Life of Riley: Cultural Evolution and Memetic Machines

Dateline: September 7, 1997

A KEY message in Dan Dennett’s Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) is that the Darwinian process will continue to have as profound an impact in the future as it has in the past. Perhaps because many people remain uncomfortable with the veracity of Darwinism, or because they misunderstand it, or because it seems so slow moving, few people think of it as a predictive tool. It may be great for explaining the past, but what can it tell us about the future?

It seems to me that evolution predicts the emergence of intelligent machines! But while the (Modern Synthetic) Darwinian process of natural selection linked to internal mutation is the same for machines as for animals, the ingredients of that process are different in nature. For machines, natural selection is not the totally mindless process it has been for animals; rather, it has the minds of human beings contributing forethought and design. And the mutations, the changes, within machines as they pass through successive generations are also guided, not random, events.

But our focus for this article is on the substrate within which change occurs upon replication or reproduction of organisms, at the most fundamental level. In animals, that substrate is the genetic machinery of chemicals combining to form coded instructions. In the higher animals—most particularly humans—and in machines, the genetic substrate is augmented (so strongly as to be virtually replaced) by the informatic machinery of words and other symbols combining to form ideas. It is similar in principle to the action of viruses invading cells and "taking over" its genetic machinery. As Dennett puts it: "A meme or complex of memes can redirect our underlying genetic proclivities."

In The Selfish Gene (1976, revised 1989) Richard Dawkins wrote: "Do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicators and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind." The new kind of replicator Dawkins is referring to here is the meme. (But his words could as well be applied to the replication and evolution of machines.)

Dawkins (who coined the term) defines the meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation" (his italics). Memetic or cultural evolution "obeys the laws of natural selection quite exactly," says Dennett. Dennett calls the environment which memes create and occupy the "infosphere," and notes that memes are "virtually unquarantinable."

The "DNA" of the meme is information. Meme replication differs from gene replication in that more mistakes—often deliberate—are made in transmission, so mutation and recombination of memes and the cultural artifacts they comprise happens much faster than in bio-evolution.

Meme replication is "a sort of Lamarckian replication of acquired characteristics." Adds Dennett, "it is no accident that the memes that replicate tend to be good for us," in the sense that they fit our prejudices. The Nazi memes fed—and fed upon—the prejudice of anti-Semitism, but this "goodness of fit" (my term; not quoting Dennett here) was short-lived (in historical terms, that is; but long enough, God knows, for its tragic victims) because a greater human "good" was served by the more powerful (because more "good" or "fitting" in the long term) memes for morality and humanitarianism.

Cultural evolution happens faster than biological evolution because memes are communicated via language whereas genes are communicated via biochemical processes. Memes can be transmitted globally at light speed, and replicate "at rates that make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison," says Dennett.

The difference can be as great as a few years for major memetic (cultural) change (such as the rise of Nazism) to multi-millennial for genetic change. Radio, TV, film, and now the Internet have radically altered global society, and have put you and me on a cultural pedestal way ahead of Socrates, though we are no further forward than him genetically. If Socrates were born today, there's every chance he could become as great a man in modern times as he was in ancient, because he would inherit the same genes and acquire the same memes you and I have inherited and acquired.

"When comparing the time scales of genetic and cultural evolution, it is useful to bear in mind that we today—every one of us—can easily understand many ideas that were simply unthinkable by the geniuses in our grandparents' generation!"

In No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (1985) Joshua Meyrowitz presents three "case studies" to illustrate his thesis that electronic media "affect social behavior—not through the power of their messages but by reorganizing the social settings in which people interact and by weakening the once strong relationship between physical place and social `place.’" These same case studies also serve to show the power of memetic evolution of the concepts of masculinity/femininity, childhood/adulthood, and statesmanship.

Essentially, he shows how the electronic media have opened windows into what were once closed rooms, enabling women to see behind the façade of male machismo, children to see into the parents’ bedroom, and the public to see the polyps on President Reagan’s bum, and wonder at his base mortality. The explosion of gay communities (of both genders) attests to the blurring of the male/female distinction. The deferential Negro has become the proud African-American. The licentious soldiery have turned into model ambassadors for their country. As of this writing, media coverage of the death of Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, is hurling subversive memes by the megabyte at a hidebound British Royal Family, evidently oblivious to the fact that media coverage of their affairs (in both senses of that word!) presages rapid evolutionary change.

