Our irresistible tendency to see things in human terms ―
that we are often mistaken in attributing complex human
motives and processing abilities to other species ― does not
mean that an animal’s behavior is not, in fact, complex.
Rather, it means that the complexity of the animal’s behavior
is not purely a (a) product of its internal complexity. Herbert
Simon’s “parable of the ant” makes this point very clearly.
Imagine an ant walking along a beach, and (b) visualize
tracking the trajectory of the ant as it moves. The trajectory
would show a lot of twists and turns, and would be very
irregular and complicated. One could then suppose that the ant
had equally complicated (c) internal navigational abilities,
and work out what these were likely to be by analyzing the
trajectory to infer the rules and mechanisms that could produce
such a complex navigational path. The complexity of the
trajectory, however, “is really a complexity in the surface of
the beach, not a complexity in the ant.” In reality, the ant may
be using a set of very (d) complex rules: it is the interaction
of these rules with the environment that actually produces the
complex trajectory, not the ant alone. Put more generally, the
parable of the ant illustrates that there is no necessary
correlation between the complexity of an (e) observed behavior
and the complexity of the mechanism that produces it.
* parable: 우화 ** trajectory: 이동 경로