At last, someone has taken the proper measure of Dan Dennett, who comes up short.

Dan Dennett has written and autobiography, I've Been Thinking. I suppose he has. Stuart Jeffries reviews it in The Guardian. He opens with the story of how Dennett came up with the idea that his brain might very well have been in a vat, "which, he tells us proudly here, powerfully influenced the makers of The Matrix." Jeffries then goes on about some this and some that, including the fallout from Dennett's 1991 Consciousness Explained, and that leads to this wonderful paragraph:

These are deep matters and yet Dennett is an unreliable guide to them. His memoir involves more chippy score-settling with intellectual opponents, some of them long dead, than is dignified. But Dennett is a conceited fellow: it takes someone with an overdeveloped sense of self and an underdeveloped sense of tact to write the following: “The philosopher Don Ross once said of me: ‘Dan believes modesty is only a virtue to be reserved for special occasions.’” My copy is now dotted with marginal “ughs” to register my irritation at some piece of professorial preening. Even when Dennett tells us the truth about himself – namely, that he is one of the few philosophers to get out of the armchair to study neuroscience, artificial intelligence, computer science and psychology – the tone is boastful. He is unremittingly self-hagiographic, confirming the notion that autobiography can be the lowest of literary genres. He transforms an interesting thinker into a dull protagonist.

YES.

I've always thought Dennett coasted through his career on a vast sea of cleverness while avoiding the need to think deeply about anything. Well, yes, that's a bit of an exaggeration. He has written a thing or three that I've liked, something about patterns as I recall. But that's not enough to balance out the damage he's done, in particular, for all the nonsense about memes that he's fostered.

I've posted a couple of working papers in which I critique various of his ideas: Dennett on Memes, Neurons, and Software, An Inquiry into & a Critique of Dennett on Intentional Systems, and Cultural Evolution, Memes, and the Trouble with Dan Dennett.

Cultural Evolution and Oral Tradition: ‘Information transfer’ at the micro scale

Bumping this to the top of the queue because cultural evolution is on my mind these days. This books speaks to a number of issues, including what makes a story culturally "fit": what features make a story easy to memorize/remember?

 

It’s clear that one problem I have with Dennett’s memetics is this his conception face-to-face mechanisms of cultural evolution – like the transfer of information from one computer to another – seems rather thin, unrealistically so. I tend to think that meaning is something arrived at through negotiation whereas Dennett writes as though one-shot one-way ‘information transfer’ is sufficient to the process.

I want to present some passages from David Rubin, Memory in Oral Tradition: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford UP 1995) that I think merit close consideration. These are passages about oral epic and so are relevant to thinking about folktales, myth and such, stories that are held in memory and delivered to an audience without benefit of written prompt. One thing we need to keep in mind is that, in oral culture, the notion of faithful repetition is not the same as it is in literate culture. In the literate world repetition means word-for-word. In oral cultures it does not. A faithful recounting of a story is one where the same characters are involved in the same (major) incidents in (pretty much) the same order. Word-for-word recounting is not required; in fact, such a notion is all but meaningless. With no written (or otherwise recorded) verification, how do you tell?

This passages illustrates that nicely (pp. 137-138):

Avdo Medjedovic was the best singer recorded by Lord and Parry. An example of his learning a new song provides insights into what it is that the poetic-language learner must learn about his genre (Lord, 1960; Lord & Bynum, 1974). A singer sang a song of 2,294 lines that Avdo Medjedovic had never heard before. When the song was finished, Avdo Medjedovic was asked if he could sing the same song. He did, only now the song was 6,313 lines long. The basic story line remained the same, but, to use Lord's description, "the song lengthened, the ornamentation and richness accumulated, and the human touches of character, touches that distinguish Avdo Medjedovic from other singers, imparted a depth of feeling that had been missing" (p. 78). Avdo Medjedovic's song retold the same story in his own words, much as subjects in a psychology experiment would retell a story from a genre with which they were familiar, but Avdo Medjedovic's own words were poetic language and his story was a song of high artistic quality. Although the particular words changed, the words added were all traditional; and so the stability of the tradition, if not the stability of the words of a particular telling of a story, was ensured.

Several aspects of this feat are of interest. First, the song was composed without preparation and sung at great speed. There was no time for preparation before the 6,313 lines were sung, and once the song began, the rhythm allowed little time for Avdo Medjedovic to stop and collect his thoughts. Such a feat implies a well-organized memory and the equivalent of an efficient set of rules for production. Second, the song expanded yet remained traditional in style, demonstrating that more than a particular song was being recalled. Rather, rules or parts drawn from other songs were being used. Third, although Avdo Medjedovic was creative by any standards, he was not trying to create a novel song; he believed that he was telling a true story just the way he had heard it, though perhaps a little better. To do otherwise would be to distort history.

So, an expert listens to a story than runs to 2,294 lines and then immediately repeats it back, but embellished to 6,313. Would he be able to do the same thing the next day or ten days or a year later? Probably.

Dennett reviews Henrich on how "the West" emerged out of medieval Europe

Daniel C. Dennett, Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory, NYTimes, Sept. 12, 2020. A review of:

Joseph Henrich: The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020.

A line of cultural evolution that appeared roughly 1500 years ago in Europe, led to European and American nations being WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. Henrich argues that the church fathers set it off when they forbade cousin marriage, thereby weakening family groups.

WEIRD folk are the more recent development, growing out of the innovation of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the birth of states and organized religions about 3,000 years ago, then becoming “proto-WEIRD” over the last 1,500 years (thanks to the prohibition on marrying one’s cousin), culminating in the biologically sudden arrival of science, industry and the “modern” world during the last 500 years or so. WEIRD minds evolved by natural selection, but not by genetic selection; they evolved by the natural selection of cultural practices and other culturally transmitted items.

Henrich is an anthropologist at Harvard. He and his colleagues first described the WEIRD mind in a critique of all the work in human psychology (and the social sciences more generally) built on experimental subjects almost exclusively composed of undergraduates — or the children of academics and others who live near universities. The results obtained drawing on this conveniently available set of “normal” people were assumed by almost all researchers to be universal features of human nature, the human brain, the human emotional system. But when attempts were made to replicate the experiments with people in other countries, not just illiterate hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers but the elites in Asian countries, for instance, it was shown in many cases that the subject pool of the original work had been hugely biased from the outset.

One of the first lessons that must be learned from this important book is that the WEIRD mind is real; all future investigation of “human nature” must be complicated by casting a wider net for subjects, and we must stop assuming that our ways are “universal.” Offhand, I cannot think of many researchers who haven’t tacitly adopted some dubious universalist assumptions. I certainly have. We will all have to change our perspective.

The church's role:

The centerpiece of Henrich’s theory is the role played by what he calls the Roman Catholic Church’s Marriage and Family Program, featuring prohibitions of polygamy, divorce, marriage to first cousins, and even to such distant blood relatives as sixth cousins, while discouraging adoption and arranged marriages and the strict norms of inheritance that prevailed in extended families, clans and tribes. “The accidental genius of Western Christianity was in ‘figuring out’ how to dismantle kin-based institutions while at the same time catalyzing its own spread.”

