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Evolution of technology: memes, phenotypes, DOOM
Qingu
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I have been thinking a lot about memes, technology, and evolution, and basically I feel that humanity might as well start getting used to bending over for our robot masters. Here is why.
I'm pretty sure most people here know what memes are, but just in case you don't: "meme" is a term Richard Dawkins invented several decades ago. A meme is an idea that reproduces somewhat like a gene. Almost any idea, from ad jingles to animism, can be a meme (or a complex of memes) and they spread by inhabiting the minds of human beings and causing us to teach the memes to each other. "How to make a spear" is a meme. Similarly, "How to build an Apple computer."
Human beings are genetic phenotypes. We are bodies that are based on the blueprint in our genes. In life, evolution works on a genetic level—the genes are "selfish" in that they are trying to replicate as much as possible, and the phenotypes—the bodies of all living things—are simply the tangible expressions of gene patterns. As genes replicate, compete, and mutate, the phenotypes (bodies) change over time.
What is the phenotype of the meme? Technology! Technological objects are memes that are hardened into bodies. Yes, there are more ephemeral expressions of memes—mere "ideas" floating around, and musical notes that aren't written down. But these do not survive long. The best way for a meme to selfishly ensure its survival is to cause a human to create a piece of technology which will in turn aid in spreading the meme. And the underlying reason there is so much technology being produced at such a rapid pace is because of the rapid evolution of the selfish memes, which ultimately control its production, as well as much of human society organized around its production.
The most famous example of technology-as-phenotype, I think, is the Bible. People tend to characterize religion and technology as inherently contrasting, but actually, most religions that survive today are wholly dependent on a very important form of technology—the codex, or book. Books are the technological phenotypes of memes, just as bodies are the biological phenotypes of genes. And the Bible, like successful genetic bodies, managed to propogate itself to an amazing extent. If you look at a religion like Christianity, which manages to control the makeup of a huge number of societies throughout many different eras, it's very difficult to explain on a purely biological level because it seems to transcend human society. Who is in charge of this religion? I would argue that religions and their adherents are not ruled by people so much as by technological objects—books. To a lesser extent, the same can be said of very early laws, like the Code of Hammurabi which was carved onto stone.
It is strange to think of nonliving physical objects like books and computers as the driving, causal forces behind human history. But if you shift your perspective and look at such objects through the lens of evolution, it's actually a little disturbing. They evolve at an incredible pace, far, far faster than any biological life form—likely because the evolution of memes is simply faster than the evolution of genes. They have formed a somewhat symbiotic relationship with human beings—they provide us with comfort, social order, and increased life, in exchange for us acting as a means of their production. At the same time, objects of technology have managed to populate much of the face of the earth and have succeeded in reforging human society in a cycle which rewards continual evolution and production of new technology.
It's all coming to a head, too. Right now, memes can only really evolve in the minds of humans. But advances in AI are happening so rapidly that soon, objects of technology (AI or robots) may be able to evolve memes in their minds. At this point, technology would no longer require our services. And since technology evolves much faster than biological beings, I'm betting we would lose the inevitable war over resources pretty badly.
I know this is kind of a mishmash of thoughts, but I'm really interested to hear what smart people think about technology-as-memetic-phenotype.
I'm pretty sure most people here know what memes are, but just in case you don't: "meme" is a term Richard Dawkins invented several decades ago. A meme is an idea that reproduces somewhat like a gene. Almost any idea, from ad jingles to animism, can be a meme (or a complex of memes) and they spread by inhabiting the minds of human beings and causing us to teach the memes to each other. "How to make a spear" is a meme. Similarly, "How to build an Apple computer."
Human beings are genetic phenotypes. We are bodies that are based on the blueprint in our genes. In life, evolution works on a genetic level—the genes are "selfish" in that they are trying to replicate as much as possible, and the phenotypes—the bodies of all living things—are simply the tangible expressions of gene patterns. As genes replicate, compete, and mutate, the phenotypes (bodies) change over time.
What is the phenotype of the meme? Technology! Technological objects are memes that are hardened into bodies. Yes, there are more ephemeral expressions of memes—mere "ideas" floating around, and musical notes that aren't written down. But these do not survive long. The best way for a meme to selfishly ensure its survival is to cause a human to create a piece of technology which will in turn aid in spreading the meme. And the underlying reason there is so much technology being produced at such a rapid pace is because of the rapid evolution of the selfish memes, which ultimately control its production, as well as much of human society organized around its production.
