00:00:23.920 Welcome to Topcast where we are up to chapter 15 of the beginning of infinity titled
00:00:29.360 the Evolution of Culture. Here in this chapter what we're learning about is a number of
00:00:35.280 quite new ways in which David Deutsch approaches the spread of ideas. What we're going to talk about
00:00:42.560 in particular are what are known as memes. Now a meme is a technical term for an
00:00:49.520 IZ that tends to get itself replicated, that tends to get itself copied so that it spreads through
00:00:56.320 different minds through different people. Now this idea of a meme for anyone who's new to this
00:01:02.560 is somewhat different to the idea of a meme that appears on the internet, although memes that
00:01:07.360 appear on the internet, those funny things, those funny cartoons that are shared between people,
00:01:12.400 they are themselves memes of a kind, but when we talk about memes, when we speak about memes,
00:01:17.840 we're speaking about a much broader category of ideas and David's going to really refine
00:01:24.240 not only what our understanding of memes are, the mental or abstract analog of a gene,
00:01:31.680 we're not only going to refine our understanding of what that is, but importantly for him in the
00:01:35.840 central, one of the central themes of the beginning of infinity is how it is that memes are
00:01:41.680 replicated under what conditions do they tend to get replicated and under what conditions do they
00:01:46.960 not tend to get replicated and what is the process by which they get replicated. Now this
00:01:53.200 centrality of the idea of memes for the beginning of infinity, I've touched on before with
00:01:59.680 respect to how it is brought up in the beginning of infinity. One important way in which it comes
00:02:04.080 up in the beginning of infinity is the discussion of and the distinction between static versus
00:02:09.520 dynamic societies. As I often do sometimes in these podcasts, I do tend to steal the thunder
00:02:16.720 of the main point that's coming later and I'm about to do that now. So let me preface everything
00:02:22.160 that we're about to talk about with the idea that perhaps there can be no greater civilizational
00:02:28.640 challenge than to ensure that we become dynamic societies and avoid being static societies.
00:02:36.080 That this is the one fundamental thing which can ensure either you will definitely go
00:02:42.160 extinct as a civilization or you have the potential to have an unbounded open-ended
00:02:47.600 future of knowledge creation before you. The distinction rests upon whether or not the culture
00:02:54.560 is saturated with anti-rational memes. Anti-rational memes are means that tend to disable
00:03:00.640 the capacity of their holders to criticize themselves. So if you feel as though there are
00:03:06.320 ideas in your society that you may not criticize and therefore may not seek improvement of,
00:03:12.240 then this can tend to slow down the rate of progress in your society. In the worst cases,
00:03:17.840 it can stop progress altogether and we can end up in a static society and then we might even
00:03:23.680 get regression whether society moves backwards in various ways. On the other hand, if we can avoid
00:03:30.400 the ideas that tend to cause us not to criticize things, then we can help to inculcate a more
00:03:37.600 dynamic society, a more open-ended society, a society that welcomes criticism, a society that
00:03:43.440 wants to create new things rather than remain satisfied with the status quo. Okay, so after that,
00:03:52.160 let's get straight into the reading and David writes at the beginning of this chapter,
00:03:56.480 subtitled, ideas that survive. A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to
00:04:03.600 behave alike in some ways. By ideas, I mean any information that can be stored in people's brains
00:04:11.120 and can affect their behaviour. Thus, the shared values of a nation, the ability to communicate
00:04:16.640 in a particular language, the shared knowledge of an academic discipline, and the appreciation
00:04:20.720 of a given musical style are all, in this sense, sets of ideas that define cultures.
00:04:25.920 Many of them are in explicit. In fact, all ideas have some in explicit component,
00:04:31.040 since even our knowledge of the meanings of words is held largely in explicitly in our minds.
00:04:35.840 Physical skills, such as the ability to write a bicycle, have an especially high in explicit
00:04:41.280 content, as do philosophical concepts such as freedom and knowledge. The distinction between
00:04:46.720 explicit and in explicit is not a way sharp. For instance, a poem or a satire may be explicitly
00:04:54.000 about one subject, while the audience in a particular culture will reliably end without being
00:04:58.880 told, interpret it as being about a different one. The world's major cultures, including nations,
00:05:04.640 languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions, have been created
00:05:09.840 incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years. Most of the ideas that define them,
00:05:14.960 including the in explicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another.
00:05:20.400 That makes these ideas means ideas that are replicators. Pause their my reflection.
00:05:26.240 So already a lot has been said about this explicit and in explicit distinction.
00:05:31.520 This was made much earlier on in the beginning of infinity, and you can go back and look at,
00:05:35.760 or hopefully you've got the book at the beginning of infinity. If you haven't, I urge you to go
00:05:39.600 out and buy it. Have a look at the index and have a look at what the meaning is of explicit
00:05:44.720 versus in explicit. Explicit, of course, has something to do with the capacity to be able to be
00:05:51.120 put into words. Certain kinds of ideas have a highly explicit content. Scientific theories have
00:05:58.240 highly explicit content. Not to say there's no in explicit content, but it's highly explicit.
00:06:03.920 A recipe for baking a cake will be highly explicit, and the more explicit it is, the better,
00:06:10.080 because then you'll be able to replicate the picture of the cake that's in the recipe book.
00:06:13.760 On the other hand, there's a whole bunch of ideas that have a much greater in explicit content,
00:06:20.560 and sporting skills are like this. Roger Federer, who can serve a tennis ball really,
00:06:26.320 really well, has knowledge of how to do that. Okay, yes, he has certain genetic
00:06:32.400 propensities to be able to do that as well. But importantly, he has knowledge of how to serve
00:06:37.440 the tennis ball really well. We'll have to return the tennis ball really, really well.
00:06:41.120 And no doubt, he could probably coach someone and train them so they can improve,
00:06:44.960 but it's unlikely they'll ever become as good as he is. Even if their genetics was that good,
00:06:49.680 people who were regarded as great geniuses in many fields have lots and lots of
00:06:54.320 in explicit knowledge. The great mathematician that I've mentioned recently, Romano John,
00:06:59.760 he would have had a lot of in explicit knowledge about how it is that he arrived at the
00:07:04.080 Theorems that he did, or how it was that he arrived at the Theorems that he did.
