Metamagical Themas, page 105
Certainly it is hard to keep shutting one's eyes to the fact that all over the world, people are thinking about "the unthinkable". Some people are talking about how unthinkable it is, but others are talking about how it might be thinkable, after all. There are those who are telling you how to build a shelter, how to stockpile food, how to keep a gun to ward off neighbors, friends, and strangers when they. try to burst into your safe little haven. There are those who are talking about evacuating whole cities into rural areas-as if we'd have the time to do such an incredible thing, or as if people would stomach the idea. These people-people involved in civil defensehave a vested interest in reassuring us all that nuclear war is indeed conceivable, survivable-not all that bad, in fact! What an incredible kind of job to have.
But worst of all, there are those who seem blind to the idea that nuclear war would truly spell the end of the world as we know it.. There are millions of ordinary citizens who are somehow relieved when they see a map of their city with the various circles drawn around the downtown square, because they notice that where they live is outside the "90 percent killed" circle, even outside the "50 percent killed" circle. So no need to worry. They'll survive., And that's as far as they choose to think about it! Some vague apprehension, maybe, about fallout, or difficulty of getting gas for the car, but that's about all.
Now I shouldn't really be accusing some people of thinking this way. The strange thing is that we all tend to think this way-or at least parts of us do. (At least I can speak for myself, and I think I am a very typical person.) For we are dealing with something that not only is very vague and unknowable, but also something that is unimaginably catastrophic, something the likes of which has never happened on this planet. So we are not equipped to imagine it (but see Figure 33-2 for some help). And so we turn off. And this turning-off happens to some extent in each and every one of us. Certainly it has been the dominant mode in me for many years. One develops and encourages a sense of security in the ridiculousness of nuclear war.
But the stockpiles are increasing every day. The dangers are increasing every day. The warmongering' talk is increasing every day. The number of flashpoints around the world is increasing every day. The mistrust and suspicion and polarization of peoples is increasing every day. The only thing we have on our side is the hope that apathy is not increasing. The hope that a country as large as our own can itself undergo a "phase transition", an awakening, a realization of the insanity of the course on which we are embarked.
* * *
Phase transitions take place in simple physical systems, schools of fish, individual brains, and in countries as well, when there are sufficiently strong and numerous interactions between the components of the, system, and when those interactions add up in such a way as to make for large-scale correlations, or, put another way, long-distance effects despite the short-range nature of the direct interaction. When such long-distance effects occur, then a new kind of entity springs up, an entity on a higher level of organization than its constituents, and that entity obeys certain laws of its own.
Performers are highly aware of this collective aspect of crowds, for instance. A singer will speak of the interaction between herself and the crowd, of how she senses the mood of the crowd as a whole. Yet how can this be? Isn't a crowd composed of individuals who are totally unknown to each other, individuals; with nothing in common? Yes; however, they do have one thing in common: they are all there, physically, listening- to the same performer, and so they are influencing each other whenever they laugh at her jokes or applaud her, or encourage her or seem impatient in any way. Such collective modes tend to lock in very quickly, to create self-reinforcing loops of interaction between performer and audience.
FIGURE 33-2. A realistic view of the world armaments situation. The chart shows the world's current firepower in terms of the firepower of World War II. The dot in the center square represents all the firepower of World War H (including the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki): three megatons. The other dots represent the world's present nuclear weaponry. This comes to 18, 000 megatons, which equals 6, 000 World War H's. The U. S' (and allies) and the S. U., (and allies) share this firepower approximately equally.
The top lefthand circle enclosing nine megatons represents the weapons in just one Pas submarine. This is " l to the firepower of three World War II's and is enough to destroy over 200 of the Soviet Union's largest cities. We have 31 suck submarines and ten similar- Polaris submarines, The bottom lefthand circle enclosing 24 megatons represents one new Trident submarine with the power of eight World War H's: enough to destroy every major city in the Northern hemisphere. The. Soviets have similar levels of destructive power.
Just two squares on this chart (300 megatons) represent enough firepower to destroy all the large and medium-size cities in the entire world. [Designed by Jim Geier and Sharyl Green in 1981. )
Such self-reinforcing "loops' ate of the essence `in phase transitions collective modes, for they are what tend to keep the whole thing going. And thus it is with the collective mode of my neurons, the one that has somehow gotten triggered into activity after many years of dormancy. This new inner voice is one that I am not yet entirely comfortable living with. But it is one that haunts me and will not leave me alone. It has seized some power inside me and it will not let go. And the "government" that it has to some extent usurped is not entirely displeased with the state of affairs.
Let me now try to return control to the more dispassionate and objective "top-level" self who began this talk.
