I slightly hesitated about putting quotation marks around the words “perceptual process” in the previous sentence, but I made an arbitrary choice, figuring that I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. That is, if I left them off, I would be implicitly suggesting that what is going on in such a robot vehicle’s processing of its visual input is truly like our own perception, whereas if I put them on, I would be implicitly suggesting that there is some kind of unbridgeable gulf between what “mere machines” can do and what living creatures do. Either choice is too black-and-white a position. Quotation marks, regrettably, don’t come in shades of gray; if they did, I would have used some intermediate shade to suggest a more nuanced position.
The self-navigation of today’s robot vehicles, though very impressive, is still a far cry from the level of mammalian perception, and yet I think it is fair to say that such a vehicle’s “perception” (sorry for the unshaded quotation marks!) of its environment is just as sophisticated as a mosquito’s “perception” (there — I hope to have somewhat evened the score), and perhaps considerably more so. (A beautiful treatment of this concept of robot vehicles and what different levels of “perception” will buy them is given by Valentino Braitenberg in his book Vehicles.)
Without going into more detail, let me simply say that it makes perfect sense to discuss living animals and self-guiding robots in the same part of this book, for today’s technological achievements are bringing us ever closer to understanding what goes on in living systems that survive in complex environments. Such successes give the lie to the tired dogma endlessly repeated by John Searle that computers are forever doomed to mere “simulation” of the processes of life. If an automaton can drive itself a distance of two hundred miles across a tremendously forbidding desert terrain, how can this feat be called merely a “simulation”? It is certainly as genuine an act of survival in a hostile environment as that of a mosquito flying about a room and avoiding being swatted.
Pondering Dogthink
Let us return to our climb up the purely biological ladder of perceptual sophistication, rising from viruses to bacteria to mosquitoes to frogs to dogs to people (I’ve skipped a few rungs in there, I know). As we move higher and higher, the repertoire of triggerable symbols of course becomes richer and richer — indeed, what else could “climbing up the ladder” mean? Simply judging from their behavior, no one could doubt that pet dogs develop a respectable repertoire of categories, including such examples as “my paw”, “my tail”, “my food”, “my water”, “my dish”, “indoors”, “outdoors”, “dog door”, “human door”, “open”, “closed”, “hot”, “cold”, “nighttime”, “daytime”, “sidewalk”, “road”, “bush”, “grass”, “leash”, “take a walk”, “the park”, “car”, “car door”, “my big owner”, “my little owner”, “the cat”, “the friendly neighbor dog”, “the mean neighbor dog”, “UPS truck”, “the vet”, “ball”, “eat”, “lick”, “drink”, “play”, “sit”, “sofa”, “climb onto”, “bad behavior”, “punishment”, and on and on. Guide dogs often learn a hundred or more words and respond to highly variegated instances of these concepts in many different contexts, thus demonstrating something of the richness of their internal category systems (i.e., their repertoires of triggerable symbols).
I used a set of English words and phrases in order to suggest the nature of a canine repertoire of categories, but of course I am not claiming that human words are involved when a dog reacts to a neighbor dog or to the UPS truck. But one word bears special mention, and that is the word “my”, as in “my tail” or “my dish”. I suspect most readers would agree that a pet dog realizes that a particular paw belongs to itself, as opposed to being merely a random physical object in the environment or a part of some other animal. Likewise, when a dog chases its tail, even though it is surely unaware of the loopy irony of the act, it must know that that tail is part of its own body. I am thus suggesting that a dog has some kind of rudimentary self-model, some kind of sense of itself. In addition to its symbols for “car”, “ball”, and “leash”, and its symbols for other animals and human beings, it has some kind of internal cerebral structure that represents itself (i.e., the dog itself, not the symbol itself!).
If you doubt dogs have this, then what about chimpanzees? What about two-year-old humans? In any case, the emergence of this kind of reflexive symbolic structure, at whatever level of sentience it first enters the picture, constitutes the central germ, the initial spark, of “I”-ness, the tiny core to which more complex senses of “I”-ness will then accrete over a lifetime, like the snowflake that grows around a tiny initial speck of dust.
Given that most grown dogs have a symbol for dog, does a dog know, in some sense or other, that it, too, belongs to the category dog? When it looks at a mirror and sees its master standing next to “some dog”, does it realize that that dog is itself? These are interesting questions, but I will not attempt to answer them. I suspect that this kind of realization lies near the fringes of canine mental ability, but for my purposes in this essay, it doesn’t really matter on which side dogs fall. After all, this book is not about dogs. The key point here is that there is some level of complexity at which a creature starts applying some of its categories to itself, starts building mental structures that represent itself, starts placing itself in some kind of “intellectual perspective” in relationship to the rest of the world. In this respect, I think dogs are hugely more advanced than mosquitoes, and I suspect you agree.