00:07:08.080 He wasn't able to explain fully what the process was that he went through. In other words,
00:07:12.480 it's in explicit. He couldn't put it into words. That doesn't mean that it is imprincible
00:07:16.720 impossible to put into words. It's just that he didn't know how. And so it's true of many,
00:07:21.600 many other things in our lives. And when David says there that words, the definition of words,
00:07:26.800 has lots of in explicit content, all you need to do is to consider trying to explain to someone
00:07:31.920 who is visually impaired, or completely without sight, what something looks like.
00:07:37.840 If you try to explain what the color red looks like to someone who's never seen it before,
00:07:43.280 you will suddenly, it will come down on you with full force, the idea that this word has
00:07:48.400 lots of in explicit content. We all know, to some extent, what the word red means. Certainly when we
00:07:56.960 say the sky is blue, that has lots and lots of in explicit content when we use the term blue.
00:08:03.920 All of us agree. But to a person who's never actually seen the blue sky before,
00:08:08.480 trying to explain to them what that sensation of blue is like is going to leave you floundering.
00:08:14.720 You're going to realize that there is just a barrier, an in explicit barrier between you
00:08:21.200 and the person of trying to put into words what that feeling, that sensation, that observation,
00:08:27.440 that sight is actually like back to the book. Most of the ideas that define them,
00:08:32.800 including the in explicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another.
00:08:39.120 That makes these ideas, memes, ideas that are replicators. Nevertheless, cultures change. People
00:08:46.880 modify cultural ideas in their minds and sometimes they pass on the modified versions.
00:08:51.440 Inevitably, there are unintentional modifications as well, partly because of straightforward error,
00:08:56.080 and partly because in explicit ideas are hard to convey accurately. There is no way to download
00:09:01.840 them directly from one brain to another, like computer programs. Even native speakers of a language
00:09:07.280 will not give identical definitions of every word, so it can be only rarely, if ever,
00:09:12.320 that two people hold precisely the same cultural idea in their minds. That is why,
00:09:17.600 when the founder of a political or philosophical movement, or a religion, dies, or even before,
00:09:24.160 schisms typically happen. The movements most devoted followers are often shocked to discover
00:09:29.520 that they disagree about what its doctrines really are. It is not much different when a religion
00:09:34.000 has a holy book in which the doctrines are stated explicitly. Then there are disputes about the
00:09:38.240 meanings of the words and the interpretation of the sentences, pause there just my brief reflection
00:09:44.240 on that. This here is an interesting criticism of dogma. In fact, it's a withering criticism
00:09:50.240 of dogma because it suggests that even if you were to complain that let's say a particular
00:09:56.640 holy book is the inherent word of God. That has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever
00:10:03.120 with your capacity to understand it inherently, or your capacity to pass it on to another person,
00:10:10.000 inherently. You remain, of course, always a fallible person, so that even if you had access to the
00:10:15.760 perfect knowledge, nonetheless, because you are a person, you are a human being, you are fallible,
00:10:22.720 you are subject to error, your identification of a particular work as being inherent, as being perfect,
00:10:29.360 as being coming straight from the creator of the universe, has to be filtered through your mind,
00:10:35.120 your imperfect mind, out into the rest of the world. So if you stand on a street corner preaching
00:10:41.040 that this is the word of the Lord, well, what you have to understand is that the message that
00:10:45.360 you're passing on is not perfect. The word of the Lord in the book might very well be perfect,
00:10:51.680 according to your lights, but that does not mean that you're reading of it as perfect.
00:10:55.600 You might be emphasizing things differently. In fact, the particular copy of the inherent word of God
00:11:00.400 you might have might itself be errant. He filled with riddled with errors, of course,
00:11:05.440 just as an aside to this. There are general purpose criticisms from the religious people
00:11:10.400 of that kind of perspective. One would be that the higher being, divinely inspires you and
00:11:17.920 prohibits you from making any errors. However, this would be a general purpose
00:11:22.640 objection that anyone could make, even where two people have competing interpretations of the
00:11:28.320 same inherent word of the Lord, back to the book. Thus, a culture is in practice defined,
00:11:34.880 not by a set of strictly identical memes, but by a set of variants that cause slightly different
00:11:40.240 characteristic behaviors. Some variants tend to have the effect that their holders are eager to enact
00:11:45.760 or talk about them. Others less so. Some are easier than others for potential recipients to
00:11:51.120 replicate in their own minds. These factors and others affect how likely each variant of a meme
00:11:56.560 is to be passed unfaithfully. A few exceptional variants, once they appear in one mind,
00:12:01.840 tend to spread throughout the culture with very little change in meaning, as expressed in the
00:12:06.560 behaviors they cause. Such memes are familiar to us because long-lived cultures are composed of them,
00:12:12.560 but nevertheless, in another sense, they are a very unusual type of idea. For most ideas,
00:12:18.720 are short-lived. A human mind considers many ideas for everyone that it ever acts upon,
00:12:24.640 and only a small proportion of those cause behavior that anyone else notices. And of those,
00:12:30.000 only a small proportion are ever replicated by anyone else. So the overwhelming majority of
00:12:36.000 ideas disappear within a lifetime or less. The behavior of people in a long-lived culture is
00:12:41.600 therefore determined partly by recent ideas that will soon become extinct and partly by long-lived
00:12:47.200 memes. Exceptional ideas that have been accurately replicated many times in succession
00:12:53.760 pause their my reflection. That was extremely dense. There was a lot of information going on there,
00:12:59.840 and I think it behooves us to go back and to just consider what David was saying.