The genius was accidental, according to Henrich, because the church authorities who laid down the laws had little or no insight into what they were setting in motion, aside from noticing that by weakening the traditional bonds of kinship, the church got rich fast. One of Henrich’s goals is to devalue the residual traces of “Great Man” history, so he would be reluctant to rely on any ancient documents that came to light recounting the “real” reasons for the church’s embattled stand on these issues. As a good evolutionist, he can say, “The church was just the ‘lucky one’ that bumbled across an effective recombination of supernatural beliefs and practices.” But as for why the church fathers enforced these prohibitions so tenaciously against resistance over the centuries, this is still a bit of a mystery.

Memes as Data: Targets, Couplers, and Designators

Bump to the top of the queue on general principle (the discussion of designation is important) and to remind myself that this material is here and that I need to think about it some more.

While these posts have been quite critical of Dennett’s use of the concept of information, that should not be taken to mean that I see no use for such a concept. There is, of course, the technical usage established by Shannon and Weaver, but that is of limited use in these discussions. The challenge is to make use a less specialized, indeed an informal, concept. I intend to do so by identifying memetic information with the formal concept of data, as employed in computer science, and in particular with the concept of a parameter.

The Wikipedia defines parameter in this way:

In computer programming, a parameter is a special kind of variable, used in a subroutine to refer to one of the pieces of data provided as input to the subroutine. These pieces of data are called arguments. An ordered list of parameters is usually included in the definition of a subroutine, so that, each time the subroutine is called, its arguments for that call can be assigned to the corresponding parameters.

Memes are arguments in the sense of that definition. The parameters for which they are values are components of “subroutines” in the mind, where, for the purposes of this discussion, the mind is considered to be a rich and sophisticated computational device whose characteristics are unspecified.

Memes as Targets

Our first task is to reconcile the current explication of memes (as arguments for mental parameters) with the explication I’ve been developing: memes are culturally active observable properties of objects, events, and processes. That is to say, those properties serve as arguments for parameters in mental processes.

For example, one wishes to make a stone ax head of the standard sort. Using an existing ax head as a model, one can treat its size and shape as targets against which one can judge progress in fabricating a new ax head. In this case a target is a parameter in a fabrication procedure that defines some aspect of the fabricated object.

Then there is the fabrication procedure itself. Apprentices, of course, observe master craftsmen at work and so can use their observations as a source of targets for their own activity. In some respects the master may give explicit instruction, Do it this way, thus helping the apprentice to identify more precise targets.

Memes as Couplers

Let’s consider my favorite source of examples, music. Here’s a passage from Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 177-178) in which I present a just-so story about the origins of music:

So now we have bands of proto-humans using their animal calls, and their animal moves as well. Group musicking would surely be common. I can imagine it starting more or less spontaneously around significant events. A lion is beaten off, a female comes back from the bush with a new infant, a death, a fresh kill, a water hole is found after a two-day search, a quarrel breaks out and is resolved. I'm imagining a group of folks going about their business and then something dramatic happens that captures the attention of more and more individuals; they begin milling around while chattering and gesturing. Then gestures, footfalls, and cries begin intersecting one another, creating ever denser patterns of sonic and gestural coincidence—the dynamics might have been a bit like those of the clapping we examined at the end of chapter 3. That, I believe, is how group musicking emerged.

For generations upon generations, this musicking may have been opportunistic and haphazard. But the particular patterns of group interaction became easier and easier to trigger, the catalytic requirements less and less, and somehow the activity began happening without any particular catalyst at all. It just happened that on this or that occasion enough individuals gathered together in a small space, one of them began a rhythmic stomp and the joined in, for the fun of it. In this context, every once in awhile—and, over time, more and more frequently—magic could happen. People would have fun and, perhaps, anxiety would be dissipated as well.

Forget about whether or not that’s a convincing just-so story. I like it, but that’s beside the point.

The point is: What’s required that people synchronize their motions and vocalization in cyclic activity? What are the parameters? The physicists tell us there are two: period and phase angle. Period is the length of time required by one complete cycle while phase angle has to do with the alignment between adjacent cycles.

Imagine a pair of people walking side-by-side. Imagine that they are walking at the same tempo. If their left feet hit the ground at the same time then their right feet will do so as well, but half a cycle later. We can say, by definition, that they are walking in phase. If, however, one person’s left foot hits the ground at the same time as the other person’s right foot hits the ground, we would say that they are 180 degrees out of phase. If they are 90 degrees out of phase then their footfalls will not be simultaneous. That’s phase angle. The point is that walking at the same pace doesn’t imply that they are performing the same actions at the same time.

Period and phase angle are thus coupling parameters. They constrain movement so that people move together. To the extent that specific values for those parameters recur in session after session, those values would be memes.

More expansively, we can think of the conventions of the blues, for example, as a set of coupling parameters. They specify cycle length (12 bars), certain melodic elements (the so-called blue notes), and the harmonic trajectory through the cycle (in one notation: I IV I V I). The harmonic trajectory is in fact a set of target parameters which have been given a specific temporal order. Rhythm Changes, as we’ve discussed before in this series, is a still more complex set of coupling parameters and associated targets.

Specific values for these parameters would then be memes. When one plays a blues in the key of Bb, the arguments for the harmonic parameters are specified: Bb F Bb G Bb. A skilled musician joining a jam session in progress has only to hear the music in order to identify it as, say, a blues. Once you’ve played a note or two you can identify the specific key as well and it’s off to the races.

Has Dennett Undercut His Own Position on Words as Memes?

I'm bumping this post, originally from April 2015, to the top of the queue because it has elements, which I've highlighted, that are reminiscent of Rodney Brooks's recent talk in which he argues that the computer metaphor is not adequate to understanding what the mind/brain does. Brooks invokes the idea of adaptation and examples from biology. Dennett brings up thermodynamics. Does biology have an advantage there? Powerful computers use huge amounts of energy. Can electronic devices match the energy efficiency of neural tissue? See this remark by Mark P. Mills:

But it’s important to keep in mind that Moore’s Law is, as we’ve noted, fundamentally about finding ways to create ever tinier on-off states. In that regard, in the words of one the great physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynman, “there’s plenty of room at the bottom” when it comes to logic engines. To appreciate how far away we still are from a “bottom,” consider the Holy Grail of computing, the human brain, which is at least 100 million times more energy efficient than the best silicon logic engine available.

* * * * *

Early in 2013 Dan Dennett had an interview posted at John Brockman’s Edge site, The Normal Well-Tempered Mind. He opened by announcing that he’d made a mistake early in his career, that he opted a conception of the brain-as-computer that was too simple. He’s now trying to revamp his sense of what the computational brain is like. He said a bit about that in that interview, and a bit more in a presentation he gave later in the year: If brains are computers, what kind of computers are they? He made some remarks in that presentation that undermine his position on words as memes, though he doesn’t seem to realize that.

Here’s the abstract of that talk:

Our default concepts of what computers are (and hence what a brain would be if it was a computer) include many clearly inapplicable properties (e.g., powered by electricity, silicon-based, coded in binary), but other properties are no less optional, but not often recognized: Our familiar computers are composed of millions of basic elements that are almost perfectly alike – flipflops, registers, or-gates – and hyper-reliable. Control is accomplished by top-down signals that dictate what happens next. All subassemblies can be designed with the presupposition that they will get the energy they need when they need it (to each according to its need, from each according to its ability). None of these is plausibly mirrored in cerebral computers, which are composed of billions of elements (neurons, astrocytes, ...) that are no-two-alike, engaged in semi-autonomous, potentially anarchic or even subversive projects, and hence controllable only by something akin to bargaining and political coalition-forming. A computer composed of such enterprising elements must have an architecture quite unlike the architectures that have so far been devised for AI, which are too orderly, too bureaucratic, too efficient.

While there’s nothing in that abstract that seems to undercut his position on memes, and he affirmed that position toward the end of the talk, we need to look at some of the details.

The Material Mind is a Living Thing

The details concern Terrence Deacon’s recent book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2013). Rather than quote from Dennett’s remarks in the talk, I’ll quote from his review, "Aching Voids and Making Voids" (The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 88, No. 4, December 2013, pp. 321-324). The following passage may be a bit cryptic, but short of reading the relevant chapters in Deacon’s book (which I’ve not done) and providing summaries, there’s not much I can do, though Dennett says a bit more both in his review and in the video.

Here’s the passage (p. 323):

But if we are going to have a proper account of information that matters, which has a role to play in getting work done at every level, we cannot just discard the sender and receiver, two homunculi whose agreement on the code defines what is to count as information for some purpose. Something has to play the roles of these missing signal-choosers and signal-interpreters. Many—myself included—have insisted that computers themselves can serve as adequate stand-ins. Just as a vending machine can fill in for a sales clerk in many simplified environments, so a computer can fill in for a general purpose message-interpreter. But one of the shortcomings of this computational perspective, according to Deacon, is that by divorcing information processing from thermodynamics, we restrict our theories to basically parasitical systems, artifacts that depend on a user for their energy, for their structure maintenance, for their interpretation, and for their raison d’être.

In the case of words the signal choosers and interpreters are human beings and the problem is precisely that they have to agree on “what is to count as information for some purpose.” By talking of words as memes, and of memes as agents, Dennett sweeps that problem under the conceptual rug.

Dan Dennett on Patterns (and Ontology)

From three years ago. Patterns are always timely.

I want to look at what Dennett has to say about patterns because 1) I introduced the term in an earlier  discussion, In Search of Dennett’s Free-Floating Rationales [1], and 2) it is interesting for what it says about his philosophy generally.

You’ll recall that, in that earlier discussion, I pointed out talk of “free-floating rationales” (FFRs) was authorized by the presence of a certain state of affairs, a certain pattern of relationships among, in Dennett’s particular example, an adult bird, (vulnerable) chicks, and a predator. Does postulating talk of FFRs add anything to the pattern? Does it make anything more predictable? No. Those FFRs are entirely redundant upon the pattern that authorizes them. By Occam’s Razor, they’re unnecessary.

With that, let’s take a quick look at Dennett’s treatment of the role of patterns in his philosophy. First I quote some passages from Dennett, with a bit of commentary, and then I make a few remarks on my somewhat different treatment of patterns. In a third post I’ll be talking about the computational capacities of the mind/brain.

Patterns and the Intentional Stance

Let’s start with a very useful piece Dennett wrote in 1994, “Self-Portrait” [2] – incidentally, I found this quite useful in getting a better sense of what Dennett’s up to. As the title suggests, it’s his account of his intellectual concerns up to that point (his intellectual life goes back to the early 1960s at Harvard and then later at Oxford). The piece doesn’t contain technical arguments for his positions, but rather states what they were and gives their context in his evolving system of thought. For my purposes in this inquiry that’s fine.

He begins by noting, “the two main topics in the philosophy of mind are CONTENT and CONSCIOUSNESS” (p. 236). Intentionality belongs to the theory of content. It was and I presume still is Dennett’s view that the theory of intentionality/content is the more fundamental of the two. Later on he explains that (p. 239):

... I introduced the idea that an intentional system was, by definition, anything that was amenable to analysis by a certain tactic, which I called the intentional stance. This is the tactic of interpreting an entity by adopting the presupposition that it is an approximation of the ideal of an optimally designed (i.e. rational) self-regarding agent. No attempt is made to confirm or disconfirm this presupposition, nor is it necessary to try to specify, in advance of specific analyses, wherein consists RATIONALITY. Rather, the presupposition provides leverage for generating specific predictions of behaviour, via defeasible hypotheses about the content of the control states of the entity.

This represents a position Dennett will call “mild realism” later in the article. We’ll return to that in a bit. But at the moment I want to continue just a bit later on p. 239:

In particular, I have held that since any attributions of function necessarily invoke optimality or rationality assumptions, the attributions of intentionality that depend on them are interpretations of the phenomena - a ‘heuristic overlay’ (1969), describing an inescapably idealized ‘real pattern’ (1991d). Like such abstracta as centres of gravity and parallelograms of force, the BELIEFS and DESIRES posited by the highest stance have no independent and concrete existence, and since this is the case, there would be no deeper facts that could settle the issue if - most improbably - rival intentional interpretations arose that did equally well at rationalizing the history of behaviour of an entity.

Hence his interest in patterns. When one adopts the intentional stance (or the design stance, or the physical stance) one is looking for characteristic patterns.

Cultural Evolution, Memes, and the Trouble with Dan Dennett

This is the final post in a old series (from four years ago) on memes, cultural evolution, and the thought of Daniel Dennett. You can download a PDF of the whole series HERE. The abstract and introduction are below.

* * * * *

Abstract: Philosopher Dan Dennett’s conception of the active meme, moving about from brain to brain, is physically impossible and conceptually empty. It amounts to cultural preformationism. As the cultural analogue to genes, memes are best characterized as the culturally active properties of things, events, and processes in the external world. Memes are physically embodied in a substrate. The cultural analogue to the phenotype can be called an ideotype; ideotypes are mental entities existing in the minds of individual humans. Memes serve as targets for designing and fabricating artifacts, as couplers to synchronize and coordinate human interaction, and as designators (Saussaurian signifiers). Cultural change is driven by the movement of memes between populations with significantly different cultural practices understood through different populations of ideotypes.

* * * * *

Introduction: Taming the Wild Meme

These notes contain my most recent thinking on cultural evolution, an interest that goes back to my dissertation days in the 1970s at the State University of New York at Buffalo. My dissertation, Cognitive Science and Literary Theory (1978), included a chapter on narrative, “From Ape to Essence and the Evolution of Tales,” (subsequently published as “The Evolution of Narrative and the Self”). But that early work didn’t focus on the process of cultural evolution. Rather, it was about the unfolding of ever more sophisticated cultural forms–an interest I shared with my teacher, the late David G. Hays.