* * *
Thank you. It has been interesting to me to observe the flipping back and forth that has taken place as the previous subself tried to express himself. One thing that it clearly shows is that there are no clear boundary lines to be drawn between "that subself", "this subself" and any other subselves of Doug Hofstadter the person. All of them are fictions, because the only real thing is the sum total, the integrated person. And that integrated person is clearly not the same person he was a few months ago, when he was blithely ignoring the notion of nuclear horror, somehow unwilling to face the possibility squarely.
This phase transition has not been an entirely pleasant thing to undergo; no more than any coup d estat would be. Not that it was so revolutionary. It, all arose peacefully, nonviolently, from within. There were no provocateurs from without. Or perhaps, I should say, there was one-a 92-year-old lady who was my neighbor last year, and whom I befriended. I would visit her on occasion, and we would have wonderful conversations that rambled from the music of Chopin to the pangs of sad romances to the secrets of the mind and-once in a while-to politics.
One day as I was leaving after one of these discussions, Hildegarde said to me, in a very gentle way, "One thing I'd like to ask you someday is how it is that with your very alert mind, you don't seem to feel the need to do something-or to try to do something-about nuclear war." It was a very gentle nudge, really only a passing remark indicating her puzzlement about me. But it did set me to wondering how it was that I could systematically ignore the biggest thing in all our lives, day after day after day.
Partially, the reason that I gave to myself was that it was just too big. There was no use in worrying about it. But that rang phony to me. It didn't sound like me! So actually, I had no answer, and that realization began to eat at me. It began to feel like either pure "ostrichism", or pure egotism. Either way, I didn't like it. But a sense of shame or guilt is never the way to bring about a phase transition. It's got to come from somewhere far deeper than that. And fortunately, there were seething, churning forces down deep inside me slowly aligned, slo ly started to bring about that collective'mode that crystallized in the inner voice that you heard.
This "waking up" of an individual has its parallel in the collective waking up of a nation. It will happen when enough citizens band together, seeing some common interest, sensing some common goal. There is a sort of S,'critical point" when that number reaches a threshold and suddenly, there is a turnaround at a national level. But just how or when that will happen is very tricky to say.
* * *
In a recent book entitled Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus, Martin Gardner quoted a beautiful passage, written by psychologist William James roughly a century ago, about the act of waking up and rising in the morning. This passage captures for me something very deep about the way the soul of a person arises from a myriad smaller actions that are completely unknowable and yet that are somehow coordinated. I would like to quote that passage to you:
We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital. principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, "I must get up, this is ignominious," etc.; but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day's life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, "Hollo! I must lie here no longer! "-an idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period' of struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea of rising in the condition of wish and not of will. The moment these inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects.
I find this to be a remarkably perceptive passage, so accurate in its understanding of the way people really work. In the "Careenium dialogue, l expressed some similar ideas of my own, with which perhaps it would be appropriate to conclude my talk tonight.
Achilles says to the Tortoise, "In, emotionally wrenching cases, you can hardly decide what you will feel. Something just happens inside you. Subtle forces shift deep inside you, hidden, subterranean. It's quite scary, in a way, because in real crises like that; instead of being able to decide how you'll a you find out what sort of stuff you're made of. It's more passive than active -or more accurately put, the action is on levels of yourself that are far lower -far more microscopic-than you have direct control over."
The Tortoise replies, "Correct. You and your neurons are not on speaking terms, any more than a country could be on speaking terms with its citizens. There is, in both cases, a kind of collective action of a myriad tiny elements on low levels that tips the balance-exactly as in a country that `decides' to go to war or not. It will flip or not, depending on the polarization of its citizens. And they seem to align in larger and larger groups, aided by communication channels and rumors and so on. All of a sudden, a country that seemed undecided will just `swing' in a way that surprises everyone."
Achilles continues, "Or, to shift imagery again, it's like an avalanche caused by the collective outcome of the way that billions upon billions of snow crystals are poised. -One tiny event can get amplified into stupendous proportions-a chain reaction. But the crystals have to be poised in the right way, otherwise nothing will happen."
And Mr. Tortoise takes over: "In cases of judgment, whether it be of one musical composer over another, one potential title or subtitle for a book over another, or whatever, the top level pretty much has to wait for decisions to percolate up from the bottom level. The masses down below are where ; the decision really gets made, in a time of brooding and rumination. Then the top level may struggle to articulate the seething activity down below, but those verbalized reasons it comes up with arc always a posteriori. Words alone are never rich enough to explain the subtlety of a difficult choice. Reasons may sound plausible but they are never the essence of a decision. The verbalized reason is just the tip of an iceberg. Or, to change images, conflicts of ideas are like, wars, in which every reason has its army. When reasons collide, the real battleground is not at the verbal level (although some people would love to believe so); it's really a battle between opposing armies of neural firings, bringing in their heavy artillery of connotations, imagery, analogies, memories, residual atavistic fears, and ancient biological realities."