00:13:06.640 Essentially, the idea here is that for any individual person, an individual mind,
00:13:13.760 we come up with a vast number of ideas throughout the course of any day, and only a few of them
00:13:20.000 do we have an act upon. We think, maybe I should have a coffee now, but maybe we don't act on it,
00:13:25.760 we just have that idea. Maybe we have the idea that, gee, I really should finish off
00:13:30.560 that essay I've been writing, but never actually act on it. Maybe I think of all the different
00:13:35.600 jobs in which I could do, and I only act on one of those. There's lots of ideas that remain
00:13:42.080 inside a particular person's mind, and never cause any outward manifestation. There's no
00:13:47.520 outward sign that you ever had that idea. There's no behavior that goes along with that idea.
00:13:52.960 But for some, there is a behavior. Sometimes you really do write the essay. Sometimes you really do
00:13:58.720 take the job. Sometimes you go for the walk. Sometimes you decide to take up dancing, so on and so forth.
00:14:04.480 Sometimes the ideas you have cause behaviors. David says, so far we've got two sorts. The
00:14:10.800 kind of ideas, the overwhelming majority of which don't cause any behavior at all. Some small
00:14:15.600 proportion of your ideas actually cause you to do something different. There are ideas you think,
00:14:20.240 yes, I'll act on that, and you actually do, and there's some behavior that goes along with it.
00:14:24.560 Then there's an even smaller proportion that the behavior happens, and someone else notices it
00:14:31.200 as well. If you're at home on your own and you go and get a glass of water, well then no one else
00:14:37.600 is ever going to notice that, and it's an idea you have in your head, I feel like a glass of water,
00:14:42.400 you go and get the glass of water. It's caused a behavior, so already it's a rare kind of idea,
00:14:47.760 but no one has noticed it. So there is a small proportion of ideas where someone else does
00:14:52.800 indeed notice. You turn up to the job interview, and you've decided not to wear a tie, let's say,
00:14:59.120 if you're a man, or you decide to turn up shabbily. So people have noticed this particular
00:15:02.960 behavior in you. So then we get to the even smaller proportion of ideas, ideas that you have,
00:15:10.800 that cause a behavior, that are noticed by someone else, and then other people replicate them.
00:15:17.200 So this is an exceedingly small fraction of all ideas that ever exist. If you're the first person
00:15:24.960 to enact a particular kind of fashion, and someone else copies that fashion, that's very rare
00:15:31.280 indeed. That's a very rare kind of idea indeed. So if you're a fashion designer and you're sitting
00:15:36.000 at home and you think I've got a design for a new hat, it's a strange-looking, tall and thin
00:15:41.840 red top hat, but you never actually design it. Well then that's an idea of the first kind.
00:15:47.840 There might be an idea of the second kind where you decide, well I'm actually going to design,
00:15:53.120 create, build this strange hat, and you do, but then you destroy it because you think it's ugly.
00:16:00.480 That's an idea of the second kind. And then there's the idea of the third kind where you
00:16:05.120 think about it, design it, build it, and keep it and wear it, and everyone else notices.
00:16:12.320 But that don't particularly like it. And so you realize that this is a bad idea. But at least they've
00:16:16.800 noticed, and then there's the fourth kind of idea, where it takes off as a fashion where other people
00:16:22.000 decide to replicate that idea, they're interested in your new design for a hat, and so they all
00:16:27.600 start wandering around in your new hat. That's the idea that is replicated by someone else.
00:16:33.920 But as David says, the overwhelming majority of ideas disappear within a lifetime or less.
00:16:39.600 One of our purposes here in this chapter is to try to tease out what are the reasons why some ideas
00:16:46.800 do end up in that fourth category of getting replicated, affecting people's ideas, but persisting
00:16:53.920 over time and causing a change in behavior that actually has some longer lasting effect on the
00:17:00.960 culture, as opposed to certain other ideas that don't have such an effect. And so back to the book
00:17:07.280 and David writes, a fundamental question in the study of cultures is, what is it about a long
00:17:13.360 lived meme that gives it this exceptional ability to resist change throughout many replications?
00:17:20.480 Another central to the theme of this book is, when such memes do change, what are the conditions
00:17:27.440 under which they can change for the better? The idea that cultures evolve is at least as old as
00:17:34.160 that of evolution in biology. But most attempts to understand how they evolve have been based on
00:17:39.680 misunderstandings of evolution. For example, the Communist thinker Karl Marx believed that his
00:17:45.040 theory of history was evolutionary, because it spoke of a progression through historical stages
00:17:50.960 determined by economic laws of motion. But the real theory of evolution has nothing to do with
00:17:57.440 predicting the attributes of organisms from those of its ancestors. Marx also thought that Darwin's
00:18:03.600 theory of evolution provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.
00:18:08.320 He was comparing his idea of inherent conflict between socio-economic classes with the supposed
00:18:14.240 competition between biological species. Fascist ideology, such as narcissism, likewise used
00:18:20.560 garbled or inaccurate evolutionary ideas such as the survival of the fittest to justify violence.
00:18:26.960 But in fact, the competition in biological evolution is not just between different species,
00:18:32.160 but between variants of genes within a species, which does not resemble the supposed class struggle
00:18:37.600 at all. It can give rise to violence or other competition between species, but it can also produce
00:18:43.680 co-operation, such as the symbiosis between flowers and insects, and all sorts of intricate
00:18:48.880 combinations of the two, pause their myreflection. This is just an aside, and stretches all the way
00:18:54.240 back to chapters that spoke more directly about evolution. But this idea of the survival of the
00:18:59.760 fittest, I don't think it's something that Darwin himself ever said, and it is actually a tautology
00:19:05.120 of a kind, because if we ask, what is defined as the fittest? So if evolution by natural selection
00:19:13.840 is the survival of the fittest, then what are the fittest? Well, the fittest by definition are
00:19:19.840 those that survive. And so what then are the ones that survive? Well, the ones only that are the
00:19:26.880 fittest. So this doesn't really help anything. It doesn't really help to explain what's going on
00:19:32.080 in evolution by natural selection. The true explanation is, of course, to do with the capacity of
00:19:38.320 genes to replicate in the circumstances under which they will replicate the environments in which
00:19:43.360 they find themselves, are fittest, namely the environments where they're going to be replicated.
