From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Part I: Turning Our World Upside Down

1. Introduction

• How come there are minds?
  • Minds evolved and created thinking tools that eventually enabled minds to know how minds evolved, and even to know how these tools enabled them to know what minds are.
  • What thinking tools? The simplest, on which all the others depend in various ways, are spoken words, followed by reading, writing, and arithmetic, followed by navigation and mapmaking, apprenticeship practices, and all the concrete devices for extracting and manipulating information that we have invented: compass, telescope, microscope, camera, computer, the Internet, and so on.
  • These, in turn, fill our lives with technology and science, permitting us to know many things not known by other species. We know there are bacteria. Even bacteria don't know there are bacteria.
  • Our minds are different. It takes thinking tools to understand what bacteria are, and we're the only species (so far) endowed with an elaborate kit of thinking tools.
• A birds-eye view of the journey:
  • Life has been around on Earth for around 4bn years. The first 2bn were spent optimizing the machinery for self-maintenance, energy acquisition and reproduction, and the only living things were relatively simple, single-celled entities - bacteria or their cousins, archaea: the prokaryotes.
  • Then an amazing thing happened. Two different prokaryotes collided and instead of one eating the other, it let it go on living, and, by dumb luck, found itself fitter, more competent in some way that mattered, than it had been before. This was perhaps the first successful instance of technology transfer. A fortuitous mutation almost never happens, but evolution depends on those rarest of rare events. This is the birth of the eukaryotes
  • Every living thing big enough to be visible to the naked eye is a multicellular eukaryote.
  • The Cambrian Explosion, which occurred over several million years about 530m ya, saw the sudden arrival of a bounty of new life forms.
  • The "MacCready Explosion", at the dawn of human agriculture, about 10k ya, transformed the terrestrial vertebrate biomass (excluding insects, other invertebrates, and marine animals). At the beginning, humans plus their livestock and pets make up only 0.1%, and now we make up 98% (mostly cattle). This explosion is based on three factors - population, technology, and intelligence (our so-called native intelligence depends on both our technology and our population numbers).
• Dennett identified the "romantic" and "killjoy" sides of the duel over the stature of animal minds. We are not the God-like geniuses we think we are, but animals are not so smart either, and yet both humans and other animals are admirably equipped to deal "brilliantly" with many of the challenges thrown at them.

2. Before Bacteria and Bach

• until there were systems that could be strictly called reproducing systems, the processes at work were only proto-evolutionary, semi-Darwinian, partial analogues of proper evolution by natural selection; they were processes that raised the likelihood that various combinations of ingredients would arise and persist, concentrating the feedstock molecules until this eventually led to the origin of life.
• A living thing must capture enough energy and materials, and fend off its own destruction long enough to construct a good enough replica of itself.
• The reverse-engineering perspective is ubiquitous in biology and is obligatory in investigations of the origin of life. It always involves some kind of optimality considerations: What is the simplest chemical structure that could possibly do x? Or would phenomenon x be stable enough to sustain process y?
• Orgel's second rule: "Evolution is cleverer than you are."
• Here is an example of a possible gambit in the origin of life:
  • It is tempting to assume that the very first living thing capable of reproducing must have been the simples possible living thing (given the existing conditions on the planet at the time).
  • Make the simples replicator you can imagine and then build on that foundation.
  • But this is by no means necessary. It is possible, and more likely, I think, that a rather inelegantly complicated, expensive, slow, Rub-Goldberg conglomeration of objets trouvés was the first real replicator, and after it got the replication ball rolling, this ungainly replicator was repeatedly simplified in competition with its kin.
  • Many of the most baffling magic tricks depend on the audience no imagining the ridiculously extravagant lengths magicians will go to in order to achieve a baffling effect. If you want to reverse-engineer magicians, you should always remind yourself that they have no shame, no abhorrence of bizarre expenditures for tiny effects that they can then exploit. Nature, similarly, has no shame - and no budget, and all the time in the world.
• Adaptionism is alive and well; reverse-engineering is still the royal road to discovery in biology.

3. On the Origin of Reasons

• There are three strategies to adopt when trying to understand, explain, and predict phenomena:
  • The physical stance - is the least risky but also the most difficult; you treat the phenomenon as obeying the laws of physics, and use physics to predict what will happen next.
  • The design stance - is only for things that have been designed, either artifacts or living things or their parts, and have functions or purposes.
  • The intentional stance - works primarily for things that are designed to use information to accomplish their functions. It works by treating the thing as a rational agent, attributing "beliefs" and "desires" and "rationality" to the thing, and predicting that it will act rationally.
• Evolution by natural selection is not itself a designed thing, an agent with purposes, but it acts as if it were. It is a set of processes that "find" and "track" reasons for things to be arranged one way rather than another.
• The reasons found by human designers are typically (but not always) represented in the minds of the designers, whereas the reasons uncovered by natural selection are represented for the first time by those human investigators who succeed in reverse-engineering Nature's productions.
• Our human world of reasons grew out of a world where there were no reasons.
• Two meanings of the word "why":
  • What for - "Why are you handing me your camera?"
  • How come - "Why does ice float?" This is asking for a cause or a process narrative
• Evolution by natural selection starts with "how come" and arrives at "what for". We start with a lifeless world in which there are no reasons, no purposes at all, but there are processes that happen.
• A central feature of human interaction, and one of the features unique to our species, is the activity of asking others to explain themselves, to justify their choices and actions, and then judging, endorsing, rebutting their answers, in recursive rounds of the "why?" game.
• Our capacity to respond appropriately in this reason-checking activity is the root of responsibility. Those who cannot explain themselves or cannot be moved by the reasons offered by others, those who are "dead to" the persuasions of advisors, are rightly judges to be of diminished responsibility and are treated differently by the law.
• The "logical space of reasons" is bound by norms, by mutual recognition of how things ought to go. Wherever there are reasons, there is room and need for some kind of justification and the possibility of correction when something goes wrong. This normativity is the foundation of ethics.
• But there are two kinds of norms and corrections:
  • social normativity - concerned with social norms, practice, and collaboration
  • instrumental normativity - concerned with quality control or efficiency, the norms of engineering
• Natural selection is an algorithmic process, a collection of sorting algorithms that are themselves composed of generate-and-test algorithms.
• In the prebiotic or abiotic world (before life), there were cycles at many spatio-temporal scales: seasons, night and day, tides, the water cycle, and thousands of chemical cycles discoverable at the atomic and molecular level, gradually changing the conditions in the world and thus raising the probability that something new will happen.
• This led to differential persistence, some temporary combinations of parts hang around longer than others. The rich can get richer, even though they can't yet bequeath their riches to descendants.
• Differential persistence must then somehow gradually turn into differential reproduction.
• "Serendipity" is when something good happens randomly, while "clobbering" is when something bad happens randomly.
• Walls or membranes that are randomly persisted are serendipitous in that they allow internal cycles to operate for a time without interference, and we see the engineering necessity of membranes to house the collection of chemical cycles - the Krebs cycle and thousands of others - that together permit life to emerge.
• Before we can have competent reproducers, we have to have competetent persisters. We are witnessing an automatic (algorithmic) paring away of the nonfunctional, crowded out by the functional.
• There are reasons why the parts are shaped and ordered as they are and this is the birth of reasons. Through Darwinism about Darwinism, we see the gradual emergence of the species of reasons out of the species of mere causes, what fors out of how comes*
• Natural selection is an automatic reason-finders, which "discovers" and "endorses" and "focuses" reasons over many generations.
• If there happens to be a "difference that happens to make a difference" then we have the germ of a reason, a proto-reason, and when this is selected to persist longer, then we can see emerge the accumulation of function by a process that blindly tracks reasons.
• Reasons existed before there were reasoners. There are reasons why trees spread their branches but they are not, in any strong sense, the trees' reasons. They don't "have" the reasons and they don't need to have the reasons.
• Darwin didn't extinguish teleology - he naturalized it.
• Reverse-engineering in biology is a descendant of reason-giving-judging.
• The evolution of what for from how come can be seen in the way we interpret the gradual emergence of living things via a cascade of prebiotic cycles. Free-floating rationales emerge as the reasons why some features exist; they do not presuppose intelligent designers, even though the designs that emerge are extraordinarily good.

4. The Strange Inversions of Meaning

• The world before Darwin was held together not by science but by tradition, through the trickle-down theory of creation from God, which Darwin replaced by the bubble-up theory of creation.
• Design space:
  • Skyhooks - float high in design space, unsupported by ancestors, the direct result of a special act of intelligent creation.
  • Cranes - are non-miraculous innovations in design space that enable ever more powerful lifting and efficient exploration of the space. Endosymbiosis is a crane, as are sex and language and culture.
• Turing showed that it was possible to design mindless machines that were absolutely ignorant, but that could do arithmetic perfectly, following "instructions" that could be mechanically implemented.
• This is "competence without comprehension" and Turing saw that it could provide a traversable path in design space from absolute ignorance to artificial intelligence.
• All the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of uncomprehending competences compounded over time into ever more competent - and hence comprehending - systems.
• This overthrows the pre-Darwinian mind-first vision of Creation with a mind-last vision.
• Darwin discovered evolution by natural selection, while Turing invented the computer, but he is one of the twigs on the Tree of Life who is, himself, an indirect product of the blind Darwinian processes.
• Distribution of expertise or understanding of this sort is a hallmark of human creative processes.
• "Ontology" is the set of "things" that an animal can recognize and behave appropriately with regard to, and equally the set of things that a computer program has to be able to deal with to do its job. Humans have extremely varied ontologies. Some believe in electrons and some believe in abominable snowmen, but there is a huge common core that is shared by all normal human beings from around 6 years old:
  • Manifest image - the things we use in our daily lives to anchor our interactions and conversations. For every noun in our everyday speech, there is a kind of thing it refers to. It comes along with your native language. It's the world according to us
  • Scientific image - populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks. But even scientists spend most of their day in the manifest image.
• These two versions of the world that are now quite distinct were once merged or intertwined in a single ancestral world of "what everybody knows" that included all the local fauna and flora and weapons and tools and dwellings and social roles, but also goblins and gods and miasmas and spells.
• We can treat animals as having different ontologies without settling issues of whether they are conscious of them or simply the beneficiaries of designs that can be interpreted (by reverse engineers or forward engineers) as having those ontologies.
• A well designed elevator:
  • Has a kind of ontology. It is a good elevator if it interacts appropriately with its environment and its passengers. It uses variables to keep track of all the features of the world that matter to getting its job done and is oblivious to everything else.
  • It has no need to know what its ontology is or why - the rationale of the program is something only the program's designers have to understand.
  • Its prudent self-monitoring can be seen to be an elementary step towards consciousness.
• Even bacteria are good at staying alive, at making the right moves at the right times, but they have elevator-type minds, not elevated minds like ours. And these minds are the products of an R&D process of trial and error that gradually structured their internal machinery to move from state to state in a way highly likely - not guaranteed - to serve their limited but vital interests.
• But unlike the elevator there is noting at all that plays the rols of the labels or comments in a source program. There is nothing anywhere at any time in that R1D history that represents the rationales of it. But they can be discovered by reverse engineering - there is a reason why the parts are shaped as they are, why the behaviors are organized as they are, and that reason will "justify" the design (or an earlier design that has now become either vestigial or transformed by further evolution to serve some newer function.
• The elevator has replaced a human - the elevator operator - by a machine that "sorta" follows the same rules as the human. We humans often occupy this kind of intermediate level of consciousness where we have internalized or routinized through practice a set of explicit rules that we may then discard and even forget.
• The Manhattan project had a small number of intelligent designers who organized a massive group of people, most of whom knew nothing about what they were doing beyond their immediate tasks. The "need to know" principle means that it is possible to create very reliable levels of high competence with almost no comprehension for rather insulated tasks
• GOFAI can be seen in retrospect as an exercise in creating something rather Cartesian, a rationalistic expert with myriads of propositions stored in its memory, and all the understanding incorporated in its ability to draw conclusion. It relied on the comprehension of the designers to contrive systems composed of subsystems that were foresightedly equipped with exactly the competences they would need in order to handle the problems they might face.
• But modern deep-learning AI is bottom-up, using wasteful, mindless, less bureaucratic, more evolution-like processes of information extraction.
• Top-down intelligent designing works, but it is responsible for much less of the design in our world than is commonly appreciated.
• Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence; natural selection on one hand, and mindless computation on the other.

