Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Prelude . . . Ant Fugue 199could then speak of distinct "organisms." But note how the whole thing is still explicable interms of physics.We could now posit a mechanical hand whose motions are controlled by the anglesof, say, two dozen high-level branches. These branches are of course intimately tied in withthe entire chime state. We could imagine the chime state determining the hand's motions in acurious way-namely telling the hand which chess piece to pick up and move on a board.Wouldn't it be a marvelous coincidence if it always picked up a sensible piece and made alegal move? And an even more marvelous coincidence if its moves were always goodmoves? Hardly. If this were to happen, it would be precisely because it was not acoincidence. It would be because the chime's internal state had representational power.Once again we'll back away from trying to describe precisely how ideas could bestored in this strange shimmering structure, reminiscent of a quaking aspen. The point hasbeen to suggest to the reader the potential delicacy, intricacy, and self-involvedness of asystem that responds to external stimuli and to features at various levels of its own internalconfiguration.It is well-nigh impossible to disentangle such a system's response to the outside worldfrom its own self-involved response, for the tiniest external perturbation will trigger a myriadtiny interconnected events, and a cascade will ensue. If you think of this as the system's"perception" of input, then clearly its own state is also "perceived" in a similar way. Selfperceptioncannot be disentangled from perception.The existence of a higher-level way of looking at such a system is not a foregoneconclusion; that is, there is no guarantee that we could decode the chime state into aconsistent set of English sentences expressing the beliefs of the system, including, forinstance, the set of rules of chess (as well as how to play a good game of chess!). However,when systems like that have evolved by means of natural selection, there will be a reason thatsome have survived and most others failed to: meaningful internal organization allowing thesystem to take advantage of its environment and to control it, at least partially.In the wind chime, the hypothetical conscious ant colony, and the brain, thatorganization is stratified. The levels in the wind chime corresponded to the different levels ofbranches dangling from other branches, with the spatial disposition of the highest branchesrepresenting the most compact and abstract summary of the global qualities of the chimestate, and the disposition of the many thousands (or millions?) of quivering individualtinklers giving a totally unsummarized, unintuitive, but concrete and local description of thechime state. In the ant colony, there were ants, teams, signals at various levels, and finally thecaste distribu-