phenomena of nature: they have their own high-level laws which depend
on, yet are "liftable" out of, the lower levels. If, on the other hand, there is
absolutely no way to realize symbol-triggering patterns without having all
the hardware of neurons (or simulated neurons), this will imply that intelli-
gence is a brain-bound phenomenon, and much more difficult to unravel
than one which owes its existence to a hierarchy oflaws on several different
levels.
Here we come back to the mysterious collective behavior of ant col-
onies, which can build huge and intricate nests, despite the fact that the
roughly 100,000 neurons of an ant brain almost certainly do not carry any
information about nest structure. How, then, does the nest get created?
Where does the information reside? In particular, ponder where the in-
formation describing an arch such as is shown in Figure 69 can be found.
Somehow, it must be spread about in the colony, in the caste distribution,
the age distribution-and probably largely in the physical properties of the
ant-body itself. That is, the interaction between ants is determined just as
much by their six-Ieggedness and their size and so on, as by the information
stored in their brain. Could there be an Artificial Ant Colony?Can One Symbol Be Isolated?Is it possible that one single symbol could be awakened in isolation from all
others? Probably not. Just as objects in the world always exist in a context of. other objects, so symbols are always connected to a constellation of other
symbols. This does not necessarily mean that symbols can never be disen-
tangled from each other. To make a rather simple analogy, males and
females always arise in a species together: their roles are completely in-
tertwined, and yet this does not mean that a male cannot be distinguished
from a female. Each is reflected in the other, as the beads in Indra's net
reflect each other. The recursive intertwining of the functions F( n) and
M(n) in Chapter V does not prevent each function from having its own
characteristics. The intertwining of F and M could be mirrored in a pair of
RTN's which call each other. From this we can jump to a whole network of
A TN's intertwined with each other-a heterarch y of interacting recursive
procedures. Here, the meshing is so inherent that no one A TN could be
activated in isolation; yet its activation may be completely distinctive, not
confusable with that of any other of the ATN's. It is not such a bad image,
the brain as an ATN-colony!
Likewise, symbols, with all their multiple links to each other, are
meshed together and yet ought to be able to be teased apart. This might
involve identifying a neural network, a network plus a mode of
excitation-or possibly something of a completely different kind. In any
case, if symbols are part of reality, presumably there exists a natural way to
chart them out in a real brain. However, if some symbols were finally
identified in a brain, this would not mean that anyone of them could be
awakened in isolation.
Brains and Thoughts 359