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December 26, 2018 - September 16, 2020
If you landed on a distant planet and were hunting along its seashore for signs of life, which would excite you more, a clam or a clam rake?
we can see how strange and radical it is: a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things that permit us to understand how a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things.
What were they thinking? When we ask the same question about Mother Nature, the answer is always the same: nothing.
Competence without comprehension is the way of life of the vast majority of living things on the planet and should be the default presumption until we can demonstrate that some individual organisms really do, in one sense or another, understand what they are doing.
Comprehension is not the source of competence or the active ingredient in competence; comprehension is composed of competences.
one of the key contributions of language to our species’ intelligence: the capacity to transmit, faithfully, information we only sorta understand!
The Beatrix Potter syndrome, as I have called it, is not restricted to children’s literature, though I think every culture on earth has folk tales and nursery stories about talking, thinking animals.
we often succumb to the temptation to engage in whig history, not settling for how come but going for a what for.
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
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As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture. —John McCarthy
Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (the notes on the lines of the treble clef in musical notation), HOMES (Great Lakes Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior), and My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos (it used to be: Nine Pies) for the order of the planets, starting at the Sun.
The sin of adaptationism is not conceiving of just-so stories—you can’t do evolutionary biology without this—but uncritically reproducing just-so stories that haven’t been properly tested.
What semantic information can be gleaned from the event depends on what information the gleaner already has accumulated.
Evolution is all about turning “bugs” into “features,” turning “noise” into “signal,” and the fuzzy boundaries between these categories are not optional; the opportunistic open-endedness of natural selection depends on them.
the way most secrets get moved around: attentive observation followed by remembering.)
Shannon’s idealized restriction to a sender and receiver presupposes, in effect, that the sender has already found the needle in the haystack that would be valued by the receiver. Finding the needle, detecting the pattern that can be exploited, is backstage, not part of the model, and so is the receiver’s task of finding an appropriate use for what is received, even though this research and development is what “pays for” all information transmission.
while Shannon’s measure can be applied as a limiting condition, it cannot explain the free-floating rationales of the ploys and counterploys.
Finding telltale information in biological systems, information that we can conclude must be there even when we haven’t yet any detailed knowledge of how the information is “encoded” or embodied, has applications in many areas of biology.
The law of copyright tries to separate “utilitarian” function from aesthetic function, and while there are good legal reasons for trying to make this a bright-line distinction, there are good theoretical reasons for seeing this as an ad hoc undertaking, as Learned Hand observes about the “idea”/“expression” distinction.
evolution by natural selection is nothing but “universal plagiarism”: if it’s of use to you, copy it, and use it.
one of Darwin’s most important contributions to thought was his denial of 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.
The claim that I defend is that 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 capable of top-down organization, ever more efficient in its ways of searching Design Space. In short, as human culture evolved, it fed on the fruits of its own evolution, increasing its design powers by utilizing information in ever more powerful ways.
The top-down intelligent design of the classic computer created a hypercompetent but deeply unbiological marvel. This is not because computers are made of the wrong kind of stuff but because the stuff they are made of is organized into the wrong kind of hierarchies: the kind of planned bureaucracies that may be “well-oiled machines” but depend on regimentation of the moving parts, suppressing both exploration and improvisation at every level.
Top-down intelligent designs depend on foresight, which evolution utterly lacks.
Brains are more like termite colonies than intelligently designed corporations or armies.
The fundamental architecture of animal brains (including human brains) is probably composed of Bayesian networks that are highly competent expectation-generators that don’t have to comprehend what they are doing.
Comprehension—our kind of comprehension—is only made possible by the arrival on the scene quite recently of a new kind of evolutionary replicator—culturally transmitted informational entities: memes.
A wide variety of animal dispositions (ways of behaving) that were long thought to be genetically transmitted “instincts” have proven to be “traditions” transmitted between parent and offspring via perceptual channels, not genes
One of the facts of life, both genetic and cultural, is that options become obligatory. A clever new trick that gives its users a distinct advantage over their peers soon “spreads to fixation,” at which point those who don’t acquire it are doomed.
should we say that language is the backbone of cultural evolution or that words are the DNA of cultural evolution?
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.
A word, like a virus, is a minimal kind of agent: it wants to get itself said
A word is selfish in exactly the same way a gene is selfish
Language evolved to fit the brain before the brain evolved to better accommodate language.
understanding a word is not the same as having acquired a definition of it.
Children acquire their native languages by a quasi-Darwinian process, achieving the competences that are the foundation for comprehension by a process that is competent without comprehension.
Dogs in effect domesticated themselves over many generations until their human neighbors became their owners, their companions, their guardians, their masters.
This is the heart of digitization, obliging continuous phenomena to sort themselves out into discontinuous, all-or-nothing phenomena.
Whether or not an audible sound is worth remembering, reproducing, or copying, if it is not digitizable, its prospects of being well remembered are dim. So synanthropic audible memes, whether mutualist, commensal, or parasitical, will persist and spread widely only if they happen to have phonemic parts:
The digitization of phonemes has a profound implication: words play a role in cultural evolution that is similar to the role of DNA in genetic evolution, but, unlike the physically identical ladder rungs in the double helix made of Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine, words are not physically identical replicators; they are “identical” only at the user-illusion level of the manifest image. Words, one might say, are a kind of virtual DNA, a largely digitized medium that exists only in the manifest image.
Words are affordances that our brains are designed (by evolutionary processes) to pick up, as Gibson said, and they afford all manner of uses.
Which kind of meme are words? The kind that can be pronounced.
In addition to words, there are other lexical items (Jackendoff 2002) such as irregular plurals and exceptions to the “rules” of a language that also have to be independently stored in memory.
What is transmitted from other speakers to a novice speaker who picks up the irregular plural of child, for instance, is a lexical item. These are all paradigmatic memes, not innate features of language or grammar, but optional, culture-bound features that have to spread throug...
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What are memes a kind of? They are a kind of way of behaving (roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered, taught, shunned, denounced, brandished, ridiculed, parodied, censored, hallowed.
Leaning on the ordinary language of the manifest image, we might say that 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.
Internet spam, like propaganda, is designed, after all. Who benefits? Sometimes the hosts, sometimes the authors, and sometimes the memes themselves, who may have no authors but who nevertheless, like viruses (who also have no authors) have their own fitness, their own relative replicative ability.
Words are the best examples of memes.
It is no accident that the population of tokens of the “meme” species (the term), founded by Dawkins in 1976, languished somewhat until the Internet provided an ideal niche for their use.
Language seems to ‘evolve’ by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution
