Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Prelude . . . Ant Fugue 200tion or "colony state"-again the most incisive yet abstract view of the colony. As Achillesmarveled, it is so abstract that the ants themselves are never mentioned! In the brain, we justdo not know how to find the high-level structures that would provide a readout in English ofthe beliefs stored in the brain. Or rather, we do-we just ask the brain's owner to tell us whathe or she believes! But we have no way of physically determining where or how beliefs arecoded.*In our three systems, various semiautonomous subsystems exist, each of whichrepresents a concept, and various input stimuli can awaken certain concepts, or symbols.Note that in this view there is no "inner eye" that watches all the activity and "feels" thesystem; instead the system's state itself represents the feelings. The legendary "little person"who would play that role would have to have yet a smaller "inner eye," after all, and thatwould lead to further little people and ever-tinier "inner eyes"-in short, to infinite regress ofthe worst and silliest kind. In this kind of system, contrariwise, the self-awareness comesfrom the system's intricately intertwined responses to both external and internal stimuli. Thiskind of pattern illustrates a general thesis: "Mind is a pattern perceived by a mind." This isperhaps circular, but it is neither vicious nor paradoxical.The closest one could come to having a "little person" or an "inne eye" that perceivesthe brain's activity would be in the self-symbol-a complex subsystem that is a model of thefull system. But the self-symbol does not perceive by having its own repertoire of smallersymbols (including its own self-symbol-an obvious invitation to infinite regress). Rather, theself-symbol's joint activation with ordinary (nonreflexive) symbols constitutes the system'sperception. Perception resides at the level of the full system, not at the level of the selfsymbol.If you want to say that the self-symbol perceives something, it is only in the sensethat a male moth perceives a female moth, or in the sense that your brain perceives your heartrate-at a level of microscopic intercellular chemical messages.The last point to be made here is that the brain needs this multileveled structurebecause its mechanisms must be extraordinarily flexible in order to cope with anunpredictable, dynamic world. Rigid programs will go extinct rapidly. A strategy exclusivelyfor hunting dinosaurs will be no good when it comes to hunting woolly mammoths, and muchless good when it comes to tending domestic animals or commuting to work on the subway.An intelligent system must be able to reconfigure itself-to sit back, assess the situation, andregroup-in rather deep ways; such flexi*See selection 25, "An Epistemological Nightmare," for a story featuring a machine that can outdoa person at "brain reading."