Metamagical Themas, page 80
TORTOISE: Exactly. An observer on this time scale might start to develop a sense for the slow drifting patterns of the pucks, even without having any clear notion of what's causing the pucks to move about.
ACHILLES: It's a natural human tendency. Why not?
TORTOISE: The observer could anthropomorphize: "Oh, those two little ones don't like to be close together, and those two long thin ones are trying to be parallel"-and so on. So she develops a teleology, or a way of describing the heavy pucks' motions all on their own. She's quite unaware that they are being bombarded constantly by teeny objects, as in Brownian motion. (Let's pretend that the marbles are more like BB's -really small.) She doesn't know that something smaller is making the pucks swim around in those patterns.
ACHILLES: So you can turn a knob on your movie projector and flip back and forth between the fast and slow views? Or even smoothly go between them? That's neat! At first, at the slowest setting, the immobile pucks seem to determine the paths of the many little bouncing marbles. As you speed up the film, the marbles become harder and harder to track, and pretty soon they become just a big blur. Meanwhile, you begin to notice that the pucks actually aren't immobile, after all. They're being shoved about by the marbles. So-who's shoving whom around really ? Well, it's mutual, I now see.
TORTOISE: Good. Now let me add some more richness to this whole metaphor. Let's say that marbles are constantly being shot in from all sides of the table, and also leaving on all sides. You can envision something like a pool table, with a lot of little marble-launching stations mounted on the walls, and a lot of pockets that act as exits for stray I
marbles that land in them. The inflow and outflow are equal, so there's no net gain or loss of marbles. And the bombardment is pretty uniform, but not exactly. The marbles are launched according to conditions outside the table. For example, if there's a red light near a marble-launching station, that station slows down its firing rate; if a green light is near it, it speeds it up. So you have a set of transducers from external light to internal marble-shooting. Now if the puck observer watches both the lights and the pucks, she'll be able to draw some causal connections between light patterns outside and the puck-patterns inside. Using mentalistic language will become quite natural. For instance, it would sound quite reasonable to say, "It saw the green light-it's moving away from it-I guess it doesn't like green." And so on.
ACHILLES: Now you've got me thinking. I too want to add some strange features. I'll propose a physical linkage between one particular puck and an external "arm" that can move toward or away from the lights. So, when that puck moves a certain way on the table, the arm may push a light away or pull it closer. Of course this is primitive-there are no fingers or anything, but at least there's now a two-way link between the pucks and the lights. Gosh! I'm almost completely forgetting about those marbles careening around down there! I'm just relying on the marble-shooters to keep on doing their job without much maintenance or attention needed ... All I see now is the seemingly animate interplay-a sort of danceamong the pucks, the lights, and the arms ...
TORTOISE: We're really jumping from one metaphor to another, aren't we? And each time, we escalate in complexity ... Oh, well, that's fine with me. No matter how complex the scene gets, you can always slow down the projector, unblur the marbles and no longer see the pucks moving at all.
ACHILLES: Of course. But there's now something that bothers me. In the brain, there aren't these large- and small-sized units-everything's uniform, right? I mean, it's all just a dense packing of neurons. So where do the two scales come from? If we go back to the maze and partitions, there too we had two levels of objects (maze people and maze walls), each kind pushing the other around. But in the brain, this isn't so-or is it? What else is there besides neural activity?
TORTOISE: Let's add, then, a level of detail to our picture that we didn't have before. Let's say there are no pucks at all. There are only marbles and a number of larger stiff yet malleable mobile metal strips, which I'll also describe as "stiff yet malleable membranes" (and you'll soon see why). They can be bent into U's or S's or circles ...
ACHILLES: So these things are swimming in the soup of marbles, now, but there are no more pucks, eh?
TORTOISE: Right. Can you guess what might happen now? ACHILLES: I can imagine that these strips
TORTOISE: Would you mind calling them "stiff yet malleable membranes", just to please me?
