Communicating with Yourself, Some Data Points in the Contemporary Intellectual Situation

But first, not so contemporary: E. M. (“only connect”) Forster is known for various things, including the assertion, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” That’s about why he writes.

Think about if for a moment, considering the fact the Forster is one of the great writers of the 20th century. And that’s not a casual remark. What’s it mean? I mean, writing is hard, often very hard; why should it be necessary to write in order to know what you think? Can’t you just, you know, sit and take thought?

Well, yes, you can, and it won’t get you as far as the labor of writing. I could likely say quite a bit about just why that is so; but I have no reason to believe that, in so doing, I’d nail it to the wall. Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. But that’s not the point. I just want you to think about it, the labor of making marks on paper as being a way of thinking about what’s in your own mind. If it’s in your mind, why do you need to put marks on paper in order to know it?

Just what is a mind and what does it mean for something to be IN a mind?

Sender-Receiver Systems

Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has been interested in what he calls a Sender-Receiver Configuration model of communication, which owes fundamental debts to philosopher David Lewis and mathematician Claude Shannon. You can find papers on this HERE. One of the most recent is a lecture he gave at George Washington University in 2012: The Evolution of Meaning (PDF). It builds the idea from (a fairly sophisticated) ground zero.

He ends with a nod to one of my favorite and seminal thinkers, Lev Vygotsky. Here’s what he says (pp. 14-15):

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's Santa Fe Workshop on Cultural Evolution

In May of this year philosopher Dan Dennett convened a workshop on cultural evolution at the Santa Fe Institute. The following were in attendance: Susan Blackmore, Robert Boyd, Nicolas Claidière, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Joseph Henrich, Olivier Morin, Peter Richerson, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny. While the workshop has not issued any formal proceedings an informal report has been posted at the International Cognition and Culture Institute (ICCI). Dennett has prepared a summary of the discussions and each individual discussant has also prepared summary remarks. Dennett notes that there are terminological issues:

Three frustrating terminological problems were exposed, but we didn’t resolve how to correct them: “cultural group selection,” “meme,” and “Darwinian” are all good terms, historically justifiable and useful in context, but by now all are so burdened with legacies of ideological conflict that any use of them invites misbegotten “refutation” or dismissal. Should we abandon the terms in favor of emotionally inert replacements, or should we persist with them, always accompanying their use with a wreath of explanation? These are questions of diplomacy or pedagogical policy, not serious theoretical issues, but still, alas, unignorable.

These are the points of consensus that Dennett has identified:

1. We should be Darwinian about Darwinism; there are few if any bright lines between phenomena of cultural change for which cultural natural selection is clearly at work and phenomena of cultural change that are not at all Darwinian. The intermediate and mixed cases need not be marginal or degenerate, a fact nicely portrayed in Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian Spaces.

2. Models must always “over-“simplify, and the existence of complications and even “counterexamples” relative to any model does not automatically show that the model isn’t valid when used with discretion. For instance, the absence of explicit treatment of SCM’s [Sperber, Claidière, Morin] “hetero-impacts” in BRH’s models “does not amount to a denial of its importance”(Godfrey-Smith). Grain level of modeling and explaining can vary appropriately depending on the questions being addressed.

3. The traditional idea that human culture advances primarily by “improvisational intelligence,” the contributions of insightful, intentional, comprehending individual minds, is largely mistaken. Just as plants and animals can be the beneficiaries of brilliant design enhancements that they cannot, and need not, understand, so we human beings enjoy culturally evolved competences that far outstrip our individual comprehension. Not only do we not need to “re-invent the wheel,” we do not need to appreciate or understand the design of many human institutions, technologies, and customs that nevertheless contribute to our welfare in various ways. Moreover (a point of agreement between Sperber and Boyd, for instance), the opacity of some cultural memes (their inscrutability to human comprehension) is often an enhancement to their fitness: “This opacity—which is a matter of degree, of course—is what makes social transmission so important. It plays, I believe, a crucial role in the acceptability of cultural traits: it is, in important ways easier to trust what you don’t fully understand and hence cannot properly evaluate on its own merits.” (Sperber)

4. The persistence of cultural features that are not fitness-enhancing, and may even be fitness-reducing, is to be expected in cultural evolution, and can have a variety of explanations.

On the last I assume that by fitness-enhancing, Dennett means the biological fitness of human individuals.

I have no problems with any of these. Dennett listed six new questions, which you can investigate for yourself.

Roles in Cultural Selection: Replicators, Interactors, and Beneficiaries, or, Where’s the Memes?