5. The Evolution of Understanding

• Human designers start with a goal (which may be refined or abandoned along the way) and work top-down, with the designers using everything they know to guide their search for solutions to the design problems they set for themselves.
• Evolution, in contrast, has no goals, no predefined problems, and no comprehension to bring to the task.
• How could a slow, mindless process build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless process couldn't build on its own? A process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who then design things that permit us to understand how a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who then design those things.
• An organism's "umwelt" is the behavioral environment that consists of all the things that matter to its well-being.
• "Affordances" are the relevant opportunities in the environment of any organism: things to eat of mate with, openings to walk through or look out of, holes to hide in, things to stand on, and so forth.
• Organsims can be the beneficiaries of design features that imply ontologies without themselves representing those ontologies.
• Biology is reverse-engineering, and reverse-engineering is methodically committed to optimality considerations. Bacteria don't know they are bacteria, but they respond to other bacteria in bacteria-appropriate ways and are capable of avoiding or tracking or trailing things they distinguish in their umwelt.
• In software engineering, there is a reason why debugging cannot be completely automated: what counts as a bug depends on all the purposes (and sub and sub-sub-purposes) of the software, and specifying in sufficient detail what those purposes are is, at least for practical purposes, the very same task as writing debugged code in the first place!
• Design revision in Nature must follow the profligate method of releasing and test-driving many variants and letting the losers die, unexamined.
• Evolution explores the "adjacent possible".
• Natural selection is full of bugs. Organisms are filled with all-but-undecipherable "spaghettit code" of undisciplined programmers, but the free-floating rationale of the whole system is clearly good enough for practical purposes.
• When does comprehension emerge?
• We are right to adopt the intentional stance to understand the benefits derived from competences, but these competences can be provided by the machinery without any mentality intruding at all.
• We can say that organisms with spectacular competences but without comprehension, are "gifted".
• When there isn't enough stability over time in the selective environment to permit natural selection to "predict" the future accurately (when "selecting" the best designs for the next generation), natural selection does better by leaving the next generation's design partially unfixed. Learning can take over where natural selection left off, optimizing the individuals in their own lifetimes by extracting information from the world encountered and using it to make local improvements.
• Costly-signalling theory, where an animal does something to deceive or distract a predator does not need comprehension. These animals cannot choose to deceive, they simply do it automatically in certain circumstances due to a "knee-jerk reflex".
• Comprehension is not the source of competence or the active ingrediant in competence - instead, it is composed of competences.
• The illusion that understanding is some additional, separable mental phenomenon is fostered by the aha! phenomenon, or eureka effect.
• Comprehension comes in degrees, but even at the highest levels of competence, comprehension is never absolute. All comprehension is sorta comprehension from some perspective.
• We count on experts to have deep "complete" understanding of difficult concepts we rely on every day, only half-comprehendingly, and language is the capacity to transmit, faithfully, information we only sorta understand.
• The Beatrix Potter syndrome, or intentional stance towards animals works whether the rationales it adduces are free floating or explicitly represented in the midst of the agents we are predicting.
• Whatever is going on in the animal's brain has the competence to detect and respond appropriately to the information in the environment. But the intentional stance just gives the specs for the mind and leaves the implementation for later.
• We idealize everybody's thinking, and even our own access to reasons, blithely attributing phantom bouts of clever reasoning to ourselves after the fact. Asked "Why did you do that?", the most honest thing to say is often "I don't know, it just came to me," but we often succumb to the temptation to engage in whig history, not settling for how come but going for what for.
• Four grades of competence:
  • Darwininian Creatures - Have predefined and fixed competences created by the R&D of evolution. They are born hard-wired, knowing all they will ever know, they are gifted but not learners.
  • Skinnerian Creatures - Have, in addition, the ability to adjust their behavior in reaction to "reinforcement". They start out with some "plasticity". They more or less randomly generate new behaviors to test the world and those that get reinforced are more likely to recur in similar circumstances in the future.
  • Popperian Creatures - Look before they leap. They extract information about the cruel world and keep it handy, so they can use it to pretest hypothetical behaviors offline. Eventually they must act in the real world, but their first choice is not random, having won the generate-and-test competition trial runs in the internal environment model. The "habit" of "creating forward models" of the world and using them to make decision and modulate behavior is a fine habit to have, whether or not you understand it.
  • Gregorian Creatures - Their Umwelt is well stocked with thinking tools, both abstract and concrete. Only with them do we find the deliberate introduction and use of thinking tools, systematic exploration of possible solutions to problems, and attempts at higher-order control of mental searches. Only we human beings are Gregorian creatures, apparently.
• The smartest animals are not "just" Skinnerian creatures but Popperian creatures, capable of figuring out some of the clever things they have been observed to do. They engage in exploratory behavior. They need not know that this is the rationale for their behavior, but they benefit from it by reducing uncertainty. The fact that they don't understand the grounds of their own understanding is no barrier to calling it understanding, since we humans are often in the same ignorant state about how we manage to figure out novel things.
• Some animals, like us, have something like an inner workshop, a portable design-improvement facility.
• An unconscious mind is no longer seen as a contradiction in terms. The puzzle today is what is consciousness for (if anything)?
• Animals, plants, and even microorganisms are equipped with competences that permit them to deal appropriately with the affordances of their environments. There are free-floating rationales for all these competences, but the organisms need not appreciate or comprehend them to benefit from them, nor do they need to be conscious of them. In animals with more complex behaviors, the degree of versatility and variability exhibited can justify attributing a sort of behavioral comprehension to them so long as we don't make the mistake of thinking of comprehension as some sort of stand-alone talent, a source of competence rather than a manifestation of competence.

Part II: From Evolution to Intelligent Design

6. What is Information?

• Did the information age begin:
  • When people began writing things down, drawing maps, and otherwise recording and transmitting valuable information they couldn't keep in their heads with high fidelity?
  • When people began speaking and passing on accumulated lore, history, and mythology?
  • Over 530m ya, when eyesight evolved during the Cambrian Era, triggering an arms race of innovation in behavior and organs that could respond swiftly to the information gathered from the light?
  • When life began - even the simplest reproducing cells survived thanks to parts that functioned by discriminating differences in themselves and and their immediate surroundings?
• Dennett focuses on "Semantic Information", which is so important to us that we want to be able to use if effectively, store it without loss, move it, transform it, share it, hide it.
• Memory can be conceived as an information channel, just as subject to noise as any telephone line.
• Analog to digital converors (ADCs), are analogous to the sensitive cells that accomplish transduction on the out input edges of the nervous system, though the conversion in brains is not into bit strings, but neuronal spike trains.
• McCulloch and Pitts, in 1943, demonstrated the logical possibility of a general purpose representing-and-learning-and-controlling network made out of units that performed simple, nonmiraculous, clueless tasks - a comprehender of sorts made of merely competent parts.
• The brain is certainly not a digital computer running binary code, but it is still a kind of computer.
• Economic information is whatever is worth some work.
• Survival depends on information, on differential and asymmetric information: I know some things you don't know.
• Semantic information is design worth getting - design always involves R1D work of some kind, using available semantic information to improve the prospects of something by adjusting its parts in some appropriate way.
• One can actually improve one's design as an agent in the world by just learning useful facts. All learning, learning what and learning how, can be a valuable supplement or revision to the design you were born with.
• Semantic information is a distinction that makes a difference, a difference that makes a difference.
• Information in general is that which justifies representational activity, that which determines form.
• Misinformation and disinformation are dependent or even parasitic kinds of information. Disinformation is the designed exploitation of another agent's systems of discrimination, which themselves are designed to pick up useful information and use it.
• Most of what anybody knows is adaptively inert, but cheap to store, and the bits that do matter, really matter.
• Advertisers and propagandists seek to build "outposts of recognition" in other agents minds.
• In natural selection, R&D happens, designs are improved because they all have to "pay for themselves" in differential reproduction, and Darwinian lineages "learn" new tricks by adjusting their form. They are, then, in-formed, a valuable step up in local design space.
• In the same way, Skinnerian, Popperian, and Gregorian creatures inform themselves during their own lifetimes by their encounters with their environments, becoming ever more effective agents thanks to the information they can now use to do all manner of new things, including developing new ways of further informing themselves. The rich get richer. And the richer and richer, using their information to refine the information they use to refine the information they use to refine the information they obtain by the systems they design to improve the information available to them when they set out to design something.
• Useful information is a descendent of JJ Gibson's affordances.
• Information is that which is selected.
• What semantic information can be gleaned from an event depends on what information the gleaner already has accumulated.
• Offspring inherit a manifest image with an ontology of affordances from their parents and are born ready to distinguish the things that are most important to them.
• Evolution is all about turning bugs into features, and turning noise into signal
• Where does all the information in DNA come from? From the gradual, purposeless, nonmiraculous transformation of noise into signal, over billions of years.
• Information is always relative to what the receiver already knows.
• Remembering is not simply retrieving some thing that has been stored in some place in the brain.
• Don't acquire and maintain what doesn't pay for itself. More is not always better. Intentional mind-clearing or unlearning is not an unusual phenomenon.
• So much of the semantic information that streams into our heads each day is not worth getting.
• Within an organism the information-transmitting channels tend to be highly reliable.
• The brain's job in perception is to filter out, discard, and ignore all but the noteworthy features of the flux of energy striking one's sensory organs.
• Semantic information:
  • Is valuable - misinformation and disinformation are either pathologies or parasitic perversions of the default cases.
  • Its value is receiver-relative and not measurable in any nonarbitrary way but can be confirmed by empirical testing
  • The amount carried or contained in any delimited episode or item is also not usefully measurable in units but roughly comparable in local circumstances
  • Need not be encoded to be transmitted or saved.
• Utility or function counts against a creation, since copyright is intended to protect "artistic" creation.
• You have to be informed to begin with, you have to have many competences installed, before you can avail yourself of information. How are humans so much better at extracting information from the environment than any other species?
• We have many more affordances - a hardware store is a museum of affordances.
• Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism that does not admit this can survive at the present day.