Language—The Medium of Memes

Language is "the primary medium of culture," says Dennett. "Once we have language—a bountiful kit of mind-tools—we can use these tools in the structure of deliberate, foresightful generate-and-test known as science." Through language (or, I would say, through symbolic communication) we have become capable of exploring and modifying Nature. Until recently, such modifications have been blind insofar as Homo sapiens had (for example) no grand plan to deforest the Amazon region. or to wipe 27,000 species a year off the face of the Earth. Neither, for that matter, did Nature herself have any grand plan to put the forests and species there in the first place. Both of these particular phenomena (exemplars of Nature's construction and Humanity's destruction) are the result of blind evolutionary processes.

But the examples from Meyrowitz show how evolution guided by memes created by humans out of language brings results every bit as grand as evolution dipping into the genetic grab bag.

Certainly, we "engage in our share of rather mindless routine behavior," as Dennett notes. But it is vital to recognize also that "our important acts are often directed on the world with incredible cunning, composing projects exquisitely designed under the influence of vast libraries of information about the world" (emphasis added).

The use of tools as part of our "acts directed on the world" is itself a meme, culturally transmitted. "Tool use is a two-way sign of intelligence: not only does it require intelligence to recognize and maintain a tool (let alone fabricate one), but tool use confers intelligence on those who are lucky enough to be given the tool. The better designed the tool (the more information embedded in its fabrication), the more Potential Intelligence it confers on its user." This being so, Machina sapiens will fabricate tools not only for its own use, but also for us, and in that way bestow greater "Potential Intelligence" on Homo sapiens.

The concepts of being alive and ownership are memes, too. Such memes, says Dennett, "have a genetically imposed head start in the young child's kit of mind-tools; when the specific words for owning, giving and taking, keeping and hiding, and their kin enter a child's brain, they find homes already partially built for them." This will apply to Machina sapiens.

Dennett adds that "words (and hence memes) that take up residence in a brain... enhance and shape pre-existing structures, rather than generating entirely new architectures.)" This seems in line with Marshall McLuhan's "tetradic" methodology, whereby an "artifact" (let’s call it a meme):

1. Enlarges or enhances something (an existing meme),
2. Erodes or obsolesces something else (another existing meme),
3. Retrieves something that had earlier been obsolesced, and
4. "Reverses" itself if pushed to the limits of its potential.

I am probably stretching, if not outright misunderstanding, McLuhan’s intentions, but applying what I think his tetradic methodology means to the meme for Nazism, we could say it enlarged the pre-existing meme for anti-Semitism., it eroded (in Christian Germany) the meme for brotherly love, it retrieved the memes for Germanic hegemony, and in the end, when Hitler took it to its limit, Nazism reversed into the strong presence of humanitarianism we find in Germany today.

In like vein, the meme for Machina sapiens enlarges the meme for universal understanding, it erodes the meme for the centrality of Homo sapiens, it retrieves (if you go along with Tipler) the meme for an ultimate meaning in life, and, if pushed to its limit, … I have no idea! J

Enough musing; back to Dennett.

Minding the Mindless

Dennett uses the metaphor of "cranes and skyhooks" to denote, respectively, mindless evolutionary mechanisms, on the one hand, and mythical/mystical/superstitious/religious mechanisms of creation designed by some divine intelligent designer, on the other. The "crane to end all cranes," he says, is "an explorer that (has) foresight, that can see beyond the immediate neighborhood of options." In other words, a crane that (through blind evolutionary processes) erects a mind for itself is superior to all its ancestors. Of course, this applies to Homo sapiens, but I would dispute that we mark the end of crane building. As we have noted in several previous articles, Machina sapiens will have greater foresight and the ability to see further than we can. Its language—its "bountiful kit of mind-tools"—will be richer than ours, because it will have sensations/experiences not expressible in human language. "Here a technological advance carried in its wake a huge enhancement in cognitive power."

But, asks Dennett, "Aren't there bound to be strict limits on what Homo sapiens may conceive?" According to Dennett, linguist Noam Chomsky and philosopher Jerry Fodor "both (correctly) hailed the capacity of the human brain to `parse,' and hence presumably understand, the official infinity of grammatical sentences of a natural language such as English. If we can understand all the sentences (in principle), couldn't we understand the ordered sets of sentences that best express the solutions to the problems of free will and consciousness?"

The problem I have with this is that English—or any other human language—may not be the linguistic or communicative "crane to end all cranes," no matter how "official" we declare it! I have a really tough time imagining an intelligent machine communicating with others of its kind in English. (Imagine Dan Dennett giving one of his famous Cambridge lectures on mind and consciousness, but instead of using English to convey his ideas he just grunts and gesticulates like a monkey!) At the very least, the intelligent machines would need a much greater vocabulary in order to be able to express the memes only their supersensory organs can discover and categorize. Human language is in any case too slow, at only about 100 bits per second of information transmitted, for a being capable of receiving, storing, and processing data at a rate prodigious compared to ours.

