Questions Darwin Almost Asked

Darwin got a lot of miles out of noticing a few things and documenting them in excruciating detail:

• Tremendous natural variation among and within species and even "races" or varieties. This is the "engine" of change. That's just a fact. Today we know about DNA mutations, transcription errors and many other reasons for variation. Variation itself is "in your face" -- obvious.
• The mathematical fact that left to themselves, any species would reproduce to cover the Earth. There must be some reason this doesn't happen. Darwin mentioned a lot of reasons, including scarcity of resources, predators, environmental change and more.
• Descent with modification - the "family tree" of life that is the basis of modern biology.
• "Natural Selection", to Darwin, simply meant the fact that every animal is put to the test along with all other members of its species - indeed all occupants of its environment in the contest for survival. It's a brutal contest and survival is the exception rather than the rule. Many characterize this idea as "survival of the fittest", but that's a drastic simplification. In many minds, it "explained," the "survival" of the superior "white guy" over others who were unlucky enough to compete with whites over the ground they happened to be occupying. Triumph of the "whites" was evidence enough to "prove" the superiority of the white race. But Darwin's idea was much broader and powerful than this. It's best to think of it the way he thought of it: a ruthless competition with countless players resulting in constant change, including survival and extinction of entire species.

Of course, Darwin famously included human beings in his "family tree" and that resulted in a lot of controversy. What was overlooked in this controversy is that, yes, "Natural Selection" applies to humans and probably explains a lot about what we look like, but the kind of "selection" he was talking about still applies (especially to Englishmen) but not because of the individual superiority of design at the individual level. Englishmen were taking over the world because of superior technology*. 

Isn't the ability to apply "technology" in the struggle survival itself "evolved" in the classic Darwinian sense? Probably. I'd say this phase involved:

• Language (involving large, new brain structure) unique to humans
• The ability to cooperate, again involving new brain circuits unique to the great apes. This ability has, in the long run, allowed us to amass cooperative projects involving millions of individuals - usually to find clever ways to kill millions of "others".

More powerful innovations, such as writing or weapons design don't seem to have been the result of any change in the basic human "body plan", but simply new things that the improved human brain was good at learning.

So, for humans, the competition for survival boils down to the survival of a society or sometimes simple elements of technology such as the steamship, longbow, horseback riding or bronze weapons. And the competition is not simply "Darwinian" competition for resources: it is mainly competition against other humans. A hint of this fact is that we are the only species of "homo" to survive (out of dozens). Among species of homo, the competition is indeed brutal, in spite of supposedly superior evolutionary gifts, such as our big brains. For example, there is no particular reason why Neanderthal humans could not have survived perfectly well if it weren't for competition with "modern" humans. Certainly, there were other factors involved but the main one is probably competition with other species of homo with superior ability to organize in the lethal ways we still associate with gangs of humans.

Bottom line, humanity is a species of "last man standing" cultures competing with each other for survival as a culture. This competition is bad news for the "losers" in this competition and is even not great for individuals in the culture. "Successful" cultures in this competition burn up more resources, pollute more and become more dangerous to life on Earth.

"Cultural evolution" is not "Darwinian". "Classic" Evolutionary Theory applies to "fitness" of individual organisms, not cultures or groups of individuals. But Darwin's thinking leads us into some equally momentous conclusions (or at least theories) about our own situation. As with his original theories, the ideas are unsettling and controversial.

---------------------
* Evolution of the usual kind had blessed the European with relative immunity to diseases that devastated inhabitants of the Americas, but it was just dumb luck that the immunity advantage didn't work the other way around. The idea that some cultures (rather than races) are superior is shredded by Amartya Sen. Sen reaches the same dark conclusions as mine but through quite a different train of reasoning from a different set of facts.

Evolution of Mind - Evolution of Machine

I'm wary of the term "evolution" - especially when it is used in a vaguely Darwinian sense to sprinkle scientific fairy dust over wild speculation. I think it makes sense to use "evolution" in a fairly narrow sense, in which we can see that some object, "thing" or situation exhibits the following qualities:

• It's in some "state" of current interest. The analysis of the "state" has some non-trivial explanatory power over the thing in question even when it is considered as a current, static object.
• The "thing" has obviously, necessarily undergone change over time - it wasn't always the same as it is now. It must have been in some other state, usually a simpler state, at some time in the past.
• There is strong evidence that the thing has undergone versions, where one version incorporates design features of previous versions.
• It is legitimate to ask what changes have taken place over time to get from the "simpler" state in the past to the current state.
• Some kind of specific process should be proposed, even if somewhat tentatively. For example, Darwin started with the observation that species are related, asked what we mean by "species" and only gradually came to theorize that species must have emerged over time.  He could only speculate about the mechanism (He liked, but did not use, what we call "survival of the fittest". He didn't know about genetics or DNA). 
• The specific timeline of change will inevitably be speculative. It's nice to establish milestones and approximate dates but this must regarded as secondary to analysis of the change itself. Darwin was famously off by orders of magnitude with his time line but this turned out to be irrelevant to his core ideas.

