Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Prelude . . . Ant Fugue 192anthropomorphic terms. A newspaper article about a terrorist group described it as "playingits cards extremely close to its chest." It is often said of Russia that it "desires" worldrecognition of its might because it "suffers" from a "long-standing inferiority complex" withrespect to Western Europe. While admittedly metaphors, these examples serve todemonstrate how strong the urge is to personify organizations.The component individuals of organizations-secretaries, workers, bus drivers,executives, and so on-have their own goals in life, which, one might expect, would come intoconflict with any higher-level entity of which they formed a part, but there is an effect (whichmany students of political science would regard as insidious and sinister) whereby theorganization co-opts and exploits these very goals, taking advantage of the individuals' pride,need for self-esteem, and so on, and turning them, back to its own profits. There emergesfrom all the many low-level goals a kind of higher-level momentum that subsumes all ofthem, that sweeps them along and thereby perpetuates itself.Therefore it is perhaps not so silly for the Tortoise to object to Achilles' comparisonof himself to an ant and to prefer an attempt by Achilles to "map himself," at a suitable level,onto an ant colony. Similarly, we may sometimes wonder to ourselves "What is it like to beChina? How different from that would it feel to be the United States?" Do suc questionsmakes any kind of sense at all? We shall postpone detailed discussion of them until afterNagel's piece on bats (selection 24). Nonetheless, let us think a bit right now about whether itmakes sense to think of "being" a country. Does a country have thoughts or beliefs? It allcomes down to whether a country has a symbol level, in the sense that Aunt Hillary does.Instead of saying that a system "has a symbol level," we might instead say, "It is arepresentational system."This concept of "representational system" is a crucial one in this book, and needs asomewhat precise definition. By "representational system" we will mean an active, selfupdatingcollection of structures organized to "mirror" the world as it evolves. A painting, nomatter how representational, would thus be excluded, since it is static. Curiously, we meanalso to exclude mirrors themselves, although the argument could be made that the set ofimages in a mirror keeps quite up to date with the world! The lack in this case is twofold.First, the mirror itself does not make any distinction between images of different objects-itmirrors the universe, but sees no categories. In fact, a mirror makes only one image it is inthe eye of the beholder that the mirror's single image breaks up into "separate" images ofmany distinct objects. A mirror cannot be said to perceive-only to reflect. Second, the imagein a mirror is not an autonomous structure with its own "life"; it depends directly on the.