The Beginning of Infinity

Explanation That Transform the World

~ David Deutsch, 2011

1. The Reach of Explanations

Scientific theories are not 'derived' from anything. [...]. They are guesses - bold conjectures.

Its [Experience] main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed (learning from experience).

The future is unlike the past, The unseen very different from the seen.

Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.

They [ideas] have to be guessed - after which they can be criticized and tested.

But the real key to science is that our explanatory theories - which include those interpretations - can be improved, through conjecture, criticism and testing. - Fallibilists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, [...].

All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden, and hence fallible, as all our theories are.

But what process do ever truer and more detailed explanations about the world come to be represented physically in our brains?

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. [...] One cosequence of this tradition of criticism was the emergence of a methodological rule that a scientific theory must be testable.

The essence of experimental testing is that there are at least two apparently viable theories known about the issue in question, making conflicting predictions that can be distinguished by the experiment.

[...] conflicting ideas [...] are the occasion for all rational thought and inquiry. (Conflicting ideas are a problem)

Terminology

Reach : The ability of some explanations to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve.

Creativity : The capacity to create new explanations.

Theory-laden : There is no such thing as 'raw' experience. All our experience of the world comes through layers of conscious and unconscious interpretations.

Problem : A problem exists when a conflict between ideas is experienced.

Bad explanation : Easy to vary.

Good explanation : Hard to vary.

The Enlightenment : A way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.

4. Creation

The knowledge in human brains and the knowledge in biological adaptation are both created by evolution in the broad sense: The variation of existing information, alternating with selection. In the case of human knowledge, the variation is by conjecture, and the selection is by criticism and experiment. In the biosphere, the variation consists of mutations (random changes) in genes, and natural selection favours the variants that most improve the ability of their organisms to reproduce, thus causing those variant genes to spread through the population.

Human brains and DNA molecules are general-purpose information-storage-media. [...]: once they [information] are physically embodied in a suitable environment, they tent to cause themselves to remain so.

[...] knowledge must be first conjectured and then tested. That is what Darwin's theory says: first, random mutations happen (they do not take account of what problem is being solved); then natural selection discards the variant genes that are less good at causing themselves to be present again in future generations.

The central idea of neo-Darwinism is that evolution favours the genes that spread best through the population.

[...] evolution does not especially promote the 'welfare' of species or individual organisms. But it does not promote the 'welfare' of genes either: It adapts them not for survival in larger numbers, nor indeed for survival at all, but only for spreading though the population at the expense of rival genes, particularly slight variants of themselves.

Organisms are the slaves, or tools, that genes use to achieve their 'purpose' of spreading themselves through the populations.

Both human knowledge and biological adaptations are abstract replicators: formas of information which, once they are embodied in a suitable physical system, tend to remain so while most variants of them do not.

The evolution of biological adaptations and the creation of human knowledge share deep similarities, but also some important differences. The main similarities: genes and ideas are both replicators; knowledge and adaptations are both hard to vary. The main difference: human knowledge can be explanatory and can have great reach; adaptations are never explanatory and rarely have munch reach beyond the situations in which they evolved.

Terminology

Evolution (Darwinian) : Creation of knowledge though alternating variation and selection

Replicator : An entity that contributes causally to its own copying

Neo-Darwinsism : Darwinism as a theory of replicators, without various misconceptions such as 'survival of the fittest'

Meme : An idea that is a replicator

Memeplex : A group of memes that help to cause each other's replication

5. The Reality of Abstractions

Thus three is a class of high-level phenomena - including the liquidity of water and the relationship between containers, heating elements, boiling and bubbles - that can be well explained in terms of each other alone, with no direct reference to anything at the atomic level or below. In other words, the behaviour of that whole class of high-level phenomena is quasi-autonomous - almost self-contained. This resolution into explicability at a higher, quasi-autonomous level is known as emergence

Even in physics, some of the most fundamental explanations, and the predictions that they make, are not reductive. For instance, the second law of thermodynamics says that high-level physical tend towards ever greater disorder. A scrabbled egg never becomes unscrambled by the whisk [...]. Yet, if you could somehow make a video of the scrambling process with enough resolution to see the individual molecules, and play it backwards, and examine any part of it at that scale, you would see nothing but molecules moving and colliding in strict obedience to the low-level laws of physics. It is not yet known how, or whether, the second law of thermodynamics can be derived from a simple statement about individual atoms.