My current line of investigation is very much about process, the standard evolutionary process of random variation and selective retention as applied to cultural forms, rather than living forms. I began that work in the mid-1990s and took my cue from Hays, as I explain in the section below, “What's a meme? Where I got my conception”. At the end of the decade I had drafted a book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic 2001), in which I arrived at pretty much my current conception, but only with respect to music: music memes are the culturally active properties musical sound.

I didn’t generalize the argument to language until I prepared a series of posts conceived as background to a (rather long and detailed) post I wrote for the National Humanities Institute in 2010: Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities (PDF HERE). But I didn’t actually advance this conception in that post. Rather, I tucked it into an extensive series of background posts that I posted at New Savanna prior to posting my main article. That’s where, using the emic/etic distinction, I first advanced the completely general idea that memes are observable properties of objects and things that are culturally active. I’ve collected that series of posts into a single downloadable PDF: The Evolution of Human Culture: Some Notes Prepared for the National Humanities Center, Version 2.

But I still had doubts about that position. Though the last three of those background posts were about language, I still had reservations. The problem was meaning: If that conception was correct, then word meanings could not possibly be memetic. Did I really want to argue that?

The upshot of this current series of notes is that, yes, I really want to argue it. And I have done at some length while using several articles by the philosopher Daniel Dennett as my foil. For the most part I focus on figuring out what kinds of entities play the role of memes, but toward the end, “Cultural Evolution, So What?”, I have a few remarks about long-term dynamics, that is, about cultural change.

Issues in Cultural Evolution 2.1: Micro Evolution, Dawkins and Memes

It’s time I get back to my attempt to lay out a map of approaches to cultural evolution in a limited number of posts, say a half dozen or even less (in my first post I said three). This is the first of two or three posts in which I look at ideas of the microscale entities and processes. In this post I’ll take a close look at Dawkins’ concept of the meme as he laid it out in The Selfish Gene. In my next post or two I’ll lay out other positions while developing mine in the process.

Dawkins Defines the Meme

I’m going to take a close look at two paragraphs from the 30th Anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene (Oxford 2006). First I’ll quote the paragraphs without interruption and commentary. Then I’ll repeat them, this time inserting my own comments after passages from Dawkins.

The book, of course, is not primarily about culture. It is about biology and argues a gene-centric view of evolution. In the process Dawkins abstracts from the biology and extracts two roles, that of replicator and that of vehicle. Genes play the replicator role and phenotypes play vehicle role. From a gene-centric point of view, the function of phenotypes is to carry genes from one generation to the next.

Have set this out in ten chapters, Dawkins then turns to culture in the eleventh chapter, where he introduces the meme in the replicator role in cultural evolution. The paragraphs we’re examining are on pages 192-193:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter:'... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking—the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'

Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent 'mutation'. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that 'survival value' here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

Dawkins says more about memes (the chapter runs from 189 to 201), but I’ll confine my commentary to those two chapters. Before I do that, however, I’d like to quote two short paragraphs from the end of the chapter (pp. 199-200):

However speculative my development of the theory of memes may be, there is one serious point which I would like to emphasize once again. This is that when we look at the evolution of cultural traits and at their survival value, we must be clear whose survival we are talking about. Biologists, as we have seen, are accustomed to looking for advantages at the gene level (or the individual, the group, or the species level according to taste). What we have not previously considered is that a cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself.

We do not have to look for conventional biological survival values of traits like religion, music, and ritual dancing, though these may also be present. Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over. We do not even have to posit a genetic advantage in imitation, though that would certainly help. All that is necessary is that the brain should be capable of imitation: memes will then evolve that exploit the capability to the full.

That I believe is the core of Dawkins’ contribution, that the entity that directly benefits from cultural evolution is some cultural entity, not any individual human being, though the cultural entity is necessarily dependent on individual humans for its existence.

Dennett on Memes, Neurons, and Software

Another working paper, links:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/16514603/Dennett_on_Memes_Neurons_and_Software

SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2670107

Abstract, contents, and introduction below.

* * * * *

Abstract: In his work on memetics Daniel Dennett does a poor job of negotiating the territory between philosophy and science. The analytic tools he has as a philosopher aren’t of much use in building accounts of the psychological and social mechanisms that underlie cultural processes. The only tool Dennett seems to have at his disposal is analogy. That’s how he builds his memetics, by analogy from biology on the one hand and computer science on the other. These analogies do not work very well. To formulate an evolutionary account of culture one needs to construct one’s gene and phenotype analogues directly from the appropriate materials, neurons and brains in social interaction. Dennett doesn’t do that. Instead of social interaction he has an analogy to apps loading into computers. Instead of neurons he has homuncular agents that are suspiciously like his other favorite homuncular agents, memes. It doesn’t work.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Too many analogies, no construction 2

Watch Out, Dan Dennett, Your Mind’s Changing Up on You! 5

The Memetic Mind, Not: Where Dennett Goes Wrong 11

Turtles All the Way Down: How Dennett Thinks 16

A Note on Dennett’s Curious Comparison of Words and Apps 21

Has Dennett Undercut His Own Position on Words as Memes? 23

Dennet’s WRONG: the Mind is NOT Software for the Brain 27

Follow-up on Dennett and Mental Software 31

Introduction: Too many analogies, no construction

Just before the turn of the millennium Dennet gave an interview in The Atlantic in which he observed:

In the beginning, it was all philosophy. Aristotle, whether he was doing astronomy, physiology, psychology, physics, chemistry, or mathematics -- it was all the same. It was philosophy. Over the centuries there’s been a refinement process: in area after area questions that were initially murky and problematic became clearer. And as soon as that happens, those questions drop out of philosophy and become science. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry -- they all started out in philosophy, and when they got clear they were kicked out of the nest.

Philosophy is the mother. These are the offspring. We don’t have to go back a long way to see traces of this. The eighteenth century is quite early enough to find the distinction between philosophy and physics not being taken very seriously. Psychology is one of the more recent births from philosophy, and we only have to go back to the late nineteenth century to see that.

My sense is that the trajectory of philosophy is to work on very fundamental questions that haven’t yet been turned into scientific questions.

This is a standard view, and it’s one I hold myself, though it’s not clear to me just how it would look when the historical record is examined closely.

But I do think that, in his recent work, Dennett’s been having troubles negotiating the difference between philosophy, in which he has a degree, and science. For he is also a cognitive scientist in good standing, and that phrase – “cognitive science” – stretches all over the place, leaving plenty of room to get tripped up over the difference between philosophy and science.

Dennett has spent much of his career as a philosopher of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. That is to say, he’s looked at the scientific work in those disciplines and considered philosophical implications and foundations. More recently he’s done the same thing with biology.

Now, it is one thing to apply the analytic tools of philosophy to the fruits of those disciplines. But Dennett has also been interested in memetics, a putative evolutionary account of culture. The problem is that there is no science of memetics for Dennett to analyze. So, when he does memetics, just what is he doing?

The analytic tools he has as a philosopher aren’t of much use in building accounts of the psychological and social mechanisms that might underlie cultural processes. The only tool Dennett seems to have at his disposal is analogy. And so that’s how he builds his memetics, by analogy from biology on the one hand and computer science on the other.