00:19:49.040 And the reason they get replicators is because they're selfish. In other words, that is their
00:19:52.960 sole objective is to replicate themselves, not because they're consciously got that feeling of
00:19:57.600 selfishness or anything like that, but because that essentially is what genes do, they try to have
00:20:03.120 themselves replicated. That's their purpose in existence. And more substantively on this passage here
00:20:12.320 is indeed there is, it's a form of scientism, isn't it? It's this idea that because something is
00:20:20.400 true in science, because there's an element of truth within this, that obviously,
00:20:26.000 evolution by natural section is a true theory. It's correct. It's an explanation of how biological
00:20:30.960 organisms work. That does not mean it can be extrapolated into domains outside of biology.
00:20:37.440 It's not applicable in those other domains. Mark thought it was, but that's incorrect.
00:20:42.960 And the reason it's incorrect is because the unit of selection is a gene, which he never knew
00:20:47.280 anyway, but moreover, as David has said, it's just a metaphor. He was using a metaphor and taking
00:20:54.160 the metaphor too seriously, comparing evolution of biological organisms to the way in which a state
00:21:01.440 is going to evolve over time to change over time. So he saw change going on in the natural world,
00:21:07.840 and so he thought, therefore, change going on society, the laws or the scientific principles
00:21:13.520 that discover, that obtain in this particular area, that are not predictive, but are explanatory
00:21:20.000 in this particular area, are going to be explanatory in this particular area, but worse than that,
00:21:24.960 he thought that you could use this to predict things. And as David quite rightly says there,
00:21:30.160 although we have this good explanatory theory in biology, to some extent, there are gaps,
00:21:35.040 again, go back to earlier chapters in the beginning of infinity all about this,
00:21:39.760 about how we do indeed have gaps in our understanding of evolution by natural selection. That's not
00:21:44.640 to say it's false. There are gaps in every single scientific theory. It's not to say that they are
00:21:50.400 utterly false, I should say, in every single respect. They're not. They're our best understandings
00:21:55.200 at the moment. However, one part of evolution by natural selection does indeed say that we cannot
00:22:02.880 predict what the organisms are going to evolve into in the future. It doesn't allow us to do
00:22:08.720 that kind of prediction. But Marx, we understood what evolution by natural selection was all about,
00:22:15.440 and thought that he could not only take it as a metaphor for how societies undergo change over time,
00:22:24.000 but thought he could use it to predict what kind of change would occur over time.
00:22:29.520 He thought that he could predict the growth of knowledge, which as we know is not possible.
00:22:34.400 Okay, let's go back to the book and David writes. Although Marx and the fascists assumed
00:22:39.040 false theories of biological evolution, it is no accident that analogies between society
00:22:44.000 and the biosphere are often associated with grim visions of society. The biosphere is a grim place.
00:22:50.800 It is rife with plunder, deceit, conquest, enslavement, starvation, and extermination.
00:22:55.680 Hence those who think that cultural evolution is like that end up either opposing it,
00:23:00.800 advocating a static society, or condoning that kind of immoral behavior as necessary or inevitable.
00:23:06.560 Pause there. There's a lot to unpack there as well. And this is going to lead into the next chapter,
00:23:11.760 and the subsequent chapters, and an underlying part of David Deutsch's philosophy,
00:23:17.280 which is that the vision of the natural world that we are presented with sometimes today
00:23:22.240 as being this clean, pristine provider of resources, a provider of our safety, and our home,
00:23:32.960 and our comfort. The natural world is the ideal, and we come along and we pollute it and ruin it
00:23:40.400 and destroy it. This vision that we are sometimes presented with today is utterly false.
00:23:45.600 And I guess at least to say something on the side of Marx here, at least he kind of understood
00:23:52.800 that the biosphere was indeed a grim place, and did entail all of these awful things like starvation
00:24:00.320 and extermination, because that's true. Nature is read into thin claw. It is a cruel place.
00:24:07.920 If you're concerned about the suffering of animals, then you should be concerned about trying
00:24:12.560 to prevent predators from getting hold of their prey. But then of course, if you do that,
00:24:17.280 you're caught in a bind because that's going to cause the suffering of predators. So perhaps we
00:24:22.400 should have meat farms for predators, and perhaps we should fend off all the predators from all
00:24:27.200 of the prey. And our task as human beings should be if we want to prevent the suffering of other
00:24:33.200 conscious creatures like animals, literally imprison these animals, or in some other way corral
00:24:40.000 them so that they don't have much to do with one another. In fact, they should be kept individually
00:24:44.480 separate from each one from another, because male animals will fight amongst themselves. So if you're
00:24:49.280 really interested in the supposed suffering of animals, or concerned about bloodshed among animals,
00:24:56.320 then we should do what we can to protect animals from themselves. Because of all the harms that
00:25:01.200 animals suffer, surely the suffering at the hands of other animals is what we should be most
00:25:06.800 concerned about, because that is the worst form of suffering that any animal undergoes. Whatever the
00:25:11.760 case, people might very well have these competing ideas in their mind. On the one hand, the natural
00:25:18.400 environment is the ideal pristine place, and that's what human civilization should be trying to
00:25:25.040 preserve the natural environment, because it's the ideal. And yet on the other hand, keep the competing
00:25:31.680 idea in their mind that in fact, evolution by natural selection, and the animal kingdom is all about
00:25:40.240 base concerns about avoiding starvation, about deceiving one another, and about killing your prey
00:25:47.680 and avoiding the predators. So we've got two visions. The natural world has been grim and awful,
00:25:54.640 and we don't want to be like that. And the natural world has been the pristine ideal towards
00:25:59.680 that we need to protect. So Marx has used this analogy between the truth of the natural world as
00:26:08.400 being an awful place. And in fact, as the worldview of David Deutsch would teach us that in fact,