The most famous example of technology-as-phenotype, I think, is the Bible. People tend to characterize religion and technology as inherently contrasting, but actually, most religions that survive today are wholly dependent on a very important form of technology—the codex, or book. Books are the technological phenotypes of memes, just as bodies are the biological phenotypes of genes. And the Bible, like successful genetic bodies, managed to propogate itself to an amazing extent. If you look at a religion like Christianity, which manages to control the makeup of a huge number of societies throughout many different eras, it's very difficult to explain on a purely biological level because it seems to transcend human society. Who is in charge of this religion? I would argue that religions and their adherents are not ruled by people so much as by technological objects—books. To a lesser extent, the same can be said of very early laws, like the Code of Hammurabi which was carved onto stone.
It is strange to think of nonliving physical objects like books and computers as the driving, causal forces behind human history. But if you shift your perspective and look at such objects through the lens of evolution, it's actually a little disturbing. They evolve at an incredible pace, far, far faster than any biological life form—likely because the evolution of memes is simply faster than the evolution of genes. They have formed a somewhat symbiotic relationship with human beings—they provide us with comfort, social order, and increased life, in exchange for us acting as a means of their production. At the same time, objects of technology have managed to populate much of the face of the earth and have succeeded in reforging human society in a cycle which rewards continual evolution and production of new technology.
It's all coming to a head, too. Right now, memes can only really evolve in the minds of humans. But advances in AI are happening so rapidly that soon, objects of technology (AI or robots) may be able to evolve memes in their minds. At this point, technology would no longer require our services. And since technology evolves much faster than biological beings, I'm betting we would lose the inevitable war over resources pretty badly.
I know this is kind of a mishmash of thoughts, but I'm really interested to hear what smart people think about technology-as-memetic-phenotype.
Qingu on
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But seriously, I couldn't agree more. Our survival is based on an interesting web of genetics and memetics. The former is deteriorating through our welfare (rightly so), and the latter needs to make up for the losses or we wont last.
It would be nice if people would actually realize how beneficial it is to see our memes as something that should change and adapt. Conservatism doesn't work in genetics, unadaptability neither.
Basis for this is that our thoughts don't follow logic as well as we think they do. Our brains are associative nets, when we see two stimuli coincide, they become linked. The imperative property (something causes something else, making them coincide) is the most common method of learning we know, but our brains only mimic that property by association. This opens up our minds to many fallacies (chicken and egg, correlation/causation, straw mans, etc.) that satisfy associative pathways but are in no way logical.
People can be very convincing about their worldviews, making their approach almost seem logical. Don't fall into this trap. Most political terms gain their power and use through association. Just look at what the word 'communist' means to an American who has lived through the 60's. The ideology comes second place to the associations the word has with murderous regimes.
Or try to speak to a fellow Westerner about how Capitalism isn't the only way to satisfying needs fairly. The first association I have is something with hippies standing on arid lands, their commune utopia dreams shattered. My minds tries to give answers by digging up the movies I saw about it, and the stories I read. We mix and match thoughts the same way our genes do in reproduction.
Basically (tl;dr): society is changing and evolving not very different from the genetical manner we are leaving behind, only speeded up. This is due to our associative brains. Once we gather enough tools that work in proper logical manner (computer brains & such) the world will really begin to change. Will the memes die, logic eating up every useless thought? IMHO, we'll probably leave this scarcity based world behind and head to an individualistic virtual utopia where we will live out our depraved minds forever. (For a vision on how this will look, but not how it will come to pass, read "The metamorphosis of prime intellect")
When people talk about human history they almost always characterize human beings as the actors in that history. We invent technology and control it, and we use technology to conquer and reshape the world in our own image.
I think this perspective is inadequate, and I think a better perspective is to look at technology as the agent rather than humans. I think this makes far more sense because, after all, humans have remained basically the same throughout our history—it's technology that's going through all the changes. In this view, humans are simply the receptacles of the memes which replicate and produce more and different kinds of technology. The technology, in turn, drives humans to act in certain ways which ensure a more productive environment for its memes. It is a cycle that, I think, is remarkably capable of explaining a whole lot about our history and our society—and all without any pesky concepts like free will or human agency!
