Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Is God a Taoist? 342Are “inner people” – homunculi, or subsystems – who are fighting for control.Inner conflict is one of the most familiar and yet least understood parts of humannature. A famous slogan for a brand of potato chips used to go, “Betcha can’t eat justone!” - a pithy way of reminding us of our internal splits. You start trying to solve acaptivating puzzle (the notorious “Magic Cube,” for instance) and it just takes over.You cannot put it down. You start to play a piece of music or read a good book, andyou cannot stop even when you know you have many other pressing duties to takecare of.Who is in control here? Is there some overall being who can dictate what willhappen? Or is there just anarchy, with neurons firing helter-skelter, and come whatmay? The truth must lie somewhere in between. Certainly in a brain the activity isprecisely the firing of neurons, just as in a country, the activity is precisely the sumtotal of the actions of its inhabitants. But the structure of government -- itself a set ofactivities of people – imposes a powerful kind of top-down control on theorganization of the whole. When government becomes excessively authoritarian andwhen enough of the people become truly dissatisfied, then there is the possibility thatthe overall structure may b attacked and collapse – internal revolution. But most ofthe time opposing internal forces reach various sorts of compromises, sometimes byfinding the happy medium between two alternatives, sometimes by taking turns atcontrol, and so on. The ways in which such compromises can be reached arethemselves strong characterizers of the type of government. The same goes forpeople. The style of resolution of inner conflicts is one of the strongest features ofpersonality.It is a common myth that each person is a unity, a kind of unitary organizationwith a will of its own. Quite the contrary, a person is an amalgamation of manysubpersons, all with wills of their own. The “subpeople” are considerably lesscomplex than the overall person, and consequently they have much less of a problemwith internal discipline. If they themselves are split, probably their component partsare so simple that they are of a single mind – and if not, you can continue down theline. This hierarchical organization of personality is something that does not muchplease our sense of dignity, but there is much evidence for it.In the dialogue, Smullyan comes up with a wonderful definition of the Devil, theunfortunate length of time it takes for sentient beings as a whole to come to beenlightened. This idea of the necessary time it takes for a complex state to come abouthas been explored mathematically in a provocative way by Charles Bennet andGregory Chaitin. They theorize that it may be possible to prove, by argumentssimilar to those