Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Prelude . . . Ant Fugue 196that there is some as-yet undiscovered "mental magnetism" through which concepts could"reach down" and, through some sort of "semantic potential," alter the paths of particles,making them deviate from what present-day physics would predict. We are talking aboutsomething else. It is more a question of where explanatory power comes from-perhaps aquestion of the proper ways of using words, a question of how to reconcile everyday usage ofterms like "cause" with the scientific usage of those terms. Thus, is it reasonable to explainthe trajectories of particles by making references to higher-level notions such as "beliefs,""desires," and so forth? The reader may detect that we see much utility in adopting this wayof speaking. Just as evolutionary biologists feel free to use "teleological shorthand" tocondense their concepts down to an intuitively reasonable size, so we feel that people whostudy the mechanisms of thought must necessarily become conversant with ways oftranslating back and forth between purely reductionistic language and a sort of "holistic"language in which wholes do indeed exert a visible effect on their parts, do indeed possess"downward causality."In physics, when a shift of point of view is made, sometimes the laws may appear tobe different. Think of the amusement park ride in which people line the inner walls of a largecylinder. The cylinder starts spinning and as it does so, its floor falls away, as if a giant canopener had just opened this can from below. The people are left hanging, with their backspowerfully pressed against the wall by the so-called centrifugal force. If you were on this rideand attempted to throw a tennis ball to a friend directly across the cylinder, you would see theball flying crazily off course, perhaps even boomeranglike returning to you! Of course, this issimply because you would move around in the same amount of time as the ball sailed (in astraight line) across the cylinder. But if you were unaware that you were in a rotating frame,you might invent a name for the strange deflecting force that makes your ball veer away fromits intended destination. You might think it was some bizarre variation of gravity. This wouldbe strongly supported by the observation that this force acted identically on any two objectswith the same mass, as gravity does. Amazingly enough, this simple observation-that"fictitious forces" and gravity are easily confused-is at the heart of Einstein's great theory ofgeneral relativity. The point of this example is that a shift of frame of reference can induce ashift of perceptions and concepts-a shift in ways of perceiving causes and effects. If it is goodenough for Einstein, it ought to be good enough for us!We will not belabor the reader further with descriptions of the tricky shifts of point ofview as one swings back and forth between the level of wholes and the level of their parts.We will simply introduce some catchy