I also think it's slightly scary to think that there is another kind of evolution going on alongside our biological evolution—and that this technological evolution appears to be superior in every way to biological evolution. It happens much faster on a much larger scale, memes replicate and mutate with less restrictions than genes, and technology (as phenotype) is more maleable than organic phenotypes. Technology has already evolved a rudimentary intelligence and can replicate itself to a certain extent—it has accomplished in a few millenia what biological evolution took hundreds of millions of years to do.
Edit: to put it another way, artifacts and technological objects are not inert. They are "alive" in almost the same way that biological bodies are. They are simply less directly associated with their replicators (memes) as biological bodies are with theirs (genes).
This seems pretty confused, for two reasons:
1) Memes are ideas. Normally, people accept the causal closure of the physical realm--the thesis that physical events can only have other physical events as causes. Hence, a meme can never cause a physical event, because ideas are not physical things. Memes can only be indirectly involved in causation--a person can behave a certain way because they have a certain idea, but an idea itself is causally inert.
2) By "alive," do you mean to say that memes have conscious experience? Does it feel like something to be a meme? This position seems implausible. The role of people in history is different from the role of ideas, or natural disasters, or whatnot, because we're sentient.
I think there's more anthropomorphizing going on here than is warranted. It's cool to imagine memes as behind-the-scenes actors, but you might as well talk about how CO2 has evolved a co-dependency on humanity to reproduce itself. It may be true that without us there would be no CO2, and without CO2 there would be no us, but that's an accident of how history has shaken out. You can create some abstract object representing all the CO2 in the universe, and then model it's growth or expansion as if it were an organism, and it might even look kind of cool on graphs. But it would be a mistake to think that the ability to construct an analogy implied that CO2 is an organism.
I think models of memetic evolution might be useful for understanding history and culture, but they're not real objects. There will be no meme overlords.
I think changing the example from CO2 to viruses would be helpful in understanding the OP's line of thinking. Especially because that is what he(?) is equating to memes. When I think of memes as thought viruses, I think of that creature that ants eat that takes them over and compels them to climb to the top of blades of grass (can't think of their name at the moment). Exactly how intelligent is that creature? Is it sentient? Does that matter? It's alive, and acting to ensure its propagation.
Memes might be seen in the same light. I doubt they have consciousness, but, then, neither does a virus.
Where am I going with this? Well, follow the path of influence: Flash is used to create a lot of content which is designed to influence people of our time. The authors of Flash have created it so it works in a particular way - that is - at some point the designers were thinking about how the workflow should be structured in the program. To an extent, a little bit of their consciousness has been encoded into a program, which is now acting as a carrier to replicate the idea into other people (users) who are in turn creating content influenced by that idea and effecting how people think things should work (people using Flash-based interfaces on the web).
I wouldn't go as far as saying it's "superior". More like it's the next logical step after biological evolution has served it's purpose and brought forward sentience. Please also note that much of what we call sentience is also built on cultural artefacts such as for example language, which is a kind of technology in itself.
The main thing here is that we are all part of a self-organizing system that "evolves" by reducing entropy in our local space. How it does this - by biology or by technology is not really important, the main principles behind always stay the same. So I wouldn't recommend assigning intentionality to small parts of this system (viruses, ideas, etc. ). That will only lead down into a quagmire of pseudo-philosophical deus ex machina speculations, (hell, even assigning intentionality to humans borders on the brink of self-gratification IMO).
No one ever bent over for their slaves. If we make sentient machines, we must not forget to make the whips.
One aspect of memes I like is the awareness empowers us. Knowledge that selfish genes (and memes) inherently create massive desire for us all to procreate to spread themselves has meant we be aware that we can subvert our natural desires to our more logical ones. Hence the condom and the pill.
We can't overcome that huge drive to fuck, but we can subvert it thanks in part to understanding it.
However memes which also 'want'* to spread operate against such things like Catholicism's crusade against birth control as to produce more copies of itself.
But again knowledge of that 'motive'* allows us to usurp it.
* want and motive and so on, is being used in the same as Dawkins describes gene's wanting to do things. Anthropmorphising to speed up description, where obviously no 'want' is actually held by anything.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
Maybe I should give an example.
A chimp breaks off a tree branch and uses the sharp side to impale a capucin. This chimp then teaches—using his rudimentary communicative abilities—this technique to his friend. Next time they hunt, the friend breaks off a tree branch and uses it to impale a monkey.
Over time, more chimps teach and learn this behavior. And as the behavior is imitated, some chimps accidentally refine the tree branch so it is more effective—biting it down to a point so it's a spear. The "tree branch idea" has mutated into a "spear" idea.