ACHILLES: Are you going to pull some acronymic trick off in a moment? Let's see-"SYMM" doesn't spell anything, does it? Is that really what you want me to call them, Mr. T?
TORTOISE: In fact you anticipated me, Achilles. Go ahead and do call them "SYMM" 's.
ACHILLES: All right. So these SYMM's will now be knocked around along with the marbles that are bashing into one another. Will the SYMM's occasionally get wrapped around some group of marbles and form a circular membrane, separating out a group of marbles from the rest?
TORTOISE: Just call the circular structure so formed a "SYMM-ball", if you please.
ACHILLES: Oh ... I should have seen it coming. All right. Now I see that in this way, structures like pucks are emerging again, only this time as composite structures made-up out of many, many marbles. So now, my old question of who pushes whom around in the cranium-er, should I say `.`fit-tee careenium "?-becomes one of"symmballs versus marbles. Do the :marbles push the symmballs around, or vice versa? And I can twiddle the speed control on the projector and watch the film fast or slow.
TORTOISE: I should mention that once a symmball is formed, it might have quite a bit of stability, because the marbles inside it get fairly densely packed together, and jostle each other around only a little bit when the symmball gets hit by a fast marble from the outside. The impact gets spread around and shared among the marbles inside, and the symmball won't tend to break up-at least not when you watch the film at either of the two speeds we've already mentioned. Perhaps the fission of a symmball would occur on a longer time scale than the motions of symmballs. And the same for the formation of a symmball.
ACHILLES: Would it be fair to liken a symmball's emergence to the solidifying of water into a cube of ice?
TORTOISE: An excellent analogy. Symmballs are constantly forming and unforming, like blocks of ice melting down into chaotically bouncing water molecules-and then new ones can form, only to melt again. This kind of "phase transition" view of the activity is very apt. And it introduces yet a third time scale for the projector, one where it is running much faster and even the motions of the symmballs would start to blur. Symmballs have a dynamics, a way of forming, interacting, and splitting open and disintegrating, all their own. Symmballs can be seen as reflecting, internally to the careenium, the patterns of lights outside of it. They can store "images" of light patterns long after the light patterns are gone-thus the configurations of symmballs can be interpreted as memory, knowledge, and ideas.
ACHILLES: It seems to me that although you got rid of the pucks, you added another structure-the SYMM's. So how is this new system any improvement, as a model of a brain; over the old one? Don't you still have two levels of basic physical constituents and activity?
TORTOISE: The SYMM's are there only to provide a way for marbles to join up and form clusters. There are other conceivable ways I could have done this. I could have said, "Imagine that each marble is magnetic, or Velcro-coated, so that they all attract each other and stick together (unless jostled too hard)." That suggestion would have had a similar effect-namely, of making much larger units grow out of smaller onesand so you would have only one kind of basic physical constituent. Would that be more satisfying to you, Achilles?
ACHILLES: Yes, but then you'd have lost your pun on "symbols", which would be too bad.
TORTOISE: Not at all! I'd cleverly rename the marbles themselves this time, as "small yellow magnetic marbles''--" SYMM's"-and a magnetically bound cluster of them would form a "SYMM-ball". No loss.
ACHILLES: That's a relief! I would hate to see a good metaphor go down the drain for lack of a pun to illustrate it.
TORTOISE: Hofstadter would never let that happen! You can take it from me. Anyway, you can conceive of the larger units however you want, as long as you have it clear in your mind that starting with just one level, you wind up with two levels and two time scales-three time scales, in fact, when you take into account the slow formation, fission, fusion, and fizzling of the symmballs.
ACHILLES: Now can we go back and talk about whether I control my molecules, or my molecules control me? That's where this all started, after all.
TORTOISE: Certainly! Why don't you try to answer the question yourself?
ACHILLES: The problem is that in all those pulsations inside a careenium, I just don't see a "me". I see a lot of activity-I see a lot of internalized representations of things "out there"-I mean of light patterns, in this case. And with fancier transducers, we could have a careenium in which symmball patterns reflected such things as sounds, touches, smells, temperatures, and so on.
