Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Prelude . . . Ant Fugue 198chime structured like a mobile, with glass "tinklers" dangling like leaves off branches,branches dangling from larger branches, and so on. When wind strikes the chime, manytinklers flutter and slowly the whole structure changes on all levels. It is obvious that not justthe wind, but also the chime state, determines how the little glass tinklers move. Even if onlyone single glass tinkler were dangling, the twistedness of its string would have as much to dowith how the chime would move as the wind would.Just as people do things "of their own volition," so the chime seems to have a "will ofits own." What is volition? A complicated internal configuration, established through a longhistory, that encodes tendencies toward certain future internal configurations and away fromothers. This is present in the lowliest wind chime.But is this fair? Does a wind chime have desires? Can a wind chime think? Let'sfantasize a bit, adding many features to our chime. Suppose there is a fan on a track near thechime, whose position is electronically controlled by the angle of one particular branch in thechime, and whose blades' rotational speed is controlled by the angle of another branch. Nowthe chime has some control over its environment, like having big hands that are guided bygroups of tiny, insignificant-seeming neurons: the chime plays a larger role in determining itsown future.Let's go further and suppose that many of the branches control blowers, one blowerper branch. Now when wind-natural or blower caused-blows, a group of tinklers willshimmer, and subtly and delicately they will transmit a soft shimmer to various other portionsof the chime. That in turn propagates around, gradually twisting branches, thus creating anew chime state that determines where the blowers point and how hard they blow, and thiswill set up more responses in the chime. Now the external wind and the internal chime stateare intertwined in a very complicated way-so complicated, in fact, that it would be very hardto disentangle them conceptually from each other.Imagine two chimes in the same room, each affecting the other by blowing smallgusts of wind in the direction of the other. Who can say that it makes sense to decompose thesystem into two natural parts? It might be that the best way to look at the system is in termsof top-level branches, in which case there might be five or ten natural parts in each of the twochimes-or perhaps the branches a level below that are the best units to look at, in which casewe might see twenty or more per chime.... It is all a matter of convenience. All parts interactin some sense with all others, but there might be two parts that are somewhat discernible asseparate in space or in coherence of organization-certain types of shimmering might staylocalized in one region, for instance-and we