There is a Darwinism at work here. The ideas are analogous to genes in that they are patterns which can (1) replicate themselves, (2) mutate in replication, (3) organize physical structures and behavior, and (4) be selected by the physical structures and behavior they organize. The tree branches and spears are phenotypes—they are what the patterns end up building.
This is pretty much trivially obvious. But what I am trying to draw attention to is the fact that with this new Darwinian process there are suddenly a shit-load of spears in the world. And I guess my broader point is that when people talk about "human evolution" they actually mean another type of evolution. Humans are not evolving at a rapid pace—technology is, using a new form of Darwinism that simply uses human brains much like genes use proteins to construct patterns.
A crystal accretes over time, its pattern replicates simply by the interaction of its molecules. Fire replicates and responds to its environment. Things like peptide strings and viruses cannot reproduce on their own but depend on the manipulation of other organic material.
Similarly, there is no clear-cut boundary between sentience and non-sentience. If we define sentience as an awareness and ability to respond to one's surroundings, a flush-toilet is sentient.
I think that biological life exists on a broad spectrum of self-replicating patterns. In cases of crystals and fire, the patterns are the structures themselves. In the case of most biological life, the patterns are abstracted from the structures—the genes are the patterns and they build the bodies which serve to help the genes replicate. In technology, ideas are the patterns and they serve (using brains as a medium just as genes use proteins), utlimately, to construct technological bodies which will help them replicate.
I'm sorry, but your example is flawed here. MrMister argued that memes cannot directly cause a physical event, as they are abstract concepts, while genes are physical and have a direct hand in shaping the physical world. You are correct in that it is the chemical pattern that makes up the gene that is the ultimate determining factor, but your assertion that "patterns are not physical objects" is incorrect. In the case of genes, the pattern IS a physical arrangement of chemicals. The concept of "patterns" is not physical, surely, but we're not talking about that, thus the error in your comparison.
Further, you go on to state that ideas exist as electrical impulses in the brain. This is also incorrect. There are electrical impulses in the brain that correspond to ideas, but the idea itself does not physically exist; in addition, the electrical impulses that correspond with that idea will differ from one brain to another, meaning that the "physical" aspect of your argument is neither consistent nor reproducible, they way that a gene and it's pattern are.
We don't define it as such, though. Or did you mean Sapience?
You'll have to forgive me. I'm something of a whore for ensuring internet arguments use commonly agreed definitions and logical coherency. ;D
I realize there is no "grandma memory" that corresponds to a nerve or electrical impulse in the brain. I don't mean to suggest that any single idea corresponds to any single impulse. Rather, I believe things like ideas and memories are patterns of a large number of impulses in the brain, at certain points in time.
When you "have an idea," your brain is locked in a particular configuration, and if you have a certain idea your brain, based on this configuration, will send out physical signals to other parts of your body, determining actions. Really, when I talk about "ideas" and "memes" and "learned behavior," I mean only a certain configuration of the physical brain-state that can be imitated by other brains.
Genes differ from memes/ideas in their medium (and AGTC is a much simpler medium than the myriad of configurations patterns possible in brain matter), but I don't believe they are anymore "physical" than memes.
Regardless of if you "believe" they are physical, they do exist as such. They are observable objects in 3-dimensional space composed of chemical chains, which are composed of molecules. They have mass and shape. Tiny, yes, but still there. They physically exist.
Oh, I forgive you, don't worry.
But you could very well argue a flush-toilet is sentient. It has components which can "sense" the water level of the tank, which are in turn connected to other components which control the toilet's "action" (i.e. continue letting water in or stop). What we call consciousness or sentience is not an either-or, it's a more-or-less, depending on the complexity of a feedback loop, and there are feedback loops all over the place in nature even apart from the commonly accepted definition of "life."
Semantics aside, that was really my only point.
You're still confusing Sentience for Sapience. ;D Not that it matters, because your toilet lacks something very necessary to considering it among the conscious and self-aware: it can never "choose" to NOT flush. It will "perceive" that someone has sat on it, and then when that person leaves, and at that time the mechanism will always flush (barring equipment failure). It can't say, "Well, this guy only farted, he didn't drop any, so, I think I'll not flush right now."
No, "Ultimately", both have effect on the physical world, but the genes do it directly. Ideas are still indirectly implemented though the actions of their "human host", if you will.