7. Darwinian Spaces: An Interlude

• Darwin talked of "the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence".
• Evolution by natural selection is change in a population due to:
  • variation in the characteristics of members of the population,
  • which causes different rates of reproduction, and
  • which is heritable.
• Whenever all three factors are present, evolution by natural selection is the inevitable result, whether the population is organisms, viruses, computer programs, words, or some other variety of things that generate copies of themselves one way or another.
• Darwin discovered the fundamental algorithm of evolution by natural selection, an abstract structure that can be implemented in different materials or media.
• Darwin refutes essentialism, the ancient philosophical doctrine that claimed that for each type of thing, each natural kind, there is an essence, a set of necessary and sufficient properties for being that kind of thing. But in fact there is no principled way of drawing a line between related things.
• A Darwinian space is a 3D array to show 3 variables and see to what extent a process is pure Darwinism, quasi-Darwinian, proto-Darwinian, or not Darwinian at all.
• Evolutionary processes are themselves evolutionary products and as a result emerge gradually and transform gradually.
• Looking at this is "Darwinism about Darwinism".
• We could for example look at the relationship between:
  • Fidelity of heredity. Evolution depends on high-fidelity copying but not perfect copying, since mutations (copying errors) are the ultimate source of all novelty.
  • Dependence of realized fitness differences on intrinsic properties. The differences in fitness between members of a population may depend on "luck" or "talent" or any combination in between. When luck is dominant, you can have genetic drift, when some random feature gets boosted to fixation.
  • Continuity (smoothness of fitness landscapes). Natural selection is a gradual process and depends on blindly taking "small steps". When the landscape is "rugged" (rapidly changing), evolution is next to impossible since small steps are uncorrelated with progress or even maintaining one's fitness.
• De-Darwinizing is when a lineage that evolved for generations under paradigmatic Darwinian conditions moves into a new environment where its future comes to be determined by a less Darwinian process.
• The developmental process that wires up your brain is a de-Darwinized version of the process that evolved the eukaryotes. There are many neurons in your brain at birth and only those that make the right connections are saved, but they just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
• The origin of life (from the abiotic world to bacteria) is a set of processes that went from pre-Darwinian to proto-Darwinian to Darwinian.
• You can look at cultural evolution using a Darwinian space with the axes:
  • Growth vs reproduction - eg the Roman Catholic Church grwos but seldom spawns descendants these days, while the Hutterites are designed to send of daughter communities whenever a community gets big enough. Religions are large complex social entities. Words are more like viruses, simpler, unliving, and dependent on their hosts for reproduction.
  • Cultural vs genetic - Trust is (mainly) a cultural phenomenon
  • Internal complexity
• An inverted Darwinian space shows Darwinian at the base and intelligent design at the opposite extreme, with the following axes:
  • Bottom-up vs top-down - Human culture started out profoundly Darwinian, with uncomprehending competences yielding various valuable structures in roughly the way termites build their castles, and then gradually de-Darwinized, becoming ever more comprehending, ever more efficient in its ways of searching design space. As human culture evolves, it fed on the fruits of its own evolution, increasing its design powers by utilizing information in ever more powerful ways.
  • Comprehension
  • Random vs directed search
• All the real cultural phenomena occupy the middle ground, involving imperfect comprehension, imperfect search, and much middling collaboration.
• We are the only species so far that has developed explosively cumulative culture. Culture has obviously been a good trick for us, but what barriers have stood in the way of other species developing it?

8. Brains Made of Brains

• A bacterium can discriminate a few vital differences to make itself at home in its tiny Umwelt.
• Swift control is the key competence of mobile organisms, so nervous systems, with a headquarters, are obligatory. Brains are control centers for dealing swiftly and appropriately with the opportunities and risks - the affordances - of a mobile life.
• Brains are designed by natural selection to have, or reliably develop, equipment that can extract the semantic information needed for this control task.
• Other mammals, and birds, can afford to be altricial in contrast to precocial; they are designed to be fed and protected by parents through a prolonged infancy, picking up semantic information that doesn't have to come through their genes and doesn't have to be learned by unsheltered trial and error in the dangerous world.
• Brains develop competences, including the meta-competences needed to acquire and hone further consequences.
• Turing was the epitome of a top-down intelligent designer.
• Computer programming is top-halfway-down design; the grubby details of the "bottom" of the design is something you can ignore (unless the program you are writing is a compiler.
• Complex evolvable systems (basically all living, evolvable systems) depend on being organized "hierarchically": composed of parts that have some stability independently of the larger system of which they are parts, and that are themselves composed of similarly stable parts composed of parts. A structure - or a process - need be designed only once, and then used again and again, copied and copied not just between an organism and its offspring, but within an organism as it develops. As Dawkins has observed, a gene is like a toolbox subroutine in a computer.
• In the genome, there is a vertebra-making subroutine, a finger-making subroutine, and eyelid making subroutine, each of these are modular tasks.
• The developing organism sorta understand the commands of its genes the way a von Neumann machine sorta understands its machine language instructions - it sorta obeys them.
• Bottom-up R&D is Darwin's strange inversion, but brains are not exactly like digital computers:
  • Brains are analog and computers are digital.
  • Brains are parallel and computers are (mainly) serial. - The brain's architecture is massively parallel, with a vision system about a million channels wide, but many of the brain's most spectacular activities are (roughly) serial, in the so-called stream of consciousness, in which ideas, or concepts or thoughts float by not quite in single file, but through a von Neumann bottleneck of sorts.
  • Brains are carbon based (protein etc) and computers are silicon.
  • Brains are alive and computers are not?
• Deacon argues that, by divorcing information processing from thermodynamics, we restrict our theories to basically parasitical systems, artifacts that depend on a user for their energy, for their structural maintenance, for their interpretation, and for their raison d'être. It is important, he claims, that a brain be made of cells that are themselves autonomous little agents with agendas, chief of which is staying alive, which spawns further goals, such as finding work and finding allies. His insistence on making brains (or brain substitutes) out of living neurons might look at first like some sort of romanticism - protein chauvinism - but his reasons are practical and compelling.
• The hardware of existing digital computers depends critically on millions (or billions) of identical elements. Neurons, in contrast, are all different, and they get organized not through bureaucratic hierarchies, but by bottom-up coalition-formation, with lots of competition.
• What do neurons want? Do they have nano-intentionality, agency? They want the energy and raw materials they need to thrive. Neurons are, like yeast and fungi, highly competent agents in a life-or-death struggle, in the demanding environment between your ears, where the victories go to those cells that can network more effectively, contributing to more influential trends at the levels where large-scale human purposed and urges are discernible.
• A neuron is always hungry for work; it reaches out exploratory dendritic branches, seeking to network with its neighbors in ways that will be beneficial to it.
• Top-down intelligent designs depend on foresight, which evolution utterly lacks. Evolution's design are all in a way retrospective - this is what worked in the past.
• Variable selective environments, because of their unpredictability, favor the selection of incomplete designs, along with mechanisms to tune the design to suit the circumstances, exploitable plasticity or "learning".
• Brains are more like termite colonies than intelligently designed corporations or armies.
• An organism's Umwelt is populated by two R&D processes:
  • evolution by natural selection and
  • individual learning of one sort or another.
• An organism is floating in an ocean of differences, a scant few of which might make a difference to it. Born to a long lineage of successful copers, it comes pre-equipped with gear and biases for filtering out and refining the most valuable differences, separating the semantic information from the noise.
• Bayesian hierarchical predictive coding - a method of calculating probabilities based on ones prior expectation:
  • Given that your expectations based on past experience (including the experience of your ancestors as passed down to you) are such and such (expressed as probabilites for each alternative), what effect on your future expectations should the following new data have? What adjustments in your probabilities would it be rational for you to make?
  • It is a normative discipline, purportedly prescribing the right way to think about probabilities.
  • Computer reading of handwriting involves a cascade of layers in which the higher layers make Bayesian predictions about what the next layer down in the system with "see" next. When the predictions proves false, they then generated error signals in response that lead to Bayesian revisions, which are then fed back down toward the input again and again, until the system settles on an identification.
  • Practice makes perfect, and over time these systems get better and better at the job, the same way we do - only better.
• Hierarchical, Bayesian predictive coding is a method for generating affordances galore - we expect solid objects to have backs that will come into view as we walk around them, we expect doors to open stairs to afford climbing, and cups to hold liquid.
• The network doesn't sit passively, waiting to be informed, but constantly makes probabilistic guesses about what will come next and treating feedback about its errors as the chief source of new information to guide its next round of guesses.
• In visual pathways, for example, there are more downward than upward pathways, more outbound that incoming signals. The brain's strategy is continuously to create "forward models" or probabilistic anticipations, and use the incoming signals to prune them for accuracy.
• When the organism is in deeply familiar territory, the inbound corrections diminish to a trickle and the brain's guesses, unchallenged, give it a head start on what to do next.
• This is descended from "analysis by synthesis"
• In a Bayesian network, silence counts as confirmation. Whatever the higher levels guess counts as reality by default in the absence of disconfirmation.
• These are expectation-generating fabrics with a remarkable competence they don't need to understand. They don't need to express or represent the reasons they track; like evolution itself, they "blindly" separate the information wheat from the chaff and act on it. Reasons are not things in their ontologies, not salient items in their manifest images.
• And these systems come, via cultural evolution, a whole new process of R&D, less than 1m years old - that designs, disseminates, and installs thinking tools by the thousands in our brains (and only ours), turning them into minds - not "minds" or sorta minds, but proper minds.
• One kind of neuron, the von Economo, or spindle cell, is found only in animals with very large brains and complex social lives: humans and other great apes, elephants and cetaceans.
• Brains are computers:
  • composed of billions of idiosyncratic neurons that evolved to fend for them selves,
  • their functional architecture is more like a free market that a "politburo" hierarchy where all tasks are assigned from on high
  • They are composed of Bayesian networdks that are highly competent expectation-generators that don't have to comprehend what they are doing.
  • Our kind of comprehension is only made possible by the arrival quite recently of a new kind of evolutionary replicator - culturally transmitted information entities: memes.

