I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [38]
What about a soccer ball zipping down a long, narrow roadside gutter having a U-shaped cross-section — is it seeking any goal? Such a ball, as it speeds along, will first roll up one side of the gutter and then fall back to the center, cross it and then roll up the other side, then again back down, and so forth, gradually converging from a sinusoidal pathway wavering about the gutter’s central groove to a straight pathway at the bottom of the gutter. Is there “feedback” here or not? Is this soccer ball “seeking” the gutter’s mid-line? Does it “want” to be rolling along the gutter’s valley? Well, as this example and the previous one of the ball rolling down a hill show, the presence or absence of feedback, goals, or desires is not a black-and-white matter; such things are judgment calls.
The Slippery Slope of Teleology
As we move to systems where the feedback is more sophisticated and its mechanisms are more hidden, our tendency to shift to teleological terms — first the language of goals and then the language of “wishing”, “desiring”, “trying” — becomes ever more seductive, ever harder to resist. The feedback doesn’t even need to be very sophisticated, as long as it is hidden.
In San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum, there is an enclosure where people can stand and watch a spot of red light dancing about on the walls and floor. If anyone tries to touch the little spot, it darts away at the last moment. In fact, it dances about in a way that seems to be teasing the people chasing it — sometimes stopping completely, taunting them, daring them to approach, and then flitting away just barely in time. However, despite appearances, there is no hidden person guiding it — just some simple feedback mechanisms in some circuitry monitoring the objects in the enclosure and controlling the light beam. But the red spot seems for all the world to have a personality, an impish desire to tease people, even a sense of humor! The Exploratorium’s red dot seems more alive than, say, a mosquito or a fly, both of which attempt to avoid being swatted but certainly don’t have any detectable sense of humor.
In the video called “Virtual Creatures” by Karl Sims, there are virtual objects made out of a few (virtual) tubes hinged together, and these objects can “flap” their limbs and thus locomote across a (virtual) flat plane. When they are given a rudimentary sort of perception and a simple feedback loop is set up that causes them to pursue certain kinds of resources, then the driven manner in which they pursue what looks like food and frantically struggle with “rivals” to reach this resource gives viewers an eerie sensation of witnessing primitive living creatures engaged in life-and-death battles.
On a more familiar level, there are plants — consider a sunflower or a growing vine — which, when observed at normal speed, seem as immobile as rocks and thus patently devoid of goals, but when observed in time-lapse photography, seem all of a sudden to be highly aware of their surroundings and to possess clear goals as well as strategies to reach them. The question is whether such systems, despite their lack of brains, are nonetheless imbued with goals and desires. Do they have hopes and aspirations? Do they have dreads and dreams? Beliefs and griefs?
The presence of a feedback loop, even a rather simple one, constitutes for us humans a strong pressure to shift levels of description from the goalless level of mechanics (in which forces make things move) to the goal-oriented level of cybernetics (in which, to put it very bluntly, desires make things move). The latter is, as I have stressed, nothing but a more efficient rewording of the former; nonetheless, with systems that possess increasingly subtle