00:26:16.160 it's the natural world that we have to protect ourselves from. It can be something as grandiose
00:26:22.640 as the asteroid heading towards us, perfectly naturally, but we want to avoid that. And so
00:26:28.000 artificially, we're going to have to create the knowledge to push it out of the way. Or it can be
00:26:33.280 something more day to day, the thunderstorm that's going to happen, the hail that's going to fall
00:26:38.400 from the sky, the cold temperatures that are going to come tonight. We need to protect ourselves
00:26:43.120 from that. And we're going to need technology to do that. We're going to need houses. We're going
00:26:47.840 to need air conditioning. We're going to need energy in order to protect ourselves from
00:26:52.160 the worst aspects of the natural environment, the perfectly natural viruses and bacteria that are
00:26:59.760 infecting our bodies in all sorts of awful ways we want to protect ourselves from. So nature is
00:27:06.320 not the ideal that we wish to protect. It's not us that are a danger to nature. Or insofar as we
00:27:11.680 are a danger to nature, we are only a danger of nature in order to respond to the constant
00:27:18.000 slings and arrows that nature is trying to sail us with. And so we need to do things to protect
00:27:24.960 ourselves. And indeed, the life forms that we care about are pets and other animals and so on and
00:27:30.960 so forth. Because hurricanes are as indiscriminately going to destroy human homes and buildings and
00:27:38.240 lives as they will animal homes and lives. Okay, let's continue in David Wright's. Arguments by analogy
00:27:45.360 are fallacies. Almost any analogy between two things contains some grain of truth. But one
00:27:52.160 cannot tell what that is until one has an independent explanation for what is analogous to what
00:27:57.280 and why. The main danger in the biosphere culture analogy is that it encourages one to conceive of
00:28:03.200 the human condition in a reductionist way that obliterates the high level distinctions that are
00:28:07.920 essential for understanding it, such as those between mindless and creative determinism and choice
00:28:12.960 right and wrong. Such distinctions are meaningless at the level of biology. Indeed, the analogy
00:28:17.920 is sometimes drawn for the very purpose of debunking the common sense idea of human beings as causal
00:28:22.640 agents with the ability to make moral choices and to create new knowledge for themselves.
00:28:27.600 Pause their mind reflection. This is a contentious point. And I guess people who believe in a
00:28:37.440 deterministic worldview when it comes to society must reject that. And so it is controversial in
00:28:45.280 many, many ways. But to me, and I think to many people listening, it will seem like a deep truth
00:28:55.520 about what human beings are. Human beings as causal agents with the ability to make moral choices
00:29:02.080 and to create new knowledge for themselves. All of those things kind of are tied up together. This
00:29:08.240 capacity to create knowledge means that you are a causal agent. It means that you are bringing
00:29:13.440 into the world something that wasn't there before. And because it wasn't there before, now you
00:29:20.000 have a wider array of choices to make. There are more choices available before you about what to do
00:29:26.640 because you've literally bought into being. You've literally created a piece of knowledge that
00:29:30.320 was not there before. Any discovery in physics which leads to a piece of new technology
00:29:36.720 is something that allows us to therefore choose to use that technology in the future.
00:29:42.000 My go-to example is being fish and energy. This idea that prior to the advent of nuclear physics,
00:29:50.400 prior to scientists fully understand that there was energy, potential energy, held within the
00:29:57.440 nucleus of all atoms. Prior to us understanding that there was no possible way to conceive of
00:30:04.400 how to get energy out of the nuclei of atoms. But once we knew there was energy in there,
00:30:10.000 then the process could begin of trying to extract that energy in some way,
00:30:14.880 and it turned out by splitting the atom, we could do that, firing neutrons at the atom,
00:30:19.280 cause large nuclei to split apart and to release lots and lots of energy. And that energy could be
00:30:26.000 gathered together, because it comes out of heat energy and you put it into some water and
00:30:30.560 of course the water deboiled and the water would turn into steam, the steam can spin a turbine
00:30:34.400 and the turbine can cause a generator to make electricity and so on and so forth. But prior to that
00:30:40.400 knowledge being created about the nucleus, we didn't have the choice. We didn't have the choice
00:30:46.160 about building a fish and reactor or building a coal-fired power station. We now do have that choice.
00:30:53.520 And so therefore it becomes a moral choice. Should we build this kind of energy source,
00:30:59.520 or that kind of energy source? And of course today that is a huge area of discussion.
00:31:05.040 The lesson behind that is of course, that they will always be new kinds of energy, new solutions
00:31:11.680 to how to create energy that will come along. And so any debate about, well we shouldn't use
00:31:17.440 that kind of energy because it could cause pollution, or that kind of energy because it could lead
00:31:22.000 to a dangerous accident. Avoid the simple point that all kinds of energy are going to be
00:31:30.880 transition kinds of energy. There are still places in the world where we are using wood in order
00:31:37.280 to generate electricity. Rather those places are, they do still exist. People have transitioned into
00:31:43.120 coal and from coal to nuclear. And so it will continue to happen. But in the meantime,
00:31:48.800 artificially forcing everyone to use a particular kind of energy ignores the fact that if we want to
00:31:53.840 make progress fast, we should probably use the cheapest, most efficient, highest energy density
00:32:00.960 form of energy production that we can. Because it won't be too long in the future that someone
00:32:05.680 will develop and even better, more efficient, more highly energy dense way of generating electricity.
00:32:11.760 But that will be slowed down. That discovery, whatever it is, will be slowed down if you slow down
00:32:17.840 progress. And that can be slowed down by artificially increasing the cost of things like
00:32:24.000 knowledge production because you've slowed down the rate at which people can get information.
00:32:28.720 And so on and so forth, that is a long discussion. Let's go back to the book and David writes,
00:32:34.400 As I shall explain, although biological and cultural evolution are described by the same underlying
00:32:39.440 theory, the mechanisms of transmission, variation, and selection are all very different.
00:32:45.040 That makes the resulting natural history is different too. There is no close cultural analog of
00:32:50.240 a species or of an organism or a cell or a sexual reproduction. Genes and memes are about as different
00:32:58.080 as can be at the level of mechanisms and of outcomes. They are similar only at the lowest level
00:33:03.360 of explanation where they are both replicators that embody knowledge. And are therefore conditioned
00:33:09.280 by the same fundamental principles that determine the conditions under which knowledge can or cannot
00:33:15.120 be preserved, can or cannot improve. Okay, I'm skipping a little bit. David talks about a very
00:33:23.200 interesting perspective on jokes and where they come from. That some jokes might not indeed be
00:33:30.880 created by anyone. They may very well have begun as a non-jerk in some way, then became a slightly
00:33:39.360 funny with you remark and eventually end up as a joke. If you're being chased by a bunch of
00:33:45.600 rabid taxidermists, don't play dead. And of course, this is not to say that jokes can't be invented.
00:33:52.800 They are and you stand up comedian will tell you that. They work on crafting a joke and then
00:34:00.160 testing it in front of audiences and allowing it to evolve over time based upon the critical
00:34:05.280 feedback the amount of laughs they're getting at their stand-up routine. And what David says on
00:34:12.080 this after me skipping a little bit, he says, you're right. People tell each other amusing stories,
00:34:17.680 some fictional, some factual. They are not jokes, but some become memes. They are interesting
00:34:22.880 enough for the listeners to retell them to other people. And some of those people retell them
00:34:27.440 to return, but they rarely recite them word for word. Nor do they preserve every detail of the
00:34:32.720 content. Hence, an often retold story will come to exist in different versions. Some of these
00:34:38.480 versions will be retold more often than others. In some cases, because people find telling them
00:34:43.520 amusing. When that is the main reason for retelling them, successive versions that remain in
00:34:48.560 circulation will tend to be ever more amusing. So the conditions are there for evolution, repeated
00:34:54.000 cycles of imperfect copying of information, alternating with selection. Eventually the story becomes
00:35:00.160 amusing enough to make people laugh, and a fully fledged joke has evolved. It is conceivable
00:35:06.160 that a joke could evolve through variations that were not intended to improve upon the funniness.
00:35:10.400 For example, people who hear a story can miss here or misunderstand aspects of it or change it for
00:35:15.520 pragmatic reasons, and in a small proportion of cases by sheer luck, that will produce a funnier
00:35:21.120 version of the story, which will then propagate better. If a joke has evolved in that way from an
00:35:27.040 unjoke, it truly has no author. Another possibility is that most of the people who altered the
00:35:32.000 amusing story on its way to becoming a joke designed their contributions, using creativity to make
00:35:37.840 it funnier intentionally. In such cases, although the joke was indeed created by variation in
00:35:43.200 selection, its funniness was the result of human creativity. In that case it would be misleading
00:35:48.160 to say that no one created it, yet at many co-authors, each of whom contributed creative thought to
00:35:53.360 the outcome. But it may still be that literally no one understands why the joke is as funny as it is,
00:35:58.240 and hence no one could create another joke of similar quality it will. Pause their my reflection.
00:36:03.520 Yes, so there's lots of jokes that people tell each other like this. I like Jerry Seinfeld's
00:36:10.400 famous routine he does in television show. And Jerry talks about how a survey has published each year
00:36:16.960 that talks about what people's greatest fear is. And typically, what comes in second is death.
00:36:23.280 Death comes in second, which is surprising. What's first is public speaking. People are more
00:36:28.720 afraid about public speaking. And Jerry quips that that means that at a funeral, the vast majority
00:36:34.400 of people at the funeral would much rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy. And so
00:36:39.520 this kind of joke is something that is created by the stand-up comedian, and which
00:36:44.800 possibly goes through a small amount of refining, but at least there we can identify the author.
00:36:51.120 David goes on to write, although we do not know exactly how creativity works,
00:36:56.640 we do know that it is itself an evolutionary process within individual brains.
00:37:01.600 For it depends on conjecture, which is variation, and criticism for the purpose of selecting ideas.
00:37:07.280 So somewhere inside brains, blind variations and selections are adding up to a creative thought
00:37:13.280 at a higher level of emergence, pause there. And so here we have some ideas about creativity
00:37:22.080 that we know so little about, the creativity in human mind, how it operates. After all,
00:37:27.680 once we do have a fully fledged scientific theory of how creativity works,
00:37:32.480 fully fledged philosophical theory of how knowledge is created, then we'll be able to program
00:37:38.720 AGI artificial general intelligence. But as yet, the repeated failures of people to produce
00:37:46.640 artificial general intelligence is due entirely to misunderstanding the capacity of humans to create
00:37:56.240 knowledge. And until we understand how it is that we do what we do, there's nowhere we're going
00:38:01.520 to be able to create an external device that can do what we do. That extended device, by the way,
00:38:07.680 would be a person. So it's kind of wrong to refer to such a thing as a thing, or as something
00:38:15.920 other than a person, anything that can create explanatory knowledge as a person. It will be able
00:38:21.920 to understand the world around it, and it will have an open-ended capacity to improve itself
00:38:28.000 and to improve its own knowledge, which would also entail being able to create all the senses that
00:38:33.600 we have to have all the thoughts that we have, the motivations we have, values and emotions,
00:38:38.960 and so on. Okay, I'm skipping a bit more here where David talks about how the idea of memes has
00:38:46.400 been criticized over time, and he rejects that criticism and provides a number of reasons why.
00:38:52.560 So I'm skipping beyond some of the criticisms and the discussion on jokes. And I'll go to the
00:38:59.360 section where he starts to talk about the rules of grammar, and he writes, we say, I am learning to
00:39:06.560 play the piano in British English, but never I am learning to play the baseball. We know how to form
00:39:15.920 such sentences correctly, but until we think about it, very few of us know that the inexpensive
00:39:20.800 grammatical rule we are following even exists that alone what it is. In American English,
00:39:25.840 the rule is slightly different, so the phrase, learning to play piano is acceptable. We may wonder
00:39:31.040 why and guess that the British are more fond of the definite article, but again, that is not the
00:39:35.760 explanation. In British English, a patient is in hospital and in American English in the hospital.
