Daniel Dennett - Philosophy, Memes, Memetics (2010 WORLD.MINDS)

thanks for all this is a nine hard act to follow I am daunted but it's been a thrilling day I'm delighted to be here and especially the order to which they're in now I get to follow dr. bertalanffy and talk a bit about brains and different different aspect of brains this time okay contemplate this sentence and see whether you think it's true or false all right how many how many would say yeah yeah there aren't any such thing as words okay how many think no no words exist okay good I just remember that okay this is one of my favorite books if you were looking for a good book for Christmas this is a book about Indian Street magic by a brilliant philosopher and magician named lee siegel and there's a passage in it which sort of sums up my life in a certain way he says i'm writing a book on magic I explained and I'm asked real magic by real magic people need miracles there are mature circle act supernatural powers no I answer conjuring tricks not real magic real magic in other words refers to the magic that's not real well the magic that is real that can actually be done is not real magic my main work is on consciousness and on free will and many people believe that if your theory of consciousness if consciousness doesn't come out to be real magic then you have not been writing about consciousness if consciousness isn't real magic that sort of you're changing the subject or if you come up with a theory of free will where free will isn't real magic then you're you're not really talking about freewill at all you're talking about as God famously said a wretched subterfuge so part of the burden for me is to get people to take seriously a theory of consciousness human consciousness where consciousness turns out to be not real magic but a bag of conjuring tricks and I can imagine some of you are already thinking oh oh in other words he's not going to try to talk about consciousness at all because consciousness is real magic okay now let's go this is my favorite all-time favorite picture of consciousness it's by Saul Steinberg New Yorker covered many years ago this man is is looking at a painting and he's identified the painters brach and that reminds him of the word baroque and then barrack and bark and poodle you get a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if I left the slide up you wouldn't listen to me you would just look and see all of the marvelous associations this is a and of course it's not just words there's colors and shapes it's a you learn quite a lot about this man's conscious life as he's standing in front of this painting for me the theory of consciousness that we're looking for and this is when I say we I don't just mean philosophers I mean this is the science the scientific study of consciousness this is a brilliant metaphorical characterization of consciousness the way to get at the problem of consciousness from the point of view of science is if that's the metaphorical truth about what's going on in his head what's the literal truth that makes it true if we can explain every detail the passage from greenberg to Monteverdi severity for instance and how that happened in his stream of consciousness then we'd have a really good theory of consciousness now before Darwin this is Darwin here and I've been going around evolution is one of my main topics that I've been going around the world talking about Darwin this year and I like to point out a strange inversion in his thought this is the pre Darwinian worldview as you know there's the Sistine Chapel the wee Michelangelo's a wonderful painting of God putting the finishing touches on Adam his best creation but if the horse still lesser than God himself this I call the trickle-down theory of creation really fancy wonderful brilliant smart thing making a somewhat less intelligent thing and so that was the image we had of the world from the beginning of civilization until Darwin came along and proposed the bubble up theory of creation and one of his early critics summed it up in a brilliant passage full of passion which is what Rolf wants listen to the passion in this Englishman's outrage when he describes Darwin's book by the way the capital letters there in the original in the theory with which we have to do absolute ignorance is the artificer so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system but in order to make a perfect a beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it this proposition will be found on careful examination to express in condensed form the essential purport of the theory and to express in a few words all mr. Darwin's meaning who by a strange inversion of reasoning seems to think absolute ignorance fully qualified to take the place of absolute wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill bingo that's right that's exactly right that is what Darwin is all about it is a strange inversion it overturns a way of thinking which is older than the species never before had anybody thought that such an outrageous thing was possible this is one of the great moments in science now my other great hero is Alan Turing who as much as anybody deserves the title of the inventor of the computer and he had his own strange inversion of reasoning and I want to put them together because they make an interesting pair here's a picture of some pre Turing computers they're wearing dresses they studied mathematics in university typically they were mathematicians who were this was a job what do you do for a living I'm a computer and they were hired by the thousands to work in industry engineering firms and so forth what they did was they had basically algorithms where they did compute computation all day long with the help of hand calculators and things like that so that's pre Turing computers in those good old days computers had to understand arithmetic they had to appreciate the reasons for what what they were doing this was a fairly skilled job high high