4.G.E.B
Introduction
"Ant Fugue" serves as an introduction that is clearly linked to the subsequent chapter "Brain and Thoughts" in Douglas R. Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". In this text, I will first introduce the dialogue and the following chapter, then conclude with some reflections on Hofstadter's use of patterns. I present the dialogue as an effective entry point to the topics addressed in Chapter Eleven and explore Hofstadter's overarching concept of patterns to introduce the philosophy of consciousness, which is central in his interweaving of music, art, and mathematics in the book.
Ant Fugue
In "Ant Fugue", the subjects of the brain, its components, thoughts, symbols, and meaning are introduced. The dialogue involves four characters: Achilles, Crab, Tortoise, and Dr. Anteater. In Chapter Eleven, Hofstadter delves deeper into these subjects. The human brain, as Hofstadter refers to it in the dialogue, is likened to an ant colony. The dialogue begins with three important concepts that are central to both the dialogue and Chapter Eleven: holism, reductionism, and MU. The concept of MU represents the brain/mind/body and more, according to Hofstadter (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 311).
Holism/Reductionism/MU!
In the dialogue, we are presented with three perspectives or concepts to consider: holism, reductionism, and MU. The reductionist view holds that one cannot understand the whole or the sum of something without understanding the parts that comprise it, as Hofstadter explains. Holism, on the other hand, entails understanding that the whole is more than merely the sum of its parts. The concept of MU symbolizes the synthesis of these perspectives, encapsulating the dialogue between the brain's neuronal intricacies and the emergence of consciousness (Hofstadter, 2000, pp. 311-312).
The reductionist perspective is represented by Dr. Anteater in our dialogue and is central to conceptualizing the brain. In an ant colony, there are many parts, systems, functions, and events that must occur for it to be somewhat intelligible or meaningful to an outsider. The parts include ants, ants in teams, caste distribution, and signals, which are specialized teams responsible for the transportation of ants with different specializations. All these parts and functions create a smart and functional system, which is the colony (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 312).
The reductionist description of the ant colony manages to show aspects of both holism and MU. Dr. Anteater suggests that ant colonies can communicate, and with experience, one can see meaning in the ant system. In a holistic view, it means that an observer could, in a sense, overlook the parts and have an overall understanding of ant colonies, provided they have a description of it that has been coded and decoded. Consequently, one does not need to have a detailed understanding of the parts, but that they together create a functioning ant colony (Hofstadter, 2000, pp. 315-322).
Dr. Anteater must talk about the parts for the colony to have meaning for someone who does not know how an ant colony works. For Dr. Anteater, it is essential to consider all the parts; the whole becomes merely a sum. A holistic description would emphasize the colony as more important than its parts. The parts would not be important in themselves but important in that they are part of the whole.
When Dr. Anteater describes the parts and how they can be meaningfully interpreted together, we have a description that Achilles' MU perspective does not contradict. The MU perspective suggests that both the holistic and reductionist perspectives are important in a MU description. It is not possible to understand anything meaningful in the parts alone, nor the whole (if it is to be more than a superficial understanding) (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 315).
The descriptions of holism and reductionism allow an outsider to create meaning in parts, the whole, and the collaborative whole. The collaborative whole describes the top-down/bottom-up relationship in reductionism and holism and is an important entry point to understanding the concepts of thoughts and symbols more elaborately presented by Hofstadter in Chapter Eleven. The MU perspective is dismissed as nonsense in the dialogue, but Dr. Anteater cannot help but mention the relationships and talk about the whole; he says, "In fact, ant colonies, seen as wholes, are quite well-defined units, with their own qualities..." (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 315).
High Level/Low Level and Consciousness
Hofstadter provides us with a basic analogy of the emergence of symbols as a "high-level" description of the brain's capabilities. He does this by first describing meaning and how meaning can arise from chaos. He makes this connection to describe a kind of similarity between the emergence of "meaningful" colonies from the parts of ants and a "meaningful" brain from neural networks (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 316). Hofstadter compares low-level descriptions of the brain as signals between neurons to ants, their castes, and age. High-level descriptions would include things like symbols emerging from the colony, loosely equated with the colony's ability to create what we define as language (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 315).
