what comes out of all this neural structure, and natural law. It makes
what I consider my SELF sound at best like a by-product of an organism
governed by natural law , and at worst, an artificial notion produced by
my distorted perspective. In other words, you make me feel like I don't
know who-or what-I am, if anything.
Tortoise: You'll come to understand much better as we go along. But Dr.
Anteater-what do you make of this similarity?
Anteater: I knew there was something parallel going on in the two very
different systems. Now I understand it much better. It seems that
group phenomena which have coherence-trail-building, for
example-will take place only when a certain threshold number of ants
get involved. If an effort is initiated, perhaps at random, by a few ants
in some locale, one of two things can happen: either it will fizzle out
after a brief sputtering start-
Achilles: When there aren't enough ants to keep the thing rolling?
Anteater: Exactly. The other thing that can happen is that a critical mass of
ants is present, and the thing will snowball, bringing more and more
ants into the picture. In the latter case, a whole "team" is brought into
being which works on a single project. That project might be trail-
making, or food-gathering, or it might involve nest-keeping. Despite
the extreme simplicity of this scheme on a small scale, it can give rise to
very complex consequences on a larger scale.
Achilles: I can grasp the general idea of order emerging from chaos, as
you sketch it, but that still is a lpng way from the ability to converse.
After all, order also emerges from chaos when molecules of a gas
bounce against each other randomly-yet all that results there is an
amorphous mass with but three parameters to characterize it: volume,
pressure, and temperature. Now that's a far cry from the ability to
understand the world, or to talk about it!
Anteater: That highlights a very interesting difference between the expla-
nation of the behavior of an ant colony and the explanation of the
behavior of gas inside a container. One can explain the behavior of the
gas simply by calculating the statistical properties of the motions of its
molecules. There is no need to discuss any higher elements of struc-
ture than molecules, except the full gas itself. On the other hand, in an
ant colony, you can't even begin to understand the activities of the
colony unless you go through several layers of structure.
Achilles: I see what you mean. In a gas, one jump takes you from the
lowest level-molecules-to the highest level-the full gas. There are
no intermediate levels of organization. Now how do intermediate
levels of organized activity arise in an ant colony?
Anteater: It has to do with the existence of several different varieties of
ants inside any colony.
Achilles: Oh, yes. I think I have heard about that. They are called "castes",
aren't they?
Anteater: That's correct. Aside from the queen, there are males, who do
... Ant Fugue 317