Ant Fugue in G minor
The essay I’m talking about in this blog post can be found in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter) as well as The Mind’s I, compiled by Hofstadter and Dan
iel Dennett. Within this little story there are four main characters: the Tortoise, Achilles, the Crab and the Anteater. Hofstadter is taking cues from Lewis Carroll as well as Zeno in his choice of allegorical animals.
The premise for this story, set up as a dialogue between characters, is that the Tortoise and Achilles have brought Mr. Crab a phonograph record, which contains a recording of Bach playing the harpsichord. This was done based on calculating the movements of molecules in the atmosphere from the present time, backwards. That element isn’t particularly important to the story, right now, but the hobby of Mr. Anteater is. He talks to anthills. Really, he’s talking to the colony of ants, as a group–not by exchanging sounds, but by finding patterns in the trails they create.
Achilles is impressed by this feat, supposing that the ants must be incredibly smart. But no, they aren’t smart–any more than the neurons in one’s brain are "smart", says the Anteater. Just as our neurons follow laws in their relative freedom of interaction, so, too, the ants follow predictable rules about where they go, when they create trails, etc.
Because of ant castes (workers, soldiers, the queen, etc), there is communication throughout the colony of "signals" that influence the movements of the individual ants. However, it makes sense to say that the "colony has purpose" in responding to stimuli, and that the rolling back through the trail of ants has a "purpose" in going somewhere. But that kind of description only goes to a certain level–not to the ants themselves, who are unaware of this interpretation.
What makes this picture odd is that Mr. Anteater adds the dimension of the colony (which has a name, Aunt Hillary) changing the patterns of ant castes in response to Mr. Anteater’s communication. But the ants are following deterministic laws and have no consciousness of any higher patterns. So does the causal arrow go from Aunt Hillary to the ant castes and their emerging patterns? Or does it go the other way?
This is the question that we are faced with in understanding our own minds. In The Mind’s I, Dennett comments on the "Ant Fugue" by citing William Calvin and George Ojemann, authors of Inside the Brain. They ask questions which seem to lead to no cause: "What causes the sodium channels to open up? [voltage pulses]…What causes the voltage to rise originally…? [nodes relying an impulse]…What causes the very first impulse to occur…? What precedes the impulse?" There seems to be no ground for us to land upon, without positing a homunculus.
Jay Garfield, who does Buddhist philosophy as well as philosophy of mind and language, argues that all of this looking to find a privileged location of genuine causation will lead us nowhere. Explanation does not need to terminate in the causal ground (say, particle physics or mental intentions) but can operate at several levels, simultaneously, without needing to be reduced. He draws this conclusion, in part, from Nagarjuna–but it is one that Western philosophers have also come to on their own.
What is interesting about Hofstadter and his book, is the reference to "Mu" and Zen philosophy. "Mu" comes from a story about a monk who asked the Zen master, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature?", upon which the Zen master replied, "Mu." The interpretation is that he "unasked" the question–that these questions do not give us the answer. Within the "Ant Fugue", the animals are trying to read a picture, which is the letters "M" and "U", in which each letter is made up of the words "Holism" and "Reductionism", and those letters made up of the word "mu." Unfortunately, the illustration is probably copyrighted–I cannot find a good example online.
Essentially, "mu" un-asks the question of whether reductionism (locating causes in the lowest level, such as particle physics) or holism (locating causes in higher levels, such as mental intentions). As Garfield puts it in his paper, a good response to the debate in cognitive science is "Fiddlesticks!"
But what does this leave philosophy to do? And isn’t it like eating your cake and having it to? There is real explanatory "work" to be done…saying "mu" doesn’t answer much. I have to end here, hoping for a little debate. I’ll come back to these dangling questions later.
Image by MC Escher.
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