This notion of joint activations opens up a Pandora's box of questions.
For instance, how much do we hear "dough" and "nut" when we say
"doughnut"? Does a German who thinks of gloves ("Handschuhe") hear
"hand-shoes" or not? How about Chinese people, whose word "dong-xi"
("East-West") means "thing"? It is a matter of some political concern, too,
since some people claim that words like "chairman" are heavily charged
with undertones of the male gender. The degree to which the parts reso-
nate inside the whole probably varies from person to person and according
to circumstances.
The real problem with this notion of "fusion" of symbols is that it is
very hard to imagine general algorithms which will create meaningful new
symbols from colliding symbols. It is like two strands of DNA which come
together. How do you take parts from each and recombine them into a
meaningful and viable new strand of DNA which codes for an individual of
the same species? Or a new kind of species? The chance is infinitesimal that
a random combination of pieces of DNA will code for anything that will
survive-something like the chance that a random combination of words
from two books will make another book. The chance that recombinant
DNA will make sense on any level but the lowest is tiny, precisely because
there are so many levels of meaning in DNA. And the same goes for
"recombinant symbols".Epigenesis of the Crab Canon
I think of my Dialogue Crab Canon as a prototype example where two ideas
collided in my mind, connected in a new way, and suddenly a new kind of
verbal structure came alive in my mind. Of course I can still think about
musical crab canons and verbal dialogues separately-they can still be
activated independently of each other; but the fused symbol for crab-
canonical dialogues has its own characteristic modes of activation, too. To
illustrate this notion of fusion or "symbolic recombination" in some detail,
then, I would like to use the development of my Crab Canon as a case study,
because, of course, it is very familiar to me, and also because it is interest-
ing, yet typical of how far a single idea can be pushed. I will recount it in
stages named after those of meiosis, which is the name for cell division in
which "crossing-over", or genetic recombination, takes place-the source of
diversity in evolution.
PROPHASE: I began with a rather simple idea-that a piece of music,
say a canon, could be imitated verbally. This came from the observation
that, through a shared abstract form, a piece of text and a piece of music
may be connected. The next step involved trying to realize some of the
potential of this vague hunch; here, I hit upon the idea that "voices" in
canons can be mapped onto "characters" in dialogues-still a rather obvi-
ous idea.
Then I focused down onto specific kinds of canons, and remembered
that there was a crab canon in the Musical Offering. At that time, I had justArtificial Intelligence: Prospects 665