On the other hand, I suspect that you also agree with me that a dog’s soul is considerably “smaller” than a human one — otherwise, why wouldn’t we both be out vehemently demonstrating at our respective animal shelters against the daily putting to “sleep” of stray hounds and helpless puppies? Would you condone the execution of homeless people and abandoned babies? What makes you draw a distinction between dogs and humans? Could it be the relative sizes of their souls? How many hunekers would dogs have to have, on the average, for you to decide to organize a protest demonstration at an animal shelter?
Creatures at the sophistication level of dogs, thanks to the inevitable flipping-around of their perceptual apparatus and their modest but nontrivial repertoire of categories, cannot help developing an approximate sense of themselves as physical entities in a larger world. (Robot vehicles in desert-crossing contests don’t spend their precious time looking at themselves — it would be as useless as spinning their wheels — so their sense of self is considerably less sophisticated than that of a dog.) Although a dog will never know a thing about its kidneys or its cerebral cortex, it will develop some notion of its paws, mouth, and tail, and perhaps of its tongue or its teeth. It may have seen itself in a mirror and perhaps realized that “that dog over there by my master” is in fact itself. Or it may have seen itself in a home video with its master, recognized the recording of its master’s voice, and realized that the barking on the video was its own.
And yet all of this, though in many ways impressive, is still extremely limited in comparison to the sense of self and “I”-ness that continually grows over the course of a normal human being’s lifetime. Why is this the case? What’s missing in Fido, Rover, Spot, Blackie, and Old Dog Tray?
The Radically Different Conceptual Repertoire of Human Beings
A spectacular evolutionary gulf opened up at some point as human beings were gradually separating from other primates: their category systems became arbitrarily extensible. Into our mental lives there entered a dramatic quality of open-endedness, an essentially unlimited extensibility, as compared with a very palpable limitedness in other species.
Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right. In other words, concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees. This reminds me — and I do not think it is a pure coincidence —
of the huge difference, in video feedback, between an infinite corridor and a truncated one.
For instance, the phenomenon of having offspring gave rise to concepts such as “mother”, “father”, and “child”. These concepts gave rise to the nested concept of “parent” — nested because forming it depends upon having three prior concepts: “mother”, “father”, and the abstract idea of “either/or”. (Do dogs have the concept “either/or”? Do mosquitoes?) Once the concept of “parent” existed, that opened the door to the concepts of “grandmother” (“mother of a parent”) and “grandchild” (“child of a child”), and then of “great-grandmother” and “great-grandchild”. All of these concepts came to us courtesy of nesting. With the addition of “sister” and “brother”, then further notions having greater levels of nesting, such as “uncle”, “aunt”, and “cousin”, could come into being. And then a yet more nested notion such as “family” could arise. (“Family” is more nested because it takes for granted and builds on all these prior concepts.)
In the collective human ideosphere, the buildup of concepts through such acts of composition started to snowball, and it turns out to know no limits. Our species would soon find itself leapfrogging upwards to concepts such as “love affair”, “love triangle”, “fidelity”, “temptation”, “revenge”, “despair”, “insanity”, “nervous breakdown”, “hallucination”, “illusion”, “reality”, “fantasy”, “abstraction”, “dream”, and of course, at the grand pinnacle of it all, “soap opera” (in which are also nested the concepts of “commercial break”, “ring around the collar”, and “Brand X”).
Consider the mundane-seeming concept of “grocery store checkout stand”, which I would be willing to bet is a member in good standing of your personal conceptual repertoire. It already sounds like a nested entity, being compounded from four words; thus it tells us straightforwardly that it symbolizes a stand for checking out in a store that deals in groceries. But looking at its visible lexical structure barely scratches the surface. In truth, this concept involves dozens and dozens of other concepts, among which are the following: “grocery cart”, “line”, “customers”, “to wait”, “candy rack”, “candy bar”, “tabloid newspaper”, “movie stars”, “trashy headlines”, “sordid scandals”, “weekly TV schedule”, “soap opera”, “teenager”, “apron”, “nametag”, “cashier”, “mindless greeting”, “cash register”, “keyboard”, “prices”, “numbers”, “addition”, “scanner”, “bar code”, “beep”, “laser”, “moving belt”, “frozen food”, “tin can”, “vegetable bag”, “weight”, “scale”, “discount coupon”, “rubber separator bar”, “to slide”, “bagger”, “plastic bag”, “paper bag”, “plastic money”, “paper money”, “to load”, “to pay”, “credit card”, “debit card”, “to swipe”, “receipt”, “ballpoint pen”, “to sign”, and on and on. The list starts to seem endless, and yet we are merely talking about the internal richness of one extremely ordinary human concept.
Not all of these component concepts need be activated when we think about a grocery store checkout stand, to be sure — there is a central nucleus of concepts all of which are reliably activated, while many of these more peripheral components may not be activated — but all of the foregoing, and considerably more, is what constitutes the full concept in our minds. Moreover, this concept, like every other one in our minds, is perfectly capable of being incorporated inside other concepts, such as “grocery store checkout stand romance” or “toy grocery store checkout stand”. You can invent your own variations on the theme.