tech job and what Touring recognized was that this was not necessary so now let's put touring strange and version up there here's Darwin in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it here's touring in order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is the CPO doesn't know the CPU doesn't know what arithmetic is but it does perfect arithmetic and that's the basis for computers so put them both together and what they both do and this was stunning this is why they're so similar is they are discovering the possibility of what I call competence without comprehension in the case of natural selection it's the competence of this mindless ignorant process to produce all the beautiful things of the biosphere no comprehension required in the case of touring it's the competence of this computing machine this touring machine to do not just arithmetic but to compute all computable functions without any comprehension down at the bottom layer the implication of both these inversions is the same that understanding that mind consciousness intention is not the first cause of it all it's an effect and a fairly recent effect at that you get intelligence and mind later not at the beginning here are two artifacts made by multicellular organisms on the Left we have a termite castle on the right we have of course la sagrada familia by gaudi antonio gaudi i chose these examples because on the one hand they are so similar I mean strikingly similar and not just on the outside on the inside there's many similarities the materials are not so different but in spite of the similarities which are manifest I want to claim the design and construction of these two artifacts could not be more different there's a world of difference between the way these two things came into existence on the Left we have the termites and the termites are clueless each one of them obeys a little local rule it doesn't know doesn't know the larger thing it is a part of it has this very simple religious competence without comprehension we have the queen on the right and she is not the boss she's not the architect there is no boss there is no architect at all the termite colony builds that termite hill without any instruction from a leader or a brilliant understander of the whole project now in the case of Gaudi it's just the opposite he was paradigmatically an autocrat a crazy genius the inspired person and he had the blueprints and the drawings and the plants and the rationales and the ideas he had a whole philosophy to go with it and he ordered people around he directed this sort of hierarchical arrangement of builders and sub builders and so forth he was in charge so this is the difference between bottom-up building and design and top-down building in design now how do we get from the termites to Gaudi how do we get through a human mind like gaudi's well let's do it gradually building up in steps here's a caddisfly library now caddisfly larvae is not exactly geniuses but they build rather beautiful structures here's a caddis larva food sieve this is built in moving water in fresh water and as you can see the water goes in the funnel at the top and it passes through a sieve a screen that the caddisfly creates and the food sticks to the sieve then then the water excess exits out there and there's also this nice little if you look at the top view you can see that there's a passageway so that the larvae can get to both sides of the screen without going outside there brilliant a brilliant design it compares very favorably with another device for getting food out of water which also involves putting a screen and leaving the water behind a lobster trap now what's the difference between these two so what two food traps well there are reasons for the arrangement of parts in the lobster trap manifestly the lobstermen have been making these for a long time and they figured out why they know why the parts are where they are there's good reasons why the parts remains are there but there are also reasons why the parts are the way they are on the cat is larval food sieve the difference is that the caddis reasons are not represented anywhere anyone until clever biologists come along and reverse-engineer the the sieve and now now for the first time the reasons are articulated or represented but they're not represented in the head of the caddis larvae any more than they're represented in the head of the termite and if they're not represented in the head of the cattle Arbor then they're not represented because Mother Nature does not have a mind mother nature is absolutely ignorant mother nature that is to say natural selection does not represent reasons but natural selection discovers reasons all the time mother mother nature natural selection tracks reasons evinces reasons and sharpens them by improving the design over time of everything from molecules from proteins on up through to a caddis larvas food sieve and the wing of the eagle now these reasons that evolution discovers I call the free-floating rationales of evolution this term gives some people the willies they don't like it and they think I'm playing fast and loose if I had more time I would very carefully defend this and say look biologists everywhere talk about function they talk about the purpose of various parts and their right to do so it goes all the way down to the proteins and their functions and you can't really talk about functions without talking about the reason so the arrays own death says in French for those parts those are the reasons of biology and until clever biologists come along and figure out the reasons and articulate them they're not represented anywhere anywhere that's part of Darwin's idea one of my favorite examples is the cuckoo chick cuckoos as you know our one are called brood parasites the cuckoo does not make her own nest when she's ready to lay her egg she finds a nest that's already been built by a host species and the eggs have already been laid in that nest she