A Random Talk

This is an experimental blog post. The idea was to simply talk about a range of issues with the aim of creating a "mind map", then using the map to create traditional posts that are more structured and focused. But along the way, I wondered if I could post the original voice note

So, to test this, click on the link below, which will show you a LINK to the audio Store that and play it. Your machine will probably have an app that plays audio. In my case, it's iTunes.

This talk can be indexed just like a text essay.

In the long run, the plan is to take notes on my own "rant" in mind map form (which can also be shown in the blog).

A Random Talk

Whatever Happened to the Meme?

The idea of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins and hammered into its most robust form by Daniel Dennett. It is an extended analogy that claims that human ideas are somehow like genes and have their own process of evolution independent of the evolution going on in their "hosts", the human race.

It's an attractive idea and it works well as a rhetorical device, especially the way that Dawkins and Dennett use it to attack religion as an infection of the brain. True believers in "memetics" claim that all of human thought is "infection" by memes - a strong claim that memetics is a fundamental explanation of mind. Memeticists claim that the brain is a "meme machine".

The problem comes when you try to apply memes outside of the examples trotted out by the "founders". Personally, I can't figure out what a "meme" is. The old words of ideas, doctrines, theories and especially paradigm seem perfectly serviceable and don't easily translate themselves into "meme talk".

It is worth noting that respected investigators of "mind", such as Hofstadter, bypass the idea of "meme" entirely in spite of being on cordial terms with the founders of the idea. For them, it's not just a wrong idea but one not worth mentioning. "It's not even wrong".

It looks like the basic "atom" of thought, especially linguistic thought (the inner voice), is the analogy, as worked out in "Surfaces and Essences". If we start with this idea, memes must be some kind of "extended analogy" or complex of analogies. However, our mental "analogy computers" process the tangle of analogies in language at lightening speed and mostly below our level of awareness. This doesn't line up well with the "meme" idea, where it seems to be assumed that people can be "talked out" of memes (disinfected) by conscious, logical argument.

In fact, analogy processing is buried in language itself and not the "memes" that have somehow "infected" our minds. If the infection is to be found at all, it is to be found in the language, not the brain. But the analogy of infection breaks down when we study language in general, not the cherry-picked poster children of memetics. For the most part, the analogies that underlie language are benign and somewhat inevitable, given the need to "boot strap" our language from almost zero. The example of "under-stand" comes to mind. How is standing under related to "understand". If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's a "meme" but do we need the "meme" idea to make sense of it? Does it make sense to think of this analogy as "surviving" on its own according to some pseudo-Darwinian principles, rather than its roots in human experience? What does "memetics" add to our understanding?

Hofstadter's concept is that some analogies are better than others. They are the "essential" analogies, the ones that come closest to isomorphic mappings between one situation and another. This would seem to claim that is the truth or at least "usefulness", not "survival of the fittest" that makes some ideas prevail over others in the long term. I'd go further and claim that it is our hard-wired preference for symmetry that makes one idea seem better than another. This comes pretty close to common sense about the matter. Is memetics providing a meaningful challenge to common sense?

There is a human tendency to regard people who disagree with us as being "infected", insane and impervious to logic. We are the logical ones. They are ignoring the evidence. Especially when seen in its early forms (attack against religious thinking), memetics is simply a put-down of of stupid people who fail to appreciate the majestic logic and superior mind of Richard Dawkins. Dennett smoothed over the rough edges and gave us some real insight about where "memes" come from, such as the idea that no person needs to "have" an idea, such as the great idea of evolution. But in defending the meme, Dennett has basically moved beyond it. Dennett's memetics doesn't need memetics.

Is there anything we can understand using memetics that can't be understood without it? As it has been said of Freud: "What  is true isn't new and what is new isn't true".

Wrong theories provide special insight by providing us with a new perspective on the problem, like footholds as we climb the mountain, to be used for a moment then discarded.

What is "Truth"?

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.”

As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me.

At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), but now called "reason". Jaynes regards this as the emergence of consciousness itself, which is not what I want to take up in this post. What I like about Jaynes is that he sees language in a dynamic light, evolving and building up over time toward some critical point where the modern mind (along with "civilization") emerges.

