Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Non Serviam 303What meaning do we have for the world? Hat meaning does it have for us? Thetrain of such speculation leads them ultimately, unavoidably, to the elemental questionsof ontology, to the problem of whether existence came about “in and of itself,” orwhether it was the product, instead, of a particular creative act – that is, whether theremight not be, hidden behind it, invested with a will and consciousness, purposivelyactive, master of the situation, a Creator. It is here that the whole cruelty, the immoralityof personetics manifests itself.But before Dobb takes up, in the second half of his work, the account of theseintellectual strivings – these struggles of a mentality made prey to the torment of suchquestions – he presents in a series of successive chapters a portrait of the “typicalpersonoid,” its “anatomy; physiology, and psychology.”A solitary personoid is unable to go beyond the stage of rudimentary thinking,since, solitary, it cannot exercise itself in speech, and without speech discursive thoughtcannot develop. As hundreds of experiments have shown, groups numbering from four toseven personoids are optimal, at least for the development of speech and typicalexploratory activity, and also for “culturization.” On the other hand, phenomenacorresponding to social processes on a larger scale require larger groups. At present it ispossible to “accommodate” up to one thousand personoids, roughly speaking, in acomputer universum of fair capacity; but studies of this type, belonging to a separate andindependent discipline – socio dynamics – lie outside the area of Dobb’s primaryconcerns, and for this reason his book makes only passing mention of them. As was said,a personoid does not have a body, but it does have a “soul.” This soul – to an outsideobserver who has a view into the machine world (by means of a special installation, anauxiliary module that is a type of probe, built into the computer) – appears as a “coherentcloud of processes,” as a functional aggregate with a kind of “center” that can be isolatedfairly precisely, i.e., delimited within the machine network. (This, nota bene, is not easy,and in no more than one way resembles the search by neurophysiologists for the localizedcentres of many functions in the human brain.) Crucial to an understanding of whatmakes possible the creation of the personoids is Chapter 11 of Non Serviam, which infairly simple terms explains the fundamentals of the theory of consciousness.Consciousness – all consciousness, not merely the personoid – is in its physical aspect an“informational standing wave,” a certain dynamic invariant in a stream of incessanttransformations, peculiar in that it represents a “compromise” and at the same time is a“resultant” that, as far as we can tell, was not at all planned for by natural evolution.Quite the contrary, evolution from the first placed tremendous problems and difficultiesin the way of