9. The Role of Words in Cultural Evolution

• The evolution of the evolution of culture is from:
  • Profoundly Darwinian processes - involving minimal comprehension, bottom-up generation of novel products by random search processes, to
  • Processes of intelligent design - comprehending, top-down generation of novel products by directed search.
• Words are the best example of memes
• Other species have some rudiments of cultural evolution that are not transmitted genetically between the generation but rather are ways of behaving that depend on the offspring's perception of the elders' behavior - an "instinct to learn" things like nest building or singing.
• Many animal behaviors that were thought to be genetically transmitted "instincts" have proven to be "traditions" transmitted between parent and offspring.
• We are the only species so far to have richly cumulative culture and this is primarily due to language. We have had a sustained population growth unprecedented by any other vertebrate.
• Our genes haven't changed very much in the last 50k years, and the changes with have seen are driven by new selection pressures created by human cultural innovations, such as cooking, agriculture, transportation, religion, and science.
• The widespread adoption of a new way of behaving creates a one-way ratchet: once almost everybody is eating cooked food, the human digestion system evolves, genetically, to make it no longer practical - and then no longer possible - for humans to live on a raw diet.
• One of the facts of life, both genetic and cultural, is that options become obligatory. A clever new trick that gives is users a distinct advantage over their peers soon "spreads to fixation", at which point those who don't acquire it are doomed.
• Eccentricities of a few members of the population bezcome a species necessity, embodied in an instinct.
• There is no law obliging people to have a credit card or a cellphone, but it is increasingly inconvenient to not have them.
• Words are the lifeblood, the backbone, the DNA of cultural evolution.
• Languages evolve like species, and/but there is widespread anastomosis, whereby what had been distinct lineages join together, as words jump between languages.
• In bacteria and other unicellular organisms, genes are often traded or shared by a variety of processes independent of vertical gene descent (reproduction). Similarly, etymologies (descent lineages) for words are more secure than the descent of the languages in which they are found, because of horizontal word transfer between languages.
• Charles Sanders Peirce's type/token distinction:
  • "Word" is a word, and there are three tokens of that word in this sentence.
  • Tokens can also be silent events in your brain. These brain-tokens will not look like "word" or sound like "word (they're brain events and it's dark and quiet in there), but they will no doubt by physically similar to some of the events that normally occur in your brain when you see of hear "word".
  • There are lots of intermediate cases of words - definite specific words - tokened in our minds without going into the distinction between spoken or written, heard or seen. And there also seems to be "wordless" thinking where we don't even go to the trouble of "finding" all the words, but just tokening their bare meanings.
  • Internal tokens seem to resemble external tokens, but this is because they make use of the very same neural circuitry we use to detect the resemblances and differences between external tokens, not because this neural circuitry renders copies of what it identifies.
  • Any process that makes a new token of a type from an existing token of a type counts as a replication, whether or not the tokens are physically identical or even very similar. Tokens of words are all physical things of one sort or another, but words are, one might say, made of information, like software, and are individuated by types, not tokens, in most instances.
• Words are structures in memory that are autonomous in the sense that they must be independently acquired (learned). They are items of information, and other informational structures include stories, poems, songs, slogans, catchphrases, myths, techniques, "best practices", schools of thought, creeds, superstitions, operating systems, web browsers, Java applets.
• Informational structures comes in various sizes from large novels to shorter poems and traffic signs.
• Words have, in addition to the visible or audible parts of their tokens, a host of informational parts (making them nouns and verbs, comparatives and plurals, etc).
• Words are autonomous in some regards; they can migrate from language to language and occur in many different roles, public and private.
• A word, like a virus, is a minimal kind of agent: it wants to get itself said. Every token it generates is one of its offspring. The set of tokens descended from an ancestor token form a type, which is thus like a species.
• Some of a word's offspring will be private utterances: its human host is talking to herself, maybe even obsessively rehearsing the word in her mind, over and over, a population explosion of tokens, building an ever more robust niche for itself in a brain. And it may well be that many more internal tokenings - offspring - are born outside our conscious attention altogether. At this very moment, words may be replicating competitively in your head as inconspicuously as microbes replicate in your gut.
• The problem with introspection is that it acquiesces in the illusion that there is an inner eye that sees and an inner ear that hears - and an inner mind that just thinks.
• How do words get themselves installed in infant brains? Children learn about seven words a day, on average, from birth to age six, by which time they have a vocabulary of about 15k words

10. The Meme's-Eye Point of View

• What are memes made of? They are a kind of way of behaving (roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered, taught, shunned, denounced, brandished, ridiculed, parodied, censored, hallowed.
• Memes are ways: ways of doing something, or making something, but not instincts (which are a different kind of ways of doing something or making something). The difference is that memes are transmitted perceptually, not genetically. They are semantic information, design worth stealing or copying, except when they are misinformation, which, like counterfeit money, is something that is transmitted or saved under the mistaken presumption that it is valuable, useful/
• Words are the best examples of memes.
• Repetition is a key ingredient in creating new affordances. Multiple copies of anything tend to enable your pattern-recognition machinery to make yet another copy, in the recognizer, and thus a meme can get spread.
• Words are high on reproduction versus growth, high on culture versus genetic, and low on complexity.
• Once words are secured as the dominant medium of cultural innovation and transmission, they do begin to transform the evolutionary process itself, giving rise to new varieties of R&D much closer to the traditional, mythical ideal of intelligent design
• Ideas, practices, methods, beliefs, traditions, rituals, terms. These are all informational things that spread among human beings.
• A meme is any culturally-based way.
• Three conceptions of memes:
  • Competence without comprehension - Human comprehension - and approval - is neither necessary not sufficient for the fixation of a meme in a culture.
  • The fitness of memes. Memes thus have their own reproductive fitness, just like viruses.
  • Memes are informational things. They are “prescriptions” for ways of doing things that can be transmitted, stored, and mutated without being executed or expressed.
• Natural selection of memes can do the design work without any obligatory boost from human, divine, or group comprehension.
• Even the meanings of words can evolve by processes quite outside the ken of those using the words, thanks to differential replication. The fact that changes in cultural features can spread without notice is hare to account for. Memes provide an alternative vision of how culture-borne information gets installed in brains without being understood. The default presumption of folk psychology is that people, and even “higher” animals, will understand whatever is put before them.
• “ One could then say, with complete rigor, that it is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function, and destroying the others.”
• No comprehension is required even if it probably accelerates R1D processes more often than it retards them.
• The meme perspective covers the whole spectrum of mutualist, commensal, and parasitical symbionts.
• Only a tiny minority of the trillions of viruses that inhabit each of us right now are toxic in any way. Do we need some viruses in order to thrive? We certainly need lots of our memes.
• Many memes, maybe most memes, are mutualists, fitness-enhancing prosthetic enhancements of our existing adaptations (such as our perceptual systems, our memories, our locomotive and manipulative abilities).
• The prospective of parasitical memes exploiting that infrastructure is more or less guaranteed.
• What does fitness means in the context of evolutionary biology? Not health or happiness or intelligence or comfort or security, but procreative prowess.
• We are the only species that has managed to occupy a perspective that displaces genetic fitness as the highest purpose, the summum bonum of life. We are the only species that has discovered other things to die for (and to kill for): freedom, democracy, truth, communism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, and many other meme complexes (memes made of memes
• We are the persuadable species, not just learners, not just trainable, but also capable of being moved by reasons represented to us, not free-floating. We often have reasons for what we do, in this sense: we have articulated them to ourselves and have endorsed them after due consideration. The individual human being’s capacity to reason, to express and evaluate logical arguments, arises out of the social practice of persuasion. Our skills were honed for taking sides, persuading others in debate, not necessarily getting things right.

11. What's Wrong with Memes? Objections and Replies

• Palpable, foldable dollar bills that are physical objects are ontological crutches of sorts.
• Memes exist because words are memes, and words exist, and so do other ways of doing things that are transmitted nongenetically.
• Nobody invented tonal music, but many musicians and music theorists contributed to codifying it and choosing the syllables to sing for each tone and perfecting a system of musical notation; a fine mixture of Darwinian cultural evolution and intelligent design over hundreds of years beginning in the eleventh century. Tonal music is a good example of a digitized alphabet that allows correction to the norm (You’re singing that note a bit sharp. Fix it!) Many musical innovations involve bending, sliding, deliberately flatting the notes (for instance in the blues), but standing behind these deviations are the canonical tones.
• Melody-world, an important part of our manifest image.
• A purely semantic-level replication.
• Memes are informational structures that are normally valuable - they are worth copying - and copyright laws have been devised and refined to protect that value. Not only translations, faithful or not, but also abridgements, cinematic treatments, plays and operas based on novels, and even video games can count as meme replications.
• What is particularly important in this exploration of memes is that some of these higher levels really do depend on comprehension, not just copying competence, even though they are based on, and rely on, systems of copying competence that do not require comprehension. In fact, from this vantage point we can see that the high-fidelity copying of DNA, our chief model for replication, stands out as an extreme case of mindlessness in replication.
• At higher levels, with more sophisticated, more competent “readers”, you can create systems that can tolerate more physical variation. Spoken words are the chief example here, but there are others. Scrambled words are easily unscrambled. Sentences can be read even if the vowels are removed. Turing saw the importance of basing his great invention on as mindless a recognition system as he could imagine - binary choices between 0,1.
• A thinko is like a typo, but at a higher, semantic level - misthinking, not miswriting. A thinko is a clear mistake in any endeavor where the assumed goals of the enterprise require certain identifiable “best practices”.
• Routines are themselves memes, hones by differential replication over the generations and composable into larger practices that can be “read” and “written” by experts. Making arrows and axes, tending fires, cooking, sewing, weaving, making pots and doors and wheels and boats, and setting out fishnets are ways that can be corrected over many generations by the combined action of simple physical requirements and local traditions.
• A reliable way of enhancing fidelity of transmission via unreliable, low-fidelity individual memories.
• Unison chanting is ubiquitous in traditional religions and other ceremonies, and it similarly serves to repair the memories of the changers, none of whom could provide a faithful copy of last year’s rendition unaccompanied.
• It’s tempting to see a gradual transition from:
  • “infectious” rhythmic entrainment among tribespeople repeating their favorite moves and imitating each other.
  • More self-conscious rituals (with rehearsal required and deliberate teaching and correcting) - the domestication of dance with careful control of reproduction.
  • Professional choreographers - memetic engineers, intelligently designing their art objects.
• The original ways of dancing were memes that nobody “owned”, mindlessly evolving to exploit human idiosyncrasies of skeleton, gait, perception, and emotional arousal, habits that spread because they could spread, like the common cold.
• Infectious bad habits can be hard to eradicate, but if they can morph into useful habits, their reproductive prospects are enhanced. Once recognize, at first dimly (Darwin’s unconscious selection) and then consciously (Darwin’s methodical selection), their reproduction would be more or less ensured by their hosts, so the memes could relax, become less exciting, less irresistible, less captivating, less vivid, and unforgettable because they had become so useful. (The brains of domesticated animals are always smaller than the brains of their nearest wild kin; use it or lose it, and domesticated animals have a relatively unchallenging life, being protected from predators and starvation, and provided with mates at procreation time.) The corollary of this, of couse, is that for something boring to spread, it has to be deemed by its hosts to be particularly useful, or particularly valuable, and hence worth breeding: inculcating via extensive training.
• In general, any artifact found in abundance and showing signs of use is a good thing; following this rule, you can often tell the good one from the not so good ones without knowing exactly why the good ones are good. Copy the good ones, of couse. Darwin’s brilliant idea of unconscious selection as the gradualist segue into domestication gets put to important use in cultural evolution as well. Our ancestors “automatically” ignored the runts of the litter, and the lemons of the fleet, and the result in each case was the gradual improvement (relative to human tastes and needs) of the offspring.
• As with genes, mutations are transmission errors, but on occasion such an error is a serendipitous improvement.
• A lot of evolutionary R&D went into improving the replication machinery of DNA during the first billion or so years of life. The invention of writing has similarly boosted the fidelity of linguistic transmission, and it was the product. of many minds in many places over several millennia. Few if any of the “inventors” of writing had - or needed to have - a clear vision of the “specs” of the machine they were inventing, the “problem” they were “solving” so elegantly.
• “The written medium allows more complexity because the words on a page don’t die on the air like speech, but can be rescanned until you figure out what the writer intended.”
• The memes of the near future may thrive without direct human intervention, still synanthropic, like barn swallow and chimney swifts, but dependent on the amenities of the technological niche constructed in the 20th C by humans.
• Genetic evolution (“instincts”) can’t operate fast enough to do the job, leaving a yawning gap to be filled by memetics, and no positive ideas of anything else coming from traditional approaches to culture that could do the job.
• Memetics can also help depsychologize the spread on innovations (good and bad). Cultural anthropology takes people to be, in the first place, perceivers, believers, rememberers, intenders, knowers, understanders, noticers - cultural innovations are noticed and then (often) adopted. Here is a vision of people as rational agents, intentional systems whose behavior can be predicted. Cultural goods deemed valuable are preserved, maintained, and either bequeathed to the next generation or sold to the highest bidder. But much cultural innovations happens by what might be called subliminal adjustments over long stretches of time, without needing to be noticed or consciously approved at all. These accumulated shifts can often be recognized in retrospect, as when an expatriate community is joined by a new person from the old country whose way of speaking is both strangely familiar and strangely unfamiliar: Aha! I remember we used to talk like that too!
• Not just pronunciation and word meaning can subliminally shift. In principle, attitudes, moral values, the most emblematic idiosyncrasies of a culture can soften, harden, erode, or become brittle at a pace too slow to perceive. Cultural evolution is lightning fast, compared to genetic evolution, but it can also be much too gradual for casual observation to discern.
• Then there are pathological cultural variants, maladaptive cultural innovations, which no current theory can account for.
• Darwinian evolutionary processes are amplifiers of noise. Evolutionary theory, not being able to predict the once-in-a billion events that in due course get amplified into new species, new genes, new adaptations, can’t predict the future except very conditionally.
• The meme’s eye view fills the large and awkward gap between genetically transmitted instincts and comprehended inventions, between competent animals and intelligent designers, and it fills it with the only kind of theoretical framework that can nomiraculously account for the accumulation of good design: differential replication of descendants.
• Genes can’t explain adaptations. That’s true, and why we need molecular biology, physiology, etc. Similarly, we need psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, history, philosophy, and literary theory to explian how and why cultural features (good and bad) work the way they do.
• Nobody is born a pries or a plumber or a prostitute, and how they got that way is not going to be explained by their genes alone or just by the memes that infest them. My overarching claim in this book is that the evolutionary perspective in general and the memetic perspective with regard to culture transform many of the apparently eternal puzzles of life, that is, meaning and consciousness, in ways inaccessible to those who never look beyond the manifest image that they grew up with and the disciplines they are trained in.
• There is no way for an acquired trait to adjust an organism’s genes so that the trait gets passed along to the next generation genetically. Cultural transmission permits any traits that are acquired by the parent to be inculcated in the young (by setting an example, by training, by admonition).
• In memetic evolution, it is the fitness of the memes themselves that is at stake, not the fitness of their hosts
• Memes don’t have genes.
• We can consider words, and memes more generally, to be the result of variable, temporally extended processes of reproduction, and imaginable variation on our normal mode of secual reproduction.
• Some of the marvels of culture can be attributed to the genius of their creators, but much less than is commonly imagined, and all rests on uncomprehending hosts of memes competing with each other for rehearsal time in brains.
• Perhaps the chief benefit of the meme’s-eye point of view is that it suggest questions about cultural phenomena that we might not otherwise think of asking, such as: Is x the result of intelligent design? Is x a good worth preserving and bequeathing or a bit or parasitic junk? Are there alternatives (alleles) to x that have been encountered and vanquished?
• Only when those accounts attribute comprehension to people (or mysterious social forces) for which there is no evidence, does our perspective provide a level playing field where all degrees and kinds of human comprehension can be located.
• “Descent with modification”

