From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett

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.67

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).

well-studied patterns of errors in human reasoning suggest that our skills were honed for taking sides, persuading others in debate, not necessarily getting things right. Our underlying talent “favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better”

we may think of it as a coevolutionary process, part cultural evolution and part genetic evolution, with the cultural evolution of pronounceable memes, words, leading the way.

A better analogy for a gene than either a word or a sentence is a toolbox subroutine in a computer.

Scamrlbed wrdos rae aesliy nusracmbedl. Mst ppl wll hv lttl trbl rdng ths sntnc.

A thinko is like a typo—a typographical error—but at a higher, semantic level—misthinking not miswriting.

“Bugs” in computer programs may be attributable to typos in the source code, but more often they are thinkos.

As a general rule of thumb, any artifact found in abundance and showing signs of use is a good whatever-it-is; following this rule, you can often tell the good ones from the not so good ones without knowing exactly why the good ones are good. Copy the good ones, of course.

There is no DNA for culture now, but HTML (the underlying language of content representation on the Internet) or its descendants may become so dominant in the future that few memes can compete for “eyeballs” and “ears” in this crowded world of information without getting themselves represented in HTML.

here is a tentative list of the functions all languages eventually served:

words may be the best memes, but they weren’t the first memes.

social intelligence (Jolly 1966; Humphrey 1976): 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).

children learn on average seven words a day for the first six years of their lives, and most of these words are not deliberately taught to them by pointing (“Look, Johnny, a hammer. Look Lucy, seagulls!”), let alone by definition (“A convertible is a car with a roof that folds down.”).

Children acquire the meanings of most of these words gradually, usually not even noticing the onset of comprehension, by a process that is not much like deliberate hypothesis formulation and testing, except in its capacity to secure results reliably: unconscious, involuntary statistical analysis of the multifarious stimuli they encounter.

I speculate that there was a gradual, incremental process of growing competence leading to self-monitoring, leading to reflection, leading to the emergence of new things to think about: words and other memes in our manifest image.

There is a general generous tendency to credit innovators with more prior comprehension than they actually deserve, and this helps perpetuate the myth of the Godlike powers of our famous geniuses, and by extension, of all of us.

Religions devote a very large portion of the donations they collect from their members to preserving, heating, and furnishing their edifices, and paying their staffs, often with scant funds left over for helping and feeding the poor.

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.

To minimize the cost of reeling in fish that will shake off the hook before being landed, the initial lure is designed to be so preposterous that only a very dull, sheltered, credulous person would seriously engage it. In short, there is a skeptic filter built into the scam, so that effort can be concentrated on the most vulnerable victims.

A curious feature of our appreciation of wit or genius is that we prefer not to know how it is done.

“I’m writing a book on magic,” I explain, and I’m asked, “Real magic?” By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. “No,” I answer: “Conjuring tricks, not real magic.” Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.

stage magicians, Jamy Ian Swiss (2007): “No one would ever think that we would ever work this hard to fool you. That’s a secret, and a method of magic.”

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 in the scientific image.

The traditional view of free will, as a personal power somehow isolated from physical causation, is both incoherent and unnecessary as a grounds for moral responsibility and meaning.

The scientists and philosophers who declare free will a fiction or illusion are right; it is part of the user-illusion of the manifest image.

Human consciousness is unlike all other varieties of animal consciousness in that it is a product in large part of cultural evolution, which installs a bounty of words and many other thinking tools in our brains, creating thereby a cognitive architecture unlike the “bottom-up” minds of animals.

The incessant torrent of self-probing and reflection that we engage in during waking life is what permits us, alone, to comprehend our competences 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.

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.

Noam Chomsky (1975) has proposed a distinction that has drawn a lot of attention and converted a few disciples: on the one hand there are problems, which we can solve, and on the other hand there are mysteries, which we can’t.

no matter how advanced our scientific problem-solving becomes, there are problems that are beyond human comprehension altogether, which we might better call mysteries. Consciousness tops Chomsky’s list of mysteries, along with free will.

The key weakness of the Argument from Cognitive Closure is the systematic elusiveness of good examples of mysteries.

As soon as you frame a question that you claim we will never be able to answer, you set in motion the very process that might well prove you wrong: you raise a topic of investigation.

Asking better and better questions is the key to refining our search for solutions to our “mysteries,” and this refinement is utterly beyond the powers of any languageless creature.

we have reached a point where even the most brilliant solo thinkers are often clearly dependent on their colleagues for expert feedback and confirmation.

This blunts the edge of the mysterian argument. By ignoring the power of collaborative understanding, it raises an obsolete issue, viewing comprehension as an all-or-nothing blessing, which it seldom, if ever, is.

Where Descartes relied on God as the guarantor of his proofs, today we rely on the improbability of multiple thinkers arriving, by different routes, at the same wrong result.

We are the intelligent designers living in a world intelligently designed for intelligent designers by our ancestors.

Orgel’s Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.

Genetic algorithms have been used to design the fascinating evolved virtual creatures of Karl Sims

While it may still be true that what you cannot create you cannot understand, creating something is no longer the guarantee of understanding that it used to be. It is now possible to make—very indirectly—things that do what we want them to do but which we really cannot understand.

“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”

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.

Would you be willing to indulge your favorite doctor in her desire to be an old-fashioned “intuitive” reader of symptoms instead of relying on a computer-based system that had been proven to be a hundred times more reliable at finding rare, low-visibility diagnoses than any specialist?

The real danger, I think, is not that machines more intelligent than we are will usurp our role as captains of our destinies, but 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. Systems that deliberately conceal their shortcuts and gaps of incompetence should be deemed fraudulent, and their creators should go to jail for committing the crime of creating or using an artificial intelligence that impersonates a human being.

Contests to expose the limits of comprehension, along the lines of the Turing Test, might be a good innovation, encouraging people to take pride in their ability to suss out the fraudulence in a machine the same way they take pride in recognizing a con artist.

we find ourselves indirectly making things that we only partially understand, and they in turn may create things we don’t understand at all.

Socrates famously said, “the unexamined life is not worth living,”

the late Kurt Baier, once added, “the over-examined life is nothing to write home about either.”