Alas, these analogies do not work very well. That’s what I examine in the posts I’ve gathered into this working paper. What Dennett, or anyone else, needs to do to formulate an evolutionary account of culture is to construct one’s gene and phenotype analogues (if that’s what you want to do) directly from the appropriate materials, neurons and brains in social interaction. Dennett doesn’t do that. Instead of social interaction he has an analogy to apps loading into computers. Instead of neurons he has homuncular agents that are suspiciously like his other favorite homuncular agents, memes. It doesn’t work. It’s incoherent. It’s bad philosophy or bad science, or both.

Latour, Language, and Translation

I’ve been reading Rita Felski’s draft essay, Comparison, Translation, and Actor-Network Theory, which is about the implications of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) for the study of comparative literature. She notes, quite accurately, that he has little to say about language. Noting that translation is a key notion for Latour – where it has to do with relations among all actors ¬– she goes on to point out that what ANT suggests about translation of texts from one language to another is quite different from translation’s standing in current literary theory (p. 5):

Translation thus becomes a key metaphor for thinking about relationality. It is not something imposed on the world—an act of aggressive encroachment on pristine otherness – but something that defines a world that is always already composed of acts of connection, negotiation, and transformation. Translations are the means by which paths are connected, actions are co-ordinated, and meanings transmitted.

I agree with her on both points and want to suggest what you might call a neo- or quasi-Latourian analysis of language and then situate linguistic translation within that.

Intermediaries and Mediators

In Reassembling the Social Latour distinguishes between intermediaries and mediators (p. 39):

An intermediary, in my vocabulary, is what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs.[...] Mediators, on the other hand . . . transform, translate, distort, and modify meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry.

Taken as a whole, language is a system of mediators. In general individual statements, individual texts do not transport meaning of force without transformation. In any given case the transformation may be minor or extreme, but in any case we have no direct way of assessing this as we have no direct way of comparing what goes on in the speaker’s head (or the writer’s) with what goes in the in listener’s (or the reader’s).

But language, whether written or spoken, is a double system in which a string of signifiers carries or encodes a string of signifieds, to use Saussure’s terms. The signifiers are physical events in the public domain, vibrations in air, marks on a page, while the signifieds exist within the privacy of individual minds and brains.

The thing about signifiers, however, is that they are discrete, digital in today’s computer parlance. They are transmitted with high, if not always perfect, fidelity from one person to another. In signifier channel “defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs” – which is what Shanon’s information theory is about. The signifier system is thus, to a reasonable approximation, system of intermediaries. It is the system of signifieds that is less reliable (or more flexible). It is the system of signifieds that makes language a mediator rather than an intermediary.

Fear of Religion

I thought I'd repost this piece from The Valve while I'm sorting through a career's worth of work, thinking about my book-in-progress, Mind-Culture Co-Evolution. This was originally published on October 23, 2006, and engendered a lively discussion, which i recomment to you. I've only skimmed it, but it does appear, however, that the discussion changed my mind about something to some extent, but I'm not sure just what.

* * * * *

Now that Adam's stirred up a hornet's nest with his Eagleton-on-Dawkins-on-religion post, I want to keep things buzzing along. In that discussion I commented:

I've not read this particular Dawkins book . . . but I've read articles and interviews where he goes on about religion, and it's clear to me that there's something very defensive in his stance and it's not mere scientific reason he's defending. The stridency of his position reeks of ritual, like the kid chanting “sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me.”

That is to say, it is one thing to argue that no gods exist and hence that religious belief is irrational. Dawkins is doing more than that. In a review of The God Delusion published in The New Republic, Thomas Nagel points out: “One of Dawkins's aims is to overturn the convention of respect toward religion that belongs to the etiquette of modern civilization. He does this by persistently violating the convention, and being as offensive as possible, and pointing with gleeful outrage at absurd or destructive religious beliefs and practices.” That is what I find bothersome.

The Uncanny Zone

Dawkins, of course, is not the only one to carry on like this, though some reviewers seem to think he's reached new rhetorical heights. Bertrand Russell did it in the last century and Daniel Dennett has gone of the war path as well. Further, not only does Dawkins argue against religious belief, he also offers accounts of just why people believe. This is not new either, both Marx and Freud, among others, had some thoughts on that subject, which has recently gained new life through a variety of contemporary psychologies - evolutionary, cognitive, and neuro. Well, I think there's more to Dawkins's crusade than the mere implausibility of religious belief, something that's driving him to be offensive.

What is it?

In asking that question I am, of course, stepping back from the arguments Dawkins advances against religion. But I am not seeking to discredit Dawkins's anti-religion arguments through an ad hominem argument. Though I'm somewhere in the vicinity of atheism, agnosticism and humanism, I am not particularly interested in arguing about the existence of God or gods one way or the other. As far as I can tell, my target is a certain kind of discourse, a kind which Dawkins exemplifies particularly well, but others participate in it as well. And what bothers me about this discourse is not that it is against religius belief, but that it is against the religious as well.

What particularly bothers me is that I cannot articulate just why I believe that distinction - between religion as a set of propositions about the world, and the religious - is both appropriate and important. I can point out that how we in fact live in the world is different from how we reason about it, but I do not yet see how to convert that observation into an argument. I feel betwixt and between.

But then, that's where I think Dawkins is as well, betwixt and between. I want to return to Nagel's review, “The Fear of Religion.” If Nagel is correct on a certain point - and I must assume that he is, because I've not read Dawkins's book - then I think he has uncovered a clue as to what's going on with the discourse Dawkins uses.

An Inquiry into & a Critique of Dennett on Intentional Systems

A new working paper. Downloads HERE:

• SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2640687
• Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/14723447/An_Inquiry_into_and_a_Critique_of_Dennett_on_Intentional_Systems

Abstract, contents, and introduction below:

* * * * *

Abstract: Using his so-called intentional stance, Dennett has identified so-called “free-floating rationales” in a broad class of biological phenomena. The term, however, is redundant on the pattern of objects and actions to which it applies and using it has the effect of reifying the pattern in a peculiar way. The intentional stance is itself a pattern of wide applicability. However, in a broader epistemological view, it turns out that we are pattern-seeking creatures and that phenomenon identified with some pattern must be verified by other techniques. The intentional stance deserves no special privilege in this respect. Finally, it is suggested that the intentional stance may get its intellectual power from the neuro-mental machinery it recruits and not from any special class of phenomena it picks out in the world.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Reverse Engineering Dan Dennett 2

Dennett's Astonishing Hypothesis: We’re Symbionts! – Apes with infected brains 6

In Search of Dennett’s Free-Floating Rationales 9

Dan Dennett on Patterns (and Ontology) 14

Dan Dennett, “Everybody talks that way” – Or How We Think 20

 

Introduction: Reverse Engineering Dan Dennett

I find Dennett puzzling. Two recent back-to-back videos illustrate that puzzle. One is a version of what seems to have become his standard lecture on cultural evolution, this time entitled

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AZX6awZq5Z0

As such it has the same faults I identify in the lecture that occasioned the first post in this collection, Dennett's Astonishing Hypothesis: We’re Symbionts! – Apes with infected brains. It’s got a collection of nicely curated examples of mostly biological phenomenon which Dennett crafts into an account of cultural evolution though energetic hand-waving and tap-dancing.

