Genes vs Cultures vs Consciousness: A Brief Story of Our Computational Minds

by Andres Campero

What is thinking and how does it work? How did it evolve and appear? Will it continue to evolve?

​The point is that all phenomena have two predominant aspects, the energetic and the informational. Just like energy is known to be present in everything and became the dominant paradigm in all theoretical and practical aspects of science and technology after the industrial revolution, with the advent of computers “information has attained a conceptual and practical status equal to – and frequently surpassing – that of energy” [Lloyd, 2013].

neurons and nerves adapt the fastest but are most costly, hormones respond at intermediate speeds, muscles adapt at monthly or weekly rates by growing or shrinking, and bones absorb regularities slowest but cheapest [MacIver, 2009].

I found particularly amusing and readable are The Computing Universe [Papay and Hey, 2014] for a history of computers and The Computer and the Brain [Von Neumann, 1958] for a comparison between the two systems from the perspective of a pioneer from 60 years ago.

Life is a set of computational and energetic processes instantiated in chemical reactions and DNA is its digital information storage device. The basic computational structure is straightforward, DNA is decoded into aminoacids, aminoacids bind into proteins, proteins form our cells and cells are combined to form our organs, our muscles and our brains. The code is extremely powerful, it contains, for example, the programs that can turn an embryo into a human.

Some animals grew in sophistication in order to exploit useful computational principles [Coen, 2012], and initiated an amazing path of increasing adaptability which led to the evolution of learning and to the development of thinking. Eventually, the appearance of humans paved the way for a new unit of evolution that would transform everything. That is the story of Cultures.

As anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Robert Boyd put it, it is our social nature and our social learning capabilities more than our cognitive abilities or any other trait which sets us apart from other species.

This again emphasizes the importance of ideas as the real units of cultural evolution. Indeed, it is ideas, much more than individuals, that have directed the course of human history. A history of religions, of nations and of political ideologies.

As described by Boyd, “Peoples that live only a few tens of kilometers apart can sometimes have different rules governing every aspect of social life, including whom you may marry, whom you consider kin, whom you must support in conflicts with others, what are crimes, how crimes are punished and so on.” [Boyd, 2018, p.99] The power of Cultures is most enhanced when brains are built to adopt the beliefs of people around them. It is no coincidence that humans excel at imitation.