12. The Origins of Language

• The origin of language is like the topic of the origin of life itself. Both are probably unique events on this planet. It is seen as "the hardest problem in science".
• What might the ancestors of today's well-designed languages have been? They were probably inefficient, hard-to-learn behavioral patterns that seldom "worked". What conditions had to be in place to make those early versions worth investing in? They may not even have "paid for" the expense of using them. They may have been parasitic habits that were infectious and hard to share. We should be on the lookout for a circuitous route, with gambits galore. The early days of language might have been more of an imposition than a gift.
• Functions that languages eventually serve:
  • Communicative utility - command, request, inform, inquire, instruct, insult, inspire, intimidate, placate, seduce, amuse, entertain.
  • Productivity - generate a vast number of different meanings (sentences, utterances) composed from a finite stoci of lexical items. There is no end to the number of grammatical sentences in English.
  • Digitality - correct to the norms, rinsing much of the noise out of the signal
  • Displaced Reference - refer to things not present in the environment of the communicators
  • Ease of Acquisition - the remarkable swiftness with which spoken or signed language is picked up by children.
• No other species has a faculty remotely like human language in its power. We have an instinct to cooperate with our extended family, enhanced dispositions to cooperate. Words may be the best memes, but they weren't the first memes. Did group cooperation evolve before language? What benefit got our ancestors' children so interested in the vocalizations of their group and so eager to imitate them?
• Can we imagine young hominins acquiring the self-control and foresight to tend a fire effectively without verbal instruction? Could the cave paintings at Lascaux (20-30k ya) have been painted by H. sapiens artists without language.
• A bias that is apt to be more valuable than "copy anything that moves" or "copy the first adult you see" is "copy the majority" (conformist bias) "copy the successful" or "copy the prestigious".
• When does a habit of (basically clueless) copying do better than engaging in your own trial and error learning?
• Viruses can't reproduce on their own. They depend on commandeering the reliable copy machinery in the nucleus of living cells, and that copy machinery was the product of a billion years of R1D. Memes, helpful or not, must above all get themselves copied - dispositions to attend to others, and to copy some of the ways perceived, it the only ground in which memes could take root and bloom.
• Once a rudimentary copy system is in place, it can be hijacked by selfish interlopers. Perhaps we are just apes with brains being manipulated by memes in much the way we are manipulated by the cold virus. Instead of looking only at the prerequisite competences our ancestors needed, we should also consider unusual vulnerabilities that might make our ancestors the ideal hosts for infectious but nonvirulent habits (memes) that allowed us to live and stay mobile long enough for them to replicate through our populations. Perhaps we should think of astronauts going to the moon as the memes way of getting into the next generation of science nerds.
• Adaptations (fitness enhancers) can be either genetically or culturally transmitted. The genetic information highway has been optimized over billions of years with DNA copying machines, editing machines, and systems for dealing with genomic parasites. The cultural highway, over a much shorter time period, has also evolved a host of design features to facilitate reliable transmission of information. A coevolutionary process in which the "research" is mainly done by the memes and the later "development" is mainly done by the genes. Innovations in memes could provide the early "proof of concept' that would underwrite, in effect, the more expensive and time-consuming genetic adjustments in brain hardware that would improve the working conditions for both memes and their hosts.
• Software innovations leading the way and hardware redesigns following, innovations that were first designed as software systems, as simulations of new computers running on existing hardware computers. Today’s smartphones have, in addition to layers and layers of software running on software running on software, special-purpose graphics and speech-synthesis and recognition hardware in their microprocessors, the descendants of software systems that explored the Design Space first.
• Cellphones have special-purpose hardware for speech processing but not for speaking English of Chinese. In the same way, an infant brain is language neutral: versatility widens the “market” for the design.
• The Baldwin Effect reduces genetic variance and versatility by driving a behavior (or developmental option) into a “best practices” straitjacket controlled genetically, turning options into obligate behaviors.
• We can think of copiers as information scroungers and learners as information producers. Mindlessly copy the majority turns out to be a remarkably effective strategy. The individuals with competence (or behavioral comprehension) soon lose their advantage to the copiers.
• Cultural transmission won’t evolve except in a Goldilocks environment that is neither too hot - chaotic - nor too cold - unchanging - for long enough to provide evolution a chance to create some new habits and fix them in a population.
• Culture has been a spectacularly successful Good Trick for H sapiens.
• For bipedality, did rudimentary tool making create a selection pressure for the ability to carry raw materials or finished tools for long distances, or did upright walking, evolved for other reasons, open up the Design Space for effective tool making?
• Another proposed threshold is social intelligence. The competence to interpret others as intentional systems whose actions can be anticipated by observing what these others observe and figuring out what they want (food, escape, to predate you, a mating opportunity, to be left alone)
• Language may not be the foundation, but I wouldn’t call it the capstone; I would call it the launching pad of human cognition and thinking.
• Niche construction: organisms don’t just respond to the selective environment they are born into. Their activities can also revise the features of that environment quite swiftly, creating whole new selection pressures and relieving others. Our species has engaged heavily in niche construction. Steven Pinker calls our world the “cognitive niche”, stressing that it is a product of human comprehension. Others disagree, proposing that it would better be called the “cultural niche”, a platform of competences on which comprehension can grow. The R&D that has constructed the niche we inhabit today is a changing blend of both Darwinian, bottom-up processes and top-down intelligent design. Our niche is certainly unlike that of any other species. It includes hardly any prey or predators (unless you’re a fisherman or a surfer in shark-filled waters), where habitants are composed of almost nothing but artifacts and domesticated plants and animals, where social role, wealth, reputation, expertise, and style (of clothing, speaking, singing, dancing, playing) have largely supplanted stronger muscles, faster running, and keener eyesight as variable advantages that bestow genetic fitness.
• Some of these meme transmissions required joint attention, some required (proto-)linguistic direction, and some required fully linguistic instructions, including mnemonic mantras and other devices, no doubt.
• How can any parent animal convey some of its hard-won experience to its young without language. The capacity of language to direct attention to non- present things and circumstances is a huge enhancement.
• There is a gradient between “instinct” and “learned behavior”, not a dichotomy.
• Possible steps towards language:
  • A proto-language of short utterances, lacking productivity or any distinction between imperatives and declaratives. These signals would be appropriate and recognized reactions to important affordances, and hence affordances themselves.
  • Perhaps a gesture language rather like the signing languages of the Deaf came first, with vocalizations used for attention-grabbing and emphasis. Speaking without gesturing is a difficult feat for many people, and it might be that gesturing and vocalizing have traded places, with gestures now playing the embellishing role that was originally played by vocalizations. The vestigial hand movements so many of us find all but irresistible may in effect be fossil traces of the original languages.
  • Perhaps there was an auditory “peacock’s tail” arms race, with male hominins vying to display their talent for musical vocalization, eventually including improvisations, like the competitive displays of nightingales and other songbirds.
• Language has two distinct compositional systems, “phonotactics” (governing which phonemes can follow which, independent of meaning) and “morphosyntax” (governing word order and the use of prefixes and suffices to build meanings out of meanings). Why two compositional levels, one semantic and one not? The productivity of languages is “motivated by” the usefulness of being able to communicate many things about the world.
• Depending on age and personality, people end up talking like the people around them, often without conscious effort. The evolution of vowel systems is thus a case of self-organization”. A system evolves not through any deliberate planning, but through the accumulation over time of a myriad of little adjustments by individuals responding to immediate pressures.
• It was in the interest of audible memes, meaningful or not, to distinguish themselves from the competition but also to exploit whatever habits of tongue prevailed locally, whereas it was in the interests of host/speaker/hearers to minimize the load on memory and articulation by keeping the repertoire of distinct sound-types fairly compact and efficient. No “conscious effort” is required because the immediate pressures are the selective pressures of differential replication.
• Over repetitions, the more readily perceived/remembered patterns survive while the others go extinct. And all are memes designed by differential replication to propagate in spite of providing not benefit beyond a reward for copying.
• A bounty of productively generated sounds looking for work is a more productive workshop of "invention" than a passel of distinctions with no sounds yet to express them. It takes a particular sort of intelligent designer to coin an apt and useful neologism. Sounds already in circulation could have been more or less unconsciously adopted to serve on particular occasions, the coinciding in experience of a familiar sound and a salient thing (two affordances) being wedded on the spot to form a new word, whose meaning was obvious in context.
• This populates the lexicon with phonology and semantics, but where does grammar come in? Isolated, conventionally fixed articulations are, like alarm calls, limited in semantic variety: hello, ouch, yikes, aaah, scram.
• The noun-verb distinction - Every language needs a topic/comment distinction (what you are talking about and what you are saying about it.
• Content words are almost never descended from function words.
• There is a robust negative correlation between the morphological complexity of a language and the size of the population that speaks it.
• Contact between adults speaking different languages tends to produce varieties of language in which morphological complexity is stripped out.
• The first words were, no doubt, assigned to the “things we had concepts for”, those things for which we were ready to discriminate these affordances, attend to them, track them, and then deal appropriately with them under normal circumstances.
• There are three kinds of entities: linguistic entities, mental entities, and worldly objects and relations. Two affordances unite to form something new, a concept in the specifically human sense of a word with an understood meaning.
• I can wonder what these things are called and what this sound means.
• Out of a rather chaotic jumble of opportunities, regularities can emerge, with only intermittent attention and hardly any intention. When things become familiar enough, they can be appropriated: my block, my dolly, my food, and my words - not at first consciously thought of as mine but just handled as possessions. With discrimination and recognition comes the prospect of reflection.
• The higher-order pattern of sameness and difference, which then become two additional things in the manifest image of the child. These iterated manipulations provide an engine of recombination from which the densely populated manifest image of a maturing human child can be constructed.
• Brains are well designed for picking up affordances of all kinds and refining the skills for responding to them appropriately. Once a brain starts being populated with pronounceable memes, they present as opportunities for mastery, and the pattern-finding powers of the brain get to work finding relations between them and the other available affordances.
• Children acquire the meaning of most of these words gradually via unconscious, involuntary statistical analysis of the multifarious stimuli they encounter.
• Can grammatical and morphological rules be acquired by bottom-up processes, competent and uncomprehending? Yes, since nobody learns the grammar of their first language “top-down”.
• At one extreme the wok is done by a pattern-finding competence that is completely general and has nothing specific in it about language, and at the other extreme is an almost-complete innate system (universal grammar) that just needs to have its “parameters” set for one language or another by experience.
• The mainly learning end of the spectrum suggests a ubiquitous gradualness, as much a feature of grammatical categories as of species and subspecies.
• Consider idioms like:
  • One fell swoop and in cahoots that are quite impervious to internal analysis
  • That doesn’t cut any ice and kick the bucket, whose meanings cannot be derived by analyzing their parts
  • Pass muster and close quarters, which are analyzable if you have the context
  • Prominent role, mixed message, and beyond repair, which are conventionalized but predictable
  • Where the truth lies and bottom-up processes, which can be understood by anyone who knows the meaning of the components
• Grammaticalization takes frequently replicated combinations and gradually hardens them into units that can then replicate on their own as combinatorial units
• When, if ever, do any two speakers speak exactly the same language? We could say that each speaker has an idiolect, a dialect with a single native user
• If we reposition Chomsky’s Merge, or something like it, as an early candidate for a transitional innovation on the way to modern languages, then we can reconcile early and late Chomsky by saying the “intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles” are not so much explicit rules as deeply embedded patterns in ways of speaking that consist of a series of improvements wrought by evolution, both cultural and genetic, in response to the success of protolanguages.