The emergence of symbols does not arise from "high-level" systems alone but from a collaboration of different levels, according to Hofstadter. In this dialogue, Hofstadter actively breaks down comparisons between the colony and the brain. The symbols that an ant colony creates are not like passive symbols, such as letters and musical notes, but rather like subsystems which would be more expressive than letters as thoughts and visuals that would be found in complex systems in the brain (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 324). All the brain's levels still fit into our three initial concepts of holism, reductionism, and MU but have begun to be described more elaborately, likened to the possible symbol emergence in the brain.
Before concluding with themes of music and presenting some mathematical examples in the dialogue, Hofstadter ties the concepts and descriptions of consciousness together. "Conscious systems," for example, humans, Hofstadter argues, are those that experience themselves only at the symbolic level. This means that conscious systems cannot perceive what happens at the "low level," such as neural activity or the ant hill's activities. Rather the conscious systems “build” many symbol systems, one of them being a symbol system representing the self and the rest of the symbols we are in conversation with. Our environment is represented since we actively engage with it. In the dialogue, he therefore argues that being conscious requires self-awareness (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 328).
In the following sections, the text will focus on Chapter Eleven, where Hofstadter discusses topics such as the brain and thoughts from various descriptions and perspectives. We are asked to keep in mind terms and similes from the previous dialogue. This is the key for a deeper understanding of the following chapter and also for buiding the bridge to an emergent description of visual cognition. Like the dialogue, we will start with the brain, its parts, thoughts, and symbols. In the final section, Hofstadter explores consciousness closely linked to the brain's ability to create visual images.
The Brain
Our first subject becomes the brain's parts, neurons, titled "The Brain's 'Ants'." These "ants" are cells that, at the low level, create neural networks whose "signals," like ants, are used in their colonies, are the synaptic transmissions of neurons. Like individual ants that do not have a larger agenda outside of the colony, brain neurons also have no larger agenda when they encode information that the brain then decodes into a meaningful interpretation (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 340).
This description involves a clear transition between the primary terms in the dialogue: holism, reductionism, and MU. Hofstadter, like Dr. Anteater, describes the parts, neurons, as important but also as part of the brain from a holistic perspective and later, in the chapter, from a MU perspective. Following the neuron description, we get a description of the brain about the interacting parts that make up our MU.
The larger structures are those that make it possible for concepts such as thoughts and visual images to emerge, according to Hofstadter. These structures are built on neurons, networks, and their functions. An important point made is that in the research available, it is believed that we cannot know which groups of neurons are activated and neither if they would be fixed for specific conceptualizations. Furthermore, the brain's sub-organs are only approximated in relation to brain activity that leads to the "mental" and physical (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 341).
Our last puzzle piece for symbols is modules. A theory presented is that we have modules of neuronal systems that convey thought processes. How these modules look or function is not certain, but they would look different from brain to brain, writes Hofstadter. He has given us the connection in Ant Fugue to understand consciousness as we understood the ant colony. By jumping from the low-level neuron level to the high-level module level, we can hopefully find the answer to how these signals/transmissions take us to the symbolic level (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 349).
Symbols
Hofstadter asks the reader to make the leap from neurons, to neural modules, and finally to symbols. Here, we jump between the perspectives from Ant Fugue, which reads from reductionism to holism and finally MU. Symbols and the brain are our MU, which Hofstadter describes can either be dormant or active. The active symbols are triggered in different ways and are not fixed. This is assumed because there are different ways to trigger the same symbol. When we talk about brain states, they can look different, and different collaborations of neural networks could trigger the same symbol (Hofstadter, 2000, p. 349).
Now, as readers, we leave the neuron description for how symbols arise. Furthermore, we should bear in mind that hardware (in our case, the neuron level) gives rise to symbols. Symbols can, of course, trigger other symbols, and these symbols are a kind of description of what happens in our environment. Hofstadter argues that neurons become uninteresting when, unlike symbols, they cannot selectively trigger a "message" that exists in our physical world. Neurons are like ants; they could not, as individuals, convey meaningful information as symbols can in our interpretation of meaning (Hofstadter, 2000).