waits surreptitiously waiting when the host parents fly off to feed she swoops down secretly in her inner wingsuit she swoops down she lays her egg and she rolls one of the hosts eggs out that's in case the hosts can count yeah she flies away never to return the hosts come back they incubate the eggs the cuckoo chick hatches before the other eggs and there's a reason for that too the first thing that cuckoo chick does it's it's blind that's featherless it's this scrawny little thing is it works it works it works it works to push the other eggs out why to get all the food to maximize the investment to exploit the hosts more there are many examples of this host manipulation by parasite this is one of the best and if you look at the video I didn't I'm not going to show the video of the I have a little video clip of this but there's some on the web these chicks are certainly purposeful but when you see it you can sort of feel a little better if you realize the chick doesn't know what he's doing he knows not what he does he's committing homicide but but he doesn't know it he is not he is not aware of the reason why he is doing this he doesn't have to be he is the beneficiary of that reason in the same way that the caddis larva is or for that matter the oak tree is the beneficiary of a lot of reasons for the its own design these are not represented reasons that's the big difference there's a reason why the cuckoo rolls the egg when she lays her own there's a reason why the cuckoo chick pushes out the egg when it hatches but they don't have to be appreciated by the beneficiaries we are different we are the reason representatives we are the ones that ask why now Descartes thinking about the human mind said well it's because we are the only human beings that have an immaterial soul a race cog attains a thinking thing an immortal soul was very convenient for him of course as a Jesuit that he could sort of take the the the Catholic concept of an immaterial immortal souls ah yes that's the race cognitive that's the race and only we have animals don't have them so that sheep are just competent robots he said that bravely in the 17th century and his contemporary a scientist named IRA knows that you're kidding me do you really think that the light bounces off the head of the wolf and into the sheep's eye and causes the sheep to flee and that that's just an atomic I and take heart said yeah it is you'd be amazed what you can do in effect with wires and police there's an automaton he was said all animals are just a ton of them and it's Hamid it can be very clever but they can't do what we can do which is what you're doing right now listening to a conversation and and and getting it the sort of understanding that we do with words having a conversation said that is beyond any machine at all that takes the race kaga tense an immortal soul well he was almost right our immortal soul gives us the powers that are required for morality we are the moral animal if a bear kills a human being that's not homicide that's not murder because the bear does not understand what it's doing we're the ones that can understand and we're the only ones that can understand and that's that's the sense in which we have a soul I don't think it's immortal Descartes was almost right now here's Descartes famous drawing I've put some graffiti on it the light bounces off the arrow into the eyes which causes actually Descartes was a brilliant he had this tremendous imagination he had what you might call the the bicycle handbrake theory of nerve action because he noticed the sheath on the nerves and he sort of thought myth is a wire in there and you you sort of pull here you tug here you could open a little valve into the end of the ventricles he thought the cerebrospinal fluid that dr. bertalanffy was talking about he thought he called that animal spirits and he thought that once what pumped up the muscles when the hand goes up here you see you open a little valve your pump is a hydraulic theory muscle action and but what happens up there in that funny sort of teardrop shape things he thinks that waves of vibration in this CSF in the animal spirits cause a little part of the brain the pineal gland it's the only part of the brain that you've just gotten one of it's right in the middle and he that was for him the fax machine to the soul if you vibrate that that caused this sort of magical interaction out into out into the immaterial mind where the the consciousness of the arrow happens and then that leads the by freewill the soul decides to point at it then somehow the souls decision to point has to be turned back into material energy this is the famous infamous Cartesian interactionist ik dualism and even Descartes realized this was hopeless when he didn't he realized was a big problem because conservation of energy how there's an immaterial anything create an acceleration in matter even he knew that there was the principle of the conservation of energy so we've given up this Cartesian dualism we're all materialists now we think the mind is the brain how can that be well sheep are competent robots are we were just more competent we don't have an immortal immaterial race car gate ends but we do have a soul we're much more competent than sheep some years ago in Corriere della Sera I was interviewed in the headline the next day I just loved and I'd saved it and use it as a sort of motto ever since see abbiamo lune anima my father D time typically robot yes we have us all but it's made of lots of tiny robots that's my view exactly exactly what are those robots well they are neurons here are some neurons in action each neuron is the direct descendant of a spree swimming eukaryotic cell which fended for itself and its progeny for over a billion years there's a lot of can-do there a lot of competence without comprehension now they're trapped now they're trapped in you know brain but they're still looking for work they're still active they're still out there there