13. The Evolution of Cultural Evolution

• Animals have some memes but they do not, in general, open up opportunities for further memes the way words do. There is none of the snowballing effect like language permits.
• Displaced reference is a giant step in Design Space.
• Human culture started out profoundly Darwinian, but the exploration of Design Space gradually de-Darwinized, as it developed cranes that could be used to build further cranes that lifted still more cranes into operation, becoming a process composed of ever more comprehension.
• Everything changed once language got in place, with growing comprehension, more top-down control, and more efficient directed search in a diagonal direction from pure Darwinian toward the (ultimately unreachable) summit of intelligent design, as we used more and more semantic information and hence design improvements.
• For there to be a population explosion of memes, there has to have been a preexisting (or concurrently evolving) instinct to imitate or copy, which would pay for itself by providing some genetic fitness benefit to our ancestors. Chimpanzees and bonobos, for instance, don’t exhibit the interest, the focused attention, the imitative talent required to kindle the cumulative cultural wildfire that marks us off from the other hominids.
• We became apes with meme-infected brains. The memes must have included enough mutualists and commensals among the parasites not to kill off their hosts, though it is entirely possible that waves of meme infection did just that before one wave finally happened to be benign enough to secure a long-term foothold. Bad habits, but catchy bad habits, would have been a price worth paying for a few really good habits.
• Once verbal communication became not just a Good Trick but an obligatory talent for our species, there would be steady selective pressure in favor of organic modifications that enhanced or streamlined the process of language acquisition, such as:
  • altricity (prolonged infancy) - for education
  • gaze monitoring
  • shared attention
  • shared intention
• The germs and viruses that occupy our bodies fly beneath our radar in most cases, and memes probably did the same. Our ancestors could have used words competently, and benefited from having words, without words being manifest to them as words in their manifest image. They would notice words, but they wouldn’t have to notice their noticing.
• Still the natural home of memes is in our manifest image, not our scientific image (where the vitamins and gut flora are found). They are, in general, available for noticing. Unlike viruses and microbes, memes are affordances we are equipped from the outset to notice, to recognize, to remember, to respond to appropriately. And when we notice our memes and start to own them and reflect on them, we have moved form the original image to the manifest image, the world we live in and know that we live in.
• Grice’s intentional model of communication - Real Gricean communication is a real pain (as anyone who’s ever been forced to engage in it will angrily tell you).
• Everyday communication is hugely unlike Gricean communication. Ordinary language may originate evolutionarily speaking in events somewhat like real Gricean communication events, but a great deal has changed since then and in particular a great deal has changed in our brains.
• Grice’s point was, or should have been, that human communicators have the competence to exploit these features - and the competence to avoid being exploited by others exploiting these features. The acquisition of a language and memes in general is like the installation of a software app like Photoshop, with many layers that most amateur users never encounter. With human communication, there is much variation, and most uses of the system are rudimentary, routine, guided by habits that are themselves beneath the ken of most observers (and self-observers). But the tools admit of some very sophisticated applications. Some people are natural manipulators, impression creators, masters of indirection and almost subliminal blandishment, and others are bluff, direct, naive, unguarded in their speech - novice users of the tools - but neither kind of people have to comprehend the reasons why their everyday communication tools have all the options that they do.
• Some people, especially high-functioning people on the autism spectrum manages to devise, with much effort and ingenuity, a genuine theory of mind (TOM), to help them interpret the kaleidoscopic social world that most of uscan “perceive directly”.
• If Grice’s theory was a performance theory, it would be applicable to a small minority of speakers.
• The free-floating rationale of the design of some of our practices is unimagined by us. Grice can be seen to have worked it our, seen the “order which is there” when people engage in nonnatural meaning, and simply presented it as an account of their intentional states at the time - overendowing people with reasons!
• Proto-labelings pave the way for labelings, and proto-requests pave the way for requests. It may take hundreds of hours of conversation before the child really gets the hang of it, and even longer before they understand what they are doing when they are having a conversation.
• It is one thing to hear yourself speaking and quite another to notice that you're saying something. Think of the double-take, too late: "Did I just say that? Did I really utter those words?"
• Early language users may only gradually have come to recognize retrospectively, what they have been doing. There was a gradual, incremental process of growing competence leading to self-monitoring, leading to reflection, leadining to the emergence of new things to think about: words and other memes in our manifest image.
• How can talking to yourself help? We may know things in one part of our brain that cannot be accessed by other parts of the brain when needed. The practice of talking to yourself creates new channels of communication that may, on occasion, tease the hidden knowledge into the open. The next time you try to solve a puzzle, consider indulging in a vocalized soliloquy: it's a good way to notice gaps in your thinking.
• Once you have a habit of going into question-posing mode, all your R&D becomes much more top-down, using more directed search, and relying less on random variation and retention. The search space can be squeezed by using information already acquired in other contexts to rule out large regions as unlikely or irrelevant - but only if the thinker can be reminded of it in a timely fashion. Talking to yourself, asking questions, or even just the inner rehearsal of relevant words ("key words"), is an efficient way of probing the networks of associations attached to each word, reminding you of overlooked possibilities that are likely to be relevant to your current perplexity.
• the ideal of a conscious human mind is one in which all its knowledge is equi-accessible, always available when needed, never distorted, a pandemonium of experts ready to lend a timely hand. An adult mind can - on rare occasions - exert significant discipline on the crew, prioritizing, squelching wasteful competition, and organizing the search parties.
• The ability to treat whatever topic is under consideration as itself a thing to be examined, analyzed, inventoried. These are meta-competences, in which we use our thinking tools to think about not just food, shelter, doors, containers, dangers, and the other affordances of daily life but also about thinking about food and shelter, and about thinking about thinking about food and shelter.
• I can't just install my meme in your brain and let it run. I have to secure your attention, your cooperation, evn - to some degree - your trust, because you are and ought to be vigilant against possible manipulation by other agents.
• Human culture is accelerating at an ever swifter pace, since more directed search and more top-down problem-setting leads to more efficient problem-solving. Among the enabling innovations were such brilliant "inventions" as writing arithmetic, money, clocks, and calendars, each contributing a novel and fecund system of representation that provided our manifest image with ever more portable, detachable, manipulable, recognizable, memorable things to do things with, to exploit in our growing mastery of other things. These were, so far as anyone can tell, Darwinian "inventions", that is inventions without inventors or foresighted authors, more like bird wings than helicopter blades.
• The free-floating rationales of the features and structures of these inventions have been gradually captured, represented, and celebrated by later beneficiaries, retrospective reverse engineers who could explain to the world the particular utility of phonemic representation of words, zero as a number, hard-to-counterfeit coins, representing time with a line or a circle or a volume, using a fixed short cycle of names for days. All of these culturally transmitted artifacts, abstract or concrete, are unmistakeably well-designed tools for thinking, but they were not the brainchildren of particular individual intelligent designers.
• The lore that builds up around these artifacts is the product of retrospective theorizing, not original invention, in most cases, byproducts of attempts to pass on the skills to apprentices, second-hand commentaries that may improve the understanding of the whole process - or may be "false consciousness", persuasive but mistaken theories of the topic. Sometimes problem "solvers" stumble on solutions without noticing or while misunderstanding what they have done. There is a general generous tendency to credit innovators with more prior comprehension than they actually deserve.
• The undeniable attractions of the rationality assumption. When we look at traditional accounts of cultural evolution, in the neutral sense of cultural change over time, the dominant theme is the economic model - as if all human cultural evolution took place near the ceiling of comprehension.
• We are indeed living in the age of intelligent design, and it goes back several millenia - as far back as we have documentation. From Aristotle's day to the present, the explanations and justifications of our storehouse of general knowledge are a kind of Whig history, written by the victors, triumphantly explaining the discoveries and passing over the costly mistakes and misguided searches. This huge backlog of nearly invisible cultural accumulation plays a role not unlike that of all the organisms in all the species who died childless but whose competition tested the mettle of those whose descendants live on today. Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven had to grow their talents in a world that included lots of slightly less talented or maybe just unlucky composers.
• But even in the most bureaucratic and rationalized of institutions, there are patterns of change - of evolution - that resist capture by the economic model, that appear as mere noise or happenstance, driven not by the rational pressures of the marketplace, but by arms races of Darwinian memetic evolution.
• Descending from the ceiling of pure rationality and looking at the middle ground, where semi-comprehending agents engage in semi-well-designed projects that generate a host of goibles, fresh new targets to attract foible-exploiters, equally semi-comprehending agents who sense, with varying degrees of accuracy, that their interests will be well served by adopting memes, adapting memes, revising memes designed (by a mixture, now, of natural selection and intelligent design) to take advantage of the weaknesses they seem to detect in their quarry. These arms races are the latest wave in the creative arms races that have driven genetic evolution for 3bn years, and they differ mainly in involving a significant degree of comprehension to lubricate and accelerate the innovations and reactions. This comprehension is overwhelmingly the product of language and other media of communication.
• Darwinian evolution by natural selection, lacking all foresight, rolls through populations that also lack foresight. The survivors are lucky. With us, there are well-developed traditions of gathering and passing along new advice as soon as it becomes available.
• Political advisors and advertisers, trend analyzers, and speculators aggressively observe and perturb the memosphere, prospecting for new moves, new opportunities, new cracks in the armor of skepticism and caution that all but the most naive people use to protect themselves. Everybody wants to go viral with their pet messages, while finding new ways of ignoring the surfeit of attention-grabbers that assault them. This fluidity of information transmission in human culture, and its use in combatting, discrediting, discarding, but also revising, improving, adapting and spreading new memes pushed Darwinian meme evolution into the background.
• Pinker restricts our attention to cultural treasures only, and exaggerates the role of intelligent design in creating these. But we have a demand for reasons that outstrips our ability to feed it. The normativity of reason-giving imposes itself even when we are at a loss for an answer. There is an obligation to have reasons that you can give for your behavior. This is the intentional stance in action, always presuming rationality. There must be a good reason or we wouldn't be doing it this way! From when children begin to speak, we begin to give them reasons: Don't touch - hot! Don't touch - dirty! Eat - it's good for you! Obedience, even blind obedience, is useful as a basis; there will be time for explaining and arguing later. Because I said so! is an important stage. And then, as we grow up, we are introduced to the norms of human society, which include, preeminently the presumption of rationality in each other, especially in adults.
• This is an ineliminable feature of language use; the presumption of comprehension is the default, so much so that when it is violated, we can become disoriented. We lead our daily lives bathed in the presumption of understanding. We expect people to expect us to have reasons, reasons we can express for whatever it is we are trying to do, and we effortlessly make up reasons - often without realizing it - when a query catches us without a pre-though answer. It is against this background that memetics looks so wrongheaded, so subversive, as Pinker says. We are the reasoners! We are the intelligent designers! We are the explainers of everything. It is an affront to suggest that some of our brainstorms are just that: cerebral disturbances caused by invading memes duking it out for dominance. We are in charge!
• And we are in charge, to a gratifying degree, capable of accepting and rejecting the ideas we encounter, discarding or developing them for reasons we can usually express.
• When a GOFAI tells you something, you can, in principle, always demand a reason, and it should be forthcoming. But the advent of LLMs with deep learning and Bayesian methods means that they won't be able to tell us.
• Long before we had designer brains, we had brains that were acquiring design-without-a-designer in the form of invading memes.
• A curious feature of our appreciation of wit or genius is that we prefer not to know how it is done. Timing is important for almost any intelligent act - which is why it is intelligent to anticipate and presolve problems wherever possible. All intelligent responses depend on costly R1D, and it doesn't make much difference how the work is distributed in time so long as the effects are timely.
• We want our minds to be "inspired" and "uncanny".
• Whether the "inspiration" is 1% or 99%, it must be a feature of a vehicle for exploring Design Space that has its own nonsupernatural R&D history, typically an unfathomable combination of genes, education, life experience, mentoring, and who knows what else - diet, the change overhearing of a strain of music, emotional imbalances temporary or permanent, and, yes, sometimes "insanity" - mental illness or pathology that has fortuitous benefits (for the art world if not for the artist).
• The multi-dimensional Design Space in which the Tree of Life has grown has now generated a daughter Design Space, for our brainchildren, and it has more dimensions and more possibilities than its parent, and we are (so far) the only species that can explore it.
• Steven Pinker is right that the human brain really is a designer, but this should be seen not as an alternative to the memetic approach, but as a continuation of the memetic approach into the age of gradually de-Darwinizing semi-intelligent design. Our traditional vision of genius portrays it as completely unlike natural selection in its creative powers, and it is no accident that genius is often see as divine, supernatural, Godlike. After all, we created God in our own (manifest) image, a natural overextension of the intentional stance into the cosmos.
• Our ancestors at the dawn of human culture didn't need understanding to acquire the new competences, and they didn't gain much understanding from having the new competences. As memes accumulated and became more and more effective at inhabiting their hosts. The manifest image became populated with more and more affordances, more and more opportunities to track, more and more things to do things with, more and more things - words - to use as tools to help keep track of things, and so forth. Some memes were tools, some toys, some were distractions, some were crippling parasites. They all depended on cultural replication to survive.
• We can see how a gradual, growing sophistication of behavior could arise by small innovations, adjustments, and refinements, building excellently designed cultural habits and institutions without much help from intelligent design. "First learning, then adaptations from learning.
• One of the most valuable innovations was the practice of putting marks in the environment to take a load off personal memory, one of the first forays of "the extended mind".
• Within a few millenia, we have Socrates and Plato and Aristotle talking about talking, thinking about thinking, imagining republics, theorizing about tragedy and comedy. The age of intelligent design is in full swing. Merely Skinnerian and Popperian creatures couldn't keep up with Gregorian creatures, their minds overflowing with new tools for making ever swifter and more accurate assessments of the complex environment confronting them. Brute force trial and error would no longer suffice; you had to comprehend to compete.
• We swim in an ocean of semi-intelligently designed, hemi-semi-demi-intelligently designed, and evolutionarily designed competitors, all still dependent on getting into new human brains to continue their lineages.