And then we have a somewhat shorter video that is a question and answer session following the first:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=beKC_7rlTuw

I like much of what Dennett says in this video; I think he’s right on those issues.

What happened between the first and second video? For whatever reason, no one asked him about the material in the lecture he’d just given. They asked him about philosophy of mind and about AI. Thus, for example, I agree with him that The Singularity is not going to happen anytime soon, and likely not ever. Getting enough raw computing power is not the issue. Organizing it is, and as yet we know very little about that. Similarly I agree with him that the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness is a non-issue.

How is it that one set of remarks is a bunch of interesting examples held together by smoke and mirrors while the other set of remarks is cogent and substantially correct? I think these two sets of remarks require different kinds of thinking. The second set involve philosophical analysis, and, after all Dennett is a philosopher more or less in the tradition of 20th century Anglo-American analytic philosophy. But that first set of remarks, about cultural evolution, is about constructing a theory. It requires what I called speculative engineering in the preface to my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil. On the face of it, Dennett is not much of an engineer.

And now things get really interesting. Consider this remark from a 1994 article [1] in which Dennett gives an overview of this thinking up to that time (p. 239):

My theory of content is functionalist […]: all attributions of content are founded on an appreciation of the functional roles of the items in question in the biological economy of the organism (or the engineering of the robot). This is a specifically 'teleological' notion of function (not the notion of a mathematical function or of a mere 'causal role', as suggested by David LEWIS and others). It is the concept of function that is ubiquitous in engineering, in the design of artefacts, but also in biology. (It is only slowly dawning on philosophers of science that biology is not a science like physics, in which one should strive to find 'laws of nature', but a species of engineering: the analysis, by 'reverse engineering', of the found artefacts of nature - which are composed of thousands of deliciously complicated gadgets, yoked together opportunistically but elegantly into robust, self-protective systems.)

I am entirely in agreement with his emphasis on engineering. Biological thinking is “a species of engineering.” And so is cognitive science and certainly the study of culture and its evolution.

Earlier in that article Dennett had this to say (p. 236):

It is clear to me how I came by my renegade vision of the order of dependence: as a graduate student at Oxford, I developed a deep distrust of the methods I saw other philosophers employing, and decided that before I could trust any of my intuitions about the mind, I had to figure out how the brain could possibly accomplish the mind's work. I knew next to nothing about the relevant science, but I had always been fascinated with how things worked - clocks, engines, magic tricks. (In fact, had I not been raised in a dyed-in-the-wool 'arts and humanities' academic family, I probably would have become an engineer, but this option would never have occurred to anyone in our family.)

My reaction to that last remark, that parenthesis, was something like: Coulda’ fooled me! For I had been thinking that an engineering sensibility is what was missing in Dennett’s discussions of culture. He didn’t seem to have a very deep sense of structure and construction, of, well, you know, how design works. And here he is telling us he coulda’ been an engineer.

Dan Dennett, Hot and Cold

3 Quarks Daily has posted two videos by Dan Dannett on the topic of Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design. The first of them I think of as Dennett COLD. This is pretty much the same cultural evolution lecture Dennett has been giving for the last two or three years, and which I have critized in various posts. He's now got it well developed enough that he manages a graceful rather than a rushed finish. I don't know when it was delivered, but it was uploaded by The Royal Institution on May 13, 2015. Here it is:

This next video is the Q&A after the first, and is about half as long. But the content is much better. This is Dennett HOT. Once again he confesses to having gotten the wrong model of the neuron early in his career. He fields questions on

A) The Singularity (not gonna' happen, but we should be wary of ceding too much of our work to machines)
B) the prospects of AI in general (it must be more bottom up, and shear numbers of computational units is not sufficient to the problem)
 C) on human gender and race in human intelligence (we don't have any worthwhile "scales" of intelligence and who cares?), and
D) the "hard problems" of consciousness is bunk.

Dan Dennett, “Everybody talks that way” – Or How We Think

Note: Late on the evening of 7.20.15: I've edited the post at the end of the second section by introducing a distinction between prediction and explanation.

Thinking things over, here’s the core of my objection to talk of free-floating rationales: they’re redundant.

What authorizes talk of “free-floating rationales” (FFRs) is a certain state of affairs, a certain pattern. Does postulating the existence of FFRs add anything to the pattern? Does it make anything more predictable? No. Even considering the larger evolutionary context in which talk of FFRs adds nothing (p. 351 in [1]):

But who appreciated this power, who recognized this rationale, if not the bird or its individual ancestors? Who else but Mother Nature herself? That is to say: nobody. Evolution by natural selection “chose” this design for this “reason.”

Surely what Mother Nature recognized was the pattern. For all practical purposes talk of FFRs is simply an elaborate name for the pattern. Once the pattern’s been spotted, there is nothing more.

But how’d a biologist spot the pattern? (S)he made observations and thought about them. So I want to switch gears and think about the operation of our conceptual equipment. These considerations have no direct bearing on our argument about Dennett’s evolutionary thought, as every idea we have must be embodied in some computational substrate, the good ideas and the bad. But the indirect implications are worth thinking about. For they indicate that a new intellectual game is afoot.

Dennett on How We Think

Let’s start with a passage from the intentional systems article. This is where Dennett is imagining a soliloquy that our low-nesting bird might have. He doesn’t, of course, want us to think that the bird ever thought such thoughts (or even, for that matter, perhaps thought any thoughts at all). Rather, Dennett is following Dawkins in proposing this as a way for biologists to spot interesting patterns in the life world. Here’s the passage (p. 350 in [1]):

I'm a low-nesting bird, whose chicks are not protectable against a predator who discovers them. This approaching predator can be expected soon to discover them unless I distract it; it could be distracted by its desire to catch and eat me, but only if it thought there was a reasonable chance of its actually catching me (it's no dummy); it would contract just that belief if I gave it evidence that I couldn't fly anymore; I could do that by feigning a broken wing, etc.

Keeping that in mind, lets look at another passage. This is from a 1999 interview [2]:

The only thing that’s novel about my way of doing it is that I’m showing how the very things the other side holds dear – minds, selves, intentions – have an unproblematic but not reduced place in the material world. If you can begin to see what, to take a deliberately extreme example, your thermostat and your mind have in common, and that there’s a perspective from which they seem to be instances of an intentional system, then you can see that the whole process of natural selection is also an intentional system.

It turns out to be no accident that biologists find it so appealing to talk about what Mother Nature has in mind. Everybody in AI, everybody in software, talks that way. “The trouble with this operating system is it doesn’t realize this, or it thinks it has an extra disk drive.” That way of talking is ubiquitous, unselfconscious – and useful. If the thought police came along and tried to force computer scientists and biologists not to use that language, because it was too fanciful, they would run into fierce resistance.

What I do is just say, Well, let’s take that way of talking seriously. Then what happens is that instead of having a Cartesian position that puts minds up there with the spirits and gods, you bring the mind right back into the world. It’s a way of looking at certain material things. It has a great unifying effect.