TORTOISE: Let your imagination run wild, Achilles!
ACHILLES: All right. If I stretch my imagination, I can even see a gigantic three-dimensional careenium, hundreds of feet on a side, filled with billions upon billions of marbles floating in zero gravity, shooting back and forth, and all over forming short-lived and long-lived symmballs, and with those symmballs in turn governing the marbles' paths. I can see all that, and yet I don't see free will or "I". I guess I can't see how I myself could be a system like this inside my cranium. I feel alive! I have thoughts, feelings, desires, sensations!
TORTOISE: Hold on, hold on! One at a time. These are all related, but let's try to talk about just one-say, thoughts. Let me propose that the word "thought" is a shorthand for the activity of the symmballs that you see when you run the movie fast: the way they interact and trigger patterns of motions among themselves (mediated, of course, by the constant background swarming of marbles, too fast to make out).
ACHILLES: But I feel myself thinking. There's no one inside a careenium to feel those "thoughts". It's all just a bunch of silly yellow magnetic marbles bashing into each other! It's all impersonal and unalive. How can you call that "thought"?
TORTOISE: Well, isn't it equally true of the molecules running around in your brain? Where's the soul of Achilles that "shoves them around"?
ACHILLES: Oh, Mr. T, that's not a good enough answer. I've just heard it said too many times that we're made out of atoms, so there's no room for souls or other things-but I know I'm there, it's an undeniable fact, so I need more insight than a mere reminder that my body obeys the laws of physics. Where does this feeling of "I" come from, a feeling that I have and you have but stones don't have?
TORTOISE: You're calling my bluff, eh? All right. Let's see what I can do to turn you around. Let's add one more feature to the careenium-an artificial mouth and throat, just as we added an arm. Let various parameters of them be driven by various symmballs. Now suppose we turn on a green light on the right-hand side of the careenium. New marble activity near that side begins immediately, and there follows a complex regrouping of symmballs. As it all settles down into a new steady configuration, the mouth-throat combination makes an audible sound: "There's a green light out there." Maybe it even says, "I saw a green light out there."
ACHILLES: You're trying to play on my weaknesses. You're trying to get me to identify with a careenium by making it more human-seeming, by making it simulate talking. But to me, this is merely "artificially signaling" (to borrow one of my favorite phrases from Professor Jefferson's Lister Oration). Do you expect me also to believe that somewhere out there, there is a conscious person reciting the time of day twenty-four hours a day, simply because I can dial a certain number and hear a human voice say, over the telephone, "At the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be five forty-two"? A voice uttering sentence-like sounds doesn't necessarily signify the presence of a conscious being behind it.
TORTOISE: Granted. But this careenium voice isn't merely uttering a mechanically repetitious sequence of sentences. It is giving a dynamic description of what is perceived in the vicinity.
ACHILLES: I have a question about that. Is the thing being perceived located outside the careenium, or inside it? Why does the mouth say, "I saw a green light out there " rather than say something such as, "Inside me, a new symmball just formed and exchanged places with an old one"? Isn't that a more accurate description of what it perceived?
TORTOISE: In a way, yes, that is what it perceived, but in another way, no, it did not perceive its own activity. Think about what perception really involves. When you perceive something "out there", you cannot help but mirror that event inside you somehow. Without that internal mirroring event, there would be no perception. The trick is to know what kind of external event triggered it, and to describe what you felt out loud in public language that refers to something external. You subtract one layer of transduction. You omit, in your description of what happened, one step along the way. You omit mention of the step that converted the green light into internal symmball responses. You are not even aware of that step, unless you are something of a philosopher or psychologist.
ACHILLES: Why would I or anyone else omit a real level? What's the origin of this socially conventional lie? I don't omit levels in my speech!
TORTOISE: Actually, you do. It's a universal phenomenon. If you live near a railroad track and hear a certain kind of loud noise coming from that direction-rumbling, bells dinging, and so on-do you say, "I Near a train", or do you say, "I hear the sound of a train"?