Part III: Turning Our Minds Inside Out

14. Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion

• The big questions:
  • How do humans achieve "global" comprehension using "local" competences without invoking and intelligent designer?
  • Do our minds differ from the minds of other animals, and if so how and why,
  • How did our manifest image become manifest to us?
  • Why do we experience things the way we do?
• Evolution has endowed all living things with the wherewithal to respond appropriately to their particular affordances:
  • detecting and shunning the bad,
  • detecting and obtaining the good,
  • using the locally useful, and
  • ignoring everything else
• This yields competence without comprehension, Nature uses the "Need to Know" principle, and designs highly successful, adept, even cunning creatures who have no idea what they are doing or why. Reasons abound, but they are mostly free-floating rationales, undreamt of by those who benefit from them.
• We know that it is like something to be us for the simple reason that we talk about it every day. Our introspective divulgences are behaviors that are just as observable and measurable as our acts of eating, running, fighting, and loving.
• In addition to all the free-floating rationales, there are the anchored reasons we represent to ourselves and others. These reasons are things for us - we can do things with them, we can think about them, and this permits them to influence our overt behaviors in ways unknown in other organisms.
• Our habits of self-justification are ways of behaving (ways of thinking) that we acquire in the course of filling our heads with culture-borne memes, including, importantly, the havits of self-reproach and self-criticism. Thus we learn to plan ahead, reason-venturing and reason-criticizing to presolve some of life's problems, using thinking tools to design our own future acts. No other animal does that.
• Our thinking is enabled by the installation of a virtual machine made of virtual machines made of virtual machines, and the apps installed on these VMs make our competences (somewhat) accessible to other people and to ourselves, as guests in our own brains.
• Communication is the only behavior that requires an organism to self-monitor its own control system.
• In the pandemonium model, goals are represented only tacitly, in the feedback loops that guide each task controller, but without any global or higher level representation. Evolution will tend to optimize the interrupt dynamics of these modules, and nobody's the wiser. That is, there doesn't need to be anyone home to be wiser!
• Communication requires a central clearing house of sorts in order to buffer the organism from revealing too much about its current state to competitive organisms. Many see communication as grounded in manipulation rather than as purely cooperative behavior. The buffer creates opportunities for "guided deception" and, coincidentally, opportunities for self-deception, by creating for the first time in history, explicit and more globally accessible representations of its current state.
• For a century and more philosophers have stressed the "privacy" of our inner thoughts, but seldom have they bothered to ask why this is such a good design feature; (An occupational blindness of many philosophers: taking the manifest image as simply given and never asking what it might have been given to us for).
• All organisms have a rudimentary sense of self - the free-floating rationales of the behavior of all organisms are organized around self-protection.
• As we learn to communicate, we need to perceive ourselves in the execution of these behaviors, and this is through a "selfy" sense of self. We need to keep track of what thoughts are ours and whether we should share them with others.
• It is like something to be you because you have been enabled to tell us - or refrain from telling us - what it's like to be you!
• When we evolved into an us, a communicating community of organisms that can compare notes, we became the beneficiaries of a system of user-illusion that rendered versions of our cognitive processes - otherwise as imperceptible as our metabolic processes - accessible to us for purposes of communication.
• If joint attention to a shared topic is required, there have to be things - affordances - that both the first and the second person can attend to, and this is what makes our manifest image manifest to us.
• The experience of will, then, is the way our minds portray their operations to us, not their actual operation.
• Curiously, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second-person point of view of others' minds: we don't see or hear or feel the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all.
• Our access to our own thinking, and especially to the causation and dynamics of its subpersonal parts, is really no better than our access to our digestive processes. Consciousness is not just talking to yourself; it includes all the varieties of self-stimulation and reflection we have acquired and honed throughout our waking lives. These are not just things that happen in our brains, they are behaviors that we engage in, some instinctively (thanks to genetic evolution) and the rest acquired (thanks to cultural evolution and individual self-exploration).
• We cushion our ignorance with a false - but deeply tempting - model. We simply reproduce, with some kind of hand waving and apologies, our everyday model of how we know about what is going on outside us. The relative accessibility and familiarity of the outer part of the process of telling people what we see conceals us from the utter blank of the rest of the process. We have no more privileged access to that part of the process than we do to the complicated processes that maintain the connectivity between a telephone contact and us.
• Explanation has to stop somewhere, and here it is in the familiar mentalistic language of knowing and seeing, noticing and recognizing, and the like. The problem with the first-person point of view is that it is anchored in the manifest image, not the scientific image, and cannot avail itself of the resources of the scientific image. You can ask yourself what your subjective experience is, and see what you say. Then you can decide to endorse your own declaration, to believe it. You can do this by talking alound to yourself, talking silently to yourself, or "just thinking". We just look and learn, and that's all we know
• "Blurts" are proto-speech acts generated internally and tested to see whether they should be uttered overly.
• For Hume, the impression of causation we experience comes from inside, not outside. It is, itself, an effect of a habit of expectation that has been engrained in us over many waking hours. We are born with a sort of automatic causal sense, like a reflex, that is ready to "see" causation whenever our senses are confronted by the right kind of sequence of stimuli. This is part of the typically unexamined assumption that all perceptual representations must be flowing inbound from outside.
• Our ontology, in the elevantor sense, does a close-to-optimal job of cataloging the things in the world that matter to the behavior our brains have to control. Among the things in our Umwelt that matter to our well-being are ourselves! We ought to have good Bayesian expectations about what we will do next, what we will think next, and what we will expect next! And we do!
• Consciousness is a channel designed not for scientific investigation, but for handy, quick and dirty use in the rough and tumble of time-pressured life. Evolution has given us a gift that sacrifices literal truth for utility. The manifest image that has been cobbled together by genetic evolutionary processes over billions of years, and by cultural evolutionary processes over thousands of years, is an extremely sophisticated system of helpful metaphorical renderings of the underlying reality uncovered by the scientific image. The manifest image composes our Umwelt, the world we live in for almost all human purposes - aside from science.
• By presupposing that we normal folks are rational and hence have understanding (not just competence), we tacitly (and invalidly) endorse our everyday use of the intentional stance as the plain truth about human minds.
• By furnishing our minds with systems of representations, this architecture furnishes each of us with a perspective - a user-illusion - from which we have a limited, biased access to the workings of our brains, which we involuntarily misinterpret as a rendering (spread on the external world or on a private screen or stage) of both the world's external properties (colors, aromas, sounds, ;;;) and many of our own internal responses, (expectations satisfied, desires identified, etc). The incessant torrent of self-probing and reflection that we engage in during waking life is what permits us, alone, to comprehend our cometences and many of the reasons for the way the world is. Thanks to this infestation of culturally evolved symbiont information structures, our brains are empowered to be intelligent designers, of artifacts and of our own lives.

