Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Prelude . . . Ant Fugue 197terminology which may titillate the reader into thinking further about these issues. We havecontrasted "reductionism" and "holism." Now you can see that "reductionism" is synonymouswith "upward causality" and "holism" with "downward causality." These are concepts havingto do with how events on different size-scales in space determine each other. They havecounterpart notions in the time dimension: to reductionism corresponds the idea of predictingthe future from the past without regard to "goals" of organisms; to holism corresponds theidea that only inanimate objects can be so predicted, but that in the case of animate objects,purposes and goals and desires and so on are essential to explain their actions. This view,often called "goal-oriented" or "teleological," could equally well be termed "goalism"-and itsopposite could be termed "predictionism." Thus predictionism emerges as the temporalcounterpart to reductionism, with goalism being the temporal counterpart to holism.Predictionism is the doctrine that only "upstream" events -and nothing "downstream"-need betaken into account in determining the way the present flows into the future. Goalism, itsopposite, sees animate objects as moving toward goals in the future-thus it sees future eventsin some sense projecting causal power backward in time, or retroactively. We can call this"retroactive causality"; it is the temporal counterpart to holism's "introactive causality,"where causes are seen to flow "inward" (from wholes to their parts). Put goalism and holismtogether, and you have-you guessed it-soulism! Put predictionism and reductionism together,and you get-mechanism.To summarize, we can draw a little chart:Hard scientistsSoft scientistsReductionismHolism(upward causality)(downward causality)+ +PredictionismGoalism(upstream causality)(downstream causality)= Mechanism = SoulismWell, now that we have indulged our fancy for wordplay, let us move on. A freshperspective is offered us by another metaphor for brain activity: that of the "thinking windchime." Think of a complex wind