Free I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter Page A

traditionally study: how neurotransmitters cross synapses, how cells are wired together, how cell assemblies reverberate in synchrony, and so forth. And by “statistical mentalics”, I mean the averaged-out, collective behavior of these very small entities — in other words, the behavior of a huge swarm as a whole, as opposed to a tiny buzz inside it.
    However, as neurologist Sperry made very clear in the passage cited above, there is not, in the brain, just one single natural upward jump, as there is in a gas, all the way from the basic constituents to the whole thing; rather, there are many way-stations in the upward passage from mentalics to thinkodynamics, and this means that it is particularly hard for us to see, or even to imagine, the ground-level, neural-level explanation for why a certain professor of cognitive science once chose to reshelve a certain book on the brain, or once refrained from swatting a certain fly, or once broke out in giggles during a solemn ceremony, or once exclaimed, lamenting the departure of a cherished co-worker, “She’ll be hard shoes to fill!”
    The pressures of daily life require us, force us, to talk about events at the level on which we directly perceive them. Access at that level is what our sensory organs, our language, and our culture provide us with. From earliest childhood on, we are handed concepts such as “milk”, “finger”, “wall”, “mosquito”, “sting”, “itch”, “swat”, and so on, on a silver platter. We perceive the world in terms of such notions, not in terms of microscopic notions like “proboscis” and “hair follicle”, let alone “cytoplasm”, “ribosome”, “peptide bond”, or “carbon atom”. We can of course acquire such notions later, and some of us master them profoundly, but they can never replace the silver-platter ones we grew up with. In sum, then, we are victims of our macroscopicness, and cannot escape from the trap of using everyday words to describe the events that we witness, and perceive as real.
    This is why it is much more natural for us to say that a war was triggered for religious or economic reasons than to try to imagine a war as a vast pattern of interacting elementary particles and to think of what triggered it in similar terms — even though physicists may insist that that is the only “true” level of explanation for it, in the sense that no information would be thrown away if we were to speak at that level. But having such phenomenal accuracy is, alas (or rather, “Thank God!”), not our fate.
    We mortals are condemned not to speak at that level of no information loss. We necessarily simplify, and indeed, vastly so. But that sacrifice is also our glory. Drastic simplification is what allows us to reduce situations to their bare bones, to discover abstract essences, to put our fingers on what matters, to understand phenomena at amazingly high levels, to survive reliably in this world, and to formulate literature, art, music, and science.

CHAPTER 3
    The Causal Potency of Patterns

    The Prime Mover
    A S THE rest of this book depends on having a clear sense for the interrelationships between different levels of description of entities that think, I would like to introduce here a few concrete metaphors that have helped me a great deal in developing my intuitions on this elusive subject.
    My first example involves the familiar notion of a chain of falling dominos. However, I’ll j azz up the standard image a bit by stipulating that each domino is spring-loaded in a clever fashion (details do not concern us) so that whenever it gets knocked down by its neighbor, after a short “refractory” period it flips back up to its vertical state, all set to be knocked down once more. With such a system, we can implement a mechanical computer that works by sending signals down stretches of dominos that can bifurcate or join together; thus signals can propagate in loops, jointly trigger other signals, and so forth.