So, this soliloquy way of mind is useful in thinking about the biological world and something very like it is common among those who have to work with software. Dennett’s asking us to believe that, because thinking about these things in that way is so very useful (in predicting what they’re going to do) that we might as well conclude that, in some special technical sense, they really ARE like that. That special technical sense is given in his account of the intentional stance as a pattern, which we examined in the previous post [3].

What I want to do is refrain from taking that last step. I agree with Dennett that, yes, this IS a very useful way of thinking about lots of things. But I want to take that insight in a different direction. I want to suggest that what is going on in these cases is that we’re using neuro-computational equipment that evolved for regulating inter personal interactions and putting it to other uses. Mark Changizi would say we’re harnessing it to those other purposes while Stanislaw Dehaene would talk of reuse. I’m happy either way.

In Search of Dennett’s Free-Floating Rationales

I’ve decided to take a closer look at Dennett’s notion of free-floating rationale. It strikes me as being an unhelpful reification, but explaining just why that is has turned out to be a tricky matter. First I’ll look at a passage from a recent article, “The Evolution of Reasons” [1], and then go back three decades to a major exposition of the intentional stance as applied to animal behavior [2]. I’ll conclude with some hints about metaphysics.

On the whole I’m inclined to think of free-floating rationale as a poor solution to a deep problem. It’s not clear to me what a good solution would be, though I’ve got some suggestions as to how that might go.

Evolving Reasons

Dennett opens his inquiry by distinguishing between “a process narrative that explains the phenomenon without saying it is for anything” and an account that provides “a reason–a proper telic reason” (p. 50). The former is what he calls a how come? account and the latter is a what for? account. After reminding us of Aristotle’s somewhat similar four causes Dennett gets down to it: “Evolution by natural selection starts with how come and arrives at what for. We start with a lifeless world in which there are lots of causes but no reasons, no purposes at all.” (p. 50).

Those free-floating rationales are a particular kind of what for. He introduces the term on page 54:

So there were reasons before there were reason representers. The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free-floating rationales” (1983, 1995, and elseswhere), a term that has apparently jangled the nerves of more than a few thinkers, who suspect I am conjuring up ghosts of some sort. Free-floating rationales are no more ghostly or problematic than numbers or centers of gravity. There were nine planets before people invented ways of articulating arithmetic, and asteroids had centers of gravity before there were physicists to dream up the idea and calculate with it. I am not relenting; instead, I am hoping here to calm their fears and convince them that we should all be happy to speak of the reasons uncovered by evolution before they were ever expressed or represented by human investigators or any other minds.

That is, just as there is no mystery about the relationship between numbers and planets, or between centers of gravity and asteroids, so there is no mystery about the relationship between free-floating rationales and X.

What sorts of things can we substitute for X? That’s what’s tricky. It turns out those things aren’t physically connected objects. Those things are patterns of interaction among physically connected objects.

Before taking a look at those patterns (in the next section), let’s consider another passage from this article (p. 54):

Natural selection is thus an automatic reason finder that “discovers,” “endorses,” and “focuses” reasons over many generations. The scare quotes are to remind us that natural selection doesn’t have a mind, doesn’t itself have reasons, but is nevertheless competent to perform this “task” of design refinement. This is competence without comprehension.

That’s where Dennett is going, “competence without comprehension” – a recent mantra of his.

It is characteristic of Dennett’s intentional stance that it authorizes the use of intentional language, such as “discovers,” “endorses,” and “focuses”. That’s what it’s for, to allow the use of such language in situations where it comes naturally and easily. What’s not clear to me is whether or not one is supposed to treat it as a heuristic device that leads to non-intentional accounts. Clearly intentional talk about “selfish” genes is to be cashed out in non-intentional talk, and that would seem to be the case with natural selection in general.

But it is one thing to talk about cashing out intentional talk in a more suitable explanatory lingo. It’s something else to actually do so. Dennett’s been talking about free-floating rationales for decades, but hasn’t yet, so far as I know, proposed a way of getting rid of that bit of intentional talk.

Dennett's Astonishing Hypothesis: We're Symbionts! – Apes with infected brains

Note: I've added some new material at the end, hence I'm bumping this post to the top of the list.

It's hard to know the proper attitude to take toward this idea. Daniel Dennett, after all, is a brilliant and much honored thinker. But I can't take the idea seriously. He's running on fumes. The noises he makes are those of engine failure, not forward motion.

At around 53:00 into this video ("Cultural Evolution and the Architecture of Human Minds") he tells us that human culture is the "second great endosymbiotic revolution" in the history of life on earth, and, he assures us, he means the "literally." The first endosymbiotic revolution, of course, was the emergence of eukaryotic cells from the pairwise incorporation of one prokaryote within another. The couple then operated as a single organism and of course reproduced as such.

At 53:13 he informs us:

In other words we are apes with infected brains. Our brains have been invaded by evolving symbionts which have then rearranged our brains, harnessing them to do work that no other brain can do. How did these brilliant invaders do this? Do they reason themselves? No, they're stupid, they're clueless. But they have talents the permit them to redesign human brains and turn them into human minds. [...] Cultural evolution evolved virtual machines which can then be installed on the chaotic hardware of all those neurons.

Dennett is, of course, talking about memes. Apes and memes hooked up and we're the result.

In the case of the eukaryotic revolution the prokaryots that merged had evolved independently and prior to the merging. Did the memes evolve independently and prior to hooking up with us? If so, do we know where and how this happened? Did they come from meme wells in East Africa? Dennett doesn't get around to explaining that in this lecture as he'd run out of time. But I'm not holding my breath until he coughs up an account.

But I'm wondering if he's yet figured out how many memes can dance on the head of a pin.

More seriously, how is it that he's unable to see how silly this is? What is his system of thought like that such thoughts are acceptable?

Follow-up on Dennett and Mental Software

This is a follow-up to a previous post, Dennet’s WRONG: the Mind is NOT Software for the Brain. In that post I agreed with Tecumseh Fitch [1] that the hardware/software distinction for digital computers is not valid for mind/brain. Dennett wants to retain the distinction [2], however, and I argued against that. Here are some further clarifications and considerations.

1. Technical Usage vs. Redescription

I asserted that Dennett’s desire to talk of mental software (or whatever) has no technical justification. All he wants is a different way of describing the same mental/neural processes that we’re investigating.

What did I mean?

Dennett used the term “virtual machine”, which has a technical, if a bit diffuse, meaning in computing. But little or none of that technical meaning carries over to Dennett’s use when he talks of, for example, “the long-division virtual machine [or] the French-speaking virtual machine”. There’s no suggestion in Dennett that a technical knowledge of the digital technique would give us insight into neural processes. So his usage is just a technical label without technical content.

2. Substrate Neutrality

Dennett has emphasized the substrate neutrality of computational and informatic processes. Practical issues of fabrication and operation aside, a computational process will produce the same result regardless of whether or not it is implemented in silicon, vacuum tubes, or gears and levels. I have no problem with this.

As I see it, taken only this far we’re talking about humans designing and fabricating devices and systems. The human designers and fabricators have a “transcendental” relationship to their devices. They can see and manipulate them whole, top to bottom, inside and out.

