The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire, and static societies, however primitive, ‘unnaturally’ suppress it.)

what sort of meme can cause itself to be replicated for long periods in a rapidly changing environment?

The ideas with the best chance of surviving through many generations of change are truths with reach – deep truths.

anti-rational memes are still, today, a substantial part of our culture, and of the mind of every individual, is a difficult fact for us to accept. Ironically, it is harder for us than it would have been for the profoundly closed-minded people of earlier societies. They would not have been troubled by the proposition that most of their lives were spent enacting elaborate rituals rather than making their own choices and pursuing their own goals.

How should we understand the existence of the distinctively human emergent phenomena such as creativity and choice, in the light of the fact that part of our behaviour is caused by autonomous entities whose content we do not know? And, worse, given that we are liable to be systematically misled by those entities about the reasons for our own thoughts, opinions and behaviour?

whenever we find ourselves enacting a complex or narrowly defined behaviour that has been accurately repeated from one holder to the next, we should be suspicious.

Biological evolution was merely a finite preface to the main story of evolution, the unbounded evolution of memes.

SUMMARY

In prehistoric times it would not have been obvious to a casual observer (say, an explorer from an extraterrestrial civilization) that humans were capable of creative thought at all. It would have seemed that we were doing no more than endlessly repeating the lifestyle to which we were genetically adapted, just like all the other billions of species in the biosphere.

Closer observation would have revealed that human languages and the knowledge for human tool use were being transmitted through memes and not genes.

Homo erectus living 500,000 years ago knew how to make camp fires. That knowledge was in their memes, not in their genes.

Unlike present-day artificial-evolution and AI research, our ancestors were evolving real creativity, which is the capacity to create an endless stream of innovations.

That there were thousands of years between noticeable changes presumably means that in most generations even the most creative individuals in the population would not have been making any innovations.

A preference to mate with the individuals with the most creative displays co-evolved with the creativity to meet that preference in an evolutionary spiral – so the theory goes – just like peahens’ preferences and peacocks’ tails.

So why were practical innovations originally so rare?

think there is only one way: it is to enact that society’s memes more faithfully than the norm. To display exceptional conformity and obedience. To refrain exceptionally well from innovation. A static society has no choice but to reward that sort of conspicuousness.

we cannot literally copy or imitate memes. The only access we have to their content is through their holders’ behaviour (including their speech, and consequences of their behaviour such as their writings).

Meme acquisition comes so naturally to us that it is hard to see what a miraculous process it is, or what is really happening.

scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees. And he would explain that, therefore, theory has to come first. It has to be conjectured, not derived.

Philosophers and psychologists work hard to discover, and to make explicit, the assumptions that our culture tacitly makes about social institutions, human nature, right and wrong, time and space, intention, causality, freedom, necessity and so on. But we do not acquire those assumptions by reading the results of such research: it is entirely the other way round.

‘mirror neurons’. These are neurons that fire when an animal performs a given action, and also when the animal perceives the same action being performed by another. These neurons have been identified experimentally in animals that have the capacity to imitate.

apes are able to imitate such behaviours without ever creating any explanatory knowledge.

Apes can copy certain individual actions instantly – the ones of which they have pre-existing knowledge through their mirror-neuron system – but it takes them years to learn a repertoire of memes that involve combinations of actions.

meme evolution gives them the ability to switch to other sources far faster than gene evolution would allow.

a student might well acquire a complex meme at a lecture without being able to repeat a single sentence spoken by the lecturer, even immediately afterwards. In such a case the student has replicated the meaning – which is the whole content – of the meme without imitating any actions at all. As I said, imitation is not at the heart of human meme replication.

humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people’s behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general.

what replicates human memes is creativity; and creativity was used, while it was evolving, to replicate memes. In other words, it was used to acquire existing knowledge, not to create new knowledge. But the mechanism to do both things is identical, and so in acquiring the ability to do the former, we automatically became able to do the latter. It was a momentous example of reach, which made possible everything that is uniquely human.

The transmission of human-type memes – memes whose meaning is not mostly predefined within the receiver – cannot be other than a creative activity on the part of the receiver.

human capacity for universal explanation did not evolve to have a universal function. It evolved simply to increase the volume of memetic information that our ancestors could acquire, and the speed and accuracy with which they could acquire it.

the more one could remember, the more memes one could enact, and the more accurately one could enact them.

by the time creativity was evolving, there would already have been significant co-evolution between genes and memes: genes evolving hardware to support more and better memes, and memes evolving to take over ever more of what had previously been genetic functions such as choice of mate, and methods of eating, fighting and so on.

Blackmore’s ‘meme machine’ idea, that human brains evolved in order to replicate memes, must be true.

It was specifically creativity that made the difference between ape memes – expensive in terms of the time and effort required to replicate them, and inherently limited in the knowledge that they were capable of expressing – and human memes, which are efficiently transmitted and universal in their expressive power. The beginning of creativity was, in that sense, the beginning of infinity.

Only the Enlightenment, hundreds of thousands of years later, and after who knows how many false starts, may at last have made it practical to escape from that eternity into infinity.

SUMMARY

our civilization is unique in history for its capacity to make progress.

the broader interpretation, that survival depends on good resource management, has almost no content:

progress is sustainable, indefinitely. But only by people who engage in a particular kind of thinking and behaviour – the problem-solving and problem-creating kind characteristic of the Enlightenment. And that requires the optimism of a dynamic society.

finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.

knowledge has the unique ability to take aim at a distant target and utterly transform it while having scarcely any effect on the space between.

Why, for instance, did the societies in North America and Western Europe, rather than Asia and Eastern Europe, win the Cold War? Analysing climate, minerals, flora, fauna and diseases can teach us nothing about that. The explanation is that the Soviet system lost because its ideology wasn’t true, and all the biogeography in the world cannot explain what was false about it.

The effects of ideas and decisions almost entirely determine which biogeographical factors have a bearing on the next chapter of human history,

The Easter Island civilization collapsed because no human situation is free of new problems, and static societies are inherently unstable in the face of new problems.

The sustained creation of knowledge depends also on the presence of certain kinds of idea, particularly optimism, and an associated tradition of criticism.

SUMMARY

history is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography.

In regard to theoretical knowledge, however, the prevailing world view has not yet caught up with Enlightenment values. Thanks to the fallacy and bias of prophecy, a persistent assumption remains that our existing theories are at or fairly close to the limit of what it is knowable – that we are nearly there, or perhaps halfway there.

level of knowledge, wealth, computer power or physical scale that seems absurdly huge at any given instant will later be considered pathetically tiny. Yet we shall never reach anything like an unproblematic state. Like the guests at Infinity Hotel, we shall never be ‘nearly there’.

the nature of science would be better understood if we called theories ‘misconceptions’ from the outset, instead of only after we have discovered their successors. Thus we could say that Einstein’s Misconception of Gravity was an improvement on Newton’s Misconception, which was an improvement on Kepler’s. The neo-Darwinian Misconception of Evolution is an improvement on Darwin’s Misconception, and his on Lamarck’s. If people thought of it like that, perhaps no one would need to be reminded that science claims neither infallibility nor finality.

the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions