CRAB: Definitely. Take the neurons in Achilles’ brain, for example. Each neuron receives signals from neurons attached to its input lines, and if the sum total of inputs at any moment exceeds a critical threshold, then that neuron will fire and send its own output pulse rushing off to other neurons, which may in turn fire—and on down the line it goes. The neural flash swoops relentlessly in its Achillean path, in shapes stranger then the dash of a gnat-hungry swallow; every twist, every turn foreordained by the neural structure in Achilles’ brain, until sensory input messages interfere.
ACHILLES: Normally, I think that I’m in control of what I think—but the way you put it turns it all inside out, so that it sounds as though “I” am just 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 long 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 explanation 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 structure 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 practically nothing toward the upkeep of the nest, and then —
ACHILLES: And of course there are soldiers—glorious fighters against communism!
CRAB: Hmm… I hardly think that could be right, Achilles. An ant colony is quite communistic internally, so why would its soldiers fight against communism? Or am I right, Dr. Anteater?
ANTEATER: Yes, about colonies you are right, Mr. Crab; they are indeed based on somewhat communistic principles. But about soldiers Achilles is somewhat naïve. In fact, the so-called “soldiers” are hardly adept at fighting at all. They are slow, ungainly ants with giant heads, who can snap with their strong jaws, but are hardly to be glorified. As in a true communistic state, it is rather the workers who are to be glorified. It is they who do most of the chores, such as food gathering, hunting, and nursing of the young. It is even they who do most of the fighting.
ACHILLES: Bah. That is an absurd state of affairs. Soldiers who won’t fight!
ANTEATER: Well, as I just said, they really aren’t soldiers at all. It’s the workers who are soldiers; the soldiers are just lazy fatheads.
ACHILLES: Oh, how disgraceful! Why, if I were an ant, I’d put some discipline in their ranks! I’d knock some sense into those fatheads!
TORTOISE: If you were an ant? How could a myrmidon like you be an ant? There is no way to map your brain onto an ant brain, so it seems to me to be a pretty fruitless question to worry over. More reasonable would be the proposition of mapping your brain onto an ant colony. … But let us not get sidetracked. Let Dr. Anteater continue with his most illuminating description of castes and their role in the higher levels of organization.
ANTEATER: Very well. There are all sorts of tasks which must be accomplished in a colony, and individual ants develop specializations. Usually an ant’s specialization changes as the ant ages. And of course it is also dependent on the ant’s caste. At any one moment, in any small area of a colony, there are ants of all types present. Of course, one caste may be be very sparse in some places and very dense in others.
CRAB: Is the density of a given caste, or specialization, just a random thing? Or is there a reason why ants of one type might be more heavily concentrated in certain areas, and less heavily in others?
ANTEATER: I’m glad you brought that up, since it is of crucial importance in understanding how a colony thinks. In fact, there evolves, over a long period of time, a very delicate distribution of castes inside a colony. And it is this distribution that allows the colony to have the complexity that underlies the ability to converse with me.
ACHILLES: It would seem to me that the constant motion of ants to and fro would completely prevent the possibility of a very delicate distribution. Any delicate distribution would be quickly destroyed by all the random motions of ants, just as any delicate pattern among molecules in a gas would not survive for an instant, due to the random bombardment from all sides.
ANTEATER: In an ant colony, the situation is quite the contrary. In fact, it is just exactly the constant to-ing and fro-ing of ants inside the colony which adapts the caste distribution to varying situations, and thereby preserves the delicate caste distribution. You see, the caste distribution cannot remain as one single rigid pattern; rather, it must constantly be changing so as to reflect, in some manner, the real-world situation with which the colony is dealing, and it is precisely the motion inside the colony which updates the caste distribution, so as to keep it in line with the present circumstances facing the colony.