Moral philosophy is basically about the problem of what to do next - and, more generally, what sort of life to lead, and what sort of world to want.

Terminology

Levels of emergence : Sets of phenomena that can be explained well in terms of each other without analysing them into their constituent entities such as atoms.

Summary

Reductionism and holism are both mistakes. In reality, explanations do not form a hierarchy with the lowest level being the most fundamental. Rather, explanations at any level of emergence can be fundamental. Abstract entities are real, and can play a role in causing physical phenomena. Causation is itself such an abstraction.

6. The Jump to Universality

Here we see a transition that is typical of the jump to universality: before the jump, one has to make specialized objects for each document to be printed; after the jump, one customizes (or specializes, or programs) a universal object - in this case a printing press with movable type.

It is a remarkable fact that, in that sense (that is to say, ignoring issues of speed, memory capacity and input-output devices), the human 'computers' of olds, the steam-powered Analytical Engine with its literal bells and whistles, the room-sized vacuum-tube computers of the Second World War, and present-day supercomputers all have an identical repertoire of computations. Another thing that they have in common is that they are all digital: they operate on information in the form of discrete values of physical variables, such as electronic switches being on or off, or cogs being at one of ten positions. The alternative, 'analogue' , computers, such as slide rules, which represent information as continuous physical variables, were once ubiquitous but are hardly ever used today. That is because a modern digital computer can be programmed to imitate any of the, and to outperform them is almost any application. The jump to universality in digital computers has left analogue computation behind. That was inevitable, because there is no such thing as as universal analogue computer. That is because of the need for error correction: during lengthy computations, the accumulation of errors due to things like imperfectly constructed components, thermal fluctuations, and random outside influences makes analogue computers wander off the intended computational path. This may sound like a minor or parochial consideration. But it is quite the opposite. Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.

What is needed is a system that takes for granted that errors will occur, but corrects them once they do - a case of 'problems are inevitable, but they are soluble' at the lowest level of information-processing emergence. But, in analogue computation, error correction runs into the basic logical problem that there is no way of distinguishing an erroneous value form a correct one at sight, because it is in the very nature of analogue computation that every value could be correct.

Fortunately, the limitation that the information bneing processed must be digital does not detract from the universality of digital computers - or of the laws of physics. [...] It is just a matter of approximating continuously variable quantities by a sufficiently fine grid of discrete ones. Because of the necessity fo error-correction, all jumps to universality occur in digital systems.

Another striking connection between all those diverse jumps to universality is that they all happened on Earth. In fact all known jumps to universality is that they all happened on Earth. In fact all known jumps to universality happened under auspices of human beings - except one, which I have not mentioned yet, an from which all the other, historically emerged. It happened during the early evolution of life: [The genetic code]

Summary

All knowledge growth is by incremental improvement, but in many fields there comes a point when one of the incremental improvements in a system of knowledge or technology causes a sudden increase in reach, making it a universal system in the relevant domain. In the past, innovators who brought about such a jump to universality had rarely been seeking it, but since the Enlightenment they have been, and universal explanations have been valued both for their own sake and for their usefulness. Because error-correction is essential in processes of potentially unlimited length, the jump to universality only ever happens in digital systems.

9. Optimism

The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say 'It is our duty to remain optimists', this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to pophesy evil but, tather, to fight for a better world. (1994, Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework)

We shall always be faced with the problem of how to plan for an unknowable future. We shall never be able to afford to sit back and hope for the best. Even of our civilization moves out into space in order to hedge its bets, as Rees and Hawking both rightly advice, a gamma-ray burst in our galactic vicinity would still wipe us all out. Such an event is thousands of times rarer than an asteroid collision, but when it does finally happen we shall have no defence against it without a great deal more scientific knowledge and an enormous increase in our wealth. But first we shall have to survive the next ice age; and, before that, other dangerous climate change (both spontaneous and human-caused), and weapons of mass destruction and pandemics and all the countless unforeseen dangers that are going to beset us. Our political institutions, ways of life, personal aspirations and morality are all forms of embodiments of knowledge, and all will have to be improved if civilization - and the Enlightenment in particular - is to survive every one of the risks that Rees describes and presumably many others of which we have no inkling.

