The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
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the same is true in all art forms. In some, it is especially hard to express in words the explanation of the beauty of a particular work of art, even if one knows it, because the relevant knowledge is itself not expressed in words – it is inexplicit. No one yet knows how to translate musical explanations into natural language.
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The same critique applies to the theory that art is self-expression. Expression is conveying something that is already there, while objective progress in art is about creating something new. Also, self-expression is about expressing something subjective, while pure art is objective. For the same reason, any kind of art that consists solely of spontaneous or mechanical acts, such as throwing paint on to canvas, or of pickling sheep, lacks the means of making artistic progress, because real progress is difficult and involves many errors for every success.
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Genes and memes are about as different as can be at the level of mechanisms, and of outcomes; they are similar only at the lowest level of explanation, where they are both replicators that embody knowledge and are therefore conditioned by the same fundamental principles that determine the conditions under which knowledge can or cannot be preserved, can or cannot improve.
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created by anyone – that they evolved. People tell each other amusing stories – some fictional, some factual. They are not jokes, but some become memes: they are interesting enough for the listeners to retell them to other people, and some of those people retell them in turn. But they rarely recite them word for word; nor do they preserve every detail of the content. Hence an oftenretold story will come to exist in different versions. Some of those versions will be retold more often than others – in some cases because people find them amusing. When that is the main reason for retelling them, ...more
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Although we do not know exactly how creativity works, we do know that it is itself an evolutionary process within individual brains. For it depends on conjecture (which is variation) and criticism (for the purpose of selecting ideas). So, somewhere inside brains, blind variations and selections are adding up to creative thought at a higher level of emergence.
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To be transferred to a single person, a meme need seem useful only to that person. To be transferred to a group of similar people under unchanging circumstances, it need be only a parochial truth. But what sort of idea is best suited to getting itself adopted many times in succession by many people who have diverse, unpredictable objectives? A true idea is a good candidate. But not just any truth will do. It must seem useful to all those people, for it is they who will be choosing whether to enact it or not.
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The ideas with the best chance of surviving through many generations of change are truths with reach – deep truths. People are fallible; they often have preferences for false, shallow, useless or morally wrong ideas. But which false ideas they prefer differs from one person to another, and changes with time. Under changed circumstances, a specious falsehood or parochial truth can survive only by luck. But a true, deep idea has an objective reason to be considered useful by people with diverse purposes over long periods.
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Creativity, as far as we know, evolved only once.
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the truth is that imitating people’s actions and remembering their utterances could not possibly be the basis of human meme replication. In reality these play only a small – and for the most part inessential – role. Meme acquisition comes so naturally to us that it is hard to see what a miraculous process it is, or what is really happening. It is especially hard to see where the knowledge is coming from.
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Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of science by asking the students simply to ‘observe’. Then he would wait in silence for one of them to ask what they were supposed to observe. This was his way of demonstrating one of many flaws in the empiricism that is still part of common sense today. So he would explain to them that 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.
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In this chapter I have presented two puzzles. The first is why human creativity was evolutionarily advantageous at a time when there was almost no innovation. The second is how human memes can possibly be replicated, given that they have content that the recipient never observes. I think that both those puzzles have the same solution: 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 ...more
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Memes, like scientific theories, are not derived from anything. They are created afresh by the recipient. They are conjectural explanations, which are then subjected to criticism and testing before being tentatively adopted. This same pattern of creative conjecture, criticism and testing generates inexplicit as well as explicit ideas. In fact all creativity does, for no idea can be represented entirely explicitly.
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Therefore, my speculation is that the creativity program is not entirely inborn. It is a combination of genes and memes. The hardware of the human brain would have been capable of being creative (and sentient, conscious and all those other things) long before any creative program existed. Considering a sequence of brains during this period, the earliest ones capable of supporting creativity would have required very ingenious programming to fit the capacity into the barely suitable hardware. As the hardware improved, creativity could have been programmed more easily, until the moment when it ...more
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Blackmore’s ‘meme machine’ idea, that human brains evolved in order to replicate memes, must be true. The reason it must be true is that, whatever had set off the evolution of any of those attributes, creativity would have had to evolve as well. For no human-level mental achievements would be possible without human-type (explanatory) memes, and the laws of epistemology dictate that no such memes are possible without creativity.
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replicating memes unchanged is the function for which creativity evolved.
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Or, if the early Andeans had worked out how to breed giant war llamas and had ridden out to explore and conquer before anyone else had even thought of domesticating the horse, South American biogeographers might now be explaining that their ancestors colonized the world because no other continent had llamas.
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Evidence – including a remarkable series of studies of supernovae in distant galaxies – has forced cosmologists to the unexpected conclusion that the universe not only will expand for ever but has been expanding at an accelerating rate. Something has been counteracting its gravity. We do not know what. Pending the discovery of a good explanation, the unknown cause has been named ‘dark energy’.
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The problem of the nature and effects of dark energy is no minor detail, nor does anything about it suggest a perpetually unfathomable mystery. So much for cosmology being a fundamentally completed science.
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the time beyond which scientific prediction has no access is different for different phenomena. For each phenomenon it is the moment at which the creation of new knowledge may begin to make a significant difference to what one is trying to predict.
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To attempt to predict anything beyond the relevant horizon is futile – it is prophecy – but wondering what is beyond it is not. When wondering leads to conjecture, that constitutes speculation, which is not irrational either. In fact it is vital. Every one of those deeply unforeseeable new ideas that make the future unpredictable will begin as a speculation. And every speculation begins with a problem: problems in regard to the future can reach beyond the horizon of prediction too – and problems have solutions.
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We do not know what qualia are or how creativity works, despite having working examples of qualia and creativity inside all of us.
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There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism.
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