Once again, cultural evolution, and the problem of memes: What are they? Where are they? What do they do? While the general case does interest me, culture is so various that it is impossible to think about it directly. One has to think about specific cases. As details are important, I want to choose a fairly specific case, that of jazz in mid-20th-Century America. I want you to imagine that you’re in a jazz club in, say, Philadelphia, in, say, mid-October of 1952. It’s 1:30 in the morning, and the tune is Charlie Parker’s “Dexterity.” The piano player counts it off–ah one, ah two, one two three four…

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We need a little conceptual equipment before considering the example. It’s the conceptual equipment that’s in question. Make no mistake, the concept of memes is conceptual equipment, and it’s confused and confusing.

Roles in Cultural Selection

Genes and phenotypes play certain roles in a more or less standard account of biological evolution. The phenotype interacts with the environment, where it either succeeds or fails at reproduction, depending on the “fit” between its traits and that environment. Where the phenotype is successful at reproduction, it is the genes which are said to carry heredity from one generation to the next.

In one very widespread account genes are said to be replicators. That is to say, replication is the role they play in evolutionary change. Here’s what Peter Godfrey-Smith has to say about that (The Replicator in Retrospect, Biology and Philosophy 15 (2000): 403-423.):

In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins had argued that individual genes must be seen as the units of selection in evolutionary processes within sexual populations. This is primarily because the other possible candidates, notably whole organisms and groups, do not “replicate.” Organisms and groups are ephemeral, like clouds in the sky or dust storms in the desert. Only a replicator, which can figure in selective processes over many generations, can be a unit of selection.

At the same time Dawkins coined the term “meme” to name entities filling the replicator role in cultural evolution. Later on he used the term “vehicle” to designate the entity that interacts with the environment. In biological evolution it is phenotypes that are the vehicles. In cultural evolution, well, that’s a matter of some dispute. And that more general dispute–what are the roles in cultural evolution and what kinds of things occupy them?–is what interests me.

However, I don’t particularly like the term “vehicle.” As Godfrey-Smith has noted, following others, it is a gene-centric term, characterizing what entities do from the so-called “gene’s eye” perspective. I’d prefer a more neutral perspective and so will use a term coined by Richard Hull, “interactor.” Here are definitions as Godfrey-Smith gives them:

Replicator: an entity that passes on its structure largely intact in successive replications.
Interactor: an entity that interacts as a cohesive whole with its environment in such a way that this interaction causes replication to be differential.

What is Philosophy?

I've just discovered (via Dan Dennett) to the work of Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of science with a particular interest in biology. I've been reading around in some of his essays and this one, "On the Relation Between Philosophy and Science", has a nice account of what philosophy is about. Godfrey-Smith offers three roles: 1) intellectual integration, 2) conceptual incubation, and 3) critical-thinking skills. He regards the first as fundamental and as the most important of the three. I agree.

Here's his basic statement of that role:

The best one-sentence account of what philosophy is up to was given by Wilfrid Sellars in 1963: philosophy is concerned with "how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." Philosophy aims at an overall picture of what the world is like and how we fit into it.

A lot of people say they like the Sellars formulation but do not really take it on board. It expresses a view of philosophy in which the field is not self-contained, and makes extensive contact with what goes on outside it. That contact is inevitable if we want to work out how the picture of our minds we get from first-person experience relates to the picture in scientific psychology, how the biological world relates to the physical sciences, how moral judgments relate to our factual knowledge. [emphasis mine, BB] Philosophy can make contact with other fields without being swallowed up by them, though, and it makes this contact while keeping an eye on philosophy's distinctive role, which I will call an integrative role.

Note the sentence which I've put in boldface type. There are, of course, many different accounts one might give of the relationship between first-person experience and scientific psychology and Godfrey-Smith plays no favorites in this paper; he doesn't even discuss that particular issue. But he recognizes that first-person experience must be honored, and that's an important recognition.

But I want to look at some later remarks, remarks he introduces as a qualification, as it is those remarks which I find helpful in understanding my own work, my interest in philosophical matters and my lack of interest in (academic) philosophy. Godfrey-Smith observes:

When asking about what role "philosophy" has, one can roughly be speaking be asking about two things: a style of work, or a cultural lineage, something with a location in space and time. This is akin to the distinction between more typological and more lineage-based views of species and some other biological kinds. To some extent philosophy is a style of work housed within a lineage, but there is plenty of work in that style outside the lineage, and the lineage gives rise to work that is not really in the style.

I do a lot of that, "work in that style outside the lineage." In my preface to Beethoven's Anvil I referred to it as a work of speculative engineering, engineering because it is about how music is designed and constructed, in brains, social groups, over centuries of human history, and speculative because it had to be. We don't really know how music works in any of those contexts, much less across all of them. The only way to tell an inclusive story is to speculate on how it might work.

It is that element of speculation that allowed me to cross disciplines, from neuropsychology to the paleoanthropology of human origins, from aesthetics to cultural history, and from physics to, well, to philosophy. This blog is philosophy in that speculative and integrative sense. In that sense philosophy is what we need perhaps more than anything else.