It could be likely that symbols also have a symbol system. Hofstadter compares it to brushstrokes and language, means that can be used to build up more complex ideas. A painting in its parts could be colors that build together a motif, where the colors are symbolic in their contrast or combination and in that way collaborate with the motif. The same with the construction of a sentence with its words; the words themselves trigger symbols, and together they trigger a collaborative symbol (Hofstadter, 2000).
Furthermore, he divides symbols into instances and classes. A class could be the symbol "house," and the instance would be "my house." For example, one could imagine that in a group discussion about houses, one gets the opportunity to discuss one's own house. In this context, the class symbol is the concept of a house, and our instance symbol is my house. It is when one discusses the individual's house in the group that the instance symbol arises rather than the shared class symbol "house" (Hofstadter, 2000).
Hofstadter argues that symbols likely overlap and are tangled with each other in our brains. This means that symbols exist in context with each other, just as objects in our physical world are in context with each other. A "chair" triggers more than just the chair; chairs have different materials, parts, and designs that are intimately entangled with the word "chair." Class symbols, in their tangled and overlapping way, can build up our world by us merely listening to each other's anecdotes. Symbols can then trigger other symbols that can trigger instances and other classes until one has a relatively clear picture of the speaker's words (Hofstadter, 2000).
Cognition and Consciousness
Thereafter, in Chapter Eleven, Hofstadter builds the bridge between symbol and cognition. Our ability to think, consequently, relies on our ability to think of symbols, class symbols, and instances. These symbols can be juggled with as if they were representative of the physical world, even though we may have made them up. We can in this way create imaginary worlds and still have activated class symbols that are real from our surrounding environment (Hofstadter, 2000).
Hofstadter suggests that our capacity to create visual images in the brain may be thanks to the damping of motor control. An example is that to describe an object, we can use motor functions to feel, smell, and see the object to form a description. We can also think up an object and its associated qualities without inspecting it when it is not in front of us. Furthermore, we can deduce information that is not available when we think. For example, when we imagine scenes in our heads, we deduce rather than record information about our environment that we have in an explicit knowledge box in the brain, Hofstadter describes. The activation of symbols and their subsequent interaction points to a more implicit storage of knowledge (Hofstadter, 2000).
Concluding Thoughts
In "Ant Fugue," we are presented with a conversational fugue where each character enters successively and uses the same sentence structure with different content. This is the formula for the book, to create loops and other aids to understand consciousness in our society. Furthermore, Hofstadter effectively involves art in the dialogue. Achilles describes how he sees ants moving in four different directions where the ants are black and white and intersecting each other. Hofstadter brings the reader directly into his process of thinking about how consciousness work with music, art, and science. He manipulates us to comprehend the subject of consciousness with his ability to create patterns that work on many different levels.
Finally, we have gained a view of "Ant Fugue" and how it reflects and is closely related to the content in Chapter Eleven. He uses the reductionist view to meaningfully describe neurons and other brain functions in the chapter. The reductionist view is the dominant and driving view in the dialogue. Nevertheless, and through Hofstadter's writing, we get a good idea of the other perspectives that the characters obtain. Dr. Anteater's addition of "..., and the nature of the 'sum'" leans towards a more holistic description due to the wording "the sum of" (a sum can be the whole). The picture itself that the characters are looking at in the dialogue also contains another level where MU is printed out, which none of them noticed at first glance in the dialogue. MU thus exists on different levels, where two levels are made up of the words of reductionism and holism written out in the picture, but also where MU reconciles reductionism and holism also in lettering. This is one of the shortest but most important parts that is crucial for the theories that Hofstadter writes about in Chapter Eleven. Finally, the symbol theory's description jumps between the neuron and symbol level in his descriptions in an instance of his writing where he wants to solely think on a symbol level. He returns to describe thoughts at the symbol level again just as the pictures lettering does with MU, holism, and reductionism.
Works Cited List
Hofstadter, D. R. (2000). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Penguin Group(CA).