15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design

• Culture evolves through a mixture of dutiful obedience to tradition, heedless and opportunistic improvisation, and knowing, intentional, systematic R1D, irregularly punctuated with moments of "inspired" genius.
• Among the artifacts we have created is the concept of God, the Intelligent Designer, in our own image.
• We have created our environment, a perfectly real environment, but an artifact nonetheless, and we call it civilization.
• Language is the key invention, and it expands our individual cognitive powers by providing a medium for uniting them with all the cognitive powers of every clever human being who has ever thought.
• Asking better and better questions is the key to refining our search for solutions to our "mysteries", and language provides a practically limitless power to extend our grasp.
• John Cage: "When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, your enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas - all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you're lucky, even you leave."
• Groups can do things, and (arguably) understand things, that individuals cannot, and much of our power derives from that discovery.
• Alfred North Whitehead: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.
• We distinguish food from poison, and, like other locomoting organisms, we are extra sensitive to animacy (guided movements) in other moving things, and more particularly to the beliefs and desires (information and goals) that guide those movements, tracking as best we can who knows what and who wants what. This native bias is the genetic bias for the intentional stance, our practice of treating each other as rational agents guided by largely true beliefs and largely well-ordered desires. Our uninterrupted interest in these issues has generated the folk psychology that we rely on to make sense of one another. Our expectations are very frequently confirmed, which cements our allegiance to the intentional stance, and when our expectations are confounded, we tend to fall back on "explanations" of our failure that are at best inspired guesswork and at worst misleading mythmaking.
• The minds we prize most are the minds that are neither too predictable (boring, unchallenging) not too chaotic.
• We have begun designing and producing artifacts that can design and produce artifacts (that can design and produce artifacts...)
• Mainly, for the moment, we are producing artifacts that provide push-button automated processes that replace thousands of days of brilliant drudgery.
• The operators of these artifacts are using Darwin's methodical selection - the selective force of natural selection is focused through the nervous system of a discerning, purposeful, foresighted agent, using cascades of uncomprehending generate-and-test cycles that gradually refine the search process.
• Five tribes of machine learning:
  • Symbolists - the descendants of GOFAI - the only ones that aren’t bottom-up, needle-in-haystack-finding repetetive churnings that gradually, with great reliability, home in on good (or good enough) answers to daunting problems.
  • Connectionists - the descendants of logical neurons
  • Evolutionaries - genetic algorithms and their offspring
  • Bayesians - using practical algorithms for achieving the competences of hierarchical networks of Bayesian expectation-generators
  • Analogizers - the descendants of nearest-neighbor algorithms.
• Things we make by hand (boats, bridges, engines, symphonies) we can (more or less) control as we construct, understanding each step along the way. Things we make “the old-fashioned way” (children, grandchildren) defy our comprehension because of our obliviousness to the details of the processes that create them. Today, we are generating brain-children, brain-grandchildren, etc, that depend on processes we cannot follow in detail, even when we can prove that the results are trustworthy.
• We can think of machine learning as the inverse of programming, in the same way that the square root is the inverse of the square, or integration is the inverse of differentiation
• Domingos: “All knowledge - past, present, and future - can be derived from data by a single, universal learning algorithm.
• We have seen how Bayesian networks are excellent at teasing out the statistical regularities that matter to the organism - its affordances. Animal brains, equipped by natural selection with such networks, can guide the bodies they inhabit with impressive adroitness, but by themselves have scant ability to adopt novel perspectives. That, I have argued, requires an infestation of memes, cognitive competences (habits, ways) designed elsewhere and installed in brains, habits that profoundly change the cognitive architecture of those brains, turning them into minds, in effect. So far, the onlhy animals whose brains are thus equipped are Home Sapiens.
• Just as the eukaryotic cell came into existence in a relatively sudden instance of technology transfer, in which two independent legacies of R&D were united in a single stroke of symbiosis to create a big leap forward, the human mind, the comprehending mind is - and had to be - a product of symbiosis, uniting the fruits of two largely independent legacies of R&D. We start, I have argued, with animal brains that have been, to a considerable extent, redesigned to be excellent bases for thinking tools designed elsewhere - memes. And chief among them, words.
• We acquire most of our words unconsciously, in this sense: we were not aware of learning seven new words a day when we were young, and for most words - words that aren't explicitly introduced to us - we only gradually home in on their meanings thanks to unconscious processes that find the patterns in our early experience of these words. Once we have the words, we can begin using them, but without necessarily noticing what we are doing.
• For every word in your vocabulary, there was a debutante token, the first time you used it either in a public speech act or an internal monologue or musing. How often have you been aware of doing that with the new words that have entered your working vocabulary in, say, the last decade? Ever?
• Once words become our familiar tools, not mere sounds associated with contexts, we can start using them to create new perspectives on everything we encounter.
• It is the capacity to self-monitor, to subject the brain's patterns of reaction to yet another round (or two or three or seven rounds) of pattern discernment, that gives minds their breakthrough powers. Our meme-infest minds harbor users, critics of the raw deliverances of our animal brains without which we would be as naive as other mammals. Only human beings have the capacity for controlled, systematic, foresighted, hypothesis-testing curiosity.
• Like the preposterous plumage encouraged into existence by methodical pigeon fanciers, and the pathetic disabilities patiently engineered into various "toy" dog varieties, human beings can - often with the help of eager accomplices - shape their minds into grotesque artifacts that render them helpless or worse.
• Operators of intelligent artifacts are piloting the exploration machines they have designed through Design Space.
• A participant in a high-powered conversation has to be able to recognize patterns in its own verbal actions and reactions, to formulate hypothetical scenarios, to get jokes, call bluffs, change the subject when it gets tedious, explain its earlier speech acts when queried, and so forth. All the discriminations that must be somehow noticed in order to provide the settings for the mental and ultimately verbal actions taken, some kind of heightened influence that not only retrospectively distinguishes what is noticed from its competitors at the time but also, just as importantly, contributes to the creation of a noticer, a relatively long-lasting executive, not a place in the brain but a sort of political coalition that can be in control over the subsequent competitions for some period of time.
• My claim, then, is that deep learning (so far) discriminates but doesn't notice. The data it analyzes does not have relevance for the system except as more "food" to "digest".
• They don't have the capacity to decide what to search for and why, given one's current aims. It is the absence of practical reason, of intelligence harnessed to pursue diverse and shifting and self-generated ends, that (currently) distinguishes the truly impressive Watson from ordinary sane people. If and when Watson ever reaches the level of sophistication where it can enter fully into the human practice of reason-giving and reason-evaluating, it will cease to be merely a tool and become a colleague.
• Human imagination, the capacity we have to envision realities that are not accessible to us by simple hill climbing from where we currently are, does seem to be a major game-changer.
• The adjacent possible: many more places in Design Space are adjacent to us because we have evolved the ability to think about them and either seek them or shun them.
• How concerned should we be that we are dumbing ourselves down by our growing reliance on intelligent machines?
• So far there is a fairly sharp boundary between:
  • Machines that enhance our "peripheral" intellectual powers (of perception, algorithmic calculation, and memory)
  • Machines that at least purport to replace our "central" intellectual powers of comprehension (including imagination), planning, and decision-making.
• The real danger is that we will over-estimate the comprehension of our latest thinking tools, prematurely ceding authority to them far beyond their competence.
• When you are interacting with a computer, you should know you are interacting with a computer.
• We should hope that new cognitive prostheses will continue to be designed to be parasitic, to be tools, not collaborators.
• We may begin to doubt the value - or at least the preeminent value - of understanding.
• But what about the huge system that makes this all possible: the highways, the oil refineries, the automakers, the insurance companies, the banks, the stock market, the government? Our civilization has been running smoothly - with some serious disruptions - for thousands of years, growing in complexity and power. Could it break down? Yes, it could, and to whome could we then turn to help us get back on the road? You can't buy a new civilization if yours collapses, so we had better keep the civilization we have running in good repair. Who, though, are the reliable mechanics? The politicians, the judges, the bankers, the industrialises, the journalists, the professors ) the leaders of our society, in short - are much more like the average motorist than you might like to think: doing their local bit to steer their part of the whole contraption, while blissfully ignorant of the complexities on which the whole system depends. According to Paul Seabright, the optimistic tunnel vision with which they operate is not a deplorable and correctable flaw in the system, but an enabling condition. This distribution of partial comprehension is not optional. The edifices of social construction that shape our lives in so many regards depend on our myopic confidence that their structure is sound and needs no attention from us.
• Human cooperation is a delicate and remarkable phenomenon, quite unlike the almost mindless cooperation of termites and depends on our ability to engage each other within the "space of reasons", on trust, a sort of almost invisible social glue that makes possible both great and terrible projects, and this trust is not, in fact, a natural instinct hard-waired by evolution into our brains. It is much too recent for that.
• Civilization is a work in progress, and we abandon our attempt to understand it at our peril.
• Evolution is two realms, genetic and cultural, has created in us the capacity to know ourselves. but in spite of several millenia of ever-expanding intelligent design, we still are just staying afloat in a flood of puzzles and problems.

Conclusion

• Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning - no longer do we have to see mind as the cause of everything else.
  • Reasons without reasoners, the free-floating rationales answering both How come? and What for?
  • Competence without comprehension
• Turing's strange inversion of reasoning
  • Information as design worth stealing
  • A difference that makes a difference
• Being a Darwinian about Darwinism.
• Decentralized, distributed control by neurons equipped to fend for themselves.
• Words striving to reproduce, and other memes, would provoke adaptations, such as revisions in brain structure in coevolutionary response.
• Thousands of Gibsonian affordances - that enriched the ontologies of human beings and provided in turn further selection pressure in favor of adaptations - thinking tools - for keeping track of all these new opportunities.
• For human comprehension, a huge array of thinking tools is required. Cultural evolution de-Darwinized itself with its own fruits.
• The manifest image, a special kind of artifact, partly genetically designed and partly culturally designed, a particularly effective user-illusion for helping time-pressured organisms move adroitly through life, availing ourselves of (over)simplifications that create an image of the world we live in.
• Human minds, however intelligent and comprehending, are not the most powerful imaginable cognitive systems. Our current state, both individually and as societies, is both imperfect and impermanent.
• There is not just coevolution between memes and genes. There is codependence between our minds' top-down reasoning abilities and the bottom-up uncomprehending talents of our animal brains.