00:39:42.640 Of course, they're my reflection. I think even within certain kinds of British English to be fair,
00:39:47.680 northern accents will sometimes eliminate the definite article where it should appear,
00:39:55.200 where lots of other people think it should appear. For instance, someone might say they're going up
00:39:59.360 stairs instead of going up the stairs. So this is a function of the way in which people speak
00:40:08.080 at the time, bleeding into rules of grammar, of course. So back to the book, David writes,
00:40:14.080 The same is true of memes in general. They implicitly contain information that is not known to
00:40:19.120 the holders, but which nevertheless causes the holders to behave alike. Hence, just as native English
00:40:24.880 speakers may be mistaken about why they have said, the, in a given sentence, people enacting
00:40:30.560 all sorts of other memes often give false explanations even to themselves of why they are behaving
00:40:35.600 in that way. Like genes, all memes contain knowledge, often in explicit, of how to cause their
00:40:43.280 own replication. This knowledge is encoded in strains of DNA, or remembered by brains respectively.
00:40:49.440 In both cases, the knowledge is adapted by causing itself to be replicated. It causes that
00:40:54.800 more reliably than nearly all its variants do. In both cases, this adaptation is the outcome of
00:41:00.800 alternating rounds of variation and selection. However, the logic of the copying mechanism is very
00:41:06.480 different for genes and memes. In organisms that reproduce by dividing, either all the genes are
00:41:11.680 copied into the next generation, or, if the individual fails to reproduce, none are. In sexual
00:41:17.920 reproduction, a full complement of genes randomly chosen from both parents is copied, or none are.
00:41:23.920 In all cases, the DNA duplication process is automatic. Genes are copied indiscriminately.
00:41:30.560 One consequence is that some genes can be replicated for many generations without ever being expressed,
00:41:36.400 causing any behavior at all. Whether you're parents of a broker-bone or not,
00:41:41.840 genes for repairing bones will, barring unlikely mutations, be passed on to you and your descendants.
00:41:47.440 The situation faced by memes is utterly different. Each meme has to be expressed as behavior.
00:41:54.240 Every time it is replicated. For it is that behavior and only that behavior,
00:41:59.760 given the environment created by all the other memes, that affects the replication.
00:42:04.480 That is because a recipient cannot see the representation of the meme and the
00:42:08.960 holder's mind. A meme cannot be downloaded like a computer program. If it is not enacted,
00:42:14.160 it will not be copied. Pause the entire selection. Or, my just exposition on this point.
00:42:19.680 So, a meme is inside of your mind, represented in your mind in some way, but no one has access to that.
00:42:28.000 This is why this so-called bucket theory of mind is so false.
00:42:31.280 Popper talks about, Carl Popper talks about the bucket and the search light.
00:42:36.800 And the bucket theory of mind is this idea that knowledge is somewhat more like a fluid
00:42:41.760 that you can pour from one person into another's, from one mind to another.
00:42:46.320 And so, a teacher standing at the front of the class is able to transmit the knowledge
00:42:52.640 to the students in the same way that pouring a fluid from one vessel into another
00:42:58.080 is accomplished. Of course, this is utterly false. There's no way of
00:43:02.880 inherently, faithfully, getting the knowledge from one mind into another. Instead, what has to
00:43:07.520 happen is that the speaker, the person with the knowledge, the person with the memes, has to
00:43:14.880 undertake some behavior that behavior might include speaking, that behavior might include
00:43:19.760 just accumulating, that behavior might include writing something on a board,
00:43:23.440 someone in circle, there are various behaviors that might go on. But then the recipient of this
00:43:30.320 idea, the intended recipient, has to interpret the behavior, the watching the behavior,
00:43:36.960 they don't have direct access to the mind, to the memes, but only the behaviors, which they might
00:43:43.120 replicate. And so, if someone's speaking, giving an explanation, this is the knowledge,
00:43:48.560 then the person hearing that is going to hear it and interpret it and try and understand it
00:43:53.360 in their own mind, such that at some later time, they will be able to express it as well,
00:43:58.960 but not in exactly the same words necessarily. They might not remember it by road,
00:44:03.760 but they will have an understanding, and their understanding might result in slightly different
00:44:07.440 words being used to articulate this particular explanation. We're going to come to that as well.
00:44:13.600 So, as David says, a meme cannot be downloaded like a computer program. In other words,
00:44:18.800 there's not this same sort of error correction that goes on inside of a computer program.
00:44:24.720 There is a further level of interpretation that must go on. It's self-filled with errors,
00:44:32.640 and David has a picture all about this, so I'll put the picture up, and let's just read what he
00:44:37.360 has to say about this. And he writes, the upshot of this is that memes necessarily become embodied
00:44:43.840 in two different physical forms, ultimately, as memories in a brain and as behavior.
00:44:51.120 We can see there. So, we've got a meme in brain number one, and that causes the behavior of this
00:44:56.480 first person. The second person is observing that behavior from person number one, and trying to
00:45:03.040 interpret what that meme is, and so that meme will end up in that brain number two. Now,
00:45:08.720 whether or not the meme in brain number two is exactly the same as the meme in brain number one,
00:45:16.400 is a open-ended question. It depends, well, it depends upon the circumstance. Maybe it is
00:45:23.280 faithfully reproduced, faithfully replicated, but it may also be replicated with some error,
00:45:30.320 with some slight variation. We can still say that aspects of the meme, or the meme
00:45:37.040 flex, or the broad idea has been replicated, but not in the same way that genes typically get
00:45:43.280 replicated. Because the gene needs to be perfectly replicated, or not replicated at all, or otherwise,
00:45:50.960 a mutation occurs. Whatever the case, the process here is of copying behavior in order to
00:45:58.800 replicate the meme in the brain of the second person, which then causes behavior and so on as we see.
00:46:04.800 David goes on to write. Each of the two forms has to be copied, specifically translated into the
00:46:12.080 other form, in each meme generation. Memes generations are simply successive instances of copying
00:46:17.840 to another individual. Technology can add further stages to a meme's life cycle. For instance,
00:46:24.160 the behavior may be to write something down, thus embodying the meme in a third physical form,
00:46:29.360 which may later cause a person who reads it to enact other behavior, which then causes the meme
00:46:34.480 to appear in someone's brain. But all memes must have at least two physical forms.