are little robots little cellular robots and if those aren't robots then look inside further and you'll see they're made up of robots you've got motor proteins and things like that which are which are little nonliving robots it's robots all the way down so we're made of trillions of mindless little robots and nothing else no mystery stuff no immaterial race car get hands now those who the robots don't have free will and not one of them knows who you are cares but you know we know and we care so the task of having a theory of consciousness is how do we get a team of trillions of robots to turn into something that knows and understands and cares that's the problem for a theory of consciousness how is it done not magic teamwork but how does the teamwork happen how does it get imposed on all these little individual agents that's the problem and how do we get from the bottom-up local rules design and construction that we saw in the termite hill to top-down global order design and construction of the sort that la Sagrada família illustrates now this really is a tricky problem because the more you look at the architecture of the brain the more you realize that all those neurons in there that is sort of like a termite colony if a termite colony can't build la Sagrada família how can the termite colony between your ears do it there's more of them there's a few hundred billion of them but still how where do they where do they get this extra level of perspective this representational power that's the question and I'm going to try to explain that in very short time by appealing to some evolutionary ideas it's got to have it we've got to have an evolutionary answer to this and John Maynard Smith the late great John Maynard Smith and Earth South Mari in a book of 1995 gives us some clues they talk about the major transitions in evolution a major transition is a point in evolutionary history where something happened not miraculous it happened just because it could happen but it changed it sort of shifted gears of evolution you know a new more efficient more effective more powerful process and they list a bunch of them I'm not going to list them all sex you'll be pleased to know is as a major multicellularity of course is a major transition from grow having a single cell to being these huge huge teamworks and then there's language in human culture and that's what I'm going to focus on because that's the key but before I talk about that I'm going to look at the first major transition because it gives us an important clue about the fifth one the eukaryotic revolution here we have all word it's that point where rounds - oh it is here we have a lovely slide of the of the Tree of Life every living thing that's ever lived is represented on this Tree of Life here's the here's the beginning of life right here about three and a half billion years ago and at first it's just bacteria and archaea these are single-celled simple single-celled organisms by you know bacteria eukaryotes this is what we're talking about now come on they're single cell - and everything over here is a eukaryote these are the multi-celled basically everything living that's you can see with the naked eye as a eukaryote so this is an important transition arriving at eukaryotes open the way to everything from insects to trees to spiders to people here right over here maybe maybe this is this is our common ancestor with the bonobo and the chimpanzee and here we are out here so now we want to explain this amazing moment and it was a it was for all we know it was a single moment in the history of life on this planet when the eukaryotic revolution happened so what happened well two and a half billion years ago but after there'd been a billion years of prokaryotes of bacteria and archaea so we've had a lot of Rd a billion years of R&D but still we just got these little simple cells so there were these simple prokaryotes and one prokaryote was invaded by another ProCare so i want you to visualize this here's prokaryote and then here's prokaryote b and one day well one prokaryote was invaded by another B was invaded by a well now this would been happening presumably for a long time and usually B would simply take a apart and use the raw materials that's called eating for sometimes it would take B apart from the inside that's called eating simple life for those prokaryotes but on this occasion neither one ate the other and that is to say the structure of a was not taken apart not dissolved but maintained and what we got was a new thing and a B thing and look what happened to in semi-independent R&D streams a billion years long were united in a moment and you suddenly have a thing which has a whole lot more can do than either A or B by itself teamwork of a very high order uniting the can do the the Rd from two completely different industries if you like in a single moment and it was so much more fit than the other cells around that it prospered and its offspring have both the a and the beef and in fact the lovely fossil trace of that you probably know this but let me just remind you you've heard of mitochondrial DNA every cell in your body you're a eukaryote has mitochondria and they have their own genome and the genes that they have those are the genes that go back those were the genes of a back in those days and the genes of B are now in your so called nuclear DNA you have two genomes in every cell in your body you have your nuclear genome and then you have your mitochondrial genome and you get your mitochondrial genes only from your mother that's why we talk about mitochondrial Eve why because as it happens the sperm doesn't carry any mitochondria so the male does not contribute any of those mitochondrial genes - to your genome you get all your mitochondrial genes from your mother okay the result was a more complicated cell that was fitter because eukaryotes are so much more talented more versatile this made multicellular life possible now you can see maybe where I'm