I had a complex experience of a simple event.

"I think such mental juggling is a very important, pervasive kind of mental activity that has nothing intrinsic to do with anagrams."

pg 90.

Do you see it? Hofstadter is dancing around the big idea. We have all these strange little abilities like anagramming. But he doesn't see them as ultra specialized quirks. D.H. wants to interpolate, in his eyes these little mental operations are inherited from the computational consequences at some system level.

There appears to be several layers of information processing. At the biological level, a series of switches are actually firing in some physical pattern--the motherboard and electron level.

At another level 'mental objects' are being juggled, our word bank entries are stored and recalled, --this is an operating system type level; saving data and running programs.

The next level is the one we are most comfortable with, it's our conscious experience of the mental juggling, its us doing crosswords and anagramming-- this can only be compared to our user experience running our operating systems and using our programs.

The fact that in our computer-mind analogy there is no analogue for consciousness speaks to the difficulty with which we have in framing the issue. 

Throughout our readings D.H. has revealed to us that his research is guided by and guides these core intuitions he has about some really big properties of reality. One of these intuitions is that we have these flavored conscious experiences that are really more like animated ghosts haunting the form of a more concrete computational structure.

   In formalizing an anagramming algorithm he is trying to gain insight into the workings of another level by modeling aspects of the level he is familiar with.

-Dvn