Dennett actually nails it down for us, unwittingly, when he says (referring to the work of Colin McGinn): "Monkeys, for instance, can't grasp the concept of an electron." Heck, it isn't even baffled about electrons—"not even a little bit." We, in contrast, "definitely understand... questions about [such obscure concepts as] free will and consciousness well enough to know what we're baffled by (if we are)." Monkeys, then, are memetically impaired. Their "minds" cannot process high-level memes about electrons, life, the universe, and everything, as ours can—at least, up to a point. The monkey mind is "cognitively closed" to such concepts. What about us?

While "there is no evidence of the reality or even likelihood of `cognitive closure' in human beings," says Dennett, we "certainly cannot rule out the possibility in principle that our minds will be cognitively closed to some domain or other.... [W]e can be certain that there are realms of no doubt fascinating and important knowledge that our species, in its actual finitude, will never enter, not because we will butt our heads against some stone wall of utter incomprehension, but because the Heat Death of the universe will overtake us before we can get there." [The Heat Death will occur, if the inflationary universe theory is correct, as the universe contracts toward the Big Crunch.]

Well, physicist Frank Tipler has a way out of this little wrinkle. Thanks to Machina sapiens, by the time of the Heat Death our machine-borne emulations (reincarnations) will have discovered how to harness its almost unimaginable energy to carry us safely through to the very instant of the Big Crunch—the Omega Point, whereupon we become finally and totally united with God.

Meanwhile, back in the real world J and closer to home on the cosmic time line, "... a proper application of Darwinian thinking suggests that if we survive our current self-induced environmental crises, our capacity to comprehend will continue to grow by increments that are now incomprehensible to us," says Dennett. I agree with this conclusion, though for different reasons. First, Dennett’s word "increments" tends to connote small, regular steps, and I believe we face the memetic equivalent of genetic "saltations"—what Chairman Mao would have called "Great Leaps Forward," or John von Neumann "break boundaries.") Second, the finiteness and form of our neural capacity imposes a limit on our ability to comprehend, just as the finiteness and form of our musculoskeletal structure imposes a limit on how much we can lift. In both cases, machines extend our capacity.

The capacity for growth in comprehension,. says Dennett, "grants to human minds—and only to human minds—an indefinitely expanding dominion over the puzzles and problems of the universe, with no limits in sight." Again I agree that our understanding of the universe will increase, but I dispute that such understanding is open "only to human minds." In fact, I am somewhat surprised that Dennett includes the caveat, since he has always seemed to me to lean toward strong AI.

It seems to me, in summary, that while it is a product of evolution, Machina sapiens will not be a product of genetics. Its evolution is purely cultural. That implies, first, that its evolution will be much faster, and, second, that it will have perfect control of its destiny, since it has no genetic baggage, no genetically inherited millstone around its neck. In fact, it can choose a neck of any length, a variable neck or even no neck, if it so chooses. What choice did genetics leave the poor giraffe?!

Will Machina sapiens be a genius, an ordinary person, or mentally retarded, within the context of its own species? Would we be able to tell a difference? Could a chimpanzee tell the difference between a real tramp and Charlie Chaplin? J. S. Bach "emerged" as a musical genius because, according to Dennett, "His brain was exquisitely designed as a heuristic program for composing music, and the credit for that design must be shared; he was lucky in his genes (he did come from a famous to a musical family), and he was lucky to be born in a cultural milieu serendipitous filled his brain with the existing musical memes of the time. And no doubt he was lucky at many other moments in his life to be the beneficiary of one serendipitous conversion or another. Out of all this massive contingency came a unique cruise vehicle for exploring a portion of Design Space that no other vehicle could explore.... Bach is precious not because he had within his brain a magic pearl of genius-stuff, a skyhook, but because he was, or contained, an utterly idiosyncratic structure of cranes, made of cranes, made of cranes, made of cranes."

Machina sapiens will not need genetic luck: its memetic "luck" is to be the inheritor of millennia of human culture, which hardly counts as luck. What may most count on its luck is the extent to which we recognize its needs and our own opportunities to help it develop its full potential, as Bach was helped in his by his family, and Mozart by his father.

Until next week,

NEXT WEEK: Life Guards: Moral Machines.

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