ACHILLES: I guess that ordinarily, I would tend to say, "I hear the train."
TORTOISE: Do you see a train, or do you see light hitting your eyes? When you touch a chair, do you feel the chair, or do you feel your feeling of the chair?
ACHILLES: I opt for the simpler alternative. I never would think those extra philosophical thoughts that go along with it. What point would it serve to say, "I hear the sound of the train"?
TORTOISE: Exactly my point. The most convenient language, the least obfuscatory and pedantic, omits the heavy "extra" reference to the medium carrying the signals, omits mention of the transducers, and so on. It simply gets straight to the external source. This seems, somehow, the most honest way to look at things-and the least confusing. You hear and see a train, not an image of a train, not the light reflected off a train, not retinal cells firing-and most definitely not your perception of a train! We are constructed in such a way as to be unaware of our brain's internal activity underlying perception, and therefore we "map it outward".
ACHILLES: Yes, I see that pretty well. I think I see why a careenium with a voice might talk about a green light rather than talk about its symmballs. But wait a minute. How would it know anything about green lights? It might prefer to refer to things in the outside world-but nonetheless, all it knows about is its own internal state!
TORTOISE: True, but its way of verbalizing its internal state employs words that you and I think refer to objects and facts outside the careenium. In fact, it too thinks so. But you could very well argue that it is just making sounds that mirror its internal state in some very complex way. It could be deluding itself. There might be nothing out there to refer to!
ACHILLES: True, but that's not exactly my question. What I want to know is, how come it uses the right words to describe what's out there? Where did it learn to say "green light"? The same question goes for people. How come we all say the same sounds for the same things?
TORTOISE: Oh, that's not so hard. I had thought you were asking whether reality exists or not. I quickly tire of such pointless quibbling over solipsism. But let me answer the question you did ask. When you were a tot, you saw things-say, rattles-and heard certain sounds-namely, various pronunciations of the word "rattle"-at about the same time. Those sights and sounds were transduced from your retinas and eardrums into internal symbol states inside your cranium. Now, as a member of the human race, you were constructed in such a way as to enjoy mimicry, so you made funny noises something like "wattle", which were then automatically picked up by your eardrums, and fed back into the interior of your cranium. You heard your own voice, to your great delight and thrill! You were then able to compare the sounds you'd just made with your memory of the sounds you'd heard. By playing this exciting new game, you were learning the English words for objects. Of course you started with the nouns for visible objects, but quickly you built on that most concrete level and over the next few years you developed a large vocabulary including such things as "ball", "pick up", "next to", "splash", "window", "seven", "remember", "sort of", "zebra", "maze", "stretch", "of course", "by accident", "tongue-twister", "blunder", "confetti", "equilibrium", "analogy", "vis-a-vis ", "chortle", "Picasso", "double negation", "few and far between", "neutrino", "Weltanschauung ", "n-dimensional vector space", "tRNA-amino-acyl synthetase", "solipsism", "careenium"
ACHILLES: Wait a minute! What about "banana split"?
TORTOISE: Now how did I overlook that? A shameful oversight. But I hope you get the point.
ACHILLES: I think I see what you mean. Gradually, I internalized a huge set of external, public, aural conventions-namely the English words attached to particular states of my own brain, states that were correlated with things "out there".
TORTOISE: Not just things-actions and styles and relationships and so on.
ACHILLES: To be sure. But instead of conceiving that the words described my brain state, it was easier to conceive of them as describing things out there directly. In this way, by omitting a level in my interpretation of my own brain's state, I cast internal images outward.
TORTOISE: A careenium would do likewise-casting its internal symmball patterns outward, attributing them to some properties of the external world. AI1d if a large number of careenia happened to be located near some specific stimulus, they could all communicate back and forth by means of a set of publicly recognizable noises that are externalizations of their internal states! So it's actually very useful to subtract out the references to the transduction, perception, and representation levels.
