Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Figure Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- 1 The Origins of Life
- 2 The Reductionist Nightmare
- 3 Ant Country
- 4 Winning Ways
- 5 Universals and Parochials
- 6 Neural Nests
- 7 Features Great and Small
- 8 What is it Like to be a Human?
- 9 We Wanted to Have a Chapter on Free Will, but We Decided not to, so Here It Is
- 10 Extelligence
- 11 Simplex, Complex, Multiplex
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Further Reading
- Index
3 - Ant Country
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 August 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Figure Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- 1 The Origins of Life
- 2 The Reductionist Nightmare
- 3 Ant Country
- 4 Winning Ways
- 5 Universals and Parochials
- 6 Neural Nests
- 7 Features Great and Small
- 8 What is it Like to be a Human?
- 9 We Wanted to Have a Chapter on Free Will, but We Decided not to, so Here It Is
- 10 Extelligence
- 11 Simplex, Complex, Multiplex
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
There is a parasitic flatworm that spends part of its life inside an ant, while its reproductive stage is inside a cow. The technique that it has evolved to affect the transfer from one animal to the other shows just how subtle the effects of ‘blind’ evolution can be. The parasite infects the ant, and presses on a particular part of its brain. This interferes with the normal behaviour of the brain, which causes the ant to climb a grass stem, grasp it with its jaws, and hang there, permanently attached. So when a cow comes along and eats the grass, the parasite enters the cow.
You will have noticed that in the game tree of figure 14 there is a gap between top-down and bottom-up. How big is it?
It contains virtually the whole of the game tree.
There is a similar gap between what is accessible to top-down and bottom-up reductionist science. In this chapter we give this gap a name: Ant Country. The origins of the name lie in a simple mathematical system, Langton's ant, which we shortly introduce. We shall employ Langton's ant as a metaphor to open up the nature of simplicity, complexity, and the relationship between them. Langton's ant itself is an instance of ‘simplexity’, the tendency of a single, simple system of rules to generate highly complex behaviour, but it also leads to a more subtle concept, which in Collapse we called ‘complicity’.
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- Figments of RealityThe Evolution of the Curious Mind, pp. 63 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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