Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Prelude . . . Ant Fugue 193external world. If the lights are turned off, it goes away. A representational system should beable to keep on going even if cut off from contact with the reality it is "reflecting"-althoughyou now see that "reflection" is not quite a rich enough metaphor. The isolatedrepresentational structures should now continue to evolve in a way that reflects, if not the trueway the world will evolve, at least a probable way. Actually, a good representational systemwill sprout parallel branches for various possibilities that can be reasonably anticipated. Itsinternal models will, in the metaphorical sense defined in the Reflections on "Rediscoveringthe Mind," go into superposition s of states, each with an associated subjective estimate oflikelihood.In brief, then, a representational system is built on categories; it sifts incoming datainto those categories, when necessary refining or enlarging its network of internal categories;its representations or "symbols" interact among themselves according to their own internallogic; this logic, although it runs without ever consulting the external world, neverthelesscreates a faithful enough model of the way the world works that it manages to keep thesymbols pretty much "in phase" with the world they are supposed to be mirroring. Atelevision is thus not a representational system, as it indiscriminately throws dots onto itsscreen without regard to what kinds of things they represent, and the patterns on the screendo not have autonomy-they are just passive copies of things "out there." By contrast, acomputer program that can "look" at a scene and tell you what is in that scene comes closerto being a representational system. The most advanced artificial intelligence work oncomputer vision hasn't yet cracked that nut. A program that could look at a scene and tell younot only what kinds of things are in the scene, but also what probably caused that scene andwhat will probably ensue in it-that is what we mean by a representational system. In thissense, is a country a representational system? Does a country have a symbol level? We'llleave this one for you to ponder on.One of the crucial notions of the Ant Fugue is the "caste distribution" or "state," for itis claimed that that is a causal agent in determining the future of the organism. Yet this seemsto contradict the idea that all of a system's behavior comes from underlying laws-those ofants of neurons, in the case of colonies or brains-but ultimately, in either case those ofparticles. Is there such a thing as "downward causality" put starkly, the notion that "a thoughtcan influence the path of ar electron"?In Inside the Brain by William Calvin and George Ojemann, there i~ a provocativeseries of questions asked about a neural firing. "What start: it?" they ask. What causes thesodium channels to open up? (The function