going with this something similar happened to us which made that multicellular but multi personal projects like building cathedrals and things like that possible thanks to a similarly radical thing that happened in the fifth transition the language and human culture one and they go together and language is the most important because human culture depends on it so this is a transition that I want to talk about we have the dog on the right has got a nice frame but the guy has words and in particular he has the word why and that's a word you get in every language one way or another and it is a deeply important word because it asks for a reason so now we want to look at how words got started like the cue carry otic revolution the human culture revolution permitted the sudden acquisition of huge gifts of design we all have minds that are beautifully furnished with not just arithmetic and long division and cost-benefit analysis from how to read a map and and different languages and and the history of the symphony and we can ransack the world's culture and all put it in our head very important you don't eat it you get somebody's book and you eat the book and you've thrown away all the design work you want to keep the structure because that's where all the R&D is and this is in the design this permitted the evolution of a new kind of mind and it's just as dramatic a development as the eukaryotic revolution in the last 10,000 years the human population plus our livestock and pets have gone from a fraction of one percent of the total terrestrial biomass of the planet under one percent ten thousand years ago human beings they're they're their cattle they're domesticated animals and pets was less than 1% of the total terrestrial vertebrate biomass of animals we're leaving the insects and the worms out of this and the fish in the sea today do you know what it is what's the percentage today ten thousand years later 98 98 percent we have engulfed the planet isn't that astonishing that is a biological fact of stunning suddenness and it's all due to culture we are not genetically different from our ancestors of 10,000 years ago hardly at all we were culturally extremely different from our ancestors now I've showed you a phylogenetic tree the tree of life long before there were phylogenetic trees that we glossa genetic trees worked out by linguists historical linguists here's the tree of languages we see the the indo-european branch of the language tree but larger tree is shown in the in the lower left here's the finno-ugric languages here's the languages of China I just went on the web and found some some nice language trees proto Mayan languages now a feature of languages that you know perfectly well is that what we might call horizontal word transfer it's rife in languages what that means is that words move easily from language to language thus the English has a lots of French and German words and French in spite of trying to prevent it no loo weekend and all the rest they've taken in a lot of English words words can move around between languages in a remarkable way which raises hob with doing the language trees it makes it really hard to do this but the same thing is true in genes words are more tractable items and whole languages we can do the lineage of a word more securely than we can do the lineage of a language we can trace it back you know back into French and then at the and then into some earlier earlier perhaps perhaps it even had a cognate in ancient Greek or you can go back further still I call this horizontal word transfer deliberately to make the parallel with what happens in jeans where the big topic these days is horizontal gene transfer this is a lovely tree drawn by a Ford Doolittle this is showing the early days of Eukarya and bacteria and archaea remember the first part of that of that tree of life and as you can see it's all higgledy-piggledy because you have a lot of anastomosis a lot of things branching together rather than branching apart now The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins was published in 1976 and in that he introduced the concept of memes that's what I really I'm gonna have a few minutes for there's cultural items analogous to genes in that they were independent replicators whose that could be traced in the same way we can trace genes or do viruses very important that he added viruses why because viruses are by most people's definition they don't count as they're not alive they're just large molecules but they sure do evolve HIV has evolved more since it was first sequenced simply more changes through its genome than have been recorded since we parted company from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee so evolution does not require living things virus is evolved and they're not alive they evolved by natural selection natural selection so now our topic of memes a lot of people really don't like the idea means I know both scientists who don't like the kind of biologists who don't like it they think it's it's awfully cultural yeah or it's just too vague they think or it's only metaphorical I think that's wrong and a lot of people in the in the guysss dissing shopton they really don't like the idea because they see it as biology Natural Science is encroaching into their domain of culture and they don't want to see this at all so there's a lot of skepticism I'm about mute so a lot of people say well let me first say there are analogous to genes or the viruses I've already said this here's my motto a virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude its attitude is all in this shape shape remember is the result of R&D it's the design it doesn't know what it's doing but it has this tremendous competence without comprehension of getting into a cell and taking over that cells reproductive machinery and getting the cell to make more copies of it rather than of its own DNA that's how virus is replicating a meme is similarly a data structure made of