In brief, then, a representational system is built on categories; it sifts incoming data into those categories, when necessary refining or enlarging its network of internal categories; its representations or 'symbols' interact among themselves according to their own internal logic; this logic, although it runs without ever consulting the external world, nevertheless creates a faithful enough model of the way the world works that it manages to keep the symbols pretty much 'in phase' with the world they are supposed to be mirroring. A television is thus not a representational system, as it indiscriminately throws dots onto its screen without regard to what kinds of things they represent, and the patterns on the screen do not have autonomy-they are just passive copies of things 'out there.' By contrast, a computer program that can 'look' at a scene and tell you what is in that scene comes closer to being a representational system. The most advanced artificial intelligence work on computer vision hasn't yet cracked that nut. A program that could look at a scene and tell you not only what kinds of things are in the scene, but also what probably caused that scene and what will probably ensue in it-that is what we mean by a representational system. In this sense, is a country a representational system? Does a country have a symbol level? We'll leave this one for you to ponder on.