The question about the sources of our knowledge [...] has always been asked in the spirit of: 'What are the best sources of our knowledge - the most reliable ones, whose which will not lead us into error, and those to which we can and must turn, in case of doubt, as the last court of appeal?' I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist - no more than ideal rules - and that all 'sources' are liable to lead us into error at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: 'How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?'

The question 'How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?' is echoed by Feynman's remark that 'science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves'.

Political philosophy traditionally centred on a collection of issues that Popper called the 'who should rule?' question. [...]. Popper pointed out that this class of questions is rooted in the same misconception as the question 'How are scientific theories derived from sensory data?' (empiricism). It is seeking a system that derives or justifies the right choice of leader of government, from existing data (inherited entitlements or opinion of the majority). [...]. [All make the some mistake:] They expect knowledge to be created by fiat with few errors, an not by a process of variation and selection that is making a continual stream of errors and correcting them.

12. Physicist's History of Bad Philosophy

[...] The substance of scientific theories is explanation, and explanation of errors constitutes most of the content of the design of any non-trivial scientific experiment. As the above example illustrates, a generic feature of experimentation is that the bigger the errors zour make, either in the numbers or in zour naming and interpretation of the measured qualities, the more exciting the results are, if true. So, without powerful techniques of error-detection and -correction - which depend on explanatory theories - this gives rise to an instability where false results drown out the true. In the 'hard sciences' - which usually do good science - false results due to all sorts of errors are nevertheless common. But they are corrected when their explanations are criticized and tested. That cannot happen in explanationless science.

Bad philosophy cannot easily be countered by good philosophy - argument and explanation - because it holds itself immune. But it can be countered by progress. People want to understand the world, no matter how loudly they may deny that. And progress makes bad philosophy harder to believe. That is not matter of refutation by logic or experience, but of explanation.

Terminology

Interpretation : The explanatory part of a scientific theory, supposedly distinct from its predictive or instrumental part.

Explanation

In science, the main impact of bad philosophy has been through the idea of separating a scientific theory into (explanationless) predictions and (arbitrary) interpretation.

13. Choices

The conditions of 'fairness' as conceived in the various social-choice problems are misconceptions analogous to empiricism: they are all about the input to the decision-making process - who participates, and how their opinions are integrated to form the 'preference of the group'. A rational analysis must concentrate instead on how the rules and institutions contribute to the removal of bad policies and rulers, and to the creation of new options.

Sometimes such an analysis does endorse one of the traditional requirements, at least in part. For instance, it is indeed important that no member of the group be privileged or deprived of representation. But this is not so that all members can contribute to the answer. It is because such discrimination entrenches in the system a preference among their potential criticisms. It does not make sense to include everyone's favoured policies, or parts of them, in the new decision; what is necessary for progress is to exclude ideas that fail to survive criticism, and to prevent their entrenchment, and to promote the creation of new ideas.

Proportional representation is often defended on the grounds that it leads to coalition governments and compromise policies. [...] If a policy is no one's idea of what will work, then why should it work? [...] The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it. Thus compromise policies shield the underlying explanations which do at least seem good to some faction from being criticized and abandoned.

Following a plurality-voting election, the usual outcome is that the party with the largest total number of votes has an overall majority in the legislature, and therefore takes sole charge. All the losing parties are removed entirely from power. This is rare under proportional representation, because some of the parties in the old coalition are usually needed in the new one. Consequently, the logic of plurality is that politicians and political parties have little chance of gaining any share in power unless they can persuade a substantial proportion of the population to vote for them. That gives all parties the incentive to find better explanations, or at least to convince more people of their existing ones, for if they fail they will be relegated to powerlessness at the next election. In the plurality system, the winning explanations are then exposed to criticism and testing, because they can be implemented without mixing them with the most important claims of opposing agendas. Similarly, the winning politicians are solely responsible for the choices they make, so they have the least possible scope for making excuses later if those are deemed to have been bad choices. If, by the time of the next election, they are less conceiving to the voters than they were, there is usually no scope for deals that will keep them in power regardless.