information with attitude it's not alive it doesn't understand what it's doing but it has a competence to the competence to provoke Minds to make copies of them just like a virus sometimes I get this skeptism I don't even know if they prove to me that there's means now you know what the first slide is about words or means that can be pronounced there are other means like wearing your baseball cap backwards or a particular sort of handshake you can't pronounce those there means too but words are the preeminent means they're the obvious means and we know even there at their evolutionary history we know those language trees we know the how these words would be both and they'd be evolved by natural selection not by people trying to change them the words have mutated over time by a process that people are largely oblivious to for evolution to occur copying must be high fidelity but not perfect this is a fundamental principle of evolutionary theory well is this true of words and the answer is yes it is what do you see say the cat oh yeah but now look the H and the a are exactly the same shape you automatically competently and without comprehension without knowing why you were doing it or what you fixed those letters you let context fix them the same thing happens in your genes we have proofreading enzymes that do that kind of work in your genes when they're copying the genes that's the fidelity stays so high when they're copying your jeans well that's of course written language how about spoken language I'm going to show you demonstrate to you a little little experiment that it also works for spoken language so listen carefully I want you to repeat after me something I'm going to say are you ready one defy the epigastrium again one more time all right do you know what it means no you don't have to that's case number one second one repeat after me are you ready and again you can't do it why not it was just as loud if you examine the acoustic signals we read just as many peaks and valleys that just is robust the physical signal but you do not have in your head an automatic system of Correction to the norm just like the turning the h and the a but now in the auditory domain use a set number of finite number of phonemes like letters of the alphabet and you move to the nearest the most appropriate letter automatically without trying and that's how come you even here and you don't even have to know what the words mean it is this feature this digitization of spoken language which is true of all languages that is the key to the fact that languages permit human culture and only human culture to ramify and to explode in cultural evolution there is cultural evolution in chimpanzees for instance and a little bit in Wales banana fairy but it never takes off and the reason is it can't take off because you can't build large structures that will preserve their integrity because you don't have the high fidelity copy and you don't have the digitisation it's a trick that was first learned by evolution in creating the digital code DNA AC GE T for you in the early days with RNA just a few simple letters they kept copied again and again digitisation it's the same reason that your computer is is a high fidelity reliable machine Norm's of Correction are not just for words and not just through genes information about canoes is stored in the brains of Polynesians of course but also in their canoes each canoe is a storehouse of information and its own right but only on the default presumption that the design is good it is itself a norm of itself even if it isn't understood well I'm just making it the way my father made it and the way my grandfather made it I don't know why but this is the way we make canoes here's a nice passage from Alan every boat is copied from another boat it is to see herself who fashions the boats choosing those which function and destroying the others it becomes back copy it that's evolution by natural selection in a nutshell right there if it comes back copy it that's what nature does and that's what people do but that's not genetic natural selection that's a cultural natural selection and that's how words and other means including how to build canoes that's how they propagate so memes are like software viruses in fact memes are software viruses and if I had more time I would go in I would really defend this in sunlight I'm going to just give you a little hint they're like Java applets if you know what that means then you already understand me I don't have time to explain it to understand this you need to adjust your imagination about computation and software words are what a software engineer would call virtual machines that's what a Java applet is - what's the word made of remember we all agreed there's words yeah but what are they made of mMmmm letters yeah but what are you doing what are letters made it worse sounds see they're they're so familiar but they're not any ordinary they're not an ordinary physical thing you can't talk about what what atoms go to make them up or you know or how much they weigh or anything like that they are abstract objects they're just as abstract as a melody or a software application of software they are made of information my wonderful colleague ray jackendoff one of the world's great linguists in his wonderful book foundations of language Vita he's since he's a formal linguist he has to call them lexical items instead of words well because there's all sorts of problems with you know is is being as in jumping running is in a word or is jump and jumping is that two words or one there's reasons for having the term lexical items he describes them as semi-autonomous informational structures with multiple roles to play in cognition doesn't that sound like a bit of software it is a bit of software but it's not software that runs on a laptop it's not binary software it's software that's designed by evolution to run on your neck top words or virtual machines who designed them evolution cultural