But of course, Dennett wants this to extend to neural tissue as well. Once we know the proper computational processes to implement, we should be able to implement a conscious intelligent mind in digital technology that will not be meaningfully different from a human mind/brain. The question here, it seems to me, is: But is this possible in principle?

Dennett has recently come to the view that living neural tissue has properties lacking in digital technology [3, 4, 5]. What does that do to substrate neutrality?

I’m not sure. Dennett’s thinking centers on neurons. On the one hand real neurons are considerably more complex than the McCulloch-Pitts logic gates that captured his imagination early in his career. That’s one thing. And if that’s all there is to it, then one could still argue that substrate neutrality extends to neural tissue. We just have to recognize that neurons aren’t the simple primitive computational devices we’d thought them to be.

But there’s more going on. Following others (Terrence Deacon and Tecumseh Fitch) Dennett stresses the fact that neurons are agents with their own agendas. As agents go, they may be relatively simple, and their agendas simple; but still, they have a measure of causal autonomy.

Dennet’s WRONG: the Mind is NOT Software for the Brain

And he more or less knows it; but he wants to have his cake and eat it too. It’s a little late in the game to be learning new tricks.

I don’t know just when people started casually talking about the brain as a computer and the mind as software, but it’s been going on for a long time. But it’s one thing to use such language in casual conversation. It’s something else to take it as a serious way of investigating mind and brain. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when computers and digital computing were still new and the territory – both computers and the brain – relatively unexplored, one could reasonably proceed on the assumption that brains are digital computers. But an opposed assumption – that brains cannot possibly be computers – was also plausible.

The second assumption strikes me as being beside the point for those of us who find computational ideas essential to thinking about the mind, for we can proceed without the somewhat stronger assumption that the mind/brain is just a digital computer. It seems to me that the sell-by date on that one is now past.

The major problem is that living neural tissue is quite different from silicon and metal. Silicon and metal passively take on the impress of purposes and processes humans program into them. Neural tissue is a bit trickier. As for Dennett, no one championed the computational mind more vigorously than he did, but now he’s trying to rethink his views, and that’s interesting to watch.

The Living Brain

In 2014 Tecumseh Fitch published an article in which he laid out a computational framework for “cognitive biology” [1]. In that article he pointed out why the software/hardware distinction doesn’t really work for brains (p. 314):

Neurons are living cells – complex self-modifying arrangements of living matter – while silicon transistors are etched and fixed. This means that applying the “software/hardware” distinction to the nervous system is misleading. The fact that neurons change their form, and that such change is at the heart of learning and plasticity, makes the term “neural hardware” particularly inappropriate. The mind is not a program running on the hardware of the brain. The mind is constituted by the ever-changing living tissue of the brain, made up of a class of complex cells, each one different in ways that matter, and that are specialized to process information.

Yes, though I’m just a little antsy about that last phrase – “specialized to process information” – as it suggests that these cells “process” information in the way that clerks process paperwork: moving it around, stamping it, denying it, approving it, amending it, and so forth. But we’ll leave that alone.

One consequence of the fact that the nervous system is made of living tissue is that it is very difficult to undo what has been learned into the detailed micro-structure of this tissue. It’s easy to wipe a hunk of code or data from a digital computer without damaging the hardware, but it’s almost impossible to do the something like that with a mind/brain. How do you remove a person’s knowledge of Chinese history, or their ability to speak Basque, and nothing else, and do so without physical harm? It’s impossible.

Molecular Storms and the Subtleties of Matter

First, links to other New Savanna posts bearing on the relationship of mind to matter:

• Galen Strawson on consciousness: the problem we face is simple, we underestimate the subtleties of matter

• Has Dennett Undercut His Own Position on Words as Memes? – In which Dennett discovers that metabolism is real

Peter Godfrey-Smith has posted a work in progress, Mind, Matter, and Metabolism (PDF), that bears directly on the issues in play in those two posts. Strawson argues that consciousness presents a problem to materialism only if we have much too simple a view of matter. Our understanding of "brute" matter has changed a great deal since the days of Descartes and Newton. Dennett doesn't express himself in those terms, but his recent reservations about computation are similar in effect. Here PGS speaks to computation (p. 2)

...with the rise of computers and AI. This work seemed to show that some aspects of cognition are mechanizable in principle, and in a non-living system. There's no question of life being present in a classical AI system, or a familiar sort of robot, and given that there seems a real possibility that such a system might capture of all of mentality, there can't apparently be too close a link between life and mind. Computation, rather than life, became the crucial bridging concept between mental and physical.

That's what Dennett thought. But he's now, sorta, realized that we've got to have life in there. PGS on "matter at the scale of metabolism" (p. 4):

Metabolic processes in actual cells occur at a particular spatial scale, the scale measured in nanometers – millionths of a millimeter. They also take place in a particular context, surrounded by water. In that context and at that scale, matter behaves differently from how it behaves elsewhere. In a phrase due to Hoffman, what we find is a molecular storm. There is unending spontaneous motion, which does not need to be powered by anything external. Larger molecules rearrange themselves spontaneously and vibrate, and everything is bombarded by water molecules, with the larger molecules being hit by a water molecule trillions of times per second. Electical charge also plays a ubiquitous role, through ions dissolved in the water and charged regions of larger molecules. The parts of a cell that do things in the usual sense – making proteins, for example – are subject to forces that are much stronger than the forces they can exert. The way things get done is by biasing tendencies in the storm, nudging random walks in useful directions, thereby getting a consistent upshot out of vast numbers of mostly meaningless changes. Moore, though not Hoffman, thinks we should conclude from all this that "Macromolecular Devices Are Not Machines." Moore thinks that a machine is a quite definite sort of thing, where low-level interactions are predictable and parts are tightly coupled. A storm-like collection of random walks influenced by friction, charge, and thermal effects, in contrast, is non-mechanistic.

Dennett on the De-Darwinizing of Culture

This recent video (talk given 19 March 2015) gathers many of Dennett's recent themes and examples. The central thread is worthwhile – Dennett's only idea on culture that's caught my interest – but it is festooned with his typical assembly of brilliant obfuscating rhetorical ornamentation. One has the impression that he's thought more and more deeply about biology than about culture. And so he's using biology as a vehicle for understanding culture. That's not unreasonable providing, of course, that you have a robust understanding of culture than is not piggybacking on biology. Dennett seems rather poor in that sort of understanding of culture.

Dennett's rhetoric would reward a close analysis, but not by me, not at this time. I've already done some of that in my working paper, Cultural Evolution, Memes, and the Trouble with Dan Dennett; see the appendix. "Turtles All the Way Down: How Dennett Thinks: An Essay In Cognitive Rhetoric".

As for De-Darwinizing, the idea seems to be something like this: There are things whose design is the result of what we might call a "full Darwinian" process, what Donald Campbell characterizes as blind variation and selective retention (BVSR). A lot of language seems rather like that, but in the cultural rather than the biological sphere. But there are also words that have been deliberately coined and introduced into the language, such as "meme". So, not "full Darwinian". It's De-Dawinized.