There is no particular reason to locate these two faculties at some location in the brain and this is perhaps Jaynes main mistake - built in to his terminology. But we can understand his arguments very well without referring back to his neurological ideas. In fact, he rarely does so himself. You could go through his book and translate "Left Brain" as "Kidney" and "Right Brain" as "big toe" without impacting the meaning of what he's saying.

What we regard as "truth", at least in the Western traditions, is a linguistic concept. The "most" true statements are those of mathematics, which can be "proven". As Wittgenstein famously pointed out, such proofs are basically moves in a language game, where everyone agrees to the rules and agrees about what is "proven" in dialogue. As Hofstadter points out in Surfaces and Essences, the concept of language can be broadened to include the "models" of Physics - the underlying idea is metaphor and analogy.

Jaynes, Hofstadter and others point out that language is a huge labyrinth of metaphor. We "bootstrap" our store of metaphors as children (Jaynes is particularly good at describing how this bootstrap process works) and we proceed to produce the vast store in our heads - tens of thousands of words. It is in this language that our "inner voice" speaks. If our inner voice proclaims something to be true, it does so according to the impenetrable rules of the language that has been programmed into our brains. In the vast majority of cases, the beleivability of that inner voice comes from uncounted assumptions and analogies buried in the language it speaks. For example, if my inner voice calls someone a "nigger" in my head, that one word carries centuries if history and thousands of voices. It will make no sense to me to say to the inner voice: No, that person is not a "nigger". In fact, given the language that is being spoken, such a question makes no sense.

If you think that "1" is a solution to "x squared minus one equals zero", you speak the language of mathematics. If it seems sensible to say "I think, therefore I am", you have learned to talk like Descartes. Like him, you will regard that statement as self-evidently true. Those who fail to see the statement as self-evident are used to speaking a different language in a whole different culture which, for example, may regard the "self" as an illusion. Such a statement would make no sense to Descartes. It's not a matter of "truth" outside of the rules of the "language game". Descartes spoke the language of the religion of his time, which regarded the soul as the "self" -- the "self evident" starting point for any discussion of what is "real".

Is there any other way we can reach the "truth"? Jaynes says there is: that "right brain" which sees the truth but speaks it to the "left brain". It's better to characterize this source of perception as some kind of holistic or aesthetic sense that goes beyond language and perhaps precedes language historically. It is an open question whether this "right brain" (or big toe) processing works according to analogy. I think it's better to say it works by hard wired recognition of symmetry, but that is another topic.

For example, this "right brain" truth pops up when we say a certain combination of notes "sounds right" or a scene is breathtakingly beautiful. It certainly shouts loudly at us when we judge another human being to be beautiful, honest or friendly.

This simple observation leads me to some wide-ranging conclusions.

• By definition, we cannot expect language to reach into non-linguistic "truth". Western philosophy, including that of Dennett, even when purged of "wild junk", has nothing to say about "truth" revealed by our innate mental capacity to judge certain experiences as special and valuable.
• Zen, emphasizes direct aesthetic perception and takes pains to isolate and ignore the "inner voice". There is no reason to prefer one path over the other. In fact, I'm perfectly happy to leave the whole idea of "truth" to the language experts and seek for other words that reflect the judgement of my "right brain". This consideration is a much needed justification for being open to Zen.
• Our "right brains" have a shared language, a culture and a history of their own, referred to as "art". I would also contend that they have a built-in "language" of their own - perhaps reaching back far into the past, perhaps part of the very definition of life itself. Even when the "art" in question is expressed in language (the novel for example), quality judgement are made by standards that are difficult to express in the language of logic, although critics struggle endlessly to do so.
• We need to distinguish between what is "real" and what is "true". Truth is the umpire's call in the language game. Reality is what remains after all alternatives are ruled out.

There is another road to "truth", described in our language as "Science". Advances in Scientific knowledge are made chiefly through language - vigorously expanding our vocabulary. There are maybe 180,000 words in the English language (give or take). Scientific journals add a few more with every published article. Moreover, Science is constantly adding new models of reality. The first of these was "Euclidean Space". More recently, Feynman Diagrams have added to our ability to "picture" and discuss quantum reactions. Many things are easily "said" with pictures but almost impossible to "say" with words. However, these pictures ("maps") obey the same principles as language as discussed by Hofstadter and Jaynes. All lovers of maps and models will agree that there is a strong element of aesthetic beauty in a good map. 