evolution not genetic evolution we are not born knowing our words we don't get our language through our genes we get our language from culture there are genetic responses certainly our brain is different from the brain of our nearest relatives the chimpanzees and the bonobos in lots of ways which are due to the fact that our ancestors developed language and this created selection pressures that the brain responded to in evolutionary time to make it a better word processor and how are they installed well you can't just download it the way you can in Java applet but almost it's by repetition now my good friend Doug Hofstadter with whom I did a book some years ago some of you may know the mind's eye in one of his recent books he gives a little toolkit these are just some some some virtual machines in his kit and their these are terms let's look at them wild goose chases tackiness dirty tricks sour grapes elbow grease feet of clay loose cannons crackpots lip service so I am dunx feedback what are these each one of those is a little thinking tool if you've got it you can think more efficiently more effectively there's there's a categorization you can make there's some a set of inferences that you will be disposed to make they will remind you of things to think about it will raise questions in your mind these are good these are useful thinking tools and he's downloaded them all and they're all in his kit words make possible the recessive transmission of information Marco Polo they say brought pasta back from the Far East and the Italians could be thankful that we can all be thankful for pasta but notice he didn't have to become a pastry chef he didn't have to become a pasta maker he only had to bring the recipes he didn't have to execute them themselves words also help us use and transmit information that we don't understand let me prove it to you how many of you believe oh this is good this was on here today how many of you believe that e equals mc-squared yeah come on yato it's true how many of you understand it so what was it I got a very quick story I was using that example in the talk I was giving about memes at Fermilab an audience a little bit bigger than this most of them you know world-class physicists and engineers so I said how many of you have a slide yeah because I'm pretty sure I said how many of you believe this all I asked well how many of you understand it all the hands go up so I said well this is not really the right example for this crowd I guess but one fellow jumped at me says no it's perfect because the experimentalists only think they understand it we theoreticians are the ones that understand it which was actually the point I wanted to make what which is that the very fact that we don't have to understand words completely this what permits a wonderful division of labour we do the believing and leave the understanding to the experts and we all use formulae that we all have only an incomplete grasp but we don't completely understand the reasons we only semi understand these things and yet we can use them with confidence because we know there's somebody in the next building who really does understand them all the way down and so it goes Doug is the author of a wonderful book a very strange and wonderful book called I am a strange loop in and I think he's the best sort of speculative theorist about how Minds how brains can come to be Minds dominated by an idea or by ideas how means come to change the operating system if you like by building more and more layers of virtual machines everybody in this room has a laptop that has a JVM on it a Java Virtual Machine that's how come you don't even know it's there it's it permits you to download Java applets the people who write Java applets don't have to know what kind of a computer you have because you all have the JVM you also all have the evm the English virtual machine that's how come you cannot take this talk in and you don't have to work that hard you get all of these new things to think about because you've already installed a fairly recent version of the evm and it permits you it permits you to take in all of these memes that I'm giving you here and and do things with them right away and this is the fulcrum with intelligent design now this is the pilot ace 1950 this is Touring's computer whose I think what had was less than 500 32-bit words of RAM that was it that room full of computer amazing that is the epitome of top-down design nobody would have put up the millions of pounds it took to make that machine if Turing hadn't proven the concepts and and unless I had the blueprints and the rationale and it had all been working this is this is representation first design and construction if there ever was it the farthest thing in the world from what the termites do in other words we are the first intelligent designers in the Tree of Life our natural tendency of course is to interpret all design is top-down that's the old pre-darwinian way of doing it as representation driven and this is both anachronistic and anthropocentric we're using ourselves the first intelligent designers ever as the model for the earlier design processes seems I've read that somewhere but it's false no no words are a very recent invention evolutionarily speaking just in the last million years at the outside so one of the most recent products of blind purposeless natural selection we the reason representers can now look back and discover the reasons everywhere in the Tree of Life it took Darwin to figure out that a mindless process discovered all those reasons we intelligent designers are among the effects not the cause of all those purposes thanks for your attention

Channel: WORLD.MINDS

Views: 13,987

Keywords: Daniel Dennett, Philosophy, Memes, curated by Rolf Dobelli, words, language, evolution, cultural evolution, brains, thinking, thoughts, worldminds, world.minds

Id: ubICD9nBBTU

Length: 51min 0sec (3060 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2011