Unfortunately there are political phenomena that can violate Popper's criterion even more strongly than bad electoral systems - for example, entrenched racial divisions, or various traditions of political violence. Hence I do not intend the above discussion of electoral system to constitute a blanket endorsement of plurality voting as the One True System of democracy, suitable for all polities under all circumstances. Even democracy itself is unworkable under some circumstances. But in the advanced political cultures of the Enlightenment tradition the creation of knowledge can and should be paramount, and the idea that representative government depends on proportionate representation in the legislature is unequivocally a mistake.]

Could it be that the problem-solving that is promoted by the plurality voting system is continually changing the options of the voters, and also their preferences among the options, through persuasion? And so opinions and preferences are, despite appearances, converging - not in the sense of there being less disagreement (since solutions create new problems), but in the sense of creating ever more shared knowledge. In science, we do not consider it surprising that a community of scientists with different initial hopes and expectations, continually of dispute about their rival theories, gradually come into near-unanimous agreement over a steady stream of issues (yet still continue to disagree all the time). It is not surprising because, in their case, there are observable facts that they can use to test their theories. They converge with each other on any given issue because they are all converging on the objective truth. In politics it is customary to be cynical about that sort of convergence being possible. But that is a pessimistic view. Throughout the West, a great deal of philosophical knowledge that is nowadays taken for granted by almost everyone - say, that slavery is an abomination, or that women should be free to go out to work, or that autopsies should be legal [...] - was highly controversial only a matter of decades ago, and originally the opposite positions were taken for grated. A successful truth-seeking system works its way towards broad consensus of near-unanimity - the one state of public opinion that is not subject to decision-theoretic paradoxes and where 'the will of the people' makes sens. So convergence in the broad consensus over time is made possible by the fact that all concerned are gradually eliminating errors in their positions and converging on objective truths. Facilitating that process - by meeting Popper's criterion as well as possible - is more important than which of two contending factions with near-equal support gets its way at a particular election.

Terminology

Representative government : A system of government in which the composition or opinions of the legislature reflect those of the people.

Popper's criterion : Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rules or policies without violence when they are.

Meanings of 'the Beginning of Infinity'

Summary

It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options. Good policies are hard to vary, and therefore conflicting policies are discrete and cannot be arbitrarily mixed. Just as rational think does no consists of weighing the justifications of rival theories, but of using conjecture and criticism to seek the best explanations, so coalition governments are not a desirable objective of electoral systems. They should be judged by Popper's criterion of how easy they make it to remove bad rules and bad policies. That designates the plurality voting system as best in the case of advanced political cultures.

14. Why are Flowers Beautiful?

It is true that, just as one cannot deduce moral maxims from scientific theories, likewise nor can one deduce aesthetic values. But that would not prevent aesthetic truths from being linked to physical facts through explanations, as moral ones are. Facts can be used to criticize aesthetic theories, as they can moral theories.

Experience may provide artistic problems. Out ancestors had eyes and paint, which may have led them to wonder how paint could be used in a way that would look more beautiful.

Just as Bronowski pointed out that scientific discovery depends on a commitment to certain moral values, might it not also entail the appreciation of certain forms of beauty? It is a fact - often mentioned but seldom explained - that deep truth is often beautiful. Mathematicians and theoretical scientists call this form of beauty 'elegance'. Elegance is the beauty in explanations. [...] Yet the truth so often is elegant that elegance is, at least, a useful heuristic when searching for fundamental truths. And when a 'beautiful hypothesis' is slain, it is more often than not replaced, as the spontaneous-generation theory was, by a more beautiful one. Surly this is not coincidence: it is a regularity in nature. So it must have an explanation.