There is also a strong aesthetic motive in Science as a whole, most eloquently described in "The Beautiful Question" by Frank Wilczek. Wilczek makes a strong case that the universe really is governed by symmetric principles, which also appeal strongly to our sense of what "looks right" (this is a right-brain kind of "looking right"). In other words, our taste for symmetry is a reliable guide to what is real.

So, in Science all three roads to the truth come together. 

Bootstraps

I can never tell if my "hits" are from robots or human beings. Please do me a huge favor and leave a comment, however short, to tell me someone is out there reading this stuff ...

I owe Hofstadter a huge debt of gratitude for his "Surfaces and Essences" and, to a lesser extent "I Am a Strange Loop". He points out the central role that analogy plays in our thinking and, in Strange Loop, the fact that we "bootstrap" our idea of what it is to be human through an analogy between our own experience and that of others.  Our conviction that the world is full of folks like us and that we are a person such as those around us is ultimately based on analogy.

We then proceed to endlessly refine this most fundamental of analogies. What is it like to be somebody else? Let me explain what it is like to be me. I wonder what it would be like to be James Bond? Or Superman? Or God?

Such curiosity leads us quickly into deep trouble.

By analogy, we ask ourselves how the world came about and why things happen in it. By analogy we imagine a person or persons "behind the scenes" controlling everything. Like us, "he" has plans, a will, and who knows what abilities. Like us, he can be persuaded, flattered, angered. Like us, he has a strong sense of what is right and wrong - rules that are often beyond the ken of his "children".

It is hard for us to imagine an alternative source of all the phenomena in the universe. We have no choice but to build on what we know - to extend our analogies into realms where they become less and less apt. Or, in the words of Hofstadter, farther and farther from the "essence" of the matter.

I saw this in High School, where we were told that the atom is "like" a little Solar System, with electrons whizzing around the nucleus. This is impossible, as we soon learned in University Physics, but what is actually happening is hard to grasp (some say impossible) since the atom is not like anything in our experience.

We find the same problem with issues in astronomy and cosmology, where we leave the world of everyday experience behind. We cannot wrap our minds around the "Big Bang" theory, because it requires something to begin without anything at all happening before that. What category of phenomena does that belong to? And what about dark matter? What we see is gravitation without any kind of "stuff" like anything we know.

In a way, Science is all about discovering totally new categories: things, events, relationships that have no parallel in our previous experience. One subtle pleasure I have experienced since my High School days is to sit in on lectures by people who are comfortable with what the atom really is. Each new example like this opens so many doors ...

The Ravenous Brain - Daniel Bor

The Ravenous Brain

Bor loves the "Prefrontal parietal cortex" PPC, which he identifies as the seat of "working memory". In turn, the concept of awareness, consciousness and working memory a so closely intertwined that research in any of these subjects is, by default, research in all the others.

In this book, he makes a strong case. It turns out that we can be conscious while missing big chunks of our brain. Evidence from such sad situations, along with EEG and fMRI studies, allow us to zero in on the brain functions that are necessary and sufficient for consciousness. Bor provides extensive examples of experiments that reveal the limits of consciousness and how it can be "taken apart" in various ways.

One of is central ideas is "chunking". He visualizes working memory has having a limited capability to handle "chunks" - perhaps just 4 at a time (whatever "chunks" are). To deal with this limit, the brain (mainly the PPC), detects patterns (chunks) that can be manipulated as one. For example, 4 lines may be lumped together as a rectangle. In his sense, Bor's "chunks" are what we'd call "patterns". Once formed, such chunks can be stored (somehow) in the rest of the brain and re-used in subsequent tasks performed in working memory. Thus, General Relativity can become just one "thing" in some situations.

Other examples in the book invite a different analogy. The "chunk" can be a "subroutine", such as an algorithm for muscle movements that form a good tennis swing. Once formed, the whole swing can be "packed away" and executed as a single "chunk'.

As I understand it, the theory is that the prefrontal lobes (what's usually though of as the seat of "executive function" or decision making) get involved only if we need to puzzle out a new way of "chunking" current experience. On the other hand, it seems like Bor is claiming that this part of the brain is always active when a person is conscious.