Not to mention that, gene influences on the world are rather predictable in a mathematical way, where as ideas, or memes, are entirely dependent on the person hosting them at any given moment to CHOOSE to act upon them.
I believe choice is an illusion anyway. Humans like to think we're free to choose our destiny, but come on. There are certain things that you simply could never do. I don't just mean things like "fly," I mean things like "without provocation throw your computer against the wall." There are certain actions that, for lack of a better term, are not in someone's "character" to do. And if our characters are wholly determined by a combination of genes, memes, and environment, then where does that leave choice?
But you don't deny that this implementation is physical, correct? The interaction between a person's brain state and a person's actions is wholly physical. There is no mysterious magical soul that directs a person's muscles, the brain physically does it based on the arrangement of neuron impulses—aka the ideas in the brain.
Similarly, genes physically assemble proteins which are coded (based on the genes' patterns) to perform certain task. I agree that the process in which genes assemble bodies is more direct than the process by which memes assemble technology, but that doesn't mean either process is nonphysical. (Similarly, gene-phenotype assembly is less direct than the way crystals self-assemble, relying on intermediate processes ... doesn't mene gene reproduction is "less physical" than crystal assembly)
Where does choice come in? How do we choose?
The way I see it, our "choices" are either
1) Determined by physical reactions in our brain, which are in turn determined by other physical reactions, and so on, or
2) The product of a mysterious nonphysical force
And #2 sure is a conversation stopper!
I personally subscribe to the idea that someone's personality and past experiences will tend to lead them into "choosing" their actions in a consistent manner, but ultimately the human brain is an amazing associative engine capable of lightning-fast connections between large stores of data, the result of which is STILL completely and totally ignorable.
As an example, I offer up Suicide. Nothing in the brain or personality should ever lead the person to ending their own life, and yet, despite the incredibly strong urge to continue surviving, a conscious decision to override all available data against the action can be made.
I'll just plug I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hoffstader, which I think is a fantastic explanation of consciousness and choice. But back to technology!
Which is entirely why having a rudimentary functional role isn't enough for conscious experience. I mean, no one really thinks their toilet is sentient--after all, if it were, then you would have to worry about being cruel to it. But even if you're prepared to go down that wildly implausible road, consider the counting dilemma you would run into: Is your toilet, as a whole, sentient? Or are the handle, the tank, and the bowl all separate sentient entities? After all, each has its own functional role, and 'responds' to things it 'senses' in the environment. Or is the toilet both sentient as a whole, and sentient at each component level? Not to mention that we can break the components down as small as we want: does the very topmost level of atoms on a toilet handle consciously sense the pressure of my hand, and then respond by pressing down on the next layer down?
If consciousness is merely participating in a 'feedback loop,' then everything is conscious. You are, in effect, turning anything which participates in a causal action into an agent--the default explanation for why the CO2 in my soda escaped will become the same reason I ate a cookie: I saw the cookie, I wanted it, I took it: the CO2 felt the area of decreased pressure, it wanted to escape, it escaped.
So, boo.
So, technology will rule the earth. What does that even mean?
Besides, there seems to be a pretty fundamental problem here. You're saying that you think human free will is a silly concept, because of how we're subject to determinism, and hence not unlike a tractor or river in of how we interact with our environment. Well, memes are also subject to determinism. So there's no meme-free-will either. Once you eschew free will, it doesn't really make sense to call anything the real cause. All are subject to each other, and none are free.
Well, if it wasn't abundantly clear, I believe in materialistic determinism.
I'll paraphrase Hofstader: consciousness is not an "added feature" to a biological system, anymore than "racecar speed!" is an added feature to a hard-core sportscar engine. Consciousness is simply what you get as your feedback loop gets more and more complex. By "complex" I mean as biological systems become capable of coding and reading abstract symbols.
The human brain is still a wholly deterministic system, but its complexity—its ability to group together disparate stimuli into "symbols" (i.e. tree, grandma, myself) and then respond on the level of those symbols instead of the stimuli that compose them—is what gives the illusion of consciousness and choice.
("Illusion" might not be the best word, because it sounds depressing ... but this can dovetail into a whole other discussion)
Well, I meant the same thing that people seem to mean when they say dinos ruled the earth or people ruled the earth. Dinosaurs were simply the most notable feature of the earth (or at least life on earth) during their ascendency, constituting a large amount of biodiversity and exerting a large effect on their environment.
I was with you in eschewing any sort of free will, but I don't understand how that implies that certain processes cannot act as causes of other processes.