One possible instrumental purpose of beauty is attraction. A beautiful object can be attractive to people who appreciate the beauty. Attractiveness (to a given audience) can be functional, and is a down-to-earth, scientifically measurable quantity Art can be literally attractive in the sense of causing people to move towards it. Visitors to an art gallery can see a painting and be reluctant to leave, and then later be caused, by the painting, to return to it.

Not all attractiveness has anything to do with aestetics [e.g. Gravity].

Because we [human] are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes. For instance, humans often act in ways that are contrary to any preferences that might plausibly have been built into our genes. People fas - sometimes for aesthetic reasons. Some abstain from sex. [...] We have an inborn aversion to heights and to falling, yet people go skydiving - not in spite of this feeling, but because of it. It is that very feeling of inborn aversion that humans can reinterpret into a larger picture which to them is attractive - they want more of it; they want to appreciate it more deeply. To a skydiver, the vista from which we were born to recoil is beautiful. The whole activity of skydiving is beautiful, and part of that beauty is in the very sensations that evolved to deter us from trying it. The conclusion is inescapable: that attraction is not inborn, just as the contents of a newly discovered law of physics or mathematical theorem are not inborn.

Now why is a flower the shape that it is? Because the relevant genes evolved to make it attractive to insects. Why would they do this? Because when insects visit a flower they are dusted with pollen, which they then deposit in other flowers of the same species, and so the genes in the DNA in that pollen are spread far and wide. This is the reproductive mechanism that flowering plants evolved and which most still use today: Before there were insects, there were no flowers on Earth. But the mechanism could work only because insects, at the same time, evolved genes that attracted the, to flowers. Why did they? Because flowers provide nectar, which is food. Just as there is co-evolution between the genes to coordinate mating behaviours in males and females of the same species, so genes for making flowers and gibing them their shapes and colours co-evolved with genes in insects for recognizing flowers with the best nectar. During that biological co-evolution, just as in thee history of art, criteria evolved, and means of meeting those criteria co-evolved with them. That is what gave flowers the knowledge of how to attract insects, and insects the knowledge of how to recognize those flower and the propensity to fly towards them. But what is surprising is that these same flowers also attract humans.

One unusual aspect of the flower-insect co-evolution is that it involved the creation of a complex code, or language, for signalling information between species. It had to be complex because the genes were facing a difficult communication problem. The code had to be, on the one hand, easily recognizable by the right insects, and, on the other, difficult to forge by other species of flower - for if other species could cause their pollen to be spread by the same insects without having to manufacture nectar for the, which requires energy, they would have a selective advantage. So the criterion that was evolving in the insects had to be discriminating enough to pick the right flowers and not crude imitations; and the flowers' design had to be such that no design that other flower species could easily evolve could be mistaken for it. Thus both the criterion and the means of meeting it hat to be hard to vary.

And therefore my guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patters designed to be recognized by hard-to-emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty. So flowers have to create objective beauty, and insects have to recognize objective beauty. Consequently the only species that co-evolved to do so - and humans.

A sort of mirror image of that objects [beautiful is only that what is in bright colors or symmetrical] is that there are other things in nature we also find beautiful - things that are not results of either human creativity or co-evolution across a gap: the night sky; waterfalls; sunsets. So why not flowers too? But the cases are not alike. Those things may be attractive to look at, but they have no appearance of design. [...] But flowers do have the appearance of design for beauty: if they looked like leaves, or roots, they would lose their universal appeal. Displace even one petal, and there would be diminishment.