00:46:41.120 In contrast, for genes, the replicator exists in one physical form, the DNA strand of a germ cell,
00:46:46.400 even though it may be copied to other locations in the organism, translated into RNA and expressed
00:46:51.280 as behavior. None of those forms is a replicator. The idea that the behavior might be a replicator
00:46:57.200 is a form of Lamarckism. Since it implies, the behaviors that had been modified by circumstances
00:47:03.120 would be inherited. Because of the alternating forms of a meme, it has to survive
00:47:07.520 two different and potentially unrelated mechanisms of selection in every generation.
00:47:13.040 The brain memory form has to cause the holder to enact the behavior, and the behavior form has
00:47:20.240 to cause the new recipient to remember it and to enact it. So for example, although religions
00:47:25.360 prescribe behaviors such as educating one's children to adopt the religion, the mere intention
00:47:29.600 to transmit a meme to one's children, or anyone else is quite insufficient to make that happen.
00:47:34.880 That is why the overwhelming majority of attempts to start in your religion fail,
00:47:38.640 even if the founder members try hard to propagate it. In such cases, what has happened is that
00:47:43.200 an idea that people have adopted has succeeded in causing them to enact various behaviors.
00:47:49.040 Including one's intended to cause their children and others to do the same, but the behavior
00:47:53.520 has failed to cause the same idea to be stored in the minds of those recipients.
00:47:58.080 The existence of long-lived religions is sometimes explained from the premise that children are
00:48:03.520 gullible, or that they are easily frightened by tales of the supernatural. But that is not the
00:48:08.720 explanation. The overwhelming majority of ideas simply did not have what it takes to persuade,
00:48:14.080 or frighten, or cajole, or otherwise cause, children or anyone else into doing the same to other
00:48:19.200 people. If establishing a faithfully replicating meme with that easy, the whole adult population
00:48:24.480 in our society would be proficient at algebra, thanks to the efforts made to teach it to them
00:48:29.040 when they were children. To be exact, they would all be proficient, algebra, teachers.
00:48:35.120 To be a meme, an idea has to contain quite sophisticated knowledge of how to cause humans to do
00:48:39.840 at least two independent things, assimilate the meme faithfully and enact it. That some memes
00:48:46.000 can replicate themselves with great fidelity for many generations is a token of how much knowledge
00:48:50.640 they contain, pause their, my reflection, and also the end of this episode. This is going to
00:48:58.160 be a multi-episode treatment of this chapter, because it is so dense, and there are new ideas.
00:49:04.160 David Deutsch has contributed to our understanding of memes in many interesting ways.
00:49:11.680 This exposition, this explanation that he has given about the way in which memes are transmitted,
00:49:16.560 is sometimes poorly understood. This idea that they need to first cause behaviors in people,
00:49:23.600 which then cause others to gain that idea, to gain that meme inside of their mind, inside of
00:49:32.000 their brain, and then to enact those behaviors as well, to pass them on. As he says there,
00:49:37.280 certain ideas are not very good at this, so teaching everyone at school algebra
00:49:46.720 doesn't have the result of making everyone very good at algebra. There's something going wrong
00:49:51.760 there, that those ideas tend not to have what it takes. We don't have lots of people proficient
00:49:57.760 at algebra, moreover, we don't have lots of people proficient at algebra, teaching out there,
00:50:02.560 because that teaching of algebra meme isn't particularly robust. What does seem to be robust?
00:50:09.520 What is passed on from one year to the next is simply the existence of school,
00:50:15.920 coercive compulsory type schooling that exists in many different countries around the world.
00:50:20.800 This idea that we all get our children into classrooms and sitting in rows,
00:50:25.360 this meme is robust in many, many ways. It is resistant to change, it has existed for centuries,
00:50:36.320 and it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere soon. Our recent experiences of many schools closing
00:50:43.760 down, and I had some thoughts that this will reveal to some extent to some people the poverty
00:50:52.800 of the schooling system as it exists right now, and that if everyone had their children at home
00:51:00.320 learning behind a computer screen, in animal free and perhaps fun for the student way,
00:51:05.600 after all they're at home, after all they're probably talking to their friends via the computer,
00:51:10.880 and they're not being forced to turn up to lessons at a particular time, in a particular place,
00:51:15.120 they have more time during the day. Perhaps those students, those parents, perhaps even the
00:51:20.560 teachers, would start to think there's a better way of doing things. Well in fact it turns out that
00:51:25.840 that's not the case, that many, many people in the system seem to revert back as soon as possible
00:51:32.960 to going back into the classroom, and so this meme of this is the way in which we
00:51:39.120 teach our young people, we treat young people, is resistant to change for reasons that I won't get
00:51:46.400 into now, but clearly there is this idea that causes behavior of turning up to school, of encouraging
00:51:53.920 people to go to school, of indeed enforcing the attendance at school from people.
00:52:01.920 These ideas causing these behaviors seem to have no end in sight at the moment, and some people
00:52:07.280 see them as very virtuous and of course that's one reason that they would propagate is because
00:52:11.920 we see that as an extremely virtuous thing, wrong though that might be for some of us to think.
00:52:17.520 Okay, until next time when we move on to more about memes, you can perhaps look forward to some
00:52:24.880 of my other shorter bite-size introductions to Karl Popper and David Deutsch. Until then, thank you.
00:52:34.400 Thank you once more to my Patreons. I've gotten a couple more Patreons, I've lost a couple of Patreons,
00:52:40.720 the numbers seem to go up and down, but there's a gradual increase and that's lovely to see,
00:52:47.840 and I'm very grateful to anyone who wishes to contribute to Topcast. If you're watching this
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00:53:11.680 YouTube version of this which has some visuals and for some episodes more than others, the visuals,
00:53:17.840 I think, help some of the explanations. Once more, thank you again for any support at all. I'm
00:53:24.800 Patreon, or PayPal, and links to those on my website www.brethal.com. Thanks again, and bye-bye.