Comparing to Hofstader's claim that analogy is the fuel of thought, it would appear that the formation and application of categories by analogy would be compatible with Bor's theory, although Bor would quite reasonably regard categories (as chunks) and analogy (as the process that creates chunks) as special cases. Bor claims words as "chunks" but makes no extensive claims about language in general.

Interestingly, Bor is a big fan of meditation as a way to "flex our consciousness muscle" and improve general mental health. He ties many mental illnesses to problems with working memory and discusses the effect that various drugs have on these conditions.

Bor's theories are necessarily confined to his experimental tools, meaning that his core theories are about brain regions that "light up" in fMRI studies. This gives a relatively static picture of the brain and leads to a lot of talk about brain regions such as the PPC. More recent methods allow Susan Greenfield to watch "chunks"(active neural assemblies) fly around in the cortex in real time, hinting at somewhat different ways to visualize what Bor talks about mainly in broad generalizations about hypothetical communication between neurons. The resulting picture gets away from regions "lighting up" to something more akin to a huge fireworks display with "chunks" flying all over the brain, igniting other "chunks" in a spectacular chain reaction. Susan Greenfield's work also ties in closely with Bor's ideas about the effects of neurotransmitters, since a closer look at "chunk" activation shows that certain neurotransmitters are elevated in physically nearby brain regions on a very short time scale. Brain regions "lighting up" on fMRI scans are blurry image resulting in a time exposure of several seconds, when the real events are a light show something like those revealed at microsecond intervals.

Memes and Analogies

The idea of a meme was introduced by Richard Dawkins in a final chapter of his popular 1976 book on genetics: "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins kicks around the meme idea with philosopher Daniel Dennett here.

Even after 40 years, Dawkins still brings up the meme constantly, especially when he's talking about religion as a meme that "infects" the human brain. The word "meme" is now tossed around quite freely, almost a synonym for "idea", but usually confined to a "big idea" or at least one that is effectively communicated from person to person and somehow "survives" competition with competing ideas.

Given "Surfaces and Essences" (S&E), we can immediately see that the meme is an explicit analogy with the gene. We can also ask if it's a very good analogy. Does it lead us to understand anything about ideas that we can't easily see without it? Does it mislead us to think that ideas have properties or behavior that genes have but "memes" actually don't? Does it lead us closer to understanding the essence of what an idea is?

Such questions lead us to suspect that we can do without the "meme" analogy.

How are genes and memes different?

• Genes are discreet entities, encoded in actual physical sequences of DNA. Memes are fuzzy and seem to be defined only in the mind of the speaker. What, exactly, is the "meme" of God?
• Genes survive (according do Dawkins) by means of competition. What accounts for the "survival" of memes? S&E would say that any idea survives because it is an apt, more or less essential "name" for a common situation. We don't know exactly how the brain decides that a particular name is appropriate, but it's fast and automatic. "Survival" doesn't seem to come into it. "Competition" for the appropriate word or phrase takes place in the brain all the time and we tend to come up with the best one available, but this doesn't imply that we forget the alternatives. The "winner" pops up where it fits.
• Genes are communicated from generation to generation. Analogies are communicated because the speaker and listener share a common understanding of the situation -- usually experiences or concepts that are "like" one another. How humans decide that one situation is "like" another is mysterious and astonishing. There is no evident similarity to "communication" in the sense of some "thing" being handed from one person to another.

The most serious problem with the "meme" analogy is that it leads us to think about ideas at the wrong level of culture. "Memes" and the analogies studied in "Surfaces" "infect" the shared language of a culture and only indirectly the thought processes of an individual. A child starts to use the word "God" without any idea of the vast baggage and extensive mythology ("memeplex") that comes along with that single word. The "meaning" of the word is "out there" in the culture, to be discovered and gradually assimilated (or not) as the child learns (or fails to learn) to think for himself.

Bottom line: the "meme" is a special case of an analogy, which is a special case of pattern recognition. It's not a very good analogy and it's been made worse by common use that divorces it from its roots (it's now just a pretentious way to say "idea").

