From: Timothy Bates (tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au)
Date: Wed May 26 1999 - 20:28:38 MDT
Darin Sunley noted an apposite dialog by
> Hofstadter ... on the very subject in
> Godel, Escher, Bach. An ant colony that, when communicated with as a whole,
>was a rabid free-market libertarian, even though it was composed of utterly
>selfless collectivists (ants).
Trouble is that the analogy breaks down as the ants are not selfless
collectivists: they do not have a representation of the collective. They are
merely robots programmed to bring food home, kill things in the nest that
are not ants, etc.
If they each had a mental representation of the hive, then the analogy would
be valid, otherwise, it is like saying my telephone is a collectivist
because it connects me just whenever us humans want it too: it has no
choice, because it has no representation of that amongst which it might
choose.
tim
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