![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslHumans, as we know, have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals and computers... to attribute their actions to malice, revenge and whatnot. This, of course, only serves to illustrate how common it is for us to have a faulty theory-of-mind. It is for this same reason, Dennett argues, that people resist the idea of Darwinian evolution. (A natural question is: is susceptibility to the fundamental attribution error correlated with skepticism towards evolution?)
He distinguishes two theories of how intelligence arises:
* the trickle-down theory: it takes a higher intelligence to build a lower intelligence
* the bubble-up theory: intelligence can arise out of non-intelligence
In 1868, a critic of Darwin wrote, and here I paraphrase: "Darwin has the strange idea that in order to MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, it is not necessary to know how it works." The critic called this Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning".
Alan Turing said: "in order to BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, it is not necessary to understand how it works." (i.e. one can be a perfect calculator without understanding why the division algorithm works). Those who don't understand this prefer skyhook explanations.
Evolution is a blind watchmaker, like a bird who build dams without knowing what dams are. The first-born baby bird who pushes his sibling eggs out of the nest isn't evil: it knows not what it does! These individuals are the beneficiaries of "knowledge" acquired through evolution without being representers of this "knowledge". Representation, in this case, simply doesn't pay off. (my aside: Humans, as intelligent creatures, seem to have thrived in dynamic environments, where the cost of intelligence pays off.)
As "mind creationists", Dennett named Searle and two more. IIRC, this list had a significant overlap with those known for expressing the human-level-AI-is-impossible view.
Dennett then quoted his student Bo Dahlbom: "You can't do much building with your bare hands. Likewise, you can't do much thinking with your bare brains". Then he discussed tools for thinking: culture! words! memes!
Finally, there seem to be common misconceptions about who the relevant replicators can be. Memes don't have to help human fitness in order to be successful. Religion is successful as a meme, not because it benefits humans, but because it benefits itself.
To really drive the point home, Dennett mentioned several species that have adapted to thrive in proximity to humans. No one tries to breed rats and pigeons: they do it on their own. The implication is that religion is a meme that has adapted to the environment of human minds. The mind virus analogy is thus justified.
tidbits:
* the "eukaryotic revolution" (i.e. the appearance of eukaryotes, AFAIU mitochondria entering a prokaryotic cell, producing a cell that is fitter than either by itself) seems to be a very improbable event... which made cells more flexible, and this specialization enabled the "multicellular revolution", the appearance of multicellular organisms.
--
Next week, Simon Conway Morris will speak. His famous idea is "humans are inevitable". In what sense does he mean this?
Two weeks from now, James Randi.
He distinguishes two theories of how intelligence arises:
* the trickle-down theory: it takes a higher intelligence to build a lower intelligence
* the bubble-up theory: intelligence can arise out of non-intelligence
In 1868, a critic of Darwin wrote, and here I paraphrase: "Darwin has the strange idea that in order to MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, it is not necessary to know how it works." The critic called this Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning".
Alan Turing said: "in order to BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, it is not necessary to understand how it works." (i.e. one can be a perfect calculator without understanding why the division algorithm works). Those who don't understand this prefer skyhook explanations.
Evolution is a blind watchmaker, like a bird who build dams without knowing what dams are. The first-born baby bird who pushes his sibling eggs out of the nest isn't evil: it knows not what it does! These individuals are the beneficiaries of "knowledge" acquired through evolution without being representers of this "knowledge". Representation, in this case, simply doesn't pay off. (my aside: Humans, as intelligent creatures, seem to have thrived in dynamic environments, where the cost of intelligence pays off.)
As "mind creationists", Dennett named Searle and two more. IIRC, this list had a significant overlap with those known for expressing the human-level-AI-is-impossible view.
Dennett then quoted his student Bo Dahlbom: "You can't do much building with your bare hands. Likewise, you can't do much thinking with your bare brains". Then he discussed tools for thinking: culture! words! memes!
Finally, there seem to be common misconceptions about who the relevant replicators can be. Memes don't have to help human fitness in order to be successful. Religion is successful as a meme, not because it benefits humans, but because it benefits itself.
To really drive the point home, Dennett mentioned several species that have adapted to thrive in proximity to humans. No one tries to breed rats and pigeons: they do it on their own. The implication is that religion is a meme that has adapted to the environment of human minds. The mind virus analogy is thus justified.
tidbits:
* the "eukaryotic revolution" (i.e. the appearance of eukaryotes, AFAIU mitochondria entering a prokaryotic cell, producing a cell that is fitter than either by itself) seems to be a very improbable event... which made cells more flexible, and this specialization enabled the "multicellular revolution", the appearance of multicellular organisms.
--
Next week, Simon Conway Morris will speak. His famous idea is "humans are inevitable". In what sense does he mean this?
Two weeks from now, James Randi.