In physics, when a shift of point of view is made, sometimes the laws may appear to be different. Think of the amusement park ride in which people line the inner walls of a large cylinder. The cylinder starts spinning and as it does so, its floor falls away, as if a giant can opener had just opened this can from below. The people are left hanging, with their backs powerfully pressed against the wall by the so-called centrifugal force. If you were on this ride and attempted to throw a tennis ball to a friend directly across the cylinder, you would see the ball flying crazily off course, perhaps even boomeranglike returning to you! Of course, this is simply because you would move around in the same amount of time as the ball sailed (in a straight line) across the cylinder. But if you were unaware that you were in a rotating frame, you might invent a name for the strange deflecting force that makes your ball veer away from its intended destination. You might think it was some bizarre variation of gravity. This would be strongly supported by the observation that this force acted identically on any two objects with the same mass, as gravity does. Amazingly enough, this simple observation—that “fictitious forces” and gravity are easily confused—is at the heart of Einstein’s great theory of general relativity. The point of this example is that a shift of frame of reference can induce a shift of perceptions and concepts—a shift in ways of perceiving causes and effects. If it is good enough for Einstein, it ought to be good enough for us!
We will not belabor the reader further with descriptions of the tricky shifts of point of view as one swings back and forth between the level of wholes and the level of their parts. We will simply introduce some catchy terminology which may titillate the reader into thinking further about these issues. We have contrasted “reductionism” and “holism.” Now you can see that “reductionism” is synonymous with “upward causality” and “holism” with “downward causality.” These are concepts having to do with how events on different size-scales in space determine each other. They have counterpart notions in the time dimension: to reductionism corresponds the idea of predicting the future from the past without regard to “goals” of organisms; to holism corresponds the idea that only inanimate objects can be so predicted, but that in the case of animate objects, purposes and goals and desires and so on are essential to explain their actions. This view, often called “goal-oriented” or “teleological,” could equally well be termed “goalism”—and its opposite could be termed “predictionism.” Thus predictionism emerges as the temporal counterpart to reductionism, with goalism being the temporal counterpart to holism. Predictionism is the doctrine that only “upstream” events—and nothing “downstream”—need be taken into account in determining the way the present flows into the future. Goalism, its opposite, sees animate objects as moving toward goals in the future—thus it sees future events in some sense projecting causal power backward in time, or retroactively. We can call this “retroactive causality”; it is the temporal counterpart to holism’s “introactive causality,” where causes are seen to flow “inward” (from wholes to their parts). Put goalism and holism together, and you have—you guessed it—soulism! Put predictionism and reductionism together, and you get—mechanism.
To summarize, we can draw a little chart:
Hard scientists // Soft scientists
Reductionism // Holism
(upward causality) // (downward causality)
+ // +
Predictionism // Goalism
(upstream causality) // (downstream causality)
= Mechanism // = Soulism
Well, now that we have indulged our fancy for wordplay, let us move on. A fresh perspective is offered us by another metaphor for brain activity: that of the “thinking wind chime.” Think of a complex wind chime structured like a mobile, with glass “tinklers” dangling like leaves off branches, branches dangling from larger branches, and so on. When wind strikes the chime, many tinklers flutter and slowly the whole structure changes on all levels. It is obvious that not just the wind, but also the chime state, determines how the little glass tinklers move. Even if only one single glass tinkler were dangling, the twistedness of its string would have as much to do with how the chime would move as the wind would.
Just as people do things “of their own volition,” so the chime seems to have a “will of its own.” What is volition? A complicated internal configuration, established through a long history, that encodes tendencies toward certain future internal configurations and away from others. This is present in the lowliest wind chime.
But is this fair? Does a wind chime have desires? Can a wind chime think? Let’s fantasize a bit, adding many features to our chime. Suppose there is a fan on a track near the chime, whose position is electronically controlled by the angle of one particular branch in the chime, and whose blades’ rotational speed is controlled by the angle of another branch. Now the chime has some control over its environment, like having big hands that are guided by groups of tiny, insignificant-seeming neurons: the chime plays a larger role in determining its own future.
Let’s go further and suppose that many of the branches control blowers, one blower per branch. Now when wind—natural or blower caused—blows, a group of tinklers will shimmer, and subtly and delicately they will transmit a soft shimmer to various other portions of the chime. That in turn propagates around, gradually twisting branches, thus creating a new chime state that determines where the blowers point and how hard they blow, and this will set up more responses in the chime. Now the external wind and the internal chime state are intertwined in a very complicated way—so complicated, in fact, that it would be very hard to disentangle them conceptually from each other.
Imagine two chimes in the same room, each affecting the other by blowing small gusts of wind in the direction of the other. Who can say that it makes sense to decompose the system into two natural parts? It might be that the best way to look at the system is in terms of top-level branches, in which case there might be five or ten natural parts in each of the two chimes—or perhaps the branches a level below that are the best units to look at, in which case we might see twenty or more per chime.... It is all a matter of convenience. All parts interact in some sense with all others, but there might be two parts that are somewhat discernible as separate in space or in coherence of organization—certain types of shimmering might stay localized in one region, for instance—and we could then speak of distinct “organisms.” But note how the whole thing is still explicable in terms of physics.
We could now posit a mechanical hand whose motions are controlled by the angles of, say, two dozen high-level branches. These branches are of course intimately tied in with the entire chime state. We could imagine the chime state determining the hand’s motions in a curious way—namely telling the hand which chess piece to pick up and move on a board. Wouldn’t it be a marvelous coincidence if it always picked up a sensible piece and made a legal move? And an even more marvelous coincidence if its moves were always good moves? Hardly. If this were to happen, it would be precisely because it was not a coincidence. It would be because the chime’s internal state had representational power.
Once again we’ll back away from trying to describe precisely how ideas could be stored in this strange shimmering structure, reminiscent of a quaking aspen. The point has been to suggest to the reader the potential delicacy, intricacy, and self-involvedness of a system that responds to external stimuli and to features at various levels of its own internal configuration.