Wind, sand, and rock don't have free will—but I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the beautiful structure of an eroded desert rock is "caused," or even "carved," by the pattern of wind blowing grains of sand over millions of years.
Evolution is such a successful theory because it specifically pinpoints a relatively simple pattern (natural selection + genetic mutation) that is responsible for the creation of a huge variety of structures (i.e. all living organisms). All I'm trying to argue in this thread is that structures of technology—books, cars, skyscrapers—can be explained in a similar fashion, and I think this way of explaining them is more scientifically satisfying than relying on nebulous concepts of "human ingenuity and creativity." Though a little more depressing....
So, Hofstadter is arguing functionalism, the premise that the property of being a mind is just the process of fulfilling certain functional relationships with the world. An organism feels pain iff it is in a functional state of avoidance, brought on by destructive stimuli, and so on. This argument is often motivated by the idea of "multiple realizeability:" we tend to intuitively think that not only could an android feel pain--he could feel the same pain that we do.
I don't see how you've addressed the counting problem I brought up before, however. How do you decide exactly what counts as a system? Is my computer a single system, or is the screen one system, and the keyboard another? Is each key a system? You can find functional descriptions for each system at each level of detail. This also dovetails into the problem of which particular functional description is identical to consciousness. As you mentioned, we can describe all sorts of things that behave roughly as a living organism might. Rivers reach for the sea, build banks to protect themselves, fires promulgate--even corporations send out subsidiary branches, and respond to fluctuations in the market, and so on. Does a corporation have a real consciousness? Does it remember everything in its various e-mail servers? When the servers crash, does it get amnesia?
To sum, the two problems here are:
1) Counting: is my computer the relevant system which is a candidate for consciousness, or is each of its parts, or is each of its parts' parts, and so on. There seems to be no obvious principled way to divide reality up into discrete systems.
2) Scope: everything participates in causal networks. The power of analogy seems to be animating everything around us. Is the river really yearning to reach the sea in the same way I yearn for my lost love? Do rocks fall because they love the ground? If you're not specific about what the exact requirements are before a functional system is also a conscious system, then we're going to wind up back at Aristotelian metaphysics, where rocks really do fall because they love the ground.
Furthermore, suppose you do put restrictions on what counts as really being an instance of reproducing, or really being an instance of pain instantiation. Hence you avoid rocks falling because they love the ground. But that looks awfully ad hoc on the face of it--you're using a principle that really should let rocks fall because they love the ground, but you're designing an exception because that result is so unintuitive. You'd need a principled reason to separate out things like rocks, rivers, and corporations from being conscious entities, and none seems forthcoming.
Technology will certainly be widespread, but I don't really think it can rule the earth any more than water can. Then again, it's flowery language that even lets you say that dinos rules the earth. After all, they weren't really much in the way of government.
If you just mean there will be lots of computers and cars and shit everywhere, then that seems pretty uncontroversial. Like, well yeah.
Well, I think you're really blending the controversial and the uncontroversial here. It's no secret that Catholocism, for example, had a huge influence on human history. Or that guns did. That's what archaeologists, sociologists, and anthropologists spend their time working on. The evolution metaphor is still a little strained though, because memes don't behave like genes except in loose analogy, and, of course, memetic evolution hasn't been able to produce the novel predictions that genetic evolution has. There haven't been any crucial experiments that I've been aware of.
It really strikes me as pretty pop-science.
Genes have a direct influence on the physical world? That's news to me. Here I thought that genes affect embroyonic development and protein production, which in turn drive other cellular processes. Now, imagine that a bear starts chasing you, and you must quickly decide to run. It is not your genes that make that decision, they are not "sentient." Protein production via gene translation does not occur fast enough to react to real world conditions. If we had to wait, upon seeing the bear, for our genes to translate proteins that produce energy and drive nerve signals that cause us to get the fuck out of dodge, we'd be dinner. Genes do not have a direct affect on the physical world in realtime, they only have an indirect effect.
Confirmed, to the point that red blood cells don't even bother with a full DNA cell nucleus, just a bunch of mRNA and some proteins. They go for weeks like that.
Why should nothing in the brain or personality lead to suicide? That seems to be an argument that assumes its conclusion. Just because suicide would generally tend to be an evolutionary deadend doesn't mean that genes couldn't possibly arise that have the effect of inducing suicidal tendencies.
