An analogy

Something has prompted me to think about the analogy of a great department of state (one of those working for Her Britannic Majesty, that is) to the business of consciousness, the business of you or I being conscious for some part of our waking days - and some rather smaller part of our sleeping days. The department might include amongst its functions the construction of bases for nuclear submarines or the construction of regional hospitals catering for expensive specialities of one sort or another. Lots to be done.

So we have the Minister and his private office, maybe as many as a dozen people, at the top of the bureaucratic ant heap.

The heap is busily anting it away, with information and briefs percolating around, sometimes upwards. From time to time briefs make it to the Minister, briefs which might contain two or three options for action and a recommendation. All to be contained on one side of double spaced A4; not too much strain on the Ministerial brain thank-you-very-much, large and Etonian though it may be.

The Minister thinks hard. He (or, quite likely these days, she) might talk to his Private Secretary or perhaps to some political colleague. He then makes a decision and his command then percolates back down the heap, generating various kinds of action. Submarine bases rise from the ground, ground where there was nothing but migratory water birds before.

The Minister, and perhaps his private office, think that they are in charge. They are the organ of consciousness in the outfit. And maybe to some small extent they are in charge; but to a rather greater extent they are in the grip of the ant heap on top of which they sit. The great amorphous ant heap generates the options and the recommendations; the heap is in real charge of what is going on. The ant heap writes the contracts which build the bases. The ants get the fancy site visits. In charge, in so far, that is, as one can attribute agency to an ant heap at all.

The ant heap contains all the sensory organs. Most input comes into the ant heap rather than to the Minister. And even if you try to write to him direct, your letter will be intercepted by the private office and sent out into the ant heap for action - and the best that you can realistically hope for is that the ant heap generated reply will have the Ministerial thumb print on it.

There is all kinds of leakage, in the sense that commands get tweaked on the way down and out. They get tweaked to say what the Minister meant to say. Or there are reflex actions with the ants doing stuff on the fly without bothering to tell the Minister at all - and if he tries to check, it all gets lost in the long grass. Worst of all, the Minister might try to do something off his own bat. Fantasy pure and simple; a figment of the overheated ministerial imagination. Note in passing: there might be less leakage of this sort in an organisation with a more rigid command structure, like an army. But there would be down sides to this. Bendy structures bend but do not break; just look at all the old parables & proverbs in google about the oak tree breaking while the willow just bends.

There is natural selection of a sort, in that the departments come and go and that the ants generally prefer the heap that they are in and know, rather than the unknown. Or perhaps even being thrust out into the real world (as the righties would have it). But I don't think that this bears on the matter in hand.

There is also the business of the spirit of the department. The ants like to feel part of, proud of a department that is going places, they will try to drive the Minister to do great things. They might wear the departmental tie and boast about the doings of the department in the pub, rather as if they are the department. But I am not sure that the Minister is going to be very responsive to this sort of thing, in the way, say, of a footballer performing in front of tens of thousands of fans cheering him on and performing all the better because of that cheering on. So again, I don't think that this bears on the matter in hand.

And there is a big difference between a department and a person. If you chop the head off a person, that is the end of it, body and soul caput. If you chop the head off a department, perhaps the Minister and his private office are abducted one dark night, there might be a bit of panic for a day or two, but things will sort themselves out. The department will live on. There is clearly a different relationship here between the head and the body.

Another difference lies in the way that input is dealt with. Input from the eyes of a person is a matter for the eyes and the brain, the rest of the body does not get much of a look in. What one can say is that we are unconscious of most of the large amount of processing involved in delivering a nice tidy image to consciousness - processing which has been outsourced to the ant heap in the case of the department.

But I still think that there is some force in the analogy in that the Minister only thinks that he is in charge, in rather the same way as the conscious 'I' thinks that I am in charge.

PS: unclear why caput should mean dead. The Latin word means head while the OED suggests that caput might be short for caput mortuum, a dead head.