In the light of these arguments I can see only one explanation for the phenomenon of flowers being attractive to humans, and for the various other fragments of evidence I have mentioned. It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture of to an individual. The other is unrelated to any of those: it is universal, and as objective as the laws of physics. Creating either kind of beauty requires knowledge; but the second kind required knowledge with universal reach. It reaches all the way from the flower genome, with its problem of competitive pollination, to human minds which appreciate the resulting flowers as art. Not great art - human artists are far better, as is to be expected. But with the hard-to-fake appearance of design for beauty. Now, why do humans appreciate objective beauty, if there has been no equivalent of that co-evolution in our past? At one level the answer is simply that we are universal explainers and can create knowledge about anything. But still, why did we want to create aesthetic knowledge in particular? It is because we did face the same problem as the flowers and the insects. Signalling across the gap between two humans is analogous to signalling across the gap between two entire species. A human being, in terms of knowledge content and creative individuality, is like a species. All the individuals of any other species have virtually the same programming in their genes and use virtually the same criteria for acting and being attracted. Humans are quite unlike that: the amount of information in a human mind is more than that in the genome of any species, and overwhelmingly more than the genetic information unique to one person. So human artists are trying to signal across the same scale of gap between humans as the flowers and insects are between species. They can use some species-specific criteria; but they can also reach towards objective beauty. Exactly thee same is true of all our other knowledge: we can communicate with other people by sending predetermined messages determined by our genes or culture, or we can invent something new. But the latter case, to have any chance of communicating, we had better strive to rise above parochialism and seek universal truths. This may be the proximate reason that humans ever began to do so.

Terminology

Aesthetics : The philosophy of beauty.

Elegance : The beauty in explanations, mathematical formulae and so on.>

Explicit : Expressed in words or symbols.

: Inexplicit : Not explicit.

Implicit : Implied or otherwise contained in other information.

Meanings of 'the Beginning of Infinity' Encountered in this Chapter

Summary

There are objective truths in aesthetics. The standard argument that there cannot be is a relic of empiricism. Aesthetic truths are linked to factual ones by explanations, and also because artistic problems can emerge from physical facts and situations. The fact that flowers reliably seem beautiful to humans when their designs evolved for an apparently unrelated purpose is evidence that beauty is objective. Those convergent criteria of beauty solve the problem of creating hard-to-forge signals where prior shared knowledge is insufficient to provide them.

15. Evolution of Culture

Ideas that survive

A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By 'ideas' I mean any information that can be stored in people's brains and can affect their behaviours. Thus the shared values of a nation, the ability to communicate in a particular language, the shared knowledge of an academic discipline and the appreciation of a given musical style are all, in this sense, 'set of ideas' that define cultures.

The world's major cultures - including nations, languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions - have been created incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years. Most of the ideas that define the, including the inexplicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another. That makes these ideas memes - ideas that are replicators.

A human mind considers many ideas for every one that it ever acts upon, and only a small proportion of those cause behaviour that anyone else notices - and, of those, only a small proportion are ever replicated by anyone else. So the overwhelming majority of ideas disappear within a lifetime or less. The behaviour of people in a long-lived culture is therefore determined partly by recent ideas that will soon become extinct, and partly by long-lived memes; exceptional ideas that have been accurately replicated many times in succession. A fundamental question in the study of cultures is: what is it about a long-lived meme that gives it this exceptional ability to resist change throughout many replication? Another - central to the theme of this book - is: when such memes do change, what are the conditions under which they can change for the better?

Genes and memes are about as different as can be at the level of mechanisms, and of outcomes| they are similar only at the lowest level of explanation, where they are both replicators that embody knowledge and are therefore conditioned by the same fundamental principles that determine the conditions under which knowledge can or cannot be preserved, can or cannot improve.

Meme evolution

Although we do not know exactly how creativity works, we do know that it is itself an evolutionary process within individual brains. For it depends on conjecture (which is variation) and criticism (for the purpose of selecting ideas). So, somewhere inside brains, blind variations and selections are adding up to creative thought at a higher level of emergence.

Like genes, all memes contain knowledge (often inexplicit) of how to cause their own replication. This knowledge is encoded in strands of DNA or remembered by brains respectively.

However, the logic of the copying mechanism is very different for genes and memes. In organisms that reproduce by dividing, either all the genes are copied into the next generation or (if the individual fails to reproduce) none are. In sexual reproduction, a full complement of genes randomly chosen from both parents is copied, or none are. In all cases, the DNA duplication process is automatic: genes are copied indiscriminately. One consequence is that some genes can be replicated for many generations without ever being 'expressed' (causing any behaviour) at all. Whether your parents ever broke a none or not, genes for repairing broken bones will (barring unlikely mutations) be passed on to you and your descendants. The situation faced by memes is utterly different. Each meme has to be expressed as behaviour every time it is replicated. For it is that behaviour, and only that behaviour (given the environment created by all the other memes), that effects the replication.

