a piece ofmusic in itself; and thus a fugue might be thought of as a collection of several distinct piecesof music, all based on one single theme, and all played simultaneously. And it is up to thelistener (or his subconscious) to decide whether it should be perceived as a unit, or as acollection of independent parts, all of which harmonize.ACHILLES: You say that the parts are "independent," yet that can't be literally true. Therehas to be some coordination between them, otherwise when they were put together one wouldjust have an unsystematic clashing of tones-and that is as far from the truth as could beANTEATER: A better way to state it might be this: if you listened to each voice on its own,you would find that it seemed to make sense all b. itself. It could stand alone, and that is thesense in which I meant tha it is independent. But you are quite right in pointing out that eachof these individually meaningful lines fuses with the others in a highly nonrandom way, tomake a graceful totality. The art of writing a beautiful fugue lies precisely in this ability, tomanufacture several different lines, each one of which gives the illusion of having been.,written for its own beauty, and yet which when taken together form a whole, which does notfeel forced in any way. Now, this dichotomy, between hearing a fugue as a whole andhearing its component voices is a particular example of a very general dichotomy, whichapplies to many kinds of structures built up from lower levels.ACHILLES: Oh, really? You mean that my two "modes" may have some more general typeof applicability, in situations other than fugue-listening?ANTEATER: Absolutely.ACHILLES: I wonder how that could be. I guess it has to do with alternating betweenperceiving something as a whole and perceiving it as a collection of parts. But the only placeI have ever run into that dichotomy is in listening to fugues.