Episodic Memory
When we sit around a table and shoot the breeze with friends, we are inevitably reminded of episodes that happened to us some time back, often many years ago. The time our dog got lost in the neighborhood. The time our neighbor’s kid got lost in the airport. The time we missed a plane by a hair. The time we made it onto the train but our friend missed it by a hair. The time it was sweltering hot in the train and we had to stand up in the corridor all the way for four hours. The time we got onto the wrong train and couldn’t get off for an hour and a half. The time when nobody could speak a word of English except “Ma-ree-leen Mon-roe!”, spoken with lurid grinning gestures tracing out an hourglass figure in the air. The time when we got utterly lost driving in rural Slovenia at midnight and were nearly out of gas and yet somehow managed to find our way to the Italian border using a handful of words of pidgin Slovenian. And on and on.
Episodes are concepts of a sort, but they take place over time and each one is presumably one-of-a-kind, a bit like a proper noun but lacking a name, and linked to a particular moment in time. Although each one is “unique”, episodes also fall into their own categories, as the previous paragraph, with its winking “You know what I mean!” tone, suggests. (Missing a plane by a hair is not unique, and even if it has happened to you only once in your life, you most likely know of several members of this category, and can easily imagine an unlimited number of others.)
Episodic memory is our private storehouse of episodes that have happened to us and to our friends and to characters in novels we’ve read and movies we’ve seen and newspaper stories and TV news clips, and so on, and it forms a major component of the long-term memory that makes us so human. Obviously, memories of episodes can be triggered by external events that we witness or by other episodes that have been triggered, and equally obviously, nearly all memories of specific episodes are dormant almost all the time (otherwise we would go stark-raving mad).
Do dogs or cats have episodic memories? Do they remember specific events that happened years or months ago, or just yesterday, or even ten minutes ago? When I take our dog Ollie running, does he recall how he strained at the leash the day before, trying to get to say “hi” to that cute Dalmatian across the street (who also was tugging at her leash)? Does he remember how we took a different route from the usual one three days ago? When I take Ollie to the kennel to board over Thanksgiving vacation, he seems to remember the kennel as a place, but does he remember anything specific that happened there the last time (or any time) he was there? If a dog is frightened of a particular place, does it recall a specific trauma that took place there, or is there just a generalized sense of badness associated with that place?
I do not need answers to these questions here, fascinating though they are to me. I am not writing a scholarly treatise on animal awareness. All I want is that readers think about these questions and then agree with me that some of them merit a “yes” answer, some merit a “no”, and for some we simply can’t say one way or the other. My overall point, though, is that we humans, unlike other animals, have all these kinds of memories; indeed, we have them all in spades. We recall in great detail certain episodes from vacations we took fifteen or twenty years ago. We know exactly why we are frightened of certain places and people. We can replay in detail the time we ran into so-and-so totally out of the blue in Venice or Paris or London. The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a human being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what “I”-ness is all about.
CHAPTER 7
The Epi Phenomenon
As Real as it Gets
THANKS to the funneling-down processes of perception, which lead eventually — that is, in a matter of milliseconds — to the activation of certain discrete symbols in its brain, an animal (and let’s not forget robot vehicles!) can relate intimately and reliably to its physical environment. A mature human animal not only does a fine job of not slipping on banana peels and not banging into thorn-bristling rosebushes, it also reacts in a flash to strong odors, strange accents, cute babies, loud crashes, titillating headlines, terrific skiers, garish clothes, and on and on. It even occasionally hits curve balls coming at it at 80 miles an hour. Because an anima
l’s internal mirroring of the world must be highly reliable (the symbol elephant should not get triggered by the whine of a mosquito, nor should the symbol mosquito get triggered if an elephant ambles into view), its mirroring of the world via its private cache of symbols becomes an unquestioned pillar of stability. The things and patterns it perceives are what define its reality — but not all perceived things and patterns are equally real to it.
Of course, in nonverbal animals, a question such as “Which things that I perceive are the most real of all to me?” is never raised, explicitly or implicitly. But in human lives, questions about what is and what is not real inevitably bubble up sooner or later, sometimes getting uttered consciously and carefully, other times remaining unexpressed and inchoate, just quietly simmering in the background. As children and teen-agers, we see directly, or we see on television, or we read about, or we are told about many things that supposedly exist, things that vie intensely with each other for our attention and for acceptance by our reality evaluators — for instance, God, Godzilla, Godiva, Godot, Gödel, gods, goddesses, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, gremlins, golems, golliwogs, griffins, gryphons, gluons, and grinches. It takes a child a few years to sort out the reality of some of these; indeed, it takes many people a full lifetime to do so (and occasionally a bit longer).
I Am a Strange Loop Page 13