With those provisos, there are a few questions in the "evolution" of humans that are interesting:

• Speech
• Language
• Writing
• Money
• Social Structure (small bands to cities, craft to corporation, tribe to Nation State)
• Religion
• Nation States
• War

It is useful to speak of the evolution of computation or perhaps the wider and broader term "information processing" rather than the "evolution" of the computer. The other aspect of this evolution is characterized by "information storage". Clay tablets and fingers have their place in this history. It doesn't begin with Babbage or Turing. I like to avoid terms such as "information processing", which would be perfectly acceptable except that virtually all readers will conjure up an image of modern computers when this phrase is used. It is, in fact, still fashionable to call the Computer Department at a University the "Information Technology" department, even though they don't teach about clay tablets or even money. The common thread seems to be progress in externalizing or delegating the task of computing and remembering to machines that grow in complexity and power over the years. Questions can be asked about the progress of mechanical information processing and they are woven in to the above questions about human society:

• Writing
• Counting
• Money
• Computation
• Stored programs ("software as data")
• Networks
• Virtualization
• Class libraries (divorce of design from platform)
• Social networks - close integration of human and computer "societies"

An important thread of this evolution is the way that we gradually shift attention to aspects of reality that can be computed and stored while pushing other aspects of reality aside. This is perhaps the fundamental way that human evolution is linked to the evolution of computation. Wittgenstein's famous saying pops into mind: What can't be said must be passed over in silence.

Several common themes emerge when discussing the parallel evolution of humans and machines:

• Information processing and the evolving nature of what counts as "information"
• Compression
• Virtualization (platform independence)
• Information embedded in language
• Communication
• Formalization and standardization 
• Efficiency

We gain special insight into these common themes by comparing and contrasting their history in the two streams of evolution. In the case of computation, many of the "landmarks" are very clear and have firm dates. Others, such as the appearance of money, have a more complex and debatable history but there is clearly a time when money did not exist and a time when it did. 

In some cases, important innovations appear in one stream and they are not obvious in the other, at least at first glance. For example, "virtualization" is a very clear and specific engineering concept in the computational field. What, if anything, can it mean to speak of a virtual "mind"? One clue is in the fact that philosophers have always felt free to describe the inner workings of the mind without reference to how the brain "works". When they do make reference, their ideas are remarkably sketchy and dated. Tellingly, their ideas about how the physical mind works are not much affected by the specifics. The ideas are "fairy dust". This leaves us free to propose that the "hardware" doesn't matter at all, leadinging in the extreme case to ideas such as Kursweil's - "uploading the mind to silicon" seem perfectly reasonable. This is an argument firmly based on ignorance, like the idea that humans were created out of nothing by God, which made sense until the facts were known.

The evolution of "society" in computation also exhibits some fascination and non-obvious parallels. One precondition of "society" is standardization of components and protocols. Such standards in human history have lead to sweeping changes in human society, including capitalism, cultural genocide and waves of economic crisis when policy is about "jobs" rather than human well being. Standardization of weapons, protocols and military "jobs" has played a key role in the evolution of modern warfare to the point where a single instruction can now spell the destruction of civilization through a "fan out" through standard protocols to standardized weapons and human beings turned into standard components of the military "machine". In the case of the military "economy" (legalized mass murder), there are many milestones on the road to standardization, along with a rich set of parallels between the kind of society humans can form compared to the kind of structure a computation can take.

Society can be usefully regarded as a machine than as collections of living things. In this sense, our two streams have been steadily converging over recorded history. The evolution of this aspect of society is worth discussion in its own right, as I have done in "The Programmable Ape". By regarding machines and humans as co-evolving along very similar paths, it becomes possible for me to describe the human machine (the "dragon") in more precise and familiar terms. This can possibly overcome the common perception of what a machine is. 

So what is a "machine"?

• Machine "language" is tiny, formal and inflexible. 
• Machines are formed of components which exist for no other purpose than to serve the purpose of the machine.
• Very few machines are "unique". They are themselves "cogs" in a larger system that demands precise standardization of components. 

In contrast, in a human ...

• Language is vast, informal, open-ended and general
• Humans are famously difficult to organize into coherent groups with coherent purpose. In practice, this involves stripping them of what makes them human in the first place.
• Humans are unique. This uniqueness is built in by the way DNA works and the inherent limitations of their nervous system. 