The upshot of this is that memes necessarily become embodied in two different physical forms alternately: as memories in a brain, and as behaviour.

Because of the alternating physical forms of a meme, it has to survive two different, and potentially unrelated, mechanisms of selection in every generation. The brain-memory form has to cause the holder to enact the behaviour; and the behaviour form has to cause the new recipient to remember it - and to enact it.

[...]. Those factors make meme evolution enormously faster than gene evolution, which partly explains how memes can contain so much knowledge. Hence the frequency cited metaphor of the history of life on Earth, in which human civilization occupies only the final 'second' of the 'day' during which life has so far existed, is misleading. In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes.

[...] That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change - a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always - and can only be - to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.

Terminology

Culture : A set of shared ideas that cause their holders to behave alike

Rational meme : An idea that relies on the recipients' critical faculties to cause itself to be replicated.

Anti-rational meme : An idea that relies on disabling the recipients' critical faculties to cause itself to be replicated

Static culture/society : One whose changes happen on a timescale longer than its members can notice. Such cultures are dominated by anti-rational memes.

Dynamic culture/society : One that is dominated by rational memes.

Meanings of 'The Beginning Of Infinity' encountered in the chapter

Summary

Cultures consist of memes, and they evolve. In many ways memes are analogous to genes, but there are also profound differences in the way they evolve. The most important differences are that each meme has to include its own replication mechanism, and that a meme exists alternately in two different physical forms: a mental representation and a behaviour. Hence also a meme, unlike a gene, is separately selected, at each replication, for its ability to cause behaviour and for the ability of that behaviour tot cause new recipients to adopts the meme. The holders of memes typically do not know why they are enacting them: we enact the rules of grammar, for instance, much more accurately than we are able to state them. There are only two basic strategies of meme replication: to help prospective holders or to disable the holder' critical faculties. The two types of meme - rational memes and anti-rational memes - inhibit each other's replication and the ability of the culture as a whole to propagate itself. Western civilization is in an unstable transitional period between stable, static societies consisting of rational memes. Contrary to conventional wisdom, primitive societies are unimaginably unpleasant to live in. Either they are static, and survive only by extinguishing their members' creativity and breaking their spirits, or they quickly lose their knowledge and disintegrate, an violence takes over. Existing accounts of memes fail to recognize the significance of the rational/anti-rational distinction and hence tend to be implicitly anti-meme. This is tantamount to mistaking Western civilization for a static society, and its citizens for the crushed, pessimistic victims of memes that the members of static societies are.

16. The Evolution of Creativity

Terminology

Imitation : Copying behaviour. This is different from uman meme replication, which copies the knowledge that is causing the behaviour.

Meanings of 'The Beginning of Infinity' encountered in this chapter

Summary

On the face of it, creativity cannot have been useful during the evolution of humans, because knowledge was growing much too slowly for the more creative individuals to have has any selective advantage. This is a puzzle. A second puzzle is: how can complex memes even exist, given that brains have no mechanism to download them from other brains? Complex memes do not mandate specific bodily actions, but rules. We can see the actions, but not the rules, so how do we replicate them? We replicate them by creativity. That solves both problems, for replicating memes unchanged is the function for which creativity evolved. And that is why our species exists.

17. Unsustainable

Terminology

Sustain : The term has two almost opposite, but often confused, meanings: to provide someone with what thez need, and to prevent things from changing.

Meanings of 'The Beginning of Infinity' encountered in this chapter

Summary

Static societies eventually fail because their characteristic inability to create knowledge rapidly must eventually turn some problem into a catastrophe. Analogies between such scieties and the technological civilization of the West today are therefore fallacies. Marx, Engels and Diamonds's "ultimate explanation" of the different histories of different societies is false: history is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.