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reason that the one is a translation, on another level of description, of the other.

Sometimes "cause" will have its usual meaning: physical causality. Both types of

causality-and perhaps some more-will have to be admitted in any explanation of mind,

for we will have to admit causes that propagate both upwards and downwards in the

Tangled Hierarchy of mentality, just as in the Central Dogmap.

At the crux, then, of our understanding ourselves will come an understanding of

the Tangled Hierarchy of levels inside our minds. My position is rather similar to the

viewpoint put forth by the neuroscientist Roger Sperry in his excellent article "Mind,

Brain, and Humanist Values", from which I quote a little here:

In my own hypothetical brain model, conscious awareness does get representation

as a very real causal agent and rates an important place in the causal sequence and

chain of control in brain events, in which it appears as an active, operational

force.... To put it very simply, it comes down to the issue of who pushes whom

around in the population of causal forces that occupy the cranium. It is a matter, in

other words, of straightening out the peck-order hierarchy among intracranial

control agents. There exists within the cranium a whole world of diverse causal

forces; what is more, there are forces within forces within forces, as in no other

cubic half-foot of universe that we know. ... To make a long story short, if one

keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the

very top those over-all organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large

patterns of cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic

activity.... Near the apex of this command system in the brain ... we find ideas. Man

over the chimpanzee has ideas and ideals. In the brain model proposed here, the

causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a

cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact

with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring

brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they

also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance

in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including

the emergence of the living cell.'

There is a famous breach between two languages of discourse: the subjective

language and the objective language. For instance, the "subjective" sensation of redness,

and the "objective" wavelength of red light. To many people, these seem to be forever

irreconcilable. I don't think so. No more than the two views of Escher's Drawing Hands

are irreconcilable from "in the system", where the hands draw each other, and from

outside, where Escher draws it all. The subjective feeling of redness comes from the

vortex of self-perception in the brain; the objective wavelength is how you see things

when you step back, outside of the system. Though no one of us will ever be able to step

back far enough to see the "big picture", we shouldn't forget that it exists. We should

remember that physical law is what makes it all happen-way, way down in neural nooks

and crannies which are too remote for us to reach with our high-level introspective

probes.

The Self-Symbol and Free Will

In Chapter XI I, it was suggested that what we call free will is a result of the interaction

between the self-symbol (or subsystem), and the other symbols in the brain. If we take

the idea that symbols are the high-level entities to

which meanings should be attached, then we can' make a stab at explaining the

relationship between symbols, the self-symbol, and free will.

One way to gain some perspective on the free-will question is to replace it by

what I believe is an equivalent question, but one which involves less loaded terms.

Instead of asking, "Does system X have free will?" we ask, "Does system X make

choices?" By carefully groping for what we really mean when we choose to describe a

system-mechanical or biological-as being capable of making "choices", I think we can

shed much light on free will it will be helpful to go over a few different systems which,

under various circumstances, we might feel tempted to describe as "making choices".

From these examples we can gain some perspective on what we really mean by the

phrase.

Let us take the following systems as paradigms: a marble rolling down a bumpy

hill; a pocket calculator finding successive digits in the decimal expansion of the square

root of 2; a sophisticated program which plays a mean game of chess; a robot in a T-maze

(a maze with but a single fork, on one side of which there is a reward); and a human

being confronting a complex dilemma.

First, what about that marble rolling down a hill? Does it make choices? I think

we would unanimously say that it doesn't, even though none of us could predict its path

for even a very short distance. We feel that it couldn't have gone any other way than it

did, and that it was just being shoved along by the relentless laws of nature. In our

chunked mental physics, of course, we can visualize many different "possible" pathways

for the marble, and we see it following only one of them in the real world. On some level

of our minds, therefore, we can't help feeling the marble has "chosen" a single pathway

out of those myriad mental ones; but on some other level of our minds, we have an

instinctive understanding that the mental physics is only an aid in our internal modeling

of the world, and that the mechanisms which make the real physical sequences of events

happen do not require nature to go through an analogous process of first manufacturing

variants in some hypothetical universe (the "brain of God") and then choosing between

them. So we shall not bestow the designation "choice" upon this process-although we

recognize that it is often pragmatically useful to use the word in cases like this, because

of its evocative power.

Now what about the calculator programmed to find the digits of the square root of

2? What about the chess program? Here, we might say that we are just dealing with

"fancy marbles", rolling down "fancy hills". In fact, the arguments for no choice-making

here are, if anything, stronger than in the case of a marble. For if you attempt to repeat

the marble experiment, you will undoubtedly witness a totally different pathway being

traced down the hill, whereas if you rerun the square-root-of-2 program, you will get the

same results time after time. The marble seems to "choose" a different path each time, no

matter how accurately you try to reproduce the conditions of its original descent, whereas

the program runs down precisely the same channels each time.

Now in the case of fancy chess programs, there are various possibilities.

If you play a game against certain programs, and then start a second game with the same

moves as you made the first time, these programs will just move exactly as they did

before, without any appearance of having learned anything or having any desire for