Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Further Reading 472is Pamela McCorduck's Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into History andProspects ofArticial Intelligence (San Francisco: Freeman, 197Part III. From Hardware to SoftwareDawkins's provocative views on genes as the units of selection havreceived considerable attention from biologists and philosophers of biology. Two good and relatively accessible discussions are William Wisatt's "Reductionistic Research Strategies and Their Biases in the Untof Selection Controversy," in Thomas Nickles, ed., Scientific Discovery, vo2, Case Studies (Hingham, Mass.: Reidel, 1980, pp. 213-59), and ElliotSober's "Holism, Individualism, and the Units of Selection," in Proceed',ings of the Philosophy of Science Association (vol. 2, 1980).There have been many attempts to establish different levels of de• scription of the brainand to describe the relations between them. Som pioneering attempts by neuroscientistsare Karl Pribram's The Languages of the Brain (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall,1971), Michael Arbib'sThe Metaphorical Brain (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1972), and R. W Sperry's "AModified Concept of Consciousness" in Psychological Review, (vol. 76, (6), 1969, pp.532-536). Consciousness and Brain: A Scientific an Philosophical Inquiry (New York:Plenum, 1976), edited by G. Globus, G Maxwell, and I. Savodnick, includes severaldiscussions of the problems faced by anyone who tries to relate brain-talk to mind-talk.An earlier work, yet still full of fresh insight, is Dean Wooldridge's Mechanical Man: ThePhysical Basis of Intelligent Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).The general problem of levels of explanation in discussing mind and brain is one of thecentral themes of Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach It is also the topic of the books TheSciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2nd ed.,1981) and Hierarchy Theory, edited by Howard H. Pattee (New York: George Braziller,1973).Reduction and holism in biological systems such as ant colonies have been under debatefor many decades. Back in 1911, William Morton Wheeler wrote an influential articleentitled "The Ant-Colony as an Organism" in theJournal of Morphology (vol. 22, no. 2,1911, pp. 307-325). More recently, Edward O. Wilson has written a remarkably thoroughtreatise on social insects, called The Insect Societies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.Press, Belknap Press, 1971). We are not aware of any literature exploring the intelligenceof societies; for example, can an ant colony learn new tricks?