Finally, Achilles exclaims, "My goodness, it sounds terrifying! You make the battlefield of the mind sound like a • vast mined battlefield! Or a treacherous ice field on a steep mountain face. I never realized that a mechanistic explanation of thinking could sound so organic and living. It's sort of awful and yet it's sort of awe-inspiring as well."
* * *
Achilles' remarks hit the nail on the head, for me. Life, when you contemplate its basis in biology, is in many ways terrifying; yet there is a kind of majesty to the depth and complexity of it all. The same holds for humanity as a whole. In many ways, we are a shocking bunch, doing the most terrible things to each other and to other living-beings-,'yet there is also an element of the sacred in humanity, something sacred in spite of the profane in each one of us.
The pile of contradictions that each one of us is still often adds up to something beautiful and cherishable. To preserve that sacred and beautiful facet from the menace created by the profane and awful facet is worth every effort that we can muster, drawing on the power of the many subselves and inner voices that resonate within us and make us what we are.
Epilogue
After writing such a long book, I have a long list of people to whom I owe genuine thanks for many different reasons. I find it very hard to draw the line between people who have contributed directly to this book, and people whose contributions, though real, are indirect. Yet I must attempt to do so, for the sphere of indebtedness, extends out hazily to encompass_ practically everyone I know. In what follows, I shall do my best.
To begin with, I should like to thank Dennis Flanagan and Gerard Piel for offering me the opportunity to write for their distinguished magazine. Each month, I worked with Dennis on the microscopic level of the columns, and I , thank him for his good judgment. Though we had our share of disagreements, we developed a warm friendship that I value.
Martin Gardner suggested that I might be his successor. To 'be recommended by someone of Martin's honesty, wit, and insight is a very high compliment. Thank you, Martin, for that and for all the wonderful things you have written and continue to write.
This book was written in many places. The first few columns were written when I was a john Simon Guggenheim Fellow visiting Stanford University's Computer Science Department, and I would like to thank the Guggenheim Foundation for its support. The majority of the columns were written in Bloomington, Indiana, where for seven years I have been on the faculty of the Computer Science Department of Indiana University. Some new material was written while I visited the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego in early 1984, and the rest at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I spent most of my sabbatical year.
I would particularly like to thank two of my hosts. Donald Norman made me feel most welcome at UCSD's Institute for Cognitive Science. I enjoyed not only all the facilities there, but also a couple of runs along the beautiful Del Mar ocean front with Don. At MIT, I was truly lucky to have the interest and support of Marvin Minsky, who went out of his way to make my stay especially comfortable. He even supported two people working .with me, something I will never forget.
To Indiana University, however, I owe the most. IU offered me a job in 1977 when I had little to show by way of achievements in cognitive science. Since then, my department has been an extremely supportive and friendly environment. I would like to thank several close colleagues, whose friendship I cherish: Dan Friedman, John O'Donnell, Frank Prosser, Cindy Brown, Mitch Wand, Dave Wise, Paul Purdom, Ed Robertson, Stan Kwasny, Bob Filman, Will Clinger, George Epstein, and the three JB's: Jim Burns, John Buck, and John Barnden. I have exchanged idea$ with all of them, and together, they have markedly influenced this book. The Computer Science staff has also been a joy to work with over the years. I would like to single out Kathy Thompson, whose spunk and wacky humor have brightened many a dismal day.
In Bloomington, I have made friends too numerous to mention. As happens in any university town, many of them have left, but they have all made Bloomington a special and wonderful place to live.
The tremendous interchange of ideas I've had with Don Byrd over these past seven years is reflected on all scales of this book, and the generous companionship he has offered is reflected on all scales of its author's life.
Two friends whose intellectual influence on me has been profound are Gray Clossman and Marsha Meredith. But even if their intellectual influence had been nil, they have been friends in need, friends in deed. For that I have to thank them deeply.
Ann Trail, with her sparkling sense of humor, her optimism and generosity, and especially her sense of mortality, has deeply and permanently enriched my life. This book reflects her style in so many ways.
Other Bloomington friends have madee such a difference as well. John and Joanie Woodcock have long been close friends, and have always been warm and lively conversation partners. With Scott and Ruth Sanders I have shared political hopes and disappointments, and many exuberant discussions. The Leake family-Roy and Alice, David and Patsy-have been true friends, full of interest and empathy. Ruth Sonneborn and her late husband Tracy were among my very first Bloomington friends, and I will never forget evenings spent at their house engaged in delightfully passionate philosophical arguments. I have relished many consonances and dissonances over musical matters with Al and Helga Winold. Over stimulating lunches with Mike Dunn and others, I gained a new kind of respect for philosophers. It has been my privilege to know University Chancellor Herman B Wells, who, if it could be said of anyone, is the soul of Indiana University.
