Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Prelude . . . Ant Fugue 179and the supply of various castes here and there. This extra complication is the price you payfor the right to summarize.ACHILLES: It is interesting to me to compare the merits of the descriptions at various levels.The highest-level description seems to carry the most explanatory power, in that it gives youthe most intuitive picture of the ant colony, although strangely enough, it leaves outseemingly the most important feature-the ants.ANTEATER: But you see, despite appearances, the ants are not the most important feature.Admittedly, were it not for them, the colony wouldn't exist; but something equivalent-abrain-can exist, ant-free. So, at least from a high-level point of view, the ants are dispensable.ACHILLES: I'm sure no ant would embrace your theory with eagerness. ANTEATER: Well,I never met an ant with a high-level point of view.CRAB: What a counterintuitive picture you paint, Dr. Anteater. It seems that, if what you sayis true, in order to grasp the whole structure, you have to describe it omitting any mention ofits fundamental building blocks.ANTEATER: Perhaps I can make it a little clearer by an analogy. Imagine you have beforeyou a Charles Dickens novel.ACHILLES: The Pickwick Papers-will that do?ANTEATER: Excellently! And now imagine trying the following game: You must find away of mapping letters onto ideas, so that the entire Pickwick Papers makes sense when youread it letter by letter.ACHILLES: Hmm. . . . You mean that every time I hit a word such as "the," I have to thinkof three definite concepts, one after another, with no room for variation?ANTEATER: Exactly. They are the "t"-concept, the "h"-concept, and the "e"-concept-andevery time, those concepts are as they were the preceding time.ACHILLES: Well, it sounds like that would turn the experience of "reading" The PickwickPapers into an indescribably boring nightmare. It would be an exercise in meaninglessness,no matter what concept I associated with each letter.ANTEATER: Exactly. There is no natural mapping from the individual letters into the realworld. The natural mapping occurs on a higher level-between words, and parts of the realworld. If you wanted to describe the book, therefore, you would make no mention of theletter level.