ACHILLES: But—isn’t it true that, before one can suffer from speech impairment, one must have the faculty of speech?
ANTEATER: Right.
ACHILLES: Since ant colonies don’t have that faculty, I am a little confused.
CRAB: It’s too bad, Achilles, that you weren’t here last week, when Dr. Anteater and Aunt Hillary were my house guests. I should have thought of having you over then.
ACHILLES: Is Aunt Hillary your aunt, Mr. Crab?
CRAB: Oh, no, she’s not really anybody’s aunt.
ANTEATER: But the poor dear insists that everybody should call her that, even strangers. It’s just one of her many endearing quirks.
CRAB: Yes, Aunt Hillary is quite eccentric, but such a merry old soul. It’s a shame I didn’t have you over to meet her last week.
ANTEATER: She’s certainly one of the best-educated ant colonies I have ever had the good fortune to know. The two of us have spent many a long evening in conversation on the widest range of topics.
ACHILLES: I thought anteaters were devourers of ants, not patrons of ant-intellectualism!
ANTEATER: Well, of course the two are not mutually inconsistent. I am on the best of terms with ant colonies. It’s just ants that I eat, not colonies—and that is good for both parties: me, and the colony.
ACHILLES: How is it possible that —
TORTOISE: How is it possible that —
ACHILLES: —having its ants eaten can do an ant colony any good?
CRAB: How is it possible that —
TORTOISE: —having a forest fire can do a forest any good?
ANTEATER: How is it possible that —
CRAB: —having its branches pruned can do a tree any good?
ANTEATER: —having a haircut can do Achilles any good?
TORTOISE: Probably the rest of you were too engrossed in the discussion to notice the lovely stretto which just occurred in this Bach fugue.
ACHILLES: What is a stretto?
TORTOISE: Oh, I’m sorry; I thought you knew the term. It is where one theme repeatedly enters in one voice after another, with very little delay between entries.
ACHILLES: If I listen to enough fugues, soon I’ll know all of these things and will be able to pick them out myself, without their having to be pointed out.
TORTOISE: Pardon me, my friends. I am sorry to have interrupted. Dr. Anteater was trying to explain how eating ants is perfectly consistent with being a friend of an ant colony.
ACHILLES: Well, I can vaguely see how it might be possible for a limited and regulated amount of ant consumption to improve the overall health of a colony—but what is far more perplexing is all this talk about having conversations with ant colonies. That’s impossible. An ant colony is simply a bunch of individual ants running around at random looking for food and making a nest.
ANTEATER: You could put it that way if you want to insist on seeing the trees but missing the forest, Achilles. In fact, ant colonies, seen as wholes, are quite well-defined units, with their own qualities, at times including the mastery of language.
ACHILLES: I find it hard to imagine myself shouting something out loud in the middle of the forest, and hearing an ant colony answer back.
ANTEATER: Silly fellow! That’s not the way it happens. Ant colonies don’t converse out loud, but in writing. You know how ants form trails leading them hither and thither?
ACHILLES: Oh, yes—usually straight through the kitchen sink and into my peach jam.
ANTEATER: Actually, some trails contain information in coded form. If you know the system, you can read what they’re saying just like a book.
ACHILLES: Remarkable. And can you communicate back to them?
ANTEATER: Without any trouble at all. That’s how Aunt Hillary and I have conversations for hours. I take a stick and draw trails in the moist ground, and watch the ants follow my trails. Presently, a new trail starts getting formed somewhere. I greatly enjoy watching trails develop. As they are, forming, I anticipate how they will continue (and more often I am wrong than right). When the trail is completed, I know what Aunt Hillary is thinking, and I in turn make my reply.
ACHILLES: There must be some amazingly smart ants in that colony, I’ll say that.
ANTEATER: I think you are still having some difficulty realizing the difference in levels here. Just as you would never confuse an individual tree with a forest, so here you must not take an ant for the colony. You see, all the ants in Aunt Hillary are as dumb as can be. They couldn’t converse to save their little thoraxes!
ACHILLES: Well then, where does the ability to converse come from? It must reside somewhere inside the colony! I don’t understand how the ants can all be unintelligent, if Aunt Hillary can entertain you for hours with witty banter.
TORTOISE: It seems to me that the situation is not unlike the composition of a human brain out of neurons. Certainly no one would insist that individual brain cells have to be intelligent beings on their own, in order to explain the fact that a person can have an intelligent conversation.
ACHILLES: Oh, no, clearly not. With brain cells, I see your point completely. Only… ants are a horse of another color. I mean, ants just roam about at will, completely randomly, chancing now and then upon a morsel of food.... They are free to do what they want to do, and with that freedom, I don’t see at all how their behavior, seen as a whole, can amount to anything coherent—especially something so coherent as the brain behavior necessary for conversing.
CRAB: It seems to me that the ants are free only within certain constraints. For example, they are free to wander, to brush against each other, to pick up small items, to work on trails, and so on. But they never step out of that small world, that ant-system, which they are in. It would never occur to them, for they don’t have the mentality to imagine anything of the kind. Thus the ants are very reliable components, in the sense that you can depend on them to perform certain kinds of tasks in certain ways.
ACHILLES: But even so, within those limits they are still free, and they just act at random, running about incoherently without any regard for the thought mechanisms of a higher-level being which Dr. Anteater asserts they are merely components of.
ANTEATER: Ah, but you fail to recognize one thing, Achilles—the regularity of statistics.
ACHILLES: How is that?
ANTEATER: For example, even though ants as individuals wander about in what seems a random way, there are nevertheless overall trends, involving large numbers of ants, which can emerge from that chaos.
ACHILLES: Oh, I know what you mean. In fact, ant trails are a perfect example of such a phenomenon. There, you have really quite unpredictable motion on the part of any single ant—and yet, the trail itself seems to remain well defined and stable. Certainly that must mean that the individual ants are not just running about totally at random.
ANTEATER: Exactly, Achilles. There is some degree of communication among the ants, just enough to keep them from wandering off completely at random. By this minimal communication they can remind each other that they are not alone but are cooperating with teammates. It takes a large number of ants, all reinforcing each other this way, to sustain any activity—such as trail building—for any length of time. Now my very hazy understanding of the operation of brains leads me to believe that something similar pertains to the firing of neurons. Isn’t it true, Mr. Crab, that it takes a group of neurons firing in order to make another neuron fire?