If we are to persist in using the word "meme', we need to drop the original analogy of the meme "infecting" our brains and taking over evolution. A "meme", if it is anything at all, is a powerful and commonly-understood idea shared by a culture or a language. Memes grow and evolve as a shared project of a culture as the language itself evolves and grows. This includes the constant elaboration of important myths that underlie the culture, along with the bottomless enthusiasm we all have for a good story.

One of the things that career atheists miss about religion is the way it "morphs" rapidly in response to our shared talent for improving on a good story. There is no inherent reason why our stories should compete with each other or be somehow logically consistent. When we use the word "meme", we conjure up a rather static picture (like a virus). In fact, "memes" are dynamic creatures, never the same at any one time, any one culture or in any one mind.

M1: A Theory of Everything

I'm beginning to feel the need to organize my ideas into some kind of structure. Let's call that structure "M1". The name comes from "M for Mind and 1 for the primacy of the first person experience".

This should probably be document in a Web Site, rather than a blog, but such a site needs a few initial ideas and some sketch of what it's about. In any case, documentation of M1 needs to be on an interactive platform (not a paper book) to allow dynamic growth and interaction with interested individuals.

Mind Maps

One key tool on the site should be the "Mind Map", which allows us to draw informal diagrams of the relationship between ideas. This is considerably less formal than UML (Universal Modelling Language) that I was first tempted to use. It takes considerable training to understand a UML diagram and there are subtle objections to the ultimate trap of equating an "idea" with a UML "class". The Mind Map allows us to informally model the "space" of ideas and say intelligible things about what ideas are "close to each other" in that space. This includes the ability to visualize the analogy, which, according to Hofstadter, is the underlying organizing principle of the mind.

Core Ideas

1. M1 builds on the first person experience. Everything we know comes from "unpacking" our experience, forming new associations into categories. This is articulated in Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop". The first person experience is also primary in Zen, although Zen and Hofstadter arrive at quite different conclusions about what's "really going on".

1. M1 is ultimately about mind, mainly but not only human minds.
2. M1 builds on first person experience to describe (if not "explain") the emergence of personal memes such as "you" and "them".
3. M1 builds on personal memes to describe social memes and the emergence of "group minds" with "thoughts", "concepts" and "perceptions" that cannot be productively described in terms of some kind of function of individuals in the group (Dragon Theory)
4. M1 is about all possible ideas. Every idea that has ever appeared in all possible mind plus any idea that could appear in the mind, including "right" and "wrong" ideas. M1 is therefore a "Theory of Everything". Annoyingly to some, it includes all other possible "Theories of Everything". This "universe" of memes is sometimes called the "noosphere" but that word is also used in an mystical way to refer to the "mind of the universe". 
5. M1 includes the idea that M1 cannot embrace all of reality. This amounts to acceptance that there is a real world "out there" and our ideas map to that world only incompletely and approximately. Of course, since it includes all ideas, M1 also includes the opposite idea, which is that there is no actual real world out there: it's all in our heads (Strong Idealism). However, M1 concerns mainly with actual, productive and powerful human ideas. Acceptance of the existence of the external world allows M1 to embrace all of "Science".
6. M1 is not "epistemology" which is the philosophical discipline attempting to describe what "we" know and how we know it. How we "know" things is of specific interest in M1, including how and why we "know" things that are manifestly false or inconsistent with the other things we "know".
7. M1 collects imagination pumps (Dennett)
8. The focus of M1 is on "core" memes. These include the "Self", "Mind", "Reality", "Person", "Category" and of course "M1" itself and the meme of a "core meme". 
9. M1 is not reductionist. It makes no attempt to "explain" the universe in terms of a privileged "fundamental" collection of memes (such as those from neurology or quantum mechanics). If anything, the "self" is fundamental, yet, when examined, turns out to depend on other things going on that could be regarded as "more fundamental". 
10. M1 attempts to "unpack" the "self" meme to show the connection between the way cells specialize in brain tissues to produce a "brain" that is, at least in principle, capable of supporting a mind.
11. M1 is shamelessly self-referential and recursive. This is to be expected, since M1 is a product of the mind which has the remarkable ability to know itself and to know it is knowing or even doubt that it is knowing ...
12. M1 is to the universe of ideas as cartography is to the world. It's about mapping and exploring - specifically about tools we can develop to map the meme world - how we get from one meme to another, how we generalize and form analogies.