Over time, these differences become blurred:

• Humans become "standardized" into "jobs" in order to fit into the larger economic machine. Unique human qualities are suppressed or even punished.
• Human "machine languages", especially the language of economics, become more and more rich and complex. To many, it starts to sound like talk about the "real world" and not "machine language".
• Machines are more and more frequently referred to in anthropomorphic terms, such as what "Wall Street fears" or what "Germany wants".
• Individuals are increasingly "programmed" by tremendous pressures of living in a man-made world of things and information. Thinking "outside the box" is difficult if all of language - including your inner voice - speaks only about boxes.

You can get a lot of fun out of taking these analogies seriously at face value. There is usually a kernel of truth - a way of seeing that machines and men are really the same in important ways. For example, if someone is talking about "efficiency", they are talking about a machine. Think of the situation they describe in terms of machines, computation and the history of such things. When they talk about "profit", think about computer games. When they talk about what is "best" for a corporation, take them at their word and imagine the corporation to be alive and part of human history. Ask how such an abstract machine can possibly acquire a desire to survive and thrive.

Surfaces & Essences - Questions

Questions:

• Is thought based on "nothing but" analogies?
• Prevailing theories of "attention" (the "pointy end" of consciousness) focus on "working memory", which has a limited ability to juggle "things". Working memory therefore tries to "cheat" by making "chunks" of percepts. For example, not four lines -- a square. In general, some kind of pattern. What is the relationship between "pattern" and "analogy". Are there not patterns that are not clearly analogies? It would seem that, once recognized, a pattern can be the source of a new analogy, but perhaps analogy is a special case of pattern and it's pattern seeking that's the "fuel" of idea creation.
• "Pattern recognition" is the mental model behind modern efforts at machine perception
• What is meant by "our" concepts? Do the insights of S&E apply to "the" mind or the mechanism of a cultural mind - the zeitgeist? 
• Is there evidence that analogy is the "fuel" of perception in the brain?
• What about the idea that the brain builds a "model" of reality? That's a rather static idea compared to the dynamic image of constant analogy making. However, the "model" idea is implicit in what philosophers call the problem of "representation" - How are ideas and memories "represented" in the brain? Along the same lines, how are analogies "represented"?

Can we compare S&E to Darwin's "Origin of Species"? Both volumes include extensive quantities of data to build support for an original insight. In the case of a new insight, it's hard to simply say what it is. You need to "walk around it" so it becomes visible against the background. Jung used the same method to explain what he meant by "archetype".

Assuming that S&E reveals some kind of valid insight, it's also true that the book will endure for quite awhile. Since the only "data" used in the book is language, it could theoretically be written 100 years ago or 100 years from now. The same can't be said about most current books on how the mind works.

Oddly, defenders of "memetics" (the pseudoscience of "memes") and Chomsky -- the defender of "Linguistics" -- agree that the capacity for language (or the "infection" by memes) was a sudden event in the history of human evolution and cannot be explained by gradual evolution from something simpler. You understand language (or memes) or you don't. It seems that S&E challenges this unnecessary and implausible claim by putting forward analogy making as the basis of thought, with speech emerging as a means of communicating analogy. Even a dog can make analogies. Many brain processes can be seen as primitive versions of analogy.

Similarly, memeticists like Susan Blackmore "explain" the sudden increase in brain capacity in terms of their own theory. Any change "must" be driven by evolutionary "pressure" and that pressure "must" come from something new, which happens to be the subject of the author's study. It could be argued that brain capacity (or actually cortical surface area) is correlated with the ability to form analogies or at least recognize patterns. In view of the high cost of this innovation and the violent nature of humans, it's easy to see that an "arms race" could result in strong pressure in favour of intelligence - especially when it comes to surviving attacks from other humans. Chimpanzee lifestyle provides a model for this. You could see a secondary pressure in this arms race that would favour communication and teamwork - especially language. Academic discussion of evolutionary pressure tends to ignore the violent nature of human beings. After a certain point, avoiding being murdered by another human and/or stealing the wives of your enemy becomes the #1 "evolutionary pressure". Such "pressure" could produce big changes in a short time - a few thousand years - an eye-blink in deep time. This is a "tipping point" argument.

Many genes control the expression of other genes. The mutation we are looking for might simply be for the cerebral cortex to continue to grow and fold itself up inside the brain case. We would have no evidence of this continuous change, nor evidence that it continues to operate. However, such a change would produce increased energy demands along with increased capability to meet those demands and increased competition over resources and mates. All this seems a bit less fanciful than the convoluted evolutionary stories told by Blackmore and company. As an aside, it's worth noting that this supposed "mutation" may or may not ultimately fail for any number of reasons. It is not certain, for example, that being smarter will actually allow us to find the energy we need to be smarter, nor that we can survive the implied strategy of dominating the entire ecosystem for resources needed for our big brains.