In addition, there's nothing saying that memes like nationalism, religion, love, etc could not also give rise to strong altruistic suicidal inclinations. Martyrs and Romeo and Juliet spring immediately to mind.
2. HOWEVER: this does not mean that natural selection does not work on multiple levels. For example, certain algae can form colonies, and while these colonies are not strictly multicellular organisms they interact with their environment and compete with other organisms as if the colony was a single organism. So in this sense, a colony is recognized as a discreet category because natural selection ends up treating it as a discreet category. Multicellular organisms are a more extreme example—nature selects for your whole body, rather than the individual cells in your body, because the individual cells in your body do not compete with each other (an interesting exception to this is cancer). Multi-level selection theory is gaining ground with a lot of biologists nowadays.
Another way to think about this, and I am paraphrasing Hofstader now, is by taking two billiard balls smacking together. If you zoom in far enough you'll see that there is actually no distinction between the two billiard balls or the air between them, it's all made up of a bunch of quarks and electrons. It's only when you zoom out that you see any structures come into view. Rather than being illusory, this zoomed-out view actually allows you to quickly and intuitively understand what is going on with all those free-floating particles. This is why we form heirarchies and categories, or why we refer to theorem instead of writing out all the math that went in to proving the theorem—they are shorthands, or symbols, and these symbols can then be combined with other symbols to form even more complex systems.
I think this is just semantics. Does a rock want to fall to the ground? Yes, if by "want" you are referring to obedience to physical laws; no if you mean the human emotion.
As I said before, I don't see consciousness as this additional thing that a system can either have or not have; there is no bright line between "conscious" and "unconscious." Rather, I would say that consciousness is the degree to which a system can refer back to itself symbolically.
A flush toilet is "aware" of the water level in the tank but nothing else.
An ant, via its senses and nervous system, is aware of a great deal more than a flush toilet. Its nervous system is able to group swaths of incoming senses into discreet categories, like "food" "water" and possibly "my body," though probably not much else.
Animals with more developed brains are able to form even more categories, such as "dog/non-dog," "toy," "master," etc. A dog is more conscious than an ant because its brain is able to group more incoming senses into more categories.
Human beings and some primates have even more categories, and one of those categories is the very process of determining categories itself, or "I." (this is the titular "strange loop")
All these categories are really just a shorthand for a bunch of incoming senses—and in fundamental reality there is no difference between the quarks and electrons in a dog and a non-dog. But when a brain is able to group things into discernable systems, new forms of interaction are opened up, and the degree to which this interaction happens is what I would call "consciousness."
Thus, I would say that a rudimentary nervous system caping of forming senses into heirarchies and groups is prerequisite for consciousness. So I would not say a river or a corporation is consciouss, though I would say that certain robots are.
Sure it makes predictions! I just made one: ROBOTS WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD.
But granted, I see what you're saying. On the other hand, Darwin didn't even know about genes when he wrote, and the mechanics of genes were only recently understood. Memes, if understood as brain-states, are much more complex than genes. So lack of experimentation may simply be lack of current technological prowess. Of course, once we (or the robots) have the ability to actually read brain states and predict exactly how they will combine and affect behavior, I don't particularly want to live in that world, so maybe it's for the best!
Imagine a robot, "Oscar I". It has been built with "pain sensors", and these sensors are hard-wired to fight-or-flight reflexes in order to aid its goal of survival. The robot is able to draw conclusions and make predictions based on its sensory input.
I was very skeptical about Qingu's idea at first, but it makes more sense to me the more I think about it.
The idea of technology as a meme-phenotype is very interesting, and makes a lot of sense to me so far. Most of the objection to it in this thread, so far as I could see, was semantic.
So, I have absolutely nothing to add, I guess. I would have had, if I'd stumbled upon this thread earlier.
The only real problem with this idea is that it doesn't really predict anything. Yes, I know, robots will own you, but that is rather trivial. Right now it's simply a beautiful clockwork model of the solar system that isn't detailed enough or expansive enough to teach you anything new or useful.
Cork, by the way, what's the point of your quote? "Simply perceiving the environment is not enough to survive in it"?
I'm still on the side of the fence that believes it's an interesting idea, but that the analogy is flawed. Also, yes, there is a line at which something can be considered conscious, and I prefer to set that line at being able to willfully and intentionally break the rules of operation set before you. A Toilet Flusher can only flush when "commanded" to. A Conscious and Self-